Sugarkins woman leaned across her mat and touched Carla on the thigh as her husband massaged her neck. I wondered if he ever considered wringing it.
“Is this your first class, sweetheart?” she asked.
“I was taking classes at Boomers, but I switched,” Carla replied in that sickly sweet voice that made mothers weak in the knees.
“How far along are you?”
“Eight months.”
“Boy or girl?”
“Boy.”
“Boy.” The woman smiled. “Boys are such a blessing. I have two boys myself. My first girl on the way.” She rubbed her ginormous stomach.
“Congratulations.”
“You too.” She looked at me briefly. I’m sure she wondered what I was doing there. I wondered that myself. “It’s nice that you have friends by your side. Pregnancy is the most beautiful experience, but it can also be such a difficult process.”
“Tell me about it,” I huffed.
“How old are you, darling?”
Carla hesitated. “Seventeen.”
“Oh.” The woman tried not to reveal her true identity as Miss Judgypants Mom, but the look in her eyes didn’t match her kindness. “Well, I wish you the very best.” She glanced at me. “And you’re lucky to have such devoted friends. You’re going to need them.”
She retreated to her mat and proceeded to further annoy Sugarkins with her baby talk and cheek pinching. I felt his pain.
The instructor snapped her fingers at the front of the room to summon the group’s attention. She was no older than twenty-two. She was wearing square glasses and had a head full of multicolored hair that curled down her Free People shirt. I doubted her credentials the moment I saw her college ID badge clipped to her workout pants.
She welcomed everyone, talked about herself, talked about the phenomenon of birth, talked about herself. Then she announced we were working on mock births that day. I didn’t like any of the words in that sentence.
“Dads, position yourselves between the mother’s legs to prepare for breathing techniques.”
The mothers spread open like swinging doors as the dads kneeled before the vast expanse of no-man’s lands before them. Carla smiled at me apprehensively.
“Reggie?”
“I’m not going down there.”
“You have to!”
“Not a chance.”
“I bet Snake would do it if he were here.”
“Snake’s already been between your legs. I, on the other hand, have no desire to venture.”
The instructor began reviewing the first technique.
“You’re going to make me look stupid!”
“I’m going to make you look stupid? Not the planet orbiting beneath your boobs?”
“Reggie!”
The mothers started the inhale-exhale routine.
“Fine,” I grumbled. I crawled to Carla’s feet and held her legs apart and imagined that I was absolutely anywhere else.
She was beginning the inhales when the instructor insisted, “Faster now.”
All the hee-hoos were like a broken fan.
“Slowly begin to push,” the instructor ordered. “Dads, it is your job to support the mother as she undergoes this difficult step in the birthing process. Be encouraging. Talk her down. Help her with her breathing. Remember what we’ve learned in past weeks.”
Carla fake pushed like a pro. She could have been an actress on one of those What to Expect When You’re Expecting DVDs.
“Encouragements, please,” she demanded through clenched teeth.
“Uh . . . I hope your baby isn’t a ten-pounder?”
“That’s not encouraging.”
“Sorry. I didn’t have time to grab an encouragement-for-the-day calendar on my way over.”
She was actually breaking a sweat over pretend pushing. Man, she was good.
“Talk about prom,” she said. “That’s encouraging.”
“Prom?”
“Yeah. It’s next weekend. I know I won’t be able to go this year. Pretend like I did.” The instructor sped up the birthing music. Had there been music playing this whole time? “Tell me how much fun I had.”
Prom. The Met Gala of small-town celebrities. A competition to see who could spend the most money on a more-often-than-not ugly gown that they would never wear again. It was large-scale excitement that fell to even larger-scale disappointment when the night of everyone’s dreams turned out to be a glorified game of Pretty Pretty Princess. Frankly, I would never have wasted my time. But Carla wouldn’t hear of missing it unless something tragic (see: getting knocked up) happened. Carla Banks would have been prom if prom were a person.
“Yeah, you went to prom,” I said.
“Did I look pretty?”
Bite your tongue. Bite your tongue.
“Uh, sure. You wore a pink dress.”
“Purple,” she corrected.
“Okay.” I rolled my eyes. “A purple dress. And Olivia was there, and Ellie, and all of your snobby user friends.”
“Did I have a date?”
“A date? Yeah, you did.”
“Snake?” She opened her eyes and stopped faux pushing.
We stared at each other, my blue eyes reflected in her brown ones. “Do you want it to be Snake?”
The music ceased, and the instructor clapped her hands, congratulating everyone on the progress they made, as if clenching their abs to a techno beat prepared them for real-life contractions and hard labor. The class went on for another thirty minutes, but nothing was as eventful as the synchronized birth routine. When it was over, the moms barked at the dads to fold the mats and wipe their sweat and grab fruit and go pull the car around. The husbands obeyed without complaint. I think they feared death by belly smothering if they rebelled.
I waited at a picnic table outside for Carla’s dad to pick her up. She still had beads of sweat on her hairline from the strenuous imaginary birth, her eyes locked onto a piece of chewed gum on the sidewalk.
I must have been going soft and spineless, because all I could think was that Snake should have been there.
“You’re good at fake labor,” I said.
She kept her eyes on the ground. “Let’s hope I’m as good at the real thing.”
“Don’t forget that there will be a human coming out of you at the real thing.”
“Trust me, I haven’t forgotten.” She scrunched her forehead like she was concentrating. “It’s entirely new to me, you know? Having a baby. What if I’m a bad mom?”
“You will be.”
“I’m serious.”
“Me too. You’re used to being perfect, and you won’t be. You’re going to screw up and forget stuff and want to jump out of your window half the time because life will suck, but that’s not you being a bad mom. That’s you being less than perfect.” I laughed to myself. “That’s you being me.”
“That’s more terrifying than labor.”
We didn’t speak as we waited. I didn’t know if I should take the silence to explain what happened with me and Snake, to assure her that I hadn’t tried to cause problems. But I doubted that she cared. She didn’t seem to be all picking-petals-off-of-flowers googly-eyed about him the way I thought she would be.
It was Carla who dissolved the quiet when she said, “I’m sorry, by the way.”