“I will. You call me too.” We will not call one another. I know this already, but Surprise does not. She is believing in the conversation. She does not know that the conversation is an emblem of belatedness, a relic of our best intentions.
“Bye,” she says, hugging me tightly with her bony body. Her shoulder blades do not allow me to hug her as properly as I would like.
“Bye,” I say. And then, because it’s true, “I’ll miss you.” I’ll miss how simple things were for a moment, a moment she will continue to live in but one that discovered me for what I am: ill equipped.
“Let’s go,” I hear her say to her boyfriend out in the hall, like a final item has been checked off her list.
The day before the very last day of school, when almost everyone has already fled to the beach or home to start summer jobs and internships, my dad and I finally connect by phone.
“How are you? It’s been a long time,” my father says. “I’ve been talking to your roommate more than to you.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Sorry. It’s been…busy. You know, end of term stuff, exams.”
“How did it go? Are you done with all that now?”
“I think it went okay. I’ll know for sure when they mail our grades.”
“So…you’re coming home, right? Or are you going to the beach? Your roommate said something about going to the beach?”
“I’m not going to the beach, no,” I say. I try picturing my body in a bathing suit and find I cannot. Every part of me feels grossly swollen, even though, according to the mirror, I look more or less like myself, just with extra clothes and a slight paunch. “Actually I was kind of hoping you could pick me up. I think I have too much stuff for the train.” My dad coughs, a form of hesitation. “Of course. I can come get you. I’d be happy to. When?”
“Tomorrow. After tomorrow everything shuts down.”
“Oh, okay. Okay. Maybe in that case I’ll leave today. In a little while. Stay at a hotel overnight. Since it’s, you know, it’s quite a drive. We can get an earlier start tomorrow that way.”
Why am I enjoying this? I feel oddly powerful in this moment. “It’s totally up to you.”
“Well, then, I better get going,” he says. “I’m just going to put some things in a bag and hit the road. It’ll be late when I get there tonight, so I probably won’t bother calling…”
“That’s fine,” I say. “Call me in the morning. We can get breakfast maybe.”
“Yes,” he says. “We’ll do that.”
A long pause. My eyes are smarting. I know that his eyes are smarting too. This is why we don’t talk, can’t talk. What is there to say, ever, that doesn’t end in crying?
“Thanks, Dad.”
“Bye…bye for now, sweetheart.”
* * *
Dad arrives at eight the next morning. His clothes are rumpled and I feel sad that he might not know how to use an iron. I make my hug brief, which is not difficult. I make an unnecessary joke—“I’m such a good procrastinator I even procrastinated the freshman fifteen!”—which makes Dad laugh wanly. He barely sees me, let alone my body.
We load up the car in two trips. I take a stick of Juicy Fruit from the middle console.
“Are you hungry?” he asks.
“I could eat,” I say. “Let’s go to the diner.”
My dad starts to pull away from the curb and I hear myself say, “One second. Just wait for one minute.”
“Did you forget something?”
“No. I just want to look.”
I stare at my dorm. It seems impossible to be leaving; it seems impossible that I was ever here. I stare past the dorm to the entrance of the quad, the same snapshot I stared at in the brochure a year ago at home: the Renaissance Revival buildings, the profusion of trees, so many trees that people visit campus from all over just to see them. The sky aches with blue. I never noticed what a pretty place this is.
“Okay. You can go.”
We sit in a booth at the diner, next to the one Tea Rose and I frequently sat in. We order an obscene amount of food: eggs, short stacks of pancakes, toast, bacon, sausage, a waffle. I gulp down a large cranberry juice with ice and it tastes heavenly. My dad drinks three cups of coffee, white with cream. The crinkly little plastic cups litter the table. We don’t bother trying to make conversation. By the time we leave, it is midmorning and the day is already verging on hot.
The drive is mostly ugly and the highway makes me immediately drowsy. I SUE DRUNK DRIVERS a billboard says. TASTE HISTORY AT AMERICA’S OLDEST FUDGE FACTORY shouts another. I close my eyes against the bright sun, the grossness of America.
