As Good as Dead (7 page)

Chapter 8

It had been Will’s contention that we ought to wait to have kids until one of us found a tenure-track line. I had gone along. A year into our Arizona jobs, though, with the service work and publishing pressures piled on, Will had said that we better revise upward. He looked swampy that second fall, poor guy, his skin skim-milk blue, despite having spent the school year in a state lacquered in sunshine. His was the pallor of days spent in libraries and museums; many academics are that same hue.

“We need to wait until we get tenure,” he said.

“
Six
years?”

He had sounded serious, but now he laughed. “You’re young, Charlotte! Your writing’s going great! And don’t you want to finish what you’re working on first? It’s the best thing you’ve ever done . . . and we’re happy the way we are, aren’t we?”

The expression on his face—a combination of a smile and a frown—convinced me that our marriage needed for me to say,
Yes, of course
. And maybe we were happy, to the degree that people obsessively bound up in their work could be. On his second try, Will did win a Guggenheim Fellowship to work at Yale on the Marinetti archives. After a lot of nail biting and neurotic, perfectionistic revision, in my fourth year at the university, I sold a third book. This meant that the chairman of the English Department encouraged me to “go up” for tenure early. Maybe, I decided, it
would
be a good idea—get it out of the way before I had a baby—and I plunged into the paperwork necessary for initiating the tenure process.

Before I had finished, however, my sister was diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer.

Martie was seventeen years older than my accidental self, a middle school teacher back in our Iowa hometown. Divorced. Her three kids were grown and had lives (and jobs) in California and Oregon and Washington State. Our parents, in their mid-seventies, remained in the hometown—Webster City—but they were not much help (after telling me about Martie’s diagnosis, my mother had said, “Well, your dad and I never had cancer so it can’t be our fault!”). Matters were complicated because, as was the case with a lot of small towns, Webster City had lost its hospital years before, and most everything that Martie was going to need—surgery, radiation, chemo, follow-up appointments—would require driving to the town of Fort Dodge, half an hour away.

Martie was a self-reliant person and uncomfortable with the idea of my taking a leave of absence from my job in order to help her. I myself was nervous—I hardly knew my sister; I was nervous about falling behind in my writing and stopping “the tenure clock”—but I acted as if it were not a big deal. “Let’s just see how it goes,” I told her, and I moved into the spare room of her duplex and wound up staying for a year and a half.

I did fall behind in my writing, and the university was not happy with me, but that was an important time. It allowed Martie and me to become sisters. We went on drives—to a nice place called Briggs Woods or just through the countryside (we’d grown up with cornfield vistas, so we were fairly easy to please). We found a Dairy Queen in Fort Dodge that made good hot fudge malts, for when she had an appetite. Sometimes, we carried peanut butter and honey sandwiches to the same stone picnic shelter in the downtown park where a ponytailed boyfriend and I had smoked cigarettes as teenagers. I bought a blow-up kiddie pool decorated with dinosaurs and set it in a shady spot behind the duplex; it was comforting, lying hip to hip, in the tepid water, talking or not. I learned that, like myself, my sister loved the old Kendall Young Library, and we regularly hung out in that enchanted place: stained-glass windows, mosaic-tiled floors suggesting ancient worlds, dark paneling, columns carved from marble that appeared perpetually lit by a sunrise—and you were invited inside! You were welcome to the books, shelf after shelf of books, which had released a sweet, baked odor when opened to pictures of Babar the elephant in his Crayola green suit and, later, to Laura Ingalls Wilder’s stories of life on the banks of Plum Creek and, then, the poetry of Emily Dickinson. Books had been Martie’s childhood friends, too (the land to the west of our house had been fields when she was little, and she told me how she would flatten a square of alfalfa plants into a bed and, hidden, with the bees feeding at the purple flowers on all sides of her, lie there reading for hours).

