Bone and Bread (19 page)

On the way down to the lobby, a pregnant couple got into the elevator with me. The man had his hand on the woman's stomach, which was the same size as mine. Enormous.

“Boy or girl?” he said. It took me a minute to realize he was talking to me.

“Oh, I don't know.”

“You're not going to find out?”

“No, I don't think so.” The way they were looking at me, I wondered if this was even allowed, to not find out. To not even be curious.

“It's helped us figure out what to buy.” The woman smiled at me. “For our boy-on-the-way.”

I nodded, trying to figure out what baby boys needed that could be different from baby girls. Maybe something to do with how they peed, different diapers or something. But they were still looking at me, waiting.

“Oh, a boy,” I said finally. “That's nice.”

They beamed.

“Names?” said the man.

“What?” It was as though we were running lines in a script I hadn't seen before. Every time I paused, they peered at me with a curiosity verging on concern.

“Have you thought about names?”

“No. Um, how about you?”

“Matthew,” said the woman. “Or Lucas.”

“That's nice.”

The man had moved his hand from her stomach to the crook of her arm, to her shoulder, to her hip. He was never not touching her. Then the elevator doors opened at the ground floor and they said goodbye, wishing me luck before moving as an indivisible twosome towards the parking lot. I went out the other door, to the bus stop.

It was the first of a few conversations like that, at the hospital and on the street, with different strangers, some pregnant but mostly not. Outside our apartment, I never felt a moment's reproach or judgement for being a teenage mother-to-be, just an earnest and sometimes intrusive interest in the baby. My extra weight, I was realizing, made me look older than I was. I had decided to start wearing an old gold ring of Mama's on my left hand.

I sat down on the wooden bench, reading graffiti scratched into the sidewalk by an enterprising vandal who had gotten to it while it was still wet.
Crystal and Jon V. FOREVER 1987.
I kicked a pebble across the declaration. There was something about the elevator couple. Their calm, their utter absorption in each other, in the life they were creating. Their love.

A bus was pulling up on the other side of the street, and I surprised myself by hurrying across the road to catch it, even though it was headed in the opposite direction from where I needed to go. It was going to Ravi's neighbourhood.

I sat down next to an older lady who had a kindly look about her. She was wearing a camel-coloured hat with a cluster of pink flowers, and a heavy wool jacket. She offered me some cheese. “It's good for your teeth,” she said.

I hesitated a moment, then held out my hand. She shook out some curds into my palm.

“Thank you.”

“Good girl. Big girl. Too many skinny girls having babies these days.” She nodded at a little boy across the aisle, whose mother was scolding him for wiping his nose with the back of his hand. “Too many allergies.” The little boy stared at me, his upper lip still shiny with snot. I looked away.

The woman pulled out a Bible from the folds of her jacket. It was a cheap one, the kind that people give out on the streets, but small and light and almost ideally made for carrying in one's coat pocket. I thought about this, the appropriateness of the edition, and clung for one moment to the idea that she was going to use it to tell me something diverting and relevant and not at all crazy. She licked her thumb and flipped open the thin blue cover. “Have you heard about Jesus Christ?”

I nodded.

“I'm going to read to you from a part about the Resurrection.”

She read aloud. I tried not to listen. The other passengers were staring, and the cheese felt like putty in my mouth. I swallowed.

“This is my stop,” I said, and it was.

She stopped mid-word and put the Bible down on her lap, helping me out of my seat with a violent, two-handed shove against my lower back. “Consider the name Didymus,” she said as I got off the bus. “Or Thomas, if you like.”

Ravi's house was on the other side of the mountain from where we lived. I'd looked up his address in Uncle's files. There were a lot more houses in his neighbourhood than there were walk-up apartments. Some people even had lawns with little fences around them.

I stood on the doorstep and rang the bell. His mother answered, then looked at me and called something over her shoulder, and his father came, too. They were both very good-looking, and his mother was wearing an emerald sari woven with golden thread.

I felt abashed. “I'm looking for Ravi.” I wondered for the first time if they had lied to Uncle. “Is he here?” The thought that he could be inside, watching television or even doing his homework, sent a wave of dizziness over me, and I grabbed at the banister.

His mother just barely glanced at my stomach. His father looked up and down the street and then over his shoulder into the house behind me, as though considering asking me inside.

