Читать книгу Happily Even After - Marilynn Griffith - Страница 7

“S ometimes I think you make this stuff up,” Dana said on the phone the next morning as we ran through the updates for her bath-and-body Web site. She had a new product line for babies, called Water Lily. It was based on the products she helped me make for my daughter’s sensitive skin.

Lily hasn’t had one rash since I started using the products and all the moms at church ask me what I did for her. I felt good about that until I realized it meant my baby must have looked bad enough for everyone to have noticed. I told them about Dana’s shop, Made of Honor, and most of them knew about it already since they’re franchised all over Illinois, but she hadn’t made the baby stuff available in her stores yet. Some drove a few hours to Leverhill, unable to wait. Thanks to my daily needling, she’d finally agreed to at least put it on the Web.

The keys clicked under my fingers as I typed the changes she’d given me. “I wish I did make this stuff up, Dane. It’d be a lot funnier to watch on TV or something. But you know what they say, truth is stranger than fiction. It happened just like I told you.”

God must have been with me to let me get some love in before service, because after his mother’s announcement about how that parking space had been hers for thirty years and she didn’t notice the five-inch-tall neon letters saying Reserved for Pastor, I hadn’t gotten so much as a kiss out of Ryan. He’d dived back into work a day early and he’d dived deep.

I’ve only seen the back of him, wandering down the hall, his voice shouting into the phone, since. I must say, though, it wasn’t a bad angle. I could have done without the screaming, though. He needed a management-style makeover. And he needed it, like, yesterday.

Just then, an e-mail from Dana popped into my box with attached photos and descriptions of the new products. I’d twirled the phone cord around my elbow, about to explode with glee. Nothing like a click-chat, where we talk and e-mail back and forth. It drives Ryan crazy, but a man who e-mails people in the same house with him has no room to talk. None. Besides, everybody can’t go blind and break their thumbs on a PDA like him. The prescription on my glasses is strong enough as is without trying to read some tiny screen.

I opened the files and smiled with satisfaction at the product photos. “I really like how these came out. I don’t know why you seem so reluctant about the baby line. It’s some of your best stuff yet.”

I could almost see Dana shrugging two hours away. “I don’t know,” she said. “I guess it’s the baby thing. I don’t feel qualified. The wedding stuff I can do in my sleep, though sometimes it’s a nightmare. I’ll have to tell you about our latest bride when we have more time. Remind me. Anyway, I almost feel like this is your line, Tracey. I made suggestions, but you researched everything, tested everything…”

Wow. Dana sounding insecure? Too weird. Too much like we were discussing infertility treatments. “Wait? Are you guys trying to get pregnant or something? Is that it?”

A pause on the line. A long breath. “Yes, we’re trying. Sorry I didn’t tell you. I guess I thought we’d be pregnant the first month and all I’d have to announce was a baby on the way. It’s turning out to be harder than we thought. God knows, though. I guess I shouldn’t have been so concerned when you got pregnant so fast with Lily. You were the lucky one.”

Sometimes I wonder. “Don’t sound like that, okay? Now that I know you guys are trying, I’ll be praying and available for random Googling on any topic you need. You know I’m good for that.”

“Yeah.”

The gaping silence, a rarity between us, widened until we both fell in. Refusing to accept it, I climbed out first. “Okay, I’d love to sit here and quietly contemplate this with you, but the boob buzzer is going to go off any minute now, so if you want to talk about it—”

“I don’t.”

Right. No more than I wanted to talk about the comment Queen Liz gave me after church on Sunday.

“Oh come on, Tracey, what size is that skirt, a fourteen? You’re better than this. I know your mother died, but she must have taught you something.” She’d said this easily, my mother-in-law, like a knife slicing through butter.

I refrained from telling Liz that despite our short time together, my mother did teach me something that seemed to have been left out of her own home training: If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.

As the alarm next to my breast pump rang in the bedroom, I hung up with Dana and scrambled down the hall, stopping to smile at myself in the mirror on the wall. If there’s one thing that thirty years as a fat girl had taught me, it was that I had a pretty face.

Such a pretty face.

Ryan was the first guy I dated who didn’t say that. He was more fascinated that my laptop had a Linux partition. Go figure. Now it seemed I was doomed to just a pretty face again. Only, this time, it didn’t look quite so pretty.

Please join the Queen for a breakfast of scones and tea on the veranda….

I wake up then, just as I’m about to drown in my bowl of Raisin Bran. Not a very royal way to die. I sit up in the tub and push the bath tray forward so that I can stand up. Dana always thought it was weird that I could eat breakfast in the tub. What she doesn’t realize is that I could live in there (at least for a weekend). A good stock of food, a stack of books and basket of Dana’s products and Princess Tracey would be good to go.

Today, though, I’ve just got to go. I pushed my reign back a day this week, so as not to encounter the natives. Lily was sleeping on the floor in her carrier. It was her first time in the royal restroom, but I thought she could be trusted.

I got out of the tub, toweled off with my secret thousand-thread-count towel and applied Smooth, my favorite product in my friend’s new product line for mothers. This week’s scent was Mango Mama and I was feeling it from head to toe.

