Across the hall was the small room the glib and persuasive realtor who sold them the house had called the baby’s room, which they had never once called the baby’s room, not wanting to jinx their luck. The box room, they called it, with ironic awareness of the pretentious Bertie Wooster tone of that term, rather than settle for the dull respectability of guest room or the tidy-as-a-pin spare room of Virginia Woolf’s Lucy Swithin, though it was tidy as a pin, with a day bed, a scarred maple chest of drawers Duncan grew up with, and a closet holding Duncan’s old ski clothing and Laura’s abandoned Pilates equipment. A single black and white photograph of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater house was all that hung on the walls. It was the plainest and least personal room in their house, and it would never be anything but the box room.
Laura sipped her wine, mindful of not dribbling on her favorite soft blue-and-white-striped sheets they had brought back from their romantic Christmas trip to Milan last year. They had hoped the trip to Italy would change the frequency after those eighteen months of trying unsuccessfully for a baby. Laura had been particularly optimistic about conceiving on that trip, and had even allowed herself to imagine the future, eighteen or twenty years hence, when she would have the disclosing conversation with that child, during which she would reveal, tastefully and appropriately, without too much detail, the fact of that tender Italian beginning. You were just the tiniest zigote, she would tell their firstborn, perhaps to mark the occasion of Clementine or August leaving for a junior year abroad, in Italy or France.
Medical tests showed nothing wrong with either of them. She was ovulating on schedule. Her fallopian tubes were clear. Her hormone levels were normal. She did not have cervical mucus hostility. (Thanks a lot for that mental picture, thought Laura when she read the lab report.) Duncan’s sperm was motile. (I contain multitudes, he had declared with pride when they received his highly adequate sperm count, upwards of two hundred million, which took the edge off the warm plastic cup embarrassment.)
How many times had they been hopeful? How many times had Laura carried herself with extra care, feeling with certainty that tiny spark of life taking root deep inside her? How had they ever been so cocky as to joke about the possibility of twins running in the family? Month after month, she welcomed the sperm, offered her egg, coaxed and willed each zygote into being, into becoming an embryo, into staying and making itself at home.
How many mornings had she been woken by the disheartening ooze of blood trickling between her legs? How many times had she realized that her tender breasts only heralded that familiar shift in her belly signifying the shedding of another uterine lining? Now it was two years of the dreaded trickle in the middle of dinner with friends, at the movies, at work, at the grocery store. Two years of farewells to what might have been, each month bringing a fresh grief of goodbye, baby who never was, goodbye, this month’s uncleaved zygote, goodbye, little not-an-embryo, goodbye, little laughing boy who might have been, goodbye, sweet napping girl in my arms who wasn’t meant to be. You are not meant to be this month, my future baby. Maybe you are meant to be next month.
The day before Duncan’s accident, Laura was five or perhaps six days late. Her cycle was fairly regular, so this lateness had once again lit a tiny flicker of hope. She had planned to wait a full week, hoping, hoping, hoping, before telling Duncan. But at dinner, seared scallops and a big slightly sandy salad (because Laura was inattentive to her one kitchen assignment, washing lettuce, a tedious task she disliked and did badly), as Duncan reached over and speared one of her untouched scallops, he caught her eye and after a long moment, it registered.
“Are you? You really think?” She had nodded without answering, not even wanting to say anything aloud this time. They didn’t speak of it again, but lay in bed that night in a tight spoon, neither of them able to go to sleep. “I want embryo to take piano lessons,” Duncan whispered against the back of her neck in the middle of the night. They had not spoken of it the next morning, though it was in the air as they had their usual companionable granola and yogurt together while listening to public radio, before Duncan walked out the door for the last time to go to work.
Laura had taken to laundering these blue-and-white-striped sheets and putting them right back on the bed still warm from the dryer, preferring the soft Italian cotton to all the other sets of bed linen on the hallway closet shelf. There was nobody in the world who cared what sheets were on her bed or how often they were changed. Upstairs, alone. Alone upstairs. The solitude of this time of day was something she looked forward to but also dreaded.
