Ted’s impatience, however, only made Ella more nervous. It actually made her withdraw. Not knowing what to say now, she took another sip of prune juice, then rested the glass on the coffee table. The doctor had put her on bed rest because her blood pressure was so high. She was lying on the living room sofa, praying for her constipation to end. On her last doctor visit, one of the nurse-practitioners told her that she had hemorrhoids and recommended more fiber. Pregnancy was a kind of physical humiliation. Ella rubbed her stomach thoughtfully, because no matter, the baby was well. She loved her baby. It was a girl.
“Ella?. . . Ella?” Ted’s phone buzzed with calls. He’d try a different tack with her. When he got angry, she got quieter or cried. “Baby, baby?” Ted deepened his voice, sounding more fatherly. “What’s the matter? Aren’t you happy about it?”
“It’s good, Ted,” she said, trying to sound chipper. Lying down was hurting her back.
Her husband was excited about the town house bid being accepted: a three-story brick house on East Seventieth requiring a gut renovation. Ted’s colleagues thought they were lucky to have it offered for just north of a million dollars. But Ella liked their current apartment. She’d been there not even three years. There was plenty of room for their daughter. Her father had bought this apartment for her, and to buy the town house, they had to sell it and rent it back from the owners if the owners agreed while the lengthy renovation took place. There seemed to be an infinite number of variables simply out of her hands. She tried to raise some of the points, like how they didn’t know the size of his bonus, though the year before he’d made so much money that they could almost have bought the house outright. The renovation would exceed half a million dollars. The numbers were dizzying to her. Her father had never discussed the cost of things, and whenever Ted started to draw his tables, charts, and graphs, Ella entered a kind of gray, smoky cloud. To be fair, she tried very hard to pay attention because Ted needed her to get it. He wanted her to appreciate the factors involved, to share the burden that he faced now as the sole provider of the family. She had to understand the facts of life—that’s one of the things Ted called money—a necessary fact of life. Normally, it was easier to agree with Ted, but she was so tired lately. Sleep was impossible because she had to get up and pee all the time, and during the day, she found it difficult to rest her mind. Ella had gained eighty pounds by her thirty-sixth week—a lot of it was water resulting from her preeclampsia, but she had also been eating almost a pint of ice cream per day. Little else seemed to satisfy her except for the cold, smooth taste of coffee-flavored H?agen-Dazs. When her teaspoon hit the cardboard bottom, she’d walk out of her apartment and head down to the hallway garbage chute to toss the empty container so Ted wouldn’t see the evidence. He didn’t like her recent penchant for sweets.
“It’s nice, Ted. It’s good,” she said.
“Nice? Good?” Ted needed her to be more excited about this. It was a big fucking deal. As big a deal as when he’d made managing director the year before—the youngest in the history of Kearn Davis. They were going to own a house in Manhattan on the Upper East Side. Didn’t she get that? He rapped his black Waterman pen that she’d given him against the crystal deal toy from his last transaction.
“What’s the matter?” He attempted to keep his irritation in check.
“I just don’t know how I’ll be able to manage the baby and the renovation. You’re working so hard at the office. I know how busy you are. And you travel. I mean, you have to travel for work. I understand that. And I know you’re doing this for me. And the baby. For the family. I know how hard you’re working, Ted.” Ella felt stupid for sounding so ungrateful. “I’ve never been a mother before, and. . .” She glanced at her protruding belly. It was so huge, tight, and round—a skin-covered igloo. The thought of it made her grow cold inside. Ella put her hands over her stomach as if she were warming the daughter within her.
“We’ll get you a sitter. All my colleagues have nannies.”
“But they work. I’m not working anymore.” Ted had wanted her to stay home with the baby, and Ella thought that was right; but in the past month since she’d left work, she found herself missing the office, the sound of the boys running down the halls, her lunches with David. Some mornings, she didn’t feel like getting out of bed. These feelings, she figured, would pass after the baby came. “What would I do if we had a nanny? Your colleagues—”