The Thin Pink Line Read online

  Constance, who was occasionally given to wearing healing crystals, regardless of their individual prescriptive properties, but rather merely because they matched with that day’s outfit and eyes, clapped again. “It’s just…too brilliant for words!”

  Louise was not quite as enthusiastic as Constance, but she certainly seemed glad that there’d be something different to talk about, while Dodo was clearly dead set against.

  “And does this…Zora person have any legitimate medical qualifications?”

  “Course not. If she did, what would be the point?”

  “Well, then, what do you suppose is going to happen if things don’t go perfectly, if it turns out to be not a matter so simple as shaking a package of voodoo herbs around the birthing chair and chanting to the baby, ‘Come out, come out wherever you are’? What will you do if something goes wrong that Xena, Warrior Princess isn’t able to handle with her mood rings?”

  “Oh that.” I flicked my wrist in perfect pooh-pooh form. “That’s what the flying squad’s for.”

  “The flying squad?”

  “Yes,” I said, showing unwarranted exasperation at her lack of knowledge, when I myself had only gleaned this information from What to Expect. Since she had her own copy, supposedly she should have been aware of this herself. But I guessed that, since she thought I was using Dr. Shelton, she hadn’t figured on it being necessary for her to read up on alternative birthing options. “Don’t you know that, for us Brits, it’s not at all uncommon to want a home birth? Why, we do it all the time. Just to be on the safe side, though, we like to keep the flying squad at the ready. That’s a fully equipped ambulance to you laypeople, ready to take me and baby to hospital should the need arise. Course, in my situation, it won’t.”

  Dodo put her hand to her chest. “Well I am relieved to hear that, Jane. To know that competent medical help will be nearby will give me a lot of comfort.”

  “Glad to be able to relieve your mind so easily. But really, girls, I think I can guarantee that this is one delivery that will go off without a hitch.”

  I had high hopes for this lunch. Perhaps, after nearly thirty years, my mother and I were finally going to bond.

  My mother and I had just been seated at our table at Meat! Meat!! MEAT!!!, a new restaurant she’d insisted we check out.

  What an odd name for someone to choose to give to an eating establishment, I thought.

  “Isn’t it a bit—let’s see—crass? Or is vulgar the word I want?” I observed aloud, rubbernecking to see the handsome waiters strolling around in butchers’ uniforms with suspiciously authentic stains which were, hopefully, ketchup, on their aprons. “Aren’t the sides of beef hanging by the menus in the front window just a tad bit de trop?”

  “I’ll have you know, Jane, that this restaurant is considered by all the best guidebooks to be very trendy right now.” She arranged her napkin in her lap at the same time rearranging her buttocks on the chair by doing one of those lift-one-cheek-and-then-the-other moves that never failed to annoy me. It was as though she had gas and was expressing it in a prissily obvious sort of way.

  “What guidebooks have you been reading? Butchers Monthly?”

  “Don’t be absurd, Jane. There is no such magazine.” Couldn’t fool her. “No, I meant real guidebooks, not imaginary ones. Anyway, the critics say that Meat! Meat!! MEAT!!! is just the high point of the cultural backlash they’ve been forecasting for some time now. After all, you can’t expect people to be excited about dining on healthy cuisine indefinitely. Radicchio, my foot. It’s just not natural.” She leaned in closer and whispered, “They predict that drinking’s going to make a comeback too, and that soon people will be donning buttons that say, I’m a smoker and I’m proud of it.” She did the shifting around thing with her buttocks again in her chair. “Anyway, I know what a crazy diet you always eat and I’m worried that, now that you’re pregnant, you won’t get enough protein.”

  “Yes, I suppose it would seem to be a crazy diet to others, the attempt to avoid unnecessarily large quantities of animal fat.”

  “Now there’s no need to get huffy. There was that bizarre smoothie phase of yours not too long ago.”

  “True.”

  “And the cantaloupe-at-every-meal phase during your university years.”

  “Guilty.”

