MARY AND O'NEIL (24 page)

The doctor stepped back. “Well, I don’t think it’s food poisoning.”

“The meal was strange but I’d have to agree.”

“I’ve eaten there. The duck is really what’s special.” The doctor furrowed her brow at Mary. “How late are you?”

“Ten days, give or take.”

“Have you ever been pregnant before?”

“Not in many years,” Mary said. “Has it changed?”

From a cabinet of supplies the doctor removed a square pink box with a picture of a daisy and handed it to Mary. Inside were a small specimen cup and a plastic wand, like an undersized thermometer, wrapped in cellophane.

Mary held up her bare wrist. “I don’t have a watch.”

The doctor unclasped her own—a Timex, with three hearts forming the first three links of the band on either side of the face—and showed Mary to the rest room. Mary squatted over the toilet and held the cup between her legs until she had filled it, and placed it on the toilet tank. The instructions on the box said the test would take three minutes, but the instant Mary dipped the wand into the cup, a turquoise ribbon shot up the blotter paper and filled the little window, resolving into a tiny cross. She counted off three minutes with the watch, waiting to see if there was some mistake and the blue cross would be retracted. When it wasn’t, she dumped the cup into the toilet, wrapped the wand in tissue paper to show O’Neil, and returned to the office.

“These tests are pretty accurate,” the doctor said, scribbling on a prescription pad, “but they’re not the real thing, so when you get home, you should go see your gynecologist.”

“Somebody told me this was going to happen,” Mary said.

“Well, they knew something.” The doctor put her watch back on. “If you don’t mind my asking, is this good news for you?”

Mary fingered the wand in her pocket. “It’s what I wanted,” she said.

On the way back to the motel Mary stopped at a Rexall to fill her prescription. It was an old-style drugstore with a lunch counter, and the air smelled of wet clothing and fried eggs. An entire aisle of the store was devoted to baby products—fat packages of diapers, cans of powdered formula, rattles and teething toys and little spoons with kittens or puppies on the handles, all sealed in plastic—and Mary paused to look it over, this vast, hopeful inventory she had never paid any attention to. She believed it was important now to stand before it—she felt as if she had achieved some final homecoming—and when she handed her prescription to the druggist, an old man with a shuffling step who took the paper from her without comment, he, like the wall of diapers and the well-worn light of the store’s interior and the lunch counter with its pies and cakes under elevated domes of glass, seemed somehow inevitable, like a figure from a dream she’d once had years ago.

The druggist handed the prescription to her in a stapled package, his face broadening with a smile. “Congratulations,” he said.

Mary thanked him, bought a carton of milk at the lunch counter, and stepped outside. O’Neil would be back at the motel, pacing with worry. Where had she gone off to? Had she gotten so sick she couldn’t wait for the muffins and the tea? Why hadn’t she left him a note? The air had warmed; a pale and ghostly snow was falling all around. Standing by the door, Mary opened the druggist’s package, which contained a bottle of prenatal vitamins. They were large orange pills that smelled like fish food, and the directions said to take one daily. The bottle contained forty pills, and the prescription could be refilled five times, for a total of two hundred—the number of days until the baby was born.
Two hundred days,
Mary thought, and removed her mittens to take the first pill, tipping her face into the falling snow and using the milk to wash it down.

LIFE BY MOONLIGHT

October 1995

F
RIDAY,
9:31
P.M,
a humid night in fall: Mary Olson Burke, age thirty-three—pregnant, pregnant, pregnant—pauses in the paint-rollers-brushes-dropcloths aisle of the Home Depot in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, and knows that her water has broken.

The tear is tiny, high in her uterus; there is no splash, no bursting water-balloon of fluid, no great, embarrassing release. Mary bends to lift a gallon can of white latex semigloss from a low shelf, when suddenly her panties are damp, then wet, a release of amniotic fluid about a thimbleful; she drops her eyes to the pleats of her cotton dress and finds no stain, no mark to tell anyone what has happened. And maybe nothing has. But, no. It is six days since Mary passed her due date, silently and without fanfare, like a car crossing a desert border at night. Inside Mary the question blooms:
Hello?
And:
Soon?
Her water has broken. Mary knows.

