I GET PREGNANT, AT FIRST, IT’S JUST FUN NEWS FOR THE staff of my restaurant to gossip about. There is no inkling of the reality attached to the announcement: “Hey guys, I’m pregnant.” And then as I grow and waddle, I’m just an amusement for the crew; an excuse for a betting pool—gender and birth date—and a great entertainment as I try to bend over to pick some vegetable peel off the floor when I can’t even touch my own toes. But when I started to really get close to the reality of my first son, Marco, and out to here with a belly, my sous chef at the time, Matt, a thirty-seven-year-old former Marine, fell apart in my arms with an anxiety attack so severe I had to rush him to the VA hospital. Hustling him to the ER entrance on Twenty-third Street as best as I was able in my condition—huge and breathless—we soon, fortunately, were reassured that his EKG was absolutely normal and his psychosomatic heart attack was all in his head. I left him on the hospital gurney to rest and recover, in the capable hands of the VA nurses, and walked back to work.
It is true that he would soon be under a lot of pressure to keep the restaurant in order while I was away having my baby and nursing for the first few weeks, and it is also true that his much respected and loved mother had just died. Equally true is that within days of his mother’s passing, my own brother Todd died suddenly, of a rare and massive stroke, and it is true, as well, that I was just ten days away from giving birth for my first time. Either way, in the end, it was me who worked the egg station at brunch that weekend. When I found myself down on all fours after that pummeling brunch service, cleaning pancake batter off the reach-in fridge with a green scrubby while my belly grazed the mats and my staff seemed calm and assured that the ship still had a captain, I wondered, uneasily, about who I’d become.
At the time, I was proud of my capableness, my strength, my dry-eyed and clinical receipt of the news of Todd, not to mention my handily earned boasting rights over Matt, which I later flaunted, kind of behind his back, with a studied nonchalance.
Whatever. Matt went down. Fake heart attack. But I worked eggs at thirty-nine weeks pregnant. I shrugged, as if it were nothing to speak of. I sounded like one of those defensive eternal line cooks, with nowhere to ever go from there, who still pulls back his sleeves to proudly show off his burns, when all of us who have deepened our focus and pushed through to greater accomplishments know that a little experience and a finessed game could keep your arms relatively free of burns.
In the week preceding the birth of my second child, Leone, twenty-one months later, a line cook responsible for five shifts a week quit unexpectedly. Connor, a kind of bland and amiable dude, came to the office and said, “Umm, listen, I’ve been made an offer I can’t refuse.”
I had been fantasizing about a modest and crazily spontaneous three-day getaway to a beach place, just to get a tiny break before the onslaught of a new infant and the constant suckling that makes me feel cannibalized, and the unhinge-ing I experience from sleep deprivation when I never hit REM sleep for the better part of a year.
In my mind, if I could book it online and find a maternity bathing suit fast enough, I would ignore the doctor’s no-air travel rule and score a lightning breakaway to one of those all-inclusive resorts in Turks & Caicos, with a swim-up bar where you don’t need to carry any money. I knew it was a fantasy but still, in it, my little Marco could have breakfast with Big Bird and make cookies in the afternoon with Cookie Monster while Mamma spent the afternoon at the maternal massage spa, the sun-soaked beach, and the virgin rum drink lounge.
But with Connor standing in my basement office giving notice on this cold and rainy April afternoon, I knew, realistically, where my next three days would be spent.
“Hmm,” I said, looking up from the schedule I was just finishing, which outlined the next six weeks and which had Connor featured in at five shifts a week, as we had just confirmed and talked