The Russian Word for Snow

by Janis Cooke Newman

  "In April?" I asked, because that was what I always asked.

  "Yes. But the day I left the hospital to bring you home, the flowers were blooming and the birds were singing. It was like you'd brought spring with you."

  After a while, my mother stopped talking about the bone-marrow transplant. I knew she was on antidepressants, and there

  must have been something else for the pain. Sometimes she'd fall asleep while I was talking to her, and the woman who was staying at her house would have to hang up the phone.

  Again I made plans to visit.

  "Ken and I are going to Boston on business," I told her. "We'll come to see you as soon as we're finished."

  She drifted back into sleep before she could tell me not to come.

  While we were in Boston, my brother called to tell me that my mother had died. When I told Ken, he held me in his arms and cried into the back of my neck. I could see his shoulders moving up and down.

  There were no flights to New York until the next morning. In the meantime, I needed to be around noise and people, so Ken and I walked to Boston's North End, to the Italian neighborhood. It was the last night of a feast dedicated to a Catholic saint—I didn't know which one, and the hot, rainy streets were jammed with tourists and locals. Men in white V-necked T-shirts carried a plaster statue of the saint, dipping him so the faithful could pin dollar bills to his ribbon sash.

  There were sausages sizzling at stands on every corner, and somebody had set a pair of speakers in their second-floor window—Frank Sinatra singing "Fly Me to the Moon." I knew these things were there, the smell of meat cooking, the syrupy sound of Frank Sinatra's voice, but it was like observing them through water.

  I don't have a mother anymore, I repeated to myself, as Italian women with fleshy arms reached past me to embrace friends in the crowd. And I wondered when I would cry.

  Ken and I walked by booths featuring games of chance— roulette wheels where the money lost would benefit the church—past stands filled with pyramids of sugarcoated zeppoles shiny with oil.

  "We should eat," I told Ken. And we pushed into a tiny

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  restaurant where a neon sign blinked: "We are famous for our mussels."

  We sat at a small table, our knees touching beneath the red and white checked cloth.

  "Mussels," we told the waitress, unable to disobey the sign.

  The mussels came served in a cast-iron skillet that burned my wrist when I touched it to the edge. We washed them down with wine that stained our teeth purple.

  I tried thinking about the time my mother had hit me with a can of frozen orange juice and broken a blood vessel beneath my eye. The six months we didn't speak to each other after she made me leave the house.

  Instead, I remembered the Easter I was thirteen and my best friend and I were to sing a duet in the church choir. We'd practiced for weeks, our voices high and pure—just like angels, I'd thought. But on Easter morning, as we stood surrounded by white lilies, the hymn about Jesus rolling away the stone suddenly seemed unbearably funny, and we started giggling.

  The organist began the music over again, giving us a chance to catch up, but we couldn't stop laughing long enough to get out any of the words about the washing away of our sins. My Sunday-school teacher hissed at us from behind the organ, and I was certain that my mother would be furious. But when I spotted her in the second row, her face was buried in the Easter-morning program, and the top of her head was shaking with laughter.

  In the restaurant famous for its mussels, a man wearing a plastic lobster bib pretended to catch his little girl's finger with a red claw as his wife showed their son how to twirl spaghetti in a soup spoon.

  My mother is gone, I thought, watching the woman lick sauce off the little boy's nose.

  "I've been thinking about having a baby," I told Ken.

  He held a mussel shell shaped like a small boat in the air.

  "You said you never wanted children."

  "But you always did."

  He took a drink of the wine. His tongue looked purple.

  "I could never imagine not having them."

  "Did you think I'd change my mind?"

  "I hoped you would."

  I watched the father in the plastic bib wiggle the front half of a lobster in his little girl's face.

  "It might not happen right away. I have only one fallopian tube, and I'm almost forty."

  "We could start tonight." Ken showed me his purple tongue.

  "Not tonight." I didn't want to start a baby in all that sadness.

  Instead, we ordered another bottle of purple wine, and as the pile of mussel shells grew between us, we talked about whether crooked teeth were hereditary, and spoke aloud every name we had ever loved.

  The Urine of Postmenopausal Nuns

  The first time I tried to get pregnant was in a small hotel on the coast of Maine, shortly after my mother's funeral. It was an old-fashioned New England place with croquet on the lawn and a boathouse where you could sip gin and tonic and watch the other guests in outfits from L. L. Bean rowing on the bay.

  Our room had a small window with starched white curtains that blew in on a wind smelling of salt water and boiled lobster. Ken and I made love on scratchy sheets, and afterward I lay listening to the wooden rowboats bumping against the pilings, wondering if I was pregnant.

  When I wasn't, I bought a copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves: Updated and Expanded for the Nineties. It still had the illustrations I remembered from college: diagrams of female genitalia, and line drawings of couples engaged in sexual intercourse. The women were always sketched with unshaven armpits. They were nearly always shown on top of the men.

  Thumbing through, I found forty-nine pages devoted to preventing pregnancy, nothing about encouraging it.

  However, a section on natural birth control gave elaborate instructions on how to use changes in body temperature and vaginal mucus to determine when you were most fertile. I decided to practice this natural method, charting the rise and fall of my fertility, and then have sex whenever I wasn't supposed to.

