Cindy and Evie had thick family albums stuffed with Sears portraits, and husbands who wanted more attention. I had an impressive stock portfolio, and a roommate who wore a wedding ring I once gave him.
Cindy said she was generally fulfilled, though she had a few complaints. She listed them with chipper resignation while holding her wine glass out to the center of the table. Sort of like a reverse toast. “I’d like more time, more money, you know, the usual stuff,” she said. I silently chuckled at Cindy’s characterization of her relationship with her husband as having grown into something more “real.” Real never translates well. Real people are almost always terribly average and unexciting. Reality television always showed people at their worst. Reality, in my book at least, was highly overrated. “It’s different now with kids,” Cindy explained. “More meaningful. More real.” For the first time, I noticed Cindy has a millisecond of an uncomfortable laugh, though I instantly recognized it from a thousand times before. Like a soprano huff.
Evie maintained that, like the rest of her life, her marriage was numbingly dull.
Reluctantly I admitted that mine was, well, comfortable. There were no surprises with Reilly, which wasn’t an altogether bad thing. He never went on weekend drinking binges or lost our retirement fund gambling in Vegas. What he lacked in excitement, he made up for in stability. Reilly was a blue-chip spouse all the way.
Silently I toasted,
To Discontent great and small.
Cindy tapped her phone and showed more photos. “Michael’s into anything that crawls, slithers, or is in any way poisonous. Vicky is just mama’s little angel, such a girly girl. Her teacher always says, ‘Owww that Vicky is such a little girl, into princesses and babies.’”
Fascinating.
“And here we are at Disneyworld this summer,” she continued, showing us the family in mouse ears.
Holy fuck.
Birthday parties. Santa’s lap. Chicken pox. Cradle cap. Baby Einstein. Buster Brown. And on and on it all went until the eventual question all mothers ask of their child-free peers.
“So,” said Cindy. “Are you and Reilly
ever
going to have kids? You know it’s not too late. My friend Corinne just had a baby and she’s forty-three. You haven’t started menopause yet, have you?
“Cindy, I’m thirty-six, same as you. Have
you
started menopause?”
“Yes, well, that’s true, isn’t it? Why would you start any younger than me?” she pondered. “My bad! So are you and Reilly ever going to start a family?”
“No, Reilly and I are both very committed to our careers and….”
Stop defending your decision.
“No, never. I’m never going to have kids,” I dismissed.
“Never say never,” said Cindy, playfully scolding me with her index finder.
“No really, you guys. I’m glad you are happy with your children, but they’re just not my thing. Really. I’m never, ever going to have children. Reilly just had a vasectomy this summer. Here, I’ve got some pictures of the procedure,” I said, pretending to reach for my phone.
“Well, that’s a valid choice too,” said Evie after an awkward silence.
Gee, thanks.
“To be sure,” assured Cindy. “I think it’s great that people have options.”
I could practically repeat her speech verbatim because I’d heard it so many times before from parents grappling with their discomfort with my decision not to join the ranks of the breeding. At parties, I could always see the thought bubbles looming over people’s heads as they tensely smiled and nodded.
Selfish
, one thinks while smiling at me.
Can’t love.
Afraid to love
, another analyzes.
Infertile.
Who will take care of her when she’s old?
another wonders.
What the hell is wrong with her?
Lesbian
, they all charge somewhere in their consciousness.
You’d think people like me would get a pat on the back for possessing the self-awareness not to enter motherhood lightly. But instead I get pitiful looks, thinly guised as respect.
“To choice,” said Cindy, raising her wine glass. Every year or so I get the “I really feel sorry for you so I’m going to toast what I pity to show how comfortable I am with your choice” routine.
The last time I got this was at a client party where a woman, who assured me she “loved being a mother and would never wish her kids weren’t born,” told me it was nonetheless “very cool” that I was doing my own thing. Mothers are a funny lot. They preface their complaints by telling you how much they love their kids and couldn’t imagine life without them. As if were they to admit that they’re sometimes ambivalent about parenting, the furious hand of God Almighty would reach from the sky and yank their children by the necks up to the heavens. Another guy said it was “just great” that I was “willing to go against nature.” Like I was some sort of knight suited in Styrofoam armor jousting at bluebirds.
