I think he thought he was being co-conspiratorial. Maybe he thought the true state of my abdomen was our fun little secret, like not wearing panties.
I almost made him wreck the car. “ ‘Going on down there’?” I shouted. “Nothing should be going on down there! It’s supposed to be a static situation. Verbs shouldn’t come into it.”
“I mean,” he stammered.
“Shut up.” There’s such a thing as too much sharing, even within the bonds of matrimony. We drove the rest of the way home in silence, and I became friendly with foundation garments after that. They do a pretty good job of keeping anything from going anywhere, though they are hideously expensive, and—no matter how hard you try to reimagine them as fetish wear—decidedly unsexy. But they make my clothed figure look like maybe I don’t hate exercise. It felt a little dishonest at first, like false advertising, but it’s not as if anyone but Patrick is going to take me home at the end of the evening and find out what is really “going on” down there. It helps keep me faithful. Some cultures require women to reinforce their chastity with long underwear. Some with veils. I have Spanx.
The subterfuge itself doesn’t bother me. I’ve always liked the implements and armature of femininity, and I took them up willingly. I begged my feminist mother to let me wear makeup as soon as I became a teenager. I love cosmetics and perfume. I can hot-roller set my hair in the dark. The brushes, the push-ups, the tanners, and tweezers have always been playthings. A girl’s game of dress-up. What I don’t like is feeling like I need it, and need more of it, just to look like myself. Or how I think my self should still look. Frankly, it’s asking too much of the Spanx.
The baby daughter of one of my girlfriends has magnificently plump thighs that everyone within arm’s reach is compelled to squeeze and worship. “Why can’t it stay that way?” I lamented to her mother at the swimming pool. “Why can’t we smile at each other in our bathing suits and be delighted at our jiggles and rolls?”
My friend grinned gamely and pointed to my backside. “Dimples!” she squealed.
Though I know better, there is a residual part of me that goes on believing things will soon return to “normal,” including my body. That indefatigable spirit watched the birth of three children, turned around and said, “Whew. Okay, now where was I?” expecting to just pick up where I left off at twenty-nine. It’s pitiful, like a coma patient who wakes up and learns her true love didn’t wait around. There was a time I could lose five pounds just by thinking about it. That metabolism is MIA. It ran off with my sleep cycle, my hormones, and my sex drive, and before they all split, they stuffed their pockets with collagen and hair pigment. If you see them, call me. I am offering a sizable reward for information leading to their capture and return: 1-800-WHT-THFK.
At least time is an equal opportunity bandit. Men escape the physical ravages of childbearing, but not those of aging. Patrick arrived at midlife six years ahead of me. In as many years as it took my body to host and evict three kids, he went from a skinny guy in his thirties to a not-so-skinny-anymore guy in his forties. The waistband size of his pants finally caught up to his inseam. For a long time, he resisted my suggestions to go up a size, insisting he would soon return to his original proportions. I catch him paused in consternation in front of his closet, or grimacing at the mirror. Instead of puffing out his chest, I see him sucking in his stomach. It’s all very familiar. And it’s my turn to be kind.
“Sexy,” I remark when he wears his new bifocals to read in bed. Persuading him to retire a snug pair of jeans, I tell him, “You were always too thin anyway.” I mean all of it. It’s true we aren’t what we used to be. The window for us ever making a porno has closed. So be it. The stretch marks, dimples, and flab are between him and me, like the years. It’s a history we share, one we recite together by touch and sight, know by heart. Like opening a beloved book, creased and dog-eared, for the thousandth time, and skipping straight to your favorite part. I can’t imagine having to start over on page one with anyone. There was a time when I didn’t necessarily need to catch a person’s last name before getting in bed together, let alone know his life story. Now, whenever I hear of someone getting divorced and beginning to date again, I am both fascinated and horrified by the idea, as if I were six years old and just heard about sex for the first time from my best friend’s big sister. How does it work, I wonder? Where do people even begin? It was awkward for us to get started after three months of not knowing each other carnally, but at least I could be sure my kids liked this guy.
