This Fragile Life

“What about some ginger tea?” Martha suggests. “It’s supposed to settle the stomach.”

“I’m fine,” I say. “Really. It was just a one-time thing.”

And still Martha says nothing.

I have this horrible feeling she knows, and I feel worse for trying to hide it from her, although, really, I didn’t exactly have time to tell her. Still I feel a certain cool kind of assessment coming from her, and I don’t remember what we talk about for the rest of the evening. Not much, anyway.

I’m exhausted by the time I head home on the subway, and then take the 14th Street crosstown bus all the way over to Avenue C. I live on the top floor of an old tenement building, which is as bad as it sounds, although I’ve never minded before. At least I have my own place.

Yet now as I climb the stairs I’m thinking all kinds of ridiculous thoughts. Like how hard these stairs would be if I were nine months pregnant. And how there is no way I could haul a stroller up six narrow flights.

It’s past eleven by the time I finally get back to my apartment, and I see it all through this new lens of quasi-motherhood, these critical and despairing eyes I don’t like. It’s one little room, about fifteen feet by ten, with a tiny sink, a two-burner stove, and a mini fridge tucked in one corner. The bathroom holds a shower stall and toilet, no sink, and besides the futon, a table, and a bookcase I have no real furniture. I keep my clothes in a jumble of plastic crates stacked on top of one another.

I sink onto my futon, and I no longer have the strength not to think about it. Not to realize how ridiculous and impossible and stupid this all is, to contemplate for one second the possibility of actually having this baby. Of being a mother.

I don’t even want a baby, do I? I’m pretty sure I don’t. Yet this isn’t even about want; it’s about something deeper, something fundamental and biological. This might be my last chance. My last chance for a life I never even wanted before.

Three days go by and I still don’t call that number.

Chapter 3

MARTHA

Alex is pregnant. It beats like a bass drum through my mind, giving me a headache. Alex is pregnant. I count the symptoms silently, the throwing up being the most obvious one of all. She took one look at that fish and heaved. But there were others, I think as I lie in bed next to Rob that night. She looked pale, drawn. She put all the blue cheese in her salad to one side. She seemed a little dizzy when she stood up. She’’s pregnant.

I haven’t told Rob my suspicions, and I don’t intend to, not yet. He’d probably be happy for her, the way he’s happy for everybody, and her fertility would highlight my own failure as a wife, a woman.

I am furious that I can’t get pregnant after five years of trying and Alex can just fall into it. It’s probably a mistake. Alex isn’t seeing anyone as far as I know, and her life isn’t exactly set up for a baby. I can’t imagine her as a mother.

And then I realize that maybe, probably, she won’t have it. It’s early. She could still have an abortion. She probably will have an abortion.

And I feel a chill enter my soul, a terror I don’t understand. I know, on a purely analytical level, that what Alex does with her pregnancy has no bearing on my life. Yet I can’t escape this inexplicable fear that slips coldly through me, that somehow her ending this pregnancy will end something for me.

It’s absurd, because everything’s already ended for me.

I feel Rob’s hand rub my back, sleepy, half-hearted. “You okay?” he asks, and I wonder why he is asking. Am I tense? Can he feel it? He’s been so careful with me since the last IVF attempt, and I felt as if we were moving on. Just a little, but my soul was healing.

Now everything feels ripped open and raw.

“I’m fine,” I say, and Rob rolls over and falls fast asleep, slack-jawed and snoring. I lie there, staring up at the ceiling, everything in me tight and taut and angry. And all I can think is, Alex is pregnant. Pregnant. And I’’m not.

Alex and I have been friends, first by default and then by choice, for over twenty years. Our parents are neighbors in the same Connecticut suburb; they’ve been friends for even longer than we have. When we were growing up we were thrown together at all those awkward family functions, dinners and drinks parties and days at the beach. At first we circled each other warily, too different from one another to attempt to find any common ground. Alex is younger than me by a year, but in junior high she seemed cooler. She had the indifferent air of a rebel, even though I don’t think she actually did anything that rebellious. Still, I was the do-gooding people-pleaser: I got straight As; I had braces; I wore knee socks pulled up high until seventh grade. Alex seemed cool to me.

Looking back, I know Alex intimidated me; she was friendly but also indifferent, dreamily in her own world. I think even then I was both jealous of the kind of comfort she had with herself, and grateful for her overtures of friendship—playing video games in her family’s basement, wandering over to our neighborhood playground to hang out on the swings—even as part of me resented it, and the fact that I needed it, that I was the needy one.

