The Thin Pink Line Read online

  Dodo walked in just then and caught me spreading the hair around my part in an effort to discover just how damning the view was from the vantage point of anyone who was taller than me. Dodo, being taller than me, glanced down at my scalp and said, “Good God, Jane, by all means take extra time for lunch if you need to, but be sure to have Rock do something about that. This is no time to be letting your looks go.”

  Dodo, whose Carole Lombard hair was completely natural, also went to Rock, who merely styled it in a modified pageboy each week. By going to Rock, it was Dodo’s hope that people would think that she was naturally a dark-haired woman who had her hair dyed like everybody else, the primary hope being that she wouldn’t be tarred with the same dumb brush as the rest of the natural blondes. As evidenced by the fact that one hundred percent of the people she worked with called her Dodo and ninety-five percent of those in her personal life—those who had become aware of her work nickname—also called her Dodo, there were times when I thought to warn her that her efforts just weren’t working. She might as well have her hair done by someone more normal-looking and easier to get along with for all the good the Rock subterfuge was doing her. Better yet, and cheaper, she could probably just set it herself every night with large Velcro rollers.

  Still, Dodo’s advice about my looks was sound and so I rang up Rock right away, only to have to resort to bribery in order to get my way.

  Me: “It’s an emergency. I look like shit.”

  Rock—sound of her drawing heavily on cigarette not quite drowned out by even louder sound of blow-dryer in background—“It doesn’t matter, luv, does it? I’ve only got the two hands, don’t I, and they’re both booked up for the next three weeks.”

  Rock considered herself having passed elocution lessons by seeing every movie that Brenda Blethyn had ever made.

  Me: “I’ll pay you double.”

  Rock: “Great. Won’t help me grow another hand though, will it?”

  Me: “I promise to know exactly what I want, to tell you in a clear and concise fashion, and not to make you go through all of the stylists’ magazines with me before deciding on the same style that I’ve worn for the last five years.”

  Rock: “Closer.”

  Me: “Fine. I give. I promise not to even once—not once—ask you why you can’t do something with your own hair that remotely resembles the nice things you do to everyone else’s. I promise not to ask you what’s so fucking great about the color purple.”

  Rock: “Done. See you in a half hour. I can take you sooner if you can get here faster.”

  Twenty minutes later, I was standing at the reception desk of Wavy Do; the same twenty minutes later, there was a purple-haired woman whose nose and ears were like a walking jewelry box shrieking practically right into my face.

  “What the hell’s the matter with you? Are you daft?” shrieked the woman who you may have already guessed to be Rock. “I can’t dye your hair for you when you’re bleedin’ pregnant! Didn’t you ever bother to read What to Expect When You’re Expecting?”

  “Er…I…er.” I was flustered. “Er…yes.”

  “And?” Rock prompted, as though this were some kind of quiz.

  I tried desperately to remember what the book had said on the subject. “And…and…” All of a sudden it came to me in one big rush, like some kind of LSD flashback except that this was a fetus-care flashback. “Nobody’s sure if hair coloring does any harm but just to be on the safe side, if an expectant mother is going to color at all and is concerned, she should stick to vegetable dyes.” I breathed as if I’d just run a marathon. “Did I get it all?”

  “Near enough,” conceded Rock grudgingly. “You left out perms.”

  “But I never get perms.”

  “True.”

  “Well?”

  “I don’t keep vegetable dyes in the shop, you know? It just seems too weird to me. I mean, like, I know that vegetables are supposed to be good for the baby and all, but if they enter the mother’s body in any way other than through her mouth—like through her scalp, say—the idea just weirds me out. I mean, it’s not very natural, is it? Havin’ your mother eatin’ through her head?”

  “No, I guess not,” I had to admit. It did seem weird when she put it like that.

  But then, all of a sudden, Rock looked like she was getting angry about something, which was a pretty scary thing. “Hey, now! If you’re startin’ to show already, by my calculations—” and here she began counting on her fingers “—I’ve done your hair with regular full-chemical dye at least two times since your baby’s conception. Why didn’t you tell me before?”

