The Solomon Sisters Wise Up (23 page)

She wouldn’t report Astrid. It wasn’t something you did. What you did was what Astrid said or you got sacked. Granted,
WowWoman
wasn’t
Vogue
or
Elle
or
Glamour,
but it was reasonably popular and had been growing in ad revenue ever since Astrid took over as editor in chief in 1998.

When I stopped by Danielle’s cubicle with two mugs of decaf, I found her trying to hide the fact that she was crying.

“I am going to report her!” she whispered, tears running down her cheeks. “That bitch just stopped by a minute ago to hand me back an article I wrote—my own pregnancy journal. She says it’s not relevant for
Wow
and then stared at my bare feet and asked me to ‘please put on your shoes.’ She has no right to treat me like that. Women
would
be interested in an article about pregnancy, and what the hell does she care if I don’t wear my shoes in my cubicle?”

“I agree,” I said.

She tucked a lock of her short blond hair behind her ear. “Give me a break, Sarah. My loss is your promotion.”

“Not if I’m pregnant too,” I whispered.

She stared at me. “Really?”

I nodded. “And you know what I think we should do? I think we should write an article about how pregnant women are treated in the workplace, interview a bunch of recent moms, really do it up. We can offer it to Astrid, and if she won’t take it, we’ll submit it to the competition.”

She beamed. “I could interview everyone in my Lamaze class!”

“Let’s do it!” I said. “We’ll shove it in Astrid’s face!”

“So when are you going to tell
Acid
that you’re pregnant?” she asked.

“A few minutes before I go on maternity leave.”

She laughed. “By the way, Sarah, congratulations,” Danielle said. “Um, if you have any questions about anything, you know who to come to.”

I nodded and headed back to my desk, aware that if she were really the asshole I always thought she was, she would have asked me a few questions, namely,
Who’s the father? That guy you’ve been dating for the past couple of months? How are you going to manage?

How I was going to manage was still beyond me. But the seven new e-mails I received in the past twenty minutes from Ally—links to pregnancy Web sites—would at least take care of the info factor. Amazing. The woman was clearly having serious marital troubles, yet she still found time to send me links about the importance of taking prenatal vitamins and how prenatal yoga classes would make delivery all the easier.

I picked up the phone and called Ally’s cell. She answered on the first half ring as though she were waiting for an important call. “Ally,” I whispered, “I have an ultrasound appointment at twelve-thirty, and I thought if you were free for lunch or could get away from the office, maybe you could go with me.”

“Of course I’ll go!” she said, and I could tell I made her happy.

I whispered the address and we hung up.

I wasn’t used to calling Ally when I needed the support of a friend, but Lisa had a nasty cold and Sabrina was away on a buying trip and Griffen was going on with his life as though the woman he’d been dating weren’t pregnant.

Had been dating. Weird. I was so focused on the subject of the baby that I hadn’t even realized I’d been dumped.

Ally was in the waiting room of the Lenox Hill Fetal Maternal Clinic when I arrived. She was flipping through
Time
magazine. No, she was pretending to flip. She was actually staring at the pregnant woman next to her. Ally was looking at the woman’s belly with the kind of longing I reserved for Häagen-Dazs chocolate chocolate chip ice cream and caffeinated coffee.

Last I heard, she and Smarmdrew were trying to have a baby. I thought Ally would make a great mother. A little overbearing, yes, but a devoted mother.

“You show up late to your own ultrasound?” she said when she saw me. “Sarah, when are you going to grow up?”

“Ally, when are you going to lay off?” I said in the same inflection.

I was
five
minutes late. But only because Danielle began telling the copy editor in the cubicle on her left about her own ultrasound appointment, which I assumed was for my benefit, and I’d sat in my cubicle, eavesdropping. She’d found out she was having a girl, and her husband wanted to name the baby Rosalind after his mother, but Danielle hated both the name and her mother-in-law.

Danielle had made me laugh for the first time in my history of knowing her.

“Five minutes, Ally,” I said. “Doctors keep you waiting for a half hour, minimum, so I’m technically twenty-five minutes early.”

