Drifts

by Kate Zambreno

  At the beginning of the spring, I find myself suddenly pregnant, which comes as a shock. I discover this after a long weekend of nursing John with the flu, and then feeling, curiously, like my insides were occupied by something else. The certainty and immediacy of the blue plus sign on the pregnancy test. How I suddenly began hyperventilating, and John made me breathe into a paper bag. And then we walked around, we walked around, buzzy, nervous, like nothing was real.

  I spent those early days on the couch, dizzy, eating lightly yet constantly—fruit, beans, tofu, hard-boiled eggs. I lay there meditatively eating a banana. The fetus is the size of a lentil, the internet tells me. And then I eat lentils. Now it’s the size of a blueberry, so that’s what I eat as well.

  I think I am enjoying my symptoms, I write to Suzanne, in those first weeks. Maybe that’s a metaphor for life, she writes back, to enjoy your symptoms! She cried with joy when I first texted her the news. Sorry, I’m such a mom, she writes.

  When I tell Anna, I can tell she is happy for me, yet full of ambivalence. She takes a picture of herself smoking and sends it to me: I was just vacuuming, now I’m having a cigarette on your behalf!

  The paranoid space of the early-pregnancy internet. I google rates of miscarriage constantly. I lurk on BabyCenter community boards, crowdsourcing ambient worry. The gagging cutesiness of the acronyms: DH (dear husband). LO (little one). Now that it had happened, my DH was thrilled about a potential LO, which felt like he’d undergone a personality change, like he was suddenly a stranger to me. Maybe we’d both undergone a personality change. I, too, felt like a stranger to myself.

  All I am supposed to do is wait. They say you can’t be a little pregnant, but actually you can.

  I’ve been in a fog of trying to write this book while also reckoning with an exquisitely tender and changing body, as if I am some sort of monster, I write to Sofia in March. Yesterday I walked around Wall Street near my doctor’s office—Bartleby territory—and I could smell everything, as if I had a superpower: cigarettes, alcohol, shampoo permeating from skin and hair. The food stands. The train an intense, humid experience. I can tell what John ate for lunch just by coming near him. I wake up at night with a metallic taste in my mouth.

  I think it’s good to think of yourself as a monster while pregnant, Sofia writes back. I thought of pregnancy as the most natural thing in the world, because that’s what I thought you were supposed to think. But I was in Cairo by myself during the day, and lonely and terrified, she writes. And also weirdly interconnected with everyone who has ever had a child or has been born or died. Overconnected, I found sometimes.

  How nauseous and stoned I felt walking toward the Canal Street Q, the way the green-lit neon fish crawled slowly in the windows. I was reminded of the Sara Driver film Sleepwalk, which I’d watched the previous fall. Suzanne Fletcher plays a character who works at a nocturnal copy shop in Chinatown, who is also tasked with transcribing an ancient manuscript. Extreme long shots of the Manhattan skyline. The city as a trance, uncanny and floating.

  Sofia sends me a Diane Arbus quote she found in her notebook: “Everything is so superb and breathtaking. I am creeping forward on my belly like they do in war movies.” I had written down that same quote, from Sontag’s On Photography, in my notebook the month before. And I had just been meditating on a self-portrait of Diane Arbus, young and newly pregnant, naked except for underwear, in front of a mirror. Her head cocked, regarding the specimen of her body, the brown planets of her nipples, the slightly swollen stomach.

  After a long day of teaching, weeping in the middle of Times Square, where I had left the subway station because I couldn’t handle the smells. Then at night, unable to sleep. Should I have an abortion? I don’t want one, but I don’t know if it’s because I’m terrified of the procedure, yet surely childbirth is much worse. Having a baby—the economics of it, the physical process of it—feels impossible. But if I didn’t want one, why was I so strangely excited and worried before each blood test? I don’t know anymore what I want, or even who this “I” is at all. This debilitating fatigue and nausea doesn’t help. I wanted a life devoted to reading and thinking and writing—something like a monastic existence—and now this is its opposite. I want to be in bed all day, but thinking and dreaming and taking notes. I want to be lazy and selfish. I feel so apart from my hermit-bachelors, as if my body has betrayed me.

  The writers I know who are mothers tell me I won’t be able to write for the first two years. Or maybe, even, the first four. My department head at the university tells me to spend the savings she assumes I have on a nanny, like she did, if I want any hope of writing or being my own person. This feels impossible. You’ve already published so many books, and you’re not even forty! Suzanne writes, trying to reassure me. Sometimes I think no one except Sofia gets this extreme desire of mine to transcend myself in this book. How close I feel to crossing a threshold to a new form. Yet Sofia is not optimistic about my chances of writing with a baby, or even a small child. I can tell she doesn’t want to spook me. Only Anna assures me that I will still write, if I choose to go through with this. But what does she know?

