The Birthdays Read online

  When they got going, Brenda dipped back into her song. She exaggerated her accent, and what was this awful song anyway? He didn’t recognize the words.

  “Bren,” he said, “could we have some quiet?”

  “I feel like singing.”

  She sounded so young, but then again, she was. “Fine.”

  “Oh, just forget it.” She reached forward and turned on the radio—anything was better than listening to him complain. Or listening to silence.

  “Go ahead, sing. The windshield might shatter, though.” He looked out the window at the squat, toylike houses on their street—teal, white, seashell gray.

  “That was unnecessary.”

  She was right, and he began to feel small sitting beside her in their car, a small-minded man withering beside his wife flourishing. It was perplexing, really, that he couldn’t embrace her happiness lately.

  “What do you think his name is?” Daniel asked. “Why do you think he wanted to be anonymous?”

  “Who?”

  “The donor.”

  She sighed heavily. “Does it really matter?”

  “I’m thinking his name is Peter. Or Jonathan. A good WASP name. Jonathan White. Something completely bland and boring.”

  “You mean something anonymous?”

  He smiled. “I guess.”

  “I don’t know why you dwell on this. It only makes you feel like shit. Mum said she knew this would be a problem, that the whole donor thing would bring up issues.”

  “What the hell does she know about sperm donors? I wish you wouldn’t tell her so much about every little thing we do.”

  “I wouldn’t exactly call this little,” she said. “At any rate, I thought you agreed to make yourself think about other things.”

  He rested his palms on his lap. “I guess I did,” he said. He could feel the rough, crisp denim of his shorts, but he could not feel the weight of his hands on his legs.

  Ten years ago he never thought much about having children. They seemed something that would remain a part of his future, never his present. He met Brenda when he was teaching a figure drawing class at her college. She was endearingly awful, so stuck on getting every detail just right (“Exaggerate, make things up, make the model yours,” he’d told them, and later he thought it made sense when she chose photography as her major), but she hovered near him at the end of each class and in her thick accent asked him question after question about his work. She listened to his answers with reverence. She was deferential in talk, but the way she carried herself—her firm posture, her emphatic gestures, even her black hair cut close to her head and her pale blue eyes—lent her a different dimension. A sense that she knew more than she let on, that she was wiser and more adult than her years. She had an endearing habit of licking her lips twice before she began speaking, and though he’d told himself not to pay such close attention to a student, he found that he couldn’t help it.

  Two years later, they married and bought an apartment in Brooklyn, and once their friends began having children, they discussed doing the same but decided to wait. Things were busy for them—Daniel’s work would soon be featured in magazines and books, and Brenda, now a commercial photographer, had been contracted for several assignments in Africa. Their careers were thriving, and they didn’t want this to change. Then Brenda was returning from a trip to the Serengeti, where she’d been photographing running shoes. A storm had moved much quicker than predicted, and the airplane rose and dipped through the lightning in the sky. The turbulence was like a wave, like we were inside a tidal wave, she said. I felt this sinking so intense my stomach went from my throat to my toes in less than one second, and then my head smashed into the seat in front of me. After the plane landed in Memphis, she was transported to the nearest hospital, and—miraculously—her injuries turned out to be only a mild case of whiplash and a bruised head. Others on the plane had not been so lucky. An elderly woman had suffered a heart attack and died; one man had been hit on the head by a falling suitcase and had slipped into a coma.

  As Daniel drove her the twenty-one hours home from the hospital so she wouldn’t have to endure another flight, Brenda sat rigid and still beside him, drumming her fingers against her knees. “I want to have a child,” she said after a while, and he nodded. “Then we’ll have a child.”

  Now Daniel liked to think back on this time and savor the drama of this decision made so soon after that flight. He couldn’t remember actively engaging in any thought process, only yielding to something bigger than them. That night, and every night for the next two weeks, they climbed into bed and tried to make a baby, and Daniel brimmed with a sense of purpose and a renewed adoration of his wife. Weeks passed and she got her period, so the next month they tried again, as well as the next.

