Stretch Marks

by Kimberly Stuart

  Immediately following Nine Months, the introductory credits began for Notting Hill. Mia tipped her spoon around the edges of the ice cream carton and deliberated whether or not she should walk down to Gerry’s for another pint. She was all out of organic popcorn, though a free sample of butter deluxe had come in the mail just before Lars had left and she’d tucked it into the pantry without his notice. Lars nurtured a zealot’s distaste for partially hydrogenated oils. He left at just the right time, Mia mused bitterly to herself. Seeing me down all these synthetic concoctions would have forced him into a vicarious toxin cleanse.

  “Julia, you are stunning,” Mia told the television, “and I must say, an inspiration to mothers the world over. You have your babies, a devoted husband, a wildly successful career.” She ticked off the items on her list with the end of her spoon. “True, I can’t identify with two of the three, but hypothetically, Julia, we’re soul sisters.”

  Is this it? she wondered as Hugh and his friends exchanged witty British banter. Talking to Julia Roberts as if we’re school pals, eating a week’s allowance of calories at one sitting. Is this the life of a single mother?

  The phone rang. She ignored it, barely pulling her ears away from the movie when someone began talking on the answering machine. It was Babs. Snippets of her rambling reached the living room, though Mia didn’t turn down the volume on the television to hear her better. She knew the gist of her mother’s concerns. Call me back, make it soon, why don’t you ever call me back? Mia scooted up on the couch far enough to prop the empty Ben & Jerry’s carton on the edge of the coffee table. She fluffed a nearby sofa pillow and laid her head on it.

  Hugh and Julia were meeting for the first time when the phone rang again. Mia didn’t move. “Hellooooo! It’s your mother!” Babs trilled from the kitchen. Mia groaned and shifted to the other side of the couch. The woman was stubborn but she’d given every one of those genes to her daughter. Mia squinted to concentrate harder on the screen.

  The third message made Mia sit up straight on the couch. “Mia, I know you’re there because that charming super in your building said he could hear the television blaring from your apartment.”

  “Mother!” Mia gasped, upright and frozen on her couch.

  “He’s such a dear—what’s his name? Mr. Fontanelli? Tortelloni?”

  “Lamberti!” Mia yelled, then checked herself in case he was in the hall.

  “… and he said he’d be happy to get his keys and check to make sure everything’s all right, since your own mother can’t seem to get ahold—”

  “Mother,” Mia said. The answering machine let out a high-pitched squawk when she picked up the phone. “I’m here.”

  “Well, of course you are. That’s what I was just saying.”

  Mia brought the cordless into the living room and muted the television. “I cannot believe you called Mr. Lamberti.”

  “He’s such a lovely man. Is he married?”

  “Divorced.” Mia lay down on the sofa and marveled at Julia’s magnificent teeth when she smiled at Hugh.

  “I see.” Babs was delighted. “I’ll have to bring him a little something from the ship next time I visit.”

  Mia sighed. “I’m not really feeling well. Did you have something specific to discuss?” In the far recesses of her mind, Mia acknowledged that the miffed-teen response she gave her mother was a tired one and that she might consider changing tactics now that she was a grown adult. But old habits became easier and more tenacious, it seemed, the longer one perfected them. She turned her gaze to the ceiling overhead and tried to remember what Dr. Finkelstein had said about moments like this.

  “… and why on earth Lars never answers the phone is beyond all means by me, though perhaps he has the sense to be at least a little ashamed of your living situation.” Babs paused and Mia knew she was shaking her head. “That boy is very bright but he has strange social skills. There. I said it.”

  “We all have our flaws, don’t we, Mother?” Mia said. She’d drifted into a fetal position and had turned on the closed captioning. It took a great deal of concentration to keep the two story lines of Hugh-Julia and Babs-Mia-Lars separate.

  “I’m glad you at least acknowledge that.” Babs sounded relieved and ready to settle in to the rightness of her thinking. “I was just saying to my friend, Yvette, here on the ship. Did you ever meet Yvette? Petite, gorgeous little thing from Missoula? Works in hospitality too?”

  “Mmm,” Mia said, knowing that would suffice.

