The Thin Pink Line

by Lauren Baratz-Logsted

  Nearly twenty years ago she’d said she loved me but, much as I had wanted to attribute it to reality at the time, I’d known it was just because I’d kept her pretty hair out of the vomit. Now she wasn’t saying it, but her actions were showing it; only this time, it wasn’t for something I had done for her. This time, if it wasn’t necessarily for who I was, it was for something she thought I was capable of doing, something in me. Perhaps one of my most secret dreams was finally going to come true. Perhaps I was finally going to achieve a sisterly relationship with my own sister.

  “My God!” she said again, more gleefully this time. “Do you know what this means?”

  I shrugged noncommittally: no, for “not really”; yes, for “what do I look—stupid?”

  Sophie accepted the no. “It means that our children are going to be the same age and they’re going to be cousins!”

  I caught on to the possibility that a new generation brings, the extended hope of second chances. I impulsively grabbed her hands. “Maybe they’ll even like each other!”

  “Oh,” she said, “this calls for a celebration. We need cake.”

  “But you said—”

  “Oh, to hell with perfect nutrition. We can start being nauseatingly good again tomorrow. In the meantime,” she said conspiratorially, “let’s split an éclair. And a napoleon. And maybe a piece of that nice rattle cake, if you can make it just big enough to include both the blue and pink parts but staying away from the part that the cat swiped because that probably wouldn’t be too good. Oh,” she ohed again, only this time solicitously, “that is, of course, if you’re feeling up to it. God knows I know that the first trimester can be a pretty wonky time for a woman’s stomach.”

  “Oh,” I brushed off the morning sickness I wasn’t having as I cut a massive slice of cake, “I haven’t been bothered much by that. Must have been lucky enough to inherit Gran Taylor’s genes. Remember what she used to say? About how she’d rather give birth to a houseful of children than go on one trip to the dentist?”

  Sophie laughed. “And remember what Mother used to say? That the only reason Gran Taylor could make that claim was because back then they used to knock women out, before Lamaze got into the act, and that anyway Gran Taylor was a drunk?”

  “I remember.”

  At Sophie’s insistence, we ate off one plate, using two forks.

  “Oh,” she sighed, “this is going to be just heavenly.”

  “Our babies being the same age?” I asked, thinking she was still reading from the same page. “Them being cousins and maybe even liking each other?”

  “Well, there is that. But also,” she conceded coyly, “there’s the added bonus of your being pregnant taking a lot of the pressure off of me.”

  “Oh?” I put my fork down.

  “Well, with both of us being pregnant now, and you more newly so, Mother’s bound to transfer some of the attention she’s been smothering me with onto you.”

  So, similar to the incident nearly twenty years before, Sophie had an ulterior motive for her enthusiasm for me.

  To distract myself from this unpleasant notion, I told Sophie about the plans Trevor and I had for getting married.

  She smiled conspiratorially again. “Mother might even begin to finally like you,” she nodded knowingly.

  Gore Vidal once said, “Every time my friend succeeds, I die a little death,” a perfect encapsulation of the writing life that I frequently found myself quoting to my colleagues in the publishing world. That said, in actuality I made it a practice to see my friends’ successes as my successes because, really, if one didn’t adopt that approach, at the end of the day what point was there in living?

  “Tell me again about Christopher,” I said to David, practically scampering along beside him as we neared the kebab takeaway on Tottenham Court Road. “It is Christopher, right?”

  “Yes, that’s right, and he is the most wonderful man I have met since I have been living in your country. He is English, but not at all English, if you know what I mean, and he’s a real rakehell.”

  “You mean he’s a libertine?”

  “No, I believe he votes Labor.”

  “That’s not what I meant.” He walked through the door and then held it for me. Always the perfect gentleman, had it been a pull, he’d have just pulled and waited. “And I don’t think that’s what you meant, either.”

  “Then perhaps I meant that he is a rapscallion.”

  “No, I really don’t think that’s quite the word you want.”

