by Mira T. Lee
She escorted Manuel to the nursery. This was what they called the small, windowless visiting room stocked with a few random soft toys, a rocking chair, a handful of children’s books. It was private, secure. Lucy Bok sat, waiting.
“Essy,” she said. “Oh God, Essy. You’re here.” Manuel carefully handed her the baby. She gazed at her daughter, stroked her forehead, her chin, her nose, her cheek, rosy from the cold outside. Then she rested the baby’s torso across her chest, Essy’s head on her shoulder. She patted her back, kissed her hair. “Essy, Essy, Essy.” Lucy closed her eyes. And the baby smiled, content with the scent of her mother, occasionally turning her head as if to check that she was still there.
Charo found herself looking away, eyes blurry, cheeks wet. She left them alone, relieved.
• • •
On the day of her departure, Lucy spent the morning in the library, filling out discharge forms. By the time she finished it was almost lunchtime. The exit plan was in place. She had been assigned to the hospital’s intensive day program, three days a week for twelve weeks. Following that, she would transition to outpatient care with a psychiatrist once a month. Psychotherapy, family counseling, and follow-up with a social worker were strongly recommended. Her prescriptions had been faxed to the pharmacy on Main Street.
Nurse Bob poked his head in as she was packing her things into a small duffel bag. “You all set?” he said.
“I think so,” said Lucy. She glanced around the room. Noon rays bounced off the glossy white walls. The beds donned fresh white sheets.
She looked radiant. Alive. Swung her hips as she marched down Hallway B, dressed in a purple ski jacket, furry boots, hair bouncing on her shoulders.
Big Juan Lopez whistled. “Oye, Mamacita!” he called.
“Where’s Coco?” said Lucy. “I need to say good-bye to Coco.”
The armchair by the window sat empty. Outside the sun shone. Much of the snow had melted. Lucy walked over to examine the cluster of potted plants, fingered their leaves, prodded their soil. She nodded, satisfied.
“Has anyone seen Coco?” she said.
Charo touched her arm lightly. “Coco was transferred to a medical unit.”
“But she was scheduled to leave today. Wasn’t she?” Lucy blinked, confused. “She said she wanted to leave together.”
“Stabbed herself in the eye with a chopstick,” shouted Big Juan. “They don’t call her Loco Coco for nothing.”
To Nurse Bob and the treatment team, it had come as no great surprise, but he saw the shock on Lucy’s face.
“Is it true?” she asked.
“This morning. I’m sorry. But she’ll be all right.”
She frowned, deep in thought, clearly saddened. Patient exhibits appropriate emotional response. He took it as a sign of her continuing recovery. Nurse Bob wondered if it would make a difference in her outcome, that the choice had ultimately been her own to take the pills.
“Could it have been . . .” Her eyes darted. “Something I said?”
Nurse Bob sighed. He shook his head. “No, doll, she did it to herself.”
Manuel Vargas stood by the nurses’ station, holding a colorful bouquet of flowers.
“You go on,” said Bob. “God bless, Lucy, and good luck. I bet that baby girl of yours can’t wait to see you again.”
• • •
Lucy Bok spent a total of forty days in Crote Six. Bob knew the odds were against her, that she would most likely be back. But if anyone could beat the odds, she could.
4
Lucia
First thing I noticed about Manny, the mole on his left cheek, a perfect circle, the size of a dime, and smack middle like a doorbell.
A mole? you say. He has such lovely features: crinkly brown eyes, prominent brow ridges, a soft, fleshy philtrum above his soft, juicy lips. The mole was distracting. Not that it bothered him. He never touched it when nervous or favored the other side. We went to a Dominican bar and danced bachata and he pressed it into my forehead, just above my left eye, and it was big and round and black but not hairy or scary, and his breath was cinnamon gum. As the night wore on, I wanted to lick it. Taste it. Later, I mean later, snapped awake and sizzled electric, I was convinced it was a recording device, a secret camera, that it would activate with a correct fingerprint or retinal identification and officers from some central compound would descend like flying monkeys, gather me and take me away.
