The Drifter(74)
Soon, very soon, this morning struggle to join the land of the living would be interrupted by the cries of the child that was growing inside her, the seven-pound wake-up call that was due to arrive in five weeks. Throughout her pregnancy, she had imagined what kind of cry her baby would have. Would it be high-pitched and nasal, a little raspy, like the sound effect on a television show? Or would it be throaty and low, shouted between jagged gasps? Almost immediately, she’d push the thought away. What kind of mother thought about what her child’s cry would sound like? This was supposed to be one of the happiest times of her life. She should be joyful. Blissful. Betsy suspected this pressure to be the beatific expectant mother was all bullshit, a kind of cultural brainwashing designed to mute the fear of childbirth and the uncertainty of early parenthood. If anything, she was shocked when she felt moments of sustained pleasure, verging on joy. Betsy had experienced plenty of joy—the thrill of the first ultrasound image, the rush of adrenaline when she felt her daughter’s first movements, like a wriggle of a fish, her squeal of delight when Jessica came into the office with the first itty-bitty onesie—though it hadn’t been as simple as all that.
She propped herself up on her elbow, grabbed Gavin’s pillow, and shoved it behind her back to help support her girth. Gavin emerged from the bathroom in the hall, showered but unshaven, buttoning his favorite striped shirt. He sat on the edge of the bed opposite her to put on his socks. She stared at the back of his still-wet head and spotted a small cluster of gray near the crown.
“You can tell your mom that those Celtic names are out. Too many extra N’s and consonants pretending to be vowels. And Reagan?” Betsy asked, rearranging herself on their bed and adjusting the pillow behind her back. She reached over to the nightstand and took the list of six baby names that Gavin had scrawled on the back of a Vietnamese takeout menu. He opened the window and let in a sudden gust of brisk air, letting the sound of distant honking horns drift into their room. “You can’t be serious. Is this just 1980s nostalgia or are you actually turning into a Reaganite on me after all these years?”
“First, uh, how about ‘Good morning,’” he said, walking around to her side of the bed to place his hand on top of her undulating middle. Betsy studied his face. At thirty-seven, he was still as boyish and lanky as he had been when she first met him at twenty, like a kid who’d never fully grown into his limbs, with a slight paunch around the middle. “Second, I like to think of our daughter as an Independent. I guess it just sounded right. I’m feeling an even number of syllables. Reagan Davis. Iambic pentameter and shit.”
“Um, iambic pentameter is a ten-syllable line in a poem, dumb ass. My question for you is this: Does Nancy Davis Reagan ring a bell?” she asked. “Or are you just going to say ‘No’?”
She’d decided to let Gavin take a shot at choosing the baby’s first name. They’d waited so long to decide to have a child, she figured, so he’d had plenty of time to think it over. As soon as the ultrasound technician waved her wand in the right spot and told them they were having a girl, Betsy decided she would present Gavin with the challenge.
“G, will you help me come up with some names for the bump?” she called out from the shower one morning, months before. He looked at her blankly, as though he’d never suspected their child would need a name, or had thought that she would present it upon arrival with a business card, or maybe they’d find it tattooed in looping script on her left inner biceps. Betsy worried that this represented a larger blind spot Gavin had for parenting, and that this was only the first of many times he would drag his feet when she asked him to help.
They’d been together over fifteen years now, more or less, hot and cold. When they first headed north on the interstate from Florida in his ancient Honda Accord, they couldn’t have known that all of these years later they’d be buying organic cotton crib sheets and researching lactation consultants. Could they have imagined, as they wore out Dinosaur Jr.’s Green Mind in the tape deck after the CD player broke, and plowed through bag after bag of original flavor Corn Nuts on their drive up the coast, Gavin laughing as Betsy gripped her seat as they skidded across snow-slick asphalt for the first time, that one day they’d be approved by the condo board of a doorman building on 18th Street and 7th Avenue and granted the privilege of paying off a mortgage in $5000 monthly chunks?
For years, the question hung between them: Kids or no kids? Could they raise even a single child in the most exhausting and expensive place imaginable? If yes, when? Finally, Betsy’s gynecologist showed her “the chart,” the one with the steadily plummeting red line that tracks the average woman’s reproductive decline, peaking at twenty, sliding steadily southward until it screeches to a halt and takes an acrobatic cliff dive at thirty-five. They’d reached yet another “now or never” milestone in their relationship, which was what was typically required to get either of them to take any meaningful action, and plunged headlong into now. Any doubts she had about their future, their past, and the sad, strange ties that bound them together were tossed in the trash with a half-full blister pack of Ortho-Cept. After eight months of trying and one round of Clomid, she was pregnant.
“I LIKE REMI,” she said, calling out to Gavin, who’d left the room to make coffee and find the newspaper. Remi was short, no possible infantilizing nickname. “What do you think of Remi Virginia?” She knew the instant they found out the baby was a girl that she wanted her daughter’s first name to be gender neutral, so no one would make knee-jerk assumptions about her when they read it, and that her middle name would be Virginia.