Bed Rest

by Sarah Bilston

  But even supposing—or assuming—Tom is still here, I know that I’m going to need my mother’s help. Because, frankly, I have no idea how to look after a baby. I’m convinced that I’m going to break him somehow. The newborns I’ve seen have necks that snap terrifyingly backward whenever you so much as nudge them. And how do you change a nappy? I’ve studied the diagrams in Yes! You’re Having a Baby, but the children in those pictures seem suspiciously cooperative to me. I can’t imagine the kicky creature I have inside me staring peaceably at the ceiling while I mop his bits. And that’s another worry. Should I hold it when I clean him or will that send him into twenty years of psychoanalysis?

  5 P.M.

  Lulu, my therapeutic masseur, tells me that I have a lot of tension in my neck—and my upper back, my lower back, my shoulder blades, my sacrum, my cranium, my glutes, my…after one hour and $200 I feel about—ooh, 1 percent better. A day of continuous massaging (with perhaps some naked sybarites oiling my feet and waving palm fronds in my face) and I might start to unwind.

  58

  Tuesday 10 A.M.

  A phone call from Jeanie this morning, just after breakfast. My mother was out searching for a particular brand of pacifier (“dummy,” as we call them in England, I’m not sure which is worse) when the phone rang. “How’s it going, Q love? Still on talking terms with Mummy dearest?” she asked, cheerfully.

  Just about, I told her. She’s driving me up the wall, but we’re managing.

  Then Jeanie told me about some football match that Dave played over the weekend. Apparently he’s involved in a local youth action program to help troubled kids. The program organizes trips to amusement parks, beaches, and so forth, and it also has its own football league. This weekend saw a particularly successful match between two groups of kids representing twelve burglaries, fifteen narcotics infractions, and three possessions of unauthorized weapons. I listened to her glowing account of the children’s improved manners and raised school grades for about ten minutes, with Alison’s parting words sounding in my ears.

  It was clearly time to speak. I took a deep breath.

  Jeanie, I have to apologize. I may have been a bit hasty, I told her at last (with teeth only slightly gritted). Perhaps I judged Dave too quickly, and I’m sorry.

  There was a long pause.

  Q, I’m worried about you, Jeanie returned, in accents of astonishment. One week alone with our mother and you’ve lost your spirit! Why aren’t you telling me that Dave is a repugnant slimy slug? Why aren’t you enumerating his financial failings? Why aren’t you hectoring me on my appalling track record in the romance department?

  I winced, several times. Mother has nothing to do with it, I told her; we haven’t even talked about you and Dave. But Alison pointed out when she was here that—well, look, anyway, I’m sorry Jeanie, really sorry for—some—of the things I’ve said about Dave. Maybe this summer we can do that cottage thing in Cornwall, y’know? You can help me with the baby, it’d be a nice break.

  I’d love to do that, she replied, still sounding as if she’d been knocked over the head with a large and heavy object. I’d really love it. And Q, when you get to know Dave, you’ll see, he’s not that bad.

  “Not that bad” isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement, but I didn’t say anything. “If you like him, Jeanie, I’m sure he’s a nice guy,” I said untruthfully.

  When my mother came home I told her about my conversation with Jeanie and its outcome. “Oh I’m glad to hear that,” she said vaguely as she struggled to stretch a freshly washed cover over the baby’s “ocean bouncer” chair. “I leapt to some silly conclusions at the beginning, but you know, it turns out that Dave is quite a pleasant young man. He’s very good to his mother, who has advanced Alzheimer’s disease. He goes to see her at least once a week, even though she lives in Yorkshire, which is quite a trek you know. That’s why he has such a problem holding down a job, which is why he keeps running out of money. I lent him a few hundred the other week, and he’s already paid me back eighty pounds by working the night shift at the local supermarket, stacking shelves. Which he didn’t have to do, as I told him, but he said he couldn’t bear being in my debt. I do like to see that attitude in young people, don’t you, dear? Now do you think I have this thing on right?”