Then my braces came off and I lost the knee socks, I grew three inches and two bra sizes and in tenth grade I was suddenly, superficially cool. It was a low-grade kind of thing; I was never in the actual popular crowd. But I had a boyfriend, I got into Yale, and my father bought me a navy-blue Mazda convertible for my seventeenth birthday. I was cool and Alex, who had never quite pulled together the rebel look, who had average grades and a random assortment of arty friends, no longer was.

And part of me was glad about that.

We were still friendly during all those tediousget-togethers, although I at least felt more smugly in control. I doubt Alex even noticed. At school, we stayed in our separate groups and never spoke, hardly even saw each other. We were in different years, after all.

Then my junior year in college I came home for summer break, intending to get some crappy job and make some money before going back to Yale. I hadn’t got the internship I wanted and I was feeling pretty low, and so I ended up fighting with my mother, which wasn’t, to be honest, all that uncommon an occurrence. Well, actually it was; since I was about sixteen I’d managed my mother as best I could, which mostly meant avoiding her, especially if she’d been drinking.

But that night we argued, I don’t even remember about what, and my mother locked me out of the house, and I ended up going across the street and knocking on Alex’s door.

I still remember how she opened the door: messy, rumpled, as if she’d just rolled out of bed although I don’t think she had. She didn’t look surprised to see me, even though we hadn’t spoken properly outside of family functions in years. She just smiled, said, “Martha, hey. Come on in,” and asked if I wanted a drink.

We drank beers out on her back patio; she was there alone, because her parents had gone on some golfing vacation for a couple of weeks. They travelled a lot, I remember, and Alex always seemed to have the house to herself.

I remember feeling a kind of vague, appalled pity for her, which I have probably felt on some level ever since. She hadn’t got into a good college; it was decent, some random place in Maine, but it wasn’t the kind that opened corporate doors. But then I couldn’t see Alex knocking on those doors, either. I remember watching her that night, in a sort of amazed fascination. She was drinking her beer almost absently, so unfazed by everything: her own wandering life, my sudden appearance, the limits of possibility on her own existence. She didn’t mind any of it, and, even though that horrified me, part of me was, I think, just a little bit jealous. To be so at ease, so relaxed and assured that life would unfold as it was meant to, like a map…! Yes, I was jealous.

At that point, of course, college was everything to me. I’d made Phi Beta Kappa my junior year and even though I hadn’t got the internship I’d wanted I was focused. I had a double major in English and Media Studies and I volunteered at an ad agency in New Haven during the school year. I had ambition, I had plans, I had everything, and Alex’s art major and aimless plans seemed awful to me.

And yet, despite our differences, we became friends. Real friends, not just ones forced together for yet another cocktail party or barbecue. I like being around Alex, mainly because she’s so different from me. She’s one of the few people who can actually make me belly laugh, although admittedly it’s rare. And she’s so relaxed about everything that when I’m with her I find myself unwinding just a little, just enough. Sometimes I wonder what she sees in me; maybe she needs one person in her life who gives her good advice, who tells her like it is. I like to think that she needs someone like me.

But now? If she’s pregnant? I feel as if it could change everything.

I wait three days and then I call her. I suggest we meet for coffee at a little place on Twenty-Third Street, halfway between my work place and where she is a barista. I take a cab and get there early; I order an iced latte and take the table in the corner.

She arrives twelve minutes late, which annoys me just a little because this is my lunch break, and I generally don’t take hour-long lunches. But that’s Alex, and I get that. Like I said, we’re different.

I smile, stand, place my cheek a half-inch from hers. We sit, and I ask if she wants a coffee. She shakes her head.

And then I say nothing, because for once I have no plan, no bullet points to cover. I want to ask if she’s pregnant, and yet I’m afraid to at the same time. Then Alex does something she hardly ever does; she takes the lead. She smiles and sighs and says,

“I know you know.”

And then suddenly it’s easy. “You’re pregnant.” She nods. I let out a shuddery breath, although I’m not sure what I’m feeling. Vindication? Jealousy? Relief? It’s all mixed up. “How far along are you?” I ask and she just shrugs.

“I’m sorry,” she says after a moment, and I stiffen.

“For what?”

“It just…it doesn’t seem fair, does it?” She looks at me with dark, sorrowful eyes and my throat starts to ache.

No, it damn well doesn’t seem fair, but weirdly I’m glad she’s acknowledged it. “What are you going to do?” I ask quietly.

“I don’t know.”

I feel a little better hearing that, although I’m not sure why. “What about the father?”

“I haven’t contacted him.”

“You’re not—dating?”

She lets out an abrupt laugh and shakes her head. “No.”

“Well.” I sit back. “I want to support you.” This sounds trite, and yet I mean it.