A duo manages the front desk, a twosome I’d bet not more than a few years removed from bittersweet sixteen, one of them wearing earrings big as bracelets, the other with a set of flushed cheeks. Kim says she’s thirsty and sends me to the cooler. She swigs what I fetch as if dying of thirst. Meantime, my nerves are straight anarchy! How, I say to myself, how, self, did we ever end up here? I ask this knowing full well the answer: Last week she asked what I had planned on this day at this time, knowing good and motherfuckin well I don’t plan much of nothing outside of school, then said, Well, since you’re not busy, why don’t you come to the appointment? She granted me all of a nanosecond to grab a wispy excuse (I didn’t) before ambushing me with one of those two-part gold medal questions only a half-wit botches: Don’t you care about me? Are you concerned with our baby?
And let it be known for the lifetime ledgers, I may be a whole bunch of things, but believemewhenItellyou, a superfool ain’t one of them!
Well, not always. Well, not then, at least.
Still, a baby don’t calibrate with me, not now, and maybe not ever, which is why these last few weeks I’ve been wrecked, one of those freeway accidents it makes you shiver just to see, which is why I’ve spent whole days consumed with finding just the right thing to say, just the right time to say it.
Let’s talk
Speak.
Are you sure?
No, I’m not.
Then we should wait, babe.
You think so?
No, I know so. Timing.
As I said, Mom’s a Mother Teresa type, magnanimous as they come, but me benevolent? In a world remade to my selfish specs, just that easy, Kim would concede, lay her aquiline cheek against my chest, and have a different kind of appointment by day’s end. But who am I supposed to be fooling? This is the first time ever she asked me to attend a visit, the first time ever that appointment wasn’t at a clinic besieged by around-the-clock picketing, the first time ever we’ve treaded anywhere near a second trimester.
Translation: These are desperate days.
Urgent days indeed.
I don’t know how it is where you’re from, but around here, the words planned pregnancy might as well be some kind of next millennium Martian language. Around these parts, it ain’t but three types of men:
Dudes who didn’t want to be fathers and made convincing cases otherwise.
Dudes who didn’t want to be fathers and got bulldogged into becoming them anyhow.
Dudes who didn’t want to be fathers and pulled Copperfieldish escapes before or right after their baby’s birth.
A nurse steps half in, half out of the lobby and calls a name. The pregnant woman labors out of her seat and totters with her charges trailing her. I watch the new foursome disappear.
Look at that. That can’t be me, Kim says. I would never do this alone.
How do you know she’s alone? I say. Could be the dad couldn’t make it. Stayed in the car. This place ain’t exactly male-friendly.
You see a ring? she says. Where was the ring?
One has to know when is when and when is now, so not another word from me. Instead, I grab a magazine. The cover girl is a pregnant girl wearing a bikini. She’s posed with an arm above her belly and another near her navel and her smile’s a normal smile on narcotics. This is the kind of picture that misleads, that makes pregnancy seem like one glorious journey for all parties involved. I peek up from the cover and see another couple enter, the man carrying a detached car seat, AKA a walking, toting sign.
As if I need one.
Every week she announces what’s new: He’s got a brain and spinal cord; by now he’s got hands and webbed feet; he’s not an embryo anymore, he’s a fetus. Updates I’m guessing are meant to beguile, but instead keep me awake late nights, staring at the swell of her belly, the broadening of her dark areolas, that, many-a-night, have shot me out of bed in sweats, my heart sailing like a souped-up metronome.
Right, my silly ass should’ve seen this coming.
Right, my silly ass didn’t see this coming. After she’d broke it off with her ex, after she and I began claiming one another (I shouldn’t have to tell you what a big step that was!), she duped me with that line of questioning that has sent many a believes-he’s-keen young skirt-chaser hightailing for an exit. We were at the open-air hot tub spot where I’d taken a few prime prospects, drinking white wine from smuggled plastic cups.
Are you the type of man to leave after the chase? Is this all about a challenge? she said.
No, not at all, I said. I really like you.
You do? she said. How long does that last?
Saecula saeculorum, I said.
What’s that? she said.
Forever and ever, I said. To the ages of ages.
And peoples, let’s admit that line sounded real slick, ultra-suave if I do say so myself, which I do. And where I’m from, the suavest shit you ever said to a chick is a superhero’s superpower.
Kim rummages in her purse and I scan the office playing the game where I imagine lives for absolute strangers. The guy in the mesh hat was a high school football star stiff-arming his way to the NFL till word leaked of test scores even a D-1 coach wouldn’t fix. Now homie hangs drywall to pay the rent and scrimps all year for fishing trips. The chick in the corner answers phones at a downtown dentist office, drives a minivan, cooks her husband two unappreciated meals a day, and sends him to work with a slapdash sack lunch and, every season or so, a shot of half-ass head! The female by the cooler is a former coed who volunteers at shelters and spends her weekends rock climbing, kayaking, hiking the Cascades.
I’m just about to dive on someone else when another nurse pushes through the door and calls Kim. We follow the nurse to a scale in the hall and afterwards to an empty waiting room, where Kim climbs on the table and kicks the shoes off her swollen feet.
Have you started prenatals? she says.
Yes, Kim says.
Great, she says. Concerned today about anything especially?
No, not that I can think of, Kim says.
The nurse checks the rest of her vitals, marks them in her chart, and sets the chart on the counter. She fishes a gown from a top drawer and tells us the doctor will be right in. Kim strips, folds her pants and top, and gives the neat stack to me. She turns in the mirror in her bra and panties and it reminds me of the cover girl. Before this, seeing my girl in any degree of naked would excite me to off-the-Mohs-chart stiffness, but today she inspires not even a tingle. She puts on her gown, unhooks her bra, slips out of her panties, and I’llbedamned still nothing.
Why are you so quiet? she says.
There a law against quiet? I say.
You aren’t any other time, she says. Why now?
Let’s not do this here, I say. Not now.
You almost don’t hear the doctor come in. The doc’s got silver hair above floppy ears but most noticeable is that he’s huge. I’m talking retired-hooper-big, alien hands and feet.
How’s my favorite patient? he says.
Hey, Doc, she says. I’m great.
And you must be Shawn, he says. I’ve heard good things. Good, good things. Doc seems intent on turning my fingers to mush, waits waaaaaay too long to let me loose. He stoops to tie a faded off-brand running shoe, and a thatch of surly chest hair sprouts from the V of his V-neck. He picks up the chart and reads. Okay, okay, okay. All is well, he says. You’re a few pounds off weightwise, but no worry.