Heads or Tails (16 page)

My shoulders slumped and I rested my elbows on my knees, staring down at the gum-studded concrete as I listened. As much as I didn’t recognize the ache I’d experienced when thinking about bringing G back home, I also hadn’t realized how much I’d been counting on being able to do so. I’d always believed that if caring for the baby grew to be too much, I could simply insist to Jean that I bring her home. My sanity, my marriage had to trump my debt to Jean. But now I learned that my last-ditch option evaporated, just like those people who hang onto the idea of marrying their good friend at age thirty-five if no other potential spouse emerged beforehand. I didn’t realize how much I’d had Jean in the back of my head like a safety net, nearly invisible but there. Now, I — and me alone — was G’s only option. I was crushed for Jean and for G’s devastating loss of options. And I felt my old life, the life I’d so proudly and carefully chosen, slip farther away.

The nurse and I hung up after Jean promised to take care of herself and to call me with any changes. I slung my purse over my shoulder and walked toward the corner market. I paused outside the store, examining the sharp red Honeycrisp apples in big barrels. I pulled the grocery list from my pocket, grabbed a basket and wondered what Jesse and I should do the next day, which was Sunday.

Maybe
, I thought,
we’ll go to the zoo
.

That night, after Jesse had gone to bed, I stayed up. I’d recently figured out that if G had a final nighttime bottle even a half hour later than normal, there was a chance it might translate into an extra hour of morning sleep. It had happened once or twice.

I sat on the couch, my back against the arm rest, my legs in a tent with my laptop balanced on top. I sat G on my lap facing me so the artificial computer light wouldn’t disturb her circadian rhythms. She gulped her bottle enthusiastically, seeming to understand that she was getting a special late-night snack. Then she amused herself by lifting and lowering the scarf I was wearing. I couldn’t help but admire her ability to entertain herself. The other day, I handed her a few pieces of junk mail that she’d played with for forty-five minutes, placing one on top of the other, pulling the bottom one from the pile, folding sides and tearing into edges.

Since Jesse was on board with my suggestion for Sunday, I surfed the zoo’s website to determine the hours and entrance fees. Then, because G hadn’t yet grown bored with the scarf, I trotted down the late-night internet rabbit hole, checking my favorite hockey forums and perusing the tri team’s upcoming training plan, even though it was growing increasingly clear that G had become a solid detour to my competing.

After a few minutes, G leaned forward, rested her head on my chest and fingered the scarf up close, periodically putting pieces of fringe in her mouth. Everything was going in her mouth then — plastic toys, fabric, the edges of books. I could tell that she was getting drowsy and I figured it would probably serve me to let her fall asleep on me and then carefully transfer her to the Pack ’n Play. While waiting for that to happen and without much forethought, I typed into Google “Abraham Jonathan Slath,” the name on the business card Abe had given me.

About twenty-five hits came up. He was, I soon discovered, a gazillionaire.

“In and out of tech,” I remembered him saying about his profession. His business card said simply his name, a cell phone number and “San Francisco Technologist.” His modesty was striking. According to articles I pulled up, he’d sold one Internet company to Microsoft for thirty million and another to Yahoo! for ten million. There were several business news articles about him as well as a UC Berkeley alumni magazine article profiling him and his multi-million dollar contribution to the undergraduate scholarship fund. Official real estate records revealed that he’d purchased the three-bedroom Edwardian on Carmel Street for nearly two million dollars four years before. It was clearly worth more now.

“Holy crap,” I said aloud. G, by then soundly asleep, shifted a few degrees to the left with my chest movement. I heard Jesse get up, use the toilet, then blow his nose loudly.

I continued to scroll through articles about Abe. Old images revealed that he’d once donned a pony tail. I enlarged one picture of him barefoot in shorts, hoping to decipher that tattoo, to no avail. Still, I couldn’t help myself from being drawn to Abe and his low-key, walk-the-dog existence even more.

I also couldn’t help but wonder what life would be like with a man like that. Would having a baby with an affluent person like Abe be any easier? While not at the financial level of Abe, Margot was quite wealthy herself, yet that hadn’t in any way eased the stress of parenting. But somehow Abe struck me as the kind of dad who’d go all in, who’d not only help out, but maybe even willingly assume the bulk of the duties, particularly because he no longer had any work pressures that I could discern. But what did I know? I barely knew the man. Still, there was something compelling about him. I wanted to devour information about his life. To imagine, to fantasize, to plot. But in twenty minutes, I’d read everything there was to find.