“Are you going to show up five minutes late to pick up your child from day care? Are you going to show up five minutes late for his basketball games? Her ballet recitals? How about your own delivery? Are you going to show up late for that?”

“Being late is how I got into this condition,” I joked.

She shook her head. “Go let the nurse know you’re here. Bring your insurance card.”

What was I, five? “Ally, I’ve been to a doctor before.”

Signed in, insurance card handed over, I took a seat next to Ally. There were five other women sitting in the upholstered chairs. Each one was with a man.

My eyes went straight to every woman’s ring finger. Every woman had a wedding ring.

I put my ringless hands to my sides and fidgeted. Why did I suddenly feel embarrassed that I didn’t have a ring? Women chose to be single mothers all the time.

But
you
didn’t choose to be a single mother. Your ringless finger announces to the world that the father of your baby doesn’t love you.

That was stupid.
Remove that thought pattern from your brain this second, Sarah!

But it was there.

The women around the room were in various states of pregnancy. The blonde across from me—she looked to be around five or six months along—was talking about how nervous she was about having amnioscentesis. I didn’t even know what that was. The blonde to my left had her head on her husband’s shoulder. He was staring straight ahead, like a zombie.

You never know what’s going on in people’s homes or marriages, Sarah,
Ally had said more than once when I’d complained last year that everyone had a boyfriend or a date to the company Christmas party or a perfect life but me.
A couple walking down the street holding hands and looking for all the world like the happiest people on earth could be mourning the loss of their baby,
Ally had said.
Or maybe the man beat her up the night before. Or maybe they are happy. But don’t think that couples are happy just because they’re a couple.

Sometimes I thought Ally was the most cynical person I’d ever known, and then sometimes I thought she was the wisest. It usually depended on my mood. Right now, when I assumed that everyone thought the worst about me, her Ally-isms were comforting.

She and Smarmdrew always looked happy enough. He was a touchy-feely type and always had his arm around her shoulder or he’d sneak up on her in the kitchen and pinch her butt. But I always applied Ally’s own pronouncement to her own marriage. Yeah, they always seemed happy at the rare times I saw them together, but that didn’t mean they were.

“Do you know what to expect when we go in?” Ally asked.

I nodded. “I read one of the articles you e-mailed me.”

She glanced at me. “Good. It should be very exciting. You get to see the baby, even if it’s just a tiny little speck at this point.”

I smiled. “I know. I’m so nervous!”

“I’m glad you invited me, Sarah,” she said. “It means a lot to me. I know we don’t always get along or see eye to eye, but you do know that I’m one hundred percent here for you, right?”

“I do know that,” I said. “And thanks, Ally.”

It was true. She was overbearing, domineering, bossy, impossible, annoying and incredibly judgmental. But she was there. And she always would be. She was there the way my mother would have been there. And, sometimes, knowing that made my mother’s loss a little easier to bear. I supposed that Andrew fulfilled that need for Ally. Maybe that was why she got married so young. I had Ally, and Ally needed an older sister too, so she got married.

Finally, my name was called. Ally and I shot up and followed the nurse.

“Sarah—”

I whirled around and there was Griffen, his hands stuffed in his pockets.

I was surprised. Very surprised.

“Uh, Ally, this is Griffen. Griffen, my sister Ally.”

They said awkward hellos and we all trailed after the nurse. I noticed Ally give Griffen the once-over, as though checking to see what the baby might end up looking like.

The baby looked a little bit like a mouse.

On the monitor, the technician pointed out the baby’s head and stomach, which both looked the same. Everything was fine and good and where it should be, the woman informed us. And then we listened to the heartbeat.

I glanced at Griffen. He was staring at the monitor, at the
zzzz
’s of the heartbeat, which sounded very loud and fast.

“Wow,” he said, looking quite awestruck.

“Yeah, wow,” I breathed.

“Wow,” Ally added.

A doctor came in and gave us the stamp of health. I was ten weeks pregnant and due in May.

“A Taurus,” Ally said with a smile. “Like Mom.”

I smiled back.

“Like me,” Griffen said, biting his lip.

That’s right. His birthday was May 12.

“Here,” the technician said, printing out still images of the ultrasound. “Keepsakes.” She handed one to me, one to Ally and one to Griffen.

