NOW SHE WAS ALIVE; was doing, was being, was at last herself and complete. She did what she had done before—cooked, cleaned, ironed, made the bed, shopped, took laundry to the basement, went to her sculpture class—but did everything against a new and serene background of knowing that Andrew-or-Susan (or Melinda) was every day a little bit bigger inside her than the day before, a little bit more clearly defined and closer to readiness.

Dr. Sapirstein was wonderful; a tall sunburned man with white hair and a shaggy white moustache (she had seen him somewhere before but couldn’t think where; maybe on Open End) who despite the Miës van der Rohe chairs and cool marble tables of his waiting room was reassuringly old-fashioned and direct. “Please don’t read books,” he said. “Every pregnancy is different, and a book that tells you what you’re going to feel in the third week of the third month is only going to make you worry. No pregnancy was ever exactly like the ones described in the books. And don’t listen to your friends either. They’ll have had experiences very different from yours and they’ll be absolutely certain that their pregnancies were the normal ones and that yours is abnormal.”

She asked him about the vitamin pills Dr. Hill had prescribed.

“No, no pills,” he said. “Minnie Castevet has a herbarium and a blender; I’m going to have her make a daily drink for you that will be fresher, safer, and more vitamin-rich than any pill on the market. And another thing: don’t be afraid to satisfy your cravings. The theory today is that pregnant women invent cravings because they feel it’s expected of them. I don’t hold with that. I say if you want pickles in the middle of the night, make your poor husband go out and get some, just like in the old jokes. Whatever you want, be sure you get it. You’ll be surprised at some of the strange things your body will ask for in these next few months. And any questions you have, call me night or day. Call me, not your mother or your Aunt Fanny. That’s what I’m here for.”

She was to come in once a week, which was certainly closer attention than Dr. Hill gave his patients, and he would make a reservation at Doctors Hospital without any bother of filling out forms.

Everything was right and bright and lovely. She got a Vidal Sassoon haircut, finished with the dentist, voted on Election Day (for Lindsay for mayor), and went down to Greenwich Village to watch some of the outdoor shooting of Guy’s pilot. Between takes—Guy running with a stolen hot-dog wagon down Sullivan Street—she crouched on her heels to talk to small children and smiled Me too at pregnant women.

Salt, she found, even a few grains of it, made food inedible. “That’s perfectly normal,” Dr. Sapirstein said on her second visit. “When your system needs it, the aversion will disappear. Meanwhile, obviously, no salt. Trust your aversions the same as you do your cravings.”

She didn’t have any cravings though. Her appetite, in fact, seemed smaller than usual. Coffee and toast was enough for breakfast, a vegetable and a small piece of rare meat for dinner. Each morning at eleven Minnie brought over what looked like a watery pistachio milkshake. It was cold and sour.

“What’s in it?” Rosemary asked.

“Snips and snails and puppy-dogs’ tails,” Minnie said, smiling.

Rosemary laughed. “That’s fine,” she said, “but what if we want a girl?”

“Do you?”

“Well of course we’ll take what we get, but it would be nice if the first one were a boy.”

“Well there you are,” Minnie said.

Finished drinking, Rosemary said, “No, really, what’s in it?”

“A raw egg, gelatin, herbs…”

“Tannis root?”

“Some of that, some of some other things.”

Minnie brought the drink every day in the same glass, a large one with blue and green stripes, and stood waiting while Rosemary drained it.

One day Rosemary got into a conversation by the elevator with Phyllis Kapp, young Lisa’s mother. The end of it was a brunch invitation for Guy and her on the following Sunday, but Guy vetoed the idea when Rosemary told him of it. In all likelihood he would be in Sunday’s shooting, he explained, and if he weren’t he would need the day for rest and study. They were having little social life just then. Guy had broken a dinner-and-theater date they had made a few weeks earlier with Jimmy and Tiger Haenigsen, and he had asked Rosemary if she would mind putting off Hutch for dinner. It was because of the pilot, which was taking longer to shoot than had been intended.

It turned out to be just as well though, for Rosemary began to develop abdominal pains of an alarming sharpness. She called Dr. Sapirstein and he asked her to come in. Examining her, he said that there was nothing to worry about; the pains came from an entirely normal expansion of her pelvis. They would disappear in a day or two, and meanwhile she could fight them with ordinary doses of aspirin.

Rosemary, relieved, said, “I was afraid it might be an ectopic pregnancy.”

“Ectopic?” Dr. Sapirstein asked, and looked skeptically at her. She colored. He said, “I thought you weren’t going to read books, Rosemary.”

“It was staring me right in the face at the drug store,” she said.

“And all it did was worry you. Will you go home and throw it away, please?”

“I will. I promise.”

“The pains will be gone in two days,” he said. “‘Ectopic pregnancy.’” He shook his head.

But the pains weren’t gone in two days; they were worse, and grew worse still, as if something inside her were encircled by a wire being drawn tighter and tighter to cut it in two. There would be pain for hour after hour, and then a few minutes of relative painlessness that was only the pain gathering itself for a new assault. Aspirin did little good, and she was afraid of taking too many. Sleep, when it finally came, brought harried dreams in which she fought against huge spiders that had cornered her in the bathroom, or tugged desperately at a small black bush that had taken root in the middle of the living room rug. She woke tired, to even sharper pain.

“This happens sometimes,” Dr. Sapirstein said. “It’ll stop any day now. Are you sure you haven’t been lying about your age? Usually it’s the older women with less flexible joints who have this sort of difficulty.”

Minnie, bringing in the drink, said, “You poor thing. Don’t fret, dear; a niece of mine in Toledo had exactly the same kind of pains and so did two other women I know of. And their deliveries were real easy and they had beautiful healthy babies.”

“Thanks,” Rosemary said.

Minnie drew back righteously. “What do you mean? That’s the gospel truth! I swear to God it is, Rosemary!”

Her face grew pinched and wan and shadowed; she looked awful. But Guy insisted otherwise. “What are you talking about?” he said. “You look great. It’s that haircut that looks awful, if you want the truth, honey. That’s the biggest mistake you ever made in your whole life.”

The pain settled down to a constant presence, with no respite whatever. She endured it and lived with it, sleeping a few hours a night and taking one aspirin where Dr. Sapirstein allowed two. There was no going out with Joan or Elise, no sculpture class or shopping. She ordered groceries by phone and stayed in the apartment, making nursery curtains and starting, finally, on The Decline and Fall of The Roman Empire. Sometimes Minnie or Roman came in of an afternoon, to talk a while and see if there was anything she wanted. Once Laura-Louise brought down a tray of gingerbread. She hadn’t been told yet that Rosemary was pregnant. “Oh my, I do like that haircut, Rosemary,” she said. “You look so pretty and up-to-date.” She was surprised to hear she wasn’t feeling well.

When the pilot was finally finished Guy stayed home most of the time. He had stopped studying with Dominick, his vocal coach, and no longer spent afternoons auditioning and being seen. He had two good commercials on deck—for Pall Mall and Texaco—and rehearsals of Don’t I Know You From Somewhere? were definitely scheduled to begin in mid-January. He gave Rosemary a hand with the cleaning, and they played time-limit Scrabble for a dollar a game. He answered the phone and, when it was for Rosemary, made plausible excuses.

She had planned to give a Thanksgiving dinner for some of their friends who, like themselves, had no family nearby; with the constant pain, though, and the constant worry over Andrew-or-Melinda’s well-being, she decided not to, and they ended up going to Minnie and Roman’s instead.