What I Had Before I Had You

by Sarah Cornwell

  Tom is a man my mother loved who did not deserve it. He has no more claim to me than a test tube would have. Yet there he will always be, claim or no claim, in my thoughtless patterns of speech, on the medical history forms I fill out in doctor’s offices, in expressions on my children’s faces, on my own face. I have his mouth, this Cupid’s bow, this slender lower lip.

  I OPEN THE Klimt door and I’m in my mother’s room. Here is the furniture of my childhood but younger, innocent and just-bought: the ceramic swans, the brass library lamp with its green shade like a banker’s visor, the pink and gold saris dripping their tassels across these New York windows. Scattered animal figurines from boxes of Lipton tea. Books stacked in towers by the bed. Mugs on the books, flowers wilting from the mugs.

  I was conceived here.

  There they are, my parents, Myla and Tom, rutting sweaty, rolling together on my mother’s childhood sheets—white with little pink flowers—the duvet kicked to the floor, the white cat watching sleepily from the cupola window seat. A little girl’s canopy bed, lace curtains trying their translucent hardest to conceal the act underway. She is off her lithium. This is the first time. Tom gasps, breathless with the thrill of doing the wrong thing, and Myla gasps, breathless with love. Tom is fascinated with the way he can feel the bare outline of Christie beneath Myla’s voluptuous movement; this wild thing is inside his fiancée, too, but buried deep, while in Myla it trembles raw on the surface. She bites his lip, she grins. She felt that if she never had him, she would waste away, as if under a spell. (She would cry for rampion, she would promise her firstborn!) Now that she has him, she is a million times strong, she is the happiest girl in the world. She does not even think of Christie. Christie belongs to another story.

  Inside my mother, two eggs have traveled a long blue corridor. They cling to the wall of her uterus and they wait.

  THROUGHOUT, MY GRANDFATHER is absent. He works in accounts at an aeronautical engineering firm. He drinks brandy in his study with men from Pan Am who wave at Myla as she passes through the foyer with Marymount friends, a blur of bright colors and swishing hair. He goes on business trips that he does not like to explain. He says it’s dull stuff, dull as bones. Christie meets him for lunch in midtown, and he orders her roast beef every time. Sometimes Myla sits in the backyard to watch him work on his models, gluing tiny plastic pieces and clamping them to set. At times like these, he doesn’t hear a word spoken to him. He works with complete focus. He does not acknowledge sandwiches left on the patio table.

  He has been unfair to Myla since she hit fourteen and developed her moods. She reminds him of his father, of whom he does not speak. He is deeply ashamed of the gene swimming in his code that he has passed to his daughter. Nobody knows the sort of memories that rise when he is made to think of his father: a purple-faced drunk bearing down on him for a hiding, the belt slithering from its loops, the devil in his eye. The outlandish claims of injury, the threatening letters unfurling from the clackety typewriter, the plate-breaking, the neighbors afraid. Then the apologies. The fits of crying, the lost jobs, the hard times. The shame.

  It could have helped Myla to know, he thinks later. There could have been a vitamin to take, or a set of exercises to keep the mind strong. It could be his fault, all his fault. His thoughts die with him at sixty-eight, of adrenal failure, in a wing of Columbia Presbyterian not far from the room where Myla used to lie on a couch and tell the psychiatrist what it felt like to feel nothing at all.

  MY SISTERS ARE born into the toilet, not into the hands of mournful nurses, as my mother always told me. They are a bloody spurt, they are a stomach cramp. They are unexpected and then they are gone.

  When she feels the first pangs, Myla skips Classics and walks home slowly from Marymount, clutching The Symposium to her chest. On her way home, she sees a group of friends and accepts a party invitation. It is spring, and her mother is growing dwarf azaleas in the window boxes. They have put her on enormous doses of lithium and thorazine, and everything is hidden under muffling blankets and tinged sadly yellow. It is only spring because the calendar says so. Her mother and Christie and the psychiatrist are a cruel little coven, meeting at secret locations to calibrate Myla’s mind. She feels that they have murdered her senses, but she doesn’t have enough in her to stay angry.

