Homing Instincts

by Sarah Menkedick

  As my due date approaches, so does the fledgling’s departure. By late May, he is nearly too big for the nest. He flaps his wings with enthusiasm, rising each time a little farther so I think, This is it, this is it! I want the ultimate conclusion and symbolic release of flight. But then he snuggles back into the dried grasses, until one Sunday I return from a weekend of birthing classes to realize he is gone.

  For about two hours, I revel in the bittersweetness of his departure and the relief of his ultimate triumph (setting aside the Google-derived knowledge that he still has weeks of training in the wild before his survival is anywhere near certain). It is the oldest story of all time—birth, coming of age, departure—and I have witnessed it for a reason. And then I look out and see the robin tucking dried grasses into the nest. She wiggles her wide belly down, making room. No, I think. No.

  “Jorge!” I shout. “She’s making another freaking nest!”

  At first I want him to take it down, to put up some sort of obstacle to future nest construction and symbolic peril. But in the end I don’t have the heart for it. Removing the nest is such a clear editorial act that it makes me feel weak. In the end what I have witnessed is one small, raw, riveting spectacle of birth and death among many. I can craft whatever larger parable I want from it, but at the end of the day the story is my invention, and trying to get it to predict or reflect the trajectory of my life is like trying to stick a Post-it to a river.

  So I watch over the last several weeks of my pregnancy as three new eggs hatch; three chicks grow and sprout feathers; three ragged necks bob and beg; three fledglings jostle one another in the too-small nest and flap their wings over one another’s heads; and one morning, the nest, brimming just the day before, is empty.

  —

  My grandma died at 2:25 p.m. on March 3, 2012. My uncle Bill, my dad, and I were in the room. Grandma had entered the hospital nearly a week earlier with congestive heart failure, and the cardiologist had given her only a few days to live. Everyone was worried it was going to get much more painful: suffering, disorientation, a sharp decline. Grandma was sleeping. Dad had dozed off. Bill was working on his computer. I was reading. I was the one who looked up, for no reason, really, just looked up. I saw a stillness in her face, the only difference from a minute ago. I tapped my dad on the foot. He startled awake, and I nodded toward Grandma.

  It was quiet. When the nurse came, she was astounded.

  “This almost never happens,” she said. She couldn’t believe it. Normally, there are signs. Labored breathing, confusion, anxiety. The nurses warn people and prepare them. The nurse was silent for a moment. “Your grandmother was a strong woman,” she told me. “She chose when to go.”

  I am almost never home. I am always the one who is not there. For holidays, births, funerals, graduations. I am always the one on a bus in South America, lost in Borneo, in a Mexican market. That semester I had taken off again for the villages of Oaxaca’s Sierra Norte, missed Christmas even when I said I’d be there. But I was home for this.

  I hold tight to this story as an example of a preordained connection between me and my grandma. It is the crucible for my first understanding of that space of birth and death, where everything I have taken for granted is turned on its head, and my everyday priorities, obsessions, desires, are revealed as so many baubles. I became an adult for my family on the night I stayed alone with Grandma in hospice, when I fed her a chocolate milk shake at 3:00 a.m. I had long been the baby, but then I was old enough to stay.

  Yet in the years after her death, I began to see that my connection with Grandma may have been as much about what I didn’t know of her life—what I couldn’t know—as it was about what she and I shared. More and more when I think of that afternoon in hospice, waiting for what came next after she’d taken her last breath, I think of Marge.

  Marge was Grandma’s best friend for nearly seventy years. They met shortly after Earl Menkedick died, when Grandma, who as a young widow had taught herself to drive, offered Marge a ride to church. This turned into a Sunday ritual in which the two stole as much conversation as they could in the car before the kids began to whine that they were hungry. Eventually, Grandma and Marge planned a vacation together to an Ohio state park. They piled Grandma’s two boys and Marge’s three girls in the backseat, shared bunk beds in a cabin, and walked to the pool to take showers. They returned every summer until their kids were grown.

