Sara had always thought of Thanksgiving as a formal occasion, involving polished silver, the best china, and a flower-embellished table. As a child, she had been expected to make an attempt at good manners and solemnity as soon as she was old enough to hold a fork. It was boring, but there had been the triumph of knowing that her younger or more boisterous cousins were relegated to the playroom with a sitter.
This Thanksgiving had all the formality of a football stadium during a Super Bowl. Mick had brought in his contribution: a case of Michelob and his color TV, which he set up in the living room next to the Clarks’ TV, so the men could watch two football games at the same time. While the women put steaming bowls and the burnished turkey on the dining room table, Jeremy Clark and Blaise Bennett, both three, ran under the table and underfoot, throwing a tiny football and tackling each other, while two-year-old Heather Bennett toddled after them, screaming at the top of her lungs, waving her chubby arms, tripping over her own feet, already a great little cheerleader. Dinner was served buffet style, and for a few brief moments relative silence reigned while the men ate, but now they had finished dessert and had settled down to serious TV watching, which seemed to necessitate clapping, cursing, and yelling. The women hissed and booed at the men for a while, then gathered in the kitchen with the door shut, ostensibly to do the dishes, but really to get down to some good gossip.
Sara leaned against the kitchen door. Annie Danforth had put an Irish coffee in her hands, and in the heat and the laughter and the informality of the kitchen, Sara began to feel at home.
“I don’t know what to do. Alison Wellington hasn’t paid me for babysitting her kids for four months now,” Mary said. She was seated at the kitchen table, covering dishes with foil.
“Don’t babysit her kids anymore till she pays you,” Carole Clark said. She was drying the glasses Jamie Jones was washing.
“What can I do, lock my door against her? She works, you know,” Mary protested.
“She was always that way, always!” Annie Danforth said. “Remember in Girl Scouts? Even in Brownies, for heaven’s sake! She never paid her dues. Never.”
“Well, she says it’s not her fault,” Mary said. “She says her husband takes her paycheck and keeps it and doles money out to her.”
“Yeah, and if you believe that, let me sell you a used car,” Carole said. “Mary, remember when our senior class went on the trip to Washington, D.C.? And she said she lost her wallet and we all had to chip in so she’d have spending money?”
Leaning against the door, Sara watched, fascinated by the gossip about the legendarily skinflint Alison Wellington, envious of the other women’s shared history and the ease with which they worked together. She wished there was something she could do to help—she didn’t want them saying later, “Did you see the way Sara Kendall just stood there, not lifting a finger, like she thought she was some kind of queen?” But she didn’t know what to do. The women seemed as organized as a hive of bees; she didn’t know where to jump in.
Then from the living room came the sound of a crying baby. Jamie Jones, who was struggling with a crusted scalloped potatoes pan, looked over her shoulder.
“Damn!” Jamie said. “She always does that. Just when my hands are wet. I’ve got to feed her. I know that cry, and it’s been four hours. Would someone get her for me while I finish this pan?”
It was only natural for Sara, the only woman doing nothing, to say, casually, “I’ll get her, Jamie.” No one fainted from shock, so she turned from the kitchen, her heart racing. She had really had so little to do with babies before. She wasn’t even sure how to carry one.
But Sheldon handed his daughter over to Sara at once. “She’s soaking,” he said, his eyes fixed on the television—it was first and goal—“you’ll have to change her.”
“Um,” Sara began, slightly alarmed.
“The diaper bag’s in the guest bedroom upstairs,” Sheldon said. Then, as his team scored, “All right!” he yelled, and left her to her fate.
The baby cradled carefully in her arms, Sara left the living room full of yelling, clapping, stomping men, and made her way through marauding children up the stairs. The little girl wailed and thrashed her legs and arms determinedly, hitting Sara in the chin and chest. Sara was amazed at the strength of this six-month-old, at the difficulty she was having holding her as she twisted in her arms.
“Sssh, sssh, there, there,” she said. “You’re okay, sweetie,” she said, looking down at the baby, who had a pink ribbon tied around a whale’s spout of dark hair. She gave the baby a big smile.
“Aaaaaaaaah!” the baby screamed, her face contorted.
In the bedroom, things only got worse. Sara had never changed a baby before, but would rather die than admit that to any of the other women. And surely she could do it, she was not an idiot, it was not that hard.
But the baby girl was enraged now because she was hungry and wet, because she didn’t know this stranger, because this woman was handling her with clumsiness instead of the rapid efficiency she was used to from her mother. Sara gently put the baby down on the bed and unsnapped her terry-cloth jumper. She pulled at the tape holding the wet diaper together, then stood a moment wondering what to do with the diaper. She couldn’t put it down on the bed, it was so wet it would soil the quilt, she couldn’t leave the baby to cross the room and put the diaper in the wastebasket. Her hesitation made the little girl furious. The baby kicked her fat bare thighs as if she were in a bike race, and her cries became frantic screams. Sara might as well have been pinching her.
