The Room Lit by Roses

by Carole Maso

  5 NOVEMBER

  In the fallen leaves I see all the miscarried children.

  Heartbeat cling.

  And Chloe, what does Chloe mean? Helen thumbing through the baby name book. Too early for me to be thinking of such things. I make up a list:

  take the megavitamins

  no hot baths

  no lifting

  no caffeine

  Tiny heartbeat cling.

  I am like the cat who keeps turning and turning in circles trying to get comfortable. Trying to find comfort. The comfortable spot. I am like the cat. Asleep eighteen hours a day.

  How Helen prayed through every village, to every saint for the child.

  The grand finale in Assisi. Maybe we should name her Chiara.

  On her knees in the modest chapel of Santa Chiara. She turning and mouthing the words in the silence: Pray for the child.

  “The forty-day-old human is so small it would fit into a walnut. It weighs less than a book of paper matches.”

  Somehow, miraculously, the desire for alcohol has completely left me. And so I am not even tempted. Mercifully. And my usual desire for oblivion? The sleep of the dead that I sleep now helps that. A sleep I have never before experienced. I follow it like an addict now down into blackness.

  Another miracle is the lack of nausea. Just a very, very mild queasiness that passes. Though in the back of my mind somewhere this troubles me. I think I read somewhere once that the lack of nausea is not always such a good sign. I avoid finding out the miscarriage statistics. Over forty. I don’t think I would advise anyone to wait this long.

  I resent the distraction of having to have a job now. Helen: Don’t be a prima donna. I cry myself to sleep.

  Another fight: You should be able to write and have a job. Everyone works!. I call this the little philistine in her ear. It’s her therapist speaking.

  And I’d like to burrow deep into the ground with her and wait this out, hibernate, quietly, without any distraction—that is how mesmerizing this is. How beautiful it is—the calm, the dark. We could paste a few stars on the top if she’d like. I could tell stories of the sun.

  I have never even come close to this much happiness. What is going on?

  I love them for saying nothing, nothing will, nothing can go wrong. My grand dames, my guides: Aishah, C.D., Rikki, Bunny, extraordinary godmothers whispering not too old.

  The few I have told.

  Angela Carter was forty-five after all, Rikki offers.

  9 NOVEMBER—WEEK SEVEN

  This white room of all possibility, all that ever was and ever shall ever be, which I inhabit now. Days of grace.

  Practicing in the gloom my Czerny and Chamanade. Another lesson on Friday. A girl at the piano. Why does it come back now?

  I see it as the final blow to men—that they can’t bear children. Excluded in the end. And that nasty bit about never even being certain you have really fathered anyone.

  Easier somehow all of a sudden to understand their melancholy, their rage, their insecurity. Yes, maybe.

  Have I subverted myself after all in typical feminine fashion and at the most crucial and last moment? I almost got away.

  These thoughts from a zone of the brain far off and yet from time to time so alarmingly close.

  15 NOVEMBER

  The pressure to conform is enormous. In ordinary and not-so-ordinary ways. I have pressed back against it my whole life: the pressure to make books that look like other books, to write more legibly, to give up what is mine, and quietly.

  This child is freedom even now. Detached from its cumbersome accouterments: husband, siblings, minivan. Its blandness, its arrogant directives. All that smug heterosexual clubbiness—its pleased-as-punch self-congratulation. This child was created outside the usual constraints and enclosures, without the usual prescriptions, hierarchies, sentences leveled on her head.

  I pray, should she come to be, that she will not hate me for it.

  Drank a hot chocolate this morning before class and about an hour later while listening to final projects felt a very, very strange sensation inside—a kind of heaving or turning or sloughing away, and tears ran down my face. Luckily we sat in darkness in the Russell Lab’s black box theater… How many times in the last three months have I lost this baby?

  Frida Kahlo motions at the very end of her life for the wet nurse as she falls back at the end into infancy or death. Having returned to the women. That zone of comfort and peace where she is gluttonous in her desiring toward—what?

  Circles within circles

  swollen

  engorged

  targeted

  to hold your mouth just so—

  suckling one.

  Working on my little Frida book, or trying to. Another strange project—part biography, part autobiography, part fiction, part poetry. A dialogue of sorts between Frida and me, I suppose. Thinking all week about her desire for children. And her ambivalence. It’s getting closer, I think.

  My students comment on how otherworldly I am looking these days. And how quiet I seem.

  Votive: Child.

  Because I wanted you with all my blood, but it was not to be.

  In a 1930 drawing of herself and Rivera, she drew and then erased a baby Diego seen as if by X-ray vision inside her stomach: the infant’s head is up, his feet are down.

  Three more times she will try to have a child.

  Frida had all kinds of dolls: old fashioned ones, cheap Mexican dolls made of rags or of papier-mâché. Chinese dolls are propped on a shelf near her pillow. Beside her bed is an empty doll bed where she once kept a favored doll, and three little dolls are enclosed with Rivera’s baptism dress in a vitrine in her bedroom. One that she treasured, a boy doll that had been given to her beau Alejandro probably shortly after her accident, when she was hospitalized.

