“My mom has to be here anyway until this is all over.”
He sighed. “Honey, I’m really tired.”
“I’ve done prayers alone four nights now,” she said, feeling the frustration well suddenly.
“Honey,” he said, “I’m really, really tired,” his voice drifting some, and sure enough, there was the sudden small shudder of his limbs as he fell into sleep. She got up, walked around. She took her belly in her hands, held it like a bowl. She shook it, to make the baby wake, but even he slept, and she went downstairs and sat in the living room, on the fraying couch. She put her feet out and reached for the small kiddie blanket on the floor, and finally she slept, waking to the boys prodding at her face.
“Go pour cereal,” she said.
Jimmy walked in, dressed already. “Did you have to?” he said. He took his cap off, put it back on, nestled it onto his head. The sight of him, his physical self, always surprised her—how did he still look so young? Here she was with the swing of fat on her arms and her thighs getting swollen, it was all so typical and all the more sad for being typical. It was his greatest kindness, never saying his disappointment aloud.
Pull it together, she said to herself, and she sat up, and for the rest of the week she did keep it together, which she achieved largely by doing very little. She ordered pizzas they couldn’t afford and watched the boys break the sprayer on the hose for the third time, and pretended not to see when they peed in the neighbor’s koi pond. She called her sisters, bored, but no one picked up until Julia. In the background Brita could hear the sounds of a restaurant.
“We’re out to lunch,” Julia said.
“Hi, Brita!” Tiina called from the background.
“Feeling pretty big?” Julia asked.
“Yeah,” Brita said, but she suddenly didn’t feel like talking about it.
On Saturday finally she got ready to go to Dr. Schwartz’s house, and she drove the van, its bumper hanging like a fat lip. She had planned to park on the street, but when she found Dr. Schwartz’s house she realized there was nowhere to hide—his house occupied the top of a man-made hill that loomed over the street and seemed to edge over even the lake. It was a new construction but made to look older, with a columned porch and a cobblestone path. Standing on the porch she could make out the hang of saucepans over the kitchen island, and even the spray of a backyard fountain. She pushed the doorbell, and after a long while a very thin girl with a serious face came down the stairs. She looked like she hadn’t washed her hair, and her eyes were rimmed with thick but neat eyeliner. She seemed somehow older than thirteen, so steadfastly did she ignore Brita’s belly.
Dr. Schwartz appeared, all warmth, doing the introductions, and Brita couldn’t stare at the house like she wanted to. She wanted to turn her head up to look at the spines of a chandelier in the two-story foyer, and she wanted to touch the stalks of some exotic grass that rose from a glazed pot. Instead she removed her sandals and padded after him, the tiles strangely dry under her bare feet.
In the library, Dr. Schwartz pulled a black sheet off the top of the piano, folding it. The piano was a Steinway grand, in full glisten, its legs unnicked, its belly free of fingerprints. “What a beautiful piano you have,” she couldn’t help saying.
“Please,” Dr. Schwartz said, opening the keyboard. Jenna fiddled with her phone.
Brita sat down on the bench. She wanted only to sit for hours and play, to run through every piece she had ever known, but instead she tried out a few opening chords, a modest adagio.
“Really nice,” Dr. Schwartz said, shaking his head. “What is that?”
“Beethoven,” she answered. She marveled at someone who owned a piano like this but didn’t know a thing like that. It was easy to forget that people who owned nice things didn’t necessarily do anything with them. It made her sad to think of it, the song as old as it was in her, going back to when her father used to play late at night on the old piano, the one with the missing hammers, and upstairs the notes would sound steadily into their sleep.
“Can you play anything at all?” Brita asked Jenna, when Dr. Schwartz had left them alone.
Jenna sat on her hands. “No,” she said.
“Well, do you play anything in school, did they teach you recorder, keyboard—”
“Listen,” Jenna said, “it’s okay, we don’t have to do this.” She gave a wry smile. “It’s been a year since my mom, well, she left him, whatever—anyway, he’s trying to be nice, so I’m trying to be nice about him being nice.”
