All Adults Here(44)
Birdie clucked her tongue. “Astrid.”
“What! This is a unique opportunity.” She looked at Cecelia. “You don’t have to tell me.”
“Um,” Cecelia said. “You mean you want to know what bad things he says about you? Like, his complaints?”
“Or not! The good things, too, of course!”
Birdie frowned at Astrid. “This is not the kind of thing that ends well.”
Astrid leaned over and kissed her on the mouth. “I’m trying a radical new approach to life. It’s called asking questions.”
“Honesty can backfire, just so you know,” Cecelia said. “I don’t know if you’re ready, Gams.”
Astrid nodded solemnly. “I can take it.”
Cecelia set her fork down on the lip of her plate and daubed her mouth with a corner of her napkin.
“Stop stalling,” Astrid said.
“Jeez! Fine! Fine.” Cecelia rolled her eyes. “I think that my dad thinks that you’re a little, um, rigid.”
“As in strong?” Astrid felt her eyelids flicker.
“As in, um, fixed? Like, you know. Immovable?”
“A bit stiff, maybe?” Birdie added.
“Gasp!” Astrid said, pinching Birdie’s thigh. “Traitor!”
“I’m just trying to help her out!” Birdie picked up her chair by the seat and slid closer to Cecelia.
“He would definitely say that you were really organized. Neat. I know he likes that, even if he can’t do it himself,” Cecelia said. “My parents are always fighting over whose turn it is to do the dishes even though neither of them wants to do it.”
“See, that sounds like me,” Astrid said. “Okay, that’s not so bad.” She would show Nicky that she was a flexible person. That she was fun. That she was not only capable of housing and feeding his daughter, but that she was capable of providing substantive care. Astrid hadn’t had time to be warm when her children were small—there were three of them, after all, and she didn’t want to go insane. When they were teenagers, they didn’t pay attention to her, anyway—Astrid remembered picking out flowers for Porter when she was one of the Harvest Queens in the annual school parade, an honor that Porter took about as seriously as a fart, and Porter hadn’t even thanked her. When Russell died, Astrid had had to be tough. A sniveling, destroyed widow wouldn’t do, would it? Astrid didn’t think so. But now, maybe now. She could try.
“Okay, I think that’s enough food for the bear, Cecelia, don’t you?” Birdie asked. “Want some ice cream?”
“Yes, please,” Cecelia said, a child again, holding up her empty plate.
Chapter 19
Twenty Weeks
Pregnant women saw their doctors more than they saw their friends, or at least Porter did. Almost more than she saw her goats. But Porter loved Dr. McConnell. Beth McConnell was an African American woman from Albany, with enormous tortoiseshell glasses and a gap between her front teeth, the smartest, nerdiest girl in any third-grade class made good. What Porter loved most about Dr. McConnell was that she swore (“Oh, shit, I forgot the goo, I’ll be right back”) and was unpretentious, but best of all, she was Porter’s age and unmarried.
The day’s appointment was for the anatomy scan, which zoomed in on each part of the baby’s body, a detailed, slow-moving movie in real time about the completely natural and simultaneously utterly alien reality of growing one human inside another. Porter was nervous.
“So you’ll be able to see everything. Truly everything.” Porter had known for weeks that she was having a girl—mothers over thirty-five had to take extra blood tests, as the risks for all kinds of terrible birth defects skyrocketed, as if in punishment for the delayed procreation, as if the eggs themselves were in revolt, salty at not being invited to the party sooner.
“Yep,” Dr. McConnell said. “The chambers of the heart, the blood, the kidneys, the toes, the spine . . .”
“Hopefully not in that order.” Porter lay back on the chair and lifted her shirt up to the top of her rib cage. For a long time, she had just felt like she was getting fatter and softer, her whole body squishier everywhere except for her breasts, hard little rocks that dreamed of becoming boulders. Now her belly curved out in a proper parenthesis, even when she was lying flat on her back.
“Oh no,” Dr. McConnell said. She rubbed her hands together briskly. “I know it’s not cold outside, but the AC is pumping in here, and my hands are freezing, sorry.” She poked around Porter’s belly, the pads of her fingertips pressing firmly at her pubic bone—“Here’s the bottom of your uterus”—and a few inches below her sternum—“and here’s the top, that’s great. You’re measuring perfectly.” She readied the machine for the sonogram, back so soon in her routine tasks.
The word perfect made Porter’s eyes water. Dr. McConnell probably said it all the time, but Porter was grateful anyway. The idea that anything about what she was doing in life was perfect was a new one. It would have been a nice thing, Porter imagined, to hear that every so often. Rachel’s parents were always cooing about her accomplishments—on Facebook, Rachel’s feed was littered with posts from her mother—baby photos, newspaper clippings, pictures of hippos cuddling in muddy rivers. The subtext was always You are perfect. Maybe she’d always done it, or maybe she was making up for Rachel’s husband, but it didn’t matter. She was still doing it, and there was no way Rachel had asked. Astrid sometimes said things like that to Nicky. Not the word perfect, because that wasn’t how she rolled, but she’d say things like, “Oh, I was at Susan’s Bookshop and these two young ladies at the register were talking about some new book, and then one of them said, ‘It’s just like Jake George!’ And then they both put their hands over their heart and swooned.” She never said things like that about Porter, though Porter knew her mother was proud of her hard work, and what she made. But if Dr. McConnell said that Porter was measuring perfectly, that meant both she and the baby were right on track.