by Julia Fine
When I was pregnant, they said: Don’t drink wine, don’t eat sushi or lunch meats or soft cheeses, don’t lie on your back. Don’t have coffee or clean out the litter box, don’t go in the hot tub, don’t sit still for too long, don’t jump. Refrain from all of these things, and your reward will be a perfect little baby. When Clara was new, they said: Don’t put her in the car seat in a puffy jacket, don’t let her sleep with blankets, don’t lie her in bed on her stomach, don’t give her honey or water or juice. But I could follow these directions to a T, and still lose her. I could build my life around making sure she was protected, the crux of my life could be the maintenance of her health and her perfection, and still I could lose her. There were so many ways I could lose her, and here she was, the door wide open, coughing, cold, now scrabbling across Margaret’s chest.
They never said: Do not invite a ghost inside you. Do not invite a ghost inside your home.
I didn’t want to be waiting, forever, for disaster. I didn’t want to be stuck living in before, in thrall of some impending after. I was ready for the after.
Margaret was looking out at the lake, and Michael was looking at Margaret. In her book, Michael had written: “My father’s death had been my father’s death, but my mother’s was in some strange way a part of my own.” How long would Clara belong to me? Without her there to suckle, my milk would swell my breasts to veiny, blown balloons, but would eventually dry up. Women who lost their babies didn’t lose their milk immediately—they had to use cabbage leaves to help the milk stop, had to sit with the pain. Women who delivered stillborn babies still had to reckon with their postpartum bodies. Even childless, they were bloody and ragged and swollen and sore; in their bodies lived the ghosts of these babies. Where would Clara’s ghost go?
“If only someone would marry you.” Michael sighed. “If only some rich man would come and take you off my hands.”
If only someone would come take you off my hands.
Margaret took a step closer to the edge.
Who would Michael be, without Margaret? It didn’t seem fair that Margaret—who’d lived only thirty years when she met Michael, who would live only two more years without her—had to sacrifice herself so that Michael could find out. I saw now that if I wasn’t going to write the story Michael wanted from me, she was going to let herself live it. She’d make Margaret smaller. She’d make Margaret nothing. She’d erase the story that biographers had told—the story that was written around Margaret—in favor of a story in which she was the star: the story of a benevolent poet queen, her body corrupted by the depravity of her most loyal servant.
Or was that my story? Was that me?
Who would I be without Clara?
“Your art lacks a certain sophistication, Bun,” said Michael. “Like you, it’s unserious and trite.”
“I disagree,” I said half-heartedly, but Margaret seemed not to hear me. This was a battle of both wills and wits, and if I chose to play seriously, I would be playing with the lesser hand. Michael was known for her persuasion, her rhetoric. She’d convinced wealthy men to back her plays, to publish her, to marry her.
“You’re already dead,” I said. “Both of you.”
Margaret’s one leg was out the door, dangling from the frame.
“Michael will change her mind,” I said, one last perfunctory attempt. Michael shook her head to signify she wouldn’t. “This isn’t how things end for you, not really. This isn’t actually how you die in real life.”
Margaret stepped out the door, looking back at me, mouthing I’m sorry. And though I knew I should feel something, I felt nothing. Just the long flight of a body, the downward drop of a body, holding Clara.
I HAD CHOSEN. I knew which one I was.
Michael turned to me; she took me by the shoulders. “All you have to do now,” she said, “is close your eyes.”
Part IV
The Rabbit poet in me has always longed for another language before it is too late—a more fearless baldness of the heart to say the things we never say and the other never knows. Sometimes we ourselves know only too late what we wanted to say.
—Margaret Wise Brown, in a letter to Michael Strange, November 1947
29
No parachuting, luminous fall. No skirts swirled up around me, no motes of light. Just the relentlessness of gravity; a steep, sickening plunge. And luck—the bushes skirting the cabin had doubled themselves since their original planting, invasive honeysuckle multiplying faster than it could be rooted up, opening its arms to us, heavy with snow. A popping lurch in my ankle upon landing was soon overwhelmed by the cold.
