Heads or Tails (11 page)

Something else I’d come to like about having Margot’s baby around was that it triggered a flood of memories of Virginia. Her Southern cooking, her devotion to her church, her harshness not quite disguising a reluctant but undeniable fondness for me. Even though I wasn’t really the focus of her job, she made my well-being a side project of sorts. She researched healthy recipes for me, eventually ditching the can of bacon grease she normally kept under the sink, a remnant of her Southern cooking roots. It was Virginia, not my parents, who decided that it was high time I learned how to swim. Virginia had been gone a long time and before Margot’s baby arrived, I’d think of her just now and then. But with Gretchen around, it was somehow like Virginia was visiting too.

While I characterized my mother and father’s parenting style as benign neglect, the key word was benign. They weren’t awful people — there was no abuse or anything like that. But I always sensed that they just didn’t want to get to know me. Like it was too risky. As I matured, it grew harder to blame them for feeling that way after what had happened before I’d been born. They’d lost Julia, my older sister. Their pain had been so horrific and unnerving that they vowed never to have another child. They were like those people who believe they’ll never again have a dog as wonderful as the one who just died and so never dare to adopt another puppy.

Then my mom got pregnant with me. It was an accident, a fact I learned one night when I was in middle school. Earlier that evening, my mother had attended a work function and had too much to drink. She arrived home in an uncharacteristically chatty mood, even asking about schoolwork and my friends. I took advantage of her that night, boldly asking her questions I never otherwise would. In her buzzed state, she admitted that I’d been “a mistake” and that they planned to have an abortion. She’d been as far as the OB’s table, clothed in a paper gown, her feet already in the stirrups, when she realized that she just couldn’t go through with it. My dad, she reported, had sobbed, though it was unclear whether his tears were from relief or disappointment. And, she revealed to me that night, she never asked.

“Is that a
baby
in the background?” my mom asked.

I put the phone on speaker, shifted Gretchen from one arm to the other and searched around for Gavin Newsom. She’d just finished a bottle and that had become her preferred time to gnaw on his plastic hair. I was breathless from hustling around the apartment looking for it while carrying her.

“Yes,” I said, trying to keep my tone light. “It’s Margot’s.”

“Is she out visiting?”

I located Gavin just in the knick of time. I could tell that Gretchen was about to launch into her chicken squawk of impatience. Amazingly, I’d begun to decipher some of her various noises and gestures. Meanwhile, I was kicking myself for not letting the phone go to voicemail when I saw my mother’s number. I had laundry to do, formula to mix, bottles to wash, messes to tidy, not to mention my own breakfast to make, errands to run and work I needed to tend to. It was just eight in the morning, but in just a few days I’d come to understand that I’d possibly not finish any of those tasks with a baby around. When I pieced the twenty-minute increments together, I’d gotten about three and a quarter hours of sleep the night before. Seven-month-olds, I’d learned from a Google search in the middle of the night, can be uncharacteristically fussy because they’re cutting teeth. The only good news was that it was Saturday and I didn’t have to go to the job site. Jesse had stomped around the apartment louder than necessary when getting ready for the early morning training swim at Aquatic Park, yet another workout I was missing.

“Um, no.”

I could sense that my mother had been prepared to introduce a wholly different topic but my answer surprised her, causing her to pause a beat.

“I called your house not your cell, right?”

“Right.” I sat down and steeled myself for the rest of the conversation. The smell of bacon from my downstairs neighbor’s kitchen seeped through the walls and drifted up to my nose. My stomach flipped and I nearly wept.

“So you’re in San Francisco with Margot’s baby but she’s not there?”

I took what I hoped was an inaudible gasp of air, gathering my mental and emotional strength. My mother did things to me that I couldn’t explain or deflect. She offset my balance and skewed my equilibrium.

“Margot is —. She hasn’t been well,” I said, stretching my cheeks to unclench my jaw. “I’m just helping out.”

“Not well? What do you mean? It’s not cancer, is it?”

I explained the postpartum depression and Jean’s desperate call for help. I described the risk of postpartum psychosis, distinguishing Margot’s situation from my cousin’s routine baby blues.

