Bitter Sweet (51 page)
Katy’s clipped response dared her mother to challenge her. ‘Seems everybody is.’
From below came the sound of the Mary Deare’s engine as she skimmed away from the dock. Maggie realized Katy had had a clear view of the dock and as her eyes adjusted to the shadows of the front porch, she saw Katy staring at her nightshirt and bare feet, judging, reprehending. Maggie blushed and felt guilt come nettling. She wanted to say, But I’m older than you and wiser, and I fully understand the vagaries of this course upon which I’ve embarked.
All which served as a harsh reminder to Maggie that she was setting a double standard when she should instead be setting a good example.
After that night, the thought troubled her. She had not before given much thought to promiscuity. It was something against which girls were warned during adolescence, but upon maturity Maggie had considered the affair her choice and hers alone.
Perhaps it was not.
With an impressionable eighteen-year-old daughter in the house, daring a handsome, undoubtedly virile young man, perhaps it was not.
Katy’s late nights continued and Maggie awakened often to lie and worry, wander to the bathroom and through the dark house, wondering if she should talk to Brookie about it after all. But to what avail?
Her interrupted sleep began telling, and she grew sluggish, occasionally queasy, sometimes weak. She had never been a snacker, but began snacking thoughtlessly, a nervous reaction to the stress, she figured. She gained five pounds. Her bras didn’t fit. Then one day she realized the oddest thing: her shoes didn’t fit.
M, shoes?
She stood beside her bed, staring at her feet which looked like a pair of overgrown potatoes. a4} anle tones Ion’ even something was wrong. Something was very wrong. She added it all up: fluid retention, tiredness, irritability, sore breasts, weight gain. It was menopausal, she was sure- the symptoms all fitted. She made an appointment with a gynaecologist in
Dr David Macklin had had the perspicacity to have the ceiling of his examination room painted with a floral mod.
Lying on her back on the examination table, Maggie distracted herself by identifying the flowers. Tulips, lilacs and roses she knew. Were the white ones cherry blossoms?
In
Dr Macklin completed his examination, lowered Maggie’s crackling paper gown and gave her a helping hand.
‘All right, you can sit up now.’
She perched on the end of the table, watching him roll his stool to a wall-hung desk where he wrote in a manilla folder, a mid-thirtyish man balding too young but wearing a great, bushy brown moustache, as if to make up for Nature’s slight on his dome. His eyebrows, too, were thick and dark, dropping like parentheses beside his friendly blue eyes. He glanced up and asked, ‘How long ago was your last period?’
‘My last real period - right around the time Phillip died, almost two years ago.’
‘What do you mean by real period?’
‘The way it always was. Regular, a full four days.’
‘And after his death it stopped abruptly?’
‘Yes, when I started experiencing the hot flushes I told you about. I’ve had some spotty periods off and on, but they didn’t amount to much.’
“Have you had any hot flushes lately?’
She considered before answering, ‘No, not lately.’
‘How about night sweats, any of those?’
‘No.’
‘But your breasts have been tender?’
‘Yes. ‘
‘How long?’
‘I don’t know. A couple of months maybe. I really don’t remember.’
‘Do you get up fairly often in the middle of the night to urinate?’
‘Two or three times.’
‘Is that normal for you?’
‘No, I guess not, but my daughter lives with me and she’s been staying out rather late. I have trouble sleeping soundly until she gets in.’
‘How has your temperament been lately? Have you been irritable, depressed?’
‘My daughter and I seem to argue a lot. It’s been a rather stressful situation with her living at home again.’
Dr Macklin hooked an elbow on the desk behind him and relaxed against it. ‘Well, Mrs Stearn,’ he said, ‘I’m afraid this isn’t menopausal, as you thought. Quite the opposite, as a matter of fact. My best guess is that you’re approximately four-and-a-half months pregnant.’
Had he produced a ten-pound baul and bounced it off her head, David Macklin could not have stunned Maggie more.
For seconds she sat slack-jawed, gaping. When she found her voice it was incredulous. ‘But that’s impossible!”
‘Do you mean you haven’t had intercourse in the past five months?’
‘No. I mean, yes, I have but.., but...’
‘Did you take any precautions?’
‘No, because I didn’t think it was necessary. I mean...’
She laughed - a short, tense call for understanding. ‘I’m going to be forty-one years old next month. I started having signs of menopause nearly two years ago and.., and... well, I thought I was beyond that.’
‘It may surprise you to learn that a good ten per cent of my patients nowadays are women in their forties, and many of them mistook their symptoms for menopause.
Perhaps it would help if I explained a little bit about it and how it begins. Menopause is brought on by the body decreasing its output of the female hormone, oestrogen. But the reproductive system doesn’t close shop overnight.
In some cases it may last over a period of years, causing the system to vary from month to month. Some months the ovaries function normally and the body produces enough oestrogen to bring on a normal period. But at other times the ovaries fail to produce adequate hormones so ovulation does not occur. In your case, obviously, on one given month when you experienced intercourse, your system produced adequate oestrogen to trigger ovulation, so here you are.’
‘But... but what about the hot flushes? I told you, I went to the emergency room thinking I was having a heart attack, and a nurse and an intern watched the hot flush happening and identified it. They watched the colour climbing my chest and they told me what it was. What about that?’
‘Mrs Stearn, you must understand, hot flushes can be caused by conditions other than menopause. Your husband died a rather dramatic and untimely death. I imagine the newspapers were hounding you and there were lawyers involved, and a daughter to console, legalities to get in order. You were under a great deal of stress, weren’t you?’
Maggie nodded, too upset to trust her voice, feeling her eyes begin to tear.
