The Yummy Mummy (21 page)
Sue’s son eyes her with displeasure. Oliver’s not a rewarding child; he’s prone to unsightly rashes and bad humor.
“I think there are rather too many,” says Nicola.
“You won’t think that when you go back to work,” observes Sue.
“That’s the idea.”
“Well, some people around here will have even less time very soon, too.” Sue beams, displaying sore red gums. “Hermione? Can I tell them?
Please
.” Hermione blushes and resignedly nods her head, knowing resistance to be futile.
Heads swivel to Sue, who puffs out her mono-breast. “Hermione is
pregnant
!”
There is a hushed silence as we absorb this mind-warping information.
“Isn’t that the most wonderful news?” she adds, trying to jolly things along.
Nicola pales. “Oh dear, there’s a lesson to us all.”
Hermione looks hurt. “Nicola, it wasn’t
un
planned.”
“But you’re still breast-feeding. How can your body do two things at once?”
Sue plants a slippered foot on the blue plastic toy table. (And she has the cheek to criticize my shoes.) Cornered by nipples and toys, not knowing where else to look, we all stare at the slipper. It is checked with a fake sheepskin lining and has a frayed hole near the big toe. All I can think is Hermione is having sex. Everyone is having sex except for me.
“Well, I’m jealous,” says Michelle suddenly. “It’ll probably take me a decade to conceive another one, by which time I’ll get mistaken for a grandmother.”
Nicola shakes her head. “If I never have to look into the bowels of the toilet bowl again I’ll be happy. God, how I hated being pregnant. The alien invasion, the nausea, the fatigue . . .” She groans at the memory.
Michelle sighs. “I found it so sensual. I felt like an ancient goddess. . . .”
“You are joking? It’s bloody awful and I don’t believe any woman who says she enjoys it. I really don’t know what I’d do if I got pregnant right now. . . .”
Oh. Silence. Eyes knife into Nicola, who by saying she doesn’t know what she’ll do is implying she might consider a termination and a termination after having had a child is inconceivable to the likes of Sue, liberal or not. Because they know what happens when the cluster of cells grow and divide and the frog’s spawn becomes a little Oliver or a little Amelia. Nicola sips her tea nonchalantly.
“Well, Alan wants another one quite soon,” mutters Sue, deciding that moral confrontation must take second place to the rescue of her tea party. “But obviously not until everything’s back to normal”—she points to where her cords crumple between her legs—“down there.”
Eew!
“Oh, please have one at the same time as me,” implores Hermione. “It would be so much more fun. We can go to NCT classes together.”
“Again? Wasn’t once enough?” Nicola looks pained.
“Well, I do have a few questions.” Hermione sighs musically. “I’m concerned that my body may be depleted. I haven’t been taking my pre-pregnancy vitamins, I’ve been taking the breast-feeding ones, so it’s all rather confusing. . . .”
Nicola looks over and rolls her eyes at me quickly, like lottery balls.
Sue stands up. God, she is big. The kind of teacher that gave me nightmares. “Now, anyone for more tea? More shortbread?” There is a hubbub of vague assent and Sue crashes toward the door through the minefield of plastic toys, each tread detonating recorded nursery rhymes.
Nicola breaks the protocol. “Actually, Sue, I’m not feeling great,” she says, looking rude with health. “I think I’m going to call it a day if you don’t mind.”
“Oh dear! Poor thing.” Sue’s cheeks wobble with empathy. “You’re not dieting like Amy, are you? Here, have a shortbread—”
“No really, thanks.”
“Sit down, lie down. You can lie down in the spare room. Here, follow me.”
Nicola shields herself behind her pram. You can almost see her feet scrabbling toward the front door, cartoonlike, while her head holds its position.
“No, Sue. I’m going to go.”
I leap up. “And I will come, too. We’ll walk back together.”
Hermione rearranges Amelia on her lap briskly. “I’m afraid it’s time for us to go, too, isn’t it, Amelia?”
Sue lifts a heavy eyebrow.
“I don’t want to, Sue,” protests Hermione. “But we’re running close to the wind, it’s almost doze time. I’ve got to race back and get her in the cot.”
“Cots are cages,” mutters Michelle under her breath. (She practices co-sleeping.)
“But Amelia doesn’t look tired.”
“It’s the Routine, Sue, sorry, I can’t break it. And it has to be her cot. The rules say so.”
Sue looks crestfallen. The tea that she had planned and baked for so rigorously, the best Habitat china . . . What a waste.