Mary is enormous; she is a cathedral, a human aria, a C note held for ten minutes. She feels luminous, beyond gravity; she is gravity itself. Her husband, O’Neil, is crouched to examine a rack of paintbrushes. Like everything else in the Home Depot, the display is huge and confusing, like a menu that is ten pages long. There are thick brushes and thin brushes, sleek brushes and hairy brushes, brushes with tips so delicate they could be used to stroke liquid gold on Fabergé eggs. O’Neil is all details, a man overwhelmed by the tiniest purchases; it will take him an hour to buy a paintbrush, but thirty minutes to buy a car.

“O’Neil . . .”

He tilts his head to the sound of Mary’s voice. His face lights up in a grateful smile; she has broken his trance.

“Who cares, am I right? You were about to say I should just pick anything so we can get the hell out of here.”

Mary gently lowers herself onto the can of paint, perching like a child on a potty chair. “Roger wilco, honeybear.” Now that she is off her feet, exhaustion folds over her like a heavy cloth. Repainting the kitchen now seems like madness, the dumbest idea of their marriage. “Please, can we just pick something and go? Can you take care of this while I sit here?”

O’Neil rises. “We’ll need a cart.”

“Make it two.” Mary tries to smile, and when she can’t, she realizes for the first time that she is afraid. “Just dump me in and wheel me home.”

They push their purchases outside, into the soupy heat and the sound of traffic on the turnpike. O’Neil leaves Mary under the concrete overhang and disappears across the parking lot, still full of cars at this late hour. Mary stands, clutching her side; under her fingertips she feels the baby shift position, feeling this also inside of her, like the sensation of her lips and tongue when the dentist has numbed them with Novocain, woozy and not quite real. Then she sees it: in the sky beyond the parking lot, the highway, the roofs of the buildings, a fat, yellowish light is emerging. Mary thinks at first that it’s a helicopter, or a searchlight, but then she sees that it’s the moon—a full moon, a harvest moon. It creeps up the cluttered horizon with amazing speed, leaking its liquidy light on everything. She is still watching it when the car pulls up.

O’Neil stops loading the paint and supplies into the trunk and follows her gaze to the horizon.

“I know what you’re thinking,” he says finally. “A moon like that. What else? It means you’ll go into labor tonight.”

Mary looks again. Somehow, the moon seems even larger than before, and weirdly bright. It is almost too bright to look at. She wonders why she hasn’t told O’Neil about her water yet, and then she knows. It is the last secret she has; she will not surrender it yet, though soon.

“There’s always a chance,” Mary says.

“Ten bucks you have this baby before breakfast,” O’Neil says.

In the passenger seat Mary dozes, and by the time they pull into their driveway she is surprised to look over the lights of the dashboard and find her own house. For a moment she thinks the baby has already come but then realizes this is a dream she has had—that she was breaking open a hard-boiled egg and found a tiny person inside. Mary climbs the stairs, undresses, puts on a nightgown, and washes her face. Below her she can hear their front door opening and closing and knows that O’Neil is bringing the supplies inside. She finds him collapsed on the sofa in the living room, drinking a beer and watching television, the sound turned off. On the screen a group of divers in yellow wetsuits are lowering a small submarine from a crane into a choppy sea. These are the kinds of shows O’Neil loves.

“And zo,” O’Neil says, “ze brave men of ze Calypzo dezend once more into ze inky deep.” He pushes his glasses onto his forehead and rubs a hand over his tired face. “I think they’re looking for the lost continent of Atlantis. Apparently, it iz near ze Canary Islands.”

Mary bends to kiss O’Neil; he returns the kiss, then puts his beer on the coffee table, takes the round mass of her stomach in his hands, and kisses that too.

“Let me know if ze brave men of ze Calypzo stop by to paint ze kitchen,” Mary says.