  The living room is strewn with silver and white boxes, ribbons shredded by the cat, wedding detritus. Christie and Tom have flown to Brazil, where they are eating seviche on some sunbaked balcony, fingering the new gold rings on their fingers. Myla can’t imagine that they are making love. Not Christie. She staggers up the stairs and makes it to the toilet.

  She grips her knees and bears out the cramp. The sun slants through the high window in the shower, casting trembling squares of light on the bath mat. She wonders if the lithium dulls pain, too, if this pain in her belly is really much worse than she can tell, and she is going to die here, alone on the toilet.

  Then she heaves. A weight drops. She parts her legs and sees blood. She gets down on her hands and knees and understands that there, rising to the top of the watery pink pulp in the toilet bowl, are two dolls. No, not dolls. She blinks. They came out knotted together, but they float apart.

  She reaches into the mess and lifts them. They have tiny curled fists with grain-of-sand fingernails. Their bodies are like wrung-out washcloths, and the pale globes of their heads have pressed shallow dents each into the other. They are slick with her blood.

  Myla sits on her bathroom floor, holding her girls. She hates the sadness she feels because it is a lithium sadness, with measure. This is the moment for her wailing heart, for the leaping feelings of her natural self. She imagines silver dollars tiny enough for their eyes. The heads of pins. She would like to cry. It will haunt her forever that she didn’t cry.

  She stares at them for a long time, waiting in case there is magic at work, in case they will stir, stretch, awaken. Eventually she holds the girls out over the toilet bowl in her palm and slowly inclines her wrist, so that it might seem to some observant God that they simply fell—oops—back into the murk. They float for a few minutes and then they slip from view. She looks at the clock and learns that hours have passed. She flushes the toilet.

  She takes a shower and an aspirin. She hears a door slam downstairs. She puts on a pair of linen pants and a pearl-throat blouse and she goes to the party, where she dances and laughs, though her voice seems to come from a place outside her body. The lithium does that. She feels a strange new hollowness in her abdomen, a yearning to restore a thing she didn’t know she had. She drinks a bottle of wine and passes out on her friend’s couch. She wakes up to a stern phone call from her mother: Young lady . . .

  She stops taking the pills.

  CHRISTIE ANNOUNCES HER pregnancy in July. Manhattan is tropical; the girls take turns standing before the open refrigerator and bathing in ice water in the claw-foot tub. Nobody will install air-conditioning units here until the nineties. My grandfather gave Christie and Tom the down payment for an apartment in Chelsea, but they were burgled after a month, and they are staying at the Seventy-third Street house until they can find a new place.

  Christie does it at dinner. She uses trite language, and it makes Myla angry. “We’re expecting a new addition,” she says, as if they are planning a new wing of a building. She looks radiant, and this, too, makes Myla angry. My grandparents raise their glasses; my grandmother springs from her seat to hug and gush. The salad warms.

  Myla watches Tom, the sweat stains at the armpits of his shirt, his handsome, blank smile as he shakes my grandfather’s hand. He doesn’t know he’s been here before. He thinks he is a first-time father. Of course Tom and Christie will have children. Christie will raise them while Tom wins bread. Myla understands that. Her attraction to Tom has lost all its subtlety and become a biological imperative. All she can feel is her hollow interior, all she can think of are those girls in her bloody palm and how to get them back. />
  MY MOTHER PURSUES Tom. She seduces, she covets. She slides into months of rapid joy, the lithium pills flushed, dissolving in the same septic water beneath New York City where the bodies of the twins disintegrate. They begin to coalesce as I will know them, fat baby legs, ghostly baby cries. She feels their hunger, their pleasure, the patterns of their sleep. Her attention span allows her to read nothing but poetry. She goes weeks without sleep. She knows the future, she hears the talk beneath talk.

  Tom yields easily. Christie is fat, Myla is thin. Christie needs backrubs and space. Christie needs quiet togetherness. Myla is a Bond girl, glittering-eyed and breathless, bolting wildly toward climax. She beguiles him. Tom lies that he is going to a meeting. Myla lies that she is on birth control. They tangle in the empty house once, twice, five times before they conceive me.

