37
“It doesn’t mean he doesn’t want children!”
I shake my head, my bike helmet jostling my brain. “Be fuckingfor real.”
It’s the morning after the fateful family dinner, and Mar and I are coasting downhill, weaving through Pasadena. The streets are wide and lined with majestic mature trees of all kinds. It’s both peaceful and menacing here—a quiet suburb where nary a human being can be seen in their yards or walking the perfectly clean sidewalks.
But it makes for a beautiful and zippy bike ride. We ride over an old, small bridge that crosses a leafy arroyo and after a few more stretches of tree-shaded residential streets, wind up at the Rose Bowl, a giant historic stadium home to the best flea market on the second Sunday of every month.
“I’m just saying,” Mar says as she locks her bike on a stand. “He said ‘for now.’ ”
I grab my giant IKEA tote bag that I’ve refashioned into a backpack for the ride home. “He was literally sweating. Like, pit stains. This man ismeticulousabout hygiene.”
We pay to get in, briskly making our way to our favorite vintage-clothing stalls. The sun is beating down on our capped heads even though it’s only eight a.m. The law of the universe is that any Sunday morning you decide to hit up the Bowl will be the hottest morning ever in the history of mornings.
“Well, he was put on the spot!” Mar says as she beelines to a stall only selling embroidered dresses from Mexico. “Your entire family was just staring at him.”
“That might be true, but ‘for now’? Sir, you areforty-twoyears old. You don’t know if you wanna have kids yet? Wake the fuck up!” My voice is loud but the woman running the stall just gives me a look like,I feel you.
Mar is somehow carrying three dresses already. “All right, slow your roll, Gloria Steinem. Up untilvery recentlyyou didn’t one hundred percent know that you wanted children.”
“What do you mean? Of course, I’ve always known,” I say, taken aback. “I froze my eggs!”
With zero self-consciousness, Mar whips off her tank and pulls the dress on. Her voice is muffled under the hot-pink fabric when she says, “Yeah, because Halmoni was on your ass. But you didn’t actually know if you wanted kids until you slept with Ellis.”
My mouth drops open. “What!”
The dress falls to right under Mar’s butt and she inspects herself from behind. “Yes. Until you made up that excuse to break up with Ellis, you didn’t definitively know you wanted kids. Remember? You even said it.”
I want to argue with her, but I replay that weekend in my head. How, when he said, “I go where the wind takes me,” I had felt a panic seize me.
My throat seizes up in response and I can only nod.
Sensing my emotional state, Mar immediately strides over to me and gives me a hug. “Oh, Cass.”
“I always thought maybe…maybe I was assuming I wanted kids to keep the family business going. Because, you know, only the women are born with the gift. And with Emoni’s family being freaks and only having boys, it was on me. And I resented that for a while. But now, I think having felt myself fall for Ellis, a twenty-eight-year-olddude, made it all so crystal clear. I can’t mess around, because I know I want kids. And I want them forme, to love someone like my mother loved me.”
Mar pulls back and nods, her eyes teary. “That makes sense. And hey, you are allowed to change your mind or feel however you want about this. There’s no ‘right time’ to know when you want kids. Sometimes it hits you like lightning, sometimes you just think, ‘Why the fuck not, what else do I have going on?’ ”
I start laughing through my tears. “Get out. You planned the birth of your children with a financial advisor.”
She shrugs. “But not because I felt some longing inside of me. It’s because I could see a future with college-aged kids talking down to me about politics around the kitchen table and suddenly I wanted to start making that future happen.”
“And sometimes you’re twenty-three and get pregnant with an absolute zero of a man,” I say as Mar pays for her dress. My voice sounds petulant even to my own ears.
“Trust me when I say that the second your mom saw your little scrunched-up newborn face, she had no regrets,” Mar says.
I let that sit with me, I try to believe it as we make our way through the aisles of the flea. We end up at a stall selling little charms and trinkets. The seller is an old white man wearing a black velvet vest and we make some chitchat with him as we peruse thetrays of oddities. I pick up a tiny turquoise penis. “I’ll fashion you a charm bracelet with this,” I tell Mar. Mature until the end.
“Please do.”
“Those are a deal right now, five for ten dollars,” the seller informs us.
My Emoni-training kicks in. “Hm. Can you do a little better on the price?” I can feel Mar dying next to me. She has not been trained in the fine art of haggling like I have.
“Eight is the lowest I’ll go,” he says.
I make a noncommittal noise and peruse the other trays. Mar rifles through a bowl full of stone fetishes that claim to be from a local Native American tribe. I glance at the seller. Highly doubt it. “Hey, did you figure out the liquor-license thing?” I ask her. This has been the restaurant’s latest battle.
