The Thin Pink Line

by Lauren Baratz-Logsted

  If someone were to come along and administer intensive care to me right now, would I survive this crazy stunt I was pulling?

  The Third Trimester

  The Seventh Month

  It was hard to believe that my mother—let me repeat, ladies and gentlemen: my mother—had deigned to throw me a baby shower in her own home, and she even seemed to care mildly whether I had a good time or not.

  She had the garden room positively festooned with all kinds of pink things and, for a guest list, she’d invited Sophie’s six-pack of parentcraft class friends, all of whom now had tiny babies of their own, which meant that there was an endless stream of diaper changing going on throughout the party that was supposed to be in my honor, making it more of a poop party really. Mother had also invited Sophie, of course, and Dodo, whom she’d met. She’d tried to get Dodo to give her the names and numbers of my friends at work, but Dodo, knowing that I would never want to face Minerva or Constance or Louise or, heaven forbid, Stan from Accounting, across a pile of rubber nipples and throw-up pads, told my mother that they were all on vacation that month.

  As they gently helped me get seated, as if I really were seven months pregnant, I looked around the room at Sophie’s friends. All of them—Goodie Peg, sour Trudy, officious Dora, mascaraed Elizabeth, sweet Patty, and Helena, who’d already returned to work part-time—were trailing those little portable baby seats with them wherever they went. When everyone was finally seated around the huge mahogany table Mother’d had Tony drag into the garden room for the occasion, it was like the meeting of the Five Families in Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, save that none of us were technically gangsters and that, instead of consiglieri, each woman had a baby seated slightly behind her and to the right.

  Before I knew what I was about, I found myself opening packages of things, and well, frankly, I didn’t know what most of the stuff was for. Sure, I’d been to plenty of other people’s baby showers before, but I’d never actually paid any attention when the women were opening the presents. I mean, who does? Certainly not people like me. Whenever I had to go to other people’s showers in the past, I just bought the expectant mothers gift certificates to what I hoped were appropriate shops, daydreamed while they unwrapped everyone else’s presents, ate the pasta salad if it wasn’t too vinegary, ate the store-bought cake no matter what kind it was because it always seemed churlish not to, drank however many glasses of wine that I could lay my hands on if they were liberal enough to put any out, and went on to the nearest pub to get completely sloshed at the earliest possible moment that etiquette would allow.

  And, as for any opportunities I might have had when reading the pregnancy books I’d bought to glean information on what commercial items a newborn baby might need, well, I hadn’t bothered with any of those chapters, had I? After all, it wasn’t like I was going to need to know anything about what a baby might need after delivery, since delivery was the end of the line in my plan, and particularly since there was no baby. So, as I sat there opening prettily wrapped present after present, I tried my best not to look completely perplexed by some of the items, or the names that the others were insistent on attaching to them.

  Receiving blankets? Yes, but what exactly did that mean? Right after I had the baby, if I ever had a baby, is this what I was supposed to receive my baby with for the first time? If so, I hoped that someone would at least have the decency to clean him or her up first; the blankets really were too nice to get all messed up with placentas and all of that other icky stuff that newborns might be trailing behind.

  “Ooh!” I said, confident that I’d finally recognized something. Actually, I’d been oohing a lot at this shower. I’d seen other people doing it all the time at other showers and figured that if I did it enough, people might not notice how mystified I was. “Ooh! Look at the pretty design! What beautiful cloth diapers! Actually,” I added, confidingly, “I hadn’t decided yet between the merits of disposable and—”

  “They’re not diapers,” interrupted Goodie Peg. “They’re meant to go over your shoulder when you burp the baby after feeding, so she has something other than you to spit up on.”

  “Oh. Sorry.” I laughed, hoping I didn’t look as embarrassed as I felt. “What’s the difference, though? Same baby, different secretions, right?”

  Nobody else seemed to think so, and I quickly moved on to the larger packages, figuring that playpens and strollers were things I could usually puzzle out on my own; it was just the smaller items of baby care that always seemed to throw me.