I closed my laptop and wrapped my arms around G. She was warm and weighted on my body like the soothing sandbags we used in a restorative yoga class I once took with Sarah. The weight, we learned, served to ground the body and calm the nervous system.

Drowsy myself by then, I was tempted to simply scooch forward, to lower my whole body onto the couch with G on my chest. If I stretched my arm up, I could even reach the switch of the lamp behind me, which had unnaturally illuminated my Internet search. But I knew that before long, I’d get stiff and need to shift positions, which would wake G. So instead, I leaned my head down and momentarily rested my cheek on the top of her head, breathing in her smell. And then I dragged myself up and gently carried her into our room for bed.

From all our outdoor race training, Jesse and I had grown intimately familiar with San Francisco’s unique microclimates. Throughout the years, we learned that even when late afternoon fog rolled through the Geary corridor in Laurel Heights, it was probably still sunny and hot in the Mission. So even though it was warm in Cole Valley Sunday morning, layers were still required for a visit to the zoo, which was out by the ocean.

Sure enough, by the time we turned left onto Sloat, we needed wipers to push away the thin film of moisture that had collected on the windshield.

“Wow,” Jesse said. “All these years in the city and we’ve never been
here
before.”

“That’s exactly what you said about the diaper aisle at Target.”

The first time we’d gone there together about a week before, we marveled at the plethora of diaper options (“leak guard,” “swaddlers,” “soft and cozy,” “sensitive,” “cruiser,” “extra absorbency”), not to mention the high-priced infant gadgets and contraptions (wipes, pins, fasteners, monitors, pillows, bottles, toys, bathing tubs), the purposes of which we had absolutely no clue in most cases.

In committing our Sunday morning to a visit to the zoo, Jesse and I were silently acknowledging something. We were searching, if no longer for an ending to this situation not of our making, then at least for some semblance of routine or structure. In our typical fashion, we’d wordlessly decided that if we were going to be taking care of a baby, we may as well try to do it well.

I paid the fee and Jesse pushed the stroller through the entrance. Once inside, I paused and glanced over my shoulder, waiting for someone to stop us. We’d never taken G anywhere this family-oriented before. But among all the families whizzing by us, we fit right in. No one saw us as impostors, even though I still felt like one. Despite G’s jet-black hair, we looked more like a biological family than the threesome I’d spotted at Peet’s the afternoon before. In fact, if you went purely by appearance, we actually looked more like a family than G and Margot did. As we wandered through the African Savanna exhibit, I realized that viewing two wholly different species of animals — like gorillas and pigs — in the same den would be weird, but we weren’t like that. Jesse, G and I were the same species. Theoretically, we could be a family.

Right before Jesse and I got engaged, we went out to dinner. Though it wasn’t official yet, we both knew we’d soon be married. We’d been dating for years. We were thirty and thirty-one. We loved and understood each other. It was the natural evolution of our relationship. That night, over Thai food at our favorite place on Lombard Street, we shared a bottle of pinot grigio. A couple of glasses in, we were both buzzed.

“We’ve talked about this some already,” Jesse said, twirling the cork between his thumb and index finger. “But, kids?”

I shrugged, not wanting to derail our forward motion.

“Not sure we’re the parenting types,” he offered.

“God knows
I
didn’t have the best role models,” I said, taking a heaping spoonful of my favorite vinegary cucumber salad.

“They did the best they could,” Jesse said of my parents, always cutting them more slack for their hands-off style than I did. “What a rotten hand they were dealt. In fact, that’s one of the things that freaks me out. Loving something so much, something that could
die
.” He didn’t say it overtly, but of course he was referring to Marigold. One incontrovertible fact I knew about Jesse: if he lost like that again, he’d never recover.

I shook my head and swigged the dregs of my wine glass, then gestured that I’d like a refill. He poured some for me and then for himself, finishing off the bottle.

“But, man,” he added, “people
are
just nuts about their kids.”

A year or so before, Ben, his closest friend in the world, had twins. The last time Jesse saw him, a far less frequent occurrence since those kids were born, he remarked that he’d never seen Ben happier. “He was, like, giddy,” Jesse had said.

