Lit (13 page)

W
omen in my bloodline don’t pop out babies like pieces of toast. We’re narrow-hipped. Birthing tends to drag on—long days of false labor followed by a good twenty hours of exorcism-quality dismay. We’re less known for patience than drive, and being flat on our back is anathema. Lecia’s own son took so long to find daylight that his father—during a grisly period called
transition
that involves much howling—excused himself, sending Mother into the room as backup. Lecia had been cursing him and God and most of the nurses. Mother stood bedside a few minutes, then—as Lecia huffed for air—held up her handbag, saying, Look at this cute little purse I bought.

At which, my sister screamed, Get her the fuck out of here!

Mother, later outraged at Lecia’s overreaction, said, I was just trying to take her mind off it.

In my case, delivery takes a full twenty-two hours—forty-four if you count the false labor that kept me manically rocking in a chair all
night like some bulbous figure in a horror movie. At the hospital, they inject various mickeys into my IV, telling me I’ll be asleep in a minute, but that’s only one of many lies—like banning the word
pain
in favor of
discomfort
, conveniently reducing the hospital’s need to deal with it while treating the mother like a piece of furniture.

In natural childbirth classes, with women sprawled around the room on wrestling mats, the men had seemed mystified by the process. One night in the car going home, Warren said, When are we supposed to learn the stuff that stops the pain?

We already have, I said. That’s what the breathing exercises are.

My God, he said, that won’t accomplish anything.

Almost two days into my own marathon, I enter the half-drugged, hallucinogenic state that causes the room I lie in to bulge like a fishbowl around me. Staring at the calico curtains hung against the vomit-green walls to make the birthing room look
homey
, I keep echoing Oscar Wilde’s last words:
Either this wallpaper goes, or I do
.

The big disappointment? The needle painfully jabbed into my spine to block pain quote-unquote
didn’t take
.

This is the breezy parlance of the anesthesia dude. He stands in the door with clip-on sunglasses flipped up from his specs. He’s clearly on his way out.

Whaddayou
mean
, I roar at him, whaddayou MEAN it
didn’t take!

I’m incapable of speaking without exclamation points and italics and any available typographical inflation. In between cogent sentences, the nurse with the tiny white head and gargantuan blue eyes—real crocodile-sized peepers—leans over me, saying,
Breathe
…

Warren’s head appears alongside hers, his face bulging forward like a drop of water squeezed from a turkey baster.
Breathe
…

I holler, DO IT AGAIN!

The nurse is telling me it’s too late.

You didn’t say it
might not take
, I say. You said…You
promised
…You PROMISED I’d be
numb
from the WAIST DOWN!!

I bang on a thigh. My LEG is like a
rump roast
!!

Not much later, Warren’s face leans down through the haze, saying, I need a sandwich.

WHAT! I say. A
fucking SANDWICH?

It won’t take long, he says. He’s gone for what seems a long stretch but can’t be even an hour.

He comes back just as they start wheeling me spread-eagled and undraped down a public hall, with me saying,
No man gets to see this who hasn’t bought me dinner
—a joke the doctor doesn’t get, followed by, to Warren,
Where the everloving fuck were you?

Sleeping, it turns out, on the front lawn of the hospital after a turkey sandwich. He’s now loping alongside my gurney toward the delivery room, his face masked.

An eternity later, I feel a cataclysmic movement, and—in one massive thunderclap of pain—all my innards seem to exit. I feel abruptly vacated. Warren shouts up at me, It’s a boy. I lie there throbbing while some space bar in the action gets hit, and there’s an interval of quiet, then the baby’s throaty cry. All the attending humans seem busily focused elsewhere till they hand Dev to me—short for Devereux—a family name of the Whitbread’s. This new Dev is squinty and crimson, and they’ve stretched a little white knit cap on his head.

As he leans over me, Warren’s face is damp, too, and his ocean-lit eyes fixed on me with wondrous attention, and in that interval I first hold our bundled son, I feel us all stitched inside a glorious tapestry, breathing the same antiseptic air, cool as pine—a rare atmosphere conscribes us—the family I’ve pined for, an end to the perennial estrangement I’ve powered through the world running from. Warren and I both address Dev in coos and smooches and clicks.

Dev squints up with dark blue eyes as if trying to make us out through smoke, and from the instant his gaze brushes by me, some inner high beams flip on. Never have I felt such blazing focus for another living creature. I can’t stop looking at him. Joy, it is, which I’ve never known before, only pleasure or excitement. Joy is a different
thing, because its focus exists outside the self—delight in something external, not satisfaction of some inner craving. I feel such untrammeled love for these two beings.

Back in my room, the nurse hands Dev to me again, and boy, is he hollering to blow the hair off your head.

