The Smart One

Chapter 14





Weezy didn’t handle it as well as Max had thought she would. He’d said, “It won’t be that bad” so many times that Cleo almost believed him. She agreed that he should tell Weezy by himself, and not just because she didn’t want any part of that conversation. Weezy wouldn’t be able to react truthfully if Cleo was there, and that didn’t seem fair.

Max went upstairs late, after everyone had gone to bed. Weezy was asleep on the couch, but he’d woken her up. Cleo had stayed in the basement, sitting on the top step and listening.

Weezy had started crying almost immediately. At first Cleo felt bad, but after a while as she listened to Weezy heave and gasp, with what seemed like unnecessary drama, she started to get annoyed. She thought about storming up the stairs, looking her in the face, and saying, “What are you crying about? You don’t have to have this baby.” She didn’t, of course. She stayed put and listened to Weezy repeat that she was so disappointed. Not in them, but for them. Whatever that meant.

Somehow, during the conversation where Max told Weezy that Cleo was pregnant, it had come out that they were living together. “You’re what?” Weezy had said, like that was the real problem, like living together was the reason she got pregnant in the first place.

MAX STAYED CALM UNTIL THE VERY END when he started to cry. She couldn’t blame him. She was about to cry herself, just listening to Weezy repeat herself, letting him know that she really was just so disappointed.

Cleo heard the word “options” and she sat up straight. She didn’t want Weezy up there talking about her like she wasn’t there. She was right here. They weren’t Weezy’s options, they were hers, and she had decided.

When Max finally came back down, she had moved one step down and had her head resting on her arms on the landing. She was exhausted. Max was walking quickly, and he still had tears running down his face, which embarrassed her so much she had to look away. She was embarrassed because she knew he wouldn’t want her to see him cry. She never had before, and if this hadn’t happened, she wondered how long, if ever, it would have been before she’d seen it.

“I think we should go,” Max said. He was already grabbing his bag and putting stuff in it.

“Now?” It was five in the morning.

“Yeah, let’s get out of here. I want to leave before anyone wakes up.”

“Can you even drive? You had kind of a lot to drink.”

“Yeah, I’m fine. It’s morning now.”

“What did she say?” Cleo already knew, but she wanted to hear it from him.

“I’ll tell you about it later. Let’s just go.”

“But my stuff is upstairs,” Cleo said. The last thing she wanted to do was to walk up there by herself, and run into Weezy in the hall, or see crazy Bets on her way to the bathroom. Her heart started to beat quickly just thinking about it.

“I’ll run and grab it,” Max said. “Can you finish packing my stuff?”

Cleo nodded and he ran up the stairs, taking them two at a time. They looked like a couple that was late for the airport.

IT WAS STILL DARK OUT when they got in the car, and they drove in silence for almost an hour. Cleo was afraid to say anything to him. Every once in a while she reached over and put her hand on his leg, or rubbed the back of his neck, but he didn’t react much. Cleo forced herself to keep her eyes open, even though all she wanted to do was sleep. It used to be that she couldn’t sleep if she was worried, but now she felt like she could sleep anywhere and anytime. Finally they passed a sign for a rest stop that was coming up, and Max turned to look at her. “Are you hungry?” She nodded, and he turned on his blinker and got off the expressway.

Max said he’d run in and get the food, and Cleo asked for an egg sandwich and a cup of coffee. Max shook his head. “I don’t think you’re supposed to have coffee.”

“Oh,” Cleo said. “Not even a cup?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Forget it. Just get me a bottle of water.”

Max nodded and got out of the car to go get their food. She was so sad just then, for both of them, as she watched him open the door and go in. It was so sad, just f*cking depressing, really. Neither of them had any idea what they were doing. They didn’t even know if she could have coffee or not.

Cleo started to cry a little bit, her nose running, and she dug around until she found an old napkin in the car to blow her nose. She was trying to stop the tears before Max came back, but when she saw him walk out with a drink tray and a bag of fast-food breakfast, she started crying all over again.

