Bed Rest

by Sarah Bilston

  The worst thing, of course, is that she has a point. Many points. I am horrible about Dave, it isn’t my place to criticize Gregory, and my husband is, indeed, rarely at home. And, while we’re at it, my friends are boring, my parties are tiresome, and my career doesn’t interest me. Good God, Alison, I told her, you must come out and see me more often. I can really count on you to cheer me up.

  As for Tom? He and I have been stepping around each other carefully, oh so carefully, ever since he walked through the door last night at 7:50. He deposited a box of Godiva chocolates into my lap with a half-glance at Alison. He thanked her for taking care of me in his absence with gentlemanly good manners. Then he slept the night on the far side of the bed, and to my knowledge, our skin never so much as touched.

  45

  I took PPE at university, but I had always wanted to study literature. Politics, philosophy, and economics were useful subjects, my mother said. They would show any potential employer that I was a Serious Person. With those subjects under your belt, she said, you’ll be able to go anywhere, do anything. Doors will open to you. People will listen to you. But literature—literature! That’s almost as bad as media studies, or home economics, or some other such “soft” discipline. (This was before she discovered personal enlightenment in the downward-facing dog, of course.)

  So I took PPE, but I snuck into a few classes on poetry and fiction and literary theory. I always loved women’s writing—the Brontës, George Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Kate Chopin, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath—so many of them so tragic, their lives, their heroines’ lives, ending in disaster, in the suck of the sea, gasping for air, the world closing over their heads in a moment of numbing release. Sometimes I would lie in my bedroom, face down into the carpet, and imagine that I was drowning in the river that flowed about half a mile from our house. I would close my eyes, let myself become heavy, and feel the darkness take charge. Half of me truly wanted to die, but without the pain, without the choking and the panic. This was my fantasy of death—death without untidiness.

  There was a boy who lived two doors down from us who hanged himself a few months before our father left. The two events are connected in my memory. The landscape of my childhood changed that raw spring; by the time the peonies bloomed along the front fence, I knew I was finally grown up. The boy hanged himself because he was bullied, or at least that was the gossip among the kids at school. His name was Patrick, and he was a slight child, blond, and very pale. He hanged himself in the garden shed, a place where he rarely played, so it was twenty-four hours before his parents even found him. His face was purple, so the neighborhood kids said, and his tongue was black, and the metal wire he’d used to strangle himself almost took off his head. I used to wonder why he hadn’t simply tied a few bricks around his waist and taken a final dip into the river. I suppose it was revenge on the parents who failed to protect him; personally I always thought the effect of an unsullied corpse would be greater. See how perfect I am; see what you failed to appreciate.

  Then my father left, and I wondered for a few weeks if he’d committed suicide as well, and my mother was making the whole thing up. Or perhaps she’d killed him. But the simultaneous disappearance of our next-door neighbor’s wife seemed to put paid to that idea, unless there’d been a complete massacre, and even I didn’t think my mother had it in her to be a serial killer. Anyway, after a pause, he began to call us and send us letters, so it seemed likely that he was really still alive. I was a bit disappointed.

  As a teenager I devoured books about absent and inadequate fathers, and there were plenty to choose from. Fathers who didn’t protect their daughters, fathers who didn’t understand their daughters, fathers who left their daughters. Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through. Fathers who went off to war (Little Women), secreted themselves in the library (Pride and Prejudice), got violent (Wuthering Heights), provided conspicuously inappropriate stepmothers (don’t get me started on fairy tales). Mothers are invariably annoying, but unless they expire in childbirth, they tend to stick around. Fathers are a whole ’nother story.

  When fathers realize their life isn’t going right, they take off.

  46

  Wednesday 7:30 P.M.

  I was watching an elderly couple eating dinner together in the building opposite when Brianna arrived, her face flushed and softened with love fulfilled.

