A Big Storm Knocked It Over (17 page)

“My God, you're a snarky young person,” Hugh Oswald-Murphy said.

“I am not young,” Jane Louise said. “I'm old and I'm pregnant and I can say anything I want.”

“You're not that old, my dear,” Hugh said. “I was a very late baby. My mother was nearer to fifty than forty when I appeared. Oh, the power of women! Their internal depth. Their inner space. That procreative fire.”

“It beats all hell out of me how we do it,” Jane Louise said. “Frankly, I'm exhausted.”

“And yet never used up,” Hugh said, dreamily. Jane Louise wondered if he was drunk. “The replenishing source. The
ewig weibliche.
”

“Oh that,” Jane Louise said, trying to remember if this was some term from literary criticism or Nazism. “The Eternal Feminine.”

“That's it in a nutshell,” Hugh said enthusiastically. This was clearly a favorite topic.

Jane Louise wondered if she brought this sort of thing out in men, or if all men were really like this deep down inside and she was a kindly soul who didn't mind listening to them endlessly rabbit on about these things, or if she simply didn't know any normal men who dreamed about going fishing and did not fill up their minds with mush about the
ewig weibliche.

But, on the other hand, it really
was
sort of amazing, all this procreative fire. The intricacy of all those dividing cells and chromosomal patterns, to say nothing of hormonal changes. When you were pregnant, your bones got softer in order to ensure a proper birth situation. This
was
a neat trick, especially when you were totally unaware of it. So maybe it was right and proper that men should be in awe of it. It was fairly awesome.

“One of my wives is an Eskimo,” Hugh was saying, and Jane Louise realized that minutes had gone by and she had been in a daze. “Amazing people, really, when you come to think of it. A beautiful person and the mother of my son, Anguuleek.”

“Uh-huh,” Jane Louise said. “Hugh, don't you think we ought to have our nice little chat about the design of your book?”

“Of course, of course,” Hugh said. He mopped his brow with a large yellow-and-red plaid handkerchief.

“Gee, that's pretty,” Jane Louise said. “Where'd you get it?”

“Bradbury Hatters in London,” Hugh said. “I'll send you a dozen. Is it hot in here?”

“It's procreative fire,” Jane Louise said. “It gets the thermostat all out of whack. Now sit very quietly, Hugh, and I'll show you these sample pages. And then I want you very quietly to accept every little thing.”

He gave her another unfocused look, and she knew he was not going to give her one single ounce of trouble. There was something to be said for the replenishing source. Before this minute she had had no idea how useful it could be in matters of business.

After Christmas it became wet and sleety, and then it snowed. Teddy was at a conference in Germany, the headquarters of his company. Had he gone in for petrochemicals he could have avoided spending his life worrying about money, just as Jane Louise had missed her big chance to get into corporate graphic design, something in which she had no interest whatsoever. She liked book publishing and book design, and she was stuck with the sort of meager salary it brought her, just as Teddy loved to figure out the nontoxic, the noninvasive, the safe, and the benign. As a result, they never had very much money, and now that there would soon be three of them, their worry about money became more concrete.

Jane Louise lay under her down comforter, watching the snowfall against the streetlight and reading Hugh Oswald-Murphy's Arctic masterpiece. She had now read it twice. On either side of her was a copy of Vilhjalmur Stefansson's
Arctic Manual
and Knud Rasmussen's
People of the Polar North,
which Mokie called
People of the Polish North.
She seemed to be unable to stop reading
about snow houses, ice packs, seals, and people who left their elderly alone to starve when their number was up. This landscape, totally inhospitable and remote, held her in thrall. When Teddy had mentioned that someday when their unborn was a teen and if they had any money, they might take one of those Arctic tours, Jane Louise was horrified. “Go there?” she said. “Are you
kidding?
It's too cold!”

“Then why are you reading all this stuff?” he had asked, and Jane Louise had looked up from her nest of pillows, looking dewy and beautiful, and had given him a gaze of total confusion. “I don't know,” she said.

