The Smart One

Chapter 18





Winter finally started to melt, and after a quick and wet spring, it became hot. The weather people kept calling it “a burst of summer,” like it was something fun, when really it was just miserable. No one was ready for the weather. People still walked outside with jackets, confused. They hit eighty degrees at the end of March and it just kept going up from there. And Cleo, who was already hot all the time anyway, became more annoyed with each day.

“Tell me there isn’t global warming,” she said to Max one morning. He was eating cereal at the little table they had in the kitchen, and he just raised his eyebrows.

“I mean, are people kidding when they try to pretend it’s not happening? Eighty-seven degrees in April? What the hell is going on here? It’s like those people that try to say the Holocaust didn’t happen.”

“I know,” Max said. He ignored her comment about Holocaust deniers. “The air conditioner isn’t doing much, is it?”

“It sounds like it’s dying,” Cleo said. They had only one air conditioner in the apartment and they kept it in the bedroom. It was an old one that Max had taken from the Coffeys’ attic, and it growled and whined as it tried to spit out cold air. If you stood directly in front of it, you could sort of feel a breeze.

“Even I’m going to the library today,” Max said. “It’s too hot to stay here.”

“Actually, I think I’m going to stay here today.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, I just need to work without distraction.”

“Okay,” Max said. “But I’ll save you a seat just in case you change your mind.”

The weather was a problem for lots of reasons, the main one being that all the kids on campus stripped down like it was spring break, and Cleo, who was not ready to show her stomach to all, still wore sweaters, as if the extra layering could hide what was happening underneath. She ended up sitting in her classes, sweating and uncomfortable, trying to cool down by pulling the fabric away from her skin and fanning papers at her face. When she was alone in the apartment, she usually wore nothing more than a tank top and boxers, and she’d sit on the couch with her feet on the coffee table in front of her, hands stretched across her stomach. She sat like that for hours, not moving, just holding her stomach like that was going to stop it from getting bigger.

They opened the windows wide, in an attempt to cool the apartment down. All it did was invite every fly to come in through the screenless openings. Once they were inside, they buzzed around, too dumb to figure out how to get back out. Cleo watched them frantically fly around, hitting the blinds and the walls. Sometimes she tried to sweep them out with papers, but it didn’t help much. Always, right before they died they got especially crazy and aggressive, looping around and dive-bombing Cleo and buzzing out of control as if that last burst of energy could save them. A few hours after that happened, Cleo usually found a little black corpse on the ground, and she’d scoop it up and throw it out the window. One morning, she woke up to find a bunch of dead flies on the table. “A massacre,” she whispered, and then cleaned them up.

After Monica heard that she was pregnant, she came by the apartment. “You could have told me,” she said.

“I couldn’t,” Cleo said. “I couldn’t even say it out loud.”

She finally had what she wanted: Monica was here with her to talk to her about being pregnant. She could have cried or screamed or told her that she was so scared all the time, that she felt like they were making every single decision wrong. They weren’t living in a movie. Things weren’t going to work themselves out offscreen and result in a cute baby. There was going to be blood and fighting and a lot of crying. She knew that much. But she couldn’t say any of that to Monica. What she’d really wanted was her old friend before they’d fallen apart. Now she had someone who looked familiar but felt sort of strange. It was almost better when she was gone altogether.

“It’s pretty messed up,” is all she said.

Monica started to come by the apartment more often. Sometimes she brought an orange or a bag of licorice or a gossip magazine, like little offerings. Most days they ended up sitting side by side on the couch, watching bad reality TV.

“You know,” Monica said one day, looking at Cleo’s stomach, “you’ll get used to people staring. Or not used to it, but it won’t bother you as much after a while. Like when you get a haircut and it feels so different, you feel the missing ends, and then one day you wake up and it’s just your hair again. It’s like that.”

“It doesn’t feel like that,” she said. She knew that Monica was trying to help, but what she wanted to say was that being pregnant was way worse than being anorexic. She wouldn’t say that, of course, because it sounded horrendous. But still, she thought it.

