I heard Lynn walk with the portable phone from the living room through the kitchen and into the back room where the Pickle, she told me, was sitting on the couch eating a waffle and watching
Barney
.
Ooof
, I swooned, then waited impatiently for my report.
“Well, today she’s wearing her denim shirt and her black leggings and …” For this she apparently had to bend over or lean over or do something strenuous sounding in order to get a better look at the rest of the outfit.
“And …?”
I prodded anxiously. This was the part I’d been waiting for, the part I always waited for: the shoes.
“And,” my sister said finally, “her yellow jellies.”
I closed my eyes: denim shirt, black leggings, yellow jellies.
The vision of her little feet inside those little yellow plastic shoes was sharp behind my closed eyes, until I opened them, reluctantly, a few seconds later.
“Thanks,” I said, then sighed; an addict after a fix.
“Anytime. Talk to you tomorrow.”
I hung up, wept, then called the airlines.
Thanksgiving was coming up.
It was time for another visit.
“She’s pregnant!” I said.
“Of course she’s pregnant,” Simon said.
“Light dawns over Marblehead,” Renee added.
The two of them had come into my office several hours after my elevator encounter with Karen—with cigarettes and ashtrays and gigantic monolithic take-out cups of coffee—and Renee had started in on me immediately.
“I can’t believe you didn’t get it. You—the person who’s obsessed with getting pregnant and having children. How could you not know?”
Through the glass windows of my office, I could see Karen through the glass windows of hers—she tucked her bone-straight fudge-colored hair behind both ears: cut and color courtesy of her appointment that afternoon with Frédéric Fekkai with whom she had a standing appointment every four weeks—and sat behind her big huge empty glass desk while Annette showed her a seemingly faulty zipper on a sample pant.
Like most Important People, her office was remarkably neat, bare of any evidence of actual work—files, papers, memos, message slips—containing only the requisite minimalist accoutrements befitting someone in her position: a huge television with built-in VCR for screening our latest ads and analyzing our runway shows; a cordless phone and three sleek black speaker units placed strategically around the office; a long white straight couch and two upholstered armchairs on an expanse of wheat-colored rug; an enormous high-backed ergonomically engineered futuristic leather swivel chair that, when she sat in it, dwarfed her and made her look like a child impersonating a boss; a laptop computer blinking and glowing on the low built-in credenza behind her; an open Palm Pilot in the center of the desk; and a bud vase full of deep-red grease pencils—her signature writing implement—that produced notes that looked as if they’d been written with lipstick.
“I don’t know,” I said, trying to come up with a Renee-proof excuse for my stupidity (even though I never could). “She’d been away for a while, so I thought she’d gotten carried away with the Belgian chocolate, but I guess I was just in denial.”
“That’s the understatement of the century.”
“I don’t think anyone else has figured it out either, but I’ve suspected for weeks,” Simon said. “Ever since I noticed that extra finger or two of padding around the hips when she gave me a ride downtown recently. Sitting in the back seat with her, I couldn’t seem to get our body parts not to touch, no matter how much I squirmed or how close I sat to the door. I felt rather—well,
suffocation
is the word that came to mind.” A shiver seemed to undulate vertically through his wiry body, and he shook himself rid of it.
His reaction didn’t surprise me, though I was sure it had less to do with Karen’s weight than with the fact that Simon seemed to avoid close proximity to all human bodies. And while I was never quite sure about his sexual preference, I came to assume that whichever church he belonged to, he didn’t much like going. Not that he’d have much opportunity anyway, given the fact that he lived with his mother—something he was surprisingly unashamed of at age twenty-seven. “My mother is a
saint
,” he’d say whenever her name came up—which was all the time, it seemed—genuflecting with his hands in the praying-tower position at his chest. “I re
vere
her.” Which is what he could, on occasion, be overheard to say over the phone during the course of a normal business day about Karen, although when he said it about Karen, one couldn’t help but detect a bit of a sneer.
I turned back to Renee, annoyed. I hated when other people knew things before I did. “Well, so, what, you figured it out immediately? Like, the morning after the fertilized egg implanted itself in her uterine wall?”
“No.” She shifted in her chair, which made me immediately suspicious. Renee was never uncomfortable.
