This afternoon, I’ve given up scanning shelves and reading labels and have lapsed into a vague stare when a—what’s a nice word for wan and anemic? willowy—a willowy health food store employee glides up behind me and offers help. I’m clearly dazed; this is a pity move on her part. “I was just looking at protein powders and got lost,” I tell her.
She grabs one off the shelf and holds it up. The label has a picture of a himbo with bulging muscles on it. “I use this stuff,” she says.
You do? You aren’t a very good advertisement for it. I take it from her and read the ingredients. Whole lotta herbs, and I can’t remember which ones are supposed to be good and which are supposed to be bad. “Some herbs are contraindicated in pregnancy,” I say.
“Oh, you’re pregnant? I thought you were just fat.” She giggles. I wait, smiling politely. “Herbs are good for you,” she chirps.
“What about this, though?” I say, pointing to an artificial sweetener.
She squints at the list of ingredients. “I can’t even say that!” she laughs. Sigh. Then she takes another can off the shelf. This one has a picture of cookies on it. “This is whey protein powder. It’s for people with soy allergies. Do you have a soy allergy?” she asks hopefully.
“No.”
“Oh, well, this has whey in it.”
“What’s whey?”
“Like curds and whey?” she screws up her face.
“What’s that?” I ask.
“You know, Miss Muffet and the spider?”
This is not helpful. I read the ingredients. “Oops. It has caffeine in it,” I say.
“Caffeine wakes you up!” she squeals.
I think I hate her. “Yeah . . . still, though . . . I am pregnant.” I put it back on the shelf. I’m tired.
“I can’t believe you’re having a baby; you’re just a baby yourself !” We look at each other, then turn back to the shelves. She points at another can. “Can you eat strawberries? This one is strawberry.”
I give up. “Yeah. I’m sure it’s fine,” I take it and toss it into my basket. “Thank you for the help. That was really nice of you.”
The hippie chick looks at me thoughtfully. “You know, maybe protein powder isn’t what you’re looking for. Like, you should maybe just eat meat or something.”
Huh? “Can’t you get fired for telling me to eat meat?”
She laughs. “I just mean that if you were, like, living in a jungle? You probably wouldn’t be shopping for protein powder?”
She’s trying—I can’t hate her anymore. “That’s true. I’ll pick up a leopard steak on my way out.”
She leans over and yells at my stomach, “Hey there, baby! Mommy’s making leopard for dinner!”
Geez. “Okay, thanks!” I laugh, backing up. She covers her mouth with her hands, giggling.
Crazy hippie chick.
Finally, I leave with a brown paper bag full of the most valuable foodstuffs I can possibly afford, too tired of even the idea of food to eat it.
At least I can keep it down now, so when I do eat, it doesn’t go to waste. It goes toward making eyelids and shoulders and tiny lungs, somehow. As far as I know, I can’t make those things, but I’ve seen a bunch of little baby parts on the monitor at the midwife’s office. She puts some goo on my stomach, turns on a TV, and shows me a little space creature, dancing around. A universe, complete with eyelids, shoulders and tiny lungs. We’re both quiet as we watch the universe dance.
Do you know what a sonogram is? It’s seeing sound. So other people do this, too.
At shows, I wear the big cotton Mayberry dresses eschewed by my old-lady friends and drape sweaters over my swollen middle. I don’t think I’m keeping too many secrets anymore, but I imagine that an unspoken rule against pointing to women’s stomachs and asking questions is keeping me from having to talk about it.
Leslie says people definitely wait for you to bring up your pregnancy, and that I don’t. She calls it “the pregnant pause,” when, in conversation, people give you the opportunity to mention the other human living inside you. “But you don’t seem to follow the same conversational cues that other people do,” she says to me in the kitchen. I’m sitting at the table and staring at another plateful of expensive protein I don’t feel like eating. “You just look at them and smile,” she continues, “which is sort of confusing. You should eat that, by the way.”
“Confusing’s okay, though, right? I don’t feel like eating it.”