  Sitting in a paper gown yesterday, left waiting for two hours, my feet in stirrups, I said out loud, to the empty silence of the room, “Seriously, I have to work on a novel.”

  Naps that are midday crashes, which leave me melancholy and dreary after waking. My body feels swollen, alien to me. Could Kafka’s The Metamorphosis be read as an allegory of pregnancy—a body that’s suddenly unfamiliar, the nausea, the small hard stomach, not being able to get off one’s back?

  I spend hours one afternoon trying to coax my little striped cat into a box so I can take her to the vet, who’s agreed to foster her. She appears to be nesting. I worry that she is pregnant. (Of course I do.) Our dogwalker sees me outside the apartment building next door, trying to capture the cat, and says she saw a larger raccoon cat rape her a couple of weeks ago—that’s the word she uses, “rape.” People stop and comment. Two women with a little dog who live in the building tell us that they call her their cat too, that they feed her tuna fish. Today she comes right up to my hand and sniffs it. I look into her beautiful green eyes. She is getting larger. Later, the scene from the fall repeats itself: the same mother and daughter come up to her, at the building gate, and watch her sleep in the garden, as I watch them watching her, keeping my distance.

  It is now spring. Tulips and irises. I sit in a chair with a blanket on my lap. Genet asleep on the rug, the windows open.

  One of the notes I take that spring: “vagueness.” Another: “signs.”

  Breakfast in Sunset Park. People carrying palms after church. Then driving through the Purim festivities in Williamsburg. Circles of inebriated men wearing hats and costumes out of the nineteenth century crowding into the streets, slapping shoulders. Children on the sidewalk dressed in more Halloween-like costumes. Little girls with full faces of makeup. In that moment I feel buoyant, like I can leave my sick body. I think of Kafka, his love of Yiddish theater, the electricity of the amateur. I could have watched and watched.

  I flip through a novel recommended to me, by a living male novelist, entranced by dead male novelists. How suspicious I am of myself, how I have clung to the canon of the bachelor hermits, I write to Sofia. A canon that so often doesn’t allow space for us. Sofia writes me that she wishes sometimes she’d stop reading men, but that it would be like cutting off half of herself. She gets angry, too, at the pressure to talk only about writers like herself, from the outside, as opposed to other writers she also resembles, from the inside. The truth is, I have often lately wanted to occlude all identity and community—to disappear—but I understand that there’s a privilege to that, or worse, a purposeful erasure, I write to her. She replies that she’d love to withdraw from race or gender, but that there’s very little space for that that doesn’t support troubling politics, so we wind up reifying these identities, again and again. We have had this same conversati
on, on loop, for more than two years. Perhaps it’s seasonal, this affliction. We are irritated when we’re on lists. But then of course irritated when we’re not. Like all these constant panels on women’s writing, I write to her. Yet why was I not invited to this one?

  Although we are always ourselves and others, all the time, Sofia writes. You are always the diffuse and ghostly “you.” Aren’t you still a woman when you’re reading Kafka?

  The Italian and I are often the only ones in the house during the day. On Wednesdays, he talks loudly on Skype for his long-distance graduate program. We are doing feminist theory this week, he tells me in the walkway as I’m leaving with the dog. Virginia Woolf! he says. Cixous! It’s clear he wants to talk to me about his reading, but I am not interested in talking to him. Later he sends me a message, asking if I have more women writers to recommend. I click the button blocking him.

  I’m a novelista, I tell Beatriz, pointing at my cluttered desk, as she stands over it with me and tries to dust the top of my books, my notebooks, my printer. She doesn’t seem to care (why would she?), but she is very excited to discover the photographs from the ultrasound on my bookshelf. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do with them. She effuses over these splotchy black-and-gray photos. We drink coffee together—one of the two tiny cups I’m allotted daily, which I siphon out religiously. I ask Beatriz about the Italian. Loco, she says, and I agree. He won’t let her inside his room at all. I wonder what’s in there. What kind of stupid bachelor mess is inside.

  Crashing out on the scratchy sofa in another temporary office, in between classes. This semester, at another college, I have been occupying the space of a scholar of early American literature who is on sabbatical. A poster of an impressively bearded Melville, crossing his arms as if defiantly. On the door a postcard of Edith Wharton, holding her tiny long-haired Chihuahuas on her lap, Mimi and Miza, like spooky twins. Her childhood nickname was Pussy (I just googled “Edith Wharton” and “Pussy” while cringing). I sit at the scholar’s desk and try to force myself to eat the parts of the salad that I can manage. I open her desk drawers, examine the crumbly beige circle of her powder compact. I walk around and look at her walls and shelves while willing myself not to vomit my lunch. Framed photographs of her lacrosse team from college and her study abroad at Oxford. Her cap and gown regalia hung up. Her family on a beach posed in identical white T-shirts with rolled-up denim—all smiling and blond. A framed crayon drawing.