“How did you know, then? Did she tell you?” Even though I thought myself above petty jealousy, I felt myself get hot with indignation at the idea that Karen would confide in Renee and not me.
“No.” She took a long drink from her coffee and played with the tassel on her gray suede loafer. “Arthur did.”
Simon’s neck craned so much, I thought he might pull a muscle. He scampered into the empty chair beside Renee as if we’d been playing musical chairs and the song had just stopped. “Arthur told you?”
She looked at each of us. “So?”
“So?” I mimicked. “Since when are you and Arthur such bosom buddies?”
“We’re not bosom buddies,” she mimicked back. “He was at the Dia Foundation fund-raiser a few weeks ago without Karen, and I asked him why she wasn’t there.”
“And he told you?” Simon assumed he was an equal partner in this interrogation, but I stared him down and he retreated to his chair.
“Well, he didn’t mean to, but it just slipped out. You know how he is.” She snapped her hand open and shut quickly—yap yap yap. “If I’d stood there long enough, which I didn’t because he’s so boring I would have killed myself, he would have told me her bra size.”
Simon raised an eyebrow in disgust. “Which will, again, be ever increasing with each passing month.”
“Of course, the minute he realized what he’d done, he begged me not to tell her that he’d told me. And not to tell anyone else about it, either.”
I threw a paper clip at her, and it landed and stuck in her hair. “Like I’m just anyone.”
“Look, you know how she is. She’s never even brought Marissa into the office. She’d rip him a new asshole if she thought everyone was going to know she was pregnant before she was ready to announce it herself. She’s the biggest control freak on the face of the earth.”
“No, you’re the biggest control freak on the face of the earth.”
“Besides,” she continued despite my baiting her, “there was something about Arthur’s face when he told me how happy they were about it.”
“They?”
“That’s what he said. ‘We are joyous.’ ”
While my head began to spin in disbelief at that incongruous thought—not to mention Renee’s uncharacteristic sentimentality—Simon got up and paced back and forth behind her. He tapped his finger against his chin and spoke just above a stage whisper, like some B-level Method actor.
“I wonder how far along she is.”
Renee and I ignored him.
“I wonder if they know yet what gender the child will be.” He stopped and turned to us: so many questions, so little time. “I became quite friendly, last time around, with her obstetrician’s assistant Tammy. Let’s see how much information a messengered package containing KLNY champagne satin tap pants and a matching teddy will get us.” Upon which he headed for the door.
Exit Simon
.
“Barnaby Jones needs to get a life,” Renee said, rolling her eyes at his departure. But when she saw the expression on my face, she could tell that my not knowing about Karen’s pregnancy was only part of why I was upset. She walked around my desk, put an arm around my shoulders, and gave me a quick hug. “Don’t worry,” she said, hip-chucking me. “We’ll get you a stupid baby. If I have to marry you off to some rich boring nebbish like Arthur, we’ll get you a baby.”
“Fleece,” I said to Amy the next day. “What’s the deal with fleece? Everywhere you go: fleece, fleece, fleece.”
The Baby Gap on Broadway and Sixty-eighth Street was
filled with the stuff. It was Saturday, around noon, and after we’d bought coffee and bagels, we made a pit stop there on our way back to her apartment. We’d gone in because she had to get a gift for a baby shower later that week, and I figured I’d cruise the sale racks for Nicole. Thousands of couples and baby carriages and strollers and children clogged the sidewalks on both sides of Broadway: it reminded me how lethal the Upper West Side was for single people. How Amy lived there without wanting to step out into traffic every weekend was beyond me.
“You’re in the fashion business. What do you think?”
“What do I think? I think fleece is the sweatpants of the 1990s. I think it’s the comfort food—the meat loaf—of clothes. It’s insidious. It’s a thick, bulky, nubby, ugly, unflattering fabric that no one looks good in, and I think it should be stopped. To her credit, Karen has been the one designer—the only designer—to resist fleece.”
Amy scanned my face as if she were checking for imminent signs of apoplexy, then reconsidered the celadon fleece one-piece she was holding to purchase. She threw it back on the rack with irritation.
“
Thank
you.”
She quickly picked out a nonfleece gift—a yellow waffle-cotton top and bottoms—and headed for the register. I waited on the sidewalk for her to come out, and it was then that she asked me what was wrong.
