White Walls

by Judy Batalion

  Dad looked me in the eyes, for the one split second he could. Here was our moment, the way the walk should end, the journey that moves, the conclusion that connects the dots. The new arc.

  “Not if you want to walk back,” was all he said, zipping up his ski jacket. Putting his hat on. Layers of down. Thick rubber soles.

  The truth about my father was: he did not have a different wife.

  “OK, let’s walk,” I said, because I had to.

  “You’re crazy,” he cackled, with pride.

  “I know.”

  And then we walked home. A full circle.

  • • •

  “I’M NOT A fucking truck!” I screamed, my lungs now burning as much as my gut. I’m alive, breathing, sensitive, real.

  Mom was on the phone, sitting at her desk—now even her organizing containers had proliferated, hundreds of filled little boxes sprouting in all directions. A wild fractal of school supplies for an entire district.

  Dad stood on the threshold.

  “I’m having the surgery and that’s it,” I yelled, dizzy, the objects around me swirling into one another. I was shocked at my outburst, that there was even room for my strong emotions. “Asshole.” I gestured to the doctor, my new pediatric gastroenterologist, who was on the other end of the line. Did he not know how long it took me to convince Mom and Dad to let me have surgery? Did he not know how many times we canceled the procedure, Dad hoping my latest colitis flare-up would resolve on its own, and that today was the last chance for months? Did he not know that my stomach hurt every hour of every day, that I hemorrhaged repeatedly? That I lived in and out of hospital rooms? That my whole life revolved around my organ that was attacking me? How I was a fifteen-year-old with the social life of a senior citizen? Did he not see how there needed to be a cure, at least a promise of escape, healing, renewal? An answer.

  How could he be suggesting, now, at the eleventh hour, a new drug trial? And one that would keep me at the hospital for two months. There were PSATs to be taken! I was not putting any more of my life on hold, on the toilet.

  “You don’t understand the stakes,” Dad yelled back. “This is major surgery. A million things could go wrong. This could affect you forever.”

  “A million things are wrong,” I shouted back. “I might not have a forever.”

  My body was hot, took over my mind. I could do this. I ran to my room and grabbed the suitcase I’d packed the night before when I’d felt good enough to get off the sofa bed in the den, where I slept so I could watch TV when I was in pain. I’d played “I’m Every Woman” as I packed and danced to Whitney Houston’s guttural sonic gestures promising me a feminine future. It’s all in me! I grabbed that luggage, then headed for my front door, bumping against piles of coats and pushing aside the mass of dusty shoes in the vestibule, growing like moss along the dirtying walls. I dragged the rolling bag—one of a dozen, Mom’s new obsession, stashed in the basement—right outside, into the cool March air. “If you won’t take me,” I screeched, “I’ll take the bus.”

  This time I did it. I used real steps and ran. I had no idea how I was going to get to the Royal Victoria hospital on top of the mountain, but I didn’t care. I’d find a taxi, I’d hitchhike. My heart sprinted, my legs soared; this was more physical activity than I’d done in weeks. Some kids may have rebelled by doing drugs, having sex, joining cults; I revolted by having major surgery. I knew what was right, even though it drove me crazy that I had to make all the decisions, that my parents never did anything, never took chances. Even Dad, who taught me to step forward, stalled and stalled.

  Now he pulled up to the curb in the station wagon. “If this is what you really want,” he said from his open window.

  “Yes!” I cried, wanting it as much as anyone had ever wanted large-scale organ removal.

  On the way to the hospital, Dad broke the silence and stopped at a diner. “Tuna melt?” he asked as he got out of the car. I smiled. I’d been on an all-white, no-fiber diet for months. “Sometimes, you have to live a little.”

  • • •

  ONCE I WAS checked in (checked in, like it was a hotel—then again, perhaps this was my body helping me escape my home?), filled up on fries, resting in my robe, the nurse told me she needed to mark me with a speck of tattoo to guide the surgeon in his cuts. She smiled sweetly as she prepped a long syringe, liquid splashing from its menacing spout, and I laughed, picturing what Dad always said about people with tattoos (the DMS says it: insane!). I imagined the cursive result: “my other stomach is a BMW.” Here at last was my appropriate teenage act-out. Plus I’d be getting a morphine pump—heroin anyone? Then, I screamed. That one tiny dot was horrifically painful, sending sharp spasms across my whole front. Insane, I thought, as I stared at the blue period punctuating my middle. But worth it.

