Dear Mom,
It’s funny how you can tell your friends you’re pregnant one moment—pregnant with a baby you didn’t plan and don’t want, pregnant by a father you don’t even know anymore—and be in “Make a Splash Swimwear Boutique” the next. Both girls “needed” new bathing suits for their upcoming vacations, so I politely browsed with them, discreetly burping up salad and trying not to take up too much space in the tiny store. Each of them tried on at least a half dozen suits, and I was made to offer my opinions on them, admonished to “be honest,” and to answer questions about whether polka dots flattered the ass or insulted it, whether white was too see-through with regard to the nipples or appropriately see-through.
Jenny ignored the little placards in the fitting rooms instructing women to not remove their underwear. “I can’t see what it really looks like! And what the hell, I’m clean! I bet guys can get naked when they try on bathing suits. It’s sexist!” Sadie’s nose stayed wrinkled for a long time. “You might be clean, but what about other girls? It’s so unhygienic! You could get weirdo diseases!” Jenny brushed this off, saying loudly, “Vaginas are vaginas,” which made us all—even me—laugh. Quietly, as though not wanting Sadie to hear, Jenny asked me a couple of times if I was okay.
But looking at them in their skimpy suits—each of them ultimately chose a barely-there bikini—I felt about 300 years old. Their jutting hip bones, perky breasts, smooth summery skin…every part of their bodies had its sad opposite in my own: my aching hips; heavy breasts; the rough, itchy patches of skin, now stubbled because of how lazy I have gotten in the shower, the effort of hunching and scraping and rinsing, just to be hairless…as though being hairless changes anything for me.
After the bathing suit store I just felt done. They wanted to keep going, look at shoes and sunglasses and makeup, but I didn’t feel like I could handle it. My first time socializing as a pregnant person, and I exploited it fully—“I’m feeling a little nauseous. I think I need to go home and lie down”—and both girls offered to drive me but I insisted on taking the bus. I wonder what they said about me after I left.
I wish I had a pregnant friend. I don’t know. I want to be with someone who feels what I feel, that pregnancy is an occupation, a colonization. I never minded being alone before it became impossible for me to ever be alone. Being commandeered like this—it is an inviolably lonely place. This is the only time in this baby’s life where it can only be separated from me by death and not by distance. I can’t escape it unless I get rid of it. And then I’d be a hypocrite, right? Choosing not to be its mother, which seems to be the same choice you’ve made.
I need to find some light. I need a friend and some instruction. I was never a great babysitter; I don’t even really know how to change a diaper. Tomorrow I’m going to call that doctor’s office again. I’m going to do whatever they tell me.
Pledged,
Agnes
Priscilla from Healthcare 4 Women gives me a hug when she sees me. I hug her back as long as she lets me.
“How have you been, Agnes? How are you feeling?”
I don’t know where to start. Suicidal, elated, nauseous, starving, sore, waterlogged with exhaustion, terrified.
“Pretty good.”
“I see you missed your last appointment. Everything okay?” Priscilla is looking in a folder. I feel momentarily excited that I have my own folder, that there is a record of me, that at least here, if not in my own life, I am a member. I am part of a system. A system of folders.
“Everything is fine, I think,” I say.
“Any complaints?”
“Physically?”
Priscilla smiles. “Or otherwise.”
“Well, um, I’m tired a lot. And having some trouble sleeping, but that’s nothing really new. Food doesn’t always agree with me. And my skin—I mean, my belly—I’m just really itchy.”
Priscilla is nodding. “That’s your skin stretching. It can be very distracting. I recommend a heavy moisturizer. Some people swear by shea butter, which you can find in a lot of drugstores. Is the nausea debilitating? Do you want me to prescribe something for you?”
“No. I don’t think so. I mean, I can manage.”
Priscilla closes my folder and looks at me closely. “Is there anything else?”
I wish she were my friend. She knows how to look at me, how to ask. I imagine myself making an appointment every day for the rest of my life.
“No. Just, you know, going along.”
She opens the folder again. “This name, on the insurance card you gave. Your father?”
