Jasper’s naughty cackle saves me from having to continue the tale of our banal day. A few chunks of chicken litter the floor beside his high chair. He’s got another piece in his outstretched hand, daring us to react.
“All right, you,” I say when it slips from his fingers. I lug myself from the chair, my uterus thudding against my pelvis as I stand. Gabe bounds up to help me and carries Jasper upstairs for a bath. I follow, watching from the doorway as Gabe starts the water, strips Jasper, and places him in a sea of bubbles and toys. After that, it’s all hands on deckto get our son dried, slathered with lotion, into pj’s and off to bed. Once we’ve cleaned the kitchen, Gabe shoveling the rest of his dinner into his mouth as he loads the dishwasher, I’m too tired for even a thirty-minute show. That’s the deal with my energy these days. It’s potent and then totally depleted. A battery drained.
Gabe tucks me into bed like he did Jasper. He lies beside me and spreads his fingers across my stomach, prompting our daughter’s in utero dance. She’s most active when I’m least. I lace my fingers through his, feeling the vigor of our child.
“I love you,” he says, curling into me.
“I love you too,” I tell him, pulling him closer. As we snuggle, the day’s tedium drains away, Jasper’s tantrum, the lingering unease of it all. I drift to sleep, the incident at the coffee shop, Gigi, long forgotten.
Chapter Two
Barb
These days, my life is filled with silence, the silence of retirement, of living alone, of crosswords and mystery novels. Those silences feel nothing like the silence today as I wait for my daughter to call. Most days, I don’t expect to hear from her. She’s busy with her life on the left coast. I don’t begrudge her this. For years, our relationship was so strained, I wouldn’t have expected a call from her even on my birthday. That was my fault. I can follow the trail of choices I made that led to our distance until—at the height of the pandemic, when we were all so disconnected, especially those of us like me and my daughter, who both lived alone—she did something unexpected. She reached out. A call became a FaceTime became regular cups of coffee shared from 2,400 miles apart. Unexpectedly, we became close. Or closer, anyway. Close enough that she couldn’t have forgotten my seventieth birthday. Yet there is no call.
At the moment, I’m not too worried. She lives in Los Angeles, in the godforsaken dregs of Venice Beach, where Arnold Schwarzenegger once lifted weights and marijuana smoke thickens the air. When I wake up at seven in New Jersey, it’s only four in LA, too early for her to call. As the morning drags on, I tell myself she’ll phone on the way to the coffee shop where she writes each day. She’s vague about what she’sworking on—a screenplay, I assume, given her film degree from UCLA and proximity to Hollywood. She tutors part time, but I worry about her financial stability. Since she’s never asked me for a dime, I don’t press her about her employment. Our relationship is still finding its footing. Unwanted motherly inquiries could quickly set it off balance.You have to trust her,my therapist Christine says,even when you know she’s wrong. Let her make her own mistakes.I didn’t start seeing a therapist until I retired. In retirement, I do all sorts of things I never thought I’d do, retiring being chief among them.
The other being a book club. My friend Linda was persistent. When I was working sixty-hour weeks, it was easy to blow her off. Since retiring, I’ve run out of excuses. Linda, it turns out, is more relentless than the analysts at the investment firm where I worked for nearly half a century. I love her for it, not just because book club has been all the things she promised—new friends, good books, better wine—but because today, on my birthday, it provides a distraction from worrying that my daughter won’t call.
My book club is taking me to lunch at noon. The restaurant is a fifteen-minute drive from my home, so I leave at 11:50, which is 8:50 in Venice Beach. This guarantees I’ll be a few minutes late. There’s nothing more depressing than being the first to arrive for your own birthday lunch. As I drive along Route 4, I think about the last time I saw my daughter, the only time since we reconciled. It was three months ago, right after I was forced to retire. A retirement on paper. The act itself was a firing, plain and simple. Though I sound bitter, I’m not. I’m devastated. Iwasdevastated. My therapist encourages me to keep the past in the rearview. It rushes up when I least expect it. That’s betrayal for you. Romantic, professional, familial—you forget, then bam, it sidelines you with its impossible cruelty. The silver lining about my forced retirement was that it gave me the courage to visit my daughter. Ever since we’d been back in touch, I’d wanted to see her, but I was scared. We had more experience fighting than getting along. Any misstep could have reverted us to the days before we were sequestered in our homes, when her life was full and complete without me.You’re stillafraid of rejection,my therapist reminds me, something so obvious I wonder if she’s been listening to me at all.
