The Three of Us (14 page)

‘Where can I find Miconazole cream, please?' I enquire.

‘Miconazole?' she booms in a voice that carries across the vast hangar of a store and out on to Seventh Avenue. ‘For vaginal discharge?' The desultory customers perk up.

‘Uh, well, no, I think it's for general fungal infections,' I say.

‘Well, our Miconazole is over there in aisle two and it's for vaginal infections.' She stresses the word ‘vaginal' unnecessarily and I flee down aisle two. Sure enough, the packet warns, in red capital letters, that Miconazole is ‘
FOR VAGINAL USE ONLY
'. There is no room for ambiguity here. I conclude that at seventy-three my mother has finally lost her medical marbles.

Tuesday, 18 August

Joanna

I need another new bra. I am outgrowing them at a rate of one every three weeks. And my nipples have grown enormous. Men stare at them on the street. As Yorkshire folk would say, they stick out like chapel hat pegs.

Wednesday, 19 August

Peter

I phone my mother to query her prescription, and also to wish her a happy seventy-third birthday. And I recount to her my mortifying Miconazole hunt.

‘Well,' she says indignantly, ‘any pharmacist should know that there are different preparations. If a man asks for Miconazole, they should assume it's the general purpose cream, or at least they should enquire.'

I tease her that I'd concluded she was medically confused.

‘I'm not past it,' she retorts. ‘Let me tell you how I spent my seventy-third birthday: I was in at work by six forty-five a.m. By twelve noon I'd seen thirty-five patients. I then went to the dentist and had root canal work. Then I went over to ward twelve, the mental ward, and certified four patients in need of psychiatric admission. I'd like to see
you
doing that when you're seventy-three.'

Hell, I'm still four years off
forty
-three and I couldn't do that.

Thursday, 20 August

Joanna

‘You know we are going to have to move?' I murmur over our decaff cappuccinos and ‘apple crumble muffins', which I was persuaded to try for a change when I phoned in our regular order of bagels and scallion cream cheese to Barocco.

‘They've no fat, no sugar and they're fifty cents off!' enticed Rosita, who takes the phone orders.

‘This is disgusting,' says Peter, pushing his muffin away. ‘What is it again?'

‘I told you, it's apple crumble, it's good for you. It's got apple but no sugar and no fat.'

‘No sugar, no fat and no taste.'

‘It's such a shame,' I say, looking round at our hopelessly impractical forty-foot-long sitting room with its view onto the Hudson. ‘But this is so not an apartment for babies.' Today, tidy after a whirlwind visit by Margarita, it looks like something out of
Architectural Digest
with its gleaming wooden floors lethally polished to skating standards, and stylish Roman columns installed as an ironic feature by Stephen and Christopher, the gay couple who rented the place before us.

‘I suppose we could get some wicker screens like Nancy and Larry and partition off a nursery space.'

‘I'm not going to be able to work with a baby bawling away behind a wicker screen,' says Peter, trying a conciliatory nibble at his muffin. ‘Mind you, I can't work anyway…'

‘I think we're talking about a boring apartment with proper rooms,' I say sadly, my vision of us living on a Woody Allen filmset finally slipping away.

‘We could always put the baby in the closet room,' Peter observes, polishing off the muffin, his hand now creeping over to my plate to start mine. ‘I mean, when Martin Amis was a baby he slept in a drawer and it didn't seem to do him any harm.'

Monday, 24 August

Peter

I have been strong-armed into accompanying Joanna to her doctor's appointment. What worries me, as we sit in the reception, is that nothing is alive in here. The flowers in the vases are paper hydrangeas and silk stargazers. The cylindrical glass aquarium, which stands like a transparent column stretching up to the ceiling, is in fact dehydrated. It has an arrangement of shells, several fake pink jellyfish hanging by clearly visible fishing line, a scattering of gaudy rubber frogs and a solitary plastic turtle. The aquarium sits on top of a wide, circular chrome base which reflects our images. It is like looking at yourself in the back of a spoon. We are broad and distorted and ugly. We are grotesque and now we are breeding.