  I was about to get all excited about a high chair that the baby could use a little farther down the road in its life, maybe once it got past the stage where it needed its head to be supported all the time lest it fall off like the man’s wife in the story about the woman who always wore a yellow ribbon around her neck, when I heard a discordant sound, just barely discernible above the oohing of the other ladies. My hearing had always been extraordinarily good, the better to torment me when the refrigerator made that humming sound I hated or whenever my mother talked.

  “Shh!” I shushed the other ladies, sensing it might be important. “Quick! Patty!” I shouted, when I’d located the source of the sound, unable to rise from my own seat quickly enough what with the cumbersomeness of my fake baby weighing me down. “It’s little Herbert! I think he’s choking!”

  And it was true. Sweet Patty’s baby Herbert, who himself was no bigger than a minute it seemed, was choking on something he’d managed to get into his mouth, his face beginning to turn colors.

  Dodo, who knew how to administer the Heimlich to any breathing being, man or beast, immediately moved into action. Before Patty even had a chance to think about panicking, Dodo was doing her thing, a tag projectiling its way out of the baby’s mouth in another few seconds, following which Herbert, quite understandably, began to cry.

  Babies were such small things really that, in spite of all their messiness, they certainly did bear close watching. In that instant it made sense to me, what some first-time parents said, that when they brought their babies home from hospital they were scared to sleep themselves for fear that something might happen to this tiny person who was now completely dependent on them. Sometimes babies did need someone to take care of them, didn’t they?

  It suddenly felt like such a close call, that I felt curiously like crying myself. As for Patty, she already was, her trembling voice carrying the scolding note of fear as she addressed Herbert, all the while holding him as though she’d never let him out of her sight again.

  “Oh, Jane,” Patty gushed after first extracting the non-speaking Herbert’s solemn promise that he would never frighten Mummy to death like that again, “however did you hear him over all of our racket? You saved my baby’s life.”

  Somehow it didn’t feel right accepting credit where it wasn’t due. “It wasn’t me, really. It was Dodo who saved the day, knowing all of the emergency medical care stuff like she does.”

  “Don’t be modest,” said Dodo, modestly. “I just did the technical part. No one would have even known Herbert was in trouble if you hadn’t heard him.”

  “It was nothing,” I actually got to say for the first time in my life.

  “Oh, please,” said Elizabeth, the heavy mascara making raccoon eyes on her since she’d started to cry in sympathy for Patty’s worry and, more especially, at the thought of such a thing befalling her own little Jemma, “you mustn’t pretend it was nothing, Jane. You saved a baby’s life.”

  I was starting to feel just a wee bit cynical again. I was tempted to point out that it was a baby’s life and not Albert Schweitzer’s; that for all we knew, rather than growing up to be another Albert Schweitzer, little Herbert might grow up to be Attila the Hun. But I said nothing of the sort. I knew the crowd I was working well by now, and I wasn’t about to fall into that trap of saying the true thing again.

  “Well, anyone might have done it,” sniffed Trudy.

  The group glared at her as one.

  “W
ell, okay, maybe not anyone,” she conceded quickly in order to avoid being tarred with Desitin and feathered with cotton swabs. “But anyone with really good hearing could have done as well. I remember reading once, a scientific study that said that each year a child grows older, his or her power of hearing decreases markedly. You’ve got to admit, Jane is young, the youngest in the room, so it’s easy for her.”

  “Don’t be absurd,” Dora tut-tutted. “Jane’s not young anymore—she’s practically thirty.”

  “Besides,” put in Helena, “you’re speaking utter nonsense, Trudy. Patty’s the youngest here. Everyone knows she’s only about as old as Prince Harry.”

  By now, all of the mothers had their babies in their arms, no longer content to have the most important part of themselves playing where they couldn’t be seen.

