An Excellent Choice

by Emma Brockes

  “That wasn’t as bad as I thought!” I say, hysterical with relief.

  “No higher praise,” he says and sweeps out of the room.

  At L’s that night, I tell her about the doctor. “Young guy,” I say. “Nice. Efficient. Probably quite junior.” My first-choice doctor hadn’t been approved by my insurers and, although this isn’t how it works, I had assumed I’d been given someone cheaper. L, who has never received a piece of information she hasn’t subjected to a thorough background check, looks him up.

  “Oh my god,” she says.

  “What?”

  “This guy—he’s the head of the whole department.” She keeps reading. “He’s some kind of wunderkind.”

  “No way.”

  “Yeah. He goes to Congress to testify about raising the abortion limit. He’s, like, the rock star of high-risk obstetrics.” I have sometimes wondered if there is anything in this life that can’t be turned into a competition, and here the answer comes, no. How I preen, from then on, about coming under the care of the most illustrious high-risk ob-gyn in Manhattan.

  It is a peculiarity of the hospital that all test results are posted online to the patient’s private mailbox, often days before a doctor rings them. This is supposed to increase transparency, but in reality, it just opens a quick and efficient route to paranoia, leaving the patient to interpret highly specialized medical data using Internet searches and guesswork. A few months into my pregnancy, I’d received a result that to my untutored eye had seemed to suggest I had a low lymphocyte count, which I’d Googled and within five minutes self-diagnosed cancer. And what to make of this, an assessment that went up a few days after the detailed anatomy scan: “The cervix could not be appropriately visualized by transabdominal exam and in some views appeared short”? I loved the idea of point of view in all this. “In some views, the cervix appeared short; other people, however, thought it looked beautiful.”

  The exceptions to this free flow of information are the results of the amnio, which are serious enough to skip straight to the phone call. A few days later, the genetic counselor rings. Everything in the test has come up fine. A week later, I run into the rock star doctor after a routine scan and we stop for a chat. “Ankles slim, all looking good,” he says, casting a professional eye over me. Smiling, he moves off down the corridor. “Stay pregnant!” he calls over his shoulder.

  * * *

  • • •

  AMONG ALL MY NIGHTMARE scenarios involving babies with tails, or going into labor on the subway, there is only one that I actually have power over. For psychological reasons, it is important to me to have permanent residence status in the United States before I give birth—not because, god forbid, I am making a lasting commitment, but because living on a four-year renewable visa is too temporary an arrangement even for me. Besides, without a green card, I can’t borrow money. Toward the end of the year, my attorney prepares the last of the paperwork for submission to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and tells me to make an appointment with a doctor.

  All prospective green card holders have to be tested for diseases, an echo of Ellis Island–era protocols that requires me, one rainy day in early November, to haul my massive bulk resentfully downtown to the “green card doctor.” I am so accustomed, by now, to my swanky hospital uptown that as I look around the clinic, I realize I am experiencing something that, should further evidence be needed, testifies to my assimilation into American society: health insurance snobbery.

  Before the doctor comes in, the nurse asks me to remove the bottom half of my clothing and cover myself with a sheet.

  “Why?” I ask.

  “To check for STDs.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  The doctor enters.

  “All righty!” he says, registers my face (thunderous) and my belly (gargantuan) and, turning to his nurse, says quickly, “OK, let’s not do the STD test. It would be unlikely.” Instead, he takes a perfunctory look in my eyes and mouth, signs the forms, tells me to get a bunch of shots, and lets me go, whereupon I dash up through Manhattan to Grand Central Terminal. Some people meet their lovers under the famous clock on the station concourse; I meet my immigration lawyer for a handover of green card paperwork before she takes the last Friday night fast train to Connecticut. “You look well,” she says and peers a bit closer. She is older than me, the mother of three children and a successful attorney. “Are you frightened?”

  I am taken aback by her directness. “Yes. Really frightened.”

