“I’m hungry,” Cammy said. “Is it ready yet?”
I turned the burner off and spooned the mac and cheese onto two plates for us, a little plastic plate for Cam.
“Ten years ago the kid would’ve been laughed out of the conference room and now we’re bowing and scraping like he’s the I.M. Pei of the shoe world.”
“Why don’t you quit?” I asked him.
“To do what?” he snorted. “What else am I qualified to do? And what about this little family of ours?”
“Jeez, Bob. Nice talk,” I said.
“Nice talk, Daddy.”
“Never mind,” he said. “Sorry. I just had a shitty day.”
“Swearword!” Cammy shot out.
I tried to rally back. To ignore what he’d implied.
“What would you do if you could do anything in the world, if money wasn’t an issue?” I asked.
“I’d invent a time machine so I could go back and actually design shoes instead of decorate them.”
I called Bob when my water broke but his secretary told me he was on his way to a meeting. It was 1999 and not many people had cell phones. The people walking and talking on them were considered pretentious show-offs. I called Sally, who was wearing a sweater with baby ducks and Easter eggs on it. I vividly remember that sweater. Sally has a theme sweater for every occasion. For Halloween. And Christmas. The Fourth of July one has a hidden battery to light up the flag across her chest so she has to keep it buttoned up and I’ve always wondered if she regrets the purchase on those sweltering sunny summer days. The minute the first leaf falls in September or October, Sally changes a seasonal flag that hangs over their front porch. The summer one featuring two beach chairs at the edge of the sea is switched to the fall one with pinecones the day after Labor Day.
We took Sally’s station wagon with labeled bins in the back (Soccer, Volleyball, Frisbees/Misc.) and I felt bad the whole way to the hospital because I was sure I was getting her seat wet. I didn’t know if it was bloody water or not (I couldn’t remember what the books had to say about this), but either way her car had upholstery instead of leather and I kept envisioning unspeakable stains, so as we turned into the parking lot for the emergency room, I offered to have it cleaned.
“Don’t be silly, of course not,” she said.
But I saw her glance at the seat when I hauled myself out of the car and even during a contraction it occurred to me that she would drive directly to the car wash that minute.
Bob came running in through the automatic double hospital doors that make everyone look like they’re making a grand entrance. He hurried alongside my wheelchair on the way to our assigned labor room. I ignored the fact that he smelled like perfume. It wasn’t the first time I wondered about him cheating, but I wasn’t about to bring it up on a gurney giving birth to my twins. Our twins.
A nurse named Doris was just wonderful during labor. I remember she was wearing scrubs with little teddy bears holding bunches of balloons and was the kind of person who strokes your head like she would a Labrador puppy. Doris repeatedly told me that an epidural was just moments away and she and I both knew she was lying because I hadn’t dilated enough but I appreciated her efforts to keep my mind off the pain, which was excruciating. There is nothing I can add to all the stories about labor pain. It’s terrible and mine was no different than anyone else’s. I stupidly wanted to experience natural childbirth.
“You’re doing great, just great,” Bob said, and I remember him grimacing from my squeezing his hand so hard.
“How could you have thought this was a good idea?” I screamed at Bob. “This is a nightmare I’ll never wake up from!”
The linoleum floor bounced the words up and back into the air of the hospital room and for a second it seemed as if everyone had stopped moving. It was like that game I used to play with Cammy—Red light, Green light.
“Honey, you’re in pain—she’s in pain,” he said to me and Doris the nurse. “It’ll all be okay in a little while. Just get through this and it’ll be fine.”
I think about that day in the delivery room and how I felt like the air had been pulled out of the room by a giant vacuum. Now, years later, I’m driving my regular route home from the kids’ school that insists on frequent fund-raisers and pep rallies. I steer the minivan past a long boarded-up carpet shop promising same-day service. A garage on the other end of the block advertising fast oil changes sits empty. They are two ghosts bookending a sprawling Barnes & Noble towering over the middle of the block like it’s flexing its muscles. Like it’s challenging someone to a fight. It swallows up everything nearby and for good reason: why go anywhere else when you can eat your lunch, take advantage of free Wi-Fi and play with your kids in the children’s book section that’s become an amusement park with puzzles and blocks and stuffed animals all for sale. I inch left, onto Lincoln Avenue, pausing for a man in a suit talking on his cell phone, unaware the light has changed and I have the right-of-way. He doesn’t break his stride, as if he is alone on the sidewalk and road. Waiting for him to reach the other side of the street, I glance into my rearview mirror at the boys, quietly watching a DVD. Their heads cocked at identical angles, their smooth little legs splayed open, each holding a corner of the DVD player because by now they know I mean it when I say if they can’t share it I’m taking it away. I love them. Those hours in that suffocating delivery room are long past and I cannot imagine life without these children of mine. But that space, that distance between Bob and me? It’s so wide right now it’s like a river where you can’t see the person on the opposite shore. We’re dots to one another.
I accelerate to make up time but it’s futile: I hit every red light. The radio traffic reporter is saying Lake Shore Drive is free and clear in both directions but the on-ramp from Belmont is jammed and, inching up to get onto the Drive, I can see all three lanes are jam-packed. No one’s moving.
“Shit,” I say, catching myself, looking into the mirror to see if my swearing registered with the boys. I’ve got to work on my swearing.
There’s nothing I can do about the traffic so I switch from news radio to NPR. All Things Considered. A gentle voice is quietly reading a story about carrier pigeons. It’s a miracle, really, how these birds fly distances specifically calculated by their owners. There are long pauses between sentences to better hear the coos of the pigeons and I start to feel sleepy, like I always do when I listen to NPR. I switch to the classic-rock station programmed into the number-two button on my radio. The guitar part of “Whole Lotta Love” wakes me right up. On cue the cars around me start moving like all they needed was some Led Zeppelin to hurry things along.
Saturday is nonstop. Bob takes the boys to soccer. I throw in a couple of loads of laundry and make it to Whole Foods before the crush of confused-looking stroller-dads who’ve promised wives they’ll take the kids to do chores on the weekend. Their wives aren’t sleeping in, though. They’re doing all the stuff they’ve been meaning to get to all week but haven’t been able to because of the kids. I remember to send flowers to Ginny, whose mother died of pancreatic cancer a few days ago. I call the florist as I pull in to a parking space at the Jewel for a paper towels/toilet paper run. All the non-food things that’re prohibitively expensive at Whole Foods. Do we really need ten-dollar geranium-scented organic counter cleaner? I mean, come on. I pick up dry cleaning and stop by Alamo Shoes to return Jamie’s Crocs because I accidentally bought him the wrong size. I check off all these things at a stoplight. The pen pokes through to the steering wheel, so I don’t bear down too hard crossing off.
At three, Bob breezes in with the birthday present we need to bring to Kelly