Bed Rest

by Sarah Bilston

  Then I had to listen for twenty minutes while Alison drivelled on about how you have to pay attention to your body’s signals, how the pregnant woman’s body is a delicate blooming flower, and how she and my mother were saying only last week that I’d come to grief unless I cut back my hours. She says she lay awake last night worrying about me and the baby. I think she hasn’t had this much fun in ages.

  Alison’s had this “thing” about me for years, this second sibling thing. When we were children she had to do whatever I did, only better. She pretty much kept up until we got to university, but then she finally realized there were things she could do that I couldn’t—acting, being cool, dating luscious men with handles to their name—and she became a lot happier. And a lot more impossible.

  I remember the sick, miserable expression on her face the day I got my GCSE results at sixteen—all As. She worked like an absolute demon the next year to prepare for her own exams; in fact, she gave herself carpal tunnel syndrome and spent six months in physical therapy. And I remember the spark of hope, perhaps even of triumph, in her eyes the day I found out I failed to get the expected A in my physics A-level. The funny thing was, she was better at physics than I, but she got a B herself the next year. I don’t know whether she lost her motivation, or if—and this is what Tom thinks—she couldn’t actually deal with the idea of beating me. I mean, her whole life had been spent trying to one-up me, then the opportunity presented itself, and she bottled out.

  Anyway, like me she got into Oxford at the last minute, like me she read PPE—politics, philosophy, economics—but unlike me she checked out in her second year and took the starring role in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner instead. She took to wearing black jeans, black turtlenecks, and secondhand suede jackets from Camden Market. She dyed her hair blond and scrunched it up into these devastating little glossy rolls, secured at the nape of her neck with a lacquered chopstick. And she dated a long line of devilishly handsome actors (who also wore black jeans and black turtlenecks, and who affected just-rolled-out-of-bed hairdos). She became a social “hit” in a way I never was. I spent my years at university trailing solo up and down the Woodstock Road with half-a-hundredweight of books under my arm, while she acted nightly to great acclaim, grades dropping through the floor, but she didn’t give a damn. We’d meet for sandwich lunches in the Covered Market, and she’d show up with a packet of Camels lodged in her hipster pockets (this was before she decided her body was a blooming flower, you understand) and inform me I had no idea how to live. I don’t mind admitting, I almost lost my head—I was so used to trying to stay one step ahead of her that I didn’t know what to do with myself when she opted out of the system and settled for a Third class degree. I tried attending a few of her parties—usually held in dark smoky basements among piles of half-painted scenery—but if there’s one thing guaranteed to humiliate, it’s being the egghead older sibling of a talented nubile sexpot. I decided to leave her to it and went back to my books.

  While I was doing my law conversion course in London, she got together with Greg and had yet another change of heart. Acting was all very well, she told me, but it’s a draining profession, hardly consistent with serious relationships. She’d met Greg while rehearsing Caligula; he was one of the tousled actors with a suspiciously implausible cockney accent. Sure enough, it turned out the closest he’d ever got to the East End was Liverpool Street Station, en route to the family stately home in North Norfolk. The Honorable Gregory Farquhar had no intention of spending his life with a bunch of poverty-stricken actors, and as soon as he graduated (barely) from Oxford, he hotfooted it to the city, where he now earns pots of money working for one of daddy’s chums. Greg, let’s face it, was something of a catch, and Alison knew it. They were married at twenty-two (wedding covered briefly in the pages of Hello!), and Alison quit acting to work on her sculpture. Translation: Alison became a baby machine. She’s produced two so far, and she’s itching to get started on number three.

  So yes, she does have more experience in the baby-making department than I do, and she’ll never let me forget it. Ever since Geoffrey’s appearance three years ago, she’s been extolling the joys of motherhood (the last time she came out to see me she saw my Pills on the bedside table and shook her head so dolefully that you’d have thought they were class-A drugs). “Motherhood is such a bond between women, Q,” she told me with that dreadful yogic light in her eye. (She wears Gaultier these days and has a three-quarters-of-a-million-pound pad in Pimlico, and her very own spiritual counselor to help her find enlightenment in the midst of it all.) “It would be so wonderful to be able to share my experiences of maternity with you! And I do want our children to be in the same age-range, I want them to view each other as close friends, not just relatives—don’t you, Q?” Truth is, Geoffrey and Serena are the kind of children I hope my kids run screaming from. Greg likes to see his son and heir in sailor suits, and Serena spends most days in a pink tutu telling anyone who’ll listen that she wants to be a “pwincess” when she grows up. I really hope we have a kick-ass daughter at some point who’ll take Serena behind a bush, and—

