The Thin Pink Line: A Jane Taylor Novel

Planned Parenthood, or the Story Behind the Story

Have you become a fuckwit, Jane?

Not exactly Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again, or It was the best of times, blah, blah, blah, I’ll grant you, but it’ll do for my life story.

Have you become a fuckwit, Jane?

No, perhaps it’s best not to start there for a first impression.

Okay. Let’s try this one last time. Deep breath here: I didn’t plan on getting pregnant, I swear, although I am certainly capable of going to great lengths to get what I want. The way I figured it at the time, it was a combination of rare animal passion and manufacturer’s error. It does happen, you know. Surely, all of the world’s unplanned pregnancies can’t be from people silly enough to engage in unprotected sex, can it? Regarding the passion and the error, er, at least that was how things came about the first time I was pregnant…but then wasn’t really.

Perhaps I’d better back up a bit and explain.

You see, Trevor and I had been to yet another friend’s wedding that weekend, so of course I was understandably depressed afterward. After all, I wasn’t an au courant Singleton or even a much maligned Smug Married, but rather, that lowest of the social lows, an inhabitor and cohabitor of that famed female limbo, an Unholy Unmarried, or UU for short, which looks kind of like a cow’s udders when seen on the printed page, but perhaps that’s neither here nor there. Anyway, after the wedding, Trevor, being Trevor, since he knew he wasn’t ready to ask me to marry him but still wanted to make me feel better, had great sex with me.

It’s always amazed me how often heartache and really great sex go hand in hand. From what I hear other women say, I think it must be different for them. Hell, sometimes I think everything must be different for other people. But for me, the more melancholy, the bigger the bang. I mean, if I’m actually happy, then I’m probably eating something and even letting myself enjoy it, and sex is the furthest thing from my mind.

But back to Trevor, great sex and pregnancy.

So there we were, having great post-someone-else’s-wedding sex, and I was thinking how not only had everyone I knew been getting married lately, but they were even having babies as well, when the thought occurred to me, What if I turned up pregnant? Well, no sooner did the thought occur to me than Trevor hit my high note, prophylactic rubber barrier and all, and the thought flew completely out of my mind.

Until I didn’t get my period when it was due three weeks later.

Of course I told my best friend David—pronounced Duh-veed—right off the bat.

But this is great news, is it not, Jane? David asked in his overly precise English.

David lived upstairs from Trevor and me. Just over the minimum height requirement for the Israeli military, in which he had served—I mean, they all do, right? Israelis, that is—he was a regular spark plug. Given to wearing muscle T-shirts and early eighties-style blue jeans, as far as I could see he was the sole item in the plus column for bringing back Jordache jeans. He also had coils of black hair that, along with his bronzed skin, gave him a Semitic Caesar profile. A former fighter pilot, make that gay fighter pilot, he was now trying to make a go of it as a chef in his own trendy Covent Garden bistro, still in the planning stages.

In the Israeli military, Jane, you both ask and tell, and you take gays and women and anyone else who can handle an Uzi, he’d once told me over a shared bottle of Burgundy left over from a boeuf bourguignonne that a lover of his had failed to show up to share.

When David suggested that my days-old pregnancy was great news, I found myself agreeing with him. After all, it wasn’t as though I had deliberately set out to snag Trevor, but this would certainly do the trick. Trevor was such a Do-Right Dudley that he was sure to marry me.

At the time, I didn’t even think about what an actual baby might actually mean.

I also didn’t think about the emotional consequences of telling people other than the father before I told the father. This was another one of those things that falls under the heading of I Didn’t Plan It That Way, But. In this case, the but had to do with how gleefully David had received the news. (And him I’d only told about the news first because Trevor was away on business in Singapore for the week.) Bowled over by how happy my pregnancy had made him, I proceeded to tell a few more people. Oh, I didn’t go overboard—well, maybe just a bit—didn’t do anything so silly as telling my mother or sister or even the girls at work, but I did tell the Pakistani newsagent down the street (Here, have some curry—it will bring good luck), a policeman who helped me jimmy my lock one night when I’d locked my bag in the flat (You can’t be too careful at night now that there’s two of you) and the odd stranger or two; so, just enough to give me a taste of how the other half lives. Their combined reactions were enough to make me start to experience a warm glow. I began to feel like, maybe, were I to miss out on being pregnant, that I’d miss the potential for the world to be a rosy place.

