Pink Elephant

I met him one rainy day when I was crossing the street--or trying to, at least--and tripped over the curb. Unbalance already by the extra forty pounds I was carrying on my stomach, I fell flat on my face into a puddle of water. I was wearing my favorite maternity outfit, a soft pink silk jumpsuit, with gold buttons down the front. Just the thing for a woman eight months pregnant. Sophisticated, but feminine, too. In one moment, I had ruined it.

I didn't even bother to get up before I started crying. And then I cried some more because I knew I had only begun crying so easily because I was pregnant. Nothing was the same.

Suddenly, though, there was this man beside me, helping me up. I stopped crying as soon as I saw him. He was tall and dark and handsome, the king I had stopped believing existed, so beautiful, so sexy, he seemed unreal. He was wearing a dark wool Italian suit with a pale yellow flowered tie. As I got up, I watched as the pale yellow became gray and the dark wool even darker with the muddy water I dripped everywhere.

But the man didn't seem to mind his ruined clothes. He didn't even seem to notice them. Instead, he smiled at me to cheer me up, and asked me if I was all right.

It was not the right thing to ask.

"How can anyone be all right?" I yelled back at him. "When they find themselves invaded by a vicious alien beast who punches them day and night without cease, when they hate themselves and everyone else because they are clumsy and hysterical and when everywhere they go," I looked down at my grotesquerly huge figure, "they feel like a two hundred pound pink elephant?"

Then I started to cry again. And conscious of my ultimate humiliation, crying in front of a strange, I cried even more hysterically than ever. It was the hormones making me cry and I hated them. Nothing was the same.

"A very elegant, very pink, two hundred pound elephant," the man amended, looking at me wryly.

Through my tears, I looked down at my clothes and saw what he must have seen. My once perfect pink outfit had become a silk worm graveyard. My hopelessly limp hair streamed water down my front into my too tight satin heels. And my mascara was already starting to run down my face like black ink on a wet page. Very elegant I was not. Very pink I was not. Two hundred pounds I was.

I couldn't help it. Probably the hormones again. I started to laugh and the man laughed with me. There I was, eight months pregnant with another man's child and a total strange had picked me up out of the gutter. The worst day of my life and he was making me laugh harder than I had ever laughed before.

He took me home in his sleek, black BMW. I dripped all over the cream leather interior. He didn't notice. All the way home, he just kept telling me stories about his mother's pregnancies or his sisters. Stories I couldn't help but laugh at.

"My mother," he told me as he leaned back in his chair, "Once told me that doctors pretend that pregnant women are only pregnant for nine months. The truth is, she said, once a woman is pregnant, she never stops being pregnant. No matter how old her child is, and how long it has been since she was an elephant, she is always attached at the umblicial cord to that child. And so she is pregnant the rest of her life."

His mother was a wise woman, I thought.

"And she ought to know," he continued. "It's been twenty years since she was pregnant, but she swears sometimes she forgets and begins waddling around like before, wondering when the goddamned baby will finally come. Maybe it has to do with the fact that she had ten children."

"Nine girls," he said, and looked over at me as if asking me to sympathize with his mother, "and me. Every one of us was four weeks late."

"Six of my sisters have gone through the same thing. I go and visit them during the last four weeks, after their husbands have become afraid of them" The psarkling gray eyes he turned towards me made me wish that I was one of his sisters, too.

It wasn't a long drive home, but by the time the man had pulled up in the driveway of my apartment, I had almost forgotten about my ruined pink jumpsuit, the fall, and the horrible mud puddle.

"Here's my card," he said to me at the door, as if he were a salesman trying to sell me something. "Give me a call if you need anything." And then he, and his delicious car, were gone.

I didn't look at the card then. I put it in my jewelry box as I undressed, determined that the myserious knight who had saved me would remain just that--mysterious.

I didn't want to know his name, I tried to tell myself in the shower as I tried in vain to reach my toes with the washcloth. I'm a married woman. I'm a married pregnant woman. I'm a very married, very pregnant woman.

Alexander Alcott, the card said when I looked at it after I got out of the shower. It was one of those perfectly understated cards that shrieked wealth and power precisely because it did not need to shriek anything. Just the name, an address and telephone number underneath. No title. No fax. Alexander Alcott. It was a perfect name.

That evening, when Luke came home, I was dressed in an old blue pair of his sweat pants. I wondered what Luke would say if I told him that I wanted to name the baby Alexander. But I didn't. I vowed never to say the name again. I didn't want to ruin it by sharing it with anyone. It was mine and mine alone.

Then Luke handed me something he'd been holding behind his back. "I love you," he said as he pressed a stuffed pink elephant into my hands.

"I love you, too," I told him and cried after he had gone, wondering if I would ever, ever stop feeling pregnant.

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