The Yummy Mummy
FOR MY HUSBAND, BEN
AS CATASTROPHES GO, IT WAS A QUIET ONE. YOU
wouldn’t have known my world had imploded. I didn’t talk about what happened, I stitched it up inside. A single girl might have sulked over a few cocktails before dieting defiantly and declaring “Next!” My affairs were more complicated. I was eight months pregnant. And Joe remained the proud, expectant dad. He’d still trace my hard bump with fascinated fingers, kiss the heat off my bruised breasts. I was his—impregnated, fat, and cosseted. But I wasn’t enough.
It was an unseasonably warm autumn. An “Indian summer,” the breakfast TV weatherman crowed as if he’d divined it himself. That particular September morning, I was awoken early by the baby pushing out its tiny palms like pastry cutters under the skin. Too tired to feel enchanted, I gracelessly levered myself out of my enormous bed. (Bought for sex when I was single. Look where it got me.) Pulling up the blinds, my neighborhood—Kilburn, northwest London—revealed itself in slices. The taste of next door’s bacon slithered in through the gap in the window frame.
Another day, hungry, drunk on hormones. Another day being Amy Crane, celebrated Pregnant Person. Strangers smiled at me then. Needless to say, they don’t anymore. My mother says this is because I sport a scowl. I say I’m just squintily shortsighted and don’t like wearing glasses. And, in any case, Mum knows how to extract a scowl better than anyone.
Joe smack-kissed my tummy. Must go, he said. Meeting. Out of the office. You have a lovely day. He was dressed in a tan linen suit, an artfully crumpled good one. Birkenstocks. All dangerously Soho. But his great size and unselfconscious lollop—his head arrives a few inches before the rest of him, not because of a stoop, but rather due to an eagerness to get behind his Mac—stop him from looking camp. The door slammed.
Clump, clump
down the steps—he used to jump every other one, doesn’t now—and then the dry drag of his sandals on the pavement. Why is it that things sound different in the sunshine? You can hear the weather. I lay back on the bed but a pile of bricks weighed down on my spine. Besides, croissants called.
The best thing about being pregnant was the license to eat with complete impunity, like a naturally thin person. Once I gave birth it transpired that the baby accounted for only a fraction of my pregnancy weight. Only Joe thought this funny.
Beep!
A text. Joe.
mt regents prk boat lake caf 12
Sweet. We hadn’t arranged anything. But it was the first week of my maternity leave and Joe guessed I didn’t know what to do with myself. After years of moaning about the nine-to-five I felt vaguely lost without its scaffolding. My intention to use that precious last bit of “free” time productively—art galleries, foreign film matinees, and girlie lunches—had yet to be realized. No, I preferred cool, private, unsociable baths. I needed to wash all the time that summer. Pregnancy made me secrete hot sticky female stuff, like sex juice, but not. That was the last thing on my mind.
Flumping in, I displaced half the bath water. A fleshy archipelago of lumpy islands broke the filmy surface, my shape barely human, nothing like those neat celebrity pods you see in magazines. After drying myself down—each pat indenting my waterlogged skin like a footprint—I squeezed into a tube of maternity Lycra and covered the mud splatter of pregnancy pigmentation marks on my forehead with a thick foundation. A squirt of useless nontoxic deodorant, and I was off, thudding forth on cracked heels.
The tube made me anxious. I knew I’d be the last person to escape through the cramped emergency exits should an emergency arise. And I’d never felt so vulnerable. Protesting to the flood of adrenaline, the baby corkscrewed inside. The carriage smelled. The man sitting next to me scratched his scalp noisily. Then he sniffed his finger and I thought I might swoon with disgust. Surfacing at Baker Street, I breathed deeply between cars to avoid asphyxiating my baby with exhaust and, following the looped lake, walked through Regent’s Park, slowly, as if I were wearing one of those Hollywood fat suits.
Chinese ducks with calligrapher-drawn faces, moorhens—and a heron, one leg bent back as if assuming a particularly punishing yoga pose. For the city, it was bucolic. I waddled breathlessly up a small arched bridge to get a better view. To my right, through the horse chestnuts, rose the bronze dome of the Regent’s Park mosque. Behind the willow tree, to my left, was the boating lake, bobbing sky blue rowing boats. On the other side of the bridge, the cafe. My phone beeped.
