Luscious Lemon

by Heather Swain

  “Annual exam?” the receptionist asks without looking up from her computer screen.

  Eddie puts his arm around my shoulders and squeezes. “No,” he says with a huge, stupid grin on his face. “We’re pregnant.”

  The receptionist stops typing long enough to look at him and blink.

  “I’m pregnant,” I clarify and jab my elbow into Eddie’s ribs.

  She hands me a clipboard with pink forms and a plastic cup. “Fill these out, then I need a urine sample.” She looks at Eddie. “Hers, not yours.”

  He chuckles, takes the cup, and bounces across the waiting room to two empty chairs. I’ve yet to see Eddie get embarrassed about anything he’s ever done or said. It’s something that I love about him, even though his total lack of shame can mortify me at times.

  “What’s this we crap?” I say as I fill in all the standard info on the forms—name, address, phone, next of kin, social security number, family history.

  “I’m part of this.” He picks up a parenting magazine with a cherubic blue-eyed baby grinning from the cover.

  “We might be having a baby,” I tell him. “But I’m the one who’s pregnant. I’m the one who’ll get huge and fat and waddle around. I’m the one who has to give up booze and coffee and sushi and rare steaks. I’ll be the one breast-feeding and having saggy boobs for the rest of my life. You’ll be walking around handing out cigars and feeling like a virile stud for nine months.”

  “Yes,” he concedes and grabs my hand. “But I’ll have to put up with you, my dear.”

  I pull my hand away. “Sperm donor,” I mutter.

  “Sugar daddy, paying your bills,” he says.

  “Good point,” I say and shut up. I know Eddie’s only joking about the money, but part of me hates to be so financially dependent on him right now. That’s one of the reasons I desperately want Lemon to start being profitable, so I don’t feel forever indebted to Eddie for bankrolling me.

  “So do I get to say we’re pregnant, then?” he asks.

  “When you pop a squealing ten-pound bowling ball out your ass—” I start to say. He looks at me with his eyebrows raised, a smirk lurking on his lips, and the words half formed. “Stop right there,” I tell him. “Crapping and child birth have nothing in common.”

  He flips a page of the magazine indignantly. “Like I’d say that.”

  I laugh at him. “Like you wouldn’t.”

  Dr. Shin is small and jittery, like a squirrel. She scurries into the room with my chart in front of her face and bangs into the portable sonogram machine. She pushes it away with her hip and continues reading my chart. She doesn’t look like a doctor. Or at least any doctor I’ve ever seen. She wears an old orange-and-green flowered sundress under her open lab coat, no socks, and scuffed-up white Keds. Her hair is short, chopped right below her ears, with two plastic barrettes holding thick dark strands away from her round face.

  “First, congratulations,” she says in a singsong nasal accent. “The test is positive.” She looks down at my chart. “Your last period was May sixteenth? So you’re about eight weeks pregnant, right?”

  “Pardon?” Eddie says.

  Somehow, Eddie has lived in New York City for the better part of ten years, yet he still can barely distinguish any accent accept his own deep southern drawl.

  “I’m not exactly sure,” I say. “I was on the pill, and we weren’t trying—”

  “So this is a big surprise?” she says with a laugh.

  “A what?” Eddie asks.

  “Surprise,” I say, emphasizing the r’s for his numb ears.

  “Listen, I’ve been doing this for ten years,” Dr. Shin says. “And every day I think it’s more a mystery.” She laughs again. “We don’t understand anything.”

  “That’s comforting,” I say.

  “Huh?” says Eddie.

  “So we’ll say May sixteenth was your last period, so you’re due—” She pulls a small calendar out of her lab coat pocket. “Middle to end of February.”

  “February?” Eddie asks.

  “Yes, February,” I say. “For God’s sake.”

  “February,” he says dreamily and beams. “A Valentine’s baby.”

  I want to smack him, or hug him, the sentimental drip.

  “Now let’s do the exam,” says Dr. Shin. “Look inside, take some blood, then the sonogram. Maybe we’ll see a heartbeat.” She yanks the extension from the bottom of the exam table, then pulls the stirrups up.