  The earth is a grave and the earth is a garden. Poor child, rest there, poor child, play there forever. The earth holds his tiny hands, his eyes, his little genitals. Rest.

  Its birth certificate filled out in elegant scroll: His mother was Frida Kahlo.

  sorrow: child

  Her journal, 1944:

  My painting carries within it the message of pain… Painting completed my life. I lost three children… Paintings substituted for all of this. I believe that work is the best thing.

  The cupped butterfly, painted black.

  The city and bay are overwhelming. What is especially fantastic is Chinatown. The Chinese are immensely pleasant and never in my life have I seen such beautiful children as the Chinese ones. Yes, they are really extraordinary. I would love to steal one so that you could see for yourself.

  The central Frida is armless

  come to me

  the useless umbilicus

  I sell everything for nothing… I do not believe in illusion… the great vacillator. Nothing has a name. I do not look at forms…drowned spiders. Lives in alcohol. Children are the days and here is where I end.

  The mute blue testimony. Dark afternoon that never ends. She sits at the end of the bed smoking, utterly alone. Beside her a grinning doll—together on a child’s bed. Misery without end.

  The dead baby, all dressed up and nowhere to go. The soles of his feet facing us—the milky eyes, the dribble of blood, Christ flagellated on his pillow—poor tiny loser, impossible, the never-to-be, poor thing. Holding a last gladiola—most funereal thing. Dressed up for Paradise.

  She watched other people dance…

  The only thing I bought here were two old-fashioned dolls, very beautiful ones. One is blonde with blue eyes, the most wonderful eyes you can imagine. She is dressed as a bride… Both are lovely, even with their heads a little bit loose. Perhaps that is what gives them so much tenderness and charm. For years I wanted to have a doll like that, because someone broke one that I had when I was a child, and I couldn’t find it again. So I am very happy having two now. I have a little bed in Mexico, which will be marvelous for the bigger one. Think of two nice Hungarian na
mes to baptize them.

  Accident: 10 Our Father’s, 10 Hail Mary’s, 3 Glory Be’s.

  The lacerated Mexican saint

  she watched other people’s children. Because it was not to be.

  Pray for us sinners.

  The useless petitions

  3 Not to Be’s

  black umbilicus

  paint:

  an umbilical chord emerges from a placenta—the large red vein. Good-bye.

  18 NOVEMBER—WEEK TEN

  Finally my first visit to the doctor. Lisa Rehrer, the one we had chosen, has been sick, and so we had to reschedule a few times. She’s nice, about my age. She wondered just how many babies I might be carrying as we got ready for the sonogram. Not funny. It seems that after forty the eggs start hurling themselves out two, three at a time sometimes—and so there is the possibility of more than one baby. No, not funny in the least. I feel I am ready for about anything—but not twins, let alone triplets. Good God! Mercifully I never took fertility drugs. That’s one hopeful thing.

  It is confirmed, one very great baby is in there! I can’t describe the feeling. To see, to hear it. No words come close. The elevator on the way down from the doctor’s office gets stuck and so all tears of joy must be postponed. Helen’s gone ahead to get the car. It is me and a man who speaks only—it’s not Spanish, so it must be Portuguese—and I am suddenly very, very panicky and claustrophobic. I am my own nest of Russian dolls in this box. These rooms within rooms making me dizzy. But it is the man who actually looks woozy. Are you sick, I ask him, pausing between my frantic attempts to reach someone on the elevator telephone. He indicates his head. Help! I feel like Lucy Ricardo.

  Days have passed without a single word written here. I have been stunned into speechlessness. For once, no words come. Saw the little being and it has a heart beat, the baby on a TV screen. Alive there. Most extraordinary sight. Swimming. Doing little somersaults. I study the picture books now obsessively.

  You fit into a goose egg now.

  Songs without words.

  You weigh only an ounce. But by the end of the third month you will be able to kick your legs, turn your feet, curl and fan your toes, bend your wrist, turn your head, squint, frown, open your mouth, pout.

  Nothing but babies everywhere I look. These babies seek me out, speak to me. Their tiny hands, the dark O of their mouths—that small intake of sweet air. Stars in their hands, sparkly eyes. The chubby feet. Everywhere I turn. I try not to see this yet—or have my heart so full. Still…

  Day after day of weeping now. This lucky, lucky life.

  Do a little fan dance for me when you can.

  I am grateful to have Gale, my assistant director. Teaching two classes and directing the program while I can hardly keep my eyes open would not be remotely possible without him. He does not know the news yet—I am waiting until after the amniocentesis—but still he instinctively comes to my rescue; he is always there by my side, helping with the next, and then the next, crisis. I realize I will be pregnant the entire school year.

  The back and forth from Providence to New York all exhausting. Trying to read student papers on the train as much as possible. I keep drifting off. Revery of the very late fall—one of my favorite seasons. A beautiful, desolate time.