Griffen glanced at the little black-and-white photo, then folded it and tucked it into his jacket pocket. “I’d better get back to work,” he said. “Um, bye, Sarah. Nice meeting you, Ally.”

Ally nodded and Griffen practically ran down the hall.

“Did you know he was coming?” Ally asked as the technician wiped the jelly off my slightly rounded tummy.

I shook my head. “I was shocked to see him here. From the way our conversation went last week, I never expected to hear from him again. He doesn’t want anything to do with me or the baby.” Tears stung the backs of my eyes.

Ally slung her arm around me. “It’s still very early, Sarah. He came today, and that’s a very good sign.”

“A good sign of what? That he wanted to make sure I was really pregnant at all?”

She handed me my pants and socks. “Hey, I’m the cynical one in this family, Sarah. I have a feeling he needed to really see the baby, hear it, in a hospital setting, to believe in it. Once it really sinks in, he may change his tune.”

Optimism from Ally was worth quite a lot. If she believed, I could too.

“Which is the head and which is the body?” Zoe asked, turning the grainy photograph of my ultrasound upside down and sideways.

The three sisters Solomon were in a Mexican restaurant near the bridal salon Giselle and her mother had dragged us to in order to photograph potential gowns. Ally and Zoe and I had all made excuses to leave at exactly the same time, found ourselves breathing sighs of relief outside the salon on Madison Avenue and having exactly nowhere to go. Zoe had suggested getting a bite to eat, and Ally, with a “My appetite is miraculously restored now that I’m out of wedding gown hell,” agreed.

“Any way you hold the photograph,” Zoe added, “you can’t tell which is which.”

Ally laughed and pointed out which end was up. “These pictures were taken only seven hours ago, so they’re already very outdated. The changes to the fetus in just one day are incredible.”

“Wow,” Zoe said. “It’s just amazing. Giselle once showed me Madeline’s first ultrasound picture, and I couldn’t believe that big, bouncy baby girl was once a teeny tiny little thing like this. Isn’t it amazing that this little creature is going to be a walking talking little person very soon?”

“You’re scaring me,” I said with a smile. “I’ve only read up through twelve weeks of fetal development. Baby Solomon doesn’t even have knees yet.”

“Baby Solomon?” Zoe repeated. “So you’re going to give the baby your name?”

“Looks that way,” I said. “Unless Griffen magically wants to be ‘and daddy makes three.’”

Zoe turned to me. “But he did show up at the ultrasound appointment. That has to be a sign of things to come.”

“That’s what Ally said, but I don’t know. ‘Wow’ was about the only thing Griffen said during the entire hour. That and ‘Nice to meet you, Ally.’”

“Well, at least our nephew’s father has manners,” Ally commented.

Except for his habit of walking away. “I can’t even speculate anymore about what Griffen’s going to do or say. It’s enough of a brain-drain to think that this—” I gestured at the photograph with a tortilla chip “—will be a Madeline or a Matthew one day.”

“Speaking of Madeline,” Ally said, “I think she should stay at home when we go on wedding hell outings. Maddy-Waddy vomited on my shoes twice in one hour.”

As our entrées arrived, I wondered why Ally was suddenly anti-Madeline. Ally had zero interest in Giselle, and Giselle had long ago given up on trying to engage her in conversation, but Ally could never get enough of Madeline. She always wanted to hold her and sing to her. But tonight’s after-work wedding gown hunt seemed hard on everyone, not just the baby. We didn’t even have to watch Giselle try on dresses; she wanted only to select a bunch she liked and photograph them so that she could figure out what style wedding she wanted. The dress was the showpiece for everything else. If she liked a modern dress, she’d have a modern wedding. If she liked an antiquey dress, she’d have an old-fashioned wedding. Maybe if she chose a transparent dress, she could have an invisible wedding!

There was something about watching an excited bride-to-be pick out wedding gowns that made you even more aware of how far from the altar
you
were. I’d sat on a stool and wondered if people used the word
illegitimate
anymore. Ally had practically ripped apart the headpiece she was “looking at.” And Zoe had stared out the window onto Madison Avenue, every now and then adding a “very nice” when Giselle asked for her opinion.