  It did. “Well, Yvette and I were discussing the way young women such as yourself sell themselves short in relationships. She has a twenty-one-year-old daughter who’s at school out east somewhere, also living in sin with her boyfriend.…”

  It was a great mystery to Mia and to the rest of the movie-consuming public why Julia had not married Benjamin Bratt when they’d dated around the time of Erin Brockovich. Mia and Frankie had entered this line of discussion a few times, not out of any disloyalty to the loyal and unassuming Danny Moder, Julia’s husband and the father of her children, but more to dissect what, exactly, was so unlovable about one of the finer specimens of humanity ever created south of the border. Ben’s hair, for example—

  “Mia. Mia Grace Rathbun, are you listening to me?”

  She cleared her throat. “Not very attentively, I’d have to admit.”

  “Honestly, I feel like I’m talking to myself.”

  “You know,” Mia yawned into the phone, “we’ve never been too good on the phone.” Or on planes, in restaurants, in the living room, on road trips … “I think we should call it a night before one of us says something we end up feeling miserable about later.” She threw her legs over the side of the couch and gathered dirty dishes to take to the kitchen.

  “But I haven’t even gotten to what we need to discuss.”

  “We will eventually, Mother. Just not tonight. Let’s celebrate, shall we? We’ve been on the phone for at least four minutes and neither of us is crying. I, for one, find this very heartening.”

  “There is no need to get sarcastic,” Babs said. “You started this when you were in high school and you still haven’t gotten over it. I blame that band you listened to all the time.… What was it? ANT? RAP?”

  “R.E.M.” Mia turned on the kitchen faucet full stream and dunked her dishes into a puddle of dish soap.

  “Exactly. That androgynous lead singer, all the whining political songs. That’s when this started.”

  “Don’t you want to mention the evil influences of our foreign exchange student, Pieter, from Amsterdam? And what about when I joined Students for a Smog-Free Highlands Cove?”

  Babs exhaled loudly. “This is just what I’m saying, Mia. You are completely unable to have a conversation in the present.”

  “Why would we, when the past is so much more fun?” Mia slammed a dirty pan into the sink and sloshed greasy water all over the countertop.

  Babs sighed. “This is going nowhere. You’re right. Let’s stop for the evening. But I need you to call again tomorrow, Mia. This cannot wait.”

  “Will do,” Mia said. “Good-bye, Mother.”

  She replaced the phone on its base with a force that nearly snapped off its small and sturdy antenna. The rest of the dishes endured their cleansing to the accompaniment of R.E.M.’s greatest hits, turned up so loud her upstairs neighbor banged on the floorboards until Mia adjusted the volume.

  8

  Customer Appreciation

  Delia pulled Mia’s hips toward the sky and then moved to the person on the next mat. Mia pushed out through the pads of her fingers like a good downward-facing-dog girl would, but she still felt tension in her shoulders. She moved quietly to her mat and rested in extended child’s pose, a position she had reserved for sissies until her pregnancy, when she became intensely fond of resting in general.

&
nbsp; Delia approached her after class. Frankie was busy rolling up her mat but close enough to hear Delia’s stage whisper.

  “Mia, are you feeling all right?” Her eyes were wide and dark brown. Springy gray curls framed her face and were pulled into a loose ponytail at the nape of her neck.

  “I’m fine, thanks, Delia. Just a bit tired.”

  Frankie joined them at the front of the room. The door closed behind the last student and left the three women alone. Frankie cleared her throat and looked at Mia. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  Mia watched Frankie for a moment and then turned to Delia. “I’m pregnant.”

  “Oh!” Delia clapped her hands and pulled Mia into a hug. “I knew it! That little pooch didn’t used to be there, though one never wants to assume. Plus, your aura has been cloudy, which can mean either lost love or new life.” She spoke as if Mia had changed to color contacts from wire rims, so obvious was the change. Mia thought she might be able to hear Babs’s eyes rolling all the way from Puerto Rico.

  Delia took Mia’s face in her hands. “Congratulations, dear girl.”

  “Thanks,” Mia said, blushing. Delia was the first person outside her immediate circle to hear the news. The sudden openness of her new life made Mia shift uneasily on her bare feet.

