Chapter Twenty-Four
In contrast to Dot, I was expanding. Probably because my middle was all stretched out anyway—three previous babies plus the general sagging and entropic spread of all of my body parts, not to mention twenty years since I’d last done a sit-up—one day I wasn’t showing at all, and the next I woke up looking pregnant.
My belly mounded out in that way that makes clear to the world: Not fat.
Fertile. My navel filled then popped. The skin on my stomach grew taut for the first time this century.
The other three times I was pregnant I’d rubbed in oils every morning and lotions every night, as if stretch marks were the worst fate imaginable, as if motherhood itself wouldn’t leave scars far deeper and more lasting.
Now, my swelling belly stretched my wrinkles into smooth, flat plains, filled those creases of age and crepes of time with new skin, new life, I guess.
My face filled out too, and with it, the lines on my cheeks, around my mouth and forehead.
It was like being ironed. It was like going back in time.
My brain unwrinkled as well. As the fog of the first trimester waned, my mind got sharper than it had been in years.
I stopped staring into cupboards with no idea why I had opened them.
My memory improved. My creativity and imagination.
I looked in on the painting club and might have joined except they were doing a life model and the model was Roger, and though he was wearing a T-shirt and shorts, my improved memory produced a very clear picture of him without those garments, so I left without picking up a brush.
I started writing a little bit, keeping notes on the strange life I was leading and the one I was growing.
Suddenly, I couldn’t get enough of the sweet-and-sour chicken.
I couldn’t get enough of the whole menu.
It was still gross and I knew it, but my body disagreed, and having thus solved the problem of the dining room, I would have been happy not leaving home for the foreseeable.
Unfortunately, the Vista View medical clinic had not anticipated the need for an OB on staff. So, as Moth said, needs must.
I still hadn’t told the kids about my meeting with Dr. Blankman.
I hadn’t told Dr. Kim either, but I had told her I didn’t want him on the team anymore.
I was proud of myself for speaking up, for insisting at least on this one thing.
It wasn’t much, but it was something. And it meant I got to see Dr. Kim more often. Much more often.
The morning Darcy picked me up for the twenty-week ultrasound, the horde had grown to include protesters. Abortion rights advocates carried signs that read “Hands off my uterus” and “Pro-choice is pro-family” and “Abortion is health care.”
(Yes. Yes. You sure would think.)
Darcy raised a fist in solidarity. We still had to run the gauntlet to the car, though, weaving between cameras and microphones, dodging belly-rubbers and rubber-neckers, ignoring shouted questions and shouted insults and shouted support that was still, however, shouting.
I kept waiting for the horde to move on, at least to thin, but they seemed only to swell.
Like my body. I kept waiting to get used to them, to at least accept that on the extremely unpredictable course of my life, they were par, but that didn’t happen either. Also like my body.
So maybe the ones skulking in front of Dr. Kim’s shouldn’t have been a surprise.
At first I thought they were tailgaters, but why would you tailgate at a doctor’s office?
And anyway, they looked so out of place—three women loitering in a parking lot in January—that I knew two things very quickly: They were here for me, and whatever they wanted, it was going to piss me off.
Not that that took much clairvoyance these days.
When we got closer, I realized they weren’t women.
You wouldn’t call them girls but only because, Lola had explained, it was respectful to use the term “woman” for anyone female-identifying and over the age of fourteen or so.
Though I did not like to presume, they looked like they were probably Latina.
Lola had also explained that not seeing race was no longer the goal.
One wished to be respectful, but the rules surrounding how to do so change over the course of a lifetime.
At Vista View, it was even harder because age eventually erases—supersedes maybe—so many of the markers and identities that had been so important when we were as young as these three were.
“Pepper Mills?” one of them broke away to ask. Though clearly she knew. “I wonder if we could have a moment of your time?”
Why do people ask questions they have no intention of listening to the answer to? “I’m afraid I have an appointment to get to,” I said.