Sara bent over the baby, her face growing hot with shame and frustration—and to her absolute horror, with anger: how could this baby embarrass her this way? She was doing her best.
“Sssh. Sssh. You’re all right, little Rosemary. I know you want your dinner. Let’s change your diaper. Just give me one more minute, please,” she whispered at the screaming child.
But little Rosemary flailed her arms and legs and twisted her body, turning over, so that Sara had to get hold of the chubby little creature and turn her back over on top of the dry diaper. This made the baby even madder, and her screams would have drowned out a fire engine’s. Sara’s heart was thudding and her hands moved like great clumsy wooden sticks.
Suddenly, flashing across the room, an angel of mercy to the rescue of a tortured child, came The Virgin, Mary. She grabbed up the distressed baby and held her against her chest, whispering in her ear. She stroked the back of her head. The baby’s bare bottom hung down over her arm.
Sara hoped the baby would shit on Mary’s sweater.
But of course Rosemary didn’t. Instead, leaning back and looking up, she saw a face she recognized—Mary babysat for Rosemary—and, comforted, her cries began to ease.
“Poor baby, poor wittle ba,” Mary said. “Aren’t you a foolish ba?” She jiggled the baby, smiled at her. As the baby calmed, Mary looked at Sara. “It sounded like you were sticking pins in her,” she said to Sara, grinning.
“I don’t think she likes having her diaper changed,” Sara said, although that was not what she thought—she thought that there was something so unnatural about her, so unmotherly about her, that the baby had instinctively reacted with fear. Was that possible? She wouldn’t ask The Virgin.
Now Mary ignored Sara. “But we have to have our diaper changed if we want our bobble,” she said, lowering the baby back onto the bed. She reached out—it was as if Mary had eyes on the side of her head, for she managed to keep both eyes on the baby’s, smiling, and at the same time see and grasp a rattle, which she presented to the baby with a flourish. “Now oo just play with this, little ba, and Mary will get Rosemary all bootiful so oo can have oor din-din.”
Oh, dear, am I going to have to talk that way if I have a child? Sara wondered. Then, heart sinking, she thought: Maybe I can’t have a child simply because I’m not capable of talking that way. I just don’t have the right instincts.
Faster than a speeding bullet, Mary diapered the child and whisked her out of the room, saying not another word to Sara.
Sara followed Mary down the stairs and into the kitchen, searching for just the right words to explain what had happened. The words wouldn’t come. Her mind was a blank. I’m so glad I’m an editor, Sara thought wryly, it’s such a help in my life.
Jamie was seated at the round oak kitchen table. She reached for Rosemary, brought the baby to her unbuttoned blouse, and watched for a few seconds while the baby began to nurse greedily. She looked back up at Sara, smiling. “I’m sorry she gave you such a bad time,” she said. “She’s at that shitty stage they call ‘making strange.’ She sees a new face and freaks. It’s so fucking embarrassing. Sheldon’s parents came over last week to visit and she screamed at them every time they came near her. I wanted to kill the little monster. Great for keeping pleasant relationships.”
“I remember when Jeremy was that way,” Carole said, leaning against the refrigerator. “I couldn’t get through the grocery store with him. Every time some little old lady coochie-cooed at him he yelled his head off. I had to leave him at home just to get the shopping done. And it went on for weeks,” she added ominously.
“Aren’t you a terrible little troublemaker,” Jamie said to her daughter, her voice thick with love, her eyes gleaming with pride. The baby suckled happily.
Sara sank down in a chair and listened while the other women talked about babies. At last Annie Danforth started talking about Christmas. Sara relaxed, until the children, exhausted from the celebration, began to fight at high volume and without mercy. Mothers scattered into the dining room to gather up their tired broods; it was time to leave.
Carole Clark slid up against Sara. “Would you guys drive Mick home?” she whispered. “He’s a little on the drunken side.”
In fact Mick was a lot on the drunken side, but he was a jolly, hearty drunk. He was hard at work now trying to get into his overcoat. “The Patriots lost, but what the hell, right?” he yelled.
“What the hell!” Steve yelled back, cuffing his friend. He grinned at Sara. “I’ll go up and get our coats,” he said.
Sara leaned against the wall in the front hall, as Mick replayed the last quarter of the game.
“The referee made the wrong call, but what the hell, right?” Mick asked her.
“Right,” Sara replied. Other couples brushed past, going up the stairs and down again with their arms full of coats, carrying children and foil-covered pans of food out the front door, hugging and calling to one another.
“The Patriots are the number-one team, right?” Mick yelled.
