Spoiled Read online

  “No, he does not,” Brenda said belligerently, licking her fingers as she returned to the batch of instant brownies she was mixing up.

  “What, he lost?” Alice said, flushing because she feared a faux pas.

  “Hello-o?” said Brenda. She wiped her index finger along the spatula and licked it. “He’s got three kids at home? And he’s hanging out down at the nineteenth hole with retired guys twice his age?” She held out the spatula to Alice, who shook her head. “When I found out I was pregnant again, I’m like, ‘You know what? No. Bullshit. You stay here with me, or you go and you take the boys with you—and not just John because he’s good; Robbie needs the practice, too.’” She gave the bowl a final scrape and tossed the spatula into the sink. She then set the timer on the stove. “Twenty minutes—don’t let me forget.”

  She drank a glass of water at the sink, surveying Alice. “Jesus, you look good. You don’t even look pregnant.”

  Alice flushed again, speechless, and Brenda said impatiently, “It’s okay! I know I’m fat. I look like shit! But what am I supposed to do about it?” She opened the fridge and took out a half-empty bottle of the vinho verde she and Kevin liked to drink. Alice watched her yank out the cork. “Not gonna tell on me, are you, Al?” Brenda said. Cracking ice into two tumblers, she topped the wine off with club soda and pushed one over the counter to Alice. “I’m not allowed to diet when I’m pregnant. It’s bad for the baby.”

  “You know, you’re right.” Alice was disgusted by the sycophantic tone she relied on with Brenda but never quite seemed to find another. “You’re absolutely right, Bren.”

  “My friend Ellen gained sixty pounds with her twins and she lost it all, every single effing pound, can you believe it? On Atkins. That’s what I’m gonna do.” Brenda picked up a paperback off the counter and tossed it to Alice, who, with only one hand free, caught the edge of it and had to lunge for it as it dropped. “Oh, right, I’ve heard this is good.” She frowned to herself as she examined the book’s cover, annoyed that she had forgotten the proscription against big, sudden movements after the amniocentesis. Minor physical humiliations were a staple of visits to the Healys’. The hot water in the bathroom off the kitchen scalded one’s hands; the screen door that led out to the deck, through which Alice followed Brenda now, was hung too tightly on its hinges, as if to make people jump when it slammed shut on them.

  “I hear breast-feeding helps, too,” Alice said without thinking, as they came out onto the deck.

  Brenda stopped and scrutinized her in a way that made Alice have to swallow. “Guess I wouldn’t know, would I?” she said. She set her drink down on the picnic table and shielded her eyes to where Robbie and John and a Chinese kid they palled around with—adopted, Alice recalled—were whacking one another with clubs in front of some sort of golf game: a patch of Astroturf that ended in an oversized net. “You guys play for real or I’m gonna lock that thing up!” Brenda hollered.

  Kevin, who was fiddling with the grill, grinned when he saw Alice. “Hubby and I have been talking, Al,” he called, gesturing with the barbecue tongs to Mark. “We figured three more and you guys’ll be right on track!”

  “Yeah, right,” Alice said lamely, pretending to drink from her spritzer, stymied as usual by Kevin’s easy banter, his comically good hair—dark and wavy, just now graying at the sides.

  “Says he,” Brenda grumbled good-naturedly as the two women tugged out facing benches from beneath the teak table. Guests at the Healys’ were expected to sit outside since the completion of the deck a couple of summers ago, even on a nippy, late autumn day like today, with Brenda’s Halloween cutouts fading in the windows and the last of the brown crunchy leaves clinging to the maple in the corner of the lawn.

  “So, my doctor thinks I should get amnio,” Alice said, shivering a little.

  “I mean it, John!” Brenda half rose to yell at the boys again. “Doesn’t it make you sick?” she said, turning back to Alice, and Alice, mesmerized by the physical aggression of the preteen boys, had to concentrate to remember what they’d been talking about. Brenda had a way of speaking that seemed to indict nuance and qualification—to take pleasure in exposing both as the weenie-ass conversational tics they were. “Doesn’t it just disgust you?” She pushed a silver bowl of nuts toward Alice. “And it’s all just for their own benefit, you know, so they don’t get sued and have their malpractice go through the roof.”