We were just finding our place when I heard the baby squeak. We had about two minutes before it escalated into a howl, at which point it would breach the sound barrier that envelops the paternal ear. I wondered how to bring things to a hasty conclusion without breaking the mood. “Oops, time’s up” seemed, well, anticlimactic. There was a second warning squeak, and inhibition gave way to urgency. I let loose with a litany of pornographic exhortations that caused my inner earth mother to run shrieking to the dark recesses of my conscious brain. As I whispered unspeakable filth into my husband’s ear, I stopped worrying about my body’s potential for dripping and drooping. I wasn’t anxious that the kids would hear the bedsprings creak. Or that the baby would taste the sweat on me when I finally did go nurse him back to sleep.
It was all coming back to me. I skipped straight to my favorite part.
As I got up to fetch the baby, my husband, happy and mussed, reminded me that being a mommy and feeling sexy don’t have to be mutually exclusive states of being.
“You are one hot mama,” he pronounced, before falling dead asleep.
I drew our baby boy to my breast, where he latched on lustily and noisily. I lay with him and his father in our rumpled bed listening to my men breathing heavy in the night, feeling exalted and adored, goddess of love and milk and all things sweet and salty, sacred and profane.
8.
Feast of Sorrow
Wanda died two days after we brought her home. Or maybe it was one day. It took me a while to be certain, since she was nestled among the stems of an aquatic plant that prevented her from floating belly-up to the surface of the goldfish bowl. I was pretty sure it wasn’t normal for her to be pointed head-down for so long, but her tail and fins would waft gently in the current of the air filter, and I thought it was possible she was resting, or just disoriented. On Saturday, the morning of Day Three, I reached in and gave the leaves a little shake. Wanda promptly fell upward and assumed the definitive position. I woke Patrick up with the sad news. His preference for disposal of the remains was a private flushing. Less said, the better, was his philosophy as far as the children were concerned.
“Let’s not make a big production of this,” he suggested, in the rich blended tone of foresight and futility that comes only with years of marriage.
“What are you talking about?” I said, with feeling. “Of course, we’re having a funeral—this is how children learn to deal with death. This,” I declared with hyperbole, “is why we let them have pets.” Moved by my own case, I began to sing the chorus from the “Circle of Life,” but his head was already under the pillow.
Men don’t know how to deal with their grief, I thought sadly, scooping Wanda into a plastic baggie and stashing her temporarily in the vegetable crisper. I was determined it would be different for my boys. When they woke up, I gave it to them straight: Wanda hadn’t made it; she had died. They were mildly curious. Where was she now, they wanted to know, inspecting the goldfish bowl. I explained that while her body was with the carrots in the refrigerator, her spirit was surely swimming with God.
I announced we were having a funeral with full honors, and that someone would have to dig a hole. My oldest, six years old at the time, was enthusiastic about this part, excavating a large hole in the lawn beneath our maple tree. He also helped me bind two Popsicle sticks together with kitchen twine for a cross.
“Wanda,” I read aloud, inscribing the grave marker with a permanent felt-tip pen, “2005.”
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I capped the pen. “Now it’s time to get Wanda.”
At this point, the sexton lost muster and looking askance, said he’d rather go back inside and watch television, thanks. I praised his work and let him go. His four-year-old brother, who during the digging and construction phase had been gathering dandelions for a memorial spray, followed me raptly to the refrigerator to see what would happen next.
The deceased was holding up rather well, considering. I lifted the baggie out, and we observed her in silence for a moment, before proceeding on our way to the front yard as pallbearers. Under the canopy of red maple leaves, I unzipped the bag and poured Wanda into her final resting place. My son helped shovel dirt over the grave with a small garden trowel, and laid his bouquet of yellow flowers at the base of the cross. I turned to the prayer I had chosen from the board book edition of A Child’s Book of Prayers.