  Neither of them could have expected what came two months later, which was eventually followed by their move to Massachusetts. Here they could more easily own a car. Here Daniel’s parents could come over and help when needed, and in a smaller city, everything seemed more wheelchair-accessible. It was like a poorly written movie, he often thought, Brenda’s near miss followed so closely by his own tragedy—tragedy? Was the word too extreme? Well, no, he thought now, and he shouldn’t have to apologize for hyperbole, and especially not to himself. Brenda survived a near plane crash virtually unscathed, and he couldn’t bike to the store to pick up sugar and milk without getting crushed by a hatchback.

  She fiddled with the radio dial. He had behaved like one of those men in the supermarket who shouted at their children when they spoke too loudly and snapped at their wives for no good reason. Surly, tired, predictable men who did nothing to prove that they weren’t the more volatile gender. He would think before he spoke from now on. He would lighten his tone.

  They drove in silence and Daniel looked out the window at the passing houses, their shingled roofs sloping toward the road. He rolled down the window, leaned out his arm and cupped his hand into the wind. The air lifted and dropped his curled hand and pushed between his fingers. It seemed he could feel every cell in his palms. They tingled and cooled with the breeze.

  —

  Ellen Miller stood at the stove, waiting for the kettle to whistle. She imagined her fingers losing sensation, then her arms, her shoulders, her neck. She pictured each part of herself shutting down, then the memories, the knowledge, the sound of her own breath each night, the look of the melon-colored sun setting over the abandoned playground at the end of the street, all of it fading to black. Or would there even be black? Perhaps there wouldn’t be color or anything she could possibly imagine given the equipment she or anyone else on this earth had. Her husband Joe would call her ghoulish for thinking such things, but MacNeil would understand. MacNeil, whom she’d known only as her good friend Vera’s husband for years.

  Joe sat behind her at the kitchen table waiting for his tea. His flesh hung on his bones, sagging and folding with age.

  “Seventy-five years. You’re an old man.”

  “And you’re an old lady,” he said in his quiet baritone, and what could she say to this? Of course I am. Give me something better than that.

  “I’m younger than you.”

  “Not by much.” He was reading some library book about a war. He read only books about war and danger and suspense and murder, books she found boring given the amount of action they provided. She supposed he must have gotten something necessary from them, as he himself had once served in a war—she often had to remind herself of this fact.

  The kettle sang and she filled two cups and brought them to the small table. They’d been talking about buying a bigger one for years, but there were always more urgent things to buy—a new clutch for the car, a new boiler. It was only seven A.M., and they had hours to pass before they would drive to Maine and board the ferry that would take them to Great Salt Island and Jake’s undoubtedly large summer home. At least someone in the family had made a lot of money. At least someone had realized a dream.

  MacNeil was in S
an Francisco visiting his daughter. He’d be back in a couple of days and that following Wednesday they would go to Boston, to the Gardner Museum for a concert of Bach and Schumann in the Tapestry Room. She’d never been disloyal to Joe in her life and she knew he’d not been either. But she wondered where her newfound friendship with Mac-Neil would lead—and how funny, she thought, how perfectly strange to wonder such a thing this late in life. The last few times she’d seen him, she’d noticed a distinct charge in the air between them, a quickening in her chest. She’d become more self-conscious with him, more aware of everything he said and the way he said it. And it seemed as if he’d been responding to something too. He’d started standing closer to her, and touching her more—gently on her arm or her hand as they walked together, on the small of her back as he opened a door for her, and she couldn’t help it, she liked it. Objectively, their relationship was just a friendship. Platonic. She knew MacNeil would have agreed, but she couldn’t keep herself from speculating about the possibilities. And when she did, she questioned what it was that she truly wanted from him—to feel the beginnings of desire again? To feel desirable and interesting, or at least interested? To act on these feelings? Or something more permanent, more life-changing? This thought seemed too cumbersome, its ramifications too enormous to even entertain. What do you really want? was the question that kept people up at night, and she’d gotten through the years mostly by not asking it of herself, just continuing on, and contemplating only that which was directly before her, that which was easily answerable: the logistics of life, of work and home and family. Her children, especially Jake, were plagued by questions of fate and human will and it did them no good. Since Jake was a child, he’d been hunting for something that was just out of his reach—more friends, different girlfriends, athletic achievement, academic success. It seemed that he finally got what he wanted when he met his wife Liz, and later, when he found his astonishingly high-paying job in finance. But even now he wasn’t entirely content. He complained constantly to Ellen about his brother and sister never calling him, about how he wished the family were closer and saw each other more and how he worried that his child would barely know its cousin. Jake didn’t seem to see his own role in the matter—that he tended to complain too much. He tried too hard to impress or at least to please people. He was too forceful with his love, and he inadvertently made people recoil, which made him try even harder. It seemed that he might never be truly happy. His wife Liz was a minor saint. Or perhaps, Ellen thought with a twinge, perhaps she had a MacNeil in her life.