“Sure,” Brita said. “Okay.”
Brita played patient, tried to teach Jenna a basic scale, but Jenna wanted to learn songs her friends recognized, songs Brita didn’t know, and she didn’t care to keep her wrists flat and her fingers curved because, she shrugged, she could hit the notes anyway.
I already have so much character, she’d wanted to say, and she felt that was doubly true now. She wanted to be vain, she wanted a nice van, she wanted to just have life be easy, to have a big and beautiful grand that announced you weren’t struggling, to have something that did no one any necessary good.
When the half hour had passed, Brita felt more nervous than when she’d arrived. She tried to slip through the kitchen with a wave.
“Well?” he said brightly. “So great to hear you playing.”
“Sorry, Dad,” Jenna said. “I don’t think it’s for me.”
“Of course it is.”
“Dad, be chill,” Jenna said.
“What do I owe you?” he asked, turning to Brita.
“Oh,” she said, “nothing, nothing, please,” and she walked outside to the van, praying he would not come and wave good-bye from the porch and see her crawl into the van, but of course he did, of course he watched her pull herself up by the wheel.
“You be careful now,” he called from the porch. He seemed apologetic, even from the distance. She was closing the door when a pop can fell out onto his driveway. She debated getting out, crouching down to get it, but instead she left it, knowing he was watching her drive away. The character-building van, they had called it when she was little—it was that mortifying to drive, even then—and now, somehow, it was still running, and theirs now, a gift, if you could call it that, from her parents. I already have so much character, she’d wanted to say, and she felt that was doubly true now. She wanted to be vain, she wanted a nice van, she wanted to just have life be easy, to have a big and beautiful grand that announced you weren’t struggling, to have something that did no one any tangible or necessary good.
Driving, Brita stared out at the homes along the lake, watching the mansions become homes, the homes become ranch houses, until she reached the section of town that started near the skiing range, which everyone knew was really a landfill. When she came into the house she was hit by the impoverished furniture. She stood in the middle of the floor and gave the living room her most critical look, accounting for each item: the black couch she’d sewn new covers for, covers that she had to redye twice a year, covers that she stapled shut before company came over; the rug she had convinced Jimmy to buy and which he regretted aloud once a week; the plywood floor she’d painted matte gold. On the whole the impression was of a neat, minimalist Scandinavian home, but to her everything smacked of resale, things she’d tried to refurbish but that were newly falling apart again, that would always be falling apart again.
“How was it?” Jimmy called from the kitchen. He was making something to eat; she could smell butter.
In the backyard the boys were naked. Clearly the neighbor was going to complain again. “Jimmy, the boys,” she said. “Poijat!” she yelled from the back door. “Boys!” Their little white penises dangled about the yard as they ran. She sat on a chair and still she did not cry.
* * *
A check for fifty dollars came in the mail from Dr. Schwartz. “Just cash it,” Jimmy said.
“It was a trial lesson,” she said, “and I feel like—I feel like it’s a consolation prize,” she s
aid. She kept seeing the pop can roll into his yard.
“What’s that your mom is always saying?” Jimmy said. “‘Your own pride stinks.’”
“Well,” she said, “pride is something to have.”
“Can’t afford it,” he said, and he took the check and put it in his wallet. She hated that, sharing a checking account, that he could sign checks for her.
The rest of the day seemed to slip by—she went to the hospital. The needle went into her abdomen, into her uterus. She watched the fluid enter the syringe and she felt like her brain or her heart was being emptied of something. “I guess you’ve done this before,” the tech said.
“You have no idea,” Brita said. She went home. The boys begged for money to walk to the gas station, and she gave it to them. It was early the next morning when Dr. Schwartz called.
“Lungs look okay.” He sounded like he hadn’t slept. “We’re moving it early.”
“Okay,” she said. “Are you sure?”
“Brita,” he said, “I live in terror your uterus will just rupture on its own. To be frank.”
Her mother came over. Jimmy called people at work, trying to find someone to cover for him, trying not to sound annoyed. She said good-bye to the boys. They were bored and wanted something to do. She told them only boring people were bored.
