Another Marvelous Thing

by Laurie Colwin

  “I will never forgive myself for not seeing your sickly, ashy face on the morning of your wedding. God, this dress is uncomfortable. I now see why you hate clothes. By the way, they won’t let me wear a watch in this getup. What’s the time?”

  “You have forty minutes before they throw the switch,” said Billy. “Do you require a last meal?”

  “I’m starving, now that you mention it,” Penny said. “Bring me something. Toast. Coffee. Anything.”

  Billy returned with a tray of coffee, buttered toast, and some cheese puffs stolen off the caterer’s tray, along with two oversized linen napkins provided by Penny’s mother lest the bride get crumbs or butter on her dress.

  “What’s going on down there?” Penny said.

  “People keep showing up. Grey and David are planning a fishing trip. Your father forgot the emery boards and says they’re not necessary anyway. Hawks and Ricardo are here chatting up your gran.”

  Dr. Hawks was the local Congregationalist minister and Dr. Ricardo was the rabbi of Mrs. Stern’s New York congregation. They would jointly perform the ceremony.

  “I could eat fifteen times this much toast,” said Penny. “These cheese puffs are top rate. I don’t suppose you’d hop downstairs and get more.”

  “I have strict instructions not to bring you anything else.”

  Penny sighed and sipped her coffee. “I’ll be very happy once this is over. I have to keep remembering that it only lasts a couple of hours.”

  “It lasts a lifetime,” Billy said.

  “There’s always divorce, my girl,” said Penny. “Is your entanglement really over?”

  “It better be,” Billy said. “When I look back over the last two years, I can’t believe the person who lived that life is me. You can’t imagine how exotic I felt to myself. I never had interesting romances like you. That was my interesting romance. I thought if I gave it up I would be my same old self, but I seem to be some other old self.”

  In Penny’s room Billy was her old self. Francis did not know anything about her real life, her past, her childhood. They were each other’s exception, and had nothing to do with each other at all.

  “You’ll get over it,” said Penny.

  “That doesn’t seem to matter,” Billy said. “Maybe I will and maybe I won’t. But now it’s part of me. It’s history. It’s my own historical event. In some way it doesn’t matter what I feel. It’s what I remember.”

  After the ceremony, the party sat down to lunch. Waiters hovered with trays of champagne. Plates were filled, emptied, refilled, and taken away. The three-tiered cake was cut amidst cheers and toasts. Between courses, the bride and groom table-hopped, making sure they talked to everyone.

  Right before the ceremony Billy had switched the place cards so she and Grey could sit together. This did not go unnoticed by old Mrs. Stern, who did not like things to be changed without her say-so, but Billy and Grey were exempt. Billy took Grey’s hand under the table. The ceremony, unlike their own spare vows, had affected them both. They sat with their knees touching. Billy felt as if she had been on a long, perilous journey and had come back with a grateful heart to everything she belonged to.

  When the waiters appeared with coffee, Penny knocked Billy’s elbow.

  “Let’s go for a ride,” she said.

  Arm in arm they ran down the hill through the apple orchard, through a gate in the low stone wall and past the rock garden. Penny wound her wedding dress around her middle. On the bank of the pond lying on its back like a giant turtle in the sun was the Old Town canoe Penny and Billy had played Indian scouts in as children.

  Billy flipped the canoe over. “I’ve splattered my dress,” she said.

  “It’s only water,” Penny said. “It won’t stain.”

  They hiked up their skirts, slipped off their shoes, and Penny hopped in. Billy gave the canoe a shove and jumped in too.

  “I filched a couple of cigs,” said Billy, taking one from behind each ear. She had stuck a pack of matches into her bra.

  They paddled across the pond. There, beside a willow, they stopped and lit their cigarettes.

  “Do you think they think we’ve bolted?” Penny said.

  “They think we’re going for a spin. Your grandmother waved to us,” Billy said.

  “Then they probably think this is some charming part of the day’s events,” Penny said.

  “It is, isn’t it?”