“Right!” Sara yelled back, though by now Mick was pacing the hallway and addressing his remarks to a seemingly large imaginary audience.
“We’re going to go all the way, right?” Mick yelled.
“Right!” Sara yelled back. “I’m going to go see where Steve is, I thought he was getting our coats,” Sara told him in a normal tone of voice. “I’ll be right back.” She hurried up the carpeted stairs.
Steve was in the guest bedroom, their coats in his arms.
Mary Bennett was the only other person there. She was seated on the bed, leaning back against the headboard. Her expression was serious. So was Steve’s. When Sara entered the room, there was that quality of silence that indicates the interruption of an intimate moment.
A spark of fantasy exploded in Sara’s mind: she would look with frigid arrogance at her husband, walk without a word from the room, drive home, pack, leave him forever.
Instead, she said, as normally as possible, “Oh, I thought you couldn’t find the coats. Ready? We’ve got to get Mick home before he passes out.”
“Sure,” Steve said. “I’m ready.”
Sara crossed the room, stood close to her husband, smiled. “Help me?” she asked, and he held her coat for her to slide into. She smiled sweetly at Mary. “Bye,” she said.
“Bye,” Mary replied, her face surly.
Silently, smiling to the death, Sara followed Steve down the stairs. Jamie Jones was at the doorway talking to Carole Clark. “… see you Tuesday night as usual?” Jamie said, sotto voce. She looked guiltily at Sara.
“Sure. I’ll call you,” Carole told her friend, and they hugged. When Carole turned to Sara, it seemed there was an artificial brightness about her smile.
Now what’s going on? Sara thought. Am I truly paranoid or did those two not want me to hear their plans? But the awkwardness of the moment passed as she and Steve guided Mick out the door and into their car.
Mick babbled all the way home about his beloved Patriots, giving Sara plenty of time to stew in her own suspicions. If I wanted to, I could work up a really good case of self-pity, she thought. The baby didn’t like her, Jamie and Carole were doing something from which they definitely but guiltily wanted to exclude her—and, worst of all, her husband had just been involved in some sort of heavy-duty discussion with his old girlfriend. This isn’t Thanksgiving, Sara told herself, this is Halloween.
Steve wrestled Mick out of the car and into his apartment, then got back into their car for the drive home.
“Mick’s really soused this time. He’s going to feel awful in the morning,” Steve said.
“What was your little conference with Mary all about?” Sara asked, trying to keep her voice normal.
“What little conference?” Steve answered innocently.
Sara studied her husband as he drove. He kept his profile to her, concentrating as if he were steering the car through a raging blizzard.
“Oh, come on, Steve,” she said.
Steve was silent for a while. Then he said, “Nothing, really. It was nothing, Sara.”
She waited, her eyes lasering into Steve’s stubborn head. Finally she turned away and sat in a deadly silence, letting her anger fill the car like a perfume. When they got home, she slammed from the car and into the house and up to their bedroom in one sweep of fury.
I will not have a baby, I will not stay on Nantucket, I will not stay married! Sara thought as she yanked off her silk blouse and skirt. I will go back to Walpole and James, I’ll take hundreds of lovers, Julia and I will live together, eating salad, drinking chablis, we’ll go on vacations together and pick up and discard men like playthings! She pulled her flannel nightgown over her head.
“Yeah, you really look like a vamp,” she said to her reflection in the mirror. She sank down onto the bed in misery.
The door opened and Steve came in. He sat down on the bed next to Sara. “All right,” he said. “I will tell you every word. Okay?”
Sara did not look at her husband. Did not speak.
“Mary asked me if I was happy. I said yes. Very. She said, ‘That’s too bad, because I’m not.’ I said I was sorry to hear it. She said, ‘How sorry?’ I said, ‘Not that sorry,’ and grinned at her. I mean, I didn’t want to insult her, Sara.”
“What did she say then?” Sara asked.
Steve hesitated. “She said, ‘Now I’m even more unhappy.’ ”
“That bitch!” Sara said in a steady voice. “She wants you back, doesn’t she?”
“I don’t know what she wants, Sara. I really don’t. And I’m sorry if she’s not happy, but I really don’t care.”
Sara looked at Steve. “You were up there for a long time.”
“Yeah, well, lots of people were up there. We were all stumbling around the bedroom getting our coats and stuff. I was alone with Mary for only a few minutes. I swear it, Sara. Nothing happened. Nothing else was said.”
Sara looked at Steve searchingly. “Steve, don’t you know how I hate this? I hate having to play the jealous wife. I hate being an interrogator. This all just makes me feel sick.”