This one has a set of lungs, the nurse says, and a strong opinion.

But soon as I open my seersucker gown to his velvety face, the crying snaps off. Dev nuzzles toward the only spot on my body soft enough to accommodate him, and blessed silence ensues.

Look at him latch on, Warren says.

My hand cups the duck-fuzzed head—such a strong pulse against my hand, faster than my own, but they syncopate somehow like tom-toms from far off villages.

The pediatric nurse says, This one’s what we call a sucky baby.

I finally ask, What do you think he’s thinking?

You know the static channel on the TV? she says.

It’s almost like he knows you, Warren says.

The nurse says, I think they can smell their mothers.

I smooch his little hand, cooing, You’re my crème brûlée, my chocolate shake, my bear claw. You’re my—in a flash, I think of my daddy snuggling the white cat he once so spoiled—boon companion.

With Dev tucked under my arm, I set to staring at him as if to emboss my gaze on him, to seal him in the safe bubble of it, and so also to sear into my own head every iota of him.

Warren comments that he does look an awful lot like Winston Churchill. Put a cigar in his mouth…

Bite your tongue, I say. At some point the woman in the next bed comes over to show us her boy, and when she peels aside the blanket to reveal his face, I have to stop my own recoil, for that is one unfortunate-looking baby.

He’s cute, Warren says.

This kid has a face like a caved-in squash. His full head of hair lends him a werewolf aspect. My plump, pink-cheeked, bald-as-a-
bubble infant sets the standard against which all others will come up short.

I sit there with a smile welded on my face till the werewolf baby starts to sputter neurasthenically,
Ehh…ehhh ehhh…

The woman looks up at us, saying, Time to nurse.

If Dev, who wails like a freight train when hungry, made no more noise than that, he’d starve.

I’m tired, Warren says, though his handsome face holds nary a crease. Bone-weary, I let him peel my clingy hand off his biceps to extract himself.

Y
ou think having a baby is a big dang accomplishment, and the nurses smile, and the doctor seems distractedly glad, and you’re lying there not even minding overmuch how you’re torn from stem to stern because you’re so proud to have laid your egg, then the nurse comes in and hands you a round plastic pee catcher shaped like a matador’s hat—itself piss-yellow in color—to sit over the toilet seat, for really, all anybody in the hospital wants you to do is pee. Forget the baby, that’s all anybody’s waiting for: You pee, you go home.

I couldn’t. It’s an indelicate thing to have to confess, but the long labor had distended my bladder or hurt my urethra’s muscle tone or blah blah blah. They give me a pee bag and a catheter, but since the gallons of IV fluid they’d pumped into me over more than a day had seeped into my tissues, I stay swollen like a prize pig. People on the ward ask me more than once when I’m due, which shocks me, for without my baby bump, I feel lithe as Miss America, puzzled when my old skinny jeans can’t shimmy over my dimpled knee.

The doctor stares at his clipboard, saying, It happens with incompetent labor.

Or a doctor’s incompetent delivery, I snap.

Mare! Warren says.

Why can’t you stick up for me? I burst out. I’m tired and sore, and my abruptly massive boobs have hardened into bricks as the milk floods in.

Mare,
incompetent
’s a medical term, not personal disparagement.

Spoken like a man who went home and slept all night, I say, dabbing at my eyes.

The doctor predicts it might be a day or two until I can pee, and they’ll keep me till then. He shakes Warren’s hand and leaves the room, and Warren announces—almost in passing—that he’s taken his paternity leave that week. Problem being, when the baby and I come home, I’ll fly solo.

All right, I say—what choice do I have, and so besotted am I with the baby, I almost don’t care—I’ll get Mother to come.

At the bank of elevators, Warren pushes the button. I sit in my wheelchair with the geriatic pee bag taped to my leg and our squinty son in my arms. The silver door slides open.

Hold the elevator, a voice cries out, and from behind us skitters up a couple from our natural childbirth class.

Warren moves aside while they get on. The new mom has a paper cone of roses in her lap, and the grandmother holds the baby while the grandfather videotapes the whole thing.

Wave goodbye to your first home, Spenser, Grandpa says.

The grandmother flaps Spencer’s limp paw.

While Warren holds the door for them, I ask him when he’ll be back.

Tomorrow about five.

The doors begin to close.

Wait, I say. Why so late?

The elevator door’s black rubber bumper stops midbounce against Warren’s hand.

He says, Visiting hours are five to seven.

Not for dads, I say.

But the silver doors have shut him away. And I know Warren will come religiously from five till seven—never a minute longer. (To be fair to Warren, not yet thirty, he must’ve been shocked, as men often are—and the younger, the more shocked—by the dreamy looks their previously income-generating wives get when staring at some dumb hunks of baby.)

