Good in Bed (50 page)

“You're late!” the head nurse scolded, and smiled at me to show she didn't mean it. I had the copy of
Moxie
curled up like I meant to smack a dog with it. “Here,” I said, handing it off.

She barely spared it a glance. “I don't read this stuff,” she said. “It's worthless.”

“I agree,” I said, heading toward the nursery.

“There's someone here to see you,” she said.

I walked to the nursery and, sure enough, there was a woman standing at my window, the window in front of Joy's Isolette. I could see short, impeccably coiffed gray hair, an elegant black pantsuit, a platinum diamond tennis bracelet around one wrist. A light whiff of Allure was in the air, her freshly polished fingernails glittered under the fluorescent lights. The Ever-Tasteful Audrey had put together just the right ensemble for going to visit her son's illegitimate premature firstborn.

“What are you doing here?” I demanded.

Audrey gasped and took two giant steps backward. Her face went two shades paler than her Estée Lauder foundation.

“Cannie!” she said, and pressed one hand against her chest. “I … you scared me.”

I stared at her, saying nothing, as her eyes moved over me, unbelieving.

“You're so thin,” she finally said.

I looked down and observed with not much interest that this was true. All that walking, all that plotting, my only food a snatched bite of bagel or banana and cup after cup of bitter black coffee, because the taste matched the way I felt inside. My refrigerator held bottles of breast milk and nothing else. I couldn't remember the last time I'd sat down and ate a meal. I could see the bones in my face, the jut of my hip bones. In profile, I was Jessica Rabbit: nonexistent butt, flat belly, improbable bosom, thanks to the milk. If you didn't get close enough to notice that my hair was dirty and matted, that I had giant black circles under my eyes and that, most likely, I smelled bad, I was an actual babe.

The irony had not been lost on me: After a lifetime of obsession, of calorie counting, Weight Watching, and StairMastering, I'd found a way to shed those unwanted pounds forever! To free myself of flab and cellulite! To get the body I'd always wanted! I should market this, I thought hysterically. The Placenta Abruptio Emergency Hysterectomy Premature and Possibly Brain-Damaged-Baby Diet. I'd make a fortune.

Audrey fingered her bracelet nervously. “I guess you're wondering …” she began. I said nothing, knowing exactly how hard this was for her. Knowing, and not giving a damn. A part of me wanted to see her twist in the wind like this, to struggle for the words. A part of me wanted her to suffer.

“Bruce says you won't speak to him.”

“Bruce had a chance to speak to me,” I told her. “I wrote and told him I was pregnant. He never called.”

Her lips trembled. “He never told me,” she whispered, half to herself. “Cannie, he is so sorry about what happened.”

I snorted, so loud I was afraid I'd bother the babies. “Bruce is a day late and a dollar short.”

She bit her lip, twirling the bracelet. “He wants to do the right thing.”

“Which would be what?” I asked. “Having his girlfriend refrain from any more attempts on my baby's life?”

“He said that was an accident,” she whispered.

I rolled my eyes.

“He wants to do the right thing,” she repeated. “He wants to help out. …”

“I don't need money,” I said, deliberately crude, spelling it out. “Not his or yours, either. I sold my screenplay.”

Her face lit up, so glad that we were on a happy subject. “Honey, that's wonderful!”

I said nothing, hoping she'd fall apart in the face of my silence. But Audrey was braver than I'd given her credit for.

“Could I see the baby?” she asked.

I shrugged and stabbed one finger at the window. Joy was in the center of the nursery. She looked less like an angry grapefruit; more like a cantaloupe, perhaps, but still tiny, still frail, still with the science-fiction-looking ventilator attached to her face more often than not. The chart at the end of her glass crib read “Joy Leah Shapiro.” She was wearing just a diaper, plus pink-and-white–striped socks and a little pink hat with a pom-pom on top. I'd brought the nurses my stash, and every morning they made sure that Joy got a different hat. She was far and away the best chapeau'd baby in all of the NICU.

“Joy Leah,” whispered Audrey. “Is she … did you name her after my husband?”

