After Birth (7 page)

A few times they took breaks to berate us about circumcision.

You’re making a terrible mistake
, my father said, addressing himself mostly to Paul. And to me:
you have no idea what it’s like to grow up in boys’ locker rooms
.

We’ve had enough with the knives for now, Dad, thank you.

Sheryl was likewise appalled.
They have no respect! Millions dead in the camps, and they can’t be bothered to circumcise their son.

My father shook his head sadly.
It’s the one thing even barely observant Jews can respect
.

Don’t bother, Norm. She’s just doing it to get a rise out of us. He’s going to have to do it later, when it’s incredibly painful.

Paul, usually generous and silent around them, piped up.
Actually it’s been shown to be incredibly painful for an infant, too
.

Oh bullshit!
Sheryl’s face could not convey displeasure. Or pleasure, for that matter.
One tiny snip and they don’t feel a thing, it’s so quick
.

We disagree.

Well, of course it means nothing to
you.
It’s not
your
heritage
.

I sat there trying to nurse, half hiding myself in shame and abasement. My father was obviously uncomfortable with my exposed tits, wore a stupid transparent look of disgust, and left the room whenever possible to avoid looking at me.

Sheryl lost herself in her device. The kettle was on for tea. The kettle began to scream.

A woman in a room has as many people to take care of as the number of people in that room
, Marianne once wrote. I underlined it.

Water’s boiling
, Sheryl noted, but didn’t move.

Fall’s given way entirely now. The trees are bare, and daylight’s deeply unsatisfying. Tried to get away with one more day wearing just a sweatshirt and am freezing my ass off.

Walker’s at Nasreen’s, I’m working the co-op. Midday you got your retirees, your local fucked-up art kids, your welfare folk, your moms from the suburbs, because organic is best.

I take a break and have a cup of tea by the info desk. I keep thinking I’ll make friends here, but something’s wrong with me or something’s wrong with this place or both, because I have made not a one.

Walker cried again today when I dropped him off at Nasreen’s. I fail him and fail him and fail him.

Few feet away a brand-newborn in a carrier on the ground. Its mother is trying to make a decision about bananas. Folded-up kitten, blinking, blobby. Rosebud. Raw.

Who can relax with that thing nearby? My jaw gets hard, extremities cold. Knot in my shoulder, have to remind myself to breathe. It’s weird when people jiggle and coo those balls of undercooked human. It’s weird to see them in public. Turn off the lights! Turn down the music! Get on your goddamn knees, beg pardon, avert your eyes, face to the earth, pray.

When I see pregnant women, I want to take them by their shoulders and shake. I mean
shake
. Are you ready? No, not have you decided on your child’s name and gender and aesthetic! No, not do you have every possible medical procedure lined up! I mean are you
ready!?
Like spiritually, bitches. Spiritually.

Finally, at wits’ end, desperate one cold early evening, I knocked on Crispin and Jerry’s door with newborn in the sling. Paul was at office hours, late. Paul was always somewhere, doing something. Paul was still a part of the world. Paul was still in possession of his body, mind, spirit. It felt like he was avoiding me. I had begun to hate him a little because I wished badly to avoid myself, too.

They’d always been friendly, Crispin and Jerry. A pie when we moved in; a polenta casserole when we got home from the hospital. I thought I’d say thank you in person for the casserole, which was so very delicious.

When Jer opened their door he was laughing at something Crisp was saying. Their house was bright and warm and smelled, I am not joking, of fresh bread. Rickie Lee Jones was doing a particularly jazzy number on the stereo.

His face fell the second he saw me.

Are you okay?

Thank you for the polenta. I forgot your dish, I’m sorry. I washed it.

That’s okay. You’re welcome. Want to come in?

I don’t know, I’m kind of losing my mind?
A foreign keening in my voice. Walker asleep on me, bundled in my coat.

Come in, sweetie.

I’m sorry. I just need. I don’t know. Can I just hang out here for a little while? I don’t mean to bother you guys. If you’re busy. Because our house is
. . .
I’m just kind of losing my mind? You know what I mean? Are you guys, like, super busy?

