In their sun-paled plaid maternity bathing suits, the pregnant young women . . . Coming along the water's edge, heads higher than the line of the sea . . . bellies swollen stately.
Faces and limbs freckled in every hollow, burnished on the ball of the shoulder, the tip of the nose . . . The light in their eyes stealing sparkle from the far hard edge of the sea.
—John Updike, When Everyone Was Pregnant
The baby blue van veers into the parking lot of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in West Hollywood, Calif. It is an increasingly common sight these days. Out of the van comes a clump of helium-filled balloons, bobbing in the expensive air. They are blue and silver: it's a boy. Next, a balloon bouquet of pink, pearl and white: a girl. In Hollywood, where trendiness is a measure of sincerity, sending flowers to mothers who have just given birth to babies went out with designer jeans and saying "Trust me." These days the modish gift is balloons.
Three thousand miles away, in New York City's Exercise Plus, a fitness center that has a popular program for pregnant women, 26 pairs of legs are waving in the air. Some of the bodies look like overturned beetles. Many applicants are unable to get into the prime lunchtime classes. Nineteen of the expectant mothers in the small workout room are over 30. "That was for your waistline," says the instructor to her huffing pupils. "What waistline?" the class shouts back.
At Prentice Women's Hospital, in Chicago, twelve couples are learning a procedure called effleurage, part of the Lamaze method of "prepared" child delivery. Husbands stroke the swollen stomachs of their wives, who pant, groan and breathe deeply. The average age of the students: early 30s. Even the 35-year-old instructor is expecting her first child.
Out in Malibu, Calif., Actress Jessica Lange, 33, hurries from a set of the film Frances to her trailer. There, she lovingly spoon-feeds pureed carrots to her eleven-month-old daughter Alexandra. When the loudspeaker calls her back to filming, Lange hands the child to the nurse and rushes out the door.
A Citibank vice president in Manhattan, Michele Bertrand, 37, is in charge of 15 branch operations with a budget of $1 billion. In her office, along with the telephone and computer terminal, there is a new addition. Behind a credenza is an electric breast-milk expresser, a machine necessary for a nursing mother who spends long hours away from home.
In the rarefied heights of Bel Air, Calif., Charlie's Angel turned Madonna Jaclyn Smith, 35, enjoys the seventh month of her pregnancy in the cool interior of her eleven-room minimansion. She became pregnant shortly after portraying Jacqueline Kennedy in a television movie. "I would put on the maternity padding to play Jackie Kennedy," she says, "and it felt so right. I found myself whispering, 'I wish, I wish.' "