by Brett Paesel
Tomorrow never comes.
Months later I join a writing class. I write several short stories. I write about a sixteen-year-old runaway, I write about an amnesiac, I write about people in an arctic town going crazy in the midnight sun.
The teacher smiles and gives me some suggestions. She is good at this. She tells me to ease up on the adverbs and adjectives. She doesn’t tell me to stop writing about the midnight sun.
I bring in a story about something that happened to me. It’s a story about a shag haircut I got after my son was born. But it’s not about the haircut. It’s about how I thought a haircut would make me feel better. How the haircut would bring back a younger me.
The teacher says, “That sounds like you. Write more things like that.”
So that’s what I do. It doesn’t feel like a purpose exactly.
It feels like breathing.
Friday
Then my mother looks me in the eye and says, ‘Well, Katherine, I don’t know what you’re complaining about. Everyone went out of their way to accommodate the children.’”
The rest of us moan and sip our drinks. Katherine is telling us about the vacation she just took with her huge Irish family. She has nine brothers and sisters, none of whom have children of their own. So when Katherine and Slim take trips home to the Midwest family seat, Jake is the lone child, jabbering to adults, pulling on them, desperate for their attention.
“I thought,” says Katherine, putting down her beer, “that having a child would pull my mother and me closer together. I’m the only one who’s doing the job she did.”
Lana takes off her sweater and lays it on the bar. “When I told my mother that I was pregnant, the first thing she said was not to expect her to babysit.”
“My parents were dying for grandchildren,” says Katherine. “When Slim and I weren’t coughing them up, they acted like we were willfully denying them the happiness of progeny.”
“So they didn’t have a problem with the idea of a biracial grandchild?” I ask.
“God, no,” says Katherine. “I’m the youngest of nine kids. They’ve had far bigger problems, in their book, than a biracial grandbaby. Two of my sisters are gay. One of my brothers is chronically unemployed. Another brother is a drug addict living in the basement.”
“Wow,” I say, the wannabe writer in me, jealous that Katherine has a drug addict in her family. Why isn’t my family that colorful?
“Everyone has a drug addict in the basement,” says Lana.
Michelle scootches her stool closer to the bar.
“I don’t,” I say, trying to keep my voice free of disappointment.
Michelle turns to Lana. “You don’t have a drug addict.”
“I do too,” says Lana. “My sister’s a drunk who slept on the couch in the family room.”
“It’s not the same as a drug addict in the basement,” says Michelle.
“She huffed my mother’s cleaning products for a summer and moved out to marry a porn star.”
“She’s still not a drug addict,” says Michelle.
Michelle has been on an accuracy kick. I suppose it’s a natural response to all the tall tales we tell on Fridays.
“‘Drug addict in the basement’ is a general term, referring to all siblings who don’t manage to leave the home because they’re impaired,” says Lana. “Right?” she adds, looking to me.
“I wouldn’t know,” I say, glum. “I don’t have a drug addict.”
“So I’m the one who brings home the longed-for grandchild,” says Katherine, sliding past the drug-addict talk. “And I don’t get any help. I’m the one who gets up with Jake at six. I’m the one who feeds him, who tucks him in.”
“Where’s Slim in all this?” asks Michelle.
“Normally, he’s pretty helpful,” says Katherine, “but as soon as he hits the Midwest, he figures I’ve got all this help and he kicks back.”
“Doesn’t sound like him,” says Michelle, ever the Slim fan.
“So I said to my mother that it’s no fun for me to come on vacation with my kid and have to work twice as hard, while everyone else gets to do their own thing.”
“What did she say?” I ask.
“That’s when she said the thing about everyone having gone out of their way.”
“Well, how does she think they went out of their way?”
“One of my sisters took Jake for a walk. And my brother chased him around the house for fifteen minutes, until Jake got so wound up he was screaming. Then, when my brother had had enough, he handed Jake back to me.”
“I hate it when people do that,” says Lana.
