by Dawn Davies
I had been demanding of God, unreasonable. Unwilling to do my share, which was to simply believe without proof, to trust, because that’s what comprises real faith. I had wanted clear signs of an afterlife, dramatic ones, gothic ones, Old Testament ones—creaking floors and candles blowing out, burning bushes, an audible voice telling me that I would not die young, but would be the mother of nations. I wasn’t listening for a tiny voice so small that it was a feeling, a feeling that told me to shut the hell up and stop asking for stuff, a feeling that told me I was going to be fine.
I saw the accident on the news that morning. The girl who died had been my age exactly—twenty-one years old, a beloved Northeastern University student, an American Sign Language major who had dreams of opening a school for the deaf. I wrote her name down and told myself I would call her family. I eventually looked up her parents’ number, then copied it down on a scrap of paper and put it in my wallet for the next ten years. I would occasionally pick up the phone, dial the number, then hang up before anyone answered. I was afraid of myself. I was afraid of death. I was afraid I wouldn’t know what to say to them. I didn’t want to reopen the wound.
One fine summer day after a hard rain, my young daughters put on their rubber rain boots and splashed in the puddles while I sat on the porch holding my baby son in my arms. I thought about that number in my wallet, like I did on many occasions while watching my children do simple and beautiful things: wiping their mouths with their sleeves, or laughing at a joke, or poking a bug with a stick, or standing on tiptoe to reach something. I thought about the parents of the dead girl who had lost all those things, and who would never get them again, and decided I was doing them an injustice.
I dialed the number. A woman answered. I introduced myself, then told her that I had been with her daughter when she died, that she hadn’t been alone, that I had held her and had sung “Jesus Loves Me.” The woman exhaled and was silent, then she started to chuckle. I could hear laughter and music in the background. She took a breath and told me that song had been her daughter’s favorite childhood song, and the day I had chosen to call would have been her thirtieth birthday. The background noise was a celebration of her life. I didn’t know, I had said, and she told me, “God is kind of weird that way, but He gives us what we need, so don’t forget that. You keep the faith.”
GAMES I PLAY
It is a Friday night in October and, like one hundred million other women around the world at any given time (which is a fairly accurate estimation and not hyperbole), I am pregnant, the kind of pregnant where the baby is crowding your breath and it feels like you are sucking air through a snorkel, and there is no room in your thorax because a human being that is not you, yet is a little bit you, is taking up the room where your guts should be spreading out, relaxing, enjoying the weekend, the kind of pregnant where you have no idea you are about to become someone who will be filled with glee when a baby exhibits a common eructative display, the kind of person who will soon begin to call a generic, run-of-the-mill belch a “big ole burpy-durp.”
My husband and I have accepted a dinner invitation from another couple he has been friends with since college. Presumably it will be the last one we can attend alone, sans baby, before I pop, and there is much merriment made over this, though this offends me slightly, as if they are implying the baby is going to ruin my life. Truthfully, I am looking forward to dining with the baby riding shotgun in a car seat, so I can have a damn beer or a damn glass of wine once in a while, like everybody else. Right now I am eating so clean I feel like it will kill me. No soda, no artificial colors, low sugar, enough cruciferous vegetables and beans to allow me to regularly crop-dust strangers with my gas, and Dutch-oven my husband under the covers a few times per hour … all night long. My husband and the other couple, Jimmy and Deb O’Toole, are career people, up-and-coming journalists headed for the top of the heap, and I am a college dropout, full to the gills with our first fetus, having nothing in common with anyone I know. Jimmy and Deb live in Providence, Rhode Island, and we live in Boston, and we get together now and again for little dinner parties sprinkled with the kind of witty conversation that comes with a measure of social pressure, continually requiring educational assertion, sometimes collective proof, that we are smarter than ninety-five percent of the population, which leaves me out of my element, because secretly, I am not that. One of the things I will be inclined to do is nod my head when they bring up politics of any sort, which, between me and my fetus, I don’t understand and don’t care one whit about. At this time in my life, I am unable to list the three branches of government, I cannot tell you about any one of the president’s cabinet members or even any of the cabinet positions. When it comes to talking about Supreme Court justices, I cannot tell you the function of the Supreme Court, let alone name any of the justices. I am a late bloomer, one who can name all of the characters in every John Irving novel, who can give you Leo Tolstoy’s biography in detail, who can name each plot point in Clan of the Cave Bear, or tell you about cross-hatching techniques in printmaking or the development of Byzantine churches throughout Europe, or how to make cheesecake on a stick with chocolate ganache, or the many varieties and reliabilities of both domestic and foreign cars, but I cannot tell you the difference between a congressman and a senator. I just don’t care. That stuff is for grown-ups and I am a twenty-five-year-old child masquerading as a married woman with a bun in the oven. It is clear that I don’t know what I am doing and have no business harvesting a baby.
