The Solomon Sisters Wise Up (19 page)

I nodded.

And he walked away.

That was getting to be a habit of his.

The moment Griffen turned the corner and disappeared, my legs gave out. Really. Right on Second Avenue. If there hadn’t been a telephone booth in front of me, I might have fallen. Hanging on to the top of the phone box for support, I dropped a quarter in the slot and dialed Lisa’s number, but of course the pay phone ate my money. I dug out my cell phone. Lisa said she’d call Sabrina and we should meet at her place right away.

For a half hour I sat on her couch, hyperventilating, then I stared at the ceiling. I was going to be a single mother. I wasn’t just a this or a that anymore. I was a single-mother-to-be.

I’m going to have a baby alone.

Lisa and Sabrina calmed me down with “You don’t know what the future holds, wait and see,” but we all knew what we were really thinking: that I’d better face reality and fast.

How did you face reality, exactly? How did you go from terrified, albeit somewhat happily, to accepting your life as it was?

“Check this out,” Sabrina said, handing me this month’s
Smart Woman
magazine, which was a major competitor of
Wow
. “I saved it for you.”

I opened to where she’d bookmarked: It was an
Are You Ready For Motherhood?
quiz.

“Okay, question one,” I said. “It’s New Year’s Eve and your four-month-old has her first cold. Do You: A) Hire a baby-sitter and go out and party till 5:00 a.m. B) Stay home and care for the wee one. C) Ask your mom to watch the baby (after all, what were she and your father going to do anyway?). D) Bring the party to your place and ask everyone to keep it down.

“
A,
” Lisa said. “It’s New Year’s Eve. You can’t make the baby better just by staying home and suffering along with it. No, maybe
C,
” she amended. “Yeah,
C.
If it’s your mom, then at least you know the baby will be in capable hands.”

“Not my mom,” Sabrina said. “She wasn’t exactly mom of the year.”

My mother had been. God, she was wonderful.

“But I agree,” Sabrina added. “Definitely
C.
Better a mom than a teenager.”

“I think I should say
B,
” I said. “But I want to say
C
also.”

Then again, I didn’t have a mother. The baby would have only me.

Only me. Only me. Only me.

We finished answering the questions and took our scores. We all scored in the
Don’t Go Anywhere Without a Condom!
category, but at least I came in on the high end, just a few points below
You’re Ready But Need a Reality Check.

“Speaking of a reality check,” Sabrina said, “what about Puerto Rico? We haven’t talked about it in weeks.”

Puerto Rico. I’d forgotten all about it. Sabrina and Lisa and I had birthdays in consecutive months—Lisa was September, I was October and Sabrina was November, so we’d decided to celebrate the big twenty-nine (Sabrina was turning twenty-eight) with a fun trip to an island, if we could afford it. Before I knew I was pregnant, Ally said the plane fare could be her gift to me this year, but I’d have to take care of everything else, like the hotel and meals and drinks.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“But it’s only the first trimester,” Lisa said. “You’re allowed to fly, aren’t you?”

I could, but hanging out on the beach and drinking virgin piña coladas had lost its thrill. All I wanted to do was read baby books and come up with articles that would wow Ms. Wow so I could get promoted.

“It’s probably our last chance to do anything fun,” Lisa said. “Soon you won’t be able to do much at all, Sarah.”

I glanced at Lisa. “I know, but…I just don’t think I should waste my money on a vacation when I have to price cribs and stock up on diapers and baby food. It seems like an irresponsible thing to do.”

“Would you mind if we went?” Sabrina asked.

“Of course not,” I said, and burst into tears. “I’m super hormonal, don’t mind me,” I added.

Sabrina put her arm around me. “Of course we wouldn’t go without you,” she said. “I’m sorry, Sarah. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I guess it’s your life changing and I don’t know how to handle it. It’s not like you cut off all your hair and need help making it look good while it grows out. You’re going to have a
baby.
”

“Speaking of virgin piña coladas,” Lisa said. “How about I make us a batch?”

Lisa came back a few minutes later with a pitcher and margarita glasses, and the three of us talked for hours about womanhood, singlehood and babyhood like we were guests on
Oprah.

