The Room Lit by Roses

by Carole Maso

  Wish I could finish up my small book on Frida Kahlo. Even though I am nearly done, it still requires keeping my eyes open and that is not really possible to do.

  The greatest risk at this point for a woman my age is miscarriage. I worry it in some part of my brain all night and all day.

  Only Helen to confide in. She says, “You are a tough old bird. Try and relax.”

  Before I knew I was pregnant, on the way to the New York Film Festival, happy as I had ever been, writing a piece in my little Bay of Angels notebook. Off to see the new Antonioni film—a ticket in the second row, where I like it best. Afterwards, part of the way home, I realized I had lost my notebook. What was most interesting was that for once I did not panic. I was not filled with the usual doom. What is this peace? I remember wondering. This unusual grace? I knew when I went back it would be there, and it was. I should have known something had radically changed in me.

  What grows in me. More than simply the child. What continues to grow.

  The depths of this emotion. The bottom continually falling out.

  Until it scarcely seems possible. I am voracious, ravenous, lustful, exhausted—everything heightened, enlarged—not to mention the breasts.

  As if being under a spell, more of a trance even, than my usual one.

  Close your eyes. The recurring refrain these days.

  Students come for meetings and I talk to them with my head on my desk. In the M.F.A. program here anything goes, and they assume it is just another one of those things. I lift my head slightly. How is your thesis going?

  It is the longest autumn I can remember. The leaves refuse to fall. They’ve turned extraordinary colors—do I see them accurately? I wonder. In this heightened season. Tenacious—refusing to drop. Use these trees as your example, little one.

  I haul huge pumpkins around with my parents at the Grieg Farm. Lifting, I’m told, is no problem. Still, why do I risk it? The desire not to turn into a neurotic invalid, I guess. Lifting huge pumpkins! I immediately regret it. Somewhere there must be still some ambivalence. This holding on and letting go at the same time.

  What I have always wanted when I think of some future world without my mother and father in it. What I always imagined might console. To have a little piece of them. To replace. To populate. A crazy, primitive notion, really. In the face of any great loss—to somehow fill up the world. To love through and beyond it, into this.

  This.

  Day thirty-three is a busy day, or so they say. The hand sections begin to show the outlines of fingers, the nose and upper jaw begin to form. The eyes are dark for the first time because pigment has just formed in the retina. The brain on this day is one-fourth larger than it was two days earlier. Baby, I’m amazed.

  I have never felt compelled to keep a journal. On occasion I have with all good intentions attempted to record the flow of my life—only after a few weeks to leave it behind. Why? Depletion, I suppose, in part. Far too many hours were spent composing fiction—every waking hour, it seemed, every sleeping hour. I couldn’t bear the thought of any more words. A journal, while an intriguing notion to me, was only that in the end, and kept very sporadically at best. Making fictive structures so much of the time, journal writing for me simply lacked a certain edge I had come to expect from composition. A journal lacked the tautness. I must say the idea of keeping an ongoing record of my life exhausted me, bored me, even appalled me a little. I could never keep my enthusiasm for the thing going. I never imagined words as a means to knowing how I felt—or to understanding something. And so there was no question of it serving any therapeutic ends, God knows. Quite the opposite, I feel suspicious of that earnest attempt at explanation—it always seems oddly reductive. I can’t make language do those things.

  But it is different with this. The perception of time, ordinarily fuzzy for me—I worked vaguely by seasons or semesters—had in an instant changed. I moved out of the blur of my life and was placed into the crucible of time. Suddenly I was counting—week four, week five—and noticing the daily changes. Meanwhile there were all sorts of little books to keep me company—what was happening exactly, and how I was feeling probably and was going to feel. I’ve never felt so—well—so narrated, so attended to, accompanied. Falling into chronology. The consolation of it. And wanting to chronicle it, hold it all, keep it somehow. How strange to feel the explicit workings of time on the psyche and on the body. The dramatic workings of time: to be inside it—intimate with it like never before. To be able to feel its accomplishments.

  This will all disappear, will fall eventually back into abstraction, or remain forever in my heart unarticulated and then, after a while, lost altogether. This book is a chalice. And my body now is a chalice—holding the most sacred, most precious… Keep this. Memorize this. Hold this time close, regardless of the outcome. I don’t want to lose this. For I have never felt this way before and will never feel this way again.

  And at once, the utter timelessness of the experience. I feel as if I am floating in some sort of blue suspension. I look out the window. Another train trip from New York to Providence. Providence to New York.

  The upper curvature of the uterus. Nesting there.

  Extreme delight these days in the body and all the body can do.

  The upper curvature of the uterus. I imagine I see that shape now wherever I turn.

  “She moved in circles and those circles moved.”

  —Theodore Roethke

  To simply record, without embellishment, without conscious intervention or formalization, as much as is possible. Free for once of fiction’s incredible demands.

