by Leah McLaren
“Mer-dith?” Zoe looked up at her.
“Yes?”
“Can we do bobbing for apples?”
And so they bobbed.
After the boiled wieners, veggie patties and McDonald’s rental cooler of “orange drink” were laid to rest, along with great scoops of smushed cake on paper plates, the mothers arrived to collect their broods. They came all at once in a gypsy caravan of Saabs and Subarus, rushing in, accepting glasses of mineral water in lieu of sangria (they were driving), collecting their goody bags and swirling out.
These Yummies of the Backyards, Meredith observed, were of a different order from the downtown soy-latte sippers in her prenatal yoga class. In their fleecy weekend-warrior wear and brutalist haircuts, the uptown Yummies were more weather-beaten, less sexy but far more efficient. Children aged you—that much was evident. But maybe they aged you for the better. Meredith envied their matronly gravitas. These women lacked the starry-eyed wonder of the new Yummies but had developed other skills—such as the ability to break down a baby jogger and pack it into the backseat of an SUV in six and a quarter seconds flat. They hitched their kids on hips and made intense small talk about kitchen renovations, real estate and private versus public education. They pulled washcloths out of thin air, spit and rubbed infant faces with just enough abrasion to buff without eliciting complaint. Smacking their lips to each other’s cheeks and fishing around for car keys in handbags the size of small arms carriers, the uptown Yummies were galvanized by the reality of life. Watching them, Meredith felt light as helium.
When the last guest was gone, Elle walked back into the kitchen, slipped off her apron and collapsed on the floor in a convincing stage faint that Meredith recognized from their seventh-grade production of Gone With the Wind. Starsky speedboated into the kitchen and began slathering his mistress’s face with goober. Zoe snorted at her mother’s performance. Meredith could see it was a game they often played.
Elle opened one eye. “I’m glad that’s over.”
“Me too,” Zoe said, with a stamp of her sequined slipper.
“Thanks a lot, Zoe. Time for bed.”
Elle lifted herself from the floor and scooped up her daughter in one movement.
“But Mummy, where’d he go?”
“Who?”
“You know. The clown.”
Elle looked at Meredith. Zoe was right. The clown had disappeared. Also conspicuously unaccounted for was Mish.
“I doubt he’d leave without his money,” Elle said, not without suspicion.
Then they heard it. A female giggle followed by an unmistakable mouth-to-mouth slurp. It came through the speaker of the pink plastic Fisher-Price baby monitor sitting on the kitchen windowsill.
“Oh God.” Meredith looked at Elle.
“Gross. I mean, for a pregnant woman,” said Elle.
“It’s a long story,” said Meredith.
“Should we interrupt?”
“It’s your house, but...”
“In the baby’s room. You’d think they’d have the decency to go to the bathroom, at least. I did notice she was getting a bit sloshed. I was going to say something, but you never know with Mish. I just got the vibe, you know? And anyway, the next thing I knew she went into this Florence Nightingale routine—dabbing the guy with iodine where he scraped his chest on the picnic table. Anyway, he had his shirt off and she offered to go up and help him wash it in the sink...” Elle looked at the kitchen clock and lowered Zoe to the floor. “That was about forty minutes ago.”
“Where’s your nanny?”
“Night off.” Elle stared at Meredith meaningfully. “What’s up with Mish?”
Meredith opened her eyes wide and grimaced.
Elle left the room with Starsky and her daughter in tow. As usual, she was bent on truth and justice. Meredith shrugged. Whatever the circumstances, the continuity girl never calls “Cut.”
When she returned home that evening, Meredith found a chartreuse envelope in her mailbox. As far as she knew, only one person on the planet regularly used chartreuse writing paper. She poured herself a glass of wine and made a dinner of organic peanut butter spread on a celery stick before opening the letter.