Whenever I needed to talk to my mother, I went to Katz’s Deli on Houston Street, a few blocks and one avenue from where I grew up. The huge, old-fashioned deli had been like a home away from home for as long as I could remember. My mom, Ally and I had gone every Sunday afternoon for stuffed corned beef and pastrami sandwiches and Dr. Brown’s cream soda, and every day after school I had stopped in for a potato knish.

The three of us would sit at our table and talk about our weeks and school and work and who said and did what, and we’d walk home hand in hand, my mother between us. Katz’s was a tradition, my mother always said, and traditions were important. For a long time after she died I couldn’t bear to go on Sundays, but then one Sunday I did go, and Ally was there, slumped over the table and crying, her head against the Formica as she sobbed, and the long-employed counter clerks let her cry it out and shushed people who tried to ask her what was wrong.

Ally had also avoided Katz’s for years, but had started going once a month or so about five years after our mother’s death. I’d graduated from college in Boston and returned to New York to find a job in publishing, and Ally had graduated from law school in California and came back with a husband, but we started going to Katz’s again regularly, as though it were expected, even though we never discussed it or arranged it. We’d talk about whatever and get into fights, and then we both got busy and one of us would say we couldn’t make it and then we both stopped going altogether, or at least, I did. And then a couple of years ago, when a guy I fell in love with hard and fast broke up with me and I wanted my mother more than anything, I started going to Katz’s to talk to her. I’d sit at a table facing the wall, pick at my pastrami, tears streaming down my face, and eventually, I’d feel her there with me.

Now, as I sat staring at the corned beef on rye and sour pickle that I’d had a craving for a second ago, I wondered what my mother would think of me being pregnant and alone. I tried to imagine what it must have been like for her with a newborn and a six-year-old, no husband and no job skills. My mother had been a winner of local beauty pageants and a sometime catalog model (she was only five foot five and too short to become a fashion model), and she’d been working as the “car and boat girl” at trade shows when she met my father. She’d been a housewife, and then she started drawing amazing portraits of Ally, and when my father left a month after I was born, she got a job as a secretary that paid pretty well, refused what I once overheard her describe as “guilt money” from my father for a better apartment and she made do.

You’ll be fine,
she would tell me now.
You’re smart, you have a great career going, I raised you to be strong and independent. You’ll be fine and so will your baby.

Strong and independent. I wondered what she would think of me ending up on Daddy’s doorstep.

You do what you have to do,
she’d always said.
As long as it doesn’t compromise you or make you feel funny about yourself.

Being at my father’s didn’t make me feel funny. I rarely saw my father and Giselle—he was Mr. Meeting and Giselle had study groups—and as much as I tried to play with Madeline, she was often asleep by the time I got home from work. Despite wanting never to share a bedroom with Ally again, I actually liked the close quarters, liked hearing Zoe’s quiet
oms
during her yoga sessions and Ally’s clicking on her laptop keyboard. Every night, when I turned the key in the door to my father’s apartment and smelled the familiar vanilla potpourri that my father liked so much, and then walked into my room to find my sisters sprawled on their beds, reading or working or thinking or sleeping or not even there at all, but their sweaters or nightgowns on the beds, I would feel safe.

I picked up my pickle and bit into it and started telling my mother, quite silently, of course, that Zoe wasn’t such a bad egg, after all.

11

Ally

F
or a date with a man who could potentially one day become my husband and the father of my child—my first date in thirteen years—I’d gone mega shopping. A black lacy Miracle bra and matching garter (for me, not him), seamed black Donna Karan hosiery that felt like satin and a killer black suit with a short skirt and a cropped jacket that I’d gotten in Paris last year. Add my three-inch black leather pumps, some red lipstick and a spritz of Chanel No. 5, and I was ready. Ready to sit across from another man, a handsome man, and flirt my ass off.

Not literally, of course.

I’d been thinking the past two weeks about what I’d do if I clicked with someone. I mean,
really
clicked with someone. The kind of clicking that makes you want to have that third glass of wine, invite him back to your place (or have him invite you back to his place, in my case), listen to some Marvin Gaye and then fool around on the sofa and see where it leads.

