Fury (35 page)

“No,” I argue. “Communication means talking about the issues at hand in the moment that they need addressing.”

I go on to ask her why she's here, in my room, to begin with. If she's just going to sit there in a scrappy, shit-stirring stance and argue on behalf of our parents, whom she is so assured I've upset with my grief. I tell her she's more than welcome to go home and lend them her support instead. Because as it stands, her presence isn't exactly what I'd call reassuring. She isn't quite a pep talk, a get-well basket of poppies and sunbeams. If anything, she's talking as though I've lost the baby already.

“Fine,” she says, stuffing ridiculous articles—her cell phone, a tabloid, a package of crackers—into the bowels of her metallic handbag. “I'll leave. Mom went home. So will I.”

“Good,” I say. “Get out.”

“I am.”

“Fucking excellent. See ya.”

But before she flings back the curtain and storms off into the blink and whir of accident and urgency, she turns and aims the spout of her water bottle at me. With the tone of authority she's acquired since becoming a mother, she shrieks, “You're so selfish! Pregnancy isn't about you! It's about your baby! You're going to learn that damn, fucking fast!”

She's one to talk
, I think, as I watch her thundering exit.
Hadn't she called me throughout all of her trimesters in varying degrees of hysteria, panic, conniption, and tears? Wasn't she the one who'd gone around ranting at her belly when its kicking gained might? Hadn't it been my mother and I who had reminded her to lower her voice a few octaves because Riley, like some omnipotent presence, could hear every word she was saying?

On top of that, I'm positive she's wrong. Pregnancy necessitates voicing one's needs.

A yoga teacher in one of the few prenatal classes I've attended is always droning on about how “in pregnancy, things are going to bother you a lot more than they ever have. Not only will you be more sensitive to sounds, tastes, and noises, but you may also be more affected by frivolous conflict. You'll have less patience for negative conversations.” To that end, my classmates and I devoted long afternoons to chanting our throat chakras open. We sang in Sanskrit for practice, to enlarge our lungs so we would be better equipped to tell people when something felt wrong, when we found ourselves in discomfort or pain.

I think that's what I'm doing at long last: speaking up.

My only regret is that it's taken me years to remember how to get this furious. Who knew I was capable of this?
What a surprise
, I think.
What a waste.
My fury's like an Italian sports car, and before now I've never dared drive it at any speed over thirty.

In the end, my sister drifts back through my curtain after a lap around the parking lot. She's counted to ten. She's walked beneath a sallow gold moon. She tells me I'm right. She says she's here to support me. And she's sorry that she's been talking as though I've already miscarried. She hadn't meant to be so pessimistic.

We find ourselves drawn back to the subject of old wives' tales, in an effort to find some neutral conversation.

My sister asks me why I suspect I'm having a boy.

“But they aren't hairy!” she says when I proudly untangle my legs from the hospital blanket.

When I look down, I'm stunned to see she is right. My coarse coat had vanished. And come to think of it, the other symptoms of my pregnancy have started disappearing too. Somewhere over the course of the past two days, my breasts have lost their paunch tenderness. My face no longer burns with that pink, clammy flush. My thirst seems quenched for the first time in two months. For the whole of my pregnancy, I haven't been sated by anything less than a gallon of water a day; I've been drinking quantities better suited for a draft animal.

Seconds later the doctor comes in to perform one of those brief, invasive exams (feet in the stirrups, an abysmal draft, butt all the way off the edge of the table). She has a bland face and a flat way of delivering her words, her eyes watery behind her glasses. She removes her plastic gloves with a smack and informs me that my cervix is still closed. But there's still considerable worry when it comes to my blood test, which reveals a slightly low hCG.

“You're familiar with hCG?” the doctor asks me.

No, doc, not really. I'm tempted to tell her that the only informational reading my book-deal-grubbing gynecologist gave me was a quarter-size sheet of paper that advised me, “It is okay to have sex during pregnancy.”

Although it sounds like a recreational drug, hCG stands for human chorionic gonadotropin, otherwise known as the pregnancy hormone. In most normal pregnancies, hCG levels double every two days or so. At nine weeks pregnant I should have around 220,000 milliliters of hCG in my system. But my tests show that I only have around 7,000—the amount a competent pregnancy has at the four-week mark.

“We'll have you come back in two days to repeat the blood test,” the doctor tells me in parting. “We'll see then if your hCG has increased.”

A different nurse comes in to hand me a clipboard filled with outpatient forms. As I scrawl my signature on a sequence of dotted lines, my sister speaks up to ask her, “Well, what happens if the hormones don't go up? Or if they stay the same? Or if they continue increasing, but at a really slow rate?”

While the doctor had been cryptic, this nurse is a whole different force to reckon with—callous and all too forthcoming. “That doesn't happen,” she says with simpering condescension. “Either the hormones go up or they continue to fall. If they fall, that's generally the stamp of a miscarriage. If that's the case, next time you're back we'll perform a D and C. Dilation and curettage. We'll clean out your womb. It's an easy procedure. Just a little scrape and vacuum. It only takes about ten minutes.”

