The Best of Friends Page 24

  But already my baby was rebelling against this unnatural world. With one hand I clung to the pole and wrapped my free arm protectively around my belly. A minute’s blur in the darkness, and when the doors of the subway opened I joined the flood of people pushing out into another station. Changing trains, I found a seat on the 1/9 line to Hudson Street, then stripped off my coat and put my head between my legs, hoping I wouldn’t faint. To calm myself, I thought of the bush, the cool air, the quiet, and then thought again for the hundredth time, What the hell am I doing back here?

  This was the flip side of wildlife filmmaking. After years spent in the field nurturing an intimacy with wild animals, understanding their story, and capturing ephemeral moments on film, making a documentary also meant spending time in dark edit suites where there’s no escape from cigarette smoke clinging to the air, the computer’s incessant humming, and the power plays of office politics. Whether you are a baboon or human, it seems there is no getting away from those who try to dominate by pulling rank. When it comes to filmmaking, rank is determined by who decides which pieces of footage end up in the trash, which bits of dialogue make the sound edit, and whose name receives which credit at the end of the film. I found life in an office bizarre, or perhaps I was just bizarrely out of touch. For eight hours I flipped between the edit suite, where pieces of film were being cut into a beautiful, touching story by a very talented editor, then flopped into the outer offices, where cuts were made with unkind words and sharp put-downs. Then it was back on the subway, gasping for air the entire way home.

  At the end of the day, I collapsed on Sara’s sofa.

  “Here you go.” Sara smiled, passing me a mug of herbal tea.

  “Thanks. Wish it were something stronger.”

  “That bad?”

  “Yeah, that bad. It was so easy with the baboon film. Jen and Des gave us carte blanche to make the film we wanted. They trusted us. I guess I’ve been spoiled. But I just don’t understand why everything has to be a fight. They can argue about anything, even things that seem obvious to me, like who will voice-over what scenes and who should get what credit. I am so new to this, I’m not familiar with some of the terminology and sometimes I simply feel taken advantage of. They treat me like I’m stupid.”

  “Gin, don’t be crazy. You’re far from stupid.”

  “It’s nothing new. I’ve been treated that way most of my life. Airhead, dumb blonde. Pretty, but simple. That’s me.”

  “But you’re not!” my friend said, jumping to my defense. Then she paused, nodded. “I guess it’s true. In some ways your looks probably work against you.”

  “Listen, I know they have also opened doors, and it’s not that. It’s being arbitrarily defined. I hate it.”

  “I know what you mean, because back in school I was labeled ‘the smart one,’ even though anyone who said that obviously never saw my math grades! Besides, what I wanted to be told was that I was pretty.”

  Now I was surprised. “Sara, look in the mirror. Why do you think you work where you do? You look great.”

  “Are you kidding? I always want to lose five or ten pounds and I think this is hairstyle number 186, and I can never hide the circles under my eyes. But what I’m trying to say is, when do we get to shed these horrible, leftover tags from childhood? Why do we still have to be clever, pretty, a jock, whatever label somebody else pinned on us back when we were twelve?” I smiled as Sara revved into one of her “change the world” soliloquies. “Why do we feel stuck with it, Gin? Isn’t part of getting older supposed to be figuring out who we are for ourselves?”

  “It should be, and lucky for me, I escape most of this when I’m in Africa.”

  “Exactly. Look, Gin, you should be taken seriously for everything you’ve brought to this project. Finding the story, writing it, even shooting it for goodness’ sake—you don’t need this pettiness. None of us do.” And then she paused again. “But, Gin, you’ve also got to try not to take everything personally. These people aren’t friends, they’re work associates. If they are professional, they also want what’s best for the film, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they want what’s best for you. Look out for yourself, but don’t be afraid to compromise.”

