Love in Mid Air (18 page)

I thought about the guy I was sleeping with at the time, and for a second, just a second, but still—I couldn’t seem to remember
his name. And I thought about how it had been snowing when I left Maryland but here the trees were already beginning to bud
and I was ready for spring, damn it, my parents were right, there was no reason to live in the cold and why was I still being
so pointlessly rebellious, here when I was closing in on thirty? I wanted to come home. I wanted a house. I wanted to be pregnant.
Phil was singing too, softly and on-key, singing some song about a horsey and a frog. Some song that was a logical thing to
sing to a child, because he was the sort of man who knew how to sing to children, he was the sort of man who knew lyrics about
a horsey and a frog.

Maybe he wasn’t my type—he was too conventional, too big, and too nice—but who’s to say that your type can’t change? Who’s
to say you can’t put your childish ways aside and find a deeper joy with the gentle and the gainfully employed? Maybe I was
done with Baltimore. Maybe I was done with boys. I thought about my job and my apartment and the guy I was dating and the
guy I dated before him and none of it seemed to matter much, not compared to being here with this child in my lap and this
man before me, kind and smiling, with a smear of blood across his shirt.

Afterwards as I was carrying Keon, who was half asleep and clutching a balloon, out to my mother’s car, I heard footsteps
coming up behind me fast, crunching in the gravel. I whirled around—it wasn’t my part of town, as Kelly would later point
out—and saw Phil running toward me, carrying a jacket.

“You forgot your coat.”

“That’s not my coat.”

“I know,” he said.

And then he asked me if I liked Indian food.

M
arriage didn’t seem that hard back then.

Witness the first holiday that Phil and I spent together as husband and wife. Thanksgiving is the major gathering time for
his family, which is lucky, because it’s Christmas for mine. It seemed to bode well that we were able to negotiate this so
easily; we agreed to drive north in November and south in December. We literally shook on it.

And so on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving we were on I-81, going toward his uncle Simon’s farm in Pennsylvania. We were running
ahead of schedule and had decided to venture off the main road and weave our way through Amish country. It was beautiful,
placid, a little misty. Like a picture on the front of a jigsaw-puzzle box. We stopped in a town with the ludicrous name of
Intercourse and there, in a general store, we bought three things. The first was a quilt, which seemed a sweet and appropriate
purchase for newlyweds. I think it even had what they called a wedding ring pattern, but no, that’s too sickeningly perfect,
so I may have that part wrong.

We also bought pumpkin ice cream. I’m sure about that. It seemed odd to me even then, a bright adobe color, more red than
orange, but Phil was uncharacteristically insistent that we try it. He said that pumpkin was the fruit of fall, and, looking
around the yard outside this country store in rural Pennsylvania, I saw his point. Pumpkins were everywhere—lining the porch,
heaped in piles near the parking lot, perched on fences out by the road. But I wasn’t sure about the ice cream. Later, two
days after we got home from the trip, I learned that I was pregnant with Tory, but things had already begun to taste funny
to me. I took one lick of the pumpkin ice cream and threw the rest away.

The third thing we bought was an Amish shirt for Phil. It was collarless, pale and stonewashed, made from a soft thin denim
that crushed in my hand. The shirt cost forty-eight dollars, more than we paid for clothes back then, but I loved it.

I loved it so much that I insisted he wear it for the rest of the trip, and he did, stripping off his red plaid flannel shirt
right there in the parking lot and putting on the denim. Phil’s neck is thick like that of a football player, with very little
indentation, and this embarrasses him. He says it makes him look stupid, and I doubt that a collarless shirt was the right
choice to minimize this condition, but in the early days of our marriage I was hypnotized by the muscularity of my husband’s
neck. I used to dream about lacing my fingers behind his head, closing my eyes, lifting my feet, and just starting to swing
back and forth. Back and forth with my eyes closed, hanging from this strong place.

I was drowsy all the time on that trip. On the way home I fell asleep in Fredericksburg and woke up in Durham, missing Richmond
completely. But somehow I did not associate this mild nausea, this leaden tiredness, these sudden fits of petulance with pregnancy.
Maybe I thought this was the way women felt when they had someone to take care of them. And I did have someone to take care
of me. “Go to sleep,” Phil would say. “I’ll drive.”