With Dev, my every practical impulse has snapped off like a spigot turned tight. So what if I’m invisible to Warren or he to me? My rent’s paid. I have my boy. In six weeks, I’ll start to teach three days per week, three or four classes per day. No other fact sinks in.

Sitting in my room the next night, after Warren’s brief, distracted visit, I feed the baby out of some gleaming core inside. It’s you and me, Dev, I say, which solitude is—in some ways—familiar. At least now I have a small sack of infant to cuddle with, a boy molded from silk and cream whose howling cares vanish soon as I take him in my arms.

For seven days, I stay catheterized in the hospital. In seven days, the Bible tells us, God made the world, but I fail to release my pent-up urine. Eventually, the insurance company starts to squawk, and while the doctor doesn’t like sending me home with a bag strapped to my leg, they figure I can get up every morning after breastfeeding all night, load the baby into the car seat with diapers and changes of clothes and miscellaneous crap. I can drive to the clinic, get on the table, have the catheter taken out, then wait, breastfeeding in the hall, till four to see if I can relieve myself of urine before then getting re-catheterized—a length of flaming skewer slid into my body’s rawest corridor.

Warren seems hardly to register any of this, sleeping every night unperturbed downstairs. Every hour and a half or two, Dev squawks, and I stagger to his crib, change his diaper, latch him to one breast
then another, burp him, swaddle him. Then back in my solitary bed, steal an hour or two of sleep before Dev eats again. Born three weeks early it’s as if he’s trying to catch up, he just needs to be bigger than my scrawny body could tote. (He grew at twice the normal rate, and I’d have been smarter nursing him in the bed, but I’d been warned—ironically—that it’d ruin my marriage.)

Maybe I don’t resent Warren more because he’s the only author of relief for me. He walks in the door like clockwork every day at six, the hour Dev inexplicably begins to holler as if being bullwhipped. And only Warren loves him enough to advance toward that flaming shriek.

What’s wrong with him? Warren says, taking him from me, handling him like rare glass.

He’s clearly unhappy here, I say.

As Warren folds the boy to his body, I enter the only certain stretch of rest in my day.

Hold his head, I say. It’s damp. Maybe tuck this blanket around him. Bring an umbrella in case it starts to mist. And when you change him, use the white cream.

I’ve got him, Mare. Just let me do it.

I plod back up the stairs and pitch forward, imploding in a black-brained sleep.

Around eleven, the door swings wide, and Warren lays Dev in my arms before tiptoeing downstairs to his pallet in the living room, where the white-fog machine throws up each night a wall of noise beyond which we don’t exist. He’s working, going to grad school full-time. I have to breastfeed anyway, the argument goes.

Then Mother flies up to help, a sober mother who sees frying chicken and assembling lasagna as a way to mend all the chaos she’d brought in the thirty years prior. All my life, she lived in a state of irritation predicated on either drinking too much or not having drunk enough. Never (is this true?) did I lie in bed and have her cook for me. As a child, when I got measles and chickenpox, she’d announce, I just
don’t like sick people, leaving me feverishly staring at the TV’s flickering grown-ups.

On this trip, Mother is transformed. She goes with me to the clinic every day, helping me load the baby in the car. Most evenings she brings my dinner steaming from a tray—doughy dumplings in oniony broth, chicken collapsed off its bones, turnip greens with fatback. Afternoons, she lies in bed with me, the baby between us kicking his covers off as I gaze at him.

Mary, I believe you’re gonna stare the skin off him, she says.

Sober she might be, but she’s still capricious as a cat. After about a week, when I’ve gotten used to counting on her, she disappears one day. I’d run out of diapers, and she’d rushed heroically off to the store. Her first hour away, I figure she got lost. An hour later, I decide she’s had a car wreck. An hour after that, I know she’s dead or stopped at a bar somewhere, so I wrap Dev’s bare ass in a towel held together by duct tape and lug him to the market in a stroller, finding no sign of our car in the lot.

Late that afternoon Mother prances in with brochures for tours of Russia and China. She is—miraculously enough—cold sober. But she met a man at a travel agency next to the grocery store, and he took her to lunch and to see the glass flowers at the Harvard Museum. By then she’s built up enough goodwill during the visit that I let it slide.

My therapist later reminds me that, however sober, Mother will forever be a haphazard fetcher of necessary items. Treat her more like a five-year-old, the therapist says, which method starts shaping expectations to the right size.

Meanwhile, the catheter that’s been in place for weeks has chafed till there’s blood in the piss bag, fire running through my ripped-up undercarriage. After a full month of daily drives to the clinic, I insist they teach me how to catheterize myself—it’s not rocket science, after all. They send me home with a bottle of betadyne and sterile gauze and a bag of glass catheters. Within a day or two—maybe after a re
spite from the nonstop irritation of the catheter—I start relieving myself like all the other girls.

