Editor’s note: This is a serial novel, with each chapter written by a different published author. There will be eight chapters in all. Catch up on the previous four (they’re short and fun to read) by clicking these links: Chapter One by Rachel Siegel, Chapter Two by Jess Bennett, Chapter Three by Sam Bittman, and Chapter Four by Daniel Tawczynski. And come back for the remaining three. Lots of surprises in store.
“I can’t believe you called right at that minute!”
“And I can’t believe what you’re telling me this minute!”
It’s two days later, Kit and Cat, looking like the pair of Yalies they are, are sitting at their favorite booth at Frank Pepe’s Pizzeria Napolitana at 157 Wooster Street, New Haven.
For the umpteenth time, it seems to Kit, she’s telling the story, now freshly titled “Marion’s Eggs,” not only to her childhood friend Catherine LeMoon, but to herself as well.
But Cat has a different response. “Oh, great,” she says, “now you’ve got two moms and I still don’t have any.”
Cat’s mother had died when her youngest daughter was only three years old, and she and her big sister Miranda had been raised by their dad.
Kit’s eyes suddenly blurred with tears. How could she have been so stupid?
“I’m so sorry,” she started to say, then burst out laughing. “We do have some pretty fucked-up lives.”
Cat said, “At least it’s not penis envy.”
Then they both burst out laughing.
Sharing a booth and a quattro formaggio pie at Pepe’s was another thing they shared.
Kit pre-med, and Cat in the MFA writing program, had both been given gift certificates to Pepe’s when they wound up in New Haven. Cat’s dad told them he’d found out about New Haven pizza watching an old movie, “Splendor in the Grass” with Natalie Wood and Warren Beatty as star-crossed mid-west high school lovers. When Beatty goes off to Yale, he promptly forgoes classes in favor of hanging around a downtown pizzeria. The scene remained etched in his memory and when the girls announced they were both going there he celebrated by giving them gift certificates to Pepe’s.
Whenever they went in, they felt it was their legacy.
Two hours and an empty liter of Chianti later, Kit and Cat have barely scratched the surface.
“So, who else knows?”
“Nobody. I mean you and Amy are the only ones I wanted to tell, I mean, could tell, you know?”
“What about your brothers?”
Kit shook her head. “Charles knows enough to keep quiet. Henry, I’m not so sure. This could mean a lot of attention on him, and he craves that, but even he’s got to figure this might get out of hand.”
“Can I tell my dad?”
Kit looked at her friend and realized how deep their connection went. For years Cat would help soothe and calm her whenever she and Elizabeth tangled. Which was often. It was an unspoken thing between them; Cat who had no mom could make Kit appreciate hers, and in doing so created a kind of mother-daughter bond herself. Kit felt tears welling up again.
“I remember, when we were kids, how we’d pretend your mom hadn’t died. The things you would say to her when you got home after hanging out with me all afternoon.
“You’d tell her what a cool friend you had, and then you’d tell her about me and my latest fight with Elizabeth. I always knew you were teaching me a lesson, you knew it too, even if it wasn’t on purpose. You were never jealous, that was the amazing thing. God, how that must have hurt, though. Day after day, year after year. And now you’re right. I’ve got two moms and you’ve still got none.”
“And the new one’s completely different at that! Golden WASP childhood with a hidden side of Jewish DNA. Geez, Kit, I don’t know how you do it!”
“Wait a minute! Oh my God. By way of Marion, if I can pass Organic Chemistry, I might be able to pass myself off as a Jewish doctor! Take that, Charlemagne!”
Buddy Boy, who bussed the tables at Frank Pepe’s, came over then to tell them his latest joke, this one he’d heard only that afternoon from a couple of guys in third year law school.
“D’ja hear what the judge said to the writer? ‘You’d better get yourself some commas, son, ‘cause I’m about to hand you a long sentence.’”
Kit and Cat groaned, as Buddy Boy hoped they would. Then he told them the place was closing for the night. Time flies when you’re having fun, right?