“Okay, another ten minutes. I suppose Amelia will survive it,” says Hermione reluctantly, checking her watch. “I’ll finish my cup of tea. Okay . . . it’s four-fifteen . . .”
Sue watches me and Nicola walk down her shingle path, her large square face framed by the red canvas curtains and geranium window boxes. She waves at us, all fingers flopping down on the palm at once, an infant wave. Her eyes are sad as a cow’s.
NICOLA PLANTS THOMAS IN THE BABY SWING AND STARTS
to push. Thomas starts to cry.
“Please tell me why I have a baby who is allergic to anything babyish. Did I eat something funny during pregnancy? Read the wrong book?” Nicola mutters to herself, persevering with the swing until Thomas’s screams start to attract concerned looks from the other mothers.
“He’s happiest when I’m sitting in the garden smoking a cigarette, blowing smoke rings.”
She scoops Thomas out. A wide-eyed Evie takes his place.
If I squint, I can almost make out, in an impressionistic blur, the bandstand. Back with Evie, in my role as mother, that moment—Josh and jazz—is like a yellowing postcard from a distant relative. I push Evie back.
Whoosh! Whoosh!
Up and away! Her fine baby hair blows flat. Her toes curl with pleasure. Evie and I laugh, each delighting in the reaction of the other.
“You look happier,” says Nicola. “Is everything better at home?”
“Nothing’s changed, Nic. Not really.” Am I really happier? Perhaps I am. Pilates has certainly put a spring in my step. (Unlike my MBTs.)
“You haven’t said anything to Joe?”
“Nope. I’m concentrating on myself at the moment. I’ve got other things going on. Somehow it’s less important.”
“I can’t believe that. What’s so important?”
I stop pushing Evie. She waggles her feet impatiently. “Well, maybe ‘important’ is the wrong word. . . .” I’m not entirely sure what I’m saying here. “I’ve lost a bit of weight. . . .”
“You didn’t need to. . . .”
“Far better being in a bad relationship weighing in at nine and a half stone than ten stone plus.”
Nicola smiles. “Well, I am presuming you’re getting near the point of asking him what the hell went on? That Amy . . . makeover thingyamajig must be achieved now?”
“Achieved? Oh no! Not yet. I’m getting there. . . .”
“Yes, there’s the boob job, the buttock lift . . .”
I laugh.
Nicola shifts Thomas to the nonaching hip. “And Joe. What does he think of this self-improvement?”
I stare back at Nicola’s pretty blue eyes blankly, thoughts forming as the words fall from my mouth. “Er . . . the truth is . . . I don’t really know. Sometimes he seems to appreciate it. He kind of likes my new shoes, now that he’s forgiven them for assaulting him. And I think secretly he likes my hair. But he has a problem with Alice.”
“Alice? Why? She’s harmless enough. I thought she was quite funny, actually.”
“Sees her as a bad influence. Possibly she’s too attractive and that disturbs him. Maybe he’s just an awkward sod. God, I don’t know.”
Nicola puts Thomas—“my dear fat lump”—on the ground, where he fillets and sucks fallen leaves.
“I think,” says Nicola solemnly, “that he is threatened by
you,
not Alice.”
“By me? Don’t be silly. I’m Amy Crane, masquerading as someone else in more expensive clothes, but Amy Crane.”
“You’re not. I discovered what you are when I was on the Internet yesterday, when I should have been giving Thomas his dinner.” She clears her throat. “You are a M.I.L.F.!”
“What the hell’s that?”
“A Mother I’d Like to Fuck!” Nicola says, unable to hide her delight. Nicola likes to annotate things. “An American expression. There are millions of sites on the Internet devoted to your species.”
Walking back from the park, I roll M.I.L.F. around my tongue, let it dissolve sweetly. Could I ever really be a M.I.L.F.?
MUM’S KIDNAPPED EVIE FOR HER NON-DATE DATE
,leaving Joe and me without our prop. We wander around the house not knowing what to do with ourselves, straining to relax. We turn the Strokes up really loud, just to reassure ourselves we haven’t turned into our parents. (Secretly we’d both prefer a bit of peace and quiet.) I apply a face mask, a gift from Alice, and prod the dirty crescent out of my thumbnail with a yellow stick. Joe sits down on my old pink upholstered bedroom stool, observing grumpily, splayed knees jutting out. What is it with men and personal space? Why can’t they ever sit with their knees together like women do?
“We’ve ceased to notice that this room smells of poo,” he mutters, pointing to the stinking huddle of nappy bags. “We’ve ceased to notice a lot of things.”