I LAY ON my back, broken branches a halo around the leaden sky. My tailbone hurt. A tiny bead of blood welled on my wrist. Soapy snowflakes hovered in the air. I rose to my knees, looking for Clara, my leggings cold and wet and clinging. A nearby tree had spouted icicles of pinesap; its trunk seemed to be weeping.
And then there she was in the bushes in front of me, her eyes open, her lashes starry from the wet, her cheeks a phosphorescent pink. She was looking up at the extraordinary slate of the afternoon sky. I was bent over her, and she was looking up at me.
NEVER HAD I been so in love and never had I been so afraid and never had I been so aware that Clara and I were alive, and that we were alone.
30
Ben found us in the car, wheels spinning out in the snow. I’d gotten stuck on the turn from the back roads to the highway, aiming for the hospital, driving wildly, my only thought saving my child. My ankle was swollen, bruising a mottled purple, possibly broken. Clara seemed unharmed—just very cold, so cold that her fingers were bloodless and white.
Luckily we were only sitting for about half an hour before Ben pulled up in a rented off-roader, its massive wheels salt-streaked and angry. I had my blinkers on, and I was, as always, nursing Clara. I’d been watching the highway for headlights, listening for a motor, waiting for some rural soul to pass so I could lean hard on my horn. If that didn’t work, I was preparing myself to double Clara’s blankets, grit my teeth and walk into town even though it was ten miles away. When I saw Ben, the stupidity of either plan unraveled. The stupidity of all of it unraveled, and I felt myself awash with self-disgust, mortified and afraid and suspicious and silent on the way to the Wisconsin ER.
Ben didn’t seem mad at me, then. He said, “I’m mad at myself for not knowing.” Even when they had to cut off the tip of Clara’s frostbitten left pinkie, he said, “I’m not mad at you, Megan.”
THEY LET CLARA stay with me at first, when I transferred to the mother-baby unit in Chicago, because I was nursing. The doctors thought it was better to keep us together, both for the breast milk and to minimize the immediate trauma. We had a nurse beside us constantly, observing, but I didn’t mind the company. I didn’t trust myself alone.
The doctors talked to me about my symptoms. They talked to me about my moods. They made a plan for me, which included a prescribed course of pills and spending time apart from Clara. I couldn’t nurse her anymore because of the chemicals. They wanted me to focus on myself. They said they took her away so that I could sleep, so I could begin my recovery. The prognosis was good, and if I kept taking the pills, they said she soon would be returned to me, but a minute is an hour is a day when she is still so young, and though it was only forty-eight hours of sustained separation, I calculated that I’d be missing one percent of her life thus far. I lay at night with my eyes open—the city below me, around me—remembering when I lay at night with my eyes open in a different wing of this same hospital complex, watching Clara’s first outside-my-body sleep. I could take the pills, but I couldn’t get better until she was back with me. I said that to the doctor, and he nodded and told me that was good.
At first I couldn’t understand why this had happened to me, or even whether this had happened to me. What had happened to me? Margaret and Michael, according to my doctors, had not. I’d been in a fugue state, broken psychotic, experienced a “flight of ideas.” This wasn’t necess
arily common, postpartum, but all assured me it wasn’t totally unusual.
It had been me, and not Michael or Margaret, who’d hurt Clara. I didn’t think I’d wanted to hurt her; I was also sure I hadn’t done all that I could have done to keep her safe. I was angry at my ineptitude, my warped instincts. I felt profoundly ashamed.
This wasn’t what my life was supposed to look like. This wasn’t what motherhood was supposed to look like. I wasn’t supposed to need so much: not doctors, not medications, not Clara, not Ben. I wasn’t supposed to cause so much trouble.
I wasn’t supposed to be Michael, or Margaret.
Eventually the pills dulled my delusions, and along with them my feelings about my delusions. My feelings about my behavior, about other mothers who hadn’t been broken, about my own mother. Once I was dull enough, they gave Clara back to me.