  In 1971, Marge’s husband died suddenly of a heart attack, and in 1973, when Marge’s last daughter had gotten married and Grandma had been a widow for twenty-one years, Grandma and Marge took their first trip together. They went to Mexico on Cartan’s Deluxe Toltec Vacation, which promised “cobblestone streets,” “living history,” “the most interesting exhibits on Mexico’s earliest inhabitants,” and “a delightful stay in Paradise.”

  On their first night in Mexico City, their roommate died. “You know, that sorta colored the trip,” Marge explained to me at a Bob Evans in Cincinnati. Marge is Grandma’s opposite in almost every way: barely topping ninety pounds, soft-spoken, dulcet of voice and manner, where my grandma was sturdy, frank, unabashed. In pictures the two look as if they’ve been chosen by casting directors to be paired on a marooned ship for comic effect. “Also,” Marge added of this Mexico adventure, “they didn’t have much electricity. It was a little bit scary.” The specter of Cartan’s Deluxe Toltec Vacation did not deter them: they went on to Ireland, Germany, Switzerland, the souks of Tangiers, where they were told, along with the other Sycamore Seniors, to walk in a straight line and not touch anything and not talk to anyone and to clutch their handbags firmly to their sides. They went to the world’s fair in Knoxville with Grandma’s boss and exhausted him and his wife in their insistence on seeing every single exhibit.

  We all knew about Marge, of course. But I don’t think any of us knew what Marge meant until Grandma’s death.

  The first time I saw Grandma cry was the day before she died, when Marge entered her room at hospice. Marge began to weep, in the same soft and sweet and steady way she speaks. Her whole body shook. Later, for a week after Grandma died, she lost feeling in her legs, and the doctors couldn’t find anything wrong.

  Marge held Grandma’s hand, and Grandma said, in her voice grown long and low and weak from her dying heart, “I ain’t gonna get any better. I’m gonna go to sleep now.”

  “You sleep peacefully,” Marge said, patting her veined hand.

  And Grandma started to cry. “We had so many good times together, I just wanted to say good-bye.”

  Marge was crying the kind of tears that come unconsciously, rising from some deep interior well.

  “Don’t say good-bye, say ‘Let’s meet again soon,’ ” Marge said.

  “Keep up with the crowd,” Grandma urged, and her voice was so parched, so low. In her final days, we gave her ice, over and over, to wet her lips. “Have fun. You keep having a good time without me. We’ve had a lot of good times together.”

  “I will,” Marge promised.

  “Good-bye, Marge,” Grandma said.

  “Good-bye, Millie,” Marge said. She was crying so hard all she could do was wave at us through the tears, and she hurried out down the hall.

  For a few minutes after she left, Grandma couldn’t stop crying. The tears were like the blinding swirls of a blizzard, unstoppable, and we were helpless before them. We, my dad and I, cried too. We did not know what to say, what to do, but I think she was too gripped by this good-bye to notice us. She did not cry like this for anyone. I had never seen her so moved. Between her and Marge was another life, another story, or simply the truth that the story is never big enough to contain all of us.

  —

  Stories organize competing desires into cause and effect and offer the reprieve of predictability and inexorability when events have unsettled our understanding of who we are. We use stories to steer ourselves in a certain direction, to create a clear wake whose dissipating V propels us. We can tell stories to lie to
ourselves or to demand more from ourselves. As I come to understand that my story of transitioning from traveler to mother, from a character always looking for the faraway and the exotic to one paying close attention to the interior and the domestic, is in fact a creation, separate from and layered atop the volatile everyday, I am at first disappointed. I go through a stretch of disenchantment: it will not be so easy to structure my life or define my role, to say that my baby will always trump my writing and that I will always put the domestic before my career, to decide to purchase a small piece of earth instead of striking out on a bumpy road in some hot forsaken land. These decisions will in fact be in perpetual negotiation and, even once settled, deeds signed or suitcases packed, will never be complete, never free from uncertainty, doubt, regret, all the shoulds and should-haves and what-ifs. All I’ll have is the story, which I can turn to in the moments that feel right as affirmation and call up in the moments that feel forced or rough or sad as a vow. Czeslaw Milosz wrote: “The purpose of poetry is to remind us / how difficult it is to remain just one person.”

