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The trophy wife was having a bad day.

The baby was crying again, and it was getting to be more than she could bear. Every time she thought she’d solved the problem, every time she thought she could leave the room, every time she tried to get some rest, he would begin again and again and again.

She had tried everything she could think of to get him to stop, but nothing seemed to work. Nothing seemed to satisfy his endless dissatisfaction, his constant implication that nothing was ever going to be enough. She had tried to talk to her husband about it, but all he would say was, "you have someone to help you," meaning the nanny, "so let her help you." But it was a mystery to her exactly how the nanny was supposed to help.

If she gave the baby to the nanny and the nanny was able to quiet him when she had failed, she felt lost and incompetent. If she dismissed the nanny and was left to struggle with the child on her own, she felt desperate and abandoned, screaming into the intercom, "I’m paying you to do a job and you’re not doing it!" until the woman scurried in and lifted the baby out of the crib, coo-cooing it into submission.

She had fantasies of sending the nanny away, putting the baby in another wing of the house, crawling beneath the covers, and falling asleep in a soft warm cocoon of heavy blankets. The problem was that the nanny never left. Her entire life had been hired to revolve around theirs, living in the maid’s quarters, feeding and clothing their child, responding to their every need. It got so that she immediately handed the baby over to the nanny as if it were the nanny’s baby, as if she were returning a sweater she had borrowed on a cold day.

She suggested to her husband that they move the nursery away from the master suite and into one of the vacant children’s rooms at the back of the house, closer to the nanny’s room and further from their own. "That’s ridiculous. Why would you do that?" Because she wanted to, but she quickly learned not to suggest it again. Her husband, she reminded herself, didn’t have any more parenting skills than she did, but he fussed and fretted over the baby, "his baby," as if she were nothing but a breeder of his genetic line. Then he looked at his watch, ticked off a list of to-do’s, gave her a peck on the cheek and disappeared for hours, leaving her alone in the immense house with the crying baby, the nanny, and time.

"Well what did you expect?"

"I don’t know," she said, "but not this." What she had wanted to say, but didn’t dare, was that she had expected to relax, but that without the baby she would not have been invited to do so. She would have remained her husband’s girlfriend, living in her studio apartment, fighting rush-hour traffic, and grooming herself to perfection, pretending that her beauty wasn’t fading. She wanted to be a wife, his wife. She wanted to put her clothes in the closet, her shoes in the hall, her car in the garage, a ring on her finger. She wanted to tell people what to do. She wanted to say, "Yes, we’d love to join you for the weekend," and, "No, it’s no trouble at all." She wanted life to be easy.

But after two years of dating and a major ultimatum, the man who became her husband, was still saying that as far as he was concerned there wasn’t any reason to marry if you weren’t going to have children, and at this late stage of his life he didn’t intend to start having children. So she got pregnant, washing her pills down the sink and waiting until the end of her first trimester before telling him the good news. He seemed startled at first, even angry, but driving home after their first visit to the obstetrician, they quickly came to an agreement, and the next day he presented her with documents to sign that stipulated what he was prepared to give her in the event of a divorce.

He took her to a jeweler and she was given a choice of two diamonds. She chose the larger one and they were married by a Justice of the Peace at City Hall. After the brief ceremony, they went out to dinner and the next day her husband went back to work. She took the day off and spent it lounging by the pool, staring at her ring, filling out the forms to legally change her name from the one she had been given at birth to the one she had acquired in the last 24 hours. She took a few boxes of clothing and jewelry from her studio apartment, forwarded her mail, disconnected her phone, leaving behind all of her furniture and dishes and bedding so that the realtor could show what the tiny apartment looked when fully inhabited.

They agreed not to tell anyone about her condition until after the party to celebrate their marriage and in the first few months she continued to work, nudging her new car into her old parking space, and feigning appreciative nonchalance about the enormous rock on her finger. On her lunch hour she took her friend from accounting with her as she selected engraved invitations, party favors, flowers, and a dress, impressing her with the ease with which she spent her husband’s money. Only it wasn’t her husband’s money, it was her own money as she had already wildly exceeded the allowance he had given her.

At the post office, she separated one invitation from the stack and locked it in the glove compartment of her car. A few days before the party, she drove down Sunset Boulevard and waited at the bus stop across from the Beverly Hills Hotel at the hour her mother normally got off work in the hotel’s laundry. She watched a group of women come out of the service entrance and walk down the steep driveway, laughing and waving as they peeled off in different directions. Her mother waited for the light to change, putting on her sweater as she crossed the road, but before she reached the opposite curb, Miranda pulled into traffic with her mother’s invitation still in her glove compartment.

The afternoon of the party Miranda stood in the guest bedroom and watched the cars arrive and the guests unloading their gifts while she waited for the seamstress to let out the waistband of her dress. She was already feeling loaded down with her child and at the last minute she’d had to forego her original gown for something a little more concealing. She held a towel in front of her and vomited into the toilet before heading down the stairs to greet her guests.

