After Birth (6 page)

It’d be creepy if he kept track, but I’m weirdly hurt he’s unaware. Comes around every year, and we’ve been together for what, now, three? It’s like, don’t make me say it, okay? Just stick your proverbial tit in my proverbial mouth, make me feel better. Curl up next to me like a faithful pet, stay close, breathe. Tell me a joke, bring me chocolate and some tea, kiss me, rub my back, make me laugh, wrap your arms around me good and tight, shut up and stay close.

It dawns on him.
Your mom
. He approaches with his arms open.
Oh, babe
.

It’s fine
, I say, because it’s not like I’m reminded she’s dead or newly sad she’s dead or anything as simple as that. She’s always dead, and time does a pretty good job on whatever the hell that means. It’s more like I get yanked back into the shit, forever eleven, twelve, thirteen, caught in the fray. Not logical. No explaining it.

It’s a spiral
, I tell him.
It’s the eye of the tornado. It’s time and space inverted in a nightmare. It’s being trapped in a mine.

Of course he doesn’t get it. How could he? His hundred-and-two-year-old grandfather just got upgraded to the wing of the nursing home from which you leave in a bag, and that’s the worst of it in his family so far.

He gives me that look, the one he always gets just before he suggests I go get a massage or treat myself to a day of galleries and boutiques in Hudson or
maybe it’s time to see someone, Ari; maybe you need some help
.

Useless.

Wonder if Mina’s given birth. Maybe I’ll knock on her door with a plate of baked goods—vegan pear almond cinnamon, say, though I’ve never successfully baked jack in my life. She’ll be in early labor, dancing, some Neil Young on, sage burning, a party, a happening, her friends over, a circle. Raft of women, Mina in the middle, and they’ll invite me in, tell me to stay, and help, join the circle. We’ll move together around her in some primal dance called forth from anonymous foremothers, the ones who came before the ones who came before the ones who came before.

We’ll calm and soothe her—
mmm-hmmm, yes
, we’ll say,
yes, yes, good, good
—hold her all the way through, share in the sweat and strain and glory. Unwavering, unflinching, rooted, brave. We’ll accomplish the impossible act and emerge sisters.

Can’t sleep. Raccoon or squirrel or whatever is moving around in there, scratching at the insides of our walls.
Thump, knock, thump
.

Kind of silly to keep pretending I have a dissertation in the works. Anything at all in the works.

My mother’s mother was prone to miscarriage. She had a bunch, I don’t know how many. More than a few. Maybe it was genetic, maybe it was war trauma, maybe it was psychic, maybe the Good Lord in His Infinite Wisdom simply did not want her bearing children, not after what she had been through, what she had survived.

Finally, pregnant with my mother at the advanced age of thirty-two, she was prescribed a miracle drug. Even better: an
experimental
miracle drug. Diethylstilbestrol. DES, for short. Some kind of synthetic estrogen. (Hey, listen, rule of thumb? The minute anyone says “miracle drug,” run. Especially if it’s a
lady-specific
miracle drug, dig? Opt the fuck out, please. Stay away. They have no idea what they’re doing to you, and they Really Do Not Care.)

So it did indeed prevent miscarriage, good old DES, but in so doing also—oh yeah, oops, by the way, sorry!—fated the unborn to all manner of cancerous disaster. DES Daughters, they’re called. Too soon to tell whether we Daughters of Daughters will have what are euphemistically referred to as “indicators,” but hey, I’m on the edge of my fucking seat.

Every few years I get a packet from the CDC. A big white eight-by-ten envelope with their logo:
Safer·Healthier·People
. It’s vaguely sinister how they track me down, my little epidemiological parole officers.

The first packet landed in my college mailbox freshman year. I mumbled something to a Health Center doctor about it, gravely offered up the packet, mumble mumble
DES
something
mother died
mumble
cancer
mumble.

Probably meaningless
, the doc said, and shrugged, glancing through the packet. (My mother, dead of medical-establishment hubris. Meaningless? Oh. Okay.)

Then she offered me that pill where you get your period only four times a year.
It’s new
, she practically squawked,
and wonderfully convenient!