  Well anyway, the idea of Alison’s doing “what I did” when she was pregnant with Geoffrey is laughable; since she’s been married to Greg she’s barely done a serious day’s work. She has her very own studio (bought by hubbie, of course), and from what I can tell, she wanders in three days a week for a few hours and comes out with a pot with no bottom, or something equally ridiculous. She gets to think she’s a serious artiste because Greg’s cousin is an art dealer, who knows a guy, who knows another guy, who owns some art space in south London, so every three years or so I get a chic little white card inviting me to an exhibition of Alison Farquhar’s work, puffed up by some obsequious chump from the Evening Standard (also a friend of hubbie’s, no doubt). But of course I can’t say any of this when Alison blathers on about understanding the pressures of work, can I—!

  4

  Thursday 10:30 A.M.

  Rereading yesterday’s diary entry, it strikes me I am not (as the therapist I briefly visited last year might remark) altogether “resolved” about Alison. I must think more about this. “Be effortlessly superior to younger sisters” is an important item on the Modern Woman’s List of Things to Do Before Hitting Thirty.

  I was still fairly wound up when Tom got home at ten, not to mention consumed with the pregnant woman’s desperate, slavering need for food. He’d been “on the verge” of leaving the office since six, and by the time he actually appeared I was seething with hunger, anger, and frustration. Five minutes after he walked through the door I was throwing the sofa cushions, screaming and crying because he hadn’t picked up takeout on the way home and now I was going to have to wait another half hour before my supper arrived.

  In the midst of all the yelling and throwing and general carrying-on I caught sight of the expression on Tom’s face. Thirty-six hours ago he had a moderately normal woman for a wife—true, she has an accent that makes half of New York swoon and the other half think of Cruella De Vil, not to mention a belly that (as I might have mentioned) causes dogs to back away in fright. But apart from that, she was pretty normal. Now, in the space of a day, she’s turned into a whirling dervishing Tasmanian devil. My husband pulled at his curly black hair in a rather desperate way as he watched his caged wife froth and fume.

  I stopped crying when he suddenly sank to his knees by the sofa and muttered something about “conserving fluid.” Almost in spite of myself, I reached out for the nape of his neck and pushed my hand through his fine dark hair. Then, after a bit more hiccupping and moaning (just to get my point across), I picked up the phone book from the bottom shelf of the side table, chucked it in his direction, and told him to find me some food, and fast. After all, it was ten o’clock.

  Now it’s Bed Rest Day Two, and Tom and I have instituted some changes to our routine:

  He’ll come home within half an hour of when he says he’s coming home so I’m not stuck in a twilight
limbo.

  I’ll order the food in the evening for him to pick up from a restaurant of my choice.

  He will make/buy me a sandwich I actually want to eat for lunch and leave it in a cooler by the sofa, and he’ll also leave a bowl of fruit and some nuts for snacking. (I was tempted to add, and a packet of chocolate chip cookies, but I’ll be rolling to the hospital in fourteen weeks if I’m not careful.)

  He will try to understand what it’s like to be stuck at home all day, and I’ll try to remember that he’s worried, too (blah blah blah).

  I Will Not Let Alison Get to Me.

  This all seems pretty reasonable. My mozzarella and artichoke pesto sandwich is on the side table—well, what’s left of it, I ate half of it at eight-thirty this morning—and I’ve already decided on the menu for this evening. This city is bristling with fabulous restaurants, and I have three months to work my way through them. Armed with my trusty Zagat and a few back issues of the New York Times food section I’ll have the next dozen-or-so suppers mapped out in no time.

