Milk by Emily Hammond Page B

catalog.”
    â€œReally? Which one?” I’m on familiar ground, mentally writing copy. Close, cuddled, safe. Our sling allows mother’s hands to be free, though her heartstrings are tied . Awful!
    â€œWhich catalog,” she says. “Hmm. Either Sensational Beginnings or, you know, the other one.”
    â€œWhich one?”
    â€œThey usually keep some copies here. You can check that table over there.” She points.
    I stay right where I am. “I have a lot to learn. A lot to buy. I don’t even know what to get.” Alarm: the first time I’ve thought about this aspect. What I don’t have. Diapers, baby clothes, mysterious ointments and balms—can you buy a crib from a catalog? I can write about this stuff, but I know nothing, nothing! What I don’t have, and what I’ll need to get. What I won’t have: a husband. Or I could have one, at a price. Then there’s Gregg. Would he like to step into Jackson’s shoes? Images collide: young fatherly sort steps into a staged nursery shot, crib, mobile, changing table, bright lights— One hundred percent cotton, machine washable, sling comes in an array of colors —his arms held out for a baby with makeup on who screams at the sight of him.
    â€œPlenty of time,” the new mother assures me. “We’re still pretty unequipped—actually it never seems you’re equipped enough. How far along are you?”
    â€œAlmost twelve weeks.”
    â€œHow are you feeling?”
    â€œNauseous. Starving. It’s beginning to seem normal.”
    She laughs, rises to her feet and rearranges her baby in the sling, having just been summoned for her appointment.
    I try to concentrate on the form I’m filling out, one I thought I’d already filled out last time here; evidently I left out a few things. Epilepsy? No. Heart disease? No. Yes, I’ve had mumps, chicken pox, German measles. Nervous breakdown? Not yet. Baby’s father’s name? the form politely requests. I leave that blank.
    Soon after it’s my turn and I follow the nurse down the hall.
    â€œTheo? Is it you?” The midwife—at least I think she’s the midwife—hurries into the exam room checking her clipboard, frantic for some reason. Oh great.
    â€œIt’s me all right.”
    â€œTheo, Theo, look at me! Don’t you recognize me?”
    I stand up suddenly: woman in a white coat, long stringy blond hair, about my age. Then I notice her eyes, blue and iridescent. I always used to think she looked like one of those Nordic Madonnas you’d find in an art museum, from the early Renaissance period—haloed and blond, sapphirine eyes.
    â€œMaggie?”
    I’d forgotten about her smile, as dazzling as when we were teenagers.
    We fall into each other’s arms first, then talk for a while—how Maggie came to be a midwife of all things, and the circumstances of my move back to Pasadena. She asks about my father and I ask about her mother, technically an aunt of mine (or is it cousin?) through my mother’s side. “Still alive and drinking,” Maggie says. Whatever our familial connection, it’s so distant and convoluted as to be absurd. We don’t resemble each other in the least.
    At last we proceed to the actual exam, gentle as a sponge bath. Maggie places something called a Doppler on my belly; I hear for the first time the whoosh, whoosh, whoosh of my baby’s heart.
    I don’t want to leave.
    Is it time for the knitting needles yet, Maggie and I used to say in high school. Code for, Are we pregnant? Knitting needles referring to either booties or abortions, depending on how you looked at it. Is it time for the K.N.’s? we’d say, counting on our fingers since our last periods, and when it— what we kept hoping were isolated incidents of sex — had occurred .
    We’d become friends in high school gym class while standing in the furthest reaches