  Frowning mistrustfully, Brenda withdrew a plastic baby monitor from her apron pocket and held it up to her ear.

  “No, but come on, Kevin,” Alice heard Mark say, “if the administration cared about terrorism …” She looked quickly at Brenda, hoping her cousin hadn’t heard. Why, with the election a week away, did Mark have to go there? But Alice’s husband would have considered it condescending not to mention the election—to dance around it the way Alice would with Brenda. Mark’s politics, an extension not of passion but of an unforgiving moral logic, didn’t allow for fury, for disappointment, for attraction and repulsion. On their very first date, he’d told her that no white, upper-middle-class, college-educated woman had legitimate fear of getting AIDS. “So much for that excuse,” she’d said, giggling, happy to be debunked.

  “They wanted me to have it with Tyler, amnio-CVS-nuchal-cord-blood shit crap whatever, ’cause I was over thirty-five, and I’m like, ‘Bullshit. I’m having this baby no matter what, thank you very much,’” Brenda recalled, satisfied.

  There was a guffaw and then a scuffle as Robbie, in braces and with an unattractive new haircut—high on top, with the sides shaved—was interrupted from teeing off by one of the boys making a loud farting noise. Brenda watched them, expressionless. “I swear if I don’t have a girl this time I’m going over to China to adopt.” Alice laughed aloud and was surprised at how good it felt. “Yeah, so they all act like I’m making a big mistake and I might regret it. Oh, crap.” Brenda gave the monitor an aggrieved shake. “I forgot to turn the fucking thing on!”

  “Yeah,” said Alice slowly. “I know what you mean.” She hesitated as Brenda pressed the device to her ear. “I mean, to be fair, I’m not sure I see the harm in just having the test …”

  A look of alarm crossed her cousin’s face and Alice flinched. But then she, too, heard the noise coming from the monitor: Upstairs, the baby had woken up. Brenda’s face sagged with the realization.

  “Do you want me to go get him? Let me go.”

  Brenda scowled in the direction of the men. “Never on his watch. I swear to God he plans it.”

  “Let me,” insisted Alice, halfway to her feet. “You relax.”

  “No, no.” Brenda reached across the table and gave Alice’s forearm a squeeze. “You’ve got to enjoy it while it lasts, lady!”

  She had always been like that. Disarming gestures of warmth, even in adolescence, had confused one’s belief that Brenda didn’t, fundamentally, like one; eventually one began to realize it was nothing personal, the abrasiveness. And Alice’s cousin really believed that thing she and her mother, Roberta, were always saying, that family were the only people you could count on. Their attitude couldn’t have been further from what Alice had learned growing up. Her own mother’s example, even within her immediate family, had been social affability to a groveling extreme, followed by endless private litanies of complaint, of remembered insult, of minor unfairnesses—an overlooked younger sister’s lot, perhaps.

  Brenda took her time about getting up: taking another handful of nuts, crunching them in her mouth, staring vacantly out at the men. As she sat there, the way her cousin looked—defeated, knowing she had to go get the baby, but bent on procrastinating nonetheless—moved Alice unexpectedly. She had to turn away and bite her cheek.

  “All right, all right!” Brenda got heavily to her feet, draining her glass, as the wail intensified. “I’m coming already!”

