What We Have

by Amy Boesky

  Everything.

  I felt a little like Martin Guerre, pacing around in a life that no longer felt completely like mine.

  IN LATE OCTOBER, JACQUES AND I started prenatal classes. We learned how to pant during labor and how to choose a focal point to stare at during contractions. Jacques tried rolling a tennis ball, hard, into the lower part of my back. We sat in a circle with people we didn’t know and practiced diapering a plastic doll. “Parenthood,” our teacher told us, “is a journey. As with every journey, you have to start with one small step.” I couldn’t believe she could say that with a straight face. I took a deep breath, passing the doll to the lobbyist on my right. When he stared at me, I realized I was holding it by its ankle.

  I threw myself into teaching. In November, Lori and Dave gave Jacques and me a baby shower. Even though I knew Julie wouldn’t come—she’d called, choked up, to apologize in advance for not being there—I couldn’t help looking around for her, the whole time I was opening boxes with tiny outfits and ingenious baby devices. Once the doorbell rang and I looked up, hopeful. But it was only one of the twins from next door.

  AFTER THANKSGIVING, JACQUES AND I went back to the hospital to take a tour of the prenatal wing.

  “Has your pregnancy been uneventful?” the form asked. All I could do was check a box for Yes or No. There was no space to write about Emily.

  I checked the box for Yes—uneventful. But I knew it wasn’t true. There had been these things: This tiny lost cousin. This danger skirted, this ineluctable will to survive.

  Ninth Month

  THE LAST STAGE OF PREGNANCY, according to my What to Expect book, is a time to think and plan ahead. But you shouldn’t forget to “reinforce romance.” The authors recommended going out at least once a week together to do something “special (and unexpected)”—like miniature golf. Or hitting the flea market. You weren’t supposed to forget your partner. “At dinner,” they advised, “spend at least some time asking about his day, talking about yours, discussing the day’s headlines . . .”

  THIS SOUNDED LIKE GOOD ADVICE, but in our case, it wasn’t happening. Jacques was working late most nights, trying to finish up a project before the baby came. He thought this was a good time to squeeze in a few extra loops to Boston. So instead of discussing the day’s headlines with him or doing something unplanned or unexpected, I lay alone on the couch eating Stoned Wheat Thins and watching the Weather Channel. Between crackers, I worried.

  Here were my worries, in order of intensity:

  The baby wasn’t growing the way it was supposed to. I had reason to worry. After Julie and Jon lost Emily, one of my tests came back outside the normal range. It was too late for an amnio, so we did what Dr. Weiss advised, which was to sit tight and try to stay calm. By my thirtieth week, there was another problem. According to the ultrasounds, the baby looked too small. Dr. Weiss, her voice taking on a new edge, told me I had what is known as “an inhospitable womb.” At each visit, she measured me, frowned at the ultrasound, and clicked away with her computer mouse. Click click click. The baby wasn’t thriving the way it should, she told us. It wasn’t a crisis, but we needed to be aware of it. There were several possible reasons for this, but the question was what to do. One option would be to deliver the baby early and let an incubator finish things up.

  I tried to work through the phrase “inhospitable womb.” I was a Midwesterner. I used to bake my teachers cookies in middle school. I joined a sorority in college where we learned how to greet people at the door and serve chocolate fondue with the right-size napkins. How could my womb be inhospitable? It wasn’t fair, I complained to Jacques. It was bad enough coming from a family with doomed ovaries. I didn’t need an unfriendly womb on top of that.

  Jacques told Dr. Weiss we would prefer to avoid the incubator option, and Dr. Weiss nodded, as if we were talking about room reservations at an overcrowded hotel. OK, fine, we’ll stick with the cramped single. Click click click. “Also, the baby is still breech,” she reminded me. “If it doesn’t turn on its own—”

  Worry number two. The baby, in addition to being small, was breech: right side up, instead of upside down, the position that’s supposed to happen naturally by thirty weeks or so. What if the baby wouldn’t turn upside down on its own and I needed a C-section and either the baby or I or both the baby and I hemorrhaged and died, like on an episode I’d seen once on ER? If it were just me who died, what would I have left behind for the baby? In the early modern period, women sometimes wrote journals to their unborn children, the likelihood of dying in childbirth was so great. Usually these journals were filled with elaborate instructions on how to lead a life of Christian devotion. I had no idea what wisdom I hoped to impart to our baby. Be like Jacques. Live your life. Stay informed, be smart, but don’t obsess. But don’t be only like Jacques, not if you want time to return the rental car and still make the plane. Don’t be like me or like Jacques. Be like yourself. Keep a sense of humor. Stay out of dark alleys. Brush your teeth, read good novels, use protection. Take a class in self-defense.

