Chris found me lying in bed in the dark with dried tears across my face when he came home that evening. I was in a funk, and there was only one way out. If there was ever a time for a shopping spree, this was it.
We were going to need frilly pillows. If you’re surrounded by pillows, bad things can’t happen. Whenever I feel especially anxious, I stroll through the linen department at Macy’s. What could possibly go wrong in a placed filled with plush comforters and soft towels? While I searched online for accoutrements, I asked Chris to collect as many throw pillows as he could find, along with the gold silk sheets we had gotten for an engagement present and rarely used because they made him slide off the bed and hit the floor in the middle of the night.
“Is there going to be room for me with all of these?” Chris said, holding five pillows piled high in shades of purple and cream. He arranged them around me as though they were crib bumpers, then picked up day-old drinking glasses from the nightstand and brought them into the kitchen while regaling me with tales of a customer who wanted to exchange a tractor the shop didn’t sell.
I lay there running my fingers over the soft satin pillows, trying to pay attention to his story, but my mind began swirling like a cyclone picking up debris: trimmers, baby, customers, fibroids, tractors, cervix. My chest clenched around my heart. The pounding in my ears drowned out Chris’s words. I wiped my forehead with the back of my wrist and cold sweat stained my sleeve. How could people worry about tractors when I might lose my baby? The room seemed smaller. Suddenly I felt as though I were being buried. Buried under the burden of keeping this child inside me from vanishing. And then I was far from my body, watching myself reach out for a baby that was floating farther and farther away from me. Its small, pink fingers grasped at the air as it drifted, receding until it finally disappeared. “Stop it,” I said out loud, looking around the room to ground myself and calling off objects in my head: Windowpane. Fireplace. Ceiling crack. Sunlight. Breathe. So much for my frilly pillow theory. I knew I was on the verge of plummeting into a dark place.
“So I told the guy he’s clueless—hey, you okay?”
“Yeah, sorry. I just, I don’t know,” I said, turning away.
“One second. I forgot something.” He left the room but quickly returned.
“I found this for you. Thought you might need it.” It was my tiara. The one I used to wear while writing The Ten-Second Seduction. He placed it on my head. “You’ll always be my queen.”
If I looked at him, the tears would become a torrent. Instead, I picked up my laptop and pointed to the computer screen. “This pillow is cashmere. I think it goes well with the wood paneling,” I said, blotting my cheek with my palm, hoping he wouldn’t notice.
“That’s the beauty of wood paneling. It goes with everything.” Chris pushed my tiara so that it was resting crooked atop my head. “Go ahead and buy it,” he said.
I smiled, dropping the pillow in my virtual cart. Scrolling for fancy items reminded me of my first Christmas with Chris’s mother and stepfather in New Jersey. That was the day Nadine had invited me into her world of luxury. I had never seen so much decadence in a suburban split-level ranch. From the King Louis XIV Bed and Breakfast Room to the hard eighteenth-century high-backed sofa that looked like it could double for a torture device in the living room, I was unsure where to place myself among the finery. I maneuvered my body into a corner between an ancient Japanese vessel and an abstract painting, where I awkwardly leaned, not sure what to do with my hands, all while wondering where they kept the tchotchkes and family photos. Dinner for four was served buffet style on gold-trimmed china placed upon woven lace—not the “fancy” Dixie plates thrown on a vinyl tablecloth with service for eighteen that I was accustomed to. We discussed rare winter flowers and the Victorian period piece adorning the table—a large crystal bowl held aloft by the outstretched arms of gold-plated vestal virgins. I had thought it was a glorified candy dish. Nadine called it “The Elkington,” and when her husband asked how much it cost, her response was, “Not much. How is the ham, dear?”