“Dear Father, please hear and bless thy beasts and singing birds,” I read. “And guard with special tenderness small things that have no words. Amen.”
I closed the prayer book and smiled serenely at my son, lesson accomplished. I was not prepared to see his fathomless blue eyes brimming with tears. His small shoulders sagged as he collapsed against my leg, sobbing.
“Oh, sweetheart,” I exclaimed, falling to my knees to comfort him. I was horrified. What kind of sick, morbid sadist was I, anyway? How many years of therapy would it take to recover from a mother who interrupts Saturday-morning cartoons to make you carry your cold, dead pet to the front yard and shovel dirt onto it? My husband was right—I take things too far.
As usual, I had arrived at one extreme by way of a nonstop flight from another. Earlier in my career as mother, I took pains to avoid a direct discussion of mortality with my kids. They had just arrived here, after all. Why spoil the fun right away with the dark and terrible truth? I thought it was better to let them down gently. Whenever possible, I evaded the subject of death.
“Mommy, where do chicken nuggets come from?”
“The grocery store. Ketchup?”
Or I waxed euphemistic. “That bird left his body here and went to fly in heaven,” I’d say, as we paused over a feathered corpse lying in the gutter.
My illusion that I could or should shield them from life’s big spoiler ended abruptly one night as I was tucking my eldest son in bed. I was telling him a story about my father.
“Where is Poppy?” my son asked pointedly.
I smiled sadly. “He went to live with God, baby.”
My son propped his head up and looked at me with a kind but resolute expression, like a psychotherapist about to get down to business. He touched my arm.
“Do you mean he’s dead, Mom?” he asked, gently.
In my momnipotence, I sometimes forget that my kids came fully assembled. When they were infants, I’d marvel over their tiny ears, how intricately formed they were, pink and golden like the inside of a conch. They were miraculous to me. And humbling, because I can’t draw an ear, much less take credit for making one. I lose sight of that from time to time, and delude myself into thinking I’m the auteur of their experience, when actually, I mainly work in catering. They don’t need me directing, feeding them their lines. They get it. The script for life and death, grief and joy, is written on their DNA.
As I knelt in the dirt around Wanda’s grave, my weeping son clasped to my chest, my grandiosity dissolved. He knew his part. Not in my little production, but in the theater of life. His mourning was both authentic and appropriate, and all that was required of me was to honor it. “Let’s have some juice,” I suggested, brushing his sandy brown hair from his eyes. We walked up the steps to the front porch and sat at the boys’ little table. I brought out the whole jug of orange juice and two plastic tumblers. I thought we could both use a drink.
“To Wanda,” I said, raising my glass.
To life, I thought. The bitter and the sweet.
I wanted to teach my kids about grief without exposing them to it. There was just so much death around us during our children’s first years, I was afraid of the shadow it might cast over them. My mother-in-law passed away four months before our oldest son was born. My father-in-law followed her less than five years later. In between, there was a nine-month stretch during which my father, both my grandmothers, and our dog died, and exploding in the center of that year’s cold heart, its atomic nucleus, September 11. It felt like the end of time.
Though it sounds like something straight out of a cheesy country-and-western song, the dog took it over the top. Bailey was my Chesapeake Bay retriever, an eighty-pound lap dog I’d adopted the week after we got married. She drowned before my eyes, in a lake in the country, catching sticks. There was no one around but me and the kids, and the baby could crawl, fast. I didn’t dare leave him and my two-year-old on the shore while I jumped in to rescue her, so I watched helplessly as she thrashed and rolled in the water. Some people on the far shore heard my shouts and came running, hauled her out, and revived her long enough for me to get her to the emergency vet clinic, but it was too late. The call came in the middle of the night that she was gone. Patrick brought home her collar and the X-ray image of her waterlogged lungs, a dark cloud passing over her heart, moving into mine.
