Spring 2003 Charles River Review: Excerpt from "Leaving No Tracks"

Chapter One: Emily and Ted

We are born on the Blue Line. The brightly painted subway cars shake through the working class neighborhoods crowded just inside and just outside city limits, running past the airport and the dog track. We go to school on the Green Line, the institutions of educational endeavors--Boston Latin, Boston College, Boston University--lining the trolley tracks, students crowding on and spilling out at each closely situated stop. Our first jobs are on the Orange Line, the fastest train, traveling in a straight line from our apartments in Jamaica Plain or Medford to the downtown office buildings that suck us in, the young, optimistic, yet-to-be-jaded masses. We get older, lose our ideals, and want them back, so we go to grad school on the Red Line, joining the intellectuals of Harvard and Kendall and Davis Squares, backpacks and strollers fighting for space on the grim patterned floor. We end up back on the Blue Line, the other side of it, on Beacon Hill, fulfilling the Brahmin dream of power, wealth, 200-year-old townhouses with no closets and purple glass front windows.

We are on the Red Line. It is late on a Saturday, and the concert at the Orpheum became rowdier than we expected, and we left before the encore. Sam complained of a headache; she'd been rubbing her temples all evening and tugging on Jack's shirt sleeve, her pretty pink lips twisted into her signature pout, mouthing "Let's go" into her husband's ear. We listened, finally. The crowd was not our style: too many under-20 girls in tiny braless tank tops, too many boys with gelled-back hair and glowing cell phones, gulping down giant mouthfuls of beer and hurling their empties toward the stage. The concession stands ran out of alcohol by midnight, thanks to the plethora of 16 year olds fisting two and three plastic cups, hoisting them through the crowds to their equally underage friends, foam spilling over the edge and forming a sticky, slippery mess on the concrete floor.

"When did they stop carding kids?" Ryan muttered as a tiny blond lost her grip on her cup, sending a yellow spray across her baby blue Britney Spears belly shirt, low-slung white pants, and Ryan's jeans. She immediately burst into tears--or giggles. We talk about it as we ride the subway to Jack and Sam's house, and we are still not sure of the true nature of her hysteria.

"That girl was crying," Jack says later, as the Red Line rattles out of Park Street. "She was totally pissed that her very first beer of her life was lodged in her belly-button piercing. Either that, or she was high."

"I think high," Abby says, drumming her hand against Ryan's chest. "I think I was high on the secondhand smoke. Hey, don't kids know that you aren't supposed to do pot until college?"

"The rules have changed," Jack insists. "We had Nancy Reagan. They had Bill Clinton. Come on--no one waits until college to experiment anymore."

Jack is our pragmatist. His tall body sways with the motions of the train, thin arms wrapped loosely around the dull aluminum bar, dark hair--that sees the inside of a barber shop only when Sam physically takes him by the arm and marches him into one--longish and curling against his broad forehead in clumps and strands.

Jack was a political science major at Brandeis, and successfully parlayed that into a career as a graphic artist for a record company, designing album covers with a social conscience, he claims.

"Art is a lot like politics," he tells anyone who asks about the connection. "And music, even more so."

We don't get it, either. Jack and Sam have been together ever since we knew either one of them, and they fit: both have the same shade of hair color, the same small builds and long limbs that don't look as if they contain anything other than the mere necessities. Skin, sinew, bones, nothing else. Jack looks more like Sam's brother than her own sibling Rob, a meaty Nordic blond, does, which often causes confusion when the three of them are introduced together.

Jack and Sam are one of those couples who is always touching. It's the casual type of connection, never embarrassing or sloppy, no pet names or messy kisses. Sam is exactly the right size to fit into the crook of Jack's arm, so that is often where she ends up.

"It's true," Sam tells Abby. "I saw a special about 15 year olds and ecstasy on HBO last week."

"My question is this," Ryan says. "Do we have to change our taste in music to avoid these kids? Should we all be mortgaging our souls to buy Stones tickets?"

We laugh, but we've actually been to a Rolling Stones concert. People who were our age when Keith Richards got his first break yelled at us to get out of the way when we danced to "Sympathy for the Devil."

"If Mick Jagger can still move, then so can we," we told them. "We didn't pay 110 bucks to sit on our asses."