  “Don’t hit me,” was all I could think of to say.

  Forty minutes later, I was back at my desk with a fairly presentable trim but with the medium-brown roots still coming in strong.

  “What happened?” Dodo wanted to know when she got back from her own lunch.

  Wordlessly, I handed her my by now well-thumbed copy of What to Expect, open to the section on “Hair Dyes and Permanents.” Apparently, she hadn’t read that part before, either.

  After a few moments, she said optimistically, “Well, it does say that the risks are only theoretical.”

  “Yeah,” I said, resigned. “But you know Rock.”

  “It’s not really such a bad shade of medium-brown,” she tried again.

  “Not if your name’s Mickey and you love cheese.”

  “I think it looks beautiful,” said Tolkien Donald. He was studying my two-toned hair. “There aren’t many women who could pull it off like you do. I seem to remember, back in the seventies, there was an American export of a television show I used to watch, The Rookies.”

  “I don’t remember that one.”

  “No? It was about these three cops, rookies, working under this curmudgeonly lieutenant. One guy was black and cool, one naive and white, and one straight and married. You know how the Americans can be—they probably thought they had every demographic in the world covered with that one. And I never could figure out how they could get away with keeping on calling the show The Rookies after the first season. I mean, it’s not like a cop can go on being a rookie forever. But I’m getting away from the point, which is that the straight and married cop was married to a woman who was played by the actress Kate Jackson, who at the time had two-toned hair just like yours. It was black on the top and then switched to auburn in the middle. I used to wonder how a person could be born with hair that was so odd and that looked so great. And you know what the really strange thing was?”

  I shook my head, mesmerized that he was so mesmerized by what I thought of as my hideous hair.

  “Well, the really strange thing was that on The Rookies, Kate played a character named Jill. But then, later in the same decade? She pops up on another show, Charlie’s Angels, only now she’s got shorter hair that’s all the same shade and her character’s name is Sabrina while there’s this other actress on the show, Farrah Fawcett-Majors, who’s got all kinds of different shades going on in her hair and now her character’s name is Jill.”

  “So what’s she doing now? Kate Jackson?”

  “I don’t know, do I? I started growing up after the seventies.” Then he was back to hair. “Of course, on The Rookies, Kate’s hair wasn’t exactly like yours. It being the seventies and all, her hair was razor straight and always looked like she ironed it before she left the house each day. Your hair, on the other hand, is twenty-first century hair. It’s trendy and spiky and fun, and the two-toned effect is much more interesting on your short hair than it ever was on Kate’s.”

  So this was what my life had boiled down to: I’d met the most perfect man, a man who would spend a half hour talking about some old program just to make me feel better about the fact that the entire world now knew that I dyed my hair, and I couldn’t tell anybody about it, now, could I? Well, except for David, of course; and, by extension, Christopher. I could just hear my mother: “Oh, Tolkien. What a wonderfully tolerant man you must be. In my day, very few
men would have willingly taken on a woman with another man’s baby on the way.” Or better still, Tolkien to me: “Is there a reason you’d like to share with me, Jane, for why you wear an inflated object underneath your clothes whenever we do something with your sister and Tony?”

  No, it wouldn’t do. Despite the inherent frustration of having finally met a man that I could point to and say, “Look, he’s decent and he likes me,” and yet not be able to tell anyone about him, I knew that if I wanted to continue dating Tolkien Donald, and I did, then I was going to have to do it under the shroud of the utmost secrecy.

  “I have a low-lying placenta.”

  What it really was, was that I had a pile of work on my desk that I didn’t feel like attending to, not when there was a perfectly gorgeous day going on outside.

  “What?” Dodo still hadn’t looked up from the galleys that had just been delivered.

  “I said, Madame Zora says I have a low-lying placenta.”

