The Pokémon Professor assured me that everything would be hunky-dory without his treatment. He insisted that most of the points he used on me are contraindicative to pregnancy. Imagine poor Tallulah writhing about inside my tummy like the artist formerly known as Prince in her desperate attempts to avoid being punctured by little copper needles. Pokémon Professor and his wife advised me to sit tight and not be active. So the Western doctor and the Eastern doctor concurred. I was pretty much bed-bound with naught for comfort but my schmutsik dogs, neroli candles, Virginia Woolf and a pile of notebooks full of pages as empty as the Sahara Desert.
I painted my nails a weird pearly pink. It reminded me of a scene in a film I saw a long time ago. I may embellish here and there; my recollection may not resemble the original at all, so I apologise to the filmmakers if I bastardise their masterpiece.
Here’s the scene: Two trailer-park hillbilly dames are hanging out in a diner in deepest, reddest, redneck middle-America. One is in the throes of what appears to be a severe existential crisis. Her boyfriend has dumped her, leaving her homeless and knocked up, with five no-good children, his gambling debt and an empty bottle of rum. Her own health is failing along with her looks. Her mother, the bitch, is dying. Her father is an alcoholic, and her cat, the one entity on this black earth ever to love her, has just drowned. Is life worth living at all?
The friend raises her head from her fried green tomatoes and rhubarb tart, flicking the split ends of her fringe out of her eyes, and says, ‘Honey, you know, whenever I’m feeling real, real bad, I paint my fingernails and my toenails a real purty pink. That way, every time I look down, I remember I’m doing jus’ fine – how can anything be bad when I have such real purty nails?’
I think of this movie moment whenever well-meaning buffoons volunteer this type of counsel to me, the ‘Honey, just pull up your socks, cheer up, look on the bright side, I wish I had your life, maybe you just need to see real suffering, maybe you need to go for a brisk walk, you don’t have cancer you know, you need to just snap out of it, stop dwelling, don’t believe the labels’ kind of advice.
People get mad if you laze about crying when you don’t actually have anything physically wrong with you. I’ve been told that manic depression has a higher fatality rate than cancer. But I’m not climbing on a soapbox – I’m just giving chirpy-chunky-cheerful manicure advice.
I applied an aspect of it to Tallulah. The colour of my nails was such a preposterously juvenile pink that I was betting Tallulah would be drawn, if not to me, then at least to my nails. I knew she’d be annoyed when she discovered that in real life my nails are very rarely painted and, when they are, it’s a rather pitiful, chipped, smudged, ebony affair.
I was relieved during the blissful moments when my Navajo neighbours weren’t making any tragic attempts at music or power-drilling one another into stupefaction. Some days, all was well in my world and God was in His universe. Everything was pastel, powdery perfect.
I felt sure that Tallulah was gently slumbering in my tummy, soothed by Bach’s ethereal Air on a G String. In a way I felt relieved that Jason didn’t have a movie in production. I’d have gone mad hanging around the house looking at the same splendid view every day while he was out there at four in the morning, eating indigestible food and shouting, ‘Action!’ I was starting to feel as though it were ten thousand years since we’d been on set. But for all the talent and vision in the world, if you can’t hang around waiting, you amount to nothing in show business.
So we waited. For film finance, for the sun to set majestically, for Tallulah to arrive, for the garden to establish itself, for Godot to fail to appear. Oh, what an awful lot of waiting is involved in being alive.
When an architect friend was designing our house, I told him, ‘I don’t want any colour at all, because when the inhabitants of a home have such colourful personalities, you dare not rival them with pink cushions. They’ll feel upstaged, which will never do!’
My family, the family that Tallulah is hopefully going to be part of, have always found one another entertaining and clever. The drag of it is how dispersed we are. What is it with Jews and wandering? Pnina at least is in Cape Town, returned from Europe, ever so perfectly glamorous, gorgeous, talented and funny. But David is in Israel, Jonty is in Johannesburg with his heart in Greece, Gigi is in New Zealand, and Jason works in Johannesburg and lives in Cape Town. Like the lost tribe, we’re scattered and flung to the four corners of the earth. Is this a South African condition? The Jewish tradition? The modern way? What’s with us all?
We’ve become quite casual about families being divided, but it seems unnatural. We grow up with people who shape our personalities. We’re trained to believe that, like it or not, siblings are always around. Then, boom! This one is here and that one is there. No more togetherness.
But children bring us back together. They create new communities out of existing ones. Pnina has chocolate that will miraculously grow out of Tallulah’s ears, just as it grew out of mine when I was a child. The Madeleine books Livicky read to us when we were children wait patiently for her to read them to Tallulah. Far and wide, the cycles continue; we all go round and round.
I want to plant roses and jasmine in the garden, so that even if Tallulah goes away, she’ll come home, as we always do, to the smells and traditions of our childhood.