Georgia Levy Coffey
Some say it’s hormone swings, some say the third trimester blues.
I have a feminist friend, Lynne Snyder, who tracks my horoscope and is worried about Pluto. (She also believes we’ve entered a Dark Age and won’t come out of it until Gaia worship is reestablished on the planet.)
My mother says it’s Larry.
Craig, who’s paid to say it, says: “Why are you so convinced something’s wrong with you?”
Because it is, Doctor. Believe me.
But Dubin, my ob-gyn, upon hearing my litany—the constant lethargy after sleepless nights, the shortness of breath, the achy joints (Could it be arthritis? But aren’t I too young for arthritis?), the nauseating waves of a nameless but almost chemical anxiety that brings the taste of metal to my palate—nonetheless pronounces the baby fine; me too.
Dubin tells me to relax, drink my milk, and listen to Mozart.
But I never had this with Justin, did I? At least I don’t remember it.
Someone said that’s what keeps the race going: that you forget how awful it was the last time.
Sleepless nights, punctuated by sudden, inexplicable stabbers in my uterus. I become convinced they’re not Braxton-Hicks but something else. Then, when I’m on the verge of getting Dubin out of bed, they stop. Beached whale, bathed in sweat, listening to the sound of my own pulse pounding in my ears.
I date it from the night the alarm went off, over a month ago, when Larry didn’t come home. The next morning, after he’d left, I had the alarm people in, and they checked the system top to bottom. Everything, they insisted, was in good working order. They thought it must have been one of the casement windows in the living room, the one with the loose lock. When the wind blew hard, the lock gave and the window sprung open, triggering the siren.
The St. George police thought the same thing.
Fine.
But they weren’t here, the night before, when I heard the noises downstairs. I was alone in the house, and Justin was asleep. Eleven-thirty had come and gone—the last train—and still no word from Larry. How did I know where he was? I was upstairs in the bedroom, on my chaise longue, my diary open on my lap, and Ted Koppel was signing off on “Nightline.” I remember clicking off the TV. Midnight, and wide awake, listening.
I’ve never gotten used to the night sounds. At least in the city they’re human: sirens, trucks, screaming arguments, even gunshots. But sometimes, out here, there are little thuds overhead (squirrels? raccoons? a burglar on tiptoe?), and some nights it’s the wind.
Even when there’s no wind, Victorians creak.
In summer, it’s the din of crickets.
This was none of the above. This was a dull and intermittent banging, not nearby.
Maybe a loose shutter, I thought?
I got up, moving heavily from one bedroom window to another. I could make out the swaying tops of our trees. Earlier, I’d turned on the outside floods—I feel safer that way—but suddenly, peering out over the overhang that covers the front porch, I realized that, to anyone hiding in the shadows, I was totally exposed.
Suppose they’d counted cars in the driveway and knew Larry wasn’t there?
I remember the sudden urge to brush my teeth because of the sickish metallic taste. Instead, I forced myself to go downstairs, in the dark. The banging continued, but even in the front hall I couldn’t locate where it was coming from.
I’d just gone into the living room, in darkness, when suddenly—all around me—the alarm siren literally exploded in my ears.
Probably I was shrieking too. I grabbed for a telephone, but the line was dead. How could that be? My second impulse—it’s still vivid, and I’m still ashamed of it—was to tear out the front door and run for my life. Instead, somehow, I got myself upstairs. I grabbed Justin, covers included, out of his bed, clambered down the back stairs (which I’d never used, pregnant, because they’re dangerously steep) to the kitchen. And out the back door, flying past the pool, tripping into the driveway, the dark road.
I stood in the middle of the road, heaving, clutching my son in my arms, until the police came.
Fine.
The police came, Larry came. It was only the window in the living room.
As for the phone, it has to go momentarily dead when the alarm goes off, because the emergency signal is being transmitted to the security service.
I had people in to repair the loose lock that same day, also the shutter moorings outside. For good measure, I ordered another arc of floods to be embedded in the ground beyond the porte-cochère.
But I also had a long talk with Harriet.
