Hillbilly Gothic

by Adrienne Martini

  The wedding was held on the grounds of a historic mansion in the heart of the city. Most of the midsummer mugginess had left for the day and, although it was warm, it wasn’t oppressive. It was the kind of day that makes you fall a little bit in love with Knoxville, with its clear skies and blooming flowers and well-dressed company—almost like a commercial for a fabric softener. Women with carefully arranged hair wore strapless floral dresses from Talbots or Dillards; their men were in light-colored suits or chinos and dress shirts. A ragtag clump of the artistically attired and coiffed, which was pretty much all of my coworkers and friends, gathered on one side to gossip and observe.

  We were outside, in white chairs. There were white tents. Everyone told me I looked just great for having just had a baby. I knew the truth, of course, but the lies were well intentioned and appreciated.

  “How was it?” asked J, a woman about the same age as me who I suspected was considering taking the plunge.

  “Long,” I said, “but fine.” I smiled. I couldn’t tell her the truth, about the pain and the blood. It’s like getting the best Christmas gift ever, but Santa decided to kick the crap out of you before you unwrapped it. No one wants to know the truth.

  The ceremony started and I left. Not physically, of course; that would have been rude. My damp rear stayed there in my folding chair, wedged between two people who used to know me before I gave birth. But the rest of me checked out. It wasn’t like when I’d stop paying attention in class or that otherworldly feeling right before falling asleep. I would like to say that it was like a movie, where I hovered about the proceedings in soft focus and a long-flowing gown but my life isn’t that poetic. Really, it was as if some giant hand turned down the volume. Everything—from sound to color to temperature—flattened into comfortable, harmless blobs, which moved around in pretty and inscrutable ways.

  Then the ceremony ended. The world refocused when I noticed those around me standing up. There was chitchat. One guest, whose girlfriend is a midwife, told me the story of a baby she delivered who was born in its amniotic sac. Someone related the tale of how Diane is faring with her newborn, who was the same age as mine. She’d had to quit breastfeeding because she had ruptured sucking blisters on her nipples and the baby had gotten a belly full of blood. The gossipers are worried about her, myself included, because I am a hypocrite. Diane just seemed so manic, so over the top with glee about everything. Diane never seemed to complain about anything that new moms complain about. And there are rumors that she’s already lost all of her baby weight, which can’t be healthy. I can feel the judgments being weighed.

  Talking to other adults is exhausting. Finding words—any words, much less those that made sense—is brutal. Whole pages were missing from my mental dictionary and my fingers would stumble through the book trying to piece together sentences without a full component of needed parts.

  It is hard not to grab people I know by the shoulders and scream at them to help me. But my cheap dramatics would have detracted from my boss and his new wife’s special day. And I’d had my special day, hadn’t I, where I got to experience the joy and wonder of childbirth? Asking for another felt greedy.

  Exhausted, I walk back to my car, where I catch some of my coworkers drinking bourbon and smoking home-grown dope on the tailgate of a pickup truck. They look like tropical birds, all bright colors and movement, and glimpses of giggling, happy (if chemically enhanced) life bring on more tears. I can’t remember what it was like to feel that light.

  I don’t want to go home and deal with the baby, who is nothing but nine pounds of need. But I don’t want to stay. It was too happy, too shrill, too real. I don’t fit anymore. And my arm is tired from holding up my damn mask, the one that makes it look like I am okay.

  The above anecdote helps explain that I don’t remember a lot of what happened during the seventy-two hours I was allowed to stay in the hospital after labor. Mostly I stared off into space, I think, while trying to wrap my mind around all that had happened, a condition that would continue to haunt me for months. Swaddled like a burrito in a portable isolet, the baby came and went, wheeled about by nurses. The baby stared off into space most of the time, too, and I imagine she was also trying to wrap her mind around what had just happened.

  There are clear spots. After my OB had done the requisite stitching of my nether regions—I found it disturbing that she wouldn’t tell me how many stitches she put in my tender flesh—the baby came back from having her first X-ray, my violent shivers wound down, and the room slowly cleared out. The nurse who had stuck with me through the whole endless process changed my sheets and replaced the thick absorbent pads under my bottom. An orderly pushed around a mop, then left. The doula showed me the basics of nursing and we roused the baby enough to waggle my nipple at her. She looked at us like we were absolute loons and promptly dropped back to sleep in my arms. My God, she was cute. My husband beamed at us or, perhaps, at my bared breast.