  “And the first diet you ever went on, when you were ten. Wasn’t that Dr. Sitwell’s Sit Well and Live Longer Diet, the one that guaranteed you a long life and eternal slimness if only you did all of your eating before noon? The one that said it was okay to eat five thousand calories a day, even if you ate it all in the form of sticks of butter, provided you did it all before the clock struck twelve?”

  “Fine. All right already. Point made.”

  “I seem to recall you actually gaining quite a bit of weight on that one.”

  I sniffed. “Well, that was just because I started getting too hungry late in the day, what with not eating or drinking at all during the eleven hours between noon and bedtime. It was like a sort of Ramadan in reverse. It got so bad that I took to going to sleep at four in the afternoon, around the time that everyone else was enjoying the tea I couldn’t have. Then I’d get up at midnight, declare it to be a new eating day, and eat my way straight through to noon.”

  “No wonder you turned into such a little butterball that summer.”

  “You have such an endearing way with words, Mother.”

  Just then the waiter came and I observed her as she placed an order for a sirloin steak—not terribly original—which I noticed she placed by weight.

  This maternal cross I’d been bearing for nearly three decades was still quite pretty in a well-preserved way. She tinted her hair champagne-colored just often enough that no one would ever guess it was still a very pretty black underneath. Her blue eyes had the confidence shown only by women who have lived without a man for a long time, deciding that they like it that way just fine. And her body was in just the optimum good shape for people to think that she was genetically lucky rather than desperately spending hours in the gym in an attempt to beat time. In fact, were it not for the fact that she made me stark-raving bonkers any time I had to be around her for more than five seconds, I might have admired her.

  “I’ll have what she’s having,” I informed our waiter, Butcher Brad according to the red script that was embroidered on his uniform, handing over the menu, “but half.”

  Now it was my mother’s turn to sniff, proving from where genetically I’d acquired that nasty little habit. “I knew that you’d object to red meat, probably say something about too much of it not being good for the baby, but it had been my hope that, if I just got you here, I could persuade you to eat enough in one sitting to carry you through the next several months. You are,” and here she cast a severe eye on my form, “looking remarkably slender for a pregnant lady.”

  This from a woman who had bandied about that dreaded word butterball only moments before.

  “Isn’t there something else we can talk about besides food, Mother?”

  “Fine.”

  I was consigned to mineral water as she took a sip of wine poured from the split Butcher Brad set down in front of her. For the first time I registered that there was something awfully familiar about this Butcher Brad, but I only got a glimpse of his face, overwhelmed as it was by his floppy big chef’s toque, before being distracted by my mother’s next words.

  “Have you given any thought to what you might like to name the baby? I was thinking that naming him after your late father might be a nice gesture.”

  I spewed water all over the tablecloth, which was actually large sheets of butcher’s paper. “Do you really think the world needs another Hugh Pugh Taylor getting the shit kicked out of him at public school?”

  “Watch your mouth and lower your voice, Jane. Your paternal grandmother’s family name isn’t that bad.”

  “Not when it’s paired with anything else, Pugh’s not that bad, which certainly isn’t saying that
it’s ever good. But when it’s paired with Hugh, well…didn’t you ever think it was suspicious that Daddy used to introduce himself by saying to people, ‘Please just call me Taylor. Really, Taylor’s just fine’?”

  Butcher Brad set our hot plates before us, my mother’s slab of meat stretching over the edges, while mine just took up most of the plate. There was a halfhearted attempt at some roasted potatoes and a mixed veg squeezed onto the plates, too, as if in concession to the delicate sensibilities of those diners who needed the illusion that they were eating an omnivorously balanced meal. I took up my serrated knife and fork with an odd feeling of relish and tucked in. It’s amazing how cannibalistically tempting a juicy piece of meat can look at times when one’s mother is sitting across the table.

  “Well,” she said, her own bold knife and fork already going to town, “if you’re not going to name the baby—if it’s a boy, that is—after your father, and I’m sure you won’t be naming him after Trevor, not after he did a bounder on you, then what are you going to do about a name?”

