Is it? Is raising children together more essential to a marriage than deep, loyal love?I wonder standing in front of this man who, albeit slowly, has begun to grow on me.
“Is that why you and your wife got divorced? Because it got complicated when she couldn’t have kids?” My mouth takes off before my brain can think through my words. Ash was the one who told me over tortilla chips in his grandmother’s kitchen that he wanted nothing more than to have a family. Standing in Saint Anne’s hallway, I wonder if I am being an emotional bully picking on Ash because I want him to spill his sad story so I feel better about mine.
Ash stuffs his hands in his pockets and bites his lower lip, appearing shut down given my line of questioning. I don’t know what my purpose was deflecting the conversation off me and my unraveling marriage and onto Ash’s, which has already unraveled. But maybe together we can deconstruct the muck of our tangled ties.
“I didn’t divorce my wife because she couldn’t have kids,” Ash states, ruining my assumption. “If my ex-wife had been on board, I would have loved to foster and ultimately adopt a house full of kids in need of a family. If Evangeline hadn’t done that for my grandmother, I wouldn’t be here talking with you.”
“Ehrm ...,”is all I say, trying to sort out in my head what must have happened in Ash’s marriage. Though now I take a beat to choose my words more wisely, I can’t control my face giving away that I desperately want to know more.
“My wife wanted to experience pregnancy. She left me because I was the one who couldn’t have kids and she wanted to be pregnant. Ultimately, I wasn’t enough, so she went out to find someone else,” Ash says, practiced, like it’s an anecdote he has delivered too many times, but he still hates the sound of it coming out of his mouth. “She is twelve years younger than me, and I couldn’t stand in the way of what she wanted for herself, so I let her go.”
I chew on Ash’s words as he stares down the row of royal-blue lockers lining Saint Anne’s main hallway. Stories of female infertility litter middle-aged women’s social media. There are fertility doctors making TikToks on how to talk to friends struggling to conceive. I’ve seen numerous stories on Instagram on how to tiptoe around the dicey Mother’s Day celebration with a sister-in-law who wants nothing more than to be a mother when all the other mothers in her family are dying to be celebrated by being left alone. As far as my scrolling shows, there is nothing that mentions the personal pain of a man who cannot do the thing society assumes all men can do.
“She’s expecting in January,” Ash admits, though I’m not sure if it is to me or to himself.She certainly didn’t waste any time.
I think about what I can do, in this moment, to help Ash understand he is not alone in feeling that he wasn’t enough. “Simon left us. Just got up one day and decided to walk out the door. For him, I guess, having a wife and kids was not enough of a reason to stay.”
“I would never do that. You, Coco, and Lou would have been more than enough for me.”
SEPTEMBER
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 4
“Who are you, and what have you done with my friend?” I nudge Zwena with my shoulder to get her attention. We are at gate D6 sitting four across, sandwiched in with my mother and Mrs. Eisenberg, on fixed pleather seats waiting to board a plane for Los Angeles. When I saw the man directly across from us with his hoodie pulled over his eyes and his body contorted over the immovable armrest to catch a few winks, I angled for us to take the wheelchair accessible seats near the window. Mrs. Eisenberg feigned insult and shrugged me off when I tried to steer her in that direction. There was so much commotion about who should sit where, taking on and off coats to contend with the air-conditioning, and back and forth roller bag comparisons, I feared the motionless man was not actually asleep but faking death to dodge the four of us.
Encased in a thick blanket of fog, the airport has closed a runway due to visibility concerns, resulting in our flight being delayed until the inbound LAX plane can land and its passengers disembark. Zwena ignores my nudging, and she ignores Patricia on the intercom, who is overly peppy with her intermittent updates—which is never comforting when your flight is postponed for weather reasons. I wave my fingers up and down, signaling to Patricia to tone it down a notch. She has only been a gate agent for a month and has yet to learn that raising passengerhopes inevitably crashes into pissed-off people when travel expectations are not met.
Settled in for our extended wait, my mom and Mrs. Eisenberg are exchanging favorite age-spot serums and Hollywood leading men, unconcerned with our deferred travel plans and my wrecked case of nerves. Every hour of this past week has been earmarked to ensure perfect preparation for our filming tomorrow at 11:00 a.m. Call time on the lot in Studio City is 9:00 a.m., which means I must be in the hotel lobby coffee shop for a double espresso by 7:20 a.m. to perk myself up to just north of wakefulness but south of the jitters. For this afternoon, though, before Zwena is allowed to go in search of the five-star food truck with the best Nyama Choma in greater Los Angeles, the four of us need to do a final run-through of our Brown Butter, Baby! presentation in the Hilton business center. Then Zwena can go grilled-meat hunting, and my mom and Mrs. Eisenberg can order room service and a hotly anticipated Kevin Costner rom-com made for the AARP crowd. I will be checking for the fifth and final time that the studio received all my lotions and display cases, and then I want to be tucked into my hotel bed by 7:00 p.m. to ward off under-eye dark circles. Except now it looks like we won’t be taking off until close to 5:00 p.m. Good thing I made a trip to Sephora to buy puffy-no-more eye patches in case of this exact scenario.