Steve pulled her against him. He spoke into her hair. “Hey, Sara,” he said. “You know you don’t have to worry. You know how it is between you and me. We’re married. I love you. And I don’t feel anything for Mary at all—except maybe pity. She doesn’t just come on to me, you know, she flirts with all the guys. I don’t know what her problem is with Bill, but he’s such an arrogant bastard I’m not surprised she’s unhappy. I guess I’m sorry she’s unhappy. I’d be sorry if anyone I know was unhappy. But that’s all. And you know that. Come on.”
As Steve spoke, he caressed Sara, gently, in the ways he knew so well would please her. Sara hid her face in Steve’s shirt, smiling with pleasure, allowing herself to be cajoled back to reality: Steve there next to her, handsome, loving, there were his hands on her body, here was his mouth on her mouth. They made love for a long time, talking to each other, watching each other as they moved together in the light. They fell asleep with their clothes tossed on the floor and the light still on.
At the end of the first week of December, Sara received two packets in the mail. She read the one from Julia first. It was a Xeroxed page from a textbook, with the pertinent parts highlighted and embellished by Julia with a number of arrows, stars, and obscenely illustrative cartoons.
Prospective mothers wishing to ascertain their ability to conceive submitted to tests of fertility. A group of tests relied upon the assumed existence in fertile women of free passages between the genital tract and the rest of the body, that allowed substances introduced per vaginam to reach the breath and the various systems. Thus, if the propositus vomited after sitting on date flour mixed with beer, she could conceive and the number of vomits indicated the number of children she would have (K.27). She could also conceive if she had borborygmi (C., V) or passed urine with faeces or wind after a genital fumigation (B. vs., 1, 7–9); but if she vomited, she would not (C, V). A test that acquired some fame later with Hippocrates (Aph., V, LIX) and the Arabs (Demiry) consisted in smelling for garlic or onion in the breath after introducing it per vaginam, a principle recently revived in Speck’s test of injecting phenolphthalein in utero and testing for it in the urine.
Julia had stapled a small bulb of garlic to the letter.
“Great,” Sara said aloud. “Thanks a lot.”
It was a rainy Saturday, cold and comfortless, and Sara was grousing around the house in an especially nasty mood: she could tell that her period, in spite of the thermometer, was going to start tomorrow. Her breasts were sore and swollen, her stomach had developed a life of its own, bulging out before her in its evil little parody of pregnancy, and her back was beginning to cramp. For most of this day she had soldiered on, cleaning the house and going through the exercise routine that had helped her get her body back in shape, but now it was three-thirty, a dimming December hour on a dreary day, and Sara was tempted to wallow in her despair.
She was glad the mail had come. She reread the sheet Julia had sent, and looked seriously at the garlic bulb a moment, considering. How did one get hold of date flour? If she mixed it with beer—and sat on it? In her mind she could almost hear Julia’s laughter. Sara laughed in response. She might be crazy, but she wasn’t going to sit on flour mixed with beer—or on this garlic. Tossing the letter with the other mail for Steve to see, Sara opened the packet from Fanny Anderson.
Dear Mrs. Kendall, [the accompanying note on heavy creamy bond writing paper read]
Because of your kindness I am taking the liberty of sending you some more pages from my Jenny manuscript. Please don’t feel obligated to like them or even to read them. I am hard at work on another Aurora Dawn book and have little time even to think of the Jenny pages. But since you went to the trouble of calling.…
With very best wishes,
Fanny Anderson
Thirty pages of Jenny! Sara looked at the packet as if it were a box of chocolates. This was the cure she needed; her work, some good book to dig into with all her talent and abilities. She brewed herself a pot of decaffeinated coffee (in deference to her premenstrual insanity; caffeine was supposed to aggravate PMS), and settled down to work.
At seventeen I was caught up in a maelstrom of desires. I wanted. What I wanted seemed infinite and nameless. I loved many things with intensity—with such a great intensity that, having felt that love, it seemed I had given love sufficient for eternity and must move on to other things or die of boredom.
I loved my parents and our farm, the Kansas skies, the free far windy sweep of land, but I wanted more. I had been dating for a year an “older” man, Will Hofnegle, a farmer across the county who at twenty-two had inherited his parents’ large farm. He was a good and gentle man who worked hard on his land and yet had the energy and insight to care for me as I was. He rode horseback with me; but he also listened to me read my stories aloud; he gave me picture books about Paris and Rome. He understood what I wanted. I would have been desperately lonely in Kansas without him, for I had no other friends, no one else who understood my love for literature and my desire to escape into a more literary world.
Will’s life was full of physical beauty—his horses, Herefords, spaniels, barns and stables, rich rolling fields, which were much more productive than ours; and he was tall and handsome and moved through his life with a loping unhurried grace. He offered himself and his farm to me, he offered to marry me, and did not take it as an insult when I told him I had to try to get out for a while. He told me he would always be there for me if I needed him.
