On Mercy Street, protestors came and went. This one was young, maybe thirty, with a Jesus beard and long dark hair in a ponytail. He reassured Claudia that God had a plan for her, that his ways were mysterious.
Claudia thought, You have no idea.
“I’m not your mother,” she told him. “If I were, I’d tell you to stop harassing women in the street and do something useful with your life.”
She plowed past him to the door and keyed in her new access code.
A higher power with a vivid imagination, a highly developed sense of irony. These weren’t qualities she had ever associated with the protestors. It seemed unlikely that any god they believed in would operate in such a way.
Inside, Luis was waiting. “Claudia, this is stupid. You’re going to get hurt. I’m putting my foot down. From now on, you need to use the garage.”
Her usual argument was ready on her lips. His face stopped her, his genuine concern.
“All right, fine. I’ll use the garage.”
THE PROTESTORS KEPT COMING. FOR NEARLY TEN YEARS CLAUDIA had stepped around them—feeling, always, that they couldn’t touch her, that she’d developed a protective carapace. Falling pregnant changed that, as it changed everything. She had never felt so unguarded and unguardable, so utterly exposed.
Strangers found the pregnant body emboldening. Those who’d never been pregnant knew someone who had, and generously shared their expertise. Her landlady, the FedEx delivery guy, the homeless denizens of the Methadone Mile. She was advised daily about proper nutrition, the importance of sleep, the benefits of transcendental meditation or tai chi or alternate-nostril breathing. Who knew there were so many home remedies for heartburn, for water retention, for stretch marks and hemorrhoids and constipation and varicose veins? No bodily function was off-limits, because the pregnant body was everyone’s. It belonged to the entire world.
Of course, she was not the first woman to make this discovery. Her peers had made it twenty years earlier. At age forty-three, almost forty-four, she was very nearly the last.
There is a fine line between concern and intrusiveness. Even her coworkers, who knew better, crossed it from time to time. Though they all wanted to, no one asked about the baby’s father, the man involved with this pregnancy. Claudia volunteered nothing. It was a story she didn’t know how to tell.
She kept her promise to Luis. Each morning she drove to work instead of taking the T. She parked in the underground garage, in the reserved space next to Florine’s, and entered the building through a basement door, acutely aware that this was a luxury the patients didn’t have.
Pregnancy changed everything. To the Access patients she said the same things she’d always said, but her words landed differently. To a woman unhappily pregnant, the counselor’s swollen belly was a Rorschach test. The patient’s reaction said more about her than it did about Claudia.
With the latecomers, especially, her pregnancy elicited strong emotions. On the worst fucking day of their lives, the last thing they needed was advice from one of the lucky ones, a middle-aged woman carrying—as far as she knew—a healthy baby. Once she’d begun to show, she handed off the latecomers to Mary Fahey. Claudia had trained her personally and trusted her completely. Her patients would be safe in Mary’s large, freckled hands.
With the minors the situation was different. Claudia was older than most of their mothers, so unimaginably old that they assumed—correctly—that her circumstances were completely unlike their own. Her pregnancy interested them keenly. They asked whether she knew the baby’s sex, or wanted to. Often this spun off into a conversation about their own future pregnancies, whether or not they would want to know. The minors spoke of future motherhood with warmth and enthusiasm, an experience they looked forward to. The minors weren’t saying no to motherhood. They were saying, Not now.
For Claudia that answer was no longer possible. At her age, saying not now was the same as saying not ever.