* * *
Soon enough comes the inevitable question. Hamlet grappled about whether to be or not to be. Our burning existential question becomes to baby or not to baby. His parents drop subtle American hints, “It would be so nice if you did. And it would be so beautiful. A lovely shade of caramel. Like Halle Berry.” My mother on the phone doesn’t hint. “So when are you going to do it? Better now than when you’re even older. What are you waiting for?”
I say, “Amma, we just got married.”
“Three years ago. Don’t you know what comes after marriage? The baby.”
“And after that?”
“The second baby, of course.”
“God, Amma, you’ll have me with a herd if you had your way.”
She says, “I always wanted a lot of kids, but then I couldn’t. You should. It’ll be good for you two, make you settle down and grow up. Maybe it’ll make that hubby of yours get a real job.”
She’s set up in Colombo now. She rents a house, has a servant. She says the country has changed so much, I wouldn’t recognize it. The war is over, of course, but more than that, money is flowing in, roads are being built—freeways, just like in America—there are shopping centers, and everyone has a cell phone. She says that the only thing that would bring her back to America is to see her first grandchild. I don’t tell her the truth. That neither of us really wants children, neither of us is pulled in that particular direction.
She goes on. “You know Dharshi is pregnant again.”
I say, “She’s having another baby?”
“Yes, her third. A girl, they say, this time. Two boys before, you know.”
“Yes, I remember.”
“You know, I think it worked out. I think she’s happy. They look good together now. Mallini got her married so young. But now she’s settled. And the babies, Mallini has her arms full of them, lucky lady.”
I sigh. She says, “What darling? I just want you to be happy. How can a woman really be happy without children? All that other stuff, career, love, what have you, it’ll all go away, but a child is yours forever.”
I don’t tell her that I’ve never felt those urges other women talk about. I’ve never looked at babies with longing, never envied women with newborns in their arms or toddlers hanging off them. My uterus has never throbbed at the sight of a newborn. The biological imperative, those essential hormones that make women stare at babies as if they are delectable, they must be missing in my particular chemical makeup.
And yet the baby-hunger is all around us. I know women with a baby-desire so deep their breasts automatically weep milk when they hear other people’s infants crying. I have friends who after years of focusing on careers are issuing baby ultimatums to stunned husbands or boyfriends.
Daniel’s male friends sit at the table and talk about being surrounded by women who are newly rapacious for newborns. One of them says, “I feel like they just want my sperm. A woman actually said to me the other night, ‘I want to have your blond baby.’” He looks terrified. The rules of dating have changed under his feet. It’s no longer lighthearted or spontaneous; the objectives are different.
The opposite too is happening: men we have known for years are saying to their wives and girlfriends, “Give me a baby or I’ll leave.” Formerly happy couples are breaking up, and the one left behind sheepishly, heartbrokenly mutters, “She/he wanted a baby. I’m not sure I do.”
Daniel and I listen to all this and turn to each other, delighted that neither of us are pulled in this way. Instead we clink glasses long after our friends with children have gone to relieve their babysitters. We loll in bed, take hiking trips into the desert, go to Mexico, and congratulate ourselves for not falling into the trap that has enmeshed so many of our friends.
Child free is the term we use to describe ourselves. In this choice, we are wholly and luxuriously selfish.
* * *
But it’s not only our friends who are heeding the call to procreate. The grocery store racks are full of magazines that follow the progress of pregnant celebrities with the concentration and enthusiasm usually reserved for sporting events. It’s a nationwide obsession that follows a predictable path in the headlines. First, the all-important photos of the woman showing off the sparkling chip of compressed carbon gracing her finger. “He proposed! She said yes!” Then the exclusive shots of nuptials: “The Fairy-Tale Wedding. Flowers. Cake. Dress.” Immediately after follows a giddy anticipation of that lauded physical manifestation of fertility, the baby bump. Who has it? Who is showing? Almost immediately after the baby is born, the most important part of this equation comes into play: How fast does the woman regain her “bikini body”? How quickly can she shed the grotesque signs that her body has harbored another being for the last nine months? If this shrinking takes longer than a few months, there must be something wrong with the mother. She must be lazy or depressed. After all, this is her job as a celebrity, isn’t it? To model for us how our own bodies should act?
