“What happens now? We can’t not talk about it.”
“We did talk about it. The first time. I’ll call Dr. Barton and schedule—”
“Michael!” I drop his arm and step back. “It’s not that easy. It can’t be. It’s not just a statistical problem to be solved. It’s a—it’s our baby.” Michael’s biting his lips white and his eyes are swimming, but I press on. “Our child, and I don’t even know if it’s a boy or a girl.”
Michael places the laundry basket on the floor at the end of the bed and sits down again. “Em, don’t make this harder than it already is. If you—I mean, if we—if we knew the sex, we might be too attached to…to do what we need to.” Elbows on his knees, Michael makes a steeple around his nose with his hands, thumbs tucked under his chin, eyes looking up at me over the long, slender fingers.
“Too attached? Of course I’m attached. It’s our baby, Michael.” He closes his eyes and I know I should stop, but I don’t. “No baby would have been as easy or neat as Sophie. So there’ll be more crying and more trips to the doctor and more trouble at school. So what? Different isn’t bad, it’s just different. Go into Sophie’s room and watch her breathe while she’s sleeping. Would you be able to abort her?”
From its place on the nightstand, Michael’s watch ticks out several seconds. He drops his hands on his lap, and when he speaks, there is steel in his voice. “Sophie is the one I’m thinking about.” He rises. “Don’t you see what her life would be like? Always having to wait her turn for just a few seconds of our attention. Needing student loans because all the money went to extra medical care. Living the rest of her life under the burden of having to take over for us when we die. Because that's what will happen, Em. Who do you think will be designated legal guardian in our wills? It’s either that or an institution if the baby is low functioning. Is that really what you want? Don’t stand there and tell me to think of Sophie, when she’s the one who will have to take care of her brother for the rest of her life.” Michael stops his lower lip from quivering by pulling back the muscles around his jaw. He paws at his eyes, and when he moves his hand away, they look strangled, somehow.
Sophie’s brother. So it’s a boy. A son, a loss: one that the miracle of medicine will anesthetize away, as if he weren’t real. I look at the floor. “I don’t want to blame Sophie for this. I don’t want to end up resenting her…”
“Then blame me.” Michael has been looking out the window into the orange glare of the street lamp. He throws open the window and takes big, heaving breaths of the cold air that rushes in on both of us.
Another white room, dimly lit. Another flimsy, bluish hospital gown and leatherette exam table. “No anesthesia,” I tell the tech.
“Are you sure?” she asks. She is a large woman with little pink and red hearts all over her scrubs. “Some women do find it painful.”
“I want to feel it. Where is my husband?”
“He’s signing some papers, and probably a waiver about the anesthesia. It’s not policy for him to be in here, but I guess since he’s a friend of Dr. Barton…”
“Fine.” I turn away from her to look at the wall. I close my eyes against its whiteness.
We haven’t spoken since yesterday afternoon on the way to the first appointment at the clinic. I didn’t know you had to go twice; the first time they put in something that feels like seaweed, lumpy and slimy. “It helps with the dilation,” Naomi explained in our counseling session.
“Good to see you, Michael. Is your wife ready?” I open my eyes to see the swarthy, mustachioed doctor sit on his toadstool by my feet. I didn’t hear Michael come in the room, but he is standing by my head. The tech comes back in the room wheeling a shiny metal tray with a clear glass jar hooked up to a hose. The doctor looks up at Michael and raises his eyebrows. “Are you sure about this, Mike?”
“Em, please let them give you something for the pain. There’s no reason to torture yourself.” These are the first words Michael has spoken to me all day; they come out in an airy hush.
“No.”
When it comes, it is like the wind. The whoosh of the vacuum roars in my ears and takes my breath away, like opening the door into a hurricane. My stomach cramps and heaves; the jar on the tray fills with blood so red it is almost glowing in the fluorescent light of the exam room.
Michael’s hands are cold on my cheek as he turns my head away from the cart and toward him, toward the wall. I look up at him and he closes his eyes. “No, Michael,” I say. My voice cracks, but I go on. “Someone has to watch.”