She didn't know, except that in the Arctic no one worked for a publishing company that had just been sold, or for a small firm of do-good plant chemists who might go bankrupt at any minute. Furthermore, Jane Louise had a suspicion that her landlady, Mrs. Berger, was thinking of selling the building. This sort of thing did not happen in the Polar North.

The telephone rang her out of a doze. It was nine o'clock at night, and she could see that the sleety snow had turned into large, lacy flakes almost the size of Queen Anne's lace.

It was Teddy. “Hi,” she said sleepily. “What time is it there?”

“It's afternoon and it's freezing. What's it doing there?”

“Beautiful snow,” Jane Louise said. “Guess what? Hamish sold the press.”

“Who to?”

“Bunch o' Brits,” Jane Louise said. “I was very rude to Hugh Oswald-Murphy today.”

“Good for you,” Teddy said. “Did he behave?”

“I made him sit up and bark like a dog, and he was very good after that. How's the food?”

“Everything has talons or hooves,” Teddy said. “These guys are
very big on game with berries, and lots of meat for breakfast. I'm dying for a salad. Listen, things are not wonderful here.”

“In what way?” Jane Louise said. A wave of anxiety was beginning to curl over her like a threatening wave.

“They may sell. They may refinance. They may go under. A Swiss company wants to buy them,” Teddy said. “Anyway, there's a wage freeze.”

“That's okay, isn't it?”

“No bonus,” Teddy said.

“Well, that's okay, isn't it?”

“I was counting on it,” Teddy said. “With the baby coming.”

“It's all right,” Jane Louise said. “We have insurance. We paid for the crib. It'll be all right, although Mrs. Berger has been nosing around.”

“She's going to sell the building,” Teddy said.

There was a long silence. The telephone was not Teddy's thing. He didn't much like being forced into a situation in which speech was necessary.

“It'll be okay,” Jane Louise said. “She isn't going to sell it for a long time.”

“You don't know that,” Teddy said.

“Hey,” Jane Louise said. “How about telling me how much you miss me, and we'll talk about our housing problems when you come home.”

“I miss you,” Teddy said.

“Well, I miss you,” Jane Louise said. “Don't worry. We're not going to collapse.”

These, of course, were the sort of consoling things Jane Louise often wished Teddy would say to her, but there was no reason in Teddy's mind to reassure Jane Louise that her dwelling space wasn't going to be sold out from under her, since Teddy had no
way of knowing if this was going to happen or not, or when. He took things as they came and dealt with them, leaving Jane Louise in a state of anxiety.

It was hard for Teddy to believe her when she told him how anxious she often was. The Jane Louise he knew and loved was brazen. She had hopped right into bed with him and loved him from the first. She was open and aboveboard in her feelings: In fact, he thought of her as fearless. Furthermore, she was as snarky as Hugh Oswald-Murphy said she was, and she had never let any bully push her around.

Teddy was not romantic: He was direct. His hunger for Jane Louise was his testimony, his love letter, his poetry. In those moments she knew that for all his silence, he was hers.

Although she missed him, she admitted to herself that being pregnant and alone was very serene. In the mornings she lay in bed with her coffee and watched her unborn child cause her saucer to jiggle on her stomach.

She sighed and called up Edie. Teddy's call had made her lonesome.

“Mr. or Miss Edith Steinhaus,” she began.

“Oh, shut up,” Edie said. “I hate my husband.”

“Trouble?” said Jane Louise.

“I love him, and he works hard,” Edie said. “But I'm telling you, his mama treated him like an African prince. Did I tell you about the test shoe?”

“You didn't,” Jane Louise said. “Is it funny?”

“It's tragic,” Edie said. “I found one of Mokie's great big shoes in the bathroom, kicked behind the hamper. The other is missing, which is just as well because they're the sneakers with the holes in them that he wore to paint your mother-in-law's shed. Anyway, I put the sneaker on the top of the hamper, and it's been there for
six weeks!
”

“Cute,” Jane Louise said. “Teddy's very neat, but only with his stuff. I could leave my coat lying on the floor for a year, and he would never pick it up because it's mine.”

“It's because they don't see it.”

“What is it about guys, anyway?” Jane Louise said. “Do you think they'll clean up after the babies?”