“Do you have any experience with babies?” Unlike other mothers of women my age, mine never asked when she could expect grandchildren. And I’d never explicitly told her about Jesse’s and my pledge not to have kids of our own. But I was sure that after what she and my father had been through with Julia, she no more wanted to bond with grandchildren than she’d wanted to bond with me when I was a child. No accumulation of years would change that. That, in turn, was precisely why I wouldn’t have kids. History had proven the pattern over and over: if you don’t experience parental love, you can’t give it. Look at Eleanor Roosevelt, Judy Garland.

“Taking Margot’s baby back to San Francisco, was that really the best idea?” Leave it to my mother not to say, “Wow, what a good friend you are,” but instead to question my qualifications (which, admittedly, were questionable).

“You know, Mom, I didn’t really have much choice. Margot needed me. Jean needed me. This baby needed me.” I stroked the top of Gretchen’s head. Her hair was like raven plies of cashmere yarn. I began walking up and down the hall. At one point, I glimpsed my pinched expression in the bathroom mirror.

“You always did have a special, um, connection with Margot’s mother,” she noted and I was surprised to detect the thinnest threat of jealousy.

I propped the baby up amidst sofa pillows I’d tossed onto the floor. In just the six days I’d had her, she had actually gotten far better at sitting up on her own. Still, I wasn’t taking any chances of her falling backwards onto our hardwood floor. I rolled my head to alleviate the stiffness in my neck and jaw.

“So, Mom,” I said, yanking all my reserves. “What’s new with you?”

There’s something about fresh air that resets me. And though it makes me feel like a late-blooming teenager (considering that I’m in my early forties), I often needed to take a re-setting walk after speaking with my mother. It wasn’t her fault. She and my dad always tried with me. But it was precisely because it took effort for them to connect with me that my feelings were perpetually hurt. Everyone knew that loving a child should be effortless and uncomplicated.

I was still insecure about taking the baby out on my own but I had to get out of the house, even just for a few minutes. My nerve endings were electric. The baby seemed to need a change of scenery too. Whenever I carried her past our apartment’s large picture window, the one that overlooked Frederick Street, she leaned over and reached out toward the glass.

That morning, I decided to walk up to Tank Hill, making my way via Belvedere Street, my favorite street in all of San Francisco. Tree-lined in a way that’s reminiscent of suburban New England, Belvedere was also the city’s most wild and popular street on Halloween. One woman I know from the neighborhood spent several hundred dollars on candy every year and still ran out.

I pushed the stroller up the hill, occasionally pulling it back towards me for a bicep workout of sorts. I had to do something to keep up with my tri training. I’d never fallen this far behind the rest of the training group. At the top of Belvedere, half-way to Tank Hill, I paused to drink from my oversized water bottle, a favorite swag item from one of Jesse’s aquarium conventions. As I screwed the top on, I heard someone approach from behind.

“Okay, okay, Truly. I get the idea.”

I turned around and spotted a tall man walking an energetic Golden Retriever, who was pulling against the leash towards us.

“Sorry,” the man said. “My dog is very friendly and he loves kids. Can he say hello?”

I wasn’t a huge dog lover but somehow I’d always had a thing for Goldens. Growing up, our next door neighbors had a Golden named Ollie who lazily wandered the cul de sac and sunned himself on our front lawn. Whenever I petted him, he reached a paw up to me for a polite shake. Goldens always looked to me like they were actually smiling. Before I could respond, this particular retriever gently stuck his muzzle into the stroller next to the baby. She bellowed a hearty laugh and fingered his black nose. The sharp morning daylight highlighted the contrast between the glossy blackness of her hair and the dog’s flaxen fur.

“Oh, Jeez. Sorry,” the man said, pulling back on the leash.

“No worries. She seems to like it.”

Indeed, the baby continued to giggle, which made me laugh too. I leaned over and patted the dog’s head.

“Dog,” I explained to the baby. “Dog-gie.”

“Hi, I’m Abe.” The man extended his hand and looked me squarely in the irises.

I stood up. My skin flushed. The man was handsome. “Hillary.”

“And this is Truly.”

“Truly?”

“Yup.” Abe used the back of his hand to wipe his upper lip. He was very tall — making his name almost comical — and had dark, curly hair, which was not exactly long, but longer than average and definitely longer than Jesse’s. He was slim but fit. He wore casual clothes that looked like they were right off the rack at REI — khaki hiking shorts and a dark green fleece. I guessed he was in his late thirties. “For some reason, I always knew I’d name a dog Truly someday.”