“Are you sure Slim doesn’t help out? It doesn’t seem like him to lay around and let you do all the work,” says Michelle.
I lean back and resolve to talk to Michelle about this accuracy thing. It really stops the spin of a good yarn.
Katherine stops to consider. “Sure. Slim helped a little. He gave Jake his baths and put him to bed twice. But I’m telling you, most of it was on me.”
Michelle looks down at her Amstel. “I can’t imagine him doing nothing.”
Lana stands up high on the rung of the barstool and flags Mack, who signals back. She plops back down. “But what Katherine is saying is that it’s strange that our mothers get so hard on us once we become mothers ourselves,” she says.
I lean forward. “Last time I was at the airport, Spence pulled off his shoes. Pat was doing the tickets, I was stuffing some last-minute stuff in the diaper bag and I picked out a juice box and sprayed juice all over my shirt, I started dapping it off with a wet-wipe, and my mother said, ‘Kristin, Spencer’s shoes are off. The bottoms of his feet are black.’ I looked at her and said, ‘Mom, the bottom of Spence’s feet are not a high priority right now.’”
Mack puts a Bloody Mary in front of Lana, followed by a tiny beer back.
I go on, “But it’s like my mother has totally forgotten what it’s like to have children. She forgets that she almost never washed my brother’s hair when he was fivish, because he hated it. For about a year he had this layer of dirt you could actually see through the hair on his scalp.”
I see Michelle look off to picture this in her mind.
“Eww,” she says.
“I don’t think it’s that our mothers have forgotten,” says Lana, twirling her celery. “I think it’s that they think we have it easy these days. We’ve got all this helpful modern stuff—the bouncy seats, the disposable diapers, the videos, the fancy toys. We even have guys who help out now and then. Even Tony used to dry an occasional dish.”
Lana stops and we wait to see if we’re going to go into a Tony moment. She puts down the Bloody Mary.
“And frankly, we do have it easier than they did,” she says. “A while ago my mom was telling me about being a mother in the late sixties. She was at home full-time. She did the washing, the cleaning, all the parenting, all the getting up in the middle of the night—no help from my dad. And I asked her. I asked her how she managed it all. You know what she said?”
Lana reaches over to grab the beer back and downs it.
“She said, ‘Booze and pills, Lana. Booze and pills.’”
Blood
A woman who has had a miscarriage does not trust her body when she becomes pregnant again. She looks at the line on the pregnancy test and feels apprehension, where before there was celebration. A woman who has had a miscarriage does not immediately run to her husband, yelling, “We’re pregnant!” A woman who has had a miscarriage keeps the knowledge to herself for a few days. A woman who has had a miscarriage, and is pregnant again, lives a secret life in the bathroom. It is there that she touches her breasts. Are they still tender? She touches her belly. Does it feel round? A woman who has had a miscarriage looks for blood.
A woman who has had a miscarriage knows a lot about blood. A few spots may mean nothing. A few more spots than that may still mean nothing if it stops soon. Brown blood means the end of bleeding. Watery blood means the beginni
ng. Bright blood means that there’s more blood to come.
I sit on the toilet, looking at myself in the mirror over the sink.
I’m not going to look at the toilet paper this time, I think. What’s the point? If I’ve miscarried, I’ve miscarried. I might as well go to bed not knowing. That way I’ll get a decent night’s sleep.
But I don’t want to find out first thing in the morning, do I? Then I’ll have a whole day to get through, cramping and bleeding, having to act normal with Spence.
If I find out now, I can have a few drinks, cry, take a bath, have a few more drinks, play a Meat Loaf CD really loud and stomp around the apartment, cry, have Pat go get some Baileys and cigarettes, watch a really bad movie on TV, write some e-mails to people who I want to feel sorry for me, and pass out around four o’clock in the morning. Pat will then have to wake up with Spence while I sleep it all off.
Sounds like a good plan.
I reach for the toilet paper but pull my hand back.
