In 1993, Bill and I had been married for three years when my friend Amy called. Ten years earlier, Amy and had I met in classes we were taking in Eugene. Classes of self-exploration and personal growth that formed a tight bond between the people who attended. We immediately connected and sustained that connection. Now, even though Amy still lived in Eugene and I’d moved to Portland, we got together regularly.
I considered her my best friend. Over the years, we’d shared the excitement of job successes and the sweet moments of falling in love. And we’d comforted each other through the hard endings of relationships.
This was the terrain under us. I’d seen her at her best and her worst. I thought she’d seen me at mine.
“Guess what, Jack?” she said.
I knew what she’d say. I knew she and her husband were trying.
“I’m pregnant,” she said.
Her words should have been almost as exciting for me as they were for her. I was excited. I would be the best friend of this baby’s mom. But next to that excitement I felt like I’d lost a race I hadn’t known I’d put myself in.
I’d met Bill before Amy met her husband. She’d looked at the relationship Bill and I were building, and she wanted one like it. Maybe I’d felt proud that I’d found someone like Bill first while she still aspired to the kind of love I had. Then she met her husband and we were even. Now Amy had a baby in her belly, and her husband wanted the baby as much as she did.
Amy came to visit in her seventh month, a last chance for us to be together before everything changed. Bill was gone for the weekend. He wouldn’t see how beautiful Amy was in her leggings and the body-hugging top that showed her pregnant belly. Pregnant women now no longer wore the loose maternity blouses and dresses our mothers had worn, silly and frilly and hiding. They dressed like this, like Amy. Stretchy clothes that said: look here, look at what I carry, look at what I am creating.
That Saturday, we did the things we always did when we were together: Chinese food, bookstores, a movie, talk, hook arms and walk down the street, her long dark wavy hair, my long dark straight hair, my strong lean body, her beautiful pregnant body. People passed us, hopeful smiles to her belly. Women asked when she was due, asked if she hoped for a boy or a girl. All eyes on Amy and her belly.
I couldn’t keep my eyes off her either, the same way I couldn’t keep my eyes off a pregnant woman at a party or in a store, the woman in Accounting coming to me in my new job in Human Resources to fill out the paperwork for her three months of maternity leave.
I wanted three months’ leave from work. I wanted the looks, the baby shower, the seat given up to let me have a rest with what I carried. I wanted that belly. Her hand went to it, without even thinking. What was it? A twinge, a pain, maybe simply holding up the weight. What was she touching, her own skin or the life beneath it? The flutter of movement within, a comforting pat to that child she maybe already knew more intimately than anything could be known.
I didn’t ask. I didn’t tell her about the wondering-what-if-maybe part of me.
Amy stopped with chopsticks above her plate, long thin fingers. “It’s amazing, Jack,” she said. “To have this life in me.” Her husband probably put his mouth to her belly, whispered to their child.
“Feel it,” she said, next to me at the bookstore. She took my hand and put it on her belly. The look on her face, like she had the best secret, right there inside her. She knew what it was like to have the bleeding stop, to see the blue line on the tester, to feel her belly-skin stretch, first swirl of movement, a tiny handprint, pressed from inside.
Her baby wasn’t the first child I’d felt kick. It wouldn’t be the last. I smiled. I said, “That is really cool. Wow. Amazing.” I was happy for her and this was all I would show. If I said I wasn’t sure, if I said I was jealous, if I said I wished, then it would take away from what she had. Saying these truths would take away from what I had, and from the bright shiny confident way I wanted to look to the world.
Late in the evening, Amy said, “I still have your aunt Lena’s rocking chair. I’d like to keep it for the baby.”
The rocking chair I’d brought from Condon to Eugene not long after Sam and I married. My great aunt Lena had died, and Mom and Dad let us kids have some of her furniture. I’d picked a mirrored china cabinet, an oak desk, and that chair. Leanne had wanted the rocking chair for the babies she already had. But when it was my turn to choose, I took it.
Back then I’d thought Sam and I would have a child to rock in that chair. But things changed. When I moved from Eugene to Portland, I didn’t have room for the rocking chair or the other furniture I’d gotten from Aunt Lena. I left it behind for Amy to store. I couldn’t take it from her now, another mother wanting to rock her child.
Early on Sunday morning, the metal blinds in my bedroom knocked against the windowsill quick and loud. Everything shook. I ran out into the living room. The shaking, the noise, the long fault line we’d been warned about. A vase shivered across a shelf and fell. A sound, a roaring, outside.