  Delia turned serious. “Well, I’m very glad you told me because I was concerned about your recent lack of energy during our yoga practices. It’s just not like you to appear exhausted, particularly during balance poses.”

  Mia nodded. “I’m actually feeling better this week. But yes, I’ve been tired.”

  Frankie put her arm around Mia’s shoulders. “She’s doing it all by herself. The baby, I mean. The father is a coward.” Frankie glanced at Mia and winced. “Am I not supposed to say that part?”

  Mia smirked. “Which part?”

  “No worries, girls,” Delia said, patting each of them on the arm. “I am nothing if not a discreet yoga instructor. Plus my own mother was a single mom, raised all of us on a shoestring and a prayer. You’ll have nothing but support from me.” She smiled and the skin around her indigo eyes settled into familiar lines. “There are some things you might want to adjust during our practice, though.”

  Ten minutes later Mia and Frankie pushed open the glass door leading to the street.

  “So you’ll need to be careful with binds. And anything with twisting. And all balance poses, especially later.”

  “Got it,” Mia said. She lifted her face to the sun. “And if I have any reservations—”

  “—you’ll stop immediately before you hurt yourself.”

  “Right.” They turned the corner and cut a diagonal through Humboldt Park. The air was cool but March was already fulfilling its promise with tiny dots of grass pushing through on the lawns edging the sidewalk.

  “Because if you don’t and I find out later that you’ve put yourself and your baby at risk,” Frankie said in her most deceptively syrupy voice, “I’ll report you to your mother. Or to Mr. Lamberti, whichever is most efficient.” She roared a sinister laugh and Mia giggled. They walked arm in arm, letting Frankie’s cackle rise through the bare branches and up to a colorless sky.

  “Did you think I’d crumble? Did you think I’d lay down and die?” Mia pointed one finger up to the ceiling in victorious disco pose. Late Sunday afternoons meant the noise allowance loosened up a bit in her apartment. Usually she was the one to listen, bemused, at her fellow building-mates’ choice of music. Last week she’d heard three songs by Twisted Sister, a Guns N’ Roses medley, John Denver, and Amy Winehouse. This week she was throwing her own into the mix with a soulful, though perhaps not tuneful, sing-along with Gloria Gaynor.

  A long-neglected dust-up of the apartment gave her a dual focus. Dancing and cleaning her way through the living room, Mia caught a glimpse of herself in the long mirror propped into one corner. She stopped and stared.

  “Good gracious, I’m huge.” She spoke her thoughts aloud, though they were completely drowned out by the disco. Black cotton pants downward, Mia still looked like a version of her original self. Her thighs seemed to be widening, and not necessarily symmetrically, she noted. Her hips looked like prime candidates for mom jeans. But at least her lower half still sparked memories of her body before everything had shifted on its axis.

  The upper half of her body, swathed in an oversized Stop Plate Tectonics sweatshirt Lars had left behind, appeared to belong to someone else. For one, Mia had never, ever, ever had breasts like the ones she now sported. Normally a small-chested girl, Mia had always enjoyed being able to easily harness any bounce factor when she went for a run. She’d never worried when trying on clothes because her chest was certain to fit into small tops and if she needed some oomph, there were always push-up bras to the temporary rescue. But this new version of her bosom was shocking. No other way to say it, she thought. Shocking. She turned to the side, pulling her sweatshirt close to accentuate her profile.

  “I’m not sure I don’t like them,” she said to her reflection. “I wouldn’t want to jump around in a mosh pit or anything, especially without good support.” But they weren’t horrible. Pairing her chest with her belly, however, presented its fair share of worries. Definitely no mosh pit, no auditioning for the Rockettes, no runs along the lake … Her belly had become a substantial and obvious testament to her delicate condition. It wasn’t that Mia hadn’t been looking in the mirror on a semiregular basis. The proportions of her growth, however, caught her by surprise as she stood in front of the living-room mirror. She’d hoped she still had a week, two weeks before her belly preceded her into a room.

  Mia sighed. “I guess the jig is up.”