I asked her to move in, at least until the baby came. I’d always been against live-ins, I admitted—a question of privacy—but now I needed her. I didn’t see how I could make it through without her. Obviously I couldn’t count on Larry, and I knew I couldn’t stay in the house alone another night.
“I know it’s only been a few weeks,” I said, “but I’ve come to look on you practically as a member of the family. I think you’re wonderful. And I need you now—for me. I really do.”
Of course, I added, there would be more money for her, too. And no expenses. She could save practically everything she earned.
To my disappointment she hesitated, even when I took her up to the third floor to show her the living arrangements I had in mind. There are three lovely, sun-filled rooms up under the eaves, one with a skylight, plus a separate bath, and views all around including, on one side, a panorama of the New York skyline. I’d decorated them originally with myself in mind. More recently, I’d had the idea that, once the children were older, it would be for them. But now, I said, it would all be hers. If she wanted, but only if—for we both knew what he’d say—we could move Justin upstairs too.
It was lovely, she agreed. But, hesitant, she’d have to see.
Finally I wormed what it was out of her. The stepfather. She didn’t know if he would approve. Well, would it help if I talked to him? Oh no, that wouldn’t be necessary, not at all. He might not disapprove either, necessarily, she’d just have to see.
By the next day, though, it was all fine. She moved in that same night, and we celebrated, Justin and I, by taking her out to a sumptuous lunch.
Strange young woman, nevertheless.
When I ask her about her past, she closes up like a bivalve. She says, “Georgia, please, let’s not. It’s pretty boring stuff, really. Besides, now is what counts, now that I’ve started over.”
Of course I more than make up for her reticence. I tell her everything. When Justin’s not there—at Group, or asleep, or playing by himself—or sometimes even when he is, I confide in her, spelling out the words I don’t want him to hear, letting her attentive gaze, her soft, reassuring comments, wash over me. I’ve also used her shamelessly since she moved in—for driving me places (with Justin in the backseat); for back rubs; for standing by when I shower, lest I slip, and blow-drying my hair afterwards; for bringing me warmed milk on a tray, with honey, sometimes a plate of oatmeal cookies the two of them have just baked.
(She even irons! Larry’s handkerchiefs. Says it relaxes her.)
In some ways, she may be the younger sibling I never had. Yet try her on a Monday morning when she shows up from her weekend, all puffy-eyed and surly, then closets herself all day with Justin. No, “surly” isn’t fair, but moody, absolutely uncommunicative. Once she said she needs Mondays to “decompress.” (Decompress from what? The stepfather? Some boyfriend she hasn’t told me about?) I asked her, well in advance, about Thanksgiving, thinking she might want to go home to Minnesota where I think she still has some family, and that we’d offer to pay for her ticket. Oh no, she said, startled, she’d much rather stay east, with us. If that was all right? Fine, I said. But when I suggested inviting the stepfather to Thanksgiving dinner, Oh no (visibly disconcerted), he’d have other plans.
Soit, as they say in French. So be it.
Occasionally, when I catch her unawares, I find her gazing out a window, a far-off stare. Her legs are apart, and she’s rolled forward onto the balls of her feet, almost to tiptoe, fists propped on the windowsill, and on her face is such a grim and tight-lipped expression. Jaws set, chin jutting. Very unHarriet. Although I invariably back away, it’s occurred to me that she’s thinking about him then, Johnny, the broken love affair she told me about. But I’ve never, since that first day, gotten her to talk about it.
Only once, an idle remark: “I’ve always had trouble with men.”
I think of this as her French Lieutenant’s Woman look.
It’s even occurred to me she might be gay.
Larry, though, can’t keep his eyes off her.
Neither can my son.
As far as Justin Coffey’s concerned, I think he’d lay down his life for her, I really do.
All fixed: alarm, shutters, Harriet.
And then there’s Larry.
Some fifty people were fired from Shaw Cross on “Bloody Wednesday” last month, but thank God, Lawrence Elgin Coffey wasn’t one of them. Apparently he thought he was going to be. At least that’s how he explained all the hush-hush with Holbrook the night before. Instead they made him an offer—“right off the dorsal fin, honey, totally unexpected”—and when I cornered him that night, in the den, he was still “running the numbers,” still trying to see if it would “fly.”