“Go away,” said Ravi's mother.

My sister aimed to succeed in everything she undertook, and in being sick, she surpassed everyone's expectations. Where other people would have submitted to treatment as the path of least resistance, Sadhana fought to preserve her illness with an intense resolve, as if rescuing a child from a burning building. Though at first she had gained weight, she revolted against recovery just as she was nearing ninety pounds. Talk of outpatient treatment or of going back to school to see her friends had the opposite effect to what the nurses may have intended. The disease, the refusal, was the only companion she wanted.

Later, when whatever had been animating her had carried her past beauty, past intent and the possibility of stopping of her own accord, Sadhana told me not to feel sorry. The doctors had more or less given her up, or said they had, to try and frighten us. The progress she'd made into food and formula had regressed back to the feeding tube through her nose, until digestive issues and her own temper tantrums scuttled even that means of taking in calories.

Sadhana lay in her hospital bed on a pillow of stringy hair, worrying the tape around her nutritional IV. “Worst-case scenario, I'll see Mama and Papa again.”

That made me jealous, too. She was sick, dying even, but she was as calm as a news anchor the way she talked about things.

She turned her head away from me. Her arms were laid out over the sheet as though they no longer belonged to her, tubes of bone and skin flecking pale and dry over every joint. “Tell your baby about me when it's born,” she said. It was a week before I was due.

“What will I say?”

“Tell him,” she said, turning back to me and wincing. Her neck was frail. Her fingers reached up to touch my belly. “Tell him I was pretty cool.” Then she started laughing, and I joined in, and I knew because we had been happy for a moment that she would get better.

“You're going to live forever and ever.”

“Whatever you say, Bee.”

The nurses let me stay over because, according to her chart, Sadhana was in critical condition. But they didn't know what I knew. I set up two chairs to face each other so I could rest my ankles, and there were plenty of blankets because the skinny girls were always cold. We pulled the curtains around our side of the room and whispered all night, until the nurses came to shush us.

“If you can't be quiet, we're going to have to separate you girls.”

Sadhana held tight to my sweaty palm in the cool of her slim grip. “Don't bother,” she said. “You can't.”

The birth was not traumatic. My body was already a balloon through which my spirit seemed to wander. I'd been heavy before the pregnancy and had gained fast, which only added to the gap, the drift between who I thought I was and who I looked like from the outside. My thighs that chafed together, and the heavy bosom. My belly button that had popped out like the lid of a juice container, the kind that might have been tampered with. Something that had slipped open and spoiled. My toes were strangers to me. I felt as though I had flesh blooming everywhere. I wondered if it was possible to have fat ears, the extra flesh squeezing out the sound. Or maybe I had always been a bad listener and I was getting worse. The doctors and nurses kept saying the same things over and over as if I hadn't heard, and perhaps I hadn't.
Breathe, breathe. Push, don't push
. It seemed normal, in a way, to be prodded and poked, to feel the fingers of strangers slipped inside me, like oblique messages into an insensible letterbox. To feel like a tangential participant in a project we were all grappling with: the extraction of a small life from its shell. Of a painful growth from its host.

Nobody was there with me. I had called a cab and left a note for Uncle in the bathroom, tucked under a scented candle on the back of the toilet. He'd go in there sooner or later. When the cab driver didn't want to take me, I lied and said I wasn't in labour, though it must have been obvious. He was afraid, I suppose, of a mishap in the car, or an expensive cleaning bill. I shoved my money at him before he started the meter, as I backed in behind him, determined to keep silent. A plastic bag with a few things hung from my wrist, which, as I jostled myself in, spun itself into a tourniquet bracelet that bit at my skin.

I had put on my white nylon jacket that no longer buttoned. As a pregnant girl in 1989, I had lucked out, fashion-wise. At nine months, I was only at the very limit of things I already owned. That Saturday night it was a huge pink sweater and black leggings. I was making little moans that I tried to disguise as coughs, holding my fist up to my mouth, teeth digging at the side of my finger. I was wearing earrings, too, big black plastic hoops, because that was the kind of thing I did when I was home alone for hours and hours. Got dressed up, fooled around with makeup or different outfits. Stupid.