  “Fine.” He held my chair for me, wiping the seat off first. The Tandoori Crown had a whopping two tables and was nothing if not marginally filthy, but they did the best curry around. This was only true, however, if you were in the know enough to know to order it to stay; if you really did order it to take away, they might throw just about anything into your bag. “Then let’s just say that I love him more than I love anyone I’ve met in this country since I met you. I love him like Bibi on a good day when Bibi still had good days.”

  “That’s saying a lot.”

  He merely nodded emphatically.

  As I looked at him, a change came over his features, his face opening up with a sheer uncomplicated joy that I had rarely seen, except on the faces of very small children who were fortunate enough to have wonderful parents. When David rose out of his chair, I turned to see the object of his untempered delight and came face-to-face with his Christopher for the first time.

  I had been vaguely expecting something along the lines of the femininely male opposite of David, but what I was confronted with was another David minus the accent.

  “You must be Christopher,” I said, holding out my hand. “You and David met when he needed to replace the architect on his restaurant.”

  “Yes, I did know that,” he said, giving my hand a shake that was warm enough to leach the sarcasm out of his words, transforming it into the basis for a future familiarity. “And you must be Jane. You and David met when he was first moving into the Knightsbridge flat and he needed to borrow a wrench and you answered the door nearly naked and you thought that he was trying to make a pass and you grew offended when he didn’t, but then you realized he was gay and you both became the best of friends and have been ever since, not that homosexuality or wrenches have anything to do with it.”

  “Yes, I suppose I did know that, too.” I could see what David meant about Christopher being English but not at all English. “Are you sure you’re not American?”

  “No,” he said, opening his menu, giving it the most cursory of glances and then placing his order. “Why? Were you expecting someone more mincing than I?”

  Well, I couldn’t actually say that I had been, could I? “No, it’s just—”

  “You know, we don’t all mince. It’s not a prerequisite or something.”

  “I know that. It’s just—”

  “Sometimes two men that are a lot alike, like David and I, fall in love. There doesn’t have to be a ‘woman’ partner involved, even though books and movies would have you think so.”

  “Yes, I am in publishing and I do know—”

  “There’s no reason—”

  This time I cut him off. “All I meant was that you talk an awful lot for someone other than an American.”

  “Oh. That. Well, my mother was from New Jersey.”

  Then he let out a huge laugh, a bark of a laugh really, the kind of laugh that must have originally given the name to the guffaw. Perhaps the fact that it was literally right in my face was what made me jump back in my seat.

  “Excuse me,” I began, “but I don’t really see—”

  Pound, pound, pound. Christopher pounded his open palm on the top of the wobbly wooden table as David guffawed right along with him.

  “You should see your face!” David roared, wiping at his eyes with the back of one hand.

  “When David first told me about you,” Christopher supplied in halting starts as their mutual hilarity dribbled down, “you know, the story abou
t you nearly naked at the door and the wrench—”

  “Yes,” I interjected, versed by his example in my lines, “I do still remember that incident.”

  “—I also told him—” David picked up Christopher’s narration “—that in spite of the bizarre circumstances of our first meeting, that you were the toughest woman I had ever known, and that included all of the women I had known back home who carried Uzis, and that you were nearly impossible to take the piss out of.”

  “To which I said,” Christopher continued, “‘Just watch me.’”

  “So we made a bet,” pinged David, handing Christopher a wad of crumpled notes that looked like low denominations, but still…

  “And I won!” ponged Christopher, accepting the money and roaring off on another tearing laugh.

  I had finally recovered. “Then you didn’t mean that whole tirade about mincing and everything?”

  “Oh, of course I meant it, but just the words and not as a tirade.”

  “And your mother’s not from New Jersey?”

  “Well, actually, that part’s true too.”

  Oh, well, so long as it worked for them.

  Over steaming plates of chicken samosa and aloo samosa—we were in a very samosa mood—they told me again about the details behind Christopher replacing the architect on David’s project. Sure, I’d heard David’s version of it before, but they were still in the stage where they were new to each other, still in the stage where they welcomed the chance to relive aloud any of the details of their coming together, and I was happy to be the excuse for their happy retelling.

