by Nancy Thayer
“Mick’s really soused this time. He’s going to feel awful in the morning,” Steve said.
“What was your little conference with Mary all about?” Sara asked, trying to keep her voice normal.
“What little conference?” Steve answered innocently.
Sara studied her husband as he drove. He kept his profile to her, concentrating as if he were steering the car through a raging blizzard.
“Oh, come on, Steve,” she said.
Steve was silent for a while. Then he said, “Nothing, really. It was nothing, Sara.”
She waited, her eyes lasering into Steve’s stubborn head. Finally she turned away and sat in a deadly silence, letting her anger fill the car like a perfume. When they got home, she slammed from the car and into the house and up to their bedroom in one sweep of fury.
I will not have a baby, I will not stay on Nantucket, I will not stay married! Sara thought as she yanked off her silk blouse and skirt. I will go back to Walpole and James, I’ll take hundreds of lovers, Julia and I will live together, eating salad, drinking chablis, we’ll go on vacations together and pick up and discard men like playthings! She pulled her flannel nightgown over her head.
“Yeah, you really look like a vamp,” she said to her reflection in the mirror. She sank down onto the bed in misery.
The door opened and Steve came in. He sat down on the bed next to Sara. “All right,” he said. “I will tell you every word. Okay?”
Sara did not look at her husband. Did not speak.
“Mary asked me if I was happy. I said yes. Very. She said, ‘That’s too bad, because I’m not.’ I said I was sorry to hear it. She said, ‘How sorry?’ I said, ‘Not that sorry,’ and grinned at her. I mean, I didn’t want to insult her, Sara.”
“What did she say then?” Sara asked.
Steve hesitated. “She said, ‘Now I’m even more unhappy.’ ”
“That bitch!” Sara said in a steady voice. “She wants you back, doesn’t she?”
“I don’t know what she wants, Sara. I really don’t. And I’m sorry if she’s not happy, but I really don’t care.”
Sara looked at Steve. “You were up there for a long time.”
“Yeah, well, lots of people were up there. We were all stumbling around the bedroom getting our coats and stuff. I was alone with Mary for only a few minutes. I swear it, Sara. Nothing happened. Nothing else was said.”
Sara looked at Steve searchingly. “Steve, don’t you know how I hate this? I hate having to play the jealous wife. I hate being an interrogator. This all just makes me feel sick.”
Steve pulled her against him. He spoke into her hair. “Hey, Sara,” he said. “You know you don’t have to worry. You know how it is between you and me. We’re married. I love you. And I don’t feel anything for Mary at all—except maybe pity. She doesn’t just come on to me, you know, she flirts with all the guys. I don’t know what her problem is with Bill, but he’s such an arrogant bastard I’m not surprised she’s unhappy. I guess I’m sorry she’s unhappy. I’d be sorry if anyone I know was unhappy. But that’s all. And you know that. Come on.”
As Steve spoke, he caressed Sara, gently, in the ways he knew so well would please her. Sara hid her face in Steve’s shirt, smiling with pleasure, allowing herself to be cajoled back to reality: Steve there next to her, handsome, loving, there were his hands on her body, here was his mouth on her mouth. They made love for a long time, talking to each other, watching each other as they moved together in the light. They fell asleep with their clothes tossed on the floor and the light still on.
At the end of the first week of December, Sara received two packets in the mail. She read the one from Julia first. It was a Xeroxed page from a textbook, with the pertinent parts highlighted and embellished by Julia with a number of arrows, stars, and obscenely illustrative cartoons.
Prospective mothers wishing to ascertain their ability to conceive submitted to tests of fertility. A group of tests relied upon the assumed existence in fertile women of free passages between the genital tract and the rest of the body, that allowed substances introduced per vaginam to reach the breath and the various systems. Thus, if the propositus vomited after sitting on date flour mixed with beer, she could conceive and the number of vomits indicated the number of children she would have (K.27). She could also conceive if she had borborygmi (C., V) or passed urine with faeces or wind after a genital fumigation (B. vs., 1, 7–9); but if she vomited, she would not (C, V). A test that acquired some fame later with Hippocrates (Aph., V, LIX) and the Arabs (Demiry) consisted in smelling for garlic or onion in the breath after introducing it per vaginam, a principle recently revived in Speck’s test of injecting phenolphthalein in utero and testing for it in the urine.
