Lift - Kelly Corrigan [14]
I don’t know why Meg’s single. She’s crazy-accomplished—marathons, fund-raising projects with Tom Brokaw, conference calls with Bono. She almost went to ballet school instead of college and still has Dancer Ass. She has a master’s from the Kennedy School and worked for the World Bank. She reads The Economist and People.
But that’s not why I love her. I love her because she gave her friend most of her savings when the financial markets imploded—in fact, she insisted on it. I love her because she pinches mold off her bread instead of tossing the loaf, she bakes casseroles, and always sends thank-you notes, like the well-raised girl from Topeka that she is. I love her because she has photographs all over her apartment of African villagers from her Peace Corps years, but none of the frames match and they’re hung willy-nilly and all the nails and wires show. I love the way she is with her sister and brothers, how they tease each other and roll their eyes and say Duh but keep coming back together—helping with cable modems, flat tires, moves. I love that they are going to puke when they read this nice stuff about Meg and start calling her something totally juvenile like Mold Pincher.
I meet people at cocktail parties all the time, women who are moody or mean-spirited, and then their charming husband comes up with a nice, fresh drink for them and I always think, what does she have that Meg doesn’t? Why does this woman get someone to sleep next to, someone to call when the dryer breaks, someone to bitch about to her friends? Meg is so much better. I’d marry her in a second.
Sometimes, when I’m with you girls, I kind of shake my head and say Meg’s name out loud, almost like a prayer, which means that I’m thinking about how unfazed she’d be by the Play-Doh in your teeth or how much she would like the fairy hut you built or the way you made yourself a math worksheet and then filled in all the answers and gave yourself a big A+. I want her to have this thing I have that’s so ordinary and tedious and aggravating, and then, so divine.
It’s no small thing to encourage someone to become a single parent, to take on the bottomless work and cost and heartache that comes with children. Dad thought I might not want to push it. He thought Meg would do fine with the logistics and frustrations, the “blocking and tackling,” as he put it. He was more worried about the unknowns. What if she adopts and the parents show up later and want the kid back? What if her child turns out to have learning disabilities or a genetic disease, or deep, unresolvable anger? What if some future boyfriend walks away, saying he really loves her kid—but he wants to have “his own”?
That conversation slowed me a bit. But then, Dad’s a man. And he was talking about regret. I just couldn’t imagine it would come to that. Mothers never come to regret their children, right? Not the mother of the trisomy baby who is born with his intestines on the outside and only lives for weeks, not the mother of the schizophrenic on America’s Most Wanted, not the mother of the fifty-six-year-old who lives at home and drinks in the morning—no mother regrets her child. Right?
The weekend Meg turned forty, we drove to To-males Bay. On the ride up, we got talking about our first road trip, twelve years before, to Lake Tahoe.
“You know the first thing I liked about you?” I said. “You blush. I don’t know anyone who blushes.” She laughed. “I don’t!” I said. “And I think it’s so funny because you’re such a competent person. I mean, you’re not silly or girly or even remotely giddy. You know?”
“Yeah. Although…,” she said, glancing at a CD in her car door pocket.
“Yes, there is that. That has always troubled me.” Meg is the only person I know who listens, unironically, to John Denver. She cried when they announced his plane had crashed. She also loved Titanic, a crap movie that got way too much credit. But other than those two flaws, which are probably linked by some kind of rogue gene, Meg is solid.
“You know what I liked about you?” Meg said. “You didn’t hold anything back.