  The increased volume of my voice, coupled with the information contained therein, finally caught her attention.

  She whipped off her reading glasses. “Good God, Jane, that can’t be good. Still, if I recall correctly, isn’t it a bit early to be worrying about that?”

  Dodo had a mind like a steel trap and a near photographic memory which was one of the reasons she’d risen so high in the business so quickly. When she wanted to, she could quote whole passages from any of our authors’ books better than the authors themselves, and that after only one reading. She pulled her parlor trick on me now.

  “As a matter of fact, if I recall—” she squinted up at the ceiling and I suddenly recollected with a sinking feeling that she had her own copy of What to Expect and was probably better versed in it than I was “—an estimated twenty to thirty percent of placentas are low-lying in the second trimester, but most of them move up to the upper segment in time. When this doesn’t happen, a diagnosis of placenta previa is made, but that’s relatively rare. In fact, it only occurs in one percent or less of full-term pregnancies and, of those, only one out of every four is ever located low enough to cause any serious complications. So you see, Jane, it really is too early—”

  I cut her off. “Madame Zora says that it’s not too early to be worried in my case.”

  “But the question here of course, Jane, the one that keeps arising, is, does Madame Zombie know what the bloody hell she’s talking about?”

  “She’s not a witch doctor.” I assumed a wounded expression. “I really wish you wouldn’t talk about her that way. She happens to be the woman who’s going to deliver my baby.”

  “I’m sorry, Jane, but—”

  “And she says that she’s never seen such a low-lying placenta in all of her career. Why, she says, if it were any lower, it’d be hitting the tops of my shoes. So, you see, it isn’t too early to worry, because it’s been my experience that, in any given situation, if there’s only a one out of four in every one percent chance of a thing happening—” and here I let the hormones rip — “IT’LL HAPPEN TO ME!”

  “I’m sorry, Jane, I didn’t mean to imply…” Dodo came around the desk to hug me.

  “No, of course you didn’t. No one ever does.”

  “But you have to admit, even though I’ve never met her, your Madame Zomba can impress as being eccentric.”

  “Well, she says that my low-lying placenta—”

  Dodo cut me off before I could begin screaming again. “Yes, I know, dear. And it really was wrong of me to sound the least bit resistant to what is obviously a legitimate problem.” She grabbed my shoulders and held me at arm’s length, smile bright, encouraging. “I know. Why don’t you take the rest of the day off and go give that low-lying placenta of yours a break?”

  As I feigned reluctance to accept her generous offer, I felt a twinge of guilt even as I thought about what fun it would be to spend the day window-shopping or listening to a midday concert outside St. Martin-in-the-Fields rather than being cooped up in here. It was getting to the point where it felt as though I was inventing complications on a regular basis. And here was Dodo being so very understanding once again. Was it possible that I was beginning to develop Munchausen’s syndrome? No, I told myself, not possible because in my case I knew that I was making the symptoms up.

  “You’re so brave, Jane,” Dodo said now, a beautiful liquid crystal of a tear caught in the corner of her eye. “I don’t think I could ever be as brave as you’ve been.”

  I demurely looked down at my Joan & David feet, at least what I could still see of them over my mound of fake stomach, portrait of Madonna and Child only without. I fell just shy of actually shuffling my feet and saying, “Aw shucks, twarn’t nuthin’, ma’am,” in imitation of Colin Smythe’s beloved John Wayne. Instead, I kept the “Aw” part, simply making the addendum “anyone would do the same in my shoes.”

  Hardly. However, if I played my cards right, no one would ever be the wiser.

  But just where in hell was I going to come up with a baby?

  My baby was now an eight- to ten-inch fetus and, if he or she had been real rather than imaginary, strong enough to be felt by me. Its body was covered with soft downy lanugo, and hair had begun to grow on its head. Brows and white eyelashes were making an appearance and there was something called a protective vernix coating which covered the fetus.

