The Continuity Girl (5 page)

“That’s how everybody feels,” he said.

“That’s not true.”

“I assure you,” he said, “it is.”

“Then why is everything so well timed in other people’s lives?” she said, glancing at the photo of the little girl on his
desk. “It’s like I’ve been off schedule from day one. I think I was born out of sync.”

His eyes smiled. “If you’re talking about children, I can tell you, there is never a convenient time—for anyone. Children
are not convenient. They require...a leap of faith.”

Meredith shook her head. “I’m sorry, Doctor, but it’s hard for me to take advice from someone like you.”

“What do you mean?” He looked surprised.

Meredith looked at his shoes—perfectly safe. “You just don’t seem like someone who’s taken many leaps of faith.”

“I don’t?”

“Not to me.”

He folded his clipboard and stood up. Meredith remained seated. Her face felt tingly, as if she had been smacked.

“I’m sorry if my bluntness offends you,” the doctor said quickly. “It’s just that I see this sort of thing every day. It’s
really discouraging to watch healthy young women become infertility statistics just because they waited too long and didn’t
have the facts.”

Meredith nodded and reached for her bag to leave.

“Don’t forget,” said Dr. Joe.

“Forget what?”

“Your Pap test.”

“Oh, right. That.”

“I’ll just step out for a moment so you can put on your gown. Please take everything off including your underwear, lie on
the examination table faceup and place your heels in the stirrups.” He paused in the doorway and turned back. “I hope my advice
didn’t upset you.”

“Not at all,” Meredith said abruptly. “Really. Thanks for being honest.”

When the metal door clicked shut behind him, she looked around the room. It was one of those moments when everything suddenly
appears shifted from where it was a second before, a skipped beat in the time-space continuum. She looked at the hospital
gown folded on top of the examination table’s waxed paper sheet. It was pink. Meredith liked pink, but this shade reminded
her of a dog’s inner ear. She stared at the gown and thought of what a strange couple of days it had been. Walking off set,
consoling Mish, being told by a man she’d just met she’d better get pregnant soon and fast... And now this same man was preparing
to scrape cells from inside her body so someone else could examine them under a microscope. Meredith looked at the oven mitts
at the end of the table and imagined the cold metal stirrups beneath them.

For the second time in seventy-two hours, Meredith bolted.

* * *

The day before Meredith left for London, she and Mish met for brunch at a French bistro in Kensington Market. Mish chose the
place for its fried cheese, homemade hollandaise and indignant ban on all American products since the war in Iraq. Not having
to eat folic-rich greens every five seconds was, she assured Meredith, one of the major bonuses of not being pregnant. That
and smoking. And drinking. Meredith arrived exactly on time. Mish was already there, at a corner table, sitting behind a two-thirds-empty
bottle of rosé, nose in a copy of
Us.

“Okay,” Mish demanded when she saw Meredith. “How is it possible that every single celebrity in the history of the world is
currently engaged? I mean, don’t these people ever just date? And their engagements are so weird. They don’t announce it or
anything like normal people—instead they just go around wearing gigantic rings and publicly denying everything. What’s the
fucking point?”

She pointed to a photo of a pop star and an actress crossing the street. Over the top of the image the magazine art directors
had added a large yellow arrow pointing to the third finger of the actress’s left hand, which was wrapped around a takeout
latte the size of a construction worker’s lunch Thermos. Lower on the page, the same image of her hand had been blown up to
twice its size and framed in the outline of a church bell.
WEDDING BELLS FOR CARRIE AND BEN
? read the headline, followed by a caption: “After a walk along the beach in Malibu, Carrie and Ben grab a coffee at their
local Starbucks. Back in action after a brief winter hiatus (during which time Ben was spotted canoodling with his former
publicity agent), the golden couple are looking more serious than ever. If you don’t believe
Us,
check out the diamond-encrusted
emerald on Carrie’s left hand! According to friends, this could be it. ‘I’ve never seen them happier,’ says one close acquaintance.
‘They can’t keep their hands off each other. The chemistry is explosive!’”

Meredith looked for other words to read on the page but there were none. Mish poured her a glass of wine, but Meredith murmured
something about wine in the daytime and poured most of hers into her friend’s glass.

“You okay?” she said.

