Now I'll Tell You Everything (Alice) (32 page)

Patrick and I were laughing and crying at the same time, and the doctor and nurse were smiling. “How about naming her ‘Cantaloupe’?” the doctor said.

I shook my head. “Patricia Marie,” I announced, the name Patrick and I had already chosen. And I could not believe, as I held my baby, that Patrick and I together had produced this wondrous little bundle of life, with her orange hair and fair skin and toes so tiny, they looked like peas.

When Dad and Sylvia came to the hospital later, Patricia Marie had been cleaned up, swathed in blankets, and was asleep in my arms. Dad could barely speak. I handed the baby to him, and he held her as though she were made of glass, looking down at her with such wonder.

“Marie! You named her after your mother,” he said, slowly leaning down and kissing the baby’s forehead. “Oh, Patricia Marie, you’ve got to be
some
girl to live up to the likes of your grandmother.”

I’ve heard that some women are uncomfortable around newborns and prefer their children after they learn to walk and talk. But I loved all the different stages of infancy and could hold my baby endlessly and talk to her, watching her little mouth try to copy the movements of my own. I think I was in a state of euphoria all during those early months, and I especially enjoyed nursing her at night. We had turned our study into a nursery, and when I heard her cry, I’d bring her into bed with Patrick and me. Lying in the fetal position with my knees bent, Patricia Marie at my breast, I could feel her little feet digging into my thigh as she drank. It was easy to feel that nothing else mattered in the whole wide world—just Patrick and me and Patricia Marie.

Sometimes, just to amuse her and us, we’d bring her into
bed with us on a weekend morning and playfully put her between us as we hugged—our “Patricia sandwich,” we’d call it.

Dad and Sylvia couldn’t seem to get enough of her.

“So what do you want to be called, Sylvia? Mom says you get first pick,” said Patrick. “Will it be ‘Grandma’ or ‘Grandmom’ or ‘Nana’ or . . . ?”

“We’ll see what’s easiest for her to say—I don’t care,” Sylvia said.

Did everyone take as many pictures of their babies as we did? We sent slide shows by computer to Les and Stacy, Dad and Sylvia, and any relatives or friends who showed even remote interest in them. First smile, first tooth, first car ride, first word . . . And then, one night, after finishing a small bag of cashews, Patrick blew the little bag full of air and popped it. First Patricia startled, her eyes huge, and then she broke into a loud belly laugh that took even her by surprise.

“Listen to her!” Patrick cried. “She loves it!”

We popped another bag, then another, and each time, as though it were the first, Patricia startled, then laughed, an infectious belly laugh that doubled us both over.

Les teased us about all the photos we took when he and Stacy came to celebrate Sylvia’s birthday at my folks’ house. Sylvia had said that all she wanted was to hold the baby, and she did, until Patricia finally fell asleep, and we put her in her portable crib in my old bedroom upstairs.

“Babies, yabies, they give me the willies,” Les said, and when we all turned on him, he said, “It’s the way they
stare
at you. No
self-consciousness whatsoever. You can stare right back, and it doesn’t faze them. It’s like
Twilight Zone
for little monsters.”

“Oh, Les!” we all cried, and even Stacy beat him on the back.

It was later, when Stacy was showing Sylvia how to play the dulcimer she had brought her as a present, that we heard a soft “Ba-by” coming from the kitchen. We all stopped and stared. “Ba-by,” came the voice again. Surely not Patricia’s.

“Baby girl, are you Uncle Lester’s bitty baby girl?”

Our mouths opened in surprise, and we suppressed our laughter as we crept toward the kitchen and over to the baby monitor on the counter.

“Are those your little toesies?” came the voice, and when Les came down at last, holding Patricia, awake from her nap, we all chorused, “Ba-by. Baby girl.” His face reddened as he stared first at us, then at the baby monitor in Stacy’s hand.

“Busted,” he said. “But it was worth it. She gave me a great big smile.”

*  *  *

Six months later, when Gwen was in her first year of residency at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, she called to say that she had a weekend off and was coming home to see her grandmother, now in her late nineties. Could we possibly get together? She had news. . . .