  It was too late. I’d left no instructions behind, only a wad of receipts and my notes on seventeenth-century timepieces. If I died, the baby would have to figure everything out on its own, without so much as a Post-it note for guidance.

  Worry number three. From time to time, the baby stopped moving. Dr. Weiss claimed this happens when the baby sleeps and is perfectly normal, but I didn’t believe her. Look at Jacques when he slept, he flailed like a drowning man! I didn’t trust stillness, even during slumber. When the baby hadn’t moved for a while, what I did was to manipulate the sides of my belly with both fists, push push push, just to wake it up a little. Wake up, little one! Wake up! Was this hospitable or inhospitable? Usually, the baby (sweet baby) kicked back in response. We were getting to know each other, this baby and I. Once or twice, though, it didn’t move so much as a centimeter, despite all my knuckling, and I had to head over to Dr. Weiss’s office for a glass of orange juice and a stress test. After a few of these episodes, Dr. Weiss’s nurses knew me by heart—my file was thick as a phone book.

  What if the baby turned out like me and not like Jacques? If it was a girl, then at least in this one way she would be like me, first and foremost. Susceptible to everything I’m susceptible to. Inhospitality. Chronic worry. Compulsive clock-watching and calendar marking. Second-guessing. Fear of heights.

  What if the baby turned out like Jacques and not like me? If it was a boy, how would I know how to play with it or what to teach it? What if he was chronically late or disliked poetry or wanted to be a skydiver or a flamethrower?

  Or what if the baby was like neither of us and we had nothing in common with it and had to sit around the dinner table for the next two decades wracking our brains for something to talk about?

  ONE THING I DIDN’T WORRY about was whether the baby would inherit a disposition for ovarian cancer. I don’t know why, but I just didn’t. Maybe I just wouldn’t let myself go there. Maybe it was because fundamentally I didn’t think that would be a deal breaker, even if it were true. Presumably it was true, because it was all we knew. I’d lived thirty-two years thinking I had a very high chance of getting ovarian cancer, but I’d never once wished I hadn’t been born. Yes, I worried about my health. Constantly. But even so, life—even life with risks—seemed like a much better deal than no life at all.

  And of course, there was always the science fiction of the future. Good humanist that I was, I secretly believed science could do anything. Remember what Julie had said about finding that breast cancer gene?

  Who knew what they’d find next?

  By the time our children were old enough to worry about cancer, they could probably just go to the doctor’s and get outfitted with computer chips like jewelry that lit up whenever a cell malfunctioned. Warning! Unruly cell division at 986CR97! Maintenance required!

  I didn’t worry about the baby inheriting my bad genes. But then, I’m only type A minus. What my mother would call a worri
er-in-training.

  THE FIRST DAY OF MY last month of being pregnant. Drizzle, fog, Washington’s raw, filmy version of winter, 163.8 pounds on the kinder of our two scales. Wearing my Glamour-Don’t wellies and Jacques’s parka, I huffed up seventeen stairs to the second floor of Ignatius Hall in the middle of a stampede of students. I had a final exam to give in English 263, Writing the Self. After that, I’d be done for the semester. More than that—I had the whole next semester off, plus the summer. Eight and a half months yawning in front of me.

  I’ve never liked finals. I like the first weeks of class, so much possibility, nobody upset yet about their grades or pigeonholed as The One Who Talks Too Much or The One Who Spilled Her Coffee on the Lacrosse Player. Endings are harder. We all want to tie everything together, but instead it comes down to this: blue books. The clock ticking. All of us worried we haven’t said what we really meant.