“This number does not define you. God does,” I whispered to myself as I stepped onto the scale, adorned only with my crown and a hopeful smile. My belly looked smaller in the mirror at least. I got up the courage to look down, again having to strain a bit to see over my stomach. Mirrors were deceiving. The numbers, happy ones, blinked back up at me.

159.

Maybe my scale worked after all. I certainly hoped so. Funny how the numbers on this thing appeared so rosy and cheerful all of a sudden. Last Sunday, they looked like something out of a horror movie. I glanced into the steamed-over mirror, and traced the circles under my eyes with the tip of my finger. I should have added a facial, as well. No time now. Despite the good news about my bubble butt and its imminent demise, my face looked like I’d been kicked around the farm a few times.

Then Lily started screaming, like she’d been doing for the past five days. Straight. One more reason that I was just now getting to wear my crown. I didn’t think I’d make it this week at all. We were going to the doctor today to see what was wrong. Of course, that meant another day’s work pushed back. Another all-nighter. I patted my cheek.

A queen has to do what a queen has to do.

Today was supposed to be Ryan’s day to watch the baby so that I could catch up on my site maintenance and start working on the new logo for the church, but with the way Ryan’s been acting lately, I didn’t bother to remind him.

A call to our family physician got us an appointment that I hope will answer some questions. Both Lily and I are going crazy. It would have been nice to have Ryan tag along, but again, I’m not going to bring it up.

One feeding, a diaper explosion and two outfits later, we were on the road, heading to the doctor. Ryan remembered that it was his day to watch Lily, called to apologize and said he’d meet us there.

More than an hour after his call, I tried to stay away from a bunch of sick children in the waiting room. I wasn’t holding my breath waiting for the doctor or Ryan to appear. Ever the optimist, I gave my dear husband a call. “Hey, you anywhere near?” I asked in my neutral, just-checking-in voice.

He answered back with the force of a megaton blast. “No, I’m not anywhere near! I’m working, okay? I would think that you could handle taking the baby to the doctor alone. I wanted to make it, but there’s some stuff going on.”

I’ll say. Our little nuclear family has had another explosion. Man down! Man down!

“No problem,” I said, although there was definitely a problem. My man was losing his mind. Ryan’s business had always been pretty much his life, but now I was worried that it would be the death of him, too.

Something would have to give, but right now I was more concerned with getting Lily well so that she and I could get some sleep. She had to be as tired as I was. Or at least as tired as I knew I was going to be when I looked up and saw my mother-in-law coming into the doctor’s waiting room. And she was smiling.

Oh, Ryan. Why?

For a moment, a millisecond perhaps, the Queen seemed normal and I wondered, not for the first time, if I’d just pegged her wrong. She was wearing her sugar-cookie lip gloss and wheat-colored linen suit. Her open-toed Coach slides matched her bag. She was one hip grandma, to be sure. As I softened toward her, her words rained down on me from where she was standing above us, like a bucket of hail.

“Well, look at you! You’ve lost what, two, three pounds? I can see it in your face. Definitely in the one-fifties again. Good girl.” She patted me like a stable horse before plucking the baby from my arms. A woman chuckled behind us while flipping through a six-year-old issue of Sports Illustrated. Her husband, a little plump himself, looked on in horror while trying and failing to hold in his own stomach. I felt his pain. And mine, too.

“Hello, Liz. You needn’t have come, though I do appreciate it.” Did I appreciate it? Yes, I did. I think. I didn’t like it, necessarily, but I did appreciate it. She was my family. “I know you’re not much for doctors. You don’t have to stay. We can meet for lunch later if you’d like.”

She glared at me at the mention of lunch. “No, thanks, dear. I’m not hungry. I usually fast lunch from the approach of spring through the end of summer. Then I have a big salad for dinner. You should try it. Even when I miss my walks, it keeps the numbers down. Besides, this is what grandmothers are for. I wouldn’t think of leaving.”

I didn’t have to ask which numbers she was referring to. The same digits that had made my morning, of course. Liz would have needed a sedative, though, if she’d seen the numbers that I’d rejoiced at today. Her scale has never gone that high. Ever. Not even when she was pregnant with Ryan. “Doctors didn’t just let you eat for two in my day,” she’d said when I explained that my doctor recommended that I gain at least twenty-five pounds with Lily since I’d been underweight by their chart when I conceived. Now that I’d added another fifteen pounds to that, Liz and Dr. Thomson were last on my list of people to see.

The nurse called us back just the same. “Lily Blackman?”

I tried to take the baby from my mother-in-law, but she was already up and sashaying down the hall with my daughter. She moved like only a former model can. Liz looked very comfortable chatting with the nurse, who was about her same size. Lily was weighed and had her temperature taken and we were led to an examination room. Once inside, Liz whispered to me that the nurse had four children and that perhaps I should talk to her to get some tips.

My throat tightened as I remembered the tips that my friends had tried to give me when Ryan and I had first started dating. “This thing with his mother, how he always talks about her, always calls her on the phone? Don’t you think that’s weird?”

