Little Earthquakes Read online

  “Hey,” said the nurse Ayinde was leaning on, “when things calm down a little, could your husband give me an autograph?”

  “I’m sure that won’t be a problem,” Ayinde said, straining to be polite because she wanted the drugs to work. She started to nod, and the doctor and nurse both said, “Oh, no, don’t move!” So she held herself nodless, perfectly still, while the warmth and then the blessed numbness spread down from her hips.

  She let her eyes slip shut, and when she opened them, it had somehow become five in the morning and the door was swinging open, admitting a wedge of harsh light.

  “Look who’s here!” said Becky.

  Ayinde saw Dr. Mendlow at the foot of the bed, his lanky frame and disarming grin, his curly brown hair tucked into a surgical cap, lifting the hem of her gown. And behind him was Richard, unshaven and weary, all six feet nine and a half inches, still wearing his warm-up suit and beaming at her, with a quartet of nurses in his wake.

  He reached for her hands. “Hey, baby.” His eyes crinkled at the corners. His smile looked the same way it did on TV, where it sold cereal and soft drinks and his own line of sneakers. Ayinde closed her eyes, leaning her face against the warm leather of his jacket, breathing his comforting smell of soap and aftershave and the faint whiff of sweat, no matter how long it had been between games and workout sessions . . .

  Ayinde jerked her head back.

  Dr. Mendlow looked up from between her legs. “Did I hurt you? I’m sorry.”

  “Shh, it’s okay. Daddy’s here,” said Richard, bending close, smiling at his own joke. Ayinde breathed deeply, and yes, there it was, a whiff of something different mixed into her husband’s comforting scent. Perfume. Her mind turned the possibility over, then dismissed it fast. He’d been at the game, then probably a press conference, then the plane back home. Reporters . . . stewardesses . . . fans outside the arena and the hotel, craning their necks as he passed, pressing moist scraps of paper into his hands . . . there could have even been a nurse who’d waylaid him in the hall. Or maybe she was just so exhausted that she’d hallucinated the whole thing and conjured up a little Chloe or Obsession out of nothing more than her own pain and fear.

  “Nine centimeters. Almost ten. Just a little lip left,” said Dr. Mendlow. He looked from Ayinde’s face to Richard’s. “You guys ready to have a baby?”

  The nurses charged into the room, breaking down the bed, folding away its bottom third, and propping Ayinde’s feet up. Richard held one hand. Becky gripped the other. “Do you want us to go?” she whispered, as Richard was being helped into gloves and a gown. Ayinde squeezed Becky’s hand hard and shook her head.

  “Stay. Please,” she said. “You, too,” she said to Kelly, who was watching from the armchair. Kelly looked so tired. Ayinde imagined that she looked even worse. The night felt like it had stretched out forever, and the hardest part was still to come.

  “Okay, going into a contraction,” called Dr. Mendlow. “You ready to start pushing?” Ayinde nodded, and the room filled with noise and people—the anesthesiologist, nurses, the nurse who was, unbelievably, clutching a notebook and a pen, the machines were beeping and pinging, and someone by Ayinde’s head was saying that it was time to “PUSH! PUSH! Tuck your head down, take a deep breath, and give me everything, little more, little more, little more, come on, come on now, Anna . . . Anya . . .”

  “Ay-IN-day!” she gasped and dropped her head back onto the pillow, where someone slipped an oxygen mask over her cheeks. “Like it’s spelled!”

  “That’s my baby,” Richard said. The pride in his voice was unmistakable. Becky squeezed her hand. Ayinde opened her eyes and peered into her husband’s eyes.

  “Good job,” he said, bending his head over hers. “Now, come on, baby. Let’s bring it on home.”

  “PUSH!” called the nurses. Ayinde locked her eyes with her husband and bore down with all her strength.

  “Here comes the head!” said Dr. Mendlow.

  And there were nurses holding her legs, Richard holding her hand, the nurse talking into her ear again, “Come on, bear down, do it now, come on, give me more, PUSH, PUSH, PUSH.”

  “Reach down!” said Becky. Ayinde did, reaching blindly, oxygen mask askew, eyes squeezed shut, and oh, there it was, the warm silky sleek wedge of his head, right there against her fingertips, more alive than anything she’d ever touched or dreamed of. She groped for Richard’s hand.

  “Richard,” she said. “Look. Look what we did.”