  “This is the end of my girlhood,” Penny said again glumly.

  “We haven’t been girls for years,” said Billy.

  They sat smoking and watching the water spiders jump from ripple to ripple. There was an occasional flutter on the surface as a brown trout rose to snap at a mayfly.

  Across the pond, the house sat securely on its rise, a big white and yellow clapboard house with six chimneys. From a distance it looked secure, remote. If she squinted Billy could see Grey talking to Penny’s father.

  The sun came through the willow branches speckling the water with light. Billy could have conjured up Francis in a flash if she had wanted to. She could have imagined him sitting on the bank waiting for her to float back to him.

  “I guess we’ve had it,” Penny said. “I mean we ought to paddle home.” She sighed. “Doesn’t everything feel unknown to you?”

  “It’s as plain as the nose on your face,” Billy said.

  “I feel as if life is all spread out in front of me but I don’t know what’s there,” said Penny.

  “That’s what life is like,” Billy said.

  They flicked their cigarettes into the water and, sitting up straight as Indian scouts with their wedding clothes billowing behind them, they paddled back, shooting across the water in that swift, determined way of long ago.

  Another Marvelous Thing

  On a cold, rainy morning in February, Billy Delielle stood by the window of her hospital room looking over Central Park. She was a week and a half from the time her baby was due to be born, and she had been put into the hospital because her blood pressure had suddenly gone up and her doctor wanted her constantly monitored and on bed rest.

  A solitary jogger in bright red foul-weather gear ran slowly down the glistening path. The trees were black and the branches were bare. There was not another soul out. Billy had been in the hospital for five days. The first morning she had woken to the sound of squawking. Since her room was next door to the nursery, she assumed this was a sound some newborns made. The next day she got out of bed at dawn and saw that the meadow was full of sea gulls who congregated each morning before the sun came up.

  The nursery was an enormous room painted soft yellow. When Billy went to take the one short walk a day allowed her,

  she found herself averting her eyes from the neat rows of babies in their little plastic bins, but once in a while she found herself hungry for the sight of them. Taped to each crib was a blue (I’M A BOY) or pink (I’M A GIRL) card telling mother’s name, the time of birth, and birth weight.

  At six in the morning the babies were taken to their mothers to be fed. Billy was impressed by the surprising range of noises they made: mewing, squawking, bleating, piping, and squealing. The fact that she was about to have one of these creatures herself filled her with a combination of bafflement, disbelief, and longing.

  For the past two months her chief entertainment had been to lie in bed and observe her unborn child moving under her skin. It had knocked a paperback book off her stomach and caused the saucer of her coffee cup to jiggle and dance.

  Billy’s husband, Grey, was by temperament and inclination a naturalist. Having a baby was right up his street. Books on neonatology and infant development replaced the astronomy and bird books on his night table. He gave up reading mysteries for texts on childbirth. One of these books had informed him that babies can hear in the womb, so each night he sang “Roll Along Kentucky Moon” directly into Billy’s stomach. Another suggested that the educational process could begin before birth. Grey thought he might try to teach the unborn to
count.

  “Why stop there?” Billy said. “Teach it fractions.”

  Billy had a horror of the sentimental. In secret, for she would rather have died than showed it, the thought of her own baby brought her to tears. Her dreams were full of infants. Babies appeared everywhere. The buses abounded with pregnant women. The whole process seemed to her one half miraculous and the other half preposterous. She looked around her on a crowded street and said to herself: “Every single one of these people was born.”

  Her oldest friend, Penny Stern, said to her: “We all hope that this pregnancy will force you to wear maternity clothes, because they will be so much nicer than what you usually wear.” Billy went shopping for maternity clothes but came home empty-handed.

  She said, “I don’t wear puffed sleeves and frilly bibs and ribbons around my neck when I’m not pregnant, so I don’t see why I should have to just because I am pregnant.” In the end, she wore Grey’s sweaters, and she bought two shapeless skirts with elastic waistbands. Penny forced her to buy one nice black dress, which she wore to teach her weekly class in economic history at the business school.

