The Continuity Girl (2 page)

She studied the fine network of cracks in the slab of raw concrete suspended twelve feet above her bed. As on every other
morning, she experienced a sweet flush of relief that the ceiling had not crumbled to dust while she slept. After a time she
managed to raise her head on one hand and, in a sweeping glance, assess the entirety of her living quarters. While most people
would look at the room and see a clean, ordered space decorated in Swedish pine and stainless steel finishings, Meredith saw
nothing but disorder and grit—a progressive deterioration back to the mud of the original construction site from which her
building had sprung, fully formed, two years prior. A cashmere throw-blanket grown nubbly, half falling off the side of her
Bauhaus-style armless sofa. Her book smushed open on the coffee table, where she’d left it the day before. A single white
ceramic coffee mug on the counter beside the sink from the morning before that. She knew that when she looked into it she
would see a thin film of baked-on brown tar at the bottom. She would fill it with water to soak before she left for yoga class.
She hated to admit it—she would never tell a soul—but the soaking coffee mug would nag her thoughts all day.

Try as she might to think of her place in the soothing, advertorial terms she had in mind when she moved in (“home,” “loft,”
“lifestyle”) she had never been able to see it as anything other than a wall-less (“open-concept”) condo with exposed ductwork
the developers were too cheap to cover up. Meredith felt about this place, which she bought three years ago from a drawing
in a model suite for the same price as a four-bedroom house on a leafy street a half-hour drive in any direction out of the
downtown core, the way most people feel about a misguided purchase of a bit of spangled nightclub stretch-gear—specifically,
For what sinister hidden purpose did an alien enter my body and buy this thing?
All the same, for the past two and a half
years, these eight hundred square feet in the howling industrial wind tunnel just west of the city’s business district had
been her home. As a matter of principle, she was attached to the place. The more the cheap new construction deteriorated,
the more at home she secretly felt. Deterioration made her anxious. Anxious was normal. Normal was home.

Thirty-five,
she thought.
My eggs are thirty-five today.

Having once heard the gynecologist on a morning talk show impart the following facts, Meredith had never been without them:
A woman is born with all the eggs she will ever have in her life. With each menstrual cycle, an egg is discarded, never to
be replaced. At the age of twenty-seven a woman’s fertility begins to decline. After thirty-five things deteriorate rapidly.
By forty she has half the chance of getting pregnant that she had a decade before. Beyond forty, the odds approach the hopeless
ones of winning a lottery jackpot.

Meredith felt a great yawn in her belly and a flush through her veins that fizzed and came out saltwater at the corners of
her eyes. Her small breasts ached with expectation.

Saturday morning prenatal yoga class was packed. Expecting mums wielded their bellies around the room like competing cigarette
girls. They handed off toddlers and toddler-related equipment to nannies who whisked their wards into a government-safety-code-approved
play area in the next room. The instructor, a beaming blonde, switched on the lute music as the women found their places.
Meredith and the instructor were the only nonpregnant women present. They smiled at each other.

Meredith had been coming to the class for more than three months now with her friend Mish. At the age of thirty-seven, after
months of turkey basters and technological intervention, Mish had finally succeeded in getting pregnant by the seed of her
roommate, Shane, a gay interior decorator and Chinese pug collector with a strong male biological clock. While Mish had conceived
only two months ago, she had started attending at least six weeks earlier than that, in the hope of “good fertility juju”
rubbing off on her during her prenatal sun salutations. Meredith was just along for the ride.

After a while, Meredith came to enjoy the class for reasons of her own. It was close to her place and at a convenient time,
but more than that, it afforded her a chance to eavesdrop on the Yummies.

The Yummies were the women who, next to the Starlets and Pro-fessional Have-It-Alls, Meredith envied most, and therefore half-despised.
You could see them at the latte bars, drinking green tea smoothies, hoisting their fat-cheeked offspring from one hip to the
other, comparing notes on washable diapers and baby-friendly resorts. But here in prenatal yoga you could truly study the
Yummy in her entire evolution—from initial bump to stroller-wielding mother of three. Eventually, every Yummy ended up at
Saturday morning prenatal yoga.

