The Solomon Sisters Wise Up (3 page)

Tears pricked the backs of my eyes, and I blinked them back hard.

He squinted across the table at me in the candlelight. “Oh shit, are you crying?” He sat back.

“I just want to know if we’re headed anywhere,” I said, my voice squeaking.

Groan of frustration. “Honestly, Sarah, I don’t know. I like you a lot. I really enjoy your company. That’s what I know.”

A small sob escaped me.

He took a deep breath. “Okay. For starters, I think you’re taking this a lot more seriously than I am. I’m not really looking for anything serious right now. If you want the truth, that’s it.”

That’s when the tears came, fast and furious.

And that was also when I heard the faint beginning of someone singing “Happy Birthday To You.” The song got louder, closer. I looked up to find our waiter finishing, “Happy birthday, dear Sarah, Happy birthday to you,” and setting down a cupcake with a tiny lit candle in the center.

“Make a wish!” Griffen said. He smiled and was looking at me with the expression of a guy who was under the impression that a thoughtful gesture would allow us to kiss and make up—or at least get me to shut up. I was tempted to conk him over the head with the bottle of Pellegrino. Was he a jerk or just clueless? “It’s chocolate with white icing,” he added. “I remembered when we passed Veniero’s on our first date, you looked at all the desserts in the window and said that with all the amazing treats to choose from, your favorite was still a plain old chocolate cupcake with white icing.”

He couldn’t be a jerk. Jerks didn’t remember things like that. Or say things like that. Right?

He stared at me for a second, clearly waiting for a smile or a
You’re right, we’re enjoying ourselves! Let’s just have a good time!
When I hung my head so low that I almost got frosting on my chin, he said, “Look, Sarah, I feel like I should just come right out and say what’s on my mind.”

I’m in love with you, Sarah. I’m in love with you. I’m in love with you.

He cleared his throat. “I really like you, but I don’t want to lead you on. Maybe we should just be friends.”

What, and be a single mother?
I thought numbly, per that old joke.

But it wasn’t a joke.

I was only supposed to be pregnant. That was enough to contend with. For the past week, I’d been slowly accepting that word as applicable to myself.
I am pregnant. I am a pregnant woman. I take prenatal vitamins and don’t drink coffee or alcoholic beverages. If I have a cold or a sore throat, I brave it out. I am a pregnant person.

The concept of single motherhood hadn’t really registered on my radar.

I stared down at my cupcake and cried. The man and woman at the table to our right were glancing at me.

“Sarah,” Griffen said through gritted teeth, “why don’t you have some champagne? It’ll help you calm down.”

“I can’t have any champagne,” I muttered.

“Have some,” he said as though I hadn’t spoken, his eyes darting around in embarrassment. “You’ll feel better, trust me.”

“I can’t have any alcohol, you asshole! I’m pregnant!”

Griffen didn’t signal the waiter and ask for the check and go running out of the restaurant, the way my sister thought he might.

He just sat there, looking as though someone had just kicked him very hard in the stomach.

“Congratulations, honey,” the elderly woman at the next table whispered to me.

2

Ally

I
t was a good thing I didn’t know until three o’clock this morning that Sarah was pregnant, or I would have ended up driving back into the city last night to drag Andrew away from his shareholders’ dinner meeting and into the bathroom of the Palm steakhouse for a quickie against the sink.

I was ovulating.

And my sister, my
younger
sister, was pregnant.

I was ovulating, my younger sister was pregnant, and where was my husband? He was working late, meeting clients early, researching something online, going for a jog. He was anywhere but in bed with me.

And as my eggs were at this very moment aging in unbearable bumper-to-bumper traffic on the Cross Island Expressway—I slammed down on the horn with a
honnnnnk!—
I had to concede that my marriage wasn’t what it used to be.

“Whose is?” my friend Kristina had said earlier this afternoon during lunch-hour Botox injections in a small spa near our midtown law offices. “It stops being about sex after the second year.”

I would have shaken my head, but a woman in a white lab coat was aiming a needle at the “angry spot” between my eyes. “Andrew and I had good sex for longer than two years,” I countered. “We still have decent sex. Well, sometimes.”