  He bent down, pressing his lips against her ear. “Love you, baby,” he whispered.

  She bore down again, until she was almost sitting upright in the bed, until the world began to flicker. “Oh, God, I can’t do it anymore!” she screamed.

  “You can, you can, you are,” said one of the voices in her ear. “Just one more, Ayinde, one more, you’re almost there, come on and PUSH!”

  Perfume, Ayinde’s mind whispered in a voice that sounded suspiciously like the voice of the formidable Lolo Mbezi (born Lolly Morgan, but her mother had left that name behind). He came back to you smelling of some other woman’s perfume. And then she shut her eyes and gritted her teeth and held her breath and pushed so hard it felt as if she were turning herself inside out, hard enough to silence the voice that whispered in her mind, to forget that smell forever. She pushed until she could neither see nor hear, and then she fell back on her pillow, exhausted and spent and breathless . . . and certain. Perfume.

  A babble of voices rose up around her. “Okay, honey, ease off now . . . slow, slow, gentle . . . here come the shoulders.”

  She felt a sensation of slipping, of a great, twisting release, a sudden, shocking emptiness that reminded her, somehow, of her first orgasm, how it had taken her entirely by surprise and stolen her breath away.

  “Ayinde, look!” Dr. Mendlow called, beaming underneath his blue surgical cap.

  She looked up. And there was her baby, sheathed in a coat of grayish white, a head full of black hair slicked along his skull, full lips parted, tongue quivering, fists trembling in outrage.

  “Julian,” she said. Perfume, her mind whispered. Be quiet, she told it, and she stretched out her arms and reached for her son.

  May

  KELLY

  “Okay, so there’s Mary, Barry, then me, Kelly, then Charlie, Maureen and Doreen—they’re twins—Michael, and Terry. She’s the baby,” Kelly said. “Maureen’s in San Diego and Terry’s in college in Vermont. Everyone else is still in New Jersey. Everyone except me.” She and Becky had been in Ayinde’s house for half an hour, lavishing compliments on ten-day-old, six-pound-ten-ounce baby Julian, and accepting Ayinde’s thank-yous and the Kate Spade diaper bags she’d given them both as gifts (“Oh, really, this is way too much,” Kelly had said, while inwardly she was thrilled and only wished that the bag had said Kate Spade in larger, more visible letters). Then they’d toured the house’s ground-floor living room, dining room, granite-countered kitchen with a Sub-Zero refrigerator and a Viking range, butler’s pantry, solarium. Finally the talk had turned to Kelly’s unfashionably large family, whose members Kelly could recite in a single breath—Mary Barry me Charlie Maureen and Doreen they’re twins Michael and Terry she’s the baby—and Kelly was eager to return to a topic that would put her on more equal footing with her new friends.

  “My husband’s a big Sixers fan,” she said. “He grew up in New York, and he used to be a Knicks man, but ever since he went to Wharton, it’s all about Allen Iverson. And Richard, of course.” She sat back, satisfied that she’d found an unobtrusive way to work Wharton into the conversation.

  “How long have you guys been married?” Becky asked.

  “Almost four years,” said Kelly.

  “Lord, you must have been a child bride,” Becky said.

  “I was twenty-two,” Kelly said. “I guess that’s young. But I knew what I wanted.” The women were sitting in Ayinde’s movie-theater-sized living room. Ayinde was nursing baby Julian, a tiny, sleepy-eyed pouty-lipped b
undle in blue footie pajamas with a matching blue cap pulled over his curls. Kelly and Becky were side by side on the couch, sipping the tea and nibbling the cookies that a maid in a black-and-white uniform had carried in. Kelly couldn’t get over the room. Everything in it, from the richly patterned rugs to the tasseled pillows on the couches and the gold-framed mirror that hung over the marble fireplace, was absolutely right. Kelly wanted to stay in this room forever or, better yet, have a room just like it herself someday.

  “Do you guys want a big family, too?” Becky asked.

  “Oh, God, no,” said Kelly, with a shudder she couldn’t quite suppress. “I mean, it wasn’t so bad. We had a big van that the church gave us a good deal on—we’re Catholic, I know, big surprise—and we had a really big dining-room table, and . . .” She shrugged. “That was about it.”

  “It must have been nice,” said Ayinde, sounding wistful as she stroked her baby’s hair with her free hand. “You must have always had someone to talk to.”

