A Bump in the Road

by Maureen Lipinski

  Gwen quickly looked at Alex, whose mouth hung open as he looked from me, the crazy pregnant lady on a tirade, to his Gwen, his girlfriend who did indeed have butt sex with a townie during school.

  “You bitch. I told you that in confidence,” Gwen said, her face turning purple.

  “Oh, yeah? Well, don’t worry. Everybody already knew. The townie told everybody. People used to call you Butt Sex Gwen behind your back.”

  Gwen looked at Jake, who nodded slightly. Ha-ha! I love Jake. He stood up and handed me my purse before dragging me out by my arm. Gwen didn’t say anything, she just stared at me and wanted to rip my lungs out. I immediately burst into tears when I got outside. I sobbed, hiccupped, and snotted the whole way home until we stopped at McDonald’s and got a McFlurry.

  Of course, I’m devastated it happened. But I’m also relieved. Gwen was a good friend in college, but over the past few years she’s made me feel like a loser every time we hung out. I don’t want someone who will visit me in the hospital and tell me my child looks like Eddie Munster or something.

  I read in one of those pregnancy books I might start to experience some rifts in friendships during my pregnancy. Apparently, it is true.

  It is also true that McFlurrys make almost anything better.

  Thursday, August 9

  I still feel like crap about dinner with Gwen and Alex. Jake said I should just let it go, that we’ve grown apart from them anyway, and they deserved everything I said. It’s hard though; growing apart from any friend is difficult.

  As much as I want to analyze the situation and replay it in my mind, I managed to focus on work today. I didn’t really have a choice, since today was Rachael Flynn’s wedding dress fitting at a snotty wedding dress boutique in the city where the dresses start in the ballpark of five grand.

  I arrived right on time at two o’clock, despite having a serious incident involving my linen pants and Mule Face’s cup of scalding hot coffee, to which she shrugged and smiled sweetly as she went back to boring everyone with her presentation of ring-bearer pillows. Anyway, I still arrived on time; burn-victim scar tissue, gestating alien child, and all. A lot of good it did me, as I waited for forty-five minutes before anyone showed up. Forty-five excruciating minutes while salesgirls pointedly stared at my still-warm coffee stain and snickered about the scuffs on my shoes. It didn’t help I’d been fighting an escalating case of gas since I arrived. So, I sat and waited and texted Julie until Rachael and Irene flounced in, looking impeccable, well-rested, calm, and not coffee-stained.

  “Hi! You’re here!” I said brilliantly when I saw them.

  Irene brushed back a lock of silvery-gray hair. “Oh, yes, dear.” Long inappropriate pause. “We are.”

  One of the snotty salesgirls led Irene and Rachael into a room and soon Rachael emerged in a stunning strapless ivory ball gown, adorned with delicate gold beading on the bodice. She twirled, swishing the heavy fabric around like a peacock tail. She stepped up on the pedestal and admired herself while Irene furrowed her brow and tapped a perfectly manicured nail against her cheek.

  Rachael looked stunning, but honestly, I was just trying to catch a glimpse of the price tag on the sample gown in the window. The ass-wad salesgirl ooohhhed and ahhhhed while kneeling down in front of Rachael and fluffing her skirt.

  “Mother, what do you think?” Rachael asked.

  “It’s stunning, dear.” Pause. “Quite lovely.” Even longer pause. “It needs to be taken in here.” She pinched at Rachael’s waist.

  “It fits perfectly,” Rachael responded.

  “I realize that, but the dress . . . and the waist . . . need to come in.”

  “That’s why I have Paolo,” Rachael said. I assumed Paolo was her trainer? Life coach? Plastic surgeon? Cocaine dealer?

  “Remember . . . these pictures . . . are forever.” Irene turned to me. “Clare, what . . .” Is your favorite sex position? Model is your dildo? Is the population of Rwanda? “. . . do you think?”

  I remembered I was supposed to be bestowing the bride-to-be with compliments and not texting Julie about my strange gas pains.

