Crossing the Line Read online

  “Who do you want to have from work?” she asked, and I could almost see her bright eyes through the phone line, see her as she excitedly drew up her list.

  “You?” I offered.

  “Oh,” she laughed, “you’re being silly. I’m sure you’ll want to have Constance and Louise and Minerva—”

  “And Stan from Accounting, of course.”

  “Really?” she said, surprised.

  No, not really, I thought. I didn’t want to have any of them. But she was trying so hard, she was being so nice…

  “Yeah, sure,” I said, “why not?”

  “Okay,” she replied, I’d bet anything scribbling Stan’s name down while shaking her head, “it’s your party.”

  “Thanks.”

  “David, Christopher, Tolkien—”

  “Of course,” I said, liking that she’d figured out on her own how important Tolkien was to me, despite the fact that I’d still not told everyone just exactly who he was to me, perhaps because I was no longer sure myself.

  She paused for a moment and I was pretty sure she was chewing the end of her pen in thought, squinting her eyes.

  “How about those women I met at your first shower—”

  “God no!” I knew she was referring to Sophie’s six-pack of friends from her parentcraft class who’d been in attendance.

  “That’s kind of a strong reaction,” Dodo said, taken aback.

  “Well, they’re a strong group, and I’d just as soon enjoy my moment with Emma, thanks, rather than be judged and hanged.”

  “I thought they seemed nice.”

  “You think everyone seems nice. You probably thought Margaret Thatcher seemed nice.”

  She continued her list-making. “And your mother and Sophie and Baby Jack and Sophie’s Tony if he can get away.”

  “Do we have to?”

  “I’m afraid so,” Dodo said. “If they found out about it later on, they’d be hurt.”

  “I suppose.”

  “Okay, then, let’s see…We’ve got, including us, seven women, five men and two babies, provided everybody comes. Why, it’ll be a Jack and Jill party!”

  “Sounds great,” I said, trying to muster enthusiasm. After all, she meant well.

  The day of the party, we all met at Wilson’s Tearoom. Something with padded walls might’ve worked better with this group, but the flower arrangements were nice and the sandwiches looked good.

  “Didn’t we do this for you once already?” My mother seethed ill humor as she walked in.

  “Yes,” Dodo said, stepping in and seeking to divert unpleasantness while at the same time making a stand, “and you did a lovely job by Jane. But I thought that, oh, you know, maybe she’d like to have another shower, only this time, with people she actually likes.”

  “Ooh, good one!” smirked Stan from Accounting, squeezing past my mother and tossing a poorly wrapped package with no card attached on the present table. He leaned over from behind me and whispered in my ear, “It’s a furry quilt with a cow pattern on it and pink satin trim. My nieces are all gaga over them, but don’t tell anyone it’s from me.” Then, louder, hitching up his pants and strutting as he moved into the room: “Is there any beer in this place?—” and after no response “—what kind of party is this, then?”

  Then David and Christopher came in: “We got her little lamb pajamas!”

  And Tolkien: “A Pooh bear mobile for over the cradle.”

  And Minerva: “A collection of Madeline books for when she’s older.”

  And Constance, a long earring dangling from her eyebrow piercing as she hauled something rather large onto the table: “A month’s supply of nappies for whenever she, oh, you know.”

  And Louise: “Socks.”

  Dodo chippered her way over, I suspect hoping to deflect the nakedness of that single-word utterance “socks,” and picked up a beautifully wrapped package all done up in cows jumping over the moon that had already been on the table when I arrived. “And I got you a Pooh quilt to match Tolkien’s mobile!” she enthused. “We worked on this together!”

  I was getting infuriated. “Don’t you people have any patience? Couldn’t you all maybe have restrained yourselves and waited for me to open the presents, rather than telling me what’s inside them?”