If I keep looking, that means I have no faith. This lack of faith could be creating the miscarriage. Whereas not looking for blood means that I’m confident. Won’t I get rewarded for that? God rewards the faithful.
I’m not going to look.
I grab the toilet paper and wipe, looking at myself in the mirror instead. I don’t look half bad. I certainly don’t look like I’m miscarrying. Thank God for my skin. Good skin makes up for a lot of deficiencies, like my eyes sinking deeper into my head. In a few years my eyes will be completely swallowed by my face, leaving a couple of dents in their place. I’ll look like one of those old-people dolls that they make with stuffing and panty hose.
I stand and pull up my pants. I reach behind and flush, without looking for blood in the water.
I don’t deal with blood well anyway. Not my own. Not other people’s. Certainly not Spence’s. Spence was a couple of months old when I first cut his fingernails, snipping a tiny fingertip. As blood streamed out of the cut, I screamed, “Oh my Christ. You’re bleeding. Holy Mary Mother of Fuck, what do I do now?”
Running to the freezer, I grabbed an ice tray and cracked it, sending ice cubes sliding over the kitchen floor. I skidded across the floor to the dish towel, grabbed it, and dropped on my knees to the watery linoleum, to gather the ice cubes in the towel.
“Hold on!” I screamed at screaming Spence.
I crawled over the wet floor with the dish towel and ice cubes, reaching the living room carpet, where I rose and ran to Pat’s sock drawer. I yanked the drawer, sending it crashing to the floor, seized a loose sock, threw the ice cubes and towel into the sock, then ran to Spence and jammed his hand into the sock.
I picked Spence up and carried him over to my bed, where I lay down next to him, winding the icy sock tightly around his hand. We cried together, blood seeping through the sock, until we both fell asleep.
I sit at the nurse’s station outside Dr. Sammy’s office. Dr. Sammy’s nurse is a round no-nonsense woman named Charlene. I can tell that she doesn’t like me, which is why I do my best to be a cooperative patient.
Charlene unwraps the blood pressure cuff from around my upper arm.
“How many weeks along are you?” she asks.
“Seven now.”
She writes this down.
“How’s my blood pressure?” I ask.
“Good,” she says. “Like a teenager’s.”
She says this like it’s something she says to a lot of people to make them feel good.
“Great,” I say. “You’ve got my urine. My blood pressure’s good. I’m taking the prenatal vitamins. Everything looks like a go.”
“Except I need some blood,” she says.
I tense. “Blood?”
“Yes.”
“But you got some of my blood last month.”
“I need some more today.”
“You’re doing more tests? Why didn’t you do them on the blood you got out of me last time?”
“Those were different tests,” she says.
I hate the way she slows down her speech whenever I question a procedure. She puts big spaces between her words, as if my brain isn’t working fast enough to understand what she’s saying.
“You know it really helps if you tell me you’re going to take my blood before the appointment, so I can prepare,” I say.
“Whenever I do that,” she says, measured like a clock, “you cancel the appointment at the last minute.”
I have no response to this because it’s true.
“I’m going to have to lie down,” I say.
“I know,” she says, taking out the rubber ball and the rubber strap. I look at these and think, as I have many times, that I cannot imagine how anyone shoots up. I’d pass out while injecting myself and sleep through my high.
She walks past me and I follow her into an examination room.
The paper on the examination table crinkles beneath me as Charlene tightens the rubber strap. I feel my blood swell in my upper arm as the strap digs into my flesh.
“Now squeeze the ball,” says Charlene.
“I can’t move my hand,” I say.
“Brett. Squeeze the ball, or it’s going to be harder for me to find a vein.”
I try to send a telepathic signal to my hand to squeeze.
My hand remains slack and the ball rolls out of it onto the floor. Charlene picks it up.
“Brett, I’m putting the ball in your hand and you need to squeeze it.”
“My hand’s not working.”
“If I try to find a vein without the ball, it’s going to be harder on you.”
