by Carole Maso
About a home movie made right before his birth, from Nabokov’s Speak Memory:
He saw a world that was practically unchanged—the same house—the same people—and then realized that he did not exist there at all and that nobody mourned his absence. He caught a glimpse of his mother waving from an upstairs window, and that unfamiliar gesture disturbed him, as if it were some mysterious farewell. But what particularly frightened him was the sight of a brand-new baby carriage standing there on the porch, with the smug, encroaching air of a coffin.
People who have vaguely despised me for having something they did not: love, talent, confidence. Now their rage, undisguised. Who do you think you are?
I rent three films at a time now from Evergreen. Have a list of really mindless ones (any Hollywood movie) for when early labor begins. Something meant to be vaguely amusing, but not too demanding, as the event begins.
1 JUNE
Ambivalence, obviously, at the end.
Yes, but can one imagine completely forgoing a major life experience? Yes. Today, yes.
Once there was almost a child with apple cheeks conceived in snow and she was called Rose. Apples and roses and snow. Angels at our feet. Mercy.
Almost a child, I had written in 1993. Angel. What did I know? Uneasiness at the end. Not to see portent in everything. Especially not in this.
Are you afraid? The question surprises me every time. I am many things, but I am not that. It has never occurred to me to be afraid. Afraid of what?
I sing her an old Kinks song all day long: So tired, tired of waiting, tired of waiting for you.
I’ve got my hot rice sack to use during labor. They’ll microwave it right up at St. Vincent’s, Michelle chirps. And afterwards for those tender breasts—bags of frozen peas!
Take out almost every night now from Home Away From Home on Bleecker Street. Carrying my little container of vodka and tomato sauce. Can’t be bothered to think of what else to eat. Find the old urge to drink beginning to return. The vodka tomato is as close as I get though.
The physicality of pregnancy—a most exhilarating thing. I am grateful, have been grateful, for all of it.
Plush, lush, luscious. Flushed with blood and beating life. Oh!
This lovely trusting little passenger.
We orbit one another. I, her—or she, me. Hard to tell anymore. This universal music. This feeling more and more each hour of being on the verge of some impending revelation.
A bizarre suspended life in the weeks just before the baby. Time hanging in abeyance. An odd concentration moves in. Also weird lapses in memory, time. Little sleep now. It’s too hard to find a good position. I use three pillows. Also walking in the city streets a bit more challenging. They’re uneven as always and my bones are all wavy now. My little collapsible ankles. My body opening up like a door, like a rose.
My life in abeyance. My life, two lives.
Rose, on the very verge.
I hear Grieg’s Cradle Song and weep.
We are two souls in one body. I am holding two souls. Moving and not moving through time and space.
2 JUNE
They are fixing the steps in front of Our Lady of Pompeii in the heat and I am in one instant back in Italy.
The Cafe Milou, new on Seventh Avenue, in one moment takes me back to France. Intense heat. And then suddenly I am in Greece. How many places have I wandered through alone? Loving that feeling. I am never to be singular again. Always double—wherever I walk in the world.
Even if I were to go somewhere without her, already it is clear, she will always be there by my side. Perhaps the reason most people have children in the first place—and the reason I almost did not.
Haunted all winter by a shadow next to my shadow as I walked down the path in the country to the car. Three-year-old Rose there at my side. I never see her; I see only her shadow next to my shadow—in winter.
3 JUNE
Feeling a bit odd, altered statey somewhat. Just different than before. Also a bit nauseous, crampy—all the classic signs?
Still trying to finish up Frida. It’s probably hopeless. Why can’t I, even now, entirely give in?
You are in the garden of an inn on the outskirts of Prague.
You feel completely happy a rose is on the table
And instead of writing your story in prose you watch
The rosebug which is sleeping in the heart of the rose.
—Apollonaire
Defiance: I have taken a certain kind of narrative as far as it will go. I can go no farther with it. I’ve done that now for good. What a relief. Just another way now to be free.
Calm beyond all reason. A day in the country. Doing a bit of gardening. Feeling as if Rose is right here with me. It’s as if she is inside and outside at the same time. I tell her about the flowers. She’s right here.
It is at the edge of a
petal that love waits.
—W. C. Williams
A great concentration and focus moves in. Not unlike the feeling when really writing. But there is no really writing anymore.
A reading from Defiance at Barnes and Noble. Defiance an unusual project for me. Enacting as it does a pain so intense and insistent that it opens up onto something else entirely in the end. Something close to radiance. Is it the accretion? How is the effect achieved? Mysterious to me still.
Weekend (if I make it)
Enter final changes to Frida.
Reread and reorder pieces.
Print out at Louis’s house.
In handwriting enter Dear Cathy pieces and see if they work at all.
Read again.
Include in Frida or no? A series of meditations in the form of letters to my friend, the painter Cathy Murphy, written as part of the Frida études.