  “Well,” pronounced Goodie Peg, who had the tendency to act as policy maker for the group, as she placed her baby, who had also been named Peg, to her breast in order to feed. God, I wished she wouldn’t do that in front of me; I might be getting a shade better at some of this baby stuff, but I still wasn’t ready for suckling. “Well,” she said, “I think it just goes to show what I’ve suspected all along. Jane is a natural mother. She’s got the instincts and, you know, not all women do, even though the romantics would have you think otherwise.”

  My, this was a different tune from the one she’d been singing at Sophie’s shower, when she’d practically accused me of being an alcoholic. Still, the others nodded their assent. I’m not sure if it was that they agreed or if they were just scared of her.

  “What was it anyway,” Sophie asked, “the thing that little Herbert was choking on?”

  “You mean this?” asked Dodo, holding up a half-chewed tag that had formerly been attached to a stuffed animal, a large pink octopus that Trudy had bought. Apparently, in our absentminded heaping-up of the presents as I unwrapped them, the overflowing stacks had gotten near the babies and thus within perfect reach of little Herbert’s grasping little hand.

  “Oh! Those things are death!” Goodie Peg nearly shouted, pointing an accusing finger at the offending object. I think she probably would have burned the guilty tag at the stake were it not for the fact that open fires probably posed some kind of risk to babies as well.

  There ensued a very animated discussion on the subject of leaving tags attached to items because, for whatever the reason, babies were always tempted to eat them and could wind up choking; obviously, any thinking person—and here they all glared at Trudy again which was really unfair since she was nowhere near little Herbert and had not been one of the ladies who were haphazardly stacking opened presents—would have removed all dangerous tags before giving the gift, rather than leaving it up to the possibly busy recipient to think to do it right away herself.

  They moved from there onto the ever popular topic of baby-proofing one’s home, with special emphasis placed on cords of all kinds, electrical outlets, and the optimum storage height for chemical products. This soon escalated into a full-blown natter on the popular wisdom that it was best not to put any bedding, like comforters and such, in the crib with baby because baby might suffocate. (“And what am I supposed to do in the middle of winter,” demanded Trudy, “let my baby bloody freeze?”—“You’re supposed to pay your heating bill on time and put the heat up high enough so that he doesn’t,” said Peg.)

  As I watched and listened to the swirl of women’s talk around me, I realized that everything had changed after I got Dodo’s attention in time to stop Herbert choking. Now, oddly enough, despite the fact that I still hadn’t a clue as to what any of this baby stuff was for, a curious thing was happening. People had begun to say to me, first Goodie Peg and then the others, in ways that indicated that they sincerely meant it, that they thought I was going to make a terrific mother.

  Later, when I tried to put on the Snugli that Goodie Peg had given me, getting it all wrong somehow by trying to step into it instead of putting it on over my head, Goodie Peg didn’t even laugh at me like you’d think she would. She just smiled openly and said, “Oh, don’t worry about it, Jane. You’ll get the hang of it. These are just the little details that everyone has trouble with in the beginning. But I know—I know it in my heart—that you’re going to be a terrific mother.”

  “Oh, I know!” gushed Elizabeth. “Isn’t she just? I knew it from the minute I realized she wasn’t dyeing her hair anymore.” The cosmetics salesgirl looked around the room knowingly. “All the best future mothers refuse to dye their hair or wear nail polish.”

  “Well,” Dodo chimed in, obviously wanting to be a part of this group that she so clearly was not a part of, a group I’d only been allowed entrée into because I was wearing a fake foam tummy that I’d “acquired” from Harrods, “I’ve known that Jane was going to make the absolutely best mother there ever was, ever since we were at a weekend house party together and Jane refused to go into the pool because of all of those new studies they have out now about it not being good for the baby.” The others were looking at Dodo like she was starkers. She desperately looked to me for corroboration. “Do you remember that, Jane?”

