Morning (20 page)

Fanny ran her fingers across her forehead in a light, obscuring gesture. “Yes,” she said softly. “I do see that. I can do that for Jenny.”

“And friends!” Sara continued. “After all these years, Fanny, Jenny should have some friends.”

“Then you’ve missed the point completely,” Fanny said, her face changing, her voice becoming harsh. “Jenny never really had friends. She didn’t know how to have friends—”

“Couldn’t she make friends?
One
friend?”

Fanny rose, took up the poker, and fussed with the fire in what seemed to Sara an attempt to hide her agitation. At last she turned back. “I have had trouble all along with the ending of this novel,” she said. “I have felt like a fortune-teller who suddenly has lost the ability to see through the crystal ball. I’ve had sleepless nights about this, I assure you. Sara, I want to trust your instincts, but I cannot go against my own.”

Sara gave the writer time to collect herself. Fanny’s hands were shaking slightly now, her mouth was working.

“Novels can be revised,” Sara said quietly. “Even lives can suddenly, at the last hour, change.”

Fanny looked at Sara. “Yes,” she said finally. “Yes, that’s true.” She sat down, took up her notebook and pen. “Very well. Jenny can have her work, and that in turn can give her friends. That is plausible, isn’t it.
True?
” Now she was almost smiling.

“Yes,” Sara answered, smiling back.

Fanny scribbled on her pad. She looked up at Sara and said, “That’s the difference between life and fiction, isn’t it? Jenny can have whatever life I give her.”

After her meeting with Fanny, Sara had run over to the CVS pharmacy in Harvard Square. She carried her purchase, hidden in a brown paper bag, as protectively as if it were jewels, back to Nantucket.

It was the meeting with Fanny that had given her the courage to do this. She understood Fanny’s hesitation about meddling in something that should happen naturally. For Fanny it was writing; for Sara, it was getting pregnant. Part of Sara still believed that because she and Steve loved each other so much, and loved making love with each other so much, a natural and even inevitable consequence would be pregnancy. But perhaps the
natural needed a little help—and that was just what she thought she had in her brown paper bag.

It helped that she had been in Cambridge today so that she could buy the item at a pharmacy where no one she knew would see. In December, when she had the prescription for prenatal vitamins filled on Nantucket, the little white-haired old lady behind the counter, the pharmacist’s wife, had embarrassed Sara so terribly she had nearly fled from the store.

“How far along are you, dear?” she had asked, as she came shuffling out from the back room with Sara’s prescription vitamins.

Sara had stared at the woman, trying to decide what to say. At that moment, she heard the front door of the pharmacy open and close. She heard female voices. She did not turn to look. If that was part of the group, she would die on the spot!

“When is your baby due?” the old lady repeated, in the ringing tones of the slightly deaf.

“Oh, oh, I’m not pregnant,” Sara said. She threw the old lady a blinding smile, as if pregnancy were the last thing on her mind.

“But these are
prenatal
vitamins,” the old lady yelled. “They’re expensive! If you’re not pregnant, you don’t need such expensive vitamins.”

“Could I please have them?” Sara asked quietly, not smiling.

“Of course,” the old lady said, and exchanged the package for Sara’s money. Sara hurried from the store, glancing quickly at the two women—she didn’t know them, had never seen them before, thank heavens.

But this item she had bought in the blissful anonymity of Harvard Square. No one knew she had it, not even Steve. Well, Ellie knew, for she had recommended it. And Sara felt good about it—felt smug. Here was the combination of science and magic she had been wishing for.

Chapter Seven

Seven o’clock in the morning.

Again.

Sara had been waking up at seven o’clock every single day for centuries, it seemed.

Steve moaned and turned on his side, pulling most of the covers with him. Sara reached for the thermometer and put it in her mouth. The five minutes took forever to pass. There was something urgent she needed to do.

At last she rose from the bed, slipped the thermometer into its blue case, pulled on her robe, and hurried into the bathroom, putting the thermometer on her Plexiglas table next to the accompanying chart and pen.

And there was the kit in all its blue-and-white plastic glory.