He opens his eyes slowly and stares over my head to the cart on the other side of the room. His jaw starts working; he is biting the insides of his cheeks. A grimace and a swallow: we are both bleeding. His hand is still on my cheek, keeping me from watching the jar fill with blood and baby.
Sophie is home after a week at her Grammy’s, and she has been tearing around all day, pulling toys out of every possible place and strewing them about the house. I have been lying on the couch watching her, getting up to make her snacks when she gets hungry. I keep my eyes closed and doze when I can. The bleeding is almost done, but I am still tired. It reminds me of the weeks after we brought Sophie home from the hospital.
“Nonono.”
I open my eyes and Sophie is standing, staring right into my face. I have an afghan scrunched up around my shoulders, but she pulls it down so she can see me better. I’m cold without it. “Yes yes yes. Mommy’s tired, Sophie.”
Sophie starts flexing her hands over and over as fast as she can, showing me her fingers. “NonoNO!”
“What is it, Soph?”
“NoNO!” Sophie swoops Dolly up from the floor onto the couch and jabs her finger at Dolly’s hand, punching into the soft fabric insistently, rhythmically. “NoNO. NoNO.”
I look down at Dolly’s grayish hand. No NO. One two. Dolly’s hand is like a mitten, only the suggestion of a thumb and a hand. Not the ten fingers we had been counting on together before. The game is not the same, and Sophie wails in frustration.
“NoNO. NONO!” Michael would never believe that Sophie can count, but she knows that two is not ten. Sophie continues to push on Dolly’s hands until I take it up by the dingy pink nightcap and hide it under the blanket.
The front door creaks open. Flurries blow in with Michael.
Sophie bursts into tears. “Baba! Baba!”
This is too hard. I want to crawl under the mottled old afghan with Dolly and hide. I sit up instead.
Michael drops his overcoat on the easy chair and kneels down in front of the couch and pulls Sophie into a hug. He bounces her up and down until her crying turns into whining for Dolly. “Baba,” she hiccups.
I pull Dolly out from the safety of the afghan and hand the toy to Michael. “She wants Dolly,” I translate and pull the blanket up around my shoulders like a shawl.
“OK, Sophie, here’s your Dolly. What’s wrong, baby?”
Sophie starts hitting Dolly’s hands again. “BaBA. BaBA. Dada?” She hands Dolly to Michael, looking up into his face with bright eyes.
Michael looks to me in confusion. I explain about Dolly’s hands. “Yes Sophie, one two. That’s not your fault, sweetie. It’s nobody’s fault.” He glances at me curled in my shroud. “We still love Dolly.” Michael rocks Dolly in his arms and kisses its nose. Then he brushes Sophie’s hair out of her face and kisses her nose. Sophie laughs and stretches her arms out to receive her baby doll. She crawls away a few paces and bounces Dolly on her lap, squealing and laughing again.
Michael sits down on the couch next to me. He touches my face the same way he touched Sophie’s, even though all my hair is back in a ponytail. “How are you feeling today?”
“Okay. Better.” I take his hand and pull it into the warmth of the afghan. We stare at Sophie on the rug in front of us. She is starting to roll around on the floor, pausing when Dolly is comfortable under her cheek as a pillow.
“C’mon, Soph,” Michael whispers. “Let’s go night-night.
” He scoops her up into a cradle hold and heads for the stairs.
“Wait, Michael.” I pick up Dolly and catch up to him at the bottom of the stairs. “You forgot Dolly.” But Sophie is already asleep, nestled against Michael’s chest.
“Never mind.”
I curl back up on the couch with Dolly tucked between my arm and my breast, blanket over just my feet. Michael’s footsteps tread softly up the stairs and fade away as he nears Sophie’s room. I close my eyes and breathe in Sophie’s smell from Dolly’s pink cap. I haven’t lied to Michael: I am better, but it’s still too hard. When I hear Michael’s footsteps returning, I put Dolly on the floor, pull the afghan up under my chin, and pretend to be asleep until I really am.