Thirteen years ago, when I first met Andrew, you didn’t go home with someone you just met. You didn’t sleep with anyone on the first date or the second or maybe even third. You carried condoms everywhere you went and you worried about catching something. When Sarah told me that she slept with Griffen on their second date, I’d been shocked. And when I found out she didn’t use a condom, I’d lectured her for a half hour.
“Diaphragms aren’t one hundred percent effective!”
I’d yelled.
“And they’re zero percent effective against chlamydia, herpes, AIDS and God knows what else is running around out there!”

For once, Sarah hadn’t defended herself. She’d simply said,
“You’re right.”

Sex. Who was having sex so fast, anyway? Not me. At least, I didn’t think so.

Thirteen years I’d been with Andrew. And for the first time in twelve and a half years, Andrew Sharp wasn’t sharing my bed. Two weeks had passed since the hammock incident. Since the vasectomy claim. Two weeks. And I hadn’t heard a word from him.

How was that possible? How did he go from asking my forgiveness and telling me he loved me to apparently being quite happy to have me gone?

“Men don’t always know what they want,” Kristina had said yesterday. “Maybe he’s having a midlife crisis.”

A midlife crisis at thirty-six? And what was he in crisis about? His wife who’d been doing everything she possibly could to keep him happy and interested for eleven years? His work that paid him three hundred grand a year? His friends and family who thought he was the greatest thing since the wireless Web?

I’d finally broken down and confided in Kristina about the breakup of my marriage. I went to work every day, barely able to concentrate and therefore relying on the associates more, and one of them, an idiot with an entitlement complex, the kind of guy who called all women
honey
(except judges, who could hold him in contempt), made a mistake that had cost me two hours to fix. I’d screamed bloody murder at him. Funwell, the senior partner, had called me into his office to tell me that I seemed on edge lately and was something wrong at home?

The idiot! I wanted to grab him by his veiny, bulgy neck and squeeze!

But I calmly told him no, everything was fine, expressed the appropriate concern for the client and the case, and then fumed to Kristina. I needed to vent to someone, and I wasn’t ready to share the breakdown of my personal life with my family. I didn’t know if I’d ever be ready.

Just telling someone had made me feel better. Kristina had shut her office door, pulled me into her arms for a long, comforting hug, then handed me a Godiva chocolate and insisted on taking me to lunch.

“The best revenge is to go sleep with the hottest guy you can find,” she said over salad niçoises and white wines. “Once you see that there are men out there, men to play with, men to fall for, men to marry, you’ll feel a lot better. Andrew Sharp is not the be-all and end-all.”

“But I thought he was,” I said. “Now I’m at square one again, and it’s scary as hell. That part of my life was settled, and I was hoping to move on to the next chapter—having a baby.”

“You can do that with someone else, Ally. You’re not even thirty-five. My older sister had her first baby at forty-one. You still have time.”

Time. For what? To get over being betrayed, lied to, in terrible ways by the man I loved? The man I thought loved me? How do I get over my marriage and my husband enough to fall in love with someone else?

“No one says you have to fall in love, Ally,” Kristina continued as if reading my mind. “You just want to put yourself out there to see that you are a desirable, lovable woman who any man would be honored to have. You want to feel good about yourself, and it’s very easy to do when a good-looking guy is fawning all over you.”

Kristina thought FindAMate.com was the greatest idea she’d ever heard. After I’d filled out my profile, I’d gone chicken about sending e-mails to the men I liked; it had taken days for me even to compose an e-mail. But thanks to her encouragement, I’d called back eight of the men with whom I’d been corresponding.

I’d begged Kristina to keep the news of my failed marriage to herself.

“Your marriage didn’t fail, Ally.
Andrew
failed you. And a separation and divorce are nothing to be ashamed about. You do know that, right?”

I did. I did know that. So why did it feel so embarrassing?

And why hadn’t Andrew been calling to beg me to come back? Was he dating Marnie? Other staffers at HotBods? Other women? Was he glad I was gone?