“I see.”
She watched as his eyes traced Eloise; as he took in the way the sun shone through her light hair, the plunging neckline of her blue dress, her tan athletic shoulders. She was used to it—all the men who’d ever stopped long enough on the way to her bed to notice the picture did the same thing. You look so happy, they’d say. And then: Who’s the guy? Are you twins? And finally: Who the hell is this?
She drank as much merlot as she could manage in a single gulp, and set the glass down on the table.
“Come on,” she said, and unfastened his belt.
Upstairs in the community center there are more footsteps, but these new ones are lighter, softer. Kids, Alice figures. Here for the party. She thinks she hears a balloon pop.
“We were together for about a year before I got pregnant. We weren’t as careful as we should have been,” she says, and leaves it at that.
“How did he react to the news?”
She’s gripped by the urge to say that he’d been awful. That he’d given her some terrible, misogynistic ultimatum: get rid of it, or get out. Something that might paint her as more of a victim, more of a martyr. Something that would squeeze out whatever empathy was left trickling through these women’s veins.
“He was wonderful. I was terrified, but he was wonderful. Honestly, my first instinct was to buy a ticket back to L.A. and call this doctor I used to see when I was in college and schedule a…” A balloon pops. This time she’s sure of it. “But anyway, he told me that he’d support me, regardless of what I decided. It was like he was following a script or something. How to Be a Great Boyfriend When You Knock Up Your Girlfriend, as written by Joan Didion.” This gets a few laughs—it always does. Alice shrugs. “So I decided to keep her. The baby, I mean. It was a girl. Or, I learned it was a girl. I figured if he could be this amazing when things were so shitty, then he’d be an even more amazing dad.”
What else is there, she wonders. She’s feeling like a leaky faucet today—all these subtleties just spilling out—she supposes she could tell them all the details she typically excludes. The stuff about how, while she squatted on her bathroom’s cold ceramic floor, staring at her fifth positive pregnancy test, she felt an unsettling mix of panic and shame and triumph. Panic for reasons that were obvious; shame because she’d graduated magna cum laude and she’d grown up in St. Charles and she could already hear her father’s voice, should he ever find out; triumph when she considered her half sister. When she was nineteen, Eloise suddenly began suffering from agonizing cramps whenever she got her period. After three months of them, her mother insisted that she fly back from Yale to see her gynecologist. Ultrasounds were performed, and a cyst was found. There was more: evidently, the haywire cells had existed for longer than Eloise had felt the cramps, because they’d decimated her uterus. Her chances of ever having children, the doctors told her, were next to nothing.
And here Alice was, holding her knees in an empty bathtub, pregnant without even trying.
“How did your parents react?”
“To me getting pregnant without being married? They were happy.”
That’s at least mostly true, Alice thinks. Her father approached the news with his characteristic gruff pragmatism. He wanted to know when Alejandro was going to propose (“Not if, Alice. When”), and she did her best to convince him that his Victorian social norms had been long since uprooted, and that neither she nor Alejandro thought matrimony to be a prerequisite for parenthood. Her mother, meanwhile, was ecstatic. Donna had shouldered Eloise’s infertility as if she were somehow the cause of it, as if it were a deficiency in herself. Alice changed all that, untangling Donna from a bizarre maternal guilt. Donna started calling more; instead of every two weeks, she’d check in every two days. And for once, Eloise ceased to be the marquee subject of their conversations. With a baby growing inside her, Alice was spared the sting of hearing about her half sister’s latest promotion at the foundation, or the charming Englishman she’d just snagged, or the marathon she’d just run. She could talk about herself and have her mother listen without worrying that she was boring her.
Karen clears her throat, and Alice looks up. “And the…”
“The miscarriage. I know. I’m stalling,” Alice says. “I was at a meeting with two foreign distributors, and I realized that I hadn’t felt the baby kick at all that morning. And this struck me as strange because … God, she loved to kick. Afterward, I read a bunch of stuff online about how these mothers suddenly stopped feeling their baby’s heartbeat, but … I don’t know. I think it’s like how some people say they can distinguish between their child’s cries. Like how one wail means that she’s hungry, and another one means she’s tired. I think that’s all a load of bullshit. I mean, I can barely feel my own heartbeat, and that’s when I’ve got two fingers pressed up against my neck. How am I supposed to feel my unborn daughter’s?”
One of the women looks at the ground, and Alice wonders if she’s said something wrong. She continues. “I went to the doctor once the meeting ended, which now, I’ll admit, seems a little … I don’t know. Seems a little … like I skewed my priorities or something. Like I should have gone straight there when I felt something strange, or even when I suspected that I felt something strange, and if I’d done that—if I’d acted on that instinct—she would have lived.”
“But—”
“Yes, I know what you’re going to say, and I’ll tell you what I tell you every time: fault isn’t objective.”
Karen doesn’t respond.
“They couldn’t take her out,” Alice says. “They said there were complications that made surgery … unsafe. So they couldn’t take her out. I had to wait until I delivered her on my own. That was the worst part. I’d heard about it happening before. Someone had a friend who had a friend who this happened to. Something like that. So, I knew that it happened, but still … this idea that your daughter is inside of you, and has been relying on you, but that you’ve suddenly somehow betrayed her … like, without any input from you, your own body has suddenly made an active and deliberate decision to murder the one thing you’ve created that has the potential to be worthwhile. And in case you want to forget, in case you want to have a few glasses of wine and remind yourself that you’re capable of being happy, you can’t. Because there the evidence is: decaying inside of you.”
Alice wipes her eyes with the back of her hand.