August 1995
Dear Cathy,
A strange recurring daydream—my life in front of me in some sort of visual representation—difficult to explain—there it was before me—an abstract shape—a precious, shimmering thing—and how afraid I was to waste it—in bravado, in drama, a hundred utterly compelling and senseless affairs—which somehow made sense, and yet—
I am pulled in too many directions. Children. To worry it now seems silly. Frida with her fetus in a bottle. Her ardent desire for a child. I am not really like her—my monstrous ambivalence. Helen says we shall be lonely one day. But my fear of having to work my whole life for money. To never get close to the book I know I must write. The vague feeling of this somewhere in some distance.
Do you think of this ever?
A week of teaching in Provincetown. Roses do grow like oceans here. The students so earnest. In the fog horn at night, the births and deaths of angels. I can scarcely sleep. Frida. The way Frida comes and goes. Drawn to the swirling… Love to you, dear friend,
C.
The French waitress at Cafe Milou asking, Would you like strawberries? To bring on labor, she tells me. And also a celebration, non?.
Do you like butter? My mother smiles, passing a buttercup under my chin.
A string of beautiful cool June days. It feels like grace,
Ilene calls.
It’s June 10th, the day I always predicted the baby would come. A full moon. Helen calls all day long.
Rented Angelopoulos’s Ulysses. Haven’t seen it in quite some time. Also a documentary on Gertrude Stein. There she is playing with Basket and waving to the camera for a second.
Defiance—formally conceived as wave after wave of pain. A series of intensities. Do I, in my own way, prepare for childbirth with these meditations?
June 10th comes and goes. No baby yet. Officially due on the 15th. A letter from Amy T. suggests the 21st would be a great, joyous, planetary-aligned-type day to be born. We shall see.
The uses of a journal: to have a record of the person I was before she ever existed. In this minute the baby is still unborn, and I am still the person who has never experienced childbirth, and who has never even for one day known her yet. The person I once sou
nded like—before everything changed irrevocably and forever.
Helen and I indulging in all sorts of magic and rituals—a Peking duck last night, that lucky and happy meal—to welcome the baby. Very spicy eggplant. So where is she? I grow less and more patient. Not sure exactly what I want.
Got myself out in the heat to a few shows in Soho. Felt like a farewell of sorts. For who knew when I would see art ever again? A last glimpse—at the New Museum, Doris Salcedo, her table made of wood, cloth, and human hair—at Sperone Westwater, Wolfgang Laib’s sculptures of pollen. Robert Irwin’s spheres of light…
Roaming around Bloomingdale’s for things we think we must need. A fan. We pick it up, put it back down again, can’t decide on a thing. Very, very distracted. Turning and turning in circles again like a cat.
Ilene and I daydreaming how the baby sucks its house away after its birth. The uterus shrinking. Well worth including somewhere in The Bay of Angels—should I ever get there.
This darling child, never one day of trouble—not even one—it seems hard to believe. Maybe she is waiting for Frida to be finished before arriving.
A spate of the most beautiful days on earth.
A flush, a flood of roses. Rose blush. Helen says the garden in the country is filled with roses. Bring them to me!
Come to me.
O Rose to be.
Rose light
Only roses.
Everything’s coming up roses.
And rain. And I wait.
As if Rose were already out there in the garden with me.
I see you and I whisper to you as a three-year-old by my side: Rose.
Rose in waiting.
A storm of roses.
Will you come then a year from the day Helen prayed so fervently for you over the relics of Saint Clare? She does fast work, that Clare.
Will you come on Bloomsday?
There is a rose by my head while I sleep (out on the fire escape).
Coco and Fauve hanging around a lot now. What do they sense in their animal perfection?
Rented an early Bergman film last night. A real beauty. It took place during the war. Liv Ullman impossibly young. Finished in a crescendo of burning roses: that small, inconspicuous monologue at the end.
The feeling is one of someone who has finally reached the sea. I wake up this morning feeling great relief.
This gorgeous floating paradise.
15 JUNE, MONDAY—THE DUE DATE!
On a chance visit to Dr. Matheson, I am just feeling a little weird—no way to explain it really. He decides to check the baby on the fetal monitor. It’s morning. He comes and goes in his usual casual way—the most natural thing in the world—but when he looks at the tape he seems for the first time a little concerned. He says softly that the baby is “not responsive,” and that I need to go immediately to Saint Vincent’s for a sonogram. Count, by the way, on staying, he says.
This child who has never given me even one day of worry. I balk at the news.
A most awful man does the sonogram. Refusing to answer our questions, just staring at the screen, telling us nothing except the baby does not seem to be moving. I drink orange juice to try to get a reaction from her. I move from side to side. He does not speak but in a murmur, and when Helen begs him to repeat himself, he does not. I hate him. Have you felt the baby move in the last few days? I wrack my brains. Yes. When? Yes, I am sure. But not today.
What we learn finally through Dr. M. and Carodean, the maternity nurse, is that there was no respiration, no muscle tone, no movement (they say it flatly, matter of factly) on the sonogram. In this place of healthy babies and faith. The pregnancy must be induced, the baby possibly in trouble. I am shocked. I have not suspected a single thing wrong. Have felt only supreme well-being. Think of my little sister again, about to die on a day I was happy and thought nothing could go wrong. I am calm and hysterical at the same time. I still know she is charmed and all is all right, but the news jars and grates so severely against what I know is true that it makes me doubt everything—every instinct, every hope, every trust.
