Pineapple Street(43)
Tim’s wife looked at Sasha wide-eyed, and she shook her head with amusement. “We’re not pregnant. He’s just excited.”
“About diapers?” she asked.
“Cord is a very enthusiastic person,” Sasha snickered in reply.
Sasha didn’t know what would happen to her business when she had a baby; she was a one-woman design shop without a human resources department, so she supposed she would just have to take a pause on projects and hope her clients would come back to her on the other side. She had one client, a Brooklyn-based company that made bed linens, that she had been with since their launch. She’d designed their logo, their website, their packaging, and their subway ads. Another client, a luxury hotel in Baltimore, had hired her to design everything from their restaurant menus and matchbooks to the eight-foot sign above the entrance. She had a craft beer brewery, an organic baby food meal-delivery service, a 3D-printing vendor, and an (admittedly weird) Chinese Swedish restaurant. She could get them all through their holiday campaigns and then, she hoped, take her maternity leave in the spring when things calmed down. It was terrifying to contemplate, but she didn’t see any other options.
“I just picture you as this badass mom,” Cord told her later that night. “Doing your job with a baby strapped to your chest.”
“And then teaching the baby how to use Photoshop?” Sasha asked.
“We’ll teach the baby to do both our jobs so we can cuddle all day,” Cord promised, snuggling his nose into her hair.
“You seem like you’re ready, huh?”
“I am. Are you?”
“I’m getting there.” Sasha nodded. Her friends were starting to have babies too. It no longer seemed crazy or irresponsible, and there was something incredibly cool about imagining a tiny human that was half Cord, half her. She could already picture him talking to the baby in weird voices, pretending the bathtub was a wild ocean, dancing around the living room with a child in his arms. He would pour all his natural silliness and joy into parenthood, and their home would be happy and full.
Sasha called her mom to talk it through. “Sasha, there’s never a perfect time to have a baby,” her mother said. “Your dad and I were flat broke when we had Nate, but it all worked out. You’re healthy, you’re in love, and you’re under forty. In my day they would classify anyone over thirty-five as a ‘geriatric mother’ and make you wear a shameful paper bracelet at the hospital. Get on the stick.”
* * *
—
They decided to start trying to get pregnant. Sasha had friends who had begun telling people as soon as they decided, saying, “We pulled the goalie,” and it always made Sasha laugh because what were they really saying except that they were about to have a lot of sex? So instead of informing the entire Stockton family that they were embarking on a bonefest, they just made a note of the start of her last period and had sex five days in a row two weeks later. It didn’t work the first time around, and Sasha was surprised at the disappointment she felt at the brown spot in her underwear, but when her period was a single day late the second month she ran out to the drugstore and bought four pregnancy tests.
“You can’t tell right away,” Cord said, squinting at the tiny print on the instructions.
“But I’m too antsy to wait!” Sasha peed on the stick anyway and there next to the control line was the ghostly pink of a second line.
“That’s not a line.” Cord shook his head.
“I think it is, it’s just very pale.”
“I don’t know,” he said, frowning. “Let’s wait and see if it gets darker.” They put the test on the bathroom counter and cooked dinner and returned to peek at it again an hour later.
“It’s still pale, but I think it’s there,” said Sasha.
“Oh, but look.” Cord read the instructions again. “It says the results are only valid for the first thirty minutes.”
“Argh, fine, we’ll do it again in the morning. It says your pee is less diluted in the mornings anyway.”
The next morning the ghostly line was still there, the day after that it was a bit darker, and by the time Sasha took the fourth pregnancy test it was solid magenta. She was pregnant.
* * *
—
If Cord had been a hen who was broody, Sasha suddenly felt like a hen who was nesting. Looking around the limestone, what she had previously seen as clutter now looked like proper hazards: the vintage oyster-and-pearl glass-topped coffee table, the midcentury tasseled Italian bar cart with its array of expensive poisons, the bone-china lamps with frizzled old wires snaking the floor. There were hundreds and hundreds of opportunities for cuts or bumps or electrocution, and Sasha felt like she might break out in hives just thinking about it.
“Cord, I think we should set up Georgiana’s room for the nursery,” she suggested over breakfast one morning. Cord was drinking coffee and eating a bowl of cereal—he had mixed three kinds together and was using what seemed to be a serving spoon to deliver the sugary mush to his mouth.
“Let’s use my old room.” He chewed. The milk looked gray.
“But your room is on the fourth floor and I think we want the baby on the third with us.”
“Won’t we just have the bassinet in our room for the first few months anyway? My mom always says we slept in a little basket on the floor of their room.”