I won a scholarship to the University of Kansas. I wanted to go east to college—perhaps I still had fantasies of a dramatic reunion with Jeremy Gardner—perhaps I simply just wanted to go east, to get away. But my parents couldn’t afford to send me anywhere else, and I was told I should feel lucky to have a scholarship. Everyone told me I should be grateful to be going off to college, but even before I got there, I wanted more.
It was probably predictable that I immediately became obsessed with Henry Cook, the instructor of the required freshman art appreciation course. He was from the East. Little else mattered. He wore cashmere sweaters, tweed jackets, elegant loafers made of leather that looked and felt like silk, and there was something about him—his accent? the way he cut his hair?—that reminded me of Jeremy Gardner on a basic, physical level.
The other students at the college seemed gushily naive, too easy to please, silly. In contrast, Henry was handsome, nervous, even tormented, like a powerful energetic neurotic Thoroughbred trembling with the need to run. And he became my conveyance; I became his jockey. I became his master—but, strangely enough, never his mistress, although his hope for that was the whip in my hands.
For I continued to be lucky with my looks. I knew this; I exploited myself—what else did I have to work with? I had waist-length black curling hair, which I tied up with blue ribbons to bring out the blue of my eyes. I had very pale skin that blushed rosily when I was happy or excited, and long legs, a slender waist, and what I learned over and over again was a spectacular bosom. Before I went to college, I spent hours in front of the mirror admiring myself, criticizing myself, deciding just how to improve myself, and every admiring look I received I took as proof and omen: use this to live your life.
Still, I do not know how I had the courage, the sheer brashness to pursue Henry as I did then: it was desperation, all desperation. I was wild with need. Henry came from an old eastern moneyed family, never mind that he was dark and handsome and thin; he could have been a fat dwarf from an old eastern moneyed family and I would have been crazed for him. My needs and his insecurities fit together perfectly.
Henry wanted to be an artist. His family insisted that art was frivolous and would not support him in his attempts to paint. They said he was, at twenty-seven, too young to know what he wanted in life, and that he would not get his inheritance until he got a “real job.” Over the bronze-bright autumn semester, I spent time with Henry, first over coffee in the student union, then over wine in his apartment. Never in bed: that was how I tempted him. I discovered that although his family was cutting him off from the real money, he was still receiving income from a trust his grandmother had set up for him, which his parents could not touch. After I recovered from the shock of it—that he was given more money than my family with all their labors had ever earned and he considered that money “nothing,” I grew even harder within myself and more ambitious. Why did a fool like Henry have so much when my hardworking parents had so little? There was no justice in the world—none given—so I must take and wreak and wrestle what justice I could.
You must paint, I told Henry, you are an artist, you must not waste yourself here. You should go to Paris and paint, it’s 1950, that’s where the artists are. I believe in you, Henry, I will go with you, I will encourage you, I will help you be brave.
So we went. What a flurry it caused! What telegrams and phone calls from his parents, his sister, his brother, his uncles, the head of the university art department! I loved it. My own parents and Will did not seem surprised when I told them, and they all wished me well. I loved Paris. Stone and river, cathedrals and cafés, lovers kissing openly in the streets, and everyone openly admiring me, blowing kisses at me as I walked past. We took a small apartment in a crooked building in the Latin Quarter. We drank Pernod at Les Deux Magots, we ate at La Coupole, I read Hemingway and Stein and Camus and Genet, Henry argued art with other painters, other painters taught me to speak a decent French and promised me that if I would only let them, they could teach me the language of love. I remained a virgin. It was one of my powers. It made Henry crazy for me. But I did not love Henry—I was so young, I loved only myself, I loved others loving me, I wanted everyone to love me. I was so young, so vain, so naive: I thought the lust of men was love.
The phone rang, jolting Sara back into the present. Sears had an order of vacuum cleaner bags in for her. She put the receiver back and stood a moment, staring at the phone. How brave Jenny was, how determined—she went out and got what she wanted! At seventeen she had had the courage and the spunk to get herself all the way to Paris. She had not waited passively for fate; she had manipulated fate. Jenny thought of life as a malleable object, a ball of clay she could pummel and mold; Sara had for too long thought of life as a great wind that blew her helplessly in any direction. She could change her mind; she would change. She would put her feet down, grab hold, be bold. There were things she could do to get what she wanted, and now she would do them. As soon as she had finished reading the Jenny pages.
“You may go in now,” the nurse said.
Sara walked into the gynecologist’s office, and her first thought on seeing Dr. Hiram Crochett was Thank God he’s not young and handsome.
Julia had recommended him; she promised that he was grandfatherly, kind but brilliant, the best in his field. “A gynecologist named Crochett?” Julia had howled with laughter. “He’d have to be fabulous to make up for that name!”
