Take Her Man

“You know, I like Alex, but I really can’t do the whole white/ black thing. I just can’t trust it.” Tamia took a sip of her wine. “I always worry about him having slave-cabin fantasies or something. You know? I just don’t think I could—”

“I’m trying to get pregnant,” Tasha interrupted Tamia mid-sentence.

“Huh?” I said, nearly choking on my lo mein.

“Oh, now I know the girl is drunk.” Tamia dropped her fork. We were all silent. Did Tasha, the ultimate party girl who’d abandoned her own mother, just say she wanted to be a mother?

“No, I am not drunk, Tamia. I’ve just decided that I want a baby,” Tasha said without looking at us. “I’m ready.”

“Ready? When did you get ready to have a baby? How? We were just at the gym,” Tamia said, looking just as surprised as I felt.

“Wait a minute, Tasha. I think what Tamia means is what made you want a baby?” I asked Tasha delicately.

Tamia and I were sitting there staring at each other with our mouths hanging wide open. It wasn’t that Tasha was a bad person or anything. It wasn’t even that she was a bad friend, but somebody’s mother? I just wasn’t sure if I’d bet on the success of that story. There are certain things you just don’t expect in life: seeing an alien, being eaten alive by wolves, and hearing that Tasha wanted to be a mother.

“Come on, guys. Y’all are acting as if this is some big shock,” Tasha said, holding her wineglass as if we were just sitting in the park discussing our finds at Saks. “I’m married, for Christ’s sake. This is just the natural course of life.”

“Well, tell us what happened,” I said. “When did you come up with this natural course of life?”

“Well, it was about a month ago. Lionel and I were bored, so we decided to go for a drive in the city. We ended up walking around, looking at things on St. Mark’s Street,” Tasha began to explain between sips of wine. “You know, where they have all that punk rock stuff in the Village? Well, we walked into this piercing shop to see if they had studs, and Lionel suggested I get a navel piercing. Y’all know how I feel about piercings.”

“You hate them,” Tamia said. Tasha always said body piercings were the ultimate symbol of a “cheap trick.” While I was impartial to the idea, I had to admit that most of the tricks I knew had piercings.

“Yeah. So Lionel got down on his knees in the store and kissed my navel. It was so cute. Then he said, ‘I guess we better not go messing with stuff down here anyway,’ and kissed my navel again. When we left the store, I was on cloud nine. I felt sparks all over my stomach when Lionel was down there. It just felt so right. You know?”

Tamia and I nodded our heads intently. Tasha and Lionel were a match made in heaven. They were good together. But were they ready for a baby?

“Anyway, just before we got back to the car, in the middle of Lionel talking about how the team was going to build up their defense for next season, I asked him if he loved me. Without even stopping to breathe or ask me why I was asking him, he said ‘Yes, I love you.’”

“Oh,” Tamia and I cooed.

“And it wasn’t just any ‘I love you,’ y’all. It was like the same kind of ‘I love you’ I heard the first time he said it. It was so real.”

“That’s beautiful, Tasha,” Tamia said, bending across the table to kiss Tasha on her cheek.

“Yeah, but where does the baby come in?” I asked.

“Just there, just right there on the spot, I decided that I wanted to have his children,” Tasha answered. Tamia and I looked at each other. That was a big statement. You could date a man, you could love a man, you could even marry a man…but saying out loud to the world that you wanted to have his children was pretty big. It was so final. What Tasha had just done—in her own little way—was announce to us that Lionel was the only man she wanted to be with for the rest of her life. It was like the last call for alcohol was coming at the bar and Tasha was heading out the door. I guess Lionel wasn’t just going to be her first husband like people had said at the wedding. “I decided I wanted a baby and I stopped taking the pill about a week ago,” Tasha said.

“Great, did you tell Lionel?” I asked, realizing how silly the question was when it came out.

“Did you tell him?” I heard Tamia say after a moment of silence passed from Tasha’s end of the table.

“No, not yet.”

“What?”

“What does she mean she didn’t tell Lionel?” Tamia’s eyes went back and forth between me and Tasha.

“I just haven’t. I figured I’d let him know once I got pregnant. Leave all the worrying to me.”

“No,” Tamia said. “I think you have to tell him, Tasha. It’s really selfish if you don’t.”

“I agree,” I said, backing up Tamia.

“Please, Lionel’s busy with finals right now. He really doesn’t even have time for this.”

“What if he’s not ready? What if he needs you to wait until the season is over or something? I don’t know, but this is wrong, Tasha,” Tamia said. “You have to tell him.”