Still, our friends are nice and it is to be a nice dinner, though my performance pressure is likely to include post-event debriefing by my husband, who is the kind of fellow to revisit things I say and behaviors I exhibit after the fact, usually on the ride home from places, questioning why I said certain things, or why I had not thought to say certain things. Because he is a few years older, because he had graduated college, and possibly because he realized far too late after marrying me—“late” being the point at which you knock up your wife and can no longer extricate yourself from a bad marriage without ruining a child—that I may not be his ideal go-getter working woman partner, he often feels free to pick apart some of my flightier comments. I don’t like it but for some reason I feel I deserve it. Soon after marrying him, I grow used to being reminded of how dull I am in this way, though he does this obliquely and possibly not on purpose, and my highly tuned oversensitivity ratchets everything up a few notches and makes things worse. I live in this state as a matter of course. It does not help, in those last few months of pregnancy, that my body has shunted most of its blood supply down from my head to my giant placenta and my giant baby, which are both gorging off me like a tick, leaving me partially brain dead. So we drive to Rhode Island on a Friday night to have a little dinner party, although secretly I would prefer to stay home in bed and grow this thing so I can get it out and take a deep damn breath whenever I feel like it.
Games I play while riding on the highway: counting telephone poles to see if the number of poles per mile in Massachusetts changes when we cross into Rhode Island. Also: imagining ejecting my husband’s Smiths tape from the cassette player and flinging it out of the passenger window to be snatched up by a hawk that will unravel it and thread it into a stick nest in the skies. Also: thinking of ways we can solidify our rocky new marriage quickly, before the baby is born. Also: leaving. Having the baby on my own, because I suspect we do not have the skills necessary to make a marriage work. Going back South, buying eight acres in North Florida, and raising the child on goat milk, like Heidi, or twelve acres in North Carolina, where I would make primitive crafts for a living, carving the baby a little rocker chair out of hickory, and fashioning traditional brooms and plaques that say “Home Is Where the Heart Is,” which I would sell to tourists. And also: wondering if this baby is a boy or a girl, suspecting that it is a girl based on a dream I had in July, during my fifth month, the night my husband and I got in an epic fight and I refused to holler back at him because I thought the ba
by would hear and would get upset, so I hissed my side of the fight through my teeth. This did nothing to damper down the intoxicating cortisol and adrenaline levels that were coursing through my blood, barely filtered through the liver of a placenta before it washed the baby in it, sharing with it my elevated heart rate, my sorrow at being newly married to a man I fought with.
About thirty minutes after my husband said the words “mistake” and “marriage” and stormed out to go to work, the adrenaline I had been enjoying dipped off and I grew tired. I fell asleep propped up in bed with a book open across my belly. I dreamed of a small girl child in a smocked summer dress, bending over to smell a red flower with her hand clasped around the finger of an adult hand that wasn’t mine. I was photographing this child, whose dress dipped into the shape of a feminine, off-kilter triangle, the front nearly touching the strap of her white leather sandals, the back lifting to show a pair of lacy bloomers. The baby, who suddenly received its share of my adrenaline, kicked up at its north wall and woke me. I touched my belly and called her “daughter,” but told no one about my premonition, as I knew not what to do with it. I had a fifty percent chance of being wrong, after all.
