by Judy Baer
This is why podiatrists are not fertility experts.
“Oh, she’ll get her mind off it, all right,” Kim drawled. “No doubt about that.”
Kim is absolutely right. Mitzi will be thinking of a thousand ways to make Arch pay dearly for this.
Monday, April 6
“Put it back!” The words crackled around me like shards of broken glass.
I’d never heard the upper registers of Bryan’s voice before. It’s impressive that he can squeak that loudly.
Feeling a headache starting in my right eyeball, I turned to him and patiently explained. “I am not going to eat your meatball sandwich, Bryan. I am, however, moving it to get to my salad, which is in the container beneath it. You are going to have to accept, sooner or later, that I am not the Pierogi Bandit, that I like my own meatballs better than the ones your grandmother makes and that, in general, I do not make it a policy to steal food from hungry people.”
He slumped onto a stool. “They all say that.”
“‘They?’”
“Betty, Mitzi, Kim…” He looked so defeated, sitting there with his mushroom-colored eyes, hair and skin, that I pulled up a stool and sat down beside him.
“What’s up? Really.”
“The food…”
“I know, but there’s got to be more. You don’t usually get so emotional, even about your grandmother’s food. There must be something else going on.”
His head jerked up, and he stared at me as if I’d just touched a sore spot in his heart. “Jennilee wants to get married.”
Well, knock me over with a feather.
“No kidding? Congratulations!” I studied his facial expression. “Or not?”
Bryan shrugged helplessly. “You know how I am about confrontations. Jennilee is giving me an ultimatum. Either we start talking marriage or she starts looking for someone who can commit.”
“You have been dating for two years,” I ventured, trying to imagine the timid Jennilee even knowing what an ultimatum was, let alone giving one. “It’s not an unrealistic expectation to discuss your future together.”
“But it’s just so hard to know!” Bryan fussed.
“Know what?”
“Whether she really loves me for myself, or if it’s all about my looks and charisma.”
It took me an entire thirty seconds to get the imps in my mind to quit rolling on the floor of my brain and laughing.
“Oh, Bryan…” I laid a comforting hand on his arm and willed myself not to wonder where Bryan parks the magnetic and alluring part of himself when he comes to work. “I wouldn’t worry about that, if I were you. I’m sure Jennilee loves you for who you are as a person and isn’t blinded by all your sparkle and glitz.”
“No?” He looked hopeful. “Maybe I just worry too much.”
“Maybe you do,” I agreed. “Take a break. Enjoy your life.”
He nodded to himself, like one of those car window dogs whose head is attached to its body by a wire spring. Bobblehead Bryan. In more ways than one.
Smiling to myself, I sat down at the table, pulled a packet of diet French dressing out of my purse and popped the lid off my delicious salad, the one I’d been looking forward to all morning. I looked into the container, then lifted my head and yelled, “Who ate all my chicken and cherry tomatoes?”
Pierogi Bandit, now you’ve gone too far. You went and messed with my salad. Consider yourself history.
Thursday, April 8
“But you have to go with me. Arch has patients.”
“I have a job. Here. Remember? Some people actually count on us to write and sell software programs. Silly, I know, but—”
“You have to go.”
At that moment, Harry, the little row of punctuation marks on his head looking more pronounced than usual, wandered by with that glazed look in his eye that he gets when he’s in the creative flow.
Mitzi lasered in on his befuddlement. “Doesn’t she, Harry?”
“Huh?”
“Whitney. She has to go to my doctor’s appointment with me, right?”
Harry stared at me as though he didn’t recognize me. “Yeah, sure. Whatever.”
She looked at me triumphantly. “See?”
I’d been hijacked in broad daylight, in front of an audience, and no one had lifted a hand to save me.
Mitzi, who is having a series of ultrasound films taken in specific cycles to monitor follicular development—which sounds like something from a program on the rain forest to me—and some blood tests, didn’t seem to mind the tests nearly as much as she did the clinic’s choice of X-ray wear and cleaning supplies. I don’t know what she expects to smell when she goes into a hospital, other than antiseptic odors. I’ve never known one to smell like Eau de Gucci or White Diamonds.
