Her aversion to the nastier parts of everyday life is legend around our office. She once tried to get the fire department to come because she’d heard rumors that someone on the first floor had seen a mouse. She refuses to look in garbage cans for fear there might be a browning apple core inside. Then there was the day that Bryan came down with the stomach flu and she sent him home in a taxi with a brown paper grocery sack over his head so he wouldn’t breathe on her.
Any sort of test recommended by a fertility specialist no doubt ranked right near hair ball urping with Mitzi. Clearly, Mitzi is motivated to have a child, or she would never consider it.
She reached into her Kate Spade purse and took out a slender metallic silver case, the kind expensive jewelry might come in. She opened the top and tilted the case toward us so that we could see what was inside.
“A thermometer?” Kim and I yelped together.
Mitzi snapped the case shut and put a finger to her lips. “Shh. I don’t want the entire world to know about this.”
“When did they start selling thermometers in jewelry stores?” Kim wondered aloud.
“Don’t be ridiculous. This is the case for my diamond tennis bracelet. You don’t think I’d carry a basal thermometer around in the ugly plastic thing it comes in, do you? I have to take my temperature every morning before I get out of bed.”
“Then why do you have it in your purse?”
Mitzi looked at Kim as if she had oatmeal for brains. “Because,” she said, drawing out every word as if she were talking to a sweet but slow child, “my housekeeper is cleaning my bedroom today. I couldn’t just leave it lying around and announce to the world what we’re doing, could I?”
“I don’t see why not,” I said. “It’s nothing to be ashamed of.” As soon as I said it, I wished I could take back my statement. Maybe Mitzi and Arch, even though they didn’t have to, felt shame or embarrassment that they were having trouble getting pregnant. Me and my big mouth. Insert foot, stroll around.
My high-school girlfriend, now the mother of two, had walked in Mitzi’s shoes and opened my eyes to the “comforting” things people say to women struggling to become pregnant. “If one more person tells me to relax and that I’ll get pregnant right away or to be patient, I think I’ll scream,” she’d told me. “And the next person says they know exactly how I feel, is going to ‘feel’ something they didn’t expect, like my hand over their mouth.”
Needless to say, I got the idea. Minimizing fertility problems is a knife in the heart to people who want a baby in their arms.
“I’ve also had my thyroid checked and we’ve been taking blood tests. If they don’t show anything, then…” Mitzi hadn’t noticed that I’d checked out of the conversation for a moment. She began throwing around words like follicle-stimulating hormones, ultrasound, hysterosalpingogram, biopsy, and several words that ended in -scopy, and I wondered how any of them would stack up against a discussion of one of Mr. Tibble’s hair balls.
Lord, I pray that Mitzi gets pregnant soon. Otherwise, it’s going to be a very tense spring and summer at Innova Software. I already have more information about Mitzi and Arch’s life than I care to.
For the first time in all the years I’ve known her, I saw fear flicker in Mitzi’s eyes. “But what if…” She left the question unfinished.
Beneath the flawless makeup, the two-hundred-dollar haircut and the designer suit, I saw the real Mitzi—uncertain, afraid, and longing for a child she wasn’t sure she’d ever have.
Kim gently laid her hand across Mitzi’s. “You can’t give up now, when you are just finding the help you need.”
“I’m an overachiever. Everyone says so. I should be able to do this on my own.”
Overachiever? That’s a quality I haven’t noticed in Mitzi, at least not around the office.
Still, my heart goes out to her. She’s been struggling for two years with the “what-if” of not being able to have a child. That’s a pain I, never having been in her position, cannot judge.
Later, back at the office, I still felt rattled by the alien expression of apprehension in Mitzi’s eyes.
Betty was at her desk, eating garlic stir-fry out of a white paper box. The odor wafted through the room, and I felt my eyes sting. I hope she finishes her lunch down to the very last snow pea, because if she leaves her leftovers in our refrigerator we’re going to need gas masks.
“Did you go out for Chinese?” I picked up the paper from her fortune cookie. “Treasures will come your way from unexpected places. Beware of the dishonest merchant.”
It figures—eBay again, even in Betty’s fortune cookie.
“Bryan brought it back for me from a Vietnamese restaurant.”
“What was that about?” Mitzi came into the break room, chewing on a large dill pickle.
I stared at the pickle. “And what is that about?”
“Oh, nothing.”
Hah. Mitzi replying to a question by saying “Oh, nothing,” is like asking Genghis Khan or Attila the Hun what they’re doing, gathering armies and polishing swords and having them innocently say, “Oh, nothing.” There’s always more than meets the eye.
“You don’t like pickles. Aren’t you the one who made the waiter take back a burger last week to remove the pickles and replace the meat so you wouldn’t have to taste pickle juice?”
“That was last week.” She took a determined bite of the gherkin.
“You didn’t have a palate transplant, did you?”
She glared at me in sheer annoyance. “If you must know, I’m practicing.”
“For what? A pickle derby?”
“For being pregnant.”
“Sorry, Mitzi, I don’t get it.”
“Of course you wouldn’t. Whitney, you have no foresight whatsoever. If it weren’t for me, you wouldn’t even have our girls’ night out on your calendar! You should really spend more time planning ahead.”
That’s what I thought I was doing by leaving girls’ night out off my calendar. Mitzi always plans it, and sometimes I just don’t want to have my body massaged with stones—there are already enough rocks in my head, thank you—to hear a clothing historian lecture on the invention of the girdle, or to attend an in-home brassiere party where we can all be fitted in the privacy of someone’s four-foot-by-four-foot bathroom. Kim, Betty and I have gone along with Mitzi’s wacko ideas, because we know camaraderie around the office helps foster a teamwork approach, but if she gets us invited to another one of those brassiere parties, I’m outta here.
“And just what are you planning ahead for, might I ask?”
She bestowed on me her “You poor, benighted idiot” look. “For when I’m pregnant, of course! Midnight cravings? Pickles and ice cream? Don’t you ever read anything other than software magazines?”
“Let me get this straight. You hate pickles, so you are practicing eating them so that when you get pregnant and have a craving for them, you will be able to tolerate them?”
“Of course. I want the entire pregnancy experience. I have to learn to eat pickles. Eating ice cream will be no problem.”
Weird as it all is, I’m impressed. If Mitzi will go to such lengths for a baby she isn’t even pregnant