Julia had stapled a small bulb of garlic to the letter.
“Great,” Sara said aloud. “Thanks a lot.”
It was a rainy Saturday, cold and comfortless, and Sara was grousing around the house in an especially nasty mood: she could tell that her period, in spite of the thermometer, was going to start tomorrow. Her breasts were sore and swollen, her stomach had developed a life of its own, bulging out before her in its evil little parody of pregnancy, and her back was beginning to cramp. For most of this day she had soldiered on, cleaning the house and going through the exercise routine that had helped her get her body back in shape, but now it was three-thirty, a dimming December hour on a dreary day, and Sara was tempted to wallow in her despair.
She was glad the mail had come. She reread the sheet Julia had sent, and looked seriously at the garlic bulb a moment, considering. How did one get hold of date flour? If she mixed it with beer—and sat on it? In her mind she could almost hear Julia’s laughter. Sara laughed in response. She might be crazy, but she wasn’t going to sit on flour mixed with beer—or on this garlic. Tossing the letter with the other mail for Steve to see, Sara opened the packet from Fanny Anderson.
Dear Mrs. Kendall, [the accompanying note on heavy creamy bond writing paper read]
Because of your kindness I am taking the liberty of sending you some more pages from my Jenny manuscript. Please don’t feel obligated to like them or even to read them. I am hard at work on another Aurora Dawn book and have little time even to think of the Jenny pages. But since you went to the trouble of calling.…
With very best wishes,
Fanny Anderson
Thirty pages of Jenny! Sara looked at the packet as if it were a box of chocolates. This was the cure she needed; her work, some good book to dig into with all her talent and abilities. She brewed herself a pot of decaffeinated coffee (in deference to her premenstrual insanity; caffeine was supposed to aggravate PMS), and settled down to work.
At seventeen I was caught up in a maelstrom of desires. I wanted. What I wanted seemed infinite and nameless. I loved many things with intensity—with such a great intensity that, having felt that love, it seemed I had given love sufficient for eternity and must move on to other things or die of boredom.
I loved my parents and our farm, the Kansas skies, the free far windy sweep of land, but I wanted more. I had been dating for a year an “older” man, Will Hofnegle, a farmer across the county who at twenty-two had inherited his parents’ large farm. He was a good and gentle man who worked hard on his land and yet had the energy and insight to care for me as I was. He rode horseback with me; but he also listened to me read my stories aloud; he gave me picture books about Paris and Rome. He understood what I wanted. I would have been desperately lonely in Kansas without him, for I had no other friends, no one else who understood my love for literature and my desire to escape into a more literary world.
Will’s life was full of physical beauty—his horses, Herefords, spaniels, barns and stables, rich rolling fields, which were much more productive than ours; and he was tall and handsome and moved through his life with a loping unhurried grace. He offered himself and his farm to me, he offered to marry me, and did not take it as an insult when I told him I had to try to get out for
a while. He told me he would always be there for me if I needed him.
I won a scholarship to the University of Kansas. I wanted to go east to college—perhaps I still had fantasies of a dramatic reunion with Jeremy Gardner—perhaps I simply just wanted to go east, to get away. But my parents couldn’t afford to send me anywhere else, and I was told I should feel lucky to have a scholarship. Everyone told me I should be grateful to be going off to college, but even before I got there, I wanted more.
It was probably predictable that I immediately became obsessed with Henry Cook, the instructor of the required freshman art appreciation course. He was from the East. Little else mattered. He wore cashmere sweaters, tweed jackets, elegant loafers made of leather that looked and felt like silk, and there was something about him—his accent? the way he cut his hair?—that reminded me of Jeremy Gardner on a basic, physical level.