“If you don’t mind hanging out with confused people, I guess.” She opens the fridge and stares into it. “Eat it anyway. It’s not for you, it’s for the baby. You don’t want to have an ugly baby.”
“I just think it’s my business, is all,” I say, pushing eggs around with a fork. They look cold and slimy. “Food is so boring.” I put down my fork and look at her. “I just don’t wanna talk about it and I shouldn’t have to. Remember that guy at the Rat? I thought he was gonna hit me.”
I really did think that guy was gonna hit me. Instead, he yelled, “Haven’t you ever heard of birth control?!” I don’t even know him.
“He was pissed off,” Leslie says.
“What the hell does that mean? What was he pissed off about?”
“Well,” she explains, “most people think teenage pregnancy’s a bad thing.”
I look at her. “It is a bad thing.” Leslie takes a bottle of pink juice out of the fridge, then sits in the seat across from me. She nods. “Nineteen is hardly a teenager, though,” I say.
“Yeah. But most people think you’re thirteen.”
“What? What do you mean?”
“By ‘most people think you’re thirteen’? What do you think I mean? You look like a little kid,” she says.
I scowl at my eggs. “Well, some people just look like kids; it isn’t my fault.”
“I didn’t say it was.” She’s not paying attention; she’s reading the label on her juice bottle. “What’s ascorbic acid?”
“Do they really or were you just kidding? Vitamin C.”
“I thought that was citric acid.” She opens her juice and takes a sip.
“No, ascorbic.” I watch her, try to take a bite of an egg, can’t do it. “Who thinks I’m thirteen?”
She smiles a Leslie smile. “Uh, let me think,” she says in a duh voice. “Oh yeah, everybody.” I slump in my chair. “You’re lucky!” she scolds. “You’re youthful. And you’ll stay youthful. Having a baby when you’re nineteen means you’ll have a nineteen-year-old’s body for the rest of your life!”
“It does?”
“Sure!”
“I hadn’t heard that,” I grumble.
“Well, it’s true.” She drinks her juice and watches me, a half-smile on her face. “A homeless guy in Santa Cruz told me that.”
“Oh, well then, it must be true.”
“You’re too judgmental. He was a smart homeless guy,” she says, leaning forward and shifting into storytelling mode. “Once, I baked him a cake in my tree house ’cause it was his birthday, right? And—”
I squint at her. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about this,” she says, annoyed. “So, I didn’t think it was possible to bake a cake in a tree house, but I was gonna try anyway, you know? ’Cause it was his birthday and nobody but me cared, which was so lame.”
“That was very nice of you,” I say vaguely. I usually enjoy Leslie’s stories, but all I can think about is people talking about me behind my back.
“Yeah! So this girl I know brought me a toaster oven and helped me run an extension cord up to—”
Putting my fork back down and groaning, I interrupt her. “Is it my accent?” I ask. “Do they think I’m a hick? I thought I didn’t have an accent anymore.” She looks at me. “I mean, how could I be thirteen? What do they think, I’m, like, a street urchin?”
Leslie shrugs, giving up on her story, and looks at my plate. “Eggs. Gross,” she says. “You should eat that.”
♋ el dora
do
these eggs look like eyeballs
and i’m too bored to eat
I’m holding my mother’s hand in Atlanta, waiting to cross the street, when a lady pushes a stroller past us with a strikingly ugly baby in it. “Mama!” I yell. “That lady’s got a monkey in her baby carriage!”
Crane is horrified; she pulls me away and hushes me, hissing, “No, Kristin, it’s just a funny-looking baby.”
The lady pushes the stroller down the sidewalk. She’s getting away. “Mama, please!” I squeal. “I wanna see the monkey!” I let go of her hand and run to see the monkey.
She catches up with me as I reach the stroller and we both peer down into it, me excited, my mother panicking. There is a tiny monkey tucked into a blanket next to the ugly baby.
