Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
Magic Acts
Daphne sometimes says her sister, Lila, is the
mother she never had. In fact, Daphne and Lila's mother is alive
and quick with maternal affection, but Daphne feels more comfortable
going to her sister when things go wrong. Their mother
displays an eagerness for bad news that can be unnerving. "Oh
no," she says when the story has barely begun, and while Daphne
is still telling her story she can already hear the echo of her
mother passing the news on to her friends. Daphne hears which
details her mother will fix on, which events will become confused
and transformed--"Now, I don't remember if she said it was her
friend's brother or her father who was bringing the lawsuit"--and
she feels herself becoming frustrated. Their mother, who believes
in the evolution of the soul over lifetimes, takes the long view. If
things are not better next week or next year, they undoubtedly
will be the next time around.
Daphne's sister, who believes in the restorative powers of moping
and self-pity, knows how to sympathize. When Daphne calls
and feels edgy with tears, when just dragging her voice across
that unhappy throat is enough to make her cry, Lila says, "Daph?
Oh, honey, what is it? Do you want to come up?"
So Daphne is on her way up to the city to spend the weekend
with Lila and Gwen. She's been feeling tired lately--even now, at
sixty-five miles an hour on the crowded freeway, she feels dangerously
close to sleep and has to keep clenching different muscle
groups to keep herself awake--and she's looking forward to
stretching out on the sunny carpet of Lila's apartment. Lila is that
kind of housekeeper, Daphne thinks--you look forward to her
floor. When they were younger and shared a room, Lila ran a
strip of masking tape down one wall and along the carpet to the
door, dividing the room exactly in half. In the week this experiment
lasted, the room looked like a before-and-after ad from a
women's magazine.
Lila and Gwen have jobs that Daphne doesn't quite understand,
jobs it seems you could do only in a city, where there's so much
money flying around you just have to build the right sort of net to
catch some of it. Lila has a business called Make It Perfect, which
helps people plan everything from first dates to New Orleans-style
funerals, and Gwen works as an office-efficiency consultant.
People tell her they need to know where to put the Xerox machine
or the coffee station, and once she's there, they close their
office door and complain about their coworkers. "The Xerox machine
is the symptom," she says, "but figuring out who to let go
is usually the cure."
When Gwen opens the apartment door to Daphne's knock,
Daphne thinks again of her pet theory that Gwen has merged sex
and efficiency in a wholly marketable way. She's wearing a simple
black jumpsuit and wooden sandals with black velvet thongs that
look like something worn in countries where people still sleep /
when they're tired and eat when they're hungry, and her blond
hair curls under cooperatively just above her shoulders.
"Baby Daphne's here!" Gwen calls out, holding her arms open
for Daphne to step into a hug. Gwen has no family--"unless you
count my mother," she always adds, without further explanation--and
she has aggressively adopted Lila's. Lila and Daphne's
parents, who loved Gwen when they thought she was Lila's friend
and blamed her when they learned she was Lila's lover, have now
warmed to her again. The string of disastrous men Daphne has
brought home over the years has probably helped, as Gwen
points out. Gwen's grateful for that, but now that things are going
better she keeps trying to get Daphne to find a nice man. "Alcoholics
and egomaniacs are fine when you're starting out," she
says. "But you don't want to let them become a habit."
"Spencer is neither of those things."
"Spencer is married, Daphne. I don't really consider that a step
in the right direction."
There's a smell of sage and garlic coming from the kitchen, and
Lila appears, wiping her hands on a towel. She's got about a dozen
different pieces of clothing on--an undershirt and over that a
shirt and vest, a short skirt giving way to tights and eventually
socks--all of it gray and green and brown. She looks as though
she's been dressed by children, or birds. But the effect is soothing,
beautiful actually. She gives Daphne a kiss on the mouth, as always;
in the thirty years Daphne has had to get used to this, she
never quite has.
Lila offers her a champagne drink, pale gold with a stain of red
at the bottom, a tiny alcoholic imitation of the sunset outside.