I made us shrimp wok, took it in to him on one of our lacquered trays with a Bass Ale and chilled glass mug and a little vase of mums from the garden. He was sitting in the Stickley I gave him one Father’s Day, talking on the phone. One of its little desk arms was piled high with papers; the other held the phone, a tumbler of Scotch, a yellow legal pad with pages folded back, and his calculator with the printer.
He was in his stocking feet, his shoes across the room under the desk. At this point, I knew nothing of what had happened, but I was all geared up. The minute he got off the phone, I announced that I couldn’t go on living as before, not seven months pregnant.
Distractedly, he said he understood.
“Not to worry, honey,” he said, still focusing on the calculator tape. “Everything’s going to change now.”
Then I told him I’d invited Harriet to move in. I expected a monumental row, but all I got out of him was, “Dynamite move, Georgie. You just do whatever you have to do.”
“Well, maybe,” I said, exasperated, “you could stop whatever you’re doing for just two minutes, and tell me what the hell is going on. And where you really were last night?”
He looked up at me, his moon face now in a big grin, then stood, stretched, and then, picking up his bowl in one hand and his chopsticks in the other, he told me about Lawrence E. Coffey and Company.
We now refer to it around here as “The Deal.”
Most days we’re going to make a fortune; every so often, there’s trouble, everything stops, and we’re on the phone endlessly—with Holbrook, Joe Penzil, other people. (“We,” of course, is Larry.) Essentially The Deal, as he explained it, is that he’s becoming—I guess has already become—a kind of independent agent, selling Shaw Cross “products” on commission. And working from home until he gets his act together—a mixed blessing—although he still goes into the office most mornings and his salary, under his old “deal,” doesn’t run out till January.
“The beauty of it, Georgie,” he declaimed that night in the den, “is that it fits Reality like a glove. When you stop to think about it, what am I if not a great seller? If the whole industry is going back to fundamentals, and that, for me, means selling—Kee-rist, when it comes to selling, I’m a fucking genius!” Grinning broadly, his glass mug raised in some kind of a toast. “The old Bear still has a few secrets up his sleeve. Believe me, baby.”
For what it’s worth, I do believe him. Maybe other people don’t—I’m constantly asked how he is, a kind of once-removed pulse-taking—but if Larry Coffey believes, I do, too. For one thing, I’ve been there before with him. The time they took his commissions away at Shaw Cross, we had the same crisis atmosphere, the near-total self-absorption, the interminable telephone huddles with Holbrook et al. But Larry came out on top then and, to judge from what’s been happening this time, he’s going to make a success of Lawrence E. Coffey and Company too.
Craig thinks I’m jealous.
Maybe I am, a little. I used to think my husband makes a truly astounding amount of money. (I still do, actually.) But now that I’ve seen a little of him in action, his indefatigable enthusiasm when he’s on the “horn”—“shoring up my customer base,” he calls it—I can’t but think that’s what God, in his wisdom, made him to do.
As for me, I quit the work force seven years ago. All it took, at the time, was Larry’s running the numbers for me and the (gruesome) discovery that what I made in a year on the magazine, after deductions, was what he pulled down in a good week.
Exit Career Girl.
Enter, seven years later, your classic, and very pregnant, Suburban Mommy.
Is that why God made me?
It’s as though I’m having the post-partum first. I wake up this morning from bad dreams I can’t remember. Drenched in sweat. And the baby kicking, the terrible taste in my mouth, the dragging, aching limbs, and, transcending the physical, a weird sense of foreboding so powerful I feel as though I have to get out of here or go mad. Out of my body would be best, but I’ll settle for out of my room, the house, St. George.
But to go where?
Yesterday was my last session with Craig till after the baby. I can’t take the back and forth to the city any longer, even with someone else driving. Just getting in and out of the car, I could use a derrick. I’m a hippo. I’ve gained over thirty pounds, which Dubin keeps saying is fine. I can’t even see the scale anymore below my bulge, I have to call Harriet, and it could be my scale is off, but Dubin’s doesn’t lie.