Of course, never one to do anything by halves, I started to tail pregnant women. You couldn’t really call it stalking, but I did spend the Saturday just prior to Trevor’s return trailing every prego I happened to casually encounter, until I finally settled on one who looked so close to delivery that I thought I might be called into service at any moment.

And it was amazing the things I learned! Following my quarry through a heavy doorway, I was surprised to see a man who’d been walking ahead of both of us double back to hold the door patiently for her until she’d squeezed her way through. I was still smiling my surprise when he let the door go just in time to smack me in the face. Apparently, the fact that I didn’t have the equivalent of a sack of flour attached to the front of my body rendered me invisible or at least not in need of any courtesy. Oh, well. As I followed her about her rounds that day, it wasn’t even so much the common courtesies she was shown that impressed me, although I was damned shocked when the drunken old sot on the tube blearily yielded his seat to her so that she could rest yer Madonna feet, luv. No, it was more the mere fact that people actually talked to her, all the time; perfect strangers who might step over their own mothers in the gutter kept making comments and asking her questions in the most solicitous manner imaginable: When’re you due? or Do you know yet if it’s a boy or a girl? or Spring babies’re always so extra special—just like little sunny angels, they are, this last from the bleary old sot.

Why, it was as though someone had sprinkled pixie dust all over her! Her existence seemed that enchanted, and I longed to find out if my bout with pregnancy would prove the same.

The only problem was that just as I was on the verge of telling Trevor, who had returned from his trip just in time to partake of the pre-celebratory Sunday dinner that was waiting for him, an odd thing occurred. As I was teetering on the precipice of my new future, while serving up a helping of the blanquette de veau that David had prepared for me to pretend to prepare, I felt an unwelcome twinge of pain in my lower back.

"Fuckfuckfuck," I swore under my breath, just barely restraining myself from slamming the pot back down on the stove.

What was that, Jane?

Nothing, I informed Trevor, ignoring the twinge. Just a little back pain.

Mmm, he said distractedly, still rifling through the post that had accumulated since he’d been gone. Perhaps you should take some Tylenol?

No, that’s okay. I’m sure it will pass. I brightened. Ready to eat?

Moments later, I eyed Trevor as he speared a piece of meat.

Mmm, Jane, this is really great. It’s always so wonderful when you take it into your head to do the homemaker thing.

That sounded promising.

He chewed some more—he makes it a practice to always chew each piece something like fifty-four times—and flipped open the newspaper to see what had been going on locally while he’d been gone. Eyes glued to some story about Charles and Camilla, he absently asked, Wasn’t there something you said you wanted to tell me? He yawned and briefly glanced my way, looking a bit knackered after his long trip. Didn’t you indicate that there was a reason why you were fattening me up for the kill?

I’m pregnant, I said, remembering the simple script I’d planned out earlier in the day. I’m late and I think I must be pregnant.

Trevor didn’t even bother to look up again. Oh, that. He flipped another page. That happened to Sam’s Dolly and it turned out that she just had a bad case of anorexia, compounded by acid reflux. Then he smiled at me, helpfully, indulgently. But if you want, why don’t you pick yourself up one of those at-home test kits? That should put your mind at ease.

Okay, so maybe it wasn’t exactly the reaction I’d envisioned, but it was a start.

I would have thought that, given the news that we were going to have a baby, Trevor would have wanted to make wild passionate love to me that night. I certainly wanted to make wild passionate love to him.

But no.

Sorry, Janey. He gave my shoulder a vague pat when I made overtures to him in bed. I’m just so tired from the plane and all. And you know how lethargic red meat always makes me. Perhaps tomorrow night?

That’s okay, I said, watching him roll away before I even got the chance to explain just why it was okay.

And it really was okay, you see. Oh, sure, I would have liked to be physically close to him right then. But, I thought as Trevor started to snore, what did missing out on one night of passion really mean in the greater scheme of things? Trevor and I were going to have a baby together! I was finally going to have what everyone else had!