What good is free will, I’m thinking, if you still have to ride in a car to a home filled with ghosts?
Dear Mom,
I said goodbye to Joan pretty hurriedly last week. She asked if I wanted to come visit her this summer. I thought about her sister, vanishing in an upstairs bed, and told her yes, we should try to make that happen, knowing it wouldn’t happen, and we exchanged home phone numbers. I said goodbye to the acquaintances from work, got a big hug from Terrence. There was cake and chips for us on the last day. I stood near the table and ate three squares of cake.
I figured I should check my mail one last time and when I did, there was a small card addressed to me in Tea Rose’s loopy, feminine handwriting. I grabbed it and walked back here. Here’s what the card says. The front is a card artist’s rendering of a night scene with flowers—navy-blue backdrop, white lily-looking things, and a full moon up top. A shitty drawing. He could have done better.
Dear Agnes,
I just want you to know that you will always mean a lot to me. I know things are weird in ways we couldn’t have anticipated. But I do love you and I think you’re an amazing person. Being with Liz [she has a name! It’s “Liz”!] hasn’t changed that. Our time together will always be special to me. I hope eventually we can be friends, and I know that sounds hollow but I really mean that. I hope you have a wonderful summer. See you in the fall.
Love,
[His name is an illegible scribble that seems practiced, affected.]
I pushed the card back in the envelope immediately after reading it and then flew around my room, packing. I packed everything so fast. Then I took a blisteringly hot shower and cried, hard. I couldn’t tell which were tears and which was water. And I hope that’s the last I cry about Tea Rose. I put on my pajamas and only took the card out to copy it down for you, but now I’m putting it in the trash. Actually, I think I’ll burn it. I’m so afraid that if I hate him, the hate will transfer to the fetus. I’m afraid to love him for the same reason.
Good night, Mom—
Agnes
The Daughter Hole
Dear Mom,
My baby is due around October 21. That makes me about 18 weeks pregnant. What happened was that I told Dad. And how I told him was that I was up late one night, unable to sleep, and I went downstairs to get some water, and he was sitting at the kitchen table, just sitting there. Except for the light above the stove, all the lights were off, and I didn’t see him at first. It wasn’t until I opened the cabinet to get a glass that I noticed him and almost dropped the glass. I was wearing one of your old nightgowns and he stared at me for a full minute, squinting.
“Is that Mom’s nightgown?” he asked, and it was. I stood and drank water from the sink, aware that he was still looking at me, aware that from the side, I probably looked soft and bulgy. Then I just said it. I put my glass down and turned to him and said, “I’m pregnant.” He didn’t hear me, or acted like he didn’t hear me, at first. He looked at his hands for a long time. So I said it again. “I’m pregnant, okay.” And his reaction was so curious. He yawned. A big, wide yawn.
“When did this happen?”
That’s when I started to feel embarrassed. It occurred to me that pretty much every question that can be asked of a pregnancy is personal, intimate. That the very fact of being pregnant is personal and intimate. A biological scarlet letter, a sex bi
llboard: I GOT FUCKED. Sorry to be crass. But what’s the point now in trying to be delicate? And how unfair that Tea Rose, that any boy, bears no mark. None. So I wasn’t expecting Dad’s question and I didn’t, of course, have a precise answer.
“I’m not sure, exactly. Sometime after winter break.”
“Have you been to the doctor? The doctor can tell you.”
“No. Not yet.”
“Agnes. What happened? Didn’t you think…Well, in any case, you need to make a doctor’s appointment. Do you have a doctor? A…woman’s doctor?” I told him I didn’t, and that I would figure it out, and not to worry. And then he said, “Most doctors won’t give abortions after a certain point. So the earlier the better, assuming…” I was surprised. Everything was surprising me. But why wouldn’t it? We were operating under entirely new, unprecedented circumstances. I guess the look on my face stopped him, and I said out loud, finally, what I’ve known as a certainty this whole time:
“I’m not getting rid of it. And I’m not giving it away.”
