The Senator's Wife (17 page)

“Lovely,”
the woman said. “Let me know if I can help.” She went to sit behind the counter. As soon as Meri began to take things out of the racks, though, she was there, offering to put them in the dressing room.

She was so gracious Meri actually got into it. She picked out four possible dresses and several blouses, plus a pair of black velvet slacks with the familiar unattractive panel in front. She followed the dancer to the back of the store, where the dressings rooms, two of them, were. The woman had hung Meri's choices on a hook, and now she slid an ample curtain across the open doorway. “Let me know if you need any more help,” her drifting-away voice said.

Meri was alone with her brightly lighted reflection.

She and Nathan had no full-length mirrors at home. The closest Meri had come to seeing how her whole body actually looked in this new incarnation—pregnant woman—was in the wall of kitchen windows, clothed, as she made supper or cleaned up, usually moving around in front of her reflection with Nathan as they shared these chores.

But
this
was appalling, she thought, as she stood in front of the mirror in her underwear. Industrial strength, indeed. She was huge. Not so much the belly, which, yes, was large, but not ridiculously so. It was everything else. Her hips, which up to now had always been narrow and well muscled. Her upper arms. These gigantic breasts, smashed together in the bra. She had cleavage, something she'd never remotely wanted, and which she saw now only as a place for sweat and crumbs to collect.

Feeling hopeless, she started to try on one of the dresses she'd picked out. She could barely get it on over her head—it was too tight around the back and the arms. Standing there in her socks with the fabric of the skirt stuck around her chin and chest, Meri realized that there probably was such a thing as maternity panty hose, a thing she would have to buy if she was going to wear this or any other dress. No.

No. She took the dress off and returned it to its hanger.

The pants fit. They were fine. The black blouse she'd brought in to wear with them was too small, though. She sent it out, and the dancer came back with a larger size in fuchsia, the only other color choice. Meri could hardly stand to look at herself, but it was better, much better than the dress at any rate. You could see that she had long legs, which was really all there was to recommend her body at this point.

Carrying her bag on the way home in the misty rain, she was thinking of her reflection under the lights in the dressing room—her pale, stippled flesh. Flesh that looked
corrupt,
she thought.

Corruption,
that was the word for what was happening to her. She'd entered the biological procession, the one that ends in total corruption. She'd been claimed, by time. By birth and death. She'd been changed.

But this was what happened. This was what women
did.
She thought of the mothers she'd known. Her own. Nathan's. Lou. Delia. Several of her friends. They'd all had to give up some sense of themselves as inviolably
who they were,
physically. They'd all had to learn to watch their bodies change in ways they had no control over. To learn to share their bodies with the stranger taking shape inside them. Why should she be any different? If her mother—mute, incapacitated before the complications of life—could manage this, surely she could.

She tried to imagine her mother, pregnant. Had she been afraid? Had she been as reluctant as Meri was? Certainly she had said, more than once, “I wish I never had you kids.”

Meri thought of the crying little boy, of the anger she had expected his mother to feel. Maybe her difficulty with all this was her own history, her past reaching into her present to claim her. Her life becoming in this way like her mother's too.

She couldn't let that happen. She would do better than that. She absolutely had to do better.

A
T THE OFFICE PARTY
, of course, everyone was dressed as usual. Only Shirley, one of the producers, had any sense of style anyway, and this usually consisted in some scarf draped around her neck, or long, dangly earrings. In early September, it's true, she'd often sported strappy little high-heeled sandals, but now, like everyone else, she wore boots—boots and jeans and big sweaters. They all looked like those
New Yorker
cartoons by Koren, Meri thought, hairy and fuzzy and funky. Of course, she reminded herself, she did too.

To call it a party, as Brian had pointed out when they divided up preparation chores the day before, might have been an exaggeration. “It's going to be, like, a regular meeting, but with alcohol.” And as the afternoon meeting was coming to an end, James carried in a large cardboard box with three cold bottles of champagne and a bag of plastic glasses. He popped open one of the bottles and started around the table with it.

Should she have a glass?

