Manhattan Lullaby (12 page)

Janie thought he sounded bitter. Evidently nothing had been resolved on the home front.

“Where's your husband?” asked Steve a few moments later. “I should have thought a new bride would have something better to do at this time of the night.”

Janie stopped walking. “I don't have a husband.”

Steve stopped walking too. “What happened?”

Janie shook her head. “It's a long story.”

“I've got all night. Look,” he continued, “my place is right around the corner on the next block. Why don't I make us a couple of cups of hot chocolate and you can tell me about it.”

“No, I don't think I'd better …” said Janie, automatically waving the suggestion aside.

“I'm an excellent listener,” coaxed Steve.

Tony sat looking up at the two of them.

But Janie was still not sure. “No, really, I …”

Tony got to his feet and, pulling sharply on the leash, slipped it out of Steve's grasp and took off in the direction of his home.

Steve looked at Jane. “I think we'd better go with him, he doesn't have a key.” And so the two of them chased Tony all the way home.

Chapter Ten

Maxine smoothed a nonexistent wrinkle out of her skirt, examined her nails and decided that, babies and nail polish being mutually exclusive alternatives, there was no point in even considering the possibility of a manicure for some time to come. With a sigh she curled the fingers of her right hand under the palm so she wouldn't have to look at the ragged cuticles and then switched the telephone from her left ear to her right because Doris was literally talking her left ear off.

“But, Doris … Doris …” She kept trying to get a word in. But Doris wasn't ready to surrender control of the conversation just yet. Maxine sighed again and looked at her watch. It was eleven-fifteen. Doris had been deluging her with pleas for intervention, requests for advice and other motherly meanderings for half an hour.

“Doris, I … Doris, look I …” Then Doris paused to replenish her oxygen supply, and Maxine plunged head-first into the welcome silence. “I told you I'll do what I can. But I think you should know that Bradley seems to think that Janie is seeing someone else.”

Doris gasped. “Another man?” she squeaked incredulously.

Maxine nodded. “Hmm-hmm. Of course, he's blinded by jealousy, so I'm not sure whether he actually saw what he thinks he saw, but he's been hanging around outside her house and he said he saw her out walking with a man and his dog. And later he saw the man going into the house with her. What's that? No, I don't know who it is. Bradley seems to think he's seen the man somewhere, but he's not sure where.” Doris said something then. “Look, why don't you just ask her who it is?” replied Maxine. “What do you mean, you're afraid she'll tell you it's none of your business? Of course it's
your
business, you're her mother.”

But Doris was not convinced.

“I know I'm Dear Maxine,” replied Maxine to Doris's next suggestion, “but you're not asking for advice, you're asking for information. You need a detective, not a columnist.”

Maxine was trying to inject a little humor into the conversation, but Doris was the product of generations of women whose primary emotional response was not laughter but tears. She took offense.

“Of course I'm not making fun,” placated Maxine. “Yes, I know how concerned you are … Doris, I
know
what it's like to be a mother, believe me.”

Unplacated, Doris went off on another tirade, and with a sigh Maxine rested the receiver against her shoulder, sure that she would not be needed to comment for several minutes.

She looked at the pile of unread letters on her desk. Ever since the wedding she had had trouble concentrating on her work. Somehow other people's problems seemed so much less immediate than her own. And the fact that she couldn't seem to solve the crisis that was pervading her own life made any attempts to do the same for other people seem equally futile. And that included Doris.

Why, she wondered as she stared out the window that formed one wall of her office, had she ever thought that beyond divorce lay freedom, freedom from responsibility for other people, freedom to live for herself instead of for others? She had more people depending on her now than she had when she was married. She began to tick off the names. Bradley, Bradley's baby, Harry, Doris …

In the window of the office in the building across the way, a woman was working diligently at her desk, head bent in blissful concentration. Maxine wondered briefly if she had any children. And then decided that if she did, they probably were celibate and lived in another country.

