“Sounds good. What about potatoes?”
“What kind?”
“Those little red ones.”
“Nice. How about roasting?”
“How.” More statement than question. She was down to shorthand.
“Chunk them. Salt, pepper, little bit of olive oil. 375ish. Stir often. Till they’re done.”
“Excellent. I am also having salad and bread. And I bought a cheesecake.”
“Very fancy,” I said. “You can knock me up anytime.”
“Tell me everything will be okay,” said Jill.
“Everything will be okay,” I said. “He’s a good guy. He’ll be well fed. Everything’s going to be fine.”
Lull, lull. Quiet before storm. Unknowing before unknowing. The kind of calm you only have when you stop to realize that you are not panicked—something you never do unless you have just been or are about to be. Status quo on borrowed time. No one ever really knows what’s going to happen next, but we’re rarely so acutely aware of that fact because usually it doesn’t matter yet. That night, the future had come strangely near. I sat on the lid of my toilet, getting used to purple paint on the walls, waiting patiently for everything in my life to change.
Katie came over at ten-thirty, bearing what she calls popcorn, but which is actually popcorn mixed with that gross glazed oriental snack mix you scoop out of plastic bins in the bulk section of the grocery store. Some holdover from growing up in Hawaii. She loves it. I just pick out the popcorn.
“So, how was it?”
“Mmm,” she said, very noncommittal, by which she meant that it did not go well, but she wasn’t ready to say so in case she was wrong and fell in love with him later. She gave me a highly typical play-by-play. Nice enough, cute enough, smart enough, but not overly impressive on any front. He talked a lot about mouths and teeth, to be expected I guess, but still a little alarming. He did his mission in Canada (a wussy mission, in my opinion, though it was evidently chosen for him by God, so who am I to say), his undergrad at Rutgers, his childhood in northern New Jersey.
“Doesn’t that get him off the hook for being a Yankee fan? I mean he’s from there. Everyone roots for the team where they’re from.”
“Root for the Mets,” I said. “What else?”
“He taught high school chemistry for a year before dental school and hated it,” she offered.
“Teaching’s not for everyone,” I said, though I am suspicious of people who don’t like to teach. On the other hand, I’m not teaching high school chemistry and would rather die, so I really can’t judge.
“His favorite author is Sports Illustrated.” She tried and failed to offer this with a straight face. “He didn’t know George Eliot. He didn’t even know Charlotte Brontë had any sisters.” Katie is obsessed with all three Brontës, but we are snotty about literature and know it.
“I can’t think of the last textbook I read on dental care,” I offered.
“Yeah, but then I told him that a friend of mine was unmarried and pregnant, and he wanted to know why I was friends with her, and I said I was already friends with her before she got pregnant, and he said why wasn’t I doing something to stop her, and I said my friends’ sex lives are really none of my business, and he said they were and got really annoyed.”
I didn’t say anything. It was a deal breaker, and we both knew it. Though in his defense, obviously, it was totally our business.
Meanwhile at Jill’s, no one was eating anything. All of that beautiful dinner just being pushed around on plates. When Dan got there, she opened the door and told him right away. She couldn’t wait. She’d been making herself sick about it. They talked for seeming days. Then she kicked him out, put everything in Tupperwares, and came over. No sense letting all that food go to waste. Not that we were much interested in eating either. It was late, and we were two hours into popcorn with nasty Asian snack mix.
“He said no,” she said, which communicated nearly nothing.
“What do you mean, honey?” Katie prompted, arm around her overgently.
“He said no. He said . . . no.” She looked dazed. She’d been crying. I couldn’t think what she might have asked him to which Daniel could possibly have answered a straight yes or no.
“He doesn’t want to be a father right now. He doesn’t want a baby. He came over. I told him I was pregnant. He looked . . . surprised, but not mad, not unhappy. He said ‘wow’ a lot. He asked when I found out and when I would be due—he kept using this weird conditional tense right from the start. He did not ask if I were sure, which is good because that’s a stupid, cliché thing to ask. He did not ask if I were sure it was his, which is good because that’s even worse. He said ‘wow’ some more. He said, ‘What are your thoughts?’ He was being really nice, but he wasn’t talking much, and so finally I just said, ‘Daniel, I don’t think I want an abortion. I think I want to have the baby,’ and he said, ‘Okay. I want to have an abortion.’ ” She stopped and looked up at us to make sure that our faces mirrored the incredulity in hers. They did.
“But he can’t have an abortion.” Katie started with the obvious. “He’s not pregnant.”
“Yeah, but he doesn’t want to be a father,” Jill explained. “He doesn’t want us to have a baby. He wants us to have an abortion.”
“So what did you say?”
“Well, I was really upset and really hurt and very sad that he didn’t want to be part of this kid’s life and very sad that he was willing to just let me go like that, but I was at least sort of prepared for this answer. I had a speech. I forgot most of it when the time came, but basically I was like, ‘Okay, well, thanks, why don’t you think about it for a while and get back to me about what role you would like to play, like none or just a little or what . . .’ But he was shaking his head like I didn’t get it, and he said, ‘No, I don’t want you to have our baby but I wouldn’t be part of its life. I don’t want you to have our baby. I want to get an abortion.’ ”
“That’s not his decision,” Katie whispered.
“That’s what I said.”
“What did he say?”
“He said, ‘Why not? Just because it’s not my body? It’s my baby.’ ”
Seven
On Sunday, we retreated to our own apartments and our own computers and our own piles of books and wrote. It’s funny that you can do that—just turn off the part of your brain that’s in emotional crisis and turn on the part that thinks about the role of the reader in Dante’s Inferno and let that one take over completely for a little while. It is nice to have days when you wake up and write, and seventeen hours later you go to bed, and in between you wander around the house a few times and eat leftovers for about five minutes standing over your computer and mainline water and otherwise write and write and write. By midweek though, I was ready for fresh air, ready for human contact, ready to find out what other people thought was important in the world (it probably wasn’t the reader in Dante’s Inferno). So on Wednesday, I went to grade and caffeinate at Joe Bar. And it was there that I ran into Daniel.