  Grey set about renovating a small spare room that had been used for storage. He scraped and polished the floor, built shelves, and painted the walls pale apple green with the ceiling and moldings glossy white. They had once called this room the lumber room. Now they referred to it as the nursery. On the top of one of the shelves Grey put his collection of glass-encased bird’s nests. He already had in mind a child who would go on nature hikes with him.

  As for Billy, she grimly and without expression submitted herself to the number of advances science had come up with in the field of obstetrics.

  It was possible to have amniotic fluid withdrawn and analyzed to find out the genetic health of the unborn and, if you wanted to know, its sex. It was possible to lie on a table and with the aid of an ultrasonic scanner see your unborn child in the womb. It was also possible to have a photograph of this view. As for Grey, he wished Billy could have a sonogram every week, and he watched avidly while Billy’s doctor, a handsome, rather melancholy South African named Jordan Bell, identified a series of blobs and clouds as head, shoulders, and back.

  Every month in Jordan Bell’s office Billy heard the sound of her own child’s heart through ultrasound and what she heard sounded like galloping horses in the distance.

  Billy went about her business outwardly unflapped. She continued to teach and she worked on her dissertation. In between, when she was not napping, she made lists of baby things: crib sheets, a stroller, baby T-shirts, diapers, blankets. Two months before the baby was due, she and Penny went out and bought what was needed. She was glad she had not saved this until the last minute, because in her ninth month, after an uneventful pregnancy, she was put in the hospital, where she was allowed to walk down the hall once a day. The sense of isolation she had cherished—just herself, Grey, and their unborn child—was gone. She was in the hands of nurses she had never seen before, and she found herself desperate for their companionship because she was exhausted, uncertain, and lonely in her hospital room.

  Billy was admitted wearing the nice black dress Penny had made her buy and taken to a private room that overlooked the park. At the bottom of her bed were two towels and a hospital gown that tied up the back. Getting undressed to go to bed in the afternoon made her feel like a child forced to take a nap. She did not put on the hospital gown. Instead, she put on the plaid flannel nightshirt of Grey’s that she had packed in her bag weeks ago in case she went into labor in the middle of the night.

  “I hate it here already,” Billy said.

  “It’s an awfully nice view,” Grey said. “If it were a little further along in the season I could bring my field glasses and see what’s nesting.”

  “I’ll never get out of here,” Billy said.

  “Not only will you get out of here,” said Grey, “you will be released a totally transformed woman. You heard Jordan—all babies get born one way or another.”

  If Grey was frightened, he never showed it. Billy knew that his way of dealing with anxiety was to fix his concentration, and it was now fixed on her and on being cheerful. He had never seen Billy so upset before. He held her hand.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “Jordan said this isn’t serious. It’s just a complication. The baby will be fine and you’ll be fine. Besides, it won’t know how to be a baby and we won’t know how to be parents.”

  Grey had taken off his jacket and he felt a wet place where Billy had laid her cheek. He did not know how to comfort her.

  “A mutual learning experience,” Billy said into his arm. “I thought nature was supposed to take over and do all this for us.”

  “It will,” Grey said.

  Seven o’clock began visiting hours. Even with the door closed Billy could hear shrieks and coos and laughter. With her door open she could hear champagne corks being popped.

  Grey closed the door. “You didn’t eat much dinner,” he said. “Why don’t I go downstairs to the delicatessen and get you something?”

  “I’m not hungry,” Billy said. She did not know what was in front of her, or how long she would be in this room, or how and when the baby would be born.

  “I’ll call Penny and have her bring something,” Grey said.

  “I already talked to her,” Billy said. “She and David are taking you out to dinner.” David was Penny’s husband, David Hooks.

  “You’re trying to get rid of me,” Grey said.

  “I’m not,” Billy said. “You’ve been here all day, practically. I just want the comfort of knowing that you’re being fed and looked after. I think you should go soon.”

