“I don’t know,” he said.
“I have to protect it,” she said. “All my life.”
“Okay,” said Daniel.
I willed us to get up, to walk outside, but we couldn’t move. We couldn’t even look up from our plates. We were trapped in the unfolding drama and folded right in.
“I can’t believe I almost lost this baby,” Jill muttered. Daniel, quiet and resigned, taking it all in, seemed to be trying to decide how much of this was reactionary and irrational and how much was certain, and was coming just as surely to conclusions of his own.
“Jill, I can’t.” He was crying then. “I can’t. I would be like Martin. I would resent it. I would want out.”
“I don’t want you that way. We don’t.” She was crying too.
“I can’t make you. I wouldn’t want to. But I can’t do it.” He was muffled. She was holding him against her. Or he had his face buried in her hair or stomach. Finally, they were both so hysterical and emotional and something else—intimate—that we were embarrassed enough to move.
“Perhaps a beer,” suggested Lucas.
“Brilliant,” said Katie, out of character, and as we left the apartment, it was like turning our backs on a fire, slowly catching, ready to rage.
By then it was late. We were all exhausted. We didn’t want a beer or anything else. Jason and Lucas, heads hung and sorry, got in their car and went home. Katie and I went to her apartment, turned on the TV, and promptly fell asleep. Overload of everything. We woke up at six o’clock in the morning, went back to my place, and found Jill sound asleep in my bed. Alone. We crawled in with her.
“Hi,” she said sleepily.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi,” said Katie.
“He left,” said Jill.
“Where?” I said.
“I’m not sure,” said Jill, slightly puzzled, like it was a logic problem. “Before he said he wanted to spend the summer in California. Maybe he’s headed there?”
“How did you leave things?” asked Katie.
“He did not want to parent. I did not want to abort. It wasn’t what either of us wanted, his leaving, but, comparatively speaking, of the given options, it was what we both didn’t want the least I guess, so at least we could agree on that.”
“Are you okay?” asked Katie gently.
“No.”
“Is there anything we can do?” I asked.
“Help me raise a baby?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Sure,” said Katie.
“Thanks,” said Jill, and we all went back to sleep.
Ten
The first problem was that, left to her own devices, Jill still ate mostly saltines. She wasn’t an overly picky eater. She ate well when we could afford to go out. She ate whatever I cooked for her. Occasionally, she supplemented the crackers with M&Ms and very occasionally the M&Ms with an apple or some orange juice. But mostly she just ate crackers and water. Great were she ever to be imprisoned in a nineteenth-century novel. Lousy for having a baby. The first problem we had to solve then, before the broken heart even, was getting Jill to eat.
The second, of course, was the broken heart. But as you know, mending those is tricky.
The third problem was financial. To the uninitiated, graduate fellowships seem like a great deal. They pay your tuition. They pay you a stipend to cover living expenses. In return, you teach first-year composition thereby earning your keep while also gaining valuable career experience and building your résumé. Unfortunately, the stipend is not really enough to live on. We were all getting by one way or another. Katie ran up crazy credit card debt (not, unlike school loans, with a low, fixed interest rate that would wait for payment until after she got a job). My parents gave me their old furniture. And paid my car insurance. My grandmother took me shopping when I needed new clothes. Jason had the good sense to fall in love with a man with a real job. And Jill ate saltines. Saltines worked for one maybe but wouldn’t for two, especially when one of them also needed diapers, bottles, clothes, toys, car seats, blankets, a highchair, and regular medical attention.
The fourth problem was childcare. Graduate school is a full-time job. It is only about twelve to fifteen hours a week in the classroom, learning or teaching or both. But it’s about a gazillion hours of grading. And about two gazillion hours of reading. So that’s three gazillion hours plus twelve plus you still have to eat, sleep briefly, and do a little bit of something social to keep from going mad. You can try to grade faster. You can try to read faster, skim more, skip a few books altogether. But there’s not a lot of time there for taking care of an infant.
We floated solutions sensible and ridiculous. We thought she could drop out of school and get a real job (solving problem 3 only). We thought she could become a professional food taster (solving problems 1 and 3). We proposed a reality TV show where teams of pregnant women go on scavenger hunts to restaurants across the country on a quest for meals which do not make them throw up (the footage of this would be dynamite, the feuds inevitable and profound, the public service rendered invaluable). But I kept coming back to the same thing. I tried but could find no way around it. When I was sure, I called her right away. Never mind it was three o’clock in the morning. I couldn’t sleep for thinking about it. Why should she?
“We’ll move in together,” I said simply when she picked up the phone and grunted something close enough to hello.
Silence. Then, “Who is this?”
“Come on, Jilly. It’s me. Wake up. We’ll move in together. All three of us. We’ll arrange our schedules so someone’s always home with the baby.” (Problem 4.) “We’ll share expenses.” (Problem 3.) “I’ll cook.” (Force-feeding Jill and Fetus. Problem 1 and maybe even 2 depending on how good the food is.) “I’ve thought about it. It’s the best solution.”
Silence. “Who is this?”
“JILL. Seriously. How is this not a good plan?”
“How does cooking help?”
“You have to feed this baby something besides crackers.”
“I eat more than crackers.”
“No you don’t.”
“Yes I do.”
“No you don’t.”
“Any chance we could have this conversation tomorrow?” asked Jill, but I could tell she’d sat up, cleared her eyes and head a little. Finally she said, “Do you think you’d be a good father?”
I smiled. “I’d be a great father.”
Eleven
We were glib in the middle of that night, but we didn’t stay that way. We debated. A lot. Jill didn’t feel entirely comfortable asking what was really a rather large favor of us. Katie wasn’t sure living with a ruined woman and helping her raise her illegitimate child was in line with church doctrine. We were all worried about our work. It was hard to imagine having even less time to get everything done and harder still to imagine reading and writing with a baby crying all the time. We also suffered, honestly, from some hesitation to live together—me especially. I thought we were too old to have roommates, that living together might well make us all hate each other. I couldn’t believe that all the wait and headache of making my bathroom finally purple was for nothing.