Craig did wish me luck. But then, with his habitual and insufferable banality, he opined that my troubles lately may simply have been that I haven’t had enough to do!
(What did he mean by that? That if I don’t have things to do, I revert to my natural state, which is one of pure hysteria?)
It’s true, I’ve never been so pampered. I have Clotie five days a week now, and she and Harriet have taken over most of the cooking from me. I hardly see Justin anymore, he’s so devoted to his precious “’arrit.” A few weeks ago, I let him move upstairs to the room next to hers (their idea, not mine) and had the workmen in to redo his old room into a nursery. I had them paint it a neutral yellow just in case (although I’m sure it’s going to be a girl this time), but now it’s done, they’re gone, the new furniture has been ordered (because Justin’s old stuff, in the basement, turned out to be mildewed), and what am I supposed to do with myself other than focus on a body that doesn’t feel as though it’s mine anymore?
If Dubin tells me to listen to Mozart one more time, I think I’ll scream!
On an impulse—a weird one, admittedly—I’ve just gotten my mother on the phone. I find myself asking if I can come over.
“In the city?” she says, a little surprised.
“Yes.” (Where else?)
“Well, of course you can, when do you want to come? And how will you get here?”
“Today, actually. This afternoon. I thought I’d stay for dinner, maybe spend the night in my old room, stay tomorrow, maybe even Sunday.”
“But what’s wrong?” my mother says. “Is something wrong?”
“No, of course not,” I answer, knowing how her mind works. What I’m really thinking, I suddenly realize, is: Friday night dinner. Throughout my childhood, my father, who is Jewish—my mother isn’t—but who never set foot in a synagogue (at least he hasn’t in my lifetime), nevertheless insisted on saying the blessing over the Friday night bread. (In Hebrew, no less.) “I’m just feeling a little antsy, is all. The pregnancy blues. I guess it’s the endless waiting.” I add, “I’d like to see you too.”
“You mean you’d like to see your father,” she says tartly.
“I mean I’d like to see both of you,” I correct.
“But if you’re here, who’s going to be taking care of Justin and Larry?”
“Well, Harriet’s here for Justin. And—”
“Oh, is she? Since when is she working weekends too?”
And—of course—she isn’t. Well, I decide, she’ll have to this once. If necessary, I’ll pay her double whatever it works out to be. Just this once, she can just do it. Do it for me.
But she won’t.
After I hang up from my mother, I call her in, and she says, “Georgia! I know I’ve committed to staying all the time once you go into the hospital, but that’s not for a couple of weeks. And you know I’m always gone weekends. Whatever could you have been thinking?”
“I wasn’t thinking,” I admit. “But it’s important to me. Damned important. If I don’t get out of this house, I’m going to go absolutely nuts.”
But, to my amazement, I can’t budge her, not even to staying over tonight if I come home tomorrow.
“I’m sorry, Georgia,” she says quietly, “I just can’t. I’ve other plans.”
“Other plans? What other plans?” Then suddenly—I can’t help it—I fly off the handle. “How can you do this to me—I thought we were friends? Don’t you realize how important it is to me?”
And how (to my simultaneous shame) she is, without a doubt, the best paid nanny I’ve ever heard of? And what about all the little gifts I’ve bought her—the sweaters, the silver earrings with her birthstone, the framed Redoutés for her room?—yet have I ever asked her to do anything outside the confines of her job before now? And how (worst of all), if she’s ever going to amount to anything in this world, doesn’t she think she’d better learn to accommodate herself a little to other people’s needs?
I stop, shocked by everything I’ve just said. It’s horrible! For God’s sake, this is Harriet!
I burst into tears.
“Oh, God …,” I stammer, unable to look at her. And, lamely, something about the pregnancy, hormones, claustrophobia. I can’t bear to look up.
Finally I do. She’s smiling at me.
“Let me see what I can do,” she says calmly.
