The Children's War

by C. P. Boyko

  Capitalizing on her unease, he suggested that although this would be only a simple examination, perhaps she would be more comfortable after a relaxation exercise.

  “Sure. Okay. All the same, I think I’ll tidy up a bit first . . .”

  “Please sit down.” —She did.

  She closed her eyes; he counted down from ten.

  There was nothing new to see and nothing to be done in her mouth, but he spent several minutes poking about inside it with luxurious thoroughness, like a child appraising a new hideout. He uttered soothing and congratulatory sounds—and Rachel was soothed. There would be no pain; and pinioned as she was by his fingers in her mouth, there was nothing for her to do or to say. Her toes uncurled, and her breathing slowed. Even her exams seemed far away.

  The inspection complete, Burris sat back and watched her breathe for a minute. Then, unwilling to break the spell, he began to give her posthypnotic suggestions: that she would awake feeling relaxed and contented; that her teeth and gums would grow healthier daily; that she would excel at her exams; that she would find success and fulfillment wherever she searched . . . His suggestions became more expansive, melancholy, and valedictory, but still he could not bring himself to sever the connection. At length it occurred to him that this need not be the end. Guilty exhilaration made him fidget as he planted the final instruction.

  “Two weeks from today, you will go shopping, at noon, at Holman’s Foods. When you awake, you will not remember my saying this; but in two weeks’ time you will feel, and follow, an overwhelming urge to shop for groceries at Holman’s Foods. And now, as I count to ten, you will become more and more wakeful . . .”

  After Doctor Kornorek left, Rachel did feel relaxed and contented, but also puzzled, for she remembered quite clearly what he had told her to forget. This seemed to prove conclusively that she had not, in fact, been hypnotized. Nevertheless, after two weeks of speculating and deliberating, a mixture of embarrassment, consideration, and curiosity carried her to the rendezvous on time. After all, she rationalized, she needed milk and bread, and Holman’s was not far away.

  They each feigned surprise when they met in the dairy aisle; and each concealed their surprise when, in the checkout line, Burris asked Rachel out to dinner, and Rachel accepted.

  For years, Rachel had been the feminine holdout among her feminist friends. She had enjoyed their proselytizing, and withstood it the more effectively because she enjoyed it. They used her as their sounding board, honing on her their diatribes against the injustice of patriarchy, the manacles of marriage, and the myth of beauty. Rachel had perhaps been inoculated against such iconoclasm by her mother, a flustered, doting single parent who blamed all her ineffectualness on men. But Rachel, deprived of them, grew to adore men—especially manly men, men with thick wrists and square jaws, men with swagger and composure. She adored women too—especially womanly women; and she felt that the genderless world that her friends were fighting for would be an impoverished one. If she was, deep down, a feminist, she was equally a masculist. She could not even wholeheartedly deplore sexist inequality, because it seemed to offer her friends something to undermine and overturn. For her own part, when a man in a three-piece suit and a gold watch stopped to watch her pass in the street, she felt like a spy, an infiltrator, a sorceress. All this drama, all this conflict, all this story would be lost to human experience if not for the sexes, and sex.

  So she was disappointed that her roommates were not more disapproving of Burris. They seemed to forgive him his male chauvinism, as if it were only to be expected from someone of his age and heritage. At last Rachel decided that they simply liked him and saw how much she liked him. When she told them that she was pregnant, they were as delighted as schoolgirls, and never once alluded to the prison of motherhood.

  She had always dreamed of a large, lavish wedding, but Burris convinced her that this would be an unwarrantable extravagance. So they were married by a functionary in a drab office; Burris took only the morning off from work. She defended him later in the restaurant to which her mother and friends took her to celebrate, but grew tearful as they grew nostalgic and maudlin over their drinks. Rachel was not allowed alcohol—or cigarettes, or coffee, or antihistamines, or peanuts, or fish. Nor was she permitted exercise, mental strain, or melancholy.

  “Burris’s doctor is very good,” she sobbed, guiltily.

