The Three of Us Read online

  Thursday, 14 January

  Joanna

  I cannot believe I am here again. On Monday I called the hospital to confirm we’d completed our birthing course, only to be told that if we wanted the option of the Birthing Center, we would still have to complete another five-hour course. And so, as if caught in Groundhog Day, I find myself back in the stuffy room on the 11th floor of Roosevelt Hospital with a beaming Sigrid and her plastic model pelvis.

  At 7.45 p.m., as we break for our dinner snack and I tuck into the huge chicken Caesar sandwich Peter has brought as compensation for my going alone, Sigrid scoots over and sits down beside me.

  ‘I have been thinking about you since the weekend, and I have decided you’re too analytical,’ she says firmly.

  ‘It’s true I take a lot of notes,’ I say, ‘but that’s because I’m writing a column.’

  ‘No, no, it’s not that,’ she says, slipping her arm around my shoulders and giving me a little squeeze. I know she is trying to be kind, but two of the other couples are now looking on with interest and I feel myself shrinking from her touch.

  ‘Joanna,’ says Sigrid, fixing me with her wide, pale, Swedish eyes, ‘I sense you need to get more visceral.’ She hisses the word out again. ‘Vissss-ceral.

  ‘You must imagine the birth. Do you remember the birth visualization we did last Sunday?’

  I nod but I am lying.

  ‘It’s still too much in your head,’ she says, shaking her gold perm. ‘That’s what you need to do now, get into your body more.’ She squeezes her knees together and puts one hand on mine. ‘You must get into your vagina.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, woman,’ I want to shout, ‘I’m British, I don’t want to get into my vagina.’

  Instead, I smile awkwardly and she hands me a photocopy of her ‘Birth Visualization Sheet’, instructing me that I must tape myself reading it over a soundtrack of relaxing music or the sound of the sea. ‘Then you must play it to yourself several times a day.’

  As the couple next to me strain to see what’s written on my sheet, I know I should feel pleased she has singled me out for special attention, but instead I feel cross that I am now hovering between teacher’s pet and uptight Brit.

  I slip it into my folder and read it discreetly on my knee. ‘Breathe slowly and deeply, letting each breath take you into a deeper relaxed state,’ the sheet instructs.

  It tells me to imagine the baby ripening and growing until finally the birth day arrives. ‘And see your baby … wet and warm … and your vagina … moist, soft, warm and elastic … massaging your baby, and you open and let your baby come …

  ‘And your baby has reached the vaginal opening. You feel the skin burning, tingling, stretching and you give your body time to open … so you let the air out, lightly blowing, blowing as you feel the tissues round the baby’s head…’

  I am sure this works for many people, but I fear it will not work for me.

  Thursday, 14 January

  Peter

  Today Joanna puts the latest issue of Vanity Fair, the one with Ewan McGregor and various Star Wars prequel robots on the cover, into the dishwasher. She slots it neatly in the plate rack, beside the dinner crockery. And when I come to empty the dishwasher I find it there, reduced to a papier-mâché glob that has spewed bits of itself all over the glasses and mugs and plates, where it has been congealed and hardened by the ‘heat dry’ function. When I tell Joanna what she’s done, she seems unsurprised.

  ‘Oh, I wondered where I’d left it,’ she says.

  Friday, 15 January

  Joanna

  I am beginning to suspect I may not be pregnant at all, merely fat. I hope the baby doesn’t come today, I feel much too exhausted to go into labour. Despite a decent night’s sleep and a long doze this afternoon, the thought of doing anything other than eat refrigerated triangles of white Toblerone fills me with panic.

  Friday, 15 January

  Peter

  The dishwasher has now broken – unable, it seems, to digest its plump, advert-rich copy of Vanity Fair. When I go to open it, expecting to find rows of gleaming glasses, I am met instead by a wall of rank-smelling water which spews all over the kitchen floor.

  Monday, 18 January

  Joanna

  At my last class Sigrid observed that a newborn baby should be allowed to spend up to an hour on the breast. The worksheet she handed out, which I am now reading for the first time, says newborns should be given between eight and twelve feeds a day. In theory, this means I could spend twelve hours a day feeding.