  “Gorgeous. Simply fabulous,” I said, which seemed to be the only input required, as Irene went back to analyzing Rachael’s body fat. I watched the salesgirl reapply her lip gloss and I felt the gas pain again. It was like my stomach was having a spasm or something. I rubbed my stomach again and shifted in my chair, hoping my stomach didn’t make some weird loud embarrassing noise and cause Irene Flynn to pass out from shock.

  It happened again. Please, Crouton, could you talk to my stomach in there and ask it—Wait a fucking second.

  I grabbed my day planner and checked what week I am—eighteen weeks.

  Between the eighteenth week and the twentieth week you should start to feel your baby move flashed into my brain from one of those pregnancy books.

  Holy crap—Crouton? Not gas? Just then, Crouton kicked out an alien leg and I felt it again.

  “Holy shit!” I muttered to myself. Yes, I actually said the S word in Bella Bridal.

  The salesgirl jumped and Irene and Rachael stared at me. I think I mumbled something about Tourette’s syndrome while turning beet red. I immediately went home and pulled out my pregnancy textbooks. After reading a few, it does seem what I thought was flatulence is actually Crouton moving around. Hooray! I don’t have gas! Hooray! Crouton is athletic!

  It’s very strange to realize he/she has been moving around this whole time but was just too little for me to feel it. Which leads me to wonder what would happen if I were obese. Like five hundred pounds, can’t get out of bed, have to be transported to a hospital in an ambulance after a crane rips out the side of my house and I have to be removed by a forklift? Would I never feel Crouton? Would I have felt Crouton sooner if I didn’t have five thousand Nacho Bell Grandes this past year? Or did the Nacho Bell Grandes make Crouton big and fat enough for me to actually feel the kicks? These are the things I actually want to know, not how much the placenta weighs.

  Saturday, August 11

  Jake was so excited when I came home and told him I felt Crouton moving. He immediately placed his hand on my stomach to see if he could feel him, too. I tried to explain to him it would be a while before he could feel the baby, too, and he looked really depressed so I said a very, very stupid thing in an effort to cheer him up.

  I said, “We can go to IKEA on Saturday.”

  I love IKEA just as much as the next person. In fact, I would totally have sex with the Swedish guy who invented it. Afterward, I would thank him profusely for inventing extremely affordable furniture made out of particleboard coated with plastic paint. Then I would ask him if it would be possible to construct it so it could withstand more than five pounds of weight. However, going to IKEA on a Saturday is dumber than a pregnant lady buying thong underwear.

  We are foolish, stupid humans who deserved everything we got today.

  Even though we knew it would be a mistake we rationalized it by saying we knew exactly what we wanted—an entertainment center for our bedroom—and could pop in and out while deftly weaving through the aisles o’ crap. We even sat in the car for a few minutes after we found a parking spot approximately one state over, to meditate a little and chant: “Must not freak out in IKEA. Stay calm. We don’t care how cheap the throw pillows are. We are only here for one thing. We will stay the course.” We approached choosing an entertainment center in true commando fashion. We agreed we would not look at anything but entertainment centers, we would pick whatever one we liked, write it down, and for the love of everything holy, get out.

  We leaped out of the car and joined the throng of people heading toward the enormous blue and yellow warehouse. (Aliens must think IKEA is a place where they give out free crack. Nope. Just furniture made out of tissue paper.) I noted looks of sheer defeat mixed with relief on the faces of people who were leaving; looks that said, the IKEA god just kicked my ass. And I kinda liked it. Man I can’t wait to put this end table together. Wher
e is my car? We went in and finally located the floor with entertainment centers via the aid of a giant map. I grabbed a piece of paper and one of those tiny pencils so I could write down FLOGERSHAM, or whatever the name of the model we chose.

  Why can’t it be called Black Entertainment Center? Too easy? Not fun for the employees because they don’t get to watch customers try to pronounce Swedish words?

  We raced over to the appropriate section, nearly knocking down a family of four speaking in a foreign language and examining bed frames. Jake got there first. He looked at me and said “DUNKERFLO,” while pointing to a unit.

  I nodded my head and scribbled it down on my teeny-tiny paper. We almost made it back to the escalator when a stray bullet grazed my leg. Oooohhhhh, picture frames for forty cents. Gee, maybe I do need fifty three-inch-by-three-inch picture frames, which are too small to hold a real picture without whittling it down to the size of a postage stamp.