  “Do you want me to…” Eddie half stands and nods toward the door.

  “No,” says Dr. Shin. “You stay. A husband should know everything about his pregnant wife.”

  “We’re not married,” I tell her.

  “Is he the father?” she asks.

  “Huh?” says Eddie.

  “Yes, he’s the father,” I admit.

  “You want him in the delivery room?”

  I look at Eddie. He’s completely bewildered by our conversation. This is great, I think. I’ll be in the middle of labor, panting and sweating and cursing, and I’ll have to stop to translate Dr. Shin’s Chinese-inflected English for Eddie’s stubborn southern ears. “Yeah, he’ll probably be there.”

  Dr. Shin holds up the cold metal duck lips. “Sit down. Relax,” she says to Eddie.

  He looks at me for a translation. “Stay,” I command him, like he’s a dog, then I hoist my feet into the godforsaken stirrups.

  “You know about the female body?” Dr. Shin asks Eddie as she inserts the duck lips into my crotch.

  “Do I know about it?” he asks uncertainly. She waits. He nods, then shakes his head. “Sort of. A little bit.” He glances uneasily at a plastic uterus on the counter. “Enough to get her pregnant, I guess,” he says with an awkward laugh.

  Dr. Shin opens the clamp and sticks her hand inside me. “She has three holes, right?” She bends down and peers in.

  “Did you say three?” Eddie asks, totally confused and slightly awed, as if he’s either completely misunderstood or he’s been missing out on some great opportunity all these years.

  “Vagina,” she says from somewhere close to mine. “You know that one.” She grabs a swab from her tray and puts it in. “Urethra.” She looks up from between my legs. “That’s the pee-hole.” She takes the swab out and releases the clamp. “And anus.”

  “What’d you know,” says Eddie, squirming in his chair, clearly uncomfortable with someone talking candidly about my anus. I’m amazed that an ob-gyn would use the word pee-hole, let alone talk about my ass with my boyfriend. I’m not sure whether that makes her really cool or just plain odd.

  Dr. Shin bullies the sonogram machine over toward the table. “You want natural childbirth?”

  “I think natural,” Eddie says.

  I scowl at him. “I might want the drugs,” I say.

  “I’ll tell you the best thing. You go into labor, you open a bottle of wine and start drinking,” says Dr. Shin.

  “Did you say a bottle of wine?” Eddie asks. I want to know the same thing.

  “You go to the hospital too early and they tell you go home, or they make you stay and give you drugs. Which is better? At home together drinking good wine or in the hospital with an IV in your arm? You must relax. Wait. Save up your energy. Childbirth’s hard work. So stay home. Have a nice time together. Wait until you’re eight centimeters dilated. Then you call me, and we meet.”

  Now I’m sure that she’s just odd, but I run through the list of good wines in the restaurant stock anyway. I’ll ask Eddie to pull out a good pinot grigio and stash it at home for the big night.

  She fills a condom with some kind of cool blue lube, then rolls it over the ultrasound wand. “Let’s say hello to the baby!”

  She swishes the magic wand enthusiastically inside me, as if she’s Glenda the Good Bitch in a lesbian porno flick called the Wizard of Jizz. Eddie stands by my side and holds my hand. We watch the scratchy black-and-white screen positioned between my knees.

  Dr. Shin leans forw
ard and squints at the screen, then she frowns and swashes the wand around more urgently. She makes a clicking sound with her tongue against her teeth, which irritates me. I don’t want to be a pansy and cry with a quivering voice, “Is everything okay?” So I wait, forgetting to breathe, squeezing Eddie’s hand.

  “Do you have to pee?” she asks.

  “Yeah, sort of,” I say.

  “See here? This big black blob. That’s your bladder. Full. Always full when you’re pregnant.” She swishes the wand some more, then nods fervently and points to the screen with her ballpoint pen. “See this small black blob?” she asks.

  Eddie and I peer more closely.

  “That’s your uterus.”

  It seems so small and ordinary. I expected something large and bright, pulsating like a disco ball, my tiny embryo shaking her groove thang to my amniotic beat. Or at least something cozier. An English drawing room with overstuffed wingback chairs covered in flowered chintz, where my wee babe would sit in front of a glowing fireplace.