“I got you orange juice, too,” he said. He put his hand on the back of her head and ran it down to her neck.

“What’re we doing?” she asked.

“We’ll be okay,” Max said. This sounded like such a complete lie that Cleo let out a little laugh. “Here, you should eat.” He handed the sandwich to Cleo and she unwrapped it in her lap.

“We’re really in a lot of shit, aren’t we?” she said. Max was pulling out of the parking lot and onto the ramp to get back on the highway, and he didn’t answer her.

WHEN CLEO TOLD HER MOM, there was a pause and for a second she thought her mom hadn’t heard her and she was going to have to repeat herself. And then she heard her mom say, “Oh goddamn it, Cleo.”

Cleo had breathed in quickly, like someone had surprised her, and then she’d started to cry. On the other end of the phone, her mom sighed. She hated when Cleo cried, she always had.

“Well, have you thought about it?” Elizabeth asked.

“Mom, of course I’ve thought about it.”

“And?”

“And what? I’m keeping it. I wouldn’t be telling you about it otherwise, would I?”

“Cleo, you really need to think about this.”

“What do you mean, I really need to think about it? You think I haven’t thought about it?”

“I’m just saying, it’s a big decision.”

“Yeah, no kidding. And I’ve thought about it. I have. You’re talking to me like I don’t think things through, like I’m some idiot who got knocked up and just decided to go with it.”

“Well, right about now, that sounds pretty accurate, don’t you think?”

Cleo hung up the phone and threw it at the couch. Then she started to really let herself cry, with big, indulgent, dramatic sobs. She waited for her mom to call her back, but all she got was an e-mail an hour later.

Cleo,

I’m upset at the way things were handled today. I understand that you are upset as well, so when you’re ready to talk in a calm manner, I’ll be available.

Mom

“Do you believe this?” she screamed. She ran into the bedroom to show it to Max, holding her phone right in front of his face until he took it from her and read it. Her first instinct had been to hide it, to hide the fact that she had a mom who was such a monster. But then her rage had taken over and she didn’t care about that.

It sounded like a f*cking business e-mail: The way things were handled. I’ll be available. Good God, her mom was a crazy person. She didn’t even know how to talk to people normally, didn’t even know how to act when her daughter told her she was pregnant.

“I’m never talking to her again,” Cleo said. “She can die alone.”

“Okay,” Max said. “You’re upset.”

“Of course I’m upset. My mom is a horrible person. And can I just point out that she also got pregnant by accident? With me. You’d think she’d be a little more understanding.”

“She’s just surprised.”

“I’m surprised too,” Cleo said. “Didn’t she think about that?”

CLEO WAS STILL THROWING UP almost every day. They kept waiting for it to stop, but it never did. Max read the pregnancy books they bought and reported back to her. “It says it’s normal for some women to be sick through the whole pregnancy. Mostly it’s just the first trimester, but some people have it the whole time.” He looked up at her with wide eyes.

“What a relief,” she said.

In class, her lips were red and raw from all the retching. She could feel her professors looking at her, probably thinking that she was on a bender, that she was perpetually hungover, that her life was spiraling out of control. The last part was true, of course, just not for the reasons they thought.

As soon as she got home in the afternoons, she’d lie on the couch and watch TV. Sometimes she’d try to eat saltines, but the only thing that ever had any chance of staying down was Fig Newtons, which she’d never liked before.

“Our baby is going to grow up to be a fig,” Cleo said. She was kidding, but Max looked worried.

“Maybe I’ll call my mom to see if she has any ideas,” he said.

Weezy had called them before they’d even gotten back to school. She apologized for the way she acted, Max relayed to Cleo. She was sorry that they’d already left. And she wanted them to know that the whole family would be there to help them through all of this.

Max was relieved, and Cleo was too. She was. For the most part, anyway. She still wished that her own mom would have come around, and if not, it would have almost been nicer if she and Max could have commiserated on how awful their parents were being. Instead, he talked to his mom every single day, filling her in on doctor’s appointments and asking her advice on every little thing.

