by Nancy Thayer
“That’s right,” he said. “That’s absolutely right.”
They had not discussed Mary after that, but Sara could tell whenever the gang was together that Steve was doing his best to deflect Mary’s attentions.
Now he sat, his arm flung casually across the back of Sara’s chair, a beer in his other hand, involved in a conversation with Mick and the other guys about football.
“Listen,” Carole Clark said, touching Sara’s arm, “are you guys going off-island for Thanksgiving?”
“No,” Sara answered. “We’ll stay here. My family’s all back in the Midwest and Steve’s parents are in Florida.”
“Great,” Carole said. “Then you and Steve can spend Thanksgiving with all of us. If you want to, I mean. The gang usually gets together at someone’s house every year for Thanksgiving and every couple brings something and it’s a huge feast. It’s going to be at my house this year. I’m doing the turkey and the stuffing, and everyone else is bringing the rest.” Carole paused. “I know it’s late asking you, but, um, we weren’t sure you’d want to come. I mean, we’ll all have our kids there, so there’ll be about a thousand children, and the noise level—well, you know, it won’t be exactly elegant.”
“It sounds wonderful!” Sara exclaimed. Conflicting emotions battled inside her: she was delighted that Carole had asked them, but terrified at her words. Did Carole think she was too cold, too unaffectionate to enjoy little children? Was Sara secretly flawed and could everyone sense it?
Carole was rattling on now, about what the others were bringing, wine and sweet potatoes and pumpkin pie and vegetables—what would Sara like to bring? Did she have any specialty? Sara roused herself and began discussing favorite recipes. Annie Danforth made her husband trade places with her so she could join in the conversation. Sara liked Annie—partly, admittedly, because Annie was in her early thirties and had no children yet—but also because she was a nice, intelligent woman. This evening was the first time Sara had had a chance to spend any length of time getting to know Carole and Annie, and with a beer inside her and the talk flowing so naturally around her, she began to have a warming sense of things being all right with the world.
“Hi, everybody!” came a high sweet breathless greeting.
Sara looked up and inwardly groaned: it was The Virgin, at last blessing them with her presence.
“Sorry I’m so late, I had some little kiddies stay late—you know, Mandy’s children—she’s in the hospital and Greg couldn’t get off work sooner.”
As she talked, Mary slipped off her thrift shop tweed man’s coat and pulled a muffler from around her neck. She was wearing jeans, knee-high boots, a green turtleneck sweater as tight as skin. Well, Sara thought sardonically, we can all see that you haven’t lost or gained an ounce this week.
“I told Bill he just had to stay home with our kiddies tonight,” Mary was saying, her breathless voice making everything she said seem of immense importance. “I’ve been with children all day and need a little adult time! And we couldn’t get a sitter. But I can’t stay long, just one beer, and I want to hear how you all are!”
Mary slipped her slender hips into a chair between Annie Danforth and Pete Clark.
“Your Jeremy was so cute today!” Mary exclaimed, turning to Carole and back to Pete. She began a detailed account of something the Clarks’ three-year-old had done, and the Clarks listened, rapt. Sara watched, thinking that there must be nothing as enthralling as stories about one’s children being clever.
Sara leaned back in her chair and sipped her beer. People started talking in small groups around the table again, about football, or what had happened at work, or the selectman’s meeting the night before. Keeping a pleasant alert look on her face, Sara surreptitiously listened to her insides: what was going on? She wasn’t cramping yet. Nothing seemed to be happening. She leaned forward, put her elbows on the table, smiled at nothing and everything. Would the time come when Mary would say, “Oh, Sara, your baby did the cutest thing today!”?
“Sara,” Mary said suddenly, leaning forward across the table toward Sara, “I’ve been wanting to ask you something.” Her voice was low and secretive. “Now you go on and talk to the guys,” she ordered Pete Clark. “This is just for us women!”
Pete smiled and turned away. Mary leaned even farther forward, her face all sweet friendship.
Sara thought: Maybe she’s nice after all, just spacey, maybe I’ve been imagining everything. She was, in spite of herself, pleased to be singled out by Mary, who usually ignored her, pleased to have Mary treating her like a friend.
