Olivia
Page 39
Livvy seemed to have forgotten about school. She had refinished the cradle to perfection, and she finally found a sufficiently beautiful blue cotton print to cover its mattress, then did a creditable job of sewing it on. She was so proud of her handiwork that I didn’t have the heart to point out that it would be covered by a sheet most of the time. Sometimes she asked me questions about the family, beginning with Anthony and Genevra and the cradle. She became interested in testing herself for memories, wanted to hear funny stories about Salvatore and the other people in the restaurant’s kitchen, whom she’d seen more recently than I had and remembered much better. She didn’t like to listen to music in the car (hadn’t listened to it even at home in some time), but she didn’t like silence either, so we had many of the best conversations we’d ever had during the drives between Manhattan and the beach.
She’d seen my last program—the Jewish program, we all called it—as well as the staggering quantity of mail it had brought in, by far the most I’d ever received. She thought it was my best program ever, still repeated some of the jokes. Her favorite was the one about the Englishman who wanted to know if you could eat any other parts of the matzo. Pablo had told her that there was a Jewish guy at work and he was very funny. She asked why I thought Jewish people were funnier than other people. I said that if it was true, the only reason I could think of was that they’d lived outside of the mainstream for most of history and had that dual sense of events from which so much humor stemmed.
As I was trying to think of an example, she asked suddenly, “Will you go to the baptism?”
“Sure,” I said. “I only hope, at some point . . . later . . . I hope she’ll know, he’ll know, he’s part Jewish.”
Silence.
“Just a little bit?” I asked in what I thought of as a comical voice. “Around the edges?”
“Not that edge.” She tittered.
So that was the other thing she knew about being Jewish. Angelo had been circumcised as a teenager, something to do, he’d reluctantly explained, when I asked him how come, with “non-trattabilità d’il prepuzio,” non-tractability of the foreskin. When I’d used the phrase as a joke after a light argument when he wouldn’t take back something he’d said after being proven wrong, he’d been distinctly unamused.
Now I just laughed, said nothing. We’d been getting along so well all summer, it might never be necessary to risk all with a discussion of the aesthetic or possible health benefits of circumcision.
By the third week of August the new staircase was in. A massive but attractive piece of curled wrought iron, it went from the right of the downstairs front door to what had been a large entrance hall. (The children had been upset by this loss of space, but it was less offensive to them than other ideas we’d explored, like having only one kitchen, downstairs. The only idea that had upset them more was closing off the upstairs door, so everyone would enter and exit downstairs.) Leon and Pablo had approved the men’s work, but Benny wanted me to see it before the paint job, in case there were touches they hadn’t thought of.
The doctor, having inspected Livvy, said it would be all right for us to go back to Bridgehampton, it would likely be two weeks or so before Livvy gave birth. We would return to the city right after Labor Day, as planned.
Leon was meeting the bus bringing the kids home from camp. The apartment’s air was still full of sawdust, the bedroom walls, with their white primer coat, already smelled of paint. We would go out to dinner when Pablo came home from work and Leon returned with the kids. We knew what the menu would be. They hadn’t had a real pizza all summer, just “some disgusting gunk they put on English muffins and call a pizza.” Then we’d drive out to the Island.
Livvy circled the base of the staircase, looking thoughtful. It wasn’t a set of stairs you could imagine a kid negotiating. Eventually we’d need a gate. After a while, she gathered up the skirt of her pretty cotton muumuu, one of three I’d found in a little store in East Hampton, and, having tested the railing to make sure it was solid, she very slowly mounted the stairs. There was no need to tell her to be careful. She was being cautious in the extreme. I waited awhile, finally called up to ask her how it was.
She called back, “I don’t think I can come down.”
“No problem,” I said. “Go to the regular stairs. I’ll let you in.”
A long silence, and then I heard the lock being undone upstairs—Leon and I had never really talked about how it would work, two different entrances, locking and unlocking doors, but because of the kids we’d felt we had no choice—and she came down.
She yawned. “I think I’m going to take a nap. Wake me up when everyone’s ready to go out for dinner.”
Back in Bridgehampton. Sunday night. We’d all been to one of those movies about ten-year-olds who have terrible things happen to them that aren’t sex. Afterward, we’d bought ice-cream cones, then driven home. The kids had gone to their rooms. The rest of us sat around in the pretty living room with its striped-cotton-covered chairs, watching the eleven o’clock news. Pablo and Livvy sat together on one sofa, his arm on the pillow back, his closer hand resting on her enormous belly. (For a while I’d made an effort to help her with dieting, but she fought it at every turn, and I’d given up. She was always eating or asking when a meal would be served. Or both.)
“Hey, there it goes, honey! This is the first time in a week I felt it!”
He’d often felt the baby move, but she claimed not to have.
Livvy was engrossed in the news.
He tried to take her hand and put it on her belly, but she resisted.
“I’m hungry. Could you get me some popcorn?”
Reluctantly, he went to the kitchen, returned with a large bag of popcorn that he handed her. She tore it open and proceeded to stuff popcorn into her mouth as though death by malnutrition were an immediate concern. Pablo excused himself to take a little walk; I think her eating routines had become difficult for him to watch.