  At Maternal Fitness they say you should start sit-ups to exercise your abdominal transverse muscles two hours after a vaginal birth, two days after a C-section. And kegels immediately – even if you are still numb. When will I have time to sleep?

  ‘You could always express,’ says Peter, when I voice these fears to him. ‘Like Veronica.’

  Veronica is a British friend of ours, a senior executive for a multinational pharmaceutical company, who was back to her jet-setting job a fortnight after giving birth. Adamant her child should be breastfed, however, she would express milk in her London office or on business trips abroad, and courier the milk home by motorbike or plane, sealed in a special Thermos.

  Monday, 18 January

  Peter

  I am hugely impressed that the repairmen from Advance have turned up to fix our dishwasher on Martin Luther King Day, a public holiday. I feel vaguely guilty about it as they are both black, and I am anxious that we have kept them from celebrating the achievements of the civil rights campaigner.

  ‘So, what happened with the machine, man?’ enquires the senior repairman, like a doctor taking a case history.

  ‘I dunno,’ I lie. ‘A few days ago it just stopped working. Lugo, the handyman, looked at it and said the pump was broken.’ I don’t feel able to tell the truth about Joanna putting a glossy magazine in for a long-wash cycle and heat dry.

  They get down, and begin to remove various panels from the dishwasher, and I leave them to work alone. Ten minutes later they call me back, the job done.

  ‘It was all blocked up, man,’ says the senior repairman, shucking on his dayglo puffa jacket. He indicates a pile of food remains; fish bones, hair, apple peel, bacon rind, pale worms of spaghetti, and a sizeable mound of grey gunk, looking remarkably like deconstructed magazine. He sifts gingerly among the gunk and retrieves a corner of intact page with a glossy photo of Ewan McGregor on it, and he snorts and rolls his eyes at the crazy things people put in their dishwashers.

  I tip them ten bucks. ‘And happy rest of Martin Luther King Day,’ I call after them as they leave.

  ‘Yeah. Right,’ says the senior repairman and shakes his head.

  Tuesday, 19 January

  Joanna

  I am beginning to wonder if there isn’t something in Kelly’s theory that taking prenatal vitamins is like force-feeding hormones to cattle. In today’s paper, I read about a farmer who had to shoot his prize bull after it became too heavy for its own legs and kept toppling over.

  At this afternoon’s visit, the doctor remarks that the baby looks large. ‘Mmnn, eight and a half pounds at least,’ she says, cupping her hands round my exposed belly. ‘At this stage it’s difficult to know if you will be able to deliver it vaginally.

  ‘Your pelvis doesn’t look small, but you really can’t tell until labour is under way. Sometimes everything’s fine, sometimes big babies get stuck and you need a C-section.’ It is the first time anyone has raised the real possibility of a C-section.

  I have read that this is how the human race will eventually die out. That we in the First World are now incubating babies too large to be born through our pelvic cups. It’s to do with our rapid progression to bipedal status. Apparently we were better designed to have babies when we swung around on all fours. I hate the idea of a C-section. I don’t want to be tubed up and sliced open. I don’t want to grab the first glimpse of my child through a bleary oxygen mask. I want to spend labour i
n a jacuzzi with the scent of lavender floating through the Birthing Center and allow the baby to crawl up my belly and latch on like they did in all those videos Sigrid showed us.

  I can’t bear the idea of a green linen screen being hung above my belly like an opaque tennis net, and the otherworldly feeling of a surgeon scooping my intestines aside and plunging through layers of muscle to pluck out our surprised child.

  Unable to sleep for worrying about this, I eventually get up at 5 a.m., make a pot of camomile tea and call Jane in England. ‘There are some advantages to Caesareans,’ she says brightly. ‘Vagina intacta, for one. At least you’ll be able to have sex again.’

  Tuesday, 19 January

  Peter

  After a long session with Doc Wasserman, I walk purposefully down Park Avenue to Tiffany’s on a mission to buy a ring for Joanna, which I will present her with after the birth. I have read somewhere that new mothers don’t necessarily like to be defined exclusively in maternal terms and that they appreciate something which is for them alone. In the lofty main hall at Tiffany’s I move among Burberried Argentinians, Brazilians, Italians and Spaniards, trying to attract a salesperson’s attention. But though I am a serious buyer today, not just a diamond dilettante, I cannot get served.

