“As you’re meant to. A few months from now this will all be a distant memory, and you’ll have a baby and you’ll be a mom and holy shit, I need this second drink all of a sudden.” Lauren pauses, then, almost accusingly, “Wait, what about names?”
There’s a short list. Sarah’s had it for some time. “I wasn’t exactly all excited to have this big wedding. I only recently started to come around and sort of . . . enjoy the thought of it. Thinking about how all these people I like are going to get together one day in April and be in the same place and eat this good food. It sounded nice. Now I feel like an asshole for not feeling excited about the baby and saying fuck all to the wedding, and I mean, sure, fuck all to the wedding and yay babies, but how did this happen?”
Lauren is quiet. “Well, when a sperm meets an egg.”
“I mean, we’re old, Lauren. We’re old now. This is it. Life is happening to us. I called Jill, you know? After you told me you ran into her?”
“You did?”
“I did. I’m not even sure why, I was curious or something. And she was like—the baby this, the baby that, and she said, the thing about having a baby is you’re never alone again, ever, in any meaningful way, ever for the rest of your life.”
“She can’t say that. Her kids are babies. They’ll turn out to be teenagers like us and we had nothing to do with our mothers for a while there. I still have nothing to do with my mother, really.”
Sarah shudders. “Envisioning the baby inside me as us as teenagers is not exactly reassuring. All I mean is, suddenly it’s happening to us. Life is happening to us.”
“Life is always happening to us.” Lauren finishes her cocktail, pushes the glass of wine back across the table. “Have another sip, he won’t grow a third leg or anything.”
She takes a small sip. “Okay, now seriously, take this away. Do you want to get dinner?”
“It’s five o’clock.”
“Early bird special?”
“Yeah, let’s get dinner.” Lauren signals for the waiter. “I’ll get this. Celebratory drink on your big day.”
“Do you really think life is always happening to us?”
“I do,” Lauren says.
Lately she feels so stupid. It’s the pregnancy, Sarah tells herself, then remembers she’s pregnant, and gets angry. For days, she vacillates between those two states: idiocy and rage. Joy—about the pregnancy, the wedding—it’s out there somewhere, she tells herself.
At the moment, nothing holds her interest. The fat paperback she’s been picking at is lying splayed open on the coffee table. It’s good, but the television seems more appealing at the moment. Jeopardy! is on, and she’s playing along, talking out loud, unembarrassed. Dan doesn’t care. He sits at the little desk by the window, tapping away, oblivious.
“Who is Vanessa Bell? What is Eminent Victorians?” Dan chimes in with the answer that eludes her: the Abyssinian hoax.
She’s not prone to exaggeration so Sarah wouldn’t say she’s exhausted, but she’s tired. She’s not used to working so many hours in the store: labor that involves much standing, much cheerful chatter. She’s good at Jeopardy!, but she’s not smart. They’re two different things. Younger, she’d have called herself smart, because she was raised to believe she was. She was raised to believe she was perfect. The shock of college wasn’t the usual—discovering radical politics, lesbianism, Kathy Acker. It was discovering her mediocrity. She’d always been adept, before, at seeming smart: asking the right questions, asking questions at all, maintaining an air of propriety, of friendliness, of openness. The ingredients, she thought, of intelligence. Teachers loved her, and so did the students. She was active, which she took for a type of intelligence. Her college professors, though, were not swayed by this activity, this performance of intelligence. They had no context for knowing her. She was one of a few hundred.
As a girl, she’d been loved, indulged, and aware enough to understand that this meant she was, in a word, spoiled. She took pains to remember that. It was unbecoming, she learned quickly, to whine, to brag, to push. The thing to do was wield her power subtly. Never a tantrum, whether over a doll or, later, a saddle, later still a CD changer for the car, a credit card, tickets to Florida, because she understood that these would come, by virtue of the fact that she wanted them to. So, too, at school, deemed academically one of the best in the country—the country, understand—she’d managed A’s almost across the board simply by expecting them for herself. And if, on occasion, she forgot to read the book, she would expect, and receive, a reprieve.
The October of her freshman year of college, Doctor Diana Baker had startled her, during office hours, by saying a firm no to Sarah, supplicant, come to inquire about an extension on a paper. She had her argument ready, should it come up—something to do with Huck, but not a name-drop.
“We’re all adults here. You don’t want to or can’t get to the work, that’s your concern. I’m not in the business of keeping tabs on my students.”