Which is Mother’s cue to leave. Why? She’s sick of it, no more complicated than that. Right before she takes off, she walks in on me sobbing. Aw, she says, and she sets down the tray and takes my hand in her silky hand, asking, What is it, baby?

I don’t have enough milk tonight. I got up and worked on my classes for fall, and maybe I didn’t drink enough water today. But he’s still hungry.

Dev’s starting to twist his head alongside me, building up to burst into wails, I can tell.

Let me give him a bottle of formula, Mother says. You need the break. He might even sleep a little longer tonight.

I start to cry full throttle at the mention of it, for the bottle is a badge of failure among young mothers.

Let me keep him tonight, she says. Please. I’ll keep him down with me in the dining room.

The thought of uninterrupted sleep glows in my head, and while my better instincts say she’s inclined to all manner of caprice, I make her swear she’ll wake me if there’s any need or he won’t quiet.

Then I sail off into a sleep that unrolls in my head endless bolts of black velvet.

My boobs wake me up, leaking breast milk. I lie in the damp they’d made. Across my legs is a fresh river of sun. In the elm trees off our balcony, loud black crows caw. I right myself and get my bearings in the sunny room. I hear noise downstairs and feel my way to the stair landing where I can hear the baby’s morning squeaks.

I tiptoe down the carpeted stairs, then peek in to see Mother cradling Dev, saying, Old Blue Eyes, that’s what Grandma Charlie’s gonna call you. And when you get ready, you come down. You ain’t never had no fun till you get to my house….

In some way, that tender tone obliterates decades of psychic carnage between us, though Mother’s pending departure recarves an an
cient ache in me. She tells me our family threesome will never really knit together till she clears out and Warren comes back to our bed. However polite their exchanges, he absents himself more with her here.

She’s at the grocery store one day when Warren is sponge-bathing the baby in a little rubber inner-tube tub in the kitchen sink. Before, I’ve supervised the project with the hovering posture of a vulture over a carcass. This time I’ve been warned off, but I nonetheless busily fold the warm laundry in the kitchen within sight. While ladling warm water over the baby’s belly, Warren recites a goofy limerick he’s written, using the husky tone he’d previously reserved for a retriever:

That’s darling, I say. Did you write that?

He says yes, and I listen to Dev’s feet kick with spastic flailing. His pudgy arm flies before his eyes, and he tries to focus on it, puzzled.
Whazzat?
his look says.

Is the water too hot? I say.

It’s body temperature, just like you said.

Don’t yell in front of him, I say.

I’m not yelling, he says, I’m trying to take care of my son without you hounding me.

Dev’s arm flies by his face again, and he startles as if thinking,
There it goes again!

You really adore him, I say.

Warren looks at me. Of course, I do, he says, he’s my son.

(Was this tone matter-of-fact or territorial? Did I—in my postpartum weariness—impose the most negative slant? Toward me, he tight
ened every line, which opposed the shining face he brought to the baby.)

I’m leaving you a warm towel here, I say. It’s got a little hood.

For God’s sake.

Well, you have to keep his head warm.

Goddamn it, Mare. Just go upstairs.

On the stairwell, I overhear another of Warren’s compositions:

Dev makes a chortling noise.

T
hat night before supper, I ask Warren again when he plans to move back into our bed. He says, Once he’s on a regular schedule.

He’s on a regular schedule. He’s up all night. I’m up all night.

I can’t be up all night and work all day, he says. Classes are starting.

I miss you, I say.

I’m here every second, he says—every instant I’m not at work, I’m here.

Here but not here, I say.

At one point, at wits’ end about not sleeping, I call up Mrs. Whitbread, who’d after all raised six children. What did she recommend?

It was so different in those days, darling, she says.

When she speaks, I clutch the black receiver, for her voice conjures clipped lawns under maple trees, the easeful life of Scott Fitzgerald’s Daisy—men in linen suits and women in billowy pastels, pitchers of lemonade on silver trays. I wasn’t entitled to any of that, of course, but the whiff of it lent me glancing courage.

She says, Everybody had help. If one of them wouldn’t sleep, I’d let the nurse take the baby home till he got on a good schedule. Or, she says thoughtfully, I’d give them a little phenobarbital.

Shortly before Mother takes off, she comes creaking up the stairs early one night with two bottles of beer and a frosted mug. They do not yet glow for I’ve been off the sauce for a year and am so besotted with Dev that drinking’s been forgotten.

She pours the golden mixture down the side of the tilted glass, saying, This’ll help your milk let down.