Читать книгу The Baby Chronicles - Judy Baer - Страница 12

Friday, March 26

It wasn’t until today that Chase and I had time to sit down together and rehash our week. After dinner we curled up together on the couch, I with a cup of jasmine tea and Chase with espresso.

I only drink espresso when I can dip sugar cube after sugar cube into it, something my one-hundred-pound mother taught me. Since all this baby-nutrition-good-health conversation has started buzzing around the office, I feel guilty even considering a dietary no-no. Mitzi can read in my eyes when I’ve enjoyed food she’s barred herself from having, and she can smell toffee on my breath from forty paces. It can’t last forever, of course, because Mitzi loves junk food.

“Since when did Mitzi become such a force of nature?” Chase asked when I told him. “She’s always been a climactic upheaval, but recently she’s gained momentum.”

“She’s more serious about this than about anything I’ve ever seen, including sending me to Hasty-Date to find a man and shopping for the perfect pair of Prada shoes.”

That might have sounded shallow to an outsider, but Chase got my drift. I told him about the basal thermometer and the list of tests Mitzi and Arch were facing.

Chase whistled. “That should give them a pretty clear picture of what’s going on.”

“Not entirely,” I muttered. “No one has even considered what it’s going to be like to work with Mitzi while she goes through this. Aphids eat their mates, right? I’m afraid Mitzi will devour us like so many cheese crackers before she’d done. She’s had so many mood swings I feel like we’re already dizzy.”

“It’s an emotional time,” Chase murmured.

And an emotional Mitzi is quite a sight to behold. Today she was alternately crying tears into her penne pasta salad with artichoke hearts, gorgonzola and pine nuts—nothing as plebian as a cheese sandwich at lunch for Mitzi—and laughing hysterically at the cartoons in the newspaper. Mitzi is becoming a split personality, and we at Innova have been watching her crack. When she got weepy over Blondie and Dagwood, we retreated to the safety of our desks.

“This has to hurt her more than she cares to let on,” I told Chase.

Chase suddenly took my face in his hands and kissed me soundly. It was the kind of kiss that, had I been standing, would have made my knees weak. Since Mr. Tibble and Scram were currently sitting on my kneecaps and had made them completely numb, the kiss only blew every sensible thought from my head as I kissed him back.

He stroked my cheeks with the pads of his thumbs and murmured, “You are amazing, Whitney.”

“What did I do to deserve that? I want to know so I can do it again.”

“You have compassion for Mitzi, even though she drives you crazy. You never dwell on the negative in anyone’s personality and always look for their humanity.” He grinned at me and, numb though they were, my knees did weaken. “Maybe that’s why I feel so fortunate to have you love me.”

“I love you because you are impossible not to love,” I told him. “Sometimes my heart hurts, I love you so much.”

“Hurts? I don’t want to hurt you.”

“It’s a good hurt. It feels as though it might explode with joy.” I snuggled into his chest and sighed.

“And?”

“And what?”

“And what was that sigh about? It wasn’t the sigh of a totally happy woman, now was it?”

“No fair. You know me too well.”

“So spill it. What’s not right in your world?”

“It’s Kim. She’s…” I searched around in my mind for a word, and could only come up with one. “Obsessed.”

Chase tucked me closer to himself, a sign that he was ready and willing to listen.

“They are finding adoption complicated and intimidating.” I thought back to this morning when, during her coffee break, Kim had filled out a self-assessment quiz meant to help her and Kurt identify their feelings and goals about adoption.

“Whitney,” she’d said, her eyes wide, “I assumed we’d adopt a healthy infant and raise him or her as we did Wesley. I didn’t even consider the children with disabilities who are in desperate need of parents.” She’d held out a paper for me to read. “Look.”

“Which disabilities in an adoptive child,” the sheet had read, “would you be willing to consider?” The inventory had been nearly a page long, listing everything from premature and drug-exposed babies to those with Down syndrome, blindness and a host of family history issues, such as diabetes, mental disorders and alcohol addiction. Then it had asked which racial heritages she and Kurt would consider and whether they had gender preferences or would think about taking twins.