And it was true. There were things that college professors were used to. They were used to kids getting drunk, or getting overwhelmed, or failing a test and then crying. They were used to girls like Monica getting pulled out of school and returning a semester later. But they weren’t used to seeing pregnant seniors wander around the campus. They could barely look at Cleo. When it finally became clear to her economics professor that she was pregnant, he started avoiding her eyes when he taught. The staring was bad, but it was worse when people pointedly didn’t look at her, when they just avoided her altogether, fixing their eyes on the air around her.

CLEO WAS READY FOR THE SCHOOL YEAR to end, ready to be away from everyone her age that was celebrating and talking about where they were going to move. They talked about Manhattan and Boston and Chicago and San Francisco. Sometimes they changed their minds just because they felt like it. They were going to live on the East Coast and then decided to try the West Coast. Why not? They had choices. They could do whatever they felt like. She was moving into the basement of her boyfriend’s parents’ house in a suburb of Philadelphia. Was a sadder sentence ever said?

She and Max had both agreed to move to the Coffeys’. She didn’t want to, but what other option was there? Where else were they supposed to go? Even if Elizabeth had wanted them, her apartment was way too small, and it was still too hard for her to really talk about the baby without causing a fight of some kind. The last time they’d spoken on the phone, she’d said, “You have to understand, I just feel like I failed as a mother, Cleo. To have you pregnant in college is a nightmare and I can’t help but think it was my lack of parenting.” Cleo wasn’t sure if this was supposed to make her feel better, but it certainly didn’t. Then Elizabeth said, “I should have never let you go to that school,” like that was the cause of all this.

She and Max also decided to get married, although that still seemed not quite real. Max had brought up marriage the day after he’d woken her up with McDonald’s on her pillow. The fight was over, but they were still talking carefully to each other, stepping out of the way when the other walked by, saying sorry and please more often than normal.

They were both in bed, but not sleeping. Max was on his computer and Cleo had her eyes closed, a book resting on her stomach. Max cleared his throat once and then again and again, until Cleo opened her eyes.

“I was thinking,” he said, “that we should probably get married.”

“Married?”

“Yeah. I mean, we’re going to be together anyway, and with the baby, I just feel like it’s right.”

“I just … I don’t know. It’s a lot.”

“But don’t you want to marry me? I want to marry you,” Max said. He shut his laptop and turned to face her. “Will you marry me?”

She said yes, although she felt unsure. It seemed mean to say no. It was a horrible story, really. That was her engagement, Max saying, “We’re going to be together anyway,” and her saying yes, because that seemed the polite thing to do.

Later in the week, Max came home and threw his bag on the floor. “I got something for you,” he said. He pulled a small box out of his backpack and opened it for her. In it was a ring with a large round diamond on it. Cleo looked up at him and tilted her head.

“It’s fake,” he said. “Sorry, I should have said that right away.” He took it out of the box and held it out to her. “I just thought you should have something now, until I can get you something real.”

“Oh,” Cleo said. “Thanks.”

“Should I kneel?” Max didn’t wait for her to answer, before getting down on one knee. It felt like they were playacting and Cleo wanted it to be over soon. She took the ring and put it on her finger.

Cleo felt funny wearing the ring, like she was pretending to be something she wasn’t. She turned the ring around often, so that the fake diamond faced the other way. She was embarrassed whenever one of her professors noticed it.

When Cleo told her mom that they were getting married, Elizabeth was silent.

“What?” Cleo asked.

“Oh, Cleo,” her mother said. “What do you think is going to happen? That you’ll get married and live together, all happy playing house? Come on, Cleo. You’re smarter than this.”

Cleo wanted to tell her mom that clearly she wasn’t smarter than this. If she was smarter, wouldn’t she be in a different situation? It reminded her of the time she got a B in calculus senior year, and Elizabeth had been angry, had shaken her head. “No B’s,” she’d said. “You’re smart enough to get an A.”

That never made sense to Cleo. If she was smart enough to get an A, wouldn’t she have gotten one in the first place? She often wondered if she was even smart at all, or if Elizabeth just expected her to be, so she had to live up to it. Of course, the next semester she had brought home an A in calculus. Elizabeth had just nodded. “I told you,” she said.