“Oh my goodness,” Crane says breathlessly to the woman in her relief. “What a beautiful baby!”
Our doormat has a daisy and a postcard on it this afternoon. I pick up the postcard and read it. “On another night, there will be another tree and it will be raining again. I’ll be there and you’ll be there and then we’ll both know.” Geez. The dripping tree guy from the Rat knows where I live.
Leaving the daisy where it is, I shove the postcard in my pocket and head to baby class. I go to this “baby class” every Tuesday. I don’t know what happened to our culture to make it so that we can’t even procreate without taking a class about it, but I go anyway, ’cause I know I can’t procreate without taking a class about it. The other mothers in my baby class are all businesswomen who’re married to businessmen. These married professionals are strange, plasticky people.
Maybe strange is the wrong word. Annoying plasticky people. I’ve never met anyone like them before. I wanted them to be smarter than me—I have so much to learn—but they aren’t. They’re unkind and that’s the dumbest thing you can be. Not unkind to me, just snippy and grabby: negative and selfish. Why be that way?
These couples all say they work in “business.” What’s “business”? Is it selling something? What do they sell? Shouldn’t it matter?
Whatever business is in real life, to them, it’s competition. In fact, everything is competition to them: get it now, whatever it is, before somebody else does. Husbands and wives compete with each other, couples compete with other couples. It’s disconcerting; I thought we were a social species. I guess they’re just a dark twist on sociability.
Anyway, both husbands and wives worked in “business” until they made enough money to feel ready to start thinking about discussing the various pros and cons of deciding to engage in the process of planning to clear their schedules long enough to paint the home office a pastel color and put a two-thousand-dollar crib in it, research imported strollers and playpens and wooden toys and baby carriers and changing tables and mobiles and tiny designer outfits, order some videotapes designed to turn their little lump of clay into a future businessperson, sign up for a diaper service and a private nursery school with a waiting list, hire a day nanny and a night nanny and a weekend nanny and a freakin’ wet nurse if they still have those, then begin trying to pinpoint ovulation and fertilize that egg in order to have a—phew—baby, whatever that is. For years, they’ve been starting their families. My family got started without me even being consulted.
Which I know is my fault and my deal. I try not to judge the yuppies lest I be yuppie-judged. I even want to like them, but they make it hard. They’re always snapping at each other and bitching about . . . well, everything: working, not working, working out, not working out, swollen feet, swollen middles (what’d you think was gonna happen?), the heat inside, the cold outside, the products they’ve purchased and the ones they don’t yet have, their friends and loved ones. It’s angrifying. They have so much and they whine so much.
All that unnecessary stuff and all that unnecessary meanness—I actually feel bad for their future children. I’m afraid they’re all getting babies as accessories, ’cause they heard other people had them and they gotta have whatever anybody else has.
At least their kids’ll have tons of money.
The yuppies’re really gung ho about the whole childbearing thing, which’d be cool if their enthusiasm was focused on growing a baby or raising a child. All they seem to care about is labor and delivery. I don’t know any more about having kids than they do, but their attitude seems myopic, like trying to have a wedding without a relationship or a marriage.
They definitely take the midwife’s assertion that pregnant women are athletes literally, treating the birth day like it’s a big race they’re in training for—the husbands even calling themselves “coaches.” I mean, nobody’s keeping score—they gotta know they aren’t gonna win the birth day race. This doesn’t make them any less competitive, though. The women sit on the floor, their husbands holding their feet, and they breathe like champions, first fast, then slow, each coach cheering on his chubby star athlete in preparation for the big day. Except the coaches’ definition of cheering is: criticizing.
“No, that’s wrong, Trisha. Butterfly breathing—butterfly!”
“I’m doing the best I can, Jim,” Trisha seethes.
“You’re gonna have to try a little harder, honey. There won’t be time to make mistakes when it really counts. C’mon, we’ll do it together.” Like he could possibly fool Trisha into thinking they’re gonna give birth together. Trisha hates Jim by the end of this exercise.