  I found myself thinking about our conversation for the rest of the night. After twenty-five years of friendship, we were still finding out new things about each other, and through each other, about ourselves. I could never have imagined that Sara didn’t see herself as beautiful because she was. That she found me smart was also a revelation, and a welcome one. But I was troubled by something else she’d pointed out. It stunned me to realize that I viewed compromise as a novel concept. I didn’t compromise with the rising sun or my alarm clock when it rang at 4 A.M. so that I could be out in the bush before first light. There was no bartering with 100-degree heat, no way to trade a violent death for a cautious life in the bush. The forces of nature didn’t play “let’s make a deal.” For almost ten years I’d lived this wild life, accepting it fully, protecting it fiercely, so much so that I’d forgotten about give-and-take. Animal behavior that took years to understand, years to capture, and months to craft into a story was cut down to a half hour of television, twenty-three minutes including commercial breaks—fifty-two minutes, if you were lucky enough to score an hour on television. Of course there needed to be concessions, the truth compacted, scenes shortened, others falling into oblivion on the editing room floor, but the tricky part was knowing when and where to deal, recognizing when a decision improved the project or when it was a matter of greed or an overgrown ego.

  I looked at Sara—my smart and pretty friend—with new admiration. This creative minefield was her world, one she had successfully navigated for years. While moving up the ranks from Tupelo to Richmond to Charlotte and finally New York City with her fancy office and fancy title of Dateline correspondent, Sara had stayed true to herself and continued to lobby for stories she felt passionately about. But she also knew that there were many ways to tell a story honestly, layering multiple visions of inspiration. The next day, when I regaled her with the latest chapter in our editing saga—where I’d given ground, where I’d held firm—Sara said with a sly grin, “Gin, welcome to creativity by committee, the other real world of television.” Now it was my turn to laugh, and it felt so good.

  LAUGHTER HAD BEEN largely absent from my life in the past month. I was finding out that waiting for the amniocentesis results was as stressful as the test. After the age of thirty-five, testing for Down’s syndrome and other birth defects through amniocentesis is routine for expectant mothers in the U.S. A test tube of amniotic fluid can tell you part of the history of a baby’s developing life—its health, its age, its sex—a wealth of wonderful information. And yet there are risks, grave risks. The needle could puncture the amniotic sac, spilling the protective fluid and potentially ending the baby’s life. A woman lies down on a cold table in her doctor’s office with a life growing inside her belly, and minutes later that life is extinguished, through circumstances nearly as random as the baby’s conception. The baby shifted, the needle slipped. One prick of a needle, like one sperm, can change your life. Yet I knew that daily, thousands of these procedures were performed safely. A routine, optional procedure. But practices considered routine in the world often aren’t typical in Africa.

  Nevertheless, for me, there were no options. I wanted desperately to know if my baby was healthy or not. I love my sister Tish, but I wouldn’t want my child to have her life. And I knew, selfishly, that I wasn’t strong enough to endure those trials again. Having an amniocentesis would give me the answers I needed. The test had been the first step, a step I couldn’t forget.

  “Ginger, Nad, come in. How was the drive down?” Dr. Baines had asked in his rich, distinctive baritone. “Any rain?”

  Rain. It had reminded me of my grandfather, standing in his tobacco fields, looking up at the sky, watching the clouds build and recede, saying a silent prayer that today they’d bless his land. I often thou
ght of my grandfather, because in an arid country, rain was always a topic of conversation. Some things never change, others do.

  Normally we met Dr. Baines in his office in the city center, but on that day we drove straight to the State Hospital, where he’d been waiting for us in a large, sterile operating room. The walls, once white, were aged yellow. The overhead lights were bright, the linoleum floor chipped.

  “Ginger, put this gown on and come lie down.”

  When Dr. Baines had patted the table beside him, I’d thought I’d seen a slight shaking in his hands. Could I have imagined this? There had been sweat on his brow and sharpness in his normally easy movements. Was it possible that he was as nervous as I was? After decades in which he’d delivered hundreds of babies with the amazing gift of making each mother feel like her baby was the first, the most special baby in the world, Dr. Baines had performed just a few amnio tests. Older mothers, especially first-time mothers, were rare in Africa. I was clearly an exception.