Over the speakers of the muzak system comes Eric Clapton's song ‘Tears in Heaven'. Written to commemorate his toddler, who fell to his death from their high-rise New York apartment, I feel it is not necessarily the most reassuring of soundtracks for us would-be parents.

Behind the desolate aquarium, displayed along the counter side, are the icons of modern payment: Visa, Mastercard, Diner's and Amex. And above them a large angry sign which declares, ‘
A CHARGE WILL BE MADE FOR ALL BROKEN APPOINTMENTS
.' This rule apparently applies in only one direction, however. We have now been waiting for an hour past our time slot. On the door I notice another sign: ‘
NO
news is
GOOD
news – you will be notified only if your pap smear is
AB
normal. Please
DON'T
call us, we'll call you.'

Out of boredom I eavesdrop on one of the receptionist's telephone conversations. ‘… Sexual relations, that's how it passes back and forth,' she says. ‘I'm gonna give you seven pills. Take one a day.' She listens for a while, before interrupting again. ‘OK, honey, it's Flagil. I just wanna be sure you're not infecting each other.'

Listening with me is a Hasidic Jew in his regulation black suit, his sideburn coils trembling at his cheeks like two black springs. He purses his lips in disapproval and his eye line disappears beneath the broad rim of his black hat. Next to him sits a heavily tattooed woman, chin on chest, snoring gently.

We are finally ushered into the cubicle where the sonogram is to take place. Joanna changes into a white disposable paper robe and lounges on the examination chair beneath a pine-scented Magic Tree. I notice that the soles of her feet are filthy from padding about our apartment barefoot and I point this out. She tries to angle her feet down so the nurse won't notice. The nurse is Luba. She is stout with tight poodle curls.

‘You English, yes?'

We nod.

‘I'm Russian,' she says, rolling the ‘r' for a lengthy breath. ‘I left eighteen years ago from Moscow, under Brezhnev. I'm Jewish so I got a visa for Israel, but I came straight here. There are too many Jews in one place in Israel, it's no good. See, there's its leg,' she says, pointing at the sonogram image on her screen. ‘Its toes. Its heart. Let me see if it has all chambers. One, two, three, four. Yes. Pulse one-fifty, normal. Let me see if its spine is all joined up. Yes? Mmmm, yes. See, look baby's waving, heh, heh, heh. You sure you don't wanna know sex?'

‘No!' says Joanna, starting out of the chair.

‘OK, Joanna.'

Afterwards, we both claim to have spotted the tell-tale signs of its gender.

‘I saw a little penis,' I say.

‘Well, I spotted the ovaries,' insists Joanna.

Tuesday, 25 August

Joanna

Peter has gone to Washington to discuss Zulus with
National Geographic Magazine
and I have decided to take advantage of his absence to do some initial apartment hunting. Though he has volunteered to traipse around the city with me and has already begun scanning the rental ads and drawing up lists, I would far rather do it on my own. The thing is Peter is completely unable to make a consumer decision. This tendency was well developed in London but has become far worse since we moved here, so much so that I can now barely stand to go shopping with him, either for clothes or food.

As soon as we get into a shop he is overcome by an almost pathological gloom. Even if the expedition is his idea, after five minutes he will announce he has developed a headache or become silent and unresponsive until I suggest he goes and finds the in-store café or waits outside.

I think it comes from growing up in Africa, where he had no consumer choice, but he has no ability to commit to a purchase. He will also debate buying an item for weeks until he has battered any enjoyment from the event. Recently it took him several weeks to decide between two almost identical leather jackets and, of course, once he had finally settled on the deerskin jacket the shop had run out of his size and he had to wait another six weeks, fretting that he had made the wrong choice, until the new stock arrived.

He's just as bad with food. Last week I asked him to buy some supplies for supper and he returned triumphantly from D'Agostino's brandishing a solitary tub of potato salad and a packet of weary smoked mackerel as if he'd bought enough supplies to last a serious snowstorm. He seems permanently surprised that food we bought a week ago is no longer in the fridge.