  David was still reluctant to give me too many details on his project, claiming that he wanted it to be a total surprise, which made me wonder what he could possibly be doing with food that would seem so new. But Christopher couldn’t keep himself from bringing it up, since it was their original common ground, and at one point he teasingly suggested to David that he rethink the name as well as the theme. “You could call it Fish! Fish! FISH!!!” he roared, writing it out on the paper tablecloth for me so that I could fully appreciate the punctuation, although I failed to grasp the joke. It didn’t bother me, though, because David got it, roaring right along with Christopher. Apparently, my best friend was in love.

  I looked at David and his Christopher laughing, and as I looked at them, I thought wistfully of Trevor. Birds did it. Bees did it. Even Israelis with hairy knees did it. If they could do it, why couldn’t I fall in love?

  “Surely you’re not planning on going to the gym today, are you?” Dodo pointedly asked, gesturing at the nylon bag I’d pulled out from under my desk, preparatory to my early four-thirty departure.

  “Er,” I responded astutely.

  “Don’t you think that by now you should be thinking about giving up weight training and running? After all, that bending and pounding can’t possibly be good for the baby.”

  Rats. I kept forgetting about the blasted baby.

  Being pregnant in the twenty-first century, I was fast learning, was an experience something akin to standing in the middle of an overloaded minefield with your fetus and saying, “God, I hope this turns out all right.” If it wasn’t that smoking resulted in a higher risk of low birth weight—a statistic that one couldn’t help but be sure was blown to pieces by the very fact of Frank Sinatra since it was impossible to picture Frank’s mother not being a smoker and since anyone who knew anything about Frank knew that he’d been born weighing thirteen pounds—then it was that drinking turned your baby into an alcoholic. Okay. Fine. Even I had to admit that if the host body weighed something like sixty times more than the guest, it probably made sense to stay away from substances strong enough to intoxicate the larger of the two. But then there was all this other stuff about cat litter (which actually worked to my advantage), about hot tubs and saunas, about electric blankets and heating pads, about caffeine, about X rays, about household hazards—including lead, bad tap water, insecticides, paint fumes—about, apparently, as Dodo was presently pointing out to me, something called the Valsalva maneuver.

  “What the hell is that?” I asked her.

  “Holding your breath and straining. If a woman wants to continue weight training during her pregnancy, it’s permissible to do light weight lifting—notice the stress on the light—but she must remember to breathe out upon lifting and must always, always avoid the Valsalva maneuver.”

  “How the hell do you know all this stuff?”

  She hoisted a copy of What to Expect from her desk drawer, waved it at me and announced, “I couldn’t let you go through all of this alone, could I? I mean, I know from what you’ve said in the past that you consider your mother and Sophie to be useless as far as any form of support goes, and as for other girlfriends…” She let her voice trail off here, being too polite to point out overtly that I had none. “Anyway,” she continued brightly, “I thought that, since you and I have become such good friends, it was only fair that I arm myself with the appropriate knowledge so that I can be as supportive as possible.”

  Great. Here I had singled Dodo out because she had no sisters, had no girlfriends, was thirty-five and had no intention of ever having any children, and now she was declaring her determination to become a know-it-all on the subject of pregnancy, and all for my sake.

  Great again, I further thought as she embraced me in a girl-power hug. Now I had the Valsalva maneuver to worry about, along with everything else.

  Was it any wonder that the modern pregnant woman—in the first pregnancy, at any rate—appeared to glide through the world like a victim of shell shock? There were so many millions of little things she had to worry about that could go wrong, so many things that she could later feel responsible for, that it was as though she lived in a constant state of dread and fear, at war with the elation that people kept telling her she must be feeling—usually the same people who had her worried that she’d precipitated a potential problem by eating a piece of fish without first contacting an environmental protection agency to find out if it had been contaminated with PCBs, which, if the fetus is exposed to, can possibly lower IQ. No wonder the modern expectant mother needed extra coddling just to get through it all without having a complete breakdown of nerve. What did women in previous times experience?

