The Thin Pink Line Read online

  “I reckon not.”

  Colin sighed. “I wish that either you or Lana had picked up on this during the editorial process. It would have saved me so much bother.”

  I neglected to point out to him that he had been the one who had actually traveled to the United States, where he should have had ample opportunity to study the speech patterns of nontourist Americans. I, on the other hand—although I would have dearly loved to go to California or Chicago or even Texas, where the latest governor was reportedly still executing death-row inmates fairly regularly—had never hardly been any farther west than Gloucester. Instead, I promised to do whatever I could in terms of damage control from my end and rang off after only a handful more sighs out of him.

  Now it was my turn to sigh, not with dejection, however, but with relief. It was time for me to get back to What to Expect.

  There were so many things to worry about, I began to learn as I read on.

  Oh, I don’t mean things to worry about as far as the baby’s health; after all, that would go without saying if a person were actually pregnant. No, what I’m getting at here is all the things that could go wrong if, say, a person didn’t quite know what they were doing and weren’t really pregnant, a person like me who had told her boyfriend that she was pregnant but wasn’t quite there yet really. For example, what if someone were to ask a person how they first suspected they were pregnant? A person might take the easy way out and say, “Well, I missed my period, didn’t I?” But if a person didn’t want to just go with the obvious, if they wanted to maybe spice things up with a splash of authenticity, they might want to say, “I’ve been tossing my cookies all day long,” or “I was beginning to think I’d turned into a greyhound, I’ve been peeing that much,” or “My vaginal and cervical tissue’s been changing colors lately.” Of course, the problem with that approach is that a really swift person might come up with alternative medical and nonmedical causes for those signs. They might easily counter with, “Have you considered that it just might be food poisoning?” or “Well, there have been those diuretics you’ve been addicted to for the last year,” or “You know, Jane, you’re not supposed to study yourself down there with a handheld mirror on a daily basis—cut it out!”

  No, it definitely seemed to me that the only conclusive proof to offer Nosy Parkers should they ask would be the results of an official test, which was pretty much well what Trevor had indicated already.

  On the way home from work, I stopped off at Mr. Singh’s and ordered a take-away curry to appease the cravings that I was sure to be having soon. While waiting for my order, I popped in next door at Boots the Chemist. I studied the display of at-home pregnancy tests available, reading the backs of each until I found one that claimed to be effective anytime during the day; no point waiting for first morning pee when a girl could do it anytime she felt like it. Then I selected a package containing a colorful assortment of fine-point Magic Markers, paid for my purchases, picked up my curry, and completed the journey home.

  It wasn’t as though I’d gone out of my way, per se, when Trevor and I had first moved in together, to select a paint color for the majority of the apartment that would clash so with his beige personality. It was more, I told myself, that I genuinely enjoyed salmon pink and, anyway, it’s always good early on in a new relationship to push the envelope so hard that you know just exactly how far a man is willing to go in terms of concessions to keep you happily in his bed. I’d heard girls at the office tell about pressuring the men in their lives to buy them gemstones as big as their heads, to take them vacationing on Necker, to let a second man play in their beds. By contrast, having your beige man paint the walls pink seemed like comparatively small potatoes to me.

  And it wasn’t as though Trevor hadn’t been doing his own share of envelope pushing which, in his case, came in the form of a horrible orange beast he loved that went by the name of Punch the Cat. I don’t know why I hated Punch the Cat so much, whom I always wanted to kick every time I entered a room as he slinked out at me from around some corner, because I’ve always adored cats in general. I guess it could be because he came across as some kind of smugly malevolent Puss in Boots or maybe it was just the color orange.

  Anyway, on that particular evening, my knee-jerk reaction upon entering the apartment and seeing Punch the Cat slithering toward me, moving like the Grinch when he’s going after the Christmas decorations and appears to not even touch the ground, was no different than any other: I wanted to swing out with one of my two-inch chunky-heeled burgundy suede Joan & Davids and send him flying into the fireplace. But I couldn’t do that tonight. Not if what I was hoping to do was launch the campaign to get Trevor to start looking at me as the future mother of his child.