Instead of telling my daughter that I wanted to visit her, I invented a conference and reserved a two-bedroom suite at Shutters, inviting her to spend a week in divine comfort with me. If she’d researched it, she would have discovered no such event existed. When she arrived at the hotel, she didn’t even ask how the conference was. We went for walks along the beach and massages at the spa. We had dinner anywhere she wanted and breakfast each morning on our waterfront balcony. I asked few questions about her life, and she offered little beyond her preferences for restaurants each evening. I didn’t mind. We were building a relationship. That takes time. I was willing to be patient.
On the last night of the trip, she took me to an Italian restaurant off the Venice boardwalk that was surprisingly quiet and surprisingly good. A date had taken her there. I didn’t ask anything about the date, whether he’d become a boyfriend, if she had a boyfriend at all. Instead, I asked her what was good, then ordered exactly as she advised even though the tomato sauce gave me heartburn that kept me up for the entire red-eye home.
Big birthday coming up,she said when she hugged me goodbye.Any plans?
Want to go to Europe with me?I almost asked her. There was no rush. We have years ahead for new adventures together.
Probably just lunch with friends.
Remember to have fun,she advised.
I peer at the clock on my dashboard as I pull into the parking lot. 12:03. A little after 9:00 a.m. in Venice. Still no call.
Inside, my book club is waiting at a round table, menus folded, napkins in their laps. They clap. “There’s the birthday girl!”
I give each of the ladies a hug. Linda, Delia, Gloria, and Susanna. Normally I go by Barb. At book club, I’m Barbara. The fiveAs. Lindateases that she wouldn’t have invited me if my name ended with ayor ane—or, god forbid, a consonant.
Other than our names and the fact that we’re all Jewish, we couldn’t be more different. Linda is a retired reading specialist, Delia never worked, Gloria never married, and Susanna still runs a chain of local bakeries. Delia is tall and lean, with dyed black hair and one too many facelifts. The rest of us are in various stages of aging, Susanna being the only one who has fully embraced her gray hair and wrinkles, her pear shape. During the pandemic, I stopped dyeing my hair, which is still mostly dark. I’m just plump enough to keep the deep wrinkles at bay, though I get my sunspots removed religiously. Sometimes I wonder if I’d gone under the knife, like Delia, hired a trainer when my midsection began to thicken, like Gloria, done chemical peels and Botox, like Linda, whether the male partners at the firm would have discarded me so swiftly. When they offered me an exceedingly generous retirement package, I went to see a lawyer—a woman—who told me I could sue for ageism. I couldn’t imagine anything more embarrassing.
Although the book club ladies and I have little in common, we’re never short of conversation. My birthday’s no exception. I nod along as Susanna and Linda swap stories of their grandchildren, as Delia laments the singledom of her three children, as Gloria jokes that all the men she dates are still children themselves. I don’t realize I’m checking my phone until Linda asks, “Got a hot date later?”
I look at her, confused.
“You keep staring at your phone.”
It’s 12:47—9:47 in LA.
“I haven’t heard from Regina.” I put the phone in my purse, then place my purse under my chair. “It’s probably nothing.”
“She’ll call.” Linda squeezes my hand.
After I’ve eaten the last of my chocolate cake, the women shoo away my credit card. This is part of our tradition, too, the song and dance of pretending that we don’t know the others will pay on our birthday. Normally this kind of charade would annoy me, but it has the distinct giddiness of a first date. I used to date a lot. Lately, ithasn’t held the same appeal. Most eligible men my age are widowed, recently single. Isaac and I divorced when Regina was thirteen. I’ve been single so long, it’s hard to remember I was ever married. While my life has had its fair share of grief, I’m not in that stage now and don’t want to usher someone I don’t know through their loss.
Outside, the afternoon is bright and sticky. I wave goodbye to my friends and thank them for the meal, saying I’ll see them at book club next week. It’s 2:08, after 11:00 in LA. Even if Regina was up all night, she’s awake now, caffeinated and cogent enough to call her mother on her birthday.
“She’ll call,” Linda assures me as she hugs me goodbye. We’ve been friends since her husband started at my firm. He’s seventy-four and still working. No one summoned him in to human resources to encourage him to embrace retirement in this stage of life and all the freedom that could come with it.
