Mercy Street(87)

Strangers found the pregnant body emboldening. Those who’d never been pregnant knew someone who had, and generously shared their expertise. Her landlady, the FedEx delivery guy, the homeless denizens of the Methadone Mile. She was advised daily about proper nutrition, the importance of sleep, the benefits of transcendental meditation or tai chi or alternate-nostril breathing. Who knew there were so many home remedies for heartburn, for water retention, for stretch marks and hemorrhoids and constipation and varicose veins? No bodily function was off-limits, because the pregnant body was everyone’s. It belonged to the entire world.

Of course, she was not the first woman to make this discovery. Her peers had made it twenty years earlier. At age forty-three, almost forty-four, she was very nearly the last.

There is a fine line between concern and intrusiveness. Even her coworkers, who knew better, crossed it from time to time. Though they all wanted to, no one asked about the baby’s father, the man involved with this pregnancy. Claudia volunteered nothing. It was a story she didn’t know how to tell.

She kept her promise to Luis. Each morning she drove to work instead of taking the T. She parked in the underground garage, in the reserved space next to Florine’s, and entered the building through a basement door, acutely aware that this was a luxury the patients didn’t have.

Pregnancy changed everything. To the Access patients she said the same things she’d always said, but her words landed differently. To a woman unhappily pregnant, the counselor’s swollen belly was a Rorschach test. The patient’s reaction said more about her than it did about Claudia.

With the latecomers, especially, her pregnancy elicited strong emotions. On the worst fucking day of their lives, the last thing they needed was advice from one of the lucky ones, a middle-aged woman carrying—as far as she knew—a healthy baby. Once she’d begun to show, she handed off the latecomers to Mary Fahey. Claudia had trained her personally and trusted her completely. Her patients would be safe in Mary’s large, freckled hands.

With the minors the situation was different. Claudia was older than most of their mothers, so unimaginably old that they assumed—correctly—that her circumstances were completely unlike their own. Her pregnancy interested them keenly. They asked whether she knew the baby’s sex, or wanted to. Often this spun off into a conversation about their own future pregnancies, whether or not they would want to know. The minors spoke of future motherhood with warmth and enthusiasm, an experience they looked forward to. The minors weren’t saying no to motherhood. They were saying, Not now.

For Claudia that answer was no longer possible. At her age, saying not now was the same as saying not ever.

Finding herself accidentally pregnant in middle age was the second-greatest surprise of her life.

The greater surprise was that she could do it. Unlike many of the patients she counseled, she was a functioning adult—healthy, employed, financially stable. She worked fifty feet away from an excellent gynecologist. Importantly, she was not in crisis. She felt ready to raise a child—clearheaded, unambivalent, sure.

In pregnancy she was always hungry. At first she found this alarming, the body taking over. For a person who loved to drive, there was something unutterably terrifying about a self-driving car. At the grocery store she filled her shopping cart. After a lifelong diet of processed garbage, she wanted fruit, fish, bread, vegetables. For the first time in many years, or possibly ever, she was hungry for actual food.

It was possible—likely, even—that these cravings were a form of atonement. Her future child, a girl, already had certain strikes against her. Half her genetic material had come from a man with an epic weed habit. (All day, every day.) The implications of this, its consequences for the next generation, were not clear.

Shortly after Claudia fell pregnant, she got in touch with a geneticist she’d once dated, a former e-boyfriend. He assumed she was asking on behalf of a patient, a misconception she didn’t correct. His response was distinctly unhelpful.

Anything’s possible, he said. No one knows anything.

In the spirit of atonement she ate salads, drank smoothies. She did not smoke weed. Like the pregnancy itself, quitting had been an accident. Claudia had exercised no special discipline; she’d quit out of cowardice. After spending the night with Timmy, she’d been too embarrassed to call him and buy more.

WHEN SHE TOLD PHIL ABOUT HER PREGNANCY, HE WAS DUMBFOUNDED. It was the first time she’d seen him at a loss for words.

“How did this happen?” he asked finally.

“In the usual way.”

“Stuart?”

“God, no.”

If it were anyone else, she would have dodged the question. At work, especially, she avoided the subject. She was a reproductive health professional. There was no easy excuse for her lapse in judgment, her failure to contracept.

“It was someone else,” she said finally. “We’re not in touch now. I knew him for a couple years.” It wasn’t much of an explanation, but it was all she was prepared to offer. “He was a friend.”

ACCORDING TO HER MOTHER, CLAUDIA HAD BEEN A LATE TALKER. Until the age of three she never said a word. When she finally spoke, her first word wasn’t Mama, and it certainly wasn’t Daddy. Her first word was No.

Naturally enough, she said it to Deb.

For most of her adult life, she’d said no to everything. No to marriage and no to daughterhood, no to food and no to love. She’d said yes to sex, it was true, but only to a certain kind: curated sex, electronically screened and vetted sex. When an e-relationship ran its course, she started over with a new e-boyfriend who would be, in the end, not so different from the last one. This was in no way surprising, since she had selected him using the same filters: education, profession, political views, zip code.