  “Hello, Punch.” I juggled chemist and curry bags so that I could reach down and pet my enemy. “Is Daddy home yet?”

  Well, of course I already knew that Trevor was around here somewhere; his car was parked out front. Why else would I be sucking up to the cat?

  “Hello, there,” Trevor said, using a towel to wipe his wet ears, wearing blue jeans and nothing else as he strolled toward me from the direction of the bathroom.

  Trevor was a two-shower-a-day man and whenever I saw him walking around suspenderless, in addition to wanting to swat him on his perfect behind, I always found myself marveling at the fact that I’d somehow managed to wind up with a man with light-blond hair and dark-blue eyes, the color combination I’d have least pegged myself to settle down with.

  “Darling!” I gushed. Perhaps I was overdoing it? Tossing my packages on the table, I threw my arms around him, slightly damp chest and all. “Lucky me to come home to you.” Well, at least I had the grace not to guffaw at my own inanities. “Tough day at work?” Could I get any more situation-comedy wife? “Hope you didn’t have to deal with any Nick Leesons.”

  “Nah, it wasn’t too bad,” Trevor said, disengaging, but in a gentle way. He peeked in the bag from Mr. Singh’s. “Hey, curry! Great!” He looked up at me. “You don’t know how many times today I thought to ring you to see if you’d like to split one, but I kept getting interrupted, and then I thought to stop on the way home, but I also thought, that if you’d already stopped someplace first, it’d create a food conflict, so I ended up not doing anything.” He smiled. “You’re the greatest.”

  God. Sometimes it was just so damned easy.

  “I’m glad you’re happy. Tell you what. Why don’t you lay out the plates and things while I just pop into the bathroom to wash my hands and—” I patted the chemist bag I’d retrieved “—attend to some girl stuff.”

  Trevor was so instantly preoccupied with the curry bag that he didn’t even remark on the chemist’s bag. What an odd man. He’d as much as told me to pick up what amounted to a ticking bomb at the chemist’s. I now had it in my possession and was about to detonate it, and rather than showing any outward signs of anxiety, he had his nose buried in the chicken tikka masala. Oh, well.

  Once I’d safely managed to lock behind me the door we usually never bothered to lock, I tore into the bag, pulled out the pregnancy kit, and reread the directions. Well, I thought, I could just dismantle the plastic wand thing and use the pink Magic Marker to make my pink line right away. But then I figured that I should at least pee onto the thing first so that it would have that authentic urine aroma.

  Dropping my drawers and squatting over the toilet bowl, I did so, only to discover, after getting pee all over my hand as well, that when I finally dismantled the thing and applied the pink Magic Marker to the damp surface, the line came out all smudged-looking and not at all like the “you are pregnant” diagram depicted on the back of the box. It didn’t help matters any that, not ever having been what one might term “good” at art class, my line had come out on a very strong diagonal and thus not like anything pictured on the box, not even like the “you are not pregnant” diagram. Good thing I’d purchased one of the few brands containing two tests. Perhaps its manufacturer had anticipated that some w
omen might be overly cautious or that some, like me, might do something truly bizarre with the first test.

  I hastily shoved the botched test into the cabinet beneath the sink for now, dropping it behind a package of sanitary napkins—after all, it wouldn’t do to have Trevor see the odd-looking botched test sticking out of the refuse basket by the toilet, would it?—and removed the second test, deciding not to take any chances by peeing on it this time. If I blew this one too, then I’d have to wait until the following evening to try again, and I was getting anxious.

  “Jane?” I heard Trevor’s voice calling. “Are you all right in there? The curry’s getting cold.”