  It is unglamorous. My father doesn’t want me, and my mother thinks I am someone else. Two people. She sends Tom away grinning foolishly, and she rocks on her back on the bed. She stares at herself in the mirror for a long time. She is so grateful for her extraordinary senses: She can feel a burgeoning in her gut like fast-motion footage of plants flowering. This is what her body wants, this is her destiny. She feels that God has given her back her girls and that their guardianship will be the glory and purpose of her life.

  I know the kind of mad driving joy that makes my mother’s decisions for her. I know how sure she must have felt and how beautiful the future must have looked to her. Though she would never admit it, especially not to me, I know that she must have had moments of regret and shame, too, moments when she came back down to earth and caught glimpses of the tightly sprung trap she had set for herself, and bore it out regardless.

  CHRISTIE SAYS SHE didn’t know about the affair until Myla started to show, but I don’t understand how she could have missed it. She who knew my mother better than anyone, who could tell from her posture and tone of voice if she was up or down or level, couldn’t see the flush of wrongdoing on my mother’s cheeks. On the other hand, it’s easy to believe that Tom didn’t let on. In photos, his smile is always the same.

  January 1971 now. Christie is eight months along with her twins, Myla three months along with me. Christie’s belly is enormous. My mother has been wearing loose, concealing clothing, and it’s not until she escorts her sister to balloon around in the pool at the 92nd Street Y that she is given away. She sits in a T-shirt, dangling her legs in the water, as Christie rolls and moans. Myla feels the cosmic rightness of sharing pregnancy with her sister, and she sometimes wishes she could tell Christie. Other times she feels fiercely protective of her secret. Her family and her shrink won’t let her live in a dormitory or go on a trip with her girlfriends. They would never let her bear a child. She will be an old-maid librarian if they have their way. So she is waiting them out. She’s feeling healthy, even-keeled, this month. She thinks, hopefully, that she has shaken the illness; the gravity of pregnancy has washed it away. She has thought such things before. Each calm period seems like the one that will last forever. Off the lithium, the world has regained its colors and its brilliant associations—the character of things.

  Christie puts her hands together to squirt water at Myla, as she has done countless times before in this pool. Myla squeals. In the moment before Myla is found out, they are little-girl sisters, playing old games. Christie grabs her sister’s legs and pulls, and Myla splashes into the pool bottom-first. When she comes up, she is laughing, she has forgotten herself, but Christie sees it: the swelling of Myla’s breasts under the translucent cotton, the low roundness of her belly. She would never have noticed if she hadn’t just watched her own similar body swell and round in the same places. Christie’s hand shoots out to feel Myla’s belly, and there is the tight skin, the hard bump.

  “Oh no,” says Christie. “Oh no.” She understands without running through the alternatives; she has known, or suspected and not let herself know. In one horrible torrent of thought, Christie sees that she has picked the wrong husband, and that her family is about to supernova, and that she will never want to divorce if she doesn’t right now, and she thinks of Tom and she just doesn’t.

  “I’m sorry,” says my mother, and who knows if she means it.

  Christie says nothing but grits her teeth and looks at Myla, blood coloring her face. This is how her sister is. She only has one sister.

  MY MOTHER’S ROOM. She has turned her overstuffed blue armchair to face the door, and she sits queenlike, awaiting the storming of her defenses. She knows they are coming. She hears their thoughts humming in the walls of the house. And they do come: her mother, her father, Christie, the family doctor. Everyone but Tom.

  I picture it as an ambush: my grandparents advancing on her with forceps, a maniacal abortionist ready with knives to cut me out right there in the armchair. Christie says it was civil, and that sounds more likely, but there is no less threat in civility. They file up the stairs and knock on her door, they sit on the edge of her bed, lean against the tall posts. The psychiatrist has told them to put her at ease. Christie tries to sit on the bed but can’t and lies back against the pillows, rubbing circles across her enormous belly.

  My grandmother moves close and flutters her hand across my mother’s arm, trying to squeeze reassuringly but unused to touching her daughters. “We all make mistakes,” she says. “It’s not the end of the world.”

