VII

The next day was spent packing… and packing, and packing. It’s amazing how much stuff you can acquire over the course of three months in Manhattan. I easily had twice as many things as I had when we’d arrived in the big city at the beginning of the summer. So much, in fact, that we had to interrupt our packing mid-morning to go bag shopping in order to finish our packing. Once we’d packed the entire apartment into a pile of boxes and bags in the center of the floor, we took the train into Greenwich, where Adam’s mother was letting him borrow her station wagon to complete the move.
The 45-minute train ride had me more and more nervous at each stop along the Metro-North route. I’d never been in a relationship serious enough for a meet and greet with the folks. This particular one had crept up on me so stealthily that I hadn’t had a chance to worry about it until after the conductor had already collected our tickets and I was left with the hum of the engine and my thoughts. Adam squeezed my hand and gave me a kiss on the forehead. I clutched my small messenger bag close to me. Inside I had the bare necessities for our night in Connecticut: a clean pair of underwear, a clean bra, deodorant, facial wash, toothbrush and a single green pill. I had cut back on the pills significantly since Adam’s last visit, and was almost positive I could get through the stay without it, but I had it just in case. Suddenly I felt like five-year-old going to visit her long distance grandmother with an extensive list of etiquette rules from her parents. I didn’t know a whole lot about Adam’s parents, and it had never occurred to me to ask. I had no idea what to expect, and suddenly that had me fearing the worst. I wasn’t even sure what the worst was, I was just sure that it involved me messing up really bad.
By the time we’d arrived at the station in Greenwich I’d calmed myself a bit, but insisted that we walk the less than two city blocks to Adam’s house at a snail’s pace to allow me to prepare for the impending doom I was sure that I was about to face. To my simultaneous relief and disappointment, Adam’s mother was out running errands when we arrived at his modest, but charming house. His younger sister was home, however, and happy to regale us with her newly learned Carole King song on the small piano in the family’s foyer. She was 14 but looked about two years older, with the same striking blue eyes and Semitic nose that made Adam uniquely attractive. She was slight, and carried herself like a dancer. Even her narrow fingers on the black and white keys were svelte, and I was impressed that someone so young would carry herself with such grace. When she was finished with the song, Adam took over at the piano, and began to play the first few bars of Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You Babe,” which his sister Maggie joined him in singing along with. It was heartwarming to see how well they got along. My younger sister and I had scarcely spoken since I’d left for college. Half way through the bridge of the song, Adam’s mother entered the foyer through the front door carrying a paper bag with a roll of French bread partially obscuring her from my view.
“I hope that girl of his isn’t as picky as him,” she spoke without looking up from her detailed task of closing the door with her hip and jiggling her keys from the door. When she finally looked up and met Adam’s eyes, she grinned, and put the groceries down on the piano bench. “Come here you,” she said, and pulled him into a warm embrace. I shrunk back a bit, suddenly nervous again. Immediately, I wanted her to like me. She looked like your typical suburban mother, pretty in a natural, understated way. Clearly she was old enough to have a college aged son, but classic looking enough to wear trendy fashions without looking like she was trying to hard. She had brown eyes that were a stark contrast to her pale complexion. Her ash blonde hair fell right below her shoulders and she had fine lines at the outer corners of her eyes that didn’t fade when her smile did, leading me to believe that she did a fair amount of smiling.
“And you must be Janie,” she said affectionately, holding out a hand for me to take. I accepted, and felt a bit more at ease.
“Jane,” I corrected.
“Well Jane, I hope you like Spaghetti, because I’m afraid it’s all I’ve had time to prepare this evening.”
“I’m Italian,” I reassured her, “anything with carbohydrates and tomatoes and I’m a contented woman.”
“Well then it looks like you’re in luck.” She gestured toward the grocery bag on the bench and then looked at Adam. “Help your mother out would you?”
The early evening was spent having dinner and cocktails with Adam’s mother, and his stepfather who returned home from the golf course just before dinner. At one point the evening began to feel like a college interview, but I think I passed their test.
“Ma, Janie just finished work on her first movie,” Adam offered, trying to engage me in the family conversation.
“Oh? Are you an actor as well?”
“No, no,” I laughed nervously, moving my spaghetti around my plate without taking a bite. “I’m a… well, I’m a film student. I guess eventually I’d like to direct.”