  So it seems that Dave is Mother Teresa in disguise, while I seem to be well on my way to earning my Cruella De Vil credentials.

  59

  Wednesday 3 P.M.

  The ultrasound this morning showed another fluid level dip, which is upsetting. But maybe Cherise made a mistake? I don’t think she was concentrating properly today—she had a fight with her mother last night, which I now know all about (I preferred it when she was silent and morose), and the baby’s heart rate sounded good. He also looked wonderful, healthy and content; he was sucking his thumb, would you believe, tiny fingers curled up and around in a tight, balled little fist. So I think I’ll just ignore today’s reading.

  60

  Thursday 6 P.M.

  Today my mother told me the most extraordinary story. She was chatting with one of our neighbors by the mail slots at lunchtime and learned that our building also had black mold!

  The neighbor—I’ve never met her, but she apparently lives on the ground floor—told my mother that mold problems started in her apartment when a pipe burst three years ago. Our landlord paid to clean up the water damage, replacing carpets and so forth, but about a year later, when the wooden window frames began to flake, a construction company discovered greenish black stuff growing deep inside the walls. Randalls was slow to act, so the neighbor (good yuppie that she is) hired an independent assessor who found stachybotrys atra, as well as a few other less dangerous types of mold. The neighbor sent a copy of the findings to Randalls, together with the assessor’s recommendations, which were that Randalls hires a company to effect a thorough and immediate cleanup.

  At this point Randalls dutifully hired a mold removal contractor, and the neighbor reported to my mother that the problem seems to be fixed. In fact, this conversation all came about because the neighbor was defending our landlord; Mummy was grumbling about the size of our apartments and the magnitude of the rents, and the neighbor told her that we do well for Manhattan and that our landlord had an unusually strong sense of professional responsibility.

  But as I listened to my mother’s account it came to me: I bet this was how Randalls first dreamed up the mold story as a way to get rid of its troublesome rent-controlled tenants. It knew that the building opposite had also suffered burst water pipes; it knew the age of the building and its type of construction, and it suspected that the complex would also have mold—which indeed it did. But rather than simply working to fix the problem, as it did in our building, Randalls found a company that was willing to recommend demolition. Our building has only one or two rent-controlled units left, so it nets the owners a nice income. The complex opposite happens to be full of dear old ladies and gentlemen who are still paying $500 a month for apartments that are worth close to five times that amount. Miracle of miracles, when black mold shows up in the apartments opposite, nothing but demolition will do.

  I debated concealing from my mother why her story interested me so much. This whole saga is, after all, grist for her mill, a real-life example of underhanded Manhattan wheelings and dealings. But then I thought, sod it, the woman deserves some praise. Mummy, I told her, when her story was done, this was good detective work. You’ve found out something very interesting indeed.

  Have I dear? she said, brightening: What?

  I took a deep breath and told her the whole yarn about Randalls, Mrs. G, and the elderly immigrants. She listened very attentively. Tsk, tsk, she muttered at the end of my narrative, shaking her head solemnly. Landlords are the same the world over. My friend Mrs. Ruskin’s landlord took two months’ rent out of her bank account—“by accident,” he said—and refused to give one of them back again. The very idea! You’ve got to stand up to these people, you know, Q. Would
you like me to go down to the girl on the ground floor with a concealed tape recorder and get her to repeat the story?

  I blinked at her. My mother the sleuth. If I didn’t know better I’d think she’d been reading too many Raymond Chandler novels. I don’t think that’ll be necessary, I told her, faintly; presumably there are records detailing Randalls’s first encounter with stachybotrys atra. The lawyers at Schuster can look into this. But because of you, they’ll know where to look.