She turned her head away, listened briefly at the earpiece and heard Doris start in on a diatribe on the perils of casual sex. A flash of something in the corner of her eye caught her attention. She swiveled her chair to face the doorway. The pale, puffy face of her wife-in-law smiled wanly at her. Maxine added Joyce's name to her list.

“Can I come in?” asked Joyce, easing herself past the open top drawer of the filing cabinet and sinking into the chair.

Maxine was not really surprised to see her. Joyce's condition, as they used to call it, seemed somehow inexorably bound to her own at the moment. Both of them were having their lives turned upside down by their children, born, unborn, or newly born. And both of them had married Harry. She wondered if there was any connection there. And decided that after all it was motherhood and not the man that was the real link.

She held up the telephone receiver and let it dangle a few inches above the desk. The far-away babble of the loquacious Doris sounded like the chattering of distant gerbils. Maxine mouthed the words “Janie's mother,” and Joyce nodded understandingly.

Poor Maxine, thought Joyce. The aftermath of the wedding was still sending ripples through the pool of her life. It had even got to the point where she was bringing Bradley's offspring to work with her in spite of a company policy to the contrary. Of course, Harry could hardly complain under the circumstances, and in fact his only comment to Joyce on the new addition to Maxine's office had been that this ex-wife thought that daycare was no place to leave a baby. And when he had suggested that maybe Bradley could take care of the baby during the day, Maxine had fixed him with one of her looks. The one that suggested that the arteries in his brain were hardening even as they spoke. Harry had wisely decided to let the subject drop.

Joyce mouthed back a question. “Where's the baby?”

Maxine hooked a thumb in the direction of the filing cabinet, and with some effort Joyce got to her feet. She peered into the open top drawer, and sure enough there was Rogue Kraft filed under B for baby and sleeping the peaceful sleep of the totally unconcerned.

She threw a questioning look at Maxine.

“Where else?” Maxine whispered, waving an arm around the cramped space that was her office.

Suddenly both women realized that the gerbil chorus emanating from the telephone receiver had stopped. Maxine cradled the phone under her ear again. “Doris?” She queried into the silence. “Yes, of course I was listening. But I have to go now. Someone's just come into my office.” And before Doris had a chance to protest Maxine hung up.

“That woman is driving me insane!” she cried.

Joyce nodded her understanding. “At least you're not related to her now,” she offered as a consolation.

“Thank God for small mercies. What more does she think I can do about it? I'm already looking after the baby.” She gestured toward the filing cabinet. “Not to mention its father. Now she wants me to go over there and talk to her daughter, do my Dear Maxine shtick and make it all work out all right. Honestly! What does she think I'm going to do? Wave a magic wand and make
that
disappear?” She pointed at the open drawer.

Still nodding her understanding in some kind of rote response, Joyce felt a sudden wave of nausea grip her, and she instinctively put a hand over the cause of it. What little color there had been in her face drained away.

“You feel sick?” asked Maxine, although she already knew the answer. “What about the soda crackers I told you to eat?”

Joyce took a deep breath before attempting to answer her. “I … I tried that but …” She swallowed back another wave of sickness. “I thought this was supposed to be
morning sickness
. This lasts all day and all night too. My stomach feels like I'm living on a roller coaster!”

“Some women have it worse than others,” agreed Maxine matter-of-factly. “It should pass by the time you get to the fourth month, though.”

Joyce shook her head.

“No, I mean it,” replied Maxine, misinterpreting the negative response. “By the fourth month you should start feeling much better, more energy, less tired, not so sick. You'll see.” She smiled the big bright smile of the cheerfully nonpregnant.

A glimmer of hope crossed Joyce's face.

But in the interest of accuracy Maxine continued. “Of course, that's when your hair will probably start falling out.”

Joyce looked appropriately stricken. Her hair had always been her best feature. “My
hair
will start falling out?”

