Kate Jacobs (35 page)

* * *

For over an hour, the two women talked, first
about
Lucie's
raw footage for the knitting video, and
then about the cost of everything from child care to strollers. Finally, they
got down to the nitty-gritty: How hard is it, really, to run a single-parent
household?
"Well, it's true you never have to compromise with someone else—and that
has its advantages," Georgia said. "But then you can never hand off
the kid and go take a nap. It's all you—twenty-four/ seven." She shrugged.
"But I was lucky. I had a great kid and a lot of help from unexpected
places—like Anita."
"That's what I need—an Anita."
"Well, she's one of a kind. But you can reach out to support groups and to
your friends and to your family." Georgia smiled. "I didn't think
that was really an option for me—the family thing—but I may have been a bit too
hasty at twenty-four on that score."
"Yeah, I, um, haven't actually told my parents that I'm having a
baby."
Georgia nodded with understanding.
"I hear you. Why not?"
"Big Catholics. My brothers and I used to refer to my parents as the
Pope…and her husband."
"And you're not, um, religious?"
"If by that you mean do I feel guilty about how I conceived this child,
then no. And let's just say I didn't go to a sperm bank." Lucie laughed,
then turned serious. "But if you're asking do I believe in God, then the
answer is yes."
"I can't say I've spent too much time thinking about God." Georgia
was thoughtful.
"Me neither—at least until I found out I was really pregnant," said
Lucie. "Now I think about that stuff way more."
She looked at her watch, rooted around for a hairbrush in her messenger bag,
and pulled off her bandana. "And, speaking of the Big Girl Upstairs, I
have an appointment to meet a priest and talk about returning to church. Also
known as getting my child baptized."
"So you're not a true believer?" Georgia was keen on the topic.
Lucie busied herself with heaving up her body from the loveseat. "Whew,
that gets harder every day," she said. "And I don't know if I'm a
believer—I guess I'm a questioner. But I figure they need people like me
too."
"I bet they do," said Georgia, with warmth. "But I'm surprised
Darwin isn't with you—the two of you seemed joined at the hip."
"Ah, Darwin," Lucie nodded. "She says organized religion is a
tool of the patriarchy—and I don't think she's going to back down the way she
did with knitting. I'm on my own with this one. Unless you want to come
along?"
"Oh, no, I'm a Presbyterian," said Georgia. "Not that I've
darkened the door of a church since I moved to New York fifteen years
ago." She whistled. "I can't believe it's been that long."
Lucie began to close the snaps of her messenger bag.
"You know what? In my later months, I used to carry a backpack around
instead of a bag," said Georgia. "It balanced out my belly."
"Really?"
"Yeah, I'll trade you, if you want." She upended her knapsack,
letting loose a pile of newspapers, a sweatshirt, and a paperback from her trip
to the park with James and Dakota the weekend before.
"My bag here is a piece of crap," said Lucie, indicating the fraying
at the edges.
"Dakota says that's the new style," answered Georgia.
"I haven't made a trade since third grade."
"Then I say it's high time for one." With a "why not?"
shrug, the two women exchanged bags. Lucie repacked her hairbrush, a baby-name
book, a makeup case, a pair of size-six rosewood needles—on one she had a
half-foot of a yellow-striped baby blanket—and one ball each of yellow and
white machine-washable acrylic. Plus a bottle of water, a pack of saltines, an
apple, and a meal-replacement bar.
"Okay, I'm off—last chance to come to my big meeting with Father Smith and
talk to God." She made a face and, with a wave, headed out the door.
"Wait up." On impulse, Georgia decided to go. Even though she knew
Lucie didn't really expect her to come along.
But then, she didn't know that Georgia had a few things she wanted to say to
God, too.

twenty-seven

"I haven't got a prayer against all those
young Turks." K.C.
was drinking a beer in the back office, even though it was only noon on
a Friday—and Georgia would positively kill her if she knew. But Georgia had
left the office a half-hour earlier and said she'd be out the rest of the
afternoon with Anita, and K.C. had taken the opportunity—after a particularly
dismal score on her practice test for the week—to rush down to Marty's and
bring back lunch for herself and her tutor.
"Along with a cold bottle of
brewski
," she
told
Peri
, taking a swig and leaning back in
Georgia's chair.
Peri
was used to her moods by now,
the way she'd burn out at the end of a long week of study. Still, K.C. was
clever, and
Peri
had no doubt in her abilities. K.C.,
on the other hand, was starting to get cold feet. She'd even sent in a few
résumés to publishing houses, half-hoping a job would materialize and she could
declare her plan to become a lawyer officially kaput.
"What law school is going to want to take on someone who'll be fifty when
they graduate?" she asked between mouthfuls.
"Lots of them, I bet," said
Peri
.
"Just think of it this way: your application will definitely stand out.
They'll sit around talking about the impressive old broad."
K.C. held up her hand in the "stop" gesture at the word
"old."
"If you keep up the abuse, I won't tell you about the
Peri
Pocketbook I saw this morning." Oh, she was a sly one, that K.C.
"You saw one of my purses?"
Peri
was
getting excited. "This isn't one of those trick things, is it, where you
say 'Oh, I saw it on the shelf of this shop.'"
"No, my dear tutor, it's not." K.C. spoke in low purr. "I'll
give you a guess: it was around Fifty-ninth and
Lex
."
"Bloomingdale's. Um, yeah, I know, I delivered them."
Peri
gave a shy smile. "I spent most of last Sunday
hovering around
Bloomie's
, watching to see if anyone
bought any. But no one did while I was there."
"Maybe that's because they weren't getting the right exposure."
"What do you mean?"
"Well, honey, I ran over to check out the shoe sale before all the good
ones were snapped up and guess what I saw in three windows? Mannequins with
Peri
Pocketbooks as part of their ensemble. You could
totally see the labels—and, as chief plastic bagger, I completely remembered
them. One mannequin had a pink-and-white purse slung over its shoulder, another
had that red-multi hobo bag that Anita finished, and the last window was all
evening wear, with the black silk clutch."
"In the windows? The windows?!"
Peri
was
jumping up and down. "K.C., this is fantastic! Oh my God, I wish I could
go over there now. With a camera!"
Coming from around the desk to offer a solid punch in the arm to her friend,
K.C. relented and gave
Peri
a quick squeeze.
"You don't tell Georgia about my beverage indiscretion, and I won't tell her
you ran out to get a cab and do a quick drive-by across town," she said.
"Don't worry—I'll stop drinking away my LSAT blues long enough to ring up
any customers."

