Dating Big Bird Read Free Page A

certainty that grew stronger with every visit—as sitting and crawling turned to cruising and walking—as the gurgling sounds and monosyllables over the phone once a week turned into words and half sentences and little conversations and then, even, my name—albeit her version of it—I knew, with a sureness I had felt about little else in my life, that I would have to have my own child someday, some way, somehow.
    Because for those three or four or five days every few months when we saw each other, my Pickle and I would be inseparable.
    We’d eat together.
    Read stories together.
    Sleep together.
    And wake up early together.
    Behavior completely befitting two people in love.
    Since It’s harder to be left than to be the one leaving, it was always worse for me when Lynn, Paul, and Nicole left after a visit, and the Waldorf wedding weekend was no exception. The quiet; the order; the overwhelming stillness where there had just been so much chaos and noise and movement was what I dreaded most.
    Paul would want to be on the road by eight A.M. , so I always took precautions the night before her departure to remove any reminders of the Pickle’s presence from myapartment: After she’d go to sleep, I’d put the books that we’d read over and over and over—
Curious George, Stone Soup, Amelia Bedelia, Make Way for Ducklings
—back on the shelf; I’d melt the red Jell-O down the sink and rinse out the bowl; I’d sweep the floor clean of cereal and cookie crumbs and M&M’s. That way, when I closed the door behind them, it was easier to pretend she had never been there at all. But there was always something left behind—a sock; a lollypop wrapper; a Cheerio stuck to the floor that I’d somehow missed; or the smell of soap and baby shampoo on my sheets and pillowcases, which I could hardly bear to launder away.
    And when they’d gone—when the car had pulled out of the parking garage across from my building and driven slowly down the street and turned onto Sixth Avenue; when I’d stood long enough on the sidewalk with my palms pressed into my eyes to stop the tears and to keep the picture of her in my mind for as long as possible—her waving good-bye from her car seat and her hair, dark and curly and uncombed and wild just visible in the window—I’d come back in to my apartment, where the inescapable silence and solitude would overtake me, and where the traces of her always reemerged as if in high relief, like the sticky handprint on the living-room window did where she’d had her time-outs that visit.
    Then I would sit and stare into the empty space, completely and utterly alone, and I’d consider the increasingly urgent question of how I was going to get my own Pickle.
    If there were one thing I could do besides having a baby and besides coming to see that the way my life has turned out really isn’t all that bad and is, in fact, even pretty good most times—it would be this:
    To eradicate from the face of the earth all traces of the phrase
biological clock
.
    I hate this phrase.
    Not only is it annoyingly overused and pejorative, but it is stupid and incorrect.
    Late at night, when I lie awake in the dark, wondering how I got to wherever it is I’ve gotten to, the image of a huge Big Ben clock ticking away my childbearing years is not the first one that comes to mind.
    At least, not to my mind, anyway.
    This is what comes to my mind:
    A gum-ball machine.
    Dispensing its limited supply of eggs.
    One by one.
    Month after month.
    Year after year.
    Egg
.
    Egg
.
    Egg
.

3

    A week after the Pickle had left, I walked up University Place on Sunday morning on the way to the office to put a few hours of work in before my nightmarish week ahead. “Fashion Week”—when New York was transformed even more into Style Ground Zero than it already was by bringing in designers and models and scary thin rich people from around the world for shows and benefits and cocktail parties and dinners—was less than forty-eight hours