I try again to send a signal to my hand. Perhaps I am successful.
I feel a slight prick in the crook of my elbow.
I hear, “That’s it. It’s flowing nicely,” before I black out.
I sit on the toilet, looking at myself.
My face looks rounder. This could mean that I am still pregnant. Or it could mean that I am hanging on to all the weight caused by the pseudo-baby currently shriveling in my uterus. I resolve, again, not to look at the toilet paper.
I wonder if “no blood at all” can be a bad thing. I mean, thirty percent of perfectly normal pregnancies spot. Is it odd that I haven’t spotted at all?
Stupid. How would I know if I’ve spotted? I threw a black pair of underwear into the hamper this morning without looking at them.
All this thinking about blood makes me woozy. I imagine myself seeping gallons of blood, unaware because I won’t look for it. I sway a bit on the toilet.
I can’t feel the tips of my fingers. I struggle to my feet, pull up my pants, and fumble with the zipper. I go into the bedroom and lie down. From Spence’s room I hear Pat making the sound of a dinosaur. Spence squeals delight.
I close my eyes.
Maybe I’m hemorrhaging internally.
The only time I wasn’t afraid of blood was when I watched my best friend, Ed, die of AIDS at the Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City, the week of September 25, 1991. That week I sat by his bedside, watching him occupy that sliver of time and space between being alive and not being dead.
Yet.
He was asleep, or simply unaware, most of the time. When he awoke in the corporeal world, his self settling into his face and voice for a few minutes, he would need to cough blood and phlegm into a plastic receptacle.
In the early nineties there was a national fear of blood. It was a time when my own fear would have marked me as a member of the terrified majority. But I am not a joiner. And this was Ed’s blood—the stuff that flowed through him, tainted though it was, that kept him near to me for one more minute, one more day.
I loved his blood. It was easy for me to empty the receptacle into the red garbage can marked “Hazardous Waste.” I did not believe that Ed’s blood would hurt me.
Listening to Pat’s dinosaur chase Spence around his room, I let my mind rest on Ed’s final week. I let myself grieve, ever so briefly, that Ed is not here to tell me that I’m bei
ng a big baby and that whatever my body delivers up is what it’s going to deliver up, regardless of how terrified or not terrified I am. I cannot create a miscarriage. I cannot prevent it. Any more than I could create or prevent Ed’s blood from finally betraying him.
I think of how much Ed would have loved to have gotten older. How much he would have loved to lie on a bed, listening to a child’s shrieks of joy, feeling blood course through him like a promise.
I get up from the bed and go into the bathroom.
I pull down my underwear and look.
Heroics
I lie on the examination table. Dr. Sammy glides the heart monitor over my belly, which rises from the rest of me like a perfectly round burial mound on sacred ground in the middle of the English countryside.
I hear Spence roll a chair back and forth in the corner of the room. From the monitor I hear the whooshing sound of the baby’s heartbeat.
“There it is,” says Dr. Sammy.
I have given up wanting more from Dr. Sammy. At first I wanted to hear things like “That is the strongest heartbeat I have ever heard in a fetus so young. How do you do it all? Writer, actress, mother of a toddler, and now this . . . creating the most genetically perfect baby I’ve ever encountered.”
Dr. Sammy pulls me up and I sit on the edge of the table, my feet dangling like a child’s.
Spence bangs the chair against the wall.
“Spence,” I say, careful to use my perfectly modulated mommy voice in front of Dr. Sammy. “Let’s choose not to crash the chair right now.”
Pat hates this phraseology. He says it leads the listener, in most cases Spence or him, to believe that they are part of the choice. I got the idea from some Suze Orman show. This guru of home finances says that with children you should never say, “We can’t afford that.” Instead, you should say, “We’re not choosing to spend our money on that right now.” I like the egalitarian sound of it. Pat says it’s subterfuge.
Spence looks up at me, smiles, and sails the chair across the room, crashing it into the wall. I guess he made a different choice.