Kristina snort-laughed. “Yeah, because you’re having it once a month, Ally. Of course it’s good. And trust me, if you two weren’t trying to get pregnant, you’d have sex once every three months.”

I didn’t know about that. Andrew and I had been trying in earnest to have a baby for only the past five years. We’d been married eleven. That left six years. Take away the first two, and that left four years in between of good, more-than-once-every-month sex.

“Anyway, Kris, what man would willingly go without sex for three months?”

She sat up and looked at me as if I’d just sprung down from Planet Naive. “No man would. It’s called a little harmless nookie on the side.”

I sat up and looked at her as if she’d just sprung down from Planet Are You Kidding Me? “Since when is ‘nooky on the side’ little or harmless?” I asked, grabbing a mirror and admiring the newly plump bridge of my nose. “Wait a minute—are you saying you know that Jack is cheating on you and you don’t care?”

She rolled her eyes. “It’s not that I don’t
care,
it’s that I don’t care to know
for sure.
We have a good, solid marriage, we love our little Ben, we have history. That’s what I care about.”

Kristina had been married for two years. Two. She’d given her longtime boyfriend (of seven years) an ultimatum three times over the course of six months, and the third time had been the charm.

She got pregnant on her honeymoon.

We freshened our lipsticks and fluffed our hair in the large, round mirror on the wall. “Trust me, Kris, if Andrew were even thinking about cheating on me, I’d know it. We’ve been married for eleven years, and we dated for two years before that. I
know
the man.”

“Okay, okay,” she said. “There’s another category, then. Husbands like Andrew in their late thirties, early forties, who don’t need it like they used to. Sex is available every night, right there in their own bed, but they’re too tired, like us. We all work twelve-hour days, commute three hours round trip, spend our lunch hours getting Botox and facials or running a few miles at the track at the gym. Who has time or energy for sex? Married couples want to come home, eat dinner, read a chapter or two in a book, watch a little TV and kiss their spouse good-night. Lights out. A little dull, but comfortable. You get through the seven-year-itch, your marriage is stronger for it. And then one day you realize you’re your parents.”

How romantic. And that didn’t describe my parents’ marriage. The seven-year-itch hadn’t destroyed my parents’ marriage—another woman had.

But it did describe my own marriage.

Which was why I was reading an asinine book called
How To Spice Up Your Marriage
by the equally asinine and ridiculously popular married marriage therapists, Doctor Joan and Doctor Jake. I was on chapter four, which was about the importance of oral sex in bringing back the sparks.
Ladies, when was the last time you performed oral sex on your husband?
Doctor Jake asked in his section of the chapter.
Hit the video stores and rent the classic
Deep Throat.
That’s all the education you need, ladies!

Idiot.

Dr. Joan had then chastised her husband and colleague in her section (that was their schtick), then gave step-by-step instructions on how to give a proper blow job.
And you’ve gotta swallow, girls!

Sexual intercourse didn’t always interest Andrew. But if I put my mouth anywhere near the region of his penis, he began to pant. And then I’d get what I wanted. Sperm inside me. And, sorry, Dr. Jake and Dr. Joan, but I wasn’t referring to my throat. I needed the sperm to fertilize my eggs—not to make me gag and run to the bathroom.

Honkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk!

“Move, goddammit!” I screamed at the traffic.

Calm down. Calm down. Calm down. Remember what the gynecologist said.
Stress is not good for making a baby.

Still, I didn’t have time for rush-hour traffic. My eggs didn’t have time for rush-hour traffic.

It was five-thirty, and I wanted to be home by six-thirty to have a good hour to prepare for Andrew, who, according to his snotty little priss of a secretary, would be stopping home for a half hour or so at seven-thirty before a tennis match with a client at the club.

I had thirty minutes of Andrew Sharp’s precious time. All I needed was thirty seconds.

For those precious thirty seconds, for my surging luteinizing hormone, I’d gone shopping. I’d left work at five o’clock, the earliest in the history of my law career (and that was after taking the two-hour lunch with Kristina for Botox) so I could nip up to Victoria’s Secret. I eyed the pink shopping bag on the passenger seat of my car.
I
could have written the chapter on sex accessories in
How To Spice Up Your Marriage.
Inside that bag was a short, sheer, lacy, low-cut red teddy, matching thong and a grocery bag containing a can of fat-free Cool Whip. I had enough slutty nighties, edible underwear, Kama Sutra body oil and paraphernalia from Come Again, an “adult toy store,” to interest my husband in the process of making a thousand babies.

