The man turned to me. His eyes were blue. It must have been a trick of the moonlight, because they looked transparent. This intrigued me. “Something I can help you with?” I said.
“Yeah.”
I expected him to elaborate, but he didn’t. He seemed to be studying me, and I felt myself blush. I turned to go. Again.
“Wait,” he said. “Do me a favor. Walk away from this.”
“Well, which is it?” I said. “Wait or walk away?”
“I think you understand me.”
Perhaps he was mentally ill. I often attract mentally ill people, feel an affinity for them, probably from years of dealing with my brother’s schizophrenia. Also, the mentally ill can have the most beautiful eyes; why is that?
“This thing you’re walking into,” he continued. “Get out.”
I said the first thing that occurred to me. “Get out of-Biological Clock?”
“What?”
“I think you understand me,” I said. Two could play this enigmatic game.
“You think you can’t get hurt?”
What a strange thing to say. I’d been hurt quite a lot, I could’ve told him. Who in life had not? But his face was so hard, except for those eyes, that I was not tempted to bare my soul to it.
He’d been leaning on the railing, but now he straightened up and I was aware of how very tall he was. And I’m six feet myself. He looked down at me. “Think you’re that pretty?”
I stared at him. If only I had a clue what he was talking about.
He leaned in close. He smelled clean. “You are that pretty. But you’ll go down, just the same.”
The words paralyzed me. Then Bing’s voice broke the spell. “Our expert’s coming,” he yelled from the doorway of Hot Aloo. “Let’s go, folks.”
The tall man walked away. He didn’t look back, just headed for the stairs, not even acknowledging he’d heard me when I called after him, “But what is it I’ve done?”
I didn’t know how I would concentrate on anything after that, but then I met Dr. Theodora Zagan.
Dr. Theodora Zagan looked about eighteen; apparently she’d begun her postgraduate work at puberty. She asked the waiter for the beef vindaloo Henry was eating, but spicier. She asked Fredreeq for a mirror, checked her lip line and fluffed her bangs, then told Bing to start rolling tape anytime. At his “Action!” she turned to me.
“Are you ready,” she said, “for the financial burden you assume with your first child? The answer,” she said, as I opened my mouth, “is no. Because you have no idea what that burden is.” She took a sip of water and turned to Henry. “Statistically, you will spend more time with your child than your father spent with you. But you’ll put in nowhere near the eighty-hour week this woman will, between her job and her mothering. You’ll pick up a fraction of the child-care duties, regardless of which of you is the household’s primary breadwinner.”
“Henry and I don’t live together,” I said.
“Then the gap widens. Child support won’t begin to address the cost of parenting. Unless you, sir, are extremely wealthy and, more to the point, generous. Oil magnate, record-industry executive?”
“Christmas-tree farmer,” Henry said.
Theodora turned back to me. “In lost wages alone, from the overtime hours you will refuse, the minimal maternity leave you will take, the absentee days you will accrue in order to tend to your child when he or she is ill, and, most debilitatingly, the promotions you will not obtain or even seek due to the fact that work is no longer your life, as it is to your male or childless female colleagues-this will add up to an average of one million dollars in the course of your lifetime. This does not include the actual cost of raising the child, the food, clothing, shelter, medical, education, and miscellaneous costs.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Did you say one million dollars?”
“Per child. More if you’re a trained professional. Less if you’re an unskilled laborer.”
“I don’t have a college degree.”
“Then you’ll be at the lower end of the scale,” Theodora said.
Thank God. I couldn’t afford a million dollars. “Do you have children?” I asked.
“No, I’m the childless colleague I just referred to, the one angling for the promotion. But I’m quite young. I have a rigorous investment program, in case I fall prey to the biological imperative you’re experiencing.”
I managed a vague smile. “So I’m-doomed? To penury?”
“Poverty.” Theodora nodded. “The single biggest predictor of a woman growing old in poverty is having children. In America. Most developed countries subsidize the caregivers of their future taxpayers. Here we recognize human capital as our most valuable resource and the early years as the most developmentally crucial, yet the lion’s share of investment in this resource comes from family, not government-”
“Says who?” Henry asked.
“Gary Becker, Nobel Prize, 1992. If children were acres of corn, we’d subsidize them. They’re not. We don’t. A day-care worker makes peanuts, but she does accrue social security; take care of your own kids and you’re a fiscal deadbeat. You’re better off as a single parent, forced to work outside the home. A stay-at-home mom falls off the map entirely. Disappears.”
Disappears. Funny to hear the word used in that context. Maybe that’s what happened to Annika: she became a stay-at-home mom.
“Are you a feminist?” Henry asked.
“God no. I’m an economist,” Theodora said.
I raised my hand. “I’m a feminist.” No one paid any attention.
“My politics are irrelevant, in any case,” Theodora said. “There’s no lobbying group for caregivers as there is for senior citizens, for instance, even though as a group, caregivers-mothers, let’s be frank-outnumber every other demographic you can think of.”
“I plan to help out,” Henry said.
“Good.” Theodora turned to me. “Get it in writing.”
“Cut!” Bing cried. “Print! Perfect!”
Our food came. Our expert dug in, Henry sniffed everything with an air of suspicion, and I just nibbled on naan, wondering if I should start my life over as Theodora Zagan.
We progressed to on-camera dessert and discussions of living trusts for the baby that none of us had. The one I’d neglected to save up for. It was a long night, and I had a headache at the end. The only bright spot was Paul telling me he left messages every day on Annika’s machine, with the shooting schedule. Just in case. It made me feel less alone.
It was long after midnight before I walked down Wilshire with Joey and Fredreeq to our cars. My friends were discussing whether my longed-for college diploma would be worth the paper it would be printed on, given what Dr. Theodora Zagan had just told us. Joey said it wouldn’t. Fredreeq vehemently disagreed, quoting wage-earning statistics for holders of bachelor degrees. That’s when I told them about my encounter with the man outside Hot Aloo. I did not mention his eyes.
My friends came to a dead halt on the sidewalk, staring at me.
“Now, that is creepy,” Fredreeq said. “So, along with everything else, I got your physical safety to worry about now.”
“I’ll follow you home,” Joey said. “And I’ll keep my phone on.”
“I hate to say this,” Fredreeq said, “but I wish Doc was here. He was short, but he was scrappy. How am I gonna be able to sleep nights, knowing about this?”
Doc. How extraordinary. I hadn’t thought about Doc for hours.
10
Fredreeq wasn’t kidding. Worrying about me had disrupted her sleep, she said, calling at seven A.M. “Let’s shop,” she suggested.
“I can’t,” I said. “One, I can’t afford to, and two, I have to be at SMC at nine-thirty.”
“That’s fine. I gotta get the kids to school and, anyway, nothing opens till ten. Westside Pavilion. Eleven. Be there.”
SMC, or Santa Monica College, was one of those places that did for me what shopping malls did for Fredreeq. When I was young and impressionable, I saw the film Love Story and developed a yearning not just for Ali MacGraw’s glossy black hair and pea coats but for college campuses. Circumstances like money and family issues diverted me from getting a degree in the normal fashion, but did not keep me from enrolling in classes in various odd learning institutions. Part of this was longing for a legitimacy I felt belonged to the college-educated. Part of it was that I aspired to an actual career, like a teacher, not a series of jobs I’d invented or fallen into or the kind that could be done by a really gifted chimpanzee. Mostly, though, I took classes for the thrill of being on a campus. Even at Santa Monica College. There was little ivy, the grass was patchy, and the bathrooms utterly frightening, but Friday morning as I strolled to the counseling office, I could, without too much trouble, hear piano music in my head and picture autumn leaves swirling around me.