* * *

These are the times when people say they need a
good, stiff drink. To blunt the edge. But Georgia didn't want to take off the
edge. In fact, it was just the opposite. She wanted the numb feeling to simply
go away.
They'd made it; gotten through the week to the Friday afternoon appointment
with Dr. Paul Ramirez. The preeminent
onco
-gynecologist
in the entire city—he of the "Best Doctors" profile in
New York
magazine and the wall of degrees from Harvard and Yale—was a short man with
exquisitely long, manicured fingers that he laced and unlaced as he talked;
Georgia couldn't take her eyes off him.
The doctor yakked on and on about how he'd looked at the ultrasound and agreed
that surgery was needed, about how they'd know what to remove after they opened
her up but that it was likely she would lose both ovaries, possibly also her
uterus, a chance they might remove some of her bowel. What's going to be left?
she asked, and the doctor tilted his head and offered a half-smile. As though
she had made a joke.
Anita was in the room, taking notes, asking questions from a checklist she'd
found on the Web. They covered the likelihood of chemo, about survival rates
and long-term prognosis and the possibility of losing her hair; she watched
Anita scribble away. But everything that was up for discussion were all things
being done
to
her body; they weren't things Georgia could see any way to
affect or control. And throughout the meeting she had the strangest sensation
of floating, as if she wasn't actually there.
Dr. Ramirez had gone on about positive attitude and blah
blah
blah
, but she'd really tuned out at that point,
wondering instead how many times he'd had to deliver this same speech. Watching
his lips and those long fingers. Did he use the same words, settle on a phrase
that worked best to illustrate the complexities to his
nonmedically
minded patients, select some pat words of comfort.
Did he ever go home and sit in his bathtub and cry?
"Do you have any questions, Georgia?" This was what he asked. Any
questions. Any questions? Um, yes, she had a question. A big question.
Was she going to live?
His answer was filled with numbers and details and "if this, then
that" scenarios.
Useless.
"We'll need to touch base as soon as possible. Take the weekend to think
things over and then I'd like to schedule a surgery."
The weekend. Of course. Not like she needed any longer to decide whether she'd
like to be sliced and diced.
"I think that went very well," Anita had said as they left, biting
her lip as Georgia threw her a dark look.
She hadn't much wanted to go to the club meeting after that, had walked all the
way up to her apartment without stopping to see how things were at the shop.
Anita followed her, but they didn't speak, Georgia simply kicking off her shoes
and climbing into her bed, clothes still on, lights out. Anita sat on the edge
of the bed, rubbing her back, as Georgia struggled between wanting to cry and
scream. A few gurgled sounds came out, but mainly she lay there, silent.
Staring at nothing.
"I think this is good," said Anita, stroking her hair. "You stay
here and hide out. I'll bring you a little something to eat after club."
She closed the door softly behind her and went down to the shop; fifteen
minutes later, Georgia was there—eyes red and puffy—but there. Cat and Anita
were in the corner by the window, heads together. Her trusty employee saw her
first.
"Hey, are you okay?"
Peri
pushed aside her
digital camera, having waited anxiously all day to show her Bloomingdale's
windows to Georgia. Even K.C. took her nose out of the study guide on the
counter, and Lucie paused from her second hour of trying to teach Darwin how to
do a basic increase so that she could tackle the sweater project. Georgia had
forgotten to tame her hair after her lie-down and it was sticking up more than
usual; her shoulders sloped forward. She looked exhausted and dazed.
"
Heya
," said Georgia, as she was surrounded
at once by the women of the Friday Night Knitting Club. There wasn't anyone
else in the shop, just the die-hards. All the other drop-ins were probably on
the jitney to the Hamptons or simply not in the mood to knit on such a warm
summer night.
She paused for a moment, weighing what to say. She could obscure the situation,
be secretive, be stoic. But a week of doing just that hadn't done much other
than leave her feeling adrift and with an unexpected sense of shame. There
seemed to be only one way to make it all real. And that was to be open about
what was really going on. To practice, just as she guessed the doctor did, the
right way to break the news to the people she loved. To her sweet girl. To
James.
But first to her friends, her fellow knitters, experts and beginners alike.
Georgia looked at the waiting faces around her and took a deep breath.

