by Amy Ephron
It had been blissful in the beginning—no morning sickness, no tiredness, no mood swings. This was aided by the fact that my first three pregnancy tests had been negative. The gynecologist didn’t believe me when I said that I had never wanted breakfast before in my life, therefore, I was certain I was pregnant. So, by the time it was definitely determined (after I’d run into my sister Delia at a luncheon and she took one look at me, and at the beach ball where my stomach used to be, and pronounced, “Oh my God, you’re pregnant”), and I twisted the doctor’s arm to do a blood test, please, instead of a urine test, I was already three months pregnant. In other words, the whole horrible period of tiredness and morning sickness usually present in the first trimester had not only not appeared but I could not psychosomatically manifest it, since I was already out of the first trimester. Except for the fact that I wanted creamed spinach for breakfast (or at least a spinach and Swiss cheese omelette and could recite every eating establishment in L.A. that had one); chili dogs for lunch (preferably Pink’s); and pancakes at midnight (Dupars is open all night), all of which I indulged in, I was perfectly fine. And so was she.
Until Labor Day weekend when there was record-breaking heat in Los Angeles, and even though I was seven and a half months or eight and a quarter months pregnant (depending on when you thought I got pregnant, which was difficult to determine), I still didn’t feel the least bit physically impaired . . . Note to anyone else who’s pregnant, beach volleyball is probably not a good thing to play, even for five minutes. But I have a really good serve and it’s really hard for me not to jump in, even though I jumped out after a two-minute stint. It had been so hot that we all felt like Mexican food was a good idea. Whether it was or not, I have no idea, but I woke up at five in the morning and could feel her doing a cartwheel in my stomach and kicking like a ballerina once she was done . . . and my water broke, six or three weeks early, depending on which reading of the ultrasound you believed.
She was hooked up to more machines than I was. There was something monitoring her heart. I’m sure there was something monitoring mine, but hers was the one that got my attention.
The next three days spent in the ICU were a tiny preparation for how I would feel years later every time she or one of her siblings would pull out of the driveway in their cars on a Saturday night until they pulled back in, like I was holding my breath.
Hospital wards always seem a little surreal, as if time has slowed and each moment amplified. The air is hazy as if it’s been infused with residual drugs, or illness, or fear—the sound of a scream behind a curtain, a tragedy on the other side of the room. Through it all, if you are the patient, a self-imposed heightened sense of awareness kicks in, since not paying attention in a hospital ward can be like falling asleep at the wheel. I decided I wasn’t going to sleep until she was born. Not realizing, of course, when I made that decision that I was in for a 72-hour stint.
On the morning of the second day, a young woman was wheeled in who had gone into labor in her fifth month, way too early to go into labor. It seemed she was in a lot of pain and they put her in the bed directly across from me and closed her curtain. Every ten minutes, almost like clockwork, as if it was tied to a contraction, from behind the curtain she let out a scream, high and piercing, that lasted for 30 seconds. It was hard not to be worried about her, too. As I was staring at the myriad of wires, monitors, and machines a few hours later, with my best friend Holly at my bedside, there was a small commotion in the doorway of the intensive care ward. A flurry, I think you would call it, and in wafted—that’s the only way I can describe her entrance—Elizabeth Taylor, dressed in something long, white, and flowy, which perfectly matched the small, white, perfectly coiffed longhaired Lhasa Apso (or Shih Tzu—I’m not quite sure which one) she was carrying. I’d never seen a dog in a hospital before, but she was Elizabeth Taylor and it matched her dress. Her assistant was trailing behind with a cell phone in his hand, which, in those days, was almost as large as the dog.
It turned out that the young woman behind the curtain in the bed opposite me was Elizabeth Taylor’s daughter-in-law. And since Holly’s sister was also one of Elizabeth Taylor’s daughters-in-law, we threw the curtains open as if we were at some sort of odd labor party. The young woman was in a lot of pain and on a lot of painkillers, which seemed to permeate the air, and that, along with her screams, which now seemed to come like clockwork every four minutes or so, and Elizabeth Taylor’s soft, whispery comforting voice, the cell phone ringing intermittently, and the dog barking every six minutes or so, made the experience seem even more surreal. In between the screams, the woman would sit up and smile and wave at me and Holly, which only added to the oddness. She was in for a longer stint than I was, and she moved shortly into a private room. I recently ran into her and I’m happy to report that she and her son are both fine. She has no recollection of the “waving” incident—further to the theory that celebrity sightings mean more to you than the celebrity you’re sighting, no matter how slight or attenuated the celebrity might be. But at the time it seemed cozy, in its own peculiar way, and confirmed my opinion that L.A., in its own strange way, is a small town.
My daughter Maia was born 73 hours later by cesarean section. They put her in an incubator in the ICU. She was fine. She was perfect, a fact the doctors confirmed after they did a lot of probably unnecessary tests to determine same. I had an infection and they wouldn’t let me hold her until I’d been on antibiotics for two days. I remember the brown tweed wing chair in the ICU that I sat in as a nurse handed her to me, coddled in a soft white blanket so that only her face and one of her toes, which was pointing, peeped out. I remember the moment clearly, as it was a moment of a kind of peace and connection, coupled with a fierce almost primal feeling of protectiveness, that would only be repeated twice more in my life when my other two children were born. I have a picture of it, me in the wing chair and her in my arms, which I keep on my bedside table. Five days after she was born, we both went home.
