by Nancy Thayer
“Mmm, yes, I see,” Sara said. “Then we wouldn’t have to bother with makeup. When I think of the time I spend trying to camouflage shadows or wrinkles—” She knew she was only echoing her hostess’s thoughts, but she wasn’t quite sure what this conversation was about. More and more she was certain that Fanny and Jenny were intertwined and that if she wanted to publish the Jenny book, she had to win Fanny’s trust.
Fanny poured tea as they talked, and put some pastries on Sara’s plate. They spoke in low voices of the psychology and paraphernalia of beauty. In her lilting, beguiling voice, Fanny spoke about salons and treatments and potions from Europe. She was like a witch speaking of spells. Sara sipped the tea, listened, absentmindedly stroking the silky back of a dog who had come to sit with his head on her knee. It was so warm in the room, the light so dim and flickering.
“I’ve been having trouble with my weight recently,” Sara said. Then, with a sense of release, she said it all. “I’m eating from frustration, I think. You see, I’ve been trying to get pregnant for quite a while now, and it just isn’t happening.”
“Aaah,” Fanny said. “That is how you know about life’s obstinate uncooperativeness.”
“Yes,” Sara said. “Yes, I am learning that lesson well.”
“Have you seen a doctor about it?” Fanny asked.
Sara found she wanted to confide in Fanny. As she spoke, Fanny watched her carefully, with sympathy. From time to time she slipped bits of cheese or pastry to the various animals around her until finally they were satisfied and lay back down on the sofas or on the floor next to the two women, so that the air was filled with the sounds of firewood crackling and animals purring or snoring.
Sara gave herself over to her problem; she told everything, and she cried. It was when she felt the tears on her cheeks that she pulled herself together with a little shudder of embarrassment: what was she doing? This was no way to edit a book or gain a writer’s trust in her intelligence!
“Excuse me,” she said, “but I need to use a bathroom. I need to wash my face.”
“Of course, my dear,” Fanny said. She rang the silver bell and Eloise appeared immediately. “Would you please show Sara to the powder room?” she asked.
Sara followed the housekeeper out of the blue room and into the central hall, which seemed blindingly bright by contrast. Beneath the winding stairs was tucked a half bath, all pink and gold and clean. Sara splashed cold water on her face and hands. She looked at her watch: she had been here almost two hours. What an extraordinary morning it was. She was not certain what even had happened in that warm blue room. She splashed more cold water on her face, then looked at herself in the mirror. You are letting your obsession with getting pregnant ruin your life, she said to herself, squinting meanly at her reflection. She took a deep breath and turned, determined to get the author back to the track of her novel.
But when she returned to the warm, large living room, she found her hostess standing back by the door at the far end of the room.
“I’ve gotten tired,” Fanny said. “It’s unfortunate, but I do tire so easily. I so seldom see people.”
“Oh!” Sara exclaimed, disappointed.
“Please,” Fanny said, holding out her hand. “I want you to understand. This meeting was very important to me, and I want you to know that now I am convinced that you and I can work together on the Jenny novel. To be blunt, I like you, Sara. I think we are compatible. I would be grateful if you would take the manuscript—the one there, on the table—back to Nantucket with you and read it, and then come back here and talk with me about it. In depth.”
Sara stared at her, still uncertain. She was glad to hear what Fanny was saying, but she hated to be dismissed so soon.
“Please,” Fanny said. “Take the manuscript. And whenever you have finished reading it, come back to me. I promise you that whenever you want to, I will see you here. I will work with you. I promise you that. But I am very tired now. I must rest.”
There was nothing Sara could do but to cross the room and pick up the manuscript, then, cradling it as carefully as if it were a newborn child, she said good-bye to Fanny Anderson and left the room.
On the flight home from Kingston to Boston, Sara smiled most of the way. It had been a good vacation; it had been a time together that they needed. There had been no appointments to keep, no phone calls from bosses or friends, no mail. It had been sunny and hot and easy, and they had made love, ridden bikes, made love, gone scuba diving and swimming, made love, drunk Technicolor alcoholic drinks. And they had talked, about what they wanted in life, what they hoped the future would hold—and then, as if they had never spoken of all this before, of their pasts, of family crises and high school embarrassments and college triumphs. All these words had looped and laced through the invisible web of their marriage, making it stronger and more elaborate.
