Within Arm's Reach (13 page)

The mood in the room changes. Everyone looks—gradually, unbelievably—hopeful. Mom’s grin lurks around the corners of her mouth. Pat’s eyes are blue again; there has been a slight thaw. Theresa balances herself on the edge of the couch. Dina has lost her bored smirk. I see the McLaughlins’ thinking, collectively, with wonder, A new baby.

Gram goes on. “This child is a second chance for us as a family. I want to get together every holiday from now on, and maybe once a month as well. If that seems like too much, then perhaps once a season would suffice.”

No one is listening to Gram. All they care about now is if she spoke the truth. She doesn’t sound like herself—did the car accident knock her into senility? Who could be pregnant?

Eyes dart from face to face. I can practically hear their thoughts. Kelly is too old, it can’t be her. Meggy? She is forty-six, so it is possible, but very unlikely. Theresa and Angel are only forty-one, though. If Angel is the one who is pregnant, it will be a miracle. In fact, it is common knowledge that she and Johnny have recently, finally, given up trying to have a baby.

Along the lines of this heart-pounding, eyes-darting reasoning, Theresa seems to be the most likely candidate. But Theresa is nearly single. Uncle Jack is a traveling salesman and is almost never home. No one in the family has seen him for over a year, and even Meggy is not sure when he last slept in his own bed, because Theresa lies about him. She makes up romantic dinners that never happened, and nights spent together as a family: just her, Jack, and the two kids playing Scrabble. No one, not even Meggy, has the heart to ask Mary and John to corroborate their mother’s stories.

The aunts’ and uncles’ knowing nods turn to puzzled looks. There is no one else it could be. The new baby, the first McLaughlin born in fourteen years, seems less and less possible. They don’t even think to look to the next generation. None of us are married. As far as our parents and aunts and uncles are concerned, we are still teenagers. We haven’t earned adulthood. My mother and her brothers and sisters don’t notice that Gracie’s cheeks have flushed red and that there is sweat on her forehead and that she is holding on to me like a boat passenger who suddenly believes the ship is about to go down. They don’t, even in the backs of their minds, even in their wildest thoughts, even in their least Catholic moments, think that it could possibly be one of the cousins, one of the next generation, one of the
children
.

Finally Meggy interrupts Gram, who has continued to expound on the symbolism of this new baby, and Easter, and a rebirth for the McLaughlins.

“Ma,” Meggy says, “who’s having a baby?”

Gracie’s fingernails have now passed through my skin and my flesh and are burrowing into my very bones. I try to think of a way to help, but between my still-weak knees and my sister’s hold on me, I have been pulled to the edge of the cliff with her. I feel lucky I can breathe. I just want to make it out of this room alive, away from my burning-hot sister and my frozen uncle and the rest of these strange characters who share my history and my holidays and my genes. But I know that the odds of any of us making it out of this moment unscathed are slim. This moment is going to roll this family over on its back like a helpless animal, arms and legs waving in the air.

Gram looks at Meggy as if she is slow. As if she should know the answer to this question already. As if we all should. “Why,” she says, in her familiar, nuts-and-bolts voice, “it’s Gracie.”

Part Two

GRACIE

I stand in front of the mirror and look at my swollen belly, pushed out with five months of life, and try to picture my grandmother like this. Gram still has the same blue eyes, the same straight spine and haughty chin, but the young woman I conjure also has strong bones, smooth cheeks, and my mother or one of my aunts or uncles curled up inside of her. Gram looks happy in my mirror, confident and sure. She appears to belong to her body. There is a sense of a full life in her, so much so that it spills out beyond the lines of her skin, her eyes, her belly. I look behind her expecting to see my grandfather walk up with a question or a complaint, or to see one of her small children bump into her knees. But no one appears. My grandmother stands alone, her hands cup her stomach, her eyes meet mine.

When I try to measure up to Gram, I am left staring at my own reflection. My body looks small, and the bulge in my front ridiculous. I see only deficiencies: skin too pale, no sexuality in this body; it has been sapped away. There is not a drop of moisture, of saliva, of juice. I have spent the last two months drying out. The doctor says I haven’t gained enough weight, but my hips and butt have widened until I don’t recognize them as my own.

Easter night, after my family left with my mother crying, her head averted so she would not have to see me, I wanted so badly to go to the Green Trolley. It was all I could think about. Lila had left, too, and she stayed out all night. I was completely alone in the house. The quiet around me rang with the earlier silence and the looks, the question of, Who did this to you? I heard my cousin John tell Dina that he’d heard I got around. Meggy murmured that this family became less with every generation. Pat pretended he hadn’t heard anything; he just kissed Gram on the cheek and walked out of the house. Mary was praying silently on one side of the room while Ryan prayed loudly on the other. Gram appeared confused by the tumult, and then increasingly unhappy and tired as she measured everyone else’s reactions against her own. Mom and Dad looked sick to their stomachs, their mouths loose as they tried to figure out what to say.