Thanks, Florence Nightingale. Because, heaven knows, my concern is for my day planner.

Maybe I wake up crying. More likely, I never stopped. My dreams are embarrassing in their lack of subtlety. In one nightmare I give birth to a buzzard.

I can't remember the last time I experienced dread like this. Unbroken. Swell upon swell.

I've also never felt so helpless to the whims of my body. Whereas I've never fully trusted my emotions, I've almost always counted on my body to be the one thing I could govern in full. I've been its maestro and, occasionally, its czar. I decide on its rations and oversee its isometrics. I've fattened, nourished, sculpted, strengthened, or victimized it as I see fit. But a coup has taken place. Suddenly my body is making demands and issuing statements on a need-to-know basis.

I curl in bed, gazing hollowly at Riley's Fisher-Price cradle swing, which has taken up residence in my bedroom since my last visit home. It's such a clever and disconcerting device: six swing speeds, eight lullabies, four D batteries. So elaborate, and yet it's meant to be so maternal.

The rest of my family moves through the morning quickly, eating scattershot breakfasts in separate crannies of the house.

Company, welcome or otherwise, occasionally seeks me out. My dad cracks my door to see if I want to join him at something called a Synergy yoga class. He has his nonslip mat in his hand and is dressed in breathable fabrics with quick-dry technology. Somewhere over the course of the past year, he's gotten really into
vinyasa
and tai chi. He's started e-mailing me quotes from Gandhi. It makes sense that we've both gravitated to yoga. Bending over backward seems to come easily to us. Standing on our heads is second nature. We enjoy prostrating.

I tell him no thanks. I'm trying to stay off my feet.

My mom also checks in on me before she leaves for work. What with everything, I still haven't lettered her birthday card or wrapped her teapot.

“Happy birthday!” I tell her, trying to stretch my face into a look of enthusiasm.

She thanks me with an apprehensive look and asks me to keep her posted on what she's begun referring to as my “condition.”

As for Eamon, he refuses to share my anguish. No, not yet. He wants to stay positive. Can we agree to stay positive? He needs confidence and wishful thinking.

Together, we turn to Internet research. We call each other every thirty minutes or so, whenever we unearth some new statistic. I phone and say, “Check this out. I found this Web site that says, ‘Caution must be used in making too much of hCG numbers. A normal pregnancy may have low hCG levels and still result in a perfectly healthy baby.'” Eamon turns ebullient, saying, “Yes! Yes! I read that article too!” We agree that the results of an ultrasound would be much more reliable.

Abetting us, my sister helps me schedule an appointment for the following day at her local ob-gyn.

When I'd first burst into the study to tell her our plan, she was sitting in front of her laptop at my father's particleboard desk. R. was sleeping in an oscillating chair on the floor. A bisexual dating show played on the TV in the background. My sister claimed an ultrasound had been on her mind too. In her words, “it was deranged” that no doctor had checked for my baby's heartbeat.

By late afternoon I am having stabbing twinges. Blood, red as rage, spills into the toilet every time I rise from bed with profound dread to pee. It's around this time that my sister, who I've always known as a very vocal atheist, tells me all we could do is wait and, quote-unquote, “pray.”

My shock is as shrill as a trumpet. My expression is one of self-conscious distress.
Where is this coming from? Who is she? Is this her secret self? Where is the woman who is always ranting about the lie of creationism and the right-wing Christian agenda?
As far as I know, her favorite sound bite is: “Religion is just a superstition. Or an OCD ritual. It's like compulsively washing your hands.”

I feel disoriented. The world is severely unstable. It's my sister all right: her pixie haircut, her hooped earrings, her big Kewpie doll eyes. Earlier that morning I'd seen her reading a feminist blog with the headline “Why Glorifying Virginity Is Bad for Women.” Her spur-of-the-moment Catholicism makes me think of her as some medium channeling a distant ghost from my past—my grandmother or my childhood parish priest, some lighter of candles and rubber of rosaries.

I take her advice, however, and try to pray the way I haven't since I was a kid, seeing as science isn't exactly on my side. I can't bear to read another statistic about how miscarriages happen in a quarter of all pregnancies, half of all first pregnancies. I can't stomach another doctor saying a woman shouldn't blame herself, as most are caused by chromosomal abnormalities.

Some months before I'd read a book about a woman who wrote long confessional letters to a god who seemed neighborly enough to listen. I drag my laptop into my bed and try through the cramps to compose a missive.

I won't bore you with that insipid, inarticulate document. I addressed it to “the Universe,” which had become, in recent years, the only higher power I could wrap my resistant mind around. I typed loose apologies (“my wrongs are a legion”), misty contrition (“please don't let this be the way you punish me”), and to-the-point entreaties (“I need you” and “help me please”).

Far more relevant to this story is the letter that followed as I continued to cramp, cry, and shed undeniable clots as the afternoon slowly died through my window. It's the better written note of the two. Perhaps because anger can be specific while faith can seem rather vague.