Until the Real Thing Comes Along (13 page)

I go into the bathroom, read the instructions again, sit on the toilet. All I have to do is aim, hold the stick in the “flow” for two seconds. But what if I miss? You can also catch some pee in a cup. Maybe that’s safer. That’s what I’ll do.

I go back into the kitchen. Ethan, who has managed at least to sit down, stands back up. “Are we?”

“What?”

“Are we pregnant?”

“Ethan, I just want to say one thing, okay? I hate that ‘we are pregnant’ stuff. I’m the one that will be pregnant. Just me, okay? You don’t have a uterus. So let’s just get that clear right off the bat.”

“But are we? You?”

“I didn’t do the test.”

“Why not?”

“Well, I’m
going
to, but I thought maybe I’d use a cup, you know, instead of aiming. Because what if I miss?”

“That’s a good idea. Then you just dip it in.”

“I know that, Ethan.” I open the cupboard, survey the cups to see which one I should sacrifice. I need to hurry up and decide—I really do have to pee. I pull out a pink cup with a flower on it. But my mother gave me that one. I put it back, pull out my Dunkin’ Donuts cup. But it’s just the right size.

“Patty?”

“What?”

“Don’t you have any paper cups?”

“No.”

“There’s good planning.”

“Well, I wasn’t going to
use
a cup! I just now decided to, at the spur of the moment.”

“But you don’t want to … ruin a cup, do you?”

“What else should I do? I need to catch it in something! What do you suggest?”

“Boy, are you crabby!”

“I’m not crabby! I’m nervous! Aren’t you nervous? I’m nervous, and I have to
pee!”

“Well just take a
cup
, stop
look
ing at them all!”

“But some of these are important!”

Ethan comes over to the cupboard, takes down a solid green mug. “Here. There’s nothing special about this one.”

“That’s my Christmas cup. Every Christmas morning, I have eggnog out of it.”

“I’ll get you another one, okay?”

I stare at it. “Ethan?”

“What?”

“I don’t think I can pee into one of my coffee cups. It’s disgusting.”

“Well then, pee on the stick, Patty!”

“What if I miss?”

“There are two tests in the kit, right?”

“Right.” And three other tests, of course. But it seemed important that this first one be done and done right. It seemed important to just save the other tests. I have no idea why. Maybe for the baby book.

“Okay,” I say. “So, I’ll just go do it. I won’t miss. How could I
miss
?”

“Exactly.”

I go into the bathroom, and in a minute come back to the kitchen, silently go to the cupboard, and get the Christmas mug. And in a few minutes more, come back to the kitchen table and sit down with Ethan. “Want to see the stick?” I ask. He nods. I hold it up. “It’s a pretty pink, isn’t it?”

“It’s a girl?” Ethan’s voice is barely audible.

“No, no, this just means I’m pregnant.”

The word fills my mouth, my neck, my chest. And, as it happens, my life.

“You are?” And then he nods, answering himself.

I start to cry a little, wipe my eyes.

“What,” he says.

“Well,
you
are, too.”

“What, pregnant?”

“No, crying.”

“I am not,” he says. But he is.

It occurs to me that this is so private, this moment. I can’t wait to tell Elaine.

“H
ow about ‘Philip’?” Ethan says.

He is spending the night. Because it is the first day of knowing for sure and we are so excited and we have so much to talk about and we want to do it in person. Spending the night means only that; I’m not sure he’ll even stay in the same bed with me. In a way, I regret our instant success. I never thought a miracle could be irritating.

Still, for the time being he is lying beside me, his shoes off, his shirt untucked, his coat hung in my closet. We ordered out for pizza and I did not get pepperoni, which is my favorite, and I did get a salad, which is not my favorite. I don’t care what people say about the beauty and the taste and the virtues of vegetables, I like starch. My idea of a good meal is an egg-noodle sandwich. But I ate the damn salad. Plus I ate a carrot, at Ethan’s insistence, because he found the salad “skimpy.” “There’s eighteen pounds of lettuce here,” I told him, but he said, “No carrots. No peppers. And that cucumber looks anemic, don’t eat it.” He offered to eat a carrot too, to keep me company. But I declined. It felt good to
be doing the right thing. Suddenly, everything I do feels like it must be passed by someone for its approval. Implantation hasn’t even occurred and already I’m calling for internal conferences. And getting them.
Carrot? Why, yes, a carrot; excellent
.