And then, Sara had met Morris Newhouse.
Thank God she had met Morris Newhouse. Now she didn’t feel so freakish and alone.
She had noticed the couple the very first morning at the hotel. Or rather, she had noticed the woman. The husband had been rather anonymous-looking, slight and tidy in a perfectly groomed, expensively dressed way. He was of the type she and Steve called “the brown men,” men with brown hair and eyes and suits and attaché cases who worked in New York at important but unexciting jobs.
But his wife was something else. She was almost six feet tall and exquisitely slender, with fine long bones. Her thick black hair was pulled back off her face into a high ponytail; on her this teenage hairdo looked sophisticated. She needed no makeup on her olive skin; she tanned beautifully. And her eyes were large and slanted, a startling dark brown. She was exotic-looking and elegant beyond words. Heads turned when she walked by. Later, when Sara saw the woman come down the beach in her white string bikini, she said to Steve, “That’s not fair.” For the woman’s body made a Barbie doll look like a Russian peasant.
Sara had no desire to get to know this gorgeous creature and secretly told herself the woman must be dumb, or mean, or something. But the two couples kept running into each other on the beach, in the hotel lobby, at the marketplace, and out of politeness they always smiled and said hello. The third night there, the four of them entered the hotel bar at the same time and ended up sitting together.
Kip and Morris Newhouse. Kip was a partner in a large investment and stockbroking firm in New York. He was as stuffy as he looked, but as they got to know him, they realized that he was also intelligent and kind. Morris was a potter—sometimes. She hadn’t worked for the past five years, not since they’d had their babies. She showed Sara and Steve pictures of their five-year-old son and three-year-old daughter, lovely storybook children. This was the first time the Newhouses had been away, alone together, without the children. They missed them.
Oh, God, Sara thought, oh, God, of course this perfect woman would have perfect children. That night she was still hoping not to start her period, but her stomach was bloated and her breasts were sore and she was easily irritable: she wanted to scream at this beautiful woman, she wanted to throw her drink in her wonderful face.
For the rest of their stay, Sara tried to avoid the couple, especially after she started her period. She just didn’t think she could bear it.
But on the seventh day there, Steve wanted to try deep-sea fishing and Sara, uncomfortable and soggy with her period, wasn’t interested. Somehow, in the easy way things are often done on vacation, it was decided that Steve and Kip would go on the fishing trip while Sara and Morris lay on the beach and sunned themselves.
And on the beach, Morris and Sara began to talk. Sara confided that she was having her period, and it always made her grumpy, and Morris said, “Oh, God, I know. I always turn into a maniac when I get my period. And before I had my children—well, my periods used to make my nearly suicidal. It took me five years to get pregnant, you see.”
“Really?” Sara asked. She turned on her side and stared at Morris, who had sud
denly, with her admission, transformed herself from a beautiful woman into a fascinating one. “Really?”
Sara confided her problem to Morris with grateful eagerness—for Morris was a stranger who did not judge her and who would probably never see her again. For her part, Morris seemed glad to relive her own difficulties before an appreciative audience, in the way a traveler likes to tell of an adventure he was forced to endure and came away from scarred but alive.
They had a late lunch and spent the afternoon near the hotel pool, under a striped umbrella, drinking Mai Tais and talking and laughing.
Morris had taken her temperature and kept a chart for fourteen months. During that time, she and her husband had had to have sex on the eleventh, thirteenth, fifteenth, and seventeenth days, every month. It got so that they almost dreaded making love. Certainly it became a duty. Then, immediately after sex, Morris had to flip her bottom up in the air and maneuver her body into a position much like a Yoga Plow, holding her hips up high and her legs stretched down so that her feet rested on either side of her head. She had to stay that way for twenty minutes. She tried to get Kip to talk to her, but he almost always fell asleep. Finally they moved a television into the room so she would have something to help her pass those twenty minutes. In the winter they liked the bedroom cold, but with her bottom in the air she couldn’t manage to keep it covered and warm; if Kip pulled the covers up over her, it also smothered her because her bottom was so near her head. Both women collapsed with laughter—and Sara laughed aloud on the plane, just thinking of that elegant woman in such a position.