Here, among her coworkers, she wanted to be in the party, of the party. She thought of Delia, of Delia telling her how she drank through her pregnancies. She'd take that as her permission for tonight, she decided. She held up her glass as James passed behind her. But she was still self-conscious enough to feel a need to explain herself. “This will be my fourth drink since I got pregnant,” she confided to Burt Hall, who was sitting next to her at the conference table. And then, remembering, “Oh wait, maybe my fifth. Or sixth. Or tenth. But that was because I had some before I knew I was pregnant.”

“Is that a big deal?” he asked. Burt was a geek, tall and much too skinny. Nerdy. Sometimes he forgot and wore his bicycle clips around his ankles all day. Now, sitting next to her, he was concentrating so hard on unwrapping a tube of goat cheese that he didn't look at her when he spoke. He'd pierced the outer layer of plastic with a ballpoint pen, and he was trying to pull this covering back. The cheese was blue where the pen had gone in, and his fingers were covered with white goo.

“Well, the doctor was dire about it,” Meri said. “But I think the rule was constructed for people who drink like fish.” The champagne fumed in her glass, tasted sour and sweet at once.

“Who are breathing, actually,” Brian said above them. He reached over their heads to set down a paper plate with crackers arranged carefully around the rim.

“Did you do that?” Natalie asked. “So
pretty.
”

“Who?” Burt asked, looking around. “
Who
are breathing?”

“We're all breathing, Burt,” Shirley said. “You too.”

“Fish,” Brian answered, taking his seat at the table. “When fish are drinking, they're actually breathing.”

“Well, thus the metaphor, I suppose,” Meri said. The champagne was so cold her nose ached with each sip.

Meri had had two stories on the show today, both holiday related. One was on unsafe toys, the other on a lawsuit brought by a local atheist who objected to the town crèche and menorah. He was a phoner, as they called them. Both pieces had gone well, and she felt lighthearted. She loved her work. She loved her colleagues. This was the best party of the season, she decided preemptively.

Jane had started in on suicide by drowning—which famous people had done it. Meri pointed out its delicious ambiguity, since you couldn't ever know for sure whether it was intentional or not. They all speculated on Natalie Wood.

“I bet it isn't as bad as you'd think,” Jane said. “The only really hard part is that first long inhalation of water.”

“How would you know anything at all about this?” Meri asked.

“I read it.”

Brian laughed, and Shirley smiled at him and said, “Oh, well, then it
must
be so.”

“You know,” he said, “
I
read somewhere that there are more suicides at Christmas or around the holidays than any other time of year. If that's true, that might be a story we could check out.” The cork exploded from the second bottle.

“This is not cheerful talk for our party,” Shirley said. “It's Christmas. Let's have some Christmas cheer.”

“Christmas. Big deal,” James said. “I'll be sitting home with my roomie.”

They talked about plans for Christmas. They talked about the day's show. Brian told several Jesus jokes. “How
sea
sonal,” Jane said, inflecting it oddly. They started to talk again about tomorrow's show, but James made them stop. “The meeting is over, folks. No more planning.”

Someone poured Meri another glass, and she drank it, more quickly this time, while the conversation meandered. She felt a little dizzy, actually. How could she be? How could she be tipsy?

She leaned over and said to Jane, “How could I be tipsy?”

“Easy. You're unacclimated to drink.” Jane said this so slowly and incorrectly—nun-acc
lim
ated—that it struck Meri that she might be tipsy too.

“What have you eaten today?” Jane asked.

Meri pondered it. Not much. Since she'd stopped feeling nauseated all the time, she'd stopped eating crackers all the time too. And though in her joy at beginning to be able to eat normally again she had sometimes put away vast quantities at meals, she also sometimes forgot to eat at all when she was busy, and she'd been busy today. She took a cracker and asked Shirley to pass the plate of inky cheese.

At a point slightly later, the first person got up to leave. Meri began to help Natalie and James pick up glasses and debris. Then they were all putting on coats, wishing one another a good weekend. Meri had a sense of munificence, blessing. How kind they were, these friends of hers.

Outside, they called good-bye into the chilly night. James offered Meri a ride, but she said no, she wanted to walk.