“Until the babies are five,” Edie said. “Then we'll have to clean up after both of them.”

“It's too bad we can't run away,” Jane Louise said. “This is our last chance.”

“It's too cold,” Edie said. “I'm too tired.”

“I'm exhausted,” Jane Louise said. “Sometimes I feel as if I can barely crawl, and sometimes I feel I could leap over tall buildings with a single bound.”

“Me, too,” yawned Edie.

“Do you suppose our babies will grow up and hate us?”

“I don't see why,” Edie said. “We're so terribly nice. We're so much nicer, more enlightened, and more self-examined than our mothers.”

“Our mothers,” Jane Louise said. “You know, the truth is, I never believe it when people tell me they liked their mothers. I always think to myself: You think you do. And now I'm going to be one myself, and I have no faith whatever that this unborn person will turn fifteen and not hate me.”

“Mokie says we can't call a girl Ernestine,” Edie said. “After his great-grandfather. I myself love it.”

“Teddy says we can't call a boy Felix, after no one,” Jane Louise said. “He says he'll get beaten up in school.”

“We won't send them to that kind of school,” Edie said. “We'll send them to a school where the name Felix will be honored.”

“Edie,” Jane Louise said. “Does Mokie ever reassure you that everything will be okay?”

“Don't be ridiculous,” Edie said. “He knows everything will
not
be okay. His way of being reassuring is that he doesn't really care one way or another.”

Jane Louise sighed. She was so tired she felt she would not even be able to crawl underneath her sheets.

“I'm fading,” she said to Edie.

Edie said: “I hate to tell you, but I slept through most of this conversation, not that I don't find you extremely fascinating.”

“See you in the future,” said Jane Louise.

“In the Fullness of Time,” said Edie, and they hung up.

The baby, whoever it was in there, was now making itself known. In the bath Jane Louise saw what she thought were elbow-shaped bulges in her stomach. She felt her baby swimming and kicking and generally horsing around. It was the oddest and most bizarre sensation she had ever felt. Edie said she felt as if she were running the gymnasium of inner space. Her unborn liked to work out right before she went to sleep.

“Of course,
I
never sleep anymore,” she said to Jane Louise one Saturday afternoon over lunch.

“Apparently we'll never sleep again,” Jane Louise said. “Unless we get one of those gizmos that sounds like your heart.”

“Her new toy arrived,” Edie said of Mrs. Teagarden. “The one that replicates the birth environment. She played it for me. It sounds like being at the beach.”

“I thought her child was about two,” Jane Louise said.

“She says she likes to remind this child, whatever its name is, of what it was like inside. She feels it's an aid to bonding and that he or she will love her better for it. And also be so appreciative of the
enormous birthday party they're having for it. They had Mokie over there the other night. They're searching for a theme, but they feel they haven't come up with quite the right thing yet.”

“Oh, yeah? What did they reject?”

“Well, they thought birds might be a nice thing. They got a real Audubon for his or her room.”

“What a nice present for a two-year-old,” Jane Louise said. “I wish I were two.”

“Then they thought they might have live doves, but then they were afraid they would shit all over their priceless curtains.”

“To say nothing of the children,” Jane Louise said.

“They didn't seem overly concerned about that,” Edie said. “It's cheaper to clean a child than a curtain. They think they might buy a parrot because they live so long, he or she can have it all his life and take it to college, but then they thought parrots might bite small children, and they couldn't get one of those falconer's gloves in a small size and if the parrot wanted to sit on his arm, or her arm, it might hurt him or her with its claws.”

“This woman thinks of everything!” Jane Louise said. “I'm so impressed. Falconer's gloves for children! Why don't we manufacture some and make a million dollars?”

“Now they're thinking trains,” Edie said.

“It's hard to get one of those into your apartment,” Jane Louise said.

“They may buy one of those child-size ones and put it in the room, and he or she can ride on it.”

“Our children will be poor,” Jane Louise said.

“They will be rich in values,” Edie said.

“Oh, screw that!” Jane Louise said. “I want money.”