The message is loud and clear: women’s bodies are supposed to swell up, drop babies, and then shrink back down to a manageable size. The baby? Another perfectly designed accessory to match her heels and bag. All around us, this ambient roar of fecundity, and I for one am happy to be outside it.
* * *
Yet just a few weeks after the conversation with my mother I think back to it and wonder if it was a trigger. If all those nights Dharshi and I spent in twin beds next to each other had synchronized us so that even though I haven’t seen her in years, perhaps her body has somehow reached out and whispered to mine, because now I am late.
My period has never been regular, the ebbs and flows of it impossible to regulate. Also maybe having to pay so much attention to other people’s bodies makes it hard for me to pay attention to my own. I realize that it’s been some time since I bled, at least a month, if not two. I wait another week hoping and praying, the question gnawing at the back of my mind. What could have happened? I’m on the pill. But is it possible I have missed one here and there? Could his sperm have breached the gates in a moment of hormonal confusion, a morning where I rushed out without popping a tiny pink tablet? It’s possible. I’ve been working mad hours; I haven’t always paid perfect attention. I don’t tell him because a part of me is convinced I am being stupid. I am not pregnant. Soon my period will come and then I can tell him how scared I was and we will laugh at my silly anxiety and toast to our child-free-ness.
At the end of the week I buy a pregnancy test. Hands shaking, I squat and piss. I lay the test on the counter, wash my hands. I stare into the mirror at my terrified face. Then there are those long, long minutes. I go into the kitchen and eat a cold chicken leg I find in the fridge.
Minutes later, there it is, an unambiguous plus sign.
* * *
I sit on the old gold couch we bought together at a garage sale when he was moving in, and my entire life shimmers and vibrates and changes in front of me. How can it be? Even now, in some secret passage of my body, some tiny, unwanted person stirs and dreams. When did this presence come? Where did it come from? Can I get it out? It’s shockingly like being possessed by some outside force. I think about my skin moving outward and stretching taut, about pushing out a living creature through an orifice that seems far, far too small. I press my hands across my belly, imagining a tiny speck of life floating there. What will I do? What will he think? How will our lives be? Should I abort? Should I carry a child? Give birth to it?
I pace the room and the lost men come to me. My drowned father, Samson. Between them, they had crafted me. How can I pass on such an inheritance to a child? How can I conjure up some miniature soul from the mysterious unknown, feed it upon my blood, and then push it kicking and screaming out of my body into this world? Existence has been heavy enough for me. Would it be a blessing or a curse to bestow it upon some small, unknown stranger?
But then this tiny thought unfolds. It whispers hope. It says that perhaps here—far away from the island, far
from those malevolent spirits, far from those cruel hands, in the arms of this strong and loving man—it could happen. Perhaps I could be a mother in a different way. Perhaps a child would be born who is a new thing, not an entity ruled by ghosts. A child made by him and me would be born of love, even if accidentally. And this accidental child, born in this safe place, it would love me unconditionally, and for this I yearn.
* * *
When I tell him, his eyes widen and his brow rises. He spreads his hands on the table, pushes himself up, and goes to stand in front of our window, his back to me. He looks down onto the street where the late October sun is falling like weak drizzle. I say, “Say something.”
He says, “I don’t know … A baby?” His voice trails off and he stands there for minutes. I stay quiet, waiting. He comes back, squats next to me, holds my hands. “I just … I don’t think we can. Do you want this?”
I shake my head and then I’m not sure. “I don’t know. I never thought I wanted to be a mom, but maybe with you…”
He says, “We’ve talked about this so much. You’ve always said you didn’t want to.”