  Now then, dear, don’t hesitate to use me, she said, sounding a bit like a horse who’s been told it can’t clear a particularly appealing gate. Maybe those evil Randalls men will get to the girl downstairs and pay her off! I think I should go down right now and…

  No, really, Mummy, I said firmly; it’s fine. Fay can find someone to research this. But I’m really grateful to you, and my friend Mrs. Gianopoulou will be too.

  My mother positively preened. “Well, I am pleased! If there’s anything else I can do, you only have to ask,” she added, smoothing her hair and smiling broadly. “I’m here to help!”

  She’s now in the kitchen cooking vegetable cobbler, which was one of my favorite meals as a child. The apartment is filled with the fragrance of vegetables, broth, and hearty cheese dumplings. By my side is a modest glass of merlot. “Don’t be silly, dear,” she said, when I protested as she splashed out the wine into a goblet. “I drank a glass a day when I was pregnant with all three of you, doesn’t seem to have done you any harm. And you need a bit of stress relief, Q. You came out of that massage looking as if you’d been prodded with a knife and fork for an hour, not lulled into a state of peaceful serenity. That poor woman was almost in tears when she left. If you won’t do yoga with me, you’ll have to find another means of unwinding.”

  Concerns about my weight seem to have abated. I overheard her telling Tom to get me a cheesecake this morning, “and I know she loves biscuits with chocolate chips in them, do you think you could find such a thing anywhere around here, dear?”

  61

  Friday 11 A.M.

  Lara called early this morning to say that Mark has packed up all his clothes and moved out for good. Mark called half an hour later to give us his new address. He and Brianna have taken an apartment together in the East Village. I could hear Brianna giggling in the background; after a few minutes she grabbed the phone from him (I heard her say “My turn now, Marky!” followed by something that sounded suspiciously like “You’ll pay for that later, my girl” and a lot more giggling). She described her new bedroom to me in great detail (something about a hole in the ceiling and her plans to stencil a pineapple over it, very tedious), then made her excuses: “I have to get up to go to work now, Q, so we’ll talk later—oh Christ, Marky, look at the time, we’re going to be late again—”

  Lara is still in the marital home with two children and a swelling belly. I promised her that as soon as I’m up and about I’ll come to see her. Not that she’s been much of a Florence Nightingale to me, but still—I feel sorry for her.

  My mother overheard my conversation with Lara and asked me what it was all about when I got off the phone; she listened to my account of Mark’s desertion with a darkening face. “Poor, poor lamb,” she said sorrowfully, when I was done. “If you tell me where she lives I’ll go and see her, if you like. I know what it’s like to be left with three children. I’ll cook her and the kids a meal of vegetable cobbler.”

  I stared at her wordlessly for a moment. Who would have thought my mother could be so, well, humane? Lara will be pretty surprised to receive a Tupperware container of stewed vegetables and cheese dumplings—I don’t think she eats anything that doesn’t have the word gourmet in the title—but somehow I think she’ll appreciate the delivery all the same. Vegetable cobbler is the most comforting food I know.

  3 P.M.

  Over lunch my mother brought up the subject of poor Lara again. She was balanced on the very edge of our leather armchair, a plate wobbling on her lap. “Who will sit with the poor woman during birth?” she asked as she picked the onions cautiously out of her pastrami sandwich. “She’ll need someone to support her during labor, you know.”

  I shrugged as I embarked on my second turkey-and-cranberry sub. It was perfectly made, the baguette white and light and flaky, the berries sweet and firm until they popped in the mouth, releasing intense, thickly sweetened juice. “Maybe Mark, I don’t know. Or perhaps she’ll choose some girlfriend to act as a birth partner.”

  My mother looked serious. “You must ask her about this, Q. If she doesn’t have a close friend, I want you to offer to partner her, okay?”

  “Me? Mother, we’re not particularly close,” I explained. “Lara doesn’t want me present when she has her legs in the air and blood spilling everywhere. She’s the kind of woman who runs the taps if she has to use the bathroom when we’re in the living room. She’s not going to want me at her delivery, I promise you.” I slurped my third banana smoothie dry.