  “We had the most amazing evening yesterday at Le Bernardin, Q, I can’t even tell you,” she told me, her eyes alight at the memory. “Mark’s never been so tender. Halfway through the meal he told me he thinks he wants to spend the rest of his life with me. I know how you feel about Lara—Mark told me you’d had a fight with him about it, but I said I thought you were willing to make peace. You are, aren’t you? Please say you are, Q. You’ve become such a good friend, I want you to be happy for me. I want you to be happy for Mark.”

  I stared at her. It seems that, in her hazy, love-drugged state, she hasn’t quite tumbled to my duplicity. But that hardly matters now. I have to decide if I’m willing to throw over the only real friend I have these days, my only friend in a foreign country, in favor of—what? A woman I don’t even like? Or the principle that you don’t leave a pregnant woman to raise the kids on her own?

  My son kicks and kicks, and we lie together contemplating our future. I can feel his head, the curve of his spine, the rounded shape of his buttocks through my stomach. I long to see him in his own skin. Although given the situation between his parents I suspect he’s better off where he is, snuggled up under mine.

  47

  Thursday Noon

  This morning I went to Dr. Weinberg’s office for another ultrasound. The baby has kicked himself into a breech position.

  I noticed a strange breathlessness when I tried to get out of bed this morning, and a new hardness under my ribs. The baby’s head is now lodged snugly beneath them, a matter of inches from my heart. Dr. Weinberg tells me that, unless he moves again, he’ll be born by cesarean section.

  Tom decided, at the last minute, to come with me, and I thought—perhaps it was only fancy—there was a shade of relief in Dr. Weinberg’s eyes when she saw him walk into the office, swinging his briefcase. When we learned of the baby’s new position he reached out and grasped my hand. I jumped a little at the unexpected pressure, the warm skin touching mine. Surely the baby may shift again, he said to Dr. Weinberg in a low, urgent voice, and then he can be delivered normally? Dr. Weinberg shrugged. “Of course,” she agreed, “although babies surrounded by so little amniotic fluid don’t have much room to maneuver. It’s a miracle he shifted at all,” she added. “He’s a determined one, this baby, I’m sure of it. He’ll keep you guessing.”

  I wondered what Tom was thinking. It is testament to the state of our relationship that I truly do not know.

  Cesarean section—major surgery. I will be cut open, the baby lifted out. Part of me is relieved—I’d begun to wonder how I was going to cope with the physical exertion of labor after weeks and weeks in bed. But part of me is horrified. My sister gave birth normally, with a great deal of determination and a stiff upper lip. She bore her children like a healthy animal, without help or intervention. Just like my mother—“Who are these women ‘too posh to push’?” I remember her saying at Alison’s bedside. “I don’t know what the world’s coming to, in my day we just got on with it, a bit of pain never hurt anyone. Alison knows that, she’s got backbone this one.” Alison, pale and spent, smiled back at her, then over at me, with the smugness of a woman whose mettle had been tested and proven. “It was hard, Mummy, but it was worth it,” she said, virtuously. I may be daughter number two, she telegraphed at me, but I’m gaining ground.

  I’ll lie passive and supine and be handed my child by a surgeon. I can’t seem to do any part of this baby thing right.

  After the appointment I perched on a low iron railing, breathless from the exertion of walking down Dr. Weinberg’s corridor, while Tom hailed me a cab. “Why is this happening to us?” I heard him mu
tter, half under his breath; “I just can’t deal with—ah. Come on, Q,” he called, in a louder voice, as a long yellow taxi pulled up, and he came over, grabbed me under the arm, and pulled me up. “I have to get back to the office, I’ve got meetings all afternoon. I’ll probably be home after you’ve gone to bed, so don’t wait up.” “As if,” I replied coldly, heaving my awkward figure into the backseat without a backward glance. He slammed the door shut without another word and set off along the sidewalk.