I nod. “We’re all—I mean I’m—on his insurance.”
“Okay. That’s good. Let’s get you weighed and check your blood pressure, and then I’m going to send you down the hall for your ultrasound. Your insurance—your dad’s—covers it.”
I step on the scale. I have gained three pounds since last time, which seems to please Priscilla. She wraps the blood pressure cuff around my arm and pumps it up. The pressure feels good. “So do you want to know the sex? If not, make sure you tell Allie not to tell you. Allie is the technician.”
“Do most people want to know?”
Priscilla shrugs. “It’s a personal thing. Everyone’s different.”
I nod, easygoing, as if to say of course, of course everyone is different, as if we are two people at a street vendor talking about ketchup and mustard, as if I were not going to have to make a decision in the next ten minutes, a decision about a baby that will soon no longer be just a baby but an actual boy or an actual girl, and not in a theoretical way but in a son or daughter way.
“We’re done here. Let me go make sure Allie is ready for you.”
Priscilla exits the room, my folder under her arm. She comes back a minute later. “You can go on down the hall. Let’s see you again in four weeks, all right?”
I slide-hop off the table, my thighs sticking to everything, to the air even. “Oh, um, last time you mentioned a group of some sort? A support group maybe? I think you wrote it down but I don’t know…I think I lost it. Do you think I could get that information again?”
Priscilla folds in her lips and her eyes look watery for a second.
“I was hoping you would ask or say something about it, but I didn’t want to pry. You know, we’re not supposed to talk to patients about their personal situations. Which is a big problem, if you ask me. I mean, practicing medicine is about more than just treating the body, right?”
As she is speaking, she is writing things on a pad. She tears the page off and hands it to me. “It’s called the Center for Unwed Mothers, but they’re working on changing the name. A little outdated, I know. But there are a lot of resources there, and most of them are free. Call this number. Let me know how it goes, okay?”
In the other room, Allie tells me to “get comfortable” in a medieval-looking chair. This one is lower to the ground than the one in the examining room, and there are no stirrups at the end. Allie is petite, under five feet, not including the frothy blond updo like an impressive dessert on her head.
“So we gonna find out the sex today, honey?” She gives me a bright smile and turns off the lights. Her face glows from the computer she stands behind. Her half-open mouth is slicked with a pink lip gloss I can almost taste. I feel a sudden indignation that seems to come straight from the baby. Leave me alone, it seems to suggest. Let me exist in this pre-personhood a little while longer.
“I don’t…No. I don’t think so. No, actually.”
Allie opens her mouth and eyeballs wide, in mock surprise. “Really? Wow! Most moms are dying to know! Aren’t you curious?”
“Um, I’m not, really. I think I’m still just, you know, getting used to everything.” My heart is beating very quickly.
And then I am nowhere. All around me and inside of me is silence, thick like wool, as though instead of being ultrasounded, I got taxidermied. When I open my eyes, Allie and Priscilla are standing over me. Priscilla is holding a small cup of juic
e.
“Well that was a first!” Allie says, touching her wrist to her forehead in a theatrical fainting gesture.
Priscilla hands the juice to Allie and helps me sit up. “You okay, Agnes?”
My mouth is dry and I feel like I’ve been asleep for hours. “What happened?”
“You blinked out for a minute or two, hon, gave me a good scare,” Allie says. I notice she is wearing earrings shaped like tiny coffee mugs. “Here, drink this.”
I accept the juice and drink the whole cup, with Allie and Priscilla watching. It tastes like straight sugar. I want to make a joke like “Got anything stronger?” but I feel too weak.
Priscilla puts two fingers lightly on my wrist and after a minute, apparently satisfied, pats my hand gently. “You’re okay. I think you might’ve gotten yourself a little dehydrated. Make sure you’re drinking plenty, especially in this heat.”
“Do you want me to reschedule or should we keep going?” Allie asks.
“I’m fine. Let’s keep going. I just need to use the bathroom first.”
