The Thin Pink Line

by Lauren Baratz-Logsted

  “It’s just that I’m so tired of not being pregnant when I want to be!”

  He snapped his fingers and pointed an accusing finger at me. “Okay, now what you are doing right now, now that is really gross.”

  “What?” I’d taken a container of ice cream out of his freezer and was eating from it with a spoon.

  “That. Mixing wine with ice cream. It’s gross. You’ll be sick.”

  “Oh, that.” I went back to spooning the ice cream. “As if it would matter if I were. I’d just tell Trevor that it was morning sickness in the evening.” Spoon; eat; sigh. “As if he’d care.”

  “What do you mean?”

  I filled him in on the fact that Trevor had been less warm since he’d learned about the baby.

  “To be ‘less warm,’ Trevor would have to have been warm to begin with, a concept that fills me with grave doubts.”

  I followed him to the bathroom where he commenced to shave. David’s hair grows so fast that if he doesn’t shave twice a day, he begins to look like an Orthodox who’s somehow wandered his way into a Calvin Klein ad.

  “Oh, you’re always so hard on him,” I said.

  “Perhaps because I still do not see what you see in him.”

  I leaned in the doorway, concentrating on my ice cream. “Oddly enough, he says the same thing about you.”

  “Yes, but in my case my conclusions are the result of rational thought.” He waved the razor dismissively. “In his case, it’s just a matter of meanness.”

  “Oh, you just don’t know him. He’s really very sweet.”

  He eyed me in the mirror as he scraped one lathered cheek. “Perhaps for a homophobe.”

  “How many times do I have to tell you? Trevor’s not homophobic. He’s just very conservative. And he doesn’t particularly like Israel.”

  He tapped his razor against the side of the sink. “Oh, well, if it’s just a matter of the entire country I come from presenting a problem…”

  “Could we please not do this right now? I have problems!”

  He wiped his face with a towel. “Oh, well, of course, Jane, if you have problems…”

  I nearly choked on my spoon. “What does that mean? Do you think I’m self-involved?”

  “Well, maybe just a smidgen.”

  “I’m…I’m…I’m… Fine. Tell me, how are the plans for your restaurant coming?”

  “Wonderful. Thank you for asking.”

  “Architect’s behaving?”

  “Today.”

  “Backers haven’t backed out?”

  “No.”

  “Still don’t want to give me the details? You know, I could always meander through Covent Garden and figure out which building it is for myself.”

  He hit the lights on his way out. “No. And, yes, I know you could, but you won’t. Curiosity might kill you, but missing out on a chance to experience the other end of the element of surprise for a change would prove devastating for your personality.”

  I grimaced. “You know, you’re beginning to do some rather weird things with the English language.”

  “True, but I am only just getting started. By the way, you’re doing an impressively good job of impersonating a real person.”

  “Oh, God,” I groaned, tossing the empty container of ice cream into the trash and reaching for the wine bottle again, “then I really am self-absorbed?”

  “Yes.” He put his arm around my shoulders and squeezed. “But don’t worry. I still like you.”

  “But why do you like me?”

  “Because there is nobody else like you. Because you are a natural force.”

  “Well, if I’m such a natural force, then why can’t I get pregnant?”

  David shrugged. “I don’t know. Perhaps you don’t really want to get pregnant.”

  “What an absurd thing to say. Of course I want to get pregnant. What do you think I’ve been going on about for the last several weeks?”

  “I don’t know. But it seems to me that if you really wanted to get pregnant, you would not keep putting up stumbling blocks in your own path.”

  “Like what, for instance?”

  “Like getting Trevor drunk before sex. Anyone who has ever read the complete works of Mr. William Shakespeare knows—”

  “Yes, I know all about wine, desire and performance, but I didn’t intend on him getting completely inebriated. It just happened that way.”

  “Yes, well, I just think that if you were more serious about having a baby, you would take it all more seriously. You wouldn’t drink…. You know, just because no one but I can see you doing it when you’re in my place, it still doesn’t make it the same as if you weren’t doing it at all. You wouldn’t smoke….” He snapped his fingers. “That’s it!”

  “What’s it?”

  “You don’t really want to have a baby at all! You just want to be pregnant without necessarily being pregnant.”

  “That’s insane!” I puzzled over it for a moment. “And what exactly do you mean by that?”

  “Tell me, Jane, if you could be pregnant without really being pregnant, would you?”

  Of course when, not long after I’d told the girls in the office about the baby, I further told them about Trevor’s plans to marry me, my cachet ratcheted itself up another notch.

  “You’re never!” said Louise, giving me a playful swat across the shoulder. It had never occurred to me before that Louise, who had always appeared to hate me with a chartreuse passion, could do playful.

  Louise was the definition of “cool blonde” in every sense of the phrase. She was cool to the point of iciness, presenting too scary a challenge even for Stan from Accounting. As for the blond part, she was another one of those with knife-straight hair parted on the side. (There have been periods in my life when I’ve been so surrounded by knife-straight blondes that I’d swear England was manufacturing them in some little cave somewhere or something.) Louise’s position at Churchill & Stewart placed her lateral to me, meaning that she toiled in the shadows created by the greater glory of an important editor, much as I toiled under Dodo. If Louise had been a different person, or if I had been a different person, we might have become like comrades in the trenches. But we weren’t different people. She’d hated me on first handshake and I’d responded accordingly.