“I don’t like this,” she said in the van. She bit her lip and looked out the window. She remembered about the check, about the shame of cashing the check. There were too many shames.
“Honey,” he said, “it’s gonna be okay. Hey,” he said, “don’t look that way. Hey, what can I do for you? What do you want?”
“Fifty dollars. AC. A diamond ring.”
“Okay,” he said. “First thing. Soon as we get this done with.”
“We,” she said, but she kept her voice light.
In the hospital room Brita sat and waited alone. Jimmy was in the cafeteria, grabbing a bite to eat. “Before the fun starts up,” he’d said. Dr. Schwartz came in, twice, but he only said that he had extra nurses to help, and that she should sit back and relax. It’s not an airplane ride, she wanted to say, but she supposed that was what people said when they knew they held someone’s life in their hands. She didn’t like this, the feeling of helplessness. She liked to bring the van in when it broke down and make endless rounds of oatmeal baths when the boys got chicken pox, but this—there was only time to be passed. She could only let this thing happen, the C-section, the neat, circumscribed phrase that suggested nothing happening at all.
More people came in, all in scrubs, all hovering near her without speaking to her—someone put the cover on her hair, lowered her bed so she began to fall flat, and her legs were lifted, readjusted, then a cold gel on her belly, spread quickly and thickly.
Around her she could feel the room grow full with people. Nurses with weekend plans lorded them over those with more shifts. To her right she heard Dr. Schwartz talking to someone, no, to Jimmy, and she noticed that an actual clump of dirt had fallen from Jimmy’s boots. He was dressed in his jeans and a neon-green T-shirt. Soon he was in the starchy green too, masked even, but his same boots still said car-pen-ter, car-pen-ter as he walked, his callused hands on her hair, his permanent citrus scent swallowing the smell of sterility.
“Remember when I asked you to marry me,” he said. He was trying to be cute.
“I’m just going to lie here and rest,” she said. She closed her eyes to Jimmy, to the sea green of nurses about her.
“Okay,” he said. She heard the scraping of a chair as he pulled closer to the bed. He took her hand in his but held it as if she were a child, fingers not threaded but palms clasped. She pretended to sleep, but of course she did remember when he asked her to marry him. They’d been shopping at the mall. He’d been eating his lunch at the food court—tacos—and suddenly he couldn’t feel his left side, couldn’t chew, couldn’t smile. The doctors at the hospital thought it was something in his brain, a stroke. He’d looked so boyish, like he needed her. Marry me, he’d said, in his hospital gown. Later they found out it was a hole in his heart; they’d sewn it up in a minute.
She turned her cheek to the side, away from Jimmy. She did not let herself cry. What should she dream about. She realized she had run out of fantasies—out of husbands to imagine, homes to build, pianos—there was nothing, only life itself, only long and hard and always more of it, always more. She forced herself to open her eyes and she studied the medical equipment, its complications—she liked complicated things, complicated machines—and craning her neck she saw the end of a cart, bags of blood hanging like deflated lungs, collapsed balloons, and their readiness paralyzed her.
Suddenly it was very quiet but for the beeping and the clatter of tools on the tray. She felt a pinching in her chest. They were doing things to her now, she knew—she remembered this, the feeling of being made of many numbed parts.
“Hold this,” Dr. Schwartz kept saying. Other people talked, but she couldn’t distinguish their individual sounds, like listening to a foreign language and not knowing where words began and ended.
Again and again she heard the sound of tools against a tray, metal to metal, the hush of people listening and watching. She didn’t want to look at the ceiling, or at Jimmy. A nurse came to peek at her over the curtain, and she warded her off with a smile.
“Pressure, pressure,” Dr. Schwartz kept saying, his voice tight. The suction’s hiss. “Tuck your hand under,” Dr. Schwartz said.