Dr. M. tries to reassure. Says we will watch for any distress. He explains that some babies simply cannot bear the stress of being born. I will be hooked up to the fetal monitor for the entire labor. I must trust him. There are few options. A C-section can be done if absolutely necessary—and if it will be better for the baby I am ready to have it done right now—but Dr. M. is reserved. We will watch. We will wait and see.
Later we will learn that she scored a four of a possible ten points on her biophysical profile and that this indicated she may not be able to withstand the trauma of labor. All of a sudden we are in the middle of this thing. I must check into the hospital and labor must be induced. I have Helen ask every person we see what the four might mean: the man who mops the floor, the man who rents the TVs, every nurse, every intern. Oh, for God’s sake, she says. She is acting casual in that way that makes me know she is very, very nervous.
no movement
no tone
no respiration
Cervadil to ripen the cervix—it is applied Monday at noon and it starts to act just before midnight. Another interval of just waiting. In the interim I put on my hospital gown—the gown Gary wore while he was dying. I visit with my parents who have come to offer some moral support (I do not tell them about the four), wait for Helen to come with all the props: CD player, fans, lollipops, three kinds of lip balm, plastic slippers for the shower. There will be no labor in the shower—I am on the monitor all the time. It prints out its news—there’s the baby’s heartbeat. Weird to be scribbling in this book right now. I cannot believe something might be really wrong. This perfect child. I cannot think it.
Cervix in Latin is neck.
This life preserver of words.
Cervadil sometimes causes labor to start.
Carodean, my nurse—she must have been named for her parents.
I can’t keep this record up anymore, though. I need now simply to concentrate.
A night of medium contractions, apparently. It hurts, but not like crazy. Helen sleeps. I let her. I watch the fetal monitor as the night progresses and the pain steadily grows. The baby seems to be doing OK, Dr. Matheson says, but “not great.” The fear and sorrow—the strangeness of all this—the pain in comparison feels small, though it grows. One line monitors her heart, the other my contractions. I will watch the contraction graphs through the whole labor. The lines are mild for a long time and then later begin to spell greater things. I see in the curves the hills of southern France. Or sometimes the rounded mountains of the Catskills—my view from a house I once loved. Still love. Time collapsed now. That is later though. This is all being told afterward now, recalled here, as I could not, did not want to write through this. I just wanted to be there. Attentive to all that was happening. Later on the graph I would see Mont St. Victoire. And then I left this world.
She gallops. In the early Germanic languages Rose meant horse. Rose Chloe: Horse, blooming. A star on her forehead. Her gal loping heart hooked up all the time to the fetal monitor. Don’t go anywhere except to the bathroom, they tell me. And where do you think you’re going? they say when I take us off for a little trot. Put your belt back on. The belt that monitors heartbeat and contractions. I promise you we will be free again.
Her tiny heart tapping, tapping.
Helen is upset I can tell but remains strong and relatively calm. Her nervousness manifests itself in the desire for ice cream at 3 A.M., which I will not let her go get, and her inability through the night to stay awake. Sleep always her means of escape. I let her sleep through some of it—sitting up in a chair in room eight on the ninth floor of Saint Vincent’s—the labor and delivery wing. Waves of pain—I ride them into day. There’s not much moving around as I must stay hooked up. None of the intricate ways of making it through labor, taking showers, sitting on medicine balls and the like, that we practiced. The hope is that the Cervadil will do the trick and I will not have to go on t
o the Pitocin, or Pit as they call it, or Pit Bull as I will come to know it. A ferocious thing. The hope is that it will not be necessary—though I’m not sure anyone really believes this but me. In the morning, sometime around six, they come looking for a vein for an IV to hydrate me—that’s sounds nice, but no vein will hold. Checking the so-called vital signs again and again.
Temperature, blood pressure. For nine months my blood pressure has maintained a cool 100 over 70. Four times now the veins collapse. Time to call for the needle man. I play piano music the whole time on my CD player. The human voice too shrill to listen to.
Finally the magic fingers of the anesthesiologist arrive to put in the water IV and I am afloat. Dr. M. arrives shortly after and announces I am two centimeters dilated and 80 percent effaced. Two centimeters is not a whole lot—we need ten to be born. I will have to have the Pitocin. The baby must come out. I am vaguely troubled by his tone, but I am protected now, filled with fluid, completely high on what is about to happen, on the edge of something clearly so amazing. Such portent, such anticipation, as I have never felt. I feel ready for anything.
At 8 A.M. the Pitocin is introduced. Before that Carodean, my great nurse who thank God is back after being away all night, tells me I should take this time to beautify a little. Wash up, brush my teeth and hair, whatever I like. I don’t like the sound of it. I remember this now from the childbirth classes This is the “collecting yourself” moment before the Pitocin begins to kick in. Time to, as they say, “regroup.” It’s going to be a bumpy ride. Somehow they are able to convey this to me without saying it straight out. Good luck. Are you ready? I am ready.