Women's Work

by Megan K. Stack

  Inside I was screaming, What have I done, how will I take him through, how will we protect ourselves?

  After a while he quieted and stared at the rain streaking in silver rivers down the glass, and the globular quiver of red and yellow and blue light, and together we sat and regarded the rain and the colors it threw, the great smear it made of a summer day in the city.

  He blinked his weak small eyes and pursed his baby beak, and I knew if love could kill I would already be dead.

  Chapter 2

  The taxi pulled up to the lobby. We were home. Home-ish. We had no home, really. We had returned, that was all, to our rented apartment in a skyscraper. The lobby smelled like dried flowers and good perfumes, and the doorman was glad to see us. The apartment was stale and hot after days of abandonment. Rain glittered and writhed down the windows. We turned on lamps and air conditioners and sat within our cool, well-lit spaces on a wilding summer afternoon.

  My stomach wouldn’t calm. I could hardly sit on the couch.

  “I’m nervous.”

  “Nervous about what?” Tom’s eyes stayed on the baby.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “That’s the worst part.”

  Our apartment with its books and Spartan kitchen and breakable things was a museum to our past selves. Tom crashed through the rooms, reclaimed lost territories. Fresh sheets on a new crib, printed diagrams for swaddling blankets, drawers full of unworn baby clothes.

  I hulked on edges—fat, swollen, bandaged, sweating. Home was unrecognizable, and so was I.

  * * *

  ————

  The baby is crying.

  The baby is crying.

  The baby cried all the time.

  We patted and paced and rocked and cooed. We turned the music on, then off. We studied Internet videos about burping and sssshhh-ing and draping babies tummy-down along our forearms. In the desperate hours after midnight we’d ride the elevator down through mute floors and carry him into the night. Architecture fell away and the summer sky bloomed over our heads, and for some unmeasurable pocket of time Max fell silent, agape at the mysteries of heaven.

  Then he started crying again.

  Whenever he erupted in tears, which was roughly every time he found himself out of my arms, somebody helpfully handed him back to me.

  “The baby is hungry.”

  “He just ate.”

  “But he’s crying…”

  Who could argue? For God’s sake stop the noise, put your nipple in his mouth. We knew no other way to quiet him. My nerves jangled and screeched until he settled against my ribs, and then the flow of milk shot delicious stupefaction fast and sure through my veins. The baby regarded me gravely. His eyes were young fat almonds, his tiny fingers curled and arched, reaching for the things of the world. Everything was all right then, every time. I whispered his name, shredded its consonants like a leaf in my hand, and wondered whether my mind and skeleton would survive this desperate new love.

  * * *

  ————

  The moment my mother stepped into the flat, the knots in my gut slackened. Had she ever riled my nerves, had we really fought, sometimes bitterly? I had even, in my pregnant naiveté, considered telling her to stay home. To give us space. To bond. As a family. This had been lunacy, I could see that now. She was a goddess and a saint. She had birthed three babies.

  She sat next to Max on the couch and read liltingly from paperback murder mysteries. “It doesn’t matter what you read,” she trilled knowingly, “as long as you use a soothing voice.” She ate take-out salads and hung our laundry to dry in the tiny sunroom and washed endless dishes.

  I tried not to think about all the parts of my lower gut that were sliced when they carved the baby from my womb. In ancient times they cut mothers open only when they had already died or when their lives had been deemed irrelevant. I’d read about a Chinese emperor who slashed six sons from the womb and left their mothers for dead.

  My mother fretted over the surgery. She had delivered all her babies naturally and had always suggested that there was no pain involved. Come to think of it, what the hell?

  “You lied to me,” I told her now.

  “I did not,” she insisted. “It wasn’t painful. A strong sensation, but not pain.”

  “You don’t remember.”

  “Maybe,” she allowed.

  “For sure, you forgot,” I told her. “Nobody could go through labor and say it doesn’t hurt.”

  I hoped my mother would tell me that she, too, had been weepy after giving birth and that the crying would soon stop. But she shook her head. She hadn’t cried, she said, but then I should keep in mind the particular atrocity of the delivery.

  “He almost died,” she kept saying.

  I accepted this silently. The words sounded wrong, like I was gathering sympathy under false pretenses. I knew countless women, especially my age, who’d delivered their babies by emergency C-section. I tried to recall a moment when I’d truly thought the baby might die. The images were murky and unreal, like radio music overheard while half asleep. I recalled pain, exhaustion, throwing up. The sensation of bones dragged out of place. I remembered thinking, knowing, that I was about to die.

  But not the baby. Not from the delivery. His life would inevitably come into being. My body would have died to help him, with or without my consent. We had labored in opposition or we’d labored in concert; competed or cooperated. Both at the same time? Something like that? I couldn’t recall. Already biology had scrubbed my mind. I didn’t care. My baby was here, and so was my mother.

  “We need strings,” she said brightly when the baby cried, throwing a lazy arm through the air. “Or piano. Chopin’s nocturnes.”

  “Drink a beer with the bedtime feeding,” she suggested when the baby woke up too often. “That always worked with you guys.”

