Motherest

by Kristen Iskandrian

  Another week goes by and we are deep into summer, in its armpit, as Simon used to say at the start of every August. I feel now that I lumber rather than walk. I cannot get cool. Alicia and I go to the pool whenever we can, which feels good as long as we’re in it, but lying on chairs in the sun and climbing in and out of hot cars begins to feel like too much effort.

  Shockingly, I am happiest at work, in the generous air-conditioning and the beige aura of file folders and clicking keys and turning pages. I grow accustomed to the triple beep from the kitchen, signifying that Nancy’s Lean Cuisine is ready, and generally go in to retrieve my own lunch a few minutes later, amid the fog of chicken-and-sauce smells. How can such a small quantity of food perfume an entire floor? Nancy usually eats at her desk while talking on the phone. Sometimes I bring my lunch back to my closet; other times Dad and I eat together at the small table in the kitchen. One time Mr. Gerstley joined us. He is a man I can only describe as a “distinguished gentleman,” because of his salt-and-pepper hair, crisp suits, and shiny shoes and spectacles. He has not changed at all since the last time I saw him, several years back, or the first time I saw him, at five or six years old. Next to him, Dad looks slovenly and tired.

  I know that Mr. Gerstley has four grown children and a very attractive wife. Is it possible for some people’s lives to just be good? Is there a corner in the basement of his large Victorian house where he masturbates to slasher films or gambles away his life savings? He and my father met in college and he is, or was, or still is—how does it work—Simon’s godfather. When he says, “You look lovely, Agnes, and you’re even smarter than I remember,” I feel so grateful but also know he is a liar, since I’ve said nothing beyond one comment on the weather and another on my sandwich. I guess it’s okay or maybe even essential for men like him to lie.

  On a morning in early August, Dad tells me he doesn’t need a lunch, that he’ll be meeting a client at a restaurant. So I pack my own and we ride to the office together in what has become an amicable silence. Nancy is hanging up the phone, as usual, as we walk in. She looks me up and down, appraising my outfit or my body or both. After getting my first paycheck, I went to the mall, alone, and bought some roughly “business casual” maternity clothes—two pairs of pants, four blouses, and a dress. I told Dad about it that evening, thinking he’d be glad, but his face looked pained and the conversation was short. The next morning, Sunday, there was a note: “I went grocery shopping” along with five twenty-dollar bills—“for the clothes you bought.” I’m confused by this but I don’t reject it. This is his way, I guess, of coping with me. A transactional form of coping. If he gives me money, maybe he thinks I will not expect as much emotional currency. Or at least, I will be less disappointed by that particular empty coffer.

  On this particular morning, I’m wearing the dress, navy blue with an empire waist that is supposed to either hide or coquettishly display my belly. I do my best to ignore Nancy’s machine-like vertical scan and say hello as I make my way to the kitchen, where I put my lunch in the fridge. I go to my desk and work for a couple of hours, at which point I begin to feel very strange.

  Around eleven o’clock, when I usually go to the kitchen for a snack or tap out a palmful of fennel seed—I keep a spice bottle in my desk drawer, along with some dental floss for afterward—a sensation grips me that makes me feel like I am dying a cartoon death, as sudden as if an anvil dropped from the sky onto my head or a stick of dynamite exploded in my lap. I can’t catch my breath and spots swim maddeningly in front of my eyes. I try to stand but fall to the ground, my hip painfully striking the corner of my desk on the way down. I can’t figure out what to do or what is happening. For some reason I have the urge to take off my underwear, even though it doesn’t feel particularly like the main problem, but I can’t make my arms work or move my body in any way that makes sense. I can’t shake the sensation that my blood is going to burst out of me in one giant, body-shaped blob, or that the baby itself is going to heave out, a huge sci-fi baby with teeth.

  Dense with pain, I scan the ceiling, which I’d never looked at before. I notice it’s covered with small, symmetrical indentations, like honeycomb. I close my eyes but still see, bubbling from the darkness, patterns of tiny holes, so I open my eyes, but there is the honeycomb ceiling again. My blood swarms and I am certain for a moment that I’m going to vomit. The next thing I know Mr. Gerstley is leaning over me.

