“Yoo-hoo, Troppo. You can’t hear me yet,” she whispers to her baby-to-be. “But you will soon.”
***
When Alan comes home from work, Laurie surprises him with a bottle of champagne and a homemade chocolate cake—a “welcome baby” cake, she calls it. Alan kisses her and they eat cake before dinner and Laurie has one tiny (very tiny) sip of champagne to celebrate.
“Wow. Pretty overwhelming,” Alan says to Laurie.
Laurie nods. “I still can’t believe it. Do you think Dr. Liu was kidding? Maybe he’s not really a doctor; he’s just a guy who sneaks into an ob-gyn office and puts on a white lab coat.”
“And sees you naked?” Alan says. “I’ll have to kill him.”
Troppo will have a goofy sense of humor like Alan. He will be tall and handsome and blond and green-eyed like Alan, smart and kind and, except for too-light eyebrows, perfect genetic material.
“Why are you staring at me?” he asks.
“I’m hoping the baby looks like you.”
“Be as good-looking as me? There’s not enough room on the planet. I want him to look exactly like you. Only masculine. No offense. You know what I mean.”
She laughs, imagines Troppo split in half—half Alan, half Laurie, like someone in a circus sideshow. Will the baby be semineurotic and addicted to chocolate like Laurie? Set in his ways and almost OCD organized like Alan? Sometimes Alan refers to himself as “retro.” That explains why he still carries a BlackBerry and wears Brooks Brothers oxford shirts and deck shoes. Laurie can’t decide which decade Alan belongs in—the ’50s? A member of the establishment in the ’60s? On one of their early dates, he showed up wearing a light blue seersucker jacket.
“My grandfather had a jacket like that,” she told him, trying hard not to make a face.
“I’m fashionably unfashionable,” Alan said. And how could you not fall in love with a man crazy enough to own and wear a seersucker jacket? Even though after their wedding it mysteriously disappeared.
***
Alan finishes his champagne. “Pregnancy’s already made you prettier.”
“That pregnancy glow they talk about? Am I illuminating the room?” she says.
“I better get my sunglasses.” He pours himself another glass of champagne. “So now I guess we make a list.” Alan takes out his BlackBerry. “What do we do first?”
Laurie thinks. “Gather wood. Build a shelter. We’ve got that covered. Unless our house isn’t big enough.”
“Our house is fine. It’s a baby; they’re small. At least for a while.” Alan frowns. “I’m a newbie at this. I need instructions.”
“It’s like riding a bike,” Laurie says.
“You’re sure?”
“No, beats me. I’m a newbie too, remember?” She sits in his lap and leans her head against his shoulder. “But how hard can it be?”
***
They tell everyone. Laurie calls her mother in Reno, Alan calls his parents in Virginia. Grace takes Laurie out for lunch to celebrate. Laurie has been helping set up Grace’s new blog. Grace’s husband, Hal, works in commercial real estate, but he’s taking a sabbatical year to stay home with Emilie, their two-year-old daughter. Hal has given Grace workspace at his office in Van Nuys, a beautiful old building from the ’20s that was scheduled for demolition until a group of preservationists fought to save it. Grace worked in the print magazine business for years and is anxious to take a leap into cyberworld. Her blog will be a guide to finding unknown treasures (cheap day spas, unusual museums, etc.) in the San Fernando Valley. Grace wants to call it Valley Gems.
“Sounds like a jewelry store,” Laurie says. They are eating in a small Italian café on a busy street just off Van Nuys Boulevard near Hal’s office. The food is good, but Grace hasn’t decided if the restaurant will make it on the site. “Too much traffic,” Grace complains.
“But the pesto’s amazing,” Laurie says, winding linguine around her fork.
“Enjoy it now. Because once morning sickness kicks in, you’ll want to die. When I was pregnant with Emilie, I was sick for nine months.”
“I don’t believe you.” Laurie’s linguine is covered with olive oil, garlic, and basil. How could that ever taste bad?
“Remember your worst hangover in college? Sick like that. Puking, dry heaves. That ‘by the second trimester you’ll be fine’ thing? Total crap. Wait and see. Are you sure you don’t like Valley Gems?”
“Hate it.”