Nights, on Martie’s DVD player, the two of us watched movies from the 1930s and ’40s, things like
Now, Voyager
and
Stella Dallas
that centered on the lives of women played by classy actresses. When her grown-up daughter, Jessie, came for a visit, while we watched Joan Crawford in
Mildred Pierce
, Martie filled in Jessie’s and my eyebrows à la Crawford and had us walk around her little living room with books on our heads—mostly she was being funny, but she did say emulating Joan Crawford’s posture would help us to project more self-confidence. She demonstrated that she could channel Bette Davis in fraught situations; turning down the corners of her mouth, tipping up her chin. “My de-ah,” she said—the imitation was very good—“when the man grew vi-o-lent, I loffed in his face!”

Apparently, her husband had hit her. That was why she had left him. I never had known. We talked about marriage and female friendships and AA and having children. Martie told me, “Don’t put off getting pregnant any longer, Charlotte. It may be later than you think!”

Sometimes our parents dropped by Martie’s duplex to visit her. They usually brought Martie a pint of ice cream or some other treat that they hoped would “put some meat on her bones.” The two of them looked good (far better than that dwindling, bald daughter with the bowl of melting rocky road in her lap). Age actually had emphasized our mother’s great cheekbones. Our dad still had his full head of curly hair. He was as prickly as ever, though, and our mother, as always, was eager to go along with his moods. After sitting with us in Martie’s living room for half an hour or so, Dad invariably would declare that Martie and I were too damned
loud.
He would wince and put his hands over his ears and glare at Mom until she winced and covered her ears, too.

Once, toward the end, after Dad had made one of these complaints, Martie said, “For Christsakes, Dad, I’ll be quiet soon enough!” He acted as if he hadn’t heard, but Mother—I’ll never know what went on inside her head—said a scolding, “That was cruel, Martha Marie!” Martie had blinked at that while I laced my fingers through hers (little twigs) and said, “We will not be squashed, you guys!”

When she died, Will flew to Iowa to join me for the funeral. The night that we arrived back in Tucson—it was June, and the sweet odor of the excelsior in the swamp cooler made me feel truly at home again—I fished my package of birth control pills from my suitcase and held it over the kitchen garbage pail.

“Ready?” I asked Will.

“Are you? You don’t want to get settled in for a while?”

“Will!” I wanted to prevent him from saying another word. I was thirty-six. Ever since our move to Tucson, I had been preparing myself for a pregnancy. I had bicycled to the Himmel Park pool every day during open season; during colder months, I’d bicycled to the university rec center for weight lifting and running on the treadmill. Back in Iowa, while Martie stayed in bed, sleeping, I’d gotten up every morning to do squats and lunges and abs-strengthening exercises and Pilates DVDs. I’d cooked Martie and myself righteous meals crammed with greens and sweet potatoes and kidney beans. I’d taken vitamin pills that included folic acid, because I knew a folate deficiency could cause a developing fetus to develop spina bifida.

“Well, if you’re sure,” Will said.

As it hit the bottom of the metal garbage pail, the hard plastic birth control pill package had given out a satisfying
gong.

However, I did not get pregnant.

In the back of my mind, I always had worried that something like this could happen. For years, in fact, I had taken care of my birth control and Pap smears in the relative anonymity of Planned Parenthood. Now I made an appointment with an ob-gyn listed in “Tucson’s Best Doctors.”

I liked that the office was located in a deep-eaved, old Craftsman-style bungalow painted a benevolent olive green. The examination room itself would have been a bedroom, once upon a time. I liked that the wallpaper (pale blue hydrangeas) looked a bit scuffed. Across the tops of big reference books on a wooden desk, there lounged various pink plastic parts of a female reproductive system that put me in mind, in a friendly way, of the pink lawn furniture and sports car that had been part of a grade school classmate’s Barbie doll collection. The doctor herself turned out to be all warmth and goodwill; also admirably without vanity (sensible sandals exposing bare feet, no makeup, graying curls a bit mashed on one side of her head). During the pelvic examination, she and her assistant and I carried on—making an allowance for the lamp and speculum and goo—an amazingly normal chat regarding which shops in Tucson carried the best secondhand furniture.

