The Opposite of Maybe: A Novel (44 page)

She’s just grieving, that’s what this heaviness is. That’s why she can’t adjust as easily. Greta had said as much on the phone: “Look, you’re nine months pregnant, you just lost your grandmother, and you’ve left the state you lived in your whole life, and you’re away from all your friends, like
moi
. It’s going to take some time.”

And I found out my mother killed herself, and I’ve been sleeping with someone else who’s not here with me. And … despite how it looks, it turns out I’m a terrible person
.

She gives herself a stern talking-to and tries to rally by getting the apartment ready for the baby. They need things, after all. The crib is really the only piece of decent furniture, and she’d had to remind Jonathan that they’ll need a changing table, too, and a dresser for the baby’s clothes.

“Really?” he said, and he started getting that vague look he used to get, but then he remembered and covered it up. “Are you sure? Can’t the baby get changed on our bed?”

She’d made a face at him. “Our bed? You do know what comes out of babies, don’t you?”

“All right, all right. Well, then, we’ll just have to go do more shopping. That’s fine, it’s fine.” He smiles.

Two days later, they buy a little gliding rocking chair she found on Craigslist, and when they go pick the thing up,
she gets to talking with the woman who’s selling it. Tayari is her name, and she has a child who is a year old, a kid who apparently took so long to be born that industrial equipment almost needed to be called in, Tayari says. They were sending out for tanks and cranes and the kind of forceps that are used in factories, she tells them with a loud laugh.

She has bright red, curly hair and when she talks she moves her mouth to one side of her face, like everything she’s going to say is ironic. Rosie and Tayari say they’ll keep in touch. For good measure, Tayari throws in a folding changing table, which she said she used to use at her mother’s house when they visited there.

Jonathan beams at her as they leave.

“See? This is going to be great for you,” he says on the way out. “You’ve made a friend already.”

She stops walking. “Look, I’m not a kindergartener on the first day of school,” she says to him. “I’ll find friends, don’t you worry about it.”

Then she has to apologize
again
. All he wants is for her to be happy. And she has no idea how to do that. Time, time, and more time. Isn’t that what’s supposed to heal you?

“I want to name the baby Serena Sophia,” she tells him one morning. “I hope you won’t mind, but I want to honor my mother and my grandmother.”

“Seriously?” he says. “Isn’t that kind of bad luck?”

“Why is it bad luck?”

“Well, if you ask me, it’s two dead people’s names. How good can that be?”

She points out that he really wasn’t involved throughout
much of the pregnancy; that, in fact, she’d made the decision of what to name this child at a time when he wasn’t even sure he was going to want anything to do with the whole business.

“Could she have a nickname?” he says finally.

“She was Serena the Bean in her ultrasound days,” she says. “So … Beanie.”

“Beanie it is,” he says. “When she gets bigger and hates that name, though, we could switch to something of a real name. Something that isn’t doomed. Like, I don’t know, Patricia.”

“No.”

“Rosie, I was
kidding
.”

Dear Milo, I am so sorry I didn’t get to see you in person to tell you good-bye before I left for California.

I hope that sometime you can come and visit me here
. Maybe I will come back when my grandmother’s house sells and you and I can see each other then.
If it sells
. I hope you are having a good time at school. I
love
miss you.
You are about the cutest kid I’ve ever had sleep in my yard
. Tell your mom and Dena hi for me. Love, Rosie.

P.S. Tell your dad hi, too.

“So let me get this straight,” says Tayari. “You’re
forty-four
, and this is your first baby?”

“Yes,” says Rosie. “I’m a late bloomer.”

They’re at the playground, and Tayari is pushing her little one, Lulu, on the baby swing. She’s invited Rosie there just so she can see where she’ll probably spend many of her waking hours, in a month or two.

“Wow, that is seriously so brave of you! Forty-four! I just hope I’m still having
sex
when I’m that age!”

Rosie starts to say something and then can’t continue. She wishes she could call Greta right this instant to report this conversation. Instead, she looks at Lulu, who is adorable and wearing a pink polka-dotted T-shirt and pants with purple lacy socks, and who has red ponytails springing from each side of her head and enormous blue eyes that look glazed over from the swinging motion. She’s also sporting a gigantic yellow pacifier with a picture of a goldfish on it. She’d like to take a photo of this getup and send that along to Greta, too.