“What have you been wanting to ask?” Sara smiled and leaned forward, too. Between her and Mary, Annie and Carole sat watching.
“Well—I suppose this is really pretty presumptuous of me—probably I shouldn’t say this—but you know I’ve just been so curious for weeks now I’m going crazy—Sara, are you pregnant? Or have you just gained a lot of weight?”
“Oh, God,” Sara said, and for a brief second that was all she could say. “Oh, have I gained that much weight? I’d better get on a diet. No, I’m not pregnant, Mary. I guess I’ve just let myself go since we moved to the island. You know I do freelance editing, which means sitting around a lot—and I tend to eat when I’m sitting around reading—and in Boston when I worked for the publishing house I had to walk a lot more, around the office and around the city and so on—and here I just don’t get that much exercise—” She was blithering, she knew it, she couldn’t stop herself, she was trying to put a wall of words between herself and Mary, spinning a cocoon of words to hide in.
“Oh, Sara,” Annie Danforth said, “you don’t look pregnant. I swear, Mary, you’ve got babies on the brain. Is that all you ever think about?”
“Well, can you blame me?” Mary laughed. “That’s all I see from morning to night. Don’t get me wrong, Sara, I don’t mean you look fat or anything, it’s just that—well, you have gained some weight since you moved here, haven’t you? And naturally, I just thought, I mean Steve’s so …” She let her voice trail off. She smiled knowingly at Sara.
“I’m the one who looks pregnant!” Wade Danforth said, leaning into the conversation from the other side of Steve.
Sara cringed inwardly again, realizing that the entire table had heard Mary’s question.
“Look at this!” Wade went on, patting his big belly. “I’m the proud father of a six-pack of Michelob!”
“More like a case,” someone at the table said, laughing.
“That reminds me,” Carole said. “Who’s bringing the wine for Thanksgiving? And what shall we have for cocktails? Does someone want to do mulled wine or something? I really don’t want beer at our Thanksgiving dinner.”
“Hey, why not? I’m not coming if we can’t have beer,” Wade yelled.
“Don’t be such a peasant,” Annie told him. “One night a year you can try for a little class.”
The conversation flowed on again past Sara. Now am I paranoid or was Mary being intentionally cruel, she wondered, and if she was being cruel, well, why? Next to her, Steve was deep in a discussion about building codes on the island; she knew he had been oblivious to Mary’s question. She wished Julia were here—she could envision how Julia would squint her eyes, and mouth “What a bitch!” across the table to Sara.
No. What Sara wished, more than anything, was that in a few weeks she would say, laughing, to Mary, “You know, when you asked me if I was pregnant that night at the Atlantic Café? And I said no? Well—guess what?—I was! But I didn’t know it yet!”
Sara smiled, lost for a moment in this reverie of her triumph, telling the women about it with a hushed voice, an amused but smug expression. Then it would be all right, then she would be able to handle Mary, then she could handle everything.
When the group finally dispersed, Sara and Steve walked together through the darkened autumn night, and after the noise the silence swirled around them as if enclosing them in an iridescent shell. Steve put his arm around her and p
ulled her against him. She leaned her head on his shoulder as she walked. They entered their house and soon were naked together, delving deeper into the intimate whorls of their love. Sara’s veins seemed to flow with gratitude, with honey and delirious joy and gratitude. She and Steve were one; and with the logic of such strong love and such a complete marriage, their joining should make three. A baby. Their baby. She could almost see its creamy skin and tiny limbs. She could almost feel its fragile breath.
But when she rose from her bed she found that once again their baby was not there.
Chapter Two
Morning.
Sara was brought to consciousness by a clock from the bedside radio.
“… a beautiful morning. The weather report for the Cape and islands in just a moment. But first a warning to all you turkeys out there, in case you forgot, tomorrow’s Thanksgiving!”