  God, I hated it when she put it like that; ever since I’d told her about my canceled wedding plans, just two hours after telling her about the baby and impending marriage in the first place, she’d been insufferable. Then, too, there was sister Sophie, who’d also been insufferable of late. After her initial sisterly surge of sentiment regarding our nearly parallel pregnancies, the fact that she was four months further along than me went straight to her head, resulting in near-daily phone calls to see that I wasn’t doing anything stupid. It’d gotten to the point where I didn’t even bother answering the phone with a “hello” anymore, preferring to cut straight to the meat of “No, Sophie, I haven’t been using any mod-cons like the microwave lately” and “No, I haven’t been inhaling any aerosol cans.”

  “It’s not as though Hugh Pugh and Trevor are the only two boys’ names in the world, is it?” I said now. “Anyway, I’ve already selected some strong candidates.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes, I was thinking either Balthasar or Attila.”

  Butcher Brad paused in his duties in order to pat my choking mother on the back. As he patted her, he made eye contact with me and the other shoe finally dropped. Good God, it was David’s Christopher! What the hell was he doing here? But before I could query the ostensible architect as to what he was doing dressed up as a waiter at Meat! Meat!! MEAT!!!, he smiled widely at me over the top of her head, winked conspiratorially, and indicated with a nod that I should continue with my conversation.

  “If I name him Attila, see,” I elucidated, stumbling a bit at first as I was still stunned at Brad-Christopher, “the chances of his getting beat up at school are greatly minimized. People just don’t go around beating up people named Attila. In fact, the only problem I see would be if he turned out to be very effeminate of feature, in which case some knobhead might think it funny to nickname him Tilly.”

  “And Balthasar?” Choking incident averted, I watched Christopher go as she took a big gulp of water. “You can’t think of anything objectionable, like with Attila, that might keep you from doing that?”

  “God, no. What’s wrong with Balthasar?”

  “Everything?”

  “But Balthasar was one of the three wise men. You know, the guys who brought all that stuff to Jesus. You are always saying that you’d like to see me become more religious.”

  “Wouldn’t it be easier to just attend church every now and then?”

  “I don’t see why you’re getting so upset about Balthasar. It’s not like I wanted to name him Melchior or anything, which was the name of one of the other two wise men, in case you’ve forgotten.” Elbow on the table, I waved my fork around in the air and squinted as though deep in thought. “Now, as for the last wise man, I can never quite remember his name….”

  “Me, either.”

  “Anyway, it doesn’t matter. I’m almost certain it’s going to be a girl.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes. And if it is, I’m going to name her Angharad. After one of the characters in those Lloyd Alexander books I used to love so much as a child.”

  “I told your father it wasn’t wise, teaching you to read.”

  “But if it does turn out to be a boy after all, I have one other name I’ve been kicking around.” I leaned over, laughing, distracted by the fiction I was creating even as I spoke. “You know, I met one woman who said that her doctor swore to her that she was going to have a boy and that he was sure because the boy, based on the pictures, was going to have a really big—” I looked around at the other diners, lowered my voice still further and whispered knowingly “—a really big you know. Turned out in the end, though, that what the doctor thought was a boy with a big—” meaningful pause again “—you know, was in reality a girl and a big shadow.”

  “The name, Jane? You were going to tell me about this other name?”

  “Oh, right. Here. Let me write this one down for you.” I rummaged in my purse until I found a pen and a crumpled sheet of paper.

  “I don’t know why you have to be so secretive,” my mother said as I scribbled.

  I looked up at her, cagily, going a little bit Nancy from Oliver Twist. “Don’t want anyone else to steal it, do I? Don’t believe anyone else has got one of these.” Then, like a hardened businessman, I shoved the folded slip of paper across the table toward her.

  She carefully unfolded it, giving it the ticking-bomb treatment. When she saw what I’d written, she gasped again. “You can’t be serious, Jane! Surely even you can’t be intending to call your own baby…Satan?”

