I’d already missed two periods before I went to Planned Parenthood in Berkeley. I knew the result before a woman asked if I wanted counseling. She had a lovely voice. “I always say, you’re the one to ask the questions of yourself. Who do you see in yourself, Gina, what do you want?” I answered that I was thirty-five, unmarried, and didn’t know what I wanted. “But my hormones aren’t neutral,” I laughed. “They’re saying yes but I just don’t know.” She asked about my circumstances. “The father is not committed but I’d like him to be. I have a good job. They won’t let me go.”
“Then it’s up to you,” my counselor laid her soft hands on mine. “It’s a big decision to have a child. I’m confident you’ll make a good choice, Gina.”
When I told the women in our office, designers and architects, both younger and older, they were enthusiastic. “I’ll never get married,” an architect over forty told me. “I’m thinking donor.” Younger ones said I’d be their practice mom. It took a village, 100 mothers. My own mother gently encouraged. “Children are a joy.”
I was grateful for support but nothing answered the big question. What would Jan say? What would he want? Did he love me even a little? Would Jan Henrikson, a Danish environmental designer much in demand, want a child? He was forty something, not a Viking in looks, stocky body with a paunch, a beard with grey, a shock of stand-up brown hair also a little grey. The nights we’d spent in November as rains pounded outside had a deadline. His project with our office would be over before the Christmas holidays when he’d be back in Copenhagen before museum design brought him to Maine in May.
“Go on, Gina, don’t be such a girl. Dial, call him.” My office crew stayed in for lunch. “He liked you.” “We know he will.” “Go on, call.” I protested it was late. “Good, he’ll be there.”
The minutes it took to connect to the satellites and find Jan in Copenhagen I nearly pressed the red button. Let his answering pick up, I silently hoped, but before he answered, I heard background music. A woman’s laugh and language I didn’t understand. We greeted each other. He said he’d been busy, and then I got out the words. He listened, asked me to wait while he found a quieter spot. Without saying the words I yearned for, he said, “Come to Maine, Gina. Summer I am promised a home on a lake.”
I had Jakob in Augusta, Maine, not long after I arrived in June. He weighed eight pounds and was healthy from his first cry. Jan stayed with me through the labor. He seemed softer, sweeter than I remembered. After a week, we moved to his lakeside camp. Most week days he was gone but weekends he helped me with all I couldn’t do alone and we adored our son. Soon Jakob was focusing his eyes and looking at us both.
When Abby called from New York asking to visit for the last weekend in July, I was feeling so nested, my day full with feedings and changings and time with Jan, I wanted to say no but I couldn’t refuse Abby, former roommate and sharer of confidences. Through our twenties and into our thirties we talked late nights on subjects hardly different from conversations in school, dissatisfaction with ourselves for not making art, and, of course, unavailable guys.
Jan and I met her at the Portland airport and headed inland toward the Belgrade Lakes. Abby was wearing a sea green halter dress printed with white shells like a mermaid Jan might have plucked off a rock. The dress tied at the neck and the bodice held up her small breasts. She was still the waif-like girl who never wore a bra.
While I nursed in the back seat, Jan narrated the two-day labor I’d gone through having Jakob. He seemed in an exuberant paternal mood so I didn’t interrupt with my side of the forty-eight-plus hours during which my doctor, a natural childbirth proponent, absent until the last minutes, rushed in and brought Jakob into the world.
When we got out of the car, I pulled back a corner of the blanket so Abby could see Jakob’s perfect tiny nose, light eyelashes and curled fingers.
“He’s beautiful. Congratulations to you while I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“Neither did I until this little one came.”
“I’m sick of plated fruit and darkrooms. I’m going to get sun all over.” Abby, a gifted photographer, was setting up food shoots for paper and online sites.
A light rain was falling and the air was steamy. “July in Maine can be rainy one day, brilliant the next, like Denmark,” Jan told us.
“Once the heat began, all the insects and bugs hatched overnight. The black flies and the horse flies are really small monsters. It’s the only bad thing,” I said. “Jan gets away from them on his boat.”
Jan had the use of a sailboat, a Sunfish, in a shed by the lake.
“I don’t care, I just want sun, I’m dying for sun,” she answered.
By evening, we hung netting over our beds and Jakob’s crib but we kept windows open to hear the loons’ mournful calls for love over the lake.
**
The next morning, Abby was up early. “Jakey, hi.” She wiggled her fingers.
“He’s seeing you. He can focus his eyes. They look like they’ll be Jan’s blue. Jan’s name is on the birth certificate.”
“Really? Is this marriage?”
I nuzzled the baby with my words. “Not that we know of.”
“I’m jealous,” she whispered. “I have never been proposed to.”
“Neither have I. Jan asked me to come here, no more.”
“Good hair genes anyway,” Abby said.
We took armloads of towels and chairs and all I needed for the baby along the rocky lake shore. The rain had stopped during the night, the pines looked refreshed and the still water gleamed with the invitation to swim.
“The sun is enough,” Abby began to undress.
“You’ll need to spray with Deet.”