I yearn to one day rip open a CDC envelope and find a different kind of letter. An
on behalf of the entire community, our sincerest apologies for the shortsightedness and carelessness with which we treated the reproductive health of your forebears . . . our bad
. . .
promise to stop fucking with you ladies
, et cetera.

Anyway then of course my mother had a nearly impossible time getting pregnant herself. The DES Daughters stuff was just coming out, all those shockingly deformed reproductive organs, wow, who knew? So they had to assume it wasn’t going to happen, had no choice but to be okay with it not happening, IVF still mostly a science-fictive question mark, though that first freak guinea pup in England was born the very same year. My parents had been married a while and made their peace. A lot of DES Daughters, it turned out, were in the same boat. My mother’s deformed reproductive organs turned out to be functional, but barely, and on a short fuse, so to speak. The cancer made itself known six months after—surprise—I was born.

Will’s trap has done its thing. Hurrah. A squirrel quivers in it all morning, petrified. Like the baby when we brought him home from the hospital. I stare at him, he stares back. Old/new face, death-wary but fresh. Are we blinking? Are we breathing? What now? I feel bad for him. The squirrel and newborn Walker, too. What a predicament, being here, alive. It can only end badly.

Will picks up the trap with these huge thick canvas gloves, puts it in his truck. We sit on the stoop.

He accidentally brushes the side of my thigh, and there’s a current there, of course there is, just how it goes, we’re all grown-ups here. After a while he speaks.

How’s writing?

Whatever.

I actually have no idea what you’re writing about.

Me neither.

He waits.

Girls
, I say finally.
I’m getting my PhD in Algorithms of Girl.

He is prepared to take me seriously, and what a gift that is. So the least I can do is take myself seriously for the moment.

I wrote this thing for my master’s about how feminist organizations very frequently tend to implode and it got published in this journal nine people read and so I got this fellowship to turn it into my dissertation and I sort of went with it.

There’s a great series of row houses opposite us. Beige, navy, dark green, burgundy. Contrasting trim on each. A bunch of people had wanted that fellowship. Good for me.

So why do feminist organizations implode?

Because women are insecure competitive ragey cuntrags with each other. In a nutshell. A lot of the records of some of the better-known ones are, like, in archives. Women in women-only groups just rip each other to shreds.

He laughs. Then I laugh, which feels like clean air, spring water. It’s not until you laugh again that you realize you have not laughed in a long-ass time.

I used to be really into, like, Adrienne Rich, and Andrea Dworkin—God, Andrea Dworkin. I’m this little radicalized undergraduate dyke freak screaming myself hoarse at Ani DiFranco shows, and next thing you know I’m blazing through a master’s, now I’m in line for a doctorate.

That’s pretty cool.

I guess, except I don’t care anymore. My advisor’s pretty much given up on me, and soon the fellowship will run out and I can stop pretending, like, just admit that it’s a bust and I’m not up to it. Then I have no idea what to do with myself. Maybe have another baby
. This is meant as a joke, and I say it all mocking, stupid-like. But it’s so not funny, I’m dizzy.

I pick up a piece of forgotten yellow sidewalk chalk and scribble. It’s not until you really talk to someone that you realize how infrequently you actually talk to anyone. I feel like Will
likes
me, weirdly enough. Paul does exquisite fucking, problem solving, logistics. Paul follows instructions. Paul is an excellent driver. Paul makes sure we don’t bounce checks. But Paul does not necessarily keep me company. And who can blame him?

Will lights a cigarette. I reach for a drag. This is the longest conversation we’ve ever had. The drag is a mistake.

I think I, ah, sort of lost my mind this year?

Ha ha ha ha ha. Ha ha ha ha ha ha!

Yeah
, he says finally.
I think a lot of women go through that.

What, abandon their dissertations?

Lose their minds. Having a kid.

Sitting on this here stoop requires my full attention. The second drag is also a bad idea. It’s windy and cold and I’m not wearing a hat or gloves. My nose is running.

Thanks for the squirrel assist.

No problem.

