This Unplanned Pregnancy Is Going Exactly According to Plan
Television for Women by Danit Brown
The whole mess started when Owen was fired at the end of summer term. Estie had been right at thirty-six weeks and two days when he came home and announced that his position as an English professor at Norton College had been terminated. “Financial exigency,” he said, his eyes puffy. It was a good hour-and-fifteen-minute drive from Norton to Briarwood, where he and Estie lived, and Estie guessed he’d cried all the way home.
He spent the next thirty minutes hauling in boxes of books from his car and stacking them neatly in the closet of what was going to be the baby’s room, and the ten minutes after that cleaning up cat vomit. The cat, Herbert, disapproved of strong emotions.
“So what happens now?” Estie asked. “Do you look for another position?”
“I don’t know,” Owen said. “No. Not yet. They don’t post English jobs until October.”
Estie felt her stomach clench, or maybe that was just Braxton Hicks. It was the end of July, and the baby was due in late August. “What are we going to do?”
“I don’t know,” Owen said again. “It just happened. I need time to think.”
Estie nodded, ignoring the baby’s kicks of protest against her ribs. The truth was, she’d been waiting for something like this to happen ever since she’d gotten pregnant, possibly even before. Estie knew she’d been lucky so far: the major disasters of her life up to this point—her parents’ divorce, the not-quite-breakup with her college boyfriend, Dan—had been relatively minor. But if reports of tornadoes and school shootings had taught her anything, it was that luck was fleeting and complacency dangerous: the other shoe was out there, dangling, ready to drop, and it was important not to be caught off guard. Except that Estie had been caught off guard. Owen losing his job felt like a failure of imagination on her part: it had never occurred to her that a tenured professor could be laid off. How had she not considered this possibility? Why had she not made any backup plans?
Then again, it wasn’t as if much had been going according to plan lately. Take, for instance, the pregnancy itself. Yes, Estie was glad she was pregnant—she was; she was really—but she’d always imagined that she would be the one setting the schedule, the one who would some day find herself weeping in the diaper aisle at Target, triggered by a passing stroller or the photo of some celebrity’s sleeping baby, and then rush home and declare it was time. Instead, it was Owen who had made the decision back in January, after they’d gone to one of Estie’s coworkers’ baby shower. The coworker, Jillian, was the receptionist at Big Earth, the artisan tile factory where Estie worked as a glazer, and she was the kind of person who emailed everyone photos of her positive pregnancy test, then separately cornered each of her coworkers and forced them to place a hand on her small mound of belly while, flushed with pride, she asked, “Can you feel the peanut kick? Now? And now?” When it had been Estie’s turn to feel the baby move, Jillian had guided her hand so far down along her abdomen that Estie’s fingers had brushed against the waistband of Jillian’s underwear. “Okay, I feel it, I feel it,” she’d said, even though the only thing she’d felt was Jillian’s hot skin. “She could’ve at least bought me dinner first,” Estie complained to her best friend, Alice, and Alice, who worked at a start-up in Chicago that was developing a tartar-detecting smart toothbrush, had laughed: “At least there’s only one of her,” she’d said. There were four pregnant women in Alice’s unit alone.
Jillian’s shower had been held at Precious Insights, a converted movie theater that specialized in big-screen 4D gender-determination ultrasounds that you watched from “luxurious stadium seating” while sipping mocktails from a sippy cup. According to Jillian, vanity ultrasounds were all the rage and women-only baby showers were passé, but then again, Jillian also liked wearing maternity tees that said things like “Don’t eat watermelon seeds” and “You’re kicking me, smalls.” Still, there were going to be cupcakes, so Estie had figured that she and Owen would spend a pleasant afternoon rolling their eyes at each other and feeling superior. And the afternoon had certainly started out that way, with Owen grimacing at the Precious Insights slogan, which was painted on the wall in a precious, impossible-to-miss script: “The Largest of Blessing’s Are Those That Are Small.” Nothing set Owen off like apostrophe errors in corporate logos. “See,” he said, pointing to the same error in the program the hostess handed them. “If you’re not careful, these mistakes just perpetuate themselves.”