Upstairs, Mary lowers herself into bed, leaving the shades open to fill the room with the night’s strange moonlight. The clock says it is just past midnight; three hours have passed since her water broke, and still nothing. She finds the position she likes, on her left side with a pillow between her thighs to straighten her back, and remembers the dream she had in the car, replaying its images in her mind like a prayer, hoping that she can return to it. It is a pleasant dream, and this time it begins in her parents’ kitchen in Minneapolis. Mary is alone, seated at the table, and there is an egg in her hand, still warm from the boiling water. Mary taps it with a butter knife, pausing to scrape away the flakes with her thumbnail. Crack, scrape, crack, scrape. But something is wrong; the egg is plastic, a plastic Easter egg. She pops it open, and inside she finds a slip of paper, like a fortune cookie, on which someone has written the word
Atlantis.

Then she is in a different house, not a house she has ever seen before. In one of the bedrooms a monkey is living, left behind by the previous owners. Mary and O’Neil discuss what to do about the monkey. Should they feed it? Is it their monkey now? In the fridge they find a wedge of cheese, and they put it on a plate and take it into the bedroom. The room is dark, the shades drawn tight against the windows, and Mary can hear the monkey moving around, scratching itself, making tiny monkey noises. “Here, monkey,” Mary calls softly. “Here, little monkey.” Then the monkey is in her arms. She is nearly weightless, clinging to her. She has a soft, human face, with green eyes like O’Neil’s. Mary is happy, very happy, holding her, and does not mind at all that the monkey has urinated, soaking Mary’s nightgown, her thighs, her bare feet on the carpet. They will have to get a diaper for the monkey.

Then it is 2:00
A
.
M
., and Mary awakens in a puddle that smells like straw, a strong contraction moving through her, and she goes to O’Neil where he has fallen asleep in front of the TV to tell him the moment is here, the baby is coming, that they have to go to the hospital,
now
.

O’Neil at 5:00
A
.
M
., asleep and dreaming: a brief, unhappy dream in which he watches his parents fly over a cliff into darkness. The image plays before him like a movie on a screen, his parents moving away, and he can do nothing. He is pinned to his chair in the theater, and when he looks down he sees his wrists are tied; when he looks up, his parents are gone.

Then a new sound reaches him, distant and familiar. O’Neil thinks at first it’s a lawn mower, then that it’s the telephone, then that it is his wife, Mary, vomiting; they have been to a party, a weird and marvelous party where all the guests wore bedsheets and carried small faceless dolls, and Mary is drunk, and throwing up in the bathroom.

“Ooooooo . . . Neil.”

He opens his eyes, and at once he remembers: he has fallen asleep in the hospital, his head rocked back in a chair pulled close to Mary’s bed; he understands that he is in the hospital, and also why. Mary is on her side, facing away, and the ridges of her backbone are exposed where the sides of her gown have opened. It is O’Neil’s job to press his hands against this place when her contractions come. He has dozed only a moment.

“Jesus, O’Neil, what’s going on back there?”

O’Neil rises on his toes and leans in. The memory of his dream, of darkness and flight, flits over his consciousness, like the shadow of a bird crossing a field. Was it his parents? He and Mary? He remembers terror, and the sound of water below. His arms feel like rubber, his eyes like little balls of lead. He has been pressing Mary’s back for three hours, first in the front hallway of their house, again in the backseat of the car where it was parked in the driveway, and so on, right until this moment.

“I’m sorry,” O’Neil manages. “It’s your body. You have to tell me.”

Mary groans, her breath catching in her chest like a hiccup. “Is that what you think?”

The nurse, whose name is Rachel, brings in some extra pillows to prop up Mary’s knees. She has brown hair and a pleasant smile; on the lapel of her white jacket is a button that says, We Deliver. As she slides the pillows under Mary, she asks them if they know the sex of the baby.

They do. The baby is a girl. When Mary doesn’t answer, O’Neil tells Rachel they’re not sure.

“I think it’s better like that,” Rachel says. “You can be happy either way.”

Rachel leaves again. Outside the sun is rising, and O’Neil knows he won’t sleep again until after the baby is born. He would like to leave the room, the building even, to take a quick walk in fresh outdoor air, just once around the hospital. But he knows he can’t, that this desire is selfish and can’t even be mentioned, like the wish to buy a sports car or spend a summer in France.