  Just then, Sophie entered for the first time, pushing past me without so much as a hello. Behind her, Tony carried Baby Jack. The former readjusted the latter in his arms so he could extract a crumpled envelope from his pocket, which he added to the table. He shrugged uncomfortably, looking embarrassed as he said, “From your mother and Soph. They said that, since that was all you gave your sister…”

  I suppose I might have been annoyed, and maybe I was for a second, but I did realize that they had a point there. At Sophie’s shower, not realizing what such things were about, I’d given her a gift certificate to some breastfeeding store. It was the kind of fits-in-an-envelope present that screeches “Impersonal!” when coming from a sister; a fine enough thing if it came from someone you didn’t know well or a man like Stan from Accounting who could be depended upon not to know better (but who apparently did), not from a sister. At the time, I hadn’t understood that these kinds of things actually meant something to people, and not because of the gifts so much as because of the feeling of community support.

  Even after my poor showing for Sophie, my mother had still had that shower for me at her place that Sophie and her friends had attended. They’d been very nice to me that day—as nice as my family gets—but I suppose the wounds had rankled, that this second shower had brought them back to the surface. I looked at that impersonal envelope on the table. This was now finally payback time. It was a bitch.

  It occurred to me that I shouldn’t always wait for others to come to me to set things right. If I wanted something fixed, I should try to do it myself.

  Cautiously, I made my way over to Sophie, where she was eating cucumber sandwiches one after another, as though they might actually be good.

  “Breastfeeding,” she mumbled around a full mouth. “It gives you one hell of an appetite.”

  “I wouldn’t know. Soph, can we talk?”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “No, not really.”

  “What in the world would we talk about?”

  “I don’t know.” And I didn’t. “Us? Our relationship?”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “No, not really.”

  I asked myself why I was doing this, when she was making it so difficult. What was the point in attempting to mend fences with her when I could be over there talking with Tolkien, Christopher and David about whatever was making them all laugh so hard, probably something to do with folding napkins into swans or collaring criminals? Or talking shop in an unpleasant way with Louise, a confounding way with Constance or a challenging way with Minerva? Or even talking football with Tony or thanking Dodo for her incredible largesse or finding something to say to, of all people, my mother?

  Suddenly, Sophie leaned toward me, eyes all a-glitter.

  “There is something I’ve been wanting to talk to you about, Jane.”

  “Hmm…?”

  “I think Mother is having an affair!”

  Once upon a time, I’d turned to David in moments of crisis, however great or small.

  But times had changed.

  My best friend was married now, after all, and Tolkien had said to call whenever I was worried about anything…

  Answer the phone, I thought. Come on, answer the phone.

  “Yes?”

  “Apgar Scores!”

  “What?” he asked, perhaps understandably.

  “Apgar Scores! I’ve been looking over What to Expect the First Year and in the section on ‘Your Newborn Baby’ it has a subheading called ‘Apgar Test.’ It says it’s the first test most babies are given. But when you checked her over on Christmas Day—remember when you did that?—I know you didn’t say anything about checking her Apgar.”


  “What’s an Apgar, Jane?”

  “It’s a baby test.”

  “What kind of a baby test?”

  “Well, I don’t know yet. I didn’t read past the first line, where it says it’s the first test.”

  “Perhaps you could do that now?”

  I read quickly. “It says the scores reflect the newborn’s general condition in five categories and are based on observations. It says that babies who score between 7 and 10 are in good to excellent condition and just need routine care, 4 to 6 is fair and may need help, under 4 is poor and needs immediate lifesaving efforts. And we didn’t check this!”

  “But you didn’t have Emma yet at that point.”

  “I can’t believe the things we missed!”

  “Jane.”

  “How could we have been so stupid?”

  “Jane!”

  “Hmm?”

  “Go look at Emma now.”

  I went. I looked.