  I’d climbed onto the cold gurney and lain down. Nad had held my hand while Dr. Baines squirted cold gel from what looked like a diner’s ketchup container onto my stomach.

  “I’ll just rub this around a bit and then we’ll get a look at your baby.”

  The image that had appeared on the antiquated sonar machine was fuzzy, a black-and-white soup with little definition that I could see.

  “Okay. Nad, I’m going to ask you to stand outside now,” Dr. Baines had said, taking one last look at the screen.

  When Nad had left the room, the image of our baby had disappeared, too. Dr. Baines had turned off the sonar and marked a dot on my stomach with a blue ballpoint pen.

  “Lie still.”

  Wiping his brow, Dr. Baines had then begun to push a long, thick needle through the dot on my stomach. I’d looked away, squeezed the stiff sheet beneath me, and felt the first painful stab before he’d pulled the needle out.

  “Sorry.”

  The next time the needle went straight through, and as he’d pulled the plunger slowly back, the tube filled with amniotic fluid, a dense, opaque liquid that held our future as a secret.

  Dr. Baines had squeezed my hand. “You are fine, and I’m sure your baby will be fine, but don’t drive back to Etosha today if you don’t have to. You need to lie still, to rest, and phone me immediately if there is any spotting or leaking. We’ll let you know the results as soon as we get them.”

  Lying on a plush bed in a hotel room we couldn’t afford, I’d instinctively rubbed my belly. At the time I didn’t allow myself to remember the passages from the baby books about amnio—how the doctor used the scan throughout the process, monitoring the baby’s movements, making sure the needle never got too close to the baby. There was no mention of a ballpoint pen, a cracked ceiling, and a steel relic posing as a sonar machine. But I trusted Dr. Baines. I hadn’t been worried about the procedure; I feared the results: a tangle of chromosomes that could create a heartbreaking pattern.

  And now, four weeks later, after thirty agonizing days of waiting, the phone rang in Sara’s apartment.

  “Gin, it’s for you.” Sara hugged me. “It’s Nad.”

  “Hi. We got it.” The line cracked.

  “Got what?” My voice cracked.

  “The pram. I just got back from South Africa with the new Land Rover. Your big blue pram.”

  “Oh, right, the four-by-four stroller. Great. Did we get anything else?”

  “Yes, Dr. Baines phoned.”

  “Stop this.”

  “What?”

  “Tell me now.”

  I hid behind Sara’s richly upholstered chair, curled up in the classic fetal position, willing myself to hold on to the phone.

  “The test results were negative. Everything is fine.”

  “Gin?”

  “I’m here. I can hardly believe it. I am just so incredibly happy.” Through laughter and tears, I pressed him for more.

  “Are you sure you want to know?”

  “Listen, I’ve waited a month for this. I deserve to know more.”

  “Sure?”

  “Sure.”

  “It’s a boy.”

  I hung up the phone, and in that moment of silence Sara crept back into the room and put her arms around me. “Gin, are you okay?”

  “Oh, Sara, he’s okay. He’s a he. He’s a boy. Can you believe it? I’m going to have a boy! I don’t know a thing about boys!”

  “Me neither, but we’ll learn.” I’m not sure who cried harder, but at that moment, when I finally gave myself permission to love my growing child completely, I realized that I already did. From the very first moment I’d suspected I was pregnant, I’d loved my baby intensely, but now I could do so without fear. He was healthy, and I was headed back to Etosha armed with hope and a lot more baby books.

  “NAD, HOW MUCH change do you have?”

  “A couple of dollars’ worth, I guess.”

  “It says here that you should be sure to have enough change for the taxi to get to the hospital for the baby’s birth.”

  “We’d need a Brink’s truck.”

  “And you must make sure the champagne is on ice.”

  “We’ll have a five-hour drive to Windhoek, that’s enough time to cool it down.”

  I handed Nad my book and caught his eye. “Check page 298. Have you been practicing your breathing exercises?”