Leon stood and yawned. “I’m ready to turn in.”
“Mmm.” There wasn’t much on the news and something in the air made concentration difficult. I stood, too, went to kiss Livvy good night, a recent habit she hadn’t objected to.
Unusual. Suddenly she set aside the unfinished bag of popcorn.
She picked up a copy of the East Hampton Star, in which she normally displayed no interest, opened it, appeared to be reading. Then, as I bent to kiss her, I saw that next to where she sat, a dark, colorless stain was spreading on the sofa’s striped fabric.
Her bag of waters had broken.
For a moment I was paralyzed. Then I said Leon’s name in a low voice. He was in the hall already, didn’t hear me the first time. Livvy didn’t look up when I called a little louder, but Leon came back. I pointed to the wet couch. He looked at Livvy, then me, looked at the ceiling, whistled softly, and snapped into action. Speaking to Livvy gently past the newspaper she didn’t want to put down, he asked her whether she was feeling any contractions. She looked at him as though she didn’t know what a contraction was, although the doctor had instructed us on the subject during our recent visits.
“We’ll go to Southampton,” he said to me. “It’s possible we could get to New York, but I don’t think we should take a chance. You get her ready. I’ll call them.”
“Livvy, sweetheart,” I said softly, “I think we have to go to the hospital now. Would you like to change into a dry dress, or do you want to go this way?”
As though in a trance, she allowed me to lead her to her room, help her change into another muumuu. Pablo came back from his walk as I was getting the overnight bag we’d long since packed. He was distraught, felt guilty that he’d taken a walk, which I assured him was ridiculous, everything was okay. We would all go to the hospital—all the adults, that was. Leon was telling his kids what was happening. Pablo took Livvy’s bag. She didn’t want to hold on to him, clung to me.
Livvy said she had to go to the bathroom but came out of it crying.
I found the good sense to treat everything in the simplest possible way.
I said, “They’ll help you at the hospital.” And when she repeated that it hurt, I put my arm around her, grabbed my pocketbook from the table, and led her out of the house to the driveway. Pablo followed us. Leon had already started the car. Livvy didn’t want to sit in the front with Leon, she wanted to sit with me in the back. She didn’t speak until we reached the hospital, where, in the voice of a little girl who knows she’s done something bad but isn’t certain the teacher knows, she gave the admitting attendant her name and birth date.
Less than three hours later, she gave birth to a beautiful, healthy girl whom Pablo decided to call Donna until such time as her mother was interested in finding another name.
For a couple of days it was possible for the attending doctor to assure us, if only because Livvy slept so much of the time, that nothing unusual was happening. But by the third day, when she was still sleepily unresponsive, showing neither pleasure nor interest when the baby was set down beside her, he became concerned. He discussed the situation with her doctor in the city, and then with us: If they handed Olivia the baby’s bottle, she didn’t reach for it, so they placed it on a folded towel near the baby’s mouth to make sure it would stay there. After one or two small incidents, they had a nurse remain in the room to pick up the baby in case she began to choke while being fed. Finally they suggested that I be present during feedings.
Back home in the city, Livvy continued to sleep most of the time. Her obstetrician and the various doctors and shrinks Leon and I talked to agreed that more time would be needed to gauge the severity of what was clearly a postpartum depression, and then to decide upon treatment and medication.
My body did everything required of it; my brain was crushed between intense joy and guilty despair. I adored Donna, found no greater pleasure than in holding her, feeding her, feeling her soft skin as I changed her, bathed her, kissed her. But I could not look at her mother when I was holding her, felt guilty if I thought she was watching. Mrs. Borelli agreed to come back for a while to baby-sit with Livvy weekday afternoons so I could take Donna for a walk. Only when I was away from the house, wheeling the carriage on my errands, picking her up for the guys in my markets to admire, sitting for a while in the little park at Abingdon Square because the sight of Washington Square Park was enough to bring me to tears, could I simply enjoy her. There were mothers and children here, too, but it was smaller and it didn’t evoke that earlier trip. I always brought a book or a magazine so I wouldn’t be drawn into conversation with the mothers sitting nearby. At home I would bring Donna into Livvy’s bedroom, set her down on the bed, talk as though something I said might interest Livvy. Nothing did. The world was a movie she wasn’t interested in watching.
I began to welcome headaches, other discomforts and difficulties. If I caught myself having a good time, if Leon or a friend had some juicy gossip and I forgot the family for a while, I’d call myself back as though my moment’s pleasure could harm my daughter. Where did I get off enjoying myself when the person I’d once loved more than anyone in the world was a husk of the healthy, lovely girl she might be? In the kitchen, I sliced vegetables too close to the hand holding them, grabbed pot handles that might be hot. If I had a lovely time with Donna in the park and came home to find Livvy lying on the sofa, her eyes wide open but not looking at the TV with Mrs. Borelli, I would set Donna in the cradle, go into the bathroom, make a fist of my hand, and bite into it long and hard. Then I would come out and carry on like a normal human being, a mother taking care of a family. The hand never bled but sometimes the tooth marks remained for days. When Leon made love to me, my body performed in such a way that he didn’t have to know anything was wrong, but if I was having pleasure, my brain wasn’t communicating it to me.