  There she was in the blue and white cradle Tolkien and I had got for her. We’d been so desperate to get something for her quickly—I was scared to have her in bed with us more than the one time—that we’d grabbed the first thing we’d seen. It turned out to be used, and must have previously belonged to an American family living abroad, because it had a very large warning, printed in several languages, on a patch of cloth that was stitched to the inside wall of the cradle, something along the lines of: WARNING! Misuse of this product may result in DEATH! Every night, when I put Emma down, she always turned her head towards the side with the warning patch. When Tolkien had been sleeping here nights, we’d look at each other fondly: “There’s Em, looking at her security warning.” Now I just thought it fondly to myself.

  Yes, there she was, all curled up, head turned toward her security warning, asleep with her fist near her mouth. She was so beautiful.

  “Jane?”

  I loved that thing she did with her tiny fist. It was so vulnerable and strong all at the same time.

  “Jane?”

  I could just look at her all day…

  “Jane!”

  “Hmm?”

  “How does she look?”

  “She looks perfect.”

  “What’s her color like?”

  I looked at that tiny brown face, all scrunched up in sleep.

  “Her color’s perfect,” I said.

  “See?” he said. “She’s fine. So whatever we might have missed before, she’s fine now.”

  We might have missed something else?

  I tore myself away from staring at Emma, picked up my new bible again.

  “There’s also something here,” I said, “about checking her reflexes, which we also didn’t do.”

  “Jane?”

  “Do you know what a Moro reflex is?”

  “Jane?”

  “Or a Babinski reflex?”

  “Jane!”

  “Hmm?”

  “Perhaps you should confine yourself to reading that book in small doses?”

  That was a sound suggestion. Not that I was likely to take it.

  I’ve got a good one:

  What’s the difference between Jane Taylor asking her sister Sophie to accompany her on her first visit to the pediatrician—Can you come with me to the pediatrician, Sophie?—and a masochist?

  Answer: twenty-eight letters.

  OkayokayOKAY! Yes, I do realize that it was sheer madness on my part, what with the history Soph and I shared, to ask her to go with me in my hour of need, but I ask you: What choice did I have?

  Is it too late for me to say that I’m scared to death of doctors? Put it another way: Have you ever heard me talk about going to see a doctor when I wasn’t making the entire doctor up?

  But now I had Emma. And Emma was just a baby. And babies need, certainly in the first year of life, to be seen regularly by doctors. I’d already missed the first month’s checkup, what with Tolkien going over her for me at home. And while from the looks of things, she was as healthy as a baby could be—knock on all the wood you can find—I wasn’t about to take any chances with her health; certainly not when no one I knew could tell me what the hell a Babinski reflex was. True, I could have looked up Babinski in the dictionary or Googled it on the Internet, as any smart editor or writer would have done, but that would have been too easy.

  The problem was, with nearly everyone I felt close to—Tolkien, David, Dodo—they all had to work for a living. True, if I confessed my fear of doctors, I knew that one of them would take time off to take me and Em, but there was only so much I felt I could impose.

  God! Was that me talking? What the hell was happening to me?

  At any rate, if, for whatever insane reason, I was reluctant to impose one step further on the three people I was closest to, that only left the choice of: 1) my mother (Can you say “over my dead body”?) and 2) Soph.

  And Soph was only too glad of the chance to be superior.

  Of course, I’d also been hoping to learn from her just exactly what she’d meant about Mother “having an affair,” since we’d been interrupted right after she’d dropped that bombshell on me at the shower. But on the phone she’d been too busy being superior for me to squeeze a word in edgewise, and now that we were face-to-face…

  “Did you remember to bring the baby?” Sophie joked as I met up with her on the pavement outside Dr. Khouri’s office.

  “Very funny,” I said, adjusting Emma’s hat against the cold. “Do you want to freeze out here or go inside?”

  She held the glass door for us, her blond hair as knife-straight as a schoolgirl’s over her green plaid coat.

  “Thanks,” I said. “Where’s Baby Jack?”

  She gave one of those sniffs that on Sophie translates to “shows how much you know.” Well, at least she saves on excess talking.

