The Birthdays (7 page)

“Of course it’s not, Dan. And for the record, having a baby isn’t only scary for those who artificially conceive.”

“Maybe you need to find yourself a workshop.”

“Ha ha.”

“For slutty, single, pregnant women.”

“You’re just hilarious. I can’t stop laughing,” she said flatly.

There was quiet on the line, and Daniel asked her whether she was planning to come East for their father’s birthday, assuming she would say,
Absolutely not.

Joe drifted in and out of the lanes. He sped up without warning and then slowed, causing other cars to tailgate them or honk and zoom past, the drivers looking exasperatedly at them and then, almost imperceptibly, their faces softening as they realized it was an older man driving.
But he’s not that old,
Ellen wanted to call to them,
he’s just let himself go
. He’d lost a
good amount of hair, and the hair he did have was paper white. Of course, he couldn’t control this, but his weight—his belly made him look at once like a baby and a one-hundred-year-old man.

“Focus,” she said, “focus on those yellow lines and please try to stay within them.”

Joe smiled and chirped, “Yessir.” Sometimes it seemed he loved nothing more than to irritate her.

She closed her eyes and tried to think of something, anything else. Her family. It had expanded with spouses and would soon expand more. She was ready, even eager to be a grandmother and was not daunted by the idea, as some of her friends were. Perhaps because her own grandmothers had been so vital and so clearly enjoyed her and her siblings and cousins. The two women, inseparable, had both emigrated from Russia at a young age. They spoke half in botched English, half in Russian. Their husbands had died before Ellen was born and they’d virtually adopted each other as surrogate spouses. They even lived together in a small apartment in Roxbury, where they hosted poker games and dinner parties for their friends, and when she and her family visited, they were served lively meals of packaged meat, soft packaged bread and salty packaged soup accompanied by booming jazz and political debates. Ellen hoped that she would be such a woman, a fun-loving grandmother who hosted raucous events. And what sort of grandfather would Joe be? Perhaps he would quietly teach the kids about cars and turtles and wars.

She opened her eyes in time to see him turn off the highway and onto a small road. She wasn’t sure this was the right turn, but no, Joe had a strong sense of direction and had to know where he was going. He could find his way anywhere,
unlike her. She got lost whenever she ventured even slightly beyond familiar territory. She sighed, glad to leave the navigating to him. Babe clicked about in his cage.

A couple of months ago, MacNeil asked her, “Did you choose Joe or did he choose you?” The two had been sitting in Vera’s garden drinking chardonnay. Ellen had made tortellini with snow peas for supper. Joe had been somewhere all evening—playing cards with Bill, was it?

“I don’t know.”

“Come on. It’s always one or the other, isn’t it?” he asked, worrying a blade of grass in his hand.

“We chose each other, I suppose. We simply went ahead and got married. There wasn’t much decision making involved,” she said. When she first met Joe, she’d just had her appendix out and her parents were driving her home from Mass General. She remembered this afternoon a little differently each time, and parts of it had vanished altogether from her mind, something that bothered her now. But that June evening with MacNeil, what she recalled vividly was her stomach still sore from the operation as she lay in the back seat of her parents’ car. They’d stopped at a deli in Newton to buy corned beef sandwiches, and left her alone when they went inside. A face appeared in the window, startling at first, but it was a handsome face with round brown eyes and a cleft chin. She felt her pulse ticking. When she rolled down the window, he asked if she was all right. (And what exactly had he said? What were his words, his tone? How could she not remember this?) She explained her situation, all the while thinking only of her pasty skin and unwashed hair, and when her parents returned, he nodded at them and stepped away. Ellen turned in time to see Joe wave, his black wingtips shiny in the sunlight.
Fortuitously, her father ended up buying a new car from Joe two months later, and soon after he took Ellen out for martinis in Boston. Very quickly it seemed she’d known him her whole life, and six months later they were married. They were the last of their friends to have a wedding.

“I’ve been thinking I chose Vera,” MacNeil said, holding his gaze on the metal table in front of them.

Ellen brought her wineglass to her lips. “In what sense?”