  “It’s too early,” said Grey. “Fathers don’t have to leave when visiting hours are over.”

  “You’re not a father yet,” Billy said. “Go.”

  After he left she waited by the window to watch him cross the street and wait for the bus. It was dark and cold and it had begun to sleet. When she saw him she felt pierced with desolation. He was wearing his old camel’s hair coat and the wind blew through his wavy hair. He stood back on his heels as he had as a boy. He turned around and scanned the building for her window. When he saw her, he waved and smiled. Billy waved back. A taxi, thinking it was being hailed, stopped. Grey got in and was driven off.

  Every three hours a nurse appeared to take her temperature, blood pressure, and pulse. After Grey had gone, the night nurse appeared. She was a tall, middle-aged black woman named Mrs. Perch. In her hand she carried what looked like a suitcase full of dials and wires.

  “Don’t be alarmed,” Mrs. Perch said. She had a soft West Indian accent. “It is only a portable fetal heart monitor. You get to say good morning and good evening to your baby.”

  She squirted a blob of cold blue jelly on Billy’s stomach and pushed a transducer around in it, listening for the beat. At once Billy heard the sound of galloping hooves. Mrs. Perch timed the beats against her watch.

  “Nice and healthy,” Mrs. Perch said.

  “Which part of this baby is where?” Billy said.

  “Well, his head is back here, and his back is there and here is the rump and his feet are near your ribs. Or hers, of course.”

  “I wondered if that was a foot kicking,” Billy said.

  “My second boy got his foot under my rib and kicked with all his might,” Mrs. Perch said.

  Billy sat up in bed. She grabbed Mrs. Perch’s hand. “Is this baby going to be all right?” she said.

  “Oh my, yes,” Mrs. Perch said. “You’re not a very interesting case. Many others much more complicated than you have done very well and you will, too.”

  At four in the morning, another nurse appeared, a florid Englishwoman. Billy had spent a restless night, her heart pounding, her throat dry.

  “Your pressure’s up, dear,” said the nurse, whose tag read “M. Whitely.” “Dr. Bell has written orders that if your pressure goes up you’re to have a shot of hydralazine. It doesn’t hurt baby—
did he explain that to you?”

  “Yes,” said Billy groggily.

  “It may give you a little headache.”

  “What else?”

  “That’s all,” Miss Whitely said.

  Billy fell asleep and woke with a pounding headache. When she rang the bell, the nurse who had admitted her appeared. Her name was Bonnie Near and she was Billy’s day nurse. She gave Billy a pill and then taped a tongue depressor wrapped in gauze over her bed.

  “What’s that for?” Billy said.

  “Don’t ask,” said Bonnie Near.

  “I want to know.”

  Bonnie Near sat down at the end of the bed. She was a few years older than Billy, trim and wiry with short hair and tiny diamond earrings.

  “It’s hospital policy,” she said. “The hydralazine gives you a headache, right? You ring to get something to make it go away and because you have high blood pressure everyone assumes that the blood pressure caused it, not the drug. So this thing gets taped above your bed in the one chance in about fifty-five million that you have a convulsion.”

  Billy turned her face away and stared out the window.

  “Hey, hey,” said Bonnie Near. “None of this. I noticed yesterday that you’re quite a worrier. Are you like this when you’re not in the hospital? Listen. I’m a straight shooter and I would tell you if I was worried about you. I’m not. You’re just the common garden variety.”

  Every morning Grey appeared with two cups of coffee and the morning paper. He sat in a chair and he and Billy read the paper together as they did at home.

  “Is the house still standing?” Billy asked after several days. “Are the banks open? Did you bring the mail? I feel I’ve been here ten months instead of a week.”

  “The mail was very boring,” Grey said. “Except for this booklet from the Wisconsin Loon Society. You’ll be happy to know that you can order a record called ‘Loon Music.’ Would you like a copy?”

  “If I moved over,” Billy said, “would you take off your jacket and lie down next to me?”