15. Luna
LUNA
The drive takes forty minutes, and I do all of it on muscle memory, every turn pre-loaded from thirty years of making it, which leaves my hands free to grip the wheel and my brain free to do the thing it does, which is everything, at once, in no order, with footnotes.
I have not told Ivan.
That’s the thing running across the bottom of every thought. I’ve had three weeks and a fish’s worth of confidences and an entire gallon of incredible borscht, and I still don’t have the courage to tell him.
But you can’t tell a man you’re pregnant when you don’t yet know what you want, because the second you say the words, they stop being yours, and I’ve watched my whole life what happens to women whose news becomes other people’s to manage.
Ivan, as much as I adore that man, is a control freak. So before Ivan, before anyone official, I’m going where I’ve always gone when the ground moves.
Marty’s house hasn’t changed since I was small, a brick bungalow with a garden that eats more of the yard every year, tomatoes annexing the roses, the roses not minding. I let myself in the side door the way I have for thirty years, and the kitchen stops me cold on the threshold.
Marty at the stove in his terrible apron, the one that says HERB YOUR ENTHUSIASM, stirring something that smells of their own tomatoes.
Gerty at the counter in a silk housecoat and full eyeliner at two in the afternoon, slicing zucchini with the knife skills of a woman who has done everything once and most things twice.
Fred at the table, reading glasses down his nose, doing the crossword in pen and arguing with it out loud, losing.
Garden light through the window over the sink. A radio playing something from well before I was born. Basil on every surface that will hold a pot.
I breathe in every detail and come close to a nervous breakdown.
The sheer ordinary warmth of it reaches into my chest and twists, and my eyes sting before I’ve said a word, because this, exactly this, the three of them cooking vegetables they grew, is the most stable, wonderful thing I have ever known.
“There’s my girl,” Marty says, turning. He reads my face in the doorway in the half-second it takes me to arrange it, because he half-raised me and the arrangement has never once worked on him, not once. He sets down the spoon. “Sit. Gerty, she’s going to want the good tea.”
“I’m already on it,” Gerty says, not looking up from the zucchini, because she read my face from the side.
I sit, and Fred puts down his pen. The radio plays as he asks, “Hey, kiddo. What’s going on?”
It bubbles out of me between sips of tea. I tell them everything, all of it, the wedding I crashed and the man I crashed it for, the pakhan and the broken foot and the club and the borscht summit, the two pink lines in the shop bathroom and the secret I’ve been keeping from a goldfish.
They let me say all of it without once interrupting, which is the rarest gift this family gives and the one it gives best. Marty stirs. Gerty slices. Fred listens.
When I finish, the kitchen is quiet except for the pot, burbling away on the stove.
Marty is quiet for exactly one moment, one, I watch him take it, and then he says the only thing that was ever going to come first from him. “Are you safe?”
Not a single word about the broken foot or the empire or the optics. Are you safe? The whole of his fathering in three syllables, and my throat closes, and I have to work to get the word out.
“Yes. He’s the safest I’ve ever felt. I know exactly how that sounds, but it’s still true. Ivan would never ever hurt me.” Not in a non-consensual way. But I leave that part out.
Marty looks at me a moment longer, weighing the answer against the years of knowing my face, and then he nods, once, and picks the spoon back up, and that’s the vetting concluded. “Then it sounds like you have another question in front of you. Just as important.”
“I know, but I don’t have an answer for that one.”
“Then,” Gerty says, smiling, “we eat.” Then they feed me, and while they feed me, they help.
Eventually, Fred says, “Okay, kiddo. The big one. Do you want it?”
“I honestly don’t know. I never gave much thought to whether I wanted to be a mom.
I mean, it’s always been in the background, I guess, but not something I thought about now.
And definitely never thought about with someone like Ivan.
” Saying those words aloud feels a little like betrayal.
“I don’t mean to speak badly of him—I don’t even mean it that way.
I mean it more like, what does fatherhood mean in his world? I don’t have a clue.”
“That’s allowed. That’s a real answer, don’t let anybody rush you off it.” Gerty wraps both hands around her own cup. “You know, we never had any. Everybody assumed it was sad, some tragedy we were brave about. It wasn’t.”
“It wasn’t?”
“I never wanted them. Not once, not a flicker, and I spent about a decade apologizing for that before I figured out I didn’t owe anyone the apology.”
“You never—” I’ve known her my whole life and never known this. “Not ever?”
“Not ever. We had scares, back when scares were scarier, and every time I felt the same thing, which was please no. Every time I was relieved, and the relief was information.” She taps my hand.
“Some women feel a yes they can’t explain.
Some feel a no the same way. Both are whole lives, Luna. Both are full ones.”
“Are you sure?”
She smiles, the old showgirl smile, undimmed. “I’ve had a marvelous time in this life. I regret nothing, including the not.”
“And if it’s a yes I can’t explain?” My voice does something I don’t authorize. “Because there’s this small thing, when I’m quiet, that—hums. That’s the only word I’ve got for it. It hums. Like it’s already a part of my life.”
Marty, from the stove, without turning around, “Then you listen to the hum. Sometimes our bodies know things before we know them.”
There’s the thing I drove forty minutes to be given. Not a decision. Permission to embrace whatever this could be.
Gerty squeezes my hand and tells me about the scares in detail, the exact years, the way she and Fred decided and re-decided, two people building a life off-script and never once apologizing to the script.
Fred adds the parts she skips, gruff, precise, the two of them narrating a thirty-one-year marriage as evidence that you are allowed to want what you want, in any number, in any shape.
I’m trying to listen. Really, I am. But all I can think of is that I need to talk to Ivan. Right now.
“…whatever you decide,” Fred says, folding his glasses, “you tell us, and then it’s just true, and we go from there. That’s the whole machine. You choose, we love it. You choose something else, we help. That’s what we’re here for, kiddo.”
I stay until the light goes gold and then orange.
I eat two helpings of the garden ratatouille and let Fred win the argument with the crossword by feeding him the one word he was missing.
Gerty sends me home with a jar of it, a bag of tomatoes, and a kiss that leaves a print she licks her thumb to fix, the way she has fixed lipstick on my face since I was seven.
Marty walks me to the car, and holds the door, the way he always does, and before he closes it, he leans down to the window.
“The man,” he says. “When you’re ready. I’d like to meet him.”
“To approve him?”
“You’re past needing my approval, Luna. You’ve been past it since you signed your first lease. I’d just like to meet the person who makes my girl feel safe. There aren’t many who can manage that.”
“I think he’d like that.” I can picture it, Ivan folded into a kitchen chair too small for him, being read by these three, surviving it, maybe even thriving, Fred handing him the crossword pen as a test.
The drive home is the pensive one. The jar of ratatouille still warm on the passenger seat. I can’t ask Ivan to be understanding about my decision when I haven’t made one yet. But I think I have. I’m just… coming to terms with it.
I stop at a light on Cermak and put my hand flat on my stomach for the first time, on purpose, in the dark, in the car, where it’s still only mine. Not a decision. Just a hello, provisional, no obligations attached. The small thing hums back, the way it’s been doing.
Figure out what you want, Luna. Then you’ll know what to tell him. In that order, always that order, the one the women in my family never got to use because someone always decided for them first.
The light goes green all of a sudden, and it makes me remember the club. His stoplight system for safe words.
This whole thing feels green.