Daphne has an instinctive moment of resistance in reaching for
the glass, but then she reminds herself that it won't matter anyway,
and she takes a sip before setting it aside. Lila and Gwen sit
next to each other on the couch; Daphne stretches out on the
flowered carpet, the spot she's been looking forward to, and closes
her eyes. In that moment the idea, the wish, that she might just
be late falls away. She knows.
"We have news," Gwen says. "Guess."
Daphne pulls herself to her elbows and looks at them, holding
hands like children. She feels that familiar stab of love. "You found
a nice, handsome, funny single man and you've invited him to
dinner."
"Yes, actually, but that's not the news."
"Lila! You didn't, did you?"
"Oh, Daph, he's nobody, just somebody I work with. I mean
he's wonderful, that's why we asked him, but he's nothing to get
excited about. Unless you like him, I mean."
"God, Lila. He's not a clown, is he? You know I hate clowns."
Daphne drops to the floor again and tries to imagine what this
handsome funny nobody might look like. As always when she is
trying to think of any other man, she imagines Spencer.
"He's a magician," Lila says. "And very sweet."
"In other words, not your type," Gwen puts in. Daphne's eyes
are dosed again when she feels the toes of Gwen's bare foot nuzzling
her ribs. "Daphne, we're trying to break some major news
to you here. You want to hear it or not?"
"You're having a baby," Daphne says impulsively, to hear what
the words sound like.
And when her sister says, "That's right! You must be psychic!"
Daphne feels something deep inside her turning on its axis.
"Well, we're not having a baby yet," Gwen says. "We're going
to start trying. We're getting into the baby business."
When Daphne first got involved with Spencer, she went
through a phase of imagining what it would be like to have a child
with him--a perfect creature with his black hair and quick reflexes,
her green eyes and knack for Romance languages. But that
phase passed, and one day she realized that she didn't want a
baby; at best, she wanted to want one. It's the virtues of motherhood
that she wants: to feel an affinity with women who cheerfully
take on the unimaginable task of being responsible for another
human being; to feel at ease when her friends offer encouragingly,
"Want to hold him?" She wants to have opinions about
how long to nurse and whether to let them cry. She wants to go
weak at the sight of one sleeping; even the men she knows--fathers--talk
about that.
Spencer has two teenage boys, one of whom, Ben, is a student
in Daphne's tenth-grade English class. He's built like his father--lean,
with big hands--and he has Spencer's habit of flipping a
pencil end over end through his fingers when he's thinking;
sometimes when Daphne's at the board and her eyes sweep the
classroom for signs of life, she sees him doing this, and the idea of
Spencer shudders briefly through her nervous system. Ben is a
good student, especially for a boy, but he can be careless, and she
often finds herself writing "I know you can do better than this"
on his compositions.
It was through Ben that Daphne first met Spencer, at parents'
night. She had delivered her carefully prepared twenty-minute
speech, leaning heavily on phrases like critical-thinking skills and
increasingly fluent command of the conventions of English, trying
not to think what an absurd description this was for what
actually went on in her class, where she tried to slip commercials
for grammar and paragraph structure into class-long arguments
about rap and new movies. Spencer came up to her afterwards,
and Daphne thought he was going to ask her whether
she really thought an in-depth discussion of the latest voyage of
the starship Enterprise was going to boost his son's SAT scores.
But he held out his hand for her to shake and told her that his
son liked her class. His wife was very sick, he said, and it meant a
lot to him to know that his son had her class to look forward to
every day.
They were standing near the door. Out in the hallway, disoriented
adults wandered by, checking room numbers against the
schedules they held in their hands. Daphne felt a wave of tenderness
break over her. She had a moment of loving everything that
she could see: these parents, milling from room to room like
children on Halloween; the rows of banged-up lockers and the
checkerboard linoleum floor; this man with the sick wife whose
son actually liked her class.