  I am a good teacher because I refuse to condescend to my students, and because I listen to them and respect the work they are doing, and the terms they have set for it. I do not prejudge it. And I do not have preconceptions. In fact this is what keeps me interested in student work. I do not ask them questions to which I already know the answers. I do not want to make them over in my own image. I cannot bear the pathetic ego most writing teachers routinely assert. I only ask my students questions, and this often exasperates them, but there is no other way I can teach in good conscience. I am not a tyrant, I am not a bully, I am always kind. In an uncharacteristic moment of dismay once I told an undergraduate class that I was not going to spend more time critiquing their papers than they spent writing them. I will not be taken advantage of. I give them a lot of room in which to work. Am I too lenient? Am I too disengaged? I think not. I am not a taskmaster. Only when I sit down to write myself am I completely relentless: you can do better than this. But not with my students. If they do not become writers it is really quite all right with me. I cannot give them the need to write if they do not have it. Some of my Brown graduate students are so good that I consider it my job mainly to stay out of their way. I like teaching but am drained by the part of the brain it uses up. It is the same part required to write. It is, I assume, the same part it takes to raise a child creatively. If I had nine lives, teaching is what I would do with one of them. As it is I have only one.

  Dreamt last night I was a belly dancer. On a table at The Magic Carpet.

  In the twelfth week motion becomes specialized and graceful.

  29 NOVEMBER

  I am on my way to California. It is Helen’s birthday. For once she got to choose her own birthday presents because I just couldn’t traipse around town the way I ordinarily like to—I am just too sleepy. I didn’t even wrap them this year. She’s gotten me one of those suitcases you pull along, because she doesn’t want me lifting anything. I do not have a phone in Providence, and she insists I get a cell phone, which she gives me with the suitcase. What if there is an emergency? I smile. My Buddha spirit is beginning to wear on her nerves: there will be no emergencies, I say serenely.

  Babies in the air. Little diapered babies at 35,000 feet running down the aisles. Babies on those little collapsible changing tables. Babies in every lap. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.

  Today is Helen’s birthday. I took her to the restaurant Provence for lunch before I got on the plane.

  But my real gift to her of course: a baby in the air.

  We are flying as the finishing touches are applied. The nail beds form on the fingertips. The eyes move toward the bridge of the nose. The eyelids close over the eyes by the ninth week and temporarily seal them like a kitten’s. They will remain closed now until the sixth month. You travel in darkness for now, little one. I’m right here.

  Imagined one. Prepared-for one. Loved so thoroughly in advance.

  30 NOVEMBER, THE FRENCH HOTEL, BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA

  Flung across time zones, gluttonous for more hours, I sleep the sleep of the dead all day, all night it seems, wake only to do my readings.

  Days of rain. The Californians do not approve of rain. I’d forgotten. It’s very beautiful here. I fall back to sleep.

  Someone says the writer Kathy Acker is dead, and I push through fog toward the terrible news. I must be dreaming.

  She has closed her eyes. They will remain closed to the sixth month. The vocal cords are complete, but in the absence of air they cannot produce sound.

  That I should have been able, in this state, to protect Kathy Acker, drawn her into this bubble. That I could not do this, or any other thing—a sorrow, a reminder.

  Extravagance of the fruits and flowers here!

  The true test: to be in Berkeley and not drink even one cup of coffee. The most delicious coffee in the country. No latte, no leche, no capuccino, no mocha, not short, not tall, not dry, not wet… A strange torture.

  Attractions of every sort considerably heightened in this condition. All is intensity. Extremity. The word shudder comes to mind.

  The lushness and lusciousness of everything.

  Read at Saint Mary’s for Brenda Hillman. A delicious meal at Chez Panisse with a very fun bunch of people afterwards. Two pregnant women at our table. What a giddy, weird joy.

  E. M. Ciorin:

  Children scare me. Their eyes carry too many promises of unhappiness. Why do they want to grow up? Children, like madmen, are graced with innate genius, soon lost in the void of lucidity.

  Does he sentimentalize and therefore condescend to both children and madmen?

  My book Aureole just out in paperback. When I read out loud now without a microphone I can’t get enough b
reath in my lungs. The effect is a particularly unfortunate one, especially with this book, overheated, hothouse flower that it is.

  One can only laugh.

  The insistence of the heart, even through the whoosh of water, magnified on a little public address system in the doctor’s office. I’m beginning to gain weight now and am already enjoying the heft.

  That time—a period of several months—when every man who neared me felt that pull, that tone, that hum. The zone of fertility, the buzz of readiness, the surge of absolute ripeness. The ancient desire to replicate propels them toward me—a little bewildered, they can’t stay away. I had the pick of the lot. Last summer and fall. The demands of an attraction they willingly and sometimes unwillingly found themselves caught up in. That smell, that touch, they were irresistibly drawn to—hovering near my body. I understand it now. The mating signals activated in me. And the men wild—they don’t know why. I am not young anymore and have not had quite this kind of power over men in some time. They might have chosen younger, more promising specimens. If there had been a choice. But there is none.

  I walk in a delirium laughing and crying. My graduate students are suspicious for I have suddenly stopped drinking altogether. It hasn’t been so hard, though I did regret not being able to keep up with Harry Mathews, who was here recently for a week. An extraordinary man and one of the great joyful drinkers.

  Already I have had moments of genuine mourning for my old life. Will I ever get it back again? I feel the immensity, the gravity of this even now.