  “Oh, am I ever!” I returned now, swatting her shoulder for all I was worth.

  Then the other women crowded around me again, just like they’d done when I first told them about the baby, and we all started schoolgirlishly jumping up and down with enthusiasm as though the solid earth were a trampoline; until, that is, Dodo pointed out that this kind of leaping wasn’t good for the baby, but not before Stan from Accounting walked by and, taking in the synchronous-dancing sight of our bouncing breasts, remarked, “There’s a fond sight I only normally get to see when I pay for it at female mud wrestling.”

  For the record, we all hated Stan from Accounting, who was slim in a nonphysically fit way, wore suits that were more expensive than his job warranted, had a brown crew cut, steel glasses with squinty blue eyes hiding behind them, and looked as though he’d gotten beat up at school on a regular basis for being gay, even though all of us who’d ever been pinched on the arse by him could testify most emphatically that he was not. Were it not for the fact that his ruthless mathematical juggling was able to save Churchill & Stewart barrels of money each year, we probably could have collectively filed suit against him and gotten him the heave-ho he deserved.

  But back to my impending wedding.

  Unfortunately, when Trevor had spoken to me about his intentions to marry me, it hadn’t been quite the romantic proposal that my girlish exchange with Louise and the others would make it out to be.

  We’d left Punch the Cat at home alone and gone out to a favorite restaurant of Trevor’s, where they specialized in eggplant parmesan cooked just the way he liked it. The candle was burning, the melting pink wax dripping down in rivulets over the blues and greens that already adorned the side
of the Chianti bottle. Trevor had a second bottle of Chianti, sans candle and dripping wax, that he was having no problem putting away all by himself. The salad dishes had just been removed and his eggplant was on its way. In short, everything was nearly right as rain in Trevor’s world, save for the absence of Punch the Cat and the presence of a pregnant girlfriend. For my part, I’d ordered the pasta primavera over Trevor’s objections that it wasn’t Italian enough and, as for the Andrea Bocelli coming through the speakers, I probably wouldn’t have minded it so much were it not for the fact that I heard the same bloody song blaring at me every time I tried to do the food shopping and had come to associate it with picking out fish.

  “You know, Jane,” Trevor said, taking a large sip from his third glass of Chianti within the half hour and picking up knife and fork to attack his eggplant, “when I said I’d stand by you, I meant every word.”

  Well, that certainly had a vaguely reassuring tone to it.

  “Did you have anything specific in mind?” I asked, idly twirling my pasta.

  “Well, you know, I was thinking that it might be doing right by the little tyke if we were to think about taking on the marriage thing as well.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “But didn’t I hear you once say at a cocktail party that you’d no sooner walk down the aisle before you turned thirty-five and had something like a gazillion trillion pounds saved up before you’d take on a wife?”

  “I might have done. But that was before this happened. This changes everything.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, for starters, it’s as though the future is here, it’s now. Kind of as though it came at us from the wrong direction on a conveyor belt, though, isn’t it?”

  “Not really.”

  “Okay. Fine. But if it were, then the only approach for us to take is to meet it head-on. We can’t very well turn tail and try to run in the opposite direction, can we?”

  “Are you asking me a serious question?”

  Trevor’s head snapped up. “Excuse me?”

  All of a sudden, I wondered why I was resisting so. Why was I giving him such a hard time? After all, wasn’t this what I’d wanted all of last year, for Trevor to ask me to marry him? At the thought of that, of finally getting my way, I felt my expression soften. I reached across the table and stilled the hand that was wielding the knife again on the eggplant, twining my fingers through his.

  “Never mind,” I said. “If you really mean it, Trevor, of course I’ll marry you.” I must have been experiencing the effects of phantom pregnancy hormones, like someone who’s had to undergo a leg amputation (except that in my case I never had the leg in the first place), because I’d gone from reticent to over-the-moon enthusiastic in about zero seconds. “When were you thinking about? Right away? If we elope now, before I’m too far along, I won’t have to suffice with wearing a gown with an Empire waist, like that poor woman in that famous Van Eyck painting teachers were always going on at us about in art class when we were at school.”

  “Good God, no, Jane!”

  I wondered at his strange reaction, but reacted in my own fashion nonetheless. “Well, you may have something there. I know we didn’t go to the same schools, so I’m sure it’s possible that your teachers focused on some other painting.”

  “No, of course I didn’t mean that, Janey.” He removed his fingers from mine and made that irritated swatting-flies gesture he had, the one that irritated me so much. “Of course my teachers went on ad nauseum about the Van Eyck—they all do. No, what I meant was that, while I do insist on standing by you and doing the right thing, I see absolutely no reason why we should marry before the child is actually born.”

  It had more typically been my experience in life that it was me who usually caused another person to choke on their food; now, as I felt a little green pea stick in my throat, I got to find out firsthand what it was like. I gulped some water. “You mean that literally, that we should wait until after the child’s born and get married while I’m still bloated up like a boa constrictor having a meal or something?”