“How about ‘Philip’?” Ethan says again. “Huh? What do you think?”

“What did I tell you?” I say.

“Come on, we need names.”

“Not
yet
.”

“Oh, you’re just mad because I don’t like ‘Eric.’ ”

I say nothing.

“Eric is a stupid name,” he says. “Meaningless.”

“Meaningless?”

“Yes.”

“What exactly is the meaning of Philip?”

“The meaning of Philip is that it’s a classy name.”

“Oh, please. It’s uptight. He’ll wear those black Clark Kent glasses with no sense of irony.” I sit up on the side of the bed. “Do you want to watch TV or something?”

“No. I won’t suggest any more names right now, okay?”

I lie back down.

“Jesus was once an embryo,” Ethan says.

I look at him, laugh.

He turns to me. “What?”

“What do you mean, ‘Jesus was once an embryo’?”

“Well, He was.”

I consider this, then say, “I saw Jesus the other day.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, He was in somebody’s garden, a big statue of Him. He had His nice white dress on, and His rope belt; and He was holding His hands out a little bit at His sides, you know how He does, palm side up? And one leg was bent a little. He looked sort of effeminate, actually.”

“Really?” Ethan asks hopefully.

“Effeminate and apologetic.”

“Yeah,” Ethan sighs. “We should have known better.”

The phone rings, and I go to answer it. As I pick up the receiver, I think, Wow, it’s true. Jesus
was
an embryo. Mozart was a ball of cells just like what is in me now. Einstein, too. Of course, Hitler, too.

“What’s wrong?” my father asks, when I say hello.

“Dad! Nothing!”

“Why do you sound so glum?”

“I’m not. I was … doing a comp sheet. I was preoccupied. How are you?”

“Listen, honey, I want you to come over tomorrow night.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Right. For dinner.”

“Okay. Any particular reason?”

“I need a reason?”

“No.”

“Okay, I’ll give you a reason: I want you to.”

“Okay. Good. So I’ll bring some huge, gooey dessert for you and me?”

“Yeah, whatever you want.”

“Dad?”

“Yeah.”

“I was just teasing you.”

“About what?”

“About dessert. You know. I know you can’t have anything. No pie. Or, you know, cake. Or chocolate-chocolate chip ice cream.”

He doesn’t take the bait. “Whatever you want,” he says again.

“Dad? Is everything all right?”

“Yeah. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

I go back into the bedroom. “What’s up?” Ethan asks.

“I don’t know,” I say. “Something.”

I lie down, pull a pillow over my stomach, hold it there. Then I turn to Ethan, smile. “Nothing to worry about, though, I’m sure.” I don’t want him to worry about anything right now. I want him to remember kissing me and think, What the hell, it’s better than Scrabble.

“Hey, Patty?”

“Yeah?”

“How about ‘Thomas’?”

I look away from him, sigh. “How about ‘Jessica,’ Ethan? You know? How about ‘Margot’?”

“Oh, no. ‘Lauren,’ I would think, in that case.”

“When should we tell people?” I ask.

“I don’t know. When will we know it’s … safe? You and the baby, I mean.”

“Safe? Well, let’s see. I think … never.”

“Right. Well, let’s tell anybody we want to, then.”

“Want to come when I tell my parents?”

His face changes ever so slightly.

“All right,” I say, “I’ll do it alone. But after they know, you’ll have to come over at least once so my dad can tell you how to do everything. He’ll probably want to smack you on the back a lot, give you a cigar.”

“You mean you think they’ll be glad?”

“Yeah. I do think they’ll be glad.”

Ethan closes his eyes. “I’m going to wait a while to tell my mother.”

I see Ethan’s mother, suddenly, as clearly as though she were sitting on the bed beside us. Though of course she would not sit on the bed beside us. She would sit in a chair across the room, eyes averted. She would suggest by her body language alone that one lay in bed at
night
, to
sleep
, unless, of course, one were tending to certain obligations. She would be dressed impeccably. Her gold would be so gold. She would be just the slightest bit weary of us as soon as she saw us.

“Oh, I know you’ll wait a long time to tell your mother,” I say. “Maybe you can combine a birth announcement with an invitation to his college graduation.”

“Oh, Jesus, Patty.” He sits up.

“What?”

“We have to open a savings account.”

“Yeah, we probably should.”