  A few moments later we drove past him—long raincoat swinging, head down, staring at the ground. The lights were green, the driver accelerated; I watched my husband’s figure as it receded into the distance, that well-loved gait, the curly hair I used to trim in the mornings, when both of us were naked and giggling, neat at the nape of his neck, longer at the crown, cropped at the sides. And as I craned to look back at him through the corner, the left-most tip-top edge of the window, a tiny shape now almost lost in the crowds, I thought I saw (or was it only in my mind’s eye?) a tall blond woman in a red suit, double-taking, looking back at him over her shoulder. I thought to myself, any woman would think, as I once did, My God, there’s a good-looking man—affluent, desirable, respectable, I wonder if he’s available…

  I sighed and slumped back in the seat. A few moments later I caught myself grinding my teeth, and when the cab lurched to a stop at a red light, I clenched my hands so hard around the safety strap that I opened the cut on my finger again. A drop of blood slipped from the tip and fell onto the sill of the cab’s window. Like something out of a fairy tale—“Snow White” perhaps, or “Sleeping Beauty.” Maybe I’m about to produce a child with skin as white as snow and lips as red as blood. Or maybe I’ll fall into an enchanted sleep, separated from my family and everyone I love, that lasts for a hundred years.

  Oh, I forgot, that bit’s already happened.

  48

  Lottie, an old friend of mine from London, recently sent us a fairy-tale anthology, a huge tome with galloping blue-eyed girls and crouched green trolls on the cover. “Here’s to many happy years of bedtime stories,” she wrote in sprawling blue pen on the flyleaf. I loved fairy tales when I was little. When you’re a child, you’re constantly figuring out the boundary between the real and the unreal. You’re not quite sure whether demons and fairies exist or not, whether a fat man comes down your chimney with a big sack of presents at Christmas, whether your parents are actually witches in disguise. Fairy tales are helpful because they literalize all that stuff. People turn into animals at the drop of a hat. Wolves lurk in dark places with red eyes, slavering tongues, and an epicurean preference for small children. But these last few days I’ve been rereading the tales and wondering about the lessons kids learn at the end. Everything seems to wind up great for the good people—the princes and princesses get married, and the evil beasties meet with a hideous bloodcurdling death. I suppose that’s all kids can cope with, but it’s hardly an accurate representation of life, is it? We teach our children that everything works out for the best if they’re good and well behaved, but all the time we know it’s not true. Bad things happen to us no matter what. Princes and princesses may love each other ever so much—so much it hurts—but it doesn’t mean they’re going to live happily ever after.

  49

  Friday 1 P.M.

  My stomach is scored with purplish stretch marks. I seem to have developed half-a-dozen in the last twenty-four hours. I am torn between horror at the sight of my scarred skin and a feeling of satisfaction and relief; after all, stretch marks are an outward sign of the baby’s development. He must be all right if he’s growing so fast.

  Lara came to visit me this morning, after breakfast. I rolled my eyes when I first heard her call my name outside the door, but then I heard a strange catch in her voice as she said, “Q, is it okay if I come in?”

  One glance at her face was all I needed to confirm the dawning suspicion; it was immediately obvious that she had found out about Mark’s affair. New lines were sharply etched around her mouth.

  “I’m in trouble, Q,” she said to me as she hovered uncertainly in the middle of the sitting room. “I don’t know what to do.”

  Sit down, I told her, and she subsided into our leather armchair without taking off her long belted couture coat. She sat, huddled, with her hands deep in her pockets, staring at the floor.

  Lara is an irritating and self-obsessed woman, but I couldn’t help feeling for her. She looked terrible. Her hair is usually gathered up into a high, jaunty ponytail; today it was lank and unwashed, and three-quarters of it had escaped its silver clip and hung limply around her face. Her skin had that slack, used look that women get when they haven’t slept properly and are no longer in their teens. Her fingernails were bitten, her tan stockings loose and wrinkled about the knees. She looked as if someone had started to disassemble her.

  I took all of this in while she sat, silent, a ghastly contrast to the last time I saw her. After a few moments of silence she swallowed hard, then said into the kilim, “Mark told me last night he’s leaving me for another woman.”

  I debated my response, but suddenly it struck me that she didn’t give a damn what I said or didn’t say. She was too wrapped up in her pain.