Cleo was tired. More tired than she’d ever been in her whole life. Sometimes when she’d be walking to class, she’d think that she was going to fall asleep standing up, because she couldn’t keep her eyes open, and they would close and her head would bob. One night, after dinner, Max came in the room to tell her that Weezy had said that her nausea would be worse if she lay down after meals. “She said to stay upright, just walk around or sit up until you’ve digested.”

Cleo was lying on the couch when he told her this, and she opened one eye to look at him standing there, so eager. “I’d rather throw up all over myself, than sit up right now,” she said. She closed her eyes again and heard Max walk out of the room.

Sometimes Max would be talking to Weezy and he’d just hand the phone to Cleo, without giving her a chance to say no, or even just prepare. She wanted to tell Max that it hurt her feelings, that it made her feel sad when she heard Weezy’s voice over the phone, telling Cleo what it was like when she was pregnant, asking her how tired she was, promising that it would get better. But she couldn’t tell him that, because even she knew it sounded ridiculous, that talking to his mom hurt her feelings, and so she kept it to herself.

There was one night, though, when Max was on the phone with his mom, again, and Cleo was lying on the couch, trying to watch TV, which was hard since Max was talking kind of loud. She turned up the volume, but all she could concentrate on was Max’s voice.

“Yeah, she’s been having trouble with that for a while now,” he said. “It’s making her feel sicker, I think.” Then Max turned to her, lowered the phone from his mouth, and said, “My mom says to drink hot water with lemon. She said it really helps constipation.”

Cleo opened her mouth to say something, but nothing came out. Then, when Max got off the phone, she finally found her words. “Could you please not talk to your mom about my constipation?”

CLEO MADE MAX PROMISE THAT he wouldn’t tell any of his friends. “Please. Please don’t say anything. I don’t want to be the pregnant girl at college.”

“Okay,” Max said. “But people are going to find out eventually.”

“I know, but let’s just wait, okay? No one needs to know right now.”

“People are going to think something’s wrong when we just hole up in the apartment.”

“Well, you can go out. Just because I can’t drink doesn’t mean you have to stay home.”

“Really?” Max asked.

“Definitely. You can just tell everyone I’m studying or sick or out with other people.”

And she had meant it. Or at least she had meant it until Max came home drunk one night with a bag of McDonald’s and crept into their bedroom to say hello.

“Hey, baby,” he said, and put his face next to hers. He smelled like rubbing alcohol.

“Hey,” she said. She’d been asleep. She rolled away from him and heard him rustling in the bag of food. She looked back to see him unwrapping a Filet-O-Fish.

“Have you ever had one of these?” he asked her. “They’re pretty good. I don’t always feel like them, but tonight I wanted an appetizer to my Big Mac.” Cleo now smelled tartar sauce in addition to the rubbing alcohol.

“Ugh, Max,” Cleo said. She sat up and put her hand over her nose.

“What’s the matter?” he asked. He was slurring just a little bit. “Do you want a bite?” He held the sandwich out to her.

“No! Just get out,” she said.

Max looked hurt. “Do you want some french fries?”

“No, Max. Really, please just leave me alone.”

“Fine,” Max said. “I was just trying to be nice.” He stood up and walked to the door, leaving a few french fries in his trail. He slammed the bedroom door shut behind him and turned on the TV in the other room.

Cleo found him there the next morning, fast asleep, mouth open, with the McDonald’s bag resting next to him. They didn’t talk for almost the whole day, just huffed around each other. Then, just when it was starting to get dark, Max apologized.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to make you mad.”

“I know.”

“But I did.”

“Yeah.”

“You’re the one that yelled at me to get out.”

“Yeah, but that was because you woke me up with a Filet-O-Fish on my pillow. Can you blame me?”

“I just wanted to say hi.” Max smiled the tiniest bit.

“Max.”

“I know, I’m really sorry. I am.”

“I’m sorry too, for yelling,” Cleo said. She went over and sat next to him on the couch.

“What a f*cking mess,” Max said. Cleo wasn’t sure if he was talking about the apartment or their life.