  When I go to the café near my house, I watch the mothers at the outside table with their toddlers, sharing a pastry. It alarms me, the claustrophobia of this romance. To be alone all day with a child. To be tending to their thoughts, not one’s own.

  I learn that I can manage not to vomit when I go out into the world if I am constantly eating sour candy—as sour as possible—and my stomach is never empty. I bring a sub sandwich to my classes, cutting it up into multiple portions, and slowly eat it over the course of the afternoon along with two bags of sour-cream-and-onion chips. I try to ignore the message boards, which tell me not to eat deli meat, because of listeria. Sometimes I rush out of class to throw up in the bathroom. My students don’t realize I’m pregnant. They probably just think I’m gross.

  In the spring I see Clutch when they are in town. Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, which came out last year, is still all anyone wants to talk about. We joke to each other, we need to cowrite a book about hormones, the estrogen injections they’re taking, my pregnancy hormones, but it will be about how fucked-up and weird hormones make us feel, it will be radiantly pessimistic.

  Never have I orgasmed like this, so rapidly and repeatedly, even though our occasional sex is missionary, perfunctory, because I am so sick and uncomfortable, except for this. Perhaps for once evolution giving the pregnant body some pleasure, to help with the misery. The saturation as well of my pregnancy dreams. So much sex and death.

  In April, a Swedish newspaper wants to profile me because of a new translation of a book I wrote years ago. The morning of the phone interview, I vomit up a green smoothie with surprising recoil. I’m not quite sure what I say to the reporter. I don’t feel like the same person who wrote the book she wants me to speak about. And yet I know, I wrote the same book from the same body as I have now, the same yet eroding set of memories or past, just as this stomach is the same stomach as when I was a child, and as it was a month ago, and yet how it changes, regenerates, stretches, transforms. During the interview, I find myself on a rant about Knausgård—that I can’t believe that Sara Stridsberg’s novel on Valerie Solanas had not yet been translated into English, I’d rather read that. I resented that I was supposed to read him. I resented his sexy leather jacket and his sexy leather face. Hanging up the phone, I imagine the inevitable pull quote, and feel somewhat ashamed.

  The Swedish newspaper also wants me to meet a photographer at Chelsea Piers to get my photograph taken. I feel nervous about this, as I am bloated and my clothing has mostly stopped fitting me. Since it is still cold, I figure I can just wrap my long black robe coat around me, the new coat that I’ve just purchased for half off in a winter sale, that probably won’t fit me for long. It doesn’t matter that I got my hair cut and styled for the occasion—the wind is so fierce that in the photograph my hair is blowing around me, as is somehow also my skin. The photographers say they want me to be outside, since I apparently spoke about my longings toward the flâneur in the interview. In the photograph they choose, I look bleached-out, uncomfortable, not myself. I think of the moment in Camera Lucida when Barthes describes getting his author photograph taken, experiencing “a kind of vertigo—something of a detective anguish.”

  The next month, I am invited to a gala celebrating Semiotext(e) at Artists Space. At the party, I talk for a while with Chris Kraus, who was my editor on the book that had just been translated, until she finally realizes who it is she’s been talking to. You don’t look at all like your photograph, she finally says, referring to the Swedish newspaper. I don’t know how to respond. The truth is that the photograph doesn’t look like me, and also that I no longer look like me. The invitation said “black-tie formal,” so after much worrying that I had nothing to wear, I wound up spending too much on a long black jersey dress with bat-like sleeves, a minimal necklace. It’s stretchy, I reasoned, I’ll wear it throughout, and even afterward. But it doesn’t matter anyway—Eileen Myles is there in jeans, looking so totally themselves. I wind up telling everyone at my table that I’m pregnant, I have no idea why.

  It is interesting being known mostly in Sweden. The book is reviewed widely there, even in major newspapers, but it’s all in Swedish, and so I don’t have to read it. It is a relief to google myself and for the results to be incomprehensible. Perhaps it’s all really about someone else—it has nothing to do with me.

  On my nightstand, Clarice Lispector’s extravagant face stares at me from the jacket of her collected stories. I manage to read only one story, about the saturated sadness of a mother of small children, “the secret center which was like a pregnancy.” The young woman spends an afternoon in bed, then wakes up still having to peel the potatoes and wash the clothes. Then she goes out at night and gets incredibly drunk, the alcohol exuding through her flesh. A word from the story: gravid, meaning pregnant or full of significance. I open Sei Shōnagon’s The Pillow Book but can’t read past the beginning, the description of the dog being beaten.

  Oh yes, Bhanu replies to me. Total blankness. No reading or writing. I didn’t like it. Finally, I could read: Maeve Binchy’s romance novels set in Ireland.