  To be freed for once of the burden and joy of making artful shapes. To just write—as if, after all these years, one could.

  How to describe these feelings as they now come on—they resist description. A humbling experience—yet again—what refuses to pass into “writing.”

  The child I had written of again and again. More and more in the last few years. Let her enter these pages now unadorned.

  Without the press or need for invention. To not invent a single thing. To have this be enough. More than enough. Of course. To live and write purely, in naiveté with you. A whole other way of being on the page.

  Utterly mysterious, miraculous, and simultaneously mundane —this world.

  I’d like in a spare minute to re-read Tarkovsky’s Sculpting in Time. The hardest thing about teaching and directing some days is the lack of a private life—the ability to read whatever I like. And in a way to be who I really am.

  All that escapes the page, alas. As usual. Do your best.

  The arms as long as exclamation points(!!) have hands with fingers and thumbs. The ears take shape. They form in unison as do the hands and the feet. The legs have knees and ankles and toes. “The time schedule for the formation of the body is generally so consistent that it has been possible to set down the agenda of development for each day of the first forty-eight days of life.”

  And so it is possible to say, when asked what you have been doing—made two human feet today.

  Do not pretend, Carole, that you are not frightened.

  That a human being’s birth dooms it to death is a truth impossible to escape.

  My life now a double secret. My life a double mystery. A silence like no other. A silence magnified.

  The pure violence of nature. The godlessness of it—pure force, the drive to live—the desire to take shape—anything to be made, to stay. I feel it running riot in my body. It is part of the enormous exhaustion.

  An odd state. Presence and absence. Between sleep and waking. Speech and speechlessness. The God and the not God. The celebration of his absence. The inkling of his presence.

  I feel astounded today by my own beauty, which is not an ordinary beauty but something else. Astounded in the end by my own resourcefulness.

  I’ve got to say I’m really quite pleased with myself. I am no longer someone I entirely recognize. A kind of wayward halo—least likely to become an ange
l or a chalice—and yet…

  To be myself and yet to be so much greater than myself.

  Last summer after our trip to Italy, a few days back home, and there was a dead rabbit on the garden path. I remember it precisely. Back in the old days wasn’t it when the rabbit died that one was pregnant? The so-called rabbit test. I took it as a sign. Immediately called Helen at work. Its dead bunny fur blowing in the wind. The next day it was completely gone, disappeared, eaten by animals or birds.

  It’s a sign, I said. I swear to you. It won’t be long now, I tell her.

  Carole, you are crazy.

  2 NOVEMBER, ALL SOULS DAY

  Pray the baby holds.

  Stay. Be mine.

  MONDAY, 3 NOVEMBER—EIGHT WEEKS

  A drop of blood. Not even a drop of blood but a pinkish color on the toilet paper. This happening during the break in the graduate workshop. I considered canceling the rest of class so I could sit at home and worry in peace but decided LaDawn and Mary-Kim, two of my students who are mothers, will protect me.

  Read brand-new work from The Bay of Angels to a very nice group of psychoanalysts last night. A long question-and-answer session afterward. Felt the enormity of the book. I need uninterrupted time. I need more than all the time in the world in order to pull it off. A pinkish stain on the tissue.

  I have waited until the last moment to conceive a child. Filled with ambivalence. What about the book? How badly I need to write this one. Different than the others—though of course there was urgency with each project. Do I let these feelings in now as protection against the drop of blood? Should things not work out.

  To hold the two simultaneously. To not deny either. Writing has taught me as much. An endeavor of utter discipline and utter playfulness. Rigor and recklessness. To control and to relinquish control.

  Want. Dread. Resignation. Extraordinary hope.

  I worry about the book I have waited so long to write, prepared my whole life to write. Have I subverted myself? And does this bring on the pinkish stain? Ten years of note-taking. My first extended break from teaching in seven years coming up next year. What have I done?

  How to describe the blur of being pregnant? The frame holds a moment longer than it should, and I am left behind a fraction of a beat, always a fraction of a beat. But it accumulates—accretion of the beats—lagging slightly behind—until suddenly I am out of the loop, and I can’t imagine the way back—the way of catching up anymore.

  For years I believed I would have a child. And then for years I believed I would not.

  And now this. I am close. Miracle, Aishah says. Gift from God. I know when she says it, in that voice of hers, that she is right.

  Aishah says it is a miracle and also the most natural thing in the world. I tell her I live in dread of miscarriage. Don’t act like such a white person, she says. Relax.

  Why does it surprise me so? I have been writing her for years now. Conjuring her. Loving her. This little one.

  This horizon of child.

  Soon the skeleton, still cartilage, will be replaced by bone. I have been very busy today making bones, I say when Helen calls.

