‘Take it easy, Mom.’ Gently the woman was being guided into the passenger seat, but she didn’t lower her head enough and managed to bump her face on the door surround. A little squawk escaped the mouth slit and a spontaneous flinch rippled through the entire restaurant. Everyone had stopped eating.
Then the woman was in. As her daughter scooted round to the driver’s side, she sat in her four-wheel drive, looking like Return of the Mummy. I had to be careful about slagging off plastic surgery, what with Lara’s fake jugs, but what must that face be like under those bandages? A raw steak? I couldn’t help wincing, ‘It looks barbaric.’
‘Hey!’ Lara playfully shook my arm. ‘Don’t faint on us. She’s happy. She’ll spend a couple of days in bed, then she’ll have a launch party for her new face.’
‘What about her daughter?’ I don’t really know what I meant by that. I just thought it must be terrible for her to see her mother in such a state.
‘Don’t worry about her!’ Emily comforted. ‘She’ll be OK soon. At Beverly Hills High they get nose jobs for their sixteenth birthday present!’
‘I got a nose job,’ Nadia announced proudly. ‘Not just for me, but so my kid will be born with, like, a totally great nose.’
A paralysed silence descended. Desiree actually got down off her seat and trotted away. Lara smiled at me but she looked a little sick.
‘What? WHAT?’ Nadia had picked up on the atmosphere and was looking from one of us to the next. ‘What’d I say?’
Then, ‘Oh, I get it. It’s because I’m gay. You think gay women can’t have children. Well, get over yourselves.’
‘Sperm donors!’ Emily declared and conversation erupted, a bit too enthusiastically.
20
There was something I’d forgotten to put on my list of bad things about Garv. Now, what was it? Putting empty orange-juice cartons back in the fridge? Pronouncing ‘certainly’ as ‘certintly’?
No, it wasn’t either of those, it was:
7. Wanting to have children when I was afraid of it.
Claire had been bang on the money when she’d remarked that the rabbits were almost as much trouble as children. Of course Garv’s fondness for Hoppy and Rider was something to do with wanting children. Even an amateur psychologist who’d failed all his amateur psychologist’s exams could have figured that one out. And I sort of knew it myself, even if I did my very best not to know.
Before Garv and I got married, we’d discussed the subject and decided that, while we both wanted children, we also wanted a few years on our own first. That suited me fine, because at twenty-four I felt too young to be a mother. (Even though I knew other twenty-four-year-olds had lots of kids; the only explanation I could come up with was that I was immature.)
The thing was – and I’d have been the first to admit it – I was terrified by the thought of having a baby. And I wasn’t the only one. Most of my friends were of the same mind, and we spent many happy hours perplexed by the notion of natural childbirth. Occasionally a horror story was produced about some girl – a distant cousin, someone one of us worked with, no one too like us, if you know what I mean – who’d recently had a baby without pain relief. Or stories of nice, normal women who’d had epidurals lined up for months, but who got to the hospital too late and had to have an eight and a half pound baby without so much as a junior aspirin to take the edge off the agony. Such conversations usually came to an abrupt conclusion by someone begging, ‘Stop! I’m going to black out!’
But the ink was barely dry on my marriage certificate before both Garv’s and my parents mounted a round-the-clock Pregnancy Watch. Soft cheeses were whipped away from in front of me. If I so much as belched (not that I ever dared to in front of his mum and dad), it generated a Mexican wave of pleased, knowing eyebrow raises. When I ate a dodgy mussel and spent two wretched days lying on the bathroom floor, they were practically knitting bootees. Their expectations made me feel panicky – and resentful. Just because I’d never stepped out of line before didn’t mean that, just to please them, I was going to start dropping sprogs like I was shelling peas.
‘They can’t help it,’ Garv said. It’s just because we’re the first one in each family to get spliced. Humour them.’
‘Will it all be OK?’ I asked anxiously, bothered by visions of my in-laws holding me down and forcibly impregnating me with a turkey baster.
‘It’ll all be OK,’ he reassured.
‘Everything?’
‘Everything.’
‘Everything everything?’ (You know the way you can get, sometimes.)
‘Everything everything.’
And I believed him. Broodiness, I was sure, was one of those things that belonged Sometime in My Future. A change that automatically occurred with the passage of time; like all of a sudden wanting to sit down in pubs, when standing up, being goodnaturedly pushed and shoved, had been fine – indeed enjoyable – for years. I’d watched it happen to other people –I saw no reason why it wouldn’t happen to me.
We hadn’t been married long when we moved to Chicago, and suddenly I was studying at night and we were both working very long hours, trying to get a toehold on our respective career ladders. Having children would have been out of the question; we’d barely have had the time or energy to conceive the poor creature, never mind take care of it.
Then, astonishing news came from London: Claire was pregnant. On the one hand, it was a blessing because my mother would have her longed-for grandchild and the pressure would be off me. But on the other hand, I felt peculiarly usurped. It was Claire’s job to reduce my parents to hand-wringing despair; it was my job to please them. All of a sudden, she’s puking day and night and cutting my most-well-behaved-daughter’s legs out from under me.
And Claire had been one of the greatest party animals of our time, so what had prompted the decision to have a baby? I asked her, hoping she’d confide that James, her husband, had said it was a good tax break. (That’s the kind of man James was. It was a godsend when he had the affair and left her.) But the hardest fact she could come up with was that it ‘felt right’. This I liked the sound of: if it ‘felt right’ for a wild woman like Claire, the time would definitely come when it would ‘feel right’ for me.