I only wanted one.

“You’re going to be thirty-five next month, Ally,”
my gynecologist had said at my last checkup.
“You
can
get pregnant through your early forties.
Can.
Maybe. But the odds are very slim. Your best time to conceive was when you were twenty-seven. Your eggs aren’t what they used to be. Off the record, Al, either get pregnant now, or start putting yourself on adoption waiting lists.”

For the past five years, my doctor had assured me there was absolutely nothing wrong with me, and Andrew’s doctor had assured him his sperm count was just fine.

“All you have to do to get pregnant,”
my gynecologist had said,
“is make love with your husband. Have lots of sex, regularly. Oh, and decrease your level of stress. Your blood pressure is at the high range of normal.”

Decrease my level of stress. Okay, Doc.

What was making my blood pressure rise to the high range of normal? How about the sixty-hour work week, the quota of two hundred and fifty billable hours a month, and the five male idiots I had to work with at my law firm? If it weren’t for Kristina and a female associate and a favorite paralegal, I’d have quit Funwell, Funwell and Logsworth a long time ago—eleven years ago.

And how about the very fancy envelope that arrived in my mailbox two weeks ago, alerting me to the fact that my father and his girlfriend were engaged? (Had my father called to tell me the news himself? Of course not.) Also included was a little card inviting me to participate in “Archweller-Solomon Wedding Fest,” the wedding-planning extravaganza to which my father and Wife No. 3-to-be were subjecting their immediate family. Invited were the three Solomon daughters, the fiancée’s toddler (oh, she’d be a big help) and the fiancée’s mother. The invitation included days and times (starting late October and continuing through after New Year’s) for visiting venues, caterers, florists, harpists, photographers, dress boutiques, et cetera, conveniently after work hours and on weekends so that the Solomon sisters and their patriarch, all of whom actually worked for a living (except for Zoe—sorry, half sis, but I wouldn’t call being the “Dating Diva of L.A.” a
job
) could attend all or some events.

Then again, given that Zoe’s own ex-friend had stolen Daddy Dearest away from Zoe’s mother, I doubted Zoe would be flying anywhere near New York City to smell floral arrangements and taste rubber chicken.

My father was out of his mind. Had been for as long as I’d known him. And my stepmother-to-be was twenty-five.

That reminded me. Also added to my list of stressors was the fact that said stepmother-to-be was younger than myself and my younger sisters.

And one of those sisters was pregnant. Without trying. With trying
not
to get pregnant.

It was so goddamned fucking unfair!

I’ve learned a lot from Ally, but she curses excessively in the office, and I don’t think it’s professional….

Ally has screamed at me four times in the past month over minor errors in minor briefs. I’ve documented every instance….

Ally, the senior partners and I commend you on another stellar performance review. However, several of the male associates have commented that your management style is a bit emasculating….

Yeah, because I don’t have a penis, you wuss!
I’d wanted to yell at Funwell number two this morning. (Funwell number one was long dead.)

That was one more thing to add to my list. Not the penis, but the double standard. Why were the male senior attorneys allowed to yell their heads off and bully the associates, but I wasn’t? Because I was a woman, that’s why.

“Why would you want to bully anyone?” my sister Sarah had asked last week—pre-knowledge of pregnancy—when we’d met for lunch to discuss how many Wedding Fest “events” we’d really have to attend. Sarah thought three, tops. I thought one. We both thought Princess Zoe should have to pick up the slack since she had always been our father’s favorite, but Sarah also doubted Zoe would make an appearance. “My boss is a bully,” Sarah continued, “and all it does is alienate people.”

“No, Sarah,” I told her, pointing a bread stick at her. “Intimidating people, especially in the workplace, is a
good
thing. It gets things accomplished and gets you what you want, what you need. If you weren’t so nicey-nicey, you’d probably be a senior editor by now.”