Another female in the house. Is this what she wants?
No, Sonia likes being the only woman. The alpha female. She loves the warm love of her boys, she loves being surrounded by men, she always has — three men or four men or more. In college, she played cards once a week with a group of guys. Russell, Bob, Jason, Stan. She loved being in that place, a smokey, vulgar place where women rarely were. She loved it. She still does. Her husband and her boys. But what if it’s a girl? She hasn’t changed the diaper of a little girl since high school. Since she herself was a babysitter. What to do in the face of a little, naked vagina, an innocent pink baby bird of a pussy? God, the thought of it. No, Sonia doesn’t want a little girl. She was a little girl herself. Why would she want that?
Her friends, the other mothers in the neighborhood, want girls. Nearly every woman she’s met in the playground wants a girl. A girl, just like me! Maybe she’ll look just like me! A girl to shop with. A girl for whom to buy pink dresses. One woman — an educated, white, middle-class woman — with three kids, the youngest being a girl, a little thing, maybe eighteen months old, explained, “She helps me pick up after the boys. She’s just a baby, but she knows how to pick up. My boys don’t, of course.” Even now, women still want girls to help them around the house! Sonia doesn’t want a girl to help her clean up after her boys. Her boys know how to put away their trains, their dinosaurs, their shoes. What does it mean to think a boy doesn’t know how to pick up after himself? What does it mean to think a little girl should pick up after her brothers?
And then her friend Lisa, who explained that she wanted a girl to talk to. Someone she could talk to, because, well, her boys weren’t very good communicators. She said this to Sonia, as she clung to her infant daughter. Her sons, listening, playing nearby, looked sadly toward their mother. “You know how men are,” said Lisa. “They have no personal skills. They can’t listen. They can’t talk about their feelings. But Lulu, she’ll be my friend! She’ll understand what it means to be a woman. We’ll have so much in common.” Just then, one of her sons threw a car at her. And Sonia thought, oh, but how men communicate.
A daughter. The sonogram would tell. A daughter to mock her, to grow young and beautiful while she gets older and less attractive, a daughter who knows just what to say to truly and deeply hurt her. There was a time when women wanted boys. When society worshipped boys. When men wanted sons for the farm. When women wanted boys for their husbands. And now, women want girls. They want more of themselves. They have self-esteem? They love themselves? Or do they just openly get to hate men? No, Sonia would love three boys. Sonia is afraid of women.
Dick, of course, would like a daughter. The dream daughter, someone pretty, someone who, as his wife dries up and ages, he could look to for beauty, for inspiration. Someone who wouldn’t identify with him, no, but would just love him. Dick loves his boys very much, but face it, the day would come when they would see their father for who he is — a man, not a God, and a tired, overworked, slightly bored man. And they would be disappointed. But a daughter? She would love him. In his dreams, a daughter would never grow disappointed, disillusioned. Not his daughter, no. And Sonia knows this about Dick. Knows he wants a little girl. Is this why she’s going through with this pregnancy? To give her husband what she herself has? The love of the opposite sex? Is she that generous toward him? And what if it’s not a girl?
The train is empty. No one reads next to her. She heads back home, her arms loose at her sides. Suddenly, Sonia thinks, I’m alone on this train. Something could happen to me! Where are the other people? The ones to protect me from the bad kind of other people? Do muggers still stalk the subway trains, as they did ten years ago, when she first moved here? But it’s the middle of the day. Why is she so frightened? The next stop, and no one gets on. She panics, standing in the cold air. My children! They need me! Swaying as she goes, she heads down the aisle and opens the door to get into the next car, where she hopes there are people. For a moment, she’s outside of either car, back in the heat, a dark, horrible heat in a tunnel underground. And then she opens the next door and the light hits her, the cold air-conditioning licks her face. A scattering of three people look up and see a woman, her eyes bugged out in fear, pale and sickly seeming, moving quietly to take a seat on an unoccupied bench.
Tom and Mike. She needs them. They make her less afraid. She feels naked and vulnerable without them. Clinging to her purse, she thinks, But once, a long time ago, I was alone in the world. And I wasn’t afraid.
The sonogram appointment is set. The blood work is done. It all feels so official. A baby, a baby. One more and then no more.
8
The first trimester ends one morning. Just like that, Sonia wakes up and the light through the skylight above is less harsh and the room feels fresh. The air in her loft is not moist, is not stuffy. Summer is over. Her sickness is over. It is fall. It is the real new beginning, the real beginning of this pregnancy. It is September, God bless. She stands and stretches, and where is Dick? Already making her coffee, already with the boys. She goes to the bathroom and pulls down her underwear and sits and pees and she just can’t believe it — she is not sick anymore. She is better. It’s over, just like that. Just like the first time and just like the second time, one day she is sick, as she’s been for three solid months, and then the next day she is not. She is no longer nauseated, she is no longer miserable, her head no longer hurts. Her mouth is warm and pasty, like a morning mouth, but not dry and disgusting, with the stink of wet garbage. It’s over! The first trimester is over! She skips downstairs and her husband stands at the counter, glancing fearfully toward her and she smiles at him, and then she grabs her coffee and kisses her boys, one at a time, first little Mike, then Tom, and then she takes her coffee and heads for the living room and and — it’s over! She’s not sick. Lord above, heavens above, she is better. She looks out the window and then bends to open it — this she can do, she can bend to her low window and pull it upward, it’s stiff and old, but she can do it, she’s not sick! — and the air comes in and it’s sweet like fresh hay, this Brooklyn September air. It’s the cleanest, freshest air she’s ever smelled, ever felt against her skin. And goosebumps rise on her arms, and they are bumps of joy, bumps from the crisp air that she herself managed to bring into this room, not from the cold, clammy sickness that just yesterday, made her feel as if she’d rather die than anything else. That she would never make it. That she was not going to make it through another day. No, no these prickly, risen pores on her skin line her arms and the back of her neck because life is a good thing now, a very good thing, and everything is going to be alright and the air is fresh and the birds in the still green trees sing to her and her alone! And Sonia wants to cry for joy but she has no tears. Dick walks up to her now, from behind, and he doesn’t quite touch her because she hasn’t wanted him to touch her for months now, and he says, “How’s the coffee?”