Dear Moo,
It’s time you came for a visit. I may be a wretched old cunt, but I’m still your mother. Everything here is very nice. The forsythia is out and I have a new lover called Jose. He is a Colombian political refugee and poet I met on the jury of the Diaspora Prize—absolutely gorgeous. The drizzle has given him a bad case of psoriasis, which puts the poor boy in a cranky mood much of the time. Luckily I am treating him with the Crème de la Mer you sent me for Christmas. Now don’t be jealous. Enclosed is a one-way ticket. You can get your own way home.
Love, Mums
P.S. No need to worry about ££ as I have arranged a job for you doing whatever it is you do.
Meredith set down her celery stick and dabbed the corners of her mouth with a cloth napkin. Picking up the letter from her lap, she folded it into quarters and placed it back in its envelope. After a moment of silent deliberation she got up from the sofa, crossed the room and tucked the envelope into a slim file in her bottom desk drawer labeled CORRESPONDENCE—THAT WOMAN.
The green voice-mail light was blinking so she picked up her phone and dialed. The phone company fembot informed her she had three new messages. She pressed one and was not surprised to hear the voice of her agent, a warm, fat mother of four named Fran.
“Meredith, it’s me. Happy birthday, honey. Listen, I just got a message from someone in Felsted’s production office at the studio and they sound pretty ticked off. I just wanted to talk to you before I called them back. Could you call me? Thanks.”
Meredith pressed seven to delete, and then one to hear the next message. Fran again. This time more distressed.
“Meredith. Fran here. Your cell seems to be turned off. The production office called again and I told them I’m waiting to hear from you. I know it’s your birthday but let’s get this sorted out.”
Next: the same voice, but cooler and clipped. “Meredith, listen. This is important. Felsted’s people are saying you walked off his set. Is this true? I need to hear from you. It’s your agent speaking.”
Meredith was about to hang up when the fembot announced, “One new message has been added to your mailbox. To listen to your message, press one.” Crunching on her celery stick, Meredith hit one. It was Fran again, but this time frothing with delight.
“Hi, sweetie, it’s me. Sounds like you’re on the other line. Listen, forget about Felsted for now. I just got a call from Osmond Crouch’s people in London. Osmond Crouch! They’re shooting a big feature in England and they want you on the set next week. You’ve got British citizenship, right? That’s what I told them, anyway. Called completely out of the blue—they got my home number somehow. I had Viia and Ashton in the tub at the time—there’s water everywhere! I hope you’re excited, sweetheart. They’re faxing over the contract tomorrow. I hope your passport’s up to date ’cause you’re on your way to jolly old...”
Meredith hung up. Across the room on the granite kitchen island sat the white ceramic coffee mug she had set out to soak that morning. She flicked on the kitchen halogens, lifted the mug and peered inside. Impressively, the coffee sludge, which only a few hours ago had hardened into a charcoal-colored resin at the bottom, had dislodged and redistributed itself throughout the liquid, tinting the remaining soapsuds brown. Meredith emptied the mug, wiped, rinsed, dried and replaced it on the specially designated hanging hooks in the cupboard. She returned to the sofa and resumed rabbiting down her celery sticks. Eating seemed to take forever. It was more work than working.
She did not turn on the television. Instead, she stared at the coffee table in front of her. There was nothing on it but half a glass of red wine, a stack of magazines (Us, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, American Cinematographer) and the plane ticket her mother had sent her. She examined the airline (BA), the class (economy), and finally, the d
ate (Thursday). The day before Osmond Crouch’s people wanted her in London.
Meredith picked up the phone and, even though it was past midnight, dialed her agent’s number.
4
She was often early but never late to her annual Pap appointment. It was a superstitious thing.
“Afternoon, hon,” said Hyacinth, the receptionist, fiddling with the radio dial to find her preferred easy rock station.
Meredith snapped her health card on the counter.
As Whitney Houston’s warbling filled the waiting room, she felt her shoulder blades unlock. For some reason she found it strangely relaxing here. Hyacinth typed her numbers into the computer.
“You’re aware Dr. Stein is on stress leave, so Dr. Veil will be filling in?”
“Is she...okay?”