  I come to see story not as flesh and blood but as religion: always invented, always subject to interpretation, and best tempered by forgiveness and doubt. At certain graceful and eternal moments, I will merge with my story, become it. I will be then a character, a photograph, a memory eulogized and recalled and passed down. But in my life I will be a girl binge-watching The Good Wife with a family-size box of Cheez-Its, reading poetry on the cabin porch, constantly vowing to drink less coffee, singing Celia Cruz’s “La Vida Es un Carnaval” to the bashful Little Dude.

  In the last week of May, I am on the cusp of giving birth. I enter a period often called nesting, referring to the powerful instinct many women have in the days before labor to organize and clean: stacking cans, scrubbing floors, getting into nooks and crannies they haven’t cared about in years.

  Much to Jorge’s chagrin, my nesting does not take this form. I am sitting on the front porch of the cabin thinking about story. I am watching clouds, considering how the lesson of pregnancy has been not the power of story but the uncertainty of the everyday. Every single day, a new scene played out over the pastures; 270-some days of ever-changing clouds. Sometimes I feel like a mother, and sometimes I feel like a selfish wannabe bohemian full of doubt, and sometimes like a generous loving wife, and sometimes like a stifled traveler, and sometimes like a daughter come home to the farm, and sometimes all, and I come to understand that it will perhaps not get any easier than this: that there will be no more certainty than the rare moment of grace when we embody a certain self completely, leaving no shadow.

  —

  My grandma kept boxes and boxes of travel relics: free postcards from cheap hotels in Florida; yellowed photos of ladies in practical one-pieces on Hawaiian beaches; flattened plastic bags with the names of stores long out of business; tiny viewfinders offering frozen and miniaturized versions of herself at one or another American tourist trap. One representative box, of the white variety that had long ago contained a Christmas sweater, was labeled PHOTOS: CLEAN OUT SOME TIME.

  But she never did. She saved it all. Perhaps it was the same Depression-era impulse that led her to hoard the miniature bags of chips she won at senior bingo in her dishwasher. But perhaps it was more than that. She rarely spoke about her deceased husband, Earl, about his life or death or their courtship. Although she never remarried, she gave no indication of mourning or missing him. And yet when my family and I spent an evening at her apartment after her death, going through her things, we found a box with a birthday card that Earl had sent her when they were dating. On the front was a duck with oversize features and a big quacky grin; inside it read “You’re my girl.” “I never knew she had this,” marveled my dad, though he’d spent eighteen years living in her house.

  We found boxes of thimbles. Boxes of rosaries. Boxes of tiny notepads she got for free at the bank. Boxes of key chains: some of crucified Jesus, some of hula-skirted and bikinied dancers. Boxes of handkerchiefs. Boxes of playing cards. Boxes of matches. Boxes of clipped recipes for coleslaw. Boxes of boxes of Kleenex.

  “Grandma was the least nostalgic person I knew,” my stepmom, Meg, told me. “She did not have a drop of nostalgia in her. She lived in the present, and that was it.” Meg made a chopping motion with her hand, as if the past were a hunk of hard cheese she’d just sliced off.

  And yet Grandma kept all those yellowing photos of her and Marge, all those memories from the best years of her life, disobeying her own Post-it urgings to throw them out.

  And yet under the sink in the bathroom, in a shoebox, she kept tiny bottles of liquor covered in dust. I lifted one out and dangled it like a pendulum in front of my dad. He laughed, shook his head. The sample size of Bacardi rum must have been twenty years old, from a cruise or a trip to Florida. There was one sip missing. When she took it, who she was then, on a boat or a beach, chatting with Marge over roast beef in Omaha or alone in the thick of Cincinnati winter, we’ll never know.

  OPEN

  IN MY TWENTY-NINTH WEEK of pregnancy, I am sprayed by a skunk. I am running with my dogs through the spring woods, and the mutt hound Little Dude gets on a scent. “Little Dude!” I bellow without stopping, hoping she’ll fall back in behind me. I steal quick glances into the thickets where she’s bolted, and my eye catches on something black, and white.