Results
I grip the sharp, plasticky edge in my teeth to get a better hold as I twist and yank at the spot where the wrapper is molded together into a tri-fold. It tastes like the wings they stick in your cheek at the dentist to separate your teeth for x-rays, but those are soft, and this is cutting the roof of my mouth. I shift my weight, bobbing unevenly from my left foot to my right and back again, propelled from some nervous place near my stomach. This might be easier if I didn’t have to go to the bathroom so badly: I feel like a little kid. I shift the wrapper edge to spear it with my right eye-tooth and give it one more downward tug. Finally.
The staticky wrapper doesn’t want to let go of my hand after the battle, but I manage to shake it off into the trash. Still in my jerking, side-to-side rhythm, I puff out some Lamaze-style breaths to try to calm down as I pop off the white plastic cap and set it on the edge of the sink. I yank down my flannel pajama bottoms and sit on the cold, hard toilet seat, elbows on thighs, and look at the stick. This little plastic wand was pretty expensive, but even so, I was hoping that by now I wouldn’t need it, that I would be glad to have traded a little tip money for the relief of an unopened package. But a week’s worth of spotless underwear later, here I sit, past the deadline I set and shivering in the bathroom. This is not what I planned to be doing the Friday before midterms in my second-to-last semester.
Exhale.
The directions say to cover the indicator window with my thumb to protect it from the urine stream so the results won’t be invalidated by a stray drop or two. It’s like holding a toothbrush, except there’s a stiff, cottony thing where the bristles would be, and I hold it so it’s pointing straight down at the toilet water. Start the urine stream and then move the stick into the stream for five seconds. But the directions also say to face the indicator window away from the urine stream. In the goofy health-class line drawing, it shows the little window facing to the right-hand side on a right-handed woman. The part it doesn’t show is how in reality this twists your arm around so your thumb, still on the window, is angled out and your shoulder is rotated in toward your chest in an extremely uncomfortable, marionette sort of way. But it’s only for five seconds, so I hold the pose and get ready to pee.
And oh, do I have to go. It says on the package that the test is “Ultra-sensitive! Results in seconds!” and that first morning urine is not really necessary, but that’s what I’ve always heard, so that’s what I’ve got saved up. I drop my head between my arms, chin on chest, and stare between my legs at the clear water in the bowl. Now that I’m thinking about it, it’s not so easy, and so I imagine that story about the little boy who fell over the Horseshoe Falls and the hand of God miraculously saved him, with some help from a white guy and a black guy standing by in the crowd… That little boy floats toward the drop, sucked along by millions of tons of water…
One Mississippi.
Two Mississippi.
Three Mississippi.
Four Mississippi.
Five Mississippi.
There’s way more than five seconds of pee here, so I maneuver the stick to the side, glad to untwist my arm, and let the rest of the amber liquid in my bladder splash into the toilet. It feels good to let it out, but only for another Mississippi or two, and then the nervous tingle is back and I feel the ghost pee, the phantom urge to go that comes back, even though I know there’s nothing left. The tingling feeling grows into a lump that sits in my stomach, heavy and kicking up at my lungs, making it hard to breathe. My hands prick with the beginnings of sweat, and when I think about stopping it, they just get clammier, colder.
Nothing in my body is listening to me.
The directions don’t offer any advice about how to wipe with a drippy stick in your hand, so I reach for the cap I left on the sink and put it on, then I put the stick—indicator-side up—back on the sink, which I guess is a cool and undisturbed enough place for the next three minutes. I check my watch, since exact timing is supposed to yield best results.
One hundred eighty seconds.
Commercials take this long, or maybe the loop from the kitchen to the soda fountain and around my section to see how the food is, if anyone needs a refill. This is about how long I wait on hold with the registrar each semester while I wait to type in the codes for courses like “Entrepreneurial Thinking” and “Financial Management for Tourism and Hospitality.” It’s shorter than the time it took to make my pros-and-cons list about going to grad school. About the same amount of time it took to make and then tear up the pros-and-cons list about getting an apartment with David.
