Still Life with Husband (19 page)

FOR SOME TIME NOW, I ’VE BEEN WORKING ON A BOOK
of poetry. It’s a series of love poems to fish called
Sole Mates.
I’m trying to carve out a niche for myself as a writer of love poems to nonhumans. If amphibians had disposable income and marketing clout, I might be on to something. As it is, it keeps me amused. Next on the agenda will be a volume of romantic verse dedicated to a more varied cross section of marine life, tentatively titled
Sealed with a Kiss.
I’ve outlined the whole cycle. From marine animals, I’ll most likely move on to the vegetable kingdom with
Tomato, My Tomato,
or possibly, if my poetic vision shifts toward the star-crossed,
Lettuce Be in Love.

So I’m in the middle of “My God, What a Cod,” when Meg walks into White’s. In fact, I should be finishing up an editing assignment. I’m supposed to be proofreading
Hooray for Plate Tectonics!,
a fifth-grade science textbook for the children’s-book publishers I freelance for (I did
Three Cheers for Photosynthesis!
last week), but I’m having more fun sorting out rhyme schemes and tweaking “When You’re Feeling Crappie.” I’m in the middle of struggling with the last verse of “Cod”—

So swim to me—quick!—you clever cod

I’ll feast my eyes on your intriguing lips

I long to caress your scaly bod

Your fate: much more than fish and chips

(notes: does “scaly” have unromantic connotation? is last line too Borscht Belt?)

—and I don’t notice Meg until she throws her arms around me from behind. I manage to surreptitiously shove my neon pink notebook under
Hooray for Plate Tectonics!
as she plants a kiss on the top of my head and sits down next to me. She looks sparkly; her cheeks are flushed.

“What’s the good word?” I say. I hear myself spout this Len Rossism; as I grow older, it’s just one of the many ways I find myself unwittingly channeling my parents. One day soon I’ll be strolling around in the summertime in Bermuda shorts with black socks and dress shoes, greeting strangers with a hearty salute.

“The good word,” Meg says, barely able to contain herself, “is ‘pregnant.’ The two good words are ‘I’m pregnant.’”

“Meg!” I say, and I throw my arms around her and hug her tightly, and then I think, maybe you shouldn’t hug a pregnant person too tightly, so I loosen my grip and say, “I’m so happy for you,” and I mean it.

“I just found out this morning,” she says. “I did the test first thing, before Steve woke up, and I started yelling from the bathroom, ‘Steve, come quick! Two lines! Two lines!’ and Steve thought I was having a nightmare about two lions, and he came running in, and he slipped on the bathroom rug and cracked his front tooth on the edge of the sink. Can you believe it?” Meg is out of breath, rushing her words together. She looks horrified and then laughs, and then looks horrified again. “He’s at the dentist now.” She clasps her hands together, as if she’s praying. “He gets a discount from other dentists. Did you know that?” My best friend seems different to me. I recognize this as a cliché, but it’s true. Her light brown eyes shine like bright amber, and her lovely skin is even clearer than usual. “Besides Steve, you’re the only one who knows,” she adds.

“How pregnant are you?” I ask. For some reason, Barbara Ross likes to say, “There’s no such thing as a little bit pregnant!”

“About three minutes,” Meg says. “Two weeks from conception, actually, which means I’m four weeks. They count a pregnancy as forty weeks, starting from your last period, instead of the actual thirty-eight weeks from conception. I guess the medical establishment thinks women aren’t smart enough to know when they conceived. I know exactly when I got knocked up,” she continues. “Down to the moment.” She winks then, lewdly.

I want to ask her if she’s worried, if her last miscarriage hovers over her, casting a shadow on her happiness. But she just seems delighted, unclouded. Any emotion untempered by pessimism worries me. For once, though, I manage to keep my mouth shut. “I’m so happy for you,” I say again.

“Me, too,” she says, and grabs my hand, squeezes it. “Auntie Emily. Can I tell you something?”

Auntie Emily? I picture myself as a thin spinster, my gray hair pulled back tightly in a bun. I clearly have no need to color my hair. My high white lacy shirt collar is tight and itchy around my neck. Men ignore me. Children fear me. I subsist on Lean Cuisines and Ritz crackers and live in a dark, furnished studio apartment with rust-colored carpeting. If only I hadn’t ruined my marriage, the one good thing I managed to achieve in this life…

Meg continues, unaware of my fantasy. “I know this is going to sound crazy, but I think it’s a girl. I had a dream two nights ago. I dreamed that a twelve-year-old girl with long brown hair and pretty lips came up to me and said, ‘Hi, Mom, it’s me. I’m fine.’ I didn’t even know I was pregnant yet! What do you think of that?” Meg’s cheeks flush, but whether it’s from mild embarrassment or just the heightened emotion of the moment, I can’t tell.