“Oh, fine. Just needs some time with her boys. And don’t worry—you’ll like Dr. Veil. You’ll be in the hands of an internationally renowned specialist.” Hyacinth winked. “Dr. Veil’s on TV.”
Meredith lowered her bum into the waiting-room chair gingerly, like a schoolteacher afraid of tacks. She failed to take her usual pleasure in the room’s finishings: the raw-silk seat covers, the fake lilies, the tidy stacks of magazines dating back to medieval times (Sharon Stone smiled on the cover of one). She didn’t do her favorite waiting-room experiment, the one where she flipped open a magazine from the top of the pile and one from the bottom to confirm that, even over a five-year span, the advice inside was exactly the same. (“Wash your hair in vinegar to make it soft.” “Drink cranberry juice for bladder infections.” “Place cucumber slices over the eyes to erase dark circles.” “Give your man blow jobs to stop his wandering eye.”) Usually these dribs of common wisdom delighted her, but not today. She was deeply suspicious of change where gynecological practices were concerned.
Dr. Stein had been a figure in her life ever since high school. As a teen, Meredith would take the subway here, bare-kneed and itchy under her kilt, and ask quavery questions about boys and fluids. Once, she came in certain she was dying of syphilis (caught, she reasoned, from a short boy’s groping paw at a school dance), but it turned out only to be her first yeast infection. She had waited in this very room for her first morning-after pill, her first breast exam, her first of many STD tests (the truth was, Meredith had had more STD tests than unprotected sex in her adult life). The only hope was that the new doctor would be as compassionate and rigorous as Dr. Stein.
Hyacinth ushered her into the examination room and told her the doctor would be with her in a moment. Meredith noticed certain details had been altered since she was last here. The broken cuckoo clock had been taken off the wall, replaced by a Nicolas de Staël calendar. The small metal-frame desk was messier than usual, jumbled with pamphlets and script pads. Propped on the corner was a framed snapshot of an almond-eyed toddler peeking over the rim of a giant white teacup. Meredith recognized the setting as the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party ride at Disney World—
“Ever been there?”
A man in a lab coat was leaning in the doorway. He looked too happy and sharply focused to be a doctor. Not in real life, Meredith thought, figuring him for a student. Meredith half-coughed, half-laughed, focused intently on the photograph and wished he would go away. Who wanted to make small talk before a Pap smear?
“My mother believed amusement parks were a religious conspiracy,” she said, gaze cemented on the photo of the child. There was a gap between the little girl’s front teeth. “She took me to nude beaches in Norway instead.”
“Sounds like a racy gal.”
“She is. Completely nuts. Lives in London. England.”
“You don’t sound English.”
“I grew up in Canada. Boarding school was cheaper overseas, not to mention farther away.”
Meredith wished someone would duct-tape her mouth shut. There was a silence, and when she peeked back she noticed the man was smiling and had extended his left hand toward her. What an odd thing—to shake with the left, Meredith thought, applying her palm to his. She wondered if he was allowed to do that. Shake hands. It seemed somehow inappropriate.
“Hello, uh”—he glanced down at the chart—“Meredith. I’m Joe Veil. I’m filling in for Dr. Stein.”
There was an awkward pause.
“Is that all right?” he asked.
Meredith picked at some grit trapped under her right thumbnail. “I wasn’t expecting a man,” she said finally.
“That’s fine,” he said. “I can refer you to someone else. You may have to wait a couple of weeks.”
“I can’t,” Meredith said. “I’m going out of town and I need to do this now. There’s no other time.”
“So do you want to proceed with the appointment then?”
“Not particularly.”
He tossed the chart on the desk and looked at her. “So what are you saying?”
“Whatever.” She glowered. “Let’s get this over with.”
“All right,” he said, closing the door behind him. “I’m both a gynecologist and fertility specialist. I haven’t done much clinic work in recent years, so this is a bit of an anomaly for me too. Now,” he said, sitting down, crossing his legs and checking the chart again, “you’re here for a Pap smear?”
Meredith corrected her posture and smiled as if to say, Ah, of course, you are the handsome stranger who is preparing to scrape my cervix with a Popsicle stick—and I am completely comfortable with that.
