Some things are to look at, not to touch. Nancy Finegold was one of them.
We went out to dinner and I wore the cardigan.
My father came to pick me up in the old brown family station wagon and when I jumped in the front seat, I felt free and very, very old.
‘How’d it go, Pea?’ he asked. ‘Did they like your dress?’
‘I don’t think they understood it, Da.’
He laughed. ‘What’s there to understand?’
‘Everything,’ I said.
Absolutely everything.
The period during which a woman is expecting a baby is not always, it must be admitted, the most propitious one for elegance. A bad complexion, an expanding waistline, a silhouette becoming a bit awkward towards the end, all add up to an image that is not always a joy to contemplate in the mirror. But since almost every woman is obliged to go through it at one time or another, it is better to accept the situation with good humour and to make the most of it.
A good plan is to buy only a few things for your maternity wardrobe and to wear the same dresses over and over again until you are quite fed up with them. This way you can give them away afterwards without the slightest regret. Above all, don’t try to have them taken in at the seams after you have recovered your normal figure. The clothes you have worn throughout these long months will disgust you for the rest of your days.
My husband and I are entertaining friends, a couple we haven’t seen in a long time. We haven’t seen them because they have children, twin girls. My husband and I don’t do children very well; no matter how much we try to hide it, we’re clearly horrified. I keep staring at them like I’m going to pass out and he’s permanently on guard, brandishing a washing up cloth like he’s ready to mop up toxic waste. Very quickly the couple feel as if they’ve defiled the sanitized sanctuary of our pristine living room and decide that the twins need to go home for a nap after only forty-five minutes in our company. Everyone’s relieved, even the babies, who are only nine months old. Their faces noticeably relax as they’re loaded into the car.
Our friends are all having children now; we’re the odd ones out. They’ve stopped asking us about it; stopped smiling and saying, ‘But surely someday you’ll want a family.’ By now it’s obvious that only an act of God could make us parents. We wave to them as they drive away, and then walk back into our barren household – the one with the dust-free living room and the bed the size of Kansas.
‘Thank God that’s over,’ my husband says, bending down to pick up something from the floor. It’s a single, pale blue baby sock, still warm and smelling of baby. He hands it to me. I don’t know what to do with it or where to put it, so I throw it away.
‘Yes,’ I agree. ‘Thank God.’
The first time I was pregnant, I was sixteen and it was before the creation of home pregnancy tests. I had to see a doctor to tell me what I already knew. You don’t have to have been pregnant before to know that there’s something strange going on. I was throwing up in the mornings and, in fact, all through the day and I started noticing strange discharges I’d never encountered before. Things smelled different, tasted wrong, and I’d gone off pizza. For the first time in my life, I was forced into paying attention to my body. I was possessed, like in The Invasion of the Body Snatchers and it wasn’t going to go away.
I couldn’t go to the family physician – not to the same man who’d vaccinated me against smallpox and measured my growth against a chart on the wall covered with smiling, cartoon animals. I was sick but I had to hide it. But by now I was used to hiding all the most important facts of my day.
I was used to hiding the fact that I threw up my food after each meal by going upstairs to the guest bathroom and sticking my fingers down my throat. I was used to hiding the little black speed pills I took every morning, the ones I bought from Sarah Blatz, a fat, red-headed girl who played on the girls’ field-hockey team and who was prescribed them by her doctor to lose weight. And I was used to hiding where I went in the evenings from my parents, what I did and especially who with.
My friend Mary took me to see her doctor, a female physician in another part of town. She had a growth chart on her wall too, but she’d never measured me before, so that was OK.
Mary was frightened; she wasn’t used to concealing things or maybe she was just used to covering up all the normal things, like that she’d gone all the way with her boyfriend, the one she’d been going steady with for a year and a half, or that she’d got drunk at a friend’s party last Saturday and had to spend the night.
I didn’t have a boyfriend; I got pregnant from a guy who never called again and I was drunk every Saturday night.
After school, Mary drove me to the doctor’s in her mother’s custom built silver Cadillac, the one with the horn that played the theme from The Godfather when you pressed it. (Her father was in the meat trade.) Every once in a while she’d press it and we’d laugh; more out of politeness than anything else. She was obviously trying her best to cheer me up and I was grateful for her kindness.
The doctor took a blood test and examined me as I sat in my little paper gown on the crinkly paper strip that covered the examining table. The office was on the 7th floor of a modern block, overlooking the traffic that led into the mall below. I concentrated on the pale blue of the sky as she felt my breasts and shook her head sadly.
‘They’re pregnanty,’ she announced. ‘We’ll get the test back tomorrow, but I can tell you right now, you’re pregnant.’
I know, I thought. I know.
Mary wanted me to tell her mom because that’s what she would do. But I knew I’d have to do the rest on my own. I made an appointment, but had to wait another month before I could have the abortion.
In the meantime, I told my parents I had an ulcer, which they believed without questioning. Every morning at around 4:30 am, I was sick. And every morning, my father woke up at 4:15 and made me a small bowl of porridge to settle my stomach, which he placed by the side of my bed. Then he’d pad off upstairs in his red robe, feeling his way in the darkness to catch another hour and a half’s sleep. He never asked if he should do that; he just did it. Like so many things in our house, even acts of kindness occurred in silence. I wondered if he would do the same thing if he knew the truth. I think he would.
My skin got bad and my mouth tasted metallic. In my locker at school, I kept an enormous box of saltines, which I ate in the hundreds. My diet diminished to saltines, mashed potatoes, and porridge. Anything else was just too exciting. No matter how much I ate, I still got sick. And no matter how often I threw up, I was still hungry. I was more afraid of gaining weight than of being pregnant.
The operation cost two hundred and thirty dollars. My parents gave me two hundred dollars in cash after I managed to convince them that I needed a new winter coat and the rest of it I paid for out of my allowance.
Finally the day came, a Saturday morning in early March. It was raining, softly misting when I left the house.
I told my parents I was going to go shopping with my friend Anne and then I drove myself to the clinic and checked in. It was early, around 9 am. The waiting room was full of flowered cushions, pleasant prints, and bright, soft colours. There were little clusters of