Yummy in her entire evolution—from initial bump to stroller-wielding mother of three. Eventually, every Yummy ended up at
Saturday morning prenatal yoga.
Here the hierarchy of the outside world did not apply. Second- and third-time Yummies were the gurus, wise lionesses licking
their young and calmly answering the anxious questions of the younger, inexperienced first-timers. Listening in on their queries
in the change room (Is it all right to have soy milk with my cereal? Drink decaf? Smoke a bit of pot?), Meredith could not
believe how much more she knew about managing the modern pregnancy than most of the pregnant Yummies around her. Had they
never
read baby books in their spare time? Spent time with their mummy friends? Still, they must know something she didn’t—they
were Yummy while she was UnYummy, thirty-five, her Fallopian tubes like a pair of half-empty Pez dispensers.
Her project was to study the Yummies in the hope that she might one day learn the secret of their effortless perfection. That
is: how to get knocked up.
She assumed the lotus position, placing one hand palm up on her knee, the other cupping her belly just above her pubic bone,
and in unison with the Yummies, commenced her first set of cleansing breaths.
Halfway through her second toe stand, Meredith heard a familiar hiss. She turned and saw Mish standing in the doorway, dressed
in pajama bottoms and a sweatshirt, her face raw and unfamiliar without its usual makeup. Meredith disentangled her limbs
and scurried to the door. Mish pulled her into the hall.
“I tried to call you all night but your phone was turned off,” Mish whispered. “I couldn’t— I didn’t know where you were.”
“I was shooting. What’s wrong?”
Her friend’s face squashed in on itself. “Shane was away at a design show in Philadelphia. I called my doula and she was away
too. The doctor said...”
Meredith put her arms around her friend as the last of Mish’s words twisted in a sob. “. . . She said—just to ride it out.”
“You need a drink.”
“No,” said Mish, wiping her nose with the heel of her hand. “I need six.”
Forty-five minutes and two Bloody Caesars later Mish and Meredith sat huddled outside a crowded brunch spot. Mish was smoking
hungrily, lighting each new cigarette from the smoldering butt of the last.
“Turkey fuck,” said Meredith.
Mish’s head bobbed up and down at the end of her neck like a marionette’s. “Huh?”
“That’s what my mum used to call it when you light one cigarette from another. Some sixties term. She thought it was so hilarious.
Made me want to die of embarrassment.”
This got a snort out of Mish. “Do you think I would have made an even more embarrassing mother than yours?”
“I’m sure you will yet.”
“Fuck it. I’m done. This in vitro thing’s a come-on. These fertility doctors make real estate agents look like straight shooters.
Pun intended.”
“But, hon, you were so
close.
I’m sure next time.”
Mish looked at Meredith and sucked so hard on her smoke it crackled.
“Fuck next time. I can’t go through this again. I’d rather die.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t, then.”
“I wish I’d never even tried in the first place.”
This was not the first lost baby for Mish. In her twenties, she’d had two abortions—the first ten weeks after a one-night
stand with the former bassist in a semi-famous Detroit thrash band, the second the result of a desperate year-long love affair
with a married psychotherapist whom her girlfriends had disapprovingly nicknamed “Herr Doktor.” Like most of the women in
her postal code (thirty-odd, unmarried, urban-dwelling, career focused in an aesthetic rather than hard-nosed way), Mish had
never pondered, even for a millisecond, the thought of having a baby until she was thirty-five. In her case, the hunger came
on suddenly in the middle of being dumped, for the third and definitive time, by an Israeli
Matthew Woodring Stover; George Lucas