“I think…” I don’t exactly know what I think. All my fears of abandonment by my best friend come flooding back to me, in spite of my efforts to suppress them. They’re mixed with unadulterated worry for Meg, for the zygote she has already imagined as a twelve-year-old. I take a deep breath and let my love for Meg rise up in my chest, let all my hopes for her happiness wash over me; I exhale. Life is delicate and fragile, and every breath is sort of a miracle, really, if you’re inclined to think in those terms. Every rising and falling of the chest is like faith, spontaneous trust in the next breath, belief that it will not be your last, nor will the next one, nor the one after that. You just keep breathing. It’s almost divine, if that’s the way your thoughts run. Meg is pregnant, right now, and maybe, if she’s very lucky, she’ll end up with a new person out of it. I say, “I think
Yay!
” And I hug my friend tightly again.

We’re midhug when I hear the screech. “Meg and Emily! Ohmygosh, just like in college! Ohmygosh, You Guys Are TOO CUTE! AREN’T THEY TOO CUTE?” The high-pitched hooting is coming closer to us with every word, like a teakettle whistling, or maybe, I see as I look up, more like peckish jackals scooting up to nibble on an antelope’s carcass. Meg and I disengage from our hug and brace ourselves against the descent of Becky and Angie, the two girls who lived across from us in Devlin Hall during our freshman year of college. They were best friends, like Meg and me, which seemed at first glance like enough of a commonality, so we all hung out together for about fourteen seconds during freshman orientation week. Almost immediately, and simultaneously, we realized that a friendship match had not been made, which bothered no one. We stayed friendly, and Becky and Angie remained an important part of our lives, because from then on, they provided excellent fodder. We defined ourselves by their reflection; we were everything they were not. Sometimes, late at night, as we were drifting off to sleep, Meg or I would whisper, “Becky, do you have any more hairspray? I’m all out, and my bangs are less than two feet high,” or “Angie, did you use the last of my Calvin Klein Obsession? I can’t go to the Kappa Kappa Kappa Kappa Kappa party without spraying at least a quart of my signature scent!” And more than once just the quickest imitation of one of Becky’s or Angie’s prodigious verbal tics disrupted a spat between Meg and me and sent us into gales of laughter. In a way, we owe them our enduring friendship. Of course they don’t know that. I heard a few years ago that they had both moved back to Milwaukee.

“Hi-eeeee,” Meg says, doing a perfect imitation, even after all these years. But the smile on her face is genuine; surprisingly, it is kind of nice to see them.

“YouGUYS!”
Becky says. “Still together, just like us!” A cloud of sweet, expensive perfume hovers over them. “Of course, we’re not Becky and Angie anymore,” she continues, tilting her head dramatically and brandishing her left ring finger; Angie picks up the cue and does the same. “We’re Becky and Tyler and Angie and Glenn! What about
youguys
? Are
youguys
married?”

“Not to each other!” Angie clarifies, and then she giggles, and it’s the first time I’ve actually heard the sound
“tee hee!”
come out of a person’s mouth.

I hold up my left hand and wiggle it, and Meg does the same. I’m wearing my wedding ring, for a change. But no diamond engagement ring shines for their approval on my finger. When we decided to get married, Kevin, ever practical, suggested that we take the two months’ salary he would spend on a diamond and put it into a retirement fund instead. “An IRA is a better symbol of my love for you than a ring,” he said then. “We’re not like that. You don’t even wear jewelry!” He was right. I didn’t tell him then that in spite of my carefully honed cynicism on the subject, I
wanted
one of those silly diamonds. I notice Becky’s and Angie’s manicured nails, and my bitten, ragged ones. I quickly put my hands back in my lap.

“We are both totally married!” Meg says. “And I’m pregnant!”

I understand that this announcement probably just explodes from Meg’s mouth unbidden, driven out of her lips by the force of her excitement. Still, what’s she doing telling these two mynah birds? I look at her, furrow my eyebrows as discreetly as I can. She looks at me, then back at Becky and Angie, smiling.

They both scream so loudly that the entire coffee shop turns and looks at us.
“No way!”
Angie cheeps.