Sara liked Dr. Crochett on sight. He was short, slightly homely, with a gently sagging, wrinkled face, and eyes myopically huge behind glasses. He had curly salt-and-pepper hair, a bristly mustache, a kind smile. He was slightly overweight—Ah, good, Sara thought, relaxing. He must have had to deal with the little greeds and inadequacies of his body, too. He must have learned compassion.
He was wearing a white lab jacket over his day clothes, and had a stethoscope hanging around his neck. His office was paneled in oak with pictures of newborn babies on every wall. He shook Sara’s hand when she entered, a courtesy Sara appreciated, then indicated a chair. Then he sat at his desk just across from her and studied the form she had just filled out, which the nurse had handed him on a clipboard.
That form: how reassuring. It was like being in school again and taking a test to which she was certain she knew all the right answers. She was healthy, Steve was healthy, their parents were healthy. Sara’s father had died of a cancer that was particular to males. Sara and Steve had no allergies, asthma, heart problems, ulcers, kidney stones, VD, arthritis, anemia, hepatitis, tuberculosis, history of mental illness. They had health insurance. If there was an intelligence looking down at the available gene pools on earth, undoubtedly that intelligence could see how superior theirs was. This test rated an A.
If that had anything to do with anything.
Dr. Crochett lifted his head and looked at Sara. “You have written here, next to ‘reason for visit,’ ‘desire to get pregnant.’ ”
Sara cleared her throat. This was difficult. “Well, I probably should have written infertility. But I couldn’t put that down in black and white. It would have seemed so definite. So—final.”
Dr. Crochett smiled and leaned back in his chair. “You have been trying to get pregnant for how long?”
“Just over a year now. Thirteen months.”
“Your periods are regular?”
“Yes. Very. Every twenty-nine days.”
“Have you ever been pregnant before?”
“No.”
“So you have never had an abortion.”
“No.”
“Has your husband ever impregnated a woman before, to your knowledge?”
“No.”
“What has been your usual method of birth control in the past?”
“Diaphragm and condoms.”
“Did you ever take the pill?”
“No. Never. My sister told me not to. She’s a nurse.”
“Ah. I see you’ve come from Nantucket. A lovely place to live. I used to summer there as a child.”
“Yes,” Sara agreed. Then, realizing he was waiting for something, she told him, “There are no gynecologists on the island. Only general practitioners. And … it’s a very small place in the winter. And I’m a very, well, I don’t think neurotically private person, but a very private person. If I did go to a doctor on the island about this … problem … well, I know some of the nurses … everyone on the island would know in a matter of minutes. Small-town living. That would make it even harder on me.”
“Of course it would,” Dr. Crochett said. “This can be such an emotional issue, can’t it? You did the right thing, coming to me. The GPs would have sent you to a specialist anyway. What are your periods like?”
“Heavy. I mean the flow is heavy. The first few days. Then it tapers off and is light. I go seven days, but the first three days are the really terrible ones. I have cramps. And I get chilled and depressed and ravenous and nutty before my period. I go insane.”
Dr. Crochett smiled. “Good old PMS,” he said. “We’re just now beginning to learn about it. Well, you seem healthy enough, normal.”
“Do you think I am too old?” Sara asked.
Dr. Crochett laughed. He had a good hearty laugh, throwing back his head. “No, my dear, I certainly do not! You are”—he consulted his form—“thirty-four. That’s a perfect time to get pregnant. Why, I have women in their early forties getting pregnant. No, you are not too old.”
“I brought this,” Sara said, reaching into her purse and handing him her temperature chart.
The doctor took it and studied it, then handed it back. “So far, so good,” he said. “One month doesn’t tell us much, you know. You’ll have to keep that up for several months if you want accuracy. How often do you and your husband have intercourse?”
As often as possible, Sara thought, and stifled a smile. “Um, perhaps four times a week.”
“Fine,” Dr. Crochett said. He stood up. “Let’s take a look at you, shall we? I notice you had a Pap smear seven months ago. You don’t need another one so soon. But I want to do a pelvic, to see if everything’s in the right place.”
The examining room was cheerful, with flowery wallpaper and more pictures of babies. After undressing in the bathroom and putting on a paper robe, Sara lay down on the table with her feet in metal stirrups, her knees drawn up. She had always hated this part, the feeling of vulnerability, the exposure. She had asked for it, but her body informed her mind that as far as it was concerned, she was being violated. Her muscles tensed.
Dr. Crochett pulled on rubber gloves and put his hand inside her. “I had a patient once,” he said, “who tried for three years to get pregnant. She finally made it. She really wanted that baby. When it came time for her to deliver, I met her at the hospital, lifted her gown, and saw that she had had her pubic hair shaved into the shape of a heart all around her vagina.” He laughed a booming laugh.