  The baby didn’t have a name yet. Two had topped our list of potentials and we were divided over which one it would be. My secret plan had been to force the Hub into my favorite after the baby arrived, when I could play the guilt card. But once I saw her, I knew that his favorite—the name that we had stumbled upon one night while driving home from a Christmas party—was the right one. “Madeline?” he asked. It was our interpretation of my paternal great-grandmother’s name, the matriarch Mama Lane. Now it would also be my daughter’s name. It’s a good one, I think, and suits her well.

  Once that was resolved and all of the paperwork filled in, it was as if one of the nurses had slipped me a mickey. Even if Johnny Depp had stumbled into the room wearing nothing but his tattoos and a smile, I couldn’t have stayed awake.

  Ten minutes later my eyes popped open, responding to the racket my belly was sending out. My mom swooped in to examine her granddaughter and, I suppose, daughter. “What took so long?” she asked. I couldn’t tell her. Clever, new-mother mental sprites had already started to work their magic, blotting out the memory of the last twenty-four hours with a giddy rush of adrenaline. I could have scaled the outside of the maternity ward, if only my legs were working again after so many hours of painkillers. My skin seemed to hum, like sparks of static would zap the next person who touched me. I was alive—so alive my teeth were grinding—and had the most wonderful baby anyone has ever had ever.

  With the manic glee came brutal hunger. My mom set out for the cafeteria. A nurse promised to scare up a dinner tray. Scott started to make the requisite calls while I gnawed on a Luna bar, which normally calls to mind chewy tree bark but, at that moment, tasted like an exotically spiced nugget of pure joy. I wanted more. More! Slices of rare beef nestled next to mashed potatoes, blanketed by a rich brown gravy. A bowl of chili, with heaps of Cheddar cheese and sour cream. A fat, juicy cheese-burger with fat slices of onion and crisp lettuce, gently caressed by beer-battered onion rings. Speaking of—I wanted a beer, an indulgence I’d not known for the last nine months. I would go fetch it myself, once I could figure out how to stand up without the disturbing sensation of my internal organs tumbling down to my toes.

  My mom returned with a Styrofoam container of Jell-O.

  Here’s the thing—as much as I harp on my mother’s shortcomings, this isn’t one of them. Since I had called out to her to just “bring back anything,” I can’t bitch too much, which doesn’t stop me most of the time. Her heart was in the right place. Jell-O was her standard panacea for whatever might ail you. Some of my fondest memories are staying home sick from school, wrapped up in an afghan on the sofa while watching daytime TV and slurping cherry Jell-O off a teaspoon. But, right now, I needed more.

  I wolfed down the Jell-O and started pondering walking down to the cafeteria my own damn self when a plate full of fried chicken arrived, courtesy of the nursing staff. Without qualifications, it is the best fried chicken I have ever eaten. Note that I didn’t claim it was merely the best hospital food I have eaten. This particular dish tops my list of
the all-time most amazingly satisfying meals I have ever had.

  After ogling the new baby a bit longer, Mom left. The three of us were alone together, for the first time.

  “Well done, you,” Scott said as he kissed me and sat on my bed. The baby was next to us. We held hands and gazed at her, while a violent summer thunderstorm crashed outside. Water poured down the windows, as if we were in our car and going through the car wash. Next would come the hot wax.

  Actually, next was a blackout. It was early evening—still enough light to see by but still kinda dark. When the lights went out, so did the background noises of ticks and beeps and voices, the ubiquitous maternity ward mood music. We just continued to sit there, awestruck by almost nine pounds of baby in the hushed, dark room. She slept. We watched. I couldn’t stop marveling at her hands, the two tiny fists clenched under her chin. They were mind-blowing. My body knew how to make perfect little hands, complete with tiny fingernails and adorable thumbs. I had no idea I could work such magic. It was all I could do to not unwrap her feet, with their caper-sized toes, which begged to be nibbled on. I contented myself with reaching over to brush my fingers across the top of her head, tickling the brown fuzz that coated her big, round melon of a skull. Her left cheek was marred with a bright red, U-shaped bruise, where the forceps had been clamped. Even the bruise was beautiful. I had been warned that newborns are not the most attractive of critters with their pointy heads and chickenlike scrawniness. But Madeline was more magnetic than the North Pole. In this silent twilight, time passed.