“It’s like skiing or golf,” I said, slurping a spoonful of our favorite number sixteen soup. “People are wild about it. But I just don’t get it. Even if I did, I’m just not cut out for it.” I wiped the outsides of my lips with my napkin and took a sip of water to tone down the spiciness of the soup. “Let’s flip a coin.”

Jesse raised his eyebrows and jutted his head forward. “About
having kids
? Time to lay off the wine, Stevens.” He slid the already empty bottle dramatically to the other side of the table.

“Why not?” I moved my soup bowl aside and grabbed a quarter from my purse. “Let’s see what the universe says.”

I was confident that the universe would confirm exactly what I thought: that we should leave the parenting to people who really cared about it.

“Alllllright,” he said. “Heads — no. Tails? What should tails mean?”

That was the key question.

“Tails means… Let’s characterize it as ‘Not out of the question.’” Though the exercise was just for fun, I didn’t want to commit to anything based on a coin toss just in case luck wasn’t on my side. It hadn’t, after all, been on my parents’ side. Or Marigold’s.

No fewer than eight times in a row, the coin came up tails.

In our inebriated condition, we laughed and both of us seemed relieved when the rest of our food arrived. But looking back, it was never really clear to me whether he wanted to preserve our streak or break it.

A couple of years later, we had a pregnancy scare, though most married couples certainly wouldn’t classify it as such. I’d missed a grand total of one birth control pill that month. I hadn’t forgotten — the tiny pill had slipped out of my hand and rolled down the drain of the sink. I figured one dose wouldn’t affect anything and forgot all about it. But a few weeks later, my period was uncharacteristically late. I panicked. Busy with our careers and enjoying our freedom as a couple, we hadn’t talked about kids since that night at the restaurant, despite the spate of tails we’d encountered in our coin flipping. I was gathering up my nerve to tell Jesse about the situation — though I hadn’t taken a pregnancy test yet so I didn’t exactly know what the situation was — when I got my period. I experienced the kind of relief you get when you’re excused from jury duty after getting as far as in the box for voir dire — times a thousand. I hadn’t felt relief like that since Jean had extricated me from my similar crisis with Arlen years before. I debated whether to even tell Jesse, but in my euphoria, I did.

The moment was still so clear to me. He was in the garage wearing a long-sleeved Sharks jersey and he was on his knees cleaning his largest tank in preparation for an upcoming aquarium contest in Monterey. Silent for a moment, he responded simply, “Your relief is, uh, palpable.” He picked up a rounded brush and resumed scrubbing.

At the zoo, we held hands and travelled leisurely through Bear Country, seagulls from the nearby ocean pleasantly serenading our excursion. On the way to the Lion House, I steered him towards the right, hoping to spare him the sight of the withering marigolds lining the path. It was fall and they’d reached their peak weeks before. I could imagine the pain it would cause him, the natural parallels to his own perished Marigold. I didn’t have anyone like that, someone who loomed so large in my life. After the Arlen mess, I had a string of nice-enough boyfriends. But I experienced no fervent attachment, had loved no one who felt like a genuine companion — until Jesse.

We stopped at The Leaping Lemur Cafe to give G her first taste of ice cream. In the weeks she’d been with us, she’d gone from formula to rice cereal to jarred vegetables to crumbled Madelines and a few other new foods, which Mercedes had explained was fine. Apparently, if her teeth were coming in, her gut could handle it.

“She’s becoming quite the San Francisco foodie,” Jesse noted, taking his own bites of ice cream from the same spoon. “Maybe we should introduce her to pastrami and rye so she doesn’t have culinary shock when she returns to Manhattan.”

At the table next to us, a woman spoke with an accent that I knew, unmistakably, was Alabaman. I leaned back in my chair so I could listen better. It didn’t matter what she was saying, I simply wanted to hear her speak because she sounded so much like Virginia. As Jesse and G ate their snack, I closed my eyes and pictured her in my head. Virginia hadn’t been effusive or loving the way those household workers were portrayed in The Help. But she was always there in a way that my parents just couldn’t bring themselves to be. She died more than a decade before but I’d thought of her more in the last few weeks than I had in a long time. I opened my eyes and realized that while I’d visited the zoo on field trips and during summer day camps as a child, my parents had never taken me.