“I know,” she said.

MAX KEPT ASSURING HER THAT she wasn’t showing, but she didn’t believe him. “Look at this,” she’d say, pulling her shirt tight across her stomach. “This is not what I normally look like.”

“Well, I know that,” Max said. “I just mean that no one else can tell.”

“But I can tell,” she said.

Max insisted she didn’t look any different, like he thought that was the nice thing to say, but it wasn’t. And so, she finally said, “If I’m normally this fat, then kill me.”

AT THE FIRST DOCTOR’S APPOINTMENT, she’d been poked and prodded and had blood drawn and everything else. She kept waiting for him to say, “It’s a mistake, you aren’t pregnant,” but he didn’t.

“Your due date is July fifteenth,” he told them.

It was already cold outside, the start of winter, so July seemed far away, which comforted Cleo. They bought a calendar on the way home, the kind that you hang on the wall, because it seemed like they should have one, and they hung it up on a nail in the kitchen, and circled July 15 with a red marker. In the circle, Cleo wrote, DUE DATE.

“Well, there it is,” Max said. They stood and stared at it.

“Yep. There it is.”



WHEN SHE WAS FOUR MONTHS ALONG, Max started telling people. “We can’t just wait until your stomach starts to get huge,” he said. He told his friend Mickey first, and then his friend Ben, and then more and more people. And those people told other people and Cleo figured that a few days after Max first told Mickey, the whole school knew. She didn’t tell anyone. Who would she tell? Her old roommates that seemed to be thriving without her? Could she really call up Monica and tell her that she was pregnant, that she’d f*cked up? She could just imagine Laura and Mary when they found out, sitting on the futon and saying to each other, “I knew it was a mistake for her to move in with him. I knew it. She’s getting what she deserves. It’s only fair.”

Cleo felt like people stared at her wherever she went on campus. She felt like as soon as she passed, people whispered to each other, or pointed her out to the friend they were walking with. There she is, that’s the pregnant girl, can’t you tell, her butt looks huge.

“You sound paranoid,” Max said.

“Well, I’m not,” she told him.

CLEO AND HER MOTHER WERE ON e-mail terms. That’s how she put it to Max. They had tried to talk on the phone once more, and Cleo had ended up screaming while her mom said, “This is not the kind of conversation I want to have,” over and over. E-mail was better for both of them, they agreed. Maybe they’d just stay on these terms forever. Maybe Cleo could just e-mail pictures of the baby to her when it was born and then when the baby was old enough, it could start e-mailing with Elizabeth, have its own online relationship with its grandmother. It would be like they were all virtual people, like they were bodyless and floating in cyberspace.

MAX WENT WITH HER FOR the first ultrasound, even though she kept telling him that he didn’t have to. It was so weird, that before she was pregnant, the thought of having Max in the room while she went to the gynecologist would have been disgusting, silly really, and so strange that no one would ever allow it. But now that she was pregnant, it wasn’t just common but it was expected? Max was supposed to be there while she put her feet in the stirrups.

“Well, we can see the baby here,” the doctor said. “And it is just one baby.” The thought of its being more than one baby had never even occurred to Cleo.

“That’s it right there?” Max asked. He pointed to the screen.

“It looks like a little doll,” Cleo said. “Or a peanut.”

The ultrasound technician froze the screen and told them that she’d print out some pictures for them.

“Can we get an extra copy?” Max asked the technician. “I want to send one to my mom.”

“Really?” Cleo asked.

“Yeah, I think she’d like to see it. She’ll probably hang it on the refrigerator or something.” The thought of a picture of the inside of her uterus hanging in the Coffeys’ kitchen made Cleo feel strange. But Max seemed excited, so she let it go.

They hung the ultrasound on their own refrigerator, and whenever Cleo went into the kitchen, her eyes went first to the picture, and then to the calendar that hung on the wall. And each time she glanced back and forth, between the calendar and the grainy ultrasound picture, she thought about how they were that much closer to that little baby’s actually being a baby and coming into the world. As if she needed reminding.