I TOLD MARLENE ABOUT THE PREGNANCY ABOUT ONE WEEK after watching Sarah walk into Planned Parenthood with my father on her arm like an urban accessory. Forty-eight hours later, she insisted we meet again in person.
Unlike our previous rendezvous, I was the first person to stroll into the diner. I sat at a corner table, ordered a Lemon Zinger tea and an everything bagel and waited. A crew of college students walked in and out, nursing their hangovers. A businessman sat on his cell phone for about five minutes until he realized he was in the wrong place. And I’m fairly certain a deal involving the price of an ounce of cocaine was taking place in the booth just ten feet from my own. As for me, I was nearly on my third refill of hot water and picking up crumbs with the cushions of my fingers when Marlene finally walked in.
“I thought we were meeting at 3:00,” I said to her, looking at the invisible watch on my wrist. “I’ve got things to do, people to see.”
She sat down. “Don’t pull that with me today.”
As she inched into the tight plastic booth, something seemed off about her. She was still wearing her habitual black attire, but she moved around in it clumsily, as if nothing quite fit her anymore.
“You all right?”
“Am I supposed to be all right with this news?”
“We haven’t even spoken yet and you want to blame me for your mood? I don’t have to stay here anymore.”
She rearranged the table décollage and finished getting ready in the booth.
“Sorry,” she said, without looking at me. “Sorry. Just tell me what you know,” she demanded, weaker than usual.
“Just that she looked happy.”
“No, no, no,” Marlene burst, pushing up her sleeves. “She’s not happy. She’s not happy. This is not okay.”
I crossed my legs under the table.
“I know you don’t like them together, but such is life, no? What can you do?”
“She can have an abortion is what she can do,” Marlene declared. In hindsight, it probably should have been more of a shock to me at the time.
“Wow,” I laughed. “And here I was, thinking I got lucky in the parent department.”
Marlene ran her fingers through her hair and pulled out a rather hefty score on her way down. She tossed them under the table.
“Shit, Marlene, are you okay?”
“I’m fine, Noa,” she said sternly. “She cannot have this baby.”
“Yeah, you already said that.”
“I want you to help me, Noa. You must help me.”
The words needy and desperate never previously applied to Marlene. This powerful woman, this sophisticated senior law partner in a major multinational law firm, was in need. She needed to talk and get something off her chest. And she needed that with me. From me. And that’s the one morbidly positive thing I learned from what happened with my father. When someone needs something from you, you offer it to that person, even if you can tell it is leading somewhere dark.
“Please, Noa,” she pleaded, holding out a hand with a Band-Aid. I could see a slight bluish bruise beginning to form underneath. “Please.”
“What could you possibly need from me now?”
A waiter came by and asked Marlene for her order. She was momentarily flustered when she couldn’t find the menu and then just ordered a cup of coffee. No, she changed it. She ordered tea. Then she changed it again to just orange juice. And a biscuit with butter on it. Then she looked back at me, adjusting her posture on the plastic bench. “Sarah won’t speak with me anymore.”
“Is that why your hair is falling out?”
I didn’t mean that. I didn’t mean to say that. I don’t know why I said it. To this day, I don’t know why I said a lot of things to her.
“I went over there to talk her out of this relationship,” she continued. “And that’s when I saw the pregnancy books and clothing and everything. I knew about it before I got your message.”
“I’m not giving you the money back.”
Again, I don’t know why I kept speaking to her like that. It was as if the screening mechanism that was stripped from my communication skills upon prison acclimation began fading a year earlier.
“We had a huge falling-out, and she kicked me out.”
“I thought it was your apartment. The whole da Gama period and all?”
“Please, Noa,” she pleaded. “Stop interrupting me. It’s hard enough.”
I nodded and the waiter came by with Marlene’s orange juice. “Sorry. Go on.”
Marlene picked up the glass and drank from it. I could almost see the juice travel down as she primped her nascent balding self into talking to me.
“Sarah has a disease called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. It’s a congenital heart defect that can lead to heart attacks, sudden death.” She paused, thinking. “Every year or so, there is a news story about a healthy active athlete who drops dead in the middle of the basketball court or the football field or track. You’ve heard of this, certainly. Well, they likely had this disease—unknown or undiagnosed—or something similar.”
“And, let me guess,” I paused, eyes open. “Pregnancy makes it worse?”
Marlene nodded, her focus back to me. “Exactly.”
I shied a bit. “I see your predicament, Marlene, but like I told you before, this is a little above my pay grade.”
“I’ll pay you more.”
“It’s an expression.”
“I know that. I know that. I just—”
“Exactly what do you think I can do?” I asked, nervously trying to fill the silence. “I’m pretty much a nobody here. You could have plucked anyone off the street to do the same ‘job.’ ”
For a change, I decided to use quote marks around my words. I think it actually might have distracted her a bit.
“I just …”
She was trying not to appear flustered.
“Look Marlene, I don’t know your daughter. I hardly know my dad. You helped me pay my bills for the last few months, so thanks for the job and all, but now this is what it is. I’m not about to break up a relationship with two loving parents who both want a kid.”
“But your father …”
“Okay, you’re right,” I corrected. “Maybe one loving parent. That’s better than none, right?”
“He’s …”
“Yes, he’s a loser. He’s a criminal. He’s not the brightest. What about him?”
“You have influence over him, and he has influence over her,” she declared, before clutching the inside of her arm. “I can’t imagine you’d want him going back to prison.”
Marlene was speaking to me as if I were sitting in the wings of the theater, a lone patron to her preauthored soliloquy. As if she actually had any control over what happened with my father’s future.
“You’re wrong,” I told her. “I have no influence over my father, so don’t try to blackmail me with sentiment.”
“Noa, you do have influence over him. You just don’t realize it. You have to learn how to use your role. Your strength.”
“So I have influence and power now?” I laughed, “and you have …?”
She nodded silently.
“Marlene?”
“I have nothing without Sarah. And now I have nothing,” she said. It was angry and pinched with pity in a way that made me want, at the very least, to keep listening. “She thinks that I want her to have an abortion because your father is not a college graduate. Or because he’s older. Or because he has a criminal record.”
“She thinks you think he’s beneath her,” I said, confirming aloud what she clearly had difficulty articulating for upper-middle-class guilt or professional embarrassment or some other concoction that people with china patterns endure.
She looked away.
“She does, doesn’t she? It’s a class issue.”
“This is America. We don’t have class issues,” she declared.
I laughed. “You’re kidding, right?”
She didn’t join me.
“Seriously, you are kidding. Your shoes probably cost more than one month’s rent for me. You drive home to the Main Line or wherever you live in your Mercedes or Lexus or Audi.”
“That’s enough.”
“What?”
“I think we both know.”
“What? That my father is beneath your sacred daughter?”
“Stop.”
“You know it’s true. I know it’s true. Why try to hide it?”
“Enough!”
She looked around to inspect her surroundings. Luckily, nobody cared whether she raised her voice or not.
“Sorry,” I said. Again, it used to be easy to say that word. It used to be easy to apologize for things I hadn’t done. It was the things I had that posed the most problems.
“So you’ll help me?” she finally said.
I stood and dropped a few dollars on the table to pay for her orange juice.
“It’s just not my problem anymore. Sorry.”