He continued to leaf through his papers without looking at her. Meredith noticed his wedding band—white gold, fine, a little loose. She always checked.
“First off, I have the results of your G-test,” he said.
Meredith nodded tightly.
The GnRH analogue test (commonly known as the G-test) was a new procedure that gauged female fecundity by measuring both ovarian function and the state of the ovarian reserve. Meredith had asked Dr. Stein about it after reading a magazine article on the high incidence of perimenopause (prematurely aged eggs) in professional females in their mid-thirties. It was the results of a G-test that had kicked off Mish’s two-year insemination obsession, and Meredith (who was a couple of years younger) was determined not to get stuck with an abdomen of raisins at the age of thirty-nine. She knew it was a pragmatic, preliminary investigation—but what was so romantic about fertility anyway? What, after all, was responsible for the desire to have children other than an involuntary biological twitch? What separated it from hunger or the urge to draw breath? On the other hand, what made it any less important? Why fight it, Meredith thought, when you can do it right instead? And so she convinced Dr. Stein to administer the G-test, a noninvasive procedure involving one blood test and two inhalers of gaseous hormones meant to stimulate the pituitary gland and measure rate of ovulation. The whole thing seemed like a pretty good deal in the end: Meredith endured a bit of dizziness and paid a thousand bucks in order to count how many eggs were left in her basket. This information, in turn, promised to give a rough picture of her window of fertility in coming years (she thought of it as the “pre-premenopausal period” and sometimes before sleep would say it aloud three times fast).
Meredith closed her eyes and quickly opened them again. As she had suspected, Dr. Joe was just as male and married as he had been three-quarters of a second before.
“Okay, lay it on me.”
“First of all I want to make sure you’re aware of how the G-test works. You know we give you hormone treatments in order to stimulate your pituitary gland, which controls the ovulation function in your reproductive system, and this way we are able to determine both rate of ovulation and—”
“Yes, I’m familiar with how it works, Dr. Veil. Just the results, please.” Meredith noticed yet again how she sounded unintentionally bitchy when she was nervous.
“All right.” He lifted the clipboard closer to read what was written there. “It seems that your ovulation rate is somewhat depleted, which is not unusual for a woman of your age. You’re thirty-four?
”
“Thirty-five.”
The doctor flipped back to the questionnaire portion of the test.
“A smoker?”
“Never.”
“Right. Well, that’s good. Smoking decreases ovulation rate dramatically.”
“But you thought I might be a smoker. Isn’t that bad?”
“Not necessarily. Your results show that your ovulation rate is lower than it probably was a decade ago. But what I’m saying is, this is normal. How long have you been trying?”
“I haven’t yet. I was just wondering for when I do try. I mean, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how I should start trying. Or at least trying to try.”
“So you’ve been thinking about trying to try to conceive?”
“That’s right.”
“Do you mind if I level with you?”
“Absolutely not.”
“As I mentioned, I’m a fertility specialist at Women’s College, which means I spend most of my waking hours trying to get women pregnant.” He paused, looking slightly perplexed. “In a manner of speaking.”
Meredith smiled, then she thought of Mish, of the ribbon of blood unfurling down her inner thigh.
“Most women who come to me are not as forward-thinking as you,” Dr. Veil went on. “They end up in my office at the age of forty or later, after they’ve been trying with their partners off and on for five years. We do everything we can, but by that time, more often than not, it’s too late.”
“So what are you saying?”
“I’m saying that if you really want a baby, you should start trying as soon as you can. Within the year is my advice.”
“This year!” she accidentally shouted. “How am I supposed to fit in having a baby this year? You talk about it as if it’s just a matter of putting in the effort, like ‘Don’t forget to clean out those eaves troughs before winter comes.’ It’s crazy. I don’t even have a boyfriend. I haven’t been on a date in months. I work all the time. I barely have time to take care of myself, let alone someone else. I have no family here. My friends are either turning into their parents or are completely fucked up.”