Mary Lou and I had gotten good at pretending the conversation in my car on the way home from bingo had never happened. When I took the shower curtain into the kitchen, she handed me a bucket and instructed me to mix ten parts water with one part bleach.
While I mixed the solution, Mary Lou began cleaning out the fridge. “It’s like my mother always says,” she said as she checked the expiration date on a container of yogurt, then tossed it in the garbage, “you’ve got to focus on the stuff you can control.”
94.
FRANCESCA WAS VERY SWEETabout Laura’s miscarriage. She’d heard about it through Bianca, which was how I suspect she got half of her news. I know what you’re thinking—that it was a gross violation of patient privacy for Bianca to run to her mother with this information. You would be right, but you also have to understand that in 1975, it hadn’t yet occurred to us to mind.
“Such a shame about your friend,” Francesca said as I placed my notebooks and a pen on her kitchen table the Tuesday after Carnevale.
I agreed. “She’s heartbroken.”
“Bianca said it wasn’t her first miscarriage?”
I shook my head. “She had one last year, back in the States.”
“I worry about you girls. You’re putting off having children later and later, and it makes things more complicated.”
“I’m only twenty-four,” I said, a little defensively.
“Yes, but if you had your way, you’d wait another decade.”
Francesca was not wrong.
“Bianca was telling me about a woman who came in to Paolo Merlo a few weeks ago. Forty-one years old and having her first baby.”
“Better late than never,” I joked.
“No, not at all. The baby was born without a skull.”
“Wait, like, you mean you could see its brain?”
“That’s what Bianca said.” She gave me a sad shake of her head. “It was visible through a thin layer of skin.”
“Did the baby die?”
“Almost immediately.”
“That’s awful.”
“I know,” said Francesca before bringing the cautionary tale to its natural conclusion. “And proof that you shouldn’t wait too long to have children.”
I didn’t know much about anything, but I suspected the mother’s age couldn’t be blamed for such a rare birth defect. Still, I didn’t want to contradict Francesca in her own home, so I changed the subject.
“Does Bianca want children?” I asked.
She shrugged. “Some days I think she does. But then she starts talking about taking extra shifts at the hospital, or going on holiday to Mallorca, and I wonder if she’ll ever be ready.”
“How are we meant to know when we’re ready?” I asked, thinking about the last time Paul and I had discussed having children, in Munich.
“I never spent much time thinking about it,” she admitted. “I just knew I loved Bernardo, and after that, it was like my body did the thinking for me.”
She was talking about some kind of biological urge to have children, and not just children in the abstract sense but a particular person’s children. Francesca had been so in love with Bernardo, so infatuated with whatever the genetic material was that made himhim, she had wanted to see it replicated in another.
I nodded along like this was a feeling with which I, too, was familiar. But the truth was I had no idea what she was talking about.
95.
OVER THE NEXT FEW WEEKS,I did what I could to help Laura get on her feet.