Two weeks later, her father went out to a screening. I looked at Maia in her little wicker basket in our little house in Laurel Canyon and I realized that I couldn’t leave. You can leave your parents’ home—I know, I did that. You can leave a boyfriend or a husband. Done that, too. You can leave an apartment you don’t like or a city that doesn’t suit you. You can quit a job. But as I looked at my perfect child, sleeping peacefully in her wicker basket, I realized I wasn’t going to be able to leave for something like the next 21 years, not in any substantive way anyway. I had lost the ability to “walk out the door” (unless, of course, I took her and any of her future siblings with me). What no one tells you (or you probably wouldn’t hear if they did) is if you do leave, taking your one child (or three children) with you, the person you were married to won’t be far behind . . .
Seven
Musical Chairs
I had arrived early for once. I was first in line in the carpool lane outside the Country Day School waiting for the sound of the bell and my son, who was six at the time, to be dismissed. I was looking forward to the sight of him, walking down the pathway with his friends, his shoulders weighed down by his backpack that somehow seemed larger than he was. If I was lucky, I would see him before he saw me—I always liked those candid moments when he didn’t know I was observing him.
I had a plan. I would take him for a glazed doughnut. He liked the glazed doughnuts at the bakery around the corner. It was a good thing to have a plan. I would talk to him about his day. When suddenly, I felt a jolt as someone slammed into the back of my old white Mercedes. I looked in the rearview mirror and watched as Kendra Rosenberg backed up her used green Range Rover, put it in drive, and (like an avatar in a suburban version of Mortal Kombat) slammed into my Mercedes again.
I knew. A bell went off in my head, sort of simultaneously with the school bell ringing in the distance. I picked up the
cell phone and dialed Sasha, whom I had been separated from for four months.
“What’s going on with you and Kendra Rosenberg?”
His one-word response spoke volumes. “Oy.”
And then he added, as if this was somehow my fault, “You didn’t yell at her, did you?”
“Yell at her? I’m fucking scared of her. I’m not getting out of the car.”
The passenger door opened and my son scrambled into the front seat.
I hung up the cell phone without saying good-bye.
“Mom,” he said, “do you know that Kendra Rosenberg just slammed her car into yours?”
“I know, honey. She’s having a bad day.” And I put the car in drive, pulled out of the carpool lane, and drove away as quickly as I could.
It wasn’t until later that night when I told my friend Shelley the story that I realized it was funny. “Shelley, Kendra Rosenberg slammed her car into mine in the carpool lane.”
“On purpose?”
“Yeah, on purpose. She’s having a thing with Sasha—she was having a thing with Sasha—and he told her he didn’t want to see her anymore. And she somehow blames me for setting him loose on the world.”
“Is your car hurt?”
“No, not really. Just the bumper. Shelley, stop laughing. It isn’t funny.”
“Yes, it is.”
“Can’t you take Colin out of the Chandler School and enroll him at Country Day. I know it’s by your house and everything but I really could use a friend over here.”
“No. Do you want to take Ethan out of Country Day? I can call Chandler tomorrow.”
“No, it’s too far to drive every day. Besides, it wouldn’t do any good to switch to a new school because Sasha would just be coming with us.”
Sasha, my first husband (I already thought of him as my first husband even though I didn’t have a second one), didn’t really understand the boundaries of a separation. It had taken me a long time to convince him that if he was going to pick up Ethan in the morning and drive him to school, he could park at the curb outside the house and wait, the coffee and muffins weren’t for his breakfast, the mail wasn’t his business anymore, the refrigerator door was closed.
It was simple, really. If I was in my pajamas, he wasn’t allowed in the house. If the telephone rang, he wasn’t supposed to answer it; if people were over, they weren’t there to socialize with him or hear about his latest business venture. Except it wasn’t simple at all, because some of it was inclination and the rest of it was habit and like all habits, difficult to break. (I’ve always thought so much of addiction is impulse control, but that’s another subject.) Since we’d separated, I felt as if I always had to be on alert, have a hand out to protect the papers on my desk, the roast chicken on the counter that was meant for dinner, the telephone (and for God’s sakes, I lived alone, I should be able to not answer the phone if I wanted, let it go to machine), except that somehow Sasha was always in the house and I was always sprinting for the phone. Maybe I wasn’t that good at setting boundaries either. But, weirdly, Sasha and I were still friends, which is why instead of concealing from me as he ought to have that he and Kendra Rosenberg had been seeing each other, he’d simply said, “Oy.”
