Aftertaste - Meredith Mileti [66]
“Can I offer you a drink, a glass of wine or some juice?” she says, giving Chloe a smile. I’ve unzipped Chloe’s snowsuit and taken off her hat, but she is getting antsy. “I mean, unless you, ah, have someone to get home for?” Ruth stammers.
“No, just my father, but not for a while. It’s Chloe, though; she eats around five.”
“Say no more; I’m now fully stocked in that department. Please say you’ll stay and have dinner with me. It’s been so long since I’ve eaten anything that doesn’t come in a little, black plastic tray, never mind having an adult conversation while eating. I may just keel over!”
Ruth pulls Carlos’s high chair over to the kitchen table and opens up her cupboard, where she has jars of Gerber baby food stacked three deep. “Okay, what will it be, chicken, beef, or lamb?”
Despite the fact that, up until now, all of Chloe’s baby food has been organic and custom prepared, she loves Gerber’s chicken and rice, and I try not to flinch each time she takes a bite. Ruth opens a bottle of wine, a yummy Saintsbury Pinot Noir. She may not know how to cook, but she does know a thing or two about wine. By the time we’ve finished the bottle and Chloe has polished off the last of her vanilla custard (another Gerber success), I’ve learned that Ruth has never been married, that she’s on extended maternity leave from Bayer, where she was a senior financial analyst, and that she’s forty-three years old.
“The last time I had a serious boyfriend, I was at Yale. From there, I went right on to B-school, and I really never had time for dating,” she says, sipping her wine. “Then, I started working, and it took me a while to get my career going. The only people I met were at work, and most of them were already married. Once I figured out marriage wasn’t in the cards for me, I tried to adopt, but I was traveling a lot and it wasn’t so easy. So, I saved for a few years, got my name in with some private adoption agencies, cashed out some investments, and got out of the market just in time. I can afford to take at least a year off and when I do go back to work, it can be part-time, so I can be more involved in raising Carlos.” She takes another gulp of wine. “The problem is I just didn’t expect it would be this hard. A single parent—what was I thinking!” Ruth looks miserable. “I did research for three years, bought every baby book known to woman, and not one of them prepared me for this.” She waves her hand in front of her face. “I’m sorry, it’s just, I guess that even adoptive moms can suffer from postpartum blues, although, in my case it is far more likely to be perimenopause. I’m just too old for this!” She wipes her watery eyes, blows her nose in the used Kleenex she pulls from the sleeve of her sweatshirt, and laughs.
Encouraged by Ruth’s candor, I launch into my own story. We’ve made a sizeable dent in the lasagna, and Ruth is uncorking the second bottle of wine by the time I get to the part about my arrest and Jake’s early morning arrival and offer of reprieve. Her only response, apart from a gleeful laugh, is to bring out the cheesecake. No plates, two forks. She hands me one and, raising both her glass and her fork, she says, “To single motherhood!”
chapter 15
In the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh where my father lives, there are five synagogues within a four-block radius, four Orthodox and one Conservative. When I was growing up, the neighborhood had been almost exclusively Jewish. If the retail landscape of the Murray Avenue shopping district is any indication, it still is. Of the two bagel bakeries and three kosher restaurants I remember from my childhood (two dairy, one fleishig), all remain in business, albeit now peaceably coexisting alongside a French bistro, a Thai noodle bar, and an Indian grocer.
Growing up, many of our neighbors had been Orthodox Jews. It wasn’t until I moved back home to Pittsburgh that I thought about how interesting it was that my parents decided to live there. We