I mean that, Mom. I mean it as an oath. I’m writing it here, and when you put something in writing, you obey it. More real than being etched in stone, it’s etched in flesh. Dad stood up and stretched. “We’ll talk about this more tomorrow,” he said. He walked over to me and put his hand on my head, an awkward gesture, even for him. “We’ll figure it out.”
I just stood there as he walked out of the kitchen, up the stairs, and out of sight. I heard his feet ascending, then stopping. That creak on the third stair.
“I love you, Agnes.”
In the morning, when I came downstairs there was a note from Dad:
Agnes,
Make an appointment with Dr. Grossman today. He is your mother’s doctor. He is very nice. 642-7876. I made a sandwich for you for lunch. We will talk about everything later. There is still time.
Dad
Next to the note was Dad’s health insurance card. I didn’t call Dr. Grossman. The idea was preposterous to me. My first time at the gynecologist, and I am introducing your doctor to your grandchild? No. A million times no. I’ll tell you something, Mom. I’ll tell you this—standing there in front of that note with that phone number, I really felt angry with you. It has subsided a little, only because I’m exhausted. But what the fuck, Mom. Where are you. I’ve tossed pretty much everything into the you-shaped hole you left, but nothing fits.
Filled with a combination of baby and spite,
Agnes
PS: I looked in the Yellow Pages and called “Healthcare 4 Women,” an ob-gyn practice run by (yep) four women, two doctors, one midwife, and one nurse-practitioner. Midwives seem so Victorian to me but then again all of this seems Victorian. This whole mess that is my body feels completely unmodern and inconvenient. I said on the phone, “I’m pregnant, it was unplanned, I’m nineteen, I don’t know how far along I am,” and maybe I was crying a little bit, and they said they could see me that afternoon. I walked to the train in the balmy May weather, for the first time not dressed in layer upon layer, just wearing a sundress from the previous summer that was always big on me but is now no longer big and even tight in the chest and belly. I looked maybe not undeniably pregnant but definitely possibly pregnant, at the very least. I tried to enjoy the sun on my skin and the swish of air between my knees. On the train I looked at my feet but my breasts partially obscured my view. They are big now, and sexy. I felt some eyes on me, but I kept my eyes off everyone.
I found the office and signed in and gave them Dad’s insurance card and filled out paperwork and waited briefly before they called my name. A nurse asked me some questions, about how I felt, about when my last period was. I gave her my best guess and told her it was my best guess. She took my blood pressure, the band tight around my arm. I stepped on a scale. I was shown to the bathroom where I successfully peed in a cup. I scrubbed my hands, filled with the desire to be one hundred percent clean. I wrote my name on the outside of the cup as I was told to do and put it in the little metal cubby above the toilet as I was told to do. The cubby seemed to have another door on the other side. A secret passageway for pee.
When I got back to the room, the nurse had a needle and a vial. I tried making a joke about giving a hair sample, too, but it fell flat. She said, “No, we don’t need any of your hair.” She took my blood—quickly, painlessly—and told me to wait. The doctor came in but she said she was the nurse-practitioner. I said, “So is that a nurse who practices?” and she smiled and gave me a brief description of her job. I guess I was shaking at this point. She asked was I scared, and I said yes. She asked did the baby’s father know and I said no. She asked would I keep the baby, had I considered other options, and I said yes I would keep it. She gave me a card with someone’s name on it and told me to call. A counselor. I told her I didn’t need to be counseled. I didn’t want anyone sucking out the baby’s head with a vacuum. I didn’t want anyone taking the baby from me to give to someone else. I told her I didn’t want this baby, but I didn’t want anyone else to have it either. She said it would still be helpful to talk to someone, and it was free and confidential. She said there were support groups. She gave me some water in a paper cup and I drank it and tried to calm down. I looked at her face. Her name was Priscilla. She looked like a tree—very up and down and sturdy.