Around the corner from the ultrasound room, I splash water on my face and pat it dry with a paper towel. My eyes in the mirror look big and old, like an encyclopedia picture of an owl. My hair is a mess but I feel too tired to do anything about it.
When I get back to the room, Allie is once again behind the computer screen with the overhead lights turned off. Priscilla is gone. I settle back into the chair, slightly tearing the already crinkled white paper covering it. Lying on paper feels terrible, I decide. I would rather lie on someone’s germs.
Allie lifts my shirt slightly and folds down the waistband of my already unbuttoned shorts. I don’t bother trying to fasten anything anymore; I just make sure my shirts cover my waist. From a tube in her hand, she squirts some clear goo onto my abdomen. The sound of the squirt and the feel of the goo are weirdly taunting, like chastisements. I get it, I think, the semen should have gone right there, on my belly.
“I’m just going to run this wand all across you, and we’ll be able to take a look at what baby’s been up to. I’ll tell you when I go in for a closer look at the private parts, and you can turn your head if you don’t want to know, okay?”
I stare at the monitor on my right, which I hadn’t noticed before now, mesmerized as the shape of a head suddenly appears, then a complete profile, an entire body. It is moving. Suddenly a hand scrunches up under its chin. The gestures are so human that I am startled—this is a human inside me. Not just a baby, but a person. Calling it a baby is somehow less threatening. But a human?
I interrupt Allie, who is narrating a tour of the baby’s brain. “You can see why we call this thing a wand, right? It’s magic to me every time, how we can peek into each organ—”
“Is there any way to know, like, how, or I guess, like beyond the physical features, is there any way to know other things about the baby, like, about its brain, anything psychological like that?” My heart is beating quickly and I’m afraid I sound borderline hysterical. I adjust my legs, which are sticking together and to the paper beneath.
“Ha, no. Not yet anyway! Can you imagine? ‘Your baby will be an obsessive-compulsive type A introvert.’ I bet we’re not far off, though, the way things are going.”
Allie points to the baby’s face on the screen. “No cleft palate. That’s good news. Everything is looking great, healthy as can be. Take a look at that spinal cord.”
I don’t ask what a cleft palate is; I don’t want to know. I try to imagine Tea Rose being here, holding my hand like on TV, but I can’t. His person, his body, is an abstraction to me, an echo.
“Good-looking kidneys,” Allie is saying. “All right, my dear, the moment of truth. If you don’t want to know, turn your head. I’ll tilt the monitor this way too.”
I turn my head so that I’m looking at the wall. For the life of me I cannot guess what this baby might be. Girl seems wrong and boy seems wrong. I focus on a smudge on the wall and try to suppress the churning in my gut.
“Well you certainly have an active baby! He—or she!—keeps wiggling around, turning away from the camera. Let’s just wait a minute and see if we can get him—or her!—to flash us.”
She gasps a little. I feel like gasping should not be allowed during any part of this process. “Whoops, there we go. Okay, baby. I gotcha! OKAY! Great. Alllll right. Got what I needed. And everything looks just fine. You’ve got a healthy baby in there. Ten fingers, ten toes, your placenta in a good place, everything is doing exactly what it should be doing. I’ll just print out some pictures for you to take as souvenirs, and we’ll be all done here.”
Allie hands me a tissue and I wipe the gunk off my belly. I sit up, feeling heavy, twenty pounds heavier than when I first lay down. She hands me a little envelope and a strip of black and white images—baby’s head, baby’s profile, baby’s spine, some region of baby I can’t discern, baby’s heart and lungs, and baby holding one hand up as if in a wave. I fold them and quickly put them in the envelope. “Thank you,” I say.
“Uh-huh, my pleasure. Just go out through here and take a right at the end of the hall and you’ll be back in the waiting room, where you came in. Good luck, hon!” She leaves the room.
I have that moment that I think most people have when they’re left alone somewhere strange—what can I steal?—but I lurch myself off the table, the envelope in my hand already slightly damp. The door clicks loudly behind me, and it somehow reminds me of the sound a trigger makes when the gun is empty.
