Lit Read online

  What is it? I say.

  Nothing, he says. It’s nothing.

  You’re looking at me so sternly, I say. And truly staring at him, I see in his green eyes that some metal doors seemed to have slid shut.

  Buckle your seat belt, he says. You need to start wearing a seat belt.

  The car continues down the snowy and narrowing road.

  I eat: french fries with gravy. Liver with greasy heaps of onions. Dried strawberries smudged with gorgonzola cheese, crackers slathered with fig jam. Stepping on the scale, I hear my doctor admonish that I’ll gain fifty pounds if I don’t slow down, but I couldn’t care less. How proud I feel shoving that giant globe of a belly through the subway turnstile.

  But the more heft I have, the more elusive Warren seems to become, the more transparent, retreating into a void I stare into, studying him while he reads, repeatedly poking my head into his office the weekends he works.

  Maybe he’s having an affair, Mother says. That’s how some guys react to fatherhood.

  Mother! I say. Warren’s not like that.

  Has he started drinking more? she asks, adding, His daddy could sure put it away.

  Not everybody’s a sot, I say. More than two drinks and Warren gets pukey.

  One night he leaves a message not to hold dinner, he won’t be home till ten. The car pulls into the garage, and he finds me sitting on the back steps.

  Where were you? I say, reaching for the stair railing to pull myself up, belly first.

  He unfolds from the hatchback, arms laden with books. School, he says.

  What school? I say. For what? (Had we really not discussed this? Surely we did, but I don’t recall it that way.)

  I told you I was starting school for my master’s. It’s paid for through work.

  I thought next fall, after the baby came, I say.

  You shouldn’t be out here without a coat, he says.

  Don’t you think it’s bad timing? I say.

  You’re one to talk, he says, gesturing to my belly.

  Can you at least not take summer classes? The baby’ll come in June.

  He sighs. Maybe this year. But I want to get it over with.

  During the week, he leaves at eight in the morning, and three nights a week, he gets in after ten. Weekends, he always seems to be working on papers or that literary magazine he cofounded.

  Lying next to him, my body swells as if hooked to a bicycle pump, and with each inch of girth, he floats further, and I began slowly to shift my gaze away from his back. I start to stare inward to the pearlescent mystery I’m carrying. Some nights I tell myself the birth will bring Warren back to me.

  (And maybe—in his version of events—he’d report that I’d studied baby books with a Talmudic intensity, hardly reading anymore the poetry he was devoted to. The bigger I got, the lower my IQ, I swear. It’s not politic to say so, but hey. Maybe Warren was telling himself the birth would bring me back to him.)

  One day, as I meticulously fold and refold minuscule T-shirts and onesies in the trance of the deeply unprepared, the phone rings. And a woman’s voice says the sentence I’ve been waiting to hear for so long, I’m almost deaf to it. So obsessed am I with the upcoming birth that she has to repeat it several times.

  I said that we’d like to publish your book of poems.

  Okay, I say, having become a farm animal at this point. With the phone to my ear, I slide the top off a box of chocolates my sister sent and start poking them in search of caramel.

  What do you mean, Okay? the editor says. We’d like to publish your book next year.

  That’s good, I say, poking as one piece gushes white goop, so I pass over it.

  You don’t sound very excited, she says.

  I’m having a baby, I say dreamily. And truly the notion of a book has grown misty.

  Right this second?

  Soon, I say. At that instant, my fingernail punctures chocolate and hits caramel. What does she need from me? The names of anybody dumb enough to blurb it. A dust-jacket photo laying around.

  I chew my caramel, satisfied as a brood sow in a mud wallow. Neither good nor ill can reach me.

  15

  Journey of the Magi

  Who is there?

  I.

  Who is I?

  Thou.

  And that is the awakening—the Thou and the I.