Maxine realized she had said the wrong thing. “Sometimes, not always. With some women it's the hair. With others it's stretch marks or varicose veins.” She shrugged, apologizing for being the bearer of bad tidings, but getting in deeper every minute in spite of herself.

“Stretch marks! Varicose veins!” croaked Joyce.

Maxine nodded. “But it doesn't happen to everyone. With me it was hemorrhoids.”

“Hemorrhoids!” Joyce sounded stricken. She wasn't ready to join the Preparation H brigade just yet. “I never knew—I mean, I thought women were supposed to glow when they were pregnant. You know, Mother Nature, natural biological functions, all that stuff.” She knew nothing about pregnancy, had never wanted to know anything about it. And in fact the entire thrust of her education and experience in the area of conception had been focused on how to avoid it. What happened if you failed to achieve this avoidance had never really been discussed.

When she went to high school, sex education had consisted solely of admonitions not to. Of course, everyone had known what happened to girls who did, but they never talked about it in any detail. The guilty girl simply went away to stay with an aunt in another state and several months later she came back—alone. The only obvious side effect of the pregnancy had been that these girls got excused from Phys. Ed. whenever they wanted to without having to bring a note from home. Nobody ever said anything about going bald.

And later there had been the pill. This had precluded the need to know anything about being pregnant as long as one could count to twenty-one. And as for pregnant friends, anybody Joyce had ever known who had chosen to procreate had done so quietly and unobtrusively, in the suburbs where the side effects had been buffered by the distance. Added to that was the fact that Joyce had never planned on having a pregnancy of her own and therefore felt no need to become better informed. The same as she had never bothered to learn about the idiosyncrasies of foreign cars because she never planned to own one. Now, therefore, at the age of forty-two she found herself both ignorant and pregnant.

Maxine sniffed with derision. “I never knew a woman yet who glowed. Bad breath, yes. Loose teeth, sure. But glowing, uh-uh.”

“No glowing?” said Joyce, sounding disappointed and relieved at the same time. For the past several days she had been worried that what was happening to her was abnormal. “Besides not glowing, is there anything else I should know?”

“Are you sure you're ready for it?” inquired Maxine ominously.

Joyce nodded, but with very little enthusiasm.

The older woman plunged on. “Well, you should know that some women get pregnancy amnesia. You know, they can't remember telephone numbers, dates, where they put things.”

“You mean I'm going to lose my mind as well as my hair!” cried Joyce, trying to envision how she was going to continue to write without the former or go out in public without the latter.

“Not your mind. Just your memory,” corrected Maxine.

But Joyce didn't hear her. She was busy trying to remember where she had put the notes from her last interview.

Maxine continued. “And then also you should stay out of the sun. Pregnancy mask takes a long time to fade, if it fades at all. And your feet will probably get bigger, so you shouldn't plan on being whatever size you were before, after.”

“Pregnancy mask?” Joyce seemed to be getting smaller in her chair with each new piece of information. “Bigger feet?” Until now the only physical side effect of pregnancy that she had been aware of was fatness. What Maxine was talking about sounded more like some sort of demented decrepitude. “There isn't anything else, is there?” she pleaded.

“Any or all of the above and that's about it. Oh, and there's heartburn, of course.”

“Of course.”

“But those are the only ones I can remember. It's been a long time since I was pregnant.”

“That's enough, believe me.” Joyce swallowed hard again, forcing down the bile that was rising in her throat. “Why would anyone want to go through something like that on purpose?”

Maxine gave a little grin. “As I remember it, most of us didn't have a choice. It just happened. And while we're on the subject—” She raised her eyebrows in a question.

A little color began to return to Joyce's face. “It was the night before I went to China. It was late. It was cold. I couldn't face getting out of bed and running into the bathroom. And I hate using the diaphragm anyway. It's so slippery. Half the time it goes flying across the room like some sort of prophylactic Frisbee.”

They both smiled at the image, sharing for a moment the conspiratorial in-joke that all women understand as the true meaning of sex.