Oooo . . . nnnnn . . .
But then no more: no “EI-ron”. The end of the word simply won’t spurt from them. No yell, no hiccup, no final syllable catching in the throat, no R vibrating softly or harshly. The women’s lips remain rounded, as if someone has just snatched a sucker out of their mouths. Plop.
And as if there wasn’t enough to endure in all of this, a much greater PLOP crashes down, an end-of-the-world sort of PLOP, a PLOP that all women trying to become mothers feel inside if heartbreaking tragedy decides, for one reason or another, to activate its screeching machinery. Suddenly Nina rips her hands free of Polina and Wlibgis, and folds up. Not out of pain but out of knowledge, knowledge like the intuitive flash that pierces all expectant mothers when Things Are Not Right. That information comes straight from where every creature comes into the world and will continue to come. It comes from the incorruptible core of womanhood.
Nina knows, inside and out, through the darkest realms of consciousness: Little Antoine & Little Antoinette are no longer inside her.
TEN REASONS WHY NINA WOULD HAVE BEEN AN EXCELLENT MOTHER
N°1. Pragmatism. Nina was usually a very pragmatic woman. Not at all melodramatic. A melodramatic woman would cut up all her husband’s ties if she suspected him of cheating on her. A melodramatic woman would bake the shreds of tie into a loaf of bread and serve it to her husband. She would write a threatening message in nail polish on the bathroom tiles at precisely the height she anticipated his eyes landing in the morning when he staggered in to piss. She would get on the train and spend the night in an idyllic hotel in a nearby village. She would let her phone ring. She would pretend to be missing, maybe even dead. She would set her phone on silent and watch, nauseated and weeping even as she enjoyed seeing JEAN-PHILIPPE appear with his cheater face over and over on the display, obviously insane with worry. The hotel’s pillow would soak through. The ring would come off her finger and fly in an arc from the balcony over the hotel entrance and into the decorative pond in front of the entrance. With the accuracy of a dart thrower, the ring would land in the middle of the waterlily arrangement, directly on the stone frog’s outstretched waterfall tongue. Touché! But that melodramatic woman is not Nina. That woman is Jean-Philippe’s former fiancé, who never would have become the mother of Jean-Philippe’s children.
Nina was different. Of course she noticed all the same things women tend to notice. She was five months pregnant when she happened to catch a glimpse of an email whose content could be ambiguous, or maybe not. She packed a bag and traveled to her parent’s house one hundred kilometers away, leaving a note on the table: Deal with this and then tell me when the situation is under control again. Nina knew how to keep a cool head at the right times. She focused on solutions.
N°2. Facing facts. Dear Jean-Philippe Pignard, the ball is entirely in your court. If you want a divorce, say so. Just one word and I’ll start looking for a new flat. Jean-Philippe didn’t want a divorce, though. Yet again. This was one of Nina’s bravuras: through imperceptible moves, without making any noise, she got everything she wanted. Her tactics were not based on manipulation, psychological games, or blackmail. On the contrary, she only dealt in facts. Nina was a strong-willed woman from a family of strong-willed women. Facing facts took women in her family only milliseconds. If an ugly word was the most appropriate, they said it (e.g. her grandmother when Grandfather’s love child turned up), calmly and without raising their voices (e.g. her aunt when the repulsive reason for her divorce had to be stated out loud in court); they listened to what others had to say and tried to summarize (e.g. the cousin when cases of chlamydia revealed utterly inappropriate cross-shagging in her group of friends); they didn’t provoke or become provoked (e.g. her mother when her old, demented father began berating his daughter as a skinflint and a closet drunk—the latter accusation was also baseless). That was what the women in her family were like, and that was how she was too.
Which was why Nina boldly opened her mouth and let her mother, her grandmother, her aunt and her cousin do the talking: “Dear Jean-Philippe Pignard, the ball is entirely in your court,” they all said in unison.
Jean-Philippe obediently cleaned up the mess he had caused. He picked up the phone and invited his wife, who was carrying Little Antoine & Little Antoinette, back home. Nina came, because these children were supposed to have a father, and their father was supposed to have a wife, and their mother was supposed to have a husband, and they were all supposed to have one flat bought with the husband’s family money on a linden-lined street five minutes walk from a market square, where one could buy the world’s best organic marmalade made from White Transparent apples.
N°3. Apt situational assessments. When Nina appeared in fourth position in the place which did not at that time have a name but which everyone later, due to Polina’s harangues, began to call, more or less seriously, with joyful resignation or crushing gloom, “the hereafter”, she recognized quite quickly, after recovering from her initial shock, that now, if ever, her organizational skills were needed. In all her (dyed, but that isn’t relevant now) platinum blond glory she had popped up right in front of Shlomith and Polina, in the middle of a heated argument, which was interrupted momentarily due to her appearance. The women burst into spontaneous hurrahs as if the Mother of God herself had descended into their midst, but their enthusiasm quickly ebbed because Nina was