I let myself get—dare I say it?—sentimental.

I lay beside him, night-dreaming of our future together: pushing the pram down the street; going to rugby games or dance recitals—or even both if I had twins; being part of that rosy world I’d glimpsed while stalking the other pregos.

Then I thought of what it would mean to me personally: I’d finally be a member of The Club. After a life lived mostly on the fringes of what constituted normal female friendships for other women, I’d finally have a legitimate reason for joining in on their discussions. We would be able to talk about—oh, I don’t know—diaper rash or something. It wouldn’t really matter what we talked about. What mattered was that I’d be one of the group.

I thought and I night-dreamed, and I thought, and I night-dreamed…

Blast! There was that damned lower-back pain again, only now it was worse and the pain had radiated frontward to my abdomen as well.

I sighed, trotting off to the bathroom, thinking to follow Trevor’s earlier advice about taking Tylenol.

Switching on the bathroom light, I grabbed a glass and took two pills from the plastic bottle. Just as I was about to toss them back, however, I vaguely remembered something about pregnant women being not supposed to take certain kinds of painkillers, something about it being bad for the developing fetus. Was it just aspirin? Was it Tylenol, too? I couldn’t remember. I shook my head, dropped the pills back in the bottle, set down the glass. No point in taking any chances. I could just muscle through the pain. After all, I had a baby to think about.

Oh, well, I thought. I’m in here already. Might as well pee.

I dropped my drawers, squatted on the toilet.

Well, of course I had gotten my period.

I’d never been pregnant at all.

I don’t know why I did what I did next, but, after peeing and wiping, without even thinking about it, I balled up my stained undies, wrapped them in paper, tiptoed across the flat and buried them in the kitchen trash beneath the leavings from dinner. Then I tiptoed back to the bedroom, got out a fresh pair of undies, returned to the bathroom, attached a sanitary napkin and tiptoed back to bed.

As I crawled in, Trevor stirred.

Shh, my mind telegraphed my urgently whispered plea to him, wishing him to remain sleeping while I lay on my side, watching him sleep blithely on as I thought about how to tell him that I wasn’t really pregnant after all.

I was just about to reach out my hand to rouse him in order to tell him what I’d discovered—I swear I was—when, in a reversal of the clichéd near-death experience, my future rather than my past flashed before my eyes.

Okay, so maybe it wasn’t my real future: my future as still-single Jane Taylor, now that I wasn’t really pregnant. No, it was my potential future as Trevor’s wife, as a mother, as one of The Club, the potential future represented by that rosy world I’d glimpsed while stalking, the potential future that I knew in my heart with certainty that I’d be giving up in the instant I told Trevor the truth.

Then I thought about how Trevor had behaved when I’d told him I was pregnant, when I’d still believed it myself.

I’ll never know what it was: the recollection of Trevor’s offhand manner, the fact that I had set myself up by telling others first—even if one of them was David, whom Trevor never spoke to, and the others were people neither of us knew—or the position of the stars and the planets, but I did a strange thing that night. In a second, without even thinking about it, I leapt into the void.

By leaping into the void, what I mean is that when Trevor stirred once more, murmuring a vague, Still awake? Is everything all right, Janey?, rather than telling him the truth, I simply replied, Everything’s fine. Go back to sleep.

I told myself that I wasn’t doing a hugely bad thing by not telling him right then and there. After all, it wasn’t as though he’d expressed hatred for the idea of our having a baby together. No, he’d hardly seemed bothered by it at all. Come to think of it, what he’d mostly been was indifferent.

I told myself again that I wasn’t doing a hugely bad thing.

Then I snuck upstairs to consult my best friend.

Did you tell him? David asked.

Yes. I hurled myself into a sling chair. The wretched thing would probably destroy my back, but who cared now.

Then why are you so glum?

Well…

Jane. He said it as though the name itself were a caution, full stop.

Well, the thing is, see, I’m not pregnant anymore. Actually, as it turns out, I never was.

For my part, in case I haven’t mentioned this before, I loved David with a rare human passion. I mean, if a girl’s lucky enough to have a gay pal, she has to be nice to him, doesn’t she? After all, they’re the only ones you can count on for the truth.