She turned to watch Jimmy, to study his handsomeness, at its best in profile, his face sturdy like fresh cedar, a catalog face. Jimmy had stood up and was leaning over the curtain. “Is he out yet?” she asked. Jimmy kept watching, did not turn back to her. “I said, Is he out yet?” she repeated and she heard three or four people talk on top of one another, voices suddenly high, and someone said, “We’ve got a hemorrhage here,” in that absurd medical calm, and then Dr. Schwartz, “Get the husband out of here.” Brita thought she would throw up, hearing that she would be alone.
Jimmy said that he would stay with her. “I’m staying here,” he said, and she had a brief moment of pride, gratefulness for his masculinity, for her provider and protector, but Jimmy was urged out of the room, and she wanted to call out something to him, she had a phrase in her mind, I love you, maybe. She felt heady, she felt— At the door Jimmy was red-faced to a nurse, and the cart of balloons was gone. Still the beeping carried on, the room wearing thin now, and she could make out no particular person. The image came to her of her abdomen as prey, ants to jelly on the counter, jelly on the knife, and she thought about Abraham and Isaac, about Abraham tying Isaac to the table, and she wondered how long it took him, and did he tie Isaac carefully. She thought she would try to get up, but she couldn’t, she was bound, or her muscles were, and she said, or thought she said, I don’t want to die, as if to ask God Himself to hold the scalpel. She noticed there was a new beep, an octave higher, doubled but not lined with the old, a syncopated shrill drumming, and she forced her chin to her chest, and she saw, caught up in the cotton, blood, her blood, steeping up from the bottom of the curtain.
* * *
For four days and three nights Brita drifted through the coma, waking on the fourth night in a bed of morphine, into a wavering world, with the sensation of an alarm missed, an accidental nakedness, nightmares she could not recall but whose presence felt permanently tattooed in her unconsciousness; even through the happiness and through the tears of others, of strangers, nurses, she felt a heaviness, like an unclean conscience—sometimes she would try to smile, but she could not. For instance, the nurses had come to her room with paper party hats that they strapped to their heads and hers, and a cake, and they all stood around her and clapped, she who should not have lived, and Jimmy was there, too, Jimmy happiest of all, if happiest was the word, and even then, even with Lars in her lap (she could not nurse him—the trauma had dried her milk) she couldn’t manage the faintest smile.
“I read to you,” Jimmy s
aid. “Your favorite psalm,” he said. “Did you hear me?” She tried to imagine this, Jimmy reading to her, For they that carried us away captive required of us a song, for they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion.
“How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land,” she said.
“Yeah,” he said.
“No,” she said, “I didn’t hear you.”
He handed her a picture the hospital had taken of Lars. “I showed this to you,” he said. “Could you see it?”
“No,” she said.
Her mother and father came to see her. Other church mothers came to see her. Her sisters came to see her, Leena and Paula and Anni and Uppu. Tiina and Julia and Simon and Nels called. Her phone would not stop ringing. Everyone had the same things to say, everyone was full of the same gratitude she did not have, and their gratitude rankled her. Four times Dr. Schwartz came to see her and each time she only listened to him talk; she wouldn’t, couldn’t talk back. He chatted faster than before, more nervously—he gave uplifting predictions of her recovery, he introduced her to groups of interns and nurses as the “miracle mother,” always shaking his head. Brita couldn’t stand that he seemed sincere about his wonder, that the birth and the coma had to be a big deal; she only wanted to fast-forward to the moment where everything was casual again, a moment when she didn’t have to think each minute about the fact that she had almost died—it was all so humiliating in retrospect, the shame stuck to her as she wheeled her IV into the bathroom, as the boys clambered on her bed, pushing the buttons, making it rise and fall.
I almost left them without a mother, she thought, looking at them, but instead of feeling more tenderly for them she could only despise herself. She felt insane. Or, rather, she felt as if she must have been insane before and had woken from the coma with a new brain, one that could think things through, one that gaped at the woman who had let herself be pregnant again, who hadn’t had the nerve to sneak the birth control pills Dr. Schwartz always offered. When she fed Lars his bottles she did not want to think the worst question of them all, but the question was all she could think—was he worth it?—and each time she thought it, she hated herself a little more for thinking it.
We Sinners Page 13