All Adults Here(16)
Then there were women who came alone, like her, and who seemed to be having their first babies. Those women were tighter knots, biting their nails, new lightning bolts of worry crisscrossing their foreheads. She always checked their fingers for a ring, and most of the time, there was one. When their fingers were bare, Porter looked closer. Were they younger than her, or older? Were their bellies big enough that their entire bodies had begun to swell, including their fingers? There were, of course, those pregnant women, who had to temporarily remove their rings because their fingers had gotten too fat. She’d then check for a chain around their neck. She didn’t want to care. She actively was trying not to care. There was one Single Mom by Choice group that her doctor had recommended, in addition to a slate of doulas and pediatricians, but Porter hadn’t done more than a cursory googling. In her almost five months of pregnancy, she had only clocked three other women who fit her profile.
Porter pulled her tote bag onto her lap and reached in, feeling around for her book. She was trying to be the kind of woman she’d want to have as a mother—well-read, open-minded, that sort of thing. Harriet was in a book club in Oregon and always sent over recommendations. This one was a novel about a bookstore in Paris that hid Jewish children who had escaped the Nazis, and there was a magical talking bird. Porter knew all that from Harriet’s email—she herself was only on the fifth page, where she’d been for some time. The book was six hundred pages long—at this rate, she’d finish when her yet-to-be-born child graduated from high school.
A nurse came out and called a name. One of the cuddling couples across the room got up and walked forward, beaming like they’d won the lottery. Porter rolled her eyes and someone laughed. Porter jerked her head to the side, a sort of tucked-away corner of the waiting room, the place where the saddest-looking women tended to seat themselves (the sad women in any ob-gyn waiting room were always the ones with no bump, not even the deflating basketball of a former bump, those who were still swearing to themselves on the toilet when they got their period each month). She saw a woman chuckling.
“I saw that,” she said. “Hi, Porter Strick.” The woman was about as big as Porter, with just a waxing moon of a belly. She smiled widely, showing a gap between her teeth.
“Oh my god, Rachel, what are you doing here?” Porter stood up fast, knocking her book to the floor. She toed it out of the path and left it there.
Rachel had been Porter’s best friend in the seventh through eleventh grades. They had worn matching Halloween costumes (Little Red Riding Hoods, candy corn, vampiresses) three times. Her parents had moved to Chicago during their junior year, and they’d lost touch. It was before the internet; it was no one’s fault. Rachel had been back for a few years, Porter knew, but they hadn’t gotten together. They each had their friends, and their lives, and there were always excuses. Or rather, there had never been a reason to try to jump back into the double dutch of their friendship.
“What do you think I’m doing here, my taxes?” Rachel stood up to embrace Porter, and their pregnant bellies bounced together with a satisfying boing. “Let me see you!” She backed up, still holding Porter’s two hands, to take her in. “You look so great. So great. How many weeks are you?”
“Twenty.”
“Me too! Well, twenty-one. Twins! Us, I mean. I’m not having twins, thank god. Anyway, I love it! This is so exciting! Where are you living now, near your mom? I’m, um, we’re on the north side, Clapham Heights-ish, but farther away from the water. Toward Bard.” Rachel’s cheeks were pink. She was wearing a Fleetwood Mac T-shirt and looked a little bit sloppy, like she was probably wearing two different socks, not on purpose, and Porter felt immediately flooded with remembered and renewed love: shortcut love, muscle memory love.
“And your husband, what does he do again?” Porter knew a little bit, from Facebook—she could picture someone small and dark-haired, like Rachel, but didn’t know any details.
Rachel held up her hand—Porter hadn’t checked—and wiggled her unadorned fingers. “At the moment, he does stuff with other people, I guess. Not really sure.” And then she burst into tears and loud hiccupping sobs that echoed through the room. They should have soundproofed for that, Porter thought, as she took Rachel into her arms. It had to happen all the time.
* * *
—
After their appointments, Porter and Rachel sat in the hospital cafeteria and caught up over a mediocre feast of macaroni and cheese, iceberg lettuce salads, and potato chips. Some years were easy enough to sum up in a sentence or two—Chicago was cold but fun, Rachel had gone to Vassar, her younger brother was married and lived in Oakland, she taught English at Clapham Junior High, and mostly loved it (“Oh! Maybe you’ll have my niece, Cecelia!” Porter interrupted, clapping her hands)—but the recent past took a while.
As it turned out, Rachel and her husband, Josh, had been together on and off for five years before they got married, and then started trying to have a baby pretty quickly. She had a miscarriage, then another, and finally, it turned out that she had what she described as a “funky uterus,” which, coupled with Josh’s low sperm count, made conceiving hard. They did IUI, to no avail, and then IVF, which took three rounds. Porter knew what that looked like—all the needles, all the blood tests, all the peeing into tiny paper cups. She murmured sympathetic noises. When Rachel finally got pregnant, she was relieved and happy and exhausted, sleeping every hour of the day that she wasn’t at school, just the way things were supposed to be. Then one day she looked at her husband’s phone and saw page after page of texts with a woman whose name she didn’t recognize.