Sara laughed politely, thinking that all sounded a little bizarre, but the image flashed before her mind and then the doctor was dropping the paper sheet between her legs. So soon the examination was over.
“That’s fine. You can sit up now. Why don’t you get dressed and come back to my office? We’ll make a plan of attack.”
In the office, Dr. Crochett said, “You’re fine. All the right equipment in all the right places. Perhaps a slight case of endometriosis, but I can’t tell much.”
“What’s that?” Sara asked, alarmed.
“Endometriosis—briefly, it’s tissue that forms in the abdominal cavity. It can cause painful intercourse if it’s bad enough. If often occurs in women as they grow older and haven’t had children. Interestingly enough, the cure for it is pregnancy. But that’s something we’ll check into later, if necessary. There are some other things we can do first, some tests we can do right away that will tell us a lot. Where are you now in your cycle?”
“I’m on the tenth day,” Sara said.
“That’s great!” Dr. Crochett said, so enthusiastically that Sara almost jumped. “Now let’s see,” he went on, musing aloud, “you probably ovulate on the fifteenth day. By the way—keep on taking your temperature. That chart will be very helpful after a few more months.”
A few more months, Sara thought. Here we go again. How wonderful it would have been to come here and have a gynecologist wave a magic wand so that she would go home and get pregnant immediately. The thought of having to go through a few more months of waiting and hoping and being disappointed made her spirits plunge.
“Now,” Dr. Crochett was going on cheerfully, “I want to do a postcoital on you. I can tell a lot from that. Cut through some steps. And I want to do it just before you ovulate. Now, can you come back here on the fifteenth day? Let’s see, that puts us on December twenty-three. Well, close to Christmas, hmm? The last day I’ll be in the office. You and your husband will have to have intercourse on the twenty-second of December. Then I’ll need to examine you first thing in the morning. Can you arrange that?”
“Will you need my husband here, too?” Sara asked.
“No, that won’t be necessary. Either the two of you can come up to Boston for the night, then you come see me in the morning, or, if you want, you can have intercourse on Nantucket on the twenty-second and fly up here on the morning of the twenty-third. Whichever you wish. The important thing is that you do have intercourse then and that you get your body in here to me as soon as possible after that.”
Sara thought a moment. The twenty-second was the night of Jamie and Sheldon’s Christmas party. And Steve had to work on the twenty-third. But she could fly up.
“Yes,” she said. “I can do it.”
“Fine,” Dr. Crochett said. “We’ll schedule an early-morning appointment with my secretary—and pray for clear weather. I know what those Nantucket fogs can be like.”
“Yes,” Sara said, suddenly worried. She hadn’t thought about the weather not cooperating. And this could be such a difficult time of the year.
“Don’t look so troubled,” Dr. Crochett said. “You’re a young, healthy woman. Your body seems to be in good shape. You’ll get pregnant.”
“I hope so,” Sara said. She rose and followed the doctor from his office into the reception room and made an appointment for the morning of the twenty-third.
“Oh, and here!” Dr. Crochett said. He scribbled something on a pad and handed it to her. “I want you to get this prescription filled. It’s for multivitamins. We’ve found that women who take these for a few months before they get pregnant have a smaller incidence of babies with spina bifida. See you soon!”
Then he was gone, back into his office. Sara looked at the piece of paper in her hand, his indecipherable scribbling black and definite on the page. Magic pills, she thought, just what I wanted, a prescription for magic pills.
Buttoning her coat against the chill as she stepped out of the office into the day, Sara felt buoyant. She felt she had done the absolutely right thing, had set something in motion, had somehow begun a chain of events that would lead to her pregnancy. Dr. Crochett’s optimism was infectious. He had given her body his seal of approval; maybe that was all she needed, maybe she only needed this bit of authoritative go-ahead to get pregnant. Certainly she felt more fertile now; she felt wonderful.
Dr. Crochett’s office was in a brownstone in Brookline; Sara took a cab from there to Fanny Anderson’s house in Cambridge.
She was going to do something she had never done before, something aggressive and pushy—but what else could she do? She was so frustrated.
During the past week, after finishing the Jenny material that Fanny Anderson had sent her, Sara had tried at least fifteen times by telephone to reach Fanny Anderson. Each time she had been thwarted by the same person, Fanny’s housekeeper or maid, who always said, in a cold hostile voice, “Mrs. Anderson is not available at the moment.”
“Well, could you please ask her to call me?” Sara had asked, politely at first, then, as the days passed and her calls were not returned, with increasing anger.
“I’ll give Mrs. Anderson your message,” the woman said, and hung up before Sara could say another thing.
