Telegraph Avenue

1999 BMW convertible, Archy and Elsabet had appeared to be just talking, and if they were just talking, then it was completely and without question unreasonable for her to have bugged out on him the way she had. Given the innocence of the observed encounter, it was wrong to have gone and drenched his beautiful pumpkin sweater and tweeds in a soft drink from the Horn of Africa. Yes, she knew perfectly well that Archy ate lunch at Queen of Sheba all the time. She knew that Elsabet Getachew worked at the restaurant and that she was the niece of the owner, who was a nice guy. And no, she did not expect him to be rude to a friend and fellow member of the Temescal Merchants Association.

“It’s the indignity of it,” she heard herself telling him, invoking a key concept of her mother’s code of morality with such stone likeness that it chilled her, spiders walked on the back of her neck, you might as well swing the camera around and show Rod Serling standing there behind a potted banana tree in an eerie cloud of cigarette smoke.

She got right up in his face so she could make her speech without raising her voice.“I have been doing this for thirty-six weeks,” she began. “I am tired, I am large, I am hormonal. And I am hot. I am so hot and so large, I have to wear a culotte slip to keep my thighs from rubbing together when I walk. So, I admit, yes, I lost it. Maybe I ought not have poured my drink on your head. But I don’t know”—was this the prompting of estrogen or logic? could she tell the difference anymore?—“maybe I ought. Because even if you are ‘just talking’ to some astonishingly beautiful girl, Archy, it’s humiliating. I’m sick of it. I have to walk around my city, the place where I live, and wonder if next time I stop in, wherever, I don’t know, the drugstore to pick up a jar of Tucks medicated pads, I’m going to see my husband macking on the pharmacist.” This was not a hypothetical example. “It’s embarrassing. I have more pride than that.” She placed a hand against her sternum then, feeling the next words coming like a mighty belch. She lowered her voice to a whisper, as if being obliged to invoke the memory of her immensely dignified mother, only the second female African-American graduate of Harvard Medical School, were the greatest humiliation of all. “I have too much self-respect.”

“Way too much,” Archy agreed.

“Swear to me, Archy,” she said. “Raise your right hand and swear to me, on the soul of your mother, you aren’t getting up to anything with that girl, Chewbacca or whatever her name is.”

“I swear,” Archy said, but there was appended no oath that might require the damnation of his late mother. No raised hand.

“Raise it up,” Gwen said.

Archy lifted his right hand, a flag of surrender.

“Swear. On the soul of your mother, who raised you to be a better man than that.”

Before forming the words required, Archy hesitated, and in that half-second he was lost. All Gwen’s protestations of dignity and invocations of self-respect were scattered like deck chairs on the promenade of a heaving ship. She glanced up and down the street, casing it for witnesses, then plunged her hand down into the front of his pants. The upper serif of his belt buckle, a gold Ferragamo F, scraped her wrist. Her fingers found the heavy coil of hose cupped in the bag of his boxers. Her fingertips were briefly snagged by a film of bodily adhesive as weak as the glue on a Post-it. She tugged her sticky fingers loose, brought them to her nose, and took a quick but practiced sniff. Market stalls, smoking braziers, panniers of lentils. All the spice and stink of Ethiopia: turmeric, scorched butter, the salt of the Red Sea.

“Motherfucker,” Gwen said, turning on itself, like a cell going cancerous, the oath that Archy would not swear. It was only the third time in her life that she had used the word, and the first time without quotation marks demurely implied, and after it there was nothing more to say. Gwen went around to the driver’s side of the car, ignoring a parking citation in an acid-green envelope that had been poked, during her absence, under her left wiper. She guided herself into the space between seat and steering wheel. Then she and her battered dignity drove off, with the parking ticket flapping against the windshield and with the want of a cup of suff—for one more caramel sip of which she just then would have endured any affront to her self-esteem or stain upon her pride—doomed to burn on inside her, unassuaged, for many days.

The house on Stonewall Road was one of those California canyon houses put up in the late sixties with a Jet Propulsion Laboratory arrogance toward gravity, a set of angles on skinny poles engineered out into the green void. From the street, all you could see of it was its mailbox and carport, with the house concealed downslope as if it planned to spring an ambush on a passerby. In the middle of the driveway, over an eternal attendant puddle of leaking motor oil, sat Aviva Roth-Jaffe’s car, a Volvo station wagon whose age could be reckoned in decades. It had gold-on-blue vanity plates that read HEK8. At some point it had been condemned by a hundred-dollar Earl Scheib paint job to approximate the color of a squirt of fluoride Crest.

