Once upon a time, in the pre-computer, pre-cell phone world of January, 1968, an hour or so after your husband’s left for work, the well-trained alarm clock clangs its metallic victory over your latest, mostly-forgettable dream, and you’re not even angry at it.  That’s because you remember, almost instantly, that today, Tuesday, your usual day off from your community college teaching job, you’re making a scheduled pilgrimage to your doctor in Forest Hills, Queens, all the way from Gravesend, Brooklyn.
        As usual, you plan to make yourself as invisible as possible on the trip—not all that easy with your twenty additional pounds—and say a silent prayer that the train doesn’t find some reason to stall.
  
The scene bears scant resemblance to the cushiony support networks for expectant mothers you have sometimes seen in romantic movies and sentimental television dramas you watch on those rare occasions when you have the time.  Your parents live in Florida, and there are frightfully few other people who seem to be interested in your pregnancy, your first, and sometimes you feel as if you’re living on your own private island.
  
You eat a light breakfast and put on one of your four maternity outfits.  Back in October, when you bought them, they seemed grotesquely large; you bought them just because someone had convinced you that you were supposed to, even while you suspected you might never wear any of them.  Now, though, each fits comfortably, and you’re happy you have only another month to wear them, because you’re not all that sure it would be the case, otherwise.  Only one outfit includes pants—you wear them today because, strange as it may seem, women wearing pants is still a taboo, except under the most informal of circumstances.
   
As you walk rather slowly the six short blocks to the train, on which you will be sitting for over an hour, two slightly annoying realizations come to you: One, walking doesn’t feel as easy now, and two, it’s cold, darned cold, even for early January.  You are embarrassed about this reaction or over-reaction to the cold; it seems more in character for a senior citizen than for a generally healthy, first-time mother a few months short of thirty-two.
        You’d have to be dim-witted or anesthetized not to admit that thirty-two is anything but young for first-time motherhood, but you have, after all, managed to continue teaching your four classes, without taking even one sick day off.  Despite that, though—certainly not your idea—you will be relegated to non-salaried maternity leave what feels obscenely too soon, because your College president firmly believes that infants need their mothers, reluctant or otherwise, with them full-time.
  
Everyone’s been telling you—there were no pre-natal sonograms then—that you’re having a boy.  This is one of the last things you want to hear.  Your husband, who would be happier with a boy to name after his late father, has graciously agreed to the delicious name you dreamed up for a girl—but the self-styled experts are sure it’s a boy because, “When you carry like that, with a point and all out in front, that’s what it is, a boy.”
  
There are only a few other women in the doctor’s office when you arrive, and they look younger, prettier, and not so far along as you.  As you turn the pages of the women’s magazine you are pretending to read, one of them purrs, “When are you due?” and seems amazed at your “February 4th” response.  You haven’t been able to figure out why being mistaken for being in the fifth or sixth month, rather than a few days short of nine, should feel like such a laudatory accomplishment, but it does, at least for you.
        When the nurse calls out your name, you’re grateful and relieved, because, even at this early hour, you are already hungry enough to eat everyone else who’s there.
        Lunch has become something of a treasured ritual for you in these periodic pilgrimages.  There’s a comfortable coffee shop on Continental Avenue, and it would feel almost sacrilegious to eat post-doctor lunch anywhere else.  You wonder what today’s specials are and hope they are appetizing.         “You’re doing fine,” the doctor smilingly assures you.  “Just move to the end of the table. 

  I’m going to do a quick internal exam to see how much progress you’ve made.”
        You comply, feeling suddenly as if you’re being tested.  Know something? you silently tell yourself,  you’re absolutely neurotic.  Hey little—or not so little right now, model student, grown-up good girl, must everything feel like a test?  
    
The doctor’s face, though, mirrors his approval, just one more test you’ve surprised yourself by passing, something like your oral examination for your Ph.D. a few years earlier, but without the last-minute studying, or the headaches.
        “May I ask you something?” you venture.
        “Why not?”
        He’s only about five feet, seven inches tall, approximately your height, but when he’s standing and you’re lying in the prescribed position, he seems tall enough to qualify as an epic hero.  You wish you knew why you feel so strong an urge to ask him, “Is anything going to happen early?  I’m  asking because my parents live in Florida, and they keep asking ‘when’.  They’re driving me out of my mind.”
        He looks down from his Olympian height, tells you that your question is absolutely ridiculous and reminds you that he will see you next Tuesday, and the two after that as well.  You wish there were a way to take your question back, so you wouldn’t have to feel as idiotic as you do.
  
Lunch almost magically makes you feel better.  You wonder for how much longer you’ll savor the solitary bliss of being brought soup, a sandwich, coffee, and even a refill.  You wonder why, although no one at the coffee shop says a word, that it’s beginning to feel somewhat out of character for you to be waited on, and feel like a duchess.
        After your uneventful ride home, with the velvet reassurance of business as usual on Wednesday, you get comfortable and prepare for classes the next day. 
        On Wednesday, it is indeed just that, business as usual, and you are happy that you had the academic discretion to be prepared for it.  On Thursday, you are equally prepared, but it is not nearly so much of a consolation.
        You, who have enjoyed excellent, work-worthy health throughout your pregnancy, do not feel well.  You try to convince yourself that your discomfort must be at least partly psychosomatic, but are totally unsuccessful.  You barely make it home from school. While it’s close to dinnertime, you find the idea of eating anything lewdly ridiculous, and shamble about the kitchen to make a decent meal for your husband.  He, however, seems more concerned about the exciting items in the Times than in what, if anything, is wrong with you.
   
What’s “wrong” makes his one-month premature, puppyish appearance at 2:40 a.m. that frigid Friday morning.  He weighs all of five pounds, twelve ounces, and looks about as helpless as you feel.  No, it is not the end of everything normal, it only seems that way.  And now you have time to relive its preview, its somewhat ignored trailer, from a couple of days ago.  
 
    
                         About The Author
  
        SIG member Louise Jaffe-Gerber is Professor Emerita of English at Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn, New York.  In addition to four poetry chapbooks, she has had many poems and several stories awarded prizes or honorable mentions in contests and/or published in anthologies and literary journals, including, she is proud to say, Calliope.
        Feminine Prerogatives, a collection of three novellas about female empowerment, was published in 2006 and dedicated to her long-awaited first grandchild, Tanya.  She has also had three Tanya-poems published.
        Louise has also served as consultant to a senior citizens’ creative writing group for the past seven and one-half years.  This group has been a source of delight and inspiration for her.
    
    
    
                        Copyright © Louise Jaffe-Gerber