Usually the little table held crystal decanters full of pastel bath oils, Royal Doulton china dishes full of scalloped soaps, perfumes, dusting powers, body lotions. All that had been pushed aside, jumbled up in a corner to make room for her new treasures: the thermometer, and now this kit.

It was an ovulation-indicator kit. Ellie had called to tell her about it. The thermometer, Ellie had said, only told a woman when she
had
ovulated. This kit would tell a woman just before she ovulated that she was going to, so there wasn’t the chance of missing the day as there was with the thermometer.

She had been using the kit for several days now. She had the routine down pat. She took the small plastic cup and crouched over it, urinating, grinning as she did so, thinking to herself:
I’m mad, I’m mad, I’m the mad scientist
. She set the cup on the table and hurriedly washed her hands.

With a clean medicine dropper, she took some of the urine from the cup and put it into a tiny tube already containing a clear liquid. Then she had to wait for fifteen minutes. She looked at her watch. It was ten minutes after seven. She had to time this portion of the test very carefully.

While she waited, she noted her temperature—the same as the day before—and marked its spot on the temperature chart. She was beginning to see the black line that
recorded her temperature as an endless repetitive road to nowhere. For five months now it had jigged and jagged along, rising when she ovulated, only to plunge when she started her period. If she was to get pregnant, the temperature would stay high, would not take that dreadful fall that carried her emotions with it. Ellie had reassured Sara that she should take great comfort from the chart: it proved that she was ovulating regularly, that her system was functioning nicely.

“But not nicely enough!” Sara had replied.

Today was the fifteenth day of her cycle. Today her temperature should have risen, but it hadn’t. What did that mean? Sara sat on the carpeted bathroom floor and leaned back against the tiled wall, closing her eyes for a moment. The ovulation-indicator kit said that the day she ovulated her urine specimen would turn bright blue and that the change on that day from the color on previous days would be the most extreme. She kept the color of her tests, rated from one to six, on another chart. So far, each day for the past four days, her urine had remained a frustratingly clear color that scarcely deserved a one on the chart.

“Oh, body,” Sara said aloud, “come on!”

She looked at her watch. Ten more minutes to wait. She raced out to get the letter she’d received from Julia yesterday, and brought it back with her to the bathroom. Eight minutes left. She sat down on the floor, leaned against the wall.

“At last!” Julia had written in her fat loping scrawl. “I’ve found it! The advice you’ve been waiting for! Oh, what would you do without me? I really can’t imagine. Now it’s up to you to find a spell for me to use to get Perry away from his clamtrap wife!”

Paper-clipped to the note was a Xeroxed page from a book devoted completely to ancient reproductive rituals. Sara checked her watch. Five minutes to wait. She read.

Whether or not the woman was fertile could be tested; for example, by watering corn with her urine. If it grew she was not barren. If it did not, a variety of remedies were at hand to increase her fecundity. Sea holly was recommended by Elizabeth Okeover; nutmeg would ‘help conception and strengthen nature,’ asserted Miss Springatt; sitting over hot fumes of catmint was suggested by several authors. Anything that warmed and invigorated such as brandy and hot baths found favour. Nicholas Culpeper,
self-proclaimed student in physick and astrology, provided in his
Directory for Midwives
(1656) typically elaborate instructions on how to aid conception. In addition to good diet and exercise he recommended wearing amulets such as a lodestone or the heart of a quail; drinking potions of eringo, peony and satyrion; eating ‘fruitful’ creatures such as crabs, lobsters and prawns; and consuming concoctions of the dried and powdered wombs of hares, the brains of sparrows and the pizzles of wolves.

“Darling, I’m combing the stores of Boston to find you some hare wombs and wolf pizzle!” Julia had scribbled on the bottom of the note.

If she finds it, I’ll use it!
Sara thought. And why not. Here she was, sitting on the bathroom floor in her robe. She hadn’t combed her hair or brushed her teeth. She had taken her temperature and peed into a plastic cup. She felt like some superstitious primitive native waiting for a cloud to pass over a mountain, giving her a sign. And she wanted a baby so much she would go to a witch doctor or drink pizzle of wolf—she would do anything!