  I catch a glimpse of my reflection in a display case and I realize why I’m having difficulty. In my black jeans and my Nick Ashley jacket – which, despite its designer label and price, still manages to look like a Rail Track regulation issue donkey jacket – and my unkempt hair, I am not exactly the picture of a promising customer.

  Then I notice a man who looks like an elegant undertaker, standing in a slightly raised booth so that he can survey the room, is paying me rather close attention. Maybe I can get him to serve me? It is only as I near his booth that I realize he is some sort of security supervisor and his scrutiny is the kind intended to make itself discreetly noticed, a visual warning shot across my potentially criminal bows. I take my hands from my pockets and he squints as though he fully expects them to emerge bearing a ski-mask and small calibre pistol.

  Instead of being offended and walking out to protest their stereotyping, I become even more determined to buy something expensive. I shoulder aside a couple of indecisive Upper East Side ladies at the étoile ring counter and jab my finger at a gold band studded with diamonds, which, like all the merchandise here, is unencumbered by anything so prosaic as a price tag.

  ‘How much is that one?’ I demand brusquely, or so I intend. In fact my voice comes out slurred from the remains of Dr Wasserman’s anaesthetic.

  The pinch-faced man behind the counter stiffens. ‘This one, sir?’ he asks, deploying the ‘sir’ with an acid sibilance. He clearly thinks I am drunk or stoned or both.

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘That would be eleven hundred and fifty dollars,’ he returns.

  ‘Hmm,’ I pretend to ponder.

  ‘Plus tax, of course,’ he adds, evidently hoping that this financial coup de grâce will send me scuttling back out into the cold, whence I have clearly come hoping for a few minutes’ shelter. He looks past me to the two vacillating Upper East Side matrons, who are still peering intently at a blue baize tray on which nestle a pair of pendant earrings thickly encrusted with diamonds, glittering like quartz chips on a hot tar road.

  ‘And is it an appropriate ring to buy for a woman who is having my child, but to whom I am not married? What is the exact etiquette in such a case?’

  He looks sourly at me, choosing to ignore the irony, or perhaps not registering it at all. Or maybe he cannot decipher my dentally numbed slur. ‘It goes on the ring finger, sir,’ he says, ‘like any other ornamental ring. Maybe you would prefer something like this.’ He fishes out a rather vulgar ring with diamonds, small as spiders’ eyes, set in a heart shape. ‘This one is only five hundred and sixty dollars.’

  On the subway home I find myself sitting opposite the ‘1-800-DIVORCE: When diamonds aren’t for ever’ ad, and I cheer up a little.

  Wednesday, 20 January

  Joanna

  Today the phone rings and as I go to pick it up I have the oddest sensation that it might be the baby calling. Foolishly I mention this to Peter. ‘Oh,’ he says, not even looking up from the Encyclopedia of Men’s Health. ‘What did it say?’

  Thursday, 21 January

  Peter

  Amazon.com has sent me a list of the top ten parenting books. These include The Hip Mama Survival Guide, which, claims the blurb, answers the vexing question, ‘Is there breastfeeding after nipple piercing?’ This is not a question which has overly taxed me in the past, but now I feel I must know the answer.

  Friday, 22 January

  Joanna

  Today our revised due date comes and goes with neither bloody show nor mucus plug. Bored and restless, we visit Relax the Back and on Sigrid’s advice, stock up on the essentials for a drug-free labour: a Gymnic bouncy ball with pump, and a massage stick with two spiked wooden balls fixed to one end which looks like something from a medieval torture chamber.

  Relax the Back’s manager leads me over to a bed, where he makes me lie down and parades a selection of bizarrely shaped cushions for me to try. They are specially designed for pregnancy and, in spite of my resistance to his sales patter, extremely comfortable. We end up ordering a hideous navy affair with arms and a neck rest, called a ‘bed lounger’, which he assures me is perfect for breastfeeding in bed.

  ‘Look,’ he says, slapping the sides, ‘there are even sewn-in pockets for the TV remote control so you don’t have to shout at your husband to fetch it.’