She started across the dark campus, her breath pluming in front of her. She strode rapidly down the walkways, then across the road and past all the shop windows on Main Street, and finally, down the shadowy length of Dumbarton Street. She felt better, stronger, as she went along. By the time she got home, she had warmed up and she was sober.

Nathan wasn't back from work yet. She went upstairs to brush her teeth, to find her polar-fleece socks. She came back down to the kitchen. When she turned on the light and saw herself in the glass, she was startled for a second or two by her reflection—for the last few hours, she realized with surprise, she hadn't thought of herself as pregnant.

“D
ON'T YOU HAVE
something that makes you look less like . . . Barney?”

Meri paused, putting the coat on over her fuchsia blouse. This didn't seem to be an attempt at a joke, which she could perhaps have rolled with. She looked at Nathan, so perfect, so beautiful in his tweed winter coat—so very unpregnant—and felt a pinch of anger. “The short answer is no,” she said.

As they were getting into the car, Nathan said, “What's the long answer?”

“It's a little more ad hominem. I don't think you want to hear it.”

They sat silently as he drove. Meri was waiting for him to apologize. Maybe he was waiting for her to apologize. They were going to the dean's party, held in her house, one of the nineteenth-century frame mansions lined up across the street from the campus.

When the door opened, they were assaulted by the sound, the general hubbub. A student wearing a white shirt and black slacks pointed them to the back of the room-size entrance hall, where their coats were taken from them by another student, also wearing a white shirt and black slacks; and Nathan was given a numbered chip, which he pocketed.

They headed to the bar, in one of the two facing parlors on opposite sides of the hall. As they hitched their way through the clots of people, Meri put her hands on her belly so it wouldn't get bumped. All around them, people were greeting one another with pleasure, standing in little groups, catching up, gossiping. Nathan knew some of them—people spoke to him, and from time to time they paused to talk and he introduced Meri. As she stood, smiling and nodding, Meri took in the spacious, comfortable room. The lamps gave off a gentle light, and in its glow everyone looked pretty and well. There were groupings of large, soft chairs and couches everywhere, and paintings—modern, vivid, well lighted—hung on the walls. It was impossible to imagine this as a home, the scale of everything was so immense, the taste so impeccable and impersonal.

Meri got her Perrier and slipped away from Nathan, who was talking to a colleague of his who looked just like Danny DeVito, but bigger. She moved her immense blouse around, standing at the edges of groups, waiting to be recognized as a stranger, to introduce herself. And people were kind. They turned to her, they asked her about herself. Mostly, though, Meri listened. She listened to the jokes they were in the middle of telling, to the long stories—about trying to get on a bus in New York City with a cello, about waiting in Ecuador for months to adopt a child.

She was waylaid several times by Nathan, who had forgotten she was supposed to be angry at him and wanted to introduce her to someone or other; and twice more by women she'd met at earlier parties. One of them, a young colleague of Nathan's, tried to recruit Meri for a departmental baseball team in the late spring. “You'll have the kid before the season starts, right?” she asked.

Meri crossed the hall to the parlor on the other side of it. She moved around, offering her opinion on various things she'd never thought about before. A man no younger than she was got up and gave his seat to her, and she took it and was suddenly part of a group of people discussing Bill Clinton and his sex life. At a certain point in this discussion, just after the woman next to her said, “I hear that the man is in
thrall
to his own prick,” Meri realized that she needed to pee. As usual. And, abruptly, that she was tired too. She wanted to go home. They'd been here for almost two hours, and Nathan had promised they'd stay for only one. She got up to find him.

The crowd had thinned a little now—others had also counted on less than two hours—and she walked more easily through the room she'd been in and out into the hall—and there he was, his back to her, leaned against the arched opening to the opposite parlor, easy to spot because of his height, because of his wild hair.

The hall was crowded, though—people out here were getting coats and taking their leave—so Meri had to thread her way across it. She could see that the woman facing Nathan, talking to him, an older woman in a green dress, was a person from the department—she'd met her before, but she couldn't remember her name. She had a drink and a napkin in one hand, and she was looking up at Nathan and listening intently to what he was saying.