“We all want money,” Edie said. “One of these days Mokie is going to tell me how sick he is of catering and that he either wants to open a restaurant or go to divinity school, in which case
we'll be totally broke. Honest, Janey, I don't think I can go on making five-tiered medieval cakes for these ghastly people.”

“One of these days I'm going to be out of a job,” Jane Louise said. “They'll hire one powerhouse to do all the design and get rid of me, probably while I'm on maternity leave, or they'll freelance everything out, and I'll get a little job once in a while, and all those nice health benefits will vanish off the face of the earth, and Teddy's company will be sold.”

“A pair of cheerful mothers-to-be,” Edie said. “Mokie seems pretty cheerful for the moment.”

“Teddy's cooking something up,” Jane Louise said. “I can feel it. There's a small company right outside of West Minton that's only twenty-five minutes from Marshallsville. It's all about alternative pesticides and household stuff. They've been nosing around him.”

“Does that mean you'd live there?” Edie asked.

“It's something to think about.”

“All right, Janey,” Edie said. “Then we all have to think about it. We could open up a catering in Primrose Hill and do something nice for all those rich matrons and their prep-school daughters.”

“And I could do design for the local paper. Wouldn't it be swell?”

“It would be something,” Edie said. “It's unclear what.”

“Edie,” said Jane Louise. “Do you think we ever knew for one second what our lives would be like?”

“When I was little I felt certain that we would be in Marshallsville every summer,” Edie said. “That's about it.”

“How lucky you are,” Jane Louise said. “I don't think I ever knew, and now it's worse—the whole world is going to change. I don't know what's what, and we don't have any money.”

“Darling,” Edie said. “We have each other.”

“Yes, but when your parents do the right thing, you'll inherit, and I won't, because the only money my mother has is Charlie's, and he has three children.”

“My parents are pretty young as parents go,” Edie said. “You know what top shape they're in, what with skiing and sailing. And as for your mama, Charlie will predecease her, and you
will
inherit.”

“I guess I ought to shut up,” Jane Louise said. “This kind of agitation isn't probably any good for the unborn.”

“It isn't great for the born, either,” Edie said.

They were sitting in their favorite restaurant, a little Pakistani hole-in-the-wall with extremely fiery food. Both of them seemed to crave the hottest food they could find. The restaurant teemed with women in saris and babies in strollers. There were babies at almost every table being fed rice with a spoon, or being nursed while their mothers ate with their left hands, or they were half asleep in their buggies. There were a number of toddlers, whom Teddy referred to as “bipeds,” walking around, several of whom found Jane Louise and Edie, with their fair skin and huge stomachs, totally irresistible.

“These mothers are young enough to be our daughters,” Jane Louise said gloomily.

“Don't be ridiculous,” Edie said. “Pass me some of that hot pickle.”

“They're in their twenties,” Jane Louise said. “Look at them.”

“I'm looking. Who cares?”

“I care,” Jane Louise said. “Poor Teddy. The guy married the president of the Withered Crone Society, who gets knocked up in her later years.”

“I don't mean to be indelicate,” Edie said, “but as you know, you decided to get pregnant and probably did on the first try.”

“One shot to the moon,” Jane Louise said.

“Not withered-crone behavior. Janey, will you cheer up, or do you think this is hormonal? You're a few weeks ahead of me. Is this what I have to look forward to?”

“Certainly not,” Jane Louise said. “You're self-employed. Your company can't be sold.”

“Yes, but,” Edie said. “At least
your
baby has dropped, and you can breathe. I still have the stuffed nose of pregnancy, and this kid is pressing against my diaphragm. It must be nice to breathe again.”

“Mine is sitting on my pelvic bone,” Jane Louise said. “I feel so weird. It's like going into a dark wood. I'm scared.”

“It's part of the process,” Edie said.

“I guess I'll get over it,” Jane Louise said. “By summer we'll be pushing these babies around in a conveyance.”

Two weeks later Miranda Elizabeth Parker was born, and three weeks after that, Aaron Talbot Frazier, nicknamed Tallie, appeared on the scene, to the intense relief and exaltation of their exhausted mothers.