  I couldn’t say that I’d noticed any decrease in mood swings, which was supposed to be characteristic of the fifth month, but Mother had always said I was a late bloomer. The irritability that was supposed to still occur occasionally was still a more than occasional thing. The absentmindedness was new but at least, thank God, I hadn’t experienced any swelling in my ankles, feet, hands or face and I had yet to develop hemorrhoids. All in all, mother and fetus were doing just great.

  The Sixth Month

  Men like to play at sports. Women compete at everything else.

  We were all gathered around the kitchen of Tony and Soph’s tiny apartment, talking about whether or not their baby’d one day kick arse for Manchester United and cooing over its ten fingers and toes. The “we” I refer to were the proud parents and Baby Jack, along with our mother and a six-pack of ready-to-pop women—all of whom reminded me of cast members from The Crucible, save for the fact that none of them wore white bonnets—and their various spouses and significant or insignificant others from Soph and Tony’s parentcraft classes.

  “Smart not to’ve had the epidural,” said smug Peg, whom I remembered from Sophie’s shower and whom I was tempted to call Goodwife Peg, or Goodie.

  “Easy for you to talk,” said huffy Trudy. “When I had my first, I was in labor for nearly three days.” She held up her fingers to count, drawing out the syllables. “Three days. I threw up on my own feet while standing up in the hospital shower more times’n I can count. If they hadn’t given me the bloody epidural on the third day, I’d’ve murdered someone.”

  I sniffed. “I’m not having an epidural or going to the hospital.”

  “Well, you’re fucking nuts, you are,” said Trudy.

  “Shh. The baby,” shushed Goodie Peg.

  “I’m having a midwife named Madame Zora who’s delivering my baby for me at home.” I rubbed my tummy. “I’m not even going to have to put my feet up in stirrups. She’s going to let me do it the natural way, the old-fashioned way—I’m going to squat and squeeze it out.”

  “Trudy’s right,” said Goodie Peg sotto voce so as not to have the baby hear. She leaned closer to my ear. “You are fucking nuts.”

  Double, double, boil and bubble, you stupid bitch, I thought, even if I was spoiling my own literary allusions.

  “I think it’s important to stay home with the baby at least the first two weeks,” said Helena, who worked for a multinational corporation.

  Dora, who was a legal assistant, snorted. “Two weeks? Try two months.”

  “Two years for me,” said Elizabeth, a cosmetics salesgirl.

  Goodie Peg smiled beatifically. “I’m plann
ing on staying home until my little girl gets married.”

  “I’m going to start a day care center in my home,” piped up Patty, who looked about sixteen. “I want to be around as many babies as I can. And,” she added assertively, “I don’t care how much birthing babies hurts. I’m not taking the chance of my baby coming into the world already hooked on drugs, not even if the labor hurts so much that it feels as though someone took a long glass tube and slowly shoved it straight through my eye.”

  “Do you think Manchester’ll go all the way then this year?” asked Tony, a rhetorical question if any of the men’d ever heard one.

  As if in proof of this, amid the sound of a chorus of popping beer cans, they all answered almost simultaneously, “I don’t see why the hell not.”

  Sophie, the tableau’s Madonna, who had been silent up to this juncture, picked a very interesting moment to point out to one and all, “You know, everybody, I don’t believe Jane’s ever changed a diaper in her life.”

  “It’s true,” my mother chortled, the chortling part really surprising me since, previously, I had only ever believed that this was something people did in books. “Jane’s never changed a nappy in her life. And why should she have? After all, she was the youngest and it certainly wasn’t as though anyone was ever going to encourage her to sit for anyone else’s kids.”

  “Here’s your golden opportunity, sis,” Sophie said, moving to hand off Baby Jack to me, Jack whose diaper was filled with the stuff that had started Sophie down this scatological path in the first place.

  Instinctively, I moved in the other direction, toward the door and the staircase down and out. “Gotta run,” I said, backing up as though Baby Jack were a gun set to go off at any moment. “I just remembered an urgent appointment that I forgot.”