*    *    *

N
othing prepared me for the violence of Tory’s birth. None of the books, none of the classes, none of the women who’d stopped
me in the street to tell me their own horrible birth stories. The long labor, the despair, the moment when the doctor put
his hands fully inside my body to turn the baby, saying, without irony, that I might feel a little pressure. I’d planned to
be braver than this. The anesthesiologist showed up and introduced himself as Dr. Wineburg. He said he was sorry he was late
but he’d just come from a pig-picking. I was the only one who seemed to find this disconcerting. It was like being the only
sober person at a party of drunks. The nurse stretched herself over me so that I wouldn’t see the needle or jerk at the moment
of puncture, but the epidural only worked on one side. I went half numb and Dr. Wineburg shook his head and said it happened
this way sometimes, that they could always pull the needle out and try again, but the obstetrician said no, it’s coming too
fast now. The side of me that could still move kept trying to crawl off the table and leave the side of me that was just lying
there taking this shit.

In the end the doctor was pulling so hard that he braced one foot on the table and Dr. Wineburg stood behind him to hold him
up. Dr. Wineburg’s freckled arms were what I focused on during the last contractions, and if anyone had told me that it was
possible for one human being to pull this hard on another I wouldn’t have believed them. Phil snapped at one point, “She can’t
take much more,” and I realized he was talking about the baby, whose presence I had long since forgotten. But Tory emerged
in one piece, long and angry and blinking, and the nurse unfolded her across my stomach like a map.

The obstetrician knelt down with needle and thread, made some stupid joke about how tight did I want to be. I told him to
just sew the whole damn thing shut. Phil was running from corner to corner with his camera, taking so many pictures that it
looked like his face was flashing at me from every angle, and Dr. Wineburg, smiling, said not to worry about it, that the
second one would be easier.

We went to stay with my mother after the delivery, ostensibly because her house didn’t have stairs, but the truth is that
I needed to lie on the same saggy couch where I’d napped as a kid and have someone bring me cinnamon toast with the crusts
cut off. Tory nursed every two hours and a deep exhaustion fell over me like a blanket. The memory of it scares me even now.
My milk came in, wild and indiscriminate, so much that if I heard a baby crying in the supermarket or saw a commercial about
starving children in Uganda, the front of my shirt would be flooded within seconds. At my insistence, Phil brought over my
clay and drop cloths and set it all up in Mom’s dining room, and each day, when the baby napped, I would grimly shuffle to
the table. I didn’t get much done, aside from making a stain on my mother’s oriental rug. Tory was a bad sleeper and I never
knew how long I’d have at the table before our fragile peace would shatter. “I can’t work like this,” I told my mother and
she said that nobody expected me to. After a baby comes things are never quite the same.

But I wanted to work. In the low gray moments of my own shallow sleep I would dream about the clay, then awaken with my hands
cupped in front of me. I was trying to hold on to something, even though it was beginning to occur to me that when my mother
said things weren’t going to be the same, what she really meant was I’d never be the same. One day when Tory was about a week
old I locked myself in my childhood bathroom and held a mirror between my legs, straining to see over the mound of my still
distended stomach. What was reflected back to me was such a tangle of gashes and stitches that I let the mirror drop to the
floor. For a second I thought that the doctor had taken me seriously and stitched me completely closed.

The books all say that the genitalia of women are easily wounded and easily healed, something about the high concentration
of blood vessels in the pubic region. Maybe so, but that image of the doctor propping his foot against the delivery table
would come back to me at odd times, like when I was blowing Phil. It was pretty much the way we did things then, even after
the six weeks they tell you to wait had come and gone. “As far as I’m concerned,” I said, “Intercourse is just some town in
Pennsylvania,” and he laughed, a little uneasily because I could tell that I frightened him then, wandering around the house
weeping, sleepless, dripping milk. He seemed to think that if we would just get into our bed naked together he’d somehow have
his wife back, but I couldn’t see going back to sex—not real sex, not the kind that led you down this road. I could hear the
baby stirring in the next room, the small hiccupping sounds of her rousing coming through the Fisher-Price monitor on the
bedstand as I knelt, keeping my mouth as tight as I could, keeping pressure to the point of giving myself a headache, and
prayed that he would come before she cried, that I would manage to get one thing done that day.