His essence? A dog. The coloring of a German shepherd, with on-guard ears and that sharp, wolflike masculinity bordering on feral, rabid, but I detected something gentle, even fragile, underneath. The way he stood in public, not quite raised to full height, hands in his pockets, downcast eyes, I knew he was an illegal. Skittish.
“You know what’s sad?” he said, one of those first evenings we sat together in front of the Vargas house, under the summer moon, holding hands.
“What?” I said.
He pointed down the street, to a frail-looking elderly couple trying to maneuver an L-shaped couch into a U-Haul van. They kept banging it into the side of the door.
“Wait here,” he said.
I knew he was decent. Kind. He could lift heavy weights. What I didn’t know about Manny, I didn’t know he would stick. Stick by me and my baby girl.
• • •
And is this a good thing?
This is me, at the p-doc’s. He’s tapping one big brown shoe, short-long, short-short-long; it must be a professional no-no, but he’s oblivious.
“A good thing? Sure. I guess so.”
He’s new. A mandatory assignment, since I’ve finished with my twelve-week outpatient follow-up program at the hospital. Older, bland-blond face, side-part hair, an overall beigeness, though he’s irregularly tall, thus also a bit grasshopper-like, uncomfortable when seated, like he’s had to accordion his limbs to fit into some toddler’s chair.
Not much interested in moles or surveillance or even balmy recollections of romance, he wants to know how I’m doing for support.
“Support?”
“Yes.”
He’s already run the standard battery of questions, checked the check boxes, computed the data: hears voices = schizophrenic; too agitated = paranoid; too bright = manic; too moody = bipolar; and of course everyone knows a depressive, a suicidal, and if you’re all-around too unruly or obstructive or treatment resistant like a superbug, you get slapped with a personality disorder, too. In Crote Six, they said I “suffer” from schizoaffective disorder. That’s like the sampler plate of diagnoses, Best of Everything.
But I don’t want to suffer. I want to live.
I sit up straight. One hand on my lower back, the other on my belly, I take a deep inhale. Control top pantyhose. Two lace-up corsets. Spanx. One traditional postpartum faja.
Oh, support.
He doesn’t smile. He is not mildly amused. My parents are dead and my sister lives in Switzerland. Time’s up. The face, not a crack, ungiving as stone! Aiya. He sends me away with a prescription.
• • •
I go away. I run away! I get in my car. It’s raining. My windshield wipers drag as they swipe, a raggedy sound, one small boys would erupt into giggles over because all they can think of is farts. All I can think is, it’s not like the old days, when some stoical psychoanalyst would hear you out for hours and hours, withholding judgment while you lay on their sofa expelling your word-salad thoughts and florid delusions. Nowadays, it’s about pharma, drugs, and it hardly matters that all those tangled thoughts originate from a sentient being—a real person. Not a lone frontal cortex with its wiring gone awry, though you could picture it, that renegade mass, all veiny and purplish and intestinal looking.
I drive to Cousin Delia’s house. She’s not really Manny’s cousin, but it doesn’t matter, Essy loves her and her two older girls.
Today, Essy’s new tri
ck: she crawls . . . backward. I sweep her up, press her cheek to my cheek. “Sweetie girl,” I say. My bao-bao, my hija. The life in her body so buttery warm.
“Bah,” she says. A finger in my eye. That beaming face. This is the best part about leaving her—to come back to this.
We go pick up Manny. This is the routine, twice a day, because Manny hates to drive. He works as a line cook at the Porky Pig, the twenty-four-hour diner where he started as a dishwasher. Despite its name, it’s a local hot spot with a certain cachet, the kind of joint where you find mini-jukeboxes in each booth and ogre-size portions on heavy white plates (except for the orange juice, fresh-squeezed, that comes in single-gulp glasses). Manny claims celebrities go there all the time, but he hasn’t spotted one yet, personally.
Today I bring Essy inside. There’s a fried chicken special for us early birds, and Manny loves fried chicken.
“How was the doctor?” he asks.
“Starchy,” I say.
“Cómo a potato?” He picks up a French fry, waves it in the air.
I pick up a French fry, wave it back. “Exactly,” I say.