“Why is it that parking spots open for you like Moses parting the Red Sea?” I asked as she pulled her Porsche into a spot right next to the clinic door. “If I’d been driving, we would have had to park at the tire shop across the street and hike over the interstate.”
She looked at me blankly. Parking spots always appear for Mitzi. And jewelry. And good hair days. It’s no wonder she’s having such a difficult time with this infertility thing. It’s the first time Mitzi hasn’t immediately gotten what she wanted.
As I sat in the waiting room, reading Good Housekeeping from February of 2003, I covertly observed the stream of patients entering and leaving through the front door of the fertility clinic.
A pale, limp woman entered the room. Everybody knows such a woman—bland complexion, mousy hair, hunched shoulders, leaning forward slightly as if she were heading into a brisk wind. Her clothes were clean but wrinkled, as if they’d resided a little too long in the dryer before being rescued, and her sweater was stretched out on one side. This was not surprising, since there was a small child hanging on its hem. The woman shambled along, one hip raised slightly to support the robust blond baby on her hip. She was the most worn-out-looking woman I have ever seen. Even the tongues of her shoes were hanging out, panting for breath.
The nurse at the desk, I soon deduced, was Limp Woman’s sister. She kissed the baby, gave the toddler dragging on his mother’s sweater a Tootsie Roll and handed the woman a package that she was to deliver to a third family member who was waiting in the car outside.
They tried to carry on a conversation, but the baby stuck its drooly fist in his mother’s mouth and the child on her sweater lifted its feet off the floor and dangled from it like a capuchin monkey. Finally the mother shuffled toward the door and disappeared, looking even more stooped than when she’d entered.
I felt exhausted just watching her.
For the sake of truth in advertising, perhaps we should see more tired mothers on the pages of national magazines and fewer rested ones who appear to have, before lunch, sewn up matching outfits for their darlings, cooked a nutritionally balanced gourmet breakfast that included pancakes in the shape of Disney characters, and taught them to speak French.
Maybe, I thought, as I thumbed through the dog-eared magazine, it’s a reprieve for Mitzi that she doesn’t see all the actualities of motherhood quite yet. The circus will begin when the dawning light of reality starts to shine on Mitzi.
And, speaking of motherhood, I dropped in on my parents after work tonight because Chase’s nurse had called to say he’d been held up at the hospital.
Mom, in a pair of leotards and a baggy shirt, was cooking dinner. It’s no fair, really. The woman is looking at fifty-five in the rearview mirror, and she doesn’t appear old enough to drive a frying pan. There are the occasional crow’s feet, of course, and a couple of frown lines in her forehead that I put there when I was a child, but overall, she looks too young to be a grandmother, even without makeup. Maybe she is too young to be a grandmother.
“Hi, darling, bring me a bag of chocolate chips from the cupboard? I want to frost this cake.”
Obediently, I opened the cupboard and peered inside. Funny, isn’t it, how a daughter o
rganizes things in her cupboards exactly the same way her mother does? Soup at eye level in rows—mushroom, tomato, chicken noodle—tuna fish on the same row as the soups, and baking supplies all on one shelf, etc. Sometimes when I see that someone has put a garbage can anywhere other than behind the right-hand door under the kitchen sink, my mind automatically screams, “Wrong! It’s just wrong!”
“There aren’t any chips in here.” I held up an empty bag. Two elderly gray chips rolled onto the counter.
“Oh, that father of yours.” Mother looked ready to slap him with her spatula. “He could buy a candy bar when he wants a snack, but no. He has to eat my chocolate chips. He thinks he’s getting away with something…Ha!”
“Ha” is right. My dad hasn’t fooled my mother in thirty years.
“Now what will you do?”
“What I always do when your father eats all the chocolate chips.” She put a finger to her lips. “But you must never tell.”
