“Lena, do you know that while you were breakdancing to Eminem, a child was conceived?” I tell her.
I can out-self-obsess her. That’s my charm.
“You could name the child Cosmo,” says Lena. “You know, after the drinks.”
The Fear Call ends abruptly. I hang up on Lena.
JANUARY 27
I couldn’t sleep at all last night. I took three Advils to try to scare off the headache, which lasted all day. I am not ecstatic to maybe be pregnant. The fiancé and I haven’t even discussed a wedding date yet. We haven’t even discussed when the next time we are going to see each other will be. Before he got on his plane yesterday, the fiancé didn’t call me from the airport like he usually does. Which is a good thing. I’m sure if he had called to tell me he loves me before he got on his plane, like he usually does, I would have said something stupid like “I think I may be pregnant,” and, with those six words, I would have ruined not only his plane ride, but his life. I can hold off ruining his life. At least for a couple more days.
Being pregnant is definitely going to ruin my life, a life which was pretty simple but thoroughly enjoyable. My life is about partying with friends, Fear Phone Calls the morning after, going to spin classes so my ass can fit into low-rise jeans, and writing columns for a newspaper. I get paid a good salary and I work only a couple of hours a day, spending the rest of my time talking on the phone with friends. Twice a month I visit the fiancé. The maximum reward for the minimum effort was all working out just fine by me.
I’m quite sure the fiancé and I would not get along as well if we lived together under the same roof. Saturday morning, for example, he got into a funk after I left a wet towel on the bed, again. “It’s like I have a child as a partner,” he said, storming out of the bedroom. He uses that line on me a lot. “It’s like I have a child for a partner,” he will say when we go out to eat and I order chicken fingers off the children’s menu. I like chicken fingers. “It’s like I have a child,” he will say when he sees me making ice cream sandwiches with waffles. I like waffle ice cream sandwiches. “It’s like I have a child for a partner,” he will say when I leave the cap off the toothpaste, which, really, I don’t think is the biggest deal. How guilty do I really need to feel leaving a gob of Colgate on the sink counter? It’s not like I’m an inside trader or a murderer.
If I am not pregnant, I will never, ever again leave a wet towel on the bed. At least, if I am not pregnant, I will never, ever again leave a wet towel on his side of the bed. At the very least, if I am not pregnant, I will never, ever again leave a wet towel on his side of the bed when he’s visiting. I’m pretty sure I can live up to that, if I’m not pregnant.
The fiancé is kind of right, though. I am twenty-nine years old and not mother material. What kind of mother prefers Froot Loops to Special K for breakfast? What kind of mother gets her home phone cut off four times a year because she forgets to pay her bill? What kind of mother owns only three forks, one knife, two spoons, and twelve free promotional mugs that were sent to her at work? I don’t even own oven mitts. The one time I needed to pick up a hot plate in the kitchen, I used my bath mat. I forget to water my plants for months. I don’t even know how the plants got into my apartment in the first place. I know I have never actually purchased any plants, so their presence in my living room is a complete mystery.
The worst thing about being pregnant right now would be that I was so very close to reaching my goal of having Janet Jackson abs. Thanks to hours a week at the gym and a regular personal trainer, my stomach has never been flatter than it is right now. My career, writing the Girl Column for the newspaper, has just started to take off as well. My entire raison d’être relies on my living a fabulous life, going to trendy bar openings and parties, so I can gather material to write about being a young woman in the city. Even if I’m not always having the best time, it’s my job to make it seem like I am always having a better time than everyone else. If I get fat, some skinny, younger girl reporter with a stomach as flat as a countertop will get my job and do it better, and I will be fired. This whole thing is a disaster.
How could I have been so stupid? I have ruined my life. I am never having sex again. I mean, I am never having unprotected sex again. Unprotected sex, like that black dress I wore the other night, is a bad idea. Ten minutes of great sex and my life is over. But another life has just begun. Life apparently does not happen when you’re busy making other plans. Life is what happens when there is an open bar.