At this point in the pregnancy, even entering the ninth month, I can go only so long without food before I vomit, so we must drive carefully, avoiding swerves and bumps and rapid accelerations. This child has caused fairly severe hyperemesis gravidarum, or what regular people call “nearly constant puking,” and I have spent most days since its implantation trying to figure out how to keep from vomiting in front of others. I carry plastic Star Market grocery bags with me in my purse so I don’t have to splash throw-up on floors. I carry flat water, or fizzy water, or water with salt and sugar in it, or crackers, or nuts, or cold noodles, depending on what I can tolerate, and expect to hurl nearly anywhere. I’ve got it down to a science, can do it neatly, silently, without mess. Once I start blowing chunks, everything else I attempt to get down to stop the vomiting cycle will usually come back up, too, so I have to be careful of the nuts, which will scrape my esophagus upon revisitation, and any red-colored liquid, which will look like blood and frighten me. If there is a wait at a restaurant and I get too hungry, I will run to the bathroom to heave before we sit down to eat, which will start a cycle that will ensure I will not be able to hold anything down for the rest of the night. I will eat what I can, then ask for a to-go container and bring home the rest, but often on the drive home, the smell of the seat leather, or the exhaust of a car idling in front of us at a red light, or a wobble of scent coming from the Styrofoam container, or even the sound of the container squeaking together where I grip it, will cause me to toss twenty-three dollars’ worth of restaurant food right back into the to-go container, on top of the food I am hoping to eat after I get home and things settle down. A few times, I go to the doctor for IVs, which will push, by gravity, fluids I have lost back into me, transforming me from a sunken-eyed, parasite-filled shell into a rounded and ripe pregnant woman again, until the next time the vomiting cycle begins.
Somewhere near the Plainville exit, I ask my husband to pull over. He does this quickly because he is used to it by now, and I hold back my dress from the wind with one hand, push my spectacles onto my nose with the other, and throw up into the New England highway grasses, thinking, while I empty myself to the toes, about the dryness of the grass and if there can be wildfires in October, if New England even has wildfires, and about the possums that might come sniffing around after dark to snack on the vomit, and I hope I am not leading an animal to death by impact by the side of the road.
The O’Tooles’ apartment is the downstairs of a typical Northeastern two-decker, complete with old, big, leaky windows, good but faded wood floors, two bedrooms, and a bathroom with 1940s tile colored seafoam green and peach, or Pepto pink and black. It is strikingly similar to our two-decker back in Boston, with a monastic wood-floored foyer, a living room with built-in half bookcases, a corner dining hutch built into the wall, and a little kitchen in the back with a gas stove and window above the sink that begged for café curtains and a house cat. The O’Tooles have decorated their apartment the same way all other up-and-coming yuppies do, with a tasteful couch and love seat, a handed-down Ethan Allen coffee table, lots of books, Irish lace curtains, modestly priced area rugs, and meaningful, middle-of-the road, placeholder art that suggests that they know what they are doing but can’t afford what they truly want just yet.
Jimmy and Deb meet us at the door, yanking back their big, deaf Dalmatian, who jumps up on my stomach, scratching my bare shins with its claws on the way down. My memory of this poor dog is of one of the most unfortunate animals I have known, the regal neck and evenly dispersed spots not disguising the way the thing shrieks at its own reflection in the night glass of the windows, or tries to bolt when it sees shiny tinfoil out of the corner of its eye. This dog cannot orient itself in its world with only vision and smell. They have hired a trainer to despasticize it, spent money on teaching it sign language, and over drinks and tasteful Van Morrison on the stereo, Jimmy and Deb report their progress with the dog, demonstrate the simple signs they have learned but the dog has not, convey to us with their voices and gestures the kind of hope we will one day see emoting from parents with impaired children, the kind of hope I will one day recognize in my own voice and gestures.