Now, no matter what I say, I can’t dissuade her. She leaves. She’s gone a good fifteen minutes. While she’s gone—other horrible confession—I pick up the receiver to see if she’s talking to him (her stepfather, I mean), but I get the dial tone instead. I must have missed them. She comes back shortly afterwards, her face uncommonly pale but her chin jutting with resolve. What she’s going to do, she says, is stay through Justin’s supper, then go home, have dinner with her stepfather, then come back and spend the night here. She’ll stay as long as I need her tomorrow during the day, but she’ll have to be gone tomorrow night. Will that help?
“Oh, Harriet,” I say, “it’s all so stupid, so unnecessary. For God’s sake, why can’t Larry and Justin fend for themselves for just one night and one day? Or I won’t go. What’s gotten into me? What do I think’s going to happen to them, that they’ll starve?”
But she won’t hear it, won’t hear my apologies either, and when I mention money again, she cuts me off. She has to leave to pick Justin up from Group, but after lunch, the two of them drive me all the way in to Riverside Drive, and when I emerge from the car, I can’t help thinking: Why on earth am I doing this?
Maybe to be with my father?
He isn’t imposing physically—he’s rather short in fact, and slightly built, and bald-pated though with a long and silver-gray fringe—and, unlike most psychoanalysts I’ve met, he’s quiet socially. Self-contained. Maybe that accounts for his appeal to women, that and his eyes. They’re dark, piercing, impenetrable at the same time. Even when he’s simply listening, observing, they seem to shine.
But he doesn’t get home till almost eight.
My mother, meanwhile, works me over about my weight gain—how will I ever get my figure back? how could I have let it happen?—and then starts grilling me about Larry. What exactly is he doing now? Forming his own business, I explain. But isn’t that something of a comedown for him? Wasn’t he an officer of the company, and a very prestigious company? And for most people who go out on their own, it takes a long time, do we have enough money put aside?
“Well,” my mother says, “at least now he won’t have any excuses, nights.”
“What do you mean by that?”
She looks at me, surprised. Haven’t I, myself, complained about how often he comes home late? And what about the night the alarm system went off?
I end up defending Larry, how a big part of what he does involves wining and dining his customers and that’s unlikely to change.
“Well, Georgia,” she goes on, “I don’t see how you stand it. I’ve told you for a long time that you’d better put your foot down. What right does he have to leave you all alone, particularly when you’re pregnant? And how do you know where he is, all those nights?”
“Are you accusing him of having affairs on the side?”
“I’m not accusing him of anything. That’s your business, not mine. You’ve got to live with it. All I’m saying is that if I’d put my foot down years ago with your father, maybe things would be different now.”
And there we are. I realize, too late, that I’ve let myself be sucked in. I’ll be damned if I’ll ask her how things are between them, but once launched, she needs no help. He treats her like garbage, she says. He’s always hiding behind his precious patients, or trying to, and her whole life is nothing but a misery of well-founded suspicions and his ducking. The saddest part, I think as I listen, isn’t that there’s no basis for her rancor—my father, I’m aware, has been less than faithful over the years—but that she feels compelled to involve me in it.
I manage to escape finally by pleading fatigue. In my old room, I lie down on the bed. Not to sleep, however. The few old familiars—the bed, the dresser, my old desk with the flip-down front, the same rose-patterned wallpaper—no longer say me, and the room has taken on a strangely anonymous character. Occupant gone, destination unknown. A little later, I steal down the back hall and into my father’s study.
It was always, for me, the magical center of our apartment. A small room, then as now. Its one window gives out on a shaft, and the only furniture, apart from the bookshelves that line the walls, is his writing desk and chair, an electric typewriter on its own rolling table, and his old easy chair with the overhanging floor lamp. When I was little, the shelves contained a virtual library of psychoanalysis. Since then, I realize with amusement, it has become a library, mainly, of Herbert Alan Levy. His own published works are there, in all their editions and translations, the relevant manuscripts in neatly labeled boxes, and row upon row of his “casebooks.” These are cloth-bound blank books, ordered through his publisher. Each of his patients gets one or more volumes, a kind of diary of his or her treatment, and they constitute the source, or raw material, of his published writings.