  Doctor Leahy was, in fact, the best obstetrician in the city. Burris had interviewed several best obstetricians before him, but had disliked all of them for various reasons. One was harried and dismissive. One seemed to have nothing else to do but answer his questions. One was a proponent of “natural” childbirth—which sounded to Burris as absurd as a dentist advocating better dental health through neglect. One was a woman. A few seemed perplexed by Rachel’s absence, as if unaware that the husband’s role was to shield the wife, and the unborn baby, from as much stress as possible. Doctor Leahy understood this. About Burris’s own age, with a thrusting manner and a firm handshake, Doctor Leahy treated Burris more like a coworker than a client; he even called him “Doctor.” His most reassuring credential was his willingness to disparage his colleagues. He scorned doulas, dimly lit birthing rooms, and warm baths, and championed the full array of medical interventions, including pain-easing epidurals, tear-preventing episiotomies, and life-saving cesarean sections. Though he called himself a conservative, he spoke like a crusader, and Burris recognized in him a kindred spirit—a fellow individualist.

  Leahy was candid about Rachel’s morning sickness. “We could draw a quart of blood and do a battery of tests, each more costly than the next; and we might, in the best case scenario, find that she is in fact deficient in, say, calcium; then we could give her a supplement, and maybe it would help. Then again, it might not. Or we might find nothing. Because in nine cases out of ten, in my experience, there is no cause to be found. Pregnant women expect to feel sick—so they feel sick.”

  He gave Burris a prescription for a bottle of expensive vitamins. These only made Rachel feel worse, which seemed to corroborate Leahy’s implication that the nausea was not physical but mental. Burris’s tactful paraphrase of this was that she was worrying too much.

  Her mother, on the other hand, maintained that morning sickness was natural and healthy: the body instinctively purged whatever would be bad for the baby. She belittled the doctor’s diet, too, and urged Rachel to obey her cravings. “Your stomach knows better than your brain what you need.”

  But Rachel had no cravings; she hardly had an appetite. Everything she ate made her feel bloated and precarious. Torn by contradictory advice, she felt alternately that she was poisoning and starving the baby. In self-defense she blamed the victim, and developed an image of the fetus as a fickle, whimpering parasite. So she ate with defiance, and vomited defiantly. No one had warned her that pregnancy was an illness.

  She suffered too the boredom and isolation of illness. Chelsea and Alexis rarely visited; her mother thought it best to give the newlyweds their privacy. Alone in Burris’s house all day, Rachel was required to do nothing but to ripen and to grow fat. She tried from time to time to read his periodicals and old textbooks, but found that she could no longer grasp the purpose of abstract learning. She still daydreamed of careers that she might pursue after the baby was born, but as a wife and mother, she felt that school was now behind her. She leached the hours from the day with herbal tea, naps, cleaning, trashy magazines, and the small, recurrent tasks of grooming. She brushed her teeth and brushed her hair, changed and washed her clothes, polished and removed polish from her toenails, and weighed herself before the mirror. She portioned out these rituals like a castaway conserving food. On especially bleak days, she saved her second bath till evening, just to have something to look forward to.

  When Burris came home, he cooked elaborate, spicy meals for her, which she struggled to ingest. After washing up the dishes, he joined her on the sofa, where they lis
tened to music and he told her about his day. Wallowing in the sound of his voice, she would remove his wristwatch, comb the hair on his arms into rows with her fingernails, and feel for an hour or two almost normal.

  She complained of heartburn, and he brought home antacids, which, she said untruthfully, helped a little. At night she experienced heart palpitations, and he brought home a portable cardiac monitor, which she cradled like a hot-water bottle for a day. The heart trace, submitted to a laboratory, proved “inconclusive.”

  Then she had a problem that he could not mediate—a pain in her uterus that was accompanied by bleeding. Burris, as scared and queasy as she was, drove her first to the emergency room, then, on second thought, to Doctor Leahy’s clinic. He went with her into the examination room, but looked out the window while two muttering nurses put her in stirrups and palpated and scanned her. Burris, who found menstruation disquieting, was horrified by his first sight of a gynecological table. Rachel wrested her hand free of his grasp and stroked his arm, soothed by the act of soothing him. She did not care what happened, and even welcomed the pain as a prelude to some end.