  Then the scent hits. It envelops us wholly as a ski mask. Little Dude is gagging, foaming at the mouth, vomiting a thin drizzle of green. Stella, the German shepherd, paws at her muzzle and rubs herself hard against wet leaves, her eyes squeezed shut and streaming tears.

  I am in shock. I shout to the dogs, Ven, ven, ven, kicking at the ground around their bodies. I run as fast as I can with my third-trimester belly down the old township road to the cabin, the dogs trailing me half blind. I fumble inside and call Jorge, who is on a fishing trip with my dad. The two men swing by Dandy Don’s for jugs of tomato juice, which supposedly removes the scent (an old wives’ tale, we discover belatedly, when the dogs reek of both rancid juice and skunk funk). By the time Dad and Jorge return, the dogs have succumbed to their punishment and are cowed, shell-shocked. The men begin the task of hosing them down, adding the insult of near-freezing water to the lingering injury of their reek. Leroy, the kingly housecat, watches with relish. He walks idly back and forth in front of the dog run, purring.

  Over the next week the cabin becomes suffocating with stench until, stir-crazy and skunk numbed, we are finally driven to play Monopoly. I get so wild that I crack an O’Douls. The .05 percent alcohol and the revived childhood thrill of Monopoly hit me hard: for the first time in seven months, I feel like myself. It comes over me in a slow wave, like a drug beginning to take effect, except the drug is my old self. Jorge moves his little metal dog, and I shout, “Those are the Chance, güey, haven’t you figured that out by now, the Community Chest are yellow,” and I sense my self like a ghost who has just slipped into my body.

  I am surprised to discover that I no longer know what to do with my self. I do not know whether to grieve or to celebrate and so do neither: instead, I watch, which is all I have learned to do throughout my pregnancy. I watch this Sarah I have taken for granted throughout my twenties and into my early thirties, the person I thought I was, who disappeared two weeks into gestation. She is adamant and lively, she drinks, she jokes, she imposes herself on a situation, gets way out in front of it, unlike this other being who does not fill up a room so much as take it in. They are not two separate people, two separate selves. Rather, one is a self and one is not. The latter is something else: an emptiness, an openness I had not experienced before pregnancy.

  Jorge wins at Monopoly as he wins at every American game: with infuriating guilelessness, despite having grown up in Mexico and never playing any of them before. I berate him for his smug little grin and his ongoing confusion of Chance and Community Chest and then lie in bed for a while feeling this old self still present, haunting. Where has she gone, and will she ev
er inhabit me so completely? In motherhood, will any self ever be so total, will I ever be me in that fully absorbed and unthinking way again? I don’t know, but my intuition is no; I will never get that self back in her entirety. But what compels me is that I have lost not just my self but the notion of a self, a definable and characterizable entity separate from the world and in a binary relationship with it, variable in tastes and appearances but consistent and singular in essence.

  Of course it’s easy to chalk all this up to hormones, and this I did during my first trimester. I was astounded at the astronomic physical and perceptual shifts of pregnancy. I’d spent my late twenties saying cavalier things like “Oh, I’d love being pregnant, I just don’t know about what comes afterward!” I thought of pregnancy like a marathon: an exotic, temporary experience of thrilling at the limits and capabilities of the body, only with a baby at the end instead of mealy sliced bagels. And then I found myself curled up in the fetal position, sobbing “Why don’t they tell you it’ll be like this?”

  Now I realize “they”—this nebulous “they” often referenced in talk of pregnancy, referring to all the women who have come before and who were supposed to have conveyed via some sort of gender ESP the overwhelming complexity of the experience—haven’t told because the most important phenomena to relate, the most significant changes, are also the most enigmatic, global, and personal. Above all, they defy the familiar language of story, with its neat transitions, its clear befores and afters. As such they are most easily defined by what they are not: I am no longer myself. Only when the old self shows up does the change gain outlines.