“How does that work for you? Get you prepped around seven a.m.? I’m on call that day.”
At odd intervals I find myself thinking, Fuck you, Dr. Lang. Not with any particular malice.
Maybe the Dr. Langs have made things easier. But it dawns on me: He needs me more than I need him. I am what he does, in order to live. He is not my father, housing me, cleaning out his other, dead child’s room so that my child can have one. He is not this baby’s father, with a baby’s father’s rights. He is a man with a job. I am a woman with a body.
In fact, I think with a weird growing pride and fascination, without my body—without my historical body—there would be no Dr. Lang, no Dr. Langs. If everything but a dirt ditch and everyone but me were erased from the earth, I would figure it out. We would figure it out. As the last people on earth, we’d become like the first people on earth, and we would get born.
Dear Mom,
You would not recognize Simon’s room. Dad undertook its transformation with a fervor I’ve never seen in him before. I’m not sure if the terms “happy” and “sad” apply to Dad—but he seemed almost happy as he worked. Relieved, maybe. And I guess it was his lack of crying that compelled me to compensate, somehow in the universal sense of checks and balances, and at various points over those few days, as he came home from work and immediately checked on me and then began moving, packing, and most recently, painting—a soft, celestial white, the color of light reflecting off snow—to get up from my lumpy bed and walk across the room and shut the door and cry, hard but quietly.
This dear father of mine, this island that is becoming a peninsula, for me, for my sake, for the sake of this baby, this man who wants nothing more than the end of all suffering, an erasure of whatever failures inscribed him before now—nothing steadies him like duty; nothing signals love for him like utility. How could I ever find fault with him? How could you, Mom?
When I eventually do coax myself all the way inside the room, I see hanging on a hook from the ceiling a mobile with tiny multicolored airplanes. It was Simon’s, Dad told me apologetically, and later mine. “If you want, we can get rid of it.” No, I told him. I love it.
I have been spending what feels like an inordinate amount of time imagining what the baby will look like, but not in a moony, tender sort of way. I’m scared for it to look like Tea Rose.
And believing in you has become a bit like believing in God.
In the name of the mother, and of the daughter, and of this wholly holey body,
Agnes
Alicia calls to tell me that she has given birth to her baby girl, that she labored for nine hours until the doctor asked her if she wanted to have a cesarean section, and Mary said yes.
“I would have kept going,” she tells me. “But they said my heart rate was dropping. My mom was really worried.”
“How was it? The, um, surgery?” My mind is racing—that is what a cesarean section means, right? Surgery?
“Well, I didn’t feel a thing. And then all the anesthesia wore off and I was just sick and sore. I’m okay now, though. Except for my boobs. Breastfeeding is super hard!”
My eye falls on a wrapped box poking out of my closet. Alicia’s nightgown. I feel a wave of shame colliding with fierce kicks so low down and far back that I half wonder if the baby has mistakenly rolled into some different, uncharted cavity. For a moment I am distracted.
“Agnes?”
“Sorry—I’m here,” I say. I can’t think of what else to add. “I’m so happy for you,” I offer feebly.
That’s all Alicia needs to forge ahead. “Ellery is sooo cute, Agnes. I can’t wait for you to meet her.”
Again, low, deep punches. I sit up straighter in my bed, which seems to make it worse. It feels as though the baby is fully underneath me. I take a deep breath. Punch. Chop. Slice.
“Hey,” I say, suddenly remembering Teeny and the shower, “when was she born?”
“Oh! September twenty-second. My friend Tessa got it right. She says she’s never been wrong about these things. Crap,” Alicia says as loud, frantic crying pierces through the line. “Dammit. She’s up.”
I hear Mary, close to the phone. “Let me take her, Alicia? Get in your chair and I’ll hand her to you? I have a bottle ready just in case?”
“Agnes, I have to go. I’ll call you in a little bit, okay?”
We hang up the phone. My room feels extra quiet. I wonder what my baby’s cries will sound like. Not like that, I can’t resist thinking, Ellery’s screeching still ringing in my ears. Another kick, alarmingly low. What if this baby comes through the wrong hole?