She said she wanted to check the baby’s heart rate. I waited for her to bend down, to press her ear against my belly. Instead she asked me to lie down and I didn’t question her, I just said okay. I lay down on the table and she gently lifted my dress and pulled down the band of my underwear. The whole time I’m thinking, “She can do this because I’m letting her do this,” over and over, which for some reason comforted me a lot. My underwear was white and plain, what Tea Rose called my virgin underwear. She put some goo on my belly. It was cold. She took a small box attached to something that looked like a microphone and she gently moved the microphone around the goo. Static blared, weird alien sounds. A whooshing, some squiggles. And then, through all of that watery gibberish, it came. The heartbeat. Strong, fast. Mammalian. In fact, it was as though everything I have ever known about human beings got distilled into that sound, that rhythm. It was a whisper-yell. It was not the thump-thump of kindergarten or the movies. It seemed to come from the innermost morass of the earth or from some whirlpool on the moon. I couldn’t cry or speak or anything. I could only listen. Mine sounded so ordinary in comparison, cranky almost. Priscilla was saying something, something positive about the rate of the heartbeat. She moved the microphone off of me and I grabbed her hand and put it back. “Just one more minute?” I asked her. “Please.” She did as I asked.
I don’t know how much time passed—probably more than a minute—but I finally told Priscilla I was okay. She turned off the microphone and wiped my belly with a tissue and helped me sit up. “Everything sounds great,” she said. “Are you taking your vitamins?” she asked. I lied and said yes. She said she’d like me to come back in two weeks so we can look at the baby. I asked if she meant an X-ray. She said no, an ultrasound. She said it would give a clearer sense of how the baby was developing. She said we could find out if it was a boy or a girl. She wrote some things down on a paper and told me to give it to the woman behind the desk at checkout.
“I don’t think I want to see the baby yet,” I sort of murmured. “But I’ll come back if I can hear the heart again.” She told me I might change my mind. She said if I was this blown away by the heartbeat, wait’ll I see the baby, actually see him or her. It’s nothing short of miraculous, she said, or at the very least, reassuring. She seemed to really want to see the baby, or at least to prove the baby could be seen. And she’d been so nice that I didn’t want to let her down. I told her I’d think it over. I thanked her. She squeezed my hand and reminded me about the card she’d given me. It had fallen on the floor near the table. She picked it up and placed it in my hand like a rabbit’s foot. “You don’t have to do this alone,” she said.
I found myself making an a
ppointment with the woman at the front desk, for two weeks from today. I found myself on the train back home. I found myself ordering a hot dog from the deli, thankfully seeing no one I knew and eating it in four bites while walking home. As soon as it was gone, I wanted another one, so I found myself turning around—I mean literally stopping in my tracks and reversing them—and going back to the deli and ordering another hot dog and eating it in the same exact amount of bites, finishing it at the precise spot I was in when I finished the first one. I imagined doing this forever—a quantum loop of walking while eating hot dogs. But I did get home, finally, and went to my room.
I fell asleep. I told Dad the gist. He seems to not be speaking to me now. I heard myself telling him that I was going to go to a support group. I thought that would make him feel better. Why am I trying to make him feel better? I wonder if I bought a stethoscope and put it to my belly if I’d be able to hear that magical heartbeat. To feel less alone.
PPS: Sorry for such a long PS.
My body seems to make both my dad and me uncomfortable, so I do my best to keep it covered. The politeness of the start of summer is giving way to a heavy ripeness, the thick creeping heat like wool against skin. The day of my second doctor’s appointment comes and goes. I do not go, out of fear and laziness. What if the heartbeat sounds different, or slower, or unmagical, or wrong? What if they make me look and what I see is deformed, missing limbs or vital organs? What if they say it’s a boy and I want it to be a girl, or a girl and I want it to be a boy?
On a Monday morning, I wake up and go downstairs and drink two glasses of water. I eat a banana. Almost immediately I run back upstairs to vomit. I wash my face and hands, rebrush my teeth, regag. I go back down and feel annoyed by my nagging hunger. This is a new development: constant hunger, chased by constant nausea. I eat toast, staring out at the hot, flat yard, repeating You’re okay, you’re okay, you’re okay after each swallow. I wash my plate and look at the clock. There is so much day left, so many ways to feel strange. I have not gone inside Simon’s room. It didn’t do any good last time. This house, oversteeped with absence like a cup whose tea bag has been left too long, forgotten about. A cold, bitter, tannic undrinkable cup.
Motherest Page 12