She stood at her husband’s side, smiling brightly, pulling away from people as they kissed her so they wouldn’t ruin her make up. She kissed her new mother-in-law, her new brother-in-law, her new sister-in-law, her new nieces and her new nephews, as well as her new husband’s business associates, his old friends and the neighbor from across the street. She even kissed the cheek of the man who had docked her pay for being fifteen minutes late as if he were the equal of all her other guests. He clung to his wife, uncomfortably aware that he was no longer her social superior. "Oh no," she said when he suggested that they may not be seeing her at work much longer. "I find my job very rewarding."

The food ran out forty-five minutes ahead of schedule so the party planner suggested they move on to the cutting of the cake. As she crossed the room, she heard someone say, "Miranda got lucky," and she turned to find her husband’s oldest friend standing alone, speaking to no one in particular. "No," she said, "he’s the one who got lucky," with such vehemence that heads actually turned. She laughed as if it were a long-standing joke between them, gave him a kiss on the cheek and put her hand on his wife’s famously barren belly and said, "looks like you’ve been working out, girl." Then she grabbed a glass of champagne from one of her new husband’s nephews and stepped in front of the assembly of well-wishers to thank everyone for coming. "Friends and family are the most important thing to us."

In bed that night, her husband told her that after seeing Miranda’s ring, his partner’s wife had insisted that her husband buy her a larger diamond for their anniversary. Miranda pretended that she was as amused as he was, that it didn’t matter, that it was silly to be concerned by such things, that she now had everything that she had ever wanted. "Good," he said, as if they had just concluded a negotiation.

A few weeks after the party they announced her pregnancy. She walked around with one hand poised on her stomach, feeling the power in her belly and the fullness in her breasts. She stopped going to work and whiled away her afternoons filling scrapbooks with photos from the wedding, placing her gifts around the house, and reluctantly writing thank-you notes even though she didn’t feel like thanking anyone for anything.

By the end of her second trimester, her engagement ring began to cut off circulation to her finger. She could see the beginning of stretch marks on her belly and cellulite on her thighs, and she was shocked by how quickly she was filling out even though the morning sickness kept her perpetually on the verge of throwing up. She felt panicky that she was being engulfed by the baby, and she stopped eating to keep the sense of fullness at bay. Then, fearing that the baby would not be able to survive inside her body, she gorged herself on vitamin pills and chili relleños until they backed up on her.

"Of course, I ordered the crib."

"Then, where is it?" Her husband asked until it was obvious that she couldn’t put it off any longer. She drove into town and parked in front of The Baby Emporium where she sat in her car and watched a series of bulbous women go in and out of the store carrying packages. She pulled away from the curb deciding that she could, in fact, put it off for yet another day.

Her due date came and went without incident, but the next morning she called the store in a panic, asking for a rush delivery, lying to the saleslady that the custom crib she had ordered had been hopelessly delayed. She hadn’t slept in three or four days and she spent hours on her back trapped beneath the tonnage, watching her hands and feet swell like sausages. Relief came in the form of a twelve-hour labor, after which the nurse handed her an ugly, pink animal that seemed to make her husband genuinely happy. She lay back against the pillows so exhausted that she could barely hold her new son, and completely indifferent as they tried to show her how he was to feed himself from her enormous breast.

When the phone rang a few weeks after she came home from the hospital, she handed the crying baby to the nanny and picked up the receiver. She said "hello" two or three times before the echo returned. "Mira… Mira… Miranda?" said a voice straining to be heard over the thumping and whirring of a hotel’s laundry. Miranda turned to face the woman who had betrayed her.

Through the doorway she could see the nanny cradling her son in her arms, her eyes dancing with his, walking him through the world as if it were a maze of fascination. Her mother continued to wait in silence on the other end of the phone, but Miranda refused to answer her, refused to be trapped by her accusations. Finally, she gave up and said, "Si, Mama, it’s a boy," and put down the receiver, picked up her car keys and walked out the front door.

She drove down the hill and turned left on Sunset Boulevard, following the buses to the end of the line, where they let off the last of their passengers. Like the buses, she waited at the depot for seven minutes then turned around and headed back toward the Pacific Ocean. Twenty minutes later, she pulled a hard right into the driveway of the Beverly Hills Hotel and left her car running, her keys in the ignition and a credit card with the reception desk, before taking the elevator to a suite on the eleventh floor of the hotel. Once inside, she stripped off her clothes, shut the drapes and crawled beneath the covers, huddling herself into a tight ball, teeth chattering, tears, mascara and mucus raining down on the cool, crisp sheets. She awoke hours later when a key turned in the lock and a maid entered the room. She felt a warm gush of liquid over her thighs as she wet the bed.

THE END

Susan Emerling lives in Malibu, California. She is a writer, producer and reseacher on TV and feature documentaaries and films. Two of her films, Nightmare Angel and The Wounding have been screened at the Sundance Film Festival, as well as at dozens of international film festivals.

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