  “It’s normal. After the birth, you’ll cry the first night and be out of your mind with fear. Then, the next morning, you’ll feel like you rule the universe.”

  The station’s heavy foot traffic flows around us and I am suddenly flooded with gratitude. It hasn’t been a spouse I have missed in all this, I realize, but a mother—not my own mother specifically, because I can’t imagine even being here if she was alive. But the idea of a mother, the person who doesn’t wait to be asked; who sees past my bravado to the cowering wreck underneath and then tells me the universe is mine. “My other piece of advice,” says my lawyer, “since everyone I know is having twins, is if you see something you like in Buy Buy Baby and there are only three left, buy two.”

  On my way home and in my apartment that evening, I feel my mind extend an invitation to itself to weep and feel bad. My mother isn’t here and will never meet these babies. In her absence, I will have to rely on the paid help of strangers. I will be denied the joy her joy would have given me. I don’t remember if I cried, which makes me think I didn’t, but either way, it was the idea of my mother’s absence that hurt, rather than the absence itself. I don’t miss her more on rainy days or on Sunday afternoons and I don’t miss her more now than before I was pregnant. It would be like saying I am more aware of my arm at some times than at others. I’m not. It’s always there, being an arm, just as my mother’s death is always there in the space behind my ribs, unobtrusive and immutable. If anything, there is a direct line from her life to the life of my babies that makes her seem closer, not further away. I think of her, I think of them, and it is impossible not to be happy.

  * * *

  • • •

  SO FAR, most of my preparations for the birth haven’t, I don’t think, been that different from those of pregnant women with spouses. I go to baby store Web sites and panic at all the terrible junk I am expected to buy. (“Snack tray for a double stroller”: essential or optional? “High-waisted postnatal support pants,” ditto.) I try to prepare for the unpreparable. At my friend Sheila’s fortieth birthday party in Brooklyn, I have a single glass of Prosecco and pose for a photo with Oliver, our arms slung round each other, grinning. My belly is poking out through the curtains of my leopard print coat, which, at seven months pregnant and under cover of absurdity, I finally have the confidence to wear. I stare at the photo for a long time on the subway ride home. The lighting is dark, so that apart from my belly, it could have been taken at any point over the last eighteen years. “You know you’re in the frame for male role model?” I yelled at Oliver before leaving, above the roar of the bar.

  “I’ll be around so much,” he roared back, “you’ll have to ask me to leave.”

  One Saturday morning, a lovely man I find on the Internet comes to my apartment to put together the crib. In the made-for-TV movie of this pregnancy, I would be shot leaning sadly in the doorway of my office-turned-nursery, looking down at his builder’s crack and wondering where my life had gone wrong. (L, who is very handy with a screwdriver, could’ve done the job, but neither of us had ever fully recovered from the Disastrous Joint Assembly of the Bed from West Elm. Better to get someone in.)

  The question of a baby nurse is harder to fathom. This is less fraught a decision in New York than in London, where the very word “nanny” is used to beat up women who work, casting them as a bunch of spoiled Edwardians palming their kids off on the help—
a characterization from which, naturally, fathers are entirely exempt. In New York, there are fewer class implications involved in hiring a nanny, but the race implications are stark; the vast majority of nannies in New York are black or Hispanic; the vast majority of employers are white. It’s also weird, the idea of sharing a living space with someone I’ve only just met when my boobs will be out half the time. None of our parents had baby nurses; most of them didn’t even have child care and this leap into Nannyland is as big and peculiar as any I’ve felt. It hasn’t escaped my notice that, while living with L was apparently too much for me, for the first month of my children’s lives I will be living with a sixty-year-old Caribbean lady instead.