I nodded once, swallowing hard around the lump in my throat. I can give her this much, I thought. After all, she wasn't the one who ignored me, who didn't call me, who caused me to fall into a sink and almost lose my baby.

“Will she be all right?”

“I don't know,” I said. “Probably. They say probably. She's still
small, and she has to get bigger, her lungs have to grow until she can breathe on her own. Then she'll come home.”

Audrey wiped her eyes with the Kleenex she extracted from her purse. “And you'll stay here? You'll raise her in Philadelphia?”

“I don't know,” I told her. Honest to a fault. “I don't know if I want to go back to the paper, or maybe back out to California. I have friends there.” But even as I said it, I wondered if it was true. After dashing off a perfunctory thank-you note that couldn't begin to express the gratitude I should have felt for everything she'd done for me, I'd been giving Maxi the same silent treatment as all of my friends. Who knew what she was thinking, or whether she even thought she was my friend still?

Audrey straightened her shoulders. “I would like to be a grandmother to her,” she said carefully. “No matter what happened between you and Bruce. …”

“What happened,” I repeated. “Did Bruce tell you I had a hysterectomy? That I'll never have another baby? Did he happen to mention that?”

“I'm sorry, Cannie,” she said again, sounding shrill and helpless and even a little scared. I shut my eyes, slumping against the glass wall.

“Just go,” I told her. “Please. We can talk about this some other time, but not right now. I'm too tired.”

She put her hand on my shoulder. “Let me help you,” she said. “Can I get you something? Some water?”

I shook my head, shook her hand off, turned my face away. “Please,” I said. “Just go.” And I stood there, turned away from her, with my eyes shut tight, until I heard her soles slap-slapping back down the hallway. That was where the nurse found me, leaning against the wall and crying, with my hands curled into fists.

“Are you okay?” she asked, and touched my shoulder. I nodded, and turned toward the door.

“I'll be back later,” I told her. “I'm going for a walk.”

That afternoon, I walked for hours, until the streets, the sidewalks, the buildings turned into a grayish blur. I remember that I bought a
Snapple lemonade somewhere, and a few hours later I stopped at a bus station to pee, and I remember that at one point the ankle I'd had the cast on started throbbing. I ignored it. I kept walking. I walked south, then east, through strange neighborhoods, over trolley tracks, past burned-out drug houses, abandoned factories, the slow, brackish twist of the Schuylkill. I thought maybe, somehow, I would walk all the way to New Jersey.
Look
, I would say, standing in the lobby of Bruce's high-rise apartment building like a ghost, like a guilty thought, like a wound you'd thought had scabbed over that had suddenly started to bleed.
Look at what's become of me.

I walked and walked until I felt something strange, an unfamiliar sensation. A pain in my foot. I looked down, lifting my left foot, and watched in dumb confusion as the sole slowly peeled off the bottom of my filthy sneaker and flopped onto the street.

A guy sitting on a stoop across the street whooped laughter. “Hey!” he shouted, as I stared stupidly from shoe to sole and back again, trying to make sense of it. “Baby needs a new pair of shoes!”

My baby needs a new pair of lungs, I thought, limping and looking around. Where am I? The neighborhood wasn't familiar. None of the street names rang any bells. And it was dark. I looked at my watch: 8:30, it said, and for a minute I didn't know whether it was morning or night. I was sweaty and grimy and exhausted … and lost.

I dug in my pockets, looking for answers, or at least cab fare. I found a five-dollar bill, a fistful of change, and some assorted lint.

I looked for landmarks, for a pay phone, for something. “Hey,” I called to the guy on the stoop. “Hey, where am I?”

He cackled laughter, rocking back on his heels. “Powelton Village! You in Powelton Village, baby!”

Okay, then. That was a start.

“Which way's University City?” I called.

He shook his head. “Girl, you lost! You all turned around!” His voice was deep and resonant and sounded Southern. He lifted himself off his stoop and walked over to me—a middle-aged black man in a white undershirt and khakis. He peered closely at my face. “You sick?” he finally asked.

I shook my head. “Just lost,” I said.

“You go to the college?” he continued, and I shook my head again, and he moved even closer, his expression growing more concerned.

“Are you drunk?” he asked, and I had to smile.

