All Adults Here(15)
“Who is the father? Are you and Ryan back together? It’s not Jeremy Fogelman, is it?” Astrid had never liked any of Porter’s boyfriends, no one had. She shook her head, as if she could whisk the news away if she disagreed with it strongly enough. “You’re only thirty-eight years old. I’m trying to be sympathetic here, I want to understand. Can you help me understand? Girls in New York City don’t even get married until now, you’re not far behind. You’re going to meet someone, and then what? He becomes stepdad? Oh, god.” Astrid was doing the math in her head. “How far along are you? You’re definitely keeping it? It’s not that I’m not evolved, Porter, it’s just that I actually raised three children, and I happen to know that it’s not a one-person job. Why didn’t you ever talk to me about this? How long have you been planning to do this?”
“Mom. Of course I’m keeping it, I paid to have this person created and placed inside my body. And the father is a person. A man. In the world, somewhere. When the child is eighteen, she can contact him via the sperm bank, and then, I don’t know, we’ll see. I know you’re not going to like it, but that’s what’s happening.” Porter took a deep breath. This was why she’d waited to tell her mother. Astrid’s standards for everyone else were the same as her standards for herself, which left no room for error. “And why would you even suggest Jeremy Fogelman? That’s absurd. This is why I didn’t tell you; I knew this was how you’d react, and I didn’t want you to talk me out of it. This is good news, okay?”
Astrid stared. “You know, you’ve always been this way. Everything always had to be on your own terms. Remember when you were Harvest Queen and you made everyone else on the float stand on the lower level of the float so that you were the tallest?” Astrid sat down in her chair at the kitchen table and plucked a hard-boiled egg out of a basket. She cracked it firmly on the lip of the table and began to peel. “You think you can do it with only two arms and two hands, maybe you can.”
Porter watched her mother make a tidy pile of eggshell. “I have told you a thousand times, the float was built that way, there was only space for one person on the top part of the float that year.” The theme had been Studio 54.
“Mm-hmm,” Astrid said. She shook some salt onto the smooth skin of the egg white and took a small bite. “I liked that you were on top, you looked like the Statue of Liberty in that green dress.”
“Thank you?” If Astrid had talked this way to either of Porter’s brothers, they would have walked out of the room. Porter thought that it had to do with her being the only girl, always eager to please, conditioned by the outside world to react softly and with a smile to everything short of bodily harm. It was important to get along, and Astrid had her ways. Nicky had run off to avoid her, and Elliot only wanted to be like what he remembered of their father, which was a twentysomething’s view of an adult man, a Ken doll with bills to pay. And so that left Porter and her mother.
“Do you need a doctor? Who are you seeing?” Astrid asked.
“Dr. Beth McConnell, at Northern Dutchess,” Porter said.
“I know Beth,” Astrid said. “She spoke to the hospital board at our annual luncheon last year.”
“And you can’t believe she didn’t call you.” Porter rolled her eyes.
Cecelia bounded back into the room, swinging her backpack in a large circle. Astrid looked up from her egg and waved a finger.
“We’ll talk more about this later,” Porter said. “Bye, Mom.”
“Goodbye, dear. Wear your seatbelt.” And with that, Astrid stood up, swept all the pieces of eggshell into her palm, and then blew half a kiss with her free hand, the most spontaneous affection she’d given Porter since her last birthday. It was a start.
Chapter 9
Little Red Riding Hoods
Northern Dutchess Hospital was one town north, in Rhinebeck. It had been built in the 1980s and had the glass bricks to prove it. Porter parked in the covered lot and made her way through the lobby, which was painted in various pastel shades and felt less antiseptic than most hospitals, and more like being at a gender-neutral baby shower. The ob-gyns were on the second floor. She’d gone on a tour of the delivery rooms, all of which overlooked the parking lot, probably because people didn’t stay very long and weren’t likely to complain about the lack of a view when they had a new baby to stare at. Porter was ten minutes early and picked a chair in the corner.
Waiting rooms full of pregnant women and women who wanted to be pregnant were more full of codes than a spy’s briefcase. Porter had been taking notes on her phone, theoretically to remember the experience, mostly because she was always there alone and most of the women were with their partners and she wanted to look busy. The only women who truly seemed not to give a shit were the ones with one or two kids already at home, who took calls from babysitters and answered questions about cookies and iPad time and then spread out their belongings like it was a day at the spa, so happy to have no one touching them, no bottom to wipe, no mysteriously sticky fingers to clean. Some young women came with their partners and stroked their baby bumps like enormous diamond rings, their nerves assuaged by the doting of their loved ones. It was all races and ages, within the scope of human reproduction. Sometimes there were jittery teenagers, holding hands like they might push a button and find themselves in line to see a movie, just on a regular date, instead of sitting on padded chairs and waiting for a doctor to call a name. Sometimes couples fought silently, the woman’s face a knotted fist of anger, and Porter would amuse herself by trying to imagine what her husband or boyfriend had said. She liked those couples best.