The Three of Us (31 page)

He looks sourly at me, choosing to ignore the irony, or perhaps not registering it at all. Or maybe he cannot decipher my dentally numbed slur. ‘It goes on the ring finger,
sir,
' he says, ‘like any other
ornamental
ring. Maybe you would prefer something like this.' He fishes out a rather vulgar ring with diamonds, small as spiders' eyes, set in a heart shape. ‘This one is only five hundred and sixty dollars.'

On the subway home I find myself sitting opposite the ‘1-800-DIVORCE: When diamonds
aren't
for ever' ad, and I cheer up a little.

Wednesday, 20 January

Joanna

Today the phone rings and as I go to pick it up I have the oddest sensation that it might be the baby calling. Foolishly I mention this to Peter. ‘Oh,' he says, not even looking up from the
Encyclopedia of Men's Health.
‘What did it say?'

Thursday, 21 January

Peter

Amazon.com has sent me a list of the top ten parenting books. These include
The Hip Mama Survival Guide,
which, claims the blurb, answers the vexing question, ‘Is there breastfeeding after nipple piercing?' This is not a question which has overly taxed me in the past, but now I feel I must know the answer.

Friday, 22 January

Joanna

Today our revised due date comes and goes with neither bloody show nor mucus plug. Bored and restless, we visit Relax the Back and on Sigrid's advice, stock up on the essentials for a drug-free labour: a Gymnic bouncy ball with pump, and a massage stick with two spiked wooden balls fixed to one end which looks like something from a medieval torture chamber.

Relax the Back's manager leads me over to a bed, where he makes me lie down and parades a selection of bizarrely shaped cushions for me to try. They are specially designed for pregnancy and, in spite of my resistance to his sales patter, extremely comfortable. We end up ordering a hideous navy affair with arms and a neck rest, called a ‘bed lounger', which he assures me is perfect for breastfeeding in bed.

‘Look,' he says, slapping the sides, ‘there are even sewn-in pockets for the TV remote control so you don't have to shout at your husband to fetch it.'

Friday, 22 January

Peter

Joanna lies writhing on our calico slip-covered sofa, trying to attract my attention. I ignore her and continue reading my book, and in due course she groans and gives painstaking birth to a white bolster, which she rocks maternally, breastfeeds briefly, burps and proffers to me, commanding it to, ‘Say hello to daddy.'

At the moment it is not uncommon for her to perform several of these false births a day as she grows increasingly impatient with the wait.

Sunday, 24 January

Joanna

Peter has pumped up the Gymnic bouncy ball and I am now using it at my desk instead of the cheap, rustic ‘Easy-folding Provence-Style' chair I bought from Pottery Barn last year.

Despite my initial scepticism, the ball is rather comfortable, even though I do feel absurd bouncing up and down at my desk. I am tempted to paint a face on the side of it and bounce off down Riverside Drive. I bet that would bring labour on.

Sunday, 24 January

Peter

Joanna is depressed. This morning BabyCenter.com, the website for the
expectanti,
has fired off an automatically generated message of congratulations, based on our due date. ‘The long wait is finally over!' it confidently pronounces. ‘You've delivered your baby, brought him home, and – now what?'

Well-meaning friends keep calling to see if we have given birth and with each call Joanna gets more fretful. ‘I feel like this baby is never going to come out,' she moans.

Joanna deals with her mounting frustration in a New York kind of way. She goes shopping. With every deadline-defying day we accumulate more infantalia. Baby tschotkes line the nursery, stuffed toys spilling off the shelves, piles of receiving blankets, drawers stuffed full of ‘onesies'. Today's addition is a musical mobile of the solar system, with the earth, the moon, Saturn and an arbitrary star revolving slowly around a smiling yellow sun to the tune of Brahms' Lullaby. I assemble it and wind up the melody a couple of times to check it and already the tune is driving me nuts. I find myself humming a slightly off-key, sinister interpretation of it, like the soundtrack to some horror movie.

Monday, 25 January

Joanna

Forget Hershey's Chocolate Milk and graham crackers. I have now progressed to Entenmann's Pecan Danish Ring, a wildly luxurious cake-size ring of flaky pastry studded with brain-crinkled nuts and covered in white fondant icing.

