A Fortunate Age by Joanna Rakoff

Author:Joanna Rakoff
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2015-04-24T04:00:00+00:00

ten

Sadie Peregrine was pregnant. This was big news. For many reasons, not the least of which being that she wasn’t yet married—Rose Peregrine was going to lose her shit, the group said—or that the father, as it turned out, wasn’t her boyfriend, Agent Mulder, but Ed Slikowski, whom they hadn’t even realized she was seeing, though they’d certainly been a bit suspicious of the frequency with which his name began showing up in conversation.

It was January of 2001, a bleak, cold winter, the sort that unfailingly led Rose to cry, “Don’t you wonder how the settlers survived? I could barely make it home from Bendel’s!” But the weather gave Sadie a convenient excuse to stay home (“It’s cold, Lil, I’m not schlepping all the way to Williamsburg”), so that she might avoid her friends and family for as long as possible, until she figured out what to do. There was a chance, she knew, that the pregnancy wouldn’t stick, and she could put it behind her and think through this mess she’d gotten herself into with Michael and Ed. And Tal, too, she supposed, for it was he that she wanted to call, he that she wanted to ask for help, but she couldn’t, of course. But she also knew, somehow, that it would stick, that this was it, that she needed to be a grown-up and rise to the occasion, make some decisions. And though, rationally, she knew the best thing would be for her to wake up bleeding one morning, the mere thought of this possibility, as the weeks went on, became enough to crowd her eyes with tears.

At the end of the month, she made an appointment with an obstetrician in Soho, randomly selected from her insurance plan’s directory—she certainly wasn’t going to old Dr. Moss, up on Park, whom her mother saw—and told her assistant she might be gone for a few hours. “I’ll hold down the fort,” he said, with a tight smile. She’d been arriving late and leaving early in recent weeks—waking sick and headachy, and growing so again by the end of the day, so that she couldn’t wait to get home, take off her too-tight dress, and lie down—and she could feel the hot force of his resentment as she breezed by his desk and closed the door to her office with a satisfying click. She’d harbored the same during her years with Delores.

“So, you’re ten weeks,” said the doctor, a pert young woman with a blonde pageboy, running a wand over Sadie’s stomach, her eyes fixed on the screen of a creaky sonogram machine. “Everything looks great.” She pointed to a tiny, pulsing bean. “Nice, strong heartbeat.” She pressed a button and, with a whir, the machine emitted a small paper version of the image on the screen. “Here’s a picture to show your husband,” she said, meeting Sadie’s eyes for the first time. She was visibly pregnant herself, Sadie realized. Everyone seemed to be pregnant lately. In her neighborhood and

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