Goodbye Without Leaving by Laurie Colwin

poured down. The maples had turned red, the ginkgoes brilliant yellow. Little children triked up and down the street and the leaves drifted slowly down like big flakes. In the air was a smell of wood smoke. In front of the third house a woman was sweeping leaves off the pavement and scooping them into plastic trash bags. A handsome black woman took a wooden basket of apples out of the back of her station wagon. My heart contracted and expanded. I longed to slip into a proper place alongside these normal-looking people—or at least I longed to long to. And on the other hand, I feared it. A pleated plaid skirt. A cashmere sweater. A baby in a pram. A broom to sweep the leaves off the sidewalk and a basket of apples. A station wagon! What, I wondered, would be left of me? I said as much to Mary.
    â€œYour essential self,” she said.
    â€œOh, don’t be silly,” I said. “I haven’t had an ‘essential self since I quit Ruby.”
    â€œNonsense,” Mary said. “I would know you anywhere. Even a nice plaid skirt and a string of pearls won’t hide you. Not even being married to Johnny.”
    Ah, Johnny! The golden mean. He managed to do good and make money at the same time. Doing good, he often said, was good for one’s career, a beautiful dovetailing of civic-mindedness and self-interest. His secretary said of him, “Unlike some lawyers who would run over their dying grandmothers to get what they wanted, Johnny would move his dying grandmother to some nice, safe place and then go get what he wanted.” That, in a nutshell, I felt, was the man I loved.
    I was constantly amazed at his ability to get things done, to get people to do what he wanted, to make sure the people he needed to like and the people he liked were one and the same. And they were the same! He did not even have to manufacture his feelings. In some ways, he was the best-adapted person in the world. Being married to someone like me gave his life an edge—I was his safe road to rock and roll, to the rebellious boy he had been in high school.
    And so I settled into life on our street, and greeted my neighbors and swept the leaves in front of the house, but it was at the Race Music Foundation that I felt most like myself.
    Once in a while I caught Ruby on television. She was now a solo act, in an elaborate wig and a dress entirely made of bugle beads. When she did some of her old songs I said to myself, “My God, I used to do that!” It seemed to me an eon ago, in some vanished era, in a time warp, in Never-Never Land, in some place that I had invented.
    â€œAll right,” I said to Johnny. “Let’s have a baby.”

25
    It seemed to me that about three or four minutes later I was in the office of my gynecologist, who, I learned, I was now to refer to as “my obstetrician.”
    I told Johnny that Little LaVonda, or her brother, Little Milton, was definitely on the way. He was, needless to say, jubilant.
    â€œOh, how wonderful!” cried Johnny. “I’m so happy!” He grabbed me around the waist and hoisted me up in the air.
    â€œPut me down,” I said. “I feel sick.”
    â€œLie down,” he said. “I’ll get you a pillow for your feet. Aren’t you supposed to put your feet up?”
    â€œI think that’s supposed to help conception, or something,” I said. “It’s too late for that now.”
    â€œWell, I’ll get you some tea. Or are you not supposed to have caffeine?”
    I said I had no idea.
    â€œNo idea!” squealed my husband. “No idea! The harbinger of new life, and you have no idea!”
    â€œSomehow I don’t think harbinger is the right word,” I said. “But look. I got this big bottle of pregnancy vitamins.” I shook it at him. “They have lots of things I’ve never heard of before, like folic acid.”
    â€œGirl,” said my husband. “Get your thing together.