Virtually every important conversation I’ve ever had with him has taken place in this room. I can almost hear the echo of the little girl who sat in his lap or, later, the teenager who straddled the desk chair back to front, her arms draped. I can (do) mark the crises of my young life in terms of my visits to that room.
But that was then, now is now.
I leave, wait, help my mother with dinner, call home.
He comes at last.
All during the meal, I find myself wondering: How can I get him alone? No answer. But over coffee in the living room, he says, “Georgie, is everything all right with you? Aside from the fact that, any day now, you’re going to have a baby?”
“I’m okay, more or less.”
“Really?” he says. “You look troubled to me somehow.”
“I’ve been telling her that all day,” my mother interjects.
“Is there anything you want to talk about? Just to me?” His eyes still focused on me.
He asks it a little cruelly, as though she’s not there. I glance at her—reflex of guilt?—but she stands, saying in an ironic tone, “You don’t have to ask my permission,” and abruptly we’re alone.
“I’d like that very much,” I say.
“I thought so. Well, come along. Let’s go in the back. It’ll be quieter there. I’ll give you an hour on the house.”
Old joke between us.
In his study, he puts me in the easy chair and sits at his desk backward, straddling the chair as I used to. His chin resting on his fists.
“You really don’t look so hot, Georgie,” he says. “Is there something wrong?”
I’m tempted to answer: Nothing and everything. Now that I’m alone with him, I’m tempted to say a lot of things, my whole Daddy’s Little Girl megillah. Instead I burble something about it having been a difficult pregnancy, the last couple of months.
But he doesn’t let it go.
“What does your gynecologist say?” he asks.
“Dubin?” I shrug. “Dubin calls me the very model of a baby factory. Says we’re both fine, mother and baby, all the vital signs. My cervix is holding nicely; the baby is growing; etc., etc. Says I should relax, let people wait on me, drink my milk, and listen to Mozart.”
“Is that so terrible?” he asks, smiling.
No, of course it isn’t. And as for the symptoms I’ve suffered this past month—the sharp contractions that convince me I’m about to deliver early, the shortness of breath and the queasiness, assorted aches and pains, even this morning’s rampant rebellion—what will he make of them if Dubin makes nothing? Or the sensation that my body has been taken over for another purpose, when in fact it has?
The pregnant woman’s syndrome, I think. But this is my second time around, not my first, and I don’t remember any of it with Justin. (Was I too excited with Justin? Too enthralled by the grandeur of motherhood?)
My father asks about Justin. Wittily, I think, I describe how his grandson has fallen in love, at three and a half, and how I’ve lost him not only to Harriet but to the Age of Chivalry—knights, castles, and the Holy Grail. He asks about Larry (never having been a fan), and I find myself defending my husband all over again, The Deal and Lawrence E. Coffey and Company. He asks about my therapist. I tell him I think Craig is something of a dunce. He laughs, says there’s no law he knows of that says an analyst has to be a genius in order to be effective—but is it my imagination or is he secretly pleased that I find Craig lacking what, face it, only Daddy can provide?
“Then what is it, Georgie?” he asks in a sympathetic tone. “What’s really bothering you? It can’t just be the pregnancy. You’ve done that before.”
Sympathetic or not, the question irritates me momentarily. Who was it who said that if men had to bear babies, the race would long since have been extinct?
But he’s right, of course. He almost always is.
And then, just as I’m thinking that, I suddenly, unaccountably, start to cry! Second time today. Oh God, I’m so ashamed! But I can’t stop, and knowing I can’t only makes it worse. I’m aware, sniveling and sobbing, that he’s on his feet and next to me, one hand on my hair, and offering a white handkerchief. I take it.
“Oh God,” I manage. “Talk about hormone swings!”
But I can’t stop. It’s like a storm that has to run its course. Or some weird chemical rush inside my body. I sob, and get the hiccups, and blow hard into the handkerchief, but the honking, snorting sound—hippos, elephants, whales—sets me off again. I hate it, hate myself for blubbering like a two-year-old. And in front of him!