Most days when I’m thinking straight, I feel very comfortable with my decision not to have children. Of course I sometimes wonder if I’m missing out on something. If parents are really right and life without a child really is incomplete. Then, honestly, all I need to do is spend a little time with a kid, and I remember my reasons. When I’m with Sophie’s five-year-old twins I find them to be delightful — as long as it’s in thrifty little spoonfuls of two hours. Everyone insists that I’d feel differently about my own. I doubt it, but sometimes I still wonder.
I waited for Cindy and Evie to tell me that they sometimes imagined what living my life would be like, but neither did. The wrath of God thing.
I never brought it up with them because it would invite a call from the missionary of breeding. Do parents have some sort of system set up where they can show proof of conversion and redeem it for a coupon to Costco? How much would filling my uterus be worth? New lawn furniture? A gas grill? Perhaps Cindy was saving her coupons for something really special like the speed boat parked at the entrance of the superstore.
* * *
In the morning, the three of us went to breakfast and ordered the two-dollar bacon-and-eggs special before heading over to the Mud Bowl to watch the fraternities and sororities play messy touch football before the big game. When we went to college, Matt’s fraternity was one of the houses that participated in the game every year. I loved watching his transformation from clean-cut jock to the Loch Ness monster after he spent several downs in the mud. In either state, he looked beautiful. He started out in his light blue fraternity jersey and gray sweat pants cut off at the knees. The deal-clinchers for me were the backwards baseball cap and, don’t ask me why, the mouth guard he wore.
I have never matched the level of chemistry I had with Matt. I don’t know what it was about him, aside from his athletic good looks and charming sense of humor. Perhaps it was the way he squinted his blue eyes and flashed a cocky smile when he saw me. Maybe it was how he was never totally available to me, but something about Matt penetrated my memory so clearly that my heart raced just knowing I was standing across the street from where he lived fourteen years ago.
I was disappointed to see that Matt’s fraternity house now bore different Greek letters. The team wore green shirts with Delta Something Something on the front.
“Nothing like young boys in mud,” said Cindy, creating a visor with her hands. As the teams ran into the mud bowl, the smile dropped from her face. Neither Evie nor I had to ask what the problem was. “Are these? Are these?” Cindy asked, knowing that the combination of alcohol and horror could likely make her sick if she finished the sentence. “Students?” she managed to complete. Evie nodded. “
Here
? Are they students here? They’re in college?!” she asked, panicked and nauseated. Evie nodded again, pursing her lips apologetically. “Lord have mercy, I can’t watch this,” Cindy said, holding one hand over her eyes.
“What’s the problem, Cindy?” I asked. “You were flirting with two little ones at Rick’s last night. You just now noticed that we’re twice their age?”
She nodded her head, panicked. “I don’t know, I don’t know. Maybe it’s the daylight, but they look so pudgy-cheeked now. Like fucking cherubs or something. Let’s get out of here.”
“Here, here,” I seconded. “Evie, let’s go. I feel like some sort of pervert ogling little boys.”
Evie insisted we were insane, but left anyway. As we walked away, we heard the sororities begin their house cheers.
“If they look that young to us,” Cindy realized, “we must look….”
“Old,” I finished for her.
“Old,” she repeated, not noticing herself clutch the bottom of her hair as if to check that it was still there.
Chapter 3
The walk to Michigan stadium was somewhat comforting as we saw clusters of sixty-year-old men wearing maize-and-blue checkered pants, with sweater vests bearing the name of our alma mater. They sat on lawn chairs next to mini-vans with spare tires covered in blue vinyl jackets with a maize letter “M” on them. The older the men were, the louder their outfits. Many wore knit hats with blue pompoms at the top. They grilled bratwurst while equally decked-out wives scooped chili into plastic bowls. The sight of anyone older than us was a welcome one.