The other students at the college seemed gushily naive, too easy to please, silly. In contrast, Henry was handsome, nervous, even tormented, like a powerful energetic neurotic Thoroughbred trembling with the need to run. And he became my conveyance; I became his jockey. I became his master—but, strangely enough, never his mistress, although his hope for that was the whip in my hands.
For I continued to be lucky with my looks. I knew this; I exploited myself—what else did I have to work with? I had waist-length black curling hair, which I tied up with blue ribbons to bring out the blue of my eyes. I had very pale skin that blushed rosily when I was happy or excited, and long legs, a slender waist, and what I learned over and over again was a spectacular bosom. Before I went to college, I spent hours in front of the mirror admiring myself, criticizing myself, deciding just how to improve myself, and every admiring look I received I took as proof and omen: use this to live your life.
Still, I do not know how I had the courage, the sheer brashness to pursue Henry as I did then: it was desperation, all desperation. I was wild with need. Henry came from an old eastern moneyed family, never mind that he was dark and handsome and thin; he could have been a fat dwarf from an old eastern moneyed family and I would have been crazed for him. My needs and his insecurities fit together perfectly.
Henry wanted to be an artist. His family insisted that art was frivolous and would not support him in his attempts to paint. They said he was, at twenty-seven, too young to know what he wanted in life, and that he would not get his inheritance until he got a “real job.” Over the bronze-bright autumn semester, I spent time with Henry, first over coffee in the student union, then over wine in his apartment. Never in bed: that was how I tempted him. I discovered that although his family was cutting him off from the real money, he was still receiving income from a trust his grandmother had set up for him, which his parents could not touch. After I recovered from the shock of it—that he was given more money than my family with all their labors had ever earned and he considered that money “nothing,” I grew even harder within myself and more ambitious. Why did a fool like Henry have so much when my hardworking parents had so little? There was no justice in the world—none given—so I must take and wreak and wrestle what justice I could.
You must paint, I told Henry, you are an artist, you must not waste yourself here. You should go to Paris and paint, it’s 1950, that’s where the artists are. I believe in you, Henry, I will go with you, I will encourage you, I will help you be brave.
So we went. What a flurry it caused! What telegrams and phone calls from his parents, his sister, his brother, his uncles, the head of the university art department! I loved it. My own parents and Will did not seem surprised when I told them, and they all wished me well. I loved Paris. Stone and river, cathedrals and cafés, lovers kissing openly in the streets, and everyone openly admiring me, blowing kisses at me as I walked past. We took a small apartment in a crooked building in the Latin Quarter. We drank Pernod at Les Deux Magots, we ate at La Coupole, I read Hemingway and Stein and Camus and Genet, Henry argued art with other painters, other painters taught me to speak a decent French and promised me that if I would only let them, they could teach me the language of love. I remained a virgin. It was one of my powers. It made Henry crazy for me. But I did not love Henry—I was so young, I loved only myself, I loved others loving me, I wanted everyone to love me. I was so young, so vain, so naive: I thought the lust of men was love.
The phone rang, jolting Sara back into the present. Sears had an order of vacuum cleaner bags in for her. She put the receiver back and stood a moment, staring at the phone. How brave Jenny was, how determined—she went out and got what she wanted! At seventeen she had had the courage and the spunk to get herself all the way to Paris. She had not waited passively for fate; she had manipulated fate. Jenny thought of life as a malleable object, a ball of clay she could pummel and mold; Sara had for too long thought of life as a great wind that blew her helplessly in any direction. She could change her mind; she would change. She would put her feet down, grab hold, be bold. There were things she could do to get what she wanted, and now she would do them. As soon as she had finished reading the Jenny pages.
“You may go in now,” the nurse said.
Sara walked into the gynecologist’s office, and her first thought on seeing Dr. Hiram Crochett was Thank God he’s not young and handsome.
Julia had recommended him; she promised that he was grandfatherly, kind but brilliant, the best in his field. “A gynecologist named Crochett?” Julia had howled with laughter. “He’d have to be fabulous to make up for that name!”