  My students filed in one by one, wearing flannel pajama pants and Hoyas sweatshirts. The room smelled of coffee and shampoo. It was too warm in the building and once the exam started they were all squirming, alternating furious bouts of writing with long pauses in which they stared out the window, faces blank. I’d given them essay questions instead of IDs—open-ended questions about self-fashioning—but there was still so much collective pressure. Every fifteen minutes, I heaved myself off the table and wrote the time on the board. My watch was just out of sync with the university bells, which gonged a few minutes after each pronouncement.

  Ten forty-five. One hour and fifteen minutes left.

  They looked up at me, shiny haired, smooth eyed. Monica LeGraf opened her water bottle, slurped noisily, and sighed. I crossed and uncrossed my legs, eye on the clock.

  I’d never actually come right out and told them I was pregnant, assuming it was obvious. But you’d be amazed what college kids don’t assume. “You’re kidding!” Monica had exclaimed when she came to my office hours the week before the exam, and I told her I was going to be staying home with the baby next semester. “I didn’t know—” And she’d glanced down at my spreading girth, nonplussed. Then, heartened, she grinned. “My mom’s expecting, too,” she confided.

  One touch of pregnancy makes the whole world kin. Last year, someone had mistaken me for an undergraduate. Now, I looked like everybody’s mother.

  Pregnancy felt different, now the end was in sight. Time felt material in a new way. Twenty-eight days left. Twenty-seven. Twenty six. The baby was creating its own calendar and nothing we did could change it.

  Everything had a new kind of finality now. My last class. My last lunch with colleagues. My last attempt to swim laps in the pool at Yates. I made plans with friends, knowing next month everything would be different.

  Essay Number 1. Choose any two characters we have studied this semester and in a well-organized, focused essay, explain how selfhood is defined in opposition to an “other” or antagonist. Think about what characters include in their self-representation as well as what they leave out.

  Be sure to consider what changes as well as what stays the same.

  Fifteen minutes left.

  What changes. What stays the same.

  Ten minutes. Five minutes.

  Time.

  JULIE AND I HAD STARTED talking again at some point in the early fall. It took effort at first, but little by little it got better. At first we stuck to the phone, which seemed safest. Usually I called her, instead of vice versa, and I tried to gauge from the sound of her voice whether she was up for hearing from me or not. We kept things light. We didn’t talk about Emily. In fact, we didn’t talk about anything having to do with pregnancy, though there were things, were we back in our real previous lives, I would have loved to tell her. How distended I looked from the side. How I woke up at night with awful cramps in my feet and had to hobble out of bed gasping in pain and crouch on the cold bathroom tiles until the spasms subsided. How my colleague Valerie had given me a large cordless drill as a baby present, telling me (slightly ominously) that in time, I’d learn what it was for.

  I didn’t tell Julie about the inhospitality of my womb or the breechness of the baby or the multiplications of worry.

  It was lonely, shoring up all the things I didn’t tell her. Like I’d lost a twin and was suddenly lumbering through life alone.

  Little by little, we started doing things together again. In October we met a few times at our favorite place—the café at Kramerbooks, in Dupont Circle. In November I drove out to northern Virginia to have brunch with her. The room they’d set up as a nursery was filled with packing boxes, still folded, and towers of masking-tape rolls.

  “What’s going on?” I asked her.

  Julie shrugged. “We’re putting some stuff in storage,” she said evasively.

  I stared her down, and she relented. “Jon wants to put the house on the market,” she admitted. “The Realtor thinks we’ll get a better price if it’s uncluttered.”

  What did she mean, he wanted to put their house on the market? Where were they going?

  They weren’t definitely leaving the area, she assured me. It was just in case. Just to keep their options open. Who knew—maybe they’d move back into the city, into Cleveland Park or Chevy Chase. Maybe they’d rent for a while. Anyway, they weren’t in a hurry. It would probably be ages before they figured out the next step.

  I doubted that. Once Julie gets an idea, there’s no stopping her. But Julie didn’t want to talk about this now—that much was clear.