And all any of them want to talk about is pain. They are absolutely terrified of pain.
“How much will it hurt? Is it like a migraine or like stomach cramps?”
“Is it an ache? Or a stabbing pain? A burning one?”
It’s so boring. And scary. Why are they worried about themselves when they have babies to worry about? I want the midwife to drop her knitting and yell, “Just do it! Just deal!” but I guess she knows that’s what the yuppies’ll ultimately have to do anyway.
The married professionals and I talk over paper cups of juice during breaks, but we don’t bond. They seem to be holding back—lots of frozen smiles and uncomfortable silences, as if we have nothing in common except our big stomachs. Now, thanks to Leslie, I know why. It’s not ’cause I’m unmarried and unprofessional; it’s ’cause they think I’m goddamn thirteen.
When I turn down my street after baby class, I see someone sitting on our front steps. I figure it’s one of the Harvard thugs, but I don’t have to care. They don’t bother me anymore now that I’m pregnant. Fun fact: to a certain kind of man, pregnant women don’t exist, don’t show up in space. The more visible my gut becomes, the more invisible I am to them.
But up close, the guy doesn’t look like a Harvard thug. I think I may know him, just can’t place his face. He’s blocking my way, though, so I gotta talk to him. “Hi.” I try to sound friendly.
“Hi,” he says, without moving.
“Do I know you?”
“No. Did you get my postcard?” Oh, the dripping tree guy.
“Yeah. Thank you.” I knew living somewhere was a bad idea. “Was the flower from you, too?”
“Yeah.” He still isn’t moving.
“Well, thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
What does he want? “I guess I better go inside,” I say quietly, but he doesn’t budge. “. . . Are you okay?”
For a long time he doesn’t say anything. Cars drive down the street, their headlights cutting across his face in the darkness, turning his teeth yellow. It’s so cold out here. Then he nods. “Yeah, I’m okay.”
Slowly, he stands up, then walks down our front steps, crosses the street and disappears into the cold.
Ice on the chain-link fence that surrounds the school yard glints in the white sun; snow that blew into the corners of the fence weeks ago is now gray. Construction-paper Santas on the door of the school blow in the chilly wind while children in snorkel jackets and ski masks huddle together to stay warm.
“You should all keep moving,” says a fourth grader, oldest and wisest
among us. “If you don’t keep moving, you’ll fall asleep and die.” Two kindergartners look terrified. They begin jumping up and down.
A third grader snorts. “Yer mental. We’re not gonna fall asleep; it’s too cold.” The kindergartners’ jumping slows, then stops.
“That’s why you fall asleep,” says the fourth grader. “And then you die. I saw it in a movie.”
The kindergartners jump around like maniacs, hats slipping down over their eyes.
The songs have settled on four in the morning as their favorite time of day. They wake up when it isn’t day or night—time just is at 4 A.M. It’s almost always silent, which may have something to do with why I hear music then.
It’s sort of a bummer; now that I’m all pregnant-sleepy, the songs’re my alarm clock. And I’m everyone else’s, ’cause I gotta heave my gut up out of bed when I hear one and grab my guitar. Then I tiptoe down the freezing hallway, the snow outside the kitchen window lit blue by moonlight, and shut myself in the bathroom. I play as quietly as I can, sitting on the edge of the bathtub, but by seven o’clock, the shimmering tile reverb has carried the sound throughout the apartment, waking everybody up.
Luckily, none of my roommates have the stomach for yelling at a pregnant lady—they thank me for helping them get to work on time. God, I hope I’m pregnant forever.
♋ colder
so I feel like an alarm clock
My job, as it turns out, is only to shut up and listen.
And it’s interesting to watch what songs do unimpeded by me. When I don’t struggle against them, they don’t have to fight me. What they do then is crawl all around an event and shine different lights on it. They grope for intensity and grab whatever has the most impact, a bewildering free-for-all. Not safe. But I don’t think we’re supposed to be safe.
Rat Girl: A Memoir Page 26