Jennifer Weiner - Good in Bed

Time passed. I developed a new and interesting set of stretch marks, and started craving the imported Stilton cheese that they sold at Chef’s Market on South Street for $16 a pound. A few times, I came close to slipping a wedge in my coat pocket and slinking out of the store, but I never did. Too embarrassing, I reasoned, having to explain my cheese habit to whoever would have to come and bail me out after my inevitable arrest.

I actually felt pretty good, which was how most of the relentlessly upbeat pregnancy books I’d read described the second trimester. “You’ll feel radiant and alive, full of energy!” read one, beneath a picture of a radiant and alive-looking pregnant woman walking through a field of wildflowers, hand in hand with her devoted-looking spouse. It wasn’t that great, what with the occasional overwhelming sleepiness, and my breasts aching so badly some days that I had fantasies of their falling off and rolling away, and the night I ate an entire jar of mango chutney while watching a rerun of Total Request Live on MTV. Occasionally – well, maybe more than occasionally – I’d feel so sorry for myself that I’d cry. All of my books had pictures of pregnant ladies with their husbands (or, in the more progressive ones, partners) – someone to rub cocoa butter on your belly and fetch you ice cream and pickles, to cheer you up and urge you on and help you pick out a name. I had nobody, I would mope, conveniently ignoring Samantha and Lucy and my mother’s twice-a-night phone calls and weekly sleepovers. Nobody to dispatch to the convenience store in the middle of the night, nobody who’d stay up late debating the relative merits of Alice and Abigail, nobody to tell me not to be scared of the pain and not to be scared of the future and tell me that everything would be fine.

And it felt like things were getting more complicated instead of less. For one thing, people at work were starting to notice. Nobody’d come right out and asked me yet, but I was getting the occasional stare, or hearing the occasional hushed silence when I came into the ladies’ room or the cafeteria.

One afternoon Gabby cornered me by my desk. She’d been gunning for me since the fall, when my forty-inch Sunday feature on Maxi ran on the front of the Entertainment section, much to the delight of my editors. They were thrilled that we were the only East Coast paper to have secured an interview with Maxi, and even more thrilled that we had the only story in which she spoke so candidly about her life, her goals, and her failed romances. I got a nice little bonus, plus a glowing note from the editor in chief, which I kept prominently posted on my cubicle wall.

All of this was good for me, but it meant that Gabby was in an increasingly foul mood – especially since I’d gotten the nod to write about the Grammys, while she’d been consigned to prewriting Andy Rooney’s obituary, lest his health take a turn for the worse.

“Are you gaining weight?” she demanded.

I tried to turn the question around, the way Redbook’s latest “10 Tips for Handling Difficult People” advised, aware that people’s ears had pricked up. “What an unusual question,” I said through numb lips. “Why are you interested?”

Gabby just stared at me, refusing to bite. “You look different,” she said.

“So what I’m hearing you say,” I began, per Redbook’s instructions, “is that it’s important to you that I always look the same?”

She gave me a long, angry stare, then huffed off. That suited me fine. I hadn’t decided what to tell people, or when to tell them, and for the time being I was wearing oversized shirts and leggings and hoping they’d chalk my weight gain (six pounds in the first trimester, another four since Thanksgiving) up to holiday overindulgence.

And it was true that I was eating well. I had brunch every weekend with my mother, and dinner once or twice a week with my friends, who seemed to be operating on some kind of top-secret schedule. Every night, somebody would call, and offer to come over for coffee or meet for a bagel in the morning. Every day at work, Andy would ask if I wanted to share leftovers from whichever fabulous place he’d dined at the night before, or Betsy would take me to the tiny, excellent Vietnamese luncheonette two blocks over. It was as if they were afraid to leave me alone. And I didn’t even care that I was their sympathy case or their project. I sucked it all up, trying to distract myself from missing Bruce and obsessing over the things I didn’t have (security, stability, a father for my unborn child, maternity clothes that didn’t make me look like a small ski slope). I went to work and to see Dr. Patel, and made arrangements for all of the classes and courses a new mother-to-be could want: Breast Feeding Basics, Infant CPR, Parenting 101.

My mother put the word out, and her friends all emptied their attics and their daughters’ attics. By February, I had a changing table and a Diaper Genie, a crib and a car seat and a stroller that looked more luxurious (and more complicated) than my little car. I had boxes full of footie pajamas and little knitted caps, drooled-upon copies of Pat the Bunny and Goodnight Moon, and silver rattles with teeth marks. I had bottles and nipples and a nipple sterilizer. Josh gave me a $50 gift certificate to EBaby. Lucy gave me a packet of hand-drawn coupons agreeing to baby-sit once a week when the baby came (“as long as I don’t have to change number two diapers!”).

I gradually turned my second bedroom from a study into a nursery. I took the time I used to devote to the composition of screenplays and short stories and query letters to GQ and the New Yorker – to bettering myself, basically – and started a series of do-it-yourself home improvement projects. And, regretfully, I started spending money. I bought a sea-green rug that went nicely with the Lemonade Stand walls, and a Beatrix Potter calendar. I trash-picked a scarred rocking chair, had the seat recaned, and spray-painted it white. I started fill-ing the bookshelf with every children’s book I could scrounge from the book editor, plus books from home, and books I bought secondhand. Every night, I read to my belly… just to get into the habit, plus, because I’d read somewhere that babies are sensitive to the sound of their mother’s voices.

And every night, I’d dance. I’d pull the forever-dusty metal blinds down, light a few candles, kick off my shoes, crank up the music, and move. It wasn’t always a happy dance. Sometimes I’d blast early Ani DiFranco and think about Bruce in spite of myself as Ani roared out “You were never very kind, and you let me way down every time…” But I’d try to dance happily, for the baby’s sake, if not my own.

Was I lonely? Like crazy. Living without Bruce, and without the possibility of his eventual return, of even ever seeing him again, and knowing that he’d totally rejected me and our baby, felt like trying to live without oxygen. Some days I’d get angry and be furious at him for letting me stay with him so long… or for not coming back when I wanted him to. But I’d try to put the anger in a box, the way I’d put away his gifts, and keep moving forward.

Sometimes I couldn’t help but wonder whether it was only pride that was keeping us apart, and whether it wouldn’t be smarter for me to call him, or better yet, go see him, and just beg until he took me back. I wondered if maybe, despite everything he’d said, he did still love me. I’d wonder if he ever had. I’d try to make myself stop thinking these things, but my mind would churn and churn, until I’d have to get up and do something. I polished my silverware, child-proofed the cabinets, cleaned my closets. My apartment, for the first time ever, was neat, even beautiful. Too bad my head was such a mess.