Rickie Lee was bebopping, and Crisp shook his hips to show me how busy they were.

Yes, honey, we are absolutely swamped.

They fed me. They murmured and giggled over the baby. They threw this impromptu intimate little party, then sent me on my way a few hours later feeling almost human, almost whole.

What r u doing for dinner
Jerry would text a few times a week, which became a simple
come over
, which gave way to my simply going over.

Always something on the stove, something in the oven. Something from the CSA, fresh, local, seasonal. Jerry a phenomenal cook, a humble and relaxed natural. And as the days got brighter and longer—baby rolling over, sitting up, cutting teeth, eating applesauce—I settled into something a little like okayness, and I thought: maybe I’m better. Maybe I’m okay.

One night Jerry handed me a joint after dinner, and Crispin produced a lighter.

Good medicine
, he said. I hadn’t had any since before the baby, since before we moved up here. I had no source, and figured: okay, let’s try life without. But now I was no longer pregnant. And life wasn’t really working so well without.

I looked at the baby, passed out on a blanket on the floor.

He’s fine
, Jerry said.
We’ll open some windows
.

I mean, breast milk?

Crispin put his arm around me.

Sweet pea, I have to believe your mental state right now is the most dangerous thing for that kid. Anything that can help you relax is probably for the best. They already gave him a big ol’ payload of serious painkillers at birth, right? This is a silly little herb. Don’t worry about it. Seriously. Here
.

Okay. I was home. I laughed until I cried. Laughter a transfusion. Oh my God. I’d missed this so much. A thousand hardened deposits melted away. God, had I missed this. It felt like easing into a hot bath, my first exhale. Rains after drought, and so on. I had been, it turned out, rather severely clenching my jaw.

Crisp told of family, how they rejected him when he came out. Unnatural, they said. Shameful. They didn’t have a lot of money. Dad in the navy. Mom taught home ec until home ec got phased out. It was really his dad with the serious homophobia, but the mom couldn’t, wouldn’t stand up to the dad.

I guess they’ll both be gone pretty soon
, Crisp said.

His sister kept in touch with him off and on.

I mean, I get Christmas cards
. The sister was a bit of a problem for the parents, too, remaining unmarried until past forty, at which point, finally married, she was unable to produce children. At which point the parents offered their life’s savings—earmarked for a bunch of cruises—and said: make a baby.

All winter we went on like that, and through the spring, and summer, too, until they went away, those jerks.

It’s always that way with periods of crisis: people you expect and want to be there for you are incapable and/or unwilling, and others you never imagined would be there for you show up with exactly what you need, exactly how you need it. And there is almost no way, alas, no way at all, to predict which people will be which.

Got my period for the first time since Walker. (
Aunt Flo’s coming to town!
my friend Molly used to holler when she started to feel insane and sad and achy, when a massive pimple showed up on her otherwise perfect chin.)

Realized something was up yesterday, when I read in the paper about a six-year-old boy in Glens Falls accidentally shooting himself in the head with his friend’s stepfather’s gun. Which was of course loaded, in an unlocked cabinet. They’re always loaded in an unlocked cabinet, somehow. Always the friend’s stepfather’s gun. There was a picture of the little boy, wearing glasses. Huge, unselfconscious, gap-toothed grin. An involuntary sob rose up in me and echoed through the house.

Paul came in with the baby.

Are you okay?

No. This little boy shot himself
.

He glanced at the headline, at the picture.

Surprising it doesn’t happen more often, I guess
. Paul and the baby and the dead little boy stared at me.

No, I’m fine. I mean, everything’s just swell, Paul. I mean, how does the world even continue to spin, you know? How is it so fucked-up easy to die and so fucking hard to get born? How is that kind of imbalance possible? You know? What is a possible explanation for that? Can you explain that to me? I would really like someone to explain it to me. I mean, what the
fuck?
Someone had to give birth to that boy. What the fucking FUCK?

