LITMIR.BIZ

      Rico and Brent lived in an apartment directly over Rico’s store, the Tiquery, and it was stuffed with pieces he couldn’t bear to part with, or perhaps simply couldn’t sell. There were two ponderous Victorian sideboards in polished veneer, a fat horse hair chesterfield with carved wooden lion’s feet, and dozens of those little occasional tables designed to feature one crocheted doily, a china shepherdess and not much else. For the party, Rico had put away the china figurines, and the little tables were cluttered with bowls full of munchies instead. I found myself grazing mindlessly, like my bovine cousins, stuffing candy corn, potato chips and chocolate-covered pretzels indiscriminately into my mouth.

      If you have any more sugar, my girl, you’ll be bouncing off the walls in a minute, I heard my mother’s voice whisper in my inner ear. Oddly, my maternal ghost was not talking to me but was rather having a severe word with my Sprog, my private dolphin, who probably was experiencing a bit of a sugar high. Still, as far as I could determine from what Dr. Cass Wright had told me, the fetus, at thirteen weeks, was quite incapable of doing any wall-bouncing just yet. At this stage, the child would be about three inches long and weigh almost an ounce. She would have eyelids, fingernails and toenails, and a bit of spontaneous movement, but not enough to be breaking ornaments or pulling down pots of hot water on herself. Or himself, I guess, but if the ghost of my dead mother had chosen this moment, after more than twenty years of silence, to tune in from the ether, and had chosen to address my progeny as if it were female, then that was that. I had no doubt she knew her stuff. My mother had never, in my ten years of having known her, been wrong.

      “It’s a girl, I think,” I muttered to Ruth, as we mixed up a couple of caesars in the kitchen—a virgin version for me and a hefty, vodka laced one for her.

      “Do you want it to be?” she asked.

      “Heck no, I just want it to be healthy,” I said in a sickly sweet parody voice, the kind that you hear on television commercials for disposable diapers. Theresa Morgan was with us, decked out in full witch regalia (she belongs to a coven that meets regularly at a spot by the rapids in Cedar Falls). Theresa used to be my Aunt Susan’s shop assistant at her co-op feed store and had recently taken the place over when Susan sold it. She was in the process of turning it into a vegetarian café, which we all hoped would be successful. The feed store had run into trouble after an American chain called Agri-Am opened up an enormous franchise a couple of doors down and undercut the co-op’s prices, luring all her business away. Theresa figured that nobody was likely to open a big-box veggie café in Laingford any time soon, so this was a relatively safe venture.

      She had dropped in just for a while, as she was presiding over the Samhain ritual that year. Theresa wasn’t wearing a pointy hat, I might add, and didn’t carry a broom. She was dressed in a dark, flowing robe, with interesting symbols embroidered in silver around the waistline and hem, and her neck was festooned with things on strings—crystals and wooden ankhs and a sturdy silver half-moon. I had been invited to come along, but I’m not big on rituals of any description, having had my fill of that kind of stuff as a child-Catholic.

      “You sound a little sarcastic, Polly,” Theresa said, pouring half a bottle of red wine into a beaker the size of a gravy boat. Rico and Brent came in at that point to top up their martini glasses. They were both in discreet drag, the kind where you can’t really tell, unless you look very closely. It was a Hallowe’en thing, although if Kuskawa society were a little less repressed, I imagine Rico would have enjoyed indulging in his hobby on a more regular basis. Brent made a great girl (if you overlooked the prominent Adam’s apple), and his makeup was perfect.

      “What are you three up to in here?” Rico said. “Doing the cauldron thing? All hail Macbeth?”

      “Hey, no fillet of a fenny snake jokes, please,” Theresa said. She tended to be a little sensitive around that time of year. It’s a religious season for her, after all, and Hallmark had co-opted it pretty thoroughly, which must have been as painful for her as Rudolph and Santa can be for devout Christians. “Polly was just being cynical about motherhood, is all.”

      “I’m just grumpy because my choice of recreational substances has been severely limited,” I said, and it was quite true. One of the hardest things for a dedicated drinker and smoker is suddenly to be unable to indulge for reasons of altruism. I didn’t particularly want to give these things up—that was the problem. I resented that I had to and resented that my body appeared to agree.

      “Hey—I’ve got a joke for you,” I said. “Three expectant mothers are sitting in a doctor’s waiting room, right? They’re all knitting little sweaters.”

      Ruth snickered. “Ruth, that’s not the punchline,” I said.

      “Sorry—carry on.”

      “So the first mom reaches into her purse and takes out a pill bottle and pops a pill into her mouth and then continues knitting. The other two ask what she’s just taken. ‘Oh, it’s calcium,’ the mother says. ‘I want my baby to have good, strong bones.’ ” I was doing the sweet parody voice again. Ruth and Theresa were listening, but both looked wary for some reason, and I realized I was speaking a bit loudly, so I toned it down.

      “So, the second mother does the same thing—puts down her knitting, reaches into her purse, pulls out a pill bottle, takes one, and then picks up the knitting again. Again, the other two ask her what she’s taking. ‘Oh, it’s iron,’ the woman says. ‘I want my baby to have strong, healthy blood.’

      “Then the third mother puts down her knitting, right? She reaches into her purse and pulls out a bottle and takes a pill and puts it back and picks up her knitting again. ‘What are you taking?’ the other two ask. ‘Oh, it’s thalidomide,’ the mom says. ‘You see, I can’t knit arms.’ ”

      There was a nasty little silence. Ruth and Theresa looked at each other and then back at me. Brent made a small snorting noise and left the room. Rico muttered “uh-oh” and followed him out, as if there were some sort of imminent girl-scene about to happen, and he didn’t want to witness it.

      “That is such bad karma, I can’t even tell you,” Theresa said, finally.

      “It’s only a joke, Terry. I think it’s funny,” I said.

      “Never mind that it’s incredibly sick,” Theresa said, “but to hear it come out of your mouth, Polly—that’s really disturbing.”

      “It is kind of in bad taste,” Ruth said.

      “Oh, jeez, you guys,” I said. “If I wasn’t pregnant, you’d have howled. Of course, it’s in bad taste. The best jokes usually are. And I tell politically incorrect jokes all the time, remember? This is me, here. Me. You’re supposed to be able to bend the rules among friends, and that’s what we’ve always done. Why is everybody treating me like a badly behaved teenager all of a sudden?” And then, of course, I burst into tears. It must have been the chocolate.