That summer we had decided: I would apply for grad school, and she would become pregnant.  It was simple.  I needed the next step, to buy time before real life began.  She needed kids.  For her there was no more time to buy, she was already in her forties.  It had taken her that many years to fall in love, to find him, but now, finally, she had a house, a home, and a desire to have him nuzzle up against those shoulders of hers that had hardened in exile.  His hands had now made them smoother.

She told me, I am glad we are going through this together.  To my kids you’ll be able to say “I’ve known you since you were an egg.”

The first time I saw them, they were labeled.  A and B.  Alfred and Betty, her brother-in-law would joke later, two round, tiny eggs that would hatch inside her womb.  We didn’t know it at the time, but one would be a boy, his pink skin sensitive to dust and fragrance; the other, a girl, with eyebrows and lashes so long and dark that at 6 months  her father swore not to let her date before she is thirty.  No one envied his future, swatting her suitors away like flies.  I could just imagine.

My friend grew equidistantly, the fluid filing her feet, her hands, her face.  In the course of the months that passed, her belly extended into the computer desk so that she was able to reach the keyboard only at an angle.  In solidarity, I wobbled like a penguin on our way from the office into the car. 

I no longer wore high heels, ate chocolate in excess and cried like never before in my life.

Yesterday I told Jorge how a saxophone player in the Washington Square Park made me sob.  Jorge said that it had been just in the last month that he learned how to cry in public. 

I asked “softly, elegantly?” 
“No,” he said.
“Effortlessly. Anonymously.”