  “Dear? Are you okay? Agnes? Nancy, I need you to call 911,” and then louder, “Nancy! Call an ambulance please, right now, please.”

  Mr. Gerstley’s eyes are kind and calm. “Agnes, can you tell me what happened? Do you know where you are?”

  “I was just trying to—” I say. And then Mr. Gerstley and his kind face and the file cabinets and all the smells and fears and holes and reasons go black.

  The first thing I hear when I wake up is Nancy saying, “If I’m going to drink it, I prefer it to be low-acid, calcium-fortified.” I’m still on my back, but now on a gurney in an ambulance. There is no siren sounding; we are not moving terribly fast. The ceiling is a soothing corrugated steel. I wonder if Nancy is talking to me the way they do on TV shows, trying to break a coma as if it’s a spell, recitations of lists and other mundane things. But then I hear another voice, a male voice.

  “I know what you mean about the acid thing.”

  And then I throw up, with no warning. I jerk my head up in an effort, I guess, not to asphyxiate on it, and it sprays out of me like my mouth is a special kind of nozzle. Nancy is hovering over me, her face a mix of horror and disdain, and the EMT whose voice it must have been appears on my other side, helping me sit up. He hands Nancy a stack of paper towels and she dabs at me like I’m a public toilet she’s been suddenly tasked with cleaning. The EMT takes my pulse with strong, gentle fingers. I see his stubble up close and get scared I’m going to be sick again—tiny holes following me everywhere—but I force my eyes away and the feeling subsides. When I look at him again, I take in his whole face. He is very handsome, which feels, right now, both like an impossibility and a needless indignity. I smell like vomit and I feel worse. I know I look disgusting. Fuck this EMT, I’m thinking, for making me worry about what I look like right now, when I’m probably about to die. I try to push my legs together, aware of my dress and the unflattering result of being half up and half down with a big belly.

  The ambulance comes to a stop and things happen very quickly. Into the sticky summer heat just long enough for the hospital air to feel especially cold, deathly cold even, redolent with all the sterile and antiseptic smells associated with illness. Why this smell? I wonder. Nancy is asking me something about my insurance but I am trying to think of the term for something that’s intended to hide something but that ends up further accentuating it. Euphemism? The hospital smell is a euphemism for nonhospital smells?

  “I’m on my dad’s,” I manage to mumble. Like how a footprint denotes the foot but is actually the absence of the foot, a physical absence. Or a seashell. What if this baby dies inside of me and I become the footprint or the shell? Walking around as one thing but in actuality the absence of the other thing, the real thing.

  I’m wheeled into a room by two men, who leave very quickly. I’m surprised to see Nancy is still with me, calmly checking her nails. I have an overwhelming longing to be in my own bed.

  “Nancy?”

  “Mmm? What’s that, dear?”

  My mind is blank. Nancy reaches for my hand, pats it a bit roughly. “I’m sure everything will be just fine. Maybe it’s something you ate?”

  My mouth is very dry. “I feel okay now. Honestly I think I’m better. Is there any way I can just go home?”

  Nancy smiles tightly, her coral lips like a child’s crayon line. “I don’t think you’re going anywhere just yet, honey. In your, um, condition, they need to make extra-certain you’re okay.”

  “Do you know where my dad is?”

  A nurse comes in and Nancy sidesteps away from the bed. “Agn
es? We gonna need a urine sample, okay, honey? After that we’ll listen to baby, and I’ll take your blood pressure. Can I help you up?” I sit up without help. “Good girl. I’m gonna walk you to the bathroom, okay?” She hands me a cup. “Easy does it. Let’s go slow. I’m Shonda, by the way.”

  I take the cup and we walk ten slow yards to the bathroom. My upright body feels like lead. I can’t picture myself pulling my underwear down, let alone peeing, let alone getting it in this cup, and I know none of it can happen with Shonda watching me. I assure her that I’m all right and I enter the bathroom alone. Somehow I manage to get a few drops in, more on my fingers. I place the cup carefully on the side of the sink while I rinse my hands. I imagine it falling, and me just laying down on the floor, forever defeated.