  4 P.M.

  Brianna has been here again, which was a good thing, because the mozzarella sandwich was finished by eleven. I was starting to freak, actually, about how I was going to make two kiwi fruit and a packet of dry roasted peanuts last for nine hours. Then Bri shows up with four slices of thin-crust pizza from La Margherita round the corner. After I’d consumed three of them she took the hint and rustled up a ham and cheese omelette in the kitchen. And she brought me some chocolate chip cookies, for which I thanked her abjectly. I ate one immediately, and I’m saving the other to eat while watching Ricki this afternoon.

  In return for her generosity I had to listen to yet more tedious details about her love life. As my mother would say, she’s not a high-wattage bulb. She’s been having an affair with a married man for the last year or so and seems bamboozled by lines like “I have to stay for the sake of the children” and “I’d marry you tomorrow, but my wife’s on antidepressants.” I thought they stopped making women like that in the 1950s.

  If you ask me she’s the kind of girl men have affairs with but never marry. She’s got fabulous cleavage and long slender legs, and she’s pretty enough; she has long straight dark hair and a smattering of unexpected freckles across her nose. Her mother is from an old Italian family that apparently once owned several snug villas and a fair-size olive grove in the hills above Florence, then lost it all in the years after the Second World War. Her father’s family were impoverished Irish immigrants who made good as shipbuilders on their arrival in the New World. But despite (or perhaps because of) the lineage she has a sort of simple feyness, an innocent “come-take-advantage-of-me” air that I can imagine some men find irresistible. When I suggested that married people have a nasty habit of staying married her dark eyes widened ever so slightly. “He wants to leave his wife,” she assured me, earnestly. “He just has to find the right time, you know?” She swooshed her curtain of hair over her shoulder with a delicate flick of the wrist.

  After Bri left, I began surfing the Web for information on my condition—it has a nice long name, oligohydramnios—and I’ve ordered subscriptions to various magazines, a mix of the worthy (The Economist, Time) and the not-so-worthy (Vogue, Harper’s, Glamour, and, on a whim, something called Working Mother. After clicking the subscribe button I had a panic about whether I was ever going to be a working mother, but then I have to live positively.)

  6:15 P.M.

  Why do people disturb me halfway through Ricki? Just as I’m settling down to enjoy “I Was a ’Ho But Now I’m a Hottie” the phone rings or the doorbell goes, and that’s the end of that.

  Today it was Fay from work. She’s brusque and short, with glossy cropped brown hair, friendly enough, but always deathly preoccupied by work. Frankly, I was amazed to see her here. I think Brianna must have said something, because she showed up with a bag of cookies—not, I’m afraid to say, a bag of chocolate chip cookies, but a bag of raisin oatmeal cookies. I do not like raisin oatmeal cookies. What I particularly hate about raisin oatmeal cookies is that they look like chocolate chip cookies from a distance. I get my hopes up. And then they are dashed.

  So I was grumpy as soon as she arrived, and I got a whole lot grumpier when she off-loaded some dreadfully earnest hardcover book on me. “I’ve been meaning to read this fucking thing for ages,” she said brightly, “but I never get the goddamn time. So now you have the time, you can read it for me and tell me all about it. Hahahahaha!”

  Not funny. Not funny at all. I have plenty of earnest books on my own bookshelf. What makes her think I want to read her earnest book for her? I have nowhere to go, nothing else to do, and the woman wants to turn my life into a living hell?

  I didn’t say this, of course. I said, how lovely, I’ll be really interested to read about one woman’s solo trek through the Andes in the face of a diagnosis of terminal cancer. Oh, and she has a prosthetic limb as well. Marvelous. Can’t wait to get started.

  After that, Fay talked work for about an hour—she doesn’t have anything else to talk about because, as far as I can tell, she doesn’t do anything else. She broke up with her long-term girlfriend two years ago and says she hasn’t dated since. She’s already been made a partner, but she’s at the office even longer hours than I am. She’s gone back there now and probably won’t leave ’til after midnight. What a horrible, lonely, miserable life.

  5

  Friday Noon

  Day three of bed rest. I woke up this morning and thought, This may go on for another ninety days. And I burst into tears.

