She, Myself & I by Whitney Gaskell

was much more polite to say “I don’t appreciate the exuberance of your verbosity” than the easier “Shut up” or more satisfying “Shut your face.” I had to look up “exuberance” and “verbosity” in my children’s dictionary to understand what the hell she’d been talking about.
    “Thank you. Now, Paige. Let me get this straight. Are you pregnant?”
    “No,” I admitted. “At least, I don’t think so.”
    “Good,” my mother said, looking relieved. In fact, insultingly so.
    “Why would it be such a bad thing if I were pregnant?” I asked her.
    “I just don’t think that would be the best thing for you right now. Do you?” she asked. “You’re not married or even in a relationship, you work long hours, you’ve gone through a difficult last couple of years.”
    “Yes, but . . . ,” I started, and then I frowned, biting my lip. “Maybe that’s what I need. Marriage didn’t work out for me, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that I can’t have a baby. I could always go to a sperm bank.”
    “Good Lord,” my mother said weakly. She picked up her glass of wine and downed it in one long gulp.
    “But you don’t like babies,” Sophie said, eyeing me critically.
    “Of course I do! Why would you think that?” I asked.
    “You just never seemed to have any interest in kids. Even when you were married, I just assumed that you’d be too caught up in your career to have a family,” Sophie said.
    “Plenty of women balance a career and kids,” I said.
    Sophie shrugged. “I know, it’s just a big sacrifice.” She looked around my apartment at the white sofas, and the glass coffee table with the hard sharp corners, and the bar against the wall that had wineglasses hanging from the underside of the cabinet, and I knew what she was thinking: this wasn’t a kid-friendly place.
    “It’s not like I’m going to have a baby right this second,” I said irritably.
    “Thank God for small favors,” my mother said. “Mickey, would you pour me another glass of wine?”
    “Even if I did get pregnant right away, there would be nine months to get ready. I could sell this place and buy a house. And maybe I could cut my hours back at work, or work out of the house part of the time,” I mused.
    “You’ve got to be kidding me,” Sophie said, rolling her eyes. She struggled to get up off the couch. “Just a few weeks ago you were saying that you were never going to date again. And now you’re all of a sudden going to have a baby? On a whim? Having a baby isn’t something that you just casually decide to do, and it isn’t something that’s going to be a Band-Aid for everything else that’s going wrong in your life.”
    “It’s not just a whim,” I said, choking on my anger. How dare Sophie, she who had everything—the doting husband, the baby on the way, the knack of being the center of attention at every single social gathering she’d ever been to—tell me that I can’t have a child? “As a matter of fact, I was pregnant once already. And then I miscarried, and then my marriage turned to shit, but before that, before I knew about Scott, all I wanted was to get pregnant. In fact, sometimes I wonder if I had . . .”
    My voice trailed off, and I clapped my hand over my mouth. Salty tears stung at my eyes and spilled over onto my cheeks. Sophie, Mickey, and Mom were all staring at me.
    “Oh, Paige,” Mom said, and she leaned over and put her hand on my leg. “Oh, honey, I’m so sorry. Why didn’t you tell us before?”
    “If you had, maybe Scott wouldn’t have left you?” Sophie asked, finishing the thought that I hadn’t been able to bring myself to complete.
    “No. I mean, yes, I wonder what would have happened. I’m not saying I think a baby would have saved our marriage. There was that one rather large problem that he wasn’t attracted to me, or anyone of my gender,” I said. “But I wish I’d been able to have that baby or that I’d gotten pregnant again. I want a