Read I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl Online
Authors: Kelle Groom
I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl
FREE PRESS
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Copyright © 2011 by Kelle Groom
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Certain names and identifying characteristics have been changed.
First Free Press hardcover edition June 2011
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DESIGNED BY ERICH HOBBING
The author is grateful to the editors of the following publications in which excerpts
first appeared, sometimes in different forms:
AGNI, Bloomsbury Review, Brevity,
Ploughshares, New Madrid, Opium, West Branch,
and
Witness.
Manufactured in the United States of America
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Groom, Kelle.
I wore the ocean in the shape of a girl: a memoir / Kelle Groom.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Groom, Kelle. 2. Poets, American—21st century—Biography.
3. Grief—Biography. 4. Alcoholism—Biography. I. Title.
PS3607.R64Z46 2011
811’.6—dc22
[B] 2010048931
ISBN 978-1-4516-1668-2
ISBN 978-1-4516-1670-5 (ebook)
for Tom
…though the earth tried to hold each one of them upright, saying don’t imagine don’t imagine there has been another like you—
—Brenda Hillman,
“Small Spaces”
Charon
You who pull the oars, who meet the dead,
who leave them at the other bank, and glide
alone across the reedy marsh, please take
my boy’s hand as he climbs into the dark hull.
Look. The sandals trip him, and you see,
he is afraid to step there barefoot.
—Zonas, 1st century
BC
,
translated by Brooks Haxton
The Boy with His Mother Inside Him
The Worst Thing That Can Happen
I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl
Now faith is the substance of things hoped for,
the evidence of things not seen.
—HEBREWS 11:1
Morphine makes me weightless, airborne. Like a spider. I rest in a corner of the high ceiling, look down on my body on the white hospital bed. It is just one shot, one needle through my skin. But even nine months pregnant, my frame is small—the weight all baby. So the effect of the drug is a flood in my veins. I’d like to walk down the street feeling this light. I’d like to be a passenger in a dusty car on a dirt road, and see a veil of trees, the clearing inside. Graveyard of cars arranged in a kind of circle. All the engines lifted out, windows dull with dirt. In that clearing I know I could find evidence of things unseen. Me on the bed waiting for my cervix to be effaced. Waiting to open like a door, ten centimeters. Then I can push.
“I can’t believe you did this twice,” I say to my mother after I come down from the ceiling, and a truck stuck in the sand guns it below my belly button. Digs in, stalls, digs. My mother laughs.
“You forget,” she says. Pulls her chair closer. We’re both mothers now. In the circle that the bed makes for us, she’s not mad at
me for not marrying, not appalled by my sexuality, my basic biology, my lack of restraint. She’s helping me count contractions, her knees a few inches away from me in her beige pantsuit. One of the outfits she wears to teach first grade. At school, the children all sit in a circle around her. Once, her school gave her an award; they took her picture as she leaned against a tree, smiling. Now it’s 1981. Despite the pain, I’m happy to be here with her. There’s an easiness, as if we’re on a brief vacation together, like friends. She’s younger than I am now, about to hold her first grandchild, about to let me give him away. My mom will never touch him again. She’ll blow up the snapshot of my son that my aunt and uncle will mail to us, frame it, place it on the dresser in her bedroom. The enlarging process increasing the light in the photo, so that he’s surrounded by glowing circles, like snow is falling on him at night.
My son has his eyes closed now. He’s close to leaving my nineteen-year-old body. Ripples wash over his skin that no one has ever touched, except me. We’re still together. My darkness keeps him safe, fed. My body does everything right: carrying, feeding, singing a water song. My heart counted on like a lullaby. In the outside world, my practical skills are limited—I don’t know how to keep house or manage money, sometimes I can barely speak. But in my son’s world, my body has everything he needs. I belong to him.
I’d had an overwhelming need to push for what felt like a long time, but the nurses kept saying it was too early, “Don’t push.” When a nurse looks between my legs, she’s surprised. “The baby’s coming,” she says. “Push.” Her tone is controlled but urgent. They need to move fast. The medical people still have to get me into the delivery room. They scoot me onto a rolling bed, push me down the hall into another room. My mother goes to sit with my dad in the waiting room. I don’t know who decides I’m going to do this
alone. Even my own doctor isn’t on duty. The hands that lift me are speedy, rushed. My bare feet are put into cold metal stirrups, which feels frightening. As if something is about to happen that I will not be able to stand unless I am restrained. A lamp is floodlight bright. I’m glad to push. A couple of minutes go by. I scream once. It’s a surprise—no planning, no slow intake of breath. The pain is surprising; my skin about to rip open from my baby’s head pushing out. The threshold keeps being raised. I scream again when I tear. And my son is in the world. I thought he would be red with blood or white or wrinkled. Maybe they washed him before I saw him? His skin looks like the skin on apricots. It might have been all the carrot juice I drank. He looks as if he’s had a lifetime of good meals.
Then, they take him away. It’s probably strange to him too, the first time we’ve parted since he was an unseen spiral twirling inside. A doctor takes a needle and thread and sews me up. I’ve been given a numbing shot, but I can still feel the tug of each stitch. The way he makes it tight.
Nurses lift me onto a rolling bed again, take me into a ward of the Navy hospital. One side of the hall is maternity; the other side for women with gynecological problems. Our side is lit up, shining. I fall asleep. But in a few hours, a nurse wakes me up. “Your baby’s hungry.” My body weeps as if a horse had kicked me between my legs, or bitten me with its huge horse teeth. I am sure that no one in my state should stand up. “You need to stand up,” the nurse repeats. “Your baby needs to eat. It’s been four hours.” My hospital gown is a bloom around my body. I sit up. My feet hang off the bed, and the nurse gives me her arm. She doesn’t smile. She’s a Navy nurse, a member of the military. I can feel a pool inside my body, a slosh of blood. My breasts leak through my gown. I clutch the nurse’s arm. My feet cold on the floor. She walks.
I follow her down the middle of the hall to a room of glass, where we turn right, until we come to a room without glass, a door. I stand inside, teetering beside a sink. Rocking chairs behind me against the wall. “Wait here.” She leaves. She comes back with my baby. He is wrapped in a white blanket, that material that feels as if it has clouds in it, hilly and airy at the same time. Someone has wrapped my baby’s hands in white gauze, so he won’t scratch his face with his fingernails. The nurse points to the sink, the pHisoderm. I soap myself, rinse. Pat my hands dry with a brown paper towel.
My baby’s eyes are still closed, and they’re big. The arc of his eyelids are little beds where I rest my eyes. He’s the most peaceful baby I have ever seen. It’s Mom, I want him to know without my saying so. The nurse doesn’t know he’s being adopted. She doesn’t know the mistake she’s making. The doctor will come to me later and say I can’t hold my baby again, can’t feed him. “It could cause you permanent emotional damage,” he says. I’m in the TV room when he walks in to tell me this. It’s night. The doctor’s day is done, but he wants to let me know this now, so I won’t expect to feed my son again.
The Greatest American Hero
is on the TV screen. The actor has the curly yellow hair of an angel, flying around to help people out. “Can I still look at him through the glass?” I ask. The doctor acquiesces. “But just once a day,” he says. I’m in the hospital for three days. And it’s only this day, this morning, that the nurse will say, “Hold your arms like this,” as she holds my son close to her chest. And then she holds him out to me.