  “Who? Me or you?”

  “Both of us. Says here that we should be going to special birthing classes by now, learning all kinds of things like how to breathe.”

  “I know how to breathe, and besides, I don’t think they have those classes in Namibia.” Clearly the book I was reading voraciously, What to Expect When You’re Expecting, was not subtitled In Africa. But it was all I had. After visits to my wonderful doctor every six weeks, I was now seven months pregnant, and the next time I planned to see Dr. Baines was when I delivered the baby.

  “It’s too hot. I’m taking this book to the bath with me.”

  “Only 105 today, it’s cooling down.”

  “Shut up.”

  It was the hottest February in living memory. Temperatures averaged 99 degrees in the shade. I’d get up in the middle of the night and lower my body into the splash pool to cool down. My belly was huge, my feet were swelling, and I seemed to be gaining weight by the minute. My friend Mike Hearn told me, with awe, that I looked like I was carrying a four-year-old. Hey, just as long as he was potty-trained.

  Then I heard from another old friend, my dear old roommate who’d also been pregnant the last time I’d seen her.

  “Gin, hey. It’s Kristy. How are you?”

  “Enormous, but fine. How are you all, and how is little Emma? She must be four months old by now.”

  Without hesitation, Kristy plunged in. “Gin, I hate to do this. I know you are pregnant, I know your family, but we are telling everyone now, this week, and I have to tell you something.”

  “Kristy, please tell me. What’s wrong?”

  “Emma is sick.”

  “Oh no, Kristy. How, what happened?”

  “I picked up a virus early in my pregnancy and passed it on to Emma. In me it was like the flu, but for Emma it is much worse. It’s called cytomegalovirus, and basically it affects everything—speech, hearing, motor skills, all parts of her development. Some cases are more severe than others. Right now we don’t know how badly she’ll be affected, but regardless we’ll deal with it.”

  “I have no doubt.”

  If anyone could deal with a grave illness, it was Kristy. She was strong to the core. In New York, Kristy could have stayed in her grandfather’s luxurious three-bedroom apartment at the Carlyle, ushered off Madison Avenue by a liveried doorman, gliding up in an elevator alongside Warren Beatty or another rich, successful tenant, then turning the key and stepping into an apartment filled with treasures. Instead she schlepped up four flights of stairs to our tiny apartment and used a cardboard box as a bedside table rather than ask her father, who owned a fu
rniture manufacturing company, for help. Through sheer force of will, packed into her petite five-foot-two-inch frame, Kristy would go to battle. She’d find the right doctors, ask the right questions, and face all the answers, even those hardest to hear, with determination. But I also knew just how much she had to deal with, including caring for her firstborn, a son who was just three years old.

  “Kristy, I am so sorry. I know you must be worried about Gordy, but I can tell you he will learn so much from Emma, about himself, his friends, about life. He will be fine. With you and Gordon for parents, he’ll be more than fine.”

  “Thanks, Gin. I knew you’d understand, now I’ll just have to get on with educating half of Chattanooga.”

  “They had better watch out.”

  To hell with airs and phony social graces, with people unable to cope with anything less than perfect, Kristy would put her children first. As I’d learned from the generations of women who nurtured me—my mother, my great-aunts, and my grandmother—this is what mothers do. Yet I couldn’t have known I would have to do it so soon.

  “DOCTOR, DOCTOR,™ SOMEONE cried while pounding on our front door.

  “Dr. Nad, please.”

  I fumbled for the bedside light and checked the clock. It was 2 A.M.

  “Just a minute.” I slipped on my bathrobe and turned on the hall light.

  “What is it?” I said, opening the door.

  The front porch light was broken, so it took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the dim light outside.

  “I need Dr. Nad.” It was Frans, a young man who had once worked in our garden, standing in the rain, jeans hanging from his slim hips, his chest bare, drops of water clinging to his hair, and light rain mixing with blood running from his skull down his face.

  “Oh, Frans, Nad is away.”

  “What? Where is the doctor?”