I immediately called Pamela in New York and virtually ordered her to come down. Patrick was in London, and it was a rare—very rare—chance for the four of us to be together. “We’ll make it a sleepover,” I said. “There’s room.” Patrick and I were
talking about buying a house, but it hadn’t happened yet.

Elizabeth had a baby of her own now—also a girl, Janine—whom she brought with her because she was still nursing. When Pamela came, we played with both babies, but when Gwen arrived, all eyes were on her left hand. There it was—a small, sparkly diamond—and for a moment Gwen almost lost her balance as we hugged her.

“Charlie came up a month ago and made his ‘It’s now or never’ speech, and I fell for it,” she laughed, the dimples in her cheeks deeper than ever. When I looked at her skeptically, she said, “No, Alice, I wasn’t pressured into saying yes—it was only a matter of when. The wedding’s still a long way off, but at least now we’re committed to each other and can make plans for when my residency’s over.”

Janine and Patricia Marie were distracted by all the laughter and chatter in the room. They were still too young to object to being passed from lap to lap, hugged and bounced and kissed, Gwen cooing over their sweet baby-skin scent. When Liz nursed Janine, I was intrigued to find that her little girl also wriggled her small toes in pleasure as she drank, kneading her bare feet into Elizabeth’s lap.

“Amazing how one end can smell so sweet and the other end smell so awful,” Pamela commented, handing Patricia back to me after holding her for a few minutes, and we laughed.

Finally, when both babies were asleep in the study, we ordered a white pizza like we used to, opened some beers, and settled down for some serious gossip. For tonight, Gwen and
Pamela would be sleeping in our bedroom, Liz and I would share the pullout couch (when or if we ever went to bed).

“Has anyone heard from Jill or Karen? Penny?” I asked.

“I get an e-mail from Karen every so often,” Pamela said. She had changed from her designer jeans into blue silk pajamas. She was wearing her blond hair shoulder length and gently curled. It was a dark blond, probably because she wasn’t out in the sun so much. She’d taken off all her makeup and looked a lot like the Pamela we once knew. It was as though we were all fourteen again.

“Where
is
Karen now?” Gwen asked.

“Pittsburgh. And guess what Lori and Leslie are doing?”

I took a guess. “Tour guides in Yellowstone Park?” That was what they’d talked about doing back in high school.

“Wrong. They’ve started a website devoted entirely to travel sites and suggestions for gays and lesbians—discounts on airfare schedules, hotels, the works. I hear it’s doing well.”

“Good for them! And Jill and Justin?”

“Still in Baltimore, I think. Karen says they separated for a while, then got back together.”

We sighed in unison.

“Penny?”

“Married. Tucson,” said Pamela, who seemed to be social secretary for our group. She stared at the three of us in astonishment. “Don’t you guys keep up with Facebook?”

“Are you kidding?” said Liz. “If I have two free minutes in the day, there are a dozen things calling to me more important than Facebook.”

“I haven’t even cut my toenails in two months.
Look
at them!” Gwen said, holding out her bare feet. “That’s
one
thing I’m going to accomplish tonight.” She was sprawled out in Patrick’s favorite chair in flannel pj’s with penguins on them, legs draped over the arms, a plate with two slices of pizza on it, resting on her chest.

“At least the four of us are still in touch,” I said. “We all have careers, two of us are married and mamas. . . . Did we turn out at all the way we’d thought?”

“You did,” said Pamela. “You always talked about being a counselor or a psychologist—picking people’s brains.”

“I don’t
pick
,” I said, and took another swallow of beer.

“And for a while we thought Liz would be a nun,” Pamela joked.

“We never did.” I looked over at Elizabeth, who was still wearing a maternity top with her jeans. “Some nun,” I said. “What about you, Pam?”

“Well, I thought I’d go into theater but ended up in advertising, and I like it.”

“Is marriage in your plans somewhere?” asked Elizabeth.

“Far, far down the road, if ever,” Pamela said.

“Don’t you ever get lonely?” Liz persisted.

“I’ve got friends. I’ve been dating one guy for six months now, so I guess you could say we’re semi-serious. But we’re not talking marriage yet. Just having a good time being together.”

“Well, so are we. Wow, it’s so nice to see you guys. Just to have time to talk like we used to,” I said. I padded out to the
kitchen in my floppy slippers to get a can of nuts and returned. “What about you, Gwen? For a while you were talking about going into pediatrics. What happened?”