It is so obviously bad for me that I feel I must neutralize it by eating a piece of fruit first. So I get up, eat a banana, congratulate myself on a healthy start and then cut myself a large slice of Danish Ring. I'm past caring about calories. Today the nurse told me I had lost a pound since my last visit. According to Miriam Stoppard, weight loss in the final week can be a sign of impending labour. Let the revels commence.

Tuesday, 26 January

Peter

‘Oh, how humiliating,' Joanna groans. She has received another e-mail, this time from a couple in our ‘birthing class', Susan the lawyer and Neta, the Israeli computer programmer, proudly announcing the successful birth of their baby daughter. ‘They were supposed to be three days
after
us,' she complains.

‘It's not a race, you know,' I point out, but Joanna is in no place for placation. ‘We should be enjoying this time,' I say. ‘It'll be the last time we have alone together, the last time we have any peace.' But the truth is I am humming with impatience myself, eager to end this dragging transition, and get on with trying to make all those compromises that friends have gleefully warned us about.

My conversation with Joanna is giving me a headache as her eyeline keeps bobbing about. She is bouncing on her newly purchased Gymnic ball, a vast blue plastic inflated ball, reminiscent of those Space Hoppers of our youth, but without the stubby handles to hold on to. She has read somewhere that diligent Gymnic ball-bouncing can help to induce labour. ‘A baby is not something you dislodge,' I object. ‘And neither is it some foetal, dangerous sports junkie who comes flying down the birth canal like a bungee jumper, hanging on to the umbilical cord for dear life.'

Behind my bluster, however, there lurks a deep apprehension. Somehow, in the process of birthing classes, Joanna has fallen in thrall to Sigrid's proselytizing zeal for natural birth and I seem to have been manoeuvred into the role of labour coach. The whole thing strikes me as slightly scary, I feel as if we have stumbled into a cult. This is not what I wanted at all.

Wednesday, 27 January

Joanna

At 8 a.m., the phone goes. It's Meredith. ‘I was just calling to ask if you're planning to breastfeed?' she asks bossily.

‘Meredith, it's eight o'clock in the morning. Why are you calling so early and more to the point what are you doing up?' I mutter blearily, knowing she frequently doesn't surface until midday.

‘Darling, don't ask,' she sighs dramatically. ‘But listen, I've got to get you the number of this brilliant breast-milk bank.'

‘A what?'

‘Have you met my friend Teddy? You know he and his boyfriend adopted a bi-racial baby last year? Well, listen, they had bottles of frozen breast milk flown in once a week from California.'

‘I think I'm going to feed it myself.'

‘Jo-
anna,
be honest, how much do you know about breastfeeding, honey? What about engorgement? Cracked nipples?
Bleeding
nipples? This is a much better way. Just thaw and feed. The baby still gets all the anti-whatevers.'

‘Antibodies.'

‘Huh?'

‘The baby still gets all the antibodies?'

‘Sure. Whatever. Exactly. It's perfect.'

‘Who does the milk come from?' I ask.

‘Oh, I don't know. Mexican peasants probably, but don't worry, it's all screened for HIV. The main thing is you're not tied down, honey. You can still go out and party with me. Let me know if you want the number, OK?' And she hangs up abruptly.

Thursday, 28 January – 3.30 pm

Peter

Our entire day has been given over to medical probing. At Roosevelt a silent Chinese technician carries out a sonogram to check that the baby is still dunked in sufficient amniotic fluid. Apparently it is. Then on to an appointment with the obstetrician on Central Park West. I stand in the corner of the surgery, facing the wall, pretending to inspect a family-planning calendar while Joanna clambers up onto the examining chair. Each of the stirrups, I notice, has been thoughtfully sleeved in a striped oven glove.

‘If there are still no signs of labour by early next week, we'll have to perform an intervention,' says the obstetrician. This, it seems to me, is the language of special forces, up there with surgical strikes. With phrases like operating theatres and theatres of operation, areas of infiltration and target cells, the vocabularies of medicine and war would appear to be converging.