  Phyllis is from Grenada, recommended by a friend of L’s, with twenty-seven years’ experience of looking after newborn twins. I don’t understand how someone can, for twenty-seven years, barely have an unbroken night’s sleep and still be alive, but here she is on my sofa, her natty snow-leopard print beret cocked to one side, telling me about her infant charges, about her relationship with “Jesus Christ our Lord” and, with a little digging, about the ex-husband she banished to a flat in her basement before changing the locks on her doors. Phyllis’s references, when I check them out, come from a variety of people: a hard-pressed legal aid lawyer in the Bronx; some very posh people in banking; and an Englishwoman on the Upper East Side who tells me how marvelous Phyllis was when they took her yachting off Bermuda, so that I worry she’ll be slumming it in my modest two-bedroom. I also wonder if I can do without her.

  My dad and Marion, his partner, will fly in as close to the birth as they can. L will be around mornings, evenings and weekends, although not overnight, with her own son to care for, and Oliver will look in several times a week. With one baby, this patchwork would probably suffice. But with two, particularly if I’m recovering from surgery, it strikes me as completely impossible. I’m freelance. I have no paid maternity leave and need to get back to work for at least a few hours a day within as short a time period as possible. There’s no way around it; I’ll have to bite the bullet.

  I interview one other candidate, who doesn’t have a cute beret or smile once during the course of our hour-long conversation and then I call Phyllis. I’m a little worried about the god thing, but I’m confident we can work around it. “I knew you were the one when you told me you locked your husband in the basement,” I tell her.

  “Well, that’s not quite what I—” protests Phyllis. Then she clacks her tongue and roars with laughter.

  * * *

  • • •

  THERE IS ONE very big difference between the preparations I am making and those being made by the other pregnant women in my prenatal group, and that is the extent to which I have to budget for my own death. I have no siblings, no close cousins, and my dad is in his seventies. I am also in the wrong country. I once got very, very drunk with a BBC camera crew at a hotel in Beirut and the next day thought I was dying. When I called Merope in London to say good-bye, I came over all English Patient (if Kristin Scott Thomas had been dressed by North Face and made out with a BBC cameraman) and made her promise to repatriate my body. “Don’t let them leave me in Lebanon,” I said. “I want my ashes to be scattered in England.”

  “I think you’re still drunk, my love.”

  “Promise me.”

  “I will. Now try to throw up and I’ll call again in ten minutes.”

  Nothing much in my attitude on this subject has changed. England is home and will always be home and when I think about dying, not only do I want my ashes to be shipped back, I can’t help wanting my babies to go with them. This is completely irrational, wholly impractical and highly offensive to L. Still, I can’t help it. If I leave my two orphans in a place I still find so strange, how will they ever find their way home?

  To defer having to make a decision, I take out a $1 million life insurance policy, surprisingly cheap when you squeak in under forty, and it even covers me for suicide—I burst out laughing when the sales agent tells me this on the phone. “Well, that certainly expands the range of my options,” I say. She doesn’t laugh.

  “You’ll be sixty-nine when this policy expires,” she says and I abruptly stop cackling.

  Then I call a good friend in London. “Who’s your kids’ guardian if you and Scott die?”

  “Aaaaaargh! It’s Scott’s parents at the moment, but they’re too old.”

  “But he has a sister, right?”

  “Yeah, but I won’t let her have them because her husband’s a fucking selfish fuck. He wouldn’t do right by my girls. Actually, I was thinking of asking you. But I guess your plate is full.”

  Everyone I call that week has the same story. Most of us had children so late our parents are too old to be made their guardians. Eventually, I talk to L.

  “I’m not sure if leaving them in the United States is what I want,” I say.

  “What do you mean?”

  I sense danger and try to walk back. “I mean, it’s just that if they stay here, they’ll have less of a sense of who I was than in England.”

  “Are you kidding me?”

  The rest of the conversation doesn’t go well. My contingency plan—to ask my friend Leila if she’ll take them if I die during their first year, after which I’ll revisit the decision—annoys L so wildly that for a while, whenever I asked her to do something, she says, “Why don’t you ask Leila?” And of course she is right, not only because I am being childish and unreasonable, but because it is not my decision to make. My children will fall in love with the person they see all the time and long before they speak, the decision will speak for itself.