  “Do you think Liz is happy?” Ellen asked Joe.

  “She’s finally pregnant. It’s what they’ve been working on for years, a family.” He didn’t look up from his book. The air conditioner next door whirred and the neighbor, Dorothy Wenders, coughed. There was no quiet in this neighborhood. No privacy at all.

  “Happy as in deeply happy, satisfied with her life and their marriage, not just relieved that she’s going to become a mother.”

  He slid a finger between the pages of his book and looked above his glasses at her. “I do think she’s happy,” he said. “Sugar?”

  She rose to find the sugar bowl and nearly tripped over Babe, Joe’s box turtle, who had planted himself a foot from her chair. “Must you let him out so often?”

  “He needs to stretch.”

  “He’s a turtle, he doesn’t have muscles that need stretching. He has a shell. He has turtle flesh.”

  “Come here, Babe,” Joe murmured, snapping his fingers near the floor.

  “It’s just not sanitary, letting him have the run of the kitchen.”

  “He’s the cleanest turtle you’ll ever find.”

  “Because it’s almost your birthday, I’ll give you this,” she said as she handed him the sugar bowl and sat. She wished she didn’t have the desire to fling the turtle out the window. As a boy, Joe hadn’t been allowed pets or toys or anything, really. The only child of a poor Russian couple, he had grown up in a small, bleak apartment in Buffalo. Constantly afraid some tragedy would befall him in this new country, his parents rarely let him play outside with the neighborhood children. It wasn’t a surprise that Joe now treasured the things that filled their small house with life.

  Babe stared up at her, and she sighed. MacNeil did not have pets or a house filled with the clutter of old newspapers or piles of clothes heaped on chairs. He did not have leaking ceilings and a prehistoric boiler and stained, threadbare carpets. His house was clean and spare and spacious, the house of a man who lived alone and kept only that which fed his soul—soul! A word MacNeil used with regularity, a word that previously Ellen had never thought to use in daily conversation. In his living room were original paintings, photographs, rare books—he could afford the finest. Ellen lifted the tea bag from her cup and wrung it against the spoon. She supposed Babe filled a small hole in Joe’s spirit, one made in his childhood, but in the end it just seemed so ignoble, his obsession with his pet, his rock with four legs.

  “Happy almost-birthday to me,” Joe said suddenly, and stood. He moved behind her and lightly kissed the top of her head. “Come here.”

  “What is it?”

  “Let’s dance,” he said, and clumsily pulled her from her seat.

  “Joe.” He was acting like someone else. Her husband Joe wasn’t the sort of man who just up and danced with his wife. He was a car salesman, a bargain shopper, a man who organized his receipts. Everything about him was practical (everything except Babe, of course).

  “Come on,” he said, and led her into the living room, where the morning light cut across the furniture in hard triangles. He gently slid his arm behind her back and guided her around the coffee table, and she practically tripped. It’d been years since she’d danced. He swept her back and forth as if in time to a waltz, and she noticed a flurry of dust winking like snowflakes in the sunlight.