  “Try putting him to sleep on his stomach,” she chided. “That always made you guys sleep longer.”

  Ridiculous advice, useless advice. But I liked it. She was telling me that it was okay to laugh and do things wrong, it was okay to come up with dumb, even deleterious, solutions to the confounding problem of the tiny baby.

  She suggested—by being there, by being alive—that the conundrum of the crying newborn was not a horror, but an inconvenient facet of the most complicated blessing life can bestow. My mother was telling me that none of it, in the end, had to be taken quite so seriously.

  Mostly I liked her terrible advice because it made me feel, even in China, that I was home.

  * * *

  ————

  It never failed: The crying erupted at four a.m. You could set a clock by it.

  Every morning I crashed into predawn darkness, yanked rudely from a dreamless haze by the baby’s wails. I carried the shrieking bundle of child into the darkened living room. He’d drink milk for a bit, then slip sobbing from my breast. After that, there was nothing to be done—he’d cry and cry and cry. I’d sling him over my shoulder while I banged around brewing coffee, stinging eyes screwed half shut, screams hammering my ears—my God!

  Then I sat on the living room couch and held him in stupefied horror. He cried, and sometimes I did, too. I didn’t know how to arrange my body, how to touch him, what to say or think or be. It was too foreign and too loud. One living room wall was nothing but a massive window onto darkness. The reflection of the ceiling light quivered in the pane. I was wrecked. Aerial bombardment had been easier for my nerves to withstand. Lord, somebody, deliver me into a fighting zone. Strum my adrenaline, shove me between life and death. Not half-awake-life-with-crying. Not this, please.

  Fingers stiff as wood, I tried to massage him according to the photocopied traditional Chinese medicine worksheets the hospital had given us. These fumblings made his sobs only more desperate. I pumped his legs in the air as i
f he were riding a bicycle. I pressed his thighs into his stomach. Nothing helped; the crying had no pause, no dent.

  Sunlight spilled over the horizon, glittering painfully off the steel and glass of towers. I was crazed and haggard, outside of myself. Light battered my eyes.

  Three hours. Four hours. The crying went on.

  I was not impassive. I lacked the experience to regard the crying as an objective truth, to let myself exist next to it, parallel and accepting. I hadn’t learned that it is a mistake to join small creatures in their emotions. Instead I felt every sob and shudder in the knobs of my spine. I held him until I couldn’t feel my arms. I didn’t understand my son’s misery, but I endured it; with panicked love I partook of it. And I kept trying things, anything, to stanch his grief, to discover the secret source of his pain.

  Finally he exhausted himself; the crying stopped; silence came back.

  Tom padded into the room, his pajamas clean and soft. The first few mornings he’d come racing, too, but soon he stopped. Even my mother claimed to sleep through the noise.

  “What’s going on with him?”

  I couldn’t bear to look at Tom.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What does the doctor say?”

  “Colic.”

  People trickled back into shops and streets. Watching through the glass I let myself be bolstered by the dull certainty of an unremarkable morning. All these strangers had been babies once. Sure they had cried in the dark. Sure they had wept and wailed, but one day they had stopped, and later they hadn’t remembered a thing.

  One day the crying would stop. I would be the only one to remember.

  * * *

  ————

  Max was always eating. I must be doing something wrong. I had the impression that other new mothers did things, sometimes, aside from breast-feeding. He had been starving in utero, I reproached myself. No wonder he’s famished.

  At least, I thought he was famished. It wasn’t like we could ask him.

  My own mother, to my astonishment and disdain, couldn’t remember how often babies ate. How could she forget?

  I pecked searches on my laptop with one hand while breast-feeding. I often landed on the website of a pediatrician named Dr. Sears. His tone struck me as authoritative and condescending. He bitterly opposed feeding schedules and insisted the baby must sleep in our bed. He had eight kids. My grandparents also had eight kids. How do people do that? I wondered about Dr. Sears’s wife. I felt positive she would be less fun at parties than my grandmother. I was pretty sure my grandmother forced the children onto schedules. They were all fine. Within shouting distance of fine. Alive. Most of them, anyway.

  The kindly Dr. Spock, on the other hand, was amenable to feeding schedules, but maddeningly evasive about how or when to create such a thing.

  I need specifics, Dr. Spock. I’m drowning, Dr. Spock.

  Dimly I recalled that a chic and stiletto-heeled lactation consultant had materialized in my hospital room after birth. I’d sobbed uncontrollably throughout our discussion. She had watched fat tears soak my snot-slicked cheeks and asked, sardonically I thought at the time: “Are you all right?”

  I loathed her for this question. I believed good manners gave her two choices: gather me, bleeding and bawling, into her lap, or pretend nothing was happening.

  “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” I’d muttered hatefully.

  She’d murmured something about hormones.

  Later I’d tried to purge her visit from memory. But now that her job title sounded relevant, I tried to recall what she’d actually said. Oh yes: “Feed on demand.” That sounded like the path of least resistance. It also described what I was already doing. My days were feedings punctuated by showers, snacks, and sleeps.