  “See this bright dot?” she asks.

  I see a dot, but I’m not sure that’s what she’s pointing at.

  “That’s the embryo.”

  I squint, disbelieving—how could some dot, however bright, be my kid? In the books I’ve looked at, an eight-week embryo has form, substance, pizzazz. A kidney bean with great black eyes and tiny limbs. This dot looks like nothing. A speck. A blip. Hardly something to pin all our hopes and desires on.

  “Now let’s look for a heartbeat.” She punches a few buttons, and the screen changes. The picture zooms in, and my insides look like a creepy aspic dish in an old cookbook. I see nothing but blobs and blurs and blotches, but it all makes sense to her, apparently. She mmmms and aaaahs as she searches around, then points her pen to what was the bright white dot. Suddenly it has more form. Shadows. “That’s the embryo. And, if we’re lucky…Hmmm,” she says.

  “What!” Eddie and I both jump.

  “It’s backward.” She jabs her hand into my belly. “Let’s see if we can make it turn.”

  I want to grab her arm and tell her to stop. She might hurt it. But the weird little alien inside me moves. I can’t feel her, but I can see her, turning slowly on the screen. The form of a little body unravels. On top there’s a giant weird head, and a tiny pulsating light appears at the center of the blob. Dr. Shin punches a button. Tiny blips moved across the bottom of the screen.

  “There it is,” she says proudly. She points to the blips. “That’s the heartbeat.”

  Just as Eddie and I are gasping with delight, an itty-bitty foot appears beneath the curved body. Then, an arm! A tiny hand sticks up and waves at us from inside my uterus. Hello.

  “Oh, my God,” I whisper and reach out for the screen. I want to take this teensy being out and play with her. Dress her up like an itty-bitty doll. Hold her up and show her off, shouting to the world, “See what I made?” Already, I am a pushy overbearing mother, but I can’t help it. My baby is so beautiful, floating there inside me. She waves again.

  “Hello,” Eddie says with nothing short of awe. I blow a kiss to the screen.

  We walk out of the doctor’s office into a fabulous morning. An early haze has burned away, and it’s become one of those perfect summer days when everyone on the streets of Manhattan looks gorgeous, rushing around in skimpy clothes under the bright warm sun. I loop my arm in Eddie’s and head toward the restaurant. I still have plenty of time this morning to prep for tonight’s dinner, plus I need to go over the order sheets on my desk, maybe even pay a few bills. If I’m lucky, I might get to plan ahead for Sunday’s brunch.

  “I talked to my parents last night,” Eddie tells me as we walk. We stop at a corner and wait for the traffic to clear.

  “Did you tell them about the baby yet?”

  “You know, they really want to come for a visit,” he says, clearly evading my question.

  “You didn’t tell them, did you?” The light changes and we step into the street.

  “It’d be better to do it in person,” he says.

  “So fly down to Georgia, then.”

  “Would you come with me?”

  I snort. “Yeah, right.”

  Eddie stops on the corner and lets go of my arm. “You never go with me to Georgia, and you don’t want my parents to come up here.”

  “I’ve been to Georgia with you,” I say indignantly.

  “Once.”

  “Once was enough,” I say. The trip wasn’t all that bad. His family is perfectly nice. Maybe that was the problem. Everyone was so polite and welcoming that I was sure it was a ruse. I could imagine his family huddled in the butler’s pantry while I was in the bathroom, whispering about all the ways I’m completely wrong for Eddie.

  “Besides,” I say. “Your mother doesn’t even like me.” His mother wasn’t rude to me. Heavens, no—she is a southerner, after all. But all of her comments seemed vaguely judgmental, and I felt like I wasn’t passing whatever tests she was giving me.

  “That’s not true,” says Eddie. “She asks after you every time she calls.”

  “Hoping that you’ve come to your senses and dumped me.” People step around us, bump our arms, give us dirty looks for blocking the sidewalk while we argue.

  “You just don’t understand southern women,” says Eddie. “And anyway, she’d like you a lot better if you made an effort to see her every now and again.”