She reached over to her bedside table, moving as little as possible, and picked up the small plastic blue-and-white case that held the basal thermometer. She put it in her mouth, feeling the brief bite of cold glass under her tongue, then looked at the digital clock on the bedside clock radio. 7:01. She had to keep the thermometer in her mouth for exactly five minutes. The instructions that came with the thermometer specified that she use it before rising from bed, even before going to the bathroom, because any activity might raise her temperature a few crucial points and throw off her chart. So she lay still, obedient.
Beside her, Steve groaned and pulled his pillow over his head. A few measures of music blared from the radio, interrupted by the disc jockey’s jovial patter.
“The first caller to tell me the name of this song wins two free tickets to the Cape Movie Mart! Come on out there, you guys, this is an easy one.”
Mouth pursed around the thermometer, Sara drifted on the sounds of the music, an easy-listening tribute to an artist with a difficult vision, a man too beautiful for this world. The DJ shouted cheerfully the instant the record stopped. He must do cocaine or at least drink eighty cups of coffee to be so energetic at this time of day, Sara thought.
“Hello, dear!” the DJ said to his caller. “What’s your guess?”
“ ‘Starry Starry Night’?” a young girl asked.
“Sorry, hon, that’s close, but no cigar,” the DJ said.
“Just a moment,” the girl cried. Muffled shrieks came over the phone. “I mean ‘Vincent!’ ” she said.
“That’s right!” the DJ shouted, as thrilled as if the girl had just unlocked the door to eternal life. “You’re absolutely right! ‘Vincent,’ by Don McLean. You’ve won two free tickets to the movies, sweetheart. And I’ll tell you what. If you can tell me who the song’s about, I’ll throw in another ticket.”
Sara smiled, thinking of sunflowers, impressionism, severed ears.
“Vincent Price!” the girl replied triumphantly.
Sara took the thermometer from her mouth as she exploded into laughter. She looked at the clock—it was all right, five minutes had passed. Switching off the radio, she retrieved the thermometer from the blankets and rose from bed.
Tying her pink robe around her, sliding her feet into fleece-lined slippers, she hurried downstairs. By now she had a little ritual set up (and there was some comfort in rituals). She turned up the thermostat, started the coffee water perking, quickly used the bathroom, then took her chart from its special drawer in the kitchen and sat down at the table with it. Holding the thermometer to the light, as meticulous as a scientist with a test tube of radioactive particles, she squinted to steady her vision, and read the morning’s news.
98.4. Well, that was just fine. She rose to get a cup of coffee, then sat back down to complete the rite.
It was a beautiful morning, still warm, and foggy, the windows filled with a shimmering gentle silver light. From Brant Point the foghorn lowed slowly and long, like some great stupid animal lost in the mist. Sara smiled, liking this, liking the sense of something out there waiting in the unseen world. Spreading her chart before her on the table, she took a pencil and put a dot just where the date column met the temperature. She drew a line connecting yesterday’s dot with today’s. Her chart reminded her of a child’s dot-to-dot game, which, when finished, would reveal a picture of a duck or a Christmas tree. Would her chart, when finished, reveal signs of a completed embryo? Was this the ritual that would conjure up her child?
Certainly it had to be better than Julia’s latest lunatic suggestion, which had come in last week’s mail.
To Promote Breeding
Let the party take of the syrup of stinking orach a spoonful night and morning. Then as follows: take three pints of good ale, boil in it the piths of three ox-backs, half a handful of clary, a handful of nepp (nepata), a quarter of a pound of dates stoned sliced and the pith taken out; a handful of raisins of the sun stoned; three whole nutmegs pricked full of holes. Boil all these till half be wasted. Strain it out and drink a small wineglass at your going to bed as long as it lasts. Accompanying not with your husband during the time or sometime before. Be very careful and let nothing disquiet you. Take Shepherd’s Purse a good handfull and boil it in a pint of milk till half be consumed and drink it off.
“I’ve looked up these weird things in the dictionary,” Julia had written on an attached sheet. “Guess what? You can get them—or improvise.”
