What Lies Between Us (22 page)

*   *   *

My body stretches, craves strange things. I had always thought they were old wives' tales, but now I realize that pregnancy cravings are real and insistent. I want foods I have always hated: brussels sprouts, raw carrots, and broccoli. I eat oranges by the ton as if unable to get enough of their sweet, sun-blessed flesh inside me. I eat apples fresh and unwashed from the farmers' market. I like that bit of grit on them. This too satisfies some strange pregnancy desire.

The sight of meat nauseates me. The veined slabs of it make me feel as if my own flesh has been filleted and displayed behind the grocer's glass. I have to avoid that entire section of the store now. How had I eaten these things before? They are so clearly organs, the workings of bodies so similar to my own, merely the skin stripped away to reveal the working muscles underneath the surface, living beings reduced to meat.

So many things I cannot have anymore! Wine, hot dogs, sushi, mushrooms, cigarettes. Such strict rules governing my body. At lunch if I even glance at a salmon roll, there are disapproving looks, which might lead to lectures about contaminated seafood and my child's development. The other nurses eat crap and smoke like mad, but now that I am pregnant, they all have strict opinions about what I can and cannot do.

I realize that my body, which had always been my secret realm, is now public property. Women stop me at the grocery store to ask if it's my first child. When I say yes, they nod knowingly as if they are the guardians of ancient and secret knowledge. “It hurts,” they say. “It'll be the worst pain of your life,” as if I don't know this, as if I am not already dreading what is to come. Perfect strangers come straight up to me and, if I don't fend them off, put their hands directly on my stomach. People ask if I am eating enough folic acid, if I'm taking pregnancy yoga.

There are too many eyes upon me. It makes me long to hide away. This body that is expanding into something I barely recognize, it proclaims itself so loudly. I remember that other life, even before I met Daniel, when I belonged only to myself. Sometimes, traitorously, oh so insidiously, I crave that privacy, that perfect self-containment.

There are ways to rebel. There were those first illicit cigarettes with Dharshi in high school; then the habit picked up in college, compounded through the tough nights of nursing school. There had been sacred moments when we all gathered outside buildings to stand silently and puff together, the communion of drawing the smoke into our lungs. A hushed and long drawing in, an instant serenity, the ecstasy of the exhale. I had never drunk much, I did not have lovers, but this ritual, in the form of a small box in my purse—
this
I had loved. In those years before him, it had been my only vice. After we were married, it had dwindled down to whenever I was stressed and could hide it from him.

Now a sharp hunger grows. Once a week or so when I can't stand it, I hide and smoke. The first few puffs calm me down. But then a hail of images of what havoc it might be causing within me rises. I imagine her, tiny inside me, gasping for air, twisting and hurting. Guilt paralyzes my throat. How weak I am. How selfish, not to be able to fight off this craving now when it is so important, when it can change everything. I throw away the butt, promise myself it is the last. I go a week without, and then like a person glimpsing an oasis after crossing the desert, I must have a cigarette.

One day I heft my bulk through the front door, and hitting my elbow on the jamb, I drop my purse. A hundred things roll out, the most secret of them landing at his feet. My heart in my throat, I watch him unwrap the toilet paper to reveal two cigarettes. He looks at me with narrowed eyes, sudden disgust. “What the fuck is this?”

A sort of chaos inside me. He has never raised his voice before. My mouth spits words: “Nothing. They're not mine.”

“What? Whose then?”

“They're Alice's. She likes to smoke after work.”

“Who the fuck is Alice? Stop lying.
I knew it
. I smelled it on your clothes. I didn't say anything. But what the fuck is wrong with you? How could you?”

I'm trying to figure out what to say. Can I conjure up an Alice, who could be a friend, who could smoke, and who stores her cigarettes in my purse? Would he believe that? What lie can save me? My pulse is racing. I am a child again, exposed, in danger. A flash of Samson's face. I have to claw my fingers against my palms to stay present.

He throws the two cigarettes on the floor, squashes them beneath his heel so that flecks of tobacco worm out of the paper.

