Morning Read Online Free PDF Page B

handful of raisins of the sun stoned; three whole nutmegs pricked full of holes. Boil all these till half be wasted. Strain it out and drink a small wineglass at your going to bed as long as it lasts. Accompanying not with your husband during the time or sometime before. Be very careful and let nothing disquiet you. Take Shepherd’s Purse a good handfull and boil it in a pint of milk till half be consumed and drink it off.
    “I’ve looked up these weird things in the dictionary,” Julia had written on an attached sheet. “Guess what? You can get them—or improvise.”
    At first Sara had laughed, then frowned. Why not? If it worked well enough in ancient times that they wrote it down, perhaps there really was something to it. So, feeling like a witch or an escapee from the nearest mental asylum, she had made her own brew, using boiled ale, store-bought cans of oxtail soup, sage, dates and raisins Cuisinarted to mush, catnip, and nutmeg. It had tasted absolutely foul. She couldn’t even drink it, and its taste and smell discouraged her completely from trying to improvise on a “stinking orach.”
    The thermometer was Ellie’s suggestion. Two weeks ago, when The Virgin snidely asked Sara if she was pregnant and she had gone home to discover that she was not, she had called her sister in despair.
    “Get a basal thermometer,” Ellie ordered. “And use it for at least three months to get some idea of the day you ovulate.”
    “Three months!” Sara cried, amazed. Three months seemed like an eternity to her. She wanted to be pregnant now .
    “You see, a thermometer can’t tell you when you’re going to ovulate,” Ellie said. “It can only tell you when you have ovulated. When your temperature rises, you’ve ovulated. After you’ve used it for a few months, you’ll have a pretty good idea if you ovulate regularly and on just what day. Then be sure to make love on the day you ovulate, and bingo!”
    “Oh,” Sara moaned, cramping and dejected and indulging in her sister’s concern, “I wish I could just go bingo without all this stuff. I’m beginning to get all obsessed with it, you know. I don’t understand why I’m not getting pregnant easily, naturally, just like everyone else.”
    “Give me a break, everyone else!” Ellie said. “Everyone else is having problems, too. Why do you think people invented gadgets like this thermometer in the first place? It wasn’t dreamed up yesterday just for you.”
    “Thank heaven you’re there,” Sara said. “I don’t know what I’d do without you. No one else seems to understand how I feel. Julia thinks I’m a complete can of mixed nuts for even wanting to get pregnant, and Steve has enough to deal with when I’m in my premenstrual madness without any added gloominess. And Mother—do you know what Mother said when she called and I was all upset because my period had started? She said, ‘That’s all right, dear, I’ve already got a grandchild. Don’t worry about it.’ ”
    “Oh, Mother!” Ellie said, and both sisters burst out laughing.
    Sara and Ellie’s mother, Monica, had never been interested in the nitty-gritty of mothering. When Ellie told Monica two years before that she was going to have a baby in January, Monica had hung up and scheduled herself on a three-month cruise around the Caribbean. Sara and Ellie didn’t mind—Monica had paid her dues, they knew; she had been a good mother and a devoted wife who had nursed her husband through a lingering and difficult death. She deserved some fun.
    And it did help Sara to know that there was at least one person in her life whom she wasn’t letting down by not getting pregnant. Sara often envisioned herself as one of those insane seabirds squawking and flapping and splatting around in the unchartable seas of procreation, while Steve remained walruslike, lazily lolling around on the sand, content to let the sea of sexual chance wash up and around him as it pleased. He smiled through his mustache,