Chapter 3: Preparation

Carolyn Pierce was dressing for church. The job shouldn’t have been difficult. She had only a few dresses formal enough for that setting, and -- as a member of the choir -- those were covered through most of the service. The problem was that most of those few dresses no longer fit. She should have gone for a more flowing style back when she’d bought them instead of the close fit to show off her narrow waist. This was the last dress that fit, and it barely did. She’d worn it last week, anyway. There was a revealing bulge at the front of her waist. She looked fat; indeed, she looked pregnant.

“I think,” she told Bill who’d just come in from putting the dishes to soak and was getting his own suit, “that I show in this dress.”

“Ihm hmm,” he agreed. He kissed the bulge in her stomach. The gesture was warm, but the words weren’t what she wanted to hear. Well, she’d wear that dress and depend on her robe.

When she got to the robing room, though, Gladys Hagopian was there before her. She greeted her warmly, but Carolyn could see her eyes take in the bulge. She hurried into her robe, and Gladys said nothing. She stayed in her robe until everyone else but Miss Armbruster had gone. Upstairs, though, Gladys and Dan were still talking with Bill.

“I think our secret’s out,” she told Bill in the car.

“Well, you couldn’t expect it to last until you delivered. You are a slender girl, and it shows -- shows delightfully.” Well, she was no longer a slender woman -- she hadn’t been a girl for more than a decade -- but Bill was right. She didn’t have the build to conceal a pregnancy. “What’s the next step?”

“I suppose I need to buy some maternity clothes.”

“Well, I like to see you without any clothes, but I suppose you have to go out in public sometimes. That’s another item that we didn’t put in the budget, but we’ve actually got some savings, now. You didn’t use much of your last TA earnings.” She’d been a teaching assistant the last semester of the previous year. She was one again this semester. She hadn’t told Prof. Kindle that she wouldn’t be next semester, but she hadn’t told him -- or almost anyone else -- about her pregnancy.

“Well, we’ll go through that awfully fast.” Bill thought of them both as pinch-pennies. She might be; he definitely wasn’t.

She went shopping Monday. She thought of asking Gladys for advice but wasn’t ready to tell her just yet. Let her learn with the rest of the choir. The prices shocked her. And most of the dresses that would fit now wouldn’t fit in two months. She couldn’t see herself coming back and back for dresses she wouldn’t wear ever again after this year. She finally settled for an empire-style dress which would drape right now and cover her for months more. The price was still twice what she had planned to pay, but nothing else looked more reasonable. The sales woman pronounced empire as ‘Ompeer’; maybe that should have been a warning.

She got by in class and in her research by wearing her work jeans. They weren’t stylish, but they had plenty of room. She wore her new dress to church the next Sunday. As luck would have it, she was among the earliest arrivals. Miss Armbruster wouldn’t notice. A flat could bring her to tears, but she didn’t really see what she looked at. Carolyn waited to put on her robe until Gladys came in.

“Carolyn. You look delightful. Is this an announcement?”

“I suppose it is.”

“Congratulations. Bill must be ecstatic.” Well, Bill wasn’t the ecstatic sort, but he was happy enough. Several other women had heard the conversation, which was enough to guarantee that the grapevine would buzz with her news. After the service and their changing from their robes, Bill, Dan, and a few more were waiting for them. Dan must have noticed her dress.

“Well, Bill,” he said, “tired of borrowing babies? Decided to grow your own?”

“Well,” Bill said, “Carolyn has promised that I can hold him on days other than Sundays.” Actually, she’d made no such promise, and Bill had better do more for his own kid than hold him occasionally. Well, she shouldn’t worry. What Bill and Dan said to each other had little resemblance to the facts.

The comfort of the maternity dress was a vivid contrast to teaching and doing interviews in her work jeans. Maybe there were cheaper maternity dresses for work times. She thought of asking Gladys, but she didn’t. After the service the next Sunday, though, Gladys talked to her.

“I still love that dress, but I was hoping to see what else you’d picked out.”

“Well, Gladys, we have only so much budgeted for clothes. It seems a waste to buy stuff that I’ll outgrow in a couple of months and never wear again.”

“Well, yes, but wait ‘til you’re buying baby clothes. After all, you might decide to have another, but that baby will never be two months old again.”

“Still...” And Gladys took that as a final answer. When they went up this time, Dan took her aside before either couple went out in the rain.

“So, how is your teaching going? Looks a little harder than you thought, doesn’t it?”

“It’s not all that hard. I just lead a discussion session; I don’t do the lectures. Is that harder?”

“Only the first year. You know the old joke about the psychology professor? ‘We don’t change the exam -- we just change the answers.’ Well, Poli-Sci doesn’t change the lectures -- we just expect you to get different things from them. Anyway, you’ve told us. Have you told your students?”

“I don’t really think it’s necessary. They’ll tumble sooner or later. It’s not as if I planned to teach next semester.”

“That’s the due date?”

“Yeah, Sometime in April.” The conversation went quite pleasantly. It was nice to have a real, live professor treat her as a fellow teacher. They turned back when Gladys called that she thought the rain was gentler now. It wasn’t particularly, but Bill and Dan both went for their cars.

When their Sunday dinner was at the dessert stage, Bill pushed back a little from the table, and started another budget discussion out of the blue.

“You know, the budget we planned out at the beginning has lasted longer than I really expected. Even so, the baby is going to sink it. Up to then, we said your teaching salary -- TA salary is what it turned out to be -- would cover any clothes you needed. Well, when we said that, we hadn’t planned on your pregnancy. Is it still enough? do you need more? Does it have to be both this semester’s and last semester’s salaries to cover this semester’s expenditures? Something else? I can’t see how it could be something else, but it might.” Well, the plan was for the TA’s salary to cover the extra expenses of being a TA. That had been quite minimal.

“Well, Bill, the salary was supposed to cover the extra clothes of being a TA. That didn’t include this dress, which I don’t plan to wear to class.”