Read The Opposite of Loneliness: Essays and Stories Online

Authors: Marina Keegan

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BOOK: The Opposite of Loneliness: Essays and Stories
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Hail, Full of Grace

A
t the Unitarian Universalist Christmas pageant in
Cambridge, Massachusetts, it didn’t matter that Mary
insisted on keeping her nails painted black or that Joseph had come out of the closet. On December 25th at seven and nine
P.M.
, three Wise Women would follow the Wise Men down the aisle, one wearing a kimono and another African garb; instead of myrrh they would bring chicken soup, instead of frankincense they’d play lullabies. The shepherds had a line on protecting the environment and the innkeeper held a foreclosure sign. No one quite believed in God and no one quite didn’t—so they made it about the songs and the candles and the pressing together of bodies on lacquered wooden pews.

My daughter Emma was the Jesus understudy. Five months into the adoption and the word still sounded strange.

“Your daughter’s our backup baby?” the minister had asked.

“Emma is, yes.” I shifted her upward in my arms. “She was just telling me how she hopes the leading Jesus sprains an ankle.” He stared at me, but I thought it was funny.

* * *

I don’t usually volunteer babies for debatably experimental Christmas pageants but Jared called me seven times the day before. There was a crisis. Jesus had to go to San Antonio to visit his grandmother in the hospital and the First Parish’s annual nativity was famous for live babies. I was back in my hometown for Christmas and Jared, my best friend from high school, was the Community Outreach Chair and didn’t want to talk about it. According to his phone, the church was only ten minutes from my house and Honestly, Audrey, do you really have an excuse? I didn’t.

I was bored anyway. The newspaper had given me six months off and I was already craving deadlines. I’d come home a few weeks early before Christmas to spend time with my mother, who recommended the early arrival after she heard me describe the strangeness of having Emma alone in my apartment. The first month had been silent. I’d put music on sometimes but I was afraid of having the TV too loud. There was no fighting or laughing or lovemaking squeezed perfectly into the hours she fell asleep, and at my Monthly, Dr. Berenson recommended I talk to the baby. So I did. Just monologued while she was feeding or staring or falling asleep on my chest.

She was four months old, but I’d told her everything. Told her about my job and being bored with my book and the reason why I got her. Told her I was sorry I couldn’t nurse her, sorry she had no father, sorry I kept talking to her all the time when she probably just wanted to sleep or eat or start mapping her world. One night, when she wouldn’t stop crying, I told her about Julian. Told her how pathetic I was for still thinking that far back. I’m forty-two, I’d whispered while she gripped at a finger—you don’t know this yet, but that’s old to hold your hand.

I’d dated Julian from sixteen to twenty-three. We got together our sophomore year of high school and didn’t break up until a year after our college graduations. Christmas meant coming home, and coming home meant Julian and I were thrust into the same eight-mile radius and forced to revisit the whole ordeal. I kept his holiday cards in a drawer in my apartment year after year: his three children aging and waving from beaches and backyards and trips to pick pumpkins.

* * *

On the evening of the twenty-fourth, I had Jared pick me up for the rehearsal. He was busy, but I didn’t know how to get there and I wanted to talk to him. He didn’t need convincing.

“You’re saving my life, Audrey.” He made a kissing noise into the phone. “I’ll be there at four.”

“Is Brett coming?” I caught him before he hung up.

“Why? Do you not want him to?”

“Either way.”

“I’ll leave him at the church.”

“You’re a doll, Jerry.” I hung up before he would make the kissing noise again. It was a habit he’d picked up from Brett since they’d moved in together and it always made me hate him.

Emma pushed Cheerios off her high-chair tray when she heard his car crunch down the driveway of my old house. It was day five of cereal eating and Emma had already mastered the art of throwing. She stared at me once the cereal had successfully spilled off the edges and I imagined her throwing Cheerios out from inside the manger. It cracked me up, which cracked her up, and when she reached her arms into the air, I carried her upstairs with me to grab a red scarf for festivity. It was my mother’s phrase,
for festivity.

* * *

“Do I have to come?” I said when Jared opened the door.

“Nice to see you too.” He plucked Emma out of my arms and cooed. “I’m taking baby Jesus regardless, so I’m guessing you’re gonna want to get in the car.” He walked straight in through the door like he had since he was ten.

