Smile
The oratorio is a huge success. You sew yourself a gorgeous gown for the occasion, a long column of puce satin with a chiffon overlay; you receive a standing ovation, you’re swarmed afterward, sign a program for an eight-year-old girl, pose for photos with the other singers and the conductor, pull Dad into one of them, though that’s a bit of an afterthought. He’s brought a bouquet of roses — and he’s not a flowers guy, he’s a guy whose wife’s friends occasionally remind him to act like a flowers guy — and roses are decidedly not in the budget but it’s a special occasion. The feeling, absorbing all this attention, is unlike any you’ve had before. The applause and the audience on their feet move into you like a new power source, like you’ve just discovered solar energy. In the local paper the next day, you get a special mention as someone to watch, a bright new soprano on the horizon. The following week is a whirl, a buzz, magic, but the week after that is quite a bit different. The buzz is gone. And then you remember you’re pregnant, for the first time in a week, and the first thought in your head is that this is a conflict.
You should be able to do both, have a baby and sing, why not, who said you couldn’t? People have nannies. You don’t have a budget for a nanny, you’re on a professor’s salary right now, but as your career gets going, you’ll earn plenty in no time. You do want this baby, you’re sure of it, pretty sure, granted the timing is suddenly not great, but it’s too late now. So you’ll just do both. Make a daily schedule and just make it work. Meanwhile, before the baby, you’ve got things to do. You’ve got a nursery to set up, which will need to be the best nursery ever. But in this era, you don’t get to know whether it will be a boy or a girl, and you don’t like yellow so you’ll go with pale blue, you like blue, and you sort of hope it will be a boy, you aren’t exactly sure why, though in remote parts of your brain where thoughts come not in words or sentences but hang around like smoke in a windowless room, there’s a vague sense that raising a girl, for you, will be a challenge, though right now there’s no time to give real attention to this, and if it does end up a girl you’ll just add some pink accents later, a couple of pillows, switch out the curtains, easy enough. Audrey and Inge throw you a lovely baby shower. Pink-and-blue cupcakes with diaper pins on top, pink-and-blue ribbons everywhere, a pink-and-blue banner that says HELLO BABY hanging on the porch of Audrey’s house to welcome you. Inge escorts you to a rocking chair with a big bow on it — that’s from Dad — and you open boxes filled with stuffed animals, linens, rattles, books; the expected oohs and ahs come from the group, but instead of building excitement — hooray, the blessed event is near! this is really happening! — when you feel a kick, instead of feeling the miracle of life or even placing a maternal hand to the belly, you are however briefly resentful, sure that this was a setup, that there was a conspiracy among your family and friends to steer you toward this path; but that’s crazy, so you focus, focus, you were sure you wanted this, it’s what every woman wants, and you want it too, but as you open more presents (carefully, saving the paper, always) and get to boxes of bottles and diapers, a picture emerges in your head of what those things are actually used for. Smile, Lois, just smile, your friends have done this lovely thing for you, they mean so well, they love you, and they have babies and toddlers, they’re all still smiling, they’re fine, you will be too, you’re certain of it.
Cross-Country Problem Solving, Episode One
You decide that twenty-nine is too old to wait tables, so Victor gets you a job as a receptionist at the talent agency where he works. Oh, wait! I totally forgot that you moved to Los Angeles for a week. Let me go back. First, you decide to wait tables in another city.
— Seriously, Mom?
— Well, you knew what I meant.
So we throw a big going-away party at the restaurant. All your friends come for the send-off, and you and I pack up your stuff and put it in storage. Everything else gets shipped ahead; your old friend Jimmy from Fire Island has an extra room in his house in Laurel Canyon.
The night you get there, you and Jimmy catch up, and a couple of bottles of wine into this, it becomes a good idea to mess around. The next morning, not so much. How best to navigate this? Ah, yes, you will not get out of bed. You’re in no hurry to drive anywhere anyway, and your head is a balloon filled with cement. Good enough. Until Jimmy brings you a breakfast sandwich from the deli down the road and says Let’s talk. The cement in your head is preventing you from picking up any meaningful nuances in this Let’s talk, but those are words you’ve never much cared for. You would love to know who the asshole was who first put those two words together. It makes talking seem like a terrible thing. Talking is a fantastic thing. You love talking. Until someone says Let’s talk. And in this case, you have no idea if this Let’s talk is going to be followed by This is awkward or I’ve always really liked you and I’d like to see where this goes or what, but you don’t care, because you do not want to deal with either end of that range. You want to not remember what happened last night and start over. You came here to start over. Why do other people who drink have the good fortune to forget the shit that happened that they don’t want to remember? You have had no such luck. What you’ve been lucky enough to forget, other people have reported back. Meanwhile, as you’re mulling this over, Jimmy is still sitting on your bed and he does not look like he wants to talk about anything terrible, but today talking at all is not going to happen. Can we talk later? you ask. I’m not feeling all that great. Sure, no problem, he says, and kisses you on the head and leaves the sandwich, smiles before he closes the door behind him. He is adorable. He looks like a guy you should love.
The next morning, you listen carefully for Jimmy’s footsteps and the sound of the front door locking before emerging from your room. This is as good a time as any to look for a job, so you drive over to Hollywood and walk around looking for Help Wanted signs, which is your best idea about how to do it, and you come across one restaurant with a sign in the window that says HOSTESS NEEDED (well, you come across a few signs, but this is the only one you deem suitable on this day; the distinctions might be microscopic to the average job-hunter, but the restaurant job you are seeking is one in which your hard work will be recognized, where there is a general and apparent good vibe, where the staff gets along, ideally one where you can wear whatever you want, but definitely not one that requires a uniform, or a terrible or embarrassing uniform, like a workplace sitcom with the usual cast of unlikely comrades — you, the arty one who doesn’t have an art — but you’re all in it together, all of this needing to be perceptible through a brief glance inside the restaurant); anyway, you haven’t considered maybe putting on a skirt and some lipstick, you’re wearing ripped jeans as usual, and the manager lets you fill out an application but it’s obvious from the way she hands the application over without a pen that this isn’t going to happen. You ask for a pen and the manager looks at you like you asked for a speedboat. Feeling like you’ve done enough for one day, you head back to the house, but it rains — pours, actually — and you’ve only just gotten your driver’s license even though you’re twenty-nine, and I get a hysterical phone call from you about rain, and how you just can’t do it, and I tell you it’s all fine, It’s not going to rain every day, Betsy, you’ll get used to driving, give it time, but you call back the next day when it’s raining even harder, and there’s no milk in the house and the closest store is a tiny market a mile down the steep hill where you live. You say You don’t get it, Mom, you can’t even walk there, it’s too steep, even if I rolled myself down the hill, I couldn’t walk back up. You walk a mile easy every day in New York, I say. You can’t walk anywhere here, Mom. Well, why didn’t you think about that before you left? I ask, and you say you just didn’t. You call back the next day again, same thing, complaints about how driving is the worst, that the freedom of car ownership is obviously an epic myth perpetuated by the auto industry that for mysterious reasons has been swallowed whole by the entire country, and there’s nothing here for you and you want to come home. I urge you to give it more time, though unbeknownst to me, you have already more or less made up your mind.