One Good Egg: An Illustrated Memoir (29 page)

The snow started to fall just after I woke up in Minneapolis. I considered my good shoes, then dashed out of the hotel for a coffee anyway. Sally, my escort, was waiting in the lobby when I got back. She glanced at my wet hair and offered me a tissue for my runny nose.

“I figured out, we were classmates at Brown,” she said. “Don’t worry”—just the opposite; for whatever reason, I instantly liked her— “no one ever remembers me.”

“Me either,” I said. We chatted nonstop on the ride. Between the car chat and the caffeine, I was revved up for my morning show.

Sally’s mother called to say she thought I was adorable. “I’m pregnant,” I gushed back. Sally hugged me. “It’s really too early to tell anyone, but if I were home, Lorene and I would be talking about it all the time.”

“Do you want to go back to the hotel and rest?”

“I’m starving!” We ate a big brunch; in between store signings, we visited Louise Erdrich’s bookshop. Then it was time to tape a Minnesota Public Radio interview.

The host was Scottish, very nice and very well prepared. My sniffles were an annoyance throughout the segment and I was very close to pressing the mike-silencing “cough” button so I could take a deep, satisfying sniff, when a drip escaped and landed SPLAT on my book. A red pool spread across the passage I was reading. The producer was out of his chair, back with toilet paper in no time. I got the bleed under control, blotted the page, and we did a new take. This time I was afraid to breathe—much less sniff— in. I felt as if I’d completed an aerobic workout by the end of the segment.

Nasal stuffiness, often with accompanying nosebleeds, is a common complaint during pregnancy.

That night I re-created the drama (which had been lost on the radio) for the NPR listeners in the bookstore audience. And then I was winging my way to Seattle, where Lorene would be joining me for the West Coast leg of my tour.

She couldn’t wait to see how pregnant I wasn’t, but other than that, we didn’t have a lot to catch up on. I had called her at least three times a day, and again before I went to bed each night. Even after my page-by-page, she was excited to be on my book tour.

Les, our escort in San Francisco, was Lorene’s introduction to touring. He loved the humor in my book, which inspired him to try out some of his own material. “How ’bout gay marriage?” he said, looking for me in the rearview mirror. “Next thing they’ll have gay divorce lawyers.”

“Why wouldn’t regular divorce lawyers work?” I had to ask loudly since the windows were open. His car wasn’t air-conditioned.

“You know, she’s not a Suzy,” he complained to Lorene. “She’s more of an Amanda, don’t you think?”

He dropped us off at our friends’ place in Berkeley. We hadn’t seen them since Joshua Tree. Jane was the only person I hadn’t been looking forward to telling. She had said more than once that she wanted me to have everything I wanted, but my having a kid would be the end of our friendship as we knew it. “You think you’ll be different but there’s just no time, you’ll see.” She and David didn’t have kids.

I had told her over the phone before I left on my book tour, figuring we’d return to it in person, but we never had the chance. Jane was beside herself when we walked in. Not about the baby—her cat was missing, and Lorene, Jane, and I spent the afternoon searching and postering the Berkeley hills. As we were leaving, David stopped me on the stairs, “Congratulations, I am so happy for you,” he said. “Don’t worry, she’ll get used to it.” Les was honking his horn out front. I hugged Jane on my way out the door and made her promise to keep me updated.

L
orene arranged massages during our downtime in Los Angeles. “When your partner said ‘pregnant,’ I thought she meant, you know,” the massage therapist pantomimed
really
pregnant. She rolled up two extra towels, put one on either side of my middle, then proceeded to reminisce for the hour. “When I was pregnant with my son, I got all kinds of extra body hair. Extra body hair, and my skin cleared up.” My old college roommate had told me she craved citrus with her three boys. I was kind of craving wine as she was telling me, but now I filed it with the new information under “Signs You’re Having a Boy.”

Lorene went home and I soldiered on to the southwest (where I was introduced as “Dr. Becker”), Texas, Colorado, and back to D.C., where Lorene met me again.
The Diane Rehm Show
bumped the book back into the top 500 on Amazon. And then we trained up to Philadelphia.

I had held off telling my dad because I didn’t want him worrying about me flying all over; now I was excited to see him. “Pop-pop, guess what?” Lorene said, and she threw open my coat.

He took a step back and clenched his fists. “You did it!” His eyes welled up. “God, you did it.” He gathered both of us in his long arms. “Can I interest you two in a late breakfast?”

He pulled into a rib joint that advertised breakfast, but breakfast was over. My dad ordered the pulled pork; the waitress turned to me. My ol’ iron stomach had objections to every entree. “Dad, I don’t think I can do this,” I said. His face fell; I’d never been a quitter. We went down the road and had eggs at a mediocre deli, then my dad took us home. Lorene had a four-hour nap. My dad and I went for a walk.

“I’ve got to stay on top of my game,” he said. He had maintained a regular exercise program for over thirty years, walking or at the gym almost every day since the massive heart attack he had when I was ten. My dad was in great shape, but his heart was a ticking time bomb. “I told Linda I’d like to take my grandkids to Disney World one day.” I was sorry that my being an old mother made my dad an old grandfather.

Lorene went back to Massachusetts and I looped through the southeast. I had become inured, didn’t blink when my Atlanta escort introduced me as the author of
I Had Breast Cancer, What’s Your Problem?
I was in the home stretch. St. Louis, Kansas City, then back to Boston. I was ready to hang up my survivor’s mantle and go around the world as a pregnant person.

Lorene met me at the airport, holding up the book escort-style. Vita and Mister were in the back of the car. I —we— were home safe, pending the next ultrasound.

It’s A Boy!