He handed me a tissue.

Why don’t you go take a nap or something?

The little boy in the paper just grinned.

Some other things about my mother.

She liked burnt toast with margarine on a square of paper towel. She once threw a chair at a wall when she came home to find me watching TV against orders. A man came to fix the plaster and paint a few days later. The incident was never mentioned again.

She got sick when I was a baby, got better, got sick again in grade school, got slightly better, got sick again, did not get better. I wasn’t really in the loop. It’s fuzzy. No one told me shit. I had to pick up clues, figure it out. She got sicker and sicker. Dead the November of my seventh-grade year, months still to go before summer vacation, the stench of sickness and death coming off me all mixed up with puberty, that other treacherous decay.

Her photos are all over the place; this house is like a shrine: black-and-white baby in saddle shoes, blushing bride with bouffant and cinched waist. Strangely quiet in her late thirties, owl glasses reflecting the light from a window as she gazes down at me, newborn in her arms staring blankly back. It’s like an unhinged Mexican funeral in here. Even found this weird little painting of a skull at a thrift shop in Troy. All done in fluorescents, trippy.

My father knocked on my bedroom door the night it finally happened.

It’s over, sweetheart. It’s over. It’s finally over
. He hugged me tight—too tight—and cried on my shoulder for a while before going out and closing the door behind him, leaving me to my silence and books and female folksingers. Anticlimactic, when it finally happened. I stayed up until dawn, but I couldn’t have told you why.

The whole class signed a condolence card. Herd of forced, off-kilter signatures: what pure, distilled humiliation. I had hoped to distinguish myself in other ways. It was embarrassing that my mother had died, that I was so human and pitiable. Everyone was
nice
to me, so false and bright. Her dying had nothing to do with
me
, I wanted to explain.
I
didn’t die!

But I had entered a different realm and would have to stay there indefinitely, in close proximity to death. There was an exoticism inherent in that; I just wasn’t sophisticated enough to go Goth with it.

I was let off the hook for the Jenny J assault (though her father did briefly, excitedly threaten to sue). I relished the way she cowered from me at school, eye turning from navy blue to purple and red to rot yellow. That’s right, bitch. Watch out. She tried to avoid me. I’d stare her down to torture her. It made me feel better.

Teachers spoke to me like I was a frightening robot whom the wrong tone or combination of words might short-circuit. In lieu of talking to me himself (at all, about anything), my father sent me to Jack, inaugural shrink, who squirmed a lot and said
hmmm
and
those are powerful feelings
, eyes darting at the clock over my shoulder.

Here is a little secret about grief, catastrophe, loss, suffering: you are exactly the same after as before. Only more so.

Jack told me not to have feelings about my feelings, advised me to write her a letter and bring it to her gravesite in Queens, tell her all the things I wished I could say.

Sorry you’re dead, Mom, I love you
the best I could come up with, and a lie.

We decide not to “do” Thanksgiving this year. A relief.

Last year we drove down to the city with Walker in the brand-new offgassing car seat. My incision was still giving me trouble. I was still moving like a ninety-five-year-old. We arrived to find Sheryl and my father and cousin Erica and whoever else doting on the turkey, bobbing and weaving around it like it was made of eternal fucking light, barely able to pull themselves away long enough to greet us. The turkey, the turkey, look at the turkey! Sue me: I’d imagined them making a little fuss over
the baby
. They’re real into their juiced-up carcasses, my father and Sheryl. It gets them incredibly excited, ministering to a dead animal.

There are no pictures of me or my mother in that apartment, by the way. Not a one. There’s Sheryl’s mother’s mother in a late nineteenth-century Russian portrait, Sheryl’s mother as kid, Sheryl’s parents’ wedding, Sheryl as sorority president. There are the sons as grade-schoolers, sons and wives on respective wedding days, grandchildren in studio portraits. There’s Norman and Sheryl on a group tour, Norman and Sheryl on another group tour, Norman and Sheryl on yet another group tour.