“Thank you,” Joni whispered, and Frankie thought she might cry.
“This really had nothing to do with you,” she said, and she started to explain, but there was so much, too much, and Frankie didn’t even have an honest grasp of it herself.
After she’d told Ezra about the pregnancy, which she hadn’t even meant to do really, he became even more Ezra than he usually was—already determined to be the most wonderful father to their zygote. Neither of them had good paternal role models, though hers had promised that he would sit nicely with her mother at graduation, even if her mom showed up with Fred. Frankie didn’t think she should be the one to tell him that her mom and Fred had split up (and furthermore, Fred had never been the problem in her parents’ marriage), and besides, she wasdone with their grown-up things. But he would show up, she trusted that, because even if her dad were absent and distracted, he wasn’t terrible. He loved her, and Frankie, both then and now, knew their problems didn’t stem from her parents’ lack of love for her. There was loads of other stuff, just like with Ezra.
Frankie couldn’t really articulate why Ezra became so frenzied in the weeks that followed after she broke down in Steinway and told him. She herself had only taken the positive test a few hours prior, so she didn’t know what she needed, what she wanted. No, that wasn’t true. Even a decade later, she knew that wasn’t true. She sat at the piano bench before he found her, her fingers lilting over the keys but never catching flight, never making a sound, and understood intrinsically that she could not, would not have this child.
And then she told Ezra, and he started making plans for their future. The pregnancy test wasn’t even dry.
“You’ll move to New York with me,” he said when they had wandered out of their dorm for dinner at the dining hall, though Frankie had lost her appetite. She thought he sounded genuinely happy. “I don’t have to live with Henry. It will be the two of us, then the three of us.”
“I didn’t realize this was something I wanted,” he said one night in her room while she started packing up her books into cardboard boxes. “But now, I can see how it makes so much sense.”
And Frankie made small protestations. She said she didn’t think the job at Sony (which had not yet been offered to her but she’d led with the lie and it’d snowballed) would let her transfer to New York. She half-heartedly shrugged when Ezra suggested they call a real estate agent to find them a rentalnear NYU. She taped up her boxes and used a Sharpie to label them and never once really considered doing any of that.
She called her mom and told her, and her mom did something right for once: she gasped and said, “Oh, honey.” Then she fell silent for a long minute and said: “What can I do to help? You have your whole life in front of you, and I don’t regret being a young mom for a second, but I don’t get the sense that it’s for you.” And Frankie cried, truly sobbed, because that’s all she had wanted to hear from Ezra, an understanding that she was in over her head here, and instead of telling her what he was going to do, maybe he should have asked what she wanted.
Years later, on the same stage, Frankie watched Ezra and Gregory grow animated in the corner where, presumably, Gregory was informing her ex-boyfriend that his current girlfriend was a thief.We all hide a whole manner of sins from one another, Frankie thought. And maybe the key to successfully loving someone wasn’t to judge them for their sins, but rather to ask how we could soothe the pains those afflictions cause one another. Mimi didn’t steal things because she needed to; she did it as a panacea for something deeper. Frankie didn’t push people away because it served her; she did it because loneliness was a safer space than emotional vulnerability. And Ezra—Frankie almost started to cry at this realization. Ezra wasn’t overprotective because he thought that she or Mimi or anyone was breakable; he was overprotective because what he really needed was someone looking out for him instead. His mother was gone; his father was gone. And maybe what he’d needed from Frankie back then wasn’t a baby but the assurance of companionship. She could have told him that she didn’t wantto move to New York with him, even before the positive pregnancy test. She could have told him that she was twenty-two and selfish and wanted to sort out her own life. Instead, she hinted and she obfuscated, and she waited for him to give her what she needed instead of just talking honestly with him. She needed space. She needed freedom. She needed to figure out who she was after being told throughout childhood who she was predestined to be and still not having a firm grasp on it after four years of college. Frankie didn’t think there was anything wrong with this—who, really, knew who they were going to be for the rest of their lives at twenty-two?
