from cradle to grave. She wondered how a town Rhome’s size generated sufficient legal matters to keep them both employed; its population was somewhere around seven thousand. Did that many houses change hands? she wondered. Were there so many people needing to bequeath vast estates? And although the six were proof that the town had no issue with fertility, she wondered about the number of adoptions they facilitated. She had not seen, as she did in New York, the Russian and Chinese children pushed around in strollers by parents who clearly did not share ethnicity with their bundles of joy. But apparently the town brought most of its legal work to Augusta and Emily, because sometimes one or the other was too busy to make it to the pool at noon.
If Joan had not inquired, she would have learned only that the Pregnant Six had all married boys they knew, but had not dated, back in junior high—two Bills, one Jim, one Dave, one Kevin, and one Steve—and were proud of their expanding bellies, their bounteous breasts, Augusta especially, who said, “This is the first time in my life I’ve worn a bra.” When they spoke about their stores, their teaching responsibilities, their practices, their accomplishments, they were individual, stand-alone women. But when they massed together, as they always did in the locker room, they colonized, insect-like, the group emitting a high drone. Perhaps it was the similarity of their haircuts, blunt and bobbed, in various versions of butterscotch, that gave them the appearance of a hive. When Joan joined them there, the last usually to leave the pool, they were buzzing about, like a collective on a mission to haul back crumbs to those left behind. And yet, when her entry split them apart, they resumed talking in normal voices, laughing about how many times a night they rose to pee, bemoaning, with pride, the loss of their figures, the weight they had gained, quick to share tips and advice, including Joan in those sessions.
“Joan’s the lucky one,” they said. “At your age, you won’t lose your figure at all, and whatever changes will spring back fast. We’ll have to work harder.” Before this accident of life, Joan never imagined worrying about her figure having to spring back. And she wondered why the Pregnant Six seemed intent on stressing their ages. Perhaps by small-town standards they were old for first-time motherhood, all of them thirty, treating her as if she were a member of a different generation, though she was not that much younger than any of them. If the baby came late, she would be twenty-six when she gave birth.
The Pregnant Six liked talking about how their priorities would change. It was husband, then work, then themselves, but soon it would be baby, then husband, then work. They set themselves up as the wise ones, with inside knowledge, though all of them were novices at pregnancy, at eventually being mothers. During those locker-room cabals, Joan silently bucked at their certainty about how they would conduct their new lives, pronouncements solid as stone. Joan thought there was something between her own mother’s disinterest and this hovering the Pregnant Six were already embracing. It should not be impossible, she thought, to keep her different aims and goals separated, to move back and forth between simultaneous worlds, to live her various lives as they unfolded in parallel universes.
With so many expecting in Rhome, the community center decided a prenatal yoga class was a good idea, to be held twice a week at one in the afternoon, a lunchtime retreat for the women in the midst of their busy days. Teresa had been consulted about the chosen hour; she sat on the community center board and thought yoga after swimming would make a nice combination. Joan did not hear about the new yoga class until they were all in the locker room after swimming one day, and the Pregnant Six stripped off their wet suits and pulled on loose track pants or shorts, bra tops and T-shirts, then clamored around Joan, who was still in her own dripping suit, and said she had to attend, smiling and encouraging, reaching out to touch a sodden curl, telling her they would have fun.
“It won’t be the same without you,” they cried out. “You’ve got to come, at least once.” She had never been invited into a group, a clique really, and it was entirely because of the baby.
Her instinct was to decline, but one Friday, in her sixth month, after her swim spent pondering the family of tombstone carvers who had appeared in the novel—a mother and father and three daughters given free rein to choose the gravestones, to decide on the embellishments and the epitaphs of those eliminated by the sympathetic executioners—Joan found herself in a small mirrored room, standing on a mat, listening to a broad-shouldered woman telling them about prenatal yoga. The woman’s hair was a brazen red, a fakery that failed to impart the youth she must have been after.
“Hi, everyone. I’m Lannie. By your wet heads, I’m guessing you’ve been swimming, which is good cardiovascular exercise, but yoga will help you stay limber, improve your balance and circulation, keep your muscles toned, and teach you to breathe right and relax, which will come in handy for the physical demands of labor, birth, and motherhood. I’m going to show you several poses, but we’re going to start with ujjayi, a special breathing technique which will prime you for childbirth. Ujjayi will let you fight the urge to tighten up when you’re in pain or afraid during labor. You’ll take in air slowly through your nose until your lungs are completely filled, then exhale completely, until your stomach compresses.”
There were laughs and the Pregnant Six grabbed at their bellies.
“Yes, of course,” Lannie said, “but you’ll still be able to feel it from the inside. Now watch me.”
She inhaled until her large nose narrowed and her chest rose up like a bulwark, then there was a whoosh of an exhale that went on forever, which Joan found loud and annoying.
“Got it, everyone?” and the Pregnant Six yelled, “Got it.”
They were their own cheerleading squad, and despite their inclusion of her, Joan felt distaste, remembering the horde of girls at her high school, she younger than everyone in her grade by several years, fourteen when she was a senior, and those girls, in short swingy cheer-skirts and crop-tops, roamed the hallways, making what they believed were pithy, hurtful remarks in superior voices that made some kids cry. About Joan they once said, “There’s the girl who sure loves her pens. Wonder what she does with them alone in her bed.” An unclever comment that had failed to land, proving to Joan, again, how easily people cracked away at others’ humanity, the pain they inflicted comforting something inside of themselves. She couldn’t help wondering what the Pregnant Six said about her when she was not among them, when they were massed and crooning together.
They practiced ujjayi breathing, their exhalations out of sync, until Lannie said, “Okay. Good enough for the first time. We’re ready now for our first asana. Virabhadrasana I, a standing posture, the first of the three warrior poses.
“Yogis are known for their nonviolent ways, but the Bhagavad Gita, the most respected of all the yoga texts, is actually a dialogue between two famous and feared warriors that takes place on a battlefield between two great armies spoiling for a fight. What is commemorated in this pose is the spiritual warrior who bravely battles against the universal enemy, avidya, which is self-ignorance, the ultimate source of all our suffering. What you all want to work at battling in yourselves.”
It was obvious to Joan that Lannie had memorized her yoga patter, but into Virabhadrasana I Joan went. Then Virabhadrasana II and III, Tree, Downward Dog, Cat-Cow, and good old-fashioned squats, out of place when Lannie was talking on about the meditative benefits of yoga, silencing their inner dialogues, and learning just to be.
Joan found she was curiously limber and graceful doing the poses, that she enjoyed heeding the instructions, ceding control for the hour, focused not on her novel’s unfolding story, as she did when she swam, but on the mystical way she was contorting her body, watching herself in the mirror transitioning easily from one pose to the next, despite her belly, and the sloshing, along with a kick or two, from inside. When she looked at the others, she was surprised by their precious way of holding themselves, mincing through the poses, hands rarely straying from their cargo, as if