"We didn't pay 110 bucks to see your asses," they retorted. They had a point. We sat down.

Conversation slows, then stops, as the train pulls from the dark tunnel into the night, rumbling across the Charles River. We turn, watching the best view of Boston, the buildings shiny and manageable, rising up over the leafy banks of the river, the occasional boat lit up like a beacon, the white husk of the Hatch Shell glowing in the distance.

For our first wedding anniversary, we had dinner at the top of the Prudential Tower, which afforded a different view of the city: breathtaking, sprawling, a puzzle to solve as we picked out the Fleet Center, the Common, the Kennedy Library. But despite these landmarks, something about the vast expanse of urban life, the lights, the buildings, the highways and bridges felt as if we were in any generic large United States city. From above, the individuality is somehow lost, unlike the view from the dirt-streaked train window, which assures us quite satisfactorily that we are in Boston, Massachusetts.

Although it is after midnight, there are people on the river's banks: strolling the Arthur Fiedler Footbridge, playing Frisbee by moonlight, accompanying their dogs through the dew-damp grass. The paths crowded with bikers and rollerbladers by day are now dotted with forms stretched out on blankets, facing the leafy MIT campus and the pyramid-shaped hotel that make up the Cambridge skyline.

Behind us, the Science Museum reaches toward the stars with its white metallic spires, but that side of the Charles receives only a passing glance. Almost every passenger in the car turns his or her face toward the Boston skyline, a perfect tableau that postcards can never quite capture, a view that links the city to its richer past, reminding us, with a slight pain to the chest, that this was once the Hub of the universe.

Our silence is broken prematurely, while the train is on the bridge and still 100 yards or so from Kendall Square, by a thin noise from Sam.

"Jack, I can't wait anymore," she says to her husband, before turning to all of us. "We have news."

She nods at Jack and he smiles at us. "We're having a baby."

"Shit."

We don't actually say it out loud, but that is what we think. We exchange a quick look to reassure each other of our identical reactions, then hurry into thin smiles of our own, squeals for Sam and jabs like "your boys can swim" for Jack. Beyond the parents-to-be, we watch as the Boston skyline disappears into darkness.

We have friends with babies, children even. Our friends in Baltimore all married years before we did, most to their high school sweethearts, and there are little kids all over the northern suburbs who call us "Auntie Emily" and "Uncle Ted." They are cute and soft and charming, and we send them packages several times a year: candy at Halloween, stuffed animals for Valentine's Day, gaily-wrapped toys from Newbury Street stores for Christmas and birthdays. We see them every summer, and sometimes in the fall or spring if we are in town for more than a few days. Not one of them has ever been to Boston; their parents all complain that it's too rough to travel with kids, and when they get older, they'll come for a Red Sox game, and to ride the Swan Boats, and visit the museums. Boston is a terrific city for children. Or so they've heard.

Our Boston friends, however, our friends that we see every weekend and often during the week, are different. They aren't like our New York friends, either, who are perpetually single, career driven, and prone to travel, many times crashing on our couch during their visits. We see our New York friends much more frequently than our Baltimore friends, but almost always here and not there because all our New York family has relocated to Florida.

Our New York friends live in Brooklyn and Queens and work jobs that require late hours. They leave their apartments at midnight, since the bars stay open all night, they call to say they ran into that guy from "Six Feet Under" at an art gallery or walked past Vince Vaughan outside of 21, and they always, always, always refer to New York as "The City," as if it is the only one.

Our friends in New York don't have kids. Most days, they don't even see children, who exist in New York pretty much the same way babies do on television shows: shortly after birth they are whisked away, brought out only for special occasions. Our New York friends were appalled that we married so young. "Twenty-nine? Are you kidding me?" they yelled at us. Meanwhile, our Baltimore friends wonder what took us so long.

Our Boston friends, however, have the exact same life that we do. We all work, in normal 40-hour stretches, and on the weekends we play, in the city, or we travel in less than two hours to the beach or the mountains or the casinos. We crash at each other's apartments so often that we have toothbrushes in three different towns.

Children would change everything.

The train pulls into Harvard Square, dislodging half its passengers, but replacing them with several more. We realize how loud it is, only because we are so silent in contrast.

