stacked her pillows, sat up against them, and waited. There was a long stillness, and then it came again, a deep internal prickling, the sparking of nerves that were normally inert. She rolled over on her side; it stopped. She returned to her back; after a moment, it started again, then stilled. Jared came back and got into bed.
She didn’t think much of it until the next morning, when she was walking through the living room in the silence of her empty house, and then she was flooded with a sense of pleasure and joy. Various images of the interior being started coming into her mind—a round face with a dimple and raised eyebrows, a tiny, fleshy behind, bent knees, an image of a diver doing a flip, tucked, hands holding his knees. The sensations in her belly were like little communications to her brain, each distinct but related to the others. When the interior being (she hated the word “fetus”) was still, the images stopped.
The house was so quiet that it seemed to form another layer around her; she herself was the emerging person, going here and there, picking up this and that, contained and protected the way she contained and protected the interior being, and, more than anything, she wanted the house to remain silent so that she would not be distracted from that fluttering, those sensations. Finally, after about anhour of pretending that her life was the same as it always had been, she lay down on the couch. It was of course quiet. The side streets of Palo Alto were guaranteed by law to be quiet. The cottony roughness of the couch cushions felt pleasant against her back and the backs of her legs. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and waited.
He was a good boy, and an active boy—he started pinging her within a minute or two. She envisioned it: punching on the right, then kicking on the left, and then a tiny brush of the hand on the right. After that he was quiet; then he started in again, oh so softly. No one talked about this, these greetings from within, these most intimate communications from the child-to-be. Probably, she thought, she should resist. She should think of the fetus as an it, she should stop imagining it, she should make her joy conditional. She should imagine, instead, what could go wrong—she would be forty-one by the time of the birth. Given the precedents, even if he was healthy, he would most likely view her as skeptically as she viewed her parents, as Emily viewed her. But in two hours, he had captured the fortress and made it his, and Janet did not see how she could undo that.
—
MRS. HERMAN DIDN ’ T STAND in the middle of the arena shouting orders, like the rest of the riding instructors did. Her trick was to keep walking and keep talking, and interspersed with her stories was a patter of suggestions—“If you keep your thumbs up, you see, the reins run much more smoothly from little Pesky’s mouth, and it’s much nicer for him. That’s fine, now just let him walk along behind me while I check some things.” And so it was that Emily was in the saddle, with her heels down and her shoulders back, and her hips swinging along, with Mrs. Herman in front of her, wandering around the arena, and then: “You keep going that way. I’m going to stop here and check this jump standard, rotten to the core. You know, when I got married, way back in the Middle Ages, the maid of honor fixed it up with the minister to run the drag right down the aisle of the church. There you go, just walk along the railing there to the end, turn, and if he trots back to me, that’s fine—grab mane if you have to.”
And she did trot! She did not grab mane. Her posting was good!
“Now just go around me here, in a small circle, to the left, that’s right. Well, there were four bridesmaids, and me, and we all wentvery solemnly down the aisle, and I wondered why there was such a long pause, with the minister not saying a thing, and then there was this sound, and here came the hounds right down the
She didn’t think much of it until the next morning, when she was walking through the living room in the silence of her empty house, and then she was flooded with a sense of pleasure and joy. Various images of the interior being started coming into her mind—a round face with a dimple and raised eyebrows, a tiny, fleshy behind, bent knees, an image of a diver doing a flip, tucked, hands holding his knees. The sensations in her belly were like little communications to her brain, each distinct but related to the others. When the interior being (she hated the word “fetus”) was still, the images stopped.
The house was so quiet that it seemed to form another layer around her; she herself was the emerging person, going here and there, picking up this and that, contained and protected the way she contained and protected the interior being, and, more than anything, she wanted the house to remain silent so that she would not be distracted from that fluttering, those sensations. Finally, after about anhour of pretending that her life was the same as it always had been, she lay down on the couch. It was of course quiet. The side streets of Palo Alto were guaranteed by law to be quiet. The cottony roughness of the couch cushions felt pleasant against her back and the backs of her legs. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and waited.
He was a good boy, and an active boy—he started pinging her within a minute or two. She envisioned it: punching on the right, then kicking on the left, and then a tiny brush of the hand on the right. After that he was quiet; then he started in again, oh so softly. No one talked about this, these greetings from within, these most intimate communications from the child-to-be. Probably, she thought, she should resist. She should think of the fetus as an it, she should stop imagining it, she should make her joy conditional. She should imagine, instead, what could go wrong—she would be forty-one by the time of the birth. Given the precedents, even if he was healthy, he would most likely view her as skeptically as she viewed her parents, as Emily viewed her. But in two hours, he had captured the fortress and made it his, and Janet did not see how she could undo that.
—
MRS. HERMAN DIDN ’ T STAND in the middle of the arena shouting orders, like the rest of the riding instructors did. Her trick was to keep walking and keep talking, and interspersed with her stories was a patter of suggestions—“If you keep your thumbs up, you see, the reins run much more smoothly from little Pesky’s mouth, and it’s much nicer for him. That’s fine, now just let him walk along behind me while I check some things.” And so it was that Emily was in the saddle, with her heels down and her shoulders back, and her hips swinging along, with Mrs. Herman in front of her, wandering around the arena, and then: “You keep going that way. I’m going to stop here and check this jump standard, rotten to the core. You know, when I got married, way back in the Middle Ages, the maid of honor fixed it up with the minister to run the drag right down the aisle of the church. There you go, just walk along the railing there to the end, turn, and if he trots back to me, that’s fine—grab mane if you have to.”
And she did trot! She did not grab mane. Her posting was good!
“Now just go around me here, in a small circle, to the left, that’s right. Well, there were four bridesmaids, and me, and we all wentvery solemnly down the aisle, and I wondered why there was such a long pause, with the minister not saying a thing, and then there was this sound, and here came the hounds right down the
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