The questions Joan asked of the Pregnant Six in their post-swim conversations, when everyone’s skin reeked with heavy-duty chlorine, allowed her to glimpse beneath their placid surfaces, their constant giggles, the way they brushed stray hairs off one another’s faces, complimented a pedicure color. They were not unsubstantial women. Carla owned Craftables on Laurel Place, just off Strada di Felicità. Joan had wandered in and immediately out, the place a warren of cubbyholes filled with colorful skeins of knitting yarn and embroidery thread. Needlepoint samplers hung from fishing lines. There were trays of beads and amulets, and silk cords on which those beads and amulets were to be strung, in every shade of the rainbow, each color bunched together, thick as horses’ tails, hanging on hooks. Carla also ran a knitting group at the store, and an embroidery group, and three times a year she brought in artists who created original drawings on needlepoint canvases for her customers. “It’s commissioned self-art, really, if that’s a real thing. Because the customer only has a picture on mesh until she needlepoints it herself.” Joan had seen the prices on those original samples; Carla charged upward of five hundred dollars. An excellent business apparently for Rhome, shilling out the goods for pursuits unfathomable to Joan, but she had dashed down a few notes later, about a town buried beneath an avalanche of yarn, the people unaware of the disaster because they never walked out their front doors, too busy knitting and needling their lives away.
Dawn owned Boulangerie de Rhome, next to the Inveterate Reader. After college, she had taken a thirty-two-week intensive pastry-arts program in France, and opened the store immediately upon her return, with funding from her father. “I paid him back years ago with interest,” she told Joan, holding her hand up for slaps from all the others. She was up at four each morning, working in the kitchen behind the shop, turning out all kinds of French breads—Pain a l’Ail, Pain au Froment, Pain aux Noix, Pain au Beurre, Pain Beignet—as well as the recognizable baguettes, and Joan’s favorite that she bought each week, Pain Batard, bread that came out of the oven lopsided, in odd shapes, were mistakes. There were cast-iron French bistro tables in the shop and cooling cases filled with neat rows of delectable petit fours, tarts and tortes and éclairs, custards and curds and ganaches. Martin had already deemed Boulangerie de Rhome off-limits for himself. He had not, he said, known he had such a sweet tooth.
Meg and Teresa’s vocations were more ordinary; both were teachers, Meg of sixth graders at Rhome Elementary, Teresa of physics at Rhome High.
Augusta and Emily were lawyers in practice together. “We focus,” Emily said, “on family and matrimonial law, including adoptions and divorces, as well as real estate, trusts, wills, and the execution of estates.” It sounded to Joan as if they were the town’s grim reapers, covering everything from cradle to grave. She wondered how a town Rhome’s size generated sufficient legal matters to keep them both employed; its population was somewhere around seven thousand. Did that many houses change hands? she wondered. Were there so many people needing to bequeath vast estates? And although the six were proof that the town had no issue with fertility, she wondered about the number of adoptions they facilitated. She had not seen, as she did in New York, the Russian and Chinese children pushed around in strollers by parents who clearly did not share ethnicity with their bundles of joy. But apparently the town brought most of its legal work to Augusta and Emily, because sometimes one or the other was too busy to make it to the pool at noon.
If Joan had not inquired, she would have learned only that the Pregnant Six had all married boys they knew, but had not dated, back in junior high—two Bills, one Jim, one Dave, one Kevin, and one Steve—and were proud of their expanding bellies, their bounteous breasts, Augusta especially, who said, “This is the first time in my life I’ve worn a bra.” When they spoke about their stores, their teaching responsibilities, their practices, their accomplishments, they were individual, stand-alone women. But when they massed together, as they always did in the locker room, they colonized, insect-like, the group emitting a high drone. Perhaps it was the similarity of their haircuts, blunt and bobbed, in various versions of butterscotch, that gave them the appearance of a hive. When Joan joined them there, the last usually to leave the pool, they were buzzing about, like a collective on a mission to haul back crumbs to those left behind. And yet, when her entry split them apart, they resumed talking in normal voices, laughing about how many times a night they rose to pee, bemoaning, with pride, the loss of their figures, the weight they had gained, quick to share tips and advice, including Joan in those sessions.
“Joan’s the lucky one,” they said. “At your age, you won’t lose your figure at all, and whatever changes will spring back fast. We’ll have to work harder.” Before this accident of life, Joan never imagined worrying about her figure having to spring back. And she wondered why the Pregnant Six seemed intent on stressing their ages. Perhaps by small-town standards they were old for first-time motherhood, all of them thirty, treating her as if she were a member of a different generation, though she was not that much younger than any of them. If the baby came late, she would be twenty-six when she gave birth.
The Pregnant Six liked talking about how their priorities would change. It was husband, then work, then themselves, but soon it would be baby, then husband, then work. They set themselves up as the wise ones, with inside knowledge, though all of them were novices at pregnancy, at eventually being mothers. During those locker-room cabals, Joan silently bucked at their certainty about how they would conduct their new lives, pronouncements solid as stone. Joan thought there was something between her own mother’s disinterest and this hovering the Pregnant Six were already embracing. It should not be impossible, she thought, to keep her different aims and goals separated, to move back and forth between simultaneous worlds, to live her various lives as they unfolded in parallel universes.
*
With so many expecting in Rhome, the community center decided a prenatal yoga class was a good idea, to be held twice a week at one in the afternoon, a lunchtime retreat for the women in the midst of their busy days. Teresa had been consulted about the chosen hour; she sat on the community center board and thought yoga after swimming would make a nice combination. Joan did not hear about the new yoga class until they were all in the locker room after swimming one day, and the Pregnant Six stripped off their wet suits and pulled on loose track pants or shorts, bra tops and T-shirts, then clamored around Joan, who was still in her own dripping suit, and said she had to attend, smiling and encouraging, reaching out to touch a sodden curl, telling her they would have fun.
“It won’t be the same without you,” they cried out. “You’ve got to come, at least once.” She had never been invited into a group, a clique really, and it was entirely because of the baby.