Autumn is the most beautiful time of the year in Ann Arbor because hundreds of different types of trees are filled with crisp orange and yellow leaves. Of course, some had fallen to the ground, but most desperately clung to the branches as if they knew letting go meant their death.
On the grass outside the stadium, three-year-old boys wore mini football uniforms and baby girls sported infant-sized cheerleader outfits. A half-dozen young, drunken boys came shirtless, each with a blue letter painted on his chest. When unscrambled, they would spell “Go Blue.” As they were, it simply implored, “BeG lou.”
“Beg Lou for what?” tailgaters shouted at the six pack.
You could see they were confused by the question, yet “G” managed to come back with a retort. “Beer!” he shouted. “Who the fuck is Lou?” he muttered to his friends.
As the band finished playing its warm-up music, the football team ran out of the tunnel and took the field as more than 100,000 fans cheered uproariously. There was something about a blank scoreboard that always lifted my spirits. Uniforms were clean. No one had been tackled yet. No yellow penalty flags had been thrown by men in stripes. It was like anything could happen. And we got to watch the whole thing from start to finish.
Late in the first quarter someone started the human wave. An entire section of fans stood, raised their arms, then sat down. Then the next section would do the same. And on and on it went until everyone in the stadium was waiting for their one silly moment to stand and shout “whoaaa” and then sit down again. The stadium was our fountain of youth and we all splashed around gleefully waiting for the wave to come our way.
Right before halftime, I had an odd sense that Matt was somewhere in the stadium. I scanned the section to the left of us, but no sight of him.
This is ridiculous. There are thousands of people here. There’s no way you’d see him even if he were here,
I thought.
No, he’s here. Keep looking,
said another part of me.
I looked to the section on the right and had two false Matt sightings before giving up.
Look now.
So I did. Two sections over was a guy who was about my age and looked an awful lot like Matt.
There’s no way that’s him
, Common Sense told me.
It could be. Why is it impossible for him to be here?
The goofy, hopeful Teenage Optimist in me couldn’t help wonder.
I squinted to see if it could be him. “Can I borrow your binoculars?” I asked an older man behind me. He handed them to me without a word, and looked surprised when I turned his lenses to the crowd instead of the football field.
I focused on my suspect and tried to decide whether it was him or not. Just the thought that it could be him sent a thrilling nausea through me. You’d think that love-at-first sight giddiness would lessen over so many years, but my reaction to just the possibility of seeing him showed me that my feelings for him had actually intensified.
* * *
I met Matt during spring break in Fort Lauderdale during our senior year in college. Cindy, Evie and I went with our other friends, Libby and Olivia. Olivia knew a group of guys we saw entering The Bahama, a hotel bar that we found on our first night of vacation. She motioned to the group of them and pointed to the extra seats at our table.
The Miami Sound Machine was blasting The Conga as we sipped blended pink drinks with umbrellas. Teens in Hawaiian shirts and island beads overtook the town, shouting pearls of wisdom like “Spring Break!” and “Party!” at the top of their lungs. A few of them crushed beer cans on their heads and passed out in the gutter.
Cindy and I both spotted Matt among the group at the same time.
“I call the guy with the brown hair in the white shirt,” she informed our table. The policy was that the first person to call a guy was the only one allowed to pursue him. The rationale was that the girl who was most interested would naturally spot him first. A logical assumption that helped maintain harmony in our overcrowded hotel room. There was one exception to this rule.
“Jump shot,” I said as the guys came closer.
And that was the jump shot. This simply meant that the guy would be a fair toss-up between the two and no matter whom he chose, there would be no hard feelings.
“Bitch,” joked Cindy.
“No, my friend.
You
are the bitch if you stand between me and that magnificent specimen of masculinity. Bow out, I beg of you.”
“I’ll do no such thing. The genetic possibilities are phenomenal with this man.”
“I hate you,” I said through a cemented smile as the guys began to seat themselves at our table.
“Olivia,” said their ambassador to ours. “These are some of my buddies from school. You’ve met Andy, Pete, Rich and Matt, right?”