Dessert was a delicate cheesecake spiraled with fruit and berries—not dried pound cake and sliced cantaloupe. Afterward we gathered around an artificial tree bedecked with ornamental figures from Louis’s court, and Nadine presented me with both a Flow Blue dish and purple elbow-length cashmere gloves. The dish looked like it had been taken from a huge collection in her curio cabinet and came with a card that read, “English, circa 1850.” A lovely gesture, but at the time it didn’t exactly go with my pull-out futon and three-way lamp from the Flatbush Avenue schlock store. The gloves on the other hand, well, I’d bet anything they were from Saks where she currently worked as a hairstylist. As soon as I glided that baby-soft cashmere across my cheek, Nadine had won my heart. Her extravagance was an art form, and though a boudoir straight out of Versailles wasn’t in my budget, I now hoped to emulate her by decorating my space with pretty things.
The next day, we moved from pillows to furniture. I wanted to bed rest not just in our bed in the living room but also on the sofa bed in the family room, so I could have a change of scenery. But there was a hitch. If we pulled out the sofa bed in its current position, I’d be staring at the wall instead of the windows with the view.
“Can you please switch the couches in the family room?” I asked my husband.
“What?” Chris had a habit of saying this when he didn’t want to do something, as if I wouldn’t repeat it and we’d just forget the whole thing. He didn’t like change. His memories were rooted in each piece of furniture, every knickknack stuffed in cobwebbed corners.
“It’s easy.”
“You want me to rearrange the furniture?”
“You want me to stab myself in the eye because I have to stare at a wall for the next five months? Think of the blood, the police investigation, and then of course we might ruin these lovely couches . . .”
“Nothing can ruin these couches. They’re practically titanium.” They were low-backed 1970s brown velour numbers inherited from Chris’s dad along with the house.
After I promised he could switch them back at a later date, Chris acquiesced, swapping the couches and opening up the sofa bed, which led to a dust storm and a solid find of three dollars in change, a small notebook, and a remote control for a television set we didn’t own. In the middle, there was a huge stain. Bodily fluids? Blood? Cheap whiskey? Who knew?
“Fit for my queen,” Chris said with a goofy smile as he wiped the dust off the mattress and patted it, inviting me to try it out. I attempted to mask the disdain spreading across my face. “Ah, the queen sneers,” he said.
I tapped the tiara on my head and winked. Once the sheets were on, I settled in and looked around from my throne. No, my stage. I was a performance artist now.
The first thing I noticed from this new angle was how steeply the floor sloped. If you threw snow on the shag carpet you could call it a bunny hill and charge admission. The pine ceiling and walls made the room look like a fancy shipping container. Not quite what I was going for in the glam department. I could at least amuse myself with the various patterns of wooden knots and cracks in the old pine paneling as I chalked off my time in bed-rest purgatory. The ceiling was like a Rorschach test: sometimes the knots looked like butterflies and fairies, while in dark moments they were demons and baby-eating zombies. The windows looking out upon the view of the mountains (my one saving grace) were the old jalousie kind with metal cranks, but all the handles had long since broken off. The only way to get air was to leave the sliding deck door open, which was covered with a silver shower curtain that looked like aluminum foil. Chris insisted it was a scientifically proven way of deflecting the blazing sun that turned the room into an oven during warmer months.
With my space in order and my emotions stabilized, I had to figure out the logistics of other luxuries, like eating. I was tired of waiting for an authorized pee break to get up and grab a snack, and every time I ate, I had crumbs all over my bed. There was only one solution: tailgating.
I sent Chris down to the Basement of Death and Despair, a place so named because not only was it dark and damp, but it was where we kept the gigantic wolf spiders, creatures the size of my hand that barreled forth wielding their spindly legs like samurai swords. Chris’s mission was to find the small blue and white cooler we used for picnics at the private waterfall behind our house. I asked him if he would pack it full of beer each morning, but he refused to be an accomplice to fetal alcohol syndrome so I settled for a few minimally processed, relatively edible food-like options. Suddenly I had my own stage and someone was bringing me meals in bed. Things were looking up.