I still had thoughts. I still had needs. But these were thought and needed under the new, thin, hazy layer of my treatment—a growing scar tissue of antipsychotics and mood stabilizers that would thicken.
I went to the group therapy sessions in the common room at the end of the hall, and felt impossibly lonely. The explanation for my postpartum behavior was hormones, and genetic predispositions, and stress. None of these other women knew me, and none of them knew about Michael or Margaret. One had tried to drown her baby, another was severely depressed, and then there were three empty seats for whoever might next be made mentally unstable by motherhood. Apparently we were in one of only three hospitals in the country to provide this level of postpartum psychological care.
When the pills made my heart race, they gave me lithium and ECT—knocked me out and rewired me with electrical currents. They told me I might experience memory loss or temporary confusion, but I remembered everything.
MARGARET ONCE SAID that she felt her whole life was spent falling “deeper and deeper into the illusion that one is separate and so far away from others that only by playing a part could one meet one’s fellows.” Accounts of her by friends, all given after her death, seemed to corroborate this worldview. Many said they loved her, but felt they didn’t really know her. Everyone thought maybe the others knew her better, but it turned out that nobody did.
Maybe Michael had been the one to know her. Or maybe it was Pebble, the boatbuilding Rockefeller heir she’d been engaged to when she died. But he’d never shown up for me anywhere—not in the cabin or the condo, not in my dreams.
BEN CAME TO visit, at first without his laptop, then with it. He would answer emails in the corner while I cuddled Clara, or watched TV, or slept. He’d come with us to the hospital’s baby massage sessions or splash play. I was trying, with the help of the pills and the therapy, to be the person I’d been when Ben first married me. From the way he looked at me—approving, relieved—it seemed like maybe I’d succeed. Annie came to visit with magazines and stories about her dates with Garbage Greg. Seth and Linda brought a ficus, and some chocolates, and more sympathy than I had expected. My father didn’t come, of course, and neither did my stepmother or Kelsey.
I was an inpatient for six weeks, and only at the very end of my hospital stay did my mother come to visit. I was packing up the cards I had pinned to the wall, and throwing away the dead flowers, and she walked in just as the credits were rolling on a Golden Girls rerun.
“I want to apologize,” she said, and I laughed. I couldn’t remember a time in which my mother had uttered those words in that order: more often it was “Young lady, come apologize to me at once.” I left Annie’s hydrangeas to make wet stem-prints on the paper tablecloth and sat down at the edge of the bed. Clara was cooing in the hospital bassinet, the same wood and clear plastic as the one they’d given her at birth. Her left hand was still wrapped in gauze, which she was busy trying to get off. I sat looking at her, waiting for what my mother would tell us.
“For?” I said finally. But that was it. That was all we were getting, me and Clara, as our maternal family legacy.
I didn’t think about my mother’s mother much—I’d never met her. She died when my mother was ten, and no one ever bothered to tell me and Annie how. I’d assumed something like cancer; now I wasn’t so sure.
“What a shame,” my mother said, stroking Clara’s forehead and removing a wet strip of gauze from Clara’s mouth, “that she won’t ever be able to play the piano.”
WE DIDN’T TALK about the things that were difficult to talk about. We, meaning my family—Annie, my mother, my father, myself—and we, meaning me and Ben. I would like to say that my reticence changed after Michael and Margaret. I would like to say I left the hospital emboldened, but I didn’t. As it had been with my mother, so it was with me: some time away, a regime of medication, a finger stuck back in the dike.
But evolution is a slow climb, trekking eons of the same until finally, something different. And Clara was now missing a finger.
31
Ben took FMLA and bought us a month of togetherness. We brought Clara to the aquarium. We watched more HGTV. When they began my medications, I’d stopped nursing—the labs tested my breast milk and called it contaminated. After the ECT they lowered my dose, but when I offered myself to Clara, she declined me. This seemed an appropriate punishment. After everything I’d done to her, I wouldn’t have trusted me either.