  WHEN SHE WAS gone Alice got up and went inside and poured her spritzer down the sink. She was hunting in the cupboards for the club soda when
the timer went off on the brownies. She couldn’t find pot holders in the mess on the counter so she doubled over a dish towel and took the pan out of the oven one-handed. The smell was intoxicating. Before Alice could stop herself she had gotten a knife and dug out a corner piece. She ate it, gobbling it down as it burned her tongue and the sides of her mouth; she cut off another piece and ate that, looking out the kitchen window past the deck at the guys. Kevin was having a go at the tee, and even with her total ignorance about the game, Alice could see his swing had something that the others’ lacked. A head shorter than Mark, he had the lean, careful kind of physical fitness that suggests control. Alice would find herself paying her cousin’s husband the tribute of being “well preserved,” forgetting that Kev was only three years older than she. But Kevin had had a mortgage and a child and another on the way at twenty-five, when people like Alice were basically still in college—getting trashed in Village bars.

  Now Mark was having a go, clowning, playing it for laughs—nothing at stake.

  Alice sliced the rest of the pan into squares, slid the brownies out, and arranged them on a ceramic pumpkin plate. She wiped her mouth vigorously with the dish towel and ran her tongue carefully over her teeth several times.

  When she heard Brenda on the stairs, she turned around guiltily and then was confused for a moment, unable to recall the source of the guilt.

  “Had to change him,” Brenda said. “Sorry.” With a practiced gesture she thrust the baby into a plastic stand-up play circle on the floor.

  “Can I do something?” Alice said as her cousin started to mix up a bottle. “I put the brownies on a plate.” The little boy had Brenda’s strawberry-blond coloring. He was robust, rosy-cheeked—cuter than Alice remembered from the christening. Feeling useless, she knelt down and waggled her fingers at him. “Hi, Tyler, how’re you doing?”

  Brenda held up the empty glass Alice had left by the sink. “You ready for another?”

  “Actually, you know—I think I’m good,” Alice said, straightening up.

  Brenda nodded. Then she got the bottle of wine out of the fridge. “There’s not much alcohol in it, you know.”

  “No, no, I know. I just—” Alice gave an inarticulate, impatient shake of her head. “I’m trying to be good.”

  Brenda studied her impassively for a moment and then she gave a little nod. “I remember that,” she said. “First kid. You think every little thing matters.”

  OF COURSE, IT had come to Alice on the train back to New York—what she could have said when Brenda asked her, when they were dumping the paper plates, plastic cutlery, and ends of hamburgers into the trash, why anyone would ever get amniocentesis. “To be ready,” she could have said. “They say it helps to be ready.” She’d heard people say that before. Why couldn’t she have thought of it in the moment?

  It was late afternoon—getting dark, and the train was drawing close to the city; passing rows and rows of the red-brick, barracks-like housing of some cemented-over neighborhood, unknown to Alice and Mark but for its proximity to the Long Island Rail Road. On one block, in each of the houses’ windows that faced the tracks, the president’s name blared forth from the familiar oblong red campaign signs.

  Alice made a strangled noise. “God, will you look at these people?”

  Three or four beers in, Mark leaned over and gave her an attagirl pat on the thigh. “Give it twenty minutes, babe, the signs’ll change color.”

  “No, but Mark, it’s insane!” she said angrily, shrugging him off, his cozy mood. “He’s a total … he’s a fucking asshole!”

  “Ye-e-es,” Mark said, in a voice that made the pretense of placating her, but was really a laugh cue to the imagined audience that attended their marriage.

  “Don’t say it like that,” Alice said ferociously. “Don’t you dare fucking condescend to me.”

  Mark studied her face. He wasn’t angry, just unimpressed. “This really isn’t a fun ten days, is it?”

  “This isn’t about the amnio! For Christ’s sake, not everything is about that fucking test!”

  After a pause, Mark shrugged and said, “It’s really not that bad.”

  “How can you say that? How can you say that when he’s going to win—again—and we’re going to lose? I just can’t bear to think about it, Mark. All the money we’ve given, and the time people have spent—and it’s all so … wasted. Months and months—when you think about the work—and it’s all just wasted!”

  Mark sat back in his seat, withdrawing to some remote place, his expression unreadable; perhaps he was simply disappointed in her, by her display of emotion when he preferred solutions. “Neither one’s going to put an end to the war,” he said finally. “Neither one’s going to outlaw abortion.”