“We’ll be so fast.” She wasn’t much older than Lola, really. “I’m Azmina. This is Becka. And this is Candi. We have a proposition for you.”
“Not interested,” I tried.
“Are those your real names?” Darcy said.
“Of course,” said Azmina.
“ABC?” Darcy raised one eyebrow and lowered the other. “Weirdly alphabetical, don’t you think?”
But I didn’t care what their names were. “How did you find me? This is my doctor’s office.”
“I have a friend at the DMV,” Candi said.
“I don’t drive.”
She smirked. “We know.”
This did not answer my question.
“We’re from an organization called Family Futures.” Azmina paused as if awaiting applause. When none was forthcoming, she went on. “We’re a powerful up-and-coming organization of strong young women fighting for the rights of unborn children.”
“Here we go,” Darcy said under her breath.
“Congratulations,” I intoned, dry as Texas rib rub.
“Thank you.” Becka either didn’t notice sarcasm or convincingly pretended not to. “Congratulations are due to you too. We want to make you a star.”
“A star?”
“Of an ad campaign.” The reverence in her voice suggested I’d been cast in whatever the new superhero movie was. “We want you to be the face of Family Futures.”
“Ahh, I see,” I said. “No.”
“Ordinarily, we would not choose someone so flagrantly engaged in, shall we say, extramarital relations,” Azmina said. “But the scope of this miracle moves us.”
“Far away?” I hoped.
Azmina ignored this. “Before you say no, let us show you what we had in mind.”
Fitttingly, it seemed I had no choice in the matter. Becka was already holding up her phone. There, my unwilling eyes met themselves.
“How did you …?” Darcy began but did not go on.
“These are mock-ups, just to give you an idea. We’d do a full professional photo session.”
Which also did not answer the question.
I was relieved that at least I was wearing clothes this time. I was relieved this woman—girl—was admitting these photos were mock-ups rather than real. I was relieved at how wholesome the images were.
Then I became nauseated at how wholesome the images were.
Moth’s front pressed to my back, arms around my pregnant belly, well, not my pregnant belly but someone’s pregnant belly pasted onto the front of my body.
Moth standing, holding my hand over my shoulder as I—and the pregnant belly—perched before him on a stool.
Moth clasping both of my hands in both of his, gazing into my eyes, the belly the only thing between us.
“Look how beautiful you are,” Becka almost whispered.
“Glowing,” Azmina added.
“Fake,” I said.
“Faked,” Becka corrected. “And only until we can get you in the studio.”
“Besides your baby,” Candi said, “think of all you could do to protect other preborn babies as well.”
I didn’t want to. Increasingly, I didn’t want anything actually on offer. Instead, I wanted to be left alone. I wanted my body to be my own. I wanted to be real rather than mocked or mocked up.
“There are going to be pictures,” Becka said. “As you’ve already seen, there will be pictures whether or not you consent to them. Ours will be beautiful, well crafted, respectful. With us, you’ll get to choose which ones you like. With us, you’ll get a say in pose, clothing, and hair and makeup.”
“You don’t even have to agree with us,” Azmina put in. “At least, not on our account. We don’t speak for … you know.” She raised her eyes toward the sky. “If you don’t believe in a heavenly reward, do it for an earthly one.”
“We’ll pay you for your time and likeness,” said Becka, “which, again, others are using without permission or payment.”
“I don’t need your money,” I said.
“But your baby will.” This was the ace up Azmina’s sleeve. She looked very pleased with herself. “You’re on a fixed income. Babies are expensive. How will you take care of yours without additional income and support? Don’t you want him to have all your first three children did not?”
Darcy smiled at me and shook her head. They’re ridiculous, her eyes said. Ignore them. But I couldn’t, not about this. “My children didn’t want for anything,” I said through my teeth.
“Oh no?” Becka cooed. “Two loving parents? An unbroken home? Resources and opportunities beyond what a single mother on a teacher’s salary could provide?”
“I think maybe the DMV has let you down on some of the details here,” Darcy said.
But then Candi, weary of these practicalities maybe, took the baton.