“Then you could give Adam a job,” she joked. I smiled, noting in my neurotic mind that even his mother noticed how well we clicked together, like interlocking pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.
“So what was the movie?” This was the first time I’d heard Adam’s stepfather speak since he’d introduced himself.
“Not one I’d put on my resume once I’m able to get real work,” I admitted, trying to figure out a way to put it delicately. “Very low budget horror film with more skin than my tastes can handle.” Adam’s mother laughed appreciatively and passed me the rolls. I felt accepted.
Once we’d cleared the table and Adam and I had loaded the dishwasher (at my insistence), we went over to Eric’s house to visit with some of Adam’s friends from home. I got even more of a glimpse into the life that Adam had led before me, and tried to remember my own life before him. It was strange, having known each other such a brief time, how we’d become such an indispensable part of each other lives.
It was a small party. Maybe fifteen people, all gathered in small bunches throughout the kitchenette area of the house. Eric and Ben looked happy to see me, and I was quickly whisked away from Adam and introduced to all of the others, names that even if I had a head for remembering them, I wouldn’t have had time to absorb. I was comfortable right away, and was glad that neither Adam nor me felt the need for me to be latched to his hip for the evening. I mingled, finding my safe-haven in the wannabe filmmakers’ bunch, with Eric and two or three other film majors from Syracuse and one from NYU. Eric spoke excitedly about the little information he knew about “Nympho Bloodsuckers II,” and the others bombarded me with more questions, before we moved into appreciator mode, critiquing the latest releases with a slick pretension that only five second-year college film majors could garner. Adam and I traded smiles from across the room, where the drama kids were, and I felt lucky to be in a relationship that had moved to that plateau. We didn’t need to have our feet touching to be sure of each other anymore, and that was a comforting thought.
Adam and I left toward the end of the night, after the party had dwindled to the few people who were visiting Eric from school and would be spending the night there. Before we saw ourselves out, Eric and I exchanged email addresses so that we didn’t have to depend on Adam to relay our film conversation. I was glad that I got along with Adam’s friends, that I didn’t have to be ‘that bitch,’ or a ‘ball & chain.’ My best friend Carrie had only met Adam once, since she went to school on the west coast and didn’t get out this way much. They didn’t seem to get along very well at the time, but it may have been partly my own nervousness at the situation. I wanted so badly for them to like each other that every little barb stuck in me like a knife and I was walking on eggshells for the entire weekend that she had visited. Since then, however, they had only nice things to say about each other, and I was sure that I’d made up the negative tone of the evening.
When we got back to Adam’s house that evening, everyone else was asleep. We brushed our teeth and went to bed, him in his room, and me on the couch downstairs where his mother insisted that I’d be “more comfortable.” I snuggled into the blanket he’d left me, one that was clearly a well-worn piece of child memorabilia, and fell asleep with the scent of the blanket reminding me that he was just upstairs.
While he was in the shower the next morning I abated my temptation, looking through his bookshelf, finding all of the familiar high school reading materials. He still had the contents of his entire senior summer reading list: Grapes of Wrath, Catcher in the Rye, Hamlet, and the list goes on. Below that shelf was a shelf comprised entirely of little league baseball trophies and Yankees memorabilia. He had a Yankees pennant over his bed and the stuffed bear on his bed wore a small Yankees cap. On his nightstand was the card I’d gotten him for Valentine’s Day, right after our first date. When I looked closer, I saw more evidence of us, a picture here, a knick-knack there, and was somehow proud of myself that I’d joined the ranks of Salinger, the Yankees, and little league trophies.
When we got back to the city, we loaded up the car quickly so that we could beat the afternoon traffic. As Adam took the last load down to the car, I looked around the empty room that had been my home for three months. It still amazes me to think of how much growing a person can do in that short of a time, though I know now that it wasn’t anywhere near as much as I thought then.
We drove the four hours back to Cambridge, and as we approached the city, I realized how much I missed home. I hadn’t seen my parents save the one weekend I’d been up here, and I hadn’t spoken to them at all since Adam and I decided to move in together, somewhat afraid that I’d tell them and I wasn’t sure yet how I was going to do that.