“Karen’s pregnant again.”
“Well, that explains it.”
“Explains what?”
“Your diatribe on fleece back there.” She smiled sympathetically, and we walked a block in silence. “When did you find out?”
“On Monday. I got on the elevator with her and suddenly realized that she was huge. I should have figured it out weeks
ago, but as I told Renee, I guess I was in denial. Not to mention blinded by envy.”
“I know. Two women in my department are pregnant and have the same due date: January tenth. I should take that week off. I’m so jealous, I can hardly get any work done.”
An instant vision of two equally pregnant women popped into my mind—their stomachs bumping into each other like Tweedledum and Tweedledee—and before I could savor the image in my head, I caught myself.
“I just don’t get it. I mean, here she is, a woman who never wanted children in the first place. Then she has one whom she never talks about, never brings to the office, never seems to be home long enough to enjoy—and now she’s having another one. And according to Renee, who talked to Karen’s husband, they’re ‘joyous.’ I don’t know. Maybe he was just projecting his joyousness onto her.”
“Maybe. But maybe not.”
“What do you mean?”
“Maybe she
is
joyous. Maybe she likes being a mother more than she lets on. Maybe she likes it more than she lets on to herself. I mean, from what you’ve told me about her, she doesn’t sound like the most innately nurturing person in the world.”
“She isn’t.”
“So maybe motherhood took her by surprise. You know, the way it takes men by surprise—men who have never wanted kids, who have never thought of themselves as daddy-types, but when they do have kids, they completely melt and become the most doting fathers in the world. Like my brother.”
“Your brother was like that?”
“Until Isabel. Then he was a changed man.”
I thought about the equation Amy had just offered, but it didn’t exactly compute. After all, it wasn’t like Karen brought
Marissa into the office every day and crawled around on all fours with her or got home early enough to crawl around on all fours with her there.
But then again, every mother is different. And maternal “saintliness” didn’t necessarily produce sane children. Take Simon, for example.
“Speaking of Isabel,” I said while we waited to cross Seventy-second Street, “how is she?”
A wave of rapture crossed Amy’s face. She reached into her bag and pulled out a small piece of construction paper on which there were two or three smudges of color.
“Finger paint,” she said.
Not to be outdone, at the next light I reached into my bag and produced a recent photo of the Pickle, all dressed up as a pilgrim for her little pre-preschool class pageant. Her fat cheeks and mop of hair underneath the black-construction-paper hat made me wish Thanksgiving was tomorrow, I missed her so much. But knowing how much she hated wearing hats, I could imagine the hellacious scene that had taken place when Lynn dressed her up that day. I pointed at the yellow dress and the yellow patent-leather ankle boots she wore.
“
Lello
is her favorite color.”
We crossed Seventy-second Street and exchanged niece stories—what Isabel’s favorite color was (“boo”); what both their favorite kind of cookies were (“chockit chip”)—until Amy grabbed my arm and pulled me across the sidewalk to a newsstand kiosk.
“Hey, look,” she said. “I want to show you something. “We stood under the metal awning as she scanned the racks stuffed with magazines until she found what she was looking for. She reached for the November issue of
Glamour
and gave it to me—I knew it was in my office under a stack of other magazines I hadn’t had the chance to open. “Arlene Schiffler has a column.”
Arlene had been in our honors English class and had scored a perfect 800 on her verbal SATs—reason enough, certainly, for everyone to hate her. But when she got rejected—
not even wait-listed!
—from Harvard for early admission, she’d come to class red-eyed and sniffling every day for a month. Now she was a freelance writer whose byline appeared too frequently for my taste in most of the women’s magazines and who I’d occasionally run into over the years at various social events.
“Please.” I was flipping through the magazine pages so hard, I almost tore a few out. “It’s just another one of her stupid pseudojournalistic self-obsessed ‘The Wonder of Me! Life As It’s Happening to Me!’ pieces. You know, ‘My Irregular Pap Smear: 48-Hours of Fear and Loathing in Gynecology.’ Or ‘To Wax or Not to Wax: A (Hairless) Feminist Perspective.’ She’s always turning some inane beauty story into a fucking sociological epidemic.”