“I pulled her away from her friends and family and seduced her,” he said. The words hissed from his lips.

The garden was quiet except for the rhythmic clicking of a sprinkler turning on and off. Ellen couldn’t sit in her own back yard without hearing the Wenderses argue or the traffic on Main Street. She shuffled her feet beneath her. “I guess Joe chose me,” she said quietly, though she wasn’t so sure. “Wasn’t that usually the way? It was up to the man to do the hard work?”

“Not always,” he said, and half smiled at her. “Vera would have liked this, supper outside on a June evening.”

“You’re right, she would’ve,” she said. “You’re missing her right now. I am too.”

He looked at his lap. “We were together fifty-three years. Forever.”

“I know.” She tried to see whether he was crying, but he’d closed his eyes. She reached for his hand and held it in the air between them a moment.

“It’s like hell some days.”

“What is?” she asked tentatively.

“Continuing on.”

“It won’t always feel this bad,” she said. “It can’t. I promise you.”

“Can I hold you to that?”

“You may.”

“Say it again, would you?”

She sat up straighter. “It won’t always feel this bad. It will sometimes, but then it won’t.”

He nodded and attempted a smile. “I definitely chose her, and it was a great choice. The best I ever made.”

“Good,” she mumbled, and didn’t know what more to say. She rose and explained that she had to be going, that Joe would be home and hungry for his dinner soon, and MacNeil nodded as if he understood something fundamental about her. She took her time driving back that evening. She opted for the long route through MacNeil’s town, past the cornfields on the periphery, and saw a group of cows lying down on a parched field. They knew rain was coming. She drove through other, more crowded towns and then back inside the line of her own town, where smaller houses with peeling paint sat closer together, and grass sprouted from patches of dirt on the sidewalks. Tomorrow, she thought, she would wake at six, shower, make oatmeal for Joe and leave for work at seven-fifteen. She would shelve books and read to the first- and second-graders. She would have lunch with Maura Paulsen and Abigail Welty and they would tell each other whatever news they had about their families and friends. Then she would shelve more books and box up the old ones. When the workday was done, she would drive home, cook dinner for Joe, do the laundry, watch some PBS show on their old television and fall into bed, exhausted. Nothing ever changed. Even if they stopped working, how much would really change? Not that she and Joe could afford to retire right now anyway. Well, they could, but only if they wanted to penny-pinch
every day, and they didn’t. A few more years, she kept telling him. We’ll wait until we’ve got a bigger cushion in the bank. But lately, Joe’d begun saying that maybe he could live with less. He could manage, they both could. She worried he’d come home one day and announce he was done with work and had submitted his retirement papers.

“Have we gone the wrong way?” she asked Joe, now certain she’d never before seen this stretch of road.

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Where’s the map?”

“In the glove compartment?” he offered, and she could tell he’d forgotten it. Nevertheless, she rifled through the papers in there. “It’s not in here. We should stop and ask for directions.”

Joe continued driving, weaving in and out of the lane. “We should stop,” she said again.

“I suppose we should.” He didn’t have a care in the world. He slowed the car and pulled into a gas station. Across the small lot, a pudgy boy dressed in stained shorts and a T-shirt stood beside a pickup truck full of corn.

Joe walked inside the small building to pay and Ellen exchanged eye contact with the boy. Behind him a man appeared, carrying a box of something. He wore no shoes, and a cigarette hung from his lips. Ellen turned away and pressed her fingers into the middle of her forehead—a headache was coming and her legs began to cramp. Suddenly the boy stood right on the other side of her window, smiling dumbly. He might have been something—mentally retarded? “Christ,” she said, and rolled down the window. “Yes?”

“You got any money?”

Was he robbing her? He had no gun, no knife that she could see.

“Ma’am, you got any money?”

She fished around for her purse in the back seat. He stood there watching her, obviously with no good sense of what he was doing. She wanted to ask him why, what did he want with her money, did he even know? But she was afraid of saying something that might agitate or confuse him. Reaching inside her wallet, she handed him three dollars, all she had, and he took it and shrugged.

