as it sounds, I know immediately that this is my unborn child. I recognize her. She is looking at me with her head tipped to the side.
I can see that she is about to ask, Mommy, why are you hiding? And I can also see that there is no suitable answer to that question. I am not behaving like a mommy. Go away, I hiss at her. I’m not ready for you yet.
Beyond her, on the steps of the Municipal Building, my father looks unhappy. I have the sense that he is thinking of me. His face is so sad, tears push at the back of my eyes. I can feel in that moment my child and my father worrying over me. Their worry bores into me like a drill. I am not strong enough. They both see my weakness: I don’t know who I am.
The light finally turns green, and I slam my foot on the gas. I need to get away. My head is splitting when I finally nose the car into a straight line. I drive across town and don’t stop until I reach Sarachi’s Pond. Once there, I pull into the dirt parking lot where the teenagers drink and neck after the sun goes down, and turn off the car’s engine. I am alone. There are no other cars. Sarachi’s is a pond surrounded by heavy woods. There are picnic tables scattered near the water’s edge. On weekend afternoons couples bring their young children here to feed the ducks and geese.
My family came here only once that I can remember. I was thirteen and Lila was eleven. We came here for a picnic, and it remains the only picnic I’ve ever been on in my life. We are not big on the outdoors in our family. We don’t like bugs or sweating or sitting on the ground. We sunburn easily. This one picnic was an exercise in forced spontaneity. My dad bought fancy sandwiches at the gourmet supermarket, and Mom pulled an old blanket from the upstairs closet. Lila was assigned to bring her Frisbee and I had my Monopoly board. Mom and Dad had told us their plan in the middle of the previous week so we wouldn’t have a chance to back out. When we asked why we were going on a picnic, they answered that we just were, and that was that. It had seemed like a strange thing to do, and a strange time to do it. Lila and I hated each other at that age. We couldn’t have been more different. I had just fallen for boys, and I couldn’t think about anything but how to get one, and once I got one, what to do with him. I slept with my hair in curlers and anti-wrinkle cream smeared under my eyes. I spoke with a horrible English accent that I thought made me sound sophisticated.
At eleven, Lila was a friendless, straight-A student who was obsessed with reading the newspaper. She read my parents’ copies of the New York Times, the Star Ledger, and the Bergen Record every day and focused on the really bad news. She cut out articles on plane crashes, shootings, abandoned children, and freak fatal accidents. Whenever Mom gave her almost daily plea for someone to please talk about something at the dinner table, Lila would pull one of the articles out of her sock, where she stored them. My sister was a weird kid, and I wanted nothing to do with her.
I can see now that the picnic was an attempt on my parents’ part to pull our family together. I’m sure it was my mother’s idea. She didn’t recognize or particularly like the two daughters who were pulling away from her. She would try to brush my hair and tuck me in at night, and I bristled under her attempts to make me stay a child. Lila and I were more relaxed with Dad. We mystified him, but he still enjoyed our company. Mom would be the one to think a picnic would be a great quick fix.
Of course, it wasn’t. It was a humid day, and after we ate our turkey and Brie sandwiches, I complained that my hair was beginning to frizz. I walked over to the water’s edge to check my reflection, and while I was leaning over, Lila beaned me in the back of the head with her Frisbee. Caught off balance, I took a step forward and lost my right