But if I can’t cry in front of my own father, who then?
“And you’re right, Daddy,” I protest tearfully, “this isn’t my first time, it’s my second! But you don’t know what it’s like in here!”
I try to describe it, but I can’t. I gather myself while he watches sympathetically. I start over again with today, how I woke up feeling trapped inside my own skin, and the dreams I couldn’t remember but that set off the panic in me, the overwhelming urge to get out, the baby kicking as though it too had to get out, and then the awful scene with Harriet.
“What it is,” I say finally, “is that I’m frightened in here almost all the time. It’s been going on for a month, more. Nameless fears, jumping at shadows. Maybe it is just the pregnancy—I feel like shit, physically—but I wake up convinced something bad is about to happen, or maybe already has but I don’t know about it, and I know that sounds stupid if I don’t know what it is, but that doesn’t mean it’s not there, does it?”
“What does Craig say?”
I flare at this.
“Do you know what he says? He says I’m not keeping busy enough!”
My father smiles.
“I’m not understanding, though, Georgie,” he says. “Is it that you’re afraid something bad’s going to happen to your baby?”
“Maybe. Or already has. Or to me, or both of us.”
But that’s not it either. Sometimes I think I’m going to drop the baby any second, sometimes I think she’ll never come out, but I guess that’s normal. What I feel is more free-floating, unfocused, I can’t explain. It’s like a character in some Stephen King novel, when the bad’s right there but nobody knows it. Except I doubt my father has ever read a Stephen King novel.
He’s closed his eyes, rubs at the corners. The gesture calms me somehow. I used to tease him about it. He does it, he’s always joked, because it gives him a precious few seconds to think of something—anything—when he’s supposed to produce an insight for a patient. Only tonight there is no special insight. All he says is that I only have a few more weeks to get through and then, whatever I’m afraid of, it will be over. Meanwhile, I just have to grit my teeth. Getting through, gritting my teeth. He reminds me that I’ve never been very good in situations over which I’ve no control. He reminisces: about when I was little and just learning to talk, God help them if he or my mother didn’t understand what I was trying to say. I’ve heard this before. I remind him too that, if he’s right about me and my need to control situations, then it must be a straight gene pass-through, father to daughter.
We laugh familiarly together.
At the same time, there’s something missing. Didn’t I cry, confess? So where’s my catharsis? Instead, he looks at me, I look at him, and I realize suddenly that I’m looking at an old face, tired, distracted even. Maybe his mind is elsewhere? Well, but he is old, I think, sixty-six this year, even though he still keeps a full slate of patients. What right do I have to inflict myself on him?
I want to reach out, smooth the wrinkles on his face, check, as I once did, for places he may have missed, shaving. In the end, though, we’re just gazing at each other. A little sadly, I think. At least I feel the sadness in me.
I stand. Half-cuddling his head, I kiss him on the forehead. He stands too, and we hug awkwardly because of my girth. I feel his hand briefly in my hair, and then he’s patting me gently on the back.
Old gestures.
“I’m glad you came,” he murmurs. Then, smiling at me, “It’s a great life if you don’t weaken.”
Old line.
I sleep better than I have in months. Well, longer at least, for when I wake up, a little before ten, the taste is in my mouth again and I’m assaulted by new waves of anxiety. What am I doing here, separated from my family? Suppose something’s happened to them? That they need me? Am I so selfish—so self-absorbed, anyway—that I could just abandon them like that?
My father has already “made his escape,” on a Saturday, and my mother is fuming. According to her, he had a call early this morning. One of his patients had a crisis during the night. He left immediately, not knowing when he’d be back.
I’m just about to call home when the first stab hits me. I all but double over, but I can’t double over. The grabbing pain makes me gasp for air. I sit down. Oh, God.
It passes. I realize I’ve broken into a sweat. I try to remember the breathing exercises from Justin. I didn’t take the course this time because I didn’t think I needed to. Failing to remember, I take deep slow breaths.
I wait. Three, four minutes. My mother is somewhere else in the apartment. I’m not feeling the baby. Then—the same suddenness, no warning—it hits again.
