Janice Lee - The Expatriates

“But does everyone have a perfect pregnancy?” She can’t help asking. “I mean, I’m sure lots of your patients don’t know they’re pregnant for a while, and have acted”—she pauses here, not quite sure what she’s going to say— “I mean, acted like they weren’t pregnant.”

“I don’t know anything about that,” he says.

She’s been here only three minutes, and she’s already alienated this doctor. She feels exhausted.

“I’ll take the pills,” she says.

“Are you feeling all right?” he asks.

“Yes, fine,” she says. “But this is all kind of new.”

He looks at her. “Yes, it’s a big change. You’re going to be a mommy.”

The stern, aristocratic doctor using a word like “mommy” makes her uncomfortable. He wheels over a large machine and starts tapping at a keyboard. His hands are as soft and white as flour, a gold wedding ring on his pudgy finger.

“Have you had a scan yet?”

“An ultrasound? No. The public hospital didn’t offer them.”

“Scoot down here.” He taps on the bottom of the chair. When he sees her underwear, he gives an exasperated sigh. “You have to take off your underwear,” he says. “The baby is still small, so we will give you a transvaginal scan.”

She gets off the chair and takes off her underwear, adding it to the pile. It looks sad and wrinkled.

He puts a condom on what looks like a giant dildo and holds it up and says, “I’m going to insert this, so don’t be surprised.” He glides it in as she breathes deeply. On the screen, black and white pixels glitter and wobble.

“There’s your baby,” he says, pointing with his free hand to what is recognizably a baby, with a head and body.

“Oh, my,” Mercy says faintly. “There it is.”

“It’s around ten centimeters now. Starting to grow.” He rolls a mouselike ball on the keyboard around. “I’m just taking some measurements.” He rolls and taps. “Everything looks good. You are young, so this should be routine. Too many women getting pregnant too old.”

Mercy is so rapt she can’t even take offense at what the man is saying. She can’t breathe. Her thickening waist, just now becoming apparent, is housing a baby, a human being, something that will come into the world in just a few months. There’s a man she’s just met who’s just inserted a plastic dildo inside her and is showing her something she cannot comprehend. The baby wriggles on the screen.

“It’s so weird,” she says. “I can’t feel the baby, but it’s totally moving.”

For the first time, the doctor looks at her with what looks like approval. She has finally reacted in what he deems a suitable way.

“Yes, it’s moving all around. Next time, I’ll probably be able to tell you if it’s a girl or a boy. Sometimes I can already tell at this stage, but you have a shy one.”

“I can’t believe it,” she says.

The rest of the exam goes in a blur. Dr. Leong never asks her about a husband or the baby’s father, making her wonder if he knows about her. She’s paranoid, she knows, but Hong Kong can be that small.

She thanks the doctor, and he leaves. Slowly she gets dressed. She’s seen her baby. She is holding three printouts of the baby’s image. The baby is real.

When she goes out, she goes to the reception desk to pay.

“Appointments are $1,200 each visit, and here’s the schedule of payment, including the hospital costs,” the receptionist says. She is a chubby young woman with a plastic name tag that says her name is Minky. She hands Mercy a sheet with the costs. There’s a separate line for multiple births.

The bottom figure is alarming, but less so now that she has $75,000 sitting in the bank.

“Triplets!” she says to the receptionist, eyeing the multiples section. “Expensive!”

“Yes,” the receptionist says. “You are lucky to have only one.”

Someone just called her lucky. Tears pool in her eyes, blurring her vision as she signs the credit card slip.

IN HER STUDIO. She is hidden. She has been here every morning this week. Outside, traffic sounds, people’s voices.

Clarke’s party is imminent. Priscilla has earned whatever exorbitant fee she is probably charging and has done everything, as promised. At some point, she figured out who Margaret was, and her dealings with her changed. She became softer, never got exasperated when Margaret didn’t return e-mails or failed to make a decision. She took over and did everything. She started e-mailing Margaret directions, like had she found a dress, did she want to book a hairdresser or makeup, and when Priscilla didn’t hear back, she would just e-mail that she had booked one for her and that they would be at the house at this time. For this reason, Margaret now loves Priscilla.

Now that Clarke knows about the party, now that it’s no longer a surprise, there is even less pressure, and she has even shifted the question of whether David Starr should be invited over to Priscilla via e-mail. So, Priscilla crisply informed her later, an invitation went out per Clarke’s wishes, but David has not RSVP’d yet. Hilary has RSVP’d and called to ask if she could bring a friend, another woman. Of course, Margaret said fine. Apparently David is still out on his midlife crisis, something that may solidify into reality. Margaret views all this with the dim, myopic view of someone watching slow sea creatures through a thick glass, creatures in another world, where emotions run high and people behave badly, as if they have all the room in the world to make bad decisions and they won’t be punished for them. Or maybe it’s the other way around, and she’s the creature behind the glass, watching normal people behave normally.

She asked Priscilla to coordinate with the children about doing something for Clarke, a speech or a song or some sort of entertainment, and apparently they have something planned. She has given Priscilla whole ownership of the party, not feeling bad because she knows now that Priscilla knows about the situation.

Clarke’s parents flew in a few days ago and are staying at a small hotel in Stanley. They have been to Hong Kong once before, after her mom left after her extended stay, and they filled in for a month or so, getting the children’s lives back on track. They are nice, from a small town an hour out of San Francisco, but they were overwhelmed by Hong Kong — all the foreign food and the maids and the taxis — and they were not much help. They went to a round of parent-teacher conferences on their behalf when Margaret couldn’t make it out of Seoul and Clarke was on a business trip, and they tried as hard as they could, but they are limited. They have decided to stay a few days, and then leave. They don’t want to be too much trouble. Margaret told her own mother she didn’t need to come, that it would be better if she came another time.

Margaret slips into the bath with her headphones on and plays music so loud it shudders through her head. This is the closest she can get to the comfortable numbness she craves.

Dr. Stein has asked her to make friends. To do things with people, to get close and share intimacies.

Friends. What an odd concept. She had them before, of course, but in her old life in California and through her children. When she moved to Hong Kong, being involved with the kids’ school made her busy and made it easy to meet other women. There had been a flurry of coffees and lunches, a few walks and girls’ nights out. It was so easy that she was lulled into thinking she had lots of friends. And in a way, she had, in the way that doing a favor for an acquaintance and sending a thoughtful e-mail segued into friendship. If you call someone a friend, they’ll become one. Something like that. Since everyone had live-in help, getting someone to go out with you for dinner was easy. It was so easy that the women often organized girls’ trips to other countries, like forays to Vietnam to buy art and get embroidered linens and lacquerware or to Bangkok or Seoul to get skin treatments. She did not do anything like that, but she had seen how she could have gotten there in a few years, when her kids were older.