Snt messge 2 wrng phone. srry. wrk thing. cancled. spk ltr
Sent while I was underground. Great. I leaned my cargo against the wooden handrail and considered a compensation prize from the cafe. Bagels? Ice cream? A flapjack would be nice. Suddenly, I heard a laugh, nasal, screechy, like a parakeet. I looked to my left. And that’s when I saw him, from behind, in the shadow cast by a willow tree. If I’d looked two seconds later or shut my eyes in rapture over flapjacks, I would have missed him. I really wish I had. But he is unmistakable from behind, even at a distance. Who was he with? Cursing my shortsightedness, stomach on spin cycle, I gripped the handrail of the bridge. Damn my impressionist vision! Then they walked away, into the light. And what I saw ruined everything. So I ran. Not terribly fast, obviously.
IT’S JUST AS WELL THAT I STOPPED CARING WHETHER MEN
looked at me after that. Because they don’t, not even a quick double take. Now I can weave through crowds without the slightest sexual ripple. Like a woman in her sixties, perhaps, or in a burka. Of course, there’s no reason why anyone would look. I’m no longer a blooming Pregnant Person. Nor am I sideshow ugly, comically obese, or in any way beautiful or striking. No, I’m five foot four and a half inches, thirty-one years old, ten stone six, with dyed blond hair (two-inch mousy roots) and washed-out denim eyes. The lashes I used to get tinted are now pale as a pig’s. After years of blasting my salary on blow-dries and beauty counters, now my monthly grooming budget—mostly products for thinning hair and breast pads—amounts to little more than the price of a Chanel nail varnish.
No, I’m not one of those women who pinged back to her pre-baby self, not in any way. I’m irreparably changed. And I dress accordingly. Today: three-year-old Nike Airs, drawstring Marks & Spencer khakis, and a blue T-shirt that slips off my shoulders to reveal feeding-bra straps sprouting elastic. My other clothes, from my pre-baby life, no longer fit.
So no wolf whistles and, a little more crushingly, no competitive size-ups by other women. (It’s funny the things you miss.) All of which made the following incident all the more extraordinary.
Last Wednesday, on the Salusbury Road, Queen’s Park, 3:15 P.M. Handsome and surf-blond, he was wheeling a hand-painted rainbow-striped mountain bike along the pavement. Taut brown legs scissoring in neon yellow cycle shorts, he was muscular, short, built like a hammer. I’d just nipped into the pub, pretending that I was looking for someone so that the landlord thought I was a customer and I could steal into the ladies’. My bladder isn’t quite what it was. On my way out, I walked straight into him, grazing my knee on his pedal. I said sorry. He said sorry. He flirted his eyes up, then down, and grinned shyly. Jolting with embarrassment, I walked away, a sharp trot, past the Queen’s Park dads—accessorized with baby slings and expensive trainers—browsing the estate agent windows, the cappuccino drinkers at the pavement café, and the low plateaus of jostling heads that made up a crowd of schoolchildren. I was aware, even then, that the fleeting flush of attention changed the way I walked. My spine lengthened in a supermodelish kind of way. My head craned up so that I looked straight ahead, at eye level with others, rather than peering at the unfolding gray landscape of pavement. Of course, with hindsight, this exacerbated the situation. It took me until I passed the third avenue (about six minutes) before I realized I had four sheets of white loo paper flagged to the sole of my left trainer.
No such delusions today. A twig is caught in the back right wheel of the pram, ticking time with each rotation, as I walk along Brondesbury Road (unnoticed). It’s breezy but unusually warm, like the low setting on the hair dryer I haven’t used for months. Blossoms dense as broccoli on the trees. Shit, there I go again, already thinking about food and it’s only six o’clock. There’s a buzz of people escaping work, impatient to get home before the last of the sunshine slopes off into the chill of the May evening. I love London like this. It reminds me of when I was single. That exciting smell of spring—cigarettes, beer, camellias, low-hung pollution—is the smell of libido rising, the promise of skimpy dresses, damp knickers, and brown feet. It means everything when you’re single. Now what does it mean? A parasol on Evie’s pram. A tooth. Solids.
