Pineapple Street(51)
“I think we’re going to get Nashaun,” Tilda whispered excitedly in Darley’s ear.
“Someone is coming after me on this chair,” the pregnant women’s husband muttered.
“Who would do that when you’re sitting right here?” Darley asked, looking around. She half expected to see another pregnant lady glowering at them.
The clock struck nine and the room erupted in cheers and groans. “We got Nashaun!” Tilda waved her phone happily in the air, teetering on her heels.
“Nooooo, I lost the chair!” the man lamented.
“What?” The pregnant woman looked like she was about to cry. “I have to get up?”
Chip helped her husband gently pull her from the soft canvas sling. She was wearing flats, and Darley could see that her pregnant ankles were swollen. Darley checked the app and clocked that her mother’s party at the Hotel Bossert had sold for forty-four hundred dollars, a terrific price. Tilda went to collect her certificate for the Nashaun vacation from the desk but came back five minutes later biting her lip. “We should go,” she whispered to Chip.
“Why? Did you get the certificate for the house? Did you give them the credit card?” Chip frowned.
“Yes, but we also won the chair.”
“What? How?”
“I had ticked off the box to automatically outbid. We paid thirty-two hundred dollars.”
“For a canvas chair with writing all over it?” Chip asked, turning red.
“We can give it to Cord and Sasha.” Tilda shrugged. Darley looked at her dad sympathetically, but Tilda cut her off. “Don’t be like that, Chip. It’s all for a good cause.” Done feeling remorseful, Tilda clicked ahead of them, out the door and home, followed by Darley and Chip carrying the flimsy, graffiti-covered chair.
* * *
When Darley read that Bill Gates was giving his children less than 1 percent of his fortune, a mere ten million dollars each, her first thought was That’s still too much. Inheritance had a way of ruining people. Obviously being born into poverty was incomparably worse, but since both Darley’s mother and father had come from great wealth, she had scads of first and second cousins who demonstrated just how badly money could fuck you up. She had cousins who had gone into law, politics, and medicine, sure, but she also had cousins who did absolutely nothing. Cousins who traveled and partied, cousins who pretended to work, masking their interest in shopping with careers as “collectors,” day-trading their money nine to five while gambling it away at night playing online poker. One cousin married an artist and spent her days watching him work, referring to herself unironically as “his muse.” Another cousin had used all his money to fund a start-up making trampolines for yachts.
Darley’s nuclear family had dealt with their great privilege in mostly respectable ways, Cord joining her at Yale and then Stanford business school, Georgiana attending Brown and studying Russian literature at Columbia, for a master’s. Darley hated to think of her own expensive education being squandered, hated to think she was using her exceptional advantages to while away days in the apartment arranging pediatric dentist appointments and looking after her husband’s dry cleaning. But the problem was, having kids so close together was career killing.
The first pregnancy and return from maternity leave were brutal. Darley had debilitating morning sickness. She was an associate at Goldman Sachs and was expected to be at her desk by seven each morning. Like Malcolm, she was in the Investment Banking division. She was working like a dog in the associates pool, logging long hours, begging to be assigned as many projects as she could, desperate to differentiate herself from the pack and find her way into the Sector Coverage Group to focus on airlines. Her pregnancy with Poppy was a surprise and she was determined not to let it derail her. She got too carsick to ride in a taxi, so she took the subway to the office each morning, but the long stretch from High Street on the A train made her feel so woozy she had to get off at Canal Street and throw up in a platform trash can. She would arrive at work pale and sweaty, her mouth tasting of vomit and gum. The only way she could quell her nausea was to suck on little sour candies, which she carried in the leather pocket of her phone case, quietly slipping them into her mouth when none of the analysts or associates were looking. Once she started showing, her male colleagues seemed visibly alarmed and disgusted. “Are you sure you’re not having twins?” Or worse, “Isn’t stress bad for the baby? I would never let my wife pull all-nighters if she were pregnant.” She was so afraid her water would break at work that she kept spare towels and underwear in a gym bag under her desk.
After Poppy was born, Darley returned to work six weeks later. Her colleagues asked her if she’d enjoyed her “vacation,” they complained relentlessly about the extra work they’d picked up on her behalf, and when she tried to go to the nurse’s office to use the breast pump they would all laugh and clench their fists, pretending to milk a cow while making squirting noises with their mouths.
Darley stuck it out for six months. She pumped in airplane bathrooms on cross-country flights. She left Poppy with Soon-ja and stored her expressed breast milk behind the valet desk at hotels and then FedExed it home. She missed bedtime and bath time and the first time Poppy crawled. She learned to keep cotton discs in her bra so that she wouldn’t stain her silk blouses when meetings went long and she missed her scheduled pumping time. If she was honest with herself, she wanted to get pregnant again. She was falling apart at work. It wasn’t a life. She couldn’t do it anymore. She was just broken, and another baby gave her an off-ramp. Everyone would understand why she quit.