I stand up slowly and walk, slowly, to the bathroom. I feel cold with terror. Suddenly I want Alicia back on the line. I want to ask her how she knew labor was starting. I want to ask how much it hurt, how much painkiller she was allowed to take. I want to ask if it is possible to call an ambulance and ask politely if they will put me under, remove the baby, and wake me when everything is clean and over. I hold the edge of the sink and clench my buttocks and try to take some deep breaths. I’m changing my mind, I think. I’m changing my mind. I’m changing my mind. People are allowed to change their minds.
I think about sitting on the toilet to try to relieve some of the intense pressure, but I’m afraid of what might come out. Cautiously, I walk to Simon’s room. On the bed is a package of newborn diapers that were not there yesterday, along with a tube of diaper cream and a few packages of disposable wipes. I sit on the bed, the items sidling toward me from my weight, the diapers practically crawling onto my lap. I look around the clean, white, hushed room, which feels like a mirrored reflection of my mind. I belong here, I think. I belong here. For a moment I consider moving to the glider, seeing the view from there, but I can’t bring myself to do it. I haven’t sat in it yet, and it feels as right of a superstition as any at this point, to wait until the baby comes. Without thinking too much, I open the package of diapers. I stack them neatly in the empty drawer of the bedside table, along with the wipes and cream. I get a clean towel from the Pink Bathroom and lay it on the bed, as a place to change the baby.
My blood feels warm. I want to do more. When Dad gets home that evening, I am vacuuming my room, having already done the baby’s room. I opened the windows in there and in my own room. I am wearing a tank top with no bra, my sweatshirt a pilly mound on the unmade bed, my bed that has not been made in weeks. I don’t hear Dad come in, and I don’t hear him tell me to turn off the vacuum, but I do hear the silence following the cord being yanked from the wall by his hand.
“Agnes! You’re supposed to be in bed! And why are all the windows open? You’re going to get a cold!”
I know I look crude in my thin top, my big breasts and belly barely concealed. I know I smell ripe and worried, exactly how I feel. But for a split second it feels good to pretend that my father is some other person, another man who loves me, and he has come home not because he had to but because he wanted to, and he has found me stooped and manic, not his college dropout daughter but the almost-mother of his almost-child. In a flash I grasp the edge of that fantasy, and just as quickly it succumbs to a present moment made even sadder and more humiliating for the contrast. In that narrowest of windows, I saw why people do on purpose what I have done by mistake.
* * *
At my appointment the following week, Dr. Lang tells me I am 3 centimeters dilated and 40 percent effaced. He tells me this after sticking something inside of me with surprising force. I lift off the table in pain.
“Sorry about that,” he says, handing me a tissue and washing his hands.
“What does that mean?” I ask, still on my back. I use the tissue—meant, I suppose, to catch the lubricant that will fall out of me when I stand up to get dressed—for my nose, now dripping. I am tired of the wetness of my body.
“It means,” he says, drying his hands one finger at a time, “that you’re coming along. We should be in good shape for your induction. You are still what I’d consider preeclamptic, but t
here’s slightly less protein in your urine, and your blood pressure has come down a bit.”
I prop myself up on my forearms and dangle my feet from the stirrups. It’s difficult to be casual from this position. “I read somewhere that preeclampsia is caused by ‘maternal-fetal conflict.’ Does that mean my body is turning against the baby?” I read this in the P volume of Funk & Wagnalls encyclopedia that I’d asked Dad to bring upstairs the other day, along with C, where I’d read the five-page entry on childbirth. I fell asleep that night, having read widely in both volumes, wondering why people bother reading other books, why books besides encyclopedias even exist.
Dr. Lang looks at me like I’m a child, and I immediately feel like a child. “We don’t really know what causes preeclampsia. There are a lot of theories but nothing definitive.” He offers his delicate hand and I sit all the way up, keeping the paper cover close around my lower half. “So, assuming nothing unforeseen happens, we’ll see you back here in a few days and get this party started.”
“Um, okay. Sounds good.”