Later they ran into each other outside and stood talking while
the parking lot emptied around them. In the darkness Spencer's
voice had the softly burred quality of sanded wood. He sounded
like a man worn down to whatever was underneath. They faced
each other with their arms crossed and eventually backed apart
without touching, but when he asked if he could call her sometime,
she found herself saying, "Please do."
Daphne is still lying on Lila's floor, her feelings pulsing like a
headache, when Sam the magician arrives. He's short, about her
height, and he's got either a goatee or a Vandyke, Daphne's not
sure which.
Oh God, she thinks, it's going to be a long night. But there's
something endearing about what he does when they're introduced,
showing her his empty hand and then reaching gently behind
her ear to come up with a tiny pink shell.
"Look what I found," he says, presenting it to her.
At dinner Gwen describes the baby project. "We're going with
donor insemination," she says, "otherwise known as the turkey-baster
method."
"Lila's going to be the bastee," Sam says.
"You seem to know a lot about it." Daphne feels suddenly annoyed
by Sam's hearty approval.
"For a while we were talking about Sam being the donor,"
Lila says.
"Then we came to our senses," Sam adds, winking.
Daphne is shocked by what she finds herself thinking: Him?
A short magician?
"The books say choosing a friend can be risky," Lila says. "So
we decided to play it safe."
"By picking a stranger?" Daphne says.
"You should see the paperwork on this stuff," Gwen says. "The
clinic probably knows more about its donors than most women
know about their husbands."
"Some consolation." Daphne suspects she is going to look back
on this conversation and wish she had been more gracious.
Fortunately, Sam is there, with an instinct for what's needed.
He raises his glass. "I think it's great," he says. "The miracle of
birth gets more miraculous all the time. You two are going to
make some baby very happy."
Lila has to work the next day, so Daphne rides to the clinic with
Gwen. On the way there, Gwen says, "Something about this
whole idea bothers you, doesn't it?"
The little red-and-white cooler, packed with dry ice and nestled
in the gully between their seats, makes Daphne feel as if they
should be going on a picnic, not a serious errand of procreation.
She flips the handle absentmindedly back and forth. "If I tell you
what it is, will you promise not to tell my sister?" she says.
"No."
Daphne lets out a disappointed sigh. She realizes how much
she wants to tell Gwen, to tell somebody. "It's not about you, it's
about me," she says.
"That's usually the case, in my experience."
For a while they don't talk, and Daphne watches Gwen weave
expertly through the city traffic. Lila once said it was Gwen's
driving that sold her: "I thought, 'This is a woman I would trust
with my life.'" Lila and Daphne are terrible drivers; they both hit
the brake reflexively when the light turns yellow, then punch the
accelerator.
"How did you know you wanted this?" Daphne says.
"For a long time I didn't want it. And then something happened,
I guess. I just started noticing babies. It was like when you
hear a new word for the first time and that week you hear it three
different times. It seemed like babies were everywhere. I'd be
talking to a client about setting up a better interoffice mail system
and all of a sudden I'd find myself thinking Sean, Jeremy,
Heather. Baby names."
They're stopped at a light and Daphne looks out her window at
a man and his dog on the sidewalk, both sitting on a filthy square
of pink carpet. On a small piece of cardboard is written "Only
Through Your Generosity Do My Dog And I Eat." Daphne is
struck by the formality of the message, and, as always, by the
presence of the sleeping dog.
There but for the grace of God, she thinks, but she doesn't really
believe it. Nothing in her life has ever brought her close
enough to the edge that she could begin to imagine what it would
be like to fall off. Nevertheless she is struck by the unfairness of
it. Sometimes she wishes agents of the government, clean-shaven
men in drab suits, would just come to her apartment and take all
the things she can't bring herself to give away but feels guilty for
owning: her stereo, her exercise bike, her clothes and books and
cupboards full of food.
