The Perfect Mother(33)
Colette wants to tell her own mother these things, but she can’t. She doesn’t even know where she is. The last time they spoke, ten minutes over a staticky phone line more than two weeks ago, Rosemary was in the San Blas Islands off the coast of Panama, conducting research on one of the last remaining matriarchal societies. Colette’s father, recently retired as the chair of biology at UC Boulder, had accompanied her. (“As a member of a matriarchal family, I feel I’ll fit in well,” he said when her parents called to tell her they’d be going away for three months, leaving a week after Poppy was due.)
Colette is breathless as Alberto, the doorman, opens the door for her, and when she gets out of the elevator on the third floor, stopping to unlace her sneakers, she can hear Charlie inside the apartment, in the kitchen, speaking to someone on the phone.
He drops the phone from his ear when she enters. “Wow,” he mouths. “You look hot.”
She glances in the mirror over the table in the hall. Her hair is soaked, her freckles crimson, the layer of sunscreen she applied on her way out of the doctor’s office chalks her skin. It’s the first time she’s gone for a run since giving birth, and she had to stop and walk several times. “I’m assuming you mean as in very warm,” she says to Charlie.
“No,” he whispers. “I mean as in hot.” He kisses her hand and then speaks into the phone. “We can make that work. I just can’t let these things get in the way of finishing the new book.” He pours a cup of coffee and hands it to Colette. “And I probably shouldn’t miss any major holidays. Doubt the baby would ever forgive me for that.”
“Nor the baby’s mother,” Colette says, assuming he’s on the phone with his publicist, discussing another invitation to speak somewhere. He finished his book tour two months earlier, but the requests for additional cities keep coming. She pours a glass of water and notices that the dining table—a vintage farm table Charlie bought them last Christmas—is set for two, with her grandmother’s dishes and their linen napkins. A handful of bright blue bodega daisies, some of the petals flaccid and wilting, are arranged in a stainless-steel travel mug in the center of the table.
She takes a grape from the bowl at Charlie’s elbow and wraps her arms around his waist, pressing her cheek into the familiar hollow between his shoulder blades, taking in his scent—Speed Stick and roasted garlic—hearing Womb Noises floating from the monitor on the shelf. She allows herself to feel the easy joy of the moment. The warmth of Charlie’s body. Poppy asleep in the nursery. The rhythm of the apartment. If only she could stay right here, in this exact moment, forever.
Colette unclasps herself and sees the book—Becoming a Family—on the counter beside the coffeepot. She takes her coffee and the book and slides onto a stool at the island as Charlie chops a thick bunch of parsley in quick, sure bursts, the phone pressed between his shoulder and ear. She opens to the early section on pregnancy, glancing through Charlie’s notes in the margins, the corners he’s turned back to mark certain pages.
Nine weeks: the baby is the size of a grape.
How to prepare your birth partner.
Things to avoid: raw fish and undercooked meat, excessive exercise, hot baths.
Colette feels the lump in the base of her throat as she reads the words, remembering those early weeks. The ache in her breasts as she climbed the stairs. The stomach-turning scent of strangers’ soap and perfume on the subway. Getting sick in her publisher’s restroom, in the middle of a meeting to discuss the direction of the second book.
The devastating shock at the two pink lines on the plastic pregnancy test.
It was a glitch in her system. An off month. She knew her body well enough to avoid birth control, which had, the few months she was on the pill, left her feeling angry and depressed. (Charlie had joked with her, saying if all women responded to the pill the way she did, he understood its effectiveness. It made women so miserable, nobody wanted to have sex with them.) She’d gone to see Dr. Bereck, needing confirmation. Bodies change, Dr. Bereck said. Cycles slow. She was almost thirty-five. Things were beginning to shift.
Five weeks: the baby is the size of a poppy seed.
Five weeks: the September night she told Charlie she was pregnant. They made love afterward, and he lay alongside her, his chest against her back, his hand on the slope of her waist. “You. A baby. My book,” he’d said. “This is everything I’ve ever wanted.” She just lay there, unmoving, trying to imagine it. Pregnancy. A baby. Motherhood.
She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t imagine any of it. Her imagination was already occupied by other things. The two-month trip to Southeast Asia she and Charlie were planning to take after he finished his second book. The marathon she’d just begun training for. Finally getting out of ghostwriting and publishing another book of her own. Those things she could imagine. But this?
She called her mother the next morning, questioning how she was going to manage, how she’d stay herself, admitting she’d had three whiskeys one night before knowing she was pregnant; that she’d gone on several punishing runs.
“What if I’ve already hurt the baby?”
“Colette,” her mother had said, “when abortions were illegal, women had to throw themselves down the stairs. You’re not going to kill your baby by accident.”
The memory dissolves as Charlie hangs up and comes to kiss her forehead. She closes the book. “You’ve scrambled eggs for me?” she says. “What’s the occasion?”