  “Well, of course, if you want to, we can wait—no pun intended—until you’ve lost all of the weight. Just so long as it’s after the delivery, it doesn’t matter much to me when it is.”

  “And why is that so important to you, waiting until after the birth before getting married?” I was beginning to feel very hard done by.

  “Oh, well, you know.” He dabbed at a red spot beneath the corner of his mouth but missed getting it all. “You know. There are all of these things that might happen along the way. Things might not work out with the baby, you know, coming to term and all. Why, look at what nearly happened to Princess Niquie.”

  “Let me get this straight. You’re willing to marry me in order to give our child a name, but only after I’ve actually given birth, so that you can make sure that the child survives and you’re not wasting a good wedding for nothing?”

  He at least had the good grace to look mortified. Not that it helped.

  “Well, Jane, of course when you put it like that it sounds as crass as can be. All I meant…”

  But as Trevor’s voice droned on, my mind began to drift back to earlier in the evening when, even before I’d rudely been made to realize how pragmatically the prospective groom was hedging his bets, I’d felt reticent about “taking on the marriage thing as well,” as Trevor had so romantically put it. Perhaps the reason I’d felt so hesitant had something to do with the niggling feeling that had been plaguing me ever since that day in the bathroom when I’d proudly revealed my twin pink lines. Even then, all that talk about standing by me, while somewhat noble in a shotgun-to-the-head sense, had smacked of being not quite the level of enthusiasm one would hope for under such circumstances.

  Still, I’d always been something of a pragmatic girl myself; a make-do girl, actually. Ever since I could remember, it seemed as though I’d always had to make do with whatever life dealt me, always had to settle. True, I had been rather defensively aggressive with Sophie when we were little, but that had been born of necessity. Making the transformation from being a make-do girl to being a monkey-see, monkey-do girl really takes no more effort than a hop, skip, and a jump, the two being only one evolutionary step removed from each other. So now I’d had my fling with the monkey-see, monkey-do part, in relation to the as yet faux pregnancy, but even I could see that if I also wanted Trevor to marry me, I was going to have to morph back into the make-do part. Well, when push came to shove, I could settle with the best of them.

  “Fine,” I forestalled his torrent of words with a tight smile. I no longer cared exactly what he’d meant. “Fine. I accept your proposal. Under your conditions.”

  He smiled the smile of the greatly relieved. “You won’t regret it, Jane. You’ll see. It’ll be best this way.”

  Not long afterward, he excused himself to the facilities as the tuxedoed waiter came to clear our plates. The moment by myself gave me a chance to think about the months ahead.

  Well, when I really thought about it, I realized that it wasn’t too bad the way things were turning out. So I’d had to settle a bit. Big deal. It wasn’t as though, even if Trevor were to marry me tonight, I’d seriously expect him to want to stay married to me if it turned out that I never got pregnant after all and he learned that I never was in the first place. This way, at least, I’d get the fun of planning a wedding over the next several months. The other way, my way, I’d have gotten married now with the knowledge that I might have to let him divorce me less than a year down the road. Still, it did rankle that he was in no rush to marry me for me, making me feel just a wee bit bitter.

  While Trevor was still using the facilities, the waiter returned with dessert menus. “Do you think that the signor will be interested in having a sweet this evening?”

  I didn’t even bother looking to see if they had Trevor’s favorite chocolate mousse. I reached across the table and drained the rest of Trev
or’s Chianti glass, depositing it on the waiter’s tray. “Only if the signor feels like wearing it on his head.”

  I had survived the critical first two months of my pregnancy with my baby still intact. By now, he or she was much more human looking and far bigger than the grain of rice it had represented just one month before. It was approximately one and one-quarter inches long from crown to bottom, one-third of which would be its big head, and weighed about a third of an ounce.

  It didn’t seem like very much, really; in my university days, there had been times when I’d smoked that much marijuana, single-handedly, on any given Thursday evening.

  My baby now had its very own beating heart, and real arms and legs where formerly there had been only buds. Now it was working on developing fingers and toes, or pointers and piggies as my uncle Jack used to call them just prior to giving Soph’s and my piggies a tickle that neither of us were ever sure we wanted. Bone was starting to replace cartilage.

  We definitely had a solid start of something going on here.

  The Third Month

  Surprisingly enough, to hear me tell it, I didn’t always hate my sister Sophie.

  Once upon a time, my own behavior during the Kewpie doll incident notwithstanding, I’d actually dreamed of having a big sister who could generously help me figure out the ins and outs of life on this crazy planet; a big sister who could be a best friend as well as a blood relative; a big sister who wouldn’t crow over her own successes and smile at my defeats with condescension or, worse, confirmation.

  But I’d gotten Sophie instead.

  There had been one twelve-hour period there, however, about five years after our father died, when I didn’t hate her at all. Our mother had gone out on the first and last date she would ever go on, and she had left us without a baby-sitter, having decided that Sophie, now well into double digits, was sufficiently mature to take charge of me, especially since Soph was “the dearest angel who ever lived.” According to our mother, who told me this and told me often, I could do worse than to adopt Sophie as my role model.