  “Oh, Mother,” I half whined, as though she might be the most drearily stupid woman in the world. “That’s just the way it’s spelled. When you pronounce it, however, the accent is on the second a, like the name of that old diet guru Martin Katahn, except that this is pronounced Satahn and spelled Satan. Have you got it straight now?”

  Okay, so maybe the Satan thing was a bit cruel. But she had called me a butterball, hadn’t she? And it hadn’t been the first time. Now, then, I ask you: what girl wants to be called a butterball, with fair regularity, by her own mother?

  Tit for tat; Satan for butterball. The way I figure it, it’s all a wash in the end.

  So Mother went back to gulping wine, while I continued to wonder just what the hell Christopher had been doing there.

  “Jane, I can explain everything.”

  Well, this was certainly a first in my life, someone directing those words at me. Usually it was the other way round.

  “Yes, I’m sure you can, David. Like why, after years of telling me that the only meat gay people go for is filet mignon, you should choose to open a cattle emporium.”

  “There’s no need to be so hard on him.” This from Christopher who’d come knocking on my door with David following the late-night closing of the restaurant.

  In my fuzzy bathrobe, I felt at a slight disadvantage to their well-groomed splendor.

  “It’s really all my fault,” Christopher continued, moving into the room and making himself quite at home. “He wanted to open a vegetarian place, perhaps with a heavy Middle Eastern influence, but I told him, ‘No, no, no, no, no. Covent Garden’s got way too much of that granola stuff going on as it is. Really, the Retro Nouveau Hippie movement—or whatever the hell you want to call it—should be going out the fashion window just about any second now—’”

  “Which was when I said, ‘How about fish?’” cut in David.

  “Which explains how hilarious we got when I spelled out Fish! Fish!! FISH!!! that time we all went to that greasy tandoori place, because of course I explained to David that it would be worse than useless to open an all-fish place in the middle of England, as if people would come there for the crab cakes or sushi or something—”

  “But then afterward, after we dropped you off that night, Christopher said, ‘But you know, having a one-note restaurant might not be a bad idea, and I really do think that meat is on its way back in. As a matter of fact
, we’re just about due, calendar-wise, for a Retro Yuppie movement, and they were always big on steaks as big as a plate—’”

  “Hence, Meat! Meat!! MEAT!!! was born.”

  I glared at them both. “That still doesn’t explain why all of a sudden you’re interested in meat other than filet mignon or why you didn’t invite me to the opening!”

  “David doesn’t have to eat it,” Christopher answered the first. “He just has to cook it.”

  “I was scared to,” shrugged David, answering the second.

  “But why?” I asked.

  “Because he’s the chef,” said Christopher.

  “I didn’t mean you!”

  “Because of, well, the way you are now, for example,” said David. “You know, you really have been quite a volatile little girl ever since Trevor left.”

  Which was true. Despite my euphoria at having met Tolkien, I was so used to playing the part of the Pregnant Woman Whose Man Has Left Her at work, that the role had permeated the rest of my life. Plus, I was in love, and being in love produces just as many volatile emotions as being jilted does, so it was sort of like I was having a double dose of PMS at every waking moment. Then, too, even though I was in love, Tolkien hadn’t called me yet.

  David continued. “I didn’t want to push you over the edge in a situation where there would be, quite naturally, a lot of steak knives involved.”

  Since what he said made a warped kind of sense, at least within the context of our bizarre world, I chose to ignore it, rounding on Christopher once more. “And what about you? How did you wind up getting to be Butcher Brad? Hmm?”

  “Oh, that. Well, I quit my day job as an architect, didn’t I? After all, good help is always hard to find, David needed good help, and I love David.”

  This was really the limit. I flopped down on the sofa, completely deflated. “Oh, why can’t I be a gay man?” I asked the ceiling, reflecting on how much these two loved one another and how, well, uncomplicated their love seemed.