All I’d wanted was to feel a man’s hands on me. I wanted lips on mine and skin that I could reach and follow and own. I wanted that kind of oblivion, the delicious kind, the powerful kind. I wanted it so badly my entire body ached. But the general announcement of my condition seemed to make that impossible. For the first time, it occurred to me that I might be physically undesirable. I had never considered the idea that being pregnant might affect my sex life. But what would a man think when a woman who had even the faintest mound to her belly came on to him? He would wonder if I was looking for a husband and father, not a lover. My body would suggest more than I wanted it to. There would be questions, concerns, emotions—nothing I had ever asked for when I stepped up to the bar and checked out the room.

I didn’t go to the Green Trolley Easter night, and I haven’t gone there since. I haven’t had sex, or anything even approaching sex, in over two months. That is the longest I have been celibate since I was sixteen years old. I don’t know what this dearth is doing to me. I feel like my only option is to wait and see. Wait and see what happens, wait and see how it all turns out. I am waiting, specifically, for someone to tell me what to do. I am hoping someone will say,
This
is how you will make everything right.

I have been keeping quiet and staying in the house. I have given myself over to the ebb and flow of everyone else’s reaction to my situation. That is how I tell time now. I have lost track of hours, mealtimes, and days of the week. I am listening too hard, waiting too intently, to pay attention to those kinds of logistics. Instead, several soft, quiet days will blur together into one, into waking and eating and going through letters looking for people who are worse off than me.

I had one phone conversation with my mother about my situation, and since then she has left a few breezy “I’m on my way out the door, just checking in to make sure you’re okay” messages on the answering machine when she guessed or hoped I wouldn’t be home.

The one real conversation we had was very short, and as with all of my worst conversations with my mother, it twisted and poked and yanked at every nerve in my body.

She called me clearly in tears. There was a big, watery gulp before there were any words, and then she said, “Do you think this is my fault, Gracie? Is it something I did or didn’t do?”

“No, Mom. This has nothing to do with you.”

“Of course it does, don’t say that. I didn’t even know you were involved with that young man . . . Joel. Can I ask—”

“We’re not together anymore, Mom. He won’t be involved.”

There is a note of panic in my mother’s voice that makes me wonder if she has been drinking. “Oh Gracie, why didn’t you tell me? I could have helped you.”

I am almost certain my mother thinks I should have had an abortion. Quietly, without bothering anyone. She prides herself on being a modern woman, with all of its complications and sacrifices. But she is not modern enough to embrace my single, pregnant status. She doesn’t know how to present this to her women’s group. This kind of event would never take place in the wonderful mother-daughter relationship she conducts in her head. At the moment she doesn’t even recognize me as her daughter.

I do feel badly. I have busted up the game my family has been playing since Lila and I hit puberty. In the game, Lila and I are polite, well-educated, achieving daughters who love and respect their parents. In exchange for presenting this front, and going to college and meeting other expected life landmarks, we have been permitted to keep our personal lives completely private. My mother never really wanted to know me, she just saw the daughter she wanted to see. She picked out a few relevant facts, that I was popular and a strong writer, for instance, and then she made up the rest. She has done the same thing with Lila. Really knowing someone is too messy and disturbing and even tedious for my mother. It doesn’t mean that she doesn’t love me, because she does. That’s why this hurts so much now. I have behaved in a way no daughter of hers would ever behave, and that has forced her to face the reality that she does not know me. This was not pleasant for either one of us.

“I’ll be fine, Mom, I promise. You don’t have to worry.”

There was a hard sob. “I shouldn’t have worked so much when you were a child. A few of those nannies were not the best role models.”

“I should go, Mom. Can we talk about this later?”

“I need to ask you one question first. I’ve been wondering, how did your grandmother know about this? Did you tell her?”

“No,” I said. “Gram just knew. I didn’t have to tell her.”

“I have to go myself,” my mother said. “I’m just running out the door. Do you need anything?”

“No thanks,” I said. “I’m okay.”

WHEN I tell Lila about this conversation, she says, “Mom always makes everything about herself.”

I say, “Do you realize she’s going to be a grandmother?”

Lila laughs so hard she snorts, and I laugh, too, watching my sister’s face. It is no problem for me to keep laughing; I like the sound. I am so thankful that Lila didn’t move out. She said something happened to her student loan situation, so that she couldn’t afford her own place after all. I know she’s not telling me the whole truth, but I don’t care. I don’t want to drive her away by asking too many questions. For the first time since she moved in we are hanging out together. We watch television. Lila flips through magazines while I read my letters. We go food shopping. She seems to not mind my company and I enjoy hers.