“No, really,” I said. “I just went for a walk and got lost.”

“Well, you better get found,” he said. For one sick, terrifying moment I was absolutely certain he was going to start talking to me about Jesus. But he didn't. Instead, he took a long, careful inventory of me, from my falling-apart sneakers, up my scabby, bruised shins, to the shorts that I'd folded over twice at the waistband so they wouldn't slide down off my hips, and the T-shirt I'd been wearing for five days running, and my hair that had grown past my shoulders for the first time in a decade, and was doing a sort of impromptu dreadlock thing in the absence of being washed and brushed.

“You need help,” he finally said.

I bowed my head and nodded. Help. This was true. I needed help.

“You got people?”

“I do,” I told him. “I have a baby,” I began, and then my throat closed up.

He raised his arm and pointed. “University City that way,” he said. “You go to the corner of Forty-fifth Street, the bus take you straight there.” He dug in his pocket, found a slightly tattered bus transfer pass, and pressed it into my hand. Then he bent and looked at my shoe. “Stay here,” he said. I stood, stock-still, afraid to move so much as a muscle. Afraid of what, exactly, I wasn't sure.

The man came out of his house with a silver roll of duct tape in his hand. I lifted my foot, and he wrapped tape around and around it, holding the sole in place.

“Be careful,” he said.
Keffel
, the word sounded like. “You a mother now, you need to be careful.”

“I will,” I said. I started limping off toward the corner he'd pointed at.

As filthy as I was, with duct-taped shoes and tears cutting slow tracks through the grime on my cheeks, nobody spared me so much as a
glance on the bus. Everyone was too wrapped up in their own private coming-home-from-work thoughts—dinner, children, what was on TV, the minutiae of normal lives. The bus heaved and groaned its way across town. Things started looking familiar again. I saw the stadium, the skyscrapers, the far-off glimmering white tower of the
Examiner
building. And then I saw the University of Philadelphia's Weight and Eating Disorders office, where I'd gone a million years ago. When the only thing I thought I had to worry about was not being thin.

Get found, I thought, and pulled the “stop requested” cord so hard I thought for a moment I'd yanked it off. I took an elevator up to the seventh floor, thinking that I'd find all the lights out and the doors locked, wondering why I was even bothering.

But his light was on, and his door was open.

“Cannie!” said Dr. K., beaming. Beaming until he stood up, came around the desk, and got a good whiff of me. And a good look.

“I'm a success story,” I said, and tried to smile. “Look at me! Forty pounds of ugly flab gone in just months!” I swiped one hand across my eyes. “I'm thin,” I said, and started crying. “Yay, me.”

“Sit down,” he said, and closed the door. He put his arm around my shoulders and eased me toward his couch, where I sat, sniffling and pathetic.

“Cannie, my God, what happened to you?”

“I went for a walk,” I began. My tongue felt thick and furry, and my lips felt cracked. “I got lost,” I said. My voice had gone strange and croaky. “I went for a walk, and I got all turned around. I got lost, but now I'm trying to be found.”

He put his hand on my head, stroking gently. “Let me take you home.”

I let him lead me to the elevator, out the door, into his car. On the way out, he stopped at a soda machine and bought a cold can of Coke. I grabbed it without asking and guzzled the whole thing down. He didn't say a word, not even when I burped hugely. He pulled into a convenience store and came out with a quart of water and an orange Popsicle.

“Thanks,” I rasped, “that's very nice of you.” I drank the water, sucked on the Popsicle.

“I've been trying to call you,” he said. “At work and at home.”

“I'm very busy,” I recited.

“Is Joy home yet?”

I shook my head.

He looked at me. “Are you okay?”

“Busy,” I croaked again. My breasts were aching. I looked down and was unsurprised to see two circular stains beneath the V of sweat from my collarbone down.

“Busy with what?” he asked.

I shut my mouth. I hadn't really planned any dialogue beyond “busy.”

At a stoplight, he looked over at me, staring at my face. “Are you okay?”

I shrugged. The car behind us honked, but he didn't move. “Cannie,” he said kindly. A single tear trickled down my cheek. He reached out to brush it away. I jerked back as if I'd been burned.