Sara liked Dr. Crochett on sight. He was short, slightly homely, with a gently sagging, wrinkled face, and eyes myopically huge behind glasses. He had curly salt-and-pepper hair, a bristly mustache, a kind smile. He was slightly overweight—Ah, good, Sara thought, relaxing. He must have had to deal with the little greeds and inadequacies of his body, too. He must have learned compassion.
He was wearing a white lab jacket over his day clothes, and had a stethoscope hanging around his neck. His office was paneled in oak with pictures of newborn babies on every wall. He shook Sara’s hand when she entered, a courtesy Sara appreciated, then indicated a chair. Then he sat at his desk just across from her and studied the form she had just filled out, which the nurse had handed him on a clipboard.
That form: how reassuring. It was like being in school again and taking a test to which she was certain she knew all the right answers. She was healthy, Steve was healthy, their parents were healthy. Sara’s father had died of a cancer that was particular to males. Sara and Steve had no allergies, asthma, heart problems, ulcers, kidney stones, VD, arthritis, anemia, hepatitis, tuberculosis, history of mental illness. They had health insurance. If there was an intelligence looking down at the available gene pools on earth, undoubtedly that intelligence could see how superior theirs was. This test rated an A.
If that had anything to do with anything.
Dr. Crochett lifted his head and looked at Sara. “You have written here, next to ‘reason for visit,’ ‘desire to get pregnant.’ ”
Sara cleared her throat. This was difficult. “Well, I probably should have written infertility. But I couldn’t put that down in black and white. It would have seemed so definite. So—final.”
Dr. Crochett smiled and leaned back in his chair. “You have been trying to get pregnant for how long?”
“Just over a year now. Thirteen months.”
“Your periods are regular?”
“Yes. Very. Every twenty-nine days.”
“Have you ever been pregnant before?”
“No.”
“So you have never had an abortion.”
“No.”
“Has your husband ever impregnated a woman before, to your knowledge?”
“No.”
“What has been your usual method of birth control in the past?”
“Diaphragm and condoms.”
“Did you ever take the pill?”
“No. Never. My sister told me not to. She’s a nurse.”
“Ah. I see
you’ve come from Nantucket. A lovely place to live. I used to summer there as a child.”
“Yes,” Sara agreed. Then, realizing he was waiting for something, she told him, “There are no gynecologists on the island. Only general practitioners. And … it’s a very small place in the winter. And I’m a very, well, I don’t think neurotically private person, but a very private person. If I did go to a doctor on the island about this … problem … well, I know some of the nurses … everyone on the island would know in a matter of minutes. Small-town living. That would make it even harder on me.”
“Of course it would,” Dr. Crochett said. “This can be such an emotional issue, can’t it? You did the right thing, coming to me. The GPs would have sent you to a specialist anyway. What are your periods like?”
“Heavy. I mean the flow is heavy. The first few days. Then it tapers off and is light. I go seven days, but the first three days are the really terrible ones. I have cramps. And I get chilled and depressed and ravenous and nutty before my period. I go insane.”
Dr. Crochett smiled. “Good old PMS,” he said. “We’re just now beginning to learn about it. Well, you seem healthy enough, normal.”
“Do you think I am too old?” Sara asked.
Dr. Crochett laughed. He had a good hearty laugh, throwing back his head. “No, my dear, I certainly do not! You are”—he consulted his form—“thirty-four. That’s a perfect time to get pregnant. Why, I have women in their early forties getting pregnant. No, you are not too old.”
“I brought this,” Sara said, reaching into her purse and handing him her temperature chart.
The doctor took it and studied it, then handed it back. “So far, so good,” he said. “One month doesn’t tell us much, you know. You’ll have to keep that up for several months if you want accuracy. How often do you and your husband have intercourse?”
As often as possible, Sara thought, and stifled a smile. “Um, perhaps four times a week.”
“Fine,” Dr. Crochett said. He stood up. “Let’s take a look at you, shall we? I notice you had a Pap smear seven months ago. You don’t need another one so soon. But I want to do a pelvic, to see if everything’s in the right place.”
