Tales From the Crib Read Online Free Page B

who’s been clean for twenty years but still attends meetings every night. She and Anjoli get along famously because there are so many similarities between the language of recovery and New Age. Kind of like Spanish and Portuguese. They take healing workshops together; they chant for inner peace together; they even get French manicures at the same salon.
    Between my mother, a platinum blond, pale version of Sophia Loren, and Kimmy, I’ve always felt a bit like a garnish.
    Zoe wanted to have a baby shower for me I think partially to redeem herself for the last one. Again, it’s one of those things that doesn’t make any sense, but was clearly the case. “Let me throw you a proper shower this time,” she said. Her last shower was quite proper. It’s the pregnancy that wasn’t.
    Her parties at college were far beyond the standard kegger. We had a Super Bowl party where Zoe went all out to create the ultimate football party. She put white tape all over our kelly-green carpet to mark the yard lines. We served Denver fans Bronco Brew, a mixture of Everclear and orange Kool-Aid. Redskins fans drank Bronco Blood, which was the same drink in red. She wanted to give our guests a party favor, so she designed a pigskin purse that was the size and shape of an actual football. As luck would have it, our pal, Dan Alcott’s girlfriend, went mad for the purse and showed it to her father who happened to sit on the board of directors at a trendy clothing manufacturer. So, if you ever wonder who designed those adorable leather purses in football, bowling ball, soccer ball, and basketball shapes, it’s my friend Zoe.
    Zoe wanted to throw a baby shower because she loves me. I have no doubt about it. My mother wanted me to affirm that the baby would make it because she believed that would bring me good fortune. I am certain of her pure intentions. My aunts, Bernice and Rita, cared about me and didn’t want me to piss off God by being presumptuous. And Kimmy supported whatever decision I made because she is a kind, decent, and genuinely supportive person. But everyone had her own baggage around my baby shower.
    Everyone, that is, except Jack, who had moved into my old home office. He said he didn’t have an opinion about whether or not I had a baby shower. Whatever I decided, he said, was cool with him. The difference between Jack’s response and Kimmy’s was that my sort-of-husband was emotionally checked out. It’s not that he’d support whatever decision I made. He just didn’t care.
    The shower was at my mother’s apartment in Greenwich Village because, as she put it, “No one’s going to New Jersey.” She had a point. I didn’t know any of the women in my neighborhood because they were all mothers, so we never connected through playgroups, preschool, or at the playground. Even without friends who had children, I always knew exactly how old JJ would have been. Going to birthday parties for other kids would’ve been too much.
    Plus, it wouldn’t be fair to the birthday child to have some psycho grab the piñata stick and beat the rainbow-colored donkey because she was enraged at the injustice of her infertility. Who needs the childhood memory of me swinging a bat, screaming through tears about how any crack whore living in an alley can give birth, but I couldn’t?
    Zoe tried to find a no-carbohydrate dessert, and quickly found that there’s no such thing. Oh sure, some diabetes boutiques try to pass off their asparagus torte as a delectable treat, but no one in their right mind would consider it a dessert. I kept telling Zoe that she should cater the party for the guests and not concern herself with the fact that I couldn’t eat anything sweet or with more than a teaspoon of flour.
    Gestational diabetes. I got that diagnosis about a week after the sciatica became so severe I needed a cane to walk. I remember the call came through on my cell phone just as the Wendy’s near my house was mounting a thirty-foot inflated