The time was up. Sara rose, took a tiny plastic stick and dipped it into the tube holding her urine and the solution. Now she had to wait five minutes more. She brushed her teeth and combed her hair. Now she looked civilized even if she was acting like a heathen.

According to the instructions, she had to rinse the dipstick under cold water to the count of ten, then put it in yet another little tube of another solution and swivel it back and forth. She did this, almost holding her breath as she concentrated.

When she put her stick into the tube and stirred, the solution turned a beautiful bright turquoise blue. In one day the color had dramatically jumped from one on the chart to six. This was the day she was ovulating!

She hurried into her bedroom. Steve was up, standing near the dresser. He had his jeans on and was pulling a T-shirt on over his head. Sara went to him and put her arms around him.

“Good morning,” he said, head coming out through the neck of the shirt.

“Take off that shirt,” Sara said. “Take off your clothes. Get back in bed.”

In March, the weather settled down. Way down. The swirling white energy of winter whisked back up into the heavens and hid behind a thick cloud of gray that hung over the island and coast for days at a time, dimming the sun, coating the air with a gray monotone as gloomy and dispiriting at the soiled slush that still edged the streets.

Sara had never been happier. Her instincts had been right: Donald James had read the first half of the Jenny novel and called her the moment he had finished the last word. He wanted it. He wanted to come out with it in January and to do all sorts of publicity that writers would usually beg for. This set off a chain of work for Sara—just the sort of work she loved. She went to Boston to meet with Fanny Anderson’s agent, Clayton Hughes, and was not surprised to find that Clayton had never met Fanny in person but had always spoken with her on the phone. Donald James offered Fanny a good advance for the book and offered Sara a good fee to edit it. Now she could afford the laparoscopy, but couldn’t imagine where she would find the time to take three weeks or three days out of her life. She was doing what she felt she had been born to do.

She spoke with Fanny daily on the phone, and traveled to Boston to work with her for two days a week. To save on traveling time, she spent nights in Boston with Julia; they went out to dinner and sat up late discussing the eccentricities of life over brandy or Bailey’s. Clayton Hughes called Sara with the news that the British rights to the Jenny novel had been sold for a wonderful sum. Sara tried to get Fanny to go out to dinner to celebrate, but Fanny steadfastly refused to leave the house. So Sara brought champagne, which they drank from platinum-rimmed crystal in the hot blue shadowy living room.

The novel was to be called, simply,
Jenny’s Book
. Fanny could not bring herself to let Jenny end up living happily with a man she loved, but she did give Jenny a job with a literary review in Boston, which in turn gave her prestige and colleagues and friends. At the end of the novel, Jenny lived by herself but led an active life in Boston’s intellectual world, going to book publication parties and gallery openings and concerts and ballets. Her friends were poets and critics and artists and professors. This was the life she had escaped Kansas for so long ago.

Sara was pleased with the way the book ended. She sat with the pages of the manuscript in her hand, feeling a sense of pride in what she had helped Fanny to do. Her period had started and she held on to the manuscript and stared into space, wishing that life could be revised as easily as a book.

Steve’s parents moved back to their Nantucket house from Florida at the end of April, and came to dinner at Sara and Steve’s the night after they arrived.

It was warm enough that they had opened the windows, and the fragrant spring air wafted through the house, slipping past the curtains, puffing at the candle flame. Sara had served a leg of lamb with garlic, and asparagus, and fresh raspberries for dessert, and the four sat content around the dining room table, idly gossiping over their liqueurs. Caroline admired the needlepoint pillow Sara had finally finished and offered to help Sara make a set of needlepoint covers for the dining room chairs—if Sara didn’t think it was too intrusive of her. They spoke of patterns, colors, materials, and Sara snuggled her chin into her hand, leaning her elbow on the table, relaxed, wishing she could have shared the same kind of moment with her own mother. Then Caroline changed the subject, and for Sara it was as if the older woman had abruptly pulled a gun and shot her in the stomach.

“What am I saying?” Caroline said. “Sofa pillows! I’ll have so much sewing to do in the next few months. Erica Evans’s daughter is pregnant, and I promised to knit a blanket and a layette for the baby. And you know—Steve, did you know? The Anderson girl is pregnant!”