It still felt unreal to lie in their bed, her bed, after she had turned out the light, staring at the dark, realizing all over again with fresh grief that she would never hear Duncan’s familiar footsteps as he bounded up the stairs, that she would never hear the sound of his pocket change going into the silver dish on his bureau, that she would never again be annoyed by his whiskers and toothpaste left in the un-rinsed sink, or his discarded socks and underwear dropped and forgotten on the bedroom floor the moment he stepped out of them, or his damp bath towel left on the bed after a shower instead of hung up to dry. Such clichéd, ordinary male behavior for someone who prided himself on his originality and attention to detail.
Laura missed the easy intimacy of those thousands of ordinary frictions. Of course, the loss of those particular little nuisances of their life together—the toothpaste, the socks, the forgotten damp towels, not to mention the messes Duncan left in the kitchen whenever he cooked a meal—none of it mattered in the larger scheme of things, but quotidian (a favorite word of Duncan’s) encounters in their domestic life together were the incandescent particles that sparked the vitality of their marriage, he had written in uncharacteristically flowery language on the card that accompanied a fifth-anniversary gift of beautifully incandescent sapphire earrings.
There was an almost formal distance between them now, and it wasn’t just the literal physical space that Ottoline so often demanded, or the separation created by the impossibility of ever sleeping together as they had all their married life until now. Laura missed the sweet intimacy of spooning more than she missed sex. Nor was it simply the loss of spontaneity between them, now that the most ordinary moments of daily living required strategies and preparation and the negotiation of constant accommodation. Though that was indeed a loss. Of course she could lie down on his bed and cuddle with Duncan, and they did this nearly every day, but it could be awkward and complicated to arrange herself against Duncan, and Laura could hardly bear the realization each time that he didn’t feel her hip against him, or her hand on his waist.
There were options, suggested the female hospital social worker who called her to discuss how Laura and Duncan were doing, attempting to open a door on a frank discussion of the creative strategies a couple had for maintaining a lively and intimate sexual connection when one partner was paralyzed. There were things they could do. Laura was sure that this was true for lots of couples. She could imagine very different people finding their way somewhere new, collaborating, being really in it together on this weird adventure that would be intimate and profound in its way. But Duncan had become so remote. How could you get there from here?
At moments, even the most ordinary and natural gesture of affection felt like a procedure she was administrating and Duncan was receiving. Lying in his hospital bed, barely able to turn his head, with only limited possible movement of one arm, he seemed so helpless and incapacitated compared to the sturdy man who used to live in that body. How could Laura gaze at Duncan without feeling that she was entirely responsible for him? This was a disconcertingly unromantic thought. When she kissed him, he was often minimally responsive, though polite. Nothing felt reciprocal. Touching Duncan, no matter how lightly she stroked him, no matter how delicately she walked her hand across his upper torso with delicate, brushing fingertips (something he used to love so much it made him groan with pleasure), Laura would watch him just lie there silently, perhaps waiting for her to stop
. His passive politeness made her feel nurse-like, as if he accepted that her every touch was just one more thing she was doing to him.
She was in a kind of phantom mourning, longing for these lost aspects of daily life with Duncan. Meanwhile, Duncan wasn’t the dearly departed, he was the dearly downstairs. As she lay there awake, Duncan was deep in a drugged sleep with the swish-swish-swish CPAP machine running, the mask snugged on his face reminding Laura at different moments of elephants, divers, welders, soldiers, protesters, HazMat workers, exterminators. He only needed breathing assistance while he slept. The trauma surgeons had said Duncan was lucky (that word again!), that he was just millimeters away from a C4 or C3 spinal cord injury, which would have left him forever dependent on a respirator to do all his breathing for him, never mind that Christopher Reeve had managed to breathe on his own for fifteen minutes at a time after undergoing surgery to implant electrodes in his diaphragm.