I handed Abby the can and then gave it to Jan who stripped to a black racing suit that fit below his paunch but clung to his essentials.
When Abby pulled up her tee, I saw the rise beneath Jan’s suit. She had unchanged small round breasts with rosebud nipples while mine were huge and dark mushrooms. When Abby stepped out of black bikini panties, the last bit of clothing over her thick triangle of pubic hair, Jan’s suit moved even more before he turned and walked away with his back to us. I knew Abby had been on European beaches where everyone lay naked, and as a Scandinavian, Jan couldn’t be shocked, but her nakedness left me feeling the least sexiest women on the planet.
The next morning Jan was gone sailing when we arrived at the shore. We saw his sail before he slipped out of sight behind Blueberry Island at the end of the lake.
“Fifteen years since we graduated and I’ve only lived one day,” Abby said.
“What? What does that mean? You live in cool Brooklyn with great restaurants.”
“I hate food, I mean all the money around food. I just hate the business. It feels like I’ve lived one day, Gina. You have a baby. I’m losing my hair.”
“You’re not losing all your hair.” I couldn’t help myself. Abby again lay naked.
“This doesn’t count. I’m losing my hair hair, Gina. I’m sure I have alopecia.”
“You always obsessed about your hair.”
“Because it was thin and yours wasn’t. Gina, see this.” She pulled back fine dark strands to show me scalp. It was true, her hair had always been thin and fine and that she needed good haircuts which she had now.
“I have hair on my pillow, in the shower. You remember my endocrine system was always weak. I’m having tests Monday.”
“Oh Abby, take biotene.”
“I‘ll never have a child with my problems and I wanted one more than you did.”
“It wasn’t a competition and I didn’t plan Jakob.”
We were quiet a moment, holding back words. Jan’s sail fluttered back into sight.
“You don’t take my problem seriously. You’re all about yourself. FYI, my endocrine system is as important to me as your baby is to you.”
Her endocrine system equaled Jakob! That was more insult than I could take.
“You went full monty in front of my man.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Naked, so Jan could see. You were flaunting yourself, Abby.”
“He’s forty or more. Plumpy. He’s not even in my sight line.”
I could see Abby reconsidering.
“A son can change everything,” she said.
“He’s going home to Denmark soon. He might even have a wife there.” My voice let her know I was confiding again, not facing off with her.
“He wouldn’t tell you that?”
“If he does, I don’t want to know. Maybe genes are all I’ll get.”
“We just want love like we always did but it’s so hard and I almost can’t stand to see you with it,” Abby reached out to take my hand
Jan drove Abby back to Portland for her flight. He called and we talked about the baby while I did my best to keep my voice steady. I’d been seeing an airport motel, Abby’s slender naked body.
Jan kissed me on the lips. A guilty kiss? I could smell the little cigars he sometimes smoked. “You’re sunburned as a ripe peach, Gina, so healthy. Is Jakob getting a little sun? We.”
“I keep him covered. The flies have gotten awful. They go for our eyes.”
“Horrible flies. It would be paradise without the flies.”
“You saw off Abby? Was her flight on time?”
He nodded. “I’ve been thinking about her. She insulted you.”
“Abby insulted me? What did she say about me?”
“We hardly spoke. I dropped her off in plenty of time. Why didn’t she wear a swim suit, at least a bottom?”
“She’s been on nude beaches since she was a kid just like you have, so she doesn’t think anything of it.”
“She thinks about it and you must have thought something of it.”
“I felt like a lump. I wished she wasn’t so thin. Did you like her, Jan?”
“No. She’s like a vain French girl who knows she’s pretty. She didn’t help you.”
“I didn’t expect Abby to help. Abby is a talented photographer doing stupid work. She has trouble finishing. She doesn’t believe in herself.”
“She doesn’t give back, she’s a taker. You deserve a better friend.”
“Sometimes you kind of fall in love with a friend like you do with a guy, despite knowing it’s not ideal.”
“Is that’s an analysis of us?” Color rose from the trimmed beard to his cheeks.
“Will you stay with us? Will Jakob have a father?”
As if he’d heard his name, the baby gave a strong cry and my breasts answered with a rush of milk. As I nursed I waited. I felt so vulnerable We were his if he wanted us. It would only take a word.
“Will he continue to have my name?”
“Henrikson is on the birth certificate. It can be changed.”
“You know I have commitments in Europe to work over the next years.”
“I know that.”
“I’m coming back to San Francisco. I’ll make it a long visit. I’ll send money.”
He knew I wanted more.
“I can’t say words you want to hear, Gina. We will always be in touch.”
When Jan returned from an evening sail, the insects were thrumming away and mosquitoes hovered. After dark, we made love. From then on until the end of the summer, the nights Jan stayed, we made love more intimately, more of ourselves revealed in touches and looks. Sometimes I carried Jakob from his crib to lie between us. Over his gentle breathing, we talked quietly about Jan’s plans, his ideas, his family. “You’ll find a crèche, a day care where Jakob will be happy like European babies. I’ll be back.”
Listening to our voices, we almost didn’t hear the loons calling across the lake, signaling to their life partners it was time to leave.
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