She wore the ring for Max, since it seemed to make him happy. After a while, her fingers got bloated and she had to take it off. She was scared it was going to get stuck on there, that her fat little sausage finger would lose circulation and have to be amputated.

A little while later, Max came home with an identical ring—except this one was bigger. She wore it until that, too, got too tight, and she placed it on her dresser. She was ringless until Max replaced it again. Sometimes she took all three rings and lined them up next to each other. She never asked Max where he got them. They were probably from Walmart but she didn’t want to know.

WHEN SENIOR WEEK CAME, Cleo was relieved. At least when it was over, people would stop talking about it all the time. Max kept insisting that he should skip it. “I don’t even want to go to Hilton Head,” he said. “I hate it there.” Because he was nice enough to lie, she told him he had to go. It didn’t go unnoticed that he was acting in a way that very few college boys would. She saw the way his friends looked at her, like she’d ruined his life, like he didn’t have as much to do with this situation as she did. And so, because of this, she kept saying, “You have to go.”

Max finally agreed, but tried to get her to come with. Cleo was firm on this. There was no way in hell she was going to Senior Week with a huge pregnant stomach to be the only sober person in a sea of Bucknell students. She’d rather be trapped in a cave with Mary and Laura for seven days straight than go through that.

“Then I’m not going the whole time,” Max said. “Just for a few days.”

Cleo figured that was better than nothing.

With Max gone, the apartment was so quiet. Even when she walked outside, the town felt empty, since all the seniors were gone. Before he left, Max went to the grocery store and bought Cleo enough food that she would have survived a war. She stood in the doorway of the kitchen and watched him unload frozen pizzas, boxes of cereal, macaroni and cheese, and soup. It made her start to cry, watching him pile up all this junk food for her, and she had to turn and go into the bathroom so she wouldn’t bawl in front of him. These hormones really were a bitch.

Secretly, Cleo had been sort of looking forward to her time alone in the apartment. She realized that it would be the last time ever that she’d really be all by herself. After graduation, they’d be at the Coffeys’ and then there’d be a baby. And while that was hard to imagine, hard to think that it was really going to happen, she knew enough to be grateful for this time.

She watched marathons of old TV shows, and stayed up well into the night, then slept past noon and ate huge bowls of cereal. She read stupid books and ate ramen. And after two days, she felt like she was going out of her mind. She’d started to have nightmares about the baby, where she forgot it someplace and left it behind. In one, she was buying shoes and Weezy came up to her and screamed at her for leaving her baby in her purse. Cleo was confused as to how the baby had gotten there in the first place, and tried to say so, but couldn’t get the words right. She woke up sweating.

She had wanted time alone, but now she wanted Max. She felt desperate for him. She wanted someone else to be there when she woke up to tell her that the baby wasn’t even there yet and to assure her that she didn’t (and wouldn’t) leave it in a purse. She couldn’t help but imagine Max at the beach, drinking and talking to girls. Every night, she thought, Please, God, don’t let him make out with anyone. Please, God, don’t let him decide to leave me.

When Max came home, Cleo almost knocked him over. She sat with her legs on his lap while he told her about the week and who got really drunk, who hooked up, who threw up all over the floor. Cleo laughed at these stories, so happy to have him home. They talked into the night, and Cleo kept her leg linked around his in bed. She wanted to make sure that he was really there. What had she been thinking, taking him for granted? Was she out of her mind? This might not be what she had imagined, and this certainly wasn’t perfect, and maybe she was wearing a ten-dollar ring from Walmart, but Max was still the best thing she had in her whole life at the moment, and she couldn’t forget that.

GRADUATION WAS LONG AND HOT, but the upside was that in her robe, Cleo looked like she was just chunky and not necessarily pregnant. The downside was that both of their families were there, and they were all together for the first time ever.

Weezy and Elizabeth had been in touch and even met up for lunch a few months back. It was a strange thing to imagine, these two women getting together. Cleo waited for her mom to call and ridicule Weezy, to make fun of her coddling ways, how she talked about her children like they were all still toddlers. But she never did. She actually seemed to enjoy her. It was amazing how much an accidental pregnancy could bind you together against your children.