  I understood, in a blurry way, that I was going about things the hard way, but changing course needed powers of concentration and investigation that had fallen out of reach. Having stumbled into a default routine, I was too bone weary and fog-headed to make any changes. I didn’t understand the breast pump. I couldn’t muster the wherewithal to untangle the tubes and cords, let alone figure out how it related to my body.

  Wherewithal. That word floated constantly through my thoughts. I don’t have the wherewithal. It meant energy, health, brains, optimism—in short, everything I’d lost when I gained a baby.

  At no time in all this milky mess did I think to offer Max a bottle of formula. My time around the natural-birth mamas had given me the impression that, if I gave him a bottle, the sky would fall. One bottle and my breast-feeding days would be over. They’d stamp a scarlet F on my back and exile me to the edge of town with my soon-to-be-subpar offspring.

  Besides, I was scared of formula. It hadn’t been long since poisoned milk powder had gravely sickened hundreds of thousands of Chinese babies. Formula meant black market chemicals, corporate malfeasance, and dead children.

  I Googled and I breast-fed and, one by one, the days slid past. My mother cooked, Tom cleaned, I fed the baby. We ordered takeout and watched DVDs. Every day was wild and provisional. Every time the baby grew one day older, my mother’s departure loomed one day closer. This arrangement, which just barely delivered us from one hour to the next with some semblance of nutrition and hygiene, was about to dissolve.

  And then, one fine and ordinary summer morning, a great upheaval rocked our household: Tom showered, buttoned himself into a collared shirt, and tapped forth in stiff shoes.

  “Bye, honey.”

  He was going back to work.

  “When are you coming home?”

  “Well…” He straightened the kinks in his phone charger, then spoke with demeaning patience. “I don’t know. It depends on what happens.”

  The door banged. He was gone. I had found him out in the world, and to the world he would return.

  Max was two weeks old. My brain shivered like jelly. I had snatched a tiny creature—our tiny creature—from the edge of life. Where did Tom think he was going?

  I had no reason to be surprised. I knew the nature of his work—it had, after all, been my work: cataclysms and eruptions, grabbing a suitcase and rushing off to the airport, tossing apologies over a shoulder. He couldn’t do his job properly unless he did it full tilt.

  I knew that. Who knew better than me?

  And we needed his job. Our domestic existence was balanced on his job.

  Who knew better than me?

  Yet there I was, holding the baby among the dirty breakfast dishes in a domestic vignette straight out of the 1950s. It was atavistic, but it was happening. There we were, the son of a single mother and the feminist daughter of a feminist mother, re-creating the same old scene.

  It wasn’t until he vanished back into work that I understood: My husband would support me financially, but he couldn’t save my book. My career would sink to the bottom of the sea if left up to him. Not because he didn’t care, but because he simply wasn’t there. He wouldn’t be home enough to do half the housework. I couldn’t, in clean conscience, ask him to stay up all night with a colicky baby and then sneak into a Tibetan village in the morning. He couldn’t clear the time for my writing—I’d need to solve that problem on my own.

  I was beginning to see the flaws in my plan to write books at home, but that wasn’t the worst of it. The dread that had come upon me in the hospital was thickening instead of abating. In the secret corners of my heart, I was afraid I was going crazy.

  “You gain access to emotions you never had before.” That’s what a friend told me after she became a mother. She made it sound like a wondrous discovery. And, in a way, it was like that. I thrilled to a love I never felt before.

  But it was love like an oblivion, and it was full of terror.

  * * *

  ————

  Long mad mornings. Weird sleepless nights.
Veins of summer lightning. Sleep bleeding to life bleeding to sleep. I was a shade; my baby was ancient; I had been breast-feeding forever. I slipped in and out of dreams, my head crashed and jerked, my neck ached. Max slurped himself to sleep against my heart. Together we woozed and drooled.

  The dead children came back to me then. Small ghosts pulled themselves from the rubble of forgotten towns. All of the dead came back, but especially the children. They demanded a mourning I had not completed at the time of their passing.

  Maybe it was sleep deprivation, or perhaps the shock of seeing my dead father’s face on my newborn son, but death played in my mind like an unwanted newsreel.

  My father was the first. I was twenty-three years old.

  A few months later I watched an execution in Texas. The condemned man was strapped to a gurney and injected with poison. His family watched from one darkened room, and his victim’s family watched from another. I can’t remember, now, which family I joined, but I was there, too, a rookie reporter looking through the window with the kin.

  After the man’s heart stopped and the doctor called the time, prison officials shut the curtains on the death chamber. Families were led away, weeping, their paths carefully choreographed to avoid one another.

  Back in the pressroom, my boss began his interrogation:

  “How many straps? On the arms, on the legs? Above the knee, below? Which side of the room was the door on? Was there a speaker, a clock, anything else? Last words? Eyes open or shut?”

  We were still in the death house, drinking cans of soda at a table. He asked me to draw a diagram of the gurney. I was new on the job; he was training me.