In too deep and stupid enough to think such things endearing, I didn’t think it was weird. Now? We’d left weird a year ago. We were firmly residing in the desert of madness and I needed a drink of water.

Living water.

Lord, please don’t let me act a fool with Liz today. I know that she means well. Show me how to love her.

There wasn’t long to contemplate that thought. Dr. Thomson entered the room with a big grin. His booming voice filled the room with Caribbean notes that reminded me of the preacher who’d presided over Dana’s island wedding. The good doctor shook the Queen’s hand. “Morning, Grandma. Nice to meet you.”

Queen Liz didn’t look very happy to have been so easily identified as a grandmother. Most people took her to be my aunt or friend. Though she was obviously disturbed by his greeting, Liz gave him her best smile just as well. “Hello, Doctor.”

Before I could explain about Lily’s problem (and my problem, all fifteen, no forty, pounds of it), the doctor picked up my daughter and cradled her as though she were his own grandchild. “Fussing, are we? No sleep for your mother? That means less milk for you, young lady, which is no good. No good a’tal.”

Lily promptly smiled and fell asleep as she always did with our doctor, who’d raised nine children of his own. Sometimes I wanted to ask him how much he charged for house calls. At least maybe I could take a nap. At present, my spare thirty-minute block of the day was spent doing workout DVDs. It had worked this week though, so I couldn’t complain.

“Coughing?”

“No.”

“Just crying then?”

I nodded. “Yes.”

“Before feeding or after?” Lily whined once. He bounced her one good time and she went quiet again. Amazing. He should bottle that for Ryan.

“After.”

Dr. Thomson nodded, then looked over his glasses at me. “Have you lost weight?”

My mother-in-law beamed. “Doesn’t she look good?” She gave me an affirming look.

The doctor gave a disapproving one. “Tracey, now is not the time for dieting. I told you that. Trust me, the weight will stabilize after the first year of nursing. Right now, though, you are building your daughter’s brain. Your body is holding on to fat reserves so that it can make milk. Your daughter doesn’t have colic, honey. She just doesn’t like the skim version of her food.”

Words escaped me. I just sat there, blinking. Could this be true? Had my dieting turned Lily’s stomach? Sure, I tried to avoid nursing her after I worked out because some of the books said it soured the milk, but surely I wasn’t starving the kid. I mean, look at me!

My mother-in-law recovered much faster than I. “So what you’re saying is that perhaps it’s time to switch to formula so that both mother and baby can get what they need? It’s the only sensible solution based on what you’ve just said.”

Dr. Thomson peered over his glasses. “It is not the only sensible solution, Grandma. It’s not even a solution that I want to consider at this point. I realize that in our generation, breast-feeding was frowned upon, but my goal for all the mothers in this practice is to breast-feed as long as possible. For a year, at least.”

Liz looked faint. “A year? Why, that’s downright…strange. The baby will be walking by then. Talking, practically. It’s gone on too long as it is. And the way it makes Tracey eat, Lily’s brain will be too big for her head with all that fat milk. It may even make her fat, too—”

“I’m going to have to ask you to leave now.” The doctor turned sleeping Lily away, as if hearing such things would crush her psyche. “Words are medicine, too, and I’m afraid you’ve come equipped with poison today. Your daughter-in-law is courageous and smart. She and her husband asked me to support them in the decision to breast-feed. I can’t do that with you here confusing things. And for the record, Tracey is not big. You’re just very…petite.” The look on his face said the rest—that Queen Liz could stand to gain a few pounds and a better attitude.

It would have been easy to gloat as my mother-in-law huffed toward the door, but I didn’t. I couldn’t. She was Ryan’s mother, even if I never would be able to accept her as mine. She gave birth to my husband. That meant something. It had to. “Please stay, Queen,” I said, before I realized it. My friend Rochelle would have been proud of me. Dana would have thought me gone soft. Maybe so. It’d be fitting. The rest of me had congealed into a Jell-O sculpture, so why not my heart, too? Wasn’t that what God wanted of me, anyway?

My mother-in-law wiped the corner of her eye and sat down.

I bit my lip. Usually there’s no stopping the Queen’s dramatic exits. My husband came by that honestly. “Thank you for your support, Doctor. And don’t worry about protecting me.” I took Liz’s hand. “You know how mothers and daughters are. She just wants what’s best for me. Ryan and I are determined to continue nursing through this first year. Don’t worry.”

My doctor bowed low toward the Queen before giving Lily back to me. “It’s not Ryan that I’m worried about, Tracey. It’s you. So many strong women come through this practice changed by motherhood into insecure little girls. I never thought that you’d be one of them. Your mother-in-law may be a queen, but so are you. You’ve just got to learn how to rule your own roost.” With those wise words, a big hug and a menu plan for nursing mothers, Dr. Thomson left Queen Liz, Lily and I alone in the room.

As we left, I realized that my mother-in-law was still holding my hand. Tight.

I closed my eyes for a quick prayer. We weren’t alone at all.