At first Sara had laughed, then frowned. Why not? If it worked well enough in ancient times that they wrote it down, perhaps there really was something to it. So, feeling like a witch or an escapee from the nearest mental asylum, she had made her own brew, using boiled ale, store-bought cans of oxtail soup, sage, dates and raisins Cuisinarted to mush, catnip, and nutmeg. It had tasted absolutely foul. She couldn’t even drink it, and its taste and smell discouraged her completely from trying to improvise on a “stinking orach.”
The thermometer was Ellie’s suggestion. Two weeks ago, when The Virgin snidely asked Sara if she was pregnant and she had gone home to discover that she was not, she had called her sister in despair.
“Get a basal thermometer,” Ellie ordered. “And use it for at least three months to get some idea of the day you ovulate.”
“Three months!” Sara cried, amazed. Three months seemed like an eternity to her. She wanted to be pregnant now.
“You see, a thermometer can’t tell you when you’re going to ovulate,” Ellie said. “It can only tell you when you have ovulated. When your temperature rises, you’ve ovulated. After you’ve used it for a few months, you’ll have a pretty good idea if you ovulate regularly and on just what day. Then be sure to make love on the day you ovulate, and bingo!”
“Oh,” Sara moaned, cramping and dejected and indulging in her sister’s concern, “I wish I could just go bingo without all this stuff. I’m beginning to get all obsessed with it, you know. I don’t understand why I’m not getting pregnant easily, naturally, just like everyone else.”
“Give me a break, everyone else!” Ellie said. “Everyone else is having problems, too. Why do you think people invented gadgets like this thermometer in the first place? It wasn’t dreamed up yesterday just for you.”
“Thank heaven you’re there,” Sara said. “I don’t know what I’d do without you. No one else seems to understand how I feel. Julia thinks I’m a complete can of mixed nuts for even wanting to get pregnant, and Steve has enough to deal with when I’m in my premenstrual madness without any added gloominess. And Mother—do you know what Mother said when she called and I was all upset because my period had started? She said, ‘That’s all right, dear, I’ve already got a grandchild. Don’t worry about it.’ ”
“Oh, Mother!” Ellie said, and both sisters burst out laughing.
Sara and Ellie’s mother, Monica, had never been interested in the nitty-gritty of mothering. When Ellie told Monica two years before that she was going to have a baby in January, Monica had hung up and scheduled herself on a three-month cruise around the Caribbean. Sara and Ellie didn’t mind—Monica had paid her dues, they knew; she
had been a good mother and a devoted wife who had nursed her husband through a lingering and difficult death. She deserved some fun.
And it did help Sara to know that there was at least one person in her life whom she wasn’t letting down by not getting pregnant. Sara often envisioned herself as one of those insane seabirds squawking and flapping and splatting around in the unchartable seas of procreation, while Steve remained walruslike, lazily lolling around on the sand, content to let the sea of sexual chance wash up and around him as it pleased. He smiled through his mustache, grandly comfortable, watching Sara sputter and flip in her fury that she had failed once again. “Aren’t you sad that I’m not pregnant?” she would screech at Steve, and he would reply, affable and placid, “No, of course not. We’ll just try again next time.” But she was suspicious. She knew he wanted a child.
She knew her in-laws wanted a child, too. They had never said anything, but they didn’t have to, certain things in the world didn’t have to be said. Clark and Caroline Kendall, Steve’s parents, were as nice as humanized teddy bears. Now retired, they wintered in Florida and spent the five good warm-weather months in their house in Nantucket. They would never pressure Sara about anything: but Steve was their only child. No words had to be spoken.
Perhaps this was the month she would succeed. The thermometer was her magic wand. Today was the eighteenth day of her cycle, and according to her chart, she had ovulated on the fifteenth day. That was when her temperature rose from 97.5 to 98.2—a good, clear, obvious jump of seven tenths of a degree.
That morning Sara had been triumphant. “Hey, good for you, body!” she had said, her heart leaping with hope. She could almost feel that microscopic egg peeking out, looking for its lover. She had raced back from the bathroom into the bedroom and awakened Steve.
“Today’s the day!” she had whispered, snuggling close to her husband and caressing him.