They’d found seats in the right corner of the theater, near the emergency exit because you never knew, and looked on as Jillian hoisted herself up on the cot in the center of the room and hitched up her maternity blouse without hesitation. The ultrasound tech, a woman in blue scrubs and lots of blue eye shadow, smeared jelly on Jillian’s abdomen, which, unsheathed, looked plastic and fake, crisscrossed by pale stretch marks and so taut with baby that her belly button appeared to be turned inside out, like one of those pop-up timers people used to cook turkeys. Then the lights dimmed, Jillian and her husband clasped hands, and the Dolby Surround Sound speakers began blasting the whooshing of the baby’s heart into the observation area. A few seconds later, the large screen behind Jillian flickered to life and there was the baby in all its yellow three-dimensional glory. Next to Estie, Owen exhaled loudly, as if he were the one who was nervous.
“Here is Baby’s foot,” the ultrasound tech said, pointing. “Here are Baby’s little toes.” She moved the wand a little, then announced, voice bursting with pride, “And here’s Baby’s little boy part,” as if she’d just attached the penis to the baby herself.
Estie had expected Owen to make some sort of crack about the solemnity of it all, but all he did was lean closer and squeeze her knee. The tech slid the wand over a little more, and on the monitor, the baby’s blurry yellow face filled the screen, shifting in and out of focus as if he were pressing himself against a fleshy yellow wall, a tiny Han Solo trapped in carbonite. You’d make out the orbs of his eyes and his flat little baby nose, and then they would recede and melt into the background, or worse, transform into dark hollows as if the baby were all skull, as if he’d forgotten to grow muscle and skin. “It looks like an alien,” Estie started to say, but just then the baby yawned and rubbed his eyes with a small fist, looking as aggrieved as any human interrupted in the middle of a deep sleep.
“Wow,” Owen had whispered, his voice reverent. “I mean, wow.” And just like that, getting pregnant became yet another milestone in a long list of milestones that refused to unfold as seen on TV—a first kiss full of spit and onion rings, a first high school party without beer or weed, first-time sex without soft lighting or simultaneous orgasms. Instead of swelling violin music and a gentle baby wakeup call, what Estie had gotten was Owen shuffling her off to the bedroom the moment they got home, then undressing her from top to bottom, all business, no kissing. “Sheesh,” Estie had said, “what’s your hurry?” Her fingers were still sticky from the cupcakes, and there was a smudge of blue frosting at one corner of Owen’s mouth, but his urgency had made her feel irresistible—he was usually so calm, so measured in everything he did—and so she’d helped him with the clasp of her bra, with her zipper, with her socks, with his, and tried not to feel self-conscious and fat when he lifted her onto the bed and climbed on top of her.
“Feel my heart,” Owen had said once he was inside her, and Estie could feel it, beating rapidly against her own chest. She waited for Owen to pull out and put on a condom, and when he didn’t, she’d said, “Wait.” Owen paused, resting his full weight against her so that she was pinned. “I really really love you,” he told her. “We’re adults. It’s time.”
She didn’t know what she wanted, just what she ought to want.
“Be serious,” Estie said, squirming.
“Come on,” Owen whispered, still on top of her, his lips against her ear. “I want you. I want you and me and a baby of our own.”
Estie swallowed hard, suddenly aware of Owen’s bony ribs against her chest, his jutting hips against her inner thighs. She could have told him to stop, but doing so felt pointless—she didn’t know what she wanted, just what she ought to want. She was thirty-two. She was married and gainfully employed. She’d always figured she’d have a baby someday. She closed her eyes and tried to relax. Of course she wanted a baby. Of course she did. “Okay,” she told Owen. “Okay. Let’s do it.”