  After awhile they were left alone; Burris, embarrassed for her, lowered her skirt. Eventually one of the nurses returned to tell them, as if they should have guessed it, that everything was all right. The scans were all normal; anyway, there was nothing to be done. “You might still miscarry, but you probably won’t.” Rachel began to sit up. “Oh no you don’t! The doctor still needs to examine you.” Half an hour later, Leahy came in and positioned himself between her legs. His greeting seemed addressed to her vagina; in any case, he did not look at her face before putting two gloved, lubricated fingers inside her.

  “Oh, sure,” he said. “This’ll be fine. Good size, good spacing, and good position. I wouldn’t worry.” He pulled the gloves from his hands with a wet snap. “It’s a bit early, but let’s schedule that ultrasound for next week. We’ll do the amniocentesis while we’re at it. Talk to Grace on your way out. Good to see you again, Doctor.”

  Leaving the clinic, neither of them knew why they felt stiff and ashamed. Outside on the pavement, a few anti-abortion protesters held placards. One of these showed a photograph of an aborted fetus. Bloody, alien, and the size of a dime, it inspired in Burris and Rachel neither pity nor tenderness, but only repugnance. Was that the thing growing inside her? Were they responsible for that?

  During the ultrasound and amniocentesis, Burris stayed in the waiting room.

  The ultrasound technician was warm and gentle. “There’s the spine, and there’s the big healthy head. See?” But Rachel could discern nothing human in the snowstorm of pixels. “Do you want to know the sex?” —“I don’t know.” Would Burris want to know? They’d never discussed it. She wished he were here. “No,” she said at last. —“Good for you. You’ll love them whatever they are.”

  When Burris asked her whether it was a boy or a girl, she realized her mistake. “A boy,” she blurted, and was hurt by his look of relief. Yet her disappointment in him proved that she too had been guilty of hoping—but for a girl. As time went by, the bluff acquired actuality, till it no longer seemed a bluff, but the intuited truth. She was carrying Burris’s baby boy.

  That night, she asked him about the amniocentesis. “What do they do with the amniotic fluid?” —He didn’t know, but said, “Only some tests to make sure the baby is fine and healthy.” —“And what if the baby isn’t healthy?” —“Don’t be silly. The baby will be fine.” —Then why bother, she wondered, with the tests?

  Burris wondered the same thing, and worried. What would they do if the baby proved abnormal, defective, or deformed? Could they love it? Should they be expected to? Would they be encouraged to keep it—or to terminate it? When weeks passed without Doctor Leahy or anyone from the prenatal diagnostic center calling, Burris assumed that the tests had been negative, and expelled the worry from his mind.

  One day, she felt a strange new discomfort—an irregular throbbing in her abdomen. Because it came and went and was not very painful, she said nothing about it to Burris. Then one night a sharp pang awoke her, and she knew that it was the baby kicking. She was startled and embarrassed, like someone discovering that she was being watched. Tentatively, she placed her hands on her belly. When another kick came, she felt a jolt of affection and awe as she realized that the two of them actually shared the same body. The kicking was a protest against the same discomfort that she’d imagined she had been suffering alone.

  From that day on, she moved more daintily and with more pride, like a curator through a museum. She ate more, and withstood the nausea with greater stoicism—taking her cue from the baby’s stillness, or venting her frustration vicariously through his kicks. She spoke to him silently, complaining or sympathizing as to an adult peer. She had found a secret ally, and from that alliance she derived, for a while, a secret strength.

  One night, too tired to cook, Burris took her out for dinner. Rachel spent an hour selecting her clothes, titivating her hair, and applying make-up. Earlier that week at the pharmacy, a horrible woman had asked her how far along she was. Tonight she was determined not to look or act pregnant.

  The restaurant was owned by distant relatives of his, who prepared for them the same meal he would have made at home. Rachel simulated an appetite so convincingly that Burris was aroused: he had always liked to see a lover stuff herself before intercourse. He was attracted too by her little swollen tummy, which her dress only accentuated. He told her, “I’m so glad finally to see you eating for two!” But this seemed to be the wrong thing to say; for the rest of the dinner she was sullen. Later, in the parking lot, when he tried to signal his desire by caressing her belly, she slapped his hands away.

