With the stopping of the pain came sleep, great dreamless ten-hour spans of it; and with the sleep came hunger, for meat that was cooked, not raw, for eggs and vegetables and cheese and fruit and milk. Within days Rosemary’s skull-face had lost its edges and sunk back behind filling-in flesh; within weeks she looked the way pregnant women are supposed to look: lustrous, healthy, proud, prettier than ever. She drank Minnie’s drink as soon as it was given to her, and drank it to the last chill drop, driving away as by a ritual the remembered guilt of I-killed-the-baby. With the drink now came a cake of white gritty sweet stuff like marzipan; this too she ate at once, as much from enjoyment of its candylike taste as from a resolve to be the most conscientious expectant mother in all the world. Dr. Sapirstein might have been smug about the pain’s stopping, but he wasn’t, bless him. He simply said “It’s about time” and put his stethoscope to Rosemary’s really-showing-now belly.
