But I’d missed swimming, I realized, as I stood in the locker room and pulled on my suit. I had missed the tang of chlorine in my nose and the old Jewish ladies who’d parade through the locker room completely naked, completely unashamed, and swap recipes and beauty tips while they got dressed. The feel of the water, holding me up, and the way I could forget almost anything but the rhythm of my breath as I swam.
My mother swam a mile every morning, moving slowly through the water with a massive kind of grace. I kept up with her for maybe half of it, then slipped into one of the empty lap lanes and did a languid sidestroke for a while, thinking of nothing. Which I knew was a luxury I couldn’t afford much longer. If I wanted to get things taken care of (and that was the phrase I was using in my mind), it would have to be soon.
I flipped on my back and thought about what I’d felt at Thanksgiving dinner. That tiny hand, waving. Ridiculous, really. The thing probably didn’t have hands, and if it did, it certainly couldn’t wave them.
I’d always been pro-choice. I had never romanticized pregnancies, intended or otherwise. I wasn’t one of those women who sees her thirtieth birthday coming and starts cooing at anything in a stroller with drool on its chin. I had a few friends who’d gotten married and started their families, but I had many more friends in their late twenties and early thirties who hadn’t. I didn’t hear my clock ticking. I didn’t have baby fever.
I rolled back over and commenced a lazy breaststroke. The thing was, I couldn’t shake the feeling that it had been somehow decided for me. As if it was out of my control now, and all I was supposed to do was sit back and let it happen.
I blew a frustrated breath into the water, watching bubbles roil around me. I’d still feel better about all of this if I could have heard God’s voice again, if I knew for sure that I was doing the right thing.
“Cannie?”
My mother swam into the lane beside me. “Two more laps,” she said. We finished them together, matching each other breath for breath, stroke for stroke. Then I followed her into the locker room.
“Now,” my mother began, “what is going on with you?”
I looked at her, surprised. “With me?”
“Oh, Cannie. I’m your mother. I’ve known you for twenty-seven years.”
“Twenty-eight,” I corrected.
She squinted at me. “Did I forget your birthday?”
I shrugged. “I think you sent a card.”
“Is that what it is?” asked my mother. “Are you worried about getting older? Are you depressed?”
I shrugged again. My mother was sounding more worried.
“Are you getting any help? Are you talking to anyone?”
I snorted, imagining how useless the little doctor, drowning in her clothes, would be in a situation like this. “Now, Bruce is your boyfriend,” she’d begin, flipping through her ever- present legal pad.
“Was,” I’d correct.
“And you’re thinking about… adoption?”
“Abortion,” I’d say.
“You’re pregnant,” said my mother.
I sat up straight, my mouth falling open. “What?”
“Cannie. I’m your mother. A mother knows these things.”
I drew my towel tight around me and wondered whether it would be too much to hope that this was one of the few things my mother and Tanya hadn’t made a bet about.
“And you look just like I did,” she continued. “Tired all the time. When I was pregnant with you I slept fourteen hours a day.” I didn’t say anything.
I didn’t know what to say. I knew I would have to start talking about it to someone, at some point, but I didn’t have words ready.
“Have you thought about names?” my mother asked me.
I gave a short, barking laugh. “I haven’t thought about anything,” I said. “I haven’t thought about where I’ll live, or what I’ll do…”
“But you’re going to…” Her voice trailed off delicately.
“Seems that way,” I said. There. Out loud. It was real.
“Oh, Cannie!” She sounded – if it’s possible – at once thrilled and brokenhearted. Thrilled, I guess, that she’d get to be a grandmother (unlike me, my mother was prone to cooing over anything in a stroller). And brokenhearted because this wasn’t a situation you’d wish for your daughter.
But it was my situation. I saw it then, that moment, in the locker room. This was what was going to happen – I was going to have this baby, Bruce or no Bruce, broken heart or no broken heart. It felt like the right choice. More than that, it felt almost like my destiny – the way my life was supposed to unfold. I just wished that whoever had planned it would drop me a clue or two about how I was going to provide for myself and a child. But if God wasn’t going to speak up, I’d figure it out myself.
My mother stood up and hugged me, which was gross, considering that we were both wet from the pool, and her towel didn’t quite make it around her front. But whatever. It felt good to have someone’s arms around me.
“You’re not mad?” I asked.
“No, no! How could I ever be mad?”
“Because… well. This isn’t the way I wanted it…” I said, briefly letting my cheek rest against her shoulder.
“It never is,” she told me. “It’s never just the way you think that it’ll be. Do you think I wanted to have you and Lucy down in Louisiana, a million miles away from my family, with those horrible army doctors and cockroaches big as my thumb”
“At least you had a husband,” I said. “And a house… and a plan…”
My mother patted my shoulder briskly. “Husbands and houses are negotiable,” she said. “And as for a plan… we’ll figure it out.”
She didn’t ask the $64,000 question until we were dried off and dressed and in the car on our way home.
“I’m assuming that Bruce is the father,” she said.
I leaned my cheek against the cool glass. “Correct.”
“And you’re not back together?”
“No. It was…” How could I possibly explain to my mother what had happened?
“Not to worry,” she said, effectively ending my attempts to think of an appropriate euphemism for sympathy fuck. We drove past the industrial park and the fruit and vegetable stand, over the mountain, on our way home. Everything looked familiar, because I’d driven past it a million times, growing up. I would swim with my mother early Saturday mornings, and we’d drive home together, watching the sleeping towns wake up, on our way to get warm bagels and fresh-squeezed orange juice and have breakfast together, the five of us.
Now, everything looked different. The trees had gotten taller, the houses looked somehow shabbier. There were new traffic lights at a few of the more dangerous intersections, new houses with raw-looking wooden walls and torn-up lawns on streets that hadn’t existed when I was in high school. Still, it felt good, and comfortable, to be riding beside my mother again. I could almost pretend that Tanya had stayed in her obsessive-compulsive codependent ex-girlfriend’s apartment and out of my mother’s life… and that my father hadn’t abandoned us so completely… and that I wasn’t in my current condition.