3.30 p.m.

Joanna

‘Great progress,' exclaims the doctor, peering up the paper skirt the nurse has draped over my lower body. ‘You're three centimetres dilated!'

‘Thank God,' I say, relieved that at last something's happening.

‘Didn't you feel any contractions?' she asks. ‘Your cervix is seventy per cent effaced.'

‘Is that good?' asks Peter doubtfully, looking up from the family-planning leaflet he has been studiously concentrating on throughout the internal.

‘Sure it's good,' she says. ‘Last week I was kinda worried because it all looked a bit tight. But something's moving. And, you know what, if we still need to do it, it will make induction easier.'

Sigrid's remedies of lavender oil and foot massage notwithstanding, I fear induction because I've heard it's a particularly painful way to start labour.

‘So this is a good sign,' the doctor continues. ‘But if nothing happens, how about next Wednesday for an induction?' She reaches for her diary as if we're planning supper and a movie. ‘How does that sound? We could wait another coupla days until you're officially two weeks overdue, but the baby's putting on weight every day and it's already a big one…'

‘Fine,' I nod, both apprehensive and reassured at finally having a finishing line by which this marathon will be over.

‘We could bring you in at lunchtime, put you on an IV and get the Pitocin set up. By Thursday you should have a baby.'

4.00 p.m.

Peter

‘Could you tell me something?' I ask the doctor as we leave. ‘
Is
there breastfeeding after nipple piercing?'

‘I didn't notice that your nipples were pierced,' she says, reappraising Joanna.

‘No, no. They're not,' Joanna says quickly. ‘He's just curious.'

‘Well, yes, there is breastfeeding after nipple piercing,' the doctor says, looking a little puzzled. ‘Of course, you'd need to take out any, ah, mammarian jewellery.'

Joanna insists that we walk home, hoping that the exercise will help to bring on labour. So we inch along, with me towing her like a blimp behind me. So slow is our pace, in fact, that we are unable to get across Broadway within the span of one flashing green walk sign, and are marooned on the narrow traffic island. We stand there, railed at by the hobos' convocation that has gathered on the piss-stained bench, and buffeted by the slipstreams of delivery trucks and buses, until the next walk sign frees us.

4.30 p.m.

Joanna

‘Good-oh,' says Peter, as we lumber slowly back from the surgery up Central Park West, its grand apartment buildings basking like ageing roués in the winter sunshine. ‘Three centimetres, wow. Only seven to go.'

By the time we reach Oppenheimer's, the butcher's on 98th and Broadway, I am exhausted and have to sit down on their radiator.

A man comes in with a little girl sitting astride his shoulders. She is eating a Ben and Jerry's chocolate ice cream, which is dripping slowly on to his greying hair. ‘Yup,' he says, surveying me, and reaching up to wipe off some of the chocolate with his fingers, which he then licks. ‘You look like you're just about due.'

I roll my eyes and grimace. ‘Don't worry, it's the best thing you'll ever do,' he beams, as his daughter absently wipes her own sticky fingers on the neck of his jacket.

We pick up lamb chops and stop next door to buy a bottle of South African red from the sour Chinese vintner at Hong Liquors.

6 p.m.

Peter

When we get home Joanna's Gymnic ball-bouncing is particularly frantic. She cannot bear the humiliation of having to be induced. To take her mind off things I offer to cook her lamb chops for dinner. But my manoeuvrings in the kitchen are even less successful than usual. I stoop to open the grill, ludicrously placed at floor level, below the oven, and as I pull at its handle to slide it out and inspect the chops, the entire front comes away in my hands and I fall back onto the greasy kitchen floor tiles, sitting heavily among a colony of black roach-bait pods.

8 p.m.

Joanna

Though I still cannot feel any contractions, I do feel odd. The smell of the lamb sizzling under the grill makes me nauseous. But Peter, normally a stranger to the oven, has gone to such trouble, laboriously spiking each chop with individual needles of rosemary, that I feel I must finish mine so as not to hurt his feelings and discourage him from these rare forays into the kitchen. I also knock back two large glasses of red wine very quickly, my first alcohol in months.