“You could work with me full time,” Grace says.
“Part time.” Since college, Laurie has worked in PR but was transitioned (about to be laid off) from her last job a year ago. Since then she’s done freelance travel writing, and she’s not ready for nine to five again, especially with a baby on the way.
“Hidden Valley,” Grace announces. “Better than Valley Gems?”
“Hidden Valley is a salad dressing.”
“I like Hidden Valley,” Grace says. “Because that’s what it’s about—places you might drive by every day, but you’ve never noticed them before. Like this restaurant. Which is great, except for the honking cars and exhaust fumes.”
Grace hands Laurie a gift bag wrapped with a gauzy ribbon. “It’s really more of a present for after the baby.” Laurie pulls out a pair of neon-colored margarita glasses.
“They’re cute, thanks,” Laurie says. “But how am I going to survive nine months without margaritas?”
“I’m not kidding about morning sickness. Even if it were medically safe to drink when you’re pregnant, you won’t want to. The thought of tequila will make you vomit.”
Laurie wipes the bottom of the bowl with her bread to get the last bits of pesto. She’s not worried. Grace exaggerates everything.
***
When morning sickness arrives, it’s not Grace’s violent vomiting dry heave scenario, but 24/7 nausea isn’t Laurie’s idea of a good time. One of her pregnancy books suggests eating saltine crackers as a possible solution.
At dinner, Alan presents her with crackers on a small plate. “Yum,” he says. Laurie wants to punch him. She had to leave the kitchen last night when he microwaved leftover pizza. The smell of sausage and cheese made her woozy, and she could hear the acid bubbling in her stomach.
She picks up a cracker. It looks gigantic, although not as gigantic as the torpedo-sized prenatal vitamins Dr. Liu wants her to take. “They’re not so bad,” Alan says.
“Then you try one.”
Alan shakes his head, as if taking a prenatal vitamin will make him grow breasts.
She is looking at the cracker in her palm.
“It smells,” she says to Alan.
“Crackers don’t smell.”
Troppo is starving. If she doesn’t eat this cracker, his brain won’t develop and he’ll never get into an Ivy League school.
She nibbles the corner. Her mouth feels full, as if it’s stuffed with paper.
“Maybe I could put a little margarine on it,” Alan says.
Laurie shakes her head. Margarine would push her over the edge. Half a cracker, she might be able to manage that. She’ll do it for Troppo.
She takes another bite, more aggressively this time. The cracker sits on her tongue like fingernail clippings. She takes a sip of water. Even water tastes funny these days. In her mouth, the water turns the cracker to the consistency of spackle. She wills the muscles in her throat to do their job and the soggy, disgusting mess doesn’t exactly slide down her esophagus, but it lurches as it begins the long journey to Laurie’s roiling stomach.
“Good girl, only two thirds of the cracker to go,” says Alan.
***
Weeks pass, and on mornings when she doesn’t feel like throwing up, Laurie goes into Grace’s office. Grace tacks a pregnancy calendar above Laurie’s desk. “So you can mark off the days,” she says. When Laurie stays
home, Grace emails her pregnancy tips and things to watch out for. For example, if seafood is polluted with mercury, it can harm a baby’s brain and nervous system. The coating on nonstick cookware might flake off and release toxic gasses.
As they’re planning the Hidden Valley format (“Blog, Facebook, eventually print,” is Grace’s master plan), Laurie asks about Grace’s pregnancy. “Emilie is a whoops baby,” Grace says. “We thought we’d wait another year to start a family, but…whoops.”
“So were you scared?” Laurie wants to know.
“It was a surprise, but a bigger surprise at how happy we were. And now Hal wanting to take a year off to be home with her. Isn’t that outrageous? It’s so good for them, father/daughter bonding. Alan will make a great dad too.”
“Yeah.” Laurie came home from the office the other day to find Alan had gotten Thai takeout and a DVD of Dumbo. They watched Dumbo after dinner and both of them cried when Dumbo’s mother sings “Baby Mine” to her child while she’s locked up behind bars. Alan says he isn’t really crying—he has something in his eye. But Laurie doesn’t believe him.
“We planned Troppo, so it’s not a surprise,” Laurie says to Grace.