“And apply to … schools!”

“What schools?”

“We don’t know what we’re doing.”

“Well, I don’t think we have to figure everything out tonight.”

He gets up, crosses the room, stands at the window, looks out.

“Ethan?”

He turns to me. He looks stricken.

“Lots of people have been through this lots of times.”

“Right. I know.”

“And you do it … you know, one day at a time.”

“I guess.”

“Come here,” I say, and, obediently, he does. When he sits beside me, I take his hand. “I’m your best friend,” I say, because I don’t know what else to say.

“I am all of a sudden scared to death,” he says. “I’m having visions of … I don’t know, inoculation records. Potty chairs. Orthodontists’ bills.”

“You’re worried about money?”

“No. No. Pain. To … it.”

“Oh,” I say. “That.”

Later that night, while Ethan sleeps chastely beside me, I remember sitting in my fourth-grade classroom while my teacher, the beautiful Miss Duffy, worked at her desk. I’d been excused from recess. Miss Duffy had seen how the other kids made fun of me. “Eraser face,” they were calling me that week. I had no idea what that meant, but I had done some powerful imagining. I sat at my desk in the too-quiet room, drawing a neighborhood: rows of houses with window boxes, identical cars in driveways. A pie cooled on a kitchen windowsill. I didn’t put any people in, their noses were too hard to draw. But evidence of their happy lives was everywhere. And their sense of belonging, that was there,
too. I made S-shaped lines of steam rising up from the pie; I made air vents in the crust and drew the edges of cherries beneath them—I had time for such details. When I was finished, I showed Miss Duffy. She looked carefully at my drawing, and I looked carefully at her. I thought she looked exactly like Snow White. “Very nice,” she said, finally, and smiled at me. Then she looked briefly out the window, longing, I knew, for the same thing I desired: for me to be out there like the rest of the girls in the class, playing hopscotch, screaming baby epithets back across the playground at the boys, replaiting Cynthia Burns’s hair between turns—she had wonderful, thick black hair and did not mind people playing with it. I never was treated badly in school again; it only happened in fourth grade, for reasons I have never yet understood. Just that one year. Of course, that was enough.

A
t five-thirty, I am sitting in the obstetrician’s office waiting for my four-thirty appointment, reading
Business Week
, which is not exactly my choice in reading material. But I have finished all the women’s magazines, and even took a look at
Highlights
, this time concentrating less on nostalgia and more on what these stories might say to a child. For the first time, I like Gallant better than Goofus. I am walking around with a new screen on. A filter. It is a bit exhausting.

I put down the magazine, go over to the receptionist. “I’m sorry to bother you again.”

“You’re next,” she says, not looking up.

“Is it always so long a wait?”

Now she looks up. “Dr. Carlson is a very popular doctor. One reason is that he takes his time when he needs to. You’ll come to appreciate that, I’m sure. And as I told you when you arrived, he had a delivery right before office hours. That’s babies for you, they operate on their own time schedule.” She smiles, I suppose. To me, it looks like she’s baring her teeth.

I hate when receptionists do this, when they act like they are the doctors’ wives. I do understand that I am on the low end of the totem pole, not even showing. There is a definite hierarchy here, the women with the biggest bellies at last the most proud.

“Okay,” I say.

“It really shouldn’t be much longer,” she says—kindly, this time. “If you’d like, I can put you in a room.”

“No, thanks. But maybe … I know I’m supposed to get a blood test. Maybe I could just go ahead and do that first.”

“That’s a possibility.” She’s friendly now; we’re sudden pals, working together to save time for our wonderful husband, Dr. Carlson.

The receptionist disappears, then comes back out to the waiting room. “We can do it,” she says. “Right this way.”

I follow her, dry-mouthed. Here we go, I’m thinking. And wish I had taken Ethan or Elaine up on their offers to come with me. I’d told them I didn’t need them this time. The way Ethan is going, he probably knows more than the doctor, anyway.

The receptionist ushers me into a smallish room with a padded, recliner-type chair, a metal stool beside it. There is also a cot with shiny metal side bars and very white sheets, a pink blanket folded at the bottom. There is a cart up against the wall loaded with supplies. A hand-lettered sign below it reads RELAX! A rather stern-looking woman—brassy blonde hair in a tight ponytail, black eyeliner, drawn-in brows—comes into the room, nods at me, then asks, “You a fainter?”