Have you become a fuckwit, Jane?

Apparently, David’s idiomatic English was just growing by leaps and bounds.

Let me get this straight, he pressed his verbal advantage, not even giving me a moment to answer his unanswerable question. You now realize that you are not pregnant, but you are neglecting to share that teensy bit of information with the father of your nonexistent child. May one be so bold as to enquire as to what you plan to do next? It’s not as if a person can impersonate being pregnant, like a trained assassin might impersonate being just a regular guy.

Well, I shrugged, attempting a smile, that was sort of the plan.

"Now you’ve got a plan? Oh, you’re really beginning to scare me, Jane."

Actually, I don’t have the whole plan yet, just the beginnings of one.

And what do you propose to do in nine months’ time? Don’t you think that eventually Trevor might begin to notice that there is no pitter-patter of little feet on the horizon?

Odd that you should say that. I don’t think that you can actually see the pitter-patter of little feet. It’s not really a visual thing at all.

Jane.

All right. It’s not a big plan. Like I said, it’s just a little bit of a plan. The way I figure it, now that I’ve already told Trevor that I’m pregnant and he hasn’t gone through the roof about it, I might as well just go ahead and get pregnant. In a way, when you think about it, it’s not exactly like I’m trapping him in the conventional sense, not since his behavior indicates that he’s not terribly bothered about it. It’s more like I’ve trapped myself.

You could, of course, resort to the truth, Jane.

I didn’t even bother to dignify that with an answer.

Then I explained to David all about the rosy place that being pregnant had come to represent in my mind. You see, I said, finishing up, "I just can’t give that up."

"You can’t give up this rosy place of pregnancy? But you’re not even pregnant. Don’t you think that maybe you’re putting the cart way too far ahead of the horse?"

I impatiently shrugged off his objection. Details.

Details?

"Yes, details."

Meaning…?

Meaning I’ll just get pregnant. So the order of events is a little screwed up. It’ll work. You’ll see.

David shook his head. I’ll never understand why you want to marry him so badly, anyway, that paragon of manhood. Just out of curiosity, what did Trevor say when you told him?

The First Trimester

The First Month

So, you see, actually, when you really think about it, this was all Trevor’s fault in a way, since he was the one who suggested that I get the at-home pregnancy test kit in the first place.

If what follows smacks a bit of being something of an apologia, I think it only fair to point out that most people never see their own tragic flaws. For my part, I am fully aware of what my shortcomings are. Does that mean I should be instantly forgiven them? Hardly. But at least I’m willing to be honest about who I am, and if who I am is a fairly small-minded person who wastes most of her days in silly-minded pursuits, nothing about who I am has ever been quite so bad as to add up to Jack the Ripper.

Anyway, I’ve always been what you might call a selfish person, always been fairly free about admitting it, at least to myself. Oh, now mind you, I don’t mean selfish in the grab-for-the-last-slice-of-pizza-when-with-friends way; that would be bad for what little image I have. Nor do I mean selfish in the willing-to-push-old-lady-out-of-way-to-secure-last-seat-on-tube-even-if-it-is-next-to-stark-raving-bonkers-loon sort of way; ditto above. No, I mean selfish in the garden-variety, monkey-see, monkey-do sort of way that’s been the bane of my existence ever since I was three years old. That was when I first saw my sister playing with a doll—a Kewpie doll, mind you, with messy red hair and a tongue that shot out at you like a snake when you poked its stomach, the kind that would normally give me nightmares—and knew I had to have one myself. Even if it meant biding my time until she was asleep and easing it out of her arms, telling her when she woke screaming in tears, "She wasn’t yours anyway, you know. You only dreamt that Mummy and Daddy gave her to you. Here I cradled my new baby in my arms. There, there, I lullabyed her, before looking down once again at my crying sister, Sophie. Now that you’re awake and not dreaming any longer, I pointed out sternly, you can see that the baby isn’t yours at all. It’s mine."

Ah, Sister Sophie: I guess I sort of think of her as a nun—a golden, beautiful, sort-of-mean nun. One year my senior and perfection itself in nearly every way, it was in fact a rare occurrence indeed for me to get the better of her. She was a real blonde with razor-straight hair, always got good grades, always had dates, always had the lion’s share of anything on offer in life, including our parents’ attention. In fact, as had once been explicitly stated to me by them, the only reason they’d ever conceived me in the first place was as a playmate for her.