Gwen leaned against the trunk of her car, took a long slow breath. Shook off as much of the memory of the past half hour as would shake loose, and tamped down everything else. She had work to do, and when this job was over, her husband would still be there, and he would still be a dog, and the smell of another woman’s pussy would still be on him. She hoisted her black gym bag over her shoulder—the bag held clean bed linens, gloves, meds and syringes, forceps, a portable Doppler—and hefted it and herself down the twisting stairway from the street to the front door. The slope behind her was overgrown with morning glory. Tendrils of jasmine fingered the wooden stairs. A huge trumpet vine with its disappointed yellow mouths threatened to engulf the wooden house clear to the peak of the steep shed roof. The air on Stonewall Road smelled of cedar bark, eucalyptus, fir logs burning in a woodstove. From the lowest limb of a Meyer lemon, a wind chime searched without urgency for a melody to play. An adhesive sticker pasted to the sidelight beside the front door told prospective firefighters how many cats (three) to risk their lives in rescuing. From inside the house came the forlorn and piteous bellowing of an animal in pain.

“Hello?” Gwen called, letting herself in the front door. A small black Buddha greeted her from a low table by the front door, where it kept company with a photograph of Lydia Frankenthaler, the producer of an Oscar-winning documentary film about the neglected plight of lesbians in Nazi Germany; Lydia’s partner, Garth; and Lydia’s daughter from her first marriage, a child whose father was black and whose name Gwen had forgotten. It was a Chinese Buddha, the kind that was supposed to pull in money and luck, jolly, baby-faced, and potbellied, reminding Gwen of her darling husband apart from the signal difference that you could rub the continental expanse of Archy Stallings’s abdomen for a very long time without attracting any flow of money in your direction. “Somebody having a baby around here?”

“In here, Gwen,” Aviva said.

Lydia and Garth, a lawyer for the poor, were having their baby in their living room. It was a large room with a vaulted ceiling and nothing between it and the canyon but a wall of solid glass. The girl—Arabia, Alabama, she had a geographical name—sat marveling blankly at the spectacle of her naked mother reposed like an abstract chunk of marble sculpture in the center of the room. Against her legs the girl held a rectangle of cardstock to which she had pasted the three pages of her mother’s birth plan, decorating the borders in four colors of marker with flowers and vines and a happy-looking fetus labeled BELLA. Two low sofas had been pushed to the sides of the room to make space for a wide flat sandwich crafted from a tatami mat, a slab of egg-carton foam rubber, and a shower curtain decorated with a giant self-portrait of Frida Kahlo. Garth, a small-boned, thin-shanked man with a red beard and red stubble on his head, lay sleeping on the improvised bed.

“I’m at nine!” said Lydia by way of greeting, adding whatever comment was provided by her spread, furry-ish butt cheeks and the backs of her legs as she bent over in the downward-facing-dog position to grab two handfuls of floor. “A hundred percent effaced.”

“I’ve been trying to persuade her to try a little push,” said Aviva. She tilted back on her haunches, down on the floor beside Lydia, studying the looming pale elderly secundigravida. Disapproving of the woman, but only Gwen would have caught it, the lips pursed to the left as if withholding a kiss. Barefoot in a loose cotton shift over black ripstop pedal pushers, the roiling surf of her black hair, with its silver eddies, pulled back and tied in a sloppy bun. Stubble showing blue against her luminous shins. Toenails painted a deep cocoa red like the skin of Archy’s Queen of Sheba. “But all Mom wants to do is goof around like that.”

“I don’t want to push,” Lydia said. A string of pain drew and cinched her voice, a yogic voice, inverted and tied carefully to the rhythm of her breathing. “Is it okay, Gwen? Can’t I just stay this way for a little while longer? It feels a lot better.”

If Aviva said it was time to try a little push, then it was, in Gwen’s view, time to try a little push. You did not get to be the Alice Waters of Midwives by leaving your gratins in the oven too long.