How melancholy Genet is when he wakes from a nap, his chin on the rim of his blanket basket. I spend the morning trying to organize my notes from the fall—it’s going badly. I hear from Sofia, who is reading Walter Benjamin. Today, she writes me, she arrived at his sentence, “Then what’s the point of writing?” and then stopped.
Trying to write a book with a baby moving inside me feels so strange. It reminds me of Kathy Acker telling students to write while using a vibrator.
My stomach is big. It’s not fat—it feels like some whalebone construction in there. It’s hard to move around with it. People open doors for me now. I look like a pregnant nun in my blue dresses, a strange performative femininity. I’ve been trying to figure out if the women posing for Vermeer’s paintings are pregnant. This one who is reading a letter in front of a window, could she be his wife? Perhaps these were just Dutch fashions of the time. Although Catharina bore him fifteen children! She was probably always pregnant. Eleven survived.
We go to the country for the weekend. John takes my photograph in panorama on his phone in the On Kawara room at Dia:Beacon. In the photo, I’m surrounded by dozens of his date paintings. My growing belly traces the passage of time.
Every July, Beatriz goes home to Peru, to drink from the sap of a local tree that helps ease her ailments, her aches and pains. She’s now been diagnosed with diabetes. I tell her, each of us communicating with each other in our halting ways, that so many on my father’s side have had limbs removed because of it. I whack away at an imaginary leg with my hand. She shows me the map across one slim muscular leg—a dog bite on her thigh, the varicose veins on her calf. She shows me a bandage on her arm where blood was drawn. I lift my shirt and show her my belly. I’m too gorda for five months, she says to me, which coming from her I don’t mind. Last time I saw her, she told me that many she knew had miscarried at four or five months, I had to be careful.
All afternoon I have to keep Genet from humping her leg. Beatriz waves him off, laughing. Animals love me, she says. She tells me she has several cats, a few dogs, and a cage of canaries at home.
Why is the baby always the size of a fruit? A lemon, an orange, an avocado. Now a cantaloupe or an artichoke. Or potatoes or a banana. A kitschy calendar of the body. John notes that these fruits are all randomly sized. What if it was a squirrel? he jokes. Your baby is the size of a squirrel.
At the hospital, the moment I realize that everyone is pregnant. The uncanniness in the waiting room.
I have not changed out of my short white maternity nightgown all day. Anesthetized by window-unit air-conditioning. Genet moves around to various rooms. We’ve gone outside for only minutes today. So gray and hot. I did not recognize anyone on the street. Genet would only pee. We both felt spooked.
The new assistant district attorney who is handling the burglary case has been leaving messages. They want me to testify when there’s a trial, which will be in my third trimester. We don’t return his calls, and every time there is a message I feel nervous and shaky the rest of the day. The man who robbed us is apparently still in jail awaiting this eventual trial. John finally talks to the ADA over the phone—an investigator for the defense might be knocking on the door, asking questions, pretending she’s not connected with the case. Since I’ve spent all month binge-watching The Good Wife, I expect to see Kalinda, the investigator from the show, in her leather jacket at my door.
They finally stop calling probably once they realize they don’t need us to lock him away. It isn’t about you and him, it’s about him and the state, the ADA tells John, when he complains about how much time they’re asking for, once he tells him that, if I was compelled to testify, I would be a hostile witness. How guilty we feel about this, but we don’t know what to do.
Every night we watch an episode of a British spy thriller, and then I have nightmares revisiting the robbery. I was up for hours last night, convinced I’d heard a noise. I attempted to slow my heart rate down by going belly to belly with the dog. The other night I woke up and panicked that the linen dress hanging on the door was a shadowy man.
Neighborhood drama involving the frizzy-haired woman with the green vest who is always walking her trio of rescue pit bulls. We routinely see her stop people in the street to lecture them on how to walk their dogs. We’ve learned to ignore her. Last week, while walking Genet, John heard a high-pitched scream. When he got close to our apartment, he saw the Polish woman holding her Pomeranian limp in her arms, while the woman with the frizzy hair was trying to talk to her. One of her pits had apparently attacked the little dog, who ran up to them—off its leash, of course. It becomes the talk of the neighborhood. Was the little dog killed or just injured? We have to find the owner of the Pomeranian and find out what happened, I text our dogwalker, Mya. The Polish woman has not been spotted since then—except when John saw her later that week at the Duane Reade, looking distraught. Mya texts me that the woman got out of her car the other day and chased her down the street, demanding she stop lying and telling people that her dog had killed the little dog. She has now been leaving long and threatening messages on their Facebook page. She needs a psych evaluation, Mya texts me. I cringe, thinking of how we speak of women we perceive as unstable. Still, her dogs are large and aggressive. The murderous row, I’ve taken to calling them. I feel pity for them, but that doesn’t keep me from picking Genet up as soon as I see them ambling by, refusing to make eye contact.
I’m writing a murder mystery, I’ve started to tell people.