She's feeling nauseated by the time Gwen pulls into the clinic
parking lot, so she decides not to go in. Instead she walks the two
blocks back to the man and his dog. On the way, she takes three
dollar bills out of her purse and puts them in her pocket, so that
she won't have to go through her wallet in front of him. She
doesn't want him to see the other bills, how much more she could
be giving but isn't. Why three dollars? Four seems cumbersome,
so close that it might as well be a five-dollar bill; but five dollars is
too much, somehow. Five dollars you would remember later, you
would miss.
She walks up to them on the corner and bends down to drop
the folded bills into a paper coffee cup. The cup is empty except
for a dime and nickel lying on the bottom, and she feels suddenly
embarrassed to be leaving so much. She finds herself hoping that
no one is watching. When the man says, "God bless you," she
thanks him and pats the dog's head.
For the drive home, Gwen puts the cooler with its new cargo of
three plastic straws on the floor behind the driver's seat and snugs
it in place by wrapping her jacket around it.
"Gwen, it's sperm, not nitroglycerin." Daphne can hear an impatience
in her voice that she didn't intend.
"I just don't want anything to happen to it," Gwen says, managing
to sound both proud and sheepish, already like a new
mother.
Daphne watches Gwen settle into her seat and reach for the ignition.
She opens her mouth and finally the words that have been
cooped up in her head come flying out: "I'm pregnant, I think."
Gwen leans back in her seat. They're strapped in like astronauts,
and for a moment Daphne expects them both to just blast off.
In the ten seconds that she could say a number of wrong things,
Gwen says nothing. Then she turns toward Daphne as far as the
seat belt will allow and says, "Do you want to be?"
Daphne shakes her head and Gwen nods in response. They go
on like that too long, until Gwen finally says, "Weird timing,
huh?" and Daphne starts to cry.
Gwen doesn't throw herself on Daphne like a blanket, the
way Lila would, to smother her unhappiness. Instead, she takes
Daphne's left hand and holds it in her right, as though together
they were about to cross the world's busiest street. They sit like
that for a while, staring out the windshield at the mural painted
on the clinic wall: women of all races standing together, some
with children and some without, all smiling.
"Are you okay?" Gwen asks finally. When Daphne nods, Gwen
gives her hand a squeeze before letting it go to start the car.
On the way home, Daphne looks out the window at the people
passing each other on the sidewalk and thinks, distractedly, that
it's a picture of inefficiency somehow--each person coming from
a place someone else needs to go. "I keep thinking of something I
read once about dogs," she says. "About how every dog likes to
play the same trick of bringing the stick back to someone other
than the person who threw it. The dog thinks that's a great joke,
apparently." She glances at Gwen. "I feel like someone brought
me Lila's stick."
"I'm not sure what we're talking about here," Gwen says carefully,
picking each word out of the air separately, "but these two
things don't really have anything to do with each other. They're
not connected. You understand that, don't you?"
Daphne decides not to tell Lila yet, and Lila doesn't press her
about what's wrong but gives her another hearty dinner. On Sunday
morning, watching her sister zigzag around the kitchen,
Daphne feels a powerful pull to spend the day with the two of
them, sprawled horizontally across big, soft chairs and listening
to music, pretending they might eventually go out and do something
worthwhile. But she knows the only thing worse than
going home to an empty apartment on Sunday is going home to
it on Sunday night. She can see herself opening her front door
and sending her hand out in the dark to scout the wall for the
light switch, her overnight bag hanging heavy on her shoulder,
and she knows that vacant, lonely moment is worth avoiding.
Daphne watches Lila pack up a loaf of banana bread and a stack
of detective novels for her sister to take home. Most of Lila's hair
is tied back with what looks like a paisley necktie, and she's dressed
in some intermediary stage between night and day that involves a
kimono worn over a pair of pants. She looks to Daphne like something
in the process of becoming something else, and Daphne sees
ourselves from reaching. She thinks of the things she could not
undo without undoing her life, and she hopes that something
their mother is fond of saying is right: that being healed does not
always require finding the cure.