Joe was now walking back toward the car. “Hey!” he yelled, and rushed forward, stumbling and almost falling over something.

The boy padded off and Joe followed him but seemed to suddenly change his mind and headed back to the car. “What was that?” he asked, leaning his head in her direction as he went to the gas tank.

“I don’t know. I gave him a couple dollars.”

“For what? Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. I don’t know what he wanted,” she said.

When Joe finished, he got back in the car, turned on the ignition and said, “We were going the right way.” He shifted the car into reverse. “Did he threaten you?”

“No, no. Don’t we need to be on a smaller highway?”

“This used to be one,” Joe said. “Did he demand your wallet?”

“I don’t know what he wanted. He just wasn’t right upstairs,” she said. She held her hands together on her lap. “All the different ways that people can be, that
children
can be. It’s awful, if you really stop to consider it.”

“Of course it is. So don’t, then.”

They drove past motels and hotels, convenience stores. “I don’t recognize a damned thing,” Ellen said.

Joe began to drift toward the lane markers and then the guardrails. Ellen’s nerves were shot.
They’re just shot,
she said to herself, and she imagined an enormous gust of wind blowing into her and causing something to burst from her like an explosion of water. “I’m shot,” she mumbled to Joe.

“What?”

“Nothing,” she said. She pressed her fingertips into her forehead again, closed her eyes and made herself think once more of her family. Daniel would be a decent father, though he was so consumed with his illustrating. (Was it art? Was it really art if it was made only to sell products or services?) He had the tendency to be a little aloof like Joe, but he too was a fundamentally good person. She couldn’t even begin to imagine being a parent in a wheelchair. Every week or so Daniel and Brenda came to dinner and it killed her to see her son like this. The squeak of the chair, the sound of the wheels in the next room. When Daniel got stuck going around a corner or the wheels jammed, she had to remind herself to breathe and move on, look away, do something else. She’d tried to explain it to Joe and he’d nodded vacantly—
Of course it’s difficult to see your son in pain
—and said Daniel would be fine, he’d still live a good life, the outcome could’ve been worse. Bland comments that left her miffed and wanting more. They were supposed to be grateful that he’d survived and could still work and live a relatively normal life.
But it’s more than difficult
, she’d say now if it came up. Joe would look at her, confused, and she’d say,
Sometimes just seeing him wrings me dry, it absolutely kills me,
and he’d gaze at her through narrowed eyes as if she were being dramatic, and she would want to smack him for the dismissiveness, the ability to reside within these bland clichés. Somewhere he undoubtedly felt pain about their son,
but he stifled it. As he had to, as she should have tried to and did sometimes, but the sting inevitably came raging back. She grew tired just thinking about the whole thing.

Thanks to Jake’s job shuffling stocks around (she could never understand exactly what it was that he did), he had more money than the rest of them combined—more money than anyone she knew, really. His family would never want for anything. Of the three, though, he was the most sensitive and therefore the least content. He always felt a little left out—and he always was, she supposed, given his overly aggressive attempts at making people like him, as well as his strict values and expectations of others. Even when they were younger, he worried endlessly about Hilary and her bad behavior and her motley group of friends. (They smoked, Ellen now acknowledged. They drank and probably tried drugs. She’d never wanted to admit it back then.) Jake had lectured his sister, leaving nothing more for Ellen to say:
the friends you make, the choices you make now,
that sort of thing. He was a person guided by rules and morals, and felt good and bad in the depths of his bones. Running a stoplight, jaywalking: these were evils to him. And the goods were holy: family, love, work. It was surprising he wasn’t religious, the way he ordered his life. But the rule of man, the rule of law—Ellen supposed these were his religions.

She’d mentioned it to MacNeil recently, and then they’d discussed what they considered to be the goods of life. “Intelligence, art, beauty. Love,” he’d said.

“Food,” she’d added, and handed him a plate of vine-ripened tomatoes and mozzarella. She sat down across from him and they ate quietly, and she tried to think of something clever to say.

“You had your hair done,” he said.