“I’ll let you get dressed. Take care, Agnes.” He turns back just before leaving. “By the way, have you taken any classes?”
I must look confused because he quickly adds, “You know, childbirth classes? Breastfeeding? CPR?”
I shake my head. “I, um, well, I’ve mostly been in bed.”
Dr. Lang laughs, a harsh ha. “Right, true. Before that, though? Did it occur to you to—”
I must look a certain way because Dr. Lang stops speaking, clears his throat. “You’ll be fine. Are there any questions that I can answer?”
I hold the paper sheet tighter around me. “Yes.” I look him in the eye. “Just one, really. What exactly is going to happen?”
Another ha. “Well, you probably remember some stuff from biology class, right?” I can tell he regrets his last-minute due diligence. “Every birth is different.” He shrugs. “We will let you know everything that we’re doing before we do it, and we’ll do our best to keep you as comfortable as possible. The rest is up to you.”
“Okay,” I say, hoisting myself off the table, my lower half exposed for a brief second before Dr. Lang hastily exits, the door clunking shut behind him.
The next evening, I am distracted by how I smell. I take a shower, despite having taken one this morning. Standing under the hot water, I feel increased pressure in my abdomen, squeezes of pain that have come and gone over the past couple of weeks. It is as though an invisible belt is being tightened around me, slackening just as I feel I might pop. I have a vague idea that these are contractions, but aside from them, my body feels the same.
My belly button looks grotesque. How strange, I think, that it was once an opening, a portal into my mother. I soap and resoap my belly, fascinated by the shallow, creased circle that used to be a real dent. I look at my crisscrossing veins, extra blue in the pinkish light of the bathroom. What was that joke we used to love to say on the playground? “Your epidermis is showing! Your epidermis is showing!” Unbelievable that this same skin is now the baby’s outer layer. That if I just dug inside a few inches, there it would be.
I stop soaping and squat down in the tub, the hot water on my back the only form of touch I can handle these days. What poetic irony, that each of us comes into the world attached to another and then immediately gets severed. All of us, walking around, cut off from our mothers, all with the same mark to prove it, the tunnel that connected us closed up and filled with skin.
As I stand back up, holding on to the tiled-in soap dish, I feel something softly come out of me. In the tub between my feet is a snot-colored mass the size of the small bar of soap I’d just been using. What happened to the soap? is my first thought. Bending down to get a closer look, I see that it is something that has something to do with my body, which has everything to do with the baby, and watching the water swirl around it, whitish and jellyfish like, I begin to fear that the worst is happening, right now, in my shower, that the baby’s brain has somehow oozed out of me, and soon the rest of the baby will follow in haphazard pieces.
I push the thing toward the drain with my foot and, reviled by how it feels, gag after it. I get out of the shower, wrap myself in a towel, and walk unsteadily to my room. I lie on my bed, damp and cold and terrified. I wait for the next dreadful thing to happen. I wait and wait. I’m scared to move, so I stay still on my wet towel. My dad calls up the stairs to ask if I need anything. I force myself to say no, I’m fine. I hear him start the dishwasher and lock the doors. I hear him walk past my room and down the hall to his room. The house goes completely quiet, except for the screaming panic in my head.
I try to write a letter in my head, to calm down, but I keep switching back and forth between addressing Mom and addressing the baby. Dear Mom, what is happening? DEAR BABY, WHAT IS HAPPENING? Dear Mom, tell me what I should do. DEAR BABY, ARE YOU STILL IN THERE?
Eventually, I must fall asleep, because I wake up shivering with cold and in dire need of the toilet. I stand up carefully and hang my towel over a chair. I find my robe in the dark and put it on and walk across the hall to the bathroom. I pee. I brush my teeth. I feel better, calmer; I wonder if maybe I dreamed the whole thing in the shower. I fix my matted, damp hair into a loose braid and take a few relieved deep breaths, checking, as I breathe, for any strange sensations. There are none. Back in my room, I put on sweatpants and a T-shirt and, feeling not quite sleepy, decide to read. My bed is wet, so I stand beside it, holding an encyclopedia, unsure of what to do, before deciding to sleep in the baby’s room. The baby’s room is exactly how it occurs to me—not Simon’s room.