  Trevor might not have been the kind of knight in shining armor that I’d wanted him to be that last year, the kind that would have asked me to marry him so that I’d at least have one less thing to envy everyone else for, but he did have the most uncommonly gracious table manners; I knew that even if he’d decided to turn Muslim all of a sudden and began observing Ramadan, that even if he’d been fasting all day long he’d never sneak one forkful past his lips until I was also seated at the table.

  “Coming!” I shouted. “I’ll just be one more tick in here.”

  Again not to take any chances this time, having already most emphatically not peed on the plastic wand, I dismantled it, lined the box up perpendicularly over the top of the wand to function as a ruler and made my mark less than a finger’s distance apart from the control line that was already in the test window for women to compare the color of their own results. Then I shoved the marker back loosely in the bag that my purchases had come in, shoved the whole thing to the back of the cabinet where the botched test had already taken up residence behind the sanitary napkins that I would, theoretically, not be needing for the next nine months, and shouted, “Trevor! I think you’d better come in here! There’s something you’re going to want to see!”

  I heard the sound of his chair scraping back from the table, accompanied by the kind of sigh that clearly said, “But I’m hungry!” Still, Trevor was too well mannered to say anything direct about it.

  I heard him jiggle the handle of the locked door. “I’m afraid that you’re going to have to unlock this door, Jane, if you have something you desperately want me to see.”

  “Look!” I enthused, having opened the door to allow him to join me in a bathroom that was really only fit for one. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Punch the Cat sneak in behind Trevor, the sly feline obviously not spotting out of the corner of her eye that I had spied her out of the corner of mine. “Look!” I shouted again, holding the test with its dual “yes, you are pregnant” stripes up across my chest as if I were some sort of quiz show hostess displaying a much-desired prize. “Look! We’ve created the matching pink line!”

  “Good God, Jane.” He involuntarily grabbed onto the doorpost for support. “Does that mean what I think it does?”

  “If what you think it means is that you’re going to have to be nicer to me for the next nine months because I happen to be bearing your child, then yes.”

  He swallowed hard. “Oh, God, Janey.” He looked slightly horrified but determined to eat his Brussels sprouts like a good Gordonstoun boy would as he hugged me to him. “Of course I’ll stand by you.”

  For my part, as I allowed him to hold me, my face positively wreathed in the beatific smile of one Madonna or another, I used my toe to give Punch the Cat a healthy shove out the door. There just wasn’t room in that bathroom for three beings.

  According to the calculations that I would be giving out to family and friends as the next few weeks and months wore on, at the time of the bathroom hugging I was a scant two weeks late. For his part, Trevor was as good as his word. He did stand by me. What he hadn’t specified, unfortunately—although, to be fair to him, he didn’t have all the facts—was just how long a period of time that standing would last for. In fact, it lasted for exactly two months and thirteen days, leading me right up to the threshold of my second trimester, at which point we were planning a small wedding and at which point events conspired to give Trevor the rest of the facts.

  But that’s getting ahead of my story.

  My story was still in its first month; my baby was still smaller than a grain of rice, a little tadpolish embryo, getting ready to sprout arms and legs from things called buds in about two weeks’ time, along with the neural tube—later to become the brain and spinal cord—and the heart, digestive tract and sensory organs; Trevor was treating me like I was either made of glass or plutonium; and I was about to embark on the next exciting phase in my pro-creative journey.

  The Second Month

  The morning after I’d first confirmed the “news” for Trevor, I woke, stretching languidly like any cat other than Punch the Cat. I snuggled up next to the yet fitfully sleeping father of my unborn child but was unable to assume the position for very long.

  My sanitary napkin needed changing.

  Rushing to the bathroom, I dropped my champagne-colored panties from the Victoria’s Secret Satin Collection, only to discover that I was still sporting the telltale scarlet stain of the unpregnant. Good God! I’d been so excited about telling Trevor that I was really pregnant that I’d completely forgotten that I still had three days to go on my period.

  Two nights before, after I’d initially told Trevor that I was pregnant and David that I was not, I’d crawled back into bed and lain awake, plotting what I would do to camouflage my own menstruation until such time as Trevor’s sperm finally took and I really became pregnant.