  Gloria had finished her battle cry and the Bee Gees were slowing things down with “More Than a Woman.” Mia sprayed lemon oil into her dust rag and lowered herself to a sprawl to get the bottom shelf of the coffee table. “More than a woman to me …” she crooned an octave higher than Barry Gibb, which meant only she and some species of canine could hear her yelps.

  As she backed up out of her prone position, a pounding on the door reached her ears. She blew a strand of hair out of her eyes, set her cloth and polish on the table, and moved to the door. The visitor resumed pounding.

  “Coming!” Mia called out. Mr. Lamberti was likely on her doorstep, coming to ask her to turn down the music. “Am I causing too much of a ruckus, Mr.—”

  She stopped.

  Adam smiled. “Yes, Miss Rathbun, you are. I’ve had several complaints and wanted to let you know that the Bee Gees were never meant to be played that loudly without the use of dry ice and a disco ball.” He peeked around Mia’s frame. “And I don’t see either.”

  She scrunched her shoulders forward in an effort to hide the figure that had just startled her in the mirror. “Adam, what are you doing here?” She looked at the paper bags he carried in his arms and the one at his feet. “Did I order groceries for delivery?”

  “Not technically,” he drew out the word to show the nuance involved. “Mind if I put these down somewhere?”

  “No, of course not.” Mia stepped aside, deepening her slouch. “The kitchen table’s straight ahead.”

  Adam bent to pick up the sack at his feet and hoisted it easily with the two he already carried. He stepped into Mia’s apartment and inhaled deeply. “Lemon furniture polish. That’s a blast from my childhood.” He parked his packages on the kitchen table and took a scan of her home. Mia felt relief she’d begun her cleaning spree in the kitchen and was nearly done with the most visible parts of the apartment. “Nice place,” he said appreciatively. “I love the colors on the walls.”

  “Thanks,” she said, happy to leave out the detail that Lars had picked every one. She watched him as he surveyed the rooms and tried to convince herself that honey skin and the ability to model for Benetton did not make a man attractive. “So, if I didn’t tech
nically order these groceries, who did? Technically speaking, of course.”

  His face broke into an easy grin. “If we’re striving for complete accuracy?”

  “Yes.”

  “No room for gray areas?”

  “That’d be my first choice.”

  “Then technically, I ordered these groceries on your behalf.” He began unpacking and looked up, eyes shining. “That probably doesn’t tell the whole story, does it?” He placed a jar of salsa and a bag of blue corn chips on the counter.

  Mia salivated but dragged her focus back to Adam, which had its own perks. “Not exactly.” She watched as he unpacked a lentil salad from the deli, a head of romaine, a package of feta.

  “Okay, here’s the deal.” He straightened to his full height, armed with a tub of cottage cheese and a bottle of mango juice. “I know you’re pregnant.”

  Mia blushed and cleared her throat. She shifted her weight when she realized she was tapping her foot on the linoleum. “You do?”

  He nodded. His eyes softened as they searched hers. “I’m sorry to tell you this, but you’re a horrible liar. And you have no talent for general deception, either.” He shrugged, resigned to the truth.

  Mia sat down at one of the kitchen chairs, happy to stop with the shoulder scrunching. “How did I give myself away? Am I that fat already?”

  “No,” he said slowly, “though I’m not sure the sweatshirts help.” He hesitated. “Do I know you well enough to say something like that?”

  “Definitely not,” Mia said, her tone wry.

  “Sorry.” He walked to her refrigerator and began clearing room for cartons of organic yogurt and soy milk. “I know you’re pregnant because you’ve been buying crazy stuff. You’re a vegetarian, right?”

  Mia nodded, knowing what was coming.

  “So you’ve bought dried beef a few times and I think I saw turkey bacon in your cart once.”

  “It was nitrate free,” she offered feebly.

  Adam was rearranging the items in her fridge to look more like the dairy section at the store. “Then there was the chocolate, and I don’t mean carob, if you get my drift.” He raised an eyebrow in her direction but continued his work. “And the biggest single clue: your salt intake. Salsa, pickles, potato chips, cheese … I’ve seen it all many times before. You’re definitely prego.”