Page 160 - A Little Life: A Novel

My father and Adele (and Liesl’s parents, for that matter; mysteriously,
they were considerably more emotive than she was, and on our infrequent
trips to Santa Barbara, while her father made jokes and her mother placed

before me plates of sliced cucumbers and peppered tomatoes from her
garden, she would watch with a closed-off expression, as if embarrassed, or
at least perplexed by, their relative expansiveness) never asked us if we
were going to have children; I think they thought that as long as they didn’t
ask, there was a chance we might. The truth was that I didn’t really feel the
need for it; I had never envisioned having a child, I didn’t feel about them
one way or another. And that seemed enough of a reason not to: having a

child, I thought, was something you should actively want, crave, even. It
was not a venture for the ambivalent or passionless. Liesl felt the same way,
or so we thought.
But then, one evening—I was thirty-one, she was thirty-two: young—I
came home and she was already in the kitchen, waiting for me. This was
unusual; she worked longer hours than I did, and I usually didn’t see her

until eight or nine at night.
“I need to talk to you,” she said, solemnly, and I was suddenly scared.
She saw that and smiled—she wasn’t a cruel person, Liesl, and I don’t
mean to give the impression that she was without kindness, without
gentleness, because she had both in her, was capable of both. “It’s nothing
bad, Harold.” Then she laughed a little. “I don’t think.”
I sat. She inhaled. “I’m pregnant. I don’t know how it happened. I

must’ve skipped a pill or two and forgotten. It’s almost eight weeks. I had it
confirmed at Sally’s today.” (Sally was her roommate from their med-
school days, her best friend, and her gynecologist.) She said all this very
quickly, in staccato, digestible sentences. Then she was silent. “I’m on a pill
where I don’t get my periods, you know, so I didn’t know.” And then, when
I said nothing, “Say something.”

I couldn’t, at first. “How do you feel?” I asked.
She shrugged. “I feel fine.”
“Good,” I said, stupidly.
“Harold,” she said, and sat across from me, “what do you want to do?”
“What do you want to do?”
She shrugged again. “I know what I want to do. I want to know what you
want to do.”

“You don’t want to keep it.”