An American Love Story Read Online Free

“Always a cygnet, never a swan,” she had said laughing, and when she was twenty she married Edward Rice and retired.
    Edward was a theatrical lawyer seven years older. They had no children; Tanya was Edward’s baby. Laura thought of them as acouple from an F. Scott Fitzgerald story. Edward was kind, handsome, good and gallant; Tanya was totally fey. They adored each other. Clay only tolerated them—Tanya because he said she was crazy, Edward because he was so protective of Tanya—and Laura was disappointed, because she had hoped the two couples could be the best of friends. But it really didn’t matter, and she understood. In a way she was almost relieved, because it meant Clay would never look at Tanya and she would never have to be jealous.
    “I’m enormous,” Laura said to Tanya in her ninth month. “Somehow I thought I would look just the same as always, but with breasts at last and a small, round Madonnalike bulge in the front. But I’m a blimp!”
    “Do you remember that girl in the company with the tiny little head? What was her name? When she got pregnant she put sheets over the mirrors so she couldn’t see anything below the neck.”
    “Pinhead Penelope,” Laura said, and they laughed until tears came to their eyes. “Oh my God, can you imagine her pregnant?”
    “Do you want me to put up sheets?” Tanya asked.
    “Hell, no. I’m going to enjoy this. Clay calls me The Goddess of Fecundity. He keeps saying he doesn’t know how such a little thing like me could have such a big baby. He doesn’t know the baby’s little and it’s me that’s big.”
    “Do you remember how we used to weigh ourselves three times a day?”
    “And before and after we went to the bathroom,” Laura said. They smiled at how fanatical they had been. “Isn’t it wonderful to be commanded to eat instead of forbidden?”
    “It will all fall off afterward,” Tanya said reassuringly.
    “I’ll see that it does!”
    “Now don’t forget, when she’s born you have to look at the clock to get the exact birth time so I can have her horoscope done.”
    “How can you be so sure it’s a she?”
    Tanya laid her hand gently on Laura’s stomach. “I can feel her aura,” she said.

    Nina Bowen was born in June. She was a Gemini baby, destined to be talented and creative in the arts, charming and verbal, with quicksilver moods; at least according to the horoscope Tanya had made. She also weighed six pounds. When Laura got on the scale after Nina’s birth she discovered she had gained fifty. It was more than half her original body weight and she was appalled. She had another project ahead of her, and immediately started a strict diet, and, as soon as the doctor permitted it, ballet classes every day. But it had all been worth it: Nina was exquisite. Clay was immediately enamored of his daughter and carried her around the apartment, looking down at her and chuckling. He often came home late from meetings after the office, but the first thing he did was go to Nina’s lacy, beribboned bassinette, and if she wasn’t awake he would wake her, pretending he hadn’t.
    If motherhood had made Laura balloon, fatherhood had made Clay bloom. Babies giggled at him in elevators; even the ill-tempered screaming ones stopped crying and smiled. The baby would look at him with big affectionate eyes and he would do that chuckle of his. “I’m on his side,” he would say to the admiring mother, and she would smile at him too.
    “You really love babies,” Laura said to him. “I never knew that.”
    “I hate them,” he said calmly.
    She was stunned. “But not Nina? You don’t hate Nina?”
    “Of course not,” Clay said. “She’s ours. She’s special.”
    “And when they get older …?” Laura persisted. “Do you hate them then too?”
    “Sure. Kids are worse than babies.”
    “But what kind of a father are you going to be if you hate kids?”
    Clay smiled his winning smile and put his arms around her, hugging her to him.