  We dropped the subject. We talked about little things. We got together once a week or so, and talked about everything except what really mattered. Emily. How she was doing. How pregnant I was getting, what she and Jon wanted. Why she was still packing. Where they were headed.

  My mother dropped the bombshell on the phone. “So,” she said, in her best confiding voice. “Can you believe it? About Maine? Did you talk to Julie yet about the job?”

  “What job? What about Maine?” I shot back, and instantly she was contrite, guilt-ridden, oh no, nothing, no, she should tell you herself—I just thought, you know—

  She thought Julie would’ve told me already. Clearly. Because why wouldn’t she?

  Now I knew two terrible things: Julie and Jon were moving, and Julie had told my mother and not me.

  Anyone who’s ever been in a relationship triangle knows what this is like. In my family, the triangles got drawn and redrawn with all the intensity and firepower of a medieval romance. Sometimes it was with my sisters: Sara, Julie, me. Sometimes it was Sara, Julie, and my mother. But at this stage, it was my mother, Julie, and me, all pining, yearning, fury, competition, and one-upmanship. Who told what. When. Who said what, who gave what, who got what, who won what. Who had the upper hand.

  All that fall, I’d felt like Julie, having lost Emily, was winning the Love War. She was tragic and suffering and my mother pored over every minute of every one of her days like a rabbi scouring the Talmud for signs of messiahhood. I, on the other hand, was bloated, pregnant, ordinary, with nothing but an inhospitable womb to evoke compassion. I knew how infantile all of this was, but I couldn’t help myself.

  Now, Julie and Jon were moving, and my mother knew all about it, and I knew nothing.

  I fumed for days. Fine! Let her move to Portland, an ice cube of a city, hours from anything that mattered. As if I cared. We’d be fine here on our own, with our cordless screwdriver and our yet-to-be-purchased crib.

  I didn’t need my mother either, thank you very much. And I let her know that.

  “Why don’t I come in when you have the baby and stay for a few weeks?” she suggested one afternoon on the phone, in her most chipper, there’s-no-reason-for-anyone-to-be-mad-at-anyone voice.

  I evaluated her tone. Was she being dutiful? Did she really want to come, or was this perfunctory?

  “That’s OK, we’re good,” I said. Testing.

  Silence. Hurt silence.

  “We want to get our feet on the ground before you come out,” I added, amend
ing. Of course I wanted her! But I wanted her to want to come—to want me. In my unhappy heart, I pictured my mother crawling on her hands and knees through Julie and Jon’s future Portland house, spritzing Lysol, scrubbing and readying things for them, while our baby came (feetfirst) into a lonely, alien world, bereft of family. No loving aunts and uncles waiting. No grandparents. An undersized waif, an almost orphan!

  “You and Julie need to talk,” Jacques said, while I crouched on the cold bathroom tiles, trying to get my foot cramps to subside. “You won’t feel better until you do.”

  I didn’t want to talk to Julie. I felt abandoned, lonely, obscenely big. I could barely see my feet when I looked down. I missed coffee, and Diet Coke, and wine, and Orbit, and sleeping more than three hours at a time, and being able to breathe. I missed my old self. I missed what Julie and I had been.

  Now, the tables had turned. Julie called repeatedly, and I was the one who didn’t answer. “I know Mom told you about Portland. We need to talk,” she said on one of the multiple messages she left, which I listened to while drinking weak herbal tea, my eyes narrowed at the answering machine. Let her suffer. She was leaving me here alone, wasn’t she? Off to colder pastures.

  “Stop torturing yourself. Talk to her,” Jacques said, while I lay on the couch knuckling the baby back into motion.

  Finally, I caved in. I called her back.

  She and I met in a café in Georgetown. The place was packed with students, all so healthy-looking and in such high spirits, talking up a storm, holiday shopping. I ordered chamomile tea, looking irritably at her espresso.

  I held out for a few minutes, until I couldn’t stand it anymore. Then I told her how I felt. How lonely, how abandoned. How guilty.

  She knuckled her eyes. She couldn’t really talk about Emily, she told me. Not yet. Maybe once she and Jon were pregnant again. But now—