“God has chosen you for a miracle. Don’t you want to be worthy of it?
A preborn baby is always a blessing, but birth control is everywhere these days—when a pregnancy somehow slips through anyway, it’s that much more of a miracle. ”
“She wasn’t using birth control, you lunatic!” Darcy yelled, though in fairness, menopause was nowhere near these girls’ horizons.
“The air is polluted.” Candi’s eyes filled.
“The grocery store aisles are crammed with chemicals. We use poisons to clean our homes. So many women are taking birth control pills these days”—her eyes spilled over and tears ran prettily down her pretty cheeks—“that we’re all taking them, whether we like it or not, just from drinking the water.
So when anyone at any age somehow conceives despite those odds … ”
“She can’t just ‘get rid of it,’” Becka concluded.
“Life begins at conception,” Candi incanted, finally, as I’d known she would since we pulled into the parking lot, as I’d known someone would at least since the horrible one-on-one with Dr. Blankman.
Candi hadn’t thought up this argument, but whoever had—whoever imagined it a conversation-ender, inarguable, self-evident, what Lola called a mic drop—surely was as young as she was.
You’d have to be, because once you live a little longer, you realize.
Life begins again and again. It ends over and over.
This might as well have been Vista View’s slogan, the tagline for retirement communities and continuing-care facilities the world over: New Beginnings for Your End.
New home, new people, new life for the coda of this one.
Or maybe the opposite: New Ends, Now Beginning.
We are loops, all of us, beginning and ending and beginning over a lifetime.
Or, sometimes, all in the same day.
On the way home after the appointment, Darcy was quiet. Hushed, in fact. A literally geriatric pregnancy was less foreseeable than a silent car ride with my eldest, but only just.
“I’m sorry you have to take me to the doctor so often,” I ventured. “And I’m sorry taking me to the doctor involves confrontations in the parking lot. It’s infuriating.”
“They’re infuriating,” Darcy corrected. “And wrong.”
“And wrong,” I echoed, but she wasn’t done.
“I’m not sorry you’re pregnant, though. I’m kind of glad actually. I’m enjoying this.”
If I’d been driving, I might have rear-ended another priest. “You are?”
“Of course you should have the right to an abortion. Everyone should have the right to an abortion. And even if that weren’t true, you shouldn’t ambush old ladies on their way to the doctor.”
She stopped. This was also infuriating, if on a different scale. Darcy so rarely needed prompting. “But?”
“But I don’t know.” She shrugged. “I missed this the first two times.”
She sounded so pleased, so sure, I hated to tell her, “I have no idea what you’re talking about, sweetheart.”
“I don’t remember a time before Alice at all.
I remember Max being born, but I don’t really remember you being pregnant with him.
” She reached over and squeezed my hand, which was unlike her.
“But you helped me so much when I was pregnant. You told me when Edward and I didn’t need to worry about what we were worrying about.
You brought us food when I was too fat to reach the stove.
You vacuumed and dusted and showed Edward how to do laundry.
I thought I’d repay the favor by doing all of it for Lola and Sari someday, but now it turns out I get to repay it right to you. ”
I blinked away sudden tears. “It’s not the kind of favor you have to repay,” I managed.
“No, I know. But pregnancy’s a big part of motherhood, and now I get to watch my mom become a mom.”
“Become a mom again.”
“Right,” Darcy agreed, Darcy who had made me a mother in the first place. “Plus pregnancy’s a vulnerable time. You need your mom. Except then it turns out a menopausal adult daughter will do. It’s kind of neat.”
Neat? “Your brother and sister don’t think it’s neat. Max is upset my life is in danger again. Alice is upset about all I won’t be able to do for a child.”
“They’re not upset. They’re anxious. And confused, because ‘anxious’ is usually my job.” The underest of understatements. “And it’s not that I’m not anxious, but I also think it’s … I don’t know … cool?”
Darcy had never before said I was cool. Not once in fifty-one years. Speaking of miracles.