“It was a hard decision, but I finally settled on gynecology because women make easier patients. You don’t have to coax or trick them into letting you have a look. And I especially like working with young women. I get lots of students, especially those asking specifically for a woman doctor.”

“It just makes sense, you know?” I said, reaching for the scrunchie that was dangling over one shoulder. I gave my pony tail a twist and secured the blue band again around my hair. “No matter how good a male doctor might be, he simply doesn’t have the female parts that we do. He can’t possibly experience the same thing.”

Gwen sat up and reached for a paper napkin. “Many of my patients still have a hard time asking their questions, though. Usually I’m doing a follow-up after prescribing birth control pills or treating a vaginal infection. And what they usually say, once they’re on the exam table, is, ‘Dr. Wheeler, could you just check to see if everything looks normal?’ And then I have to guess what’s really on their minds.”

“Which is what?” I asked.

“Could be anything, but often they’re afraid that some part of their body isn’t attractive or isn’t working right. We females can be one insecure bunch!”

“Gwen, the Reassurer of Worried Women,” I said. “I’ll bet you’re good at it.”

“But that’s for starters. The big worry, but the one most unspoken, is that they don’t climax during intercourse. It’s like the six-hundred-pound gorilla in the room that everyone knows is there but they never talk about. They’ll wait till the very end of their visit and then say, ‘By the way, Doctor . . . ’  ”

We’d all stopped chewing then, and I wondered if that six-hundred-pound gorilla was sitting right there with us.

“And . . . ?” Pamela said, bobbing one foot up and down.

“And they assume that because I’m close to their age and probably have a boyfriend that I’ve worked it all out.”

“Well, darn!” said Pamela. “We hoped you had!”

We laughed a little self-consciously.

“We had a good lecturer on female sexuality in my last year of med school,” Gwen told us. “She was a psychologist and researcher from somewhere in New York, and all the ob-gyn students were supposed to attend. She said that although some women do occasionally climax during intercourse, expecting them to is like expecting a man to ejaculate simply by stroking his thigh.”

“Hear, hear!” said Pamela.

“Really?” said Liz. She looked thoughtful. “Hmm. I wonder if Moe could . . .”

We laughed, but Gwen continued:

“None of the women students looked surprised. Relieved, maybe, but you should have seen the men’s faces. Disbelief? I’m not sure. She suggested that when a female patient brings this up, we should reassure her that her anatomy is just fine and suggest that she discover how she most likes to pleasure herself
when she’s alone, then see how she and her partner can incorporate that in their lovemaking.”

“Wow!” I said. “When do you suppose movies and novels will catch up?”

“It’ll be a while,” Pamela said. “That came up in a rehearsal at theater arts school. The scene was supposed to portray two people making love in silhouette, and the actress was complaining that both of them climaxing at the same time was a male fantasy. There’s too much faking going on, she said.”

“Man oh man, I’m going back to school,” said Liz. “Where were these discussions when
I
was in college?”

“The thing is, though, men usually can’t tell the difference,” Pamela went on, looking around to see if anyone agreed with her. “And it’s more convenient for them if we climax together—less work. So we fake a lot.”

“Well . . . that depends,” said Liz. “But don’t we worry sometimes that our guy will meet up with a woman who climaxes easily, no matter what? And he doesn’t have to work so hard to satisfy her?”

“Exactly!” said Gwen. “And we just assume she’d automatically be gorgeous, sexy, and slim, a temptation any husband couldn’t resist.”

We sighed, signaling it’s something we’d all thought about at least once.

“Maybe people should take turns,” I ventured, trying not to get too personal. “Like one time they do everything the man likes, and the next time it’s
her
turn to choose.”

“That is so . . . so
Alice
!” Pamela exclaimed, laughing. “Gosh, you’re so democratic!”

“Every couple has to work out their own unique way of making love—that’s what I tell my patients,” said Gwen. “And that can be half the fun. You know how the psychologist concluded her lecture? She said that she knows for sure that God is a man, because if God was a woman and wanted her female creations to climax during intercourse, she would have put that little button of pleasure
inside
the vagina where it would do the most good.”