  I open the door and hand the cup to Shonda. She helps me onto the examining table. The gurney is gone. “Lemme run this to the lab, ’kay? I’ll be right back. Just relax.”

  Nancy has moved to a far corner of the room and is staring at a diagram of the heart as if it’s a painting in a museum. Shonda comes back in. She moves with incredible speed. I feel like an extinct volcano in her midst.

  “How you feelin’?”

  “I feel okay, actually. Just a little tired.”

  “How far along are you in your pregnancy?”

  “I was in college. I’m not married. I live at home with my dad.” This seems like important information.

  “That’s okay, doll. We just want to keep you and baby healthy, okay? Can you tell me how far along you are? Do you know?”

  Shonda has freckles and enormous teeth. I could imagine lying next to Shonda in the dark and feeling comforted. Then again, the idea of lying next to most anyone in the dark is very comforting. She is looking at me expectantly.

  “Um. Thirty weeks, I think?”

  “You think? Who’s your doctor?”

  As if not having a doctor would make me any less pregnant. I feel a burning shame, burning with the heat of the thousand shames I have been able to suppress so expertly until now. “I don’t really have one. I went to a clinic a couple times.”

  She nods, wrapping a blood pressure sleeve around my arm and pumping the bulb rapidly. We wait, the hissing of the device like a drum roll. “Okay, darlin’, 150 over 92.” I have no idea what 150 or 92 means. “I’m gonna need to lift your dress so I can get to your tummy. That okay, honey?”

  She squirts out the cold goo. I remember the cold goo from a couple months ago. I remember lying in that other room and feeling fine and then feeling weird and then blinking out like an appliance, all gears halted. I wonder for the thousandth time if my massive confusion and inability to sort my emotions is negatively affecting the health of this baby, altering its development in strange and irrevocable ways.

  Cosmic-sounding static issues from my belly, the ferment of cells choked with blood. Then—with a relief like a jolt of electricity—the rushing of a heartbeat, steady and loud and fast. Extremely fast.

  I want to keep listening but Shonda removes the wand and hands me a tissue. I dab dumbly at my stomach. “I’m gonna get you an IV. We need to hydrate you and that baby, okay? How are you with needles? This just a bitty one, okay?” She slides something onto my right wrist. I try to say something, I’m not sure what, but my mouth is dry.

  “Sit tight, honey.”

  Nancy has moved farther away and is staring out the small window, her back to me. It seems as though she keeps receding, like the part of the room she’s in keeps elongating. I have a clear, calm thought—She hates me—before I hear the door open and close again. Shonda wheels in an IV with a bag of liquid attached.

  Quickly, sleight-of-handily, she hooks the IV up to my wrist. I feel cold almost immediately.

  “You cold?”

  I nod. Shonda unfolds a blanket from the foot of the bed and drapes it over me. “Doctor’ll be in in a few minutes. I’m gonna take a little blood from you, okay? Squeeze this.” She hands me a small rubber ball.

  “Did something happen? Bad, I mean? To the baby?”

  Shonda produces another needle and pops it into a vein in the crook of my arm. “Okay, relax your hand.” We both watch the vials fill with my blood. I’m fascinated that anyone would want to do this for a living. She takes out the needle, tapes a piece of cotton to my arm, and wraps a label around the vial, all in about .04 seconds. “Baby’s fine, so are you. Your blood pressure’s a little high. Doctor wants to know what your liver and kidneys are doing—this’ll tell him. He’ll be in soon.” Shonda smiles warmly and glides from the room. I want her to stay. I feel scared but also too tired to feel really scared. I feel scared resignedly.

  I close my eyes, and it sets in. Beneath the fear. Beneath the cold. Beneath the blanket. Relief. Gratitude to be stuck here, to have what would appear to be zero control and almost as little knowledge of my situation. Why does powerlessness and ignorance get a bad rap? This, this is heavenly.