Dear Mom,
I saw the baby today. It was like looking at a constellation, but of cells instead of stars. I keep looking at the ultrasound pictures they gave me, a little strip of film like you get from photo booths at carnivals, and I can’t believe it’s such a baby already. I can’t help but feel like I got tricked—like, I know I could have opted out of it or something, but I wouldn’t have really known what I was opting out of. They should’ve told me, “Look, this is going to make it 100 percent real to you,” and then I might have reconsidered. I actually passed out for a second—dehydration, apparently, or maybe I was trying not to be there? Were they forcing me to love it, by showing it to me? I mean, I don’t know if I’d say I love it, but I can’t deny that it’s in there. What’s the causal relationship? It seems all of civilization is built on this unscientific, emotional idea that we love our children, simply because they’re our children.
Do you think that’s enough?
Agnes
When I tell my father that I have decided to go to a support group meeting, his eyes go strange for a moment. I think he forgets and remembers I am pregnant fifty times each day, the shock and disappointment on continuous playback.
“Where is it? Do you want me to drive you?”
“That’s okay. I’ll just take the car, if that’s okay.”
My dad nods, blinking rapidly and clearing his throat, as though spores of something have just flown into his face. We sit down to dinner. I have made spaghetti, which is all I seem to want to eat lately—boiled until mushy, salted and buttered vigorously, slathered with jarred tomato sauce. My dad likes it too. He is shaking Parmesan cheese from a plastic shaker onto his pile. “When is it? The…meeting?”
I know that my presence makes him uneasy. The conspicuousness of my body seems to downright scare him. Often I am awake when he gets up. I hear the shower, hear his shoes go down the hallway and past my closed door, hear him run the coffeemaker and take sips while turning pages of the newspaper. Then I hear the garage door open, the car pull out, and the garage door close. I hear these things from my bed, and they usher in the day with a rhythmic kind of dread. Once in a while I go downstairs and join him, drinking weak tea or orange juice since coffee still makes me throw up. We say good morning, we say goodbye. I feel from him a deep and strangled love like something I want to cure him of, release him from. Over and over I repeat my new mantra: you’reokayyou’reokayyou’reokay, mouthing it to myself like an incantation, some kind of a spell
to ward off our mutual scrutiny, his aggrieved existence, any blame he feels.
I’m trying to remember what my dad has just asked me. I am distracted by this new silence. Every day, a new kind of silence. I always thought silence was one thing.
“Sorry, what did you say?”
My father puts his fork down—a rarity—and dabs his mouth with the paper napkin. “When is your meeting? Of your…group.”
“Tomorrow. Tomorrow night. Six-thirty.”
He picks up his fork, starts twirling. “Okay. Good. We can have dinner before you go.”
* * *
The Center for Unwed Mothers sits in the middle of a squat, dingy strip mall, flanked by a methadone clinic on one side and a pawnshop (se habla español) on the other. I park around the back and walk to the front door. A man smoking a cigarette in front of the clinic touches the top of his head, as though doffing an imaginary cap, and gives me a glassy grin. It’s the first whiff of smoke I’ve gotten during this pregnancy that has made me want to smoke. The door seems locked or stuck. I throw a little more weight into it and it pushes open with a slow sucking noise, and as I cross through, I feel like I am being reluctantly admitted into an exclusive vortex. Where VIP stands for “very inconveniently pregnant.”
The room is freezing and loud from a window air-conditioning unit set to high, a jolt after the warm summer air. Vinyl couches and folding chairs form an irregular circle on the left side of the room. The blue carpet is stained in a few places, bubbling up in others from an odorous humidity that swathes the room despite the cold. There is also the vague smell of air freshener and sugar and plastic. For a second I panic that I am not in the right place, that perhaps the right place does not actually exist, that I have wandered instead into an AA meeting or a Bible study.
But then I see. On the right side of the room, five or six women, most of whom are visibly pregnant, or even, I think, excessively pregnant, milling around a table of lemonade and packaged cookies. One of them approaches me now, but she is not pregnant, or if she is, she is approaching fifty and rail thin and pregnant.
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