  —Paul Valéry

  Women in my bloodline don’t pop out babies like pieces of toast. We’re narrow-hipped. Birthing tends to drag on—long days of false labor followed by a good twenty hours of exorcism-quality dismay. We’re less known for patience than drive, and being flat on our back is anathema. Lecia’s own son took so long to find daylight that his father—during a grisly period called transition that involves much howling—excused himself, sending Mother into the room as backup. Lecia had been cursing him and God and most of the nurses. Mother stood bedside a few minutes, then—as Lecia huffed for air—held up her handbag, saying, Look at this cute little purse I bought.

  At which, my sister screamed, Get her the fuck out of here!

  Mother, later outraged at Lecia’s overreaction, said, I was just trying to take her mind off it.

  In my case, delivery takes a full twenty-two hours—forty-four if you count the false labor that kept me manically rocking in a chair all night like some bulbous figure in a horror movie. At the hospital, they inject various mickeys into my IV, telling me I’ll be asleep in a minute, but that’s only one of many lies—like banning the word pain in favor of discomfort, conveniently reducing the hospital’s need to deal with it while treating the mother like a piece of furniture.

  In natural childbirth classes, with women sprawled around the room on wrestling mats, the men had seemed mystified by the process. One night in the car going home, Warren said, When are we supposed to learn the stuff that stops the pain?

  We already have, I said. That’s what the breathing exercises are.

  My God, he said, that won’t accomplish anything.

  Almost two days into my own marathon, I enter the half-drugged, hallucinogenic state that causes the room I lie in to bulge like a fishbowl around me. Staring at the calico curtains hung against the vomit-green walls to make the birthing room look homey, I keep echoing Oscar Wilde’s last words: Either this wallpaper goes, or I do.

  The big disappointment? The needle painfully jabbed into my spine to block pain quote-unquote didn’t take.

  This is the breezy parlance of the anesthesia dude. He stands in the door with clip-on sunglasses flipped up from his specs. He’s clearly on his way out.

  Whaddayou mean, I roar at him, whaddayou MEAN it didn’t take!

  I’m incapable of speaking without exclamation points and italics and any available typographical inflation. In between cogent sentences, the nurse with the tiny white head and gargantuan blue eyes—real crocodile-sized peepers—leans over me, saying, Breathe…

  Warren’s head appears alongside hers, his face bulging forward like a drop of water squeezed from a turkey baster. Breathe…

  I holler, DO IT AGAIN!

  The nurse is telling me it’s too late.

  You didn’t say it might not take, I say. You said…You promised…You PROMISED I’d be numb from the WAIST DOWN!!

  I bang on a thigh. My LEG is like a rump roast!!

  Not much later, Warren’s face leans down through the haze, saying, I need a sandwich.

  WHAT! I say. A fucking SANDWICH?

  It won’t take long, he says. He’s gone for what seems a long stretch but can’t be even an hour.

  He comes back just as they start wheeling me spread-eagled and undraped down a public hall, with me saying, No man gets to see this who hasn’t bought me dinner—a joke the doctor doesn’t get, followed by, to Warren, Where the everloving fuck were you?

  Sleeping, it turns out, on the front lawn of the hospital after a turkey sandwich. He’s now loping alongside my gurney toward the delivery room, his face masked.

  An eternity later, I
feel a cataclysmic movement, and—in one massive thunderclap of pain—all my innards seem to exit. I feel abruptly vacated. Warren shouts up at me, It’s a boy. I lie there throbbing while some space bar in the action gets hit, and there’s an interval of quiet, then the baby’s throaty cry. All the attending humans seem busily focused elsewhere till they hand Dev to me—short for Devereux—a family name of the Whitbread’s. This new Dev is squinty and crimson, and they’ve stretched a little white knit cap on his head.

  As he leans over me, Warren’s face is damp, too, and his ocean-lit eyes fixed on me with wondrous attention, and in that interval I first hold our bundled son, I feel us all stitched inside a glorious tapestry, breathing the same antiseptic air, cool as pine—a rare atmosphere conscribes us—the family I’ve pined for, an end to the perennial estrangement I’ve powered through the world running from. Warren and I both address Dev in coos and smooches and clicks.