I unravel a nice, thick handful of toilet paper and wipe myself off. Twice. I have three minutes to kill, so I might as well be thorough. I stand up, pull up my now-cold flannels, and press the cold handle to flush the toilet. Sh-fwhoosh. Spin, spin, spin. Gluggle glug glug. Hiss. The water pressure seems low, and maybe this weekend I will check that out before it starts backing up again like it was a month ago. David said he looked at it, that it was fine, but I know he only jiggled the handle, and anyway, he’s more of a big-picture, building-the-framework kind of construction guy. He’s got a big project this fall, a whole housing development to finish before the snow comes, so he’s out the door before the sun comes up, home after it’s down. On Saturday he’ll want to sleep in and then hit the paints on his new series, “Rage in Reds and Rusts” or something, so that leaves to me the details of keeping this place in working order. David has been putting together a second showing at a small gallery, and the new Applebee’s at the mall bought one of his pieces to add “local flavor” to the test-marketed clutter on the walls. He rolls his eyes at the idea of his work collecting grease and dust at a chain restaurant, but I remind him that this is good exposure and could attract more people to the out-of-the-way gallery. He doesn’t much care for marketing, and I do not mention that the restaurant sale is his biggest commercial success, something to build on rather than to scoff at. David does not want a manager.
I cinch up the silky red drawstring and make a bow.
One hundred thirty-five seconds.
I could brush my teeth. But that will contaminate the cool, dry, undisturbed place where I put the stick. Besides, it will probably be better if I don’t look at it until the three minutes are up, so I don’t get nervous or upset before there’s any real reason to be. My friends have told me that the sticks show if you’re pregnant right away—something like two or three seconds, and if it takes longer than that, you aren’t. The leaflet in the box says to give it three minutes, minimum, and no more than ten. I’m not sure who to believe: uterus-equipped women who have been pregnant or guys in lab coats with PhDs.
Standing here staring in the mirror is making me tired. Looking at the purplish smudges and the little lines in the thin skin under my eyes makes me feel even more exhausted than I already am. Without mascara, my eyes look small and faded, and the part that you notice is the half-moon of oxygen-less blood that is stuck near my eyes because my circulation is too slow to push it along to the rest of my face this early in the morning. My eyebrows need tweezing. My split ends need trimming. There’s no one to impress at an eight a.m. class, but a little time investment here might help up my tips from the mildly drunk nightcap-and-brownie-sundae crowd. I think David just sees my skin
and hair as highlight and shadow, calculating how to mix the colors it would take to get it right if I ever let him paint me.
Seventy-five seconds.
I clasp my nose with my hands prayer-style, with my index fingers pushing up under my brow bone. I close my eyes and rub them at the corners. It feels good to rub my eyes, and I push up along my eyebrows with all the fingers, smoothing out the hairs until I reach my temples, then dragging my hands down the sides of my cheeks. I open my eyes, and I am still in the mirror, with redder eyes that don’t seem any more alert or pretty, just blinkier. How much worse would this be with a baby, being up all night on top of classes and working all day?
Sixty-two seconds.
I think the light is buzzing, and it is so quiet that I can hear my watch ticking its feeble little clicks every second. I should go get something to eat, or a magazine to read, or put some slippers on—the veins in my feet are reddish-purple and my skin is cold on the tile floor. I break eye contact with my reflection and turn to the door. I turn back. I just want to look at the stick already and know for sure so I can plan the next month of my life. Even if it’s positive, I just want to know. And when I know, then I can tell David, if I need to. But to get him worked up before, maybe for no reason, would be a waste of effort: Why make him crazy? Or mad, or afraid, or whatever he’d be when he stopped slinging paint around the room and getting little multicolored speckles all over my textbooks and notes and the computer screen. This apartment is full of paint, little bits of it everywhere, drips that don’t come up because you don’t see them until they’re dry and stuck-on wherever it is they landed. We’ll never get the security deposit back.
Forty-seven seconds.
Forty-seven Mississippis to go. That doesn’t seem like much, but looking at the watch face shows three-quarters of the circle left to go for Mickey’s contortionist act. He looks very Saturday Night Fever right now, with his short, gimpy arm pointed to the floor and the longer one sassily pointing to his imaginary disco ball. He’s smiling, I can see, as the back stub of the second hand sweeps to the side and uncovers his little red mouth.
Both Sides of My Skin Page 4