Contents
Dedication
Recognition
The Second Time
Results
September Air
Afterword
Notes
Acknowledgements
About the Author
About the Publisher
Other Titles from Annorlunda Books
Copyright
Both Sides of My Skin
By Elizabeth Trach
For Tiegan and Jonas, who turned me inside out.
Recognition
“The day I brought you home from the hospital,” my mother says, crossing one leg over the other and letting it bob lightly in the air, “was cold. There were flurries, and that was May seventeenth. All I had on was this loose yellow sundress with straps because I wanted something pretty for your first day at home.” She hunches her shoulders to click up a light for her cigarette, then waves the smoke away from me. “Will the smoke bother the baby?”
“No, Mom, it’s fine.” The baby, still tucked away under layers of skin and fat and fluid, is safe for now, although I don’t know how to tell my mother that she won’t be able to visit her granddaughter if she’s going to smoke. She probably won’t need to as long as her visits are in the afternoon. When I was about six or seven, I remember hearing her side of a phone conversation with my grandmother, and feeling funny to hear her call someone “Mom.” They talked about ulcers, which I thought sounded like a bad stomachache. Later she explained that they came from worrying about things. I didn’t understand why she would be afraid of getting ulcers when all she did was play with me and my sister during the day while my father was at work, but soon after that she gave up coffee and switched to tea with a cigarette first thing in the morning. As far as I know, her digestive system is fine, but gathering up her energy to face the day is a ritual she still observes, even though my sister and I have long since moved out of the house and don’t require any special vigor from her anymore.
She leans back into the metal café chair and holds the cigarette as far away from me as she can, careful to let the wisps of smoke rise into the air beyond the umbrella over our table so it won’t somehow be trapped in my breathing space. She exhales. “Well, anyway, your father forgot to bring me a coat, but I don’t remember being cold at all. I just remember holding you tight in your hospital blanket, watching your face watching the snow somewhere over my shoulder. You didn’t blink the whole ride home.”
It’s hard to imagine my parents as young as Rick and I are now, wrapped in joy and expectation. I’ve seen pictures, but the gold and browns of the furniture and clothes, the wide ties and polyester sheen on everything, the glasses that darkened in the burnt-smelling glare of the flash cube all take away from their faces, make them seem like strangers.
The effeminate young waiter delivers our lunch with a flourish and a smile. He’s awfully cheerful for Sunday brunch, working for a tip, and I will slip him some extra to make up for the embarrassing twelve percent my mother will add to the bill she insists on paying. This morning all I could think about was eggs, but now that an enormous ham and cheese omelet is in front of me, I know I’ll only be able to pick at it. There’s not much room left for my stomach inside me, so even though I am hungry all the time I can’t eat much anymore.
“So, do you think that you’re ready for the delivery? I mean, is the baby’s room ready? And you packed a little overnight bag for yourself?”
“Yes and yes. I think we’re all set. Birthing class is done, so I practice the relaxation and meditation techniques every night now, and Rick guides me through this glove-relaxation thing where I practice touching parts of my body to numb them.”
“Does that work? I mean, I don’t really know…the C-section was so easy with you that I just signed right up for another one for your sister.”
I take my time chewing. The way I was born is the exact opposite of how I plan to have my baby. No interventions, no drugs, no men in white coats telling me what to do without me asking some serious questions first. This is mine. Mine and Rick’s, not some guy’s lunch break between rounds of golf. My mother has no idea what giving birth felt like, so it’s hard for us to talk about. She can’t tell me what I want to know.
“But I know, you want to do it natural. I think it’s good to try, to go as far as you can. But if you are in pain, you should let them give you something. It’s all so different now, you know, how they even let you have people in the room…”
So this is what it’s really about, why she got up early on a Sunday, when I know she fell asleep in her reclining chair the night before while watching tapes of the week’s talk shows. I try to navigate this lightly but quickly, like hurrying over a patch of ice: the less contact, the better.