‘But we've got loads of salad stuff,' he protested last week, when I asked him to pick up a bag of ‘Pre-sliced, Pre-washed, European-Style Salad' on his way back from the gym. ‘No,' I remind him, ‘we bought and ate it last week.' No matter how many times I point it out to him, he seems genuinely astonished that buying food must be done on a regular basis. On the rare occasions we do venture to D'Agostino's together, we only avoid a row if I take charge and ask him to find specific items, like a jar of capers or Carr's Water Biscuits. Only then, oddly, does he seem to enjoy himself.

SEPTEMBER

The baby is now completely formed. From now on its time in the uterus will be spent growing and maturing until it is able to survive independently. Lanugo (fine down) is starting to form all over the baby, following the whorled pattern of the skin. The baby is 6
³
⁄
₄
inches long and weighs nearly five ounces.

Sheila Kitzinger,
The New Pregnancy and Childbirth

Saturday, 5 September

Peter

It is Labour Day weekend and we rent a car and drive down to Maryland for a pig roast, to be held at the house of a tugboat captain on the Chesapeake Bay. We have been invited by Tom, my laconic friend who works for
Newsweek,
but whose real passion is the saxophone.

The pig weighs in at 260 lbs. It lies belly down and legless on the griddle of a pig roaster made of oil drums welded together. There it sizzles for most of the day, its molasses-dark juices draining through a small hole in the griddle into a tin below. Much to the children's squealing delight, steam issues in a strong jet from the pig's cored anus. After several hours its eyes shrivel up – tiny dried peas that slide slowly down its blistering cheeks, like two last tears. Its ears swell until they are like two inflated balls. From time to time someone uses a floor mop to baste the beast. Finally its back sags and its leathery hide wrinkles into dark brown ripples as it transforms into crackling.

It is a strange cast which has gathered here on the grassy banks of Chesapeake Bay, around an original nucleus of friends who all lived on the same block in downtown Philadelphia. There is Neil – a Falstaffian character – with a rotund belly, a black beard, trousers that hang loosely by their braces, and a non-stop chatter, interrupted only by his own appreciative laughter. Neil runs an outfit called the Dumpster Divers, who scavenge for antiques and collectables at construction sites and abandoned buildings.

‘Our drama group in Philly does a solstice play every year,' he tells me later as we swim in the muddy bay. ‘We did one called
The Berlin Wall.
It was the year the Wall came down. We inverted the “W” of wall so it became
The Berlin Mall.
'

He begins singing in a rich baritone to a syncopated beat:

 

‘They came,

They saw,

They did a little shopping.'

 

‘That', says Neil proudly, as the words float out across the bay to the yachts on the sound, ‘was the opening chorus.'

Also among our number is Talane, a thirty-something, apple-cheeked blonde. She used to be Tom's bank manager in Manhattan but is now a personal coach. ‘Not a trainer,' she quickly corrects me, ‘a life coach, someone who helps people achieve their goals.

‘It's not like therapy,' she explains. ‘I don't deal with unresolved problems of the past, I deal with the goals of the future.' She trained at Coach University, an institution which exists only on the Internet. After a six-week course she was ready for business. Her clients fill out a lengthy questionnaire, in which they must note down and prioritize their goals. But first they have to practise attaining more modest, easily achievable tasks.

‘I give them homework,' she says.

‘Homework – like what?' I ask incredulously.

‘Like – “Go clean your closet.” You see, everything you have takes up energy, so before you start on something new you have to get rid of some of the old stuff, stuff that's cluttering up your life – to make space.'

She coaches her clients on e-mail and via half-hour weekly telephone calls. Price? $50 an hour.

Sometimes she works with ‘clutter consultants', who are an even newer profession. For a fee they will come in and sort out your cluttered life.

Bob the tugboat captain has rummaged through a chest and produced a British ensign. He tacks it to the side of the house next to the Stars and Stripes and the flag of Maryland. It flaps over the porch as the children swing in the hammock, as the adults munch on corn cobs and soft-shell crabs and tear at great slabs of roasted pork, and as we get slowly drunk on bourbon and beer, and a blues band blasts its music out across the wide Chesapeake estuary.