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Playing for Keeps
A Couple about to Hit a Jackpot
By Steven Winn
"It's great that you're still swimming," the woman said.
"Sunning," Sally corrected her. "I haven't tried the water yet. But I intend to."
As I stood off at a distance, watching my wife and a stranger nod and smile at each other, it struck me that a woman who walked up to Sally at a hotel swimming pool immediately touched a chord of shared experience that I never could.
Men – those who don't shut their eyes to it altogether, that is – tend to glorify pregnancy with lofty pronouncements. When I was in high school, a progressively inclined health teacher announced one morning that his wife was expecting their second child and that "a woman is never more beautiful than when she's pregnant." His declaration, elaborated with a metaphor about ripe melons, left his audience of 16-year-old boys too dumbstruck to snicker.
Our first night in Las Vegas, a retired farm equipment dealer from Indiana had said more or less the same thing across a showroom table. "Helen here," he told me, patting the shoulder of the gray haired woman beside him, "she glowed like a light when she was expecting. Prettier than when I married her."
Men say these sorts of things to each other, I think, as a way of deflecting our deeper and more fearful feelings. We're afraid of being bystanders, outsiders, winding up as witnesses with our noses pressed to the glass of a hospital's nursery window.
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