coffee with Ellie and Beth and Linda, the other girls at work. The others were trying to avoid pregnancy until their husbands graduated, until they knew whether their adult lives would be lived in New York or California or somewhere on the plains.
“I'm going to be raising a family for the next twenty years,” Beth said over coffee during the midmorning break. “I don't mind if my life's a little breezy for another year or two.”
Ellie added, “My mom made me promise to wait till I'm twenty-three. She says a girl any younger than that can't raise a child because she's still a child herself.”
“I guess,” Susan said. “But you know, I have this feeling that somebody's waiting for me. I mean, my baby is.”
“How's that?”
She sighed, and her breath rippled across the surface of her coffee. “Oh, don't pay me any attention,” she said. “I don't know what I'm saying half the time. It's just that I have this, I don't know, feeling. It's like my baby already exists, and he's just waiting for me to catch up with him so he can get started on his life.”
“Or her,” Linda said.
“But I feel like the first one will be a he. I feel sure about it. That's what I mean. I keep thinking this is already a person, right now, and I'm just holding things up. Like if I wait too long this person will just disappear.”
“It's better to have a baby after you're settled,” Beth said. “You don't know where you and Todd'll be this time next year. If you got pregnant now, I mean right now, tonight, you could be moving to some remote place with a three-month-old.”
“Todd isn't applying to law schools in any remote places,” Susan said, and she felt a furtive glow of satisfaction. Of the four girls, she had married the boy whose future seemed least subject to question. Beth's husband, Arnie, had switched his major suddenly, from engineering to journalism. Linda's Bob had failed two of his classes. These girls needed to protect themselves, to measure their lives as best they could, because they might be blown anywhere.
Linda said, “I bet when you've got a three-month-old, the supermarket feels like a remote place.”
“Oh, everybody makes too much of a fuss,” Susan said. “My mother had my brother and me before she was twenty-one, and no money, and she did just fine.”
Again, Beth and Ellie glanced at each other. “Well, I'm not my mother,” Ellie said. Susan knew she was the outsider, the one banded against. After she left the job she wouldn't know these girls anymore.
“I'd better get back to work.” She sighed. “Terrible calamities will happen if I don't get my folders filed by noon today.”
“Right,” Beth said with exaggerated patience. As they left the employees' lounge Linda's skirt caught on her nylons and showed the rippled white heft of her thighs. Susan saw, with a brief and terrible clarity, how Linda's future would fall. Linda's husband wouldn't make enough money. Linda would get fat—it was already starting—and stay at home with her children as her husband's orbits grew wider and wider around a house like the ones Susan's father built, a house made of wire brads and false wood.
Her father's houses were waiting for people who didn't do well enough.
Susan knew Linda had been cheerful and unremarkable in high school, a friend of the more popular girls because she carried no hint of danger. She knew Ellie had offered willingness as apology for her flat bust and her lack of chin. Susan saw these things automatically, the way a jeweler can't help seeing the relative value of a stone. She tried not to pass judgments but she saw what she saw and could not seem to see in any other way. To punish herself she remembered Rosemary, crowned and weeping on the football field. She reminded herself, Don't start feeling too superior. You were only a princess, you didn't win. But the more she thought about that, the more obdurately her mind seemed to insist on Linda's plainness, Beth's lack of spark, Ellie's habit of wearing too much rouge and eyeliner.
When she got home, she found Todd at his desk. He was turning into someone. She watched it happen. He'd bought himself new glasses, with licorice-colored rims. A certain boyishness had evaporated—his old, transparent need to be loved—and in its place was a newer need to work. Susan thought of his studies as devourings. He worked through his books with