  Friday, 22 January

  Peter

  Joanna lies writhing on our calico slip-covered sofa, trying to attract my attention. I ignore her and continue reading my book, and in due course she groans and gives painstaking birth to a white bolster, which she rocks maternally, breastfeeds briefly, burps and proffers to me, commanding it to, ‘Say hello to daddy.’

  At the moment it is not uncommon for her to perform several of these false births a day as she grows increasingly impatient with the wait.

  Sunday, 24 January

  Joanna

  Peter has pumped up the Gymnic bouncy ball and I am now using it at my desk instead of the cheap, rustic ‘Easy-folding Provence-Style’ chair I bought from Pottery Barn last year.

  Despite my initial scepticism, the ball is rather comfortable, even though I do feel absurd bouncing up and down at my desk. I am tempted to paint a face on the side of it and bounce off down Riverside Drive. I bet that would bring labour on.

  Sunday, 24 January

  Peter

  Joanna is depressed. This morning BabyCenter.com, the website for the expectanti, has fired off an automatically generated message of congratulations, based on our due date. ‘The long wait is finally over!’ it confidently pronounces. ‘You’ve delivered your baby, brought him home, and – now what?’

  Well-meaning friends keep calling to see if we have given birth and with each call Joanna gets more fretful. ‘I feel like this baby is never going to come out,’ she moans.

  Joanna deals with her mounting frustration in a New York kind of way. She goes shopping. With every deadline-defying day we accumulate more infantalia. Baby tschotkes line the nursery, stuffed toys spilling off the shelves, piles of receiving blankets, drawers stuffed full of ‘onesies’. Today’s addition is a musical mobile of the solar system, with the earth, the moon, Saturn and an arbitrary star revolving slowly around a smiling yellow sun to the tune of Brahms’ Lullaby. I assemble it and wind up the melody a couple of times to check it and already the tune is driving me nuts. I find myself humming a slightly off-key, sinister interpretation of it, like the soundtrack to some horror movie.

  Monday, 25 January

  Joanna

  Forget Hershey’s Chocolate Milk and graham crackers. I have now progressed to Entenmann’s Pecan Danish Ring, a wildly luxurious cake-size ring of flaky pastry studded with brain-crinkled nuts and covered in white fondant icing.r />
  It is so obviously bad for me that I feel I must neutralize it by eating a piece of fruit first. So I get up, eat a banana, congratulate myself on a healthy start and then cut myself a large slice of Danish Ring. I’m past caring about calories. Today the nurse told me I had lost a pound since my last visit. According to Miriam Stoppard, weight loss in the final week can be a sign of impending labour. Let the revels commence.

  Tuesday, 26 January

  Peter

  ‘Oh, how humiliating,’ Joanna groans. She has received another e-mail, this time from a couple in our ‘birthing class’, Susan the lawyer and Neta, the Israeli computer programmer, proudly announcing the successful birth of their baby daughter. ‘They were supposed to be three days after us,’ she complains.

  ‘It’s not a race, you know,’ I point out, but Joanna is in no place for placation. ‘We should be enjoying this time,’ I say. ‘It’ll be the last time we have alone together, the last time we have any peace.’ But the truth is I am humming with impatience myself, eager to end this dragging transition, and get on with trying to make all those compromises that friends have gleefully warned us about.

  My conversation with Joanna is giving me a headache as her eyeline keeps bobbing about. She is bouncing on her newly purchased Gymnic ball, a vast blue plastic inflated ball, reminiscent of those Space Hoppers of our youth, but without the stubby handles to hold on to. She has read somewhere that diligent Gymnic ball-bouncing can help to induce labour. ‘A baby is not something you dislodge,’ I object. ‘And neither is it some foetal, dangerous sports junkie who comes flying down the birth canal like a bungee jumper, hanging on to the umbilical cord for dear life.’

  Behind my bluster, however, there lurks a deep apprehension. Somehow, in the process of birthing classes, Joanna has fallen in thrall to Sigrid’s proselytizing zeal for natural birth and I seem to have been manoeuvred into the role of labour coach. The whole thing strikes me as slightly scary, I feel as if we have stumbled into a cult. This is not what I wanted at all.