Just as I reach the room, I feel an enormous pressure between my legs, and then a pop, and then wetness. I think, Well, this is great. I’ve somehow, despite having just gone to the bathroom, peed my pants, but the wetness seems to have nothing to do with my bladder, and there is suddenly more of it, and then still more. Fear overcomes me, the same fear from the shower, and I stand frozen, dripping God knows what on the hallway carpet. I recall a long-ago soap opera episode, watched in secret when I was home sick once from school, where a pregnant woman stood in a puddle of her own water before being rushed to the hospital. The memory soothes me somewhat. This is supposed to happen, I tell myself. I drop the encyclopedia and walk stiffly to my parents’ room, hesitating outside the closed door as I’ve done so many times before. How many minutes of my life spent hovering outside their room, and what on earth does that mean? Finally, I make myself knock and open the door. As my eyes adapt to a new shade of darkness, I can make out my father’s shape in the bed. He is sleeping on his back, his hands clasped over his middle, like an arranged corpse. My mother’s side of the bed remains taut.
I hover over him. “Dad. Dad?” His eyes flutter open.
“I think I need to go to the hospital. I’m, um, all wet.”
He flies out of bed. “Okay, okay. Are you all right?” He rubs his face as though trying to see me better.
“I feel fine I think. I don’t know. I’m not really sure what’s happening.”
“Let me get dressed. Why don’t you change your clothes? Can you do that? Maybe put a few things in a bag? I will meet you downstairs in five minutes.” He rushes into their bathroom and closes the door.
The clock on his nightstand says 2:11 a.m. Back in my room, I strip off my clothes and pat myself dry with them before throwing them in the hamper. I put on underwear, a tank top, clean sweatpants, and a soft sweater. I slip into my Doc Martens but can’t fathom bending down to tie the laces. I’m aware that I must look slightly deranged. Into a bag I put more underwear, socks, a hairbrush, another shirt. I see the wrapped box—Alicia’s present—in my closet and impulsively tear into it and shove the nightgown in my bag. I look around my room, suddenly desperate for something else to bring along, a rabbit’s foot or some other amulet, but finding nothing, I go downstairs. Dad is already there.
As we drive in the dark, Dad’s knuckles on the steering wheel look almost fluores
cent. At one red light, a wave of pain doubles me over—pain like the worst cramps I’ve ever had but more sinister. I hug my belly and try to breathe. I arch up out of my seat, trying to hoist myself out of the pain. At the next red light, I feel completely fine. Dad’s face looks desperate but he keeps his eyes straight ahead. Another surge of pain hits as we arrive at the hospital, and again, I picture myself clawing out of my body, which feels not like a body but like a fanged and barbed monster, a torture machine. Dad parks the car and the agony lifts. Nobody told me that labor would be so schizophrenic. Then again, I sheepishly realize as we enter the hospital, I was pretty resolute about not asking.
It feels strange to walk into the emergency room. A few people are in the waiting room. Nobody looks to be in excruciating pain.
“My daughter is beginning to have labor,” Dad blurts awkwardly to the woman behind the Plexiglas. She looks at me. “How far apart are your contractions, dear?”
I draw a blank. Am I supposed to know this? Why is math always trying to sneak into my life? “I’m not sure. I had two on my way over here. We live about fifteen minutes away.” She’s the one not in labor, I think. Let her figure it out.
“Okay. I’m going to send you two up to maternity. They’ll get you settled there. Do you know where you’re going?”
“Yes,” Dad and I say at the same time. Which is funny considering that we have, generally speaking, no idea where we’re going. On the seventh floor, I am given some paperwork to fill out. Midway through, I have another contraction, and somehow, knowing what to call it now—a contraction, something I’d previously believed only happens when you’re lying down in a hospital bed—makes it slightly less scary, if no less painful.
A nurse leads Dad and me to a room. There is a hospital gown and an oddly shaped plastic bottle on the bed. She tells me to get undressed in the adjoining bathroom. “You might want to use the enema too.”
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