  Fifteen

  How you kept checking your panties, leaving Algebra II every twenty minutes or so, hoping, hoping, looking for a trace of blood, one spot, a pinkish tint. You had, you were sure, detected the hint of a menstrual cramp, certainly you had, there was no mistaking—and you were elated. You pressed your belly in, you prayed. You walked home in such a way as to pass the maximum number of red street signs, so as to suggest something to your body. You sang every song in order on the Rolling Stones’ Let It Bleed album. You played it over and over. You bargained shamelessly. Promised you would change everything about your life if only, if only—this once. You jogged in place. Lifted weights during fencing practice, and hit the red heart on your opponent’s jacket with great accuracy. You were all focus, all will. Another chance. At home you kept closing closet drawers—hangers frightened you, what in a few days you might be capable of. You took scalding hot baths, said to bring on menstruation—you could no longer bear the suspense. Never in your young life had you felt such dread. The next day in Home Ec while making the improbable Welsh rarebit you felt a twinge—you were sure. And you were getting that headachy feeling you always got. But nothing more. It was winter and you thought if you saw a red bird eating a berry in a tree—you thought. Spicy foods, standing on your head, praying to the Virgin, shoveling snow…

  Forty

  You check your panties every half hour or so. You are not really late yet, but you are almost late, meaning you are right on time. You are almost always early and so in your mind you think: I am already quite late. And your excitement rises. You discount the stress you’ve been under lately and its role on the body’s course. You reason, when in the last, oh, say twenty years have you not been under great stress? Good point. You count and recount the days on the calendar. You’ve got absolutely no menstrual cramps of any kind, and that in itself is a kind of miracle. By now you are usually doubled over in pain. Your breasts, which you check, stripping to the waist even during breaks in your writing workshop, seem to be swelling, my God, in fact they have never been so engorged—the first sign, is it not, of something nesting inside you? When did this desire for a child sharpen? You’re not really sure it has. But it is not so much about the child maybe—it’s simply the challenge now, the wanting to succeed at this thing—it’s odd, you’re the first to admit. You try to eliminate any ambivalence from your mind, knowing full well that this could throw off the whole project. You convince yourself you are nauseous and dizzy, and you’re sure. But it passes. It passes so quickly that you can’t be sure now you haven’t invented it. You are disheartened. You pray, bargain, beg, if only this, you would become a different person. Motherly, in fact. Maternal. And at this moment you believe yourself—a good sign. You would, you think, do anything. You’ve got a desire for chocolate, which is an unusual desire for you. You check your panties in between meetings with students. You pray there is no stain, no blood. When the red dog passes you avert your eyes. You walk in such a way as to avoid the red signs. You decide to walk all the way home from Columbia University—a long walk—and on the way back you stop in at any number of houses of worship, as they are called—all faiths. You kneel at the holiest place in each. You feel like a pulsing, open secret. You are full of grace. When you arrive downtown and walk into your apartment the room is lit by roses.

  How many times have I kissed the feet of the Virgin?

  Back on that plane where, over the ocean, the stranger appeared in the night. Handing me a little note.

  The silly things people say to one another: You are exactly my type. Or, I changed my seat to be near you. Don’t move. Stay just like that. So I might memorize this moment.

  Once many years ago, I met a Hungarian girl of about sixteen on a plane flying back from I cannot remember where, and I thought to myself, she is my daughter. It was the strangest sensation. I remember her exactly.

  Somewhere between darkness and light. The moon on the wing. High up, close to heaven.

  “An experienced seductress.”

  The press of water in the dark. A delectable darkness. Where the ocean opens up into a kind of infinity. And the sky.

  An ocean in the window. I recall the vastness. He took my hand.

  “Vintage Carole Maso,” Helen says, after the shock wears off.

  I carry the lines of her palms and the lines of her feet—unique to her, hers alone, in my body.

  On day forty-four, twenty milk teeth are embedded in the gum ridges

  I return to Blistein House, where the Creative Writing Program resides. In the past two years five baby girls have been born here. After the initial shock Helen, who has always risen to every occasion, rises again. Helen, who has wanted this in many ways more than I have. In that kind of direct way of wanting.

  We’ll be a family: a baby, two cats.

  We’ll make it up as we go along. As we alw
ays have, I think to myself.

  Deeply suspicious of convention as I have always been. Of what most people will take for granted.

  In the air I told him I was writing a book about a professor who murders her students and he thinks I am a trashy novelist and I like the idea of that a great deal—free of the burden of seriousness.

  I have written for the past few years again and again of children and sometimes it seems of this very child. The way the writing has worked as charm. Calling forth the child, inventing it. The word made flesh. In the perfection of the love and the faith—the writer’s faith, strange talisman, protection, guide. This amazing, unlikely life of mine.

  Heartbeat cling.

  Now it begins: pain au chocolat! I cry out to Helen in the next room.

  She sends pears to me in Providence. Always our lucky, our most precious fruit. They always feel like a celebration to me. A gift of pears arrives. Everything will be all right.