  • FIVE •

  10 WEEKS: GETTING METAPHYSICAL

  New York City, 2011

  “Surprise!” Jon said, leading me outside by the arm. I was the one who usually planned elaborate birthday adventures, but this year, for my thirty-fourth—a number so thick, substantial, so midthirties where I still didn’t feel I belonged, at the point where I woke up in the morning thinking “Oh God, not me again”—Jon had warned me he’d been doing some planning.

  Downstairs he ushered me outside to the cool, cloudy April day and pointed to a Ford Escalade. “You got me a minivan?” I shrieked, horrified. “I’m not even in the second trimester.”

  “No, idiot,” Jon said. “I rented a car. I’m taking you out on a special surprise food day—a tour of artisanal Brooklyn!”

  “Oh,” I let out, genuinely surprised. “Amazing.” Though I didn’t like to admit it, I was as much a foodie as the next hipster, analyzing meals for weeks, drooling over cuisines from small African countries (even when I didn’t eat half of it), studying menus like literary texts, relishing unusual juxtaposed flavors—fish and fruit! Fries served in mini washing machines caused frissons. I had no idea how to even turn on a food processor—hell, I couldn’t work a toaster—but was guilty of watching Chopped marathons. A culinary Sunday, a chance to ingest with abandon, planned by a husband who otherwise never planned anything, should have been my dietary dream come true.

  But, as my arm brushed my voluptuous side, my heart (and hips) felt heavy. In the past weeks, I’d gained twelve pounds. Twelve! A dozen pounds was half my entire recommended gain. Every single book said that the normal first trimester weight increase was between negative one and two pounds. Not to mention, I boasted the facial complexion of a bar mitzvah bocher. The worst part was, nobody knew why. I appeared to be undergoing a radical transformation into a pubescent boy, and could not explain to my friends who stared quizzically at my double-layered torso what was transpiring. I imagined their reaction at learning my condition. Huh? You? In my circles, being thirty-four and knocked up was akin to being a teenage mom. It would be like when I introduced Jon to friends as “my husband” and their expression said your what?

  Now I turned to him, squeezed his hand. “How perfect,” I said, trying to stay positive.

  “Also, it’s an SUV, not a minivan,” Jon muttered as he helped me up into the passenger seat.

  At our first stop—Smorgasburg, an outdoor food flea by the water—I giddily went along with his plans, stuffing my face with artisanal cannoli, state-of-the-art pigs in the blanket, super chef schnitzel bits and other carbs that were not forbidden for the fetus. “Should we try the spare rib–infused scallion pancakes or Bolivian soda?” I muttered among my munching. The cool maritime wind blew a few strands of pan-seared locally-raised brussels sprout shavings into my coat collar.

  “How is that even a choice?” Jon asked. “Both!”

  “I meant, which one first. . . .” But he’d already sprinted off to fetch our treats.

  I sat down on a bench facing the East River, feeling its dewy moistness on my nose. Though I trie
d to focus on that sense along with the zingy smell and tangy sensations of limeade munchkins, I couldn’t help repeatedly patting the extra stomach that now rested above my old one, and hiking up my (new, large) underwear to cover my masses, blend it all together, to make it feel like one.

  When Jon returned, calories in both hands, I tried to transcend my appetite with rhetoric. “What do you think fuels our obsession with food? Why has hunger become the art of our time? Are we so screen-based, so visually overstimulated, that we seek experimentation in the realms of taste, touch, smell?”

  “Or, because it’s delicious,” Jon said, gently bringing the soda bottle to my lips as if I was a child. “Happy birthday.” I felt the liquid drool coolly down my esophagus, even though I knew from X-rays that it actually dropped down, heavy, in an instant.