After I got back into my street clothes, the doctor returned to the room. She was tall enough to easily settle herself on a corner of her wooden desk. Wooden shutters covered the bottom half of the room’s double-hung windows and, nervous, I looked out over the shutters at the blue-blue desert sky and a tendril of cat’s claw vine that, now and then, waved into view.

The doctor cleared her throat. The frown on her face signaled concern, not disapproval. Still, my heart seized even before she said, “Has anyone ever told you that you have endometriosis?”

I shook my head.

She wiggled a finger in her ear, as if an itch, there, prevented her from continuing. “You do understand your records are confidential? I ask because your endometriosis looks like it’s a result of Asherman’s syndrome, but you didn’t indicate any previous intrauterine surgery in your history.”

Up until that moment, I’d told exactly two people in the world that I’d had an abortion: Esmé—I’d had no choice in her case—and Jacqueline C., a bighearted Tucsonan with whom I’d once shared what Alcoholics Anonymous called a
personal inventory
.

“Thank you,” the doctor said after I’d tearfully made her the third person. She pulled a paper towel from the dispenser over her sink and handed it to me. “It’s very important for me to know your history.” After she removed a few of the pink plastic reproductive organs from the top of her reference books, she pulled one of the books toward herself and flipped through the pages until she located a black-and-white photograph of what, when she turned the book my way, looked like a heap of crepe paper streamers. “Asherman’s,” she said, “is the result of surgical scarring. At present, your uterus isn’t competent to support a pregnancy. I’d recommend a hysteroscopy—it’s outpatient and usually takes about thirty minutes. We’d use microscissors to snip the adhesions in the uterus, then insert a Foley catheter of saline solution. That keeps the adhesions from re-forming. You would take a course of hormones—also antibiotics to reduce the risk of infection.”

She rested a hand on my arm. Her teeth when she smiled were crooked, but very white. “We can’t guarantee that the procedure will enable you to have children—
biologically,
that is—but it’s your best shot.”

Endometriosis was common enough in women who waited until they were older to have children that I did not need to excuse or explain the condition to Will. We’d known two women—one of them his sister—diagnosed with it. Both had had surgery and gone on to have successful pregnancies.

The Asherman’s syndrome—I did not tell Will about that.

Two weeks after my meeting with the doctor, Will drove me to the university medical center for the outpatient procedure. He brought along his briefcase and a heap of student essays to read; and, after the procedure, when an orderly—hospital protocol—wheeled me to the hospital entrance, he was waiting with the car already running. I felt pretty lousy—both aching from the procedure and upset. On our drive to the pharmacy where we were to pick up the necessary prescriptions, I said—as if the idea never would have occurred to me on my own, or been valid if it had—“The doctor’s mentioned adoption as an option a couple of times—if things don’t work out. Because I’m over thirty-five. When you’re over thirty-five, the success rate for this isn’t great. One place I looked at online said just twenty-three percent.”

Will frowned. An exemplar of the frown. I was not intended to miss it. Now that he was getting older, I saw his father in his frown. His father, John Ludlow—with a good wife by his side—had been pastor of a Lutheran church in little Brainerd, Minnesota (putative home of Paul Bunyan) for almost forty years. Negativity was not countenanced in the Ludlow home (my husband had grown up peeing at a toilet over which hung a sampler stitched by his mother that read, “Christians: Not perfect, just forgiven”).

The pharmacy came into view and Will switched on his turn signal and slowed. “You’re incredibly healthy,” he said, “you’ll do fine.” Then, a moment later, he was out of the car, loping across the parking lot toward the store’s entrance. His combination of confidence and what I took for disapproval set me chewing at my nails, something that I did only in moments of extreme anxiety. Suppose I wasn’t
fine
! The doctor wouldn’t have mentioned adoption to me twice if she assumed that I would be fine. Twenty-three percent was not great. Shit. I bent forward with a cramp and rued the fact that we had not worked on a pregnancy sooner.