Using formula meant Ben could be a more active parent, that Ben could forge a real relationship with Clara. She was now sleeping up to seven hours at a time. Ben was back to sleeping beside me, and he’d lift Clara from the bassinet when she woke crying and take her to the living room, put on sports highlights, and feed her.
They’d had two nights together without me at the beginning of my treatment, and something had altered in that two-night separation, had left a scar more prominent than anything that had occurred with Margaret, more obvious than even Clara’s finger. She still preferred me to Ben, but she seemed wary of me. And I had learned what it was like to be without her—the stiff hospital sheets, the sudden crying jags, the sense that I’d become an echo of myself.
I didn’t think, now, that I would ever finish my dissertation. The fantasy I’d entertained in the throes of my “flight of ideas,” of having both motherhood and a career, was a pipe dream. But maybe it was less that I didn’t want to finish, or that I couldn’t finish, than that I was afraid to finish. I was afraid I would find them again, Michael and Margaret. I was scared I would jump-start the old circuitry, undo all of what my doctors had been calling my good work. Corine, my outpatient therapist, said it would be fine, that most women took up their former occupations, most new mothers found their way back to themselves. She said that it’s generally a good idea to finish what you start.
Corine had a white noise machine in her office, the same brand we used for Clara. She had little individually wrapped mints in bowls at strategic locations, and whenever I looked at them, I thought about little individual mint wrappers piled in some landfill. Corine wasn’t interested in psychoanalysis, or if she was, she pretended that she wasn’t. This pretending was something that had struck me about therapists even before Margaret and Michael, something I’d pointed out to Annie when she’d first gotten involved with her own. A therapist hears you say all sorts of crazy things and then has to pretend that they don’t think you’re crazy. A therapist has to come to work every day in a sweater set and sensible shoes and maybe pearls and a mask of what they think that you should see. I felt like putting on that mask was setting a bad example for those of us who’d considered telling our own truths, but weren’t sure about unmasking. I felt like the resources Corine was giving me were all in service of adapting to society, and not necessarily in service of figuring myself out. But I played along, because I needed to live in society, because we all did, and also because I had Clara.
“Let’s talk about your daughter,” Corine would say, and I would try not to cry. “We can wait until you’re ready,” Corine would say, but I was never ready.
We made a plan for what I’d do if I heard noises, or
saw things that I suspected were not actually there. I had to go see Corine twice a week at first, then once, then once every two. I saw my doctor every two weeks to talk about my medications, and my sister was supposed to come by to look for warning signs. Ben was supposed to look for warning signs.
“Let’s talk about your husband,” Corine would say. This I could do. I knew the answers here, or thought I knew them. Because of what we called my “lapse,” Ben had a chance at getting custody of Clara if I ever decided to leave him. He said he wasn’t mad at me, but he said it so often, I knew that he was. I wanted him to come out and tell me, and I said this to Corine, and she suggested couples counseling to air ourselves out, but when I brought it up to Ben, he wouldn’t have it.
“We’re doing well now,” he said. I wasn’t allowed to be mad at him, because I was the one who’d fucked up. But I was mad at him, and I said so to Corine, who was sworn to secrecy as long as I didn’t seem violent. I was mad that he hadn’t helped out more with Clara when she was brand-new, and mad that he was helping so much with her now that she was older. I was mad that he needed so little to be happy, mad that he would say things like “It’s okay if you want to go back to work” or “Do you think the milk is spoiled?” I was mad that I didn’t love him passionately, that I would never feel for him what Margaret felt for Michael.
I’d been raised on the idea that everyone would get one true, deep romance in their lifetime. My mother had fallen in love with my father. My father had fallen in love with Claudia, the preschool teacher who ultimately left him for a wealthier man. Ilsa got Rick and Cathy got Heathcliff and Rachel got Ross. I realized suddenly, sucking on a Life Savers mint in Corine’s drafty office, that I wasn’t going to get anyone.