Even though only high school girls got pregnant the first time they had unprotected sex, Estie had gotten pregnant right away. “That’s some good sperm,” Owen said proudly when she showed him the first positive pregnancy test, and then the second and the third, because what if the first and second tests were defective? They waited until they had the doctor’s confirmation before telling Estie’s mother, who for months had been campaigning vigorously for Estie to have a baby before her eggs shriveled up and her uterus rotted, never mind that Estie’s brother, Sammy, had already provided her mother with two perfectly good grandchildren. “Nobody wants a perimenopausal mom,” Estie’s mother had pointed out helpfully time and again, although now that Estie was finally pregnant, instead of shrieking in delight or bursting into tears of joy, her mother contented herself with eyeing Estie’s waistline and saying, “I thought as much.” Then, after some further consideration, she added, “You’ll have to get rid of the cat. Cats suck the breath out of babies.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Estie said, or maybe even snapped, although later that evening, while Herbert was using the litter box, she surreptitiously asked Google, “Do cats suffocate babies?” and Google answered ominously, “Not purposely,” which wasn’t as comforting as it could have been.
But even though her mother’s reaction to the pregnancy had been disappointing, it had still been far better than Alice’s response, which had been a pause so pregnant it put Estie’s actual pregnancy to shame. Estie knew what the pause meant: Alice was trying to think of something nice to say. She’d done something similar back when Estie told her she was marrying Owen, but that had been because Alice had impossibly high standards for marriage, and so that silence had been easy to dismiss. Alice’s hesitation about the pregnancy, though, rattled Estie. She cleared her throat. “You’re not happy about the baby?”
“That isn’t it,” Alice said. “I just didn’t know you were trying.”
“We weren’t,” Estie said, “and then we were.”
“Huh,” Alice said. “That’s the biological imperative to reproduce for you. You couldn’t help it.”
“No, I could have,” Estie said. “It’s not like that.” She put a hand on her belly, which felt, at four weeks, no different than it ever had—soft and paunchy—and for a moment she wondered if maybe she was mistaken and she wasn’t pregnant after all. Please, she caught herself thinking, please. She didn’t let herself finish the thought, but after she hung up, she found herself taking the final pregnancy test in the four-pack she’d purchased, blushing in embarrassment when the second blue line showed almost immediately. She was still pregnant. There was no reason to think otherwise. The whole thing, she reminded herself, was going exactly according to plan.
After he finished stacking the boxes of books from his office in the nursery closet, an exhausted Owen told Estie, “I don’t think I can go to childbirth class. Not tonight. Tell them I’m sick?” Then he lay down on the couch, head down, arms and legs drawn inward, and fell asleep almost immediately, Herbert curled up behind his knees.
“Okay,” Estie said, mainly to herself. She considered staying home too, but that night’s topic was diaper changes, and those seemed important. Plus, she needed time to think, or to not think, or to do or not do something that would soothe the panic rising in her throat. Maybe a class full of pregnant women led by an instructor who kept reminding them to trust their Inner Wisdom was exactly what she needed.
Except that it apparently wasn’t. Class was held in a yoga studio with mirrors on two walls, which meant that the instructor, Rita, with her flowing skirts and jangly bracelets, spent most of class addressing her own reflection while the parents-to-be sat in a semicircle in front of her, bobbing up and down on giant inflatable balls. While Rita lectured about the evils of absorbent gel beads—“I’m not against Pampers or Huggies per se,” she explained—Estie tried to convince herself that Owen getting laid off was a good thing, a kind of parental leave that would enable him to be fully present for the birth and the first couple months of the baby’s life. This was not, she told herself, the beginning of a downward spiral that would have them living out of their car by Christmas. Her mom still lived in town. Her brother worked for Google. Nobody would let them starve. She forced herself to focus on Rita, who was passing out baby dolls to everyone. The doll she handed Estie was naked except for a diaper and made of yellowing plastic that made her appear jaundiced. Her hair was blond and matted, and her eyes didn’t shut properly, as if she instinctively understood that Estie wasn’t to be trusted.
Rita returned to the front of the classroom and clapped her hands sharply, then announced, “Rule number one: If there’s no changing table, place your baby on the floor. Babies can’t roll off the floor.”
Obediently, Estie heaved herself off her yoga ball and began the arduous process of getting down on her knees.