“Yeah, well, it will just be Rick and me. Kind of private and calm, something we need to do together.” I press on past the circled day on the calendar in my mind. “We want some time to be together as a family for a while, the three of us, before any visitors. Probably a week or two.”
“Oh. Oh, I figured that. I think you had said that. But if you feel like you need help—not with the baby or anything, but with cooking or cleaning up, then I can come and stay for a few days. Whenever you decide.”
I don’t remind my mother that Rick does all the cooking, and that we split the cleaning. I have trouble picturing her doing these things that she hasn’t done for years. Rick says I have her trained to be the ideal laissez-faire mom, but I remember when, in a burst of frustration with a wad of tulle, I asked her for help making my wedding veil. She was ready with an idea right then, and I realized that she had been watching, either waiting or wishing for me to need her. She smiled a lot that night, and it ended up being fun, but when she told me how glad she was that we got to do this together, the sharing ideas and the solving problems and the mindless chatter about flowers and food, I felt like a teenager who doesn’t let her little sister watch her get ready for a date.
Suddenly the air in my lungs is pressed out of me, from within. I shift and stretch in my seat, trying to somehow make myself taller so the baby’s feet aren’t jammed so far into my airspace. I imagine the baby curling her toes to get a foothold between my ribs and using the muscles in between them as a springboard, trying to get leverage to push her head toward the light. Not yet, I think.
“Not so much room left after eight months, huh?” My mother puts down her fork and slides her chair around the small table. She reaches a hand toward my belly. “Is she kicking?”
When was the last time my mother touched my stomach? When she tickled me as a toddler? When I was nine and made myself sick over a detention for leaving my viola in the coat rack? Or was it involuntary, a lightning stab across the car as she jammed on the brakes, even though I was already old enough to drive myself wherever we were going?
My mother’s hand on my stomach doesn’t feel any different than the hands of all the other people, strangers or friends, who have reached out to touch me since I started to show back in the spring. I’m not quite used to this, my body being available for anyone who needs contact: patted from the outside, kicked from the inside.
“Oh, now that she knows I want her to move, she’s not going to. That reminds me of you.” She takes her hand back to rest on her own stomach, the soft mound of menopausal fat an echo of what she is feeling for in her memory. “But enjoy it now, because soon you won’t be able to keep her from moving. Even though you love her more than anything else.”
“Her and Rick, you mean.”
“No, just her. The way I love both you and your sister more than I love your father.” I feel a squirmy flutter at the point of my breastbone, and it’s not the baby this time. I have never been comfortable with th
e things my mother was so willing to share after my father divorced her. There are things that I know about them, about my mother and all her feelings, that I don’t want to know. Things that I pretend I don’t know, even though she seems to want to tell me, the way you suddenly gush everything out at a slumber party to girls who, in their pajamas in the dark, seem just like you, and you hope that it doesn’t come back as something ugly and misunderstood in the fluorescence of a junior high hallway.
“Yeah, but you and dad aren’t married anymore. Rick and I…are.”
“It doesn’t matter. This is something I realized long before. Your father forgot my coat, but I didn’t need it. Dogwood petals were curling up under the snow and dropping, but I didn’t feel the cold. I felt you.”
I think about telling Rick what my mother said, but when he looks up from pulling suckers off the almost-ripe tomato plants and asks, “How was brunch?”, all I say is “Fine, but I’m tired now,” and in the house I close doors and pull shades for a dark, cool nap. A day passes and another, and I know I won’t tell him, that it would seem stranger to him than it does to me, that he would want to laugh away our failure to understand. There are many things I don’t tell him now, because I will not be able to explain what it’s like to have my body controlled by someone else, to feel a stranger inside yet not to feel her, the way we only feel our stomachs when they make demands. The baby is and isn’t, just like I am and am not myself anymore. But I think about the way my mother splits herself open for me, spills out whatever’s inside, sometimes sweet like watermelon, sometimes hot and sticky like blood. She flows; I’d rather avoid a mess.