Never mind Christopher Reeve altogether, though Duncan and Laura were constantly reminded by well-meaning friends and helpers about how impressive and dignified and determined he was, how he had managed to do so much after his accident, not to mention his wonderful contributions to research. Yes, Christopher Reeve was everybody’s favorite poster child for life with quadriplegia, but let’s not forget that the poor man’s death, after all that valiant effort, was a consequence of pressure sores.
While Laura lay alone and awake ruminating in the dark upstairs, Duncan lay directly beneath her, sleeping in his hospital bed in the room that used to be his spacious home office (which had each year made fourteen percent of certain household expenses tax deductible), now set up like a hospital room. He was not alone. Across from the rolling lift was the large cage which held a sleeping tufted capuchin monkey, snoring faintly under her faded flannel baby blanket where she lay peacefully beside her favorite little red teddy bear.
SIX
Laura missed her mother in a new way since the accident
LAURA MISSED HER MOTHER IN A NEW WAY SINCE THE accident, even while imagining how useless and irritating she would have been in this situation, in between occasional moments of being kind and helpful. Marion Keller’s excision from Laura’s story had not been a sudden picnic, lightning sort of event, but a gradual effacement caused by early-onset dementia, to the point of near-extinction of the part of her mind where Marion dwelled. The lively, sharp-tongued retired dental office receptionist from Ohio who had raised Laura on her own had simply gradually ceased to exist. She lived on, however, in a nursing home called The Willows, on the other side of New Haven. There was a wing devoted to residents who shared Laura’s mother’s “exit-seeking behavior.”
When Laura cleaned out her mother’s apartment on Whitney Avenue the week of her precipitous move to The Willows, when it had quite suddenly become apparent that the support of daily visiting nurses and Meals on Wheels were no longer enough to keep Marion going and there had been a fortuitously available room, she had found a heartbreaking mess. A flannel nightgown was wadded up in the crisper drawer in the refrigerator, while spoiled boxes of frozen vegetables were stacked in the linen closet. Thick rubber-banded bundles of unopened mail were wedged under the sofa cushions. On a notepad beside her mother’s bed, in a wobbly version of her mother’s familiar handwriting, Laura spotted these urgently underlined reminders: TOMORROW WILL BE TODAY. IT IS STILL TODAY RIGHT NOW.
Marion hadn’t shown more than a flicker of recognition of Laura for nearly two years, and the last time she had spoken to Laura at all, after months of silent staring, which the doctors called elective mutism, she had declared, inexplicably and unexpectedly, at the end of a visit on her fifty-fifth birthday that had consisted of Laura nattering (while Marion gazed at her, expressionless as always) about the chocolate birthday cupcake, the rainy weather, and Duncan says hello and how nice her mother’s hair looked that day, “You’re just like me! We’re loners! I never thought in a million years that anyone would love you enough to marry you! Bet you didn’t think so either!”
A nursing aide assured Laura that demented people say strange things when they are no longer really themselves, for example Sylvia, the sweet old lady across the hall who played the organ for the Methodist church in Hamden every Sunday for forty-three years, these days she swears like a sailor whenever anyone tries to comb the tangles out of that wispy little head of hair she’s still got.
“She didn’t mean nothing by that, sweetheart,” the kindly aide had said to her as she walked Laura out through the double set of locked doors. “Your mama loves you. I can see it in her eyes.” Laura had parsed this double negative on the way to her car. If she didn’t mean nothing, then surely she did mean something.
Marion Keller did indeed love her daughter, though she had always been a brisk and unsentimental mother. Marion herself was an only child. Her mother had died when she was in eighth grade, and for reasons she never spoke about, she wasn’t close to her father. There was a lot she didn’t speak about. Having grown up on a hardscrabble farm on the outskirts of Centerburg, Ohio, a small, plain town in the center of the state (thus the name), Marion had left home the day after her high school graduation.