My face is tight. Any movement cracks the mask. I raise an eyebrow. Something squeaks.
“You’re not talking to me?” Joe asks.
“Trying to. A bit difficult.”
“I don’t know why you put crap like that on your face, buy into that whole beauty company propaganda.”
“Who are you? Naomi Wolf?”
Joe blows out noisily, lifting his fringe, revealing the creep of his hairline. “I can’t quite get a handle on what’s going on, Amy.” He moves his legs farther apart, elbows on knees. “I’m so pleased to see you happier. You seem lighter somehow. . . .”
I crack a smile. “By about eight and a half pounds.”
“With people, I mean. With everyone. And you’re pulling your life together. Thinking about work.” He looks doubtful and crosses his legs. “Although you haven’t told me your decision yet. It would be nice if you communicated. . . .”
“Sorry . . . It’s just that I haven’t made a decision yet.”
“Well, you’ve been thinking about it, I’m sure. Anyway, that’s by the by, my point is that you seem happier around everyone . . . everyone but
me.
” Joe shoots a moody unfathomable look. I used to find these looks really seductive, in the earliest days. They suggested he was brooding, deep, and thoughtful. That’s endorphins for you. Now I’m not entirely sure what’s going on beneath those glass paperweight eyes.
“It’s like I’m just the person you have to eat dinner with. All we ever talk about is Evie, or domestics—the washing, the laundry—and who will be looking after her when. It’s not a proper relationship.”
“It’s . . . it’s . . .”
“Careful, you are developing a fissure around your nose to mouth lines.”
“Very funny.”
But Joe isn’t laughing. Joe looks miserable. And Joe looks tired, his handsome features crumpled. “It’s what, Amy?
What
?”
The sun sheets through the windows, catching the dust disturbed by Joe’s tapping foot.
Boom, boom, boom!
The bass gets louder, more insistent. Just tell him, I hear Nicola say. Risk it. Face the truth.
“The park,” I say, mumbling through the ever-hardening face mask.
“Ark? What are you talking about?”
“Regent’s Park. That day. I was pregnant . . .”
Joe looks puzzled. A muscle twitches in his jaw.
“I came down . . .”
Slam!
The door. Evie’s primordial wail snakes up the stairs.
“Cooeeee!”
And that is that. My soundtrack drowned out by Evie, by Mum. The drama that could have played doesn’t. And five minutes later I’m still here in the same domestic space, my life dramatically unchanged. Part of me is actually rather relieved that I haven’t forced an issue. What was I thinking? Where would I go? Far better this, for the moment. The conversation will soon be lost in our busy day-to-day airspace. I wipe the mask off in milky circles, revealing skin as pink as the sole of Evie’s foot.
“Let’s talk another time,” says Joe. “Now have you seen my clean blue socks?”
A REACTION TO THE FACE MASK: MY FACE IS FLUORESCENT
pink, as if I’ve spent the morning sunbathing. (Joe thinks this highly amusing.) With weird symmetry, Evie does actually have a mild case of sunburn. (Joe is furious.) My mother, evidently distracted, “forgot” to put on Evie’s sunscreen while using her as a romantic chaperone. As a tan, let alone sunburn, on a baby is tantamount to child abuse, I fruitlessly try to smear the heat away with baby lotion. This inflames my mother’s guilty hysteria further, which, coming unhelpfully after the event, irritates Joe. The house crackles with tension. And I am late.
With Evie sheltered like a maharaja under a broderie Anglaise parasol (the roses on her cheeks taken down by a canny dust of baby powder), we set off for Annabel’s baby shower. We pound past the tight terraces of Kilburn, the delis and bakeries of the Salusbury Road, toward the streets framing Queen’s Park where vast million-pound houses sit, bloated with rising equity, like smugly pregnant women.
Annabel’s house, one of the largest, gazes directly onto the park from its northern border, Chevening Road. (How pleasant it must be not to live within sight of a discount store.) Her door is sage green with finely etched glass panels. The gleaming door furniture invites a sharp chic knock. There is a scuttling sound, a low shadow behind the glass. A beautiful blond boy opens the door. He stares at me solemnly. “I’m Cosmo,” he says in a piping BBC voice. “Have you come to party?”
I try not to scuff the dove gray hallway with my pram. Up the staircase, eyes directed by twirly Victorian banisters and a run of black-and-white photographs, is a huge well of light cut into the ceiling, a rectangle of sunshine. Farther down the hall, a hall as wide as Evie’s bedroom, comes the sound of music and laughter and squealing children.