Livvy came to the table for meals, but ate lightly, without interest, though she lost weight slowly because she was inactive. The only object in the apartment that ever drew her attention was the cradle, which stood against a wall near the dining table. Donna lay in it most of the day, at night slept in the crib in the bedroom that had once been mine. If she cried during the night, Pablo took her to bed with him. He told me that he cradled her on the bed’s far side, in case Livvy should roll over in her sleep. Pablo was depressed, apologetic, always helpful with Donna, whom he adored and handled effortlessly from the first day.
At first Leon, September-busy with work and getting his kids settled in at home and prepared for school, was sympathetic about Livvy without exactly paying attention to what was going on. He kept wanting to know if I was as happy as he was with Benny’s work. He’d ask what the doctor had said about Livvy without exactly absorbing the answer. The girls’ hostility to me had vanished. They wanted to do anything they could to be helpful. Anything that didn’t involve dealing with Livvy, whose condition was upsetting to them. They played with Donna only if Livvy wasn’t around. Ovvy didn’t appear to be upset by Livvy, but neither was he interested in the baby. He wanted to be out playing ball with his friends.
As she passed through the living room, Livvy would always stop at the cradle, which was so wide that we’d moved my desk into the bedroom to make room for it in the passageway near the dining table. At first I thought she might be thinking about the space it took up. Then I hoped she was looking at Donna. But at some point I became aware that even if Donna wasn’t in the cradle, Livvy still stopped and looked down in the same way.
Our understanding with Pablo was that if the staircase light was on, anyone from upstairs could come downstairs, or vice versa, without a signal. One night, when Leon was watching some awful TV program, I decided to go down to pick up the biography of Eleanor Roosevelt I’d begun. The light was on. I wound my way down the steps, stopped before I reached the bottom.
Pablo was sitting on one of the sofas, holding the baby. He was crying. I didn’t see Livvy, which wasn’t unusual, since she was most often in bed.
“Pablo!” I went to him, looked down at Donna, who was asleep. “What happened?”
With his head he beckoned toward the cradle. I was momentarily confused. Then I walked over to the cradle and looked down. Livvy was curled up inside it, asleep, her thumb in her mouth, her back pressing against the rail on one side, her knees squeezed up against the other. She wore one of the two white cotton nightgowns I’d bought her. A few toes of each foot stuck through the bars at the bottom.
I went to Pablo, sat down next to him, offered to take the baby. He shook his head adamantly. He had cried so much that the collar and front of his blue cotton shirt were soaked. He was still crying.
“Listen to me, Pablo. I’ll call the doctor in the morning. But I think . . . I don’t know if this is so different from what’s been going on. Maybe it’s a little worse. We’ll have to get her to a doctor, even if it’s difficult. They’ll want to give her medication, I imagine. In the meantime . . .”
Maybe it’s a little worse.
It was very much worse. When I try to understand why, my brain goes to the television images of Vietnam that moved Americans finally to protest what was happening there. We’d known all along, but it had been possible to know without knowing. With this picture of what was going on inside Livvy it was no longer possible to believe she’d win the battle. There was no reason even to assume she was fighting. She’d lost it. There she was, an infant in a cradle. I had no idea of how long it might take her to grow up again. I just knew that whether or not she wanted help, she needed it.
I put my arm around Pablo and sat with him. When the baby stirred and cried, he gave her a bottle, then, almost reluctantly, brought her to the crib. I took a mohair throw we kept on the sofa and covered Livvy. Then we came back to the sofa and he reached for my hand as though he couldn’t go on without touching another human’s flesh. We sat in silence until daybreak. Sometimes one or the other of us drifted briefly into sleep, but ea
ch time we woke ourselves up as though there were something that had to be done. Now.
Of the doctors I’d spoken to, only Edward Weinberger was an M.D. who could prescribe medication but also sounded competent to treat a patient, didn’t expect that everything would be solved by the medicine. Pablo was in the middle of an important job, but with Leon’s help, I got Livvy to Weinberger’s office the next day. She was indifferent to him and to everyone else we encountered, though she took the medication without resistance. Weinberger warned us that it would be a minimum of two weeks before we saw results, but that didn’t keep me from constantly checking the cradle as though some change might have occurred that even he hadn’t been able to predict. For three weeks there was no change at all. She slept in the cradle, awakened to eat, curled up again in the cradle. She went to the bathroom as she needed to but never washed unless I went in with her and helped.
There were marks on her back from its pressing against the bars. I had no need now to chew at my hands to feel pain. When the baby was awake I carried her around over my shoulder or on my hip so she wouldn’t see my expression, lest it make her cry.
I became aware of a first small difference during an afternoon when I came home with Donna to find Livvy still asleep in the cradle but with a pillow under her head. Mrs. Borelli said she had awakened and asked for milk and cookies. Then she’d gone to the bathroom, walked to her bedroom, gotten the pillow, and returned to the cradle with it.
I looked away from Mrs. Borelli so she couldn’t see that I was crying. I think that until that moment, I hadn’t been certain that anything would change.