“And is it what you thought it would be?”
“I don’t love the nausea. But everything else…I don’t know. I expected joy, but this is a ridiculous amount of joy.” She laughs. “I sound insane.”
“You sound like a new mom.” Grace looks serious. “You’re not going outside on smoggy days, are you? Check the pollution levels first.”
***
Laurie talks to Troppo all the time. She’s standing in his bedroom and facing the doorframe. “This is where we’ll measure you on your birthday. Right here,” she tells him. She sees herself carefully drawing a line and printing the date. “Look how big you are, Troppo. How did you get so big?”
“Growing like a weed,” Alan will say, and Troppo will look up at his parents, grinning. The lines will grow higher and higher on the doorframe and one day—surprise!—he’ll be taller than Laurie.
Even though she calls him Troppo, the baby’s room has a unisex decor. The room needed a fresh coat of paint anyway, so Laurie chose a light lemon yellow color. And as long as they were painting, why not add a cute animal alphabet trim along the wall just below the ceiling? A is for Alligator. B is for Bird. The Python wrapped around the letter P seems vaguely sinister. “To make sure the baby won’t grow up afraid of snakes,” Alan says.
“Really? Suppose the baby gets some terrible snake phobia?”
“Then we’ll buy real snakes. Isn’t that what you do with phobias? Confront them?”
“But maybe we don’t know how to have a baby,” Laurie says as she looks at the almost-assembled crib. Okay, it’s not as if they were going to completely finish the baby’s room, but the Juvenile Shop was having a sample sale and now that they’ve got the crib, she’ll go back when the Juvenile Shop has another sale to check out changing tables. Except—why does her maternal confidence seem to come and go these days? A baby? What were they thinking? “Suppose it’s not like riding a bike,” she tells Alan. “Suppose it’s more like building a particle accelerator. With Q-tips.”
“No going back. We’ve waited long enough.”
He’s not wrong, Laurie thinks. They’ve been married for almost five years. No children right away—Laurie’s job meant lots of travel and Alan traveled for his job too, including to help organize a new branch of his company, Palmer-Boone, in Sydney. Friends told them they should travel now, prechildren. They listened to the advice, took advantage of Laurie’s job, enjoyed river cruises down the Volga, glacier trips in Alaska. Scuba diving in the Great Barrier Reef, courtesy of Palmer-Boone.
Alan, the ideal travel companion. They have fabulous adventures. And then one day, they looked at each other and that was it. Time for a baby.
Now they’re decorating a baby’s room and putting together a crib. Years from now, in this room, Laurie will tell fourteen-year-old Troppo to pick up his clothes and he’ll roll his eyes and say, “Yeah, yeah. I’ll get around to it, Mom.”
Mom. That’s who she is. Alan is right; there’s no going back.
***
“You’ll hear the heartbeat for the first time,” Grace tells her. “Alan should go with you, it’s very cool.” But Palmer-Boone is having a “power breakfast” to welcome visiting VIPs from Palmer-Boone Great Britain, so Laurie arrives solo at her doctor’s appointment.
Dr. Liu is in a good mood, very chatty, and Laurie wonders what it’s like for Mrs. Liu, thinking about her husband rubbing gel on women’s stomachs and looking in their vaginas all day.
“We should hear the heartbeat, right?” Laurie asks Dr. Liu as he slides the ultrasound paddle across her tummy.
“Who’s the doctor, you or me?” He’s grinning as he maneuvers the paddle. The machine makes a thunk thunk sound, slightly wet.
“I vote for you. I’d make a horrible doctor. And I look terrible in white,” says Laurie. Dr. Liu moves the paddle to another spot. Thunk thunk. How loud will the heartbeat be?
Dr. Liu frowns, taps the end of the paddle. “Let me try another one, this one’s acting a little funky.”
Of course ultrasound machines go funky. So it’s not unusual for Dr. Liu to leave the room to bring in another machine. It must happen all the time.
Only Laurie knows, deep down, not even deep down, she knows right there on the surface that Dr. Liu won’t find a heartbeat; it isn’t a broken ultrasound machine. Something has gone wrong; it’s bad news, the worst possible news.
