Eliza Starts a Rumor(20)

She pressed Send and went back to scrolling through old posts looking for one on yoga or meditation classes. The tampon uprising intimidated her from asking the question without searching first. She got stuck in the even juicier thread regarding a woman’s infidelity.

Her computer dinged as a message from Jackie Campbell appeared.


WTF! Can you believe these women? I mean, ask a simple question!?!



Ha, Alison thought, a girl after my own heart. She responded with a similar vernacular:


It was a real shitshow! They were acting like you were advocating overturning Roe v. Wade.

I know, what a bloody mess, right?

Ha! At least you have a sense of humor about it. What did you end up doing?

I gave her the tampons. After that beating I almost threw in some condoms too.

Was it after you read the comment, “My mother told me not to put anything up there until after I was married, so I rebelled and had a baby at 16”?

You got it!

So funny—to the single mother of an infant at least. I don’t envy you having a teenage daughter.



Alison thought back to how hard the teenage years had been for her and her own mother. It was the only time they really butted heads. Bringing up a teenage girl in a totally different world from the one she had grown up in could not have been easy for her mom. Alison knew better than to even ask for tampons. She bought them on her own and kept them out of sight.


Is your baby a boy or girl?

A boy. Zachary Michael. Four months tomorrow. What about you?

It’s just my daughter, Jana, and me.

Well, nice to virtually meet you, Jackie.

You too, Alison. Thanks for reaching out. And if there’s anything I can help you with, I’m a single parent too and I know it can be hard going it alone.

It’s OK. I guess if offered the chance, I would gladly hand him over and go pee or something, but I don’t know any differently.

Well, if you ever have any questions, feel free.

Actually, I’m looking to try a yoga or meditation class if you know of any.

I don’t, but there is a place in town, Café Karma Sutra. The people in there know all that hippy dippy stuff.

I am so not hippy dippy, but I thought I’d give it a try. Now that I’m on maternity leave, I may be at a place where I can find some kind of inner peace. Before, forget about it. There’s no way I could calm my brain down enough.

What do you do?

I’m a criminal defense attorney.

No wonder! Sounds intense.

Do you work outside the home?



Alison had trained herself to ask that question that way when speaking to other women. She was adept at reading people, but you didn’t have to be a litigator to see that when you asked most stay-at-home moms what they did, it threw them. Their reactions made Alison laugh now that she was in the position of taking care of a baby 24-7. Most days at the office seemed like a vacation by comparison.


I’m in finance.

In the city?

Yes, but my mom lived with us for 12 years. I don’t know if I could have done both, and lived here, without her—not well at least. Do you have family nearby?



She typed and quickly erased:


I don’t have any family, anywhere.



She never shared this with anyone; she wasn’t about to put it in writing to a stranger.

It all fed right into the fear and doubt that had been brewing in Alison since she found out she was pregnant. She and Zach were very much alone in the world, family-wise, just as she and her own mother had been. Her mother had died two years earlier of leukemia, and Alison often thought about how different things would be if her mom was here right now. Her mother had met her father when he was stationed in Hanoi as a military attaché at the US embassy a few years after the Vietnam War had ended. She had worked there as a translator. Like she and Marc, they didn’t have a real relationship, even less of one, really, as they were only together a few times before he was transferred home. Upon discovering she was pregnant, and wanting to hide it from her family, she flew to the States to find him and feel out the situation. She waited outside his house only to see him leave with a wife and two small children that she had known nothing about. She walked away and braved it out on her own.

Alison only met her father once, when she was five years old, and quite by accident. They bumped into him on a line to see Santa at Macy’s Herald Square. She had only the faintest memory of a very tall man in a long wool coat, but for years later, when a random kid asked about her father, she would say he worked in a top-secret toy factory at the North Pole, and that she can’t say anything more about it. It worked every time.

She sometimes thought about what Zachary would say if he asked about his father, and it made her sad. Alison was, of course, aware that she was traveling down the same path as her mother, but she had no idea how to switch directions—or if she even wanted to.

Zachary cried from his bedroom as if giving his opinion, though she wasn’t sure what that opinion was. She was aware that she hadn’t answered Jackie’s question, but went with:


Zach is up. I have to go. Nice chatting with you!

You too. If you go to Karma Sutra, order a rain forest muffin—they’re wicked good!

I will!



I guess I’m joining the muffin cult, she thought, as she ran upstairs to her baby boy.