  “Joe, what music are you hearing?” she asked, but he only grinned in reply.

  Pleasant. Silly. Pointless. Inane—words filled her mind.

  *

  Ellen met Vera and MacNeil at an exhibit of young photographers at the DeCordova Museum thirty years ago. Ellen had dragged Joe and the kids out to Lincoln on a sunny Saturday afternoon, though they’d had other ideas of how they wanted to spend the day. The five drove the hacking station wagon fifteen miles westward on the skinny highway through larger and larger towns. They turned onto the road that led them up and down hills and through maples, elderberries, pines, oaks, past big old wooden houses with large porches and long driveways. Ellen had once dreamed of living in Lincoln in a sprawling antique farmhouse on acres of land, but she and Joe never could have afforded it, and in the end she’d accepted their small but sufficient Cape.

  At DeCordova, two outgoing and seemingly parentless children tagged along with their bored three, and eventually an attractive couple appeared and apologized vacantly for their kids’ rambunctiousness. Dressed in a loose black tunic and slacks, Vera was petite, with a long ballerina’s neck, curtains of silky brown hair, and MacNeil was twice Vera’s height but thin, broad in the forehead and square in the chin. Attractive. “Have you seen the Gartsons?” Vera asked Ellen after introducing herself and her husband. “We met the man a few years back at an opening downtown. A real genius, though he was out of his mind drunk at the time. Come on, come look at them. They’re unbelievably gorgeous,” and tugged her into the next room to show her the wall-sized color photographs of entwined nudes. The children followed and Ellen felt a blush fill her face as she watched her children giggle at the enormous breasts and legs and even the hulking shadow of a penis. Joe followed far behind, stopping to glance at each photograph, his hands held in a knot behind his back.

  Later, he said he’d thought the couple was pretentious about art and completely careless with their children, but Ellen told him that she’d found them refreshingly exuberant, so obviously smitten with the world and each other. “You can just tell they squeeze every ounce they can out of this l
ife.” Joe looked at her straight on and said, “Just make sure her pretense doesn’t rub off on you.” She pivoted, rushed out of the room and secretly vowed to befriend Vera.

  The next week, on her day off, Ellen found herself sitting on Vera’s large front porch in Lincoln, listening to the history of the two massive apple trees in her front yard—they’d been planted as symbols of hope by MacNeil’s Scottish ancestors—and sipping fresh-squeezed limeade that tasted like candy. And every Wednesday that followed, Ellen traveled to Lincoln and experienced a different life. Vera took her on long, hilly walks and identified the many different birds in the trees above. The two cooked risotto with truffles or prosciutto or goat cheese for lunch, and on rainy days they sat beneath Vera’s eiderdown comforter on her sofa and watched French and Italian films about young lovers, films that seemed to Ellen at once frivolous and profound. Occasionally Vera asked if they should meet at Ellen’s house, but Ellen always found an excuse for them not to. After all, she almost said once, we don’t have a VCR or leather furniture or a view of the trees or anything, really, that you’d want to see. The months and years passed, and Vera and MacNeil came to dinner a couple of times, but not once did Vera come alone, and not once did Ellen invite her.

  At Vera’s funeral decades later, MacNeil looked like a stripped leaf—blanched, tired, finished. When they arrived, Ellen said to him, “It doesn’t get worse than this”—as if she knew, she now thought—and he said, “I hope not.” He’d had no time to prepare for Vera’s death, a massive heart attack that struck her one morning when she was yanking up weeds in her flower garden. He’d only just retired as dean of the university.

  Two weeks later, Ellen bumped into him at a gourmet grocery store where she liked to shop once in a while for produce. He stood perplexed before a wall of milk. “I’ve never noticed what sort of milk I’ve been drinking all these years,” he said to her. It was their first time alone. “Vera took care of all these things and I let her. I am a terrible person.”