Phil had worn his collarless denim shirt for Tory’s birth. A few days after the baby and I finally moved back from Mom’s house
I found the shirt wadded in the closet. I was shocked by the smell. I hadn’t realized how much he’d sweated during the delivery,
and the shirt had been marinating for over two weeks. It was his favorite, my favorite too, and I felt compelled to save it.

I washed the shirt, using an extra scoop of Tide, and then I washed it again. It was the first time I had ever done his laundry.
We’d more or less taken care of our own stuff the first year we’d been married, but now that I was going to stay home with
the baby it seemed logical that I would do these little chores for him… Only logical, and yet I knew that I had suffered,
through no fault of my own, a sudden and drastic drop in street value, like the way they say a car’s worth goes down five
thousand the minute you drive it off the dealer’s lot.

I hung the shirt in his closet, but when Phil saw it he said that the odor was still there and we should throw it out.

I told him he was being ridiculous. The shirt didn’t smell, how could it? He didn’t argue, but he never wore the Amish shirt
again.

W
as I happy? Hard to say, even now, and maybe that’s the wrong question. I healed. Over time, I learned the art of the nap.
I would catch myself sometimes singing little songs, even when the baby wasn’t in the room. I developed that great gift of
wives and mothers: I began to see the beauty in small things. Mothers are like Zen monks who have no choice but to live in
the present moment. I’d watch green beans rising through the bubbling water of a silver pot and stand paralyzed at the sight,
thinking that it was beautiful, like some type of moving art that I would never capture and never fully see again. Kelly would
call to tell me she’d spent the night in the rain making love on a picnic table and then she would say, very gently, “What
are you doing?”

I would stand looking down into the violently roiling water beneath me. I would say, “Nothing.” And I would exhale in a kind
of prayer.

O
ne day, on an impulse, I pulled into the parking lot of a church with a sign saying they had a Mom’s Morning Out. Tory was
getting old enough to leave her for a few hours every week and it was thrilling even to consider the possibility of running
errands alone. Grocery shopping without her carrier taking up the whole basket. Getting my hair cut without having to make
the stylist cut off the dryer every few minutes so I could tell if she had started crying. And oh dear God, just the thought
of meeting a friend for lunch. When I was in college I used to say that churches are cults, but this particular cult was willing
to keep my daughter two mornings a week, and that was good enough for me.

I put Tory into the Mom’s Morning Out and the next Sunday Phil and I went to the church. Just to check it out, I told him,
to make sure it really was an okay place to leave her. It was a Presbyterian church, the denomination I’d been raised in,
and when they sang I knew all the hymns by heart. Phil knew them too. He could sing through the first and second verses without
looking at the hymnal and it wasn’t until we got to the third and fourth that we had to lift the book and really focus on
the page. This surprised me about him, and I think it surprised him about me a little too.

After services, they swarmed us. Of course they did. We were a young couple with a child. We were what they wanted. Did we
play whist? Softball? Handbells? Would I be interested in joining the book club? Would he like to sign up for Habitat? Everything
that starts out as comfort ultimately becomes a vise—I know that now and I knew that then. But there was a part of me that
wanted a community. I craved the God of my childhood. We picked Tory up from the nursery, where a big-breasted woman told
us she’d been an angel, and ran the gauntlet of well-wishers out to the car. And as we were backing out, waving at all the
people who were waving at us, Phil said, “Maybe we should do it. For her. To give her a base.”

“Yeah,” I said. “To give her something to rebel against when she turns thirteen.” I looked in the rearview mirror as we drove
away, watching the church grow smaller and smaller. When I was a kid I’d gone to church and learned the hymns and the Bible
verses. I’d drunk the sweet juice, and eaten the thin cookies, played with the broken dolls in the nursery, and listened to
the flies drone and thump against the stained glass windows. It hadn’t hurt me.