  On our forty-minute riverside drive out to Coney Island for the original slice (authentic trumps artisanal), I stared at the waves, cresting and falling, recalling car rides with Jon in Montenegro, Poland, Israel, how together we jetted along the highways of the world. And before that, my solo journeys in trains and buses, through France and Austria, England and South Africa. Now there were fewer options, I knew, feeling little palpitations. I had to forgo saunas, sushi, sun, even Sudafed. I couldn’t use zit cream, down the Diet Coke, or purchase plane tickets with liberty. The coping mechanisms I’d relied on for decades—the ways I’d learnt to navigate my fears and flaws, to make peace and structure in this world—were crumbling.

  “That was a great fennel quinoa crumble,” I said.

  “Actually, it was kind of disgusting.”

  “Yeah.”

  The pièce-de-résistance that evening was a shmancy dinner at a restaurant on a boat moored on the shores of Dumbo. Jon and I sat at the white tablecloth, drinking sparkling juice, its sweetness coating my front teeth. “God I’m old,” I said.

  Everything I’d spent years trying to contain was leaking, bursting at its seams. The stretching of my skin, of my fundamental boundaries, this mimicry of my mother, itched in discomfort. I stuffed my face with hot caraway rolls, trying to dissociate myself from the body hidden under my empire-waist dress, from my physical being that was distending and distorting, marked with blotches, pocks, and streaks that might never subside.

  I stared out to the limitless water and imagined unanchoring the whole ship, floating off to sea, away, afar, forever.

  THE PUZZLE PIECE

  Montreal, 1993

  The doorbell—a shrill reminder of the outside world, coming in.

  I couldn’t do it. I had to do it. How could I do it? Do it. “Coming!”

  I jetted to the vestibule, brushing off my sleeves. While other sixteen-year-old girls might have spent the two hours prior to hosting a Saturday night get-together dabbling with eyeliner and Nair, I spent mine engaged in mad housekeeping, scrambling to throw cheap suitcases and endless magazines into the cold storage room and shut doors leading to the wrong spaces, like the room with still unpacked boxes from our 1983 move.

  When I’d found out that I’d have the house to myself that evening—Mom and Dad each visiting their respective parents—I’d casually suggested to Lisa over the phone that “people” (i.e., the group of girls and guys she hung out with every weekend, and I, sometimes) come over here. “We can watch videos,” I’d said. “We have hundreds.” I did not mention that they were the result of Mom’s obsessive recording of movies shown on TV (free films!), leading her to buy additional VCRs so several movies could be captured at once—but never watched. Despite the mess, I wanted to host, pushed by dreamy fantasies—that Josh or David or Ian might grab my hand, ask to see my room, pull me close, kiss me tightly, not caring about where I came from or how little experience I had.

  “We also have banana cake,” I added like a pert saleswoman, not mentioning that though my mother didn’t cook, she’d lately gone baking-berserk, making half-a-dozen loaves at a time; hot tins constantly perched precariously over the kitchen counter’s uneven surfaces permanently saturating the air with the scent of burned sugar. Sometimes, I ended up standing at the counter, eating an entire cake, chewing to silence my anxiety, unable to stop, unable to discern a normal amount among all the excess.

  I held in my post-op stomach, which in its new formation, had been gloriously cured. I was wearing Mom’s 1960s loose-fitting pink blouse stamped with cartoon vegetables that I’d dug out of my closet, imagining I wore her pretty young self who’d had fiery love-not-war romances. “Hi,” I said as a sudden thrall of bodies heaved their way into our tiny anteroom with its blue-glass chandelier, silver wallpaper painted with wall-length brown trees, and mock-marble linoleum. (I wasn’t sure which was worse—the mess that covered everything or the hideous diva decor that underlay it.) My guests, my guests, were so tall, with hot pizza breath, their substantial weight a new sensation for this creaking floor, bringing whips of cold in with them. “Come in,” I said quickly, neck craned, my voice choked by closeness. Goose bumps spread from my arms to my ears. “No cover charge tonight.”