Abby has pushed Jack off his seat and is now huddled next to Sam, her honey blonde head bent close to Sam's dark unruly locks. They are talking in quick, excited tones about names and nurseries, Baby Gap and Dr. Spock, onesies and overalls.

"I can't wait to buy the sweetest little duck blanket," Abby bubbles. "It has a hood that's a duck bill, and little yellow feet. I can't believe how adorable it's going to look."

Jack mentions their house, where the six of us are spending the night. The plan is to hit a bar in Porter Square until last call, then stumble back to the place they bought last year, the narrow, two-bedroom half of a house that pushed them into the land-owning class, we like to tease.

"Let's just go home," Sam says. "We can make celebratory martinis for everyone. I don't feel like dealing with another bar scene tonight."

Jack nods quickly before continuing his soliloquy about the house.

"We'll have to completely change the layout upstairs," he says, his hands sliding down the thumbprint-smudged pole, his lanky body moving with the rhythm of the train. We can't imagine Jack as a father in nine months, can't wrap our minds around the picture of him, the least patient person we've ever met, calmly holding a blanket-wrapped babe.

"Knock down that wall, rip out that sound system we installed, sell the futon. . . ."

Change already. We look at each other, sitting on this train, among these people, our friends, who are transforming in front of our very eyes into strangers, almost. Turning away from each other, we try to smile, offer encouraging words, add to the conversation. But our hands seek each other out, one left with a thin gold band and shiny blue diamond, one right, larger and bare, wrapping itself around the cold metal and stone that bind us together, both sets of fingers as frigid as the rings themselves.

Marcus is on the couch in Jack and Sam's apartment, his thick hands wrapped around a bottle of Sam Adams.

"You told them," he says, nodding his head. "I can tell."

"You knew?" Abby shrieks, sounding jealous.

"The benefits of sleeping with the future uncle," Marcus smirks in return. "How was the concert?"

"It sucked, kind of. Too many kids. You guys were smart to skip it."

"Where's Rob?" Sam trips through the house, calling her brother's name.

We get busy right away, mixing martinis and sliding cold bottles from the small refrigerator. When they first moved in, Jack and Sam started immediately on the living room before any other part of the house--and it was a work of art, the perfect place to gather. The carpenters had built a large bar, which we rubbed with varnish for two consecutive weekends to give it a smooth dark finish.

On the wall are square black frames, seemingly haphazardly arranged, detailing important moments in the Sam and Jack story. There was a photo taken on their first date, at a formal dance back in college, and it is hung among pictures with their families and their graduation. Many of them were taken with us: at our ski trip four winters ago, on the ferry to Martha's Vineyard, in the backyard of their last rental. There's one of the boys lined up in tuxedos before their wedding, and a shot of all of us with sweaty brows and red faces, forcing furniture and kicking boxes through the small doorways of this house.

Some of these photos will need to be replaced, surely: the wall space in the living room is not that large, and for new additions to be made, some will have to be subtracted, packed into a box in the attic and labeled something like "friends" or "memories" or worse, a range of dates. Soon, we'll be replaced by the gender-to-be-determined baby, first smile, first step, first word.

Our images won't be the only things replaced in this house once the baby arrives. Sam mounted a floor-to-ceiling glass display case to house her martini glass collection: dozens and dozens of works of art glitter in the specially lit surface, each one gorgeously cut or colored or both. There is the deep blue one she's had since college, the crystal pair from Prague, and the two delicately matched filigree silver and gold glasses, which we'd picked out in a gallery on Beacon Street as their wedding gift.

Ryan lifts several of the "everyday" glasses off the middle shelf, cherry red bowls on thick cylinder stems. He fills them from the metallic martini shaker--"None for me, of course," Sam giggles, adding in a slightly more serious voice, "Oh my God, how am I going to not drink for the next eight months?"

"You should have thought of that sooner," Rob teases, coming in from the back room. Taller than his sister by almost a foot, Rob wraps his arms around her slender frame, which we imagine will soon be round and bulging. Rob is brilliant, pulled out of school at an early age after he aced one of those tests that are rumored to be given to lazy students with untapped potential. He finished college at 16, had a graduate degree at 22, and spent five years using his amazing brain to shape public policy or change the world or something. We're not too clear on the details, because right around the time we met him, he was skipping work to play chess in Harvard Square.