  Jake looked over his shoulder and saw his comrade was hit. Like a brave soldier, he raced back to rescue me. He tossed the plastic-and-wood frame back into the bin and towed me to the escalator.

  “But . . . I . . . we . . . might . . . need . . . someday . . . always . . . wanted . . . forty cents!”

  My protests were ignored and we proceeded to the warehouse sector. This is when we got to helplessly wander the aisles, trying to locate DUNKERFLO in the color that we wanted. After thirty minutes, we finally found it and realized it came in three pieces. And box two of three was located in aisle four. So we went back to aisle four and wrestled the last box two of three from the hands of a weak college student. Ha-ha, screw you, blondie!

  Back at home, two hours, eight hundred four-letter words, five holes not lining up, some tears, bruises, and some very creative usage of masking tape later, and it is assembled.

  We had a panic attack as we realized the entire thing might crumble when we placed an actual television in it, so we decided to test it by placing books on it. It seemed to be holding up under the weight—unlike our dresser, whose drawer shelves buckle and bow when we put more than the equivalent of four T-shirts in them.

  We then switched out the books with the television à la Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark. It creaked and moaned a little and we thought the entire thing was going to explode, but it stabilized.

  “Cool. So what do you want—,” I started to ask.

  “Shhhhh!” Jake hissed at me.

  “What?”

  “Clare, we don’t know its limits yet. No sudden movements or noises or loud talking or too much disruption of the air around it until we know for sure how it will react.”

  Good point.

  So, we stood there for another fifteen minutes, staring at our television, waiting for the unit to crumble like broken pie crust. Finally, Jake allowed me to speak and turned on the television. What a coincidence, the Cubs game just started.

  Regardless, we both breathed easier with the knowledge we have a new entertainment center for the next six to twelve months.

  Or at least, we did until my parents stopped by a few hours later.

  They came over to take us out to dinner and nearly made it out the front door without major incident. That is, until my dad walked into our bedroom and patted it. Hard.

  “Looks pretty good!” he said, as he had heard all about the blood, sweat, and promising of Crouton to the devil it took to get it assembled.

  He gave it another firm pat and Jake and I simultaneously winced right before one of the holder things on the shelf broke and the entire shelf came crashing down. Thankfully, it wasn’t the piece holding the television up, but the whole thing swayed, as though warning us to NEVER TOUCH ME AGAIN, BITCHES!!!

  Point made.

  I blame my father’s mistake (not only touching but firmly patting IKEA furniture) on the fact they are in their fifties and out of touch with the furniture trends of the poor.

  The IKEA gods seem appeased now. Thank God, because I really do think I need some picture frames. For Crouton’s supermodel-like baby shots, of course.

  Monday, August 13

  I thought it would be one of those days. One of those days when I’d wake up and lie in bed, stare at the pillow next to my cheek, not wanting to twitch a muscle, not wanting to breathe because I knew once I moved, my day had begun. I thought I’d wake up slowly and allow my brain to wrap around the concept I was about to learn the baby’s gender.

  But no, I didn’t wake up today with a sense of anticipation. My day began by being yanked out of a yacht in the Mediterranean where that cute guy on The Office was rubbing Hawaiian Tropic on my shoulders, by a deafening, panic-stricken sounding “Holy shit!” followed by a minor earthquake as Jake leaped out of bed.

  I bolted straight in the air, cruelly ripped away from my European vacation.

  I glanced at the clock. It was already 8:16 A.M. How the hell did we sleep so long this morning?

  I had an 8:30 doctor’s appointment before work. The big one. Or at least the biggest one so far. The Big One will probably be the one where a human comes out of my body. Apparently, Crouton’s parts are formed enough for us to be able to see and photograph, which sounds gross and almost pedophiliac or something.

  Jake kept insisting we keep it a surprise and find out at the birth, but seeing as how I’m the one who actually has to push this thing out, my vote counts as two. Overruled. I’d like to start calling the baby something other than Crouton. Like an actual name or something.