Maybe Ezra did. He was going to be a lawyer and work his way up through the firm so that he never had to worry about money and also build a logical, linear, reassuring existence where bad things didn’t happen that he couldn’t control like his dad leaving when he was three and his mom getting ovarian cancer.
It dawned on Frankie now, as she saw Gregory throw his hands in the air, and then Ezra turn and march down the steps from the stage and along the left aisle of the auditorium toward the exit, that the only people who knew who they were going to be at twenty-two were people like her mother and father: parents. Her mom had aspirations well beyond giving birth at twenty and then mothering Frankie until she was old enough to have a life of her own. And Frankie knew this wasn’t her fault, that her mom had been stunted. But it had happened all the same; once you had a child, you were a parent forever, and at twenty-two, Frankie knew that she wasn’t ready to sacrifice for such things.
Gregory saw her staring and pushed through the dance floor toward her.
“Well, I tried,” he said. “I mean, I told him.”
“About Kmart?” Frankie asked.
Gregory nodded, looking grim.
“It’s not the worst thing in the world, the stealing,” Frankie said. “I mean, we all have our shit.”
“Of course it’s not the worst thing in the world!” he snapped. “But wouldn’t you think he’d want to know? But he didn’t. He didnot! He was furious with me for telling him.”
“Shooting the messenger.” Frankie shrugged because that did sound exactly like Ezra: upset at the outcome, not at the cause. Ten years had come and gone, and here they were exactly the same. Frankie reconsidered. She hoped she had evolved, even just in tiny shifts. Brick by brick, Fred used to say when she was learning a new piece, and she was surprised to think of him now. Still though, brick by brick to self-improvement too.
“Well, you can’t blame a guy for trying,” Gregory said, just as the DJ came on the mic and said, “We are not only celebrating April and Connor, but a new century in ninety minutes! The countdown has begun!” And then cued up “Electric Boogie.”
They stood there and watched some middle-aged guests attempt to wiggle their bodies to the choreography, with April and Connor at the center of it, both of them looking overjoyed, truly elated.
The thing was, Frankiedidblame a guy for trying. She blamed Ezra for a lot a decade ago. Not the pregnancy. That was on her. She had realized on her way back to the dorm from Steinway that she’d skipped two days of her pills when she was deep into her final econ project and lost track of everythingelse around her. She had only herself to blame for the mess. She’d trudged back to her room, and all around her, students were carrying on with their lives unencumbered. Someone was blasting Depeche Mode too loudly from their window; a group of boys was playing Hacky Sack on the quad. All of them had their whole futures available, wide open. And Frankie, who had tried so hard to chart her own course after high school, realized that with the pregnancy, hers was already written. But Ezra didn’t want to hear any of that. He’d wanted to be her savior instead.
By the time she’d made it back to her room and fell onto her bed and smashed her face into the pillow, Frankie was nearly incandescent with rage. The pregnancy she owned. The rest of it was on him. That he didn’t stop to ask her what she wanted. That he simply leapt totheirfuture and ignoredherfuture. That he seemed truly happy at the possibly of her joining him in New York, of their duo becoming a trio. So, yes, she did blame a guy for trying.
Now, with “Electric Boogie” booming behind them, she looked at Gregory and said: “So what’s he going to do?”
And he shrugged. “Who knows. Chase after her, apologize, propose.” He swallowed the rest of his drink and set his empty glass on a gold-linen-covered table littered with napkins smudged with lipstick and dirty plates with half-eaten buffet bites.Everything that started out so beautiful eventually fell apart, Frankie thought.
“And what should I do now?” Frankie asked, though she wasn’t sure why.
“Well, you could chase after him,” he said after a long beat. “Apologize. Propose.”
“Give me a goddamned break,” Frankie scoffed. “Also, I think you mean divorce. We may already be married.”
“No, I don’t mean that at all,” he said, then fell silent again. Then: “But chasing after Ezra was never your thing. You always made him do all the work.”
THIRTY-FOUR