  The biggest stumbling block, as I saw it, was the sanitary napkins themselves. So the person to blame for what might end up ruining what should be the happiest days of my life, again as I saw it, was my mother.

  After my father had died, when Sophie was seven and I was six—I was sure that it was the state of being married to my mother that had killed him—all my mother had seemed fit to cope with was spoiling Sophie and enjoying the rather substantial inheritance he had left her. She certainly hadn’t gone out of her way to provide me with any of the skills I might need to get on in the world, not least of which was the ability to use a Tampax.

  Let me just point out here that I am not one of these dirty-laundry-in-the-wind type of women who likes to lay the responsibility for everything she’s ever done wrong at the feet of everything her parents did or did not do. Even I, in my craziest moments of what others might term “diabolical plotting,” am aware of the fact that if I take out a loaded gun and pull the trigger, it really is me making the choice. As a matter of fact, as I grow older, I find myself having increasingly less patience with acquaintances who whinge on about not being able to have proper relationships, about being passive-aggressive, about needing to be a child before they can be an adult, blah, blah, blah, all of it being the fault of Mummy and Daddy. I sometimes find myself wanting to shout, “It’s not your bloody mother’s fault you can’t get laid on Saturday night! It’s because you’re a bloody whiner!”

  But back to the Tampax. For it is true that I don’t believe it’s my mother’s fault if I choose to fake a pregnancy until the real thing comes along, but parents can most definitely be blamed for some vacancies of knowledge and, in my case, it is definitely my mother’s fault that I never learned how to use a Tampax. Being the old-fashioned daughter of an old-fashioned mother who hadn’t helped her out either, when my mother’s generation finally made the change from belted napkins to the more convenient type with the adhesive strip, it was like taking a major evolutionary step; Tampax was a Mount Everest they’d never dared ascend. I never knew what Sophie had done about the situation later on in life. I suppose that, if the two of us had been closer, we might have been able to figure it out together; we could have helped to modernize one another. As it was, I had a mother who was useless, a sister who was as good as, and, as far as any girlfriends I’d had over the years, they were never the kind of overly chummy types of relationships that you see depicted in girls’ mystery stories all the time, the kind i
n which you might envision one young heroine saying to another, “Oh, Sally! Could you give me a hand with something? My mother’s hopeless when it comes to feminine hygiene products and, well, I’m worried that if I don’t know exactly what I’m doing, I’ll manage to lose the Tampax inside of my pancreas or something.”

  As for me then, not having a Sally, I was, quite frankly, scared of the things.

  But I couldn’t keep dwelling on my mother, Sophie, Tampax and my lack of a Sally. I needed to come up with a plan.

  The problem was that at home, when I disposed of my napkins, I used tin foil to wrap them in afterward. And Trevor, even though he certainly was not obsessed with the details of feminine hygiene, would most definitely notice if a presumably pregnant lady began piling up foil-wrapped packages in the bathroom trash. As a matter of fact, he’d always somewhat affectionately referred to these little packages as my “rat packages.”

  So what to do to solve this problem that would definitely be a problem five days a month until I could somehow make it become no longer a problem?

  The only solution that I had been able to figure out was that I would have to purchase and learn how to use Tampax, which would be much easier to hide from Trevor when I needed to dispose of them than the rat packages.

  Since I’d forgotten, what with the excitement and all, to do it yesterday, I’d just have to remember to do it today.

  Then, too, there was the further problem of me not being able to have sex with him until my period stopped, because if I did he might notice that something was amiss. But that was another bridge—I could always claim to be too nauseated or something—and I would cross it, like all others, only when I had to.

  Besides, oddly enough, even though Trevor was usually hot for sex whenever he returned from a business trip, there hadn’t been a peep out of his southern region since he’d been back. Perhaps the idea that sex could somehow lead to babies had put him off his feed for the time being.