My father and aunt are in town, so I arrange to meet them for dinner. They don’t ask questions about me, how I’m feeling, what I’m doing with my time, what I’m writing, but I know they want to see my pregnant body. At dinner they tell me about a book they are both reading, about the history of cancer. Always so morbid, the two of them. But I’ve been also thinking of Wittgenstein’s prostate cancer, Rilke’s leukemia. I had just been writing Sofia of the nineteenth-century practice of deathbed memoir, dictated to the dutiful daughter who lives with the patriarch. How erased I feel after I see family, my eroding sense of self. How many days—weeks—it can take to recover, to feel outlined again.
Two photos yesterday I took with John’s phone, even though I haven’t wanted to take photographs lately: One a decapitated Barbie doll stuffed in a plastic bag under the wheel of our parked car. (Is it paranoid to wonder if someone placed it there?) The other a hole in a tree in the park more than a mile away where birds built a nest out of blond hair, seemingly from the hair of the same doll.
On a Friday, I want to stay in bed all day. John lectures me that I have to worry about time. Are you telling me to practice self-care or to work? I ask him. Both, he says. I throw my wooden clog at him, which cuts his hand. We are both on edge, underslept. Up the night before, throwing off covers, shining a flashlight on the sheets. Realizing that the brown bug we saw on the dreary hotel bed for our weekend away upstate had left itchy patterns of bites on his arms and neck, my leg and foot. How gray and hot it is outside, the constancy of this. We have begun to fragment by the instability of our lives here. Now a job in Chicago John wants to apply for, even though I have painstakingly lined up classes for the year. Also the national mood—the constant grief and stress. It feels impossible to leave the bed, so paralyzed by all the news. The horrors stockpile and there’s no way to filter them. Headline: The emotional toll of a violent news cycle.
I don’t leave the house except for brief hot walks to take the dog out. I have begun to walk around the apartment in a T-shirt, without underwear. I tell Suzanne about my fights with John, my recent depression and regression after seeing my family. She texts me her own feelings of isolation and abandonment, encounters with her ex. The partial ways we keep in touch. The way we retreat and withdraw. Clara Rilke complaining to Paula Modersohn-Becker about how housebound she feels while pregnant, and then with a baby, how impossible it is for her to get on a bicycle and pedal away. Paula miffed at this, feeling that Clara has abandoned her
and their friendship in her marriage, how dare she complain. That photograph of the painter and sculptor as young women. The women in white, Rilke called them. They stare at each other, so complete and conspiratorial. I email Suzanne the photo. That’s us, I write. How it makes me weep to think of Paula, who died so soon after childbirth, just when she was at her full potential as a painter. How close I feel to crossing a boundary in my work, and then how stopped as well. That line from Adrienne Rich’s poem about Paula, a rejoinder to Rilke’s unnamed requiem: “They say a pregnant woman dreams her own death.”
Still, in all of this, the occasional beauty of encountering strangers. Their kindness and tenderness. I shower, finally, and walk to the nail salon. I haven’t had a manicure or pedicure in months, unable to bear the smell or tedium. I tell my manicurist—Pema, she’s Tibetan, from Nepal—that I am pregnant. She asks me how I am feeling. She, too, felt incredibly ill the first four months, like she was dying, she says. This was with her first child, a boy, now ten. They live down the street from us. With her second, who is two, she was fine, normal, she says. With her first, she could eat only potatoes or white rice. No one tells you this, I say. Being a woman is not nice, she says then, slowly, in sympathy, gently massaging my hands. She tells me about a friend of hers, who while pregnant was so nauseated by the green color of her rug that she chopped it into pieces and threw it away. As Pema is telling me this, she is painting my nails a silver glitter, like a prom dress. I tell her that for a time I couldn’t stand flowers, the bulbousness of flowering trees. So strange, she says to me. I agree.
Feeling stoned on a bench at the botanic gardens. I had the idea of venturing here on the train, to luxuriate near a blooming bush, writing in my notebook and thinking about Rilke’s roses. Try to be with flowers, large arrays of flowers, Bhanu had written me, when I wrote her of my recent depression. Try to be inside flowers. Instead I staggered through the browning rose garden, already overheated in my denim maternity overalls. The passive-aggressive performance on the train now. People know they should give their seats to me, but I feel I’m supposed to act humble, Madonna-like in my gratitude. I sit on the bench and watch. Robins looping up and down. A few tourists. Women with strollers dot the cherry orchard. This is who comes here during the week, I realize: Mothers. Nannies. A way to leave the house, to be outside. The security guard lingers near me. In the rose garden I had asked him the way to the closest air-conditioned enclosure and he had pointed me to the nearby business center. Now I am stuck here on the bench. Perhaps he’s concerned that the obviously pregnant woman might faint. There’s construction noise, even here. I can’t escape it. School groups wearing identical bright T-shirts in case of separation. A couple strolls by, both on their phones. I am more wilted this trip than I’d imagined. I watch a bridal party pose for a portrait against a tree. I think of a massive hybrid oak I’d taken a partial picture of when ambling into the park. In a fuzzy, indistinct way, I connect this with a line from Agnes Martin I’d recently scribbled in my notebook, from the back of her biography I hadn’t yet read: “When I first made a grid I happened to be thinking of the innocence of trees and then this grid came into my mind . . .” Agnes Martin in her denim overalls.