Here the hierarchy of the outside world did not apply. Second- and third-time Yummies were the gurus, wise lionesses licking
their young and calmly answering the anxious questions of the younger, inexperienced first-timers. Listening in on their queries
in the change room (Is it all right to have soy milk with my cereal? Drink decaf? Smoke a bit of pot?), Meredith could not
believe how much more she knew about managing the modern pregnancy than most of the pregnant Yummies around her. Had they
never
read baby books in their spare time? Spent time with their mummy friends? Still, they must know something she didn’t—they
were Yummy while she was UnYummy, thirty-five, her Fallopian tubes like a pair of half-empty Pez dispensers.

Her project was to study the Yummies in the hope that she might one day learn the secret of their effortless perfection. That
is: how to get knocked up.

She assumed the lotus position, placing one hand palm up on her knee, the other cupping her belly just above her pubic bone,
and in unison with the Yummies, commenced her first set of cleansing breaths.

Halfway through her second toe stand, Meredith heard a familiar hiss. She turned and saw Mish standing in the doorway, dressed
in pajama bottoms and a sweatshirt, her face raw and unfamiliar without its usual makeup. Meredith disentangled her limbs
and scurried to the door. Mish pulled her into the hall.

“I tried to call you all night but your phone was turned off,” Mish whispered. “I couldn’t— I didn’t know where you were.”

“I was shooting. What’s wrong?”

Her friend’s face squashed in on itself. “Shane was away at a design show in Philadelphia. I called my doula and she was away
too. The doctor said...”

Meredith put her arms around her friend as the last of Mish’s words twisted in a sob. “. . . She said—just to ride it out.”

“You need a drink.”

“No,” said Mish, wiping her nose with the heel of her hand. “I need six.”

Forty-five minutes and two Bloody Caesars later Mish and Meredith sat huddled outside a crowded brunch spot. Mish was smoking
hungrily, lighting each new cigarette from the smoldering butt of the last.

“Turkey fuck,” said Meredith.

Mish’s head bobbed up and down at the end of her neck like a marionette’s. “Huh?”

“That’s what my mum used to call it when you light one cigarette from another. Some sixties term. She thought it was so hilarious.
Made me want to die of embarrassment.”

This got a snort out of Mish. “Do you think I would have made an even more embarrassing mother than yours?”

“I’m sure you will yet.”

“Fuck it. I’m done. This in vitro thing’s a come-on. These fertility doctors make real estate agents look like straight shooters.
Pun intended.”

“But, hon, you were so
close.
I’m sure next time.”

Mish looked at Meredith and sucked so hard on her smoke it crackled.

“Fuck next time. I can’t go through this again. I’d rather die.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t, then.”

“I wish I’d never even tried in the first place.”

This was not the first lost baby for Mish. In her twenties, she’d had two abortions—the first ten weeks after a one-night
stand with the former bassist in a semi-famous Detroit thrash band, the second the result of a desperate year-long love affair
with a married psychotherapist whom her girlfriends had disapprovingly nicknamed “Herr Doktor.” Like most of the women in
her postal code (thirty-odd, unmarried, urban-dwelling, career focused in an aesthetic rather than hard-nosed way), Mish had
never pondered, even for a millisecond, the thought of having a baby until she was thirty-five. In her case, the hunger came
on suddenly in the middle of being dumped, for the third and definitive time, by an Israeli merchant banker whom she had been
faithfully dating for two years but in whose company she had probably collectively spent only a week and a half.

“It was as if I woke up one day and my leg was hollow,” she had told Meredith.

In the two years since, while taking time out from her job as a freelance wardrobe stylist, Mish had tried to get pregnant,
finally employing the sympathetic sperm of Shane, the man with a pompadour whom she referred to (somewhat depressingly, Meredith
thought) as her “gay husband.”

Now, seven months, six thousand dollars, five botched inseminations and two miscarriages later, Mish—a gal famous for her
ability to chug a bottle of tequila only to get up the next morning and run a half-marathon—was finally exhausted. Meredith
could see it in her eyes: she looked beaten.

“Guess we better head out,” Mish said.