  She looked at him quickly but just then the train ran underground, creating that momentary sensation of intimacy among all of the passengers, so she didn’t dare to speak. It wasn’t until they had pulled to a stop and people were clogging the aisle, trapping them in their seats that she turned to him and said in an urgent murmur, resuming the conversation they’d begun the trip with, “I don’t understand, all right? I don’t get it. If it’s got nothing to do with viability … ? I mean, where exactly do you draw the line?” “Oh, Alice.” Mark raised his eyes to the ceiling before he spoke. “I think the only consistent argument,” he said slowly, “is that sometimes it’s okay to kill a kid.”

  A FEW MINUTES after she hung up with Dr. Rand, Alice took the elevator down to the ground-floor atrium of her office building.

  She sat down with a paper cup of tea at one of the chrome café tables, dunking the tea bag, then fiddling with her cell phone, clearing her throat and practicing her “hello”—gearing up to try Maureen. She sipped her tea and looked around the open-air space at the random assortment of people who’d come in off the street to kill time with a cup of coffee in this strange, corporate charity—the atrium was open to the public—and it wasn’t rage or a sense of injustice that came over her, but weariness, a profound weariness, for the time in which she lived, and a longing for the past, when you had to wear a coat and tie at the Yale Club and there were no free agents in baseball, when people still put four hundred thousand miles on their cars and jury-rigged fifteen-year-old toasters to go another season. Whereas nowadays, she thought, appliances were so expendable.

  She dialed home and when Maureen picked up, cheerful and expectant, Alice’s voice cracked.

  “Mom?”

  SHE WAS AN educated, successful woman.

  Oh, sure, given some other context, a different context, there was no question Alice would have gotten something out of it. One of her mother’s cousins, Danny (didn’t every family have one?), had presided over every extended-family function these last thirty years. He gave the speech everyone remembered at Brenda and Kevin’s wedding—the most heartfelt, the least self-conscious, even through the stutter and the nasal tones—a moment of grace in an otherwise, let’s face it, pretty tacky affair. Tears had come to Maureen’s eyes, to Alice’s eyes. When Alice’s great-uncle died and her great-aunt was ailing, Roberta and her mother and their brother had looked around for a group home for Danny outside of Boston. The one they found was a very nice one; Danny would be very happy there. (“Of course it’s ‘nice,’ ”Alice remembered saying when Maureen was giving her the line. “What are you going to do, put him in a crap one?”) Alice had visited Danny there twice, once with Maureen and once on her own, in a fit of atonement after the prolonged, crushing end of a relationship. He seemed to have a lot of friends and was particularly fond of a young woman named Kay. The second time she went, her timing was off; Danny couldn’t talk. The residents were heading out in their van to go to the movies and Danny was anxious about getting to share a seat with Kay.

  “She’ll save it for you, Danny. Don’t worry,” said a slack, overweight woman who was helping to load the adults into the van. To Alice she said she should have called first.

  “Danny certainly seems very happy here,
” Alice said, ignoring the rebuke. She had used the remark on the previous visit, to good effect.

  “Mm-hmm,” the woman had answered neutrally. “Danny’s a happy guy.”

  TOWARD THE END of the following week, Alice came out of the hospital into the cutting wind of a bright November afternoon—alone, as she had insisted, which was in keeping with the rest of the pregnancy. Unlike the preponderance of women waiting in the various holding rooms of the hospital, for checkups, sonograms, consultations, counseling, Alice had never had her husband beside her. It had not occurred to her that Mark would come—the same as it had not occurred to her to go around saying, “We’re pregnant”—until she was surrounded by women to whom it had. And then of course it had become a point of pride. (Cynical; tomboys.) Who were these other women at the hospital who always had Hubby in tow? Or rather, who were the men? “What the hell do they do for a living?” Alice liked to ask glibly, as if she were making a comment on the men’s industriousness, when of course it was really a class boast. Mark, of all people, with his academic schedule, might easily have been at these appointments with her, had she but asked him to come.