  More haziness ensues. Eventually, I drift off to sleep. The baby is taken to the Maternity Ward’s holding pen. While it is tempting to keep her with us all night, good sense prevails. If she were in the room, I’d never sleep, rousing at every single gurgle, convinced she was about to perish. The drugs are wearing off, finally, and every piece of anatomy south of my collarbones is starting to realize that it has been part of a bloody uprising. There are protests. The peasants are hollering recriminations and waving torches. Sleep is the only thing that will quell the coming revolution.

  During the night’s wee hours, a nurse wheels in the baby. The mewling emerging from her box is grating.

  “I don’t want to wake you but she’s starving,” the nurse says.

  I rouse myself and pluck out a breast, careful to make sure it’s not the same one that was last offered. The La Leche League’s handbook has been my bedtime reading for the last four weeks and I am schooled on how one does this lactating thing. Milk will flow from my body like those dancing fountains in Vegas.

  The baby is purple with rage. Gone is blissed-out angel, replaced by vigorous desperation.

  We tease her mouth into a big O and jam my nipple in. The baby gives a suck. Her big blue eyes glare at us, easily transmitting her thoughts, which run along the lines of “What the hell am I supposed to do with this?”

  The nurse unlatches the babe and flattens my breast as if she were taking a mammogram. The infant is reattached. Still the same glare.

  This goes on. The nurse squishing, the baby resisting, and me helpless. I don’t know how the species has survived this long, given how difficult this breastfeeding is. Unflappable, this nurse pulls out a needleless syringe that is as big around as my thumb. “Your nipples aren’t popping out,” she tells me. It’s not an accusation, but a statement of fact. My recalcitrant nipple is placed under the open end of the syringe and coaxed erect with the suction. (It sounds much more erotic than it was. Trust me.) With great haste—lest the little bugger should again vanish—my child is attached to it. She sucks a bit, which I really don’t feel, then drops off to sleep. We all assume that she’s getting what she needs.

  Every couple of hours, a new nurse, the baby, and I would repeat this exercise with the suction and the nipple. I am given hard plastic shells, which sort of look like the two halves of a yo-yo, to wear on the ends of my breasts in order to encourage more productive nipple action. With my top on, I am indistinguishible from Madonna during her Gaultier/cone-shaped tits phase. Unfortunately, the similarities end when you look away from my chest.

  More blurriness ensues. My mom visits, gives the baby stuffed animals, and leaves. Scott comes and goes. He brings food (barring that fried-chicken feast, the hospital food is about as bad as expected) and cards and flowers. I take my first shower and, apart from all of the gore running down the inside of my legs, I feel like a new woman. I also discover the joy of the sitz bath, something that I’d previously thought was only in the purview of old Jewish men. If you take nothing else away from this cautionary tale, remember only this: the sitz bath rocks. Succumb to the sitz bath.

  The morning of the second day—the day of my forced release from the Maternity Ward—my OB drops in for her last visit. The baby is on the bed in front of me, swaddled up tightly. I am staring down at her and bawling. Big tear stains darken the sheets around her. I’ve not been myself the past couple of days. It is safe to say that I am not entirely sure now what the definition of myself is.

  My doctor asks what is wrong.

  “She’s just so beautiful,” I sob. I don’t finish the thought, however. The rest of it runs something like “and I don’t have any idea how a sack of shit like me could have made something so gorgeous.” Had I kept talking, I probably could have saved everyone a lot of trouble and been wheeled directly from my maternity bed to a psych bed. Ah, hindsight.

  While I continue to weep, she listens to my heart and lungs and belly, then pronounces me physically well enough to go home. The crying chalked up to run-of-the-mill baby blues, I am cautioned to call if it keeps up for more than a couple weeks. With that, she leaves and I am free to go.

