good at dancing; it was part of her whole horror of physical activity, so she stood by the side of the piano, sulking and being bored. Dr Finegold sang ‘Mona Lisa’, which I thought was hysterical and Lisa ignored him. All in all, we had a great time.
We didn’t even hear Nancy come in but suddenly she was there and Dr Finegold stopped playing. I stood beaming and panting to catch my breath. This was it, I’d just turned four pirouettes and was wearing the most beautiful dress in the world. If ever they were going to want to adopt me, it was now.
Nancy Finegold stood in silence in the doorway. ‘I think you girls ought to get ready,’ she said at last.
‘We are ready, Mama.’ Lisa’s voice was unusually quiet.
She turned to me. ‘Is that what you’re wearing?’
I nodded. Was this a trick question?
She turned her back to me and spoke to Lisa. ‘Don’t you have something she could borrow?’
I felt myself go cold; the way you do when someone talks about you as if you were a chair.
‘Nan!’ Dr Finegold interrupted.
She registered him with distaste. ‘Don’t be so dramatic, Mel.’ Bending down to examine my dress more closely, she smiled sweetly. ‘That dress is fine, Louise, but Lisa has one that will be better.’
‘Mom!’ The horror on Lisa’s face was unmistakable; she’d obviously never been asked to share anything before.
Nancy Finegold was a genius trapped in a world of idiots. She sighed in exasperation, rolling her eyes in the grown-up version of Lisa’s favourite expression. ‘All right, fine! What about a cardigan then?’
Dr Finegold walked away and Lisa stared dejectedly at the floor.
In her full-length mink coat and slender high heels, Nancy seemed too thin to stand upright for long. Her huge brown eyes scanned the room for any sign of affirmation or weakness and, finding nothing, she opened her mouth to speak but nothing came out. She closed it again in such a way that she reminded me of a ventriloquist’s dummy and for one terrible moment I thought I would laugh. Her exquisite hands clenched in frustration and then fell limply by her side, the gold bangles rattling against one another, as if someone had suddenly let go of the strings.
I couldn’t bear it. ‘I’ll wear a cardigan,’ I offered.
She stared at me for a moment and then smiled, triumphant. She gave Lisa a shove. ‘Go on. Run upstairs and grab one of your blue cardigans.’
Lisa extracted herself with all the speed of one of my giant slugs.
Now there was just the two of us. I stared at her, but she didn’t look at me. Instead, she knelt down and pulled up my knee socks, folding the tops over in two perfectly even strips. I could smell her perfume, her hairspray and the musky, almost aluminium scent of the fur coat she wore as she smoothed down my hair with her hand. I had wanted to be touched by her for months, to run up and wrap my arms around her, to bury my head against her shoulder and tell her how much I loved her. And now, at last, I was the whole focus of her attention. And I couldn’t move.
Some things are to look at, not to touch. Nancy Finegold was one of them.
We went out to dinner and I wore the cardigan.
My father came to pick me up in the old brown family station wagon and when I jumped in the front seat, I felt free and very, very old.
‘How’d it go, Pea?’ he asked. ‘Did they like your dress?’
‘I don’t think they understood it, Da.’
He laughed. ‘What’s there to understand?’
‘Everything,’ I said.
Absolutely everything.
The period during which a woman is expecting a baby is not always, it must be admitted, the most propitious one for elegance. A bad complexion, an expanding waistline, a silhouette becoming a bit awkward towards the end, all add up to an image that is not always a joy to contemplate in the mirror. But since almost every woman is obliged to go through it at one time or another, it is better to accept the situation with good humour and to make the most of it.
A good plan is to buy only a few things for your maternity wardrobe and to wear the same dresses over and over again until you are quite fed up with them. This way you can give them away afterwards without the slightest regret. Above all, don’t try to have them taken in at the seams after you have recovered your normal figure. The clothes you have worn throughout these long months will disgust you for the rest of your days.
My husband and I are entertaining friends, a couple we haven’t seen in a long time. We haven’t seen them because they have children, twin girls. My husband and I don’t do children very well; no matter how much we try to hide it, we’re clearly horrified. I keep staring at them like I’m going to pass out and he’s permanently on guard, brandishing a washing up cloth like he’s ready to mop up toxic waste. Very quickly the couple feel as if they’ve defiled the sanitized sanctuary of our pristine living room and decide that the twins need to go home for a nap after only forty-five minutes in our company. Everyone’s relieved, even the babies, who are only nine months old. Their faces noticeably relax as they’re loaded into the car.
Our friends are all having children now; we’re the odd ones out. They’ve stopped asking us about it; stopped smiling and saying, ‘But surely someday you’ll want a family.’ By now it’s obvious that only an act of God could make us parents. We wave to them as they drive away, and then walk back into our barren household – the one with the dust-free living room and the bed the size of Kansas.
‘Thank God that’s over,’ my husband says, bending down to pick up something from the floor. It’s a single, pale blue baby sock, still warm and smelling of baby. He hands it to me. I don’t know what to do with it or where to put it, so I throw it away.
‘Yes,’ I agree. ‘Thank God.’
The first time I was pregnant, I was sixteen and it was before the creation of home pregnancy tests. I had to see a doctor to tell me what I already knew. You don’t have to have been pregnant before to know that there’s something strange going on. I was throwing up in the mornings and, in fact, all through the day and I started noticing strange discharges I’d never encountered before. Things smelled different, tasted wrong, and I’d gone off pizza. For the first time in my life, I was forced into paying attention to my body. I was possessed, like in The Invasion of the Body Snatchers and it wasn’t going to go away.
I couldn’t go to the family physician – not to the same man who’d vaccinated me against smallpox and measured my growth against a chart on the wall covered with smiling, cartoon animals. I was sick but I had to hide it. But by now I was used to hiding all the most important facts of my day.
I was used to hiding the fact that I threw up my food after each meal by going upstairs to the guest bathroom and sticking my fingers down my throat. I was used to hiding the little black speed pills I took every morning, the ones I bought from Sarah Blatz, a fat, red-headed