It was late on a Saturday when I called the cab, past midnight. I'd been pacing the length of the apartment, stopping here and there to clutch at a chair, press my forehead against the edge of a bookshelf as a contraction seized me. I'd drawn a bath but couldn't manage to get in. When I stood and then crouched, I felt a throbbing zip up and down my legs, lighting them up like neon tubes, like pain as a gas, as a substance that could be breathed in, that could fill up any space. And my whole body bent and glowing with it, a sign in a dark window spelling out
I REGRET THIS
. I felt like something might suddenly open up where it shouldn't. At one point, I found myself on all fours under the kitchen table, huffing like a dog, grit under my palms and the certainty that we didn't sweep enough. At last, a reason to care about hard-to-reach places. Uncle was down at the shop because he liked to show the staff how to handle drunk people, and I was trying to hold out as long as I could. I knew that I didn't want to go to the hospital too early. Be checked, dismissed, and ordered back home. I couldn't afford the cab fare.

When I arrived at last, having inflicted no injury upon the taxi driver's upholstery, I was ushered through reception with some urgency, more flurry than I'd expected. I had waited long enough, not too long, but long enough for things to be coming together, or, rather, apart. I tried to say something about my sister, that Sadhana was a patient who would want to know I was there. There was some confusion, a notion that she'd brought me and then wandered off, or was possibly in the bathroom.

“We'll page her, honey,” a nurse told me. “What's her name?”

“No,” I said. “No, no, no, no.” I wondered why I hadn't called her myself before I left.

By the time I was checked into a room and had made myself understood, a nurse had been sent up to me to explain. I squinted at her face as she spoke, let the syllables drift towards me through the huff of my own breathing. Her jaw that tapered to a sharp point, dark feathered hair. She was telling me that Sadhana was asleep and they weren't going to wake her.

“Part of her treatment program is keeping her to a schedule. Eating, sleeping at regular intervals. And emotional stability.” She shrugged in her mauve scrubs that still seemed new, that seemed to take a moment to follow her shoulders down. Her eyes, though, were worn, as though at the end of a shift. With my tear-streaked face, my stomach hard as a wall, there seemed to be no question but that I was a liability.

“I'm sorry,” she said, and I nodded. I didn't believe her, but it was nice of her to say it.

When Quinn was born, I was staring at a tiny scar on one of the nurses' faces. It was at the side of her lip and curved up in such a way that it looked like a lopsided grin, even as she checked me, forehead wrinkling, barking encouragement with narrowed eyes. Where it was, as a cut, it would have bled a lot, and I was seized, in those dislocating moments, not with the betrayal of my own body into pain, for I expected no less of it, but with the utter vulnerability of the face. The momentousness of a change there, whether fleeting or permanent. People read reactions there, and character. Then I thought that sometimes even the look of a smile could be enough, as it was to me then. I was riveted on her, the point on my horizon, now far, now looming close, terribly close. It was because I was hunching my upper body, throwing it forward into every push. I thought about the wooden crib that Uncle had bought and the nurse that came to see me from Sadhana's ward, and I wanted to be able to be grateful for gestures, for the seed of a feeling behind a gesture, and also for whatever it was in me that might allow me to take this comfort even in something involuntary, like the nurse's smiling scar, that could be infused with meaning. To be able to exist in surfaces. Why should I demand anything more? I did not feel that I was particularly entitled. If I held out for something wholly real, for some secure certainty of authenticity, I might spend my whole life unhappy.

It was clear to me later that these thoughts were themselves a kind of coping mechanism, as was the idea I had then that the intensity of those labouring hours had given me a new insight into life, into experience itself. Pain was no doubt a factor, as were the drugs, and the memory of both, and of my accompanying strange descent into philosophy, soon faded. For profound thoughts, even or sometimes especially when they arrive by revelation, necessarily fade, and with the passage of time seem not only to lose their urgency but, by what might be in the end a wrong-headed logic, also some of their claims to truth.

Quinn, in my arms, was small, and intent on taking all of me.

When my sister Sadhana saw my son for the first time, she scraped the side of his cheek with her bony brown finger. He opened his mouth, fists working, the folds of skin on his face and hands voluminous and soggy, like something waiting to be blown up to full size. He kicked out one of his pigeon-toed feet and it brushed at the tape holding the IV tube in place on her hand.