Mary’s obstetrician arrives a little after seven. She is a pretty woman, very small, who always dresses nicely; this morning she is wearing a blue chalk-stripe suit under her white coat, and a pair of gray flats. O’Neil would like to call her by her first name, which is Amy, but since she’s never invited them to do it, he has always called her Dr. Sullivan.

She reaches under Mary’s gown to examine her. She feels around inside her, her eyes pointed upward and away, like someone cracking a safe. She finishes the exam and removes her gloves.

“Five centimeters.”

On the bed Mary groans. “God. That’s
all
?”

Doctor Sullivan lifts her tiny shoulders in a shrug. “Five is pretty good. It could be eight an hour from now.”

Mary lets her head fall back onto the pillows. “I feel like I’ve carried a piano up the stairs.”

But at ten o’clock Mary is still at five, and she is still at five at noon, when Dr. Sullivan examines her again. The baby is in a good position, she tells O’Neil, but Mary’s cervix won’t dilate. She speaks in a low voice, and uses the word
stubborn
. Mary has been in labor now for ten hours, fifteen if they count it from the Home Depot. Her face is damp and flushed from exertion, and golden strands of hair cling to her neck and cheeks—the long, rich hair of pregnancy. Mary’s contractions come just two minutes apart now, and between them she has little to say, to him or anyone. She seems to doze, although O’Neil knows she is actually concentrating, putting her mind in a state of readiness to ride out each contraction like a surfer paddling in front of a wave. It is a lonely feeling, he realizes, watching your wife have a baby. With each passing hour she moves farther away from him, into a place where all her strength comes from.

“I know it seems like days, but technically, it’s not all that long for a first labor,” Dr. Sullivan says. The pager clipped to her waist begins to beep, and her hand darts to her waist to shut it off. She peeks at it quickly, frowning. “Well. I have to take this.” She lifts her eyes once more to O’Neil. “Her blood pressure is fine. The baby’s in great shape. But without the epidural, as I said, this could get hard. She could run out of gas.”

All along, Mary has been saying that she wants nothing, no Demerol, no epidural, not even an aspirin. It is history she is thinking of, and O’Neil has seen the pictures: faded black-and-whites of the women of her family, a lineage of stern Germanic matriarchs who bore their children in covered wagons in the middle of blizzards on the Minnesota plain. O’Neil knows that having her baby without painkillers is part of Mary’s conversation with these women, with the past itself. But all along he has hoped that, when it came time, Mary would opt for something to make it easier.

“No epidural,” Mary says from the bed. “Are you kidding? I’ve seen that needle. It’s like something designed by the Pentagon.”

Dr. Sullivan leaves to take her page, and Mary and O’Neil are alone again. O’Neil hasn’t set foot from the room since dawn; somewhere in the late morning his body turned a corner, leaving exhaustion behind and taking him into some new state where night and day have lost their meaning and nothing else will happen until Mary has their baby. The way his body feels reminds O’Neil of the night his parents died, when O’Neil was just nineteen. They had just been up to visit him at college, and on the trip home their car missed a turn and went over an embankment. This is the memory he often returns to. O’Neil was coming back from a party, and when he opened the door to his room and saw the college chaplain there, and his roommate, Stephen, and then noticed behind them his track coach, talking in a low voice to the dormitory’s resident advisor, and their eyes, a luminous chorus of compassion, rose all at once to meet his own where he stood in the doorway with his keys in his hand, he knew something awful had happened, and also what it was; before anyone could speak, a hole appeared in O’Neil’s heart where his parents had once been. Though he has gone on to live his life, to choose a profession and marry and start a family, he is not certain he has ever left it, this pause—a gap in his life like the valley of rocks and trees where his parents’ car, upside down and wheels spinning, came at last to rest. It was three days before he slept again. This is the way he feels now—suspended, like a balloon that will neither rise nor fall—and he wonders if there are other men in the building who feel the way he does.