Free Private Practices by Linda Wolfe

separate, purposeful. Slamming the door, she thrust the bags into the kitchen and went into the bedroom where she slipped off her sweater and the irritating bra and donned one of Philip’s loose workshirts. Then she returned to the kitchen, lit the oven and began putting away the groceries, all the while peering down at herself to marvel at her new majestic size.
    The oven heating, she set the table, gathering plates and glasses into her arms and thinking as she arranged them that most likely she would nurse. Just last night she had read another book which argued that breast-fed babies were psychologically healthier than their bottle-fed peers. Sliding straw table mats into place, she made a mental note to ask Dr. Zauber what he thought of Nurse Me! I’m Yours !
    She was forever storing up questions about her reading or anecdotes about her job at the neighborhood center to tell him and when she saw her friends she talked about him all the time. On her second visit to him, she had decided he was every bit as understanding as her old doctor, Mulenberg, and actually a good bit more intriguing, indeed, a fascinating man. Philip, who had read a lot of Freud, didn’t see it. He said her absorption in the obstetrician was just another facet of the self-preoccupation of pregnancy. The obstetrician was a concretization of narcissism. But she told Philip he was just being jealous.
    Finished with the table, Emily seasoned the chicken, shoved it into a roasting pan, and was just bending to slide the pan into the oven when she felt a familiar stickiness between her legs. She slammed the oven door on the chicken and still half-standing, half-squatting, pulled up her skirt and looked at her panties. There was a bright red stain on the white nylon. She swayed and nearly sat down right on the linoleum floor. And then she vaulted for the telephone.
    It was five-thirty. She called Dr. Zauber at his office, trying to stay calm. But her usual self-possession was deserting her. Her fingers slipped and she dialed the wrong number, reaching a laundry instead of her obstetrician.
    She sat down on the edge of the bed before she dialed again and this time pressed her finger hard into the plastic dial, making sure she didn’t make another mistake. At last she was rewarded with the doctor’s reassuring voice saying, “Hello. This is Dr. Zauber.”
    â€œOh. I’m go glad I got you,” she cried. “I was afraid you’d be gone already.” But his voice went on in tandem with her own. “I am sorry I cannot speak with you right now, but if you will leave your name and number I will get back to you.”
    Embarrassed at having been so nervous as to mistake his tape recording for the doctor himself, she rattled her name and number into the machine and then, hanging up, unexpectedly began to cry.
    The tears, burning and copious, astonished her even more than the bleeding had. She blotted them with the bottom of Philip’s shirt, yet they continued to flow, until finally she had to acknowledge to herself what she had never before acknowledged, had to admit that although the baby had been Philip’s idea, it had now become as important to her as ever it had been to him. The thought of losing it was suddenly unbearable and, lying back against the pillows, she began to sob uncontrollably. She wanted nothing but to keep the baby inside her. Crying, she wrapped her arms around her chest and clenched her legs together, wondering wildly whether this would help.
    She was still crying when the phone rang fifteen minutes later and Dr. Zauber, in his soothing, quiet voice, asked her why she had called. She told him and was terribly ashamed of herself for crying, particularly when he assured her, “It’s probably nothing. Twenty percent of all pregnant women have these bleeding episodes and fewer than half of them miscarry. Their bleeding just stops and that’s all there is to it.”
    Still, it took her a