It was the pot, not the coffee. She and Mark had received four electric coffee-makers as wedding presents, and three of them had been promptly returned for refunds. The fourth, with a twenty-four cup capacity, had been retained; it might be useful for large parties. Andrea made coffee in an old-fashioned drip pot like the one her mother used.
Hadn’t she told Eileen this? Hadn’t they had this conversation before?
“About four months to go, Andrea?”
“Three months and three weeks. According to Dr. Lerner.”
“Getting excited?”
“I don’t know. Not exactly.” She sat back, folded her hands over her rounded abdomen. She remembered the first time she’d felt life, that extraordinary sensation of alien movement within herself. “I suppose I’m excited,” she said. “It’s hard to be excited from day to day.”
“I know what you mean. With Jason I was nauseous the whole nine months, did I tell you?”
“I think so.”
“So I didn’t have time to be excited.”
Andrea lit a cigarette. She had tried to stop as soon as she had learned that she was pregnant, apprehensive that smoking might have a bad effect on her unborn child. So many things seemed to be bad for the unborn. Her own morning sickness had lasted less than three months, but during its duration Lerner had refused to prescribe anything for it.
“Not since Thalidomide,” he’d said. “You wake up nauseous, you have a glass of orange juice, you throw up, and then you’ll be set for the rest of the day. I wouldn’t even take aspirin for headaches if I were you.”
But it had been impossible to stop smoking. It made her terribly nervous, and mightn’t the nervousness be as bad for the baby as the smoking? Mark had suggested the possibility and it made a certain amount of sense to her.
“I’ll just finish this coffee and then I’ll get Jason,” Eileen was saying. “Nursery school makes such a difference in my life. It’s not even two months yet, I’m not used to it, but it makes a real difference. You feel as though you’ve got space to breathe again, you know what I mean?”
“Sure.”
“But I shouldn’t be saying this to you. You haven’t even had the kid yet and I’m telling you what a pleasure it is to be able to dump him on the nursery school. Well, I’ll enjoy my freedom while I’ve got it. It won’t be long before people tell me to sit down while they bring the coffee.”
“You’re not—”
“No, not yet, but didn’t I tell you we’re going to try in a month or so? Because I’d rather have the baby in the spring or early summer so I don’t have to carry in the hot weather. And if I’m like I was with Jason I won’t have to try for very long. All Roger has to do is look at me and I’m pregnant.”
Andrea drew on her cigarette. It was a strange relationship that she had with Eileen Fradin. She felt at once both more and less mature than Eileen. She was almost three years older, had gone out of town to college, had lived and worked in New York. Eileen had never lived other than in her parents’ house until the day she married Roger Fradin. She had read almost nothing, had done no traveling to speak of, and had spent all her life in a world bounded by her family and the friends of her childhood.
On the other hand, Eileen had been married for four years and had a three-year-old son. She lived not in an apartment like Andrea but in a tract house in Tonawanda. She knew whom to call when something went wrong with the washing machine. She was more experienced at the business of being a wife and mother and, Andrea sometimes thought, more efficiently designed from the beginning to play those roles.
“I got pregnant so easy the first time, Andrea.” She leaned forward and her eyes narrowed. “If you want to know something, I wasn’t even a hundred percent sure I wanted to. And then it was too late to change my mind.”
“How did you feel then? After you found out you were pregnant?”
“Oh, well, you have to feel excited, right? I mean maybe I was going through some doubts, but then it was too late so I put it out of my mind. We wanted children, and there was no question about it. I just got to thinking maybe we should have a little more time to ourselves. Not so much for Roger’s sake because he was older.” Roger was a few years older than Mark. “But for my own sake, I was like still in college and so young. Of course I was looking for an excuse to quit college anyway but I thought, you know, if we had another year or two to ourselves who would it hurt? You know what I mean?”
“Sure.”
“So now I think things worked out for the best. Jason’s three and I’m not even twenty-three yet. If I get pregnant right away and have the second one in, say, July, they’ll both be in college and I’ll be how old? Twenty-three and eighteen, I’ll be like forty-one. That’s still young.” She thought for a moment. “I think we’ll probably stop at two. Especially if the second one’s a girl. To have one of each. Or is it better to have two the same? What do you figure?”
“I don’t know.”
“I know Roger wanted a son to begin with, but I wonder does it matter to him if he has two sons or a son and a daughter? What he said the first time is all he wanted was a healthy baby.”
“That’s what Mark says.”
“I think that must be what everybody says, but I knew Roger wanted a boy, and afterward he admitted he was glad it was a boy. Does Mark want a son do you suppose?”
“I don’t honestly know. I suppose most men do, don’t they? But I don’t honestly know in Mark’s case.”
“I’ll tell you who was happiest Jason was a boy and that was my father. Having three daughters of his own and then my sister Marsha had a girl and I guess he never thought he’d see a grandson. Sometimes I think I’d like a little girl and other times I just don’t know. You didn’t have any brothers or sisters, did you, Andrea?”
“No.”
“I had Marsha three years older than me and Rochelle two years younger. Just a couple of weeks ago I was reading a magazine article about the middle child and it suddenly hit me. That’s what I was, a middle child! It gives you a lot to think about.”
“In what way?”
“Oh, I don’t know. To put it into words. But I was thinking, how many children are you supposed to have? If you got one it’s an only child and that can be a problem, and if it’s two they’ll be competitive, and if it’s three you’ve got the middle-child situation, and if it’s four — but a person could go crazy trying to bring up four children. Listen, don’t laugh.”
“You don’t want to be late picking up Jason.”
“Yeah, that’s the truth.” She set her cup on the end table, got to her feet. “Listen, give me a call or I’ll call you, huh, Andrea? Don’t bother, I’ll find my own way out. I think I can remember where the door is.”
“I’ll walk down with you. I want to see if the mail’s here yet.”
“I could bring it up, save you a few steps.”
“Oh, come off it, Eileen.”
“Listen, I’m telling you. Take advantage of it while you can. Once they’re born you never stop running.”
She carried the mail upstairs and sorted through it. All of it was addressed to Mark except for her Alumnae Bulletin from Bryn Mawr. She put Mark’s letters on the sideboard and sat down with the bulletin, but before she could open its envelope the telephone rang.
It was her mother. “I know I talked to you this morning,” she said, “but I just had a phone call. Sadie Robbins passed away. That’s Essie Davis’s mother.”
“Oh, that’s a shame.”
“In this case it’s a blessing. I won’t say what she had, but she was wasting away to nothing and they couldn’t even stop the pain toward the end.” The word cancer, of course, could not be spoken aloud, Andrea thought. “The funeral will be tomorrow. Your father and I will go, of course.”