“Yes and no. You?” asked Mish.

Meredith shrugged. She wanted badly to tell her friend about the handsome gynecologist and the G-test and the Pap smear that
never was, but felt it was perhaps better not to mention anything fertility-related for now. She was worried Mish might break
down. Actually she was more worried
she
might break down, but worrying about other people breaking down helped her to not
break down herself.

For two hours they spoke of every amusing thing they could think of that didn’t particularly matter and ate eggs and butter
and cheese and pastry. Afterward, Meredith ordered decaf coffee, explaining her new theory that caffeine was the devil, and
Mish teased her for being such a priss.

After lunch, Mish wanted to stop by a pharmacy to pick up cold sore ointment (the clown had left her with that special tingling)
and Meredith said she would come with. Wandering around drugstores was something they did very well together. It was just
like high school, except that Meredith no longer worried about Mish stealing cosmetics.

“Hey, remember the summer you stayed at my house and we put this in our hair?” Mish was standing in aisle three holding up
a box of Flirt.

“Totally.” Meredith smiled. “It was meant to be burgundy but it turned our hair pink.”

“Mine was more fuchsia. It matched my fluorescent bikini.”

“Clit pink. That was what my mother called it when she met me at the airport.”

“Didn’t she think it was so cool she copied it or something?”

“Yup.” Meredith took the box from Mish’s hand and placed it back on the shelf. As she did, she saw something flash in the
corner of her eye. A big diamond ring—like the one in
Us
magazine—on the very small, slender hand of a very young girl. Meredith
tried not to stare but it was hard—the girl was so pretty. She was indeterminately Asian, or possibly Middle Eastern—with
the sort of fine boned, sloe-eyed darkness that politically incorrect casting directors described as “exotic.” In a wife-beater
tank and grubby, frayed jeans, she was doing the rich-hippie thing. The look was one Meredith had always admired but had never
been able to pull off.

“Hello? Fashion moment,” said Mish, who always talked to strangers after a couple of glasses of wine. She winked at the girl
and pointed approvingly at her outfit.

“Uh, thanks,” said the girl, grabbing a tube of organic lemon--verbena toothpaste—not, Meredith sensed, because she wanted
it but because she wanted to get away from the weirdly complimentary gawking women.

Meredith wondered if they looked middle-aged to her. She was just about to say this to Mish when she noticed him. The handsome
gynecologist. Farther down the aisle, choosing conditioners. As Mish wandered away, Meredith watched surreptitiously while
the rich young hippie sidled up to him. Dr. Veil smiled and said something to her. She giggled, took the bottle of conditioner
from his hand and exchanged it for another. Then confidently, almost cockily, she walked away. He waited a dignified amount
of time before following her out of the aisle, an adoring expression on his face. He did not seem to notice Meredith at all.

Meredith found Mish in the contraceptives aisle, looking at a box of condoms. “Who do you suppose the ribs are actually
for,
anyway?”

“Listen, can we go? There’s someone here I can’t really run into.”

Mish paused, but Meredith was already halfway out of the store.

When they were outside and a full block away, Mish put her arm around her friend’s waist. “One-night stand?” she asked. “High
school enemy? Shrink? The host of a party you got totally wasted at and ended up dancing topless on top of the freezer? Or
wait—that wasn’t you. That was me.”

Meredith laughed. “Worse,” she said. “That modelly looking Asian chick? The one with the diamond? Did you see that guy she
was with? The tall, good-looking one about twice her age? That’s my gynecologist.”

Mish wrinkled her nose. “I hate people,” she said. “Don’t you hate people?”

Irma Moore feasted her eyes on the buffet of horror laid out before her. Terminal 4, Heathrow International, at seven a.m.
was, she decided, a magnificent contemporary restaging of Dante’s lowest circle of hell, or perhaps, if she closed her eyes
to freeze its last image in her mind, Picasso’s
Guernica.
Trails of human sausage links tangled and writhed across the industrial-tiled
floor, and Irma was one of them, bravely navigating her small form through the seething mass. The din was dampened only by
a faint misting of perspiration. The weight of this respirated atmosphere pressed down on Irma’s head like a dumbwaiter. Everyone
took a place in line: queues of the paranoid waiting to have their old suitcases wrapped in cellophane. Mothers and infants
in rows outside a metal door bearing a sign of a grinning cartoon elephant and the words
BABY PIT STOP
. A whole generation of smartly swaddled Saudi ladies waiting in line to get their VAT tax-back forms signed after their vodka-and-Prada
sprees in Knightsbridge.