“Now remember—” Rita began, and that was when it happened: Estie, still making her way down to the floor, lost her balance and tipped forward—stupid shifting center of gravity—her knee landing squarely on the doll baby’s sternum. The doll baby crumpled with a high-pitched squeak, and the pressure of the escaping air launched her head across the room. The other parents-to-be gasped, then watched in horror as the head rolled to a stop at Rita’s feet. Estie watched in horror too, too mortified to laugh when Rita picked up the head and quipped, “Okay, start over. The actual first rule of parenting is: do not crush your baby.” She walked over to Estie and pried her trembling fingers off the doll’s torso so she could shove the baby’s head back onto her little stump of a neck. Then she straightened up and checked her reflection in one of the mirrors. “Reattaching limbs,” she cautioned, tucking a wayward curl behind her ear, “isn’t nearly this easy in real life.”
Estie knew that, and she also knew that a head wasn’t a limb, but she was too busy blushing and sweating to say anything. And that was pretty much how she spent the remainder of class: cringing and sweating and using a wet wipe to clean up the yellow mustard Rita had thoughtfully squeezed into each doll’s diaper in what she called “a touch of realism,” then cringing and sweating some more. When class finally—at long last—ended, Estie was the first one out the door, the first one screeching out of the yoga studio’s parking lot: she was going to have to find another childbirth class in another town.
Apparently having your husband get laid off and accidentally crushing a doll baby wasn’t portentous enough for one day.
AC blasting, she drove around in circles until she felt calm enough to go home, or at least calm enough to stop at the Creamery for some ice cream—two scoops of chocolate chip for her, a mint Oreo shake for Owen. She parked, then hoisted herself out of her car, and, because apparently having your husband get laid off and accidentally crushing a doll baby wasn’t portentous enough for one day, she spotted Penny Smilovitz standing three people ahead of her in line. Estie hadn’t seen Penny since their freshman year in college, but she still recognized her immediately in much the same way that she recognized her own foreshortened reflection in the funhouse at the annual Kiwanis Fair. The acne was gone, thank goodness, but Penny still had those liquid brown eyes and the nose that, during puberty, had broadened and lengthened at an alarming rate but had now finally settled into the right size for her face.
“Oh my God,” Estie said. “Penny.” Almost immediately, she wished she’d kept quiet. She wasn’t proud of the way she’d handled her friendship with Penny, a friendship she’d resisted for the first two months of ninth grade, put off by Penny’s frizzy hair, her braces, her giant grown-woman boobs. You had to dress for the job you wanted, not the job you had, and the job teenage Estie had wanted—being popular—didn’t allow for (and here the grown-up Estie had to wince, because there was no good way to put it) ugly friends. Then again, at fourteen Estie had been no prize herself—sallow and plain, with greasy bangs and cold sores that showed up like clockwork two days before her period—and it didn’t take her long to understand that high school was much easier to navigate with a partner at the ready for science lab, for gym class, for group projects, a partner who didn’t reek of sweat and cigarettes or spend most of class drawing lightning bolts on the soles of their shoes. And so she and Penny had settled into a friendship of sorts, an arrangement of convenience, maybe, which was fine. More than fine, actually, because going over to Penny’s to do things like bake cookies or thumb through the dirty parts of Penny’s mom’s romance novels turned out to be kind of fun, even if it hadn’t been the right kind of fun. And even that didn’t matter because, as Estie kept reminding herself, nobody actually wanted high school to be the best years of their life, not when there were a good sixty years to get through afterward. And so her arrangement with Penny had lasted right up until they’d graduated and gone to different colleges and “drifted apart”—which was how Estie liked to think of it—and the last Estie had heard, Penny had moved to California.
Except now Penny was back and standing in line for ice cream. “Oh my God, Estie,” she said, dropping back to stand beside her. “Look at you!” She gestured at Estie’s ginormous belly. “Do you know what you’re having?”
Estie did know. “A boy, thank God.”
Penny patted her own flat stomach. “I just hit twelve weeks, so we don’t know yet.”
“I swear,” said the ponytailed man who was eavesdropping behind them, “you pregnant women are everywhere.” He winked at Penny. “If only there were some kind of pill . . .”