JANUARY 28
10:00 a.m.
Maybe I haven’t completely ruined my life. Isn’t it better to be a young mother, like Reese Witherspoon, than an old mother, like Madonna? Reese has managed to have two kids before the age of twenty-eight. She always looks stunning on red carpets and makes $15 million a picture. She’s America’s Sweetheart! Because I am young(ish), my body will bounce back quicker if I have a baby now. My eggs won’t be healthy forever. Lena, who is thirty-eight and still single, is always moaning about how her eggs are old and her ovaries have probably dried up like prunes. I did want kids eventually, didn’t I? This way, my child will be in school full-time, and I’ll only be thirty-five. Some people don’t even decide what they want to do with their lives until they’re thirty-five. Right now is actually the most perfect time to be pregnant. I’m employed. My newspaper has benefits. I can take maternity leave. I can still work from home after giving birth. The fiancé will be a great father.
The fiancé is actually ideal father material. I’ve said this many times. “He’s definitely marriage and father material,” I would say to my friends when the fiancé and I first started dating, and they would nod, knowing exactly what I meant. Women always know what “father material” means when you describe a man you’re dating that way. It means that the guy is a perfect mix of provider and protector, brains and brawn, that he always takes your phone calls no matter how busy he is at work.
Sure, this pregnancy is unplanned. But some of the best things in my life have been unplanned. I didn’t plan to be a newspaper reporter. I didn’t plan to fall in love and be in a long-distance relationship for five years. Shit happens. And, for the most part, all the unplanned things in my life have worked out just fine. It’s like when you plan just to go out for brunch and then spontaneously decide to go shopping and end up finding the one pair of pants that makes your ass look like a ripe peach. It’s actually a good thing.
10:20 a.m.
Who am I kidding? The fiancé will dump me. My boss will fire me. My parents will never talk to me again. I will be a single, unemployed, unwed mother who keeps in touch with the father of her child only through support checks. I have ruined my life and that of this unborn child.
JANUARY 29
No one believes me. My other best friend, Ronnie, refuses to acknowledge that there’s even the slightest possibility that I’m knocked up. It’s not like I utter the words “I’m pregnant!” every day. I’m kind of hurt no one is taking me seriously.
“You are not pregnant,” Ronnie told me, laughing into the phone. I had assumed Ronnie would understand what I’m going through. We are the same age but live entirely different lives. She has three children, all under the age of five. We attended college together. She got married right after graduation, while I took on a very important job serving coffee to guests in the waiting room of a nightly television current affairs talk show. At the time I was sleeping with a drummer in a band the name of which is too painful to repeat. Ronnie was nearly a virgin when she got married. (She had slept with only two men, and one of those two men she only half-screwed. To this day, she’s not even sure what happened.) She had her first child at twenty-five, her second at twenty-seven, and her third at twenty-nine. We speak almost every day— for about three minutes. Without fail, her kids start screaming in the background and she must rush off to attend to them, because this is what mothers do. And Ronnie is a very good mother. While she’s driving her kids to daycare or school or music lessons, I’m usually
still sleeping. While she’s busy baking cookies for fundraisers that will guarantee that her children get into good private schools, I’m partying with friends. I know her kids’ names but for the life of me I couldn’t tell you their birthdays. I practically yelled at her four-year-old son when I called her this morning.
“Brad? I need to speak to your mommy,” I said.
“My mommy?”
“Yes, your mommy. Is she there?”
“Yeth.”
“Can I speak to her? Please?”
“Yeth.”
“Um, Brad sweetie? Get your mommy NOW!”
“Who ith this?” My God, is my kid going to be this stupid? Of course, Brad is four. Maybe all four-year-olds are stupid.
“It’s your mommy’s friend Rebecca. Where is your mommy?”
“I don’t know. Do you like Harold?”
“No. I don’t like Harold. Who is Harold?” Argh. Why did I take the bait?
“He’s Ms. Thompson’s bird.” Not going to ask who Ms. Thompson is. Not going to ask.