In truth, due to morning sickness, my diet was limited to two starchy foods (kaiser rolls and Cheerios); one type of unoffending vegetable (carrots); and two proteins (fresh mozzarella cheese and cashew nuts). Luckily, most of these fit easily into mini Ziploc bags. I knew this would make Chris’s weekly grocery shopping trips a snap. But on the first day of this experiment, it was clear that he had a difficult time remembering to put all these ingredients into bags and then place them into the cooler. Even more difficult, it seemed, was to master the closing mechanism on the bags so that the contents didn’t spill out. Chris was in a frenetic rush each morning, and filling my cooler was just one more thing he was going to have to do before heading off to work for another day of lawn mower drama.
On the second day of the cooler experiment, deeply involved in a television episode of Barefoot Contessa, I reached for the Cheerios and the bag popped open all over my growing belly. Like a zoom flume, they slid down my body, lodging under my back and between my legs.
My dog, Satchie Red, taking no pity on a convalescent and being the fine opportunist her species demanded, pounced onto the sofa bed, and suddenly we were very intimate as she searched for Cheerios in unmentionable places. With a growling sneeze, shaking her head, she began swiping her front paw along the mattress as if to say, “May the best bitch win.” The race was on, and we both squirmed and scrounged for Cheerios, seeing who could get them in their mouth the fastest. She may have been born with better hunting skills, but I was blessed with thumbs. Just as I thought I’d proven myself the superior species, I picked up a Cheerio, popped it in my mouth, and with grotesque awareness realized that the little beast had already chewed it up and spit it out.
Understanding that these actions were beneath her, she refused to meet my gaze. Satchie Red was, after all, a shar-pei of Westminster lineage—her father had won Best in Breed. But now she had been reduced to a common mangy mongrel. I guess the fact that the cooler was on the floor, technically her territory, made the food inside it fair play.
Out of sheer necessity, I added one more game-changing accessory: a tray table. This was my saving grace. Seriously, if there was a fire, I’d save my wedding pictures and this tray table. The tray table itself is an epic invention, and mine came with the addition of a little side pocket to hold small items, which brought the entire contraption to a whole new level of brilliance. This side pocket would spare me hours of trying to find my remote in a sofa bed full of pillows, books, magazines, and food wrappers. I owed my life to the designer of that side pocket.
Satchie Red’s animal instinct told her I was weak, and as the days went on, I became paranoid that she was contemplating eating me to thin the herd. If I kept my food on the tray table, we were fine, but if I reached over or ruffled the blankets, she turned her head ever so slowly and stared me down, her upper lip quivering.
“What? You think you have it tough? How many dogs get to eat out of a cooler every day and lounge around on a cashmere pillow? Cut me some slack.”
I knew it was tough for her. Satchie Red—whose full name was Aka Satchmo Redstone Princess of All Things Purple Divine and Serendipitous Rotten Sauerbraten, named partially for the great Louis Armstrong and for the red stripe down her back, among a multitude of other situations and incidents, including a bad date I had years before—was my first baby. She was only six weeks old when we brought her home, just a few short months before our wedding. I cuddled her in my arms most days, and when she couldn’t settle down at night, I sang the alphabet song to lull her to sleep. Now I could no longer play with her like I used to or take her for hikes along the ridge. I guess we all had some major adjusting to do.
I was ready to settle into bed rest, but there was one final item I was still missing: lip gloss. This tiny tube of happiness has gotten me out of many sticky situations, and once it even got me a few extra cable channels. I wasn’t going anywhere, but that didn’t mean I had to look like I had no place to go. My lips were the only part of me that wasn’t gaining weight, so I planned to show off the assets I still had. Even if I was miserable, I could still look dewy. Besides, the UPS guy, who reminded me of Charlie Chaplin with his bushy eyebrows and funny little mustache, might stop by.
I went on Amazon to see if I could order some lip gloss . . . in bulk. By the time I was done with my spending spree for the week, it totaled more money than I cared to think about. Was I overcompensating, trying to cover up my pain and creeping depression with sparkles and sheen? Maybe. But this was the time to indulge. I looked around the room. This was my stage and I was going to perform amazing feats of bed-rest magic here.