Then it all stopped. Only a few long seconds had gone by.
“Jack?” Amy came out of her room, her dark eyes gone darker. “What was that?” She held her belly. One hand on top, one hand under. Afraid for more than herself.
“Earthquake,” I said. “That was really cool, huh?” I sounded smug in my this-is-no-big-deal voice.
We looked at the vase, unbroken on the carpet. Waited for the ground to move again. Her life wasn’t only hers anymore.
After Amy’s baby was born, Bill and I drove south to Eugene for the weekend. We went to Amy’s house. I gave her a gift for her boy. I don’t remember what that gift was, but I remember the way Amy looked at her baby when she took us to his bedroom. He was asleep. She leaned over the crib and stared at him with a private smile. As though Bill and I weren’t there with her.
Bill looked at the baby and put his arm around Amy and said, “I’m happy for you.” And he stepped back and made room for me. I bent over the crib for a long time looking at her boy. His head was bald, except for some blond fuzz. His mouth moved in tiny sleep moves.
“I’m sorry you can’t hold him,” Amy said. “But I don’t want him to wake up.” I didn’t mind not getting to hold him. This surprised me.
She stood beside me and we watched him. “I had no idea it would be like this,” she said. “It’s like nothing I’ve ever felt. You can’t imagine. I sometimes put him next to me on the bed and I stretch out with him and the whole afternoon goes by just watching him. I love him so much.”
I’d always been interested in new-mother stories. But now I felt bored. This surprised me too.
Looking back, I must have had some sense of loss. The old ways of our friendship gone. This baby was now the center of things. But I went past that fast. It was too late; the baby was here.
Aunt Lena’s rocking chair was in the corner, the dark old wood. I stepped over and touched the arm of it. Aunt Lena never rocked a baby in this chair. Amy had this bedroom with this baby and this rocking chair. I loved my friend for her happiness and I resented her for telling me she had what I couldn’t know.
I looked over at Bill. He was looking out the window at the yard below.
We didn’t stay long. The baby was sleeping, and there didn’t seem to be much else to talk about. Besides, we were staying with other friends, friends who didn’t have a child and who could go out to dinner with us and stay up late and not worry about a schedule and feeding and quiet.
The next time I saw Amy, her baby was six months old. It would be the last time I saw her until her boy became a man.
She came to Portland with her husband. They didn’t stay with us. She asked me to come to her at the Heathman Hotel. “It’s easier,” she said. “All the stuff it takes to go anywhere with a baby.”
Never mind that I was working more than full-time, that I would have to drive downtown in traffic, take time out of my busy workday. “Oh, no problem,” I said. “I’ll come to you.”
After I hung up, I told Bill how it bothered me. Ever since she’d met her husband, she hardly spent time with me. Having a baby meant everyone had to work around it. I took my stand, counting the reasons to step away from her.
I spent extra time getting dressed that day. Heels, a slim skirt, a silk blouse, a bright scarf. I was the professional, the working woman. She was the mother with a baby.
In the hotel room, I held her boy on my lap. I touched his downy hair. His perfect round head. Already he was smiling, catching eyes, taking my hand and pulling himself up. Amy took a picture of her boy and me. My profile looking at him, smiling. His profile looking at me, smiling. My long hair, that bright scarf.
I didn’t hold him for long: he got fussy. I didn’t stay long: he needed a nap. When we said goodbye, we said we’d see each other again soon.
Later Amy sent a copy of that picture. Me and her boy. I pinned it to my wall of pictures of nieces and nephews and friends’ kids, pictures of Bill and me in front of pyramids and sandstone and mountains. Bill and me holding kids and playing with kids. I looked beautiful and happy with that big baby boy in my lap. In that picture, there is no hint of the longing in me.
Later, the final shifting, settling. Something Amy said or didn’t say, an effort she didn’t make. The relief I felt that I already had plans when she tried to visit and she was busy when I tried.
She felt the shifting, the distance growing. She tried to find out why, to fix it. I gave her small reasons, reasons that didn’t make sense. About her not coming to see us, about her husband seeming not interested in us, about me having to come to her rather than her to me. In her last long letter, she said the loss of our friendship devastated her. She didn’t understand. She hurt. She said she would stop trying to reach out. She said, “The ball is in your court.”
I didn’t pick it up.