Weezy made the two of them pose in front of trees and buildings, with their caps on, then with their caps off, holding their diplomas, and just standing. She tried to make the two of them throw their caps in the air, which was when Max put his foot down. Then she made Cleo pose with Elizabeth, and then they took pictures of the whole Coffey family. “I’ll get you copies,” Weezy told Elizabeth. Elizabeth just nodded. Cleo was pretty sure she didn’t even have a camera with her.

After the ceremony, Cleo and Elizabeth ran into Monica and her family. Cleo and Monica hugged, and then Monica’s mom and dad each hugged her. Elizabeth looked at Monica with a fond but distant smile, like she was sure she’d seen her somewhere before, but couldn’t say where. When they went to say good-bye, Monica’s mom hugged Cleo again, and whispered in her ear, “We’re all thinking of you,” which made Cleo feel strange, and weirdly like Monica had told on her. She pulled away and said the only thing she could think of, which was, “Thanks.”

They all went out to an Italian dinner at a restaurant where Weezy had made reservations months earlier. Every restaurant was booked, of course, and unless you remembered way ahead of time, you were out of luck. Cleo wondered what they would have done if they weren’t with the Coffeys. Elizabeth probably would have just driven back to New York.

They all said good-bye outside the restaurant. Cleo and Max had to go pack up their apartment, and everyone else was driving back that night. It felt weird packing up the apartment with Max. “I don’t feel like we graduated,” she said. “I don’t feel like anything’s over.”

WEEZY MADE THEM UNPACK THEIR BAGS on the driveway. “Who knows what you’re bringing back from that place?” she kept saying. Cleo wasn’t sure if she thought they had bedbugs or that mice were hiding in their clothes, but she was offended. She managed to convince Weezy to let them bring the stuffed chair from their apartment down to the basement, after Weezy inspected it and sprayed it with some sort of foam that she then vacuumed off of it.

Cleo wondered what the neighbors must have thought, looking out to see Weezy in cropped workout pants and an old hockey T-shirt of Max’s, sweating as she pulled the vacuum around, the orange extension cord trailing out of the house, while Cleo just stood there and watched, her hands resting on her stomach, which was as big as a beach ball.

After they moved everything in, Max sat on the edge of the bed and Cleo stood by the dresser. They were exhausted and sweaty. The room felt tiny, like it could barely hold the two of them.

“Well, here we are,” Max said.

“Here we are,” Cleo said.

MAX STARTED LOOKING FOR A JOB the very next day, which was annoying. There was no point in her even applying anywhere, since no one was going to hire a girl that was almost eight months pregnant. Cleo looked at his résumé and wanted to tell him that she should be the one getting a job, that she’d be able to get a better one than he could. It was always understood between them that she was the smarter one, and now she wanted it acknowledged. She had to bite her lip to keep from saying something out loud. Instead, she sat and watched Max send out his résumé, feeling like a big blob of nothing.

THEN MAX GOT A JOB DOING AD SALES for a small business magazine, and Cleo spent her days sleeping late, wandering around the house, reading, sleeping, and waiting for Max to come home. Then when he did, she listened to him talk about his job. She wanted to hear everything about his coworkers. Who brought tuna for lunch every day and who napped in their cubicle? She herself had nothing to share, except for the day that she took Ruby for a walk and the poor thing got diarrhea. Max was so tired every night. “I can’t believe this is what a job feels like,” he said. Most nights, he fell asleep while they were still watching TV in bed.

The days got even more boring. Weezy tried to help, which some days Cleo appreciated and some days it made her want to scrape her teeth with her fingernails. “Shall we go look at some strollers?” Weezy would say. Or, “Why don’t we go get you some new tops?” That last comment made Cleo cry a little, since she was sure that Weezy was telling her that her shirts were too tight.

One day, even Weezy seemed at a loss, and the two of them sat upstairs on the couch, reading. Weezy had given Cleo an old copy of The Thorn Birds that she’d found on a bookshelf in the basement. The book was wrinkled, like it had gotten wet and the pages had dried all wavy, but Weezy promised she’d enjoy it. “It’s so dramatic, full of love affairs with a priest, and—oh, I don’t want to ruin it. You’ll love it, I promise.”