  The baby, however, isn’t. After I get the tears under control, I notice that her coloring seems funky. Her porcelain skin is taking on an orangey glow, which I chalk up to the sunlight that we were finally seeing after days of rain. I start packing up two days’ worth of flowers and stuffed animals. I notice that I haven’t worn my new soft green floral pajamas, which I’d bought because they looked so clean and motherly, perfect for my days in the hospital. A pediatrician breezes in and whisks the baby away. A bit later, she comes back.

  “I’m going to let you go,” she tells us, “but you’ll have to come to the office tomorrow so that we can keep an eye on the jaundice.”

  The penny drops. The baby’s big pumpkin head is orange from jaundice, not from the lighting. While the numbers on her blood test nudge the upper limit of what is reasonable, the pediatrician decides we are an acceptable risk and lets us take the baby home. Paperwork is signed, including a document that certifies that we have a clean water supply. Ah, Tennessee. We load her into the car seat, which is a fumbly process full of false starts and blind corners. Scott and I are slightly concerned that we haven’t the slightest clue what we’re doing, but are reasonably certain that we can handle anything. We’d made it this far in life, after all. How tricky can a baby be?

  4

  Most roads in the eastern United States lead to Knoxville. Literally. Imagine Knoxville as the great big filter that separates North from South, both metaphorically and geographically. It is where I-40 and I-75 physically intersect in a mess of an interchange that makes even brave men weep. From the city, you can get almost anywhere in the Southeast with little effort. Atlanta is close. Nashville is closer. Asheville is closer still. The beach is a sixish-hour drive. The Great Smoky Mountains are less than forty-five minutes from the heart of downtown. In many ways, it is the ideal location, close to bigger cities and wide-open spaces without the hassles of either.

  Wherever you are, you can always find someone who knows Knoxville. A woman in my yoga class in a wee town in New York went to grad school at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville and knows some of the theater folk I used to hang with. When I was in London, I met a cabbie who had a sister who had recently left Knoxville for Central Florida. When I lived in Austin and was writing for the Chronicle, I knew a fellow scribe only through e-mail,
but he had grown up in Knoxville—and I met him in person only after I moved there myself. I suspect that even in farthest Mongolia you could find someone who knows what it means when you say, “Go, Vols.”

  Contrary to popular belief, Knoxville is not the home of Fort Knox, which is actually in Kentucky. Knoxville was, however, the site of the 1982 World’s Fair—a tidbit of information that never fails to surprise the uninitiated. The fair left in its wake a huge erection called the Sunsphere, which resembles a big, golden golf ball on a dark green tee, and a park, which no one knew what to do with until the turn of the most recent century. Thanks to the Sunsphere, Knoxville has also been immortalized in an episode of The Simpsons, when Bart and his buddies traveled to town to discover that the entire structure was full of wigs. For the record, it isn’t, but that doesn’t stop most Knoxvillians from dreaming that it is, because it would be much cooler that way.

  It is fitting that Knoxville was home to a World’s Fair that most outsiders can’t recall. This Appalachian jewel has always been the most neglected of Tennessee’s major cities, which are represented on the state flag with three white stars. Memphis is known for the blues and barbecue. Nashville is known for the country music industry and southern charm. Knoxville, well, Knoxville has bluegrass, the bastard child of American music. Save for April when the dogwoods are in bloom, the city lacks any real visual charm with which to woo outsiders. There is no regional cuisine to speak of, either, and most of the city’s “special” dishes—like pulled pork sandwiches and chowchow and banana pudding—can be found on almost any menu in the region. Most of the folks who grew up there seem deeply apologetic about their native town. A New York writer once called Knoxville a “scruffy little city,” nomenclature that still works, even though the city’s political honchos would have you believe otherwise. According to the boosters, Knoxville is the jewel of the southern Appalachians, a Mecca that is rivaled only by Atlanta when it comes to business brilliance, family friendliness, and liberal (but not too liberal, like where gays and atheists are tolerated) thought. The truth is that Knoxville is like any other town its size, full of contradictions and strip malls.