  At his next appointment with Doctor Leahy, he asked in a roundabout way whether pregnant women could still enjoy themselves . . . —“You mean sexually?” said Leahy. —“Well, yes, for instance.” —“Tremendously. Oh, yes. Some of them become quite nymphomaniacal. And the best part is: you don’t have to worry about birth control!”

  But whenever Burris made advances, Rachel scoffed. She did not feel sexy, and did not believe that he could find her so. For as she grew larger, she received less and less attention from men, and more and more from older women, who praised her and put their hands on her, like veterinarians admiring a heifer.

  Burris allowed himself to be discouraged, secretly agreeing that there was something perverse about lusting for a pregnant woman. But he felt irritated, too, to have been confronted with this fact—and, in effect, criticized—by his wife.

  Five weeks before the due date, Rachel called Burris at the clinic, interrupting a crown installation. “I think I’m in labor.” —His mind went white, filled at once with every color of thought. “Are you sure?” —“I don’t know, but I’ve had eight contractions.” She did not say that each of them in succession had been the most painful and frightening event of her life to that point. —“What about your waters? Have your waters broken?” —“I’m not sure. I think maybe they came out while I was peeing.”

  At the hospital, while a clerk took Rachel’s information with maddening methodicalness, Burris phoned Doctor Leahy’s clinic. The receptionist did not even transfer the call. “Oh, those are Braxton-Hickses.” —“I beg your pardon?” —“The contractions. Unless they’re coming regularly and getting closer together, they’re just false alarms. Sure, a lot of women get them.” —Three hours later, after a cursory examination, a midwife told them the same thing. —“But they’re agony,” Rachel protested. —The midwife smiled, too fatigued to snort in derision. “Just wait till the real thing.”

  During the ride home, Rachel squirmed in her seat, shaking her head and mouthing disbelief. “I won’t be able to,” she muttered. “I just won’t be able to . . .”

  Burris, humiliated and resentful, said nothing to console her. How could she know so little about her own body?

  The nex
t week, Rachel entered Leahy’s clinic prepared to demand some help. In addition to the heartburn, nausea, and contractions, none of which had gone away, her breasts were sore; her scalp was tight and sensitive, and her hair was falling out; her back always ached, though most when she tried to sleep; perhaps due to exhaustion, she had lost fine motor control in her fingers; she was often dizzy and afraid to use stairs. But Leahy appraised her at a glance in the waiting room, zeroing in on her primary complaint. “You’re getting humongous, aren’t you?” He clapped her shoulder, and said that if the baby had not arrived by week forty plus one day, he would perform a membrane sweep. Rachel thanked him, but had to ask one of the other women what a membrane sweep was. —“They massage your cervix to kick-start your body. It’s the first step of inducing labor.” —“Oh,” said Rachel. “Thank God.”

  On the morning of the due date, Burris watched her quizzically, and left for work reluctantly. The next day, she packed an overnight bag and he drove her to Leahy’s clinic. But the procedure—which seemed no different, only more painful, than a regular examination—was quickly finished, and to their surprise they were told to go home again. Frazzled by suspense, they wanted only to do something, to have something finally happen. —“But what do we do now?,” Burris asked, and Rachel gave him a grateful look. —“Now,” said Leahy, “we wait and see.” Eventually Burris extracted the information that if labor had not started in a week, Leahy would admit Rachel to the hospital for an induction. —Burris opened his pocket calendar. “So, next Tuesday?” —“Sure,” said Leahy, “thereabouts.”

  On Tuesday morning, Burris called Leahy’s clinic. —“Right,” said Leahy. “Tomorrow afternoon at three o’clock. Sound good?” —Burris consented helplessly. At two o’clock the next day, when they were about to leave, the receptionist called. “So, it turns out that tomorrow morning will actually work better for Doctor Leahy. Is that all right?” —“What time?” asked Burris. —“Eight o’clock?”