We pulled up to Adam’s apartment building, which was to be our new home. We unloaded the car much more slowly then we’d loaded it, dragging the mattress up to the sixth floor where our little piece of heaven lay in wait for our arrival. I’d only seen the place for the weekend that I’d visited, since Adam had moved in right before summer classes, but already it was obvious that two college boys had been living there all summer. There was some definite fixing up to be done. Just the same, I felt like this was the perfect first place for Adam and I to share.
It was a bit larger than my apartment in New York had been, with two bedroom, one of which we decided to use a study/movie room once we’d moved all of our stuff in and decided that two desks cramped the space in the small “master” bedroom a bit. There was a common room, which divided in half without a closed doorway where the linoleum kitchen faded into a carpeted living room. The bedrooms had gorgeous hardwood floors, and we stacked my mattress on top of his that was already on the bare floor to make a respectable level bed. We wouldn’t have known it on that day, when we first started playing house, but it wouldn’t be long before we were both sleeping on the floor again.
I quickly made my mark on the apartment, and the first weekend we were moved in, our last before beginning our sophomore year’s classes, we painted the common room, bedroom, and “office.” We settled on a red for the bedroom, but that was the easy part. He wanted a dark burgundy and I wanted china red to match the Tibetan prayer flags and scrolls that had decorated my last apartment. I won that fight, but the office was a midnight blue to match his Yankees memorabilia. That door stayed closed when we had my parents over for dinner that Sunday night. It was the first time that they had met Adam, and it didn’t help that I was placing the added pressure of us living together on the situation.
All things considered, that meeting went smoothly, my father and Adam bonded quickly over their love of sports, especially baseball, and once it was settled that team rivalries not be discussed, they spent a half an hour looking through old sports books and the drinking hour found them both on our futon watching a Braves/Angels game on NESN. My mother and I shared a cup of our favorite decaf gourmet roast while we did the dishes, then sat down at the kitchen table for the inevitable judgment.
“Well,” she still hadn’t said anything. She folded her hands neatly in her lap, and crossed one leg over the other as was customary of her “good breeding,” before speaking.
“He’s nice.” That was it?
“That’s it?”
“Well,” she paused to take a dainty sip from her coffee. “He’s a very attractive young man.” She paused again, thoughtfully. “Is he Jewish?” I looked at her incredulously. She looked taken aback. “I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that, I’m simply asking a question.”
“Well thank you mother for letting me make up my own mind, and yes, he is Jewish.” Apparently her good breeding had not worn onto me, and this was quite the faux pas. I struggled to remember that my mother was, at my age, much more rebellious than me. With my summer stay in New York and emergent methamphetamine habit, I wasn’t even trying to hold a candle to her run-away pregnancy and shotgun wedding to my father. At 21, she’d had me when she was barely old enough to drink, and the first five to ten years of my life were filled with libraries, museums, tarot cards, Bangles concerts, organic brown bagged lunches, and punk hair-cuts. Somehow since then, my mother had adopted the sensibilities that had forced her to run away from home when she was my age, and my elegant uptown grandmother was channeled whenever I spoke with her.
“I’m simply concerned, is all. You know how your father feels about the church. Where would you get married? How would you raise the children?”
“Number one, what children? Number two, Dad’s probably much more concerned that he’s a Yankees fan than that he’s Jewish, and he seems to be handling that just fine. Number three, we’ve only been together about nine months, no one, save you, is talking about marriage.”
“Well you certainly hopped right into living together. Living in sin.” That was matter of fact.
“Excuse me,” now I was fuming, but trying to keep my voice down as not to disrupt the boys’ club on the other side of the room. We’d been speaking quietly up until now, and they hadn’t seemed to notice our presence at all between shouting at the television and analyzing slow motion recaps. “Living in sin? I seem to recall that you were about my age when you got pregnant with me.” She glared back at me.
“That was different.”
“Of course it was different, Mom. It’s always different when it’s you. Here’s another difference: when Adam and I are 40 years old, we won’t be driving each other insane wondering why we ever thought it would be a good idea to bring a child into this world together, and why we didn’t just opt for abortion or adoption or gone our separate ways when we’d had the chance, and staying together just for the sheer fact that it’s the easiest, most comfortable thing for both of us even though we can’t stand to look at each other anymore.”
My parents left about a half hour later, and it took a week for either my mother or I to call to apologize. Looking back, I’m not sure I remember who it was that apologized first, but it turns out we were both kind of right. That same week, I found out that I was pregnant. I never told my mother.