  Kelly nodded, even though it wasn’t precisely true. Maureen was the only one she could really talk to. The rest of her brothers and sisters thought she was bossy, a tattletale, and too big for her britches when she tried to tell them what to eat or what to wear or how to behave. God, if she had a nickel for every time she’d heard You’re not my mother! from one of them. Like their actual mother was such great shakes. Kelly remembered how Paula O’Hara had discovered the scrapbook she’d kept when she was eight years old. The scrapbook was an old photo album that was meant to be the twins’ baby book, but her mother had gotten bored with it, so there were only a few snapshots of Maureen and Doreen when they’d come home from the hospital. The rest of it Kelly filled with her own pictures, ones cut out of copies of Ladies’ Home Journal and Newsweek and Time that she’d take from the dentist’s office at the end of the block after the receptionist left the magazines bundled up on the curb. Kelly wasn’t interested in pictures of people, just pictures of things. She’d cut out shots of big Colonial houses where the paint on the shutters wasn’t flaking off in long, curling strips; pictures of shining new minivans where you couldn’t still make out the words MARY MOTHER OF PEACE painted over on the side; pictures of blue vases full of daffodils and patent-leather tap shoes and a pink Huffy bike with a glitter banana seat. Pictures of dresses, pictures of shoes, a picture of the coat with real rabbit fur on the collar and cuffs that Missy Henry had worn to school last winter. Her mother had escorted Kelly into the living room, where none of the children were normally allowed, told her daughter to have a seat on the plastic slipcovered gold-and-green couch, and brandished the book in her face, shaking it so hard that a picture of some duchess’s hunting lodge came loose and fluttered to the floor. “What’s this?”

  There was no sense in trying to lie. “It’s just pictures of things I like.”

  Her mother’s eyes narrowed. Kelly surreptitiously sniffed her breath, but no, it was just coffee. So far. “Covetousness is a sin.”

  Kelly dropped her eyes, and even though she knew she should just be quiet, she couldn’t keep herself from asking, “Why is it bad to want nice things?”

  “You should be concerned with the state of your soul, not the state of your bank account,” said Paula. Her brown curls were cut short in a wash-and-go style that she hardly ever even bothered to comb, and she was wearing one of her husband’s old plaid shirts over her jeans. “Easier for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle than a rich man to enter Heaven.”

  “But why? Why is it bad to be rich? Why is it bad to have nice things?”

  “Because God doesn’t care about nice things,” her mother had said. Paula had been trying to sound pleasant—instructive, too, like a Sunday-school teacher—but Kelly could hear that she was losing patience. “God cares about good deeds.”

  “But why doesn’t God want good people to have nice things?” Kelly asked. “What if you have nice things and you do good deeds, too? What if . . .”

  “Enough,” her mother had said, tucking the book under her arm. “I’ll be keeping this, Kelly Marie. I want you to go to your room, and I want you to tell Father Frank about this on Saturday.”

  Kelly never told anyone about her book. That Saturday, she just confessed to her usual complement of little transgressions—Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It’s been one week since my last confession. I took the Lord’s name in vain and I fought with my little sister. What was she supposed to say? Why was what she’d done so wrong? Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. I cut a picture of a movie star’s black-and-white kitchen out of a three-month-old issue of Life? Her mother had done a poor job of hiding her scrapbook. She’d just shoved it in her closet, underneath the white leatherette book with the words our wedding tooled in gold leaf on the cover. The book contained a few dozen snapshots of the wedding at St. Veronica’s and the reception at the Knights of Columbus hall after. Her father’s tuxedo had had disco-era wide lapels; her mother’s Empire-waisted gown had failed to hide the bulge that would be baby Mary five months later. Kelly rescued her scrapbook the next night, and she’d kept it until she went off to college.

  Kelly sat back in Ayinde’s leather couch and set her teacup carefully into its saucer and smoothed her hair. She knew that, objectively, she looked okay, or at least as okay as a seven-and-a-half-month pregnant woman could look. At least her hair was right. Dr. Mendlow had probably thought she was crazy because the first question she’d asked during her first office visit wasn’t about diet or exercise or the birth itself but, “Can I get my hair highlighted?” Then again, Kelly thought, Dr. Mendlow didn’t know that her hair was the exact shade of dirty dishwater if she didn’t keep up with her color.