“Huh.” Two fries later, a grin sneaks across his face. “Riiico, no?” He does a yum-yum tap on Essy’s belly until she laughs.
This is Manny, on a good day. I kick him under the table.
“But you’ll go back,” he says.
It’s a question or not a question, I can’t tell, but he’s Very Serious.
“I’m supposed to,” I say.
It’s an answer or not an answer, but he says, “Okay,” reaches over and squeezes my hand. His is always a little bit clammy.
When Esperanza was born, a pair of serpents lived inside my head. Their job was to warn me of the dangers of motherhood, which boiled down to this:
If you touch your baby, she will die.
My body, commandeered, a vessel of evil, was leaking evil into my child.
The serpents spoke in opposite voices. If one was soft, the other was loud; if one politely reminded me to keep my hands to myself, the other said I deserved to have my arms lopped off for not listening. They scrutinized my every move. She is removing the baby’s diaper. She is wiping the baby’s bum. The baby is crying. See, the baby is no good. Cheap. Defective. Don’t touch baby like that! Chop it off! Return to the proper authorities for a refund.
Twelve touches, they said. Twelve more touches. Then my baby, contaminated, would die.
I didn’t tell anyone. First, it was a secret. Second, I was ashamed. Third, I couldn’t stand to hear the human population’s efforts to convince me it wasn’t true—you’re sick! you’re sick!—that was all part of the plot. So I wore thin cotton socks over my hands, dressed my baby in layers, cocooned her in blankets, avoided her skin coming into contact with mine. If I did as I was told, I hoped they might spare her. But it was hard to be a good mother like that.
So this is me, with Essy, eight months old. In the basement of the First Unitarian Church. A circle of women, all new mothers, has turned its attention on us. The group facilitator starts each session with a question, and today’s icebreaker is, What were your first thoughts as you held your baby? Standard answers seem to be “miracle” and “love,” though one woman, a catlike Pakistani with glassy green eyes, has nerve enough to say, “Not much, truthfully.” But I can’t exactly tell the truth.
“Blessed,” I say, taking in all the breasts around me, both free-flying and poking out of nursing bras. I’ve never seen so many breasts before—pointy, droopy, splotchy, smooth, jiggly, perky, flat, like the Seven Dwarfs. I imagine their cartoon voices. “I felt scared. But blessed.”
The mothers bob their heads. I can tell this is an excellent answer. The woman to my left, cross-legged on the floor, makes googly eyes at Essy. This is a sign a mama likes you, if she genuinely tries to make your kid laugh. She has a greenish complexion, oblong breasts that splay apart, and when her son, in her lap, tilts his chin upward, he can reach her and suck away. Hands-free! Very impressive.
Eggplant. Definitely eggplant. And when this comes to me, something inside my stomach topples over. I think of my sister, Jie.
Okay, me. What am I?
Oh, Jie, that’s easy. A porcupine!
For some reason, I’m remembering all of Jie’s floors, the ones I slept on over the years. Three different dorm rooms in college, a shared studio in Chelsea (partitioned off with a world map shower curtain), a one-bedroom sublet in Gramercy Park (the only available spot, in the hallway, with a mangy dog), a loft space in Tribeca, the apartment she shared with her friend Tess in Washington Heights (where she had to smuggle me and my boyfriend in and out through the fire escape). Wherever she lived, whenever I visited—as her starry-eyed mei-mei, as a restless teen, as an itinerant college grad—she would blow up the air mattress, unroll her red Coleman sleeping bag. Here you go, Lucia.
It used to be simple, like that.
Now Jie mostly stays away, swoops in only to unleash her wrath upon whichever Person of Importance she deems most incompetent. She stuck around until I was sprung from the p-ward, then swooped back to Switzerland. I’d say I felt ninety-five percent relieved when she left, five percent like an abandoned cat. But, well, she would’ve gotten a kick out of these mamas, anyway.
After introductions, we go back around the circle to discuss the most challenging moments of our weeks. With the newborns, the gist of anxiety seems to be that they won’t eat; for older babies it’s that they’ll never learn to sleep. I don’t have much to say about it, because Essy is a good eater and sleeper, but I know I shouldn’t say that, so I say, “Essy throws up in her car seat.”