Morris had had to do another embarrassing and bizarre thing. Her doctor was an old-fashioned one who had started practicing during World War II. He held with old practices, but he did have a high record of success. So she had done what he told her; she had had him perform a culdoscopy. Drugged into a zombielike state, Morris had had to kneel on the table, with her head against the table and her legs spread and her bottom high in the air so that the doctor could insert a culdoscope into her vagina and look through it into her abdominal cavity with magnifying mirrors to see if she had endometriosis. Afterward, it seemed to take forever for the drugs to wear off; she had been nauseated and spaced-out.
None of the procedures revealed anything. There seemed to be no reason for her infertility. She had a D&C, she took various drugs, and she did not get pregnant. Instead, she said, she “got weird.” She began to hate every woman she knew who had a child. In department stores, in grocery stores, she would see a woman with a baby in a cart or in her arms and she would be filled with such anger, such hatred, that she would have to leave the store, leave her cart full of groceries, or risk hitting the woman—it was that bad, her fists would clench and she would want to hit, to hurt any woman who had a baby.
People kept telling her to “relax.” This only made her more insane. At last she and Kip took a six-month trip around the world, which he could afford to do only by quitting his firm. But he did it; money was not their problem. She did not get pregnant.
They went back to New York, Kip joined a new firm and worked hard, she worked hard as a potter. There was nothing else for them that could be done medically. There was no explanation. She was not resigned; she was still frantic and depressed and greedy for a child. And one month, and she had no idea why that month, she missed her period. After five years, she was pregnant.
Sara loved knowing all this, and that night in bed she had told Steve. It gave her such courage to know about Morris, to know all she had been through, and how even medical science had failed, and how, after all, she had gotten pregnant. It gave Sara hope. And it made her laugh, which was a real gift. The thought of Morris—elegant, exquisite Morris—spending night after night with her bottom above her head put things into a better perspective for her. Things did not seem quite so gloomy and impossible, after all.
Sara took comfort in the fact that she was not alone. She was, in fact, in good company.
She kept Morris in mind when she called Dr. Crochett her first afternoon home. By now he had been able to see the results of her uterotubalgram.
“You’ve got one tube blocked, Sara,” he told her. “I’ve seen the X rays; the dye came through on the right side but not on the left.”
“I—um—I was disappointed with the doctor,” she said, feeling brave. “He didn’t stop to explain anything to me. And I wish he had gone ahead and done the procedure the third time. Perhaps that would have opened the tube. I wouldn’t have minded the discomfort.”
“My dear Sara,” Dr. Crochett said, “if the doctor had put the dye through the third time, he would have had to use more force, and you would have experienced something much stronger than discomfort. No, he did what he could. Now it’s time to schedule you for a laparoscopy. This is a procedure that requires day surgery in the hospital. I’ll do a small incision in your abdomen, insert a laparoscope and look around to see if you have serious endometriosis. Find out what’s blocking that tube of yours. If you do have endometriosis, I’ll want to do a laparotomy; I’ll open you up and clean you out. Then, of course, you’ll have a longer hospital stay, probably about five days.”
“Good Lord,” Sara said. “Does this require general anesthesia?”
“Yes,” the doctor replied. “Which means some discomfort. And, of course, if you have the laparotomy, you’ll have scars from the incision. But nothing you won’t be able to hide under a bikini.”
“Oh,” Sara said. “This seems like such a serious thing to do.”
