Goodbye Without Leaving by Laurie Colwin Page A

We have to get educated. Let’s go buy some books.”
    â€œYou go buy some books,” I yawned. “I’m sleepy. The fetus is a parasite and this one is making me very tired. Wake me when you come back.”
    My sweetie came back with a shopping bag full of tomes. Advice for pregnant fathers. Nutrition and pregnancy. How the fetus develops. What you should and should not do while pregnant.
    â€œGee,” I said. “It makes me tired just looking at them.”
    â€œAnd this one,” Johnny was saying—he had not even bothered to take his coat off—“this one is in living color. Jesus, I wonder how they did this. You can see the fetus develop week by week. Yours—I mean ours—is this tiny little speck. Imagine that”
    â€œImagine that,” I said, sinking into my pillow.
    â€œOur parents will be thrilled,” he said.
    â€œHow about not telling them for a while?” I said. “Let’s get the first three months over with, okay?”
    â€œWhy?” demanded my spouse. There was a truculent note in his voice.
    â€œHigh rate of miscarriage for first pregnancies in the first trimester,”
    â€œOh, no, not my baby,” said Johnny.
    â€œAren’t you arrogant,” I said.
    â€œNot my baby,” Johnny said. “This baby’s here to stay.”
    â€œBecause of your fine, fine, extra-fine sperm, doubtless.”
    â€œDoubtless. Hey, let’s tell ’em, for God’s sake.”
    I turned over on my side.
    â€œBoy,” Johnny said, “you hate a public demonstration, don’t you.”
    I was mute. All I really wanted to do was go to sleep, preferably for nine months, and wake up when it was all over.
    â€œOkay,” Johnny said. “It’s a deal. After all, you’re the mother.”
    These words chilled me to the bone. You’re the mother . Mother of what? Something that looked like a speck or blob, and yet this little speck would soon develop fingers and toes, vital organs, a personality. And to think that I was the harbinger of all this! I found these thoughts quite daunting. They made me hungry. I demanded that my husband take me to an expensive delicatessen for an enormous pastrami sandwich.
    He actually brought along the book about nutrition in pregnancy and read to me, out loud, about nitrates and nitrites while I wolfed down my sandwich, demolished the pickles and drank a large glass of celery tonic.
    â€œâ€˜â€¦ the effects of which are unknown,’” Johnny read.
    I looked down at my empty plate. I felt I easily could have polished off another entire sandwich but I contented myself by filching what was left of Johnny’s.

26
    It took about a month before anyone at the Race Music Foundation noticed any change in me. I did not look pregnant, but I began to look slightly less defined.
    â€œHey, you look terrible,” said the Bopper. “What’re you, off your feed?”
    I did feel rather off my feed. I felt I had shed whatever luster I had once possessed. Since the episode of the pastrami sandwich, I had lost my appetite, and although I was not sick, I could not have said that I felt precisely well. I found myself yawning a good deal. And curiously, I had a fierce desire to announce my condition to everyone, with the exception of my parents and in-laws.
    Naturally I told Mary Abbott.
    â€œIt’s all over,” I said
    â€œPregnant, huh?” said Mary, slumping onto her bed.
    â€œUh-huh,” I said. “July, right in the middle.”
    â€œBut you haven’t told Gertrude, right?”
    â€œRight.”
    â€œHow thrilled she’ll be,” Mary said.
    â€œJust for about five minutes, and then she’ll discover that I’m not being pregnant the right way or not gaining enough weight or gaining too much weight or not wearing the right clothes. She always advised against summer babies. She thinks people should deliver before the middle