They walked out into the warm spring night, arm in arm. Nearby was one of the local Little League fields, the infield grass giving off the unmistakable scent of fresh-mown.
Across the street was another field, one used mainly by softball players, older guys. That infield was all dirt.
Kit hugged her friend a little tighter.
“I love an infield with all grass, I don’t know, it reminds me of when we were young. Like it says ‘We’re the old days. We’re here to remind you of the old days. When you were a kid yourself, when every day you could trust the world to be just what it says it is.’
“Am I making any sense, Cat? Or am I losing my mind? Or have I lost it already?”
But Cat was thinking about something else entirely. She was thinking about her own mother, and about Marion, too. She’d just read an essay by Carl Jung, just picked it up by chance in the library where she’d gone for a change of pace from her writing room at home. She’d copied a couple of lines onto her laptop and emailed them to herself on her phone.
She read them aloud to Kit now, the two of them standing stock still under a broad canopy of just budding city elms.
“Whatever you repress, whatever you don’t recognize in yourself, is nevertheless alive. It is constellated outside of you; it works in your surroundings and influences other people.”
and
“Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent.”
“Marion’s unlived life, and your mom’s. How incredible! Funny how we never think of that.
“I mean, Marion has certainly had a life that she’s lived, but what about this other one, the one that had these three egg children who never crossed her mind?
“Until she had to cross the street to meet them. I mean us.”
“And my own mom, who never got to see her eggs grow up.
“Who are these people, these women? What manner of species? I mean, can you imagine, Kit, the chutzpah to just drop off a couple of offspring, then go off and die? Or drop off two, three eggs and never give them another thought?
“Of course, my mom didn’t have much of a choice, did she? She caught the cancer and it did her right in. Almost didn’t have time for any regrets. But Marion, wow that’s a whole other kettle of fish. Or barrel of halibut. Or piece of pizza dough. Did she tell you she never thought of you at all?
“I think about my mom all the time.”
Kit’s just standing there with tears streaming down her cheeks. “Where did I come from? “
“Whoa, easy now Kit. You’re reminding me of when we used to micro-dose.”
“Exactly what I was just flashing on! Remember that night with Alice and Laurie
and Teddi on the highway. Alice was so high. She kept saying, ‘I don’t know who I am, I don’t know who I am.’ We really had to calm her down.”
“Yeah, we told her it was okay that she didn’t know, because we knew, and we were her friends and we’d take good care of her.”
“Cat, I . . .”
“It’s okay, Kit. I’ve got you. I’m your friend, and I will take good care of you.”
“No, it’s not that. I know who I am. It’s just…it’s just I used to know where I came from and now I don’t know that anymore. I mean, I guess I do, but…was that real? What is real?”
Cat smiled. “‘Real isn’t how you are made,’” she said, quoting from both of their childhood favorite storybooks, The Velveteen Rabbit, “‘it’s a thing that happens to you.’”
“’Does it hurt?’” asked Kit, also quoting from the same passage.
“’Sometimes…but when you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.’”
Sometimes all it takes is a gentle reminder that what used to be, still can be as well.
“Real is what you were, what you are, and what you always will be, my friend,” said Cat, holding Kit’s eyes with her own. “Real is what both your moms gave you, from both their lived lives as well as their unlived ones. I guarantee it.”
“How can you say that? How can you be so sure?”
“Well, what’s the point otherwise, you know? Motherhood, you know it’s got to be more than just survival of the species. Elizabeth doesn’t just love you because she thinks you’re also related to Charlemagne. She loves you because she birthed you, you’re her daughter—her only one, by the way—and she raised you and she gave you everything she could think of.”
“Yeah, whether I wanted it or not. How many times did I feel like we were all in some Edward Albee play?”
“Let me finish. And Marion. Marion gave you her genes. Goddammit, that’s pretty wonderful itself! She gave you her unlived life. That’s a gift, Kit, you know it is.”
“Like your mom gave you hers.”
“That’s right, she did. I love you, Kit.”
“And I love you, Cat.”
