All Adults Here(59)
Now that she’d been inside Jeremy’s house, parking in front didn’t seem like such a big deal. She put the car in park but didn’t turn off the engine, just in case. It was a weekday morning, and she assumed that Jeremy was at work, but his wife could be home. She could be at the grocery store, or at the YMCA, or at the bank, or getting a manicure, or volunteering at their kids’ school, or cooking at a soup kitchen. Porter spent a considerable amount of time picturing her doing each of those activities and more, each one getting more and more virtuous until she couldn’t help but believe that Kristen was donating a kidney to a stranger while simultaneously reading to the blind. Kristen was good and she was bad. Kristen was beautiful and she was ugly. Kristen was thin and she was fat. Kristen had made all the right choices, right from the very beginning of her personhood, including but not limited to what kind of underwear to wear under which clothes, what kind of haircut to get, what kind of sex to have on which date, what to say after someone told you they loved you, what to say when someone said they wanted to marry you. She had done everything right, and Porter had limped along, making her silly, stupid mistakes, all the while thinking that there would be time to correct the course. Now she was pregnant and sitting in a running car like a getaway driver, her eyes fixed on the front door.
The light shifted; something inside the house had moved—the cat, maybe—and Porter drove away before waiting to see what it was. She drove past the clinic, slowing down enough to make sure that Jeremy’s car was in the lot. She thought about the cloth seats of his Honda, stained from years of abuse, and wondered how Kristen’s labors had been. Her pregnancies. Had she been sick, had she slept? Had she delivered vaginally, with no drugs, a Madonna of the birthing center? Or had she circled a date on the calendar and gotten a bikini wax in preparation for surgery, just to look nice? Porter felt a wave of nausea roil through her esophagus and pushed the button to roll down the window. It was sick, what she was doing, and she knew it. It was sick but it was also giving her the same kind of tingly feeling she’d had in high school and college when she saw someone she had a crush on, and no one else had to know, not yet. Humans deserved things they kept private. She wanted what she wanted. Everyone had their kink, right?
By the time Porter circled back to Spiro’s and went inside, she found Wendy already taking up prime real estate at one of the large booths. Wesley Drewes was on the radio, his sonorous voice talking to callers about the Clapham Harvest Festival, and the annual hordes of leaf-peeping tourists that would soon descend upon the Hudson Valley, taking up parking spots and restaurant tables, filling hotel rooms and campgrounds. The festival was in mid-October every year, and it was a big weekend for the town, and for Clap Happy. If every person who came to Clapham that weekend bought one of her cheeses, Porter could retire at forty. The highlight for Porter was the parade, which featured floats built and helmed by students. The year she rode on one as the Harvest Queen was a disaster, but as a spectator, she always enjoyed it.
Porter squeezed into the booth opposite Wendy, who had half a grapefruit in front of her, and a plate of toast and cottage cheese.
“Hi,” Porter said. “How are you? How’s everybody? Gorgeous day outside, isn’t it?”
Wendy shook her head. “You don’t have to do that.”
Olympia swanned by with a stack of dirty dishes in each hand. She paused. “Pancakes?” Porter nodded.
“Okay,” Porter said, relieved. “Are you okay? Why did you want to see me?” She ran a hand over her belly. It was something she’d observed in other pregnant women, too, the insatiable urge to touch yourself, as if to simultaneously remind yourself of your double existence and as an attempt to connect to the person on the other side, like someone touching one side of the glass in a prison visiting room. “Birth tips? Parenting advice?”
Wendy shook her head. “Not really, but we can certainly talk about that, if you like. I know you’re more, well, earthy than I am, but so much of it is unnecessary: the essential oils, the eye mask, the mix CD of birth songs, doulas. There is stuff you should actually take to the hospital: socks, pajamas, a good breastfeeding pillow, a change of clothes for . . . Oh, I guess you don’t have to worry about that.”
“For my imaginary husband? Yeah, I don’t think he needs extra clothes.” Porter felt irrationally annoyed. “So what was it? That you wanted to talk about?” She could be having breakfast with her goats, or sitting in her car in front of a veterinary clinic, she didn’t need this. If she wanted judgment, she could call her mother, or Rachel. And there were plenty of women who had had babies who could tell her what was bullshit and what wasn’t.
“Okay. Two things. So, one of the things that Elliot and I had been putting off forever, for whatever reason, is making a will. But I decided that I would go ahead and do it. Which was fine. It’s just a piece of paper, right? I’m a lawyer, we know how it works. But the one thing you have to do is choose someone who will be your children’s guardian if you die.” Wendy paused and then hiccupped. When had she started to cry? Porter had never seen either Wendy or Elliot cry, not at their wedding, not at the birth of their children. Elliot hadn’t even cried, at least not in front of her, when their father died. “And we choose you. If you agree to be chosen. I know that you’re about to have a baby, and that you are one person, so feel free to say no. Astrid is too old, my parents are too old, and on the other side of the country. I don’t have any siblings. Your brother Nicky is a pothead. Which leaves you. You’re local, so they wouldn’t have to move and leave their whole lives. You love them, they love you. They might not always show it, but they do. We would make sure that you had enough money for everything you needed. The house, if you wanted. Or the money from the house. If we’re dead, we don’t need it, you know?”