Breakdown Lane, The Read Online Free PDF Page A

“shoppe.”
    The new arrival was a congenial part of the general game plan. I felt more part of a family than I ever had at home. Always having liked Hannah and Gabe, I grew to love them.
    Grandpa got well. Business soared. Gabe was born. The Steiners were all but ready to host a ticker-tape parade.
    But, then, I lost my mind.
    Staying home with your baby wasn’t “done” then, by women such as I. After giving him a good start, I was expected to turn Gabe over to the kindly moonbeams at someplace called the Red Giraffe or the Little Caboose. What I hadn’t counted on was the volcanic quality of love that would overawe me when he finally emerged, limp and gray as a wet muskrat, after thirty hours of mind-altering back labor. In the early 1980s, people gave the slant eye to anyone who required a whole aspirin during labor; they’d see your one-inch episiotomy and raise you one. I was spent, and so was Gabe, barely able to mewl. When the big, brusque Swedish nurses slapped an oxygen mask over his face, I roared like a reverse Medea at their offhand treatment of my morsel, the only being on earth who needed only me. I never wanted to leave him, never wanted him to grow up. By the time he was two months old, I was already able to make myself cry at the thought of missing him for eight hours, and so I hadn’t done a thing about the Little Caboose. Grandma Hannah, though her eyesight was poor, was as strong as a mustang. She stepped in gratis, while I churned out a couple of successful (but theoretical) magazine articles on getting in shape after pregnancy, the importance of being in shape before pregnancy, and the ease of delivery afforded by…guess what? Being in shape during pregnancy.
    Leo, however, was wondering, and finally asking, why are we eating variations on rice pilaf every night, Jules? Why are we not the two-income household we planned—as in the kind of people who could buy a house? Still, life remained mostly genial. Gabe Senior and Hannah bought a (modest but cute) cottage in Door County, where we often went on weekends, and “went in” on a condo in Sarasota with their best friends, Leo’s godparents.
    Then, quite suddenly, the Steiners’ “shoppe” went belly up, victim to creeping strip-mallism.
    Instantly, Leo took advantage of the prime location and sold it. Shocked at the worth of their property, the Steiners retired, Gabe Senior (never idle) began to fool with a little stock-marketeering. They virtuously shared their profits with us so we could, as Hannah liked to say, “put something by.”
    Leo was still a genius.
    We put a down payment on a postwar two-flat so huge it was actually two complete houses, slapped one on top of the other. We had four nice bedrooms and a little corner that Leo and I used as an office. We immediately rented the upper floor to a Danish couple, Liesel and Klaus, professors in the Department of Entomology at Wisconsin State, who so often flew off to this or that bug-infested paradise they were practically benign ghosts who paid our mortgage. They had three big bedrooms—one of which they used as a lab. Leo often said he was glad they studied bugs instead of tropical diseases.
    Then, Leo decided to spring one on me. He was going to use part of what we’d “put by” to go to law school at Marquette. Unemployed and hoping to stay that way, I wanted to kick him in the knee, but he quite rightly pointed out that, with a law degree and an MBA, he’d be even more marketable.
    “Jules,” he added, “now you have to get some kind of job. We’re not going to be able to afford his checkups.”
    “You know,” I’d respond, “did you ever think that with both the degrees you’re going to have, you could probably be an FBI agent?”
    “Jules,” he’d steer me back, but sweetly, “I know you don’t want to leave him.”
    “I don’t want to leave him. I think I should nurse him at least a year, and—”
    “Even a job share with somebody would help. Get partial