She went to the small cupboard where she kept cough syrup, aspirin and any sort of medication she didn’t want a child to reach. She dug in the back and pulled out a flat white box with bright blue lettering.
“Mother, you wouldn’t!”
She stared at my horrified expression, then down at the box in her hand—and burst out laughing. “Oh, Whitney, even I’m not that cruel! I hide a can of frosting behind the Ex-Lax so I always have it on hand. Your father never looks in here when he’s hungry.” She put the laxative back into the cupboard and pulled out a can of fudge frosting.
I sagged with relief. Even though Dad needs to be taught a lesson about eating between meals, Ex-Lax frosting would definitely be overkill.
“You know, dear,” Mother said as she greased and coated a pan, “next time you bake, flour your cake pan with a bit of the cake mix itself. Then you won’t have that messy white stuff all over the bottom of your cake.”
But if I go to a bakery, I don’t get messy stuff all over my kitchen.
She handed me the can to open. She’s finally quit sending me to the neighbors’ to have their hunky bachelor son open anything with a lid. Her theory was that if she sent me over there often enough, and if I looked helpless enough, he’d fall in love with me and ask me to marry him. He opened a thousand bottles over the years, with nary a proposal, much to my mother’s disappointment.
Chapter Ten
Wednesday, April 14
Too much information! I have heard more about what happens when a couple goes to a fertility specialist than I’ve ever wanted to know. Unfortunately, no matter how hard I try to get Mitzi to quit talking about her and Arch’s exploits, it doesn’t work. Today she’d pounced on me the moment I entered the break room to get coffee.
“And the phlebotomist said I had the smallest veins he’s ever seen. Do you want to see the bruise on my arm? My skin is very delicate, you know. I just can’t be poked and prodded like some people. Can you see those tiny little veins? And look at this bruise. Black, blue and red! She put a bandage on it, but, of course I just bled anyway. Why, Arch says…”
Bryan, who was pouring himself a cup of coffee, skittered out of the room.
I handed Mitzi a sheaf of papers, hoping she’d get the hint, leave the break room and get back to work. “If you’d just file these, I’ll…”
“Sometimes I feel like I’m in school, worried about whether I’ll pass or fail a test. I never liked that part about school. I’m very sensitive, you know. I don’t believe in failure. Why, there was this time in geometry class that…”
I escaped into the office just in time to see Kim at her desk, systematically breaking pencils in half. As she did so, she muttered to herself, “Take that, and that and that.” She gritted her teeth so tightly that I could hear her molars grinding. Then she picked up one of the broken stubs and rammed the lead tip into the desk so that it shattered and left a large dark graphite smudge where it hit. She smiled with satisfaction, picked up another and did it again.
“Kim…” I approached her warily, much as I might an unfamiliar dog with speckles of foam around its mouth. My eyes went to the corners of her lips—just in case.
She looked up at me, face flushed, eyes darting. “Yes?”
“Is there something you’d like to tell me?”
She thwacked another pencil lead into oblivion. “No. Why would you ask?”
“Oh, just a guess, that’s all. Woman’s intuition. And the fact that you are pulverizing number two lead pencils just for the fun of it.”
“A girl has to have hobbies, doesn’t she?” She rammed another pencil into the desk.
“Whatever happened to scrap-booking and golf?”
Through gritted teeth, she muttered, “Get me out of here.”
“Noon?”
“No, now.”
There are advantages to my position in the company. Normally, I do not exercise these benefits, but when one of my staff is losing her mind—and her writing implements—before my very eyes, I need to act.
“Bryan, will you see that Kim’s desk is covered? I want her to come with me for a quick meeting. We’ll be back in a half hour, forty-five minutes, max.” And before anyone could protest, I hustled the maniacal Kim out of the office.
She was still muttering to herself when I brought her a latte and a chocolate biscotti from the coffee shop. I sat down across from her and waited. Eventually her breathing started to slow and the tenseness in her body began to fade.