  Dev squints up with dark blue eyes as if trying to make us out through smoke, and from the instant his gaze brushes by me, some inner high beams flip on. Never have I felt such blazing focus for another living creature. I can’t stop looking at him. Joy, it is, which I’ve never known before, only pleasure or excitement. Joy is a different thing, because its focus exists outside the self—delight in something external, not satisfaction of some inner craving. I feel such untrammeled love for these two beings.

  Back in my room, the nurse hands Dev to me again, and boy, is he hollering to blow the hair off your head.

  This one has a set of lungs, the nurse says, and a strong opinion.

  But soon as I open my seersucker gown to his velvety face, the crying snaps off. Dev nuzzles toward the only spot on my body soft enough to accommodate him, and blessed silence ensues.

  Look at him latch on, Warren says.

  My hand cups the duck-fuzzed head—such a strong pulse against my hand, faster than my own, but they syncopate somehow like tom-toms from far off villages.

  The pediatric nurse says, This one’s what we call a sucky baby.

  I finally ask, What do you think he’s thinking?

  You know the static channel on the TV? she says.

  It’s almost like he knows you, Warren says.

  The nurse says, I think they can smell their mothers.

  I smooch his little hand, cooing, You’re my crème brûlée, my chocolate shake, my bear claw. You’re my—in a flash, I think of my daddy snuggling the white cat he once so spoiled—boon companion.

  With Dev tucked under my arm, I set to staring at him as if to emboss my gaze on him, to seal him in the safe bubble of it, and so also to sear into my own head every iota of him.

  Warren comments that he does look an awful lot like Winston Churchill. Put a cigar in his mouth…

  Bite your tongue, I say. At some point the woman in the next bed comes over to show us her boy, and when she peels aside the blanket to reveal his face, I have to stop my own recoil, for that is one unfortunate-looking baby.

  He’s cute, Warren says.

  This kid has a face like a caved-in squash. His full head of hair lends him a werewolf aspect. My plump, pink-cheeked, bald-as-a-bubble infant sets the standard against which all others will come up short.

  I sit there with a smile welded on my face till the werewolf baby starts to sputter neurasthenically, Ehh…ehhh ehhh…

  The woman looks up at us, saying, Time to nurse.

  If Dev, who wails like a freight train when hungry, made no more noise than that, he’d starve.

  I’m tired, Warren says, though his handsome face holds nary a crease. Bone-weary, I let him peel my clingy hand off his biceps to extract himself.

  16

  Postal Partum

  Let him be happy from time to

  time, and leap over abysses.

  —Wislawa Szymborska, “A Tale Begun”

  (trans. Stanislav Baranczak)

  You think having a baby is a big dang accomplishment, and the nurses smile, and the doctor seems distractedly glad, and you’re lying there not even minding overmuch how you’re torn from stem to stern because you’re so proud to have laid your egg, then the nurse comes in and hands you a round plastic pee catcher shaped like a matador’s hat—itself piss-yellow in color—to sit over the toilet seat, for really, all anybody in the hospital wants you to do is pee. Forget the baby, that’s all anybody’s waiting for: You pee, you go home.

  I couldn’t. It’s an indelicate thing to have to confess, but the long labor had distended my bladder or hurt my urethra’s muscle tone or blah blah blah. They give me a pee bag and a catheter, but since the gallons of IV fluid they’d pumped into me over more than a day had seeped into my tissues, I stay swollen like a prize pig. People on the ward ask me more than once when I’m due, which shocks me, for without my baby bump, I feel lithe as Miss America, puzzled when my old skinny jeans can’t shimmy over my dimpled knee.

  The doctor stares at his clipboard, saying, It happens with incompetent labor.

  Or a doctor’s incompetent delivery, I snap.

  Mare! Warren says.

  Why can’t you stick up for me? I burst out. I’m tired and sore, and my abruptly massive boobs have hardened into bricks as the milk floods in.

  Mare, incompetent’s a medical term, not personal disparagement.

  Spoken like a man who went home and slept all night, I say, dabbing at my eyes.

  The doctor predicts it might be a day or two until I can pee, and they’ll keep me till then. He shakes Warren’s hand and leaves the room, and Warren announces—almost in passing—that he’s taken his paternity leave that week. Problem being, when the baby and I come home, I’ll fly solo.