It is a matter of public record that I was always the more aesthetically challenged of the Taylor girls. They say she never even drooled as a baby. I, on the other hand, had a steady stream of saliva running from lower lip to chest from the get-go, family legend holding that they had to keep me in bibs pretty much well from birth until grade school. In short, then, being Sophie’s younger sister was about as bad as having the Queen for one’s older sister without one’s older sister being the Queen. You might say that Sophie and I had the biggest case of sibling rivalry in the world since Liz and Maggie, except that Sophie didn’t even appear to know about it. Am I exaggerating when I compare my lot in life to that of the Queen of England’s late sister? Perhaps. But I can honestly say that, based on firsthand knowledge, I can certainly understand why Maggie drank.

But back to the Kewpie doll. It didn’t even phase me when I had raging nightmares about that darting serpentine tongue every night for the next month, until the doll was finally irretrievably lost somewhere—probably into the void behind the big blue couch in the living room, the black hole of our very early childhood—and Sophie acquired the next thing that I simply couldn’t live without.

Now that I’m an adult—in years anyway—working for a London publishing company, not all that much has changed. Oh, I don’t mean that I’m still stealing my sister’s dolls; nothing like that. I’ve moved on to much more mature levels of envy; I’ve taken to coveting on a higher plane: ohm. No, no more childish things for me. Teetering on the cusp of thirty, for the past year the object of my grasping jealousy has been matrimony—much to the chagrin of Trevor Rhys-Davies, the suspenders-snappingly handsome stockbroker I’ve been sharing a place in Knightsbridge with for the past two—a state that sister Soph has been blissfully wedded in for exactly that length of time. To Tony. Who cooks Italian on weekends and who lovingly encourages her to put her feet up whenever she gets tired, which she does much more often now, her being—suck it up and tell it all now, Jane! Tell the worst!—five months’ pregnant.

So I guess that, technically, you’d have to say that matrimony was last year’s rivalry problem. After all, it was last year that I won the Bad Sportsmanship Award for Inability to Throw Rice Nicely; last year that I used to sob uncontrollably at all of the weddings of friends and acquaintances, not out of happiness for them but out of sheer misery for myself; last year that I’d sniffled onto Trevor’s shoulder as he led me around the dance floor after the bride had cut the cake, had a garter put on her in a salacious manner and thrown the bouquet to some other guest whom I’d tried to tackle. It’s not fair, I sobbed. Why isn’t it ever me? To which Trevor would caress my fashionably spiky dark hair as best he could, sigh heavily and say, Oh, Jane.

Technically, then, this year’s problem is no longer matrimony. Technically, the green-eyed-monster dilemma for this year is pregnancy.

Pregnancy envy, for those of you who have never heard of it, is something akin to penis envy in that the appeal lies in what is represented by the physical shape of the thing itself. It’s sort of like wanting to wear a cross around your neck without ever being at all sure that you’d want to set foot in any kind of church.

Notice that I don’t say a thing about babies. This is very specific, so pay attention.

It was only April, and I had already been invited to, and guiltily felt compelled to attend, seven baby showers that year: three for people at work, only one of whom I knew in a more than passing way; two for people whose weddings Trevor and I had attended the year before (eager little rabbits, weren’t they?); one for a woman whose name I hadn’t recognized at all but whose invitation said that the shower was being catered by Food by Gloria (I love catered food); and one for a woman that I had grown up with. My mother always remembers her as being my best friend as a child and had wrangled a spare invitation for me out of the girl’s mother under this pretext. I, on the other hand, remember myself as having despised the girl intensely for her Tory views—perhaps that’s a slight exaggeration of my political precocity, but she was an annoying girl. Still, I went anyway, in the hopes of more catered food, and with what I thought of as a generous gift certificate to A Mothers Work: The Breastfeeding Emporium tucked inside my purse, fighting with my mother the whole way to Brighton: She was your best friend!—I hated the twit! And, even if no more showers loomed in my immediate