And it is. A second machine confirms what Dr. Liu suspected—no heartbeat. A blighted ovum, Dr. Liu explains, his face serious. No dimples this time. The fertilized egg attached itself to the wall of the uterus and began to develop a placenta, but there is nothing inside. No embryo. No baby.
No Troppo.
Alan
One morning when Laurie leaves early for work, Alan dismantles the crib. He looks down at the crib pieces scattered on the floor, and he’s tempted to throw everything away, but instead he gets a roll of masking tape and a Sharpie and a box of plastic bags and prints in clear handwriting where each piece should go. “Headboard, twelve six-inch screws, twelve matching washers and nuts.” He tapes the plastic bags to the corresponding pieces and carries everything out to the back of the garage. When he’s done, he covers the crib with an old beach towel with a picture of Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio on it.
The room looks empty without the crib. Afternoon sun makes the yellow walls almost too bright. He looks up at the alphabet border. A is for anguish, he thinks. B is for bereavement. L is for loss. Longing. Laurie.
***
Alan grew up as the youngest child in a noisy house in Virginia with three brothers and a sister, parents who spoiled them rotten and made up for it by making them wear matching red-and-green reindeer scarves and hats for their family Christmas card photo. It was a middle-class, white picket fence, Wonder Bread life. When Alan left home, finished college, and got married, no question about it, of course he’d have kids. Probably make them do stupid Christmas cards too.
Having children only to replicate yourself seems ridiculously narcissistic. Alan doesn’t need an Alan Lee Gaines Junior to feel complete. Or Alan Lee Gaines Junior who grows up to have Alan Lee Gaines III. And on and on until Alan Lee Gaines Infinity. Not that he dismisses genealogy. Alan’s mother would never let him get away with that.
Alan’s mother has always kept scrapbooks and researched family trees and has recently discovered (and become obsessed with) Ancestry.com. She follows various family members through different countries, tracks their trips on ocean liners, prints up obituaries. “Family means everything,” she says. “It’s the thing that’s left.”
His mother emails him black and white photos of men standing beside Model Ts, women in shorts and gingham-checked blouses
sitting on picnic blankets. One woman with dark hair in a white bathing suit is so pretty she could be a pinup. He asks his mother about her when they talk on the phone.
“Bess, my mother’s older sister, isn’t she gorgeous? She never got married. Lived in Vermont with a woman named Catherine. They didn’t visit Virginia much.”
“Were they gay?”
“My mother said no. Not that she had anything against gay people. She just didn’t want to think about it.”
If it’s unpleasant and you don’t think about it, it goes away. Worrying if Bess and Catherine were gay might’ve made Alan’s grandmother crazy. So she ignored it. And life went on.
***
If Alan doesn’t think about Troppo, maybe he never existed. Of course, that’s the irony; he never did exist. Not exactly a ha-ha funny kind of irony, but irony all the same.
Does it make things easier? The fact that Troppo wasn’t close to being a real baby? From a medical point of view, he wasn’t. The pregnancy didn’t take, never got off the ground.
“It’s very common,” Dr. Liu tells Alan and Laurie in the office after the D & C. “Forty percent of pregnancies end in miscarriage. But you two are young, in your early thirties. You’re healthy. And more good news—you know you’re able to conceive.”
Dr. Liu is so cheerful Alan expects him to say that miscarriage is terrific, a wonderful learning experience. As they’re leaving his office, Dr. Liu mentions forty percent again, as if that will make them feel better. But Alan is only thinking one thing—why aren’t we the sixty percent?
***
“I can do the dishes,” Alan says to Laurie after dinner.
She shakes her head. “That’s okay.”
He feels guilty and he doesn’t know why. Of course the miscarriage is harder for Laurie—she was the one who was pregnant. But he feels the loss too. Laurie understands that, doesn’t she?
When the dishes are done, he sits beside Laurie on the sofa in the den. She’s watching Dancing with the Stars. He knows she thinks it’s stupid, but her eyes are locked on the screen. “Doesn’t that dress make her legs look fat?” she says. He sees a heavy woman with too much makeup swirling in the arms of an orange-tan man with a shirt unbuttoned to his waist.
Expecting: A Novel Page 2