JANE’S FORTIETH BIRTHDAY fell on the first Saturday in November, and Liz traveled by train to Rhinebeck to help set up the dinner party Amanda and Prisha were hosting. Liz had made two earlier trips to Rhinebeck and been reassured both times to see that her sister’s coloring was rosy, her demeanor was upbeat, and a small, enchanting bump protruded a little more from her midsection with each visit. By her birthday, Jane was twenty-two weeks pregnant and downright voluptuous. She wore empire-waist shirts that emphasized her full breasts, and jeans whose stretchy belly panels she revealed to Liz with amusement. “You’re like a fertility goddess,” Liz said, and Jane laughed but didn’t seem displeased.
Mr. and Mrs. Bennet called in the afternoon to sing “Happy Birthday”—this was the only duet Liz had ever known her parents to perform—and the guests arrived around seven: friends of Amanda and Prisha’s whom Jane had recently come to know, a Barnard classmate and her husband living in nearby Kingston, a pair of yoga studio colleagues who, like Liz, had made the journey from the city. Though Jane didn’t drink, Amanda broke out several bottles of what Liz recognized as expensive wine. Liz had brought a cake from a Cobble Hill bakery—on the crowded train, she’d sat with the cake box on her lap like an obedient child, holding above it the book she was reading—and despite the filling meal, no one declined a slice.
Liz shared the double bed in the guest room with Jane and her body pillow, and on Sunday morning, while Amanda and Prisha were still asleep and their son was watching television, the sisters went for a stroll on the woodsy, sidewalkless roads around their hosts’ home.
“Does being forty feel fabulous and foxy?” Liz asked.
“More like fatigued and foolish,” Jane said, but she sounded cheerful. “Thanks for coming up to celebrate.”
“How are you doing on money?”
Jane shook her head. “Amanda won’t let me pay for anything, and their friends have been amazing with hand-me-downs. Now I just have to figure out how to break the news to Mom and Dad. Mom still hasn’t spoken to Lydia and Ham, has she?”
“I don’t think so. Did you hear that Lydia registered? Which, not to sound like Mom, but is that allowed if you elope?”
“I’ll have to order her something,” Jane said.
“How about dinner china that’s $240 a setting? Or perhaps you’d prefer the $650 juicer.”
“Are you making those up or are they real?”
“To be fair, the juicer also chops and purées.”
Jane laughed. “Maybe I can afford to buy her part of a fork. Lizzy, I don’t know what I imagined my financial situation would be when I was forty, but mooching off friends—it wasn’t this.”
The surprise, Liz thought, wasn’t that someone rich would swoop in to subsidize Jane’s pregnancy; the surprise was that Jane had arrived at a point where she needed subsidizing. So refined and delicate was Jane, so charming and beloved, that a certain inevitability had surrounded her courtship with Chip, and it was their breakup rather than their coupling that felt like a deviation from the script. Also, Liz wondered, was it indecorous of her to feel relieved that obscenely successful Amanda rather than middling Liz herself was supporting Jane—should Liz insist on taking responsibility, as a family member? Aloud, Liz said, “They seem fine with your so-called mooching.”
“You would never do it. In fact, the opposite—aren’t you paying Kitty and Mary’s rent?”
“Only until they finish their classes and get jobs. I have one more thing to tell you about Lydia. She took Ham’s last name, so she’s Lydia Ryan now.”
“Hmm,” Jane said. “I guess she’s traditional after all.”