“Honey, you’re home!” Joe’s attempt at an American accent. He opens the door as I twiddle the key, so I fall forward. He catches me. Whoa! I get a double-take flash—I’ve been getting these a lot recently, still a little startled that this life is mine—and see Joe distinctly, as if for the first time. Not bad looking, not at all. A big man. Over six feet, coat-hanger shoulders, a smile wide enough to glimpse the mercury fillings in his molars. Eyes, Atlantic blue, feathered with ink-black lashes. He’s by far the most attractive one in this relationship now. The power has shifted.
Joe stumbles, tripping on a plastic block. While this would make me curse, he tuts affectionately. He loves our baby’s imposition, the clues to her six-month-old existence. A contented father. A good catch. Still, many women would have confronted him, I know that. But if you absolutely can’t risk losing, you don’t play, do you?
“Got off early,” he says.
“That makes a change.” Joe is usually late. He runs his business hours infuriatingly erratically. I never know where he is from one day to the next, which leaves me wondering.
He ruffs up his sleeves, exposing wide, freckled forearms. “Thought I’d come and see what mischief you two get up to when I’m not here.”
“Now you know. Wild bacchanalian sex orgies, blizzards of cocaine . . .”
Joe grins shyly. “Er, I’ve got something for you. A present.”
“Oh fab. No birthday required.” My last present involved a travel bottle sterilizer and a recent photograph of me that he’d doctored on Photoshop, removing the bags under my eyes and my postpartum chins. (He didn’t understand why I was offended.)
Joe peers into the pram. “Asleep, good.” He wheels it into a nook of the hall and swivels it to face the wall.
“Amy . . .” Joe lunges for my hand and folds it into his, digging his fingers into my palm. When we first met I loved his big hands, like the Green Cross Code man, the way they made mine look so pretty and doll-like. We haven’t held hands for a long time.
“I just want you to know that”—I brace myself. What have I done wrong now?—“you’re an amazing mother. Maybe I don’t say it enough.”
We stare at each other, slightly embarrassed. We don’t operate in this gear. We don’t do soppiness. Life with a baby requires practicality, organization, a delegation of tasks. Romance is too time-consuming and susceptible to awkward misunderstandings.
“But there
has
to be more to our relationship than parenting.” He looks down, bashful of his own sincerity. “We must not forget about us: Joe and Amy
the couple
. It’s been tough. But a happy couple make the best parents. . . .”
I recognize this line from the “Shock of the New” chapter of his well-thumbed baby manual.
Joe whips out a bag from behind his back. “So I got you this.”
The box is nipple pink and long and flat with the words AGENT PROVOCATEUR scrawled across it in bordello writing.
“Wow, thanks.” Paroled from his grip, I open the box and peel away the layers of tissue paper. Oh. A froth of pale pink and black lace. A bra! After all my industrial-strength maternity bras, I’m stunned by its gossamer lack of substance, its defiance of function. “Oh Joe, so beautiful.”
“Obviously, you can’t wear it yet, it’s got underwiring,” he says authoritatively. “Something nice for when you finish breast-feeding. I intended to just get you the knickers but it matched and the lady in the shop said . . .”
“Shush, I’m impressed.” Joe’s never bought me lingerie before. It hadn’t been needed. Didn’t matter what knickers I was wearing, they came off. But that was before my life was measured out in fluid ounces.
“I did my homework,” he says quietly, eyes fever bright. I try not to dwell on the nature of his homework. There is more! Rummage into the tissue paper. Lacy knickers! “How pretty!” How alien. (I still wear my maternity knickers a lot. They’re very comfortable.) I hold the knickers up. Oh Christ! The gusset splits in two. A ribbon-seamed hole where my bottom should be hidden. “My bum isn’t up to this.”
“Don’t be silly, you’ve got a great bum. Put them on. Go on. Evie’s asleep.” Joe’s big frame is silhouetted against the wall lamp. He is the shape of a men’s lavatory graphic.