Since we got to the airport, Zwena has had her nose in the recently updated US citizen’s test prep book that Krish ordered for her. With our growing intolerance of Zwena’s near constant insertion of random North American facts into our conversations, for the preservation of our friendship with Zwena, and to increase her chances of passing the test on the first try, Krish bought her the tome. The hope is it will narrow her history knowledge down to exactly what she needs to know to nail the exam. No more. No less.
I rolled my eyes as she started on page one, thinking I was going to have to relive the dry, uninspired lectures of my twelfth-grade government teacher. It all felt oddly new to me, with only a few familiar tidbitshere and there. I couldn’t answer most of the practice test questions, or even offer a best guess. As it turns out, Zwena from Kenya knows more about the three branches of our democratic government than I do. It’s not a great feeling to know you are too ignorant to become a citizen of your own country.
I slurp the dregs of my drink extra loud and then stir my straw around the ice, intentionally trying to break Zwena’s concentration so she will pay attention to me. If I have to spend one more minute alone with my thoughts questioning every word I’ve selected for the presentation tomorrow, I may have a mental breakdown today.
“Subiri,” Zwena instructs, holding her right hand up to my face. Her left index finger follows a sentence in her book to the end of the paragraph. “Hey, hey, look at this. Did you know your mom can run for president of the United States?”
I glance over to the woman who is pulling an eyelash curler out of her purse. “No, she can’t, she was born in Puerto Rico,” I respond, gnawing on my straw. “You have to be born in the US to become president. And you have to have the slightest interest in politics.”Whew, there is one fact I remember from second period senior spring.
“Ah. Wrong.” Zwena looks up at me from under raised eyebrows. “As of April 2000, any Puerto Rican who has lived in the United States for at least fourteen years and is over the age of thirty-five can run for president,” she corrects me, licking her index finger and marking an imaginary point in the Zwena column of our ongoing US history scoreboard.
“Did you know that not one, but at least four attractive men between the ages of twenty-two and fifty have strolled past us, and you have not noticed one of them? Not one. And that guy”—I point down the concourse toward a fading man with a pair of Bose headphones warming his neck—“was trying to get your attention, and you didn’t even bother to look up!” With pursed lips, Zwena throws me a scowl like I must be mistaken. I meet her lips with a huff and give myself an imaginary point in my own column.
“Points are for facts, not fiction. Trust me, I can multitask. I saw that brother in the red Adidas tracksuit. He’s too lanky for me, plus he reminded me of my cousin Gathii.” Zwena shivers, sticking her tongue out at the thought. Then she dives back into her catalog of facts, leaving me alone with the ping-ponging disastrous scenarios that could occur tomorrow taking up residency in my brain. The most recent scenario being the possibility that I am filming dead last in the season because including me on the show was solely a favor to Ash and the network has no actual plans of including my segment in the final cut.Of all things that could happen, please don’t let it be that.
“Hey, ladies!” Krish saunters up, greeting the four of us with a warmhearted grin that, of course, captivates my mother. Zwena’s neck snaps to meet Krish’s voice with an equally affectionate grin.She can tear herself away from her studies for Krish, but she couldn’t bother with a moment of eye contact in my time of need?
My surprise delight in seeing Krish in street clothes at the airport mixed with my nervous anticipation for the next twenty-four hours comes out as an interrogation. “How’d you get past security since you don’t work here anymore?” On more than one occasion, Zwena and I have lamented that we miss having Krish as our workday sanity check. Just as an airport has a center with limbs that extend from its heart, Krish often felt like our center, tethering Zwena and myself to earth, or at least insisting we be tolerant of Dieting Donna and her weekly wellness check-ins.
“Albert at security owed me a favor. My last week of work, I gave him a bunch of happy hour coupons for Hayes Street Grill.” Krish points behind him, and we look over his shoulders to a handful of guys drinking beer and watching a game, their carry-ons littering the bar area. “He loves their cheese curds.”
“Then are you going someplace?” I continue, searching for Krish’s own carry-on. Krish had finally saved enough money to take a three-week trip to Jalandhar to see his relatives, but I’m fairly certain he’s not leaving until November.
“No, I have an anniversary party tonight at the Old Union at Stanford.”
“The Patels’, right?” Zwena chimes in, looking proud to have memorized this fact too. Krish is right, she really is holding on to way too much useless intel.
Nodding to Zwena’s fact-checking, Krish brings out a cloth bag he’s been holding behind his back. “I wanted to surprise you ladies and wish you the best of luck in LA. You’re going to crush it, Toni.” Krish opens his free arm, inviting me in for a hug. “I know it.”