  I led everyone directly downstairs along my carefully choreographed pathway that delivered the fewest vistas of domestic pathology. Though the playroom hosted piles of books and mismatched furniture, not to mention bright green-and-yellow stained glass windows (thanks again, divas) this traditionally children’s space, I figured, had an excuse for being messy. I didn’t mention it also served as Dad’s bedroom. I frantically kept tabs on everyone’s gazes as they made themselves comfortable on the dozens of pillows I’d scattered on the floor—how did people make themselves at home so easily?—and no one seemed to notice anything awry. Their warm solidity planted on my floor made me want to dive from the staircase right in between their torsos, melt into them forever.

  “Holy shit,” Josh said, pointing at a full wall of videocassettes. “This is amazing.”

  I was reminded of my younger years, when friends came over to play with my overpopulation of Barbies or to host weddings among my ludicrous congregation of Cabbage Patch Kids, delighted by being surrounded by this fun fantasyland. They never saw the underside: the boxes of children’s clothes, board games, and puzzles, all bought on sale, growing into mountains in the closet and leaving no room for my and Eli’s clothes.

  “We have hundreds of movies,” I said, grabbing the binder where Mom had begun, but never finished, to classify them alphabetically and by tape number. Shaking, I handed it to Josh, who smiled, looking right at me. I could smell his deodorant. A gentle, foreign mélange of mint and beef. My heart flittered.

  The guys scoured the wall, closely reading the titles that Mom had written in meticulous, tiny script on each tape as if with this organizational act she’d find an answer to the kaleidoscopically confusing world she herself created. The three girls chatted in a corner. No one seemed horrifically shocked. No one knew.

  I breathed in relief, but still felt uneasy, unsure where to place myself. The soft piles of banana cake! I escaped to the kitchen, shutting the door behind me, particularly aware of the divas’ shiny golden-pink wallpaper and mismatched chandeliers, not to mention the mountains of Tupperware that bulged out of the unclosable cupboard and the fridge with its green-tinged cottage cheese, limp rotting bananas (being cryogenically preserved en masse for the making of said loaves) and expired Kodak film. I grabbed a cake and one of dozens of two-liter bottles of Diet Coke before heading back downstairs, promising myself that I wouldn’t eat anything tonight, that I would be pretty and graceful; that using my same talent for cleaning up, I would slide myself right in the middle of the gaggle of guys, making my body open, accessible, alive.

  But by the time I returned to the basement, it had been decided that we’d be watching Pink Floyd’s The Wall and everyone was already settled on cushions. I saw Lisa grab Josh’s hand, and they both laughed. I sighed and bid farewell to my fantasies.

  “For all your loaf needs,” I said instead. I set the cake
down and walked over to a mound of blankets on the side of the room, tucking myself into it, understanding for the first time how these alienating piles could be useful, could offer me protection, a hiding place. Then I watched cartoon figures hammer down The Wall and thought, “People” are in my house, and they are OK, and I am OK.

  • • •

  THE NEXT MORNING, the fight began because Mom couldn’t find the papers that I’d moved into the kitchen. “Cleaning isn’t your job,” she said.

  I know, I wanted to say. It’s yours. But I didn’t. I sensed my mother’s pain. I didn’t know how to help, how to change anything.

  At the same time, my annoyance at her annoyance made me snappy. She seemed to think that having stuff gave her some kind of control over her life when it was obviously controlling her. “Here are your useless things,” I mumbled, pointing at the papers.

  “You”—her voice hardened—“have no idea what’s useful. Your father’s things—maybe those are useless.”

  I rolled my eyes, she slammed the door. I did my homework on my carpet, snuggled close to the radiator for warmth, angry that I was angry, that this—and not pancakes and phone calls from or about someone I made out with—was my Sunday morning.

  “Judy, sweetie.” An hour later, I heard a soft voice approach—the version that did not yell—and my guard was momentarily let down. I looked up to see Mom reenter my room and sit on the edge of my bed, her toes just touching the ground, her balloon body leaning forward, slightly off-kilter. She was one with her surrounds, her own self perched oddly on her oddly perched piles. “I’m sorry I got angry. I didn’t mean to. I love you so much.”

  I love you too, I should have said. “Fine,” I said.

  “Judy, we really need to talk. We need to discuss our relationship and why we’ve had such a difficult time communicating with each other for so many years.”