I fight the panic, the tears that well involuntarily from the biting pain.
When it passes this time, I call home. I talk to Harriet, Justin, Larry. All of them seem strangely distant. I tell Harriet what’s happening. Justin asks, “Why are you calling, Mommy?” Struggling for calm, I tell him it’s because I miss him. Apparently this doesn’t make much of an impression—he and “’arrit” are watching Saturday morning cartoons.
I end up hollering at Larry. When I ask him to come get me, now, he hesitates. Something about some calls he has to make. The Deal. (On a Saturday?) He says he thought I was staying over till tomorrow anyway. I tell him, for Christ’s sake, I’m cramping, I think I’m going into labor! He reminds me that I’m not due for another three weeks, probably it’s a false alarm, and then my mother—she must have come in without my hearing—is shouting at me, “Just tell him to meet you at the hospital!”
The next attack is some ten minutes later, then longer, then quick, quick, three- or four-minute intervals. My mother has made me lie down. She wants to make me tea, but all I can take is water. After an hour of it, I call Dubin’s office, get the answering service, and then, a few minutes later, Dr. Orloff calls me back. He’s a partner in the practice. I don’t know him, except that he has a black mustache and an oily voice and somebody said his examinations hurt more than Dubin’s. He too mentions the hospital. He’s headed there himself, wants me to meet him there. Clearly it’s a matter of his convenience. I say back—maybe I’m shrieking—that I don’t want the hospital, and for that matter, I don’t want him, I want my own doctor. He says that’s impossible, he’s covering for all the office’s patients. Now I am shrieking—the idea of a stranger delivering my baby!—and I’ve got Dubin’s home number, and he’s always told me not to worry, any time, morning, noon or night …
I guess Orloff’s happy as not to get rid of me. Half an hour later, Dubin calls me back. Apparently he’s on a golf course somewhere in Westchester, even in November, but no matter. He listens to me, tells me to take it easy. He says what I’m describing doesn’t sound like the beginning of labor to him, but that doesn’t matter either. He’ll meet me at the office at one.
A little over an hour.
I lie down again. I hear my mother mobilizing Harriet, Larry. She tells them what Larry should bring. My last contraction is in the taxi heading downtown (fingernails digging into the upholstery), and then there’s Dubin, in his white coat over a V-neck sweater, rubber gloves on his hands, bending over me and saying, “Okay, Georgie, let’s check the two of you out.”
Irritable uterus.
It’s nighttime now. I’m home again; the house is quiet. Harriet has gone off, Justin’s asleep, Larry’s watching some football game downstairs. I’m on my chaise longue, writing in my diary.
Dubin gave me two choices. Either I can go into the hospital now, and stay there until the baby comes, or I can go home, but to bed. No activity and, yes, rest and relaxation.
“But what’s wrong with me?” I asked him.
“Nothing at all,” he answered. “In fact, everything looks fine. Your cervix is holding nicely and it hasn’t begun to soften. The baby’s in good position, the heartbeat regular. No fibroids. I see no reason why you shouldn’t carry to term.”
“Then why is this happening? And why do I have to go to bed?”
“Because we want to keep the uterus quiet, and I don’t want to give you anything for it, this late in the day. Too much activity has been known to stimulate early labor, and even though the baby’s already viable, we don’t want to encourage the process. Besides, what’s so bad about a couple of weeks in bed?”
Nothing. Nothing really.
My father just called. He sounds depressed. One of his patients, a reformed drug addict, tried to commit suicide last night, and right now my father can’t dispel the idea that he’d have been better off succeeding.
Unusual, I think in passing, for him to admit something like that.
I tell him about me—paltry stuff by comparison. I ask him to thank my mother again. I thank him, too, for last night. He says what’s to thank him for. For listening, I say. It did me good. We wish each other good night, and I hang up, and there we are, me and my baby, and my irritable uterus.
Still, there’s a question none of them has answered. Not Dubin, or Craig, or my father.
Why do I lie awake, so many nights, anticipating the worst?