It was their friend Elle’s daughter’s fifth birthday party this morning. The party, which was being thrown at Elle’s and her
husband Andrew’s house uptown, had started off as a birthday dinner party for Meredith but had evolved into a daytime reception
with hired magicians and a Barbie ice-cream cake for Elle’s daughter. Zoe and Meredith shared a birthday—a coincidence Meredith
had thought mystical when Elle called her from the hospital in the midst of her thirtieth birthday celebration and asked Meredith
(happily stoned off a mother lode of birthday Moroccan Gold Seal) to be godmother of her firstborn. Meredith had cried sisterly
tears and reminisced about the days when the three of them—Mish, Elle and Mere—were kids at school, sneaking smokes in the
furnace room at lunch hour. She went on in this slightly embarrassing but unstoppable vein until Elle, exhausted after twenty-six
hours of labor and an emergency Caesarian, said she loved her too, and hung up.

Since that moment, Meredith’s birthday had become a shadow of its former self. Gone were the dope and hired DJs, replaced
by goody bags and glasses of supportive sangria for Elle (now a mother of two).

“You sure you want to go?” asked Meredith.

“We can’t miss your birthday party.” Mish managed a small, wet smile. “Mommy would kill us.”

Elle and Andrew lived in Summerhill, an enclave of pointy-peaked toy houses whose modest, postwar facades belied the opulent
salaries of their occupants. The neighborhood, though average in every outward way, was one of the most sought-after in the
city. The reason for this was purely practical: it happened to be located six subway stops away from the financial district.
Four stops away from the place where Andrew, like many of his fellow Summerhill residents, toiled in a tower seventy hours
a week arranging the smooth transfer of vast millions from one multinational conglomerate to the next.

Elle and Andrew’s house was a solid place. A house constructed as much with the false memory of a bygone era when men were
men and women wore A-line skirts and red-checked oven mittens as with mortar and bricks. Just the sight of it made Meredith
feel nostalgic for a past she had never known, a vision of a time of domestic balance that, she knew, probably never existed
in the first place.

As she pulled into the driveway and shifted the car into park, Meredith reached over and patted her friend on the knee.

“I’m fine. Really.” Mish emptied her lungs of smoke with a whistle. “Let’s do it.”

Elle appeared on the front stoop, waving, in a cotton sundress. It was an unseasonably warm day in April and everyone except
Mish was dressing hopefully. Elle mouthed the words
New car!
(Meredith had recently traded in her old black Volkswagen for
a new black Volkswagen) and made a wide, fingers-splayed Broadway-chorus-line gesture with both hands.

Mish began to unbuckle her seat belt. She tried the door but it was locked. “Fuck-a-duck,” she muttered. Then she noticed
Meredith sitting stiffly in her seat.

“What is it?”

“I think I quit my job yesterday. I mean, this morning.”

“Seriously? Aren’t you freelance?”

Meredith thought this over. The lack of sleep and the two Bloodies were beginning to take their toll on her cognitive abilities.
“I am, but I had a fight with Felsted—not
even
a fight really—and I just walked off the set.”

“In the middle of shooting?”

“It was sort of at the end but, yeah, pretty much.”

Mish hooted. “Right on!” She punched her friend on the shoulder before prying up the door lock with her fingers and hoisting
herself out of the car. “It’s about time. That guy’s an asshole. I’m just sorry you didn’t do it sooner.”

Meredith removed her key from the ignition. Elle was now clipping down the driveway with a puzzled expression, pulling on
her fingers with a dishcloth. A Jack Russell terrier bounced around her ankles emitting a series of high-pitched barks.

Mish leaned back into the car and pinched Meredith on the thigh.

“Let’s not mention it to her today, okay? I can’t deal.”

“No prob.” Meredith got out of the car and took a deep breath.

“Down, Starsky. I said
down
! Don’t— I told you NO. Guys—” Elle pulled her friends together and hugged them both at the same
time. “Welcome to bourgeois hell. Don’t worry, I’ve got spiked punch for the grown-ups. And pregnancy punch
pour vous.
” She
bumped her hip against Mish’s and began clicking her way along the flagstones back to the house. “How sick are you of cranberry
soda? By my second trimester I couldn’t even stand the sight of the stuff.”