  “Pediatricians’ offices are the worst places to bring babies if you don’t have to,” she said.

  “They are?”

  “Yes. They’re all just big germ factories. Oh, sure, they have a separate waiting room for the sick kids, to keep them from infecting the ones there for well visits, but the so-called separate room is right smack in the middle of the regular waiting room and it doesn’t even have a proper door on it, just a doorway. Believe me, doctors’ offices are no place for healthy people.”

  I looked at her as I signed us in at the nurses’ station. “Can you tell me why I asked you to come with me?” I asked.

  “Don’t be silly,” she laughed, and it was a rather sunny laugh coming from Soph, giving my arm a reassuring pat. “You asked me to come for support.”

  There were times I thought her name should be Sybil.

  As we waited among the presumably healthy, I felt myself growing anxious; okay, more anxious.

  “What’ll they do to her?” I asked.

  “For her two-month visit?” asked The Expert, eyeing Em. The Expert must have deduced that, Emma being a newborn when I found her and two months having passed and two-month visits being something you did with babies—it must be time for that particular visit. “Everything.”

  “Everything?”

  “Everything. They’ll ask you about eating, sleeping, general progress. They’ll want to know what her childcare situation is, what it’s going to be for the near future. They’ll measure all sorts of things—pfft!” she let out a little explosion of serious-thinker’s breath “—weight, length, head circumference—”

  “Head circumference?”

  “Oh, yes. They’re very big on that. The idea is that all those things are supposed to keep growing. Then of course they’ll want to use those numbers to plot her progress since birth.”

  “But I don’t know what her head circumference was at birth! Tolkien and I never—”

  “Emma Taylor?” the nurse called into the waiting room.

  It was the first time I’d ever heard anyone speak her full name like that out loud. True, she might not legally be mine—yet—but it wasn’t like there was anything else to call her. I
was still awestruck at the sound of it, “Emma Taylor,” when I heard Sophie hiss at me:

  “Just make some numbers up for head size and all the rest. After all, you’re good at making things up, aren’t you?”

  I resented that remark, however true it might be.

  Dr. Khouri, a petite Indonesian woman, asked and did all the things Sophie said she would.

  When she asked me about height and weight, I estimated based on things I’d heard Sophie and others say when their own children were born. But when she asked me that one about head circumference, I really was stumped. Well, I figured, one hundred always represented a perfect mark on exams…

  Not wanting to boast, then, I blurted, “Ninety-two!”

  Dr. Khouri stared at me. “Ninety-two? You’re saying Emma was born with a head ninety-two centimeters in circumference? I don’t think so.”

  “If that were true,” sniggered Sophie, “she’d be walking around with a beach ball on her shoulders.”

  “Um…five!” I blurted, erring in the other direction.

  Dr. Khouri looked for help to Sophie, who returned the look with a shrug that seemed to say, “See what Jane’s like?”

  “You don’t seem to know very much about your baby’s medical history,” Dr. Khouri said.

  I thought of the checkup Tolkien had given Emma. “She was born Christmas Eve.” I shrugged. “You know—everyone was pretty busy.”

  Then Dr. Khouri did some more things.

  “What are you doing with her head?” I asked, alarmed.

  “She’s testing Emma’s head control,” Sophie informed me, as if I were the stupidest woman who ever lived. Then Sophie turned to Dr. Khouri. “It’s not like anyone in the family ever said Jane was mother material.”

  See what I mean? My sister was fucking Sybil! Whatever happened to the supportive Soph of the arm pat?

  Then Dr. Khouri, with Sophie translating for idiot me, checked Em’s hand use, vision and hearing.

  “How is Emma’s social interaction?” Dr. Khouri asked.

  “She’s delightful!” Sophie enthused, before I could answer. “Which is really amazing, considering who’s raising her.”

  I wasn’t sure who the doctor found more odd: me or Soph.