  But I pulled myself together by the time Tom left for work, to his evident relief (“I can’t go to the office and leave you like this!”), and I’ve just spent a vigorous hour plucking my eyebrows into submission. I have also:

  waxed my belly (the hairs have taken to growing thick and dark on my navel, and if I’m going to be inspected every five minutes for the next thirteen and a half weeks I might as well be looking my best);

  taken a nap (woke up to find I’d drooled all over our red chenille throw cushion—why do pregnant women drool so much? Is it so they’ll be better prepared for their babies’ slobber?);

  watched an old lady in the opposite building clean her floors (all the ones I could see, anyway);

  cracked and called my mother.

  The last, I’ll admit, was a mistake. It’s one thing to call my mother to impart information (Alison’s flight’s arriving at 7:10, I’m sending you an article from The New Yorker, I have low amniotic fluid and our baby may be delivered prematurely). It’s another thing entirely to call for comfort or support.

  So the conversation went something like this:

  ME: Hi, Mum, how’re you doing? I’m going a little crazy here, stuck on my left side day after day! Thought I’d call for some cheering up.

  HER: Well, I don’t want to say it’s your own fault…. Have you tried ylang-ylang?

  ME: My own fault? How is this my fault?

  HER: I don’t want to say this wouldn’t have happened if you lived in England…

  ME: What do you mean? How has this got anything to do with where I live? This has nothing to do with where I live!

  HER: I said I didn’t want to tell you it had something to do with moving to America—

  ME: You think this is all about my hours, don’t you? Here we go again! You think I’d be working less hard in London, and that all my problems are caused by the crazy American work ethic. You don’t actually know anything about lawyers’ hours in London, or about the American work ethic, but you still think you—

  HER: Actually I do know something about this, madam! Jane Cooper’s daughter works five days a week and is home in time to pick up her kids from school….

  ME: Jane Cooper’s daughter is a bloody paralegal in Saffron Walden, the two are hardly comparable—

  HER: There’s no need to swear, dear; you called me, remember, and I don’t have to listen to your rudeness….

  The conversation ended
some forty minutes later, after I had (a) conceded that I was probably working too hard and (b) agreed to try ylang-ylang on my pillow at night. This inspired a half-hour meltdown on my part after I put down the phone; why do I, a moderately successful, fairly self-confident lawyer, routinely lose these kinds of battles with my mother? Why do I find myself red-faced and tearful when she tells me I’ve done something wrong? Why does it matter to me that she thinks I’ve done something wrong? I long to be the kind of person who can laugh lightly, with an air of indulgence, at her mother’s foibles. I long to be the kind of person who can check the box that says “have superbly adult relationship with mother” on the Modern Woman’s List of Things to Do Before Hitting Thirty. But I am not this person.

  Anyway, the various hair-pulling activities gave me a constructive outlet for my venom, and it’s about time for Brianna to show up with some lunchtime bit of deliciousness.

  2 P.M.

  No Brianna. But that’s okay, Tom left a mound of sandwiches made with outrageously expensive cheese from Zabar’s (he made a guilt-inspired shopping dash on his way home from work yesterday afternoon to buy me my favorite English cheese, crumbly white Cheshire—“Here you are, Q, don’t say I never get you anything good, by the way I might have to work late tomorrow…”). And I still have those damn raisin oatmeal cookies that Fay brought. If I pick out all the raisins (nasty wrinkly things) they’ll do as my treat for this afternoon.

  6

  Monday 10 A.M.

  Why is no one coming to see me? I’ve had at least a dozen phone calls from people at the office either explaining why they can’t come, or offering vague promises of visits in the future (when the kids have gotten over their colds, when the trial finishes, when they get back from the Maldives). You’d think I lived in upstate New York, not in the middle of the city. How hard is it to hop on the subway? True, Lara and Mark dropped in for lunch on Sunday, but that’s a delight I’d be happy to pass up. I’m not a fan of either of them: Mark was in law school with Tom, but he’s become absolutely terrifying since he became an assistant U.S. attorney and started pursuing lowly ganja dealers; Lara is an insanely toned gym instructor who seems to have given birth to their two children through her nose for all the effect it’s had on her figure. She looks at my flabby floppy belly with barely disguised distaste. They’re also the worst guests in the hemisphere. Okay, so they brought takeout, but would it have hurt them to help Tom tidy up a bit afterward? This place is a sty! And they didn’t bring me any treats, just a damn bottle of chardonnay, which I can’t drink, for obvious reasons. Not a slice of cake or cookie in sight.