Days are warm now, midsummer, so I take my walks in the morning. I need the exercise to get stronger, to keep up my stamina for the birth, but when I get to the playground down the street, I stop to sit on the bench by the sandbox. I know that there will be no rest periods in labor, but I stop anyway. I’m not ready for the real thing; I need more time to practice relaxing and preparing myself to feel the pain as something other than pain. More time to massage and stretch myself out ahead of time so I don’t tear apart.
My feet feel better without all the extra weight on them, and the air is still morning-cool. A little boy with hair cut too short to curl plays alone in the sandbox, building whole cities and digging tunnels to connect them, creating countries and empires. Every now and then he smashes them and rebuilds, so intent on his work that he doesn’t know I am watching him. He is sturdy, confident; his command of the sandbox scares me a bit in its utter independence.
I am startled by the wet grind of an old man clearing his throat as he thuds down on the bench next to me. I blink to focus on him, so much closer to me than the boy, and I wonder how long I have been staring off into space. This isn’t the first time I have been surprised to find that the world has shifted around me while I was busy being pregnant. So much of my time is spent just sitting, and for the first time I can remember, spent not thinking. Or else thinking so far on the inside that it’s not in words or even pictures, but somewhere my body takes me. But it’s not nothing, because when I get snapped back I can feel that things on the inside have shifted too, have pressed forward just a sliver of a degree in their trajectory. The groaning push of earth; tectonic plates in their slow, inevitable passage.
The man looks at me and nods. Large-knuckled hands on the hard ridge of his thighs, he eases back against the bench, letting it prop him up. He looks as though he has never had to shave, skin translucent with age, still more peachy than sallow. It is still firm over his cheeks, and he probably doesn’t look old when he smiles, but farther down his face the skin has been pulled into sagging flaps around the jaw and neck. His eyes are blue.
In silence except for the sparrows and the traffic, we watch the boy continue his construction. I feel the muffled tapping from inside my belly, its taut dome like a large, smooth egg. I look down and can see a small section of my big turquoise shirt rippling up and down: the baby’s hand, maybe foot, pushing against its boundaries. I am ready to shift position, maybe to move on, when a screech from the sandbox slices the air.
“No no NO! I don’t WANT to! I want to stay here!” The boy smashes his shovel into the dirt and turns to look up at his mother, who has come up behind him. She holds out her hand to him across the low wall of the sandbox.
“Honey, it’s time to go home and have lunch. You want to eat a good sandwich, don’t you? You must be hungry with all this playing.” The woman says this sweetly, more calmly than I could have managed, and more nicely than he deserves. She places her palm on his head.
“NO!” The boy, face twisted in rage that is not softened by the curves of his baby fat, flicks his shovel up, flinging sand into his mother’s eyes. She steps back, off-balance, and brushes at her eyes with her hand.
The old man sighs, and I turn to him in time to see him give a slow, tight-lipped shake of his head. In profile he looks like my grandmother: paper-dry skin at the throat, and gray-white hair, too long for a man but too short on my grandmother, wisping around the collar. The firm, round cheek forming a shelf under the sunken eye.
What I remember most clearly about visits with my grandmother is her Lazy Susan on the Formica kitchen table. She lived in a farmhouse that smelled like cats and seemed to be falling down around her, floors listing and creaking under her weight. She would stand in the kitchen, round-backed and arthritic, pouring tea while my mother admonished us not to spin the Lazy Susan. My sister and I loved it, loved to watch the honey bear, sugar, salt, pepper, torn envelopes scribbled with phone numbers, the little calendar from the IGA with a flag for each federal holiday, and the amber prescription bottles all whirl past again and again, turning and returning to us in a blurry version of themselves.
“What’s the difference, Miriam? A little spinning isn’t hurting anything,” my grandmother always said. “They’ll be spinning off for real soon enough.”
