Back at the office, Wynn bolted through the typing pool, her bag clutched protectively to her stomach. She made it a few steps before she wondered if the colorful labels were visible through the thin white film of the sack. Glancing down, she winced, and shoved the stupid bag into her cardigan, feeling as though she had stolen the tests and the damning jar of rattling vitamins. Spotting the secretaries’ bathroom, a bright and cheerful little oasis, she ducked in, locking the bathroom door behind her even though it had multiple stalls. She’d only be a minute. Hell, she always needed to pee these days. With shaking hands, she ripped open the box, pulled out a slender packet, dropped the test. Scooping it up, she raked down her own trousers and her lace underwear, uncaring that her nail mangled the decorations and scraped her thigh.
She started to urinate, realized that the tube had a cap that had to come off, and growled in horror. To make matters worse, an insistent banging had begun at the door, and an irritated female voice called in, “I’m giving you ten seconds, and then I am kicking down the door!”
“Please just a minute,” Wynn called, embroidering on the truth as she accidentally splashed liquid far too warm to be water on her hand. Without looking down, she maneuvered the clear plastic cap back onto the test, trusting in the rules of the universe to give her the result she had to have if she just did everything exactly as the test said. “I’m going to be sick,” she added.
“Oh for crying out loud,” came the voice again, although the pounding had stopped. “I’ll use the men’s.”
Wynn backed out of the stall, cleaning up after herself numbly, and set the test down on a gigantic wad of paper towel. Washing her hands, she remembered to backtrack and flush the commode. Then, because the test was a wash of pink, she consulted the directions. “Wait one minute,” they read, and she flicked to the second function of her watch. What if she had already been a minute? Was it a bad test? She retrieved the box, found the Customer Service number, glanced down again.
Two pink lines stared serenely back at her.
She smiled down at them in pure triumph, then frowned. “Wait,” she mumbled. Wasn’t two lines a pregnant response?
The back of the box confirmed her worst fear. So, she took another test.
It also claimed she was pregnant.
No worries, she told herself, opening the second box. The first test was just a bad batch, that was all.
The second brand of test agreed with the first.
She swept up all the sticks, stuffing them into the bag, and buried them in the garbage. Clutching the brown jar of vitamins, she edged out of the bathroom, her cheeks pink as a few of the secretaries glanced up from their typing. Whispering an apology, she bolted from the room, trying to ignore the susurrus that dogged her every step back to her office. Taking a deep breath, she dialed the number off her blotter, getting it right the second time, and made herself wait as a receptionist found the gynecologist’s nurse for her. Every cell in her body was praying for sanity, for the chance that this was only a bad dream. She’d even be happy if Evan had somehow given her chlamydia instead, just so long as she wasn’t pregnant.
“Your test result was positive,” the nurse said. “Congratulations! The doctor will want to see you in early December, when you’re about eight weeks pregnant. Let me transfer you back to reception, to set up that appointment...”
Wynn hung up on her, completely numb.360Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡqbxl7lJeHH
She couldn’t stay in the office: questions suddenly descended on her. She killed a few moments by locating the already-tattered copy of the Yellow Pages that sat under the break-room telephone, surreptitiously opening it to the letter G. After a moment, she opened it to letter A, instead, but closed it again. She couldn’t decide, couldn’t think – couldn’t tell Evan, not yet. It seemed so unfair. Why had this had to happen now? Yanking her purse open, she added a few rows of vengeful knitting to Evan’s scarf, but the motions of stitching failed to soothe her. She needed out. Instead of calling around for a more competent gynecologist, she called Human Resources, telling the attendance line clerk that she must have had a bad hamburger for her lunch. That part was untrue – she hadn’t eaten yet today, even – but the nausea she felt was real enough.
Hurrying out of the office with her vitamins stuffed in her purse, Wynn surprised herself by turning toward the Safeway rather than rushing to the curb to board the bus there. There was a crowd around the pharmacy window, but it all seemed to be related to one woman: after she pushed off, the rest of the group dissipated, likely gone in search of the next spectacle of everyday surburban life. Wynn stayed, though: she had no idea how to approach the dark-haired woman behind the counter, just knew that she needed someone to talk to, and the clerk was the first person who’d come to mind. She couldn’t tell Evan, not yet, not til they were together, and her sister was insane with the ordeal of wedding planning. A stranger was the first comfort she could allow herself, and well...the pharmacy tech had been nice.
“Back again?” the tech asked, cocking her head as she glanced down at Wynn from her height. “You look like someone died, too. Hold on a second.” She disappeared, then reappeared out of a small door set in an alcove to the side. “Took my break,” she said, casually. “Come on over here, the deli’s not all bad.”
“It was positive,” Wynn blurted at the girl, noting that her name tag read Beth. “It says I’m pregnant.”
“Yeah, you looked like you hadn’t been sleeping well to me, too,” Beth said, casually. “You can tell the worried ones after a while.” They waited through the deli queue in silence, except Beth’s order of egg rolls and diet Coke, and Wynn’s sudden desire for fried chicken, although she knew already that the mass-produced fare wouldn’t satisfy her craving. She didn’t want just any fried chicken: she wanted her mother’s.
“Don’t cry over the chicken,” Beth chided, a smile on her lips. “It’s not that bad, really.”
“But I’m pregnant,” Wynn said, “and my husband’s in New York City for a year. A whole year.”