“What a funny little raisin,” she said. She was fourteen and I was sixteen and Quinn was the first newborn baby either of us had ever seen. Up where I was, in the maternity ward, I had heard a few more, from behind the curtains the other mothers kept drawn, where other people moved and snapped pictures and brought bouquets of flowers in glass vases from the shop downstairs.

“Can I hold him, Beena?” said Sadhana, and I was touched that she had asked with such politeness.

So we called a nurse, who propped up the pillows, cranking the bed so my sister could sit up without becoming exhausted. The nurse stayed a moment, with a tight smile, to watch me place Quinn against Sadhana's chest, helping us position her scrawny arms as though we were all afraid the baby might plummet through, like a set of dropped keys slipping through a grate.

“Don't you stay too long,” the nurse said, and left.

“Can I look at his you-know-what?” asked Sadhana. “I've never seen one before.”

We didn't know what to do with a boy. We could scarcely remember Papa. As for Ravi, I could hardly even summon the sensation of his fierce, darting tongue, though I often tried.

When Uncle came to pick me up at the hospital, he barely looked at the baby. “So your shame has been brought into the world,” he said. “Congratulations.”

Yet Uncle had already bought the crib and put it at the foot of my bed in the room I shared with Sadhana. He did not complain about Quinn crying, either, for just as he had ideas about the predilections of females, he had a notion of babies, as well. They cried, and were a nuisance, but there was no sense in grumbling about it as though it might be changed. So he told me, over and over.

So one of the surprises about Quinn was Quinn, how he was very much not like a doll or even a cat, which were my two closest points of reference. The other surprise was Uncle. There was the unexpected patience, and also a dignity that he began wearing around the house as though it were his work apron, talking to me as he might to a customer: his voice quiet and even, like that of a man who visits the public library and asks another man if he has finished with the
New York Times
. He stood straighter, as he did in the store; perhaps the bitterness implied in his slump was no longer the attitude he wanted to convey. I thought it must be Quinn, the possibility he offered of a legacy, a personality not yet turned to the bad.

Quinn was a wonder, a fullness. He felt like the precipice of every emotion I'd ever fallen into. I whispered secrets to him, things about Sadhana, about his father. About how he made me angry but it wasn't his fault because he was only a baby. At first I thought he looked like his father, then I didn't. I'd been trying to picture Ravi's face for months. I talked and talked, then felt guilty for exploiting his lack of language. I got out my French textbook and whispered to him in French. It was a story about a man who worked in a bank and bought baguettes on his way home to dinner. It felt like a poor world I was offering him.

Sadhana began calling after Quinn was born and I stopped visiting every day. Something about holding the baby had triggered a change, and from talking to the nurses, I knew that she had made progress. It made it easier to stay away, even if I'd been anywhere close to figuring out how to wrangle a baby out of the house to go visit. She'd call, and sometimes it seemed like I already had the receiver to my ear before the phone rang. I'd pick it up when she was just an angry pulse coming down the line, a second before she burst into sound.

I'd barely say hello before she launched into it. It was a long, ongoing conversation we were having. There were no pleasantries. She complained about the nurses, the doctors, a therapist she was forced to talk to who had called her a liar. If we didn't answer, she left messages that were accusatory and abusive. “I'd like to know what the hell you're doing that you're too busy to pick up the goddamn phone.” She'd left behind all pretence of propriety. It was as if Uncle did not even exist, or she was past all thoughts of fearing him. I made no mention of the messages when I called her back.

One Saturday when Uncle was down at the store, I answered the phone halfway through the first ring.

“When are you coming?” she asked. “It's been nearly a week.”

“It's hard for me to get down there, Sadhana.”

Her response was icy. “Do you even care about me getting better?”

When I did arrive, Quinn strapped tight into a second-­hand car seat I had carried on the bus, I was surprised to find Sadhana sitting up in her bed, surrounded by a group of girls I recognized from our high school. She was bright-eyed, strung up with vibrancy. When she was speaking, she did not give the impression that she was someone very sick at all. I could hear the laughter of the girls all the way up the hallway. Through her absence and ordeal, she had become a kind of heroine. And it occurred to me then that Sadhana had never needed me as much as she said she did.