I look at the women with babies strolling up and down the cherry orchard and wonder if I’ll ever feel uninhibited again. Whether I’ll have true solitude again. I wonder whether I have it now. It is so unknown to me. The notebook is how I think, and see. My fear that I won’t have it anymore. I used to see this army of strollers as intrusive, but now see the vulnerability of how these women occupy public space. Women gaze at me and I don’t know what they think I am, or what they think I represent. How one of my department heads, the medieval scholar, just wrote to me over email: Happy Baby Waiting. Like that’s what this summer would be for me. Even though I’m a writer—even though she hired me to teach writing. Also that she was amazed I still wanted to teach next year, that I wept and begged to be offered a class again.
I also don’t understand the bounds of this new body. The security guard still watches me. Afraid perhaps I’ve gone into a fugue state. Which maybe I have.
Later I manage to get up from the bench and walk around the gardens. At the Japanese pond, staring at the slow turtle and large orange fish. Overheated in the tropical orchid room. Then finally at home in bed, white food stains on my black nightgown. I take off my militaristic bra, which leaves deep red grooves on my body. I drag plates of food to bed—bagels, cold pizza. Genet waits for my scraps.
I wake up feeling hungover. Weeping when John leaves. I put a dress over my unshowered body and walk slowly through the humidity to go eat an omelet on the patio of the local restaurant, despite the heat. The constant hunger, as if I’m a zombie. I refuse to cook; I can’t handle the smell. I am now completely unworking. Even at the restaurant I keep texting with John, unable to bear my own solitude. The melancholy is overwhelming.
And yet there is an intense beauty, if I allow myself to be present in my sadness. How I am seeing colors. The purple flowers of the butterfly bush. My orange-red toenails. My new dress, a magenta linen caftan. I wear it the next day when I go into Midtown with John. My plan is to read Rilke’s letters at the library but again have no proof of address. Me in the vestibule, the contents of my bag scattered, trying to locate ID. Instead I go to the art and architectural room and read Rilke’s monograph on Rodin and copy some of William Gass’s introduction into my notebook. Whenever the poet went to the Bibliothèque nationale, he felt overwhelmed by research, copying down everything he read. His constant search for a space where he could work. It wasn’t possible in the grand reading room, even with the light pouring in from the great oval leaded glass, the stacks all around him.
The garden is wild again. Daisies, echinacea. I text an image to John of the dog lying in the sun. John agrees, Genet does look like Rilke—the heavy, begging eyes, the downturned face and mustache. (Or does Rilke look like a dog?) What a strange and beautiful mongrel, he writes. I eat a mealy peach and feed a bite to Genet from my mouth.
The little dog lazes at my feet.
Still, the little dog lazes at my feet.
The relief of turning my mind off and watching TV on my computer. The trancelike nature of the Kardashians. Kris Jenner tells her daughter Kourtney that she is reading a book about the Swiss architect Le Corbusier. “I’m reading a book. It’s so weird and boring, but I’m obsessed.”
It’s summer, so my friends are writing or away. My correspondences have dried up. Although still my inbox crowds with requests—to blurb or be interviewed, or to do this event or that—now with these awkward asides about my pregnancy. How lonely and private this process feels. What process do I mean? Writing a book or pregnancy?
I write to Danielle today of my intense desire to make beauty out of this drift. A way to experience time. It’s not that life is less important than writing, I say, at least for me it’s not. . . .
I’ve begun avoiding the office, even though it’s the coolest room. Genet pads in here gratefully and settles on the small slip of white rug. I take a photo of my desk—my neon Post-it notes, the Dürer book open, postcards, photographs, notebooks, and send it to Danielle. I suppose I will have to give up this office, soon, for the baby’s room.
After a few days I hear from her. How tender it is, the need to have space to write, whether it be the need for time, money, a pen name, or silence.
This is not a heat wave, but a heat dome. So much to write down, yet it is all so hazy. I cannot leave the house. Genet lazes in his patch of light—I watch his breathing move his body up and down. This morning he ran into my arms while I was still half-asleep—I caught him as he was heading for my pillow—because John was trying to kill a moth in the kitchen. What a guard dog.
I have not seen the old woman from the yellow-and-brown house in quite a while. Is she stuck inside, has she escaped?
I wake up with a pink eczema patch on my cheek, because of last night’s
pint of ice cream. I wait for the encroachment all over. I exist on the couch now, covered with my white patchy food stains. In the morning I balance my oatmeal on my pillow. My breasts falling out of this long black nightgown, which has now ceased to fit. My new dark brown nipples are the size of silver dollars. So odd—that my body can transform into something else.
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