“Thank you, Whitney. You may just have saved a life.” She swilled down the coffee as if it were ice-cold instead of steaming.
“Yours?”
“No. Mitzi’s.” She poked the biscotti into the remaining coffee, sloshed it around until it was soft and gobbled that down, too. “And Kurt would never forgive me if I wrestled that woman to the floor and put a gag in her mouth.”
“No?” I took a sip of my own java. “But think of the thank-you cards you’d receive from Mitzi’s friends and neighbors.”
Finally, she smiled. “Poor Mitzi. She doesn’t even know what she’s doing, does she?”
“Want to talk about it?”
Kim rumpled her hair with her fingers. “Whitney, I’m so ashamed!”
“I would be, too, if I’d wrecked all those pencils. Think of the trees….”
“She makes me crazy, and it’s not even her fault.”
“For once,” I said, still clueless about what we were discussing. If there’s trouble in the office, it usually can be traced back to Mitzi. “Care to clue me in as to what we’re talking about? Or would you like me to play twenty questions with you?”
Kim looked at me quizzically. “But don’t you…No, of course you don’t!”
Here we go again. Our own little Tower of Babel. Everybody’s talking, and I haven’t a clue what any of them are saying.
“I can’t believe it, but I’m jealous of Mitzi!”
That’s what this is about?
“It’s so stupid. She’s been talking nonstop about she and Arch getting pregnant, and I’m green with envy. I want to feel a baby growing beneath my heart, to feel it kick and flutter….” Kim, grieving over the loss of that treasured experience, rested her hand just above her diaphragm and looked so wistful that I felt like crying for her.
“She’s not sure this will work, Kim. Below all that bluster, Mitzi is terrified that it won’t. She’s talking about this to convince herself she’s going to have a child—not you.” I crossed my arms over my chest and stared Kim down. “And I think you already know all that. You’ll be delighted for Mitzi when she becomes pregnant. There’s something else going on with you.”
Her eyes welled with unshed tears. “I’m the paper version of Mitzi, and I hate it. She’s got to pass all these physical hurdles in order to get her baby, and I have to pass the paper ones. Kurt and I have spent hours filling out forms and gathering documents to compile a dossier and get our adoption started. We’ve been assigned a social worker. Our home study looks at everything about us, our personal and
family backgrounds, how we were raised, our siblings, the significant people in our lives, our marriage and family relationships, our motives for adopting and what we expect for this child. They want to know how we plan to integrate a baby into our family, how we’ll parent, our health histories, education and finances. They want references and background clearances to make sure we aren’t criminals. They’ll know more about us than we know about ourselves!”
“Too bad they don’t have that information before babies can be born into all families. We’d probably learn a few things about how to be good parents before the fact, rather than by trial and error. Cars come with owner’s manuals, but babies you have to figure out on your own.”
Kim smiled wanly. “You’re probably right. After filling out some of these forms, I wonder if I’m fit to be a mother to Wesley.”
“And he’s a smart, healthy, funny, happy little boy. Go figure.”
Kim cheered slightly. “We were told that it could take six months or longer to compile everything we need, but we think we can get it done in half the time. Then we have to send it all to China and wait for a referral.”
I must have looked surprised.
“We went to a meeting last night with several families with children from China. The moment I walked into the room, I knew it was where we needed to be. There’s a child in that country, Whitney, that’s meant for us. I feel it in my heart.”
Kim scowled. “Yet when Mitzi yammers about all her tests and I think about what it was like to carry Wesley for nine months…” She touched her flat belly.
“You want that, too.”
“It’s hard to let go of that dream, even though I know adopting is the right thing for us to do. Am I totally selfish, Whitney?” She toyed with the stiff paper the biscotti had come in.
“You and Mitzi aren’t in a race to see who gets a baby first. This isn’t an Olympic event, you know.”
Kim wiped her eyes with a rough paper napkin. “You know how to put things in perspective, don’t you?” She snuffled. “Now I really feel stupid.”