“Well, you don’t have to do it right away,” Dr. Crochett said. “No one is eager to have general anesthesia. You can wait as long as you want. You may not have endometriosis. But we’ve determined that your husband is okay, your mucus and his are compatible, you’re ovulating, and you have one tube blocked. This seems like a reasonable next step. But we can do it whenever you want. Why don’t you think about it? Talk with your husband about it. We can wait as long as you’d like.”
“Fine,” Sara said. “I’ll call you back.”
Steve was at work. The house was silent and bright with winter sun reflecting off layers of snow that glittered from lawns and along tree branches and rooftops. Sara sat thinking.
She had to admit it to herself: she was afraid of general anesthesia. She had heard too many horror stories; she was afraid she would die from it. Not wake up. Or have brain damage. The longer she sat thinking, the more frightened she got.
She knew she couldn’t do it, not just yet. And really, why should she? Look at all that Morris had gone through, only to finally get pregnant for no real reason at all. And she wanted to edit Fanny Anderson’s book, there was that, too, to be responsible for its seeing the light of day. If she went into the hospital, she couldn’t work. If she went into the hospital and died—no. She just couldn’t schedule it, not yet. She would give herself another month or two. Why not? Perhaps if she became truly engrossed with the Jenny book, so that she wasn’t always thinking about getting pregnant, she would get pregnant. And it really would be better, from a financial point of view, if she edited another book or two and saved up some money before she went into the expense of surgery and a hospital stay.
When Steve came home, she explained to him all that the doctor had said and explained her thoughts to him, including her feeling of fear.
“Well, let’s wait, then, Sara,” he said. “I don’t want you to have to do anything you don’t want to. I admit, if it were my body going under a knife, I’d hesitate, too. Let’s give ourselves some more time. After all, we’ve got years ahead of us.”
“Oh, Steve, I do love you,” she said, and hugged him. She felt she had just been given a reprieve.
All right, body, she secretly said to herself, I’m not going to subject you to surgery just yet. So why don’t you get busy and cooperate and get pregnant and we won’t have to do surgery at all? She wondered if anyone else spoke to her body in quite the same way she had come to speak to hers, as if it were a willful and cunning and
traitorous child.
Winter had hit the coast in earnest now. It was too dangerous to fly in the tiny planes that serviced Nantucket through the high winds and thick fogs or snow-laden clouds. Sara had no choice but to take the six-thirty ferry over to Hyannis, where she rented a car to drive to Cambridge.
Sitting on the ferry, Fanny’s manuscript in her lap, Sara leaned her head against the window. Today the sea shimmered like a dream, with snow spiraling down onto the peaks of ice-blue waves and the wind whipping the flakes toward the window, then tossing them away in a flurry. That was the way Sara felt: spirited, energetic, swirling enthusiastically through time. Her energy was high.
She had agreed to edit another romance novel for Heartways House so that she would have additional money for the surgery. She had actively tried to become a more integral part of Steve’s Nantucket group; just this week she had had the group, including The Virgin and her grumpy husband, over for a lasagna dinner followed by a boisterous game of Trivial Pursuit. She had made an appointment to talk to Donald James about Fanny Anderson’s book.
And now she was going back to see Fanny. Fanny had kept her word. As soon as Sara had returned from Jamaica and done the work she needed on the Jenny pages, she had called Fanny, and Fanny had said, at once, “Yes, dear, of course, come tomorrow.”
The final section of the Jenny novel began in London in the early seventies, back in a world full of men and champagne and dangerous parties. The first few pages were fine, although Sara noticed something that had not been included in the novel before: every time Fanny mentioned a new man that Jenny was involved with, she mentioned the man’s age, and the men were all in their twenties. Sara made a mental note to ask Fanny about this. Undoubtedly she wanted to prove a point—that Jenny was so beautiful and exciting that she could attract men ten and twenty years younger than she. But it made the writing stilted: “Jasper Kitteredge, who was only twenty-two, crossed the ballroom toward Jenny with the assurance and determination of a much older man.” “Jenny returned from her ride just as the Whartons’ new guest was arriving. From the high back of the black thoroughbred jumper she looked down at Stephen Matte, who was twenty-four years old, just stepping out of his sleek low Aston Martin.”