I shrug my shoulders, my hands on my stomach pointing out that the decision has been taken from us, has been made by unknown, unseen forces.
He says, “But we’re so good. Look how much freedom we have. How easy our lives are. It’ll change everything. I don’t want it to change. I love our lives. I love how we are together.”
I counter, “I love our lives too. But maybe it’ll be like us multiplied. It’ll be us times ten. You, me, and a little one. A tiny one just like you or me. It could be good.”
He says, “Have you even thought this through? Do you know how much time and effort and money it’ll be? I’m just trying to get off the ground. I mean, if I sold some paintings it could be different.”
“Yes, of course. I’m not proposing we adopt a puppy.” He lets go of my hands, gets up, and paces the room again. He says, “I don’t know.”
I say, “I have to go to work,” and stand up. Something in me is far away from him, but he must feel it, because he comes and holds me close to him, strokes my hair with his palms. I rest my face against his chest. He says, “We’ll figure it out together. I promise.” His voice sounds like it has traveled miles to me, but I nod against his skin.
* * *
I go to my doctor and find out that I am about seven weeks pregnant. At home despite my trepidation I open my old nursing manuals, and there are the lists of attributes:
The embryo is around 13 mm (1/2 inch) in length. The heart is beating with one chamber. A dividing wall is formed in the heart. Arm and leg buds are beginning to grow. The lower jaw and the vocal cords are beginning to form. The mouth opening is forming. The inner ear is being created. The digestive tract is developing. The navel string is being created. The following organs are being formed: the lungs, the liver, the pancreas, and the thyroid gland.
It sounds like a poem, like the lines of the most beautiful poem in the world.
Inside me, these things are happening. The delicate whorl of an inner ear, its complicated mechanisms beyond the grasp of all science to create, is being created. Inside me, organs that pump blood, breathe air, secrete hormones are coming into being, forming the tiny swirl of life that will be this miracle, a new human being. A childhood memory rises, of listening to the Buddhist verses that extoll the sanctity of life, verses that claim that a child is a child from conception and that the months we spend in utero too are marked as a year of life.
* * *
I can’t eat, I can’t sleep. I am as devastated as a bombed-out city. He tries to hold me, but I don’t want him. I walk my shifts like a zombie, go through my paces at bedside on automatic. Nadine tries to talk to me, but I push past her. I wonder when one of the others will report me for being careless, for more than once pushing the needle into flesh rather than vein so that patients gasp and swell and complain. There is a time bomb ticking inside me. This is one problem with a deadline set in stone as much as in flesh.
At the grocery store and at the park, I stop to watch women with their children, the way they look at their little ones and the way that longing gaze is returned. No matter how far the child might stray, there is always that look over the shoulder to make sure mommy is there, mommy has not left. The mothers always know where their children are, even as they hold coffee and talk to the others. Always, this invisible umbilicus stretching between a mother and her young.
To be adored like that. To be loved unconditionally, to extend the way we are together, Daniel and me, to this other unknown person, who is also both of us. Could we be like that? Happy? All three of us in love with each other? It seems the last thing missing in the life I have built.
* * *
He comes home one night, sits on the edge of the bed with his face in his hands. He looks ragged, like he too has been crying. I feel a rush of love for him and then he says, “I’m sorry, I just can’t do it. I’ve thought and thought and thought about it, but I just can’t. I’m sorry, but I’m not cut out for being a parent. I can’t do it. I think you’d be a good mother. But I can’t do it.”
“What are you saying?”
“I just mean maybe it’s important for you to be a mother. Maybe more important than being with me.”
“What?”
“I’m just saying that if you want the baby … you know. More than you want me, I understand. I love you and I want you to be happy.”
I understand then that nothing is more important than him. I will give up this baby for him. I am not strong enough to carry it without him.