  At Thanksgiving, L braces for impertinent questions about my pregnancy from conservative elements in her family. None comes. Everyone is lovely and tolerant and excited about the babies, and this is how it seems to go. Even those of my friends who, conceiving in circumstances similar to mine, suffered the initial dispproval of relatives, watched as they changed their minds once a baby was born. You have to be a spectacular cunt to set eyes on a child and reject it on the basis of provenance.

  * * *

  • • •

  IN EARLY DECEMBER, L throws me a baby shower—“Why don’t you get Leila to throw you one?”—at our local Chinese restaurant and I wear a crown and play dumb games and eat my own body weight in lo mein and, given how grudging I used to be about this kind of event, am touched by how many people turn up. The following week, I eat the last of the leftovers before the fetal nonstress test, and the babies are so high on MSG it takes three hours to get two adequate readings. (These tests, which monitor the babies’ heart rates and are conducted weekly in the last months of my pregnancy, for some reason aren’t routinely covered by my insurance and so one of the doctors arranges for the paperwork to be sent to his office and adjusted before being sent on.) After the test, I go downstairs to be looked over by Dr. Y. “Two good, brave babies,” he says, beaming.

  My final ultrasound of the year falls just after Christmas. I am six weeks from the due date and still have a lot to get done. The technician looks at the screen. “What do you have as the deepest vertical pocket on A?” she says to her colleague. He frowns, says something I don’t catch and leaves the room. Someone else comes in. Everyone gathers by the monitor while I look at the ceiling and try to figure out whether to have lunch on the East Side, or save myself ten dollars and eat out of the fridge when I get home.

  Finally, a fourth doctor comes in and tells me to get dressed. “Could you follow me, please?” he says. I feel a spike of alarm. We walk to his office, where Dr. Y is waiting.

  “They have to come out,” says Dr. Y.

  “Oh my god.”

  The placenta for the smallest baby is working only intermittently; if it stops altogether she’ll die. “This is not an emergency,” says Dr. Y calmly, “but it is . . . fairly urgent.” He tells me he has time in his calendar the follo
wing day, New Year’s Eve, or the day after that. Even in my panic, I realize that New Year’s Day is the very worst day of the year to have surgery. In any case, I don’t want to make Baby A wait.

  “Let’s do it tomorrow,” I say, trembling.

  “Three p.m.?”

  “OK.”

  “We’ll see you then.”

  How can he be so casual? Why isn’t anyone screaming or calling the newspapers? As I stagger out of the room, one of the doctors smiles and jokes that I should look on the bright side. Having them before the New Year will bring significant tax breaks. “Call your accountant!” he says.

  THIRTEEN

  Neonatal

  I LIE ON MY BED looking up at the ceiling. I’ve changed my mind, I think vaguely. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed this pregnancy; it’s been interesting and challenging and wonderful in every way, but I’ve had enough now and would like to go home. In fact, this entire twenty-year experiment in adult living has been more than sufficient and it’s high time my parents came to collect me. I picture myself as a child, walking down my old street on a summer afternoon, holding my mum’s hand as the sunlight dips in and out of the trees above our heads. In some obscure way I know we are sailing toward death in this scene, but it always reassures me; the grip of her hand, the flicker of the sun, the sense that whatever else happens, some part of me is fortified against the unknown, inside this moment forever.

  At thirty-four weeks’ gestation, the babies are only three weeks shy of full term for twins, but because of the problem with the placenta, the doctors believe the smaller of the two babies might have stopped developing at thirty-two weeks. The surgery tomorrow is not a marginal call. It is a vital measure to preserve the life of the baby, and after the initial panic, the main thing I feel is relief: not that the doctors caught the problem in time, or that their prognosis is optimistc. I’m relieved that the threat to the baby is so unequivocal my insurers can’t possibly challenge it.