One weekend, I showed up late at the Starbucks.
“You think she’ll be wearing another thousand-dollar pair of Gucci boots?” That was Mary Jo Farrell’s voice.
“Don’t even get me started.” Sue Sanchez.
“Little Miss Rich Girl. I’m surprised she even bothers to hang out with us anymore.” Gret Soderberg.
“Wait until she hits forty and has stretch marks and he leaves her for a younger woman.” Pamela Jackson.
I slipped outside without ordering, texted Sal that I couldn’t make it, and raced home. I think I cried for a half hour in the driveway before Nick stuck his head through the kitchen door and found me.
“Bitches,” he said, taking me inside and pouring two mugs of coffee. “Forget them. Besides, my coffee’s better than that Starbucks crap.”
It should be. He spent enough money on it.
“Will you still love me when I’m forty?” I asked.
“Yep.”
“Even if I have stretch marks?”
“Yep.”
“Promise?”
“Yep.” He stopped drinking and set the mug down between us. “Spill it, Mrs. Reynolds.”
I knew Nick was smart. I didn’t think he could read minds.
There was a script in my head that morning as I drove to the coffee klatch. Sort of rehearsed, sort of not. I’d planned to tell the girls my news and then sneak off to Planned Parenthood with Sal. Easy, simple, one, two, three. What Nick didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him, I’d go get the doctorate, and we’d move on to family making in a few years. I’d even made sure to hide the pee stick with its damning blue cross in my bag before I left the house.
And then I had to go open my big mouth and mention stretch marks. Not a smart move for a chick who had just been accepted to Georgetown’s applied linguistics doctoral program.
“Girl or boy?” Nick took my coffee away and poured it down the drain. Steam clouds came up from the sink. At least the aroma was still there. “Don’t worry,” he said, seeing the look on my face. “I’ll run out and get you some decaf. But first—let’s spread a little joy.”
“No way.”
“Yes way.”
Which is how I ended up on the phone with my mother.
Nick left the room, coffee in hand. “To give you girls some privacy,” he said. The second his footsteps started one of their usual pace-and-think beats over my head, I poured a cup of high-test.
“What’s wrong, Miranda?” Mom said. Airport noise filled in the pause after she spoke. That was my mother, always leaving on a jet plane to the next gig, the next road show.
She would think something was wrong. When you don’t speak to your own mother for more than a year and then call out of the blue, it’s usually not to chew the fat about the weather. So I blurted it out.
“I’m pregnant.”
“Oh, Christ.” This was a favorite of Win Somers, an all-purpose blanket response to what she called “unpleasant shit.” “Tell me you’re getting rid of it. Please tell me that much.”
Well, that was the original plan. I let the pause speak for itself.
Mom settled down, and her voice became quiet, conspiratorial, the calm before the storm. I’d heard it before. “Does he know?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“And we’re talking about it,” I lied.
Then the storm rolled in. “You don’t need to talk about it, Miranda. You just need to act. On your own.”
“But he—”
“Fuck him,” she said. “Goddamned men. Let me guess, he’s mansplaining, right?” It was Mom’s favorite new term. “Telling you how wonderful it’s going to be to have a family while you’re young, that you can go back to school later—like that’s going to happen—and he’ll take care of you and your little bundle of joy always and forever. Does that sound about right?”
By the time she’d finished, my ears hurt. I poured another cup of coffee and sucked it down. It was hot, and it stung, but it gave me a moment.
“Well, Miranda? I’ve got a plane to catch.”
“Go catch it, then,” I said.
Deep breath, long sigh, a few final mother-to-daughter parting words. “You know, if you were more like Jen, we wouldn’t need to have this conversation.”
I sat in the kitchen after hanging up, wondering how long it would be until I spoke to my mother again.
It turned out to be years. Even then, there was only the one last time, the final knock-down, drag-’em-out scene that seemed a kind of mother-and-daughter anti-reunion. Two weeks later, Jen Jones broke the news that Femlandia’s founder was dead.
I didn’t cry.
Eight
Win was eighteen when she went to college, nineteen when she met Carl Finley of Finley Motors, and three months away from twenty-one when he raped her. He said all the things a man says on the morning after. Sorry. Thought you wanted to. I didn’t know. And so on. Ya-de-ya-de-ya. It wasn’t the kind of rape she could report, because Carl’s kind of rape, the kind where Friday night presents itself with a few too many drinks and there just happens to be a sofa nearby and the answer to “Will you still love me tomorrow?” is always an unequivocal “Yes,” wasn’t really assault. There wasn’t any date rape in the seventies because if you didn’t have a label for something, the thing in question didn’t exist.
“I don’t want to marry you, and I don’t want to have the baby,” she told Carl on her twenty-first birthday. “I’m sorry, but I don’t. I have plans. Besides, I think I’d rather be with a woman.”
He pouted, he sulked, and then he did the unthinkable. He called Win’s father.
Win spent the next month under her mother’s nose, stifling the last remnants of morning sickness while being dragged through bridal shops and patisseries, nodding tacit approval at the flowers Mrs. Finley picked out, forcing herself to agree that the lemon cake really was the best choice. Not that her opinion mattered. Win was out of choices. Win was under house arrest.
They had a February wedding, both mother and mother-in-law sacrificing hopes for June nuptials in favor of saving themselves the embarrassment of explaining Win’s inflated belly to five hundred guests. Instead, they ended up explaining why the blushing bride cried through the hour-long ceremony.
“She’s overjoyed,” Mrs. Finley said.
“It’s her biggest day,” Win’s mother explained, pinching the soft flesh on her daughter’s arm. “Right, dear?” When Win didn’t respond, she pinched harder.
Win didn’t like men, not that way—despite Carl reading all the signals wrong and thinking he could convert her, just as her parents thought Win’s predilections toward girls had been a phase she would grow out of. But she had never hated men. Men brought home the bacon, took care of their families, doted on their daughters and wives. By twenty-two, Win realized men also wrote the law, enforced it, and had the final word.
She was twenty-two when she started thinking about a way to live without them.
Nine
The blacktop on the road shimmers with heat. We should be tucked inside the Porsche, blasting the AC and the radio, arguing over whether the Beatles or the Stones were the best band, not sweating our way down Arlington Road with a backpack full of canned food and cranberry juice. The juice is the mostly artificial kind, no refrigeration needed, not the organic stuff I used to buy.