Jane Smiley - Golden Age

As soon as she moved, the fluttering went away, but she stacked her pillows, sat up against them, and waited. There was a long stillness, and then it came again, a deep internal prickling, the sparking of nerves that were normally inert. She rolled over on her side; it stopped. She returned to her back; after a moment, it started again, then stilled. Jared came back and got into bed.

She didn’t think much of it until the next morning, when she was walking through the living room in the silence of her empty house, and then she was flooded with a sense of pleasure and joy. Various images of the interior being started coming into her mind — a round face with a dimple and raised eyebrows, a tiny, fleshy behind, bent knees, an image of a diver doing a flip, tucked, hands holding his knees. The sensations in her belly were like little communications to her brain, each distinct but related to the others. When the interior being (she hated the word “fetus”) was still, the images stopped.

The house was so quiet that it seemed to form another layer around her; she herself was the emerging person, going here and there, picking up this and that, contained and protected the way she contained and protected the interior being, and, more than anything, she wanted the house to remain silent so that she would not be distracted from that fluttering, those sensations. Finally, after about an hour of pretending that her life was the same as it always had been, she lay down on the couch. It was of course quiet. The side streets of Palo Alto were guaranteed by law to be quiet. The cottony roughness of the couch cushions felt pleasant against her back and the backs of her legs. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and waited.

He was a good boy, and an active boy — he started pinging her within a minute or two. She envisioned it: punching on the right, then kicking on the left, and then a tiny brush of the hand on the right. After that he was quiet; then he started in again, oh so softly. No one talked about this, these greetings from within, these most intimate communications from the child-to-be. Probably, she thought, she should resist. She should think of the fetus as an it, she should stop imagining it, she should make her joy conditional. She should imagine, instead, what could go wrong — she would be forty-one by the time of the birth. Given the precedents, even if he was healthy, he would most likely view her as skeptically as she viewed her parents, as Emily viewed her. But in two hours, he had captured the fortress and made it his, and Janet did not see how she could undo that.

—

MRS. HERMAN DIDN’T STAND in the middle of the arena shouting orders, like the rest of the riding instructors did. Her trick was to keep walking and keep talking, and interspersed with her stories was a patter of suggestions—“If you keep your thumbs up, you see, the reins run much more smoothly from little Pesky’s mouth, and it’s much nicer for him. That’s fine, now just let him walk along behind me while I check some things.” And so it was that Emily was in the saddle, with her heels down and her shoulders back, and her hips swinging along, with Mrs. Herman in front of her, wandering around the arena, and then: “You keep going that way. I’m going to stop here and check this jump standard, rotten to the core. You know, when I got married, way back in the Middle Ages, the maid of honor fixed it up with the minister to run the drag right down the aisle of the church. There you go, just walk along the railing there to the end, turn, and if he trots back to me, that’s fine — grab mane if you have to.”

And she did trot! She did not grab mane. Her posting was good!

“Now just go around me here, in a small circle, to the left, that’s right. Well, there were four bridesmaids, and me, and we all went very solemnly down the aisle, and I wondered why there was such a long pause, with the minister not saying a thing, and then there was this sound, and here came the hounds right down the center aisle, running to beat the band! Giving voice, loud as you please! Very good, now turn and go to the right. Give him a little pop with your legs, just a pop-pop, right along with his steps, so he moves out. Very good.”

Pesky stretched his neck and put his head down. Emily could feel his back end curling and stepping a little more.

“Let the rein out. That’s his reward. Peter spun around and stared. I was just laughing. Then the side entrance of the church opened; Sally had stationed a whipper-in there, and the hounds ran out the door. Everyone was roaring with excitement, and I must say it did make the local paper. Now just pop him a couple of times with your right leg so that he will bend inward and make a larger circle — there you go. You are only signaling him, not punishing him. Pesky knows that.”

Pesky was walking fast now; his head and neck were moving from side to side and his ears were half pricked, which, Emily knew, meant that he was paying attention to her, not to the two riders who were passing the gate. Walking, walking, and in the next stride, he rose into the trot, and his trot itself lifted her out of the saddle. She posted again, this time more smoothly. It didn’t feel fast or scary, but easy, and just what someone riding a horse would like to do, even Emily.

Mrs. Herman kept talking. “At the reception, they all told me that they’d planned to use a fox! Can you imagine? But foxes are elusive — they never did catch one. Now, that is a good trot. Just loop outward to the rail, and then turn toward me. Very good!”

What was really strange was how different the landscape looked when she was on top of Pesky rather than walking beside him. It looked brighter and broader. Mrs. Herman would say, “Right over there we had a lovely gallop last winter, that’s a beautiful spot,” or, “You can’t see it from here, but behind that stand of oaks, there’s a trail that’s perfect in the summer, very shady. Next summer, we’ll go out there. Barkis likes a good long walk, two hours at least.” Emily believed that in a year they would do all sorts of things, because Mrs. Herman knew just how to do them.

—

JANET HAD ALWAYS sneered at Stanford Hospital as the only hospital in the world with its own upscale shopping mall, but there she was, standing in Handbags at Saks, actually thinking of her mother telling her that Saks was fine if you had to go there, but if you needed to really spend money, she preferred Bergdorf’s. It was a week before her due date, and that morning she’d gotten on the scale and wondered if she was going to hit thirty pounds, which some expert or other had recently declared to be the optimum weight gain. It had been an uneventful pregnancy; the day before, Jared had stoked her vanity by saying that, from the back, you couldn’t even tell she was pregnant.

The waters didn’t splash, she didn’t make a scene, and she was wearing jeans, which soaked up the mess without showing it. She turned on her heel, walked right out the door, and said to the guard, “I’m in labor”; one of the mall managers got her car and drove her the five minutes to the hospital. One moment she was standing at the entrance, and the next she was flat on her back on a gurney, and the contractions were two minutes apart, and the public-address system was calling for her doctor, Dr. McLarey. They rushed her down the hallway. She heard the doctor and the nurse who were with her say that all the delivery rooms were full, they were going to have to use a recovery room; then Dr. McLarey was told to go to Room Something Something Something. No one asked her how she felt, but she felt fine; a contraction was a contraction, after all, and better to have them come over you all at once than to build and build.

Dr. McLarey, who was five years younger than she was, was sweating when he appeared, tying on his mask, and, apart from looking at her, she supposed to make sure that she was Janet Nelson, he focused his attention on the very spot that she, of all of them, could not see. All she could see was that he held out his hands, and the next thing she knew, he was standing up and Jonah was in his arms, Jonah Timothy Nelson, eight pounds, eight ounces, labor exactly forty-six minutes by the watch she still had on her wrist, every pain overwhelmed by a sense of speed and urgency. The doctor laughed and said to the nurse, “Talk about sliders!”