‘Well, stress is one of the culprits that can trigger hot flushes and undoubtedly it did at that time. Because you were informed, and because you were of the age where you could expect menopause to begin, you took it for that. It’s an understandable mistake and, as I said, a common one.’
‘But I...’ She gulped and swallowed. ‘Arc you sure?
Couldn’t you be mistaken?’
‘I’m afraid not. All the symptoms are there - the wall of your cervix is slightly bluish in colour, the genitals are swollen, your breasts are enlarged and tender and the veins highly coloured, you’ve been experiencing water retention, tiredness, increased urination, weight gain, and probably a grab bag of other discomforts -cramps, heartburn, constipation, lower-back ache, leg cramps, maybe even a temper tantrum or two and a few unexplained tears. Am I right?’
Maggie recalled her many bouts of irritation with Katy, the outgrown bras and shoes, the nocturnal trips to the bathroom and the night she’d stepped onto the Mary Deare and burst into tears for no apparent reason. Glumly, she nodded, then dropped her eyes to her lap, abashed by the fact that she had begun to cry.
Dr Macklin rolled his stool nearer and fixed his sympathetic attention upon her.
‘I take it from your signs of distress that you’re single.’
‘Yes... yes, I am.’
‘Ah... well, that always complicates matters.’
‘And I run a bed-and-breakfast inn.’ She lifted brimming brown eyes and spread her hands in appeal. ‘How can I do that with a baby in the house, waking for his night feedings?’
Dropping her head, she swiped at the tears with the side of her hand. Macklin plucked up three paper tissues and handed them to her, then sat nearby, waiting for her to collect her emotions. When she’d calmed, he said, ‘You realize, of course, that you’re beyond the stage of foetal development where abortion is either safe or legal.’
She lifted beleaguered eyes. ‘Yes, I realize that, but it wouldn’t have been a consideration, in any case.’
He nodded. ‘And the baby’s father- is he in the picture?’
She met his kind, blue eyes, dried her own, then rested her hands in her lap. ‘There are complications.’
‘I see. Nevertheless, I must advise you to tell him as soon as possible. In these days of human rights awareness, we realize that fathers have the right to know of the baby’s existence and to have the opportunity to plan for its welfare, just as the mother does, and as soon as the mother does.’
‘I understand. Of course I’ll tell him.’
‘And your daughter - how old did you say she is?’
‘Eighteen.’ At the thought of Katy, Maggie braced an elbow on her belly and dropped her face to her hand. “How ironic. Here I’ve been lying in bed at night worrying about this happening to her, wondering if I should bring up the subject of birth control. Oh, Katy’s going to be appalled.’
Dr Macklin rose and stood beside Maggie with a hand on her shoulder. ‘Give yourself some time to adjust to the fact before you tell your daughter. It’s your baby, your life, your ultimate happiness you should be concerned with. Certainly a barrage of accusations is not what you need right now. ‘
‘No ... it’s ... I...’ Maggie’s thoughts became disjointed by the enormity of her plight. Sadness and panic besieged her by turns. Myriad concerns flashed through her mind, one upon the other, in no specific priority.
I’ll be fifty-seven before this child finishes high school.
Everyone will know it’s Eric’s and he’s still married.
What will Mother say?
I’ll have to close the business.
I don’t want this responsibility!
Dr Macklin was speaking, instructing her to eliminate a alcohol and over-the-counter drugs from her intake, inquiring whether she smoked, handing her sample vials of prenatal pills, advising that she cut down on the use of salt and increase her intake of dairy foods and fresh vegetables, rest periodically with her feet elevated, do moderate low impact exercise such as walking, and make an appointment for a return visit.
She heard his voice through a haze of thoughts that ran like gurgling currents through her hear. ane repeating automatically, yes, no, all right, I will.
Leaving the clinic, she experienced a feeling of displacement, as if she’d assumed the identity of another, fluttering above and behind the woman below like some watchful angel, while that woman whose pumps clicked along the sidewalk was the one who had just learned she was carrying a child out of wedlock and would inherit all the complications of such a situation.
Suspended above herself she could remain aloof from the cares of the other. She could know and watch but remain beyond direct involvement, enveloped in this anaesthetized state of observant dispassion.
For a while she felt almost euphoric, divorced from the cloudburst of emotion she’d undergone in the doctor’s office, as she passed two sweaty towheaded boys licking strawberry ice cream cones and riding skateboards, as she moved from sunshine into shade along the city sidewalks and crosswalks, smelling the peculiar mixture of smells emanating from the open door of a drugstore and the adjacent dry cleaner’s.
In the parking lot she paused beside her car, feeling the summer heat radiate from its metal body even before she reached to unlock the door. Inside, the trapped heat seemed to have speed, so powerfully it struck. The steering wheel felt oily, as if it were being dissolved by the sun, and the leather seat burned through her clothing.
She started the engine, turned on the air conditioner, but as it emitted a hot blast, a wave of nausea struck accompanied by a billow of blackness, as of a curtain lowering behind her eyes. The sensations brought the bewildering truth back with vicious ferocity: you are the one who’s pregnant! You are the gullible one who saw only what you wanted to see in the symptoms. You are the one who should have taken precautions and didn’t, who chose an extramarital affair with a married man. You are the one who’ll be attending school conferences in your forties, and be pacing the floor at night in your fifties waiting for your teenager to return from his first date. And you are the one who’ll suffer the smalltown disdain of women like your mother for years to come, The cold air rushed from the vents as she lowered her forehead onto the hot, hot steering wheal, and the hot, hot tears continued seeping from her eyes.
Four and a half months.