I’d seen a therapist, years ago with my “serious boyfriend” Jonathon when our relationship was in a shambles. The therapist was a middle-aged woman with red hair and glasses who sat in a leather chair and didn’t seem to notice (or mind) that her skirt hiked up when she was sitting down, revealing the tops of her stockings and a slight bulge where the nylon hit her upper thigh. She was a little bit intense, peering at us all the time from behind her glasses as if we were specimens under a microscope. At a certain point, she pulled out a piece of paper and drew two circles on it. “Imagine your life is a pie and his life is a pie,” she said, looking at us both intently. “And each of your pies has a small slice that’s damaged. Those two slices have connected. And that’s all that’s connected. And the two of you don’t have a chance.” A few weeks later, I’d met Sasha. But the pie analogy still resonated. If Sasha and Kendra Rosenberg had consulted me before they’d become involved, I would have told them about the pies.
Kendra Rosenberg was 5’1”, wore four-inch wedge high heels, and let her hair run wild and curly around her face, which had the effect of making her look like Minnie Mouse. She had two daughters, Deirdre and Diana, who were a year apart. They were overdeveloped for their age and towered above most of the other kids in the second and third grades. They weren’t twins but (except for the fact that Diana was always happy and Deirdre was always sullen), it was almost impossible to tell them apart.
Kendra Rosenberg was going through a difficult divorce. Having said that, it was difficult to feel sorry for her, expecially since she’d just rammed her car into mine. Twice. And then I discovered that it was going to cost eight hundred dollars to replace the bumper on the Mercedes. I was too frightened to confront Kendra, who was spreading the rumor that, “In her haste to get out of the carpool lane, you know how weird she is, sometimes she even forgets to pick him up . . .,” I had backed up and slammed into Kendra’s Range Rover and driven away without even apologizing! The prospect of bringing my son in as a witness wasn’t appealing and I was just going to have to let the whole thing slide. I thought about asking Sasha to pay for it, but since he was already behind on his child support payments, which were only four months old, I didn’t think I had a prayer.
Things were quiet for a while until Sasha showed up with the redhead at soccer practice. I sat two rows behind him and watched as his hand occasionally made its way to her back in a gesture that was a little more than friendly. I considered storming down there but then I would be throwing a fit at soccer practice and I could hear the rumors already—“You know how weird she is, you won’t believe what she did now! She threw a fit at soccer practice!”
“Who’s the redhead?” I whispered to Tory Feldman, who was sitting next to me on the bench.
“You know who she is.”
“No, I don’t, or I wouldn’t be asking.”
“That’s Stephanie Delaney, Cassie’s mom. You know Cassie. She went to Zuma Beach Camp with Ethan last summer. Short blond hair, bangs.”
“Oh, right. She’s sort of quiet. And where’s her husband?”
“I don’t know. As long as I’ve known Stephanie, there’s never been a Mr. Delaney. I think they split up when Cassie was a baby. Stephanie’s a little overprotective. Cassie’s an only child, so Stephanie’s very hands-on and she goes to every soccer practice.”
I couldn’t tell if this was a backhanded dig since this was the first soccer practice I’d attended. But, as I thought about it, I might not be going to a lot more of them as this was a little more “up close and personal” than I thought it needed to be. I was the one who had asked for the separation but still . . .
A few weeks later, I got a call from Sam Maddox. I liked Sam Maddox. Sam was 5’10” and took hikes in the early morning in mountain boots in remote canyons and told stories about waterfalls she’d discovered and close encounters with mountain lions. She had a son, who was also named Sam, who was in Ethan’s class, as well. I always thought it was sort of liberated (kind of reverse name-ism) that Sam had named her son after herself. Sam was a photographer who worked some of the time. She did fashion shoots and occasionally traveled to exotic places for National Geographic. And I realized I had more in common with Sam than with some of the other mothers i
n Ethan’s class because of that common working thing, which sort of kept the children in perspective.
“Hi,” said Sam. “I have to tell you something because I don’t want it to affect our friendship.”
This is the kind of sentence that can make a person nervous. I waited for her to go on.
“I’m”—she hesitated—“sort of going out with Sasha.” These last four words were said very quickly.
I didn’t say anything.
“I hope that’s okay. We went for a hike,” she said, “and, well . . . well, you probably don’t want to hear the details. I mean, I figured you wouldn’t mind, right?”
I waited a minute, holding the phone to my ear, to see if some version of jealousy would kick in. No, not jealousy. I could feel a little anger bubbling under the surface. But not jealousy. “No, I guess that’s okay. I don’t think I want to have dinner with you guys, but . . .” I took a deep breath. “I guess it’s okay.”
A few weeks later, Sam called again. “I’ve fallen in love . . .
“No, not really, you don’t mean . . .”
“He’s Norwegian.”
“Norwegian?”
“He’s great. I mean he’s really great. He owns a record company. I mean, I think it’s really serious. He sort of swept me off my feet. I feel a little giddy. It was totally unexpected.”
“I thought you were going out with Sasha.”
“Oh, that. That was just a little fling. But Adrien is divine. I would love for you to meet him.”
“I—I would love to meet him, Sam. I’m really happy for you.”
That Friday night, Sasha showed up with a shiner under his right eye.
“What happened to you?”
He didn’t answer.
I could practically see the indentations where someone’s knuckle had connected with his right cheekbone. “Don’t tell me you ran into a door.”