But Lila’s schedule is more insane than ever, and she creeps in and out at odd hours. More than once, she and I have frightened each other in the hall in the middle of the night, me in my bathrobe, her in her jacket and shoes smelling of fresh air. I know that regardless of whatever else is going on, she is getting laid on a regular basis. I knew she had had sex when she came home the morning after Easter. There was a vagueness to Lila’s eyes as if she were unable to focus on the chairs, the table, the room around her. I recognize that look.

At first she denied it, and then when I wouldn’t let up, she admitted it was true but refused to say anything more. She said that it didn’t mean anything and was going to end any minute, so there was no point in discussing it. Then she would leave the house, and I wouldn’t see her until the next morning.

The phone rarely rings when I’m home alone. My father has not spoken directly to me since Easter. I’m not surprised. I know he’s embarrassed and ashamed and doesn’t know what to say. I don’t want to speak to him for those same reasons, but I miss him.

The constants in my life right now are Gram and Grayson. If the phone does ring, it is one of them. Since our last meeting, Grayson and I have spoken about nothing but work. I haven’t apologized for yelling at him. He hasn’t apologized for insinuating that I can’t handle having a baby on my own. Just like when I broke up with him on his answering machine, we are ignoring the issue at hand and focusing on business. Grayson requested that I come into the office three days a week instead of my usual one. He says that a professional, sterile environment will help me choose my letters and my responses with more balance and objectivity.

He gives me the office of a writer who spends most of his days covering stories in South Jersey. I sit in the gray room with no windows and center my laptop on the steel desk and arrange my letters in neat piles. Then I tuck my chair in and put both feet flat on the linoleum floor. I arrange and rearrange the correspondence. I type a few starting lines on the screen. But that is as far as I get. The lighting is too harsh in the office. The waistband of my pants cuts into my swollen stomach. My pumps are too tight. There are too many distractions. That gossiping goat Charlene pops her head in at least once a week and asks me, with the most malicious smile, how my bubbala is doing. During one visit, she hands me a white envelope.

“What’s this?” I ask.

“Another letter from your adoring public. It must have gotten separated from the normal mail. Strange, isn’t it?” Charlene smiles, but the curve of her lips is cold and mean. She flips her hair and then leaves without closing my office door.

I look the envelope over. It couldn’t have come in with the mail. There’s no stamp, and it is addressed simply to the Dear Abby Department,
Bergen Record
. I slit the envelope open with my favorite silver letter opener and pull the thin piece of paper out. The cursive writing on the page is so full of loops and flourishes that it takes a minute before I can concentrate on the words.

Dear Abby,

My boyfriend and I are deeply in love. What we have is the real thing. We are very blessed because we know that God made us for each other. We couldn’t be any closer or any more committed. Unfortunately, we went through a rough patch last year, and the town tramp took advantage of the situation by seducing my true love.

When she realized he would never be able to care for her, she tried to trick him into marriage by getting pregnant. She is the worst kind of woman, a weak slut who can’t keep her legs shut or hold on to a man. Dear Abby, please tell me how I can get it through this girl’s dim brain that my man is off limits. She won’t get a thing from him. Not his love, and not a dime.

Sincerely,
Righteous in Ramsey

I breathe out slowly and fold the letter shut. I know I shouldn’t be surprised by Margaret’s ferocity. I should be relieved to have this letter. I’ve spent the last few months on the lookout for an approaching redhead, anticipating her attack. Still, I’ve never received a Dear Abby letter from someone I know, or from someone who knows me. My letters have always been my best escape, and my peace. Until now they have been written only by strangers who trust me, look up to me, and turn to me when they need to be saved. A line has been crossed, and I feel oddly revealed by Margaret’s choice to come at me in this manner. I flip the letter over so I am looking at the blank side of the page, then tear it into tiny bits and drop it in the garbage.

GRAYSON INSISTS that I attend the weekly staff meetings, which I have always skipped in the past. I sit through only one, which is sufficiently humiliating to keep me away in the future. The meeting falls first thing on a Thursday morning, which is the day my column comes out. I get my first look at the paper as Grayson’s assistant hands them out at the door of the conference room. I can tell that everyone else in the room ran to the end of their driveway at the crack of dawn and read their copies. When they walk in the room they toss the newspaper the assistant hands them onto the table and take a seat. There are about twelve people at the meeting, including the major front-page writers and the main editors: Business, Local, National, Sports, Arts, and Lifestyles. My boss is the Lifestyles editor, a cranky man with prostate problems that make it difficult for him to sit. I’ve never had much to do with him. When I have column problems I have always gone to Grayson. The editor frowns every time he sees me, so I figure he’s happy enough with our arrangement. Today as he paces the length of the room, he says, “What are you doing here?”