  I see my mother so clearly now. Her intelligent face, each feature a brilliant idea. I feel as though she’s with me, in a stronger way than she’d ever been when she was actually with me. I open my eyes and am startled to see Nancy’s face peering into mine, erasing where I’d just been. Behind her is a pattern of moving chevrons, multicolored zigzags obscuring the rest of the room. I must be dreaming but I am fully awake. The IV bag is half empty.

  “You should be on your left side,” Nancy says. She hoists me over and moves my pillows around so that I stay put. She is surprisingly strong.

  “Do you know I’ve had three abortions?” She looks at me with raised eyebrows. “One in my teens. One in my twenties. One in my thirties.”

  I nod, or try to. She hovers over me, not menacingly, but not not menacingly. Idly I wonder if she intends to kill me.

  “Legally, I’m sure it’s too late,” she says. “But it’s something you might have considered. You have to admit, this is all a little”—she clears her throat for about five full seconds—“inconvenient.”

  “I actually did—I mean, think about it,” I say, feeling the need to defend myself from Nancy’s hostility despite being at an obvious disadvantage. My judgment feels soft and wobbly, as though it has been diluted by the fluid trickling in. What’s in the fluid? I wonder.

  Nancy shrugs. “Maybe you did, maybe you didn’t. But here we are. And this is exactly why women are only making seventy-one cents to the male dollar.”

  Just then the door swings open and a doctor walks in and the room goes still. Above me, the IV bag is nearly empty, its sides straining together. My mouth is dry. Nancy is at the far side of the room again, near the window. She fixes me with a blank expression.

  The doctor is male and young and good-looking. What is with this place? Do they have to be attractive, to make you feel like an even bigger disaster?

  “Hi, Agnes. I’m Dr. Lang. How are you feeling?”

  I don’t know, I want to say. I forget what I’m supposed to feel like. “Fine,” I say. “I think I’m fine.”

  “This is a prescription for labetalol. It’s going to help manage your blood pressure. You will also need to rest—as in, no activity at all. This is very important. We call it bed rest. Are you familiar with it?”

  “Is it just, like, resting in bed?”

  Dr. Lang makes his fingers into a gun and cocks it slightly with that tch-tch noise people do that is supposed to convey agreement, as if I have just answered correctly a question about sports. “You got it. It means total rest. Nothing physical. We need to get your heart rate down. You’ll have to come back in a week, and the week after that, and so on, until we can deliver the baby, probably a bit earlier than your due date.”

  “What’s wrong with me? And what about work?” In my peripheral vision I can now see Nancy. She has stepped closer, it seems, grown larger, the way a shadow might. I pull my blanket up a little higher. I wish—I actually wish—my dad were here.

  Dr. Lang has a lot of energy. He seems to sort of rev himself up before he speaks, like
a certain kind of contestant on Jeopardy!

  “Preeclampsia,” he announces.

  What is preeclampsia? I think.

  “Basically this means that there is too much protein in your urine. Also, your blood pressure’s a little high. These things can be dangerous for you and for the baby, but in your case, I believe that some meds, strict rest, and close monitoring will be sufficient.”

  “I have a job, though.”

  “Bed rest is generally not convenient for anyone,” he says smilingly. “Your boss will just have to understand. I will write a note so that he understands this is medically exigent.”

  “It’s a she, actually,” I say. “She’s over there. Also I guess it’s my dad, so, yeah. He.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. Hi, I’m Dr. Lang. Nice to meet you,” he says to Nancy, who has slid over and is standing near my bed. “I thought you were Agnes’s mother.”

  Nancy laughs, an exaggerated, semihorrified peal, confirmation that she did say all those things after all. “Nancy Jones. Nice to meet you.”

  “If we were closer to your due date, we’d probably go ahead and deliver this baby, but you’re still a ways off. Thirty weeks, you said? Do you remember the date of your last period?”

  “Um. January.” How could I have even been alive in January? I miss Tea Rose suddenly, violently—with the same intensity that drew me to him in the first place. That got me here.

  “Baby’s fine, Agnes. You’ll be okay. But listen—this is important: Any headache or change in vision, you need to come back and see us immediately. Okay? Otherwise, just take it easy—doctor’s orders.” Again he makes the gun thing at me. Like he wants to shoot me, but only to make everyone laugh.