“Har har,” Estie said, and Penny gave him a withering look, and apparently the shared bond of being pregnant among idiots trumped twelve years of silence. “It’s so weird to see you,” Penny said after the server handed them their ice cream, “and also not weird at all. We only moved back, like, two weeks ago.”
“That’s so great!” Estie said, although she wasn’t sure if it really was all that great. Standing next to Penny after all these years was making her feel dowdy and fat. Had she always been shorter than Penny? Had Penny always looked better in jeans? And then there was the matter of the square-jawed and massively-forearmed man who was saving Penny a seat at one of the few shady tables outside.
“Wow,” Estie said when Penny introduced the man as her husband, Jack, “you’re huge.”
“I know,” Penny said. “I thought it was cute, but now I’m going to have to push out his giant baby.” She pretended to shudder, and Jack rolled his eyes.
They spent the next few minutes exchanging headlines—Jack was an accountant, Penny worked at Briarwood Speech and Language out by the mall, and they’d just bought a house on the Old West Side, a neighborhood full of stately Victorians with gingerbread trim. “I’m at Big Earth,” Estie said when it was her turn. “And Owen is a professor at Norton. Or he was. He just got laid off.” She thought it was a good sign that she managed to say this last part without her voice cracking, although she did have to blink a few times when Penny said, “Oh no. Poor him. And poor you.”
“Oh, we’re fine,” Estie said, careful to keep her voice light. “He’ll find something else—there are, like, a million colleges between here and Detroit.” Then, as if suddenly remembering, she added, “Speaking of Owen, his ice cream is melting. So great to run into you. I’ll see you around?”
Penny nodded, and that would have been the end of it, but Jack had apparently never heard of Michigan invites and how everyone knew they were only for show, and so, just as Estie turned to leave, he pulled a pen and a crumpled receipt out of his pants pocket. “Wait a second,” he said, tearing the receipt in half. “You two should exchange phone numbers.”
Back in the duplex, Owen was still asleep, so Estie slid his shake into the freezer, then worked herself up into a state of righteous indignation on his behalf—because anger had to be better than panic—before calling Alice to fill her in. “All those weekends of grading,” she said, “and for what?”
“But I thought he had tenure,” Alice said.
“I know!” Estie said. “Can you believe it?”
She waited for Alice to say something else, something equivalent to Penny’s “Poor you,” or “I’m sorry,” or “Those assholes.” But instead, what Alice said was, “I didn’t think colleges worked like that.”
“Well, they do,” Estie told her. “They can lay you off if they run out of money.” She felt incandescent with rage, so much so that even the warm purring weight of Herbert on her chest was doing nothing to settle her down.
“Did they have to lay off a lot of people?” Alice asked.
“I don’t know. Probably? I didn’t think to ask.” Even Estie could hear the whine in her own voice. She loved Alice, her logic, her ability to advise Estie through flight delays and corrupted Word documents, but this—Owen losing his job—was different. There was no logic to it, at least no logic that didn’t involve moving numbers from one budget line to another. “I mean, we just found out.”
Alice was quiet for a few seconds. “I’m sorry. Is there anything I can do?”
By then, it was too little, too late—everyone knew that a sorry you had to solicit didn’t really count—so Estie just said, “Thank you. I don’t think so.” And then, because she didn’t want Alice to hang up mad, she said, “At least Herbert is having a good day.” Alice was the one who had given her Herbert, the one who had driven all the way from Chicago to Briarwood with kitten Herbert in a soft-sided carrier after Dan, Estie’s college boyfriend, had ghosted Estie. Up until then, Estie hadn’t even known she’d wanted a cat, but after that first night of Herbert sleeping between her knees like a small, thrumming hot-water bottle, there had been no question she was keeping him. “How’d you know?” she’d asked Alice over breakfast, and Alice had shrugged: “I just did.”
Now, Estie held the phone to Herbert’s neck so that Alice could hear him purr, and maybe that in itself was enough, because by the time they’d hung up, Estie felt calmer. It wasn’t as if the world was ending. Somehow, she and Owen would be fine.
