“Well, I told them that you’re my first husband masquerading as my brother and that my second is due any minute,” I said.
“Stifle it,” said Les, but he was instantly sorry when I clenched my teeth against another contraction. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll rub your back.” I’m not so sure it did anything for me. There’s a lot of difference, I decided, between a brother awkwardly rubbing your back and a husband doing it just the way you like it.
“Well, Al,” he said, “I thought I’d be going through this with Stacy one of these days, but so far it hasn’t worked out.”
I glanced at him over my shoulder. “Really, Les?”
“We haven’t given up—there are a few more procedures to try—but we’re just not having any luck so far.”
“Oh, Les, I’m sorry,” I said.
“Yeah. Figured a big beautiful stud like me would be procreating all over the place. Maybe you’ll have to have all the grandkids for both of us.”
I wished I could think of the right thing to say, but just then another contraction came, and I didn’t want to talk at all.
Between contractions I tried to think how I could describe them to Elizabeth and Pamela if they asked. Like a rolling gut ache, I guess—the kind you get just before you’re going to be sick. I found myself counting by fives each time a contraction came, timing it. Five . . . ten . . . fifteen . . . twenty. . . . The pain grew stronger, swelling and reaching its peak about the time I got to eighty-five, and then it tapered off. By a hundred ten, it was gone and I could rest a little. Lester looked relieved.
“Well, Mrs. Long, how are you feeling?” came the doctor’s voice as she appeared beside me, and from then on, it seemed I was concentrating mostly on my pains. I wasn’t conscious anymore of time—whether it was minutes or hours.
At some point I heard Les say, “Hey, Al, Patrick’s here. I’m going to go home and let Dad and the others know how you’re doing, okay?” I just opened and closed my eyes, and he added, “Hang in there.”
And then Patrick was bending over me, kissing my forehead, and for a while I wasn’t sure who was in the room and who wasn’t. The doctor examined my cervix, and then I was back to the contractions again. I knew that once I counted to eighty-five by fives, they would start to go away, and knowing that helped me deal with them.
I felt Patrick rubbing my back, wiping my forehead with a cold cloth. I squeezed his fingers when the contractions came and heard myself grunt. I closed my eyes when the pain was the worst, but there wasn’t any feeling of ripping or tearing. It was more like everything in my abdomen was playing musical chairs, changing places. If I could just have a five-minute break between pains, I thought, I could handle this pretty well, but that didn’t happen.
The anesthesiologist arrived and asked if I wanted an epidural—an injection in my back.
“Yes!” I said, wanting to rise up and kiss the man. After that, the contractions were a breeze. I felt no pain.
Patrick stayed with me the whole time. I could see it was dark outside the window and I was hungry, but they wouldn’t let me eat anything. Patrick slipped little slivers of cracked ice in my mouth when I was thirsty.
“Okay, Mrs. Long,” came the doctor’s voice finally. “Let’s go have that baby.”
They arranged a mirror so that I could watch my baby being born, and I suddenly began to laugh. All I could think about was that summer Elizabeth, Pamela, and I had taken a class called “For Girls Only” at the Y, and a nurse suggested we go home and look at our genital area with a mirror so we could see how we were made. And here I was again with a mirror, and this time there was a live audience.
“Well, she’s in a good mood,” said the anesthesiologist.
“It’ll be one cheerful baby, I’ll bet,” said the nurse.
They put my legs in stirrups, the doctor down at the end of the table, and I heard her say to Patrick, “Now would you like to help that baby along? Press your hands gently on your wife’s abdomen, just about here, and let’s push that little monkey out.”
I never knew if what Patrick did actually helped or not. I was busy with my own pushing. But now and then I raised my head a little, and I do remember seeing a pinkish-orange ball emerging between my legs.
“Push now,” said the doctor. “Big push,” and I strained. I took a breath and pushed again.
And a few minutes later I heard a faint cry, then a louder one—a tremulous “Waaaah,” like a doll makes—and Patrick said, “Honey, we have a little girl!”
Then Patrick was kissing me, tears in his eyes, and the doctor laid this small, warm, moving bundle on my abdomen. The baby was coated with some sort of white stuff, but I could feel her little chest heave as she squalled again. She had bright orange hair like her daddy. Her head looked like a wet fuzzy peach.
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.”
19
BALANCING ACT
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 a
nd 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?”
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