Irma paused to watch a customs official, his nose decorated with gin blossoms, glare over the counter at a small Muslim woman
shrouded in a Gucci-logo-print head scarf. He pointed at the woman’s bag on the floor. The woman bent down wordlessly and
hoisted it onto the counter, spilling its contents before him. He held up a flimsy pile of paper and made a dismissive, uncooperative
gesture. The woman stamped her foot and raised her hand in frustration. They stared at each other for a moment before the
woman—perhaps because of a language barrier, perhaps because of sheer annoyance—swept up her purchases and her carry-on bag
in two arms and clopped away, burka swishing out behind her.

More than any other version of hell, Irma Moore preferred the hell of other people. As someone who had rarely behaved normally—let
alone well—in her life, Irma thought it was lovely to watch otherwise polite people lose it. This was especially true in public.
For this reason, she had a soft spot for airports. She cruised over to the arrivals board but couldn’t get a view for the
mobs of people standing in front of her.

“Ucchh,” she said. The Ulsterwoman’s trademark articulation of frustration. An involuntary, guttural reflex that she often
made, and the only discernible trace of her middle-class upbringing in Belfast.

“A poor-bog Irish peasant girl” is how Irma liked to describe herself, though in fact she had grown up in a tidy Protestant
suburb. Her father was an eye surgeon, not a potato farmer as she sometimes passively led people to believe. But Irma had
never been much of a fan of unadorned facts—the truth, in her mind, was too barren and plain. She preferred a more cluttered
version of reality.

Being a poet, Irma was big on metaphors. She rarely thought of things as they were, but instead imagined them as what they
represented in the larger scheme of things. Human existence, in her mind’s eye, was a vast, messy castle with high turrets
and secret passages, crocodile moats and magic suits of armor that might spring to life at any moment. Life was loud, animated
and bloated with waste, not unlike Heathrow’s Terminal 4. But in the case of the great metaphoric castle, she mused, while
craning her neck to read the flight numbers on the screen, there was one crucial difference: the castle contained only one
royal personage. And that was Irma.

Ah-
ha.
BA flight from Toronto due to arrive at 7:05 a.m. Just minutes ago, Irma noted, checking the pocket watch she carried
in her handbag. For once, her daughter was late. Even if it wasn’t Meredith’s fault, Irma couldn’t help but take a bit of
pleasure in this uncharacteristic tardiness.

She pushed on, toward the arrivals gate at the other end of the terminal. When she got there, a man in uniform informed her
this was the arrivals gate for domestic flights only. She would have to go back and check the message board to find the right
gate. Irma reached through her batwing sleeve and scratched at a spot under the restrictive cummerbund of her traditional
geisha’s kimono. (What had possessed her to put on this wretched thing anyway? She really should have worn the rabbit-fur
poncho instead.) Another message board, with more encoded messages. She flung her head up like a garbage can with a spring
lid, and her red velvet beret came loose from its bobby pin and Frisbeed off her head.

Ucchh.

She bent down with some effort and, after a couple of lunging steps, caught the hat midair by its peacock feather. She had
taken to wearing hats after noticing a bald spot at her crown reflected in a restaurant mirror she had made the mistake of
sitting in front of during a recent gallery board-members’ luncheon in Soho. Getting old was a bugger—a point she planned
to impress upon her daughter. The young should be grateful, if only for the fact that they are not yet old.

The only thing that delighted Irma Moore about being a mother was the tyrannical irreversibility of it. She was a fatalist.

While dismally ill-equipped for empathy, nurturing and polite conversation, Irma excelled in other departments. Smuggling
exotic and dangerous house pets into Britain via Heathrow, for instance, and consuming large quantities of sweet Italian liqueurs.
To date, Irma had concealed six snakes, twenty spiders, two lizards and four rare birds in her battered crocodile carry-on
bag. Each night before bed she chugged a half-pint of Limoncello. She claimed it kept her young.