“How can I decide? If a child needs love—needs us—then we would take it, wouldn’t we?” she’d lamented. “And what about all those we can’t take? What happens to them?”

“She either wants to bring all the children home with her or give up on the process entirely, depending on her mood,” I told Chase.

“They’re forgetting something important,” he commented. “They already have someone who is willing to direct them, someone who will find the perfect child for them—if it’s His will.”

I looked Chase in the baby blues. “You are absolutely right. God is on their side. He knows if they should adopt a baby or not. And He also knows who and where that baby is right now. Perhaps it isn’t even born yet.”

You knit me together in my mother’s womb…My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret…Your eyes beheld my unformed substance. In your book were written all the days that were formed for me, when none of them as yet existed.

Psalms 139:13-16

I, too, sometimes forget God is in charge and try to tackle the world on my own.

“You’re so wise.” I brushed my fingers against my husband’s cheek. “Kim and Mitzi are both doing the ‘What-ifs’. No wonder they’re nervous.”

It makes more sense for Mitzi to be nervous. Although she doesn’t seem to mind that Kim and I are Christians, she doesn’t appear interested in joining the club herself. Just because she and Arch once committed to join a denomination in order to marry in a particular church, that didn’t make them Christian anymore than standing in a kitchen makes one Julia Child.

“Ah, for the good old days.” He gathered me into his arms and nuzzled his nose into my hair. I detected the faint, crisp smells of shaving lotion and soap.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I want to have a baby the old-fashioned way. You know, homemade, a do-it-yourself endeavor…”

“And if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again?”

He grinned, and his even white teeth flashed. “It’s a project I’m willing to commit my life to.”

“Like the post office? ‘Neither rain, nor hail, nor sleet will stop…’”

“Something like that. In fact, I think playing post office is a good place to start.”

I didn’t even hear Mr. Tibble or Scram complain when I dumped them off my knees and onto the floor so that I could get my arms around my husband’s neck.

Monday, March 29

On Monday morning, Mitzi dealt out party invitations around the office as if they were Old Maid cards.

“For you, for you, for you…” She paused and gathered herself together before putting one on Bryan’s desk. “For you…”

Bryan isn’t exactly the life of the party. In fact, he can suck the energy right out of one. If he overhears an argument, he gets nervous and hides in the bathroom until it’s over. “What’s this?” Kim held hers up to the light to see if the flat vellum envelope contained a bomb.

“Arch and I are having a get-together on Saturday night. There will be appetizers, a buffet by the pool, music, and scads of doctors and their wives there. I thought it might be good to water down the intellectuals with you guys.”

Leave it to Mitzi to extend a gracious invitation.

“Suddenly, I think I’m busy,” Kim retorted.

“Don’t get huffy. You know what I mean. I don’t want these people discussing appendectomies and thyroidectomies all evening. You’ll be a diversion.”

“Like a juggling clown, or someone who does balloon art? You aren’t helping your case, Mitzi.”

“I’m having the food catered by Ziga’s.”

Ziga’s is a well-known dining spot on Lake Zachary, where Mitzi lives.

“Well, why didn’t you say so in the first place? They have the best food I’ve ever eaten.” Kim exchanged a resigned glance with me over Mitzi’s head. We’re a family; we show up for each other no matter what—especially when food is involved.

Thursday, April 1, April Fools’ Day—Innova’s Annual Day of Celebration

Forget Presidents’ Day, Labor Day and the Fourth of July. April 1 is my company’s day to howl. Quite literally, in fact.

The first thing Harry did when he walked into the office this morning was to stub his toe on the leg of Kim’s desk and start hopping around as if he was riding a crazed pogo stick.

“Ouch, ouch, owww…”

Immediately, Kim jumped up to help him, Bryan headed for the bathroom to get out of the way, and Betty lunged to the phone to call for help. I, meanwhile, had the presence of mind to find the man a chair so he could sit down. But it wasn’t until Mitzi sauntered over to examine the damage to Harry’s shoe, that he erupted out of the chair and yelled, “Gotcha! April Fool!”