And so, even if love affairs with a priest didn’t really sound like a huge selling point for Cleo, she was reading the book, which actually seemed a little bit trashy to be on Weezy’s bookshelf but did hold her attention, which wasn’t easy these days.

“You know what we should do?” Weezy asked her. “We should go get some yarn and start knitting blankets for the baby.”

“I don’t know how to knit,” Cleo told her.

“You don’t know how to knit?” Weezy sounded appalled, as though Cleo had just told her she didn’t know how to tie her shoes. Really, what did Weezy think, that girls still took Home Ec classes? In what world was it that strange not to know how to knit? Cleo thought all of this, but just shook her head in response to Weezy’s question.

“Well, then, I can teach you. It will be wonderful.”

Cleo was so bored that she agreed. She even hoped it really would be wonderful. Here she was, getting excited over yarn and books with philandering priests. She didn’t even recognize herself.

She and Weezy went to the yarn store, to stock up on needles for Cleo and get some easy patterns and fun yarn. The place was called At Knit’s End and was tucked in an old house off of a busy road. A few of the women greeted Weezy when she walked in.

“Hello,” Weezy said. “Ladies, we have a first-timer! This is my daughter-in-law, Cleo.” The women didn’t seem all that excited, and Cleo stood frozen, shocked to hear herself be called Weezy’s daughter-in-law. She wasn’t yet, but she didn’t correct her. She guessed that’s what she would be soon.

“Since we don’t know what the baby will be,” Weezy was saying, “we’ll have to get some neutral colors. Yellows, greens, and I guess even light blue would work. We’ll get you some yarn to practice on. And let’s see …” She thumbed through a stack of books. “Here. This looks like an easy pattern. Just knitting with increasing and a yarn over. Or you could do this one, it’s a basket weave. Just knitting and purling. What do you think?”

Cleo hadn’t understood one word that Weezy had just said, but she pointed to the simpler pattern, and Weezy nodded. She chose a light yellow yarn, which was super-soft and pretty. Weezy had found a complicated pattern, with sheep dancing across it, and she was picking up ball after ball of yarn and throwing it into the basket.

When the ladies rang them up, Cleo was surprised by the total. How did yarn cost this much? Cleo tried to offer to pay, but Weezy patted her hand away. “This was my idea and it’s my treat. It will be fun for me to get knitting again, and now I have a good excuse.”

The cashier, who was a large sour-looking woman, put their purchases into a bag and handed it to them without smiling.

“ ’Bye, ladies,” Weezy called. Some of them grunted in response. When they got out to the parking lot, Weezy lowered her voice. “Knitters are not friendly. I don’t know what it is, you’d think they would be, but I’ve learned over the years that most of them act like they have a needle up their behind.” Cleo laughed and then Weezy laughed a little bit too.

It turned out that Cleo loved knitting. Well, that wasn’t exactly true. She loved the feeling of concentrating, the magic of turning the yarn over the needles and coming out with a perfect little stitch. When Weezy taught her to do a yarn over for the first time, she gasped. “Oh, look at that!” and Weezy looked pleased. It was magical, sort of.

She could knit for hours, sit with the TV on or music in the background and let her fingers go. She didn’t enjoy the actual process; it sort of made her fingers ache, and sometimes it was so boring that she felt like her skin was going to split. But she liked the goal, and she loved checking off the boxes as she was done with each row, marking her stitches with the little stitch counters. She was determined.

At night, she’d sit up in bed and knit. Max thought she was becoming obsessed. “Maybe I’m nesting,” she told him.

“Maybe that’s it,” he said. He pulled her down for a kiss and then put his face on her stomach and kissed that. “Good night, baby.”

She and Weezy took to knitting every night after dinner. They had different programs that they liked to watch, and Weezy could always help her if she knotted a stitch or did something wrong. She sometimes hoped that Claire or Martha would join them, but they seemed to have their own thing going on. Will always went up to his office to work, and Max was so tired with his new schedule that he went to bed early.