“Oh, no!” Some of the mamas cover their mouths in an oh-no way, some of them like it might be contagious.
“Regularly?” says Eggplant.
“Is it spit-up or vomit?”
“Does she have reflux?”
“Had she just eaten beforehand?”
“How much does she weigh?”
The mothers chime in, but I know spit-up from vomit and it only happens in the car, and Essy eats or drinks every few hours, so it’s hard to say. I’ve talked to the pediatric nurse, who had me come into the office, but Dr. Vera Wang gave Essy only a cursory inspection, asked a few questions, then told me everything would be fine. “It’s just a phase,” she said. “It’ll be okay. And you, are you doing okay?” The way she asked, in that raised-eyebrow way without actually raising her eyebrows, made me suspect that she knew, and I thought maybe I should just come out and say it: Yes, I’m taking my meds. But it isn’t really any of her business.
“Sometimes the biggest challenge is just staying awake,” I say.
The mothers laugh, bob in agreement, roll their knowing eyes. This makes me feel good somehow, to think I’ve broken some ice.
• • •
I go back to that group a few more times. It’s an odd mix of people, lots of older, hand-wringing Westchester housewives, a few immigrant women, two teenagers, but it’s sweet how everyone tries to get along. Faith (aka Eggplant) invites me on a coffee date, and Essy sleeps the whole time while her baby fusses and she has to keep lifting up this sunflower nursing cover that’s like a giant apron and it’s like sunflower, breast, sunflower, breast, and I get so distracted I can barely carry on a conversation. So she talks, mostly about her complicated pregnancy and how blessed she feels that her doula was able to help her follow her birthing plan and how she got through her natural labor in spite of the pushy OB who was all ready to go C-section. I admire Faith’s ability to withstand pain, but all her words make me kind of tired.
The woman I like best is Nipa, the cat-eyed Pakistani, who confides to the group that she’s a breast cancer survivor, two years in remission. After this, I notice some mamas try to sit closer, to absorb her strength, while others seem to shy away. “Isn’t that, like, irresponsible?” I overhear one of the Westchester hou
sewives say, and I kind of hate her forever right on the spot.
Nipa and I meet in town. A crisp fall day, perfect for strolling down Main Street. We wheel past Pizza Palace and the Korean grocery and the laundromat, where the door is propped open, and I’m comforted by the detergenty-fresh thuds and clangs.
“This is where I met Essy’s dad,” I say.
“No way. That’s so romantic comedy,” says Nipa, and I have to laugh.
We head to the waterfront, where the wind picks up and the river shimmers, all zigzagged, and yellow leaves start to fly. When we reach the playground, Nipa confides to me that her doctor thinks she’s suffering from postpartum depression.
I’m floored. First, she is telling me. Second, she’s wearing makeup and her hair is clean, and her Natey is perfectly cherubic with his rolls of chin fat and cream bun cheeks.
“It’s weird,” she says. “In all these years, no one’s ever told me I suffered from cancer. I’m a fighter. A survivor, you know.”
“That is strange,” I say.
She doesn’t seem sad, not like Jazz, the girl in Crote Six whose eyeballs were permanently glued to her feet. But Nipa says she’s cried every day since her Natey was born. “It seems silly, right? To be crying when everything’s fine?”
Well, why not, I figure, because if pain and tears were correlated, surely we would’ve all drowned by now.
“Or we’d be living on arks,” says Nipa, and for a second I’m confused, until I realize I’ve spoken aloud. She sweeps up her hair, piles it on top of her head, and it stays there like a big brown donut.
“Do you feel hopeless?”
“Maybe. How do I tell? I feel so wishy-washy.” She reaches down to pry a wood chip from Natey’s mouth. I suggest we move closer to the swings, where the ground is that foamy rubber made from recycled tires, but she doesn’t want to deprive the kids of their tactile exploration.
“It’s really hard,” I say. That’s usually the best thing to say. It occurs to me that no condition covered in the DSM-IV is ever followed by the word “survivor,” but I don’t mention this.