  But it is, and Myla knows it. She could never have me here, the bastard daughter of the crazy daughter of the president of the Junior League. How would it look? When my grandparents discuss Myla’s future, at night, curled together in their navy bed, they wonder what strings they can pull to set her up in a steady low-profile job and who will ever want to marry her. They discuss the costs of hospitalization, how best to word that delicate clause in their wills.

  My mother has already chosen me, and she listens to them from a remove because she knows she is leaving. She has begun to detach. She becomes minutely aware of her heartbeat, her breath inflating tiny alveoli in the depths of her lungs, the feeding warmth of my body inside hers. Reality turns inward. Myla watches as the people she loves lose their substance, become transparent. My grandmother is a brisk ghost, gesturing, rings bright on her ghostly hands. Her heart is a black boot. My grandfather is shot through with hot white veins, like photographs of frantic highways taken from great height. And then she sees her sister. There, on the inside of Christie, twisting in the weightless dark, are two baby girls. Not one. Twins. She stares at them until she understands, or thinks she does, and then she feels betrayed: Tom gave them away. He gave her girls away to Christie. She shakes her head to clear it, and the filmy doctor looks concerned. Myla looks down at her own slight swell, and she can’t see me, but this is the moment when she knows I am a new girl, not a rebirth at all but a deathless daughter, a never flushed thing.

  My grandmother looks to my grandfather, who coughs and says something about a surgeon. Christie looks at Myla, wet-eyed and unable to speak. Myla sits still until they back out of the room. She hears the key turn in the latch; they long ago installed a lock on the outside of her door, and she long ago learned how to pick it. For a few days she allows them to keep her under surveillance and lockdown. She thinks hard about all these people and all the different things they want. And she thinks about me. A few times Christie comes in to sit with her, trying to understand how she could have done what she has done. Myla tells her about losing the twins and about the terrible hollowness that followed. The urgency she felt.

  Christie goes into labor late at night. Myla listens to her family rushing around outside her door, packing a bag, voices quick with excitement. She hears Tom say, “Careful,” as Christie walks down the front steps. It is the last word she will hear from any of them for fifteen years.

  When they are gone, she goes out into the night and buys a junker from a classmate’s brother. She loads it with boxes: everything in her parents’ house that she can call her own. Wh
en you’re twenty, it’s not running away. It’s just leaving.

  She kisses the white cat and puts her forehead to his. He is the only one who wishes her well. She drives south. On the New Jersey Turnpike, she feels me kick at the inside of her ribs, and she listens to her old things rattling around in cardboard boxes in the back, and she thinks of Christie screaming in a hospital bed, Tom’s hand smoothing the hair from her sweaty forehead. She thinks of her twins crowning between her sister’s thighs, her tiny washcloth girls grown fat and pink, gasping that cold hospital air and screaming, screaming, screaming their way into the world she has left behind.

  17

  IN THE DREAM, I am back in our house in Austin, doubled over the gray Formica kitchen table, a knifing pain in my belly. Sam is holding my right hand in both of his, asking, What’s wrong? He seems to want to comfort, but I feel a panicked need to have my hands free, for what I don’t know. His grip on my wrist looks gentle but is not. I kick the table from beneath, and it shatters upward as if made of glass. Sam’s hands fly up to shield his face, and I sprint to the bathroom before the shards can rain back down.

  I pull my pants down and kick them off, collapse on the toilet. The pain. My stomach heaves. A weight drops. I part my legs and see blood. I get down on my hands and knees and see, rising to the top of the watery pink pulp in the toilet bowl, three plucked chickens.

  Sam? I yell. Sam?

  I open the door and find the hallway changed. The walls and floor are made of stone and lit moon blue. The hallway extends into darkness. I know to be afraid. I see their eyes first, four gleaming disks, and by then they are already upon me: two lions with great empty red and gold saddles, stirrups flung back with the speed of their approach. Their mouths are great toothy caverns, incisors yellow and crusted with plaque. Their matted golden fur ripples with contracting muscle, their manes are full of things I have lost: watches, safety pins, bus tickets. They close the distance between us in two bounds, and one enfolds me in its enormous paws and jerks me close, my head back and my throat prone. The moment the teeth touch my skin, I am gone.