  She took another sip of tea. She’d kill to have hair like Becky’s. She’d just bet those were natural curls. Hair like Becky’s and a house like Ayinde’s, and she’d be all set.

  “So tell us about event planning,” Becky said. “Do you do weddings?”

  “Only a few and only the very high-end ones. Brides are crazy,” Kelly said, wrinkling her nose. “I mean, they have a right to be, of course, it’s their big day and all, but it’s much easier dealing with corporations. It’s not as personal for them.”

  Becky rolled her eyes. “Someday I’ll tell you about my wedding.”

  “Why? What happened?”

  Becky shook her head. “It’s a long and tragic story. Some other time.”

  Kelly hoped there would be another time and that the three of them would turn into those women she’d seen in the park or on the sidewalks, chatting easily as they wheeled their babies along. Maureen had always been her best friend, but Maureen had married an investment banker and moved out west, and none of her college friends were having babies yet. Only a few of them even had husbands.

  “Do you guys have brothers and sisters?” she asked. She ran one finger quickly over the gold rim on her saucer and wondered if it would be tacky to flip it over and see who’d made it. She decided, regretfully, that the answer was yes. She and Steve had gotten Wedgwood for their wedding, the same pattern that one of her favorite actresses had registered for, according to In Style magazine. But Ayinde’s china was more beautiful than anything she’d seen in any of the stores. Antique, probably.

  Ayinde shook her head. “I’m an only child.” She pressed her lips together, and shifted the baby in her arms. “I think my mother didn’t want to risk her figure with any more than me.”

  “Seriously?” asked Kelly.

  “Oh, yes, indeed,” said Ayinde. “Lolo takes her figure very seriously. She was a model in the seventies. She was the second woman of color ever on the cover of Vogue. Which she’d tell you herself, about ten minutes after she met you.”

  “And where are you both from?” Kelly asked. Oops. Bad move. Kelly the Cruise Director, her brother Barry used to call her. At family dinners, after grace, her mother would slump in her chair, staring listlessly at her plate, and her father would glare from face to face to face, looking alternately furi
ous and bewildered, as if he couldn’t figure out how all those kids had gotten there. Her brothers and sisters would just shove food into their mouths, and Kelly was the one trying to keep the leaden ball of the conversation aloft, with an effort that made her teeth ache. How was school today, everyone? she’d ask. Doreen, how was field hockey? Her sister would say, Shut up, Pollyanna. You’re not my mother. And Paula would be glaring at Kelly from her chair. No, you’re not their mother, she’d mumble sometimes, in a voice both angry and somehow confused, as if she was saying it out loud to convince herself that it was true. But somebody had to be their mother, Kelly thought; someone at least had to try, and after four in the afternoon, there was no way that Paula was up to the task. So she’d try. Michael, how was your science test? Terry, did you remember to get Mom to sign your permission slip? One by one, her siblings would carry their plates into the family room to eat in front of the television set, leaving Kelly and her parents alone at the table, in a room gone so quiet that you could hear their knives and forks moving over their plates.

  Becky told them she’d grown up in Florida and had come to Philadelphia for her husband’s residency. Ayinde was born in New York City, but had gone to Miss Porter’s in Connecticut for high school, then Yale for college, and she’d spent her summers abroad. Abroad. Kelly didn’t think that she herself could ever get away with using that word in a sentence, even though technically she could because she’d gone to Paris for her honeymoon. You had to be beautiful to use a word like that. It also helped if you didn’t come from New Jersey.

  Ayinde settled Julian over her shoulder to burp him, and Becky shifted on the couch, giving her belly small pats, as if it were a dog that had settled in her lap, and Kelly felt the silence stretching uncomfortably. There were a million questions she wanted to ask Ayinde—What was labor really like? foremost among them. Her mother had had so many babies, Kelly thought she’d have some idea, but she didn’t. Paula would leave either in the middle of the night or the middle of the day, and she’d come home a few days later, looking even more exhausted than normal, with a new little bundle in her arms for Kelly to wash and diaper and coo over. She’d tried to ask her sister Mary, the only one with children, some of her questions, but Mary had brushed her off. “Your labor will be fine, and your baby will be perfect,” Mary said, as her own three kids screamed in the background during the sisters’ first-of-the-month conference call. “And if it’s not, you’ll just return it for store credit.”