“While I was pregnant, my boyfriend was in Iraq,” Beth said, biting off a chunk of her egg roll, swathed in fluorescent orange sweet and sour sauce. “And I so wish he’d kept his ass over there, too.”
Wynn chewed on that and her chicken.
“Oh, he cheated on me while he was in training. Jemima – hell, how does anyone call you that, anyway?” Beth interrupted herself, her bright eyes fastening on Wynn’s face.
Wynn choked a little. “Um,” she said, taking a swallow of her own Diet Coke, “they don’t, actually. I’m, um, Wynn. For Winslow,” she said.
“And I’m Beth,” the woman said, needlessly lifting her photo tag and grinning idiotically beside it. “Look, Wynn, it’s a pretty tough start for everyone, even the women who say they knew the second they conceived and they wanted the kid before they even tried.” She paused, obviously fishing for words, and Wynn leaned back, toying with her chicken breast and her plastic fork.
“It really all boils down to what you think you should do, I think,” Beth finally said, slurping a bit of drippy sauce off her egg roll. “I didn’t think I wanted to be pregnant at first. I was in school and he was gone and you know, he just didn’t seem the daddy type. And I was right. He’s not. But me, I am the mommy type,” she said, a small flash of defiant pride in her features. “I thought I could give him up when he was born. Was looking at adoption,” she said. “But he came and I loved him like I’ve never loved anyone else. And so I quit med school and did the pharm tech courses instead, and I don’t regret that yet.”
Wynn considered this for a moment, still picking at her chicken and the accompanying mashed potatoes. “So. You changed your goal because you...love your kid,” she said, at last. “I can’t change my goal. This was my once in a lifetime shot, and I have to push ahead with it. It can’t fail,” she said, feeling a bit of panic surging in her stomach again, churning the chicken and the greasy gravy around.
“But what will you have, if this job does fail?” Beth probed, flicking her hair away from her face. “What’s undeniably yours? What do you live for?”
Wynn glanced down at her food, nauseated, and back up at Beth, whose face wore the patient expression she had come to know so well on Evan’s face when he made the same arguments. “Me. I have me,” she mumbled, scanning the brown-tiled walls for a familiar “ladies’” sign. Beth sighed, and shifted in her seat.
“Wynn. One day you’re going to wonder if you is enough to have.”
“I’m not saying I want an abortion or anything,” Wynn said, stabbing the chicken with her plastic fork irritably. “Although if you want me to be honest, the first thing I did? I looked in the Yellow Pages. I looked for a gynecologist first – I can’t go back to the one from my clinic because I hung up on the nurse -” Beth stifled what sounded like a cough into her hand, but after a moment, Wynn realized she was giggling, and cut her short. “And then I flipped to the A’s. Abortion providers. Adoption agencies.”
“Because,” she said, flatly, the voice she used when she hated the news she had to give, “I’m not a mother. I can’t even keep a plant alive. I have a Gucci handbag. I’m not gonna go sticking bottles in that! I saved for three months to buy real Prada shoes.” Never mind that she had found them too painful to wear halfway through the date: she owned them still, lovingly packed in their shoebox. “I am not a mommy!”
“But,” Beth reasoned, “you’re going to be.”
“This is all a mistake somehow,” Wynn decided. “I’ll wake up and the nightmare will be over. I’ll have my period and everything will be peaches. I’ll get back to helping my sister plan her crazy wedding. I’ll call my husband and tell him I’m not pregnant. That would make him sad, though,” she said. Untwisting her hands, she pushed her plate away, then stood, collecting it. A few steps toward the garbage can and her stomach smoothed out. Beth raised a hand to flag her back to the table, and Wynn perched on the edge of her chair. An awkward silence descended as Beth finished her meal: Wynn found herself reaching for Evan’s horrible red scarf.
“I think,” Beth said, suddenly, as Wynn’s mind focused on the simple, repetitive act of making chains of loops, “that we get pregnant to teach us how to give ourselves to someone else. I think until we’ve tried this, we aren’t really ready for responsibility yet. And I think,” she said, more quietly, “that you don’t back away from a challenge.”
Wynn’s knuckles whitened around the rosewood needle, and she fought to contain her temper, but it exploded out of her.
“I can’t afford to give this job up. I fought like hell to get into a good school, and I stayed even when my daddy died of cancer. Stayed even when my boyfriend’s family died in a car accident. Kept him going.” Her fingers tapped her stomach, unconsciously. “I don’t give up when I have a goal. But this is not my goal,” she said, pointing at her traitorous womb. “My goal? I want to be a full partner in an international firm by the time I’m forty. I want to have the world at my feet. I want to be the kind of woman everyone respects. I want to be noticed.”
“A baby,” Beth said, bluntly, standing to drop her containers into the trash, “won’t keep you from that. And maybe, it might just save you from something you didn’t know you didn’t really want.” She returned from the trash bins, gathered her bag in one hand. “So here,” she said, not sitting down, “is my advice to you. Take those needles and start another project. Sit back and work out your life. You have months. Learn something that no college on the face of this earth could ever have taught you.”
“What?” Wynn asked, half-stung, half-amused by Beth’s diatribe.
“Faith,” Beth said, swinging her bag onto her shoulder, then rooting in its depths. “And,” she said, withdrawing a small pad and a stubby pencil, “call me. I need a friend who isn’t – well, I need a friend.”
ns 18.68.41.179da2
