“Well,” I said slowly, “for starters you should take a prenatal vitamin. And how far along are you?” The phrase far along just fell out, as if it had been waiting in my mouth this whole time.
“Eleven weeks, I think. I’m not totally sure.”
“But you’re sure you want a baby.”
“Oh no.” She laughed. “It’ll go up for adoption. Can you imagine? Me?”
I laughed too. “I didn’t want to be rude, but . . .”
She mimed cradling a baby, rocking it frantically with a manic grin.
IN WEEK TWELVE IT WAS just a neural tube, a backbone without a back; the next week the top of the tube fattened into a head, with dark spots on either side that would become eyes. I read these developments aloud to her each week from Grobaby.com.
“All clogged up? Those pesky pregnancy hormones are to blame. Time to fixate on fiber.” She was constipated, she admitted, starting this week. The website had an uncanny ability to predict what she was about to feel, as though her body was taking its cues from the weekly updates. With this in mind I often reiterated parts that seemed important. (“Paddle-like hands and feet emerge this week. Hands and feet: this week. They should be paddle-like.”) When I accidentally skipped a week the cells twiddled their thumbs, waiting for further instructions. She took the vitamins and ate my food but the idea of a prenatal checkup sickened her.
“I’ll go when it’s closer,” she said, hunched over her sleeping bag. I dropped it for the moment. Talking to her this way felt like a role—not unlike “Woman Asks for Directions.” “Woman Takes Care of Pregnant Girl.”
“I don’t want anyone from the medical establishment touching me,” she added a few hours later. “It has to be a home birth.”
“You still have to get checked, though. What if there’s a problem?” Somehow I knew just the right thing to say, as if I had watched Dana say it in a video.
“There won’t be a problem.”
“Hopefully you’re right. Because sometimes it just never comes together—you think there’s a baby in there but it’s just unconnected bits and when you push it all comes out like chicken rice soup.”
When Dr. Binwali showed us the fetus with the sonogram I was sure Clee would weep like every astronaut who has seen the earth from space, but she turned away from the screen.
“I don’t want to know the gender.”
“Oh, don’t worry, it’s too early to tell,” said the doctor. But her eyes held fast to the ceiling, avoiding the sight of her own splayed legs. She meant ever. She hoped to never see it.
“Grandma might be curious to see the last bit of the tail,” he said, tapping the screen.
Neither of us corrected him. We were rolling on rails now; the good people of the world glided around mothers and daughters, opening doors and carrying bags, and we let them.
HER SHAPE SHOULD HAVE LENT itself to a fertile appearance, but it was her biggish chin that I noticed now, and her burly way of moving. Together with the swollen stomach it created a peculiar picture, almost freakish. The more pregnant she became, the less like a woman she was. When we were out in public I tried to see if other people flinched or did a double take. But apparently I was the only one who could see this.
“ ‘Week seventeen,’ ” I read, “ ‘This week your baby develops body fat (join the club!) and his or her own unique set of fingerprints.’ ” It was hard to tell if she was listening. “So, make fat and fingerprints this week,” I summarized. She pulled a snail off the coffee table and handed it to me. I dropped it into the covered bucket by the front door; Rick was collecting them.
“ ‘Your baby weighs five point nine ounces and is about the size of an onion.’ ”
“Just say ‘the baby,’ not ‘your baby.’ ”
“The baby is the size of an onion. Do you want me to read ‘A Tip from Our Readers’?”
She shrugged.
“ ‘A Tip from Our Readers: No need to splurge on maternity wear, just borrow your husband’s button-down shirts!’ ”
She looked down at her stomach. It looked like a beer belly peeking out under her tank top.
“I have a shirt you could borrow.”
Clee followed me to my closet. The clothes were all clean but collectively they had an oily, intimate smell that I had never noticed before. She began sliding hangers around. Suddenly she pulled out a long green corduroy dress and held it up.
“It’s the lesbo dress,” she said.
The dress I’d worn on the date with Mark Kwon, Kate’s dad. She’d found it awfully quickly. It was long sleeved with tiny buttons running the whole length of it, from the edge of the calf-skimming skirt to the high collar. Thirty or forty buttons.
“It probably still fits you.”
“I don’t think so.” An older, blue-blooded woman with white hair and real pearl earrings could have been elegant in it. Anyone younger or poorer would look like a soldier from one of those countries where women hold automatic weapons. I pulled out my pin-striped men’s shirt. She took it into the bathroom with her but when she came out she was still wearing her tank top.
“It’s not my style,” she said, handing it back.
“Does it feel natural to you?” I asked. “To be pregnant?”
“It is natural,” she said. “It’s the medical establishment that makes it unnatural.”
Her friend Kelly had given birth at home in a bathtub. Same with her friend Desia. There was a whole group of girls in Ojai who had put their babies up for adoption through a Christian organization called Philomena Family Services. All of them home-birthed with midwives.
“But here, in LA, the hospitals are really good, so you don’t need to do that.”
“You don’t need to tell me what I don’t need to do,” she said, narrowing her eyes. For a split second I thought she was going to push me against a wall. But no, of course not. That was all over.
EVERYONE AT OPEN PALM KNEW and thought it was big of me to take her in like this.
“She was already in—I just didn’t kick her out.”
“But you know what I mean,” said Jim. “Risking your job.” My job was in no danger; Suzanne and Carl routinely sniffed out news of Clee from my coworkers. After each prenatal checkup I made sure to circulate the update. Everyone assumed I knew who the father was, but I didn’t. I didn’t know anything. It seemed impossible to broach the subject without also recalling our past, the scenarios, my betrayal. The unspoken agreement was we wouldn’t look back.
In the middle of the second trimester I saw Phillip. He was parking his Land Rover just as I was leaving the office. I ducked into a doorway and waited for twenty minutes while he sat in his car, talking on the phone. Probably to Kirsten. I didn’t want to think about it. Everything was in delicate balance and it needed to stay that way. When I finally walked to my car my legs were shaking and I was drenched in a foul sweat.
Each night I listened as she stumbled to the bathroom, bumping into the doorway and then hitting it again on the way back. It was torture.
Finally one night I yelled out from bed. “Careful!”
She stopped abruptly and through my half-open door I watched her stand in the moonlight and touch the swell of her stomach with a look of shock, as if the pregnancy had just come upon her right then.
“Was it Keith?” I called out.
She didn’t move. I couldn’t tell if she was awake or had fallen back asleep, still standing.
“Was it one of the men from the party? Did it happen at the party?”
“No,” she said huskily. “It happened at his place.”