  Of course, we haven’t picked a name yet, but I wanted to narrow the field by 50 percent.

  Instead of waking up, snuggling closer to Jake, and dreaming about buying teeny-tiny little baby socks, it was as if we were both shot out of a cannon and electrocuted at the same time. No time to shower. We ran around the bathroom, grabbing items out of the medicine cabinet as though we were escaping town before an impending alien invasion.

  After seriously injuring a flock of geese and shaking our fists at a blind elderly woman driving a Cadillac, we made it to Dr. Clarke’s office at 8:42 A.M. Not bad considering my meltdown over Butterscotch vomiting all over the carpet right before we left.

  Ten minutes later, I was lubed up and we were staring at grainy pictures of Crouton. Jake commented how much it looked like a snuff film, which I agreed. I also concurred when he mentioned the extreme size of Crouton’s head. Apparently this is normal, though. I was told all fetuses (feti?) resemble Skeletor from the He-Man cartoon on an ultrasound. I was very relieved to hear this, seeing as how I’m not sure how strangers would react to a baby closely resembling He-Man’s nemesis. I mean, I’m sure it would be cute and all but a date for the prom would probably be out.

  Yet the resemblance was so uncanny, I immediately changed the baby’s name from Crouton to Skeletor.

  The ultrasound technician, a lady named Catalina (like the island and the salad dressing) who was in desperate need of an upper-lip wax, smiled and looked at us. “Do you want to know the sex?”

  I glanced at Jake, and silently asked him. He smiled and shook his head. I paused and looked at the screen, at Skeletor the Klingon Spawn. It felt like the moment before smoking the first cigarette after I “quit,” the moment before doing the shot I knew would probably make me puke, the moment before handing over my credit card for the outfit costing more than my rent.

  So I paused. But no way was I going to leave without finding out what kind of reproductive organs were forming inside of me.

  “YES!” I shouted out. I looked at Jake and he just rolled his eyes and feigned surprise. I knew everything was cool.

  “Well, see the legs there? I see three of them!” Catalina said.

  We both just stared at her.

  “Boy!” she said.

  Nothing.

  “B-O-Y,” she said very slowly, her upper lip whiskers twitching.

  Our cue.

  “Oh my God!” I screamed as Jake began immediately mapping out Skeletor’s—I mean Mr. Skeletor’s—future in the NFL. “I win!”
I joyfully pumped my fist in the air. “Ha-ha! I knew it was a boy!” I pointed at Jake. “I rule!”

  He laughed but couldn’t take his eyes off the ultrasound monitor.

  Yes, it’s true. I have a very small penis growing inside of me. Which is sort of strange.

  1:35 P.M.

  I went back to the office for a few hours until I met Jake for lunch.

  “So, a boy.” I smiled at Jake as we settled into a booth at the tiny diner.

  “No kidding.” He folded his hands in front of him on the table.

  “What do you think?” I studied his face for a reaction.

  “I’d be happy either way. I’m just glad he’s healthy and doing well.”

  “You don’t have to be politically correct with me. It’s OK to say you’re excited he’s a boy.”

  “I’m thrilled he’s a boy, but honestly, I would’ve been thrilled if it were a girl, too.”

  “Oh, whatever. You’re so diplomatic,” I teased him, and rolled my eyes. “So, are you finally getting used to the idea that we’re going to have a baby?”

  “Well, that helps.” He pointed to my stomach. “But, yeah. I think I am. I think I’m even excited. Screw that, I am excited. Some days, completely terrified, but mostly excited.”

  “Me too. Isn’t it weird to think in a few months that will be us?” I gestured to a couple across the diner with a baby in a high chair.

  “Yes. But it’s also cool, you know what I mean?” He smiled at me earnestly.

  “I think I do.” I smiled back at him before I turned my attention to the menu, because damn did Mr. Skeletor want to eat.

  10:00 P.M.

  We never should’ve found out the sex. Our joy lasted a few hours, until we began to call people and tell them the news. Jake, of course, added, “He definitely was a boy, if you know what I mean,” as if he could distinguish between Mr. Skeletor’s arm, neck, or wiener.