Sara was beginning to envision the housekeeper as some kind of awful tyrant, some jealous jailer, who saw Sara as an enemy, an intruder to be fended off. Certainly she sounded that way on the phone. Perhaps she was the writer’s lover? A neurotic lesbian, afraid to let any other woman come in contact with Fanny Anderson? In any case, it was strange and maddening, how the woman with her cold, thin voice refused to put Sara through to Fanny. Sara remembered Fanny’s voice, by contrast so warm and soft and welcoming, so personal. And Fanny had sent her more of the Jenny pages, so she wanted to keep in touch with Sara. Something odd was going on, and Sara wanted to know what it was. More, she wanted to try to persuade Fanny to finish this book, she wanted to help her to shape it, she wanted to be a real editor in a way she seldom had been before.
So, once she had made the appointment with a gynecologist in Boston, she tried Fanny Anderson’s number once again, and after she once again received the same response, the cold, hostile “Mrs. Anderson is not available at the moment. I’ll give her your message,” Sara had written a letter.
Dear Fanny Anderson,
I have tried numerous times over the past week to reach you, day and night, but the person who answers your phone seems unwilling to let me speak to you, and since you have not returned my calls, I’m afraid you haven’t gotten my messages.
I would like very much to talk with you about the Jenny book. I’ve finished reading the pages you sent me, and they are wonderful. Jenny is a fascinating person, and your writing style is at once elegant and intimate. I want to read more! And I know that many others will want to read this book, and will love it.
I have to come to Boston for medical purposes on December 19th, a Thursday. I would like to stop by your house around two-thirty, to see you and return the material you sent to me, and I hope, to pick up more. And if possible, I would very much like to sit down and talk with you about what you’re writing. I don’t know your writing schedule, but I promise I won’t take up too much of your time. Perhaps on Thursday we could meet briefly and then set up another time for a longer talk about your book. I would be very grateful if you could afford me just a few minutes in your day.
There, Sara had thought, that should do it. She had praised the book, she was offering to make the trip from Nantucket to Cambridge, she was practically groveling. If only she could get past the dreadful housekeeper, or lover, or envious spinster aunt, or whatever she was.
Fanny Anderson’s house was a tall old Victorian set behind a wrought-iron fence, graced with towering ancient maple trees that arched and draped their naked winter limbs over and in front of the house like giant garlands. The windows were long and narrow and shuttered. Stained glass glittered on either side of the massive oak door.
The woman who opened the door to Sara’s knock was so much like Sara’s mental image of her that Sara almost gasped. A woman in her fifties, perhaps, she had dark hair pulled back into a bun, and forbidding brown eyes set in a wrinkled somber face. She was wearing a drab brown wool dress and the heavy brown laced shoes of a woman who has no claim to vanity.
Jesus, Sara thought, but gave her most winning smile. “Hello,” she said confidently, “I’m Sara Kendall. I’ve been corresponding with Mrs. Anderson—” She stopped a moment, waiting. Surely this woman couldn’t be Fanny Anderson? When the woman showed no change of expression, Sara pressed on, “—and I have some material that I’d like to return to her.” She nodded down at the packet in her arms. “I wrote Mrs. Anderson a note last week, telling her I would be in town and would like to see her—is she in?”
“Mrs. Anderson is not available,” the woman said.
Oh, no, Sara thought, and nearly burst into tears. “Well, I could wait,” she said. “If she’s out. Or if she’s writing and might be available later. I could wait, or I could come back later today.”
“Mrs. Anderson will not be available today,” the woman said coldly.
Angered, Sara frowned. “Oh, really,” she said. “You mean she will not be available at any time today, not free for even a moment?”
“Mrs. Anderson is indisposed,” the woman said.
Well, Sara thought, I can’t argue with that. I can’t protest that she’s not sick. “Indisposed,” what an old-fashioned word.
“Well,” Sara went on, conceding defeat, “would you please give her this package? It contains some writing of hers, and a few notes I’ve made. And would you please tell her I stopped by? And that I would like to hear from her as soon as possible?”
“Very well,” the woman said, and took the manila envelope. “Good day,” she said, and shut the thick oak door in Sara’s face.
“You old harridan,” Sara said aloud, with quiet rage. “You Nazi.”
She turned and traced her steps back down the winding slate walk, out of the wrought-iron gates to the street. She had dismissed the cab. That was all right, she could walk to Harvard Square from here, then get a cab to the airport.
On impulse, she turned and looked back up at the Victorian house. She saw, on the second floor, a woman looking down at her through parted heavy drapery. It was not the woman who had answered the door—this woman’s face was fuller—but that was the only judgment Sara’s mind could make before the woman, seeing Sara’s gaze, drew back, disappearing from view.
My God, Sara thought, I wonder what’s going on? She stood a few more minutes, watching, but the woman did not appear again. Then, shivering, for it was a cold day, Sara turned her back on Fanny Anderson’s house and walked toward Harvard Square.