  She passed her hands wearily over her eyes. “Apparently he’s been having an affair for the best part of a year, and now he—wants to start over, with this new girl. I—oh God, you must be wondering why I’m here telling you this. But I was sort of hoping you, or Tom, might be able to talk to him, maybe persuade him not to leave me…?” The question mark hovered in the air between us.

  Oh good God, I thought.

  I don’t have any influence on Mark, I told her at last, but I will talk to him, if you like. And I can ask Tom to talk to him too, only—only I don’t know if he will, I finished lamely. She nodded helplessly. “I don’t expect it to work, but I have to try everything,” she said. “Everything. He told me he was spending last night at a hotel,” she added, with a bitter laugh. “But I’m sure he was with her,” she finished, as if strangely forced into the humiliating confession, into opening the wound and exposing it to my gaze. “The kids asked me what was happening, I said he was on a business trip. I don’t know how I’m going to tell them he’s not coming home.” Her voice broke into a hundred jagged shards.

  I sat and watched her cry. There was nothing else I could do.

  Finally, she gave a sort of choking gasp and stood up, wiping her nose hurriedly on her cuff. “I’m sorry about this, Q. The last thing you need, I’m sure,” she said, a sickly smile on her lips. “You’re a good friend. We girls stick together, don’t we?”

  I smiled falsely back at her, feeling terrible. Of course I didn’t tell her I was already best friends with her husband’s mistress. Or that I was inadvertently the means of reuniting her husband with his lover. How could I?

  5 P.M.

  I was brooding over Lara’s visit when Mummy called in high excitement, to say she’s bought her plane ticket (“I used the Internet, dear. It’s rather amazing. You can buy all sorts of things. And it’s much cheaper than Johnson’s on the high street, did you know?”). She has also bought herself a new wardrobe (she either thinks we don’t have clothes in America or believes we require a certain level of sartorial elegance from our visitors, I’m not sure which). And she has purchased an extraordinary array of guidebooks and swears she wants to “do the sights” (“I’ve written down where I want to go, where is it, oh here it is, in this little folder with color-coded sections, it’s under ‘blue,’ now listen dear and tell me if you think I’ve covered everything, empirestatebuildingstatenislandferryellisislandgrandcentralcentralparkchryslerbuildingtheworldtradecentersitemomawhitneythemetropolitanmuseumofartnewyorkpubliclibrarytimessquaresohowestvillageupperwestsideharlemqueensbrooklynthebronx…”).

  “And perhaps, dear,” she continued, excitedly, “once you’re up and about a bit, we can go farther afield.” She paused. “I’ve always wanted to see Maine. Can we go to Main
e, do you think, dear?”

  I gulped. I didn’t want to throw cold water on this unexpected enthusiasm, but—Maine? “It’s quite far, Mummy,” I said, faintly. “It would take us six or seven hours to get there, and I’m not sure what the baby will think of the drive…”

  “As much as that, you think?” she said, sounding discouraged, and then, with returning confidence, “No, I don’t think you can be right, dear, I think it’s a good deal closer than that.”

  “No, Mummy, really—”

  “I’m quite sure it’s closer,” she said firmly, with the air of one who would simply move it closer if worst came to worst. “Two hours should do it. Let’s pencil in Maine, anyway, and if we have a spare day we’ll tootle up the coast and have lunch, there’s a jolly good place listed in my guidebook…”

  So I can only assume she’s looking forward to her visit, although her anxieties have not completely disappeared. She told me she’s bought a pair of compression stockings to guard against thrombosis of the leg on the flight, and a mask in case the person sitting next to her appears to have the flu (“Well, dear, it might not be English flu!” she said, in vaguely outraged tones. “It might be the one those poor people in China have, and there’s also a bird one isn’t there, really you can’t be too careful these days…”). She also has a money belt for her “valuables” (the mind veritably boggles, because her wedding ring is Mexican silver and her watch is a battered Timex with a frayed cloth band) and finally (this is my favorite) a pepper spray to fend off attackers. “It’s also a foghorn, and a torch,” she told me seriously, “and a radio. Really, it’s very versatile.”