“Brad. I really, really need to speak to your mother. Please tell her to come to the phone.”
“My daddy drives a car.”
“Yes, your daddy is very smart. Where. Is. Your. Mother?”
“I have a penith. My mommy hath a vagina.” How the hell do you respond to that?
“Please, Brad. Your mommy will give you chocolate cake if you go get her for me right now.”
“Who ith this?” I’m going to snap. I am.
“It’s your mommy’s friend. Get her NOW.”
“She doethn’t like you.”
“Yes she does.”
“You are not nice.”
“Yes I am.”
“Do you drive a car like my daddy?”
I know it was wrong to get infuriated with the kid. But he’s not my kid. And, yeth, I really needed to thpeak to his mommy. What does he not understand about “Get your mommy NOW”?
Then, suddenly, Brad put the phone down. What followed was about a minute and a half of silence on the other end.
“Hello?” said Ronnie, finally picking up the phone. “Is someone there?”
“Thank God!” I huffed, exasperated.
“Hey, did you just call me? I didn’t even hear it ring.”
Jesus. This is why kids should never be allowed to pick up a phone. Ever.
“I know I am pregnant,” I told Ronnie, once again, before explaining what happened the night of the engagement party. “I know my body. I know something is different. Stop laughing!”
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Were you ovulating?”
“Why? Does that matter? How the hell do I know if I was ovulating? What does ovulation have to do with getting pregnant?”
“Um, everything? I thought you knew your body. Some women can feel when they’re ovulating. When was your last period?”
“I’m not sure. I think it was . . . I don’t know.”
What type of woman actually keeps track of her periods anyway? The type that has a lot of sex, I suppose. And the type that is super organized and owns Filofaxes or Palm Pilots so she can write that sort of thing down and fill up her calendar so it looks like she lives a very busy, very organized life. I am neither of these types. Before I would have even protected sex with a man, I would make him run down his sexual history with me. I would ask, “When was the last time you had an AIDS test?” Much to his horror, I made my fiancé actually take an AIDS test before I would sleep with him. Men will do almost anything if they want to sleep with you, even if it means taking the morning off work and spending four hours in a public health clinic. The last time I wrote something down in my Filofax was in 1998, in one of my “brilliant idea” flashes, when I decided it would be a “brilliant idea” to get organized. During those four days of organization, I never once even thought about writing down “Period today.”
“Beck, I’m sorry. I’ve got to run. I have a kid screaming in each room and I have to make dinner. I’ll have to call you tomorrow, Mama,” Ronnie said, before we even made it to the three-minute mark.
“Oh God. Don’t say that to me! Do not say that to me!” I think I actually felt my heart skip a beat at being called “Mama.” It was like when I’m forced to listen to jazz. I hate the sound of it.
“I’m joking. Find out when your last period was, okay? You are not pregnant. You are just being psycho, girl. Once you find out when your last period was, you can figure out if you were ovulating or not. You can log on to the Internet and type in ‘ovulation calculator’ and type in the date of your last period, and it will tell you if you were fertile the night of your engagement party. That’s what I did when I was trying to get pregnant with Brad.”
“Okay, okay. Wow. I didn’t even know about that. Listen, one more quick question and then I’ll let you go. Did you feel morning sickness the day after you got pregnant?”
“I’m definitely getting off the phone now. And no, I did not. You cannot possibly have morning sickness two days after you’ve conceived. It doesn’t hit for four to six weeks.”
“But, I swear, I think I can feel the baby moving.”
“But it’s not even a baby yet! It’s like nothing. It’s like a spot! In a few weeks, when you get your period, you’ll be laughing too. We’ll be laughing about this over a bottle of wine. Trust me. You’re just being a drama queen.”
Actually, we will not be laughing about this or anything else over a bottle of wine. Ever since Ronnie had children, I can’t remember her ever drinking more than one glass of wine. And I still don’t see how me being pregnant is so funny. And, for the record, I think that getting pregnant without thinking about it, while the father of the child lives in a different city, is a good reason to be a drama queen.