“That’s not the point, Mom,” my mother’s voice was brittle. “This is my thing to deal with, not yours.” She huffed out a pouty, exasperated sigh. The Lazy Susan ground to a halt, and I looked over it at my little sister, who had shrunk down into her chair, eyes wide. I sat up; I couldn’t decide if my mother sounded like a grown-up or a kid, or if she thought my grandmother was one of us for a minute.
My grandmother, unruffled, sat and sipped her tea. “Yes, but I know how it will turn out. Just enjoy them while you still have them.” My grandmother gave the Lazy Susan a spin.
The scrape of my mother’s chair as she pushed away from the table vibrated through the floor and into my chest, with an almost musical overtone in the metal chair legs. Her tea sloshed over the edge of the chipped cup and ran down into the saucer. She opened the back window and lit a cigarette. “I’m not you,” she breathed out, sound and smoke floating out the window toward the doghouse of her long-dead childhood pet.
“Mm hmm. All you can do with kids,”—a broken cough—“is love the shit out of them.” I blink, and the old man is looking at me. The sky is white and hazy, but bright, and I’m not sure if the androgynous, age-cracked voice is in my memory or if it is real. I feel a centrifugal pull at the pit of my stomach, as if suddenly the earth has stopped spinning and I have been thrown, waiting for things to fall back into place around me. All kinds of people give all kinds of advice when you’re pregnant, and a stranger’s good intentions are nothing unusual, but his bushy eyebrows are raised as though he expects a reply.
“The thing is, they will never love you back as much as you love them.” I’m not sure what he’s talking about and feel choked by confusion, embarrassment. He looks straight ahead to the empty sandbox, eyes following the mother and son as they turn onto the sidewalk for home. “Maybe, if you’re lucky and if you live long enough, you see it in how they love their own kids, and that’ll do.” His voice is soft; he could be talking to himself. He shifts his weight again to look first at my belly and then at my face. “My wife never believed me when I tried to tell her this.”
I try to smile, but mostly I just want to get home. My stomach has been bothering me off and on today, and I feel now like I really, really need to use the bathroom. I feel nervous and full. I pull myself up, and except for my feet, it feels good to stand and have the baby’s weight on other parts of me. “Enjoy the weather,” I say, and it sounds stupid and small out there on the air. I walk, and the baby is a lumbering pendulum in the space where my legs hinge to my body.
When I get home Rick is in the garden, weeding. He waves, and I continue straight into the house. The bathroom is cool and dark, and I sit. Rick is home? It must be Saturday. For me the days are all the same: breathing, eating, sleeping, walking. The weekends are a little different because Rick is added to the background while I do these things, or while they are done to me, which is how it feels sometimes. I push against the pressure I feel, the hard lump of gas, but nothing happens. Again, and again, but the room feels small and I want to be outside with lots of space and air on my skin.
In the garden the tomatoes are still green, with just a hint of blushing at their tops. I used to think that tomatoes turned red slowly, a progression from green to yellow to orangey-pink and then, finally, red. Since we dug out these garden plots, though, I have never seen a season when this is true. Really, one day they are green, and the next they are red. I don’t know if the change is too fast to see, or it’s just that I grew forgetful and stopped looking for it, but I have never been able to follow one tomato’s ripening step by step.
Rick comes and sits down next to me under the cherry tree. He sits until his breathing slows from pants to regular pace; he has been working hard getting the garden to grow this year without my help. “Julia, are you feeling alright?” he asks me.
I am sitting cross-legged, rocking back and forth a little. I don’t want to stop, but I do, to show him I can. But stillness doesn’t feel right, so I start up again, forward and back. The sky has become white-damp, and my fingers are glistening fat like sausage links, swelled numb with water they seem to pull out of the air when the weather turns humid. “I’m fine. It just feels like there’s a lot of pressure today. I keep feeling like I have to go to the bathroom, but then I don’t. I don’t know. I was practicing the glove-relaxation thing, so when it bothers me I put my hand on my stomach until I feel better.”
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