One Good Egg: An Illustrated Memoir (12 page)

“He’s great!” Lorene said once we were in bed. “I don’t know what I expected—he’s completely regular.” The way she said it made being regular sound exceptional.

The next morning, Lorene and I had breakfast and went to work as usual.
Steve was sleeping. There was some evidence—a mug of unfinished tea, an open magazine on the kitchen table—of insomnia. He was still sleeping when Lorene came home just before noon. She had a bunch of purple irises: “These are for you, O my beloved, O the delight of my eyes.” She was channeling Rudyard Kipling again. The words had run through her head for months before she felt comfortable saying them; now she came out with them every few days. “They didn’t have the white ones. They’re for the beginning.”

So
this
was the beginning.

I was still looking for something to put them in when Mary Ann arrived. She was predictably pink-faced (although usually it’s from the cycling, not the cold) and high-spirited, which could also account for some of the pink. She let herself in, predictably no-nonsense. “Where’s Steve?” she asked.

Steve entered on cue. Semi-dressed (not half nude), wearing his house pants, uncombed and unshaven. “Strange night,” he said after he and Mary Ann had been introduced. “Anyone else care for a cup of tea?”

Mary Ann had a cup. We stood around the kitchen, the two of them sipping tea. “How’d you sleep, Steve?” Lorene asked.

“Well, you’ll never believe this,” Steve laughed. “Most bizarre thing, I don’t know that I could tell you the last time . . . I had a wet dream.”

Dare I ask:

(a)
How much of a wet dream: half, three quarters, the whole wad?

(b)
Wow, what was it about?

There was a man with a ladder in the garden, tromping on the plants, eyeing the roof above our bedroom.

“Hello?” I called out.

“Mrs. Becker? You called about your chimney?”

I closed the door. “I called him
five
months ago—I gave up on him four months ago.
TODAY
is the day he’s going to set his ladder up outside our bedroom window? Perfect!”

Steve and Mary Ann were cracking up. Lorene went to find a sheet to tack up over our naked window. By the time she returned, the guy was packing up. Mary Ann set her mug in the kitchen sink and said, “Well, shall we?”

I took one of my mother’s white soufflé cups out of the cabinet and presented it to Steve. Then we filed upstairs, leaving Steve at his bedroom door, next door to ours.

Mary Ann laid out her equipment on the bed. A flashlight, speculum, and a small syringe with a flexible plastic catheter tube on the end. Lorene took a closer look at the syringe while I dropped my drawers and got into bed. The three of us chatted like normal people with pants on, waiting for Steve’s delivery. His knock startled us. “It’s not much,” he apologized.

“It’s fine. Thank you,” Lorene said, and gently shut the door on him. She tipped the cup to show Mary Ann.

“Not bad,” Mary Ann said. “After that story downstairs, I wasn’t sure what we’d get. You only need one, right?”

Mary Ann had Lorene insert the speculum. She suctioned up Steve’s offering with the syringe, took aim, and pushed the plunger.

Lorene propped my hips up on a couple of pillows and kissed my belly. Mary Ann patted it, hugged Lorene good-bye, chirped, “I want to be the fourth to know!” and she was gone.

Lorene left the door open. “Steve?” Steve padded in and the three of us hung out until I was sure the sperm had made it down to my sinuses. Then we went downstairs to make dinner.

Over the next couple of days, Steve settled in. Having him around during the day instantly made working alone less lonely. I anticipated the shuffling of moccasins across the kitchen floor (~10:30), overtaken by a combination of whistling and humming, overtaken by the orange juicer, the teakettle whistling and shaking, followed by a silence of varying length as he read during his breakfast, invariably punctuated by an endearing shriek—Mister or Vita had found an exposed ankle or hand to lick—then, “Okay, all right, yes, we’re going to be friends.”

He would be at his desk working on his novel by the time I came down for lunch. Then, when he was ready for a break, he’d call upstairs and the two of us would take the dogs for a long walk.

We had another couple of soufflé cup sessions over those next two nights. And we mixed up our routine. Night 1, we tried Advice #2 (about as exciting as it looks spelled out). Night 2, Steve, self-proclaimed urban shaman, did the laying-on of hands.

I observed the same hands dropping everything they came into contact with the next day; Steve was still in the grips of his jet lag insomnia. On Night 3, when I made mention of a patch of soapsuds on the drying dishes, he threw down his sponge and left the kitchen. I apologized when he came back an hour later to make himself some tea. “It’s all right,” he said, hyperfocused on the tea. “I guess it’s the first time I wondered what kind of mother you’ll really be. You’re very critical.”

It was my turn to leave the room. I went to bed. I was still reading when Lorene came up. “Hey, do you feel pregnant?”

“I don’t feel any different.” I thought about it. “Maybe sometimes I feel a slight something on my right side. It’s only been a few days. Why, when did you first feel pregnant?”

“The next day. I remember taking the mail out of the mailbox and I knew—but then I never felt like that again. I wouldn’t believe it until I heard his heartbeat.”

Our exchange prompted an informal survey of my mother friends: “When and how did you know you were pregnant?” More than half of my respondents admitted to being clueless or wrong. The others gave the following prenatal symptoms: big boobs, feeling tired, bloated, and/or hormonal, getting a zit, peeing more often. With the exception of the last one, they all sounded pretty premenstrual to me.

I asked my mother.

I woke up with my period on December 16th, two days before Steve’s birthday. It
would
have made the best present. I sat in the bathroom and looked out toward the woods. Everything looked so black-and-white.
And red.
I went back to bed and told Lorene.

“It’s just the first try,” she said, and rolled me into her.

We tiptoed past Steve’s room. I made waffles while Lorene got a fire going in the wood stove. We were reading the Sunday paper when Steve came down. He toted his bag of oranges over to the cutting board.

I brought my plate to the sink and turned to face him. “I just got my period.”

“Ohhh, honey.” He held my shoulders. “Never mind.” He gave me a big hug and went back to his oranges. “Juice? C’mon, lots of—”

“VITTamins,” Lorene joined in from across the room.

Never mind. Never mind, never mind, never mind.
It has to be one of the kindest things anyone’s ever said.

A Bad Chapter