I don’t understand why no one will believe me. I knew practically the minute the fiancé rolled off of me that I was pregnant. It’s like how I always know when the phone company is about to cut off my phone. Or how I know, halfway through drying my hair, if I’m going to have a good or bad hair day. It’s women’s intuition.
JANUARY 30
Ever since the fiancé left, he’s been acting weird. Because the fiancé is being weird with me, he’s making me be weird with him, and so our dozen or so daily conversations are entirely weird. Ever since that night, it’s like we have a big weird cloud over our relationship.
“You’re being weird,” I started our most recent phone call, which started almost exactly like the phone call before that, and the one before that, and the one before that, and the one before that.
“I’m not being weird,” he responded. “You’re being weird.”
“I’m not being weird. I know that you’re being weird, though.”
“You’re the one being weird.”
If we both didn’t have jobs to attend to, it’s possible we could have gone on like that for hours.
“I’m not being weird. I’m being tired,” he finally said.
“Me too. I’m being tired. Let’s talk later,” I said, before throwing in “Weirdo” and hanging up. I always get the last word.
And that’s pretty much how we’ve been talking to each other these days.
Thanks to my favorite shopping buddy, Dana, I have nearly figured out when my last period was.
“Why are you calling me so late in the middle of the week, asking me when you got your last period?” she said groggily when she picked up her phone. “Why are you being so weird?”
Really, is it so weird to call a friend after midnight to ask when you got your last period?
“I am not being weird. I just really, really want to know when we went shopping for those Miu Miu slingbacks. What day was that? Please help me. I need to know.”
“Okay, okay. Chill out. What is your problem? You bought those shoes on January 14th. Don’t you remember me saying how I couldn’t believe John ditched me a month before Valentine’s Day, then I spent hundreds of dollars I don’t have on clothes I don’t need to kill the depression?
And don’t you remember how I got mad at you for buying those shoes because I really, really wanted them? And then we went to buy you tampons.”
“Right, right. Perfect.”
“Why? Hey, are you planning to take the shoes back? It’s probably too late. But I might be convinced to buy them from you. Can you believe that idiot ditched me a month before Valentine’s Day after I spent so long with him? I really trained that guy. He was almost ready to be husband material.”
“No, I’m not giving the shoes to you. And, no, I can’t believe he dumped you. But, really, you weren’t even sure what the guy did for a living, were you? I don’t think he was actually marriage material. You should know how your husband spends his days. But I can’t talk about that right now. Go back to bed. I’ll call you later.”
“By the way—great party last weekend. It was the best party I’ve ever been to. Your dress was amazing. Didn’t I tell you you should wear that dress? You looked fantastic. I was right. You should always listen to me.”
“Dana, I hate that dress. I’m pregnant.”
“WHAT?!?” screeched Dana. Finally, the reaction I was expecting. “When did that happen? You were drinking like a wino at your party.”
“No, it happened the night of the party. He . . . you know . . . in me. We were drunk!”
“Are you a fucking idiot?”
“Dana, you must learn to express your opinions. Why don’t you tell me how you’re really feeling about my accident? We were drunk! And, yes, I’m a complete fucking idiot.”
“Okay, don’t freak out. I’ve been through this before a couple of times. I always worried that I was pregnant immediately after too. Chances are you’re not. Okay, that was how many days ago? Five? Hmm. Too late for a morning-after pill. I’ve done that twice. It’s easy. You just have to call your doctor.”
“You have?” I couldn’t hide my shock. Dana, in addition to being my favorite shopping buddy, is also my calorie-counter friend. She’s always counting calories and can tell you exactly how many calories are in the top of a bran muffin or a cup of frozen yogurt or a bowl of cereal. It’s quite an amazing skill she has, if a completely odd and obsessive one. Dana works at a magazine, in the marketing department, and has the best wardrobe of all of my friends. I know exactly how many pairs of shoes she has (fifty-six) but had no idea she had all that much sex.
Knocked Up Page 2
