We’re Pregnant and I Can’t Speak Japanese. William Hay
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frightened her.
You think so? she asks very seriously.
I don’t know; I’m not a doctor.
I was amazed my father’s line had stayed with me all those year. One day, when I was too young to understand anything about sexual reproduction, I pointed to a heavily pregnant lady in the street. My father explained, first, that it was rude to point, and then; the lady was not fat; there was a baby in her stomach. Of course, I wanted to know how it got in there. He made up some guff about the father’s seed entering the lady and growing into a baby, which I didn’t get, but accepted, because at that age my father was the smartest man in my very restricted world. Then naturally I wanted to know how it was going to get out. My father cleverly said the doctor took the baby out.
But how? I asked.
I don’t know; I’m not a doctor, he replied then bought me a Matchbox car to shut me up.
My wife didn’t go to the doctor, but the chemist.
She presents me with a thin plastic paddle about the size and shape of her new nail file at 6.15am before I can produce a coherent thought. My sleepy eyes focus on a circle cut out of the centre with a definite blue line down the middle.
What do you think? she asks with a shrug of the shoulders.
I study the plastic paddle for faults in its making. That blue line is awfully similar in colour to the water that sits at the bottom of our toilet bowl to keep it smelling fresh.
Well, you better see the doctor, then, I answer not really giving it too much credibility.
It is a Friday morning and I suspect I have a crazy day ahead: teach two classes in the morning then scoot off to the law office in the afternoon. My boss is leaving over the weekend for a conference in South Africa and I want to get everything in order before he leaves. Blue lines and a possible pregnancy don’t enter my head again. I shrug, too.
The next day, I meet my wife outside of a clinic in her hometown. She went for a check up while I subbed for a teacher who couldn’t teach his Saturday morning private student. No, she didn’t have breast cancer and yes we were pregnant.
My breasts start to hurt. Actually, it is my chest, tightening with the anxiety restricting my heart from beating its regular 80 beats per minute. We have to come up with $40,000 in a year, make that $60,000, as well as pay medical bills because you can’t claim gynaecological services on the national health scheme – and they wonder why young Japanese couples aren’t having kids. I’m not Japanese and I’m definitely not young.
My God, I’m 45 years old! I’ll be sixty-four when the baby graduates from high school. I’ll be old, grey, riddled with arthritis, and incontinent. That’s if I live that long. My father started having heart troubles at the age I am now and then up and died at the tender age of fifty-one. Although, my mother believed his heart troubles stemmed from the tiny fragments of shrapnel floating around in his body they couldn’t remove over 30 years earlier; little meteors destined to do some damage someday. I kind of think the daily pack of cigarettes, a brand that could have been endorsed by the Road Transit Authority for the amount of tar they contained; the swimming pool of brewery products he marinated himself in; the diet of steak, eggs and chips, and the idea that watching someone else exercise on TV was adequate exercise for him, helped clog his arteries.
Possibly, my father knew something his doctors didn’t. His father was a strapping 6-foot-tall Scotsman, a whisky distillery man, who lugged sacks of barley on his back all day long, but still died of a heart attack relatively young. Like father like son. This was long before the heart specialists endorsed paraphernalia, which basically says there’s not a lot you can do about inheriting a “dicky ticker”.
I must have inherited my father’s myocardial-infarction-prone predisposition because a fortune teller once told me I would have troubles with my heart after reading my aura. The good news however was that I would be successful before I dropped dead and I wouldn’t die alone. It’s good to leave people behind to grieve for you? Anyway, all these years later that good success she predicted would reign down on me somehow missed its mark and landed on the guys who founded Yahoo and Google, even my good friend who parlayed a good eye for sketching into a thriving advertising, graphic design and web design business. According to my decoded vibes, my backside and not his should be wearing in the leather on the driver seat of his newly delivered Aston Martin.
My God, my friend’s kids are having kids!
If you’ve done a little calculating of your own: the guy gets married at forty-four; buys his first home at forty-five; and has never stayed in one job longer than three years (you didn’t know that); you’ll see I’m a little commitment shy, which is something my wife knows best.
I knew her for eight years before we decided to get married and she did the proposing. It was nothing romantic like stuffing a message in a fortune cookie or hiring a plane to drag a huge banner across the sky with the words, “Marry Me You Fool.” She handed me a brochure. It was for a soon to be built apartment building with Tokyo Government sponsorship, which meant the government would subsidise the rent based on the tenants’ incomes. The apartment building was conveniently located near the station, nicely designed, and would be built to the new earthquake proof regulations; perfect for us. The one catch was that it was only available to married couples and families. Couples with a commitment to getting married and would be officially married before taking up the lease were also allowed to enter the ballot for places. How could I refuse a proposal like that from my wife and the Tokyo Governor?
This time I’m staring at another proposal, as my wife shows me a monochrome photo of the inside of her womb. There are tiny crosses marking the baby’s presence, which I can’t actually see because I don’t have my reading glasses. Apparently, the baby is 8.4 millimetres long and it is too soon for the gynaecologist to predict a birth date. I don’t want to be an insensitive klutz like my father in a similar situation, so I say nothing beyond: okay. We walk the five minutes or so to another hospital to visit her father, who has had minor surgery to remove a blockage in one of his arteries. Nothing else is said.
The tail of a typhoon, which blew through town a few days earlier, has wiped the sky clear of the grey smudge that usually tinges the Tokyo skyline. Save for a brisk breeze, it is a beautiful autumn day. I hold my wife’s hand, suddenly conscious of the traffic creeping past us on a street without a footpath. I look at the nail on the index finger on my free hand and try to imagine 8.4 millimetres. That’s one-third of a centimetre, so I guess it is about the length of the nail. I could see 8.4 millimetres. 8.4 millimetres, how about that? I feel myself smiling as thoughts of zero bank balances, arthritic knees, and hardening arteries dissipate. My wife flashes me a querying look. What did you do? If I was writing this scene for one of the many predictable and clichéd screenplays which have done nothing beyond eat up space on my computer’s hard disk, I would turn to my wife and say:
I love you. Instead I offer a defensive, What?
Nothing, she answers then smiles as we continue walking.
She knows this is a good moment for both of us, an indelible memory.
Delivery date
We’re gripped with constipation. According to one of my wife’s baby magazines, it’s common for pregnant women to get constipated. But why me? I’m eating Sultana Bran and yogurt with fresh fruit for breakfast and drinking enough coffee to give an elephant a bowel movement. I give in and take a so-called natural laxative, which terrifies me. Rush hour in Tokyo means horrendously crowded trains where you are poked and prodded from all sides, and full station toilets; many without toilet paper. Thankfully, my natural remedy takes effect at convenient times and I feel less bloated.
I can lay the blame on my body’s overreaction to being a product of the affirmative action, equal opportunity, environmentally conscious generation, which spawned a new breed of male, the SNAG: sensitive new age guy. I’m caring too much, I know it. In my father’s generation, once the sperm had hit its mark, pregnancy, delivery and