I just need to finish （high school, chemo, probation. My PhD. My tour of duty.）
My mother would never forgive me.
I want a different kind of life.
“Last summer we had a call on the hotline,” she said. “A 603 number, so New Hampshire. She said that if her ex found out she was pregnant, he’d come to her house and shoot her kids.”
Phil looked up from the menu.
To the list of reasons, add another: I must escape this monster, raise the drawbridge, bar the door. If I bear his child I will never be free of him; he will take up residence in my life.
“It’s possible she was delusional, or a compulsive liar. Honestly, I have no idea. All I know is what she told me.” Out of the corner of her eye Claudia saw, at last, a waitress approaching their table. “The point is, what’s a good reason? Who gets to decide?”
Phil ordered the brisket.
IT WAS HARD TO BELIEVE THEY’D EVER BEEN MARRIED. CLAUDIA’S recollections of that time were like blurred photocopies, memories of memories of memories.
She hadn’t disliked it, exactly. Married life was like walking around in shoes that almost fit. She wore them every day for two years, and still they gave her blisters. Like most shoes designed for women, they were not foot-shaped.
She saw, in retrospect, that she’d been a poor candidate for marriage. She had never seen a happy one up close. Her Yankee grandparents were so taciturn that it was impossible to tell if they were happy or not, but their children, who were less well behaved, lived in raucous misery. Aunt Darlene and her husband bickered constantly. Uncle Ricky drove his first wife to drink and his third to Jesus. Claudia wasn’t sure what happened with the second one, but none of them hung around for long.
She didn’t know how to be married, but she wanted to learn. It was part of her master plan to live like people on television. Phil was raised in Westchester County, New York, in a handsome Tudor house filled with books. His father and grandfather were law partners. His mother owned a high-end catering business and was a personal friend of Martha Stewart. The Landaus were people of quality. By marrying Phil she hoped to become more like them, and less like herself.
She took his name happily, gratefully. As Claudia Landau she could be someone else entirely, which was all she wanted. To be relieved of her Birchness seemed like a gift.
Her in-laws, Joel and Nadine, were educational parents. They were always telling Phil how to do things better: save money on car insurance, prevent jet lag with melatonin, allocate contributions to his 401（k）。 This, she later learned, was called parenting. （Nadine was the first person she’d ever heard use parent as a verb.） It had been going on for Phil’s entire life and explained why he was good at everything, competent in ways Claudia would never be.
A landau is an elegant horse-drawn carriage. A birch, in Maine, is the commonest sort of tree.
Next to Phil she felt like an orphan, unparented. It wasn’t a question of being poor—or not only. Like many poor people, she’d been raised by a teenager. Years later, working on Mercy Street, she would meet her mother every day—pregnant girls in extremis, half-educated, without resources. Adolescents charged with the monumental task of raising a human being and utterly unqualified for the job.
That Claudia had been inadequately parented must have been obvious. Phil’s mother, in particular, seemed alarmed by her ill-preparedness for life, so she took Claudia shopping. Claudia learned to write thank-you notes, to make hollandaise sauce, to iron sheets with a few drops of rosewater perfume. In Nadine’s world, these were basic life skills.
At first this attention was thrilling. Later it became oppressive. Phil had been raised in a greenhouse, fed and watered and protected from the elements. Such relentless care and tending was stifling if, like Claudia, you were nothing but a weed.
In those years she rarely spoke to her own mother. When she did, Deb’s stories never changed: a cranky resident at the County Home, senseless beefs with coworkers, a foster who had nightmares or played with matches or started fights or wet the bed. Deb, notably, asked no questions. Her daughter’s life in New York—the glamorous job, the handsome husband, the exemplary new parents—didn’t interest her at all.