“Tell me no one from high school is going to be there.” The question hadn’t occurred to me on the phone, but the prospect of parading Emma to my old friends as Jesus incarnate was horrifying. Jared didn’t answer. “Is there any way to specify in the program that I didn’t volunteer?”

“But you did volunteer!” he grinned, picking up the car seat and walking out to his Volvo. “I asked you and you said yes!”

Jared was the only one of us who’d never really left, but he understood that coming home was hard for me. Seven years is no small amount of time to date someone, no matter how young, and practically everything in our small town reminded me of Julian: our high school years when we went to proms and movies and our college summers when we passed the time smoking pot in his car, squealing to 7–Eleven with Jared and Lucas and Sarah and trading off sleeping in each other’s twin-size beds. We were that couple. The one the single teachers envied at prom, the one everyone took for granted, for untouchable. Our senior year, we lost Cutest Couple to Skylar and Jillian, but it was only because Jillian’s best friend was editor of the yearbook and Julian’s soccer team voted against us as a joke. In the summer we traveled with each other’s families and in the fall we ate at two Thanksgivings. He was nerdy but earnest, handsome but flirty. And I loved him.

I try to remember these months objectively but it’s hard—and around thirty, they started to haunt me. His dimples and his collarbone and his compliments and the way my girlfriends’ parents told my mother they were jealous. Sometimes I’d go months without thinking back, but the what-ifs always seemed to find me, creep up on me when I was lonely or tired or forced home for Christmas. He’d found someone else and I never did. Never even fell in love again. Not really.

* * *

Jared turned on the radio. All the stations were carols, so we just settled into it. “Winter Wonderland” played as we drove past salted pavement and snowless fields. The Charles was half frozen but the trees on Storrow Drive were still clutching their crinkled leaves.

“How are you doing?” Jared asked as we crossed the Eliot Bridge.

“Okay,” I admitted. “I’m excited to get back to work but feel guilty for feeling that, if you know what I mean.”

“Naw, that’s normal,” he said.

“How would you know?”

“Happened with all my babies.” I shoved him and he smiled, then sobered. “But you’ve been okay, in New York?” I knew New York was a euphemism for “by yourself,” but it was Jared and I didn’t mind him asking.

“Yeah,” I said, pausing to reach a hand back for Emma to squeeze. “I’m still struggling with . . . I’m still hoping that she . . . feels more like she’s
mine.

“Interesting.”

“Not really,” I said, feeling terrible for even articulating it. I pulled up my turtleneck and looked back out at the river. “To be honest, it’s hard because she reminds me a lot of the other baby.”

Jared was silent and kept his eyes on the road.

“It’s been a long time, Audrey.”

“I know,” I said.

“She’s okay. She’s doing fine.”

“I know she is. I know.” I shifted my attention back into the car and sat up. “Look, you’re the big bad Community Outreach Chair, we can just talk about it later.”

“Okay,” he said, shrugging his thin shoulders upward. I waited for him to protest, to insist that we discuss and
overanalyze—but instead he started humming “Silent Night.” “Wait till you see this pageant, Audrey, it’s going to be insane. I have this girl playing Mary who we practically had to coax out of her goth clothing. A real sweetheart, don’t get me wrong, and she’s been practicing with the other Jesus all week so if we end up needing to swap in Emma, she’ll be fine.” He turned around to make a face at the baby and got a high-pitched squeal. And I realized he was right to change the subject.

* * *

I found out I was pregnant in December of my senior year at college. The night before, I’d told Julian I thought I’d gained weight at school. He didn’t say anything, just looked at me with an expression of disgust. But when we went out to dinner the next night, neither of us touched the bread basket. Julian smiled at the waiter when he took it away, taking my hand and pinching at my knuckles.

We bought the test on our way home. It wasn’t the first time. I was skinny then, missing my period a lot, and we always giggled in the car about what to buy along with it.

“I dare you to buy condoms,” I’d say.

“I dare you to buy porn,” he’d tease.

That night Julian chose to buy a bag of Skittles and we shared his peace offering while we waited until I had to pee.

