She always thought she’d have a lot of kids. She thought of herself as a maternal person, sensible and loving. She’d played with dolls long past the time when her friends had turned to other things—like Bonne Belle Lip Smackers and Tiger Beat magazine—and she was strict but loving with her stuffed animals, each of whom got a turn once a week sleeping next to her on the pillow. Even now, she felt the cravings on the inside of her arms, and somewhere along the base of her jaw, almost like salivary glands, when she held small babies. And she doted on her niece Annali, with her heart-shaped face, her cap of blond curls—but of course, who wouldn’t, with a kid like that?
And Rudy was right there, too. He liked kids. His own childhood was a source of immeasurable, endlessly recollectable pleasure for him. He loved comic books, cartoons, and Quisp cereal (which he’d recently given up in favor of low-calorie twigs of bran). The fact that he wanted children, too, had been the most heavily weighted item on her pros-and-cons list (she’d given it five full points). And still, she hadn’t been able to pull the trigger. It had now been two months since the last time they’d talked about getting married. Rudy had grown strangely silent on the subject.
She couldn’t say why she kept putting him off. She told herself it was because they had a good thing going, so why ruin it? They could be together when they wanted to be, and each had an apartment to retreat to for what they called “me time.” Pru had found that, dating Rudy, she needed a lot of “me time.”
Being with Rudy could be exhausting. He practically had an advanced degree in pop culture, with an emphasis on his own childhood, and he needed a lot of attention, as the funny often do. Sometimes the apartment seemed so full of Rudy—of Rudy’s needs, of Rudy’s problems, of Rudy’s therapy, his little jokes and his dirty socks.
A few months ago, she’d tried to talk to him about taking a break from seeing so much of each other. She had begun to wonder whether they had really chosen to be together or just fallen into the habit. But then Rudy went through a bad patch. He was promoted from animator to producer, which seemed at the time like a good thing; but then the pressure that came with assuming nominal control of the ragtag group of smart, neurotic comedy nerds he used to belong to made him anxious and depressed. It didn’t seem right to leave him, just then.
And then the tables turned, and now she needed him. She’d never been fired before. Not even anything close to that. Right away, she’d thrown herself into the work of finding another job, as though that would erase what had just happened. She found herself missing Rudy, counting the hours until he would be home from work. She wasn’t entirely comfortable with that. She wanted to turn the tables back again, so they faced in the proper direction.
In the darkness of the lunchtime session, she gathered up her things and slipped out before the PowerPoint presentation was over. She couldn’t wait to get home and rip off her business suit. She wanted to shove it into the back of the closet and never see it again; but of course Pru would never really do that with wool crepe.
She was wasting her time at the conference. This wasn’t the direction her future was taking her; she was absolutely certain of that. She had another vision of herself, this time sitting on a primary-colored carpet, playing quietly with a baby. She would wear those capri khakis, maybe, with layered T-shirts, and her cork-wedgie sandals.
Oh, this in-betweenness—how she hated it! They needed to fish or cut bait, as her mother would say. What did she need, big fat red arrows pointing the way? It couldn’t have been an accident, seeing in that pregnant woman a vision of her future self. What better time, really, than now, to get married and have children? Didn’t people take sabbaticals from their jobs, to write books or do research or whatever? Why not a sabbatical to start a family?
On her way out of the hotel, she happened to spot the little family again. The girls were playing at the koi pond in the lobby. This time, Pru got close enough to the woman so that she could say, “What sweet little girls you have.”
“Thanks.” The woman beamed. Then she rolled her eyes. They were the same gray-blue as Pru’s, under the same straight brows. “Until it’s time to go to bed. That’s when they getcha.”
Pru nodded. That was just what she would have said, too—the obvious pride, followed by a touch of humility. Just right, for a woman her age.
Two
“Rudy Fisch? God, why?”
McKay had a way of saying Rudy’s name that made Pru picture a fat, glaring trout.
McKay didn’t like Rudy because they had the same sense of humor, and, he said, because Rudy was an asshole.
Pru and McKay were having a beer at the bar under the souvlaki place next to Pru’s apartment, on the Friday Rudy was due home. She was meeting him in a few hours, outside the Film Institute. She’d spent the days following her encounter with her future self making plans. (How she loved planning! Always much better than doing.) She found out that to book a wedding venue in D.C., you needed at least a year’s notice. She was stunned at the cost—most places asked for $10,000 just to rent them for the day. She was toying now with the idea of a justice-of-the-peace wedding, followed by dinner at one of the nice restaurants in Georgetown for everyone: her mother, sister, and her niece; Rudy’s parents (no getting out of that, unfortunately); McKay and Bill, of course; and her best friend Kate McCabe. In her