I could extract some meaning from the other losses, if only as an end to suffering, but Bailey’s death mocked those inferences with its gratuitousness. Chesapeakes are bred for swimming—they have webbed feet and waterproof coats. Something had caused her to take on a little water—a stroke, maybe, or exhaustion—and in no time at all, she was sinking. I saw how quickly she lost her sense of which way was up, and I knew I was also dangerously close to the tipping point. Your center of gravity changes when a loved one dies. Part of your life goes with them, so you no longer stand with your full weight on this side, each loss inclining you a little more toward death. I was beginning to list. I tucked my children under my arms, and I pushed off from the silt-bottom sadness with everything I had, diverting my grief into compartments I had sealed off a long time ago.
My unwept tears for my grandfather sloshed around in one of them. He was the first person close to me who died. I was eight years old, and he was the god of my small heaven until cancer took him from me. He went into the hospital for a while, then he came home to his bedroom. I watched my parents, uncles, and aunts coming and going from there for weeks, before I was called to go see him, all by myself. I was scared as I walked down the dim hallway toward the door. I had been told he was dying, and I grasped the word, but not the reality. I knew dimly that it meant he was going away and not coming back, but when he saw me, and began to cry, I understood fully. He didn’t want to die. He was scared, too. I ran out of the room, terror stricken, and ashamed of myself for abandoning him.
I turned to the god of my grandfather’s heaven, and I began to pray in earnest for the first time in my life. Not for a miracle—I knew that would be asking too much—but for one small mercy: When Poppy dies, don’t let me cry. I prayed those words over and over. I suppose I thought if I didn’t cry, I might not hurt. Or maybe the shock of seeing my grandfather break down made me fearful of tears. But that’s hand-tinting the picture with an adult brush, guessing at the true colors. I don’t remember the reasons, only the urgency. The prayer was answered. I didn’t cry when I heard the news, or saw my grandfather in his coffin, or walked behind him to the grave. I was proud of keeping it together. I felt very grown up, though the actual grown-ups were weeping freely. In a world that could apparently take anything from me, at any time, I at least had mastered my emotions.
As kids, we make those kinds of internal errors in navigation, deviations that are slight in the beginning, but widen tangentially as we grow, taking us a little further off course each year. My attitude toward grief became very skewed. For years, I felt about crying the way most people feel about throwing up. I’d really rather not, even if I did feel better afterward. If I had to cry, I did it alone and in private, and there had to be a good reason for it, like de
ath or divorce. I was afraid that if I started crying, I might not be able to stop. Other people’s crying made me very uncomfortable. It was like watching them vomit. I’d avert my eyes and hand them a tissue.
I’ve tried to get better about it since having children. I want the boys to know that sorrow is natural and acceptable. I can tell them, but I have trouble showing them. My tendency is still to hide when I need to cry. I go to the bathroom and turn on the faucet to mask the sobbing, or slip out the back door to sit on the steps. I wait for the redness of my eyes and face to settle down before I reemerge, worried that my tears will frighten them, or that I’ll have to explain whatever it is that’s the matter. I don’t want to have to tell them that awful things happen to people, or that their parents are capable of hurting each other sometimes, or that someone who isn’t done with living can die.
But grief seeps in anyway, especially during the holidays, when the absence of our parents feels most acute, and the lengthening nights invite melancholy. We light the Advent wreath to mark off the time. Three weeks in, we come to the pink candle. Anglicans say the color is for “joyful anticipation,” but I borrow from my Catholic roots, and claim it for Mary, for the mother. The candlelight kindles storytelling. We linger in its glow after supper, and Patrick tells the boys about Christmases past, years when his family filled and overflowed the house that belonged to his grandmother, long gone. As he enumerates kin, the boys’ eyes grow wide. It’s hard for them to imagine. They don’t know the kind of family gatherings we did as children.
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