  I spent the next few months making a graph of my daily temperature and checking the viscosity of my vaginal mucus.

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  But my temperature graph never seemed to make any of the little spikes the book described, and no matter how I rolled and pressed it between my fingers, my vaginal mucus always felt exactly the same.

  "Stay in bed with your legs and hips elevated for thirty minutes after sex," said a woman who was having her hair shampooed next to me.

  And the next time Ken and I made love, I lifted my feet high on the wall behind our bed and lay there like a biblical vessel waiting to receive the gift of life.

  "Could you bring me a glass of water?" I asked Ken. "Can I have another pillow?"

  While I waited, I visualized thousands of tiny sperm swimming up my vaginal canal like little salmon.

  "Your uterus is probably out of balance," said my friend who believed in the healing power of crystals and the advice of psychics. "Let me align it for you."

  I took off my clothes and crawled onto her massage table. My friend lit votive candles, placing them on every flat surface. Then she put on music sung by a woman with a high breathy voice.

  I closed my eyes, and the friend who listened to psychics rubbed sandalwood oil in little circles around my navel, working her way out to the edges of my pelvis, as if she could see what lay beneath the skin with her fingertips. When my breathing became deep and slow, she placed her fingers near my hipbones and pressed, fast and hard. It felt as if everything inside me had been rearranged.

  "You should get one of those ovulation predictor kits," suggested a pregnant woman in my yoga class.

  There were eight different brands on the drugstore shelf. I chose the one with the baby on the box.

  I put the box with the baby on it in my medicine cabinet and tried not to think about it too much. Buying the ovulation predic
tor meant that Ken and I had made the leap from people

  who were going to get pregnant right away to people who weren't—a distance we'd been covering in baby steps each month when I'd get my period.

  "I have to pick up some tampons," I'd tell Ken, as if what I was saying had little importance. "Do we have any Advil?" And I wouldn't look at him, afraid that seeing his disappointment would make mine more real, the way looking through a magnifying glass makes everything appear bigger and more sharp.

  I began measuring my life in two-week increments. When I got my period, I'd just want the two weeks until I ovulated again to be over. Once I ovulated, I wanted to fast-forward to the day I'd written the P in my calendar, to find out if I was pregnant.

  Each month, when my breasts felt heavy and sore, I'd think, I'm pregnant. I'd lie in bed and convince myself I was nauseated, focusing my attention deep in my belly, certain I could feel a soft fluttering there. I'd turn down a glass of wine without saying why and imagine my baby growing ever more perfect.

  And then, when I felt the warm blood slide out of me, I'd be sorry I ever made myself want this. I'd wish I could go back to pitying the pregnant women in their tentlike dresses with little collars that made them look like gigantic schoolgirls. I hated envying their swollen bellies and feet, their need for naps and glasses of milk.

  "My sister-in-law had a friend who got pregnant after trying acupuncture," the checker at the drugstore told me.

  The acupuncturist's office smelled like the shops in Chinatown, the ones that sold ginseng roots shaped like little men.

  "Stick out your tongue," the acupuncturist said, and I made a face like a Balinese mask while he stared into my mouth. Then he placed four fingers along a tendon in my arm and concentrated so deeply that I was afraid to breathe.

  "Take off your shoes and socks and lie on the table," he instructed.

  I heard him opening small paper sleeves, and when I turned

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  my head I saw him slip a short needle into the skin of my wrist. The needle didn't hurt; it didn't feel like anything. Only the sound of the paper sleeves being torn let me know he was putting in another.

  Afterward, the acupuncturist gave me a small plastic bag filled with a fine gray powder that had the same bitter, musty smell as the room.

  "Mix two teaspoons of this with hot water, and drink it three times a day."

  I drank it all, even though it tasted like dirt.

  "Isn't it funny how you get pregnant only when you don't want to?" my chiropractor asked, twisting my neck so it made a burst of popping sounds. "Like when you're in high school and it'll ruin your life?"

  "I want to have sex in the car and pretend we're seventeen years old," I told Ken.

  "No problem," he said.

  We made love in our Toyota Celica, parked in our own driveway, twenty feet from our bed.

  "Can you move just a little?" I asked Ken. "My head keeps bumping against the button that makes the window go up and down.

  "Try taking a vacation," my dental hygienist advised from behind her plastic mask. "I know loads of people who have gotten pregnant on vacation."

  Ken and I went to Mexico and made love on a lumpy bed in a town where dogs barked all night. At an open-air market, I found an old man who sold potions and remedies. His stall was crowded with old shoeboxes filled with powders, dried herbs, and plants I'd never seen before.

  "Do you have anything that might help someone get pregnant?" I asked him, making my hands emulate the curve of a pregnant belly. The woman selling chipotles in the next booth turned away, smiling.

  The man handed me a round black root still covered with dirt. :h chocolate," he said. He mimed shaving a piece off the root.

  "Why chocolate?*" I asked.

  Again, he made the little shaving motion. "This," he said, pointing to the root; then another shaving motion. "And chocolate."

  Ken took the root from me, turning it over in his hand.