  I’ll tell you one thing. At the risk of sounding like my mother, in the good old days, people didn’t worry about all of this stuff. Ignorance was indeed bliss. True, the infant mortality rate was much higher back then, but surely there were other contributive factors. The typical farmer’s wife, the way I see it, got pregnant a number of times, didn’t even think that being exposed to cat shit could be a problem since she was exposed to so many other kinds of shit, drank the water, used as much heat as she could find to keep warm, drank some of her husband’s whiskey occasionally for medicinal purposes, took puffs off hand-rolled cigarettes if she felt like it, lifted all kinds of heavily weighted things all the time without worrying about what breathing method she was using, lost some babies, kept some babies, and died herself without ever once feeling personally responsible for her household’s survival rate.

  But I knew, in the sensible part of my brain, that those times weren’t these times, and that if a pregnant woman today were to behave blithely about what the public perceived as safety issues, she’d probably be arrested on charges of negligence before the outcome concerning her baby’s health had even been determined.

  Anyway, I had other things to worry about. For, according to Dodo, I had an obstetrician to pick out.

  “What do you mean you haven’t picked an obstetrician out yet for the baby?” Dodo nearly shrieked in my ear, which meant that anyone in the office who was within earshot got the same earful that I was getting, only less painfully.

  I don’t know how getting the name of an obstetrician had managed to slip my mind. After all, I, like Dodo, had read some of What to Expect and so should have known that by the time a woman was into her third month, it was pretty much well considered SOP to have found so
meone who would commit to delivering one’s baby. Whenever Trevor asked how the pregnancy was progressing, I made up a recent doctor’s appointment and said that everything was going fine. What more did people want? Details?

  “Er,” I said, intelligently, “did I actually say I hadn’t picked one out yet?”

  “Actually, you did,” said Constance, our overpaid and almost underaged receptionist who, it being Tuesday and therefore not Friday, was at her desk. I had always suspected the overpaid part since she wore the season’s latest over her waifish frame, had funky accessories, such as a whole bunch of different-colored contact lenses, including violet and turquoise, and had her black hair coifed in an ultrachic short style that looked like she had it trimmed each week at a high-end salon. And, as for the underaged part, all you had to do was look at her; for, despite her expensive trappings, she looked more like she was just a guest at Churchill & Stewart, having come in with her mother as part of some Take Your Daughter to Work program, than someone with a legitimate right to any pay.

  “Er.” There it was again. Who the hell did I think I was, bloody Hugh Grant? “That may have been what I said, but it was not necessarily what I meant.”

  “Do tell,” said Louise, the saucy git who was assistant editor to the editor who was most jealous of Dodo’s success, as she played with the office copy machine. Louise always pretended an urgent need to copy something whenever she wanted to listen in on other people’s conversations, the dead giveaway being when she tucked her long and straight blond hair behind one elfin ear, the better to hear us all, my dear. Now she turned her back to the copier, leaned her butt against it as though it was the bar at the local pub, crossed her arms in front of what can only be described as scary breasts, and said, “Do tell us all, Jane, what you necessarily meant.”

  Yes, this was the same Louise who had jumped up and down with me so enthusiastically the month before when I’d told her of my impending marriage. Since then, however, the ardor of the women in the office regarding my procreative and matrimonial double coup had cooled somewhat and I couldn’t quite place my finger on why. Could it have been jealousy over this embarrassment of riches my life was providing me with? Were they, too, longing for morning sickness or, even better, the extra-special treatment that came with it? Did they also want to become engaged, with the Pollyannaish hope that, like heroines in a Shakespeare comedy, they could end their stories poised on the edge of bliss rather than continuing on into an Act VI where, inevitably, marital fights began to break out over rights to the remote control, whose turn it was to take out the garbage, and whether or not it was really necessary to visit in-laws every weekend? It was amazing, really, how quickly women could turn the worm. Even being a woman myself, I found that I could never predict with any statistical certainty which way they’d come down on anything.