“Cool,” I said, thinking the name was certainly more creative than the many canine Maxes, Buddies and Maddies I heard being called around the neighborhood.

“You heading up?” He nodded towards Carmel Street.

“I am,” I responded, inexplicably pleased that he was going that way too. “To Tank Hill.”

“One of my favorite walks. I live a few blocks that direction. Mind if we walk with you?”

I had an unusual awareness of my own heartbeat. “Please.”

Truly trotted next to the stroller as we headed up, which delighted the baby. To the uninformed observer, we probably looked like a little family, complete with an all-American dog, heading home.

“I’ve seen you before,” he said. “Running. With your…husband?”

I was flattered and embarrassed. I’d never noticed Abe in the neighborhood before.
How could I have missed him?
I wondered. He was so distinct. His height, those sable curls.

“Um, yeah. We do races,” I said, waving my hand across my body in a modest, no-big-deal gesture. His long legs forced his stride a half-step ahead of mine and I noticed a thin, vertical tattoo on his calf, though I couldn’t quite make it out. It may have been a serpent or a scroll with writing. I had a strange urge to kneel down and inspect it with my thumb. Instead, I raised my gaze, taking in his long, fit frame and rigid muscles. He struck me as the kind of man who kept in shape by playing pickup basketball. Social, confident, scrappy.

“Awesome. Glad to officially meet you. I meet all kinds of people because of Truly.”

“I’m starting to meet all kinds of people because of this baby.”

“Starting to?”

“Oh, yeah. Sorry.” I shook my head slightly to rejigger my brain. I still felt like a fraud, an impostor who’d be discovered and punished. “She’s, uh, the baby isn’t mine. I guess you’d say I’m babysitting. Her mom’s been sick.” I rubbed the top of the baby’s head. Her black hair felt like angora.

Abe sucked in air loudly. “Ooohhh, sorry.”

“Yeah, me too.”

Truly paused and then sat patiently in front of an elegant but simple grey and white Edwardian on Carmel. The front door was painted dark red. Good feng shui, Sarah had once taught me.

“Good boy,” Abe said, bringing Truly’s head toward his thigh and scratching behind the dog’s ear. He had a handsome, manly quality about him. I had the unsettling desire to smooth the hairs on his forearm. At the same time, I had a strange compulsion to ask him all kinds of questions.
You have a sister, don’t you? What’s your favorite country? Can we stand back-to-back so I can see exactly how much taller you are than me?
I remained stunned that I’d never noticed him before. “This is us,” he explained tilting his head towards the beautiful home.

“Nice place,” I said.

He nodded and shrugged. “Well, I’m glad my dog and your friend’s baby colluded so we could finally meet.” His tongue wetted his lips as he reached out his hand, which was nearly twice the size of mine.

“Me too.”

“Bye, Truly,” I said, bowing slightly at the dog.

Abe winked at Gretchen and we parted.

It’s just a bath, it’s just a bath, it’s just a bath
, I repeated to myself as I filled up the kitchen sink with water, as Sarah had instructed me. Our bathroom didn’t have a tub — only a shower stall — and the baby had started to emit a faintly yeasty smell. I could put it off no longer.

“No need 2 use a sledgehammer 2 crack a nut,” Sarah had texted. “What is she — 15 lbs.? Use the kitchen sink.”

“Warning,” she added moments later, “some babies don’t like baths.”

After the sink was filled and I’d squirted in a few drops of mild dish soap (which Sarah had also suggested because I hadn’t thought to buy baby shampoo on my last trip to Walgreen’s), my first mistake was not letting Gretchen hold onto Gavin as I lowered her into the water, which annoyed her. As her toes dipped in, her eyes widened in surprise and then crinkled in displeasure. I balanced her over my left shoulder to double check the temperature with my right hand. It seemed okay and so I lowered her further. In protest, she slapped her hands down and soapy water sprang up into my nose and onto the counter, soaking a nearby bowl of pears.

“Okay, okay,” I mumbled, as kindly as I could, despite my exasperation.
Just a baby, just a baby, she’s not doing this on purpose
, I told myself.