Weezy’s blanket was really complicated. Sometimes she would explain it to Cleo, the stitches she was doing, and Cleo would watch, fascinated. It took Weezy more than an hour to do a row, and almost every row required something different. When she was done, she would knit the sheep over the blanket. “It’s not as hard as it seems,” she said. But Cleo could tell she was pleased at the attention.

Cleo finished her first blanket, and as Weezy taught her how to do the final stitch and tie it off, they both cheered. Cleo felt exhilarated. She couldn’t believe that she’d made this thing. “I love it,” she said over and over. She put it next to her and rubbed it on her face.

“We’ll wash it in Dreft and it will be all clean and ready for the baby. It’s really beautiful. You are a natural.”

They got Cleo more yarn and she started on the basket-weave blanket. This one she did in a light blue that was almost aqua. It was really more of a girl color, but you could use it for both. Plus, Cleo felt like she was having a girl, but she hadn’t told anyone in case she was wrong. She didn’t want to sound like an idiot.

“A baby can never have too many blankets,” Weezy said. “And you can always give them as gifts. It’s such a wonderful thing to receive.”

Sometimes Weezy had a glass of wine while she knitted, although one night, after she’d had a few, she ended up messing up the blanket so much that she had to take out two entire rows. “This is why you don’t drink and knit,” she told Cleo. They laughed, and Cleo wished that she could knit and drink, but it wasn’t an option.

It was funny, those nights, how peaceful it was to sit together, the TV chattering in the background showing some silly sitcom or fashion reality show. She and Weezy could talk about the people on the TV, who their favorites were, or they could talk about their knitting. But most of the time they were silent, both pairs of hands working away, fingers moving in rhythm, and Cleo felt a certain sense of happiness, to be making something for the baby, to be sitting quietly with Weezy and creating something for this little person.

Ruby liked to sit on the couch next to Cleo while she knitted, sometimes resting her body on the completed part of the blanket, like she was testing it out. At first Cleo hadn’t really liked Ruby all that much. The dog had goopy eyes and some strange-feeling lumps on her back. But after seeing how much Max adored her, and after being at the house long enough to get used to her, and the sort of foul smell that she carried with her, Cleo grew fond of her.

Ruby seemed to know that Cleo was pregnant, and she would come sit next to her and rest her head on Cleo’s stomach, as if she were talking to the baby or protecting her somehow. “Are you talking to the baby?” Cleo would sometimes whisper, and Ruby would press her snout into her stomach, as if to say yes.

Max was always worried about Ruby. “She’s walking weird,” he’d say. “She’s limping, on her right side.”

“She’s just getting older,” Weezy would tell him. But she didn’t sound so sure herself.

Ruby moved slowly around the house, and sometimes when they got ready to take her out, by the time she walked to the back door, she seemed to have forgotten where she was going.

SOME DAYS, IF CLEO DIDN’T think too much about anything, she was okay. But she was never much good at putting things out of her mind, and so most days she spent worrying. She thought about getting married to Max, and how silly it probably was. Then she thought about how, if they didn’t get married, Weezy would probably sneak down to the basement one night with a judge and marry them in their sleep. She did not want her grandchild to be born to unmarried parents. She’d made that much clear.

Cleo loved statistics. But she knew that what they would tell her now was that she and Max wouldn’t make it. Not for the long term anyway. Who knew what would happen ten years from now? She’d be only thirty-two. Not old at all. She tried not to dwell on these thoughts, but she couldn’t help it. Look at what happened with Monica. She couldn’t even keep a best friend. What hope did she have that she and Max would stay together?

There were nights that she lay in bed and stared at the back of Max’s head, just thinking, Well, this won’t last long. Or worse, sometimes when she woke up in the middle of the night, she’d stare at the lump of him in the bed and think, Who is that?

Sometimes if she couldn’t stop thinking about their doomed fate, she’d remind herself that the odds of her getting pregnant while on the pill were small too. Almost impossible, really. If she was feeling good, she’d think that these slim statistics would revisit them again, that she and Max were some sort of magnet for the improbable, and that they’d have a long and happy life together. If she was feeling bad, she’d think that they’d used up all of their impossible odds, and that she and Max were bound to split up soon.