“That is so super!” Becky chirps.

They mean it, of course; the happy news of marriages and pregnancies is clearly their métier.

“I just had a baby boy six months ago,” Angie says. She’s rooting around in her oversized handbag, presumably for a photo.

“And I had a girl last December!” Quicker on the draw, Becky whips out her wallet and unfurls a series of photographs of a fatcheeked little girl in varying stages of hair and tooth growth.

“She’s beautiful,” Meg says, and I nod. She is.

“Hannah,” Becky says. “Thirty hours of labor and an emergency C-section!”

“And this is Glenn junior.” Angie passes us a photograph of what may be the ugliest child I’ve ever seen, a wan, bald-headed, morose-looking creature who resembles a baby eagle more than a human. “He’s my little charmer. Pushed him out in nineteen minutes and got a stage-three tear. Ripped almost all the way from front to back! Anyone want a piece of gum?”

Meg is still smiling, but her eyes register horror. I just shake my head and flash what I hope is my own smile, but it feels more like a grimace.

“So, when are you
due
?” Angie asks, as if Meg were a library book. Her sleek black hair and her tiny, pointy nose call to mind a friendly, curious rodent. Maybe a ferret. This image is much meaner than I feel; I banish it.

“July,” Meg whispers.

“And what about you, Emily?” Becky asks. “Is there the pitter-patter of little feet in your house?” I shake my head. Who says these things, anyway? “Any plans for little ones?” she goes on, clueless, her big white teeth gleaming.

“Some day…” I say in what I hope is a mysterious and aloof tone, my voice drifting off. Actually, my husband is mercilessly haranguing me about this
very topic,
but I’m
super busy
these days, because I’ve decided to have an affair. “Probably not for a while.” I look over at Meg again, hoping she’ll have worked out a polite way of extricating us from this situation. But Meg is staring intensely at the duo, blinded, perhaps, by their tasteful tennis bracelets, and I get no sense that she’s planning our escape. Maybe she’s too busy imagining some version of her future.

“Where do
youguys
live?” Angie asks. She and Becky nod politely as we tell them: Kevin and I in our rented apartment, Meg and Steve in their bungalow in a less-than-desirable neighborhood. “Mmmhmmm,” she says cheerfully, clearly unimpressed. “Becky and I are neighbors in Morgan Heights,” she announces, leaning a little bit onto her tiptoes with the news. Morgan Heights is the wealthiest suburb in the metro area. She and Becky immediately launch into a catalogue of names from our shared past and where they all live—lots of people from Madison have apparently ended up in Milwaukee—and, to spice up the discussion, Angie offers a corresponding list of what they all paid for their homes. Angie, it seems, is a real estate agent. “I
was,
” she emphasizes, “before Glenn junior came along.”

Becky and Angie have seamlessly morphed from 1990s sorority queens into expensively dressed suburban matrons, slim and toned and encased in brightly colored cashmere coats. They both wear up-to-the-minute shoes, I notice, too—a sort of sneaker/pump hybrid that I heard Melissa-Katherine Parker-Samuels discussing on
Entertainment Today.
Did Becky and Angie plan for their lives to turn out this way? Did Angie meet Glenn and draw up a flowchart of his personality traits so that she was absolutely certain she’d end up in a huge house with a cleaning service twice a week? Did Becky stand in front of the mirror one day, carefully applying mascara and thinking, I’ll go to business school to meet a man, and I’ll get my MBA
and
my MRS? Or did it all just fall into their laps? Because I barely have the foresight to plan dinner. And it has always seemed to me that the smallest, most random choice in your life can lead you where you never thought you’d be.

“Youguys,”
Becky says. “We should totally have lunch some time.” She says it so warmly, so sincerely, that I’m about to agree. Just then, Angie catches a glimpse of
Hooray for Plate Tectonics!
on the table. “Neat!” she exclaims, reaching for it. Underneath
Hooray
is my pink notebook, on the front of which I’ve scribbled the title,
Sole Mates,
along with several earlier contenders, including
Marlin, My Darlin’; Loves and Fishes;
and
Salmon to Watch Over Me.
I’ve also drawn pictures of fish shaped like hearts, hearts shaped like fish, fish swimming in a pond of hearts, and fish kissing. Meg takes one look at the notebook and giggles; Becky and Angie glance at it and then at each other, and before I can stop her, Angie drops
Hooray for Plate Tectonics!
back on the table and grabs my notebook instead.