Then the woman was in. As her daughter scooted round to the driver’s side, she sat in her four-wheel drive, looking like Return of the Mummy. I had to be careful about slagging off plastic surgery, what with Lara’s fake jugs, but what must that face be like under those bandages? A raw steak? I couldn’t help wincing, ‘It looks barbaric.’
‘Hey!’ Lara playfully shook my arm. ‘Don’t faint on us. She’s happy. She’ll spend a couple of days in bed, then she’ll have a launch party for her new face.’
‘What about her daughter?’ I don’t really know what I meant by that. I just thought it must be terrible for her to see her mother in such a state.
‘Don’t worry about her!’ Emily comforted. ‘She’ll be OK soon. At Beverly Hills High they get nose jobs for their sixteenth birthday present!’
‘I got a nose job,’ Nadia announced proudly. ‘Not just for me, but so my kid will be born with, like, a totally great nose.’
A paralysed silence descended. Desiree actually got down off her seat and trotted away. Lara smiled at me but she looked a little sick.
‘What? WHAT?’ Nadia had picked up on the atmosphere and was looking from one of us to the next. ‘What’d I say?’
Then, ‘Oh, I get it. It’s because I’m gay. You think gay women can’t have children. Well, get over yourselves.’
‘Sperm donors!’ Emily declared and conversation erupted, a bit too enthusiastically.
20
There was something I’d forgotten to put on my list of bad things about Garv. Now, what was it? Putting empty orange-juice cartons back in the fridge? Pronouncing ‘certainly’ as ‘certintly’?
No, it wasn’t either of those, it was:
7. Wanting to have children when I was afraid of it.
Claire had been bang on the money when she’d remarked that the rabbits were almost as much trouble as children. Of course Garv’s fondness for Hoppy and Rider was something to do with wanting children. Even an amateur psychologist who’d failed all his amateur psychologist’s exams could have figured that one out. And I sort of knew it myself, even if I did my very best not to know.
Before Garv and I got married, we’d discussed the subject and decided that, while we both wanted children, we also wanted a few years on our own first. That suited me fine, because at twenty-four I felt too young to be a mother. (Even though I knew other twenty-four-year-olds had lots of kids; the only explanation I could come up with was that I was immature.)
The thing was – and I’d have been the first to admit it – I was terrified by the thought of having a baby. And I wasn’t the only one. Most of my friends were of the same mind, and we spent many happy hours perplexed by the notion of natural childbirth. Occasionally a horror story was produced about some girl – a distant cousin, someone one of us worked with, no one too like us, if you know what I mean – who’d recently had a baby without pain relief. Or stories of nice, normal women who’d had epidurals lined up for months, but who got to the hospital too late and had to have an eight and a half pound baby without so much as a junior aspirin to take the edge off the agony. Such conversations usually came to an abrupt conclusion by someone begging, ‘Stop! I’m going to black out!’
But the ink was barely dry on my marriage certificate before both Garv’s and my parents mounted a round-the-clock Pregnancy Watch. Soft cheeses were whipped away from in front of me. If I so much as belched (not that I ever dared to in front of his mum and dad), it generated a Mexican wave of pleased, knowing eyebrow raises. When I ate a dodgy mussel and spent two wretched days lying on the bathroom floor, they were practically knitting bootees. Their expectations made me feel panicky – and resentful. Just because I’d never stepped out of line before didn’t mean that, just to please them, I was going to start dropping sprogs like I was shelling peas.
‘They can’t help it,’ Garv said. It’s just because we’re the first one in each family to get spliced. Humour them.’
‘Will it all be OK?’ I asked anxiously, bothered by visions of my in-laws holding me down and forcibly impregnating me with a turkey baster.
‘It’ll all be OK,’ he reassured.
‘Everything?’
‘Everything.’
‘Everything everything?’ (You know the way you can get, sometimes.)
‘Everything everything.’
And I believed him. Broodiness, I was sure, was one of those things that belonged Sometime in My Future. A change that automatically occurred with the passage of time; like all of a sudden wanting to sit down in pubs, when standing up, being goodnaturedly pushed and shoved, had been fine – indeed enjoyable – for years. I’d watched it happen to other people –I saw no reason why it wouldn’t happen to me.
We hadn’t been married long when we moved to Chicago, and suddenly I was studying at night and we were both working very long hours, trying to get a toehold on our respective career ladders. Having children would have been out of the question; we’d barely have had the time or energy to conceive the poor creature, never mind take care of it.
Then, astonishing news came from London: Claire was pregnant. On the one hand, it was a blessing because my mother would have her longed-for grandchild and the pressure would be off me. But on the other hand, I felt peculiarly usurped. It was Claire’s job to reduce my parents to hand-wringing despair; it was my job to please them. All of a sudden, she’s puking day and night and cutting my most-well-behaved-daughter’s legs out from under me.
And Claire had been one of the greatest party animals of our time, so what had prompted the decision to have a baby? I asked her, hoping she’d confide that James, her husband, had said it was a good tax break. (That’s the kind of man James was. It was a godsend when he had the affair and left her.) But the hardest fact she could come up with was that it ‘felt right’. This I liked the sound of: if it ‘felt right’ for a wild woman like Claire, the time would definitely come when it would ‘feel right’ for me.