  "What is this?" he asked the man.

  The man shrugged, and said something in Spanish to the woman in the chipotle booth. They both laughed.

  1 brought the root home, hiding it in my suitcase from the agricultural inspectors at the airport.

  j re not going to eat that, are you?" Ken said. course not." I told him.

  I put the root in my underwear drawer, along with a Cadbury Fruit and Nut bar and a vegetable peeler.

  The next morning, while Ken was in the shower, I shaved off a piece of the black root and a piece of the Cadbury bar. I put the two pieces together, black and brown curls, and smelled them. Chocolate and earth. I heard Ken turn off the water, step out of the shower, and I put the shavings on my tongue. Bitter and sweet, they tasted. I swallowed them.

  When the black root from Mexico did not make me pregnant, I called a fertility clinic.

  "How long have you been trying?" asked the woman who answered the phone.

  :een months. Eighteen cycles of my period." That's long enough."

  She explained all the treatments I could try: hormones that would make me produce more eggs, a procedure that involved ng Kens sperm before injecting it into me. Which would be most likely to get me pregnant?"

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  "We have the most success with in vitro fertilization."

  "That's what I want."

  Everything in the clinic's waiting room was baby-colored: pink walls and pale blue carpeting. Another couple sat across from Ken and me on a mint green couch. They were holding hands and laughing about something in the clinic's copy of Business Week. I'd heard that only 25 percent of the couples who tried in vitro got pregnant—one in four—and I worried that the laughing couple would get our baby.

  A woman in a pale blue lab coat that matched the carpet came into the waiting room. "I'll be your in vitro fertilization counselor," she told Ken and me. "I'll be taking you step-by-step through what can often be a difficult and complicated process."

  "Thank you." I leaped off the couch and reached for her hand. "Thanks so much."

  The in vitro counselor led us into a small office with photographs of snowcapped mountains on the wall. She sat behind an empty desk and smiled. Her teeth were very white, like the snow in the pictures. Extending her baby blue arms, she handed us each a little book titled The In Vitro Fertilization Story.

  "The first thing we're going to do is put you on birth-control pills."

  "But I want to get pregnant."

  "The birth-control pills are to regulate your cycle, so it coincides with your in vitro appointment."

  "Couldn't I just change my appointment?"

  "These appointments are given out months in advance." She stretched out the word "months." "They cannot be changed at the last minute."

  "Yes, yes, of course," I assured her. "I wouldn't do that."

  "Good." The counselor showed me her white teeth. "Now, a few weeks before your appointment, we'll start you on injections of Pergonal."

  "What's Pergonal?" asked Ken.

  "A fertility drug made from the urine of postmenopausal nuns."

  Ken laughed through his nose.

  "The nuns live in the French Alps," the counselor informed him. She looked pointedly at the snowcapped mountains on the wall, making me believe they must be the home of the postmenopausal nuns.

  "The possible side effects of Pergonal include mood swings, severe headaches, and strangulated ovaries."

  I gave my head a little nod for each side effect.

  "What about cancer?" Ken asked. "Don't fertility drugs cause cancer?"

  "Preliminary studies show a possible connection." The counselor studied the cuff of her baby blue sleeve. "But as of this point, nothing concrete has been documented."

  Since my mother's death, I'd begun to believe that cancer's having come so close to me had made me more susceptible. I'd hold my breath when I walked past idling cars, wouldn't let the dentist X-ray my teeth, and stepped away from the microwave when it was on. I a
te only organic fruits and vegetables, checked my meat and milk for growth hormones, and swallowed so many antioxidants and cancer-fighting vitamins that it took two glasses of nonirradiated orange juice to wash them all down.

  Yet now I could sit in a room decorated in baby colors, and ignore everything the counselor was saying about the increased risk of uterine and cervical cancer.

  "So there's no documented connection between Pergonal and cancer?" I said.

  "Not at this time."

  "Good."

  "When your eggs are ready, we'll remove them with a long needle that can pierce the uterine wall. And then we'll fertilize them."

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  "That's where you come in." The counselor turned to Ken and flashed him her white teeth.

  "Once the eggs are fertilized, we'll use a catheter pushed through the cervix to introduce them into your uterus."

  I was nodding my head at her like it was attached by a spring.

  This is how it should be done, I thought, with piercing needles and catheters filled with fertilized eggs. All this relying on penises and vaginas was much too imprecise.

  The counselor stood and excused herself, leaving us alone while she went to get something she called "the financials."

  "Are you sure you want to do this?" Ken whispered. His copy of The In Vitro Fertilization Story was open to a drawing of a fallopian tube with a twisted-looking blob at the end of it.

  "I want a baby."

  "Can't we keep trying on our own?"

  "If you want. But we're going to do this, too."

  The financials were three pages long. At the bottom of the third page was the total cost of our vitro fertilization. $10,000.

  "And we pay this whether we get pregnant or not?" Ken said.

  "Of course," the counselor told him.

  "Of course," I echoed.

  I'd already decided that I would use the money I'd gotten from the sale of my mother's house, an amount that was close to $100,000.

  "How many times are you thinking of trying this?" Ken asked me.