* * *
I make the appointment. It’s on a weekday, so he won’t be with me. The doctor says it’s not a big deal. I’ll be sedated and afterward he’ll pick me up. I’ll sleep a lot, she says, and then I’ll heal. It’ll be like it never happened. We can go on with our lives and forget about it. I’m so glad I live in a time and place where this is easy, where I don’t have to risk my life to do this. But I also know I will be haunted by this day. Haunted by this scraping out of the material that could have been our child. Right now just a curl of life, but also within it the possibility of a whole human existence with its entire weight of experience, memory, connection.
I’m sitting in the waiting room, trying to get myself ready for what happens next. I stare at a magazine, but I can’t make out the features of the happy women in bikinis on sun-bleached beaches. Instead I see a jumble of limbs, flashes of what will happen inside me in a few minutes. My heart is thudding, the pages of the magazine fluttering with my hands. The breath is stuck in my rib cage like a trapped bird.
Daniel walks in. He sits down next to me. He takes my hand and I clutch his fingers as if I am drowning.
I stare at him. “What are you doing here?”
He says, “Do you think we can do this?”
I say, “Yes, if we do it together. If you stay with me.”
The nurse comes to the door, calls my name. I stand, but he pulls me back into the seat. He says, “No, it’s okay. We’ve changed our minds.” She looks at me to be sure. I nod at her. He kisses my cheek in his special spot and whispers, “We’re going to have a baby.”
We walk out together. I leave that room as if I am walking out of a bad dream. I’m too happy to say anything.
* * *
After that, he’s kind; he’s solicitous. He cooks the foods of his childhood for me, bland white-colored foods that ease my rising nausea. He brings me large-faced flowers, filling the apartment with gardenias, camellias, huge waxy magnolias that glow like full moons. Our space is a swirl of scent. We fall asleep lulled by the perfume of these blossoms. We never talk about what almost happened. We pack our fears into a Pandora’s box and lock it securely away. We have decided that the story was always that we both wanted this accidental child. We have no more use for doubt.
He says, “You’ll be such a great mother. I just know it.” He says, “What shall we call him or her?” and compile
s a long scroll of names with beautiful doodles of animals in the margins. He gives me a red pen and asks me to circle the ones I like. He has taken the names that have run in his family, and here are the names of our brethren dead and alive. Generations of names. A way to connect this child to the ones who came before.
He moves the art supplies out of the spare room. He starts painting a mural but says I can’t see it until it is done. He goes around with paint on his face and splattered all over the old gray sweatshirt he loves. Then he leads me to the door of the new nursery, his hands over my eyes. “Look,” he says, and the room is transformed, a secondhand crib, a stack of diapers and baby wipes, and a changing table, and on the wall he’s painted two beavers in perfect detail. One of them is stretching up to draw a perfect, anatomically correct rendition of a majestically large-antlered deer. The other has drawn a child’s stick figure of a deer with red crayon, has trailed off the red crayon into a corner after having gotten some of it on his face, and is grinning at us from the wall. “This is you,” he says, pointing to the artistic beaver. “You’ve got it figured out. This mother thing. You’re going to be great. This is me,” he says about the crayon-besmirched beaver. “I’m a mess, but with you, I can figure it out.”
I think: here are the two souls who will love me without condition, without artifice. I know I will never again wander pathless and unsure of who or what I am. Instead I am this one’s wife and this one’s mother; I will be called by these sacred names: wife, mother. I will be fixed, stable, and held in place securely between them.
Sixteen
It’s an easy pregnancy. I have some morning sickness, the skin stretches and hurts, I can’t sleep much, but at five months there’s a softness emanating from deep inside me. From the ultrasound, the doctor has confirmed what I already knew: we are having a girl. I feel her move in the seas of my body and it makes me breathless. I pull Daniel’s hands onto my skin and we stare into each other’s eyes in wonder. How is this possible? How have we made a new creature, a person who will have her own life? A new person who is both him and me. The immensity of it makes us grin in delight.
What Lies Between Us Page 16