“You're a goddamn nurse. You know what could happen to the baby if you smoke.”

“I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to.”

I just want him to hold me and love me again. It feels like the world is ending inside my skin.

“No more cigarettes, okay? It's too dangerous.” Then, his voice changing, “We don't want a messed-up baby, do we?” He screws his face into a mask, grasps his hands into hooks like a mini Godzilla. “Look at me. My mom smoked when I was inside her and now look at what happened to me. I wish she hadn't done that.” The voice becomes plaintive. “I wish I coulda been a nice normal bay-bee.”

The terror abates. I walk into his arms, his kiss. The earth slips back under my feet. But now I also know this: he loves this creature growing inside me more than me. Now I am only a body holding another body whose needs are more important than mine. Now an interloper lives between us, separating us with her inescapable presence.

 

Seventeen

I have put off telling my mother, but now it's time. I have to catch her in those slivers of time appropriate to both of us, the hours of waking or just before going to bed. I tell her and I hear the joy bloom in her voice. She asks me to come and let her take care of me. Or, she says, she could come to me. This is the way it should be. Always among mothers and daughters on the island, this tradition: a woman is taken to her mother's house far away from her husband. She is hidden away from men and tended to by the women of her family until the baby comes. For months after the birth she is not allowed to work. The women will surround her, will ensure that she and the baby are properly loved and tended until she is healed, until they are bonded, and only then do they return to the man's house.

I say, “No, it's fine. Come later when the baby is born. Then I'll need help.” I can tell she doesn't want to listen, but she has no power now. The baby inside me is already changing me from subject to queen. Now I am the mother and she has no choice but to listen.

*   *   *

Being pregnant is like falling into an alternate universe. In the places that are overrun with the fertile population of the city, young women in yoga pants pushing strollers, fathers with babies strapped to their fronts—a café in Noe Valley, for example—I feel a sort of beaming acceptance. I am being welcomed into an elite club. It is a cool club, a hip club. We are not parenting in the old-fashioned way our parents did. No, sir. This is all new. We are a new breed of parent, knowledgeable about water births, orgasmic births, prolonged breastfeeding, the fathers as conversant as the mothers in all this complicated jargon of the reproductive body. We won't do anything our parents did, is the mantra. We are so much better than they were at this, is the unspoken mandate.

There are smiles and questions about my due date, my diet. The women with toddlers running around their feet relate their battle stories: twenty hours, thirty-six hours, forty-two hours in labor. The woman who says, “Pssshh … try sixty-five hours” is looked upon with the awe due a goddess.

One says, “I did it all naturally. Because you know, it's better for the baby.”

Another says, “I had a home birth. Just Joel and the midwife and the doula. It was transformative.” They flash perfect, glossy smiles, kiss their cherubic children, and hand them to the Guatemalan or Salvadoran nanny waiting patiently by.

In another part of town, in the Mission, young hipsters look at my rounded bulk with the distaste of people who have just seen the movie
Alien
. They are skittish around me, as if at any moment my belly will rip open and a fanged and phallic monster will burst out to chomp at their own delicate flesh. Young women give me a wide berth as if sitting next to me on the bus will cause their own taut bellies to pop into eminent, bursting heft. Men with beards glance past my body as if unable to see it. My female body, no longer in any way desirable, but instead reminding them of the ugly end result of sex.

Environmentalist friends wrinkle their noses. “But it's such a huge decision, isn't it?” they say. “Such a drain on the resources of the planet. My god. Seven billion people.” They shake their heads. One friend of Daniel's sniffs, “I wouldn't ever do that. If the polar bears are dying. And they
are
.” She fixes me with a hard stare. “Dying because of us, you know. I don't know why I have the right to reproduce if the polar bears don't. It's their planet too, isn't it?”

I shake my head at her, not sure how to respond. Daniel says, “Yvette, how about we leave the polar bears outta this, okay? It's just our baby. Hers and mine. We don't have to bring the fate of the whole planet into the situation.” I press his hand in gratitude. With him next to me, I can do anything.