* * *

There wasn't much to say as they descended the
stairs to the street,
Peri
leading the way and Darwin
a step behind Lucie, who was hanging on tightly to the railing to steady her
top-heavy body.
"I have an idea, guys," said the academic, whose knitting skills
remained marginal. "What if we all start working on an afghan that Georgia
can have with her in the hospital or in the recovery? We could all make a
section and then sew it together. A sort of surprise."
"It's a great idea, but I don't know if we'd get it done.
Lucie's
the only one of you who's finished her
sweater!"
Peri
had been blown away by Georgia's
revelation, thinking, of course, about how to help her dear employer but also
worried about what battling cancer could mean for the shop. Would she need to
find another job?
"It's a good impulse, Darwin—I'll help you figure out an afghan. Something
simple—no increasing." At the bottom of the stairs, Lucie gave both her
labor coach and
Peri
a big hug. To reassure them. To
reassure herself. It's a scary thing, when a person you admire is suddenly
revealed to be absolutely, truly human.

* * *

K.C. was still upstairs, not wanting to leave
Georgia. Of course, Cat and Anita were loitering around as well, doing their
best to convince her to stay overnight with one or the other.
"Come to the Lowell or just let me sleep in Dakota's room until she gets
back," Cat had been saying as the rest of the group packed up the knitting
they'd barely touched over cooling cups of tea and coffee and fervent
discussion of people they'd known who had beaten the disease. They talked about
the shop and how they could operate a version of the schedule they'd run while
she was away in Scotland—
if
Georgia opted for surgery—and they talked
about vitamins and exercise and the need for rest.
There had been something wonderful about it, for Georgia, to suddenly be the
center of attention. Not that she was enjoying being ill—she certainly
wasn't—but it was such a welcome reversal of how things typically were. From as
long as she could remember, when she was a child, a teen, a young mom, she had
been the organizer, the worker bee, the behind-the-scenes manager of life.
Keeping her head down, doing the right thing, using her energy to make things
easier for everyone else. It had been like that at home with her parents, loud
Donny distracting Bess and Tom's attention. At school she'd edited the
newspaper and kept everyone on deadline, but Cat had been the columnist, the
showstopper, the one who wore miniskirts to her jeans. She'd always been
comfortable to be in the background, to move at her own rhythm, confident in
her own thing.
Georgia's sense of satisfaction came from the collective happiness of those
around her. It had been that way at the store, too, when she taught beginners
how to cast on and saw the pride in their eyes. Or when she found a small
supplier of a high-quality yarn and knew that she was giving a boost to the
supplier and delighting the customer all at the same time. She loved the
win-win. She loved to make it happen.
Still, she'd hung back, all those months ago, when the women started meeting on
Fridays; now she was pleased that she'd risked letting her guard down. That she
could sit at the table in her pretty little yarn boutique with this unlikely
collection of women and call them her friends, that she could share with them
how her body was betraying her and that they would truly, genuinely care.
It felt good. It felt right.
Like anyone does from time to time, Georgia had tried to be her own
fortune-teller and figure out how her future was going to be. In college, she
obsessed about careers. In the days of James, she fantasized about white picket
fences and suburban backyards. In the first year of the shop, she imagined a
franchise across the nation. Or a descent into bankruptcy. And of course she
was still predicting now, was making special deals with God to save her (I'll
go to church! I'll give to charity! I'll help old ladies across the street!),
and had imagined all week the moment when she would tell the people in her life
that she had cancer. Would she just blurt it out? Scream it in frustration when
Peri
asked for time off, when K.C. messed up her desk
once again, when Cat used up all the paper in the printer trying out fancy font
styles for her résumé? Or would she whisper it softly, play the role of the
always-capable Georgia, not wanting any special treatment, so brave, so
amazing.
The truth was that, increasingly, she did feel a bit set apart by the news, as
though she'd finally been given a hall pass to get out of the workaday drudgery
and responsibility and her overwhelming need to make sure everything—everyone—was
quite all right. Finally, she could use the I-have-cancer revelation to excuse
away any decision, any behavior, any desire. And no one would question her. No,
it didn't mitigate all the possible consequences or reduce her fears, but it
seemed that being diagnosed with cancer had a surprising effect: Georgia
finally felt that it was okay—more than okay—to put herself first.
And what she'd needed that Friday night was not to struggle by herself or spare
everyone's feelings or simply assume that their problems were larger than her
own; no, she needed—she wanted—to reach out. To open her heart. To share her
pain.
Her friends were shocked. By the news. But they didn't recoil at Georgia's
vulnerability.
Instead, they listened, they brainstormed, they joked when the tears pricked at
their eyes, and they were there. Just there.
For her.