Games I play during drinks: wondering what kind of birth control the O’Tooles are practicing, wondering which of us in this room has the most startling yet vaguely possible unrealized dream. Wondering if Jimmy and Deb have sex in the shower, and which of us in this room will be the first to die. Jimmy and Deb and my husband start drinking stingers while I carefully swallow a piece of garlic bread we will be having for dinner, in the hopes that the garlic will quiet the nausea I have felt since throwing up on the highway. When it doesn’t work, I rummage, a little bit frantically, through Deb’s kitchen for something that will, while she sympathetically guides me toward saltines, which never work but which people who have never been pregnant try to tell me to eat, or a piece of lunch meat, which might work, or some cheese, which I’ve not yet tried but perhaps the milk fat in it will work. It doesn’t work. While they are each on their second stinger, I excuse myself to use the bathroom and vomit my body inside out. Up comes one slice of bologna, one slice of cheese, and a piece of garlic bread. Their toilet is impeccably clean, I note. I open up their medicine cabinet for some mouthwash, and it is also compulsively ordered, and I decide then that they are probably not the kind of people who would have sex in the shower, because it would be too spontaneous, as people with alphabetized medicine cabinets aren’t likely to wing things, though perhaps you can schedule in sex in the shower, which I suppose some do, on Saturday morning, after walking the dog, and after coffee but before brunch and the flea market.
When I come out, my husband gives me a squint, which I understand means, “Do not tell anyone that you just threw up,” and I wouldn’t dare. I am tired of the sympathy. I am tired of people asking me how I feel. I am tired of people asking me if it is a boy or a girl, or if I would prefer a boy or a girl, or how many children we want to have, or if we have a name picked out yet, or when I am due. I just want the baby out of me already so my liver and my diaphragm can go back to where they belong and I can stop chunking my groceries in public.
I sit down and notice, by Jimmy’s broad gestures, which the dog watches with anxiety, and Deb’s higher-pitched laugh, and my husband’s general loosening, that they are having a grand old time thanks to the stingers and I am, furthermore, out of the loop. How I long to drink stingers. How I long to relax my uterus with double stingers on the rocks until the weight of the baby’s head softens and stretches my cervix and labor begins.
Games I play: imagining delivering the baby on their Ethan Allen coffee table, Jimmy O’Toole catching it like Thurman Munson, taking illicit peeks at my neatly trimmed hoo-ha at the same time, because when you are nearly due, the trimming of the hoo-ha can be a daily event, like ke
eping your landscaping up weeks before the garden club contest. I imagine the dog running off to its crate with the placenta that drops onto the Ethan Allen, guarding it to the point of biting, viciously, anyone who comes near. Before we get too tipsy, Deb says, we’d better eat.
During dinner, which is some sort of roast and Irish scalloped potatoes with cream and dill, the smell of the dill leaving me hopeful for a few minutes that the pale potatoes will go down and stay at best, and at worst, will come up softly and painlessly, Jimmy and Deb grow increasingly unified and more affectionate, tipping their heads toward each other, clasping hands, reminiscing about the years they were together before moving to Providence, how they each knew the other was “the one,” while also reminding my husband of wild capers and strange shared experiences from when the three of them lived together as roommates in that rental house during college. My husband, usually measured and reserved of countenance, guffaws, shouts back at Jimmy, snorts humorous anecdotes of his own. His friendship with these two has gone much further back than his relationship with me, and this is a side of him I have not yet seen. We have been married only eleven months, and met four months before that. I know nothing of his previous life as Jimmy and Deb’s roommate. I have never seen him drunk, in fact. The truth is, we don’t really know each other. We guard the tender sides of ourselves, creating polite, false truths to sink our teeth into—both of us thinking we have one thing in the other, when really, we have something else. We are, I realize for the first time, living a lie, and I do not know how to be truthful about who I really am because I am afraid he will not like the real me. The real me is insecure and compulsive and tender, and needs humor and a gentle touch to ground me. The real me likes to dream wild dreams, talk about things that will never come true. The real me likes to drop the F-bomb and laugh at farts. The real me likes pointing a kaleidoscope at a bright window and saying, “Ah, look at this.” The real me likes to cook the same ridiculously traditional foodstuff over again, like a ritual prayer: Welsh cookies with currants, crêpes, pierogis. For some reason, I do not think my husband will like the real me, and later, when I show him the real me, I am right. He will never laugh at my jokes, and instead of holding me when I need comfort, he will judge me. He will also never think a fart is funny.