*   *   *

We learn that there are many things to buy. Strollers and car seats and nursing bibs and breast pumps and rocking chairs and clothes and pacifiers and on and on. I understand now why young parents look buried alive under mountains of things, why they buy larger cars and bigger houses. There is so much paraphernalia! His parents send us fat checks that he is loath to accept. But I tell him it's not a time to be picky. We need the money, and if they can be generous, why not? It's their first grandkid, after all. These days I'm paying most of the bills. We don't talk about it, but I know it cuts him.

We go shopping at a place that proclaims, “We deliver everything but the baby.” I wander the aisles, thinking this is how a fifties housewife might have felt when she was asked to choose the perfect bathroom cleaner. If she could just master the uses of all these new scientific products, she would be
perfect
. Now an avalanche of things is targeted at me. I need to pick carefully so I can be the perfect mommy. It is a very, very important job. The most important one in the world, as the ads keep reminding me.

*   *   *

And lost under all this noise, the looks and the stares, the baby bump mania, the obsessive accumulation of things, is the absolute miracle of what is happening inside my body. Every week I read to him the newest accomplishment of our very small person, the acquisition of earlobes, the lengthening of the spine like a taproot, the spreading web of capillaries and arteries, the minuscule but rapid beat of that forming heart, the way this tiny human in me is replicating step by step the journey of our entire species, from tiny fish to curled-up mammal. We watch the sonogram screen and hold our breaths to see our baby girl. The technician knocks at my belly as if on her front door to make her move so that he can check her neck. It will reveal a wealth of information, he says. We watch spellbound as, legs tucked, hands in prayer, she turns to us with her huge, closed alien eyes. She is sacred; we are in awe.

These days she moves constantly. I can touch a hard place on my belly and say, “This is her head.” In another place, “These are her feet.” We watch the way my belly moves like a wave as she stretches an arm, moves a leg. Not gently, as one would expect, but assertively, just under my skin, as if she is saying, “I am here; I am alive; I am coming.”

*   *   *

Then as if one miracle engenders another, I walk into the apartment and he hands me a glass of sparkling apple cider, clinks it with his own rare tumbler of whiskey. His eyes are sparkling, some deep emotion barely contained in his body. I rest my hands on my aching hips and ask, “What's happened?”

“You won't believe it. It's crazy. I've just sold
The Coming
,” he says.

“What? But that one's not even in a gallery.”

The Coming of Civilization to California
is an oil he completed in the Oakland warehouse studio he shares with three other artists. It shows a covered wagon cresting the horizon, pulled by a steer, a woman in lingerie splayed on its back. Small panels show parts of the steer, cuts for sale, the woman too dissected into bits for consumption. A Mexican man in a sombrero looks agog at this insertion of commerce and commercialism.

“I know. I've never even shown it. We were installing a private collection in that house in Woodside. A bunch of modern pieces. Stuff that's super delicate, so it's been days of unpacking the boxes and carefully placing them where this rich woman tells us. Then last week she mentioned that she was looking for a big painting. Something specifically Californian. And Marcus pointed at me and said, ‘You should look at this guy's work. It's damn good.' She said, ‘Oh yeah?' and I said I have pictures on my phone. I was joking, but she looked and then she wanted to see them and then today she came in. I didn't want to tell you. I didn't think anything would happen. But she loved it and she wants
Cry of the Rain Crow
and
The Unmaking
too.”

We stare at each other, eyes huge. This would mean more money than Daniel has made in all the years we have been together. Can it be? Is it happening as we have wished and hoped and prayed? The baby gives a kick from inside me. I put Daniel's hand on my belly and we grin in hope and joy.

*   *   *

I am eight months along. She lies inside me, head up, nestled below my heart, and now I am afraid that she may not turn in the appropriate direction, facedown like a diver waiting to arc out of my body, but might instead attempt to exit in this dangerous fashion, feetfirst. The doctor tells me to try speaking to her. She explains that there are invisible bonds between mother and unborn baby that no one understands, a certain chemical language, perhaps, or an emotional one. It's said to happen. She says, “You might be able to get your baby to move yourself.”