  My mother shook her head. “Q, I want you to offer to be with her, seriously. There’s something very frightening about facing labor on your own. When your father walked out on me before you were born—yes, I know I’ve never told you this, but it happened—I was absolutely terrified. Those were the days when there was never any question of asking a friend or a parent to sit with you. I had nightmares about it for weeks; in the end I begged him to take me back, just so I’d have someone beside me to hold my hand. I found him in Clacton-on-Sea with a woman he’d met through the British Legion and told him I’d take him on any terms. Not, I have to tell you, that he was a great deal of use while I was giving birth, but at least I didn’t have to see the sympathy in the nurses’ eyes. I think that would have killed me.”

  I was completely floored. “Dad left you before I was born?” I asked her, astounded.

  My mother half-looked at me, then looked away. “Yes,” she said, embarrassed. “Then he left again just after Alison was born, and then one more time for about a week when Jeanie was six months old. That time you were old enough to understand, so I told you that he was on tour with his band. But I was terrified that he’d left for good; I couldn’t think what I was going to say if he never came home again. Apparently, the woman he’d left with got bored quickly, because he arrived back with his tail between his legs long before you got suspicious. I was terribly relieved.”

  I had the strangest sensation of being on a pitching boat in a strong gale. “Why didn’t I know any of this? Why didn’t you ever tell us?”

  My mother shrugged. “I thought it would make you feel insecure. I wanted to protect you as much as possible, make you feel that home was a safe and happy place. And I wanted you to love your father. That was so important to me, Q. To be honest with you, I needed him. I didn’t want to do it all on my own. I had no illusions about how hard it would be.”

  I looked back over the landscape of my childhood and everything seemed suddenly subtly different. The lighting had changed, darkened. A longer shadow stretched out behind my father. Not that I ever thought he was perfect, but still—

  “Does Alison know? What about Jeanie? And why are you telling me now?” I asked, at last.

  “Your sisters—no, they don’t know,” my mother replied. “And I’m only telling you now because—well, there’s no reason to keep it a secret anymore, is there?” She got up from the armchair, fetched the teapot from the kitchen, and poured herself another strong cup of Yorkshire tea. “There’s plenty more in the pot, dear, if you’d like some—?”

  But I don’t entirely believe her. I don’t think that’s the only reason she told me about my father’s desertions today. I caught her watching me and Tom together this morning, the way we dance around intimacy, the way we avoid each other’s eyes, the tiny nags that catch, like fishhooks, on the skin (“Do you have to bang the door?” “Do you have to scatter crumbs around the floor?”). Is she telling me to repair the breach, to close the gap? What was that she said?—“I needed him. I didn’t want to do it
all on my own. I had no illusions about how hard it would be.”

  The problem is, my husband’s not in Clacton-on-Sea, he’s in a different universe.

  7 P.M.

  Just got back from another trip to Dr. Weinberg’s. She told me to start trying something called “breech tilts,” which are supposed to help persuade the baby to pivot on his own so I can deliver vaginally. (“I don’t think it will work,” Dr. Weinberg said, equably, “but there’s no harm in trying, eh?”) As far as I can tell breech tilts are designed to turn large pregnant women into sources of public hilarity. One version has me on the floor with my ass sticking up in the air. The other involves lying on the floor with my hips up while my husband (“or your mother, for that matter, husbands don’t have to be there”) speaks words to the baby that are designed to encourage him to find his own way out. Come along baby, turn around. Turn to face the world. The opening to the uterus is your entrance to the world. Face the world, baby. Turn around.

  If this works I’ll eat my own placenta.

  Fluid level down again, but hopefully it means nothing. Cherise didn’t seem particularly bothered, and as Dr. Weinberg explained, these readings are only an approximation. Plus if my stretch marks are anything to go by, the baby’s growing at an astounding pace.