  “Aha! I was right. She doesn’t like me.”

  “I said she’d like you better, meaning more than she likes you now, meaning she does like you now.”

  “Your family’s nuts. Between your Aunt Eulabelle quizzing me on cuts of pork and your Uncle Jasper trying to get me liquored up on his special bourbon, not to mention all the stories of the glory days of the textile mill—”

  Eddie smirks. “You’re a fine one to talk.”

  “You’re the one who’s in love with my aunts.”

  “My mother’s going to be the grandmother of this child, Lemon,” Eddie says passionately.

  “Why haven’t you told her, then?”

  “It would be better if we could tell her together,” he says.

  I poke him in the chest, and I laugh. “You’re afraid to tell her that I’m knocked up.”

  “That’s not true,” he says, defensively.

  “Scaredy-cat! Mama’s boy!” I taunt.

  “Stop,” says Eddie, obviously not amused by me. He shifts from foot to foot. “Before I tell them—” he says. He scratches his neck and straightens his shirt. “I think that you should move in with me.”

  This does stop me. Shuts me up. I stand and stare at him under the clear blue sky. I almost laugh at the situation. Standing on the corner of First and First, taxis swerving around bikes, trucks rumbling over loose manhole covers, people pushing past us, this is where Eddie asks me to move in with him? He has an uncanny knack for terrible timing when it comes to proposing major life changes. But, he looks at me so sweetly, so tenderly, and also vulnerably, as if he’s afraid of what I might say or do.

  His uncertainty softens me, and I’m filled with the vision of our little critter growing inside me. I see Eddie and me in a bed together with this small person between us. I see walks in the park and lazy Sundays. Us on a picnic blanket watching the baby learn to smile, sit up, and crawl.

  This past month, while I’ve walked around getting used to the idea of another being in my life, I’ve become sentimental and sappy. Overwhelmed with emotion at the sight of stumbling puppies and flowers growing up out of sidewalk cracks. I don’t know what the hell is happening to me, but whatever it is, I realize at this moment that having a place separate from Eddie in the midst of all this confusion of urban life is just silly if we’re going to have a kid, so I simply say, “Okay. I’ll move in with you.”

  “Really?” he asks.

  I nod.

  He looks at me suspiciously. “Why?”

  “You don’t want me to?”

  “You’re never this easy.
”

  “Must be the hormones,” I say. “Enjoy it while you can.”

  He takes my arm, and we walk again. Eddie is buoyant, bouncing beside me like a little kid. “This is great, Lemon. You’ll see. It’ll be wonderful. We’ll get settled, then my parents can come.”

  “Now you’re pushing it,” I tell him, but still I’m surprisingly calm and happy. Maybe I’m finally ready for all the changes in my life. Moving in with Eddie, having a kid, being a mom. Maybe I’ll be able to handle it after all.

  As we near the restaurant, I yawn. I’ve got that familiar late-morning heavy feeling. “I’m so sleepy all of a sudden.”

  “You should lie down, then,” Eddie says. “I read an article in the doctor’s office that says pregnant women should take naps. Especially in the first trimester.”

  “I don’t have time for a nap,” I say. “I have to work.” As I say this and watch Eddie’s reaction, the fears that I won’t be able to handle everything start to creep back in.

  “You should stop drinking coffee, too,” Eddie tells me.

  “I have one cup in the morning.”

  “Caffeine can lower birth weight.”

  “Okay.” I let go of his arm. “I’ll make it decaf.”

  “Decaf still has caffeine. Have you even read the books I bought?”

  I think of the stack next to my bed, on top of all the old French cookbooks I devour like trashy romance novels. What to Expect When You’re Expecting. Birthing from Within. The Girlfriend’s Guide to Pregnancy. I’ve looked at them. Mostly at the pictures, and I end up wondering, Who in the hell are the women in these pages? Standing in flowing pink dresses and straw hats in the middle of wheat fields, staring dreamy-eyed into the distance with their hands cradling those monstrous bellies. Or little cartoon women, harried lines of consternation sprouting from their curly heads of hair as they wonder which is better to eat, potato chips or an apple. They’re not me, that’s for sure.