We all groaned in unison. How could we have let Harry get away with the first April Fools’ gotcha? There is, after all, a trophy at stake for the one who tricks the rest of the office with his or her April Fools’ joke. Harry had, in the first moments of the day, set the standard high. Now, if one or two of us did hoodwink the others with our stories, we’d still have to face the play-offs—a highly competitive game of dominoes, something to do with Mexican trains or chicken scratches or whatever Betty dreams up.

It’s not like the traveling trophy is so fabulous or anything. It’s actually a spectacularly ugly lamp with the names of past winners taped to the shade, but such is the competitive element of our office that everyone takes pleasure in displaying it in a place of prominence in their homes. Mitzi won it last year and had a small decorative niche installed in her basement family room to show it off.

After a high-level meeting of the minds over the water cooler, we decided to play a group trick on Harry in retaliation for catching us all so early in the day.

While I distracted him with a bogus question about a spurious client, Mitzi sneaked into his office and took his car keys out of the pocket of his jacket and passed them off to Kim, who, on her break, went outside to the parking lot. Harry always parks in the first row of cars, those nearest our building. In fact, if there’s no opening when he arrives, he circles the area until someone leaves.

Kim reparked the car in the fifth row and returned to the office unnoticed because Betty was intercepting him with another counterfeit question. Kim handed off the keys to Bryan, who put them back into Harry’s pocket and was back at his desk before Betty let Harry return to work.

Then we all sat holding our breath, waiting for lunchtime.

Harry breezed out of his office and called back over his shoulder, “I’ll be back at one. I see I’ve got a luncheon meeting with a client today.”

Mitzi smiled and waved at him as he left, never letting on that she had fabricated the luncheon just to get him out of the office and into his car.

Then we all stood at the window and watched.

Harry strode to his parking space and, without even looking at the car, thrust the key into the lock. When it didn’t fit, he glanced up and did a double take when he saw that he’d been trying to breach a gleaming black Hummer instead of his charcoal Jeep Cherokee.

He glanced around the parking lot, and then at his key. We hooted with laughter as he tried the key in the lock a second time, as if hoping that upon feeling the familiarity of the key, the Hummer, like Cinderella’s coach, would turn back into a pumpkin.

I’ve got to give it to the man, he’s persistent. He stormed up and down the long row of parking places for nearly five minutes before spinning on his heel and marching back toward the building.

When he arrived, we were ready for him.

We greeted him when the office door banged open. “April Fool!”

Harry folded like sails collapsing from a dearth of wind.

“You! You? You…” Then he grinned. “Man, that was good!”

Like sportscasters recapping the game’s best plays, we rehashed every moment from Harry arriving at the Hummer to him returning to the office.

And the day only went up—or maybe it was down—from there. Mitzi put a thin layer of Icy Hot on the toilet seat in the ladies’ room and nearly drove Betty wild. Bryan, with a piece of thin fabric on his lap, waited until I bent over and then ripped it in half. I immediately clutched my backside and headed for the back room to check out the damage. I also vowed to lose five pounds before his laughter stopped me. I’d been had.

There was a fake spider on Mitzi’s keyboard, which stopped all progress in the office for twenty minutes while we talked her down from her chair, and a bloody gash on Kim’s knee, which turned out to be ketchup.

I was so exhausted by the end of the day that I went home and fell asleep on the couch and Chase had to carry me to bed.

No fooling.

Friday, April 2

Mitzi was two hours late for work today and came in white as a sheet. Her hair, a never-a-strand-out-of-place do, looked as though she’d combed it with an eggbeater, her jacket was missing a button, and she had a run in her stockings.

“Are you okay?” I hurried to her as she stood propped against the reception desk. “Did you fall?”

She looked at me hazily, as if she recognized my voice but couldn’t remember my name. “I’ve had the most terrible morning.”

Kim and I helped her to her desk while Bryan ran for water and Betty fluttered helplessly around us.

When her color started to return, Kim demanded, “What happened to you, anyway?”

“Shh. She probably came from the doctor. She said she had to have some tests this week.”

“No tests,” Mitzi bleated. “I had my teeth cleaned. The stress was enormous.”

The stress of having her teeth cleaned had caused this? I hope I’m nowhere near the delivery room when Mitzi goes into labor.