Though she claimed to have never wanted to return to the farm, Marion only moved as far as Westerville, twenty miles down Route Three, where she got a job at a dry-cleaning shop and lived in a small apartment over a travel agency on West Main Street. Laura lived in this apartment with her mother for the first six years of her life, until they moved to Connecticut.
Marion was as vague about the identity of Laura’s father as she was inconsistent about the circumstances of their brief marriage. As Laura grew up, she heard a variety of her mother’s accounts of her life between leaving home and having Laura. Marion had left home to share the Westerville apartment with her best friend from high school. Marion eloped with her high school sweetheart (whose name was too painful to say) right after graduation, but he was drafted and was shipped off to Vietnam, while she stayed in Westerville with her best friend from high school to await his return. But she got word that he was lost in action right away, and after a while he was declared MIA. By then, Marion, only eighteen at the time, was quite pregnant with Laura.
Marion was never able to qualify for benefits, she explained to Laura when Laura was old enough to inquire about such things (and Laura was very much the sort of child who concerned herself at a young age with insurance forms and knowing if the utility bills had been paid and if the car registration was up to date), because when they eloped, it turned out their marriage was never properly registered, because of a technicality. Because someone forgot to sign a form. Because they didn’t know they had to pay for something to be registered at some town hall somewhere. They were kids! Because some town hall office somewhere was closed on the afternoon they went there. But someone performed the ceremony anyway, without the paperwork. Because some town hall office lost the papers, or filed them incorrectly, or spelled a name wrong. Who can remember the name of a little town in the middle of nowhere? Did they even know the name of the town where they got married that day? They were so young! The way Marion told it, they just drove and drove until they got to a town where they could get married and that’s what they did.
The creased snapshot Marion carried in her wallet, the one photograph of Laura’s father in her possession, had been taken, according to Marion, by the waitress at the diner in Butler on their way back from the courthouse or the town hall or the whatever, wherever they had gotten married. All versions of the story landed at the same conclusion, like a folk song with many verses and one familiar refrain: he was a war hero and Laura should feel proud of the man who was her father, and let’s leave it there. “Never look back unless you’re planning to go that way,” Marion liked to say.
When Laura was in fourth grade, a Vietnam veteran gave an assembly presentation at her school, and as she shifted in her folding chair with rubber-tipped feet that squeaked on the linoleum floor of the “cafetorium,” it dawned on her that
the war in Vietnam had ended four years before she was born, as had the draft. But she knew by then that this was not information with which to challenge her mother. By high school, she figured that her mother and father had probably not been married.
Was the nameless man in the photo actually even her father? She would slip the photograph from her mother’s wallet, where she knew to find it in the slot behind the Stop & Shop loyalty card, and study his features. Did Laura resemble him? Sometimes she thought she did. But then at times when she looked at the teenaged version of Marion, on whose shoulder his leather-jacketed arm was draped, Laura could barely find anything of her own features in her mother’s young face.
In more recent years Laura had been frustrated all over again by her mother’s fluctuating versions of history, which were utterly useless as she attempted to gather more complete medical background information as she began to worry about her fertility. By then Marion’s recollections of personal history were beginning to get looser and vaguer, a mental state that seemed to match her temperament. She retired from her last job at the front desk of a downtown New Haven dental practice, where she had worked for nearly twenty years.
Armed with a few dubious facts extracted from her mother, Laura spent many hours on the internet tracking down some dead ends, and she also called various town clerks all over Butler County, with fruitless results. Laura even telephoned two diners in Butler, Ohio, hoping absurdly to find the salty waitress with a heart of gold who had worked there for a little more than Laura’s lifetime, someone who would remember the newlywed couple (“Sure, sure honey, of course I remember them! They had just gotten married that day! They asked me to take their picture. It was my first week on the job. Cute couple, so in love. He had a farmer’s breakfast and she had a short stack. How about that, after all these years!”) But it was another double negative, proving only that there was no evidence for a marriage that did not exist.
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