“Wow,” says Tayari, and she shakes her red curls. “My mom is only forty-five,” she says, and stops pushing Lulu’s swing so she can check her phone, which has apparently just buzzed in her jeans pocket. She looks down at it for a moment and then says, “That is so weird.”

“Yeah, I know, it’s weird,” says Rosie. “Two generations—”

“No, no, not you. My friend Lani just posted this thing on Facebook about what she ate for lunch,” says Tayari.

“She posted a picture of her lunch?”

“Yeah. I mean, lots of people do that. But the thing is—whoa! Look at that wrap thingie she ate! I thought she was going on the paleo diet, but this wrap is so
not
on the diet.” She starts tapping away at the keys on her phone with her thumbs. From the slowed-down swing, Lulu lets out a wail. “Give her a push, will you?” says Tayari, and so Rosie does. But then after a moment she says she has to get going, and
thanks Tayari for showing her the playground. It looks like a fabulous place. She knows this will be her main hangout soon.

“Oh, sure. Yeah, I’m sure I’ll see you around. This is like the place where everybody comes between naps. Sometimes the grandmothers come, too, ha ha! You’ll like them.”

“I’m old,” she says to Jonathan that night. “I have it on good authority that no one this old has ever attempted to be a mother.”

“What about Sarah from the Bible? Wasn’t she ninety?”

“Forty-four
is
the new ninety,” she says.

He doesn’t answer. She knows why: there are no words. Also, he’s staring at his phone. He is always staring at his phone.

“You know that we need to practice Lamaze,” she tells him.

He looks up from whatever he’d been studying and frowns at her. “Does that stuff really work? I have to say, when I was there, I thought it sounded like wishful thinking to me.”

“Jonathan, don’t
say
that! We have to believe in it. It’s all we have.” She bursts into crazy tears. “If we don’t believe in Lamaze, then we might as well just declare we’re unfit parents right now!”

He looks at her steadily. “Okay, okay! I’m so sorry. I didn’t know, honest.”

After that, he gets down on the floor with her every night before bed and helps her practice the breathing, except he has to read from the faded mimeographed sheets that Starla Jones had handed out, and often he doesn’t have his glasses because he left them at the museum, and, all in all, she’ll
be lucky to get through labor without being put in a strait-jacket, or whatever they do to women who can’t do it.

One night he comes over to her side of the bed and wraps his arms around her and they just lie there together, feeling the baby doing her evening calisthenics.

“I’m sorry you’ve having such a hard time,” he says in her ear. “But I just know you’re going to end up loving it here. We’re going to be okay. It’s all going to work out.”

“Thank you,” she says.

“We just have to stick together,” he says. “We’re like two gears trying to meet and work together, to blend. And the trick is not to break off any of the teeth.”

She laughs.

“Ohhh, Rosie,” he says. “Oh, honey, it’s so good to hear you laugh again. I can’t believe it! You haven’t laughed in weeks.”

One day after she finishes painting the baby’s room a light mossy green, which she did without even asking permission from the doctor—what the hell does he know about whether she can paint a room?—she goes into the kitchen to get a drink of water. Her cell phone is on the counter, and, after thinking about it for two-tenths of a nanosecond, she picks it up and punches in Tony’s number. She’ll just talk to him for a minute. It’s her reward for all that painting. She should think of a question she needs to ask him. He’s a painter, so is moss green a good color for a baby girl’s room if you’re not intending to go the bubble-gum pink route? That’s what she’ll say.

And then he answers. “Oh my God,” he says in her ear.
“How are you? Let me guess. You’re in labor, and you want to remember how to do the cleansing breaths.”

She laughs.

“No, no,” he says. “Really. How are you?”

“I’m … good,” she says. And then she tells him that since she left Connecticut, she’s found out that she’s the oldest person ever contemplating giving birth and that another mom at the park thinks she’ll get along better with the grandmothers than with the other new moms.