He claims to have been the one to introduce us. "I said, ‘Ted, you have to meet my crazy friend Emily. You are going to marry this girl, I promise,'" Rob often says. That's not exactly what happened; we knew each other before that, really, but we let Rob tell the story. It's more romantic that way.

After that, the two of us started spending a lot of time with Rob--and his sister, and her boyfriend, Jack, and his roommate, Ryan. Abby came later, and Marcus has only been with us for about a year. We are comfortable here, like we are with each other. We've been together six years, married for three of them, and while it's not perfect by anyone's standards or imaginings, and we fight, sometimes loud enough to wake our next door neighbors, sometimes breaking dishes, promises, and on the rare occasion, hearts, we know that we can't live with anyone else and that for better or worse, this is it.

The conversation flows smoothly around us, without us having to do much talking. Abby has resumed the same excitement she held on the T, her high voice exclaiming with anticipation.

"Rob, you're so lucky," she says, a trace of envy in her raised-pitch voice. "You get to be the baby's uncle. I'm so jealous--I'll never be an aunt."

"Of course you will," Sam pipes in. "Our baby will have all of you as aunts and uncles--come on, we can't do this without you guys. We want you to be involved in everything."

"And we mean everything," Jack smiles. "Four am feedings, dirty diapers, the crying, the battling grandmothers."

"I am totally babysitting for you guys, all the time," Abby promises.

"I didn't know you were such a fan of children."

The words come tumbling out, the martinis loosening the thoughts that have been threatening to spill ever since the news was first announced. We look at each other in quick horror, and recovery is attempted.

"I mean, I don't remember you ever mentioning them before."

"I just haven't had the chance to mention it yet."

Abby's voice is defensive, and we can hardly blame her. Of all the people in the living room, Abby is the one we are least comfortable with. We haven't known her very long; the first time we met her was when we were introduced to Ryan's date at our wedding. Abby is from the South, the real South, and not Washington or Baltimore or Delaware, which most people around here consider the South. She takes care to hide her accent, concealing her "r"s and deleting words like "y'all" from her vocabulary, in order to fit in with the equally distinctive speech patterns of the North. Her words sometimes come out strange, a weird mix of Southern repression and Boston aggression, but like any voice one hears often, we've adapted to it, and it sounds almost normal now.

As far as we know, Abby doesn't have friends back home with hundreds of children. Her apartment is void of the photographs or crayoned-drawings that litter our place, and when we talk of our adopted nieces and nephews down in Baltimore, she never chimes in with stories of her own. In fact, this is the first time we can recall ever hearing her talk about children in any terms, never mind the glowing, almost jealous attention she directs at Sam.

It's late, and Sam is obviously tired. She rises from the floor and yawns, but Jack shows no signs of following her. "One more drink, honey, Okay?" he says. "Then I'll join you."

"No, I'll stay," Sam sighs, sinking back down on the couch.

Rob talks about the play we have tickets to next weekend, the one that's stopping briefly here with its movie star cast before heading to Broadway. Our words drift further away from the baby, and we breathe tiny sighs of relief, anxious to retire to the futon in the guest room, where we can talk about this together--or not.

"I really think that girl was crying," Ryan returns to the scene at the club and mimes the act out for Rob and Marcus. He pretends to upend his martini glass, shaking drops of alcohol onto the living room rug.

"She was probably scared of you," Sam teases. "I bet she just wanted to make you feel sorry for her, so you wouldn't yell at her for soaking your pants."

"Because I'm so threatening."

We are happy with this talk. It's normal, it's us, just an average night out with friends. Everyone is slowing down, Jack drops his glass on the floor, Abby yawns, and Marcus closes his eyes. We're just about ready to say goodnight when Rob utters the words we've been dreading, hoping not to hear all evening, but knowing somehow to expect that it will be unleashed before the evening has ended.

"So, when are you guys going to start having kids?" he directs at us, half-playfully, but as we feel our friends all turn to face us, we know that this question no longer rests in the realm of the unknown, unconsidered, absurd world abstractly defined as "the future."

And at that moment, with that question, our clock starts running.