  But I was too preoccupied with the thoughts I was having to save her this time. What, I wondered, in the whole bloody world did these women see in me that I didn’t see in myself? After all, I would never dream of saying to another woman that I thought she would make a good mother. Hell, most of the time when I saw a pregnant lady, I found myself tempted to reach out and grab the woman by the arms, perhaps say, “Good God, after you have it, you’re not going to drop it on its head ever, are you?” or “Don’t you think it might be better if you gave it up for adoption?” I never thought that anyone looked like they’d be a good enough mother. What I mostly thought was that there ought to be a law against most people even trying. Yet here were all of these women, gathered in one place, and they all thought…

  “Oh, Jane,” shy Patty sighed as she embraced me, little Herbert, still in her arms, only getting slightly in our way. “If only I could believe that I’d be half as good a mother to little Herbert as I know you’re going to be to your little girl.”

  See what I mean? These women were all fucking nuts.

  Still, I was beginning to get odd, fuzzy feelings in my tummy when I looked at some of the things they’d brought me: the tiny matched outfits; the mobile with Pooh and Piglet and Tigger and Eeyore on it; the socks that looked like no human being’s feet would ever be small enough to fit them, despite the evidence of the live babies in front of me.

  Stuff and nonsense. It was still all smelly diapers and spit-up to me.

  That same evening, I had the most wonderful dream, which was odd since its chief component was the source of my scariest waking nightmare: a baby.

  In my dream, there were three figures: myself; a man who had one of those cloud things in place of where his face should be, like what they use on TV when they’re trying to protect the identity of some squealer; and, at the center of both of our attentions, but in a nice way, a baby of indeterminate gender. (Was the man with the cloud thing for a face Tolkien perhaps? I liked to think so. I liked to think that if there were somehow a baby in my future, that Tolkien would somehow manage to wind up being the father.) We weren’t really doing anything special, not really, just doing the kinds of things that you see families who aren’t Tolstoy families doing in books and on the screen. We were doing the eating thing, the playing thing, and the caregiving thing. And, it wasn’t as though me and the male figure looked like a pair of grinningly mindless village idiots, either, so much as that we looked capable of doing whatever we were doing and glad to do it.

  When I was awakened by my own bladder at around 2:00 a.m., as I made my way to the bathroom I had the peculiar feeling that my dream had been a part of some kind of bonding ritual, not exactly Stonehenge maybe but definitely something age-old. I felt as though I’d just completed a practice run and been found not wanting.

  I endeavored to return to that bucolic
place, crawling back under the covers a few moments later. Once sleep came, however, I was unable to find it. The same three figures from before were there, only this time, it really was Tolstoy territory. Oh, I don’t mean that there were revolutions going on or people throwing themselves under trains, nothing so dramatic as that, but we were out of the territory of boringly happy families and into the norm.

  And the worst part of it all was me.

  The male figure and the baby figure were still performing their roles just fine, while there I was, the unprepared and incompetent one. If I wasn’t forgetting to do things, like feed the baby, I was losing things; at one point I even lost the breast with which to feed the baby with, which might not sound possible, but there you have it. There I was in my nightmare, searching around for it until I finally located it buried in an overflowing basket of dirty laundry. Of course, by the time I found the breast, the baby was nowhere to be seen, search as I might.

  I woke up screaming about a quarter to four, just loud enough to cause the Marcuses below to bang on their ceiling with a broomstick, just like they’d done in the old days whenever the sex that I was having with Trevor began to sound as though we were having too good of a time. Anyway, I couldn’t get back to sleep at that point if I’d tried, nor did I want to; I was too frightened of what awaited me. Instead, I sat up drinking cup after cup of tea until my nerves were jangling so much from all of the caffeine that I was ready to go airborne, at which point I deemed it an acceptable time for me to call Sophie without disturbing her family.

  I don’t know why I turned to her, really; sometimes, I guess only a sister will do and, if you’ve got one, you hope that the one that you’ve got will be up to it.

  I didn’t give her the opportunity to groggily complain to me about the impossibility of ever getting enough sleep when one is the mother of an infant or about the rudeness of people who telephone at hours when only a true emergency should be calling.