We could climb into his truck and drive until we hit the farthest ocean, never come back. Things like that have been known to happen.

Instead we go inside. I offer tea, which he declines, like I’m trouble.

Sorry
, I say, out of nowhere.

No
, he says, leaving. He’s wearing a gray plaid flannel shirt and it’s the same gray as his eyes, goddamn it.

She was not beautiful, my mother, but is remembered as such, small recompense for dying young.

My father, when pressed to talk about her, admits she was “moody.” Which is deeply hilarious, like all euphemisms.

Bitch from hell
, I scrawled in my diary at nine. Made her only child call her Janice. Used physical force and terror for shits and giggles. Paid someone else to care for her child and treated that person horribly.

In a fine mood she might take me shopping or out for ice cream, host dinner parties with a half-insane, vivacious gleam in her eye. In darker moods she’d scowl to bring down the house, rage, take to bed for days, say terrible things to my father and to me. If she was angry, if she was sad, you were going to suffer. The darkness is most memorable, far outweighs the decent. The malevolent fog.

She abused our housekeepers, made them cry. She preferred Hispanic housekeepers to black ones, because the black ones didn’t take shit. The Hispanic ones took her shit like real professional shit takers, just how she liked it.

I remember a succession of terrified, kowtowing brown women:
yes Miss Janice, okay Miss Janice, I so sorry Miss Janice, oh Miss Janice yes I so sorry
. She’d give them a raise whenever they survived an abusive episode, then ultimately fire them over something insignificant. A parade of crying brown women ran from our apartment. Some gave me kisses on their way out. Spanish benedictions; I was their little
pobrecita
. One pressed her lips to my forehead.

Sweet girl, sweet girl, bye. I be praying for you.

It’s true, too, though, that Janice made chocolate chip cookies once in a while, and let me lick the batter off the beaters, so she wasn’t all bad.

She wore tiny gold hoop earrings. She once got a perm (big mistake). She loved the movies. She relished her movie popcorn like nothing you’ve ever seen relished. She consumed culture. Saw every exhibit. Was passionate about everything. Read every book. I understood early that I’d find what I needed in books, if not in her. She gave me that.

But the baby. The baby. I am not saying enough about the baby. Walker. Him: a person! My son. His own person. Swell little guy. Sunny super-lovely love of a guy. If I kill myself, maybe he’ll grow up to be a poet.

In the first days I suffered spontaneous letdown, which sounds like a fascinating psychological disorder but really means there was milk absolutely everywhere. Sopping wet all of the time. Constantly shoving cloth diapers down my shirt. A big old leaky funereal fountain, that was me. He’d latch onto one side, and the other would just spray. I had to start nursing him lying down so gravity could slow it.

He wouldn’t sleep. I felt convinced that the surgery had damaged him, ruined his chances for a happy way in the world. He was always hungry. He needed to be held, he needed to nurse. He shat his diaper, he pissed his diaper. He cried, he needed to be held, he needed to nurse. Endless need. I did not understand how there could be no break. No rest. There was just no end to it. It went on and on and on. There was no end. And I couldn’t relinquish him to Paul, not for a minute, because he was
mine
, you see,
mine
,
my
baby,
my
responsibility, mine alone. I had to stand guard over him, make sure he was safe and okay and breathing and loved and fine and very close at hand. There was an agony that bordered on physical when he wasn’t in my arms. Every cell screamed No! Murder! Where is he? Hold him close! Hold him tight! Don’t let go!

Way more physically exhausting than I could have imagined. Just the sheer physicality of it, especially agonizing after surgery. Was the baby difficult because the mother was having a difficult time, or was the mother having a difficult time because the baby was difficult?

He refused sleep. Sleep, why wouldn’t he sleep? When might he sleep? We needed to sleep. All of us, sleepless. Lie down now and sleep. Nothing made sense. Sleep. Sleep. Sleeeeep.

So it was that, after a tearful phone call to my father—
an extra pair of hands
, I begged,
we
just need an extra pair of hands here
—he and Sheryl parked themselves in the living room, held the baby, took endless photos of themselves and each other holding the baby.