  All right, I say—what choice do I have, and so besotted am I with the baby, I almost don’t care—I’ll get Mother to come.

  At the bank of elevators, Warren pushes the button. I sit in my wheelchair with the geriatic pee bag taped to my leg and our squinty son in my arms. The silver door slides open.

  Hold the elevator, a voice cries out, and from behind us skitters up a couple from our natural childbirth class.

  Warren moves aside while they get on. The new mom has a paper cone of roses in her lap, and the grandmother holds the baby while the grandfather videotapes the whole thing.

  Wave goodbye to your first home, Spenser, Grandpa says.

  The grandmother flaps Spencer’s limp paw.

  While Warren holds the door for them, I ask him when he’ll be back.

  Tomorrow about five.

  The doors begin to close.

  Wait, I say. Why so late?

  The elevator door’s black rubber bumper stops midbounce against Warren’s hand.

  He says, Visiting hours are five to seven.

  Not for dads, I say.

  But the silver doors have shut him away. And I know Warren will come religiously from five till seven—never a minute longer. (To be fair to Warren, not yet thirty, he must’ve been shocked, as men often are—and the younger, the more shocked—by the dreamy looks their previously income-generating wives get when staring at some dumb hunks of baby.)

  With Dev, my every practical impulse has snapped off like a spigot turned tight. So what if I’m invisible to Warren or he to me? My rent’s paid. I have my boy. In six weeks, I’ll start to teach three days per week, three or four classes per day. No other fact sinks in.

  Sitting in my room the next night, after Warren’s brief, distracted visit, I feed the baby out of some gleaming core inside. It’s you and me, Dev, I say, which solitude is—in some ways—familiar. At least now I have a small sack of infant to cuddle with, a boy molded from silk and cream whose howling cares vanish soon as I take him in my arms.

  For seven days, I stay catheterized in the hospital. In seven days, the Bible tells us, God made the world, but I fail to release my pent-up urine. Eventually, the insurance company starts to squawk, and while the doctor doesn’t like sending me home with a bag strapped to my leg, they figure I can get up every morning after breastfeedin
g all night, load the baby into the car seat with diapers and changes of clothes and miscellaneous crap. I can drive to the clinic, get on the table, have the catheter taken out, then wait, breastfeeding in the hall, till four to see if I can relieve myself of urine before then getting re-catheterized—a length of flaming skewer slid into my body’s rawest corridor.

  Warren seems hardly to register any of this, sleeping every night unperturbed downstairs. Every hour and a half or two, Dev squawks, and I stagger to his crib, change his diaper, latch him to one breast then another, burp him, swaddle him. Then back in my solitary bed, steal an hour or two of sleep before Dev eats again. Born three weeks early it’s as if he’s trying to catch up, he just needs to be bigger than my scrawny body could tote. (He grew at twice the normal rate, and I’d have been smarter nursing him in the bed, but I’d been warned—ironically—that it’d ruin my marriage.)

  Maybe I don’t resent Warren more because he’s the only author of relief for me. He walks in the door like clockwork every day at six, the hour Dev inexplicably begins to holler as if being bullwhipped. And only Warren loves him enough to advance toward that flaming shriek.

  What’s wrong with him? Warren says, taking him from me, handling him like rare glass.

  He’s clearly unhappy here, I say.

  As Warren folds the boy to his body, I enter the only certain stretch of rest in my day.

  Hold his head, I say. It’s damp. Maybe tuck this blanket around him. Bring an umbrella in case it starts to mist. And when you change him, use the white cream.

  I’ve got him, Mare. Just let me do it.

  I plod back up the stairs and pitch forward, imploding in a black-brained sleep.

  Around eleven, the door swings wide, and Warren lays Dev in my arms before tiptoeing downstairs to his pallet in the living room, where the white-fog machine throws up each night a wall of noise beyond which we don’t exist. He’s working, going to grad school full-time. I have to breastfeed anyway, the argument goes.