Pretty Baby. Mary Kubica
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and just like that, I feel some great sense of relief.
But then, because of my tendency to overanalyze, my Achilles’ heel if ever there was one, “Do you think they should be menstruating?” I ask, having discovered on various internet searches that it can start as soon as eight, as late as thirteen. But the websites I scour suggest that menarche begins about two years after girls start developing breasts. Zoe, at twelve, is as flat as a pancake. “They’re not behind schedule or anything, are they?”
Jennifer hears the concern in my voice. She works as a clinical dietitian at a local hospital. She’s my go-to for all things medical, as if working in a hospital provides her with a free medical degree. “It’s not a big deal, Heidi. They all mature at their own pace. There’s no schedule,” she assures me, and then she tells me that Zoe’s adolescence is something I cannot control. “Though I know you’ll try,” she goads, “because that’s just what you do.” The kind of blunt statement only a best friend can get away with. And I laugh, knowing it’s true.
And then the conversation shifts to the spring soccer season and what the girls think of their hot-pink uniforms, whether or not the Lucky Charms is an appropriate team name for a group of twelve-year-old girls, and the girls’ infatuation with their coach, a twentysomething college kid who didn’t make Loyola’s team. Coach Sam, who all the mothers think is dreamy. And there Jennifer and I are, gushing about his bushy brown hair, his dark, mysterious eyes, his soccer player build—the strength and agility, calf muscles like we’ve never seen—pushing all thoughts of Zoe’s emerging adolescence and that girl and her baby from my mind. The conversation drifts to boys, preteen boys, like Austin Bell, who all the girls adore. Including Zoe. Including Taylor. Jennifer admits to finding the words Mrs. Taylor Bell scribbled across her daughter’s notebook and I envision the pale skin of Zoe’s arm, the name Austin tattooed in pink, a heart over the i.
“In my day, it was Brian Bachmeier,” I admit, remembering the spiky locks that graced the boy’s head, the heterochromatic eyes, one blue, the other green. He moved to our junior high from San Diego, California, which was respect worthy in and of itself, but on top of it, the kid could dance, the Carlton and the jiggy, the tootsee roll. He was the envy of the other boys, the one the girls idolized.
I remember asking him to dance at my first boy-girl party. I remember he said no.
I think of Zoe. I think of Taylor. Maybe our girls aren’t so different after all.
There’s a knock on my door. I look up to see Dana, receptionist extraordinaire, beckoning me for a tutoring session with a twenty-three-year-old woman who was recently granted asylum from the country of Bhutan, a small South Asian country sandwiched between India and China. She’d been living in a refugee camp in nearby Nepal for much of her life, living in a bamboo hut with a dirt floor, surviving on food rations, until her father committed suicide and she sought shelter in the United States. She speaks Nepali.
I lay a hand over the receiver and whisper to Dana that I’ll be right there. “Work calls,” I tell Jennifer and we confirm the sleepover for Zoe and Taylor tonight at Jennifer’s home. Zoe is absolutely thrilled about it. So much so that she actually remembered to say goodbye this morning before she ran into school.
* * *
The day dawdles by at an excruciatingly slow speed. Outside the rain quiets, though the city skyline remains gray, the tops of skyscrapers lost in the ashen, obese clouds. When five o’clock rolls around, I say my goodbyes and ride the elevator down to the first floor. It’s rare that I leave the office at five o’clock, but on a night such as this—Zoe at a sleepover and Chris on a delayed flight that won’t arrive until after 10:00 p.m.—I take pleasure in having the condo all to myself, a simple delight that doesn’t happen too often. I’m relishing the idea of watching a chick flick all by myself, of lounging on the sofa in my warm, snuggly pajamas and devouring an entire bag of microwave popcorn all alone (and possibly following it up with a scoop of mint chocolate chip ice cream!).
Above me the clouds are beginning to disintegrate, the sun trying hard to don a lovely sunset behind the fissures in the clouds. The air is cold, an unsettling forty degrees and blowing. I slip my hands in a pair of leather gloves and drape a hood over my head, hurrying, with all the other evening commuters to the “L” station. I force my body into the congested train, where we stand like sardines in a can, smashed together, chugging along the winding, choppy track.
When I depart at the Fullerton Station, I make my way carefully down the wet steps. Beside me, a fellow commuter lights a cigarette and the scent of tobacco fills the air. There’s a nostalgic redolence to it: it reminds me of home. When I was a girl, living with my family outside of Cleveland in a 1970s Colonial home with the sponge-painted walls my mother adored, my father smoked Marlboro Reds, a half pack a day. He smoked in the garage, never in our home. Never in the car when he was with my brother and me. My mother simply wouldn’t allow it. He secreted the scent of tobacco from the pores of his skin. It was on his clothing, in his hair, on his hands. The garage was suffused with the smell; my mother claimed it oozed through the heavy metal door and into the kitchen, a thoroughly white kitchen—white cabinets, white countertops, a white refrigerator, a chunky farm table. In the morning, my father wouldn’t be out of bed five minutes before he was sneaking off to the garage with his coffee and Marlboro Reds. He’d come in, and I’d be at the table eating my Cocoa Puffs and he’d look at me with the most beguiling smile (I knew my mother had snagged a good one when she married my father) and tell me never to smoke, just like that, “Don’t ever smoke, Heidi. Never,” and he’d wash his hands and join me at the farm table for a bowl of Cocoa Puffs.
I’m thinking of my father as I make my way down the steps, my fingers instinctively reaching for the yellow gold wedding band that hangs on a chain around my neck. I trace the grooves and ridges of the ring, the words the beginning of forever etched on the inside.
And then, for a split second I’m nearly certain I see him, there, in the crowd, my father in his Carhartt overalls, one hand thrust in a back pocket, the other holding a Marlboro Red, looking straight at me when he smiles. A hammer dangles from its allotted loop on the pants, a baseball cap sits on his head—Cleveland Indians it says—atop a mess of brown hair, which my mother always begged him to trim.
“Daddy,” I nearly say aloud, but then the image disappears as quickly as it appeared, and I shake my head, remembering. It couldn’t be.
Or could it?
Of course it couldn’t, I decide. Of course.
And then I’m breathing in that familiar carcinogenic scent—wanting to smell it and yet not wanting to smell it—when I hear it: a baby’s wail. My feet have just hit the pavement when the sound grabs me by the throat and I spin instinctively, my eyes searching for the source.
And there I see her, sitting underneath the train tracks, shivering in the nippy air. She’s leaning against a brick wall beside newspaper stands and rank garbage cans, beside swollen puddles, sitting on the cold, wet concrete, rocking the baby against her chest. The baby is crying. There’s a frenzy to the way she rocks the baby, a mother with an inconsolable baby, moments away from becoming unhinged. Zoe was a colicky baby, prone to endless hours of intense crying. I can relate with the frustration and the overwhelming fatigue in the girl’s eyes. But what I can’t relate to is her presence on a city street, in the midst of twilight, on a cold spring night. I can’t relate to the desperate way she thrusts a waterlogged coffee cup (likely snatched from the neighboring garbage can) at passersby, begging for money, and the way people give her the once-over, dribbling spare change in her cup: a quarter here, a handful of pennies there, as if any amount of spare change has the ability to save this girl from her fate. I feel my breath leave me for a moment. This girl is a child and the baby is a baby. No one deserves such a fate, to be penniless and displaced, but certainly not a child. My mind leaps to the outrageous cost of infant formula and diapers, knowing that if this girl is supplying diapers for that baby, there is certainly no spare change left for her own provisions. For food and shelter, for the umbrella with the flamboyant golden daisies.
I’m rear-ended by a throng of commuters