When the test came back positive, we drove back to CVS and bought three more. We made the mistake of telling our parents and everyone seemed to have opinions. The Elks were Catholic and that was pretty much it. Julian wanted to keep it. He told me it wouldn’t matter—that
I
was what mattered. That he’d love me. That we could get married.

My mother disagreed. My dad was Jewish and my mom was nothing, and to them, pregnancy was a choice.

I was somewhere in between.

“You don’t understand,” I told her that night. “You
wish
Dad looked at you the way Julian looks at me.” She stopped sorting clothes and let the quiet settle.

“I know,” she said. “If you loved him less, I’d tell you to have it.”

I told her she didn’t make sense. I told her there were options. I told her she was just jealous and heartless and it was my body and he wanted it and I loved him so I
had
to have it. I had to. She didn’t understand. She was aged and stubborn and she didn’t understand.

That Sunday, Julian and I went for a walk along the reservoir.

“We don’t have to keep it,” he said. “But if you love me, please, don’t kill it.”

So I had it. For him. And we gave our six pounds, fourteen ounces to a couple from New Hampshire on August 19, 1989. They came to pick her up two days after I’d gone into labor. They did it in another room; the literature said it was best not to meet adoptive parents. Julian wanted it open, but I wanted it closed. So we signed our names on dotted lines that even eighteen years wouldn’t undo.
No, I do not want my birth child contacting me. No, I do not want the progress reports.

* * *

The Unitarian Universalist church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was stone and beautiful and surrounded by bumper-stickered cars. It was cold out, and I was worried about Emma, so I pressed her tiny face to my neck as we dashed from Jared’s sedan to the basement’s back door. The place was packed with screaming children dressed like animals and bearded shepherds herding angels upstairs. The basement smelled like attic and the costumes were dated but the energy circling the room was powerful and warm. A rainbow flag hung next to a bulletin board and painted Plato quotes wrapped the room’s upper wall. A girl with a head scarf was buried in her cell phone and Joseph appeared to be flirting with a Wise Man. The moment we entered, Emma started wailing, and the entire tableau seemed to freeze and face us. A gray-haired man in the middle smiled at me and I knew he was the minister even before I saw his robes. He didn’t say anything but held his hands out slightly to his sides, palms out and fingers spread. I nodded back and shifted Emma around so everyone could see.

The pageant director was a chubby man in his fifties. He cupped my elbow in his palm while he explained the procedures and walked through the logistics for the following day. I was to sit in the front row and hold Emma wrapped in blue cloth in my lap. Henry, the Stouffers’ baby, was the first baby Jesus; however, should he start crying or moving around, the director would give me the sign, Ms. Stouffer would take Henry down to the basement, and I would move forward and hand Emma to Mary. Conceptually, it seemed a bit bizarre. But I was assured elbow-in-hand that two babies were essential, so I smiled at him with only my eyes and pretended my head hurt so I could go back downstairs.

I saw my first pageant in Mesnil-le-Roi, just outside Paris, when I was in France the year after graduation. There was a Swiss boy and it was his idea, but it was stuffy and the goats smelled so we left and went back to his apartment. I’d thought I’d have a different mind in France—but when I landed at de Gaulle, it was still me. I worked in a school and walked around on weekends trying to force bohemia. When I came home, I was yearning for someone to whisper to, but everyone was twenty-three and living in New York.

Julian and I broke up just before I left. We’d tried to make it work after the adoption, but things were never quite the same. Giving her away was my decision and, like it or not, Julian understood what it meant. The baby asked if we really meant our forevers; he said yes, and I said I didn’t know. I wanted to experience the world and meet new people and everyone says you’re supposed to be single for at least some time. He tried to get me back, but not for too long.

The problem was, I’d broken up with him while I was still in love, so I never had the time to let it wash out. My mom said I shouldn’t marry the first guy I dated and my friend Eliza had said I looked like I was bored. But I never met anyone better. I dated other men, but I seemed to pass them by, waiting for someone who’d trace my back while I slept and take me to church on Sundays. I’d meet
Him
in Paris, after Paris, in graduate school, at work. But each location passed as I rolled them off my shoulders. My sister called it a fluke at Thanksgiving one year when a friend of our aunt’s asked about my husband.

BOOK: The Opposite of Loneliness: Essays and Stories
8.19Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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