“Taste one!” Riana urged.
Never one to stick a toe in, I grabbed an entire cluster and stuffed it into my mouth. I was actually really hungry. A hundred sweet explosions in my mouth went off as I chewed on the grapes. A hint of tart, but only a little. They were warm from the summer sun, and the skins were just slightly chewy. I grabbed the next closest cluster and ate more. I looked down at Amaya and she was doing the same thing.
We got out our baskets and began collecting. Walking along the fallen fence, pausing to clip the heavy fruit. The air was so clean, so crisp. The soil was chocolate brown. The leaves had just started to blush red, and the rolling hills of vines were stunning. Walking along next to my sister, I was reminded of the ranch. I also thought of my parents—not far from here they had been picking grapes together, planning a family.
A little while later, Riana and I sat in the car, waiting for Benji to take Amaya for a potty under a tree.
“God, she’s all grown up,” I said. I was surprised at how having a child had changed my sister. Right after giving birth to Amaya, my sister began living a more ecological lifestyle. She didn’t want to use disposable diapers, and so made her own diaper inserts and wipes. As Amaya got older, her fervor to save the earth grew stronger: she and Benji stopped using toilet paper; they stopped buying stuff and started dumpster diving and foraging. Some more Dad traits surfaced: Riana learned how to use a chainsaw and started channeling her psychic abilities. She had gotten into exploring her past lives and studying the moon cycles.
We watched Amaya pull up her pants, skipping along back to the car, pausing to pick up a stick. Amaya was so perfect, so beautiful.
“You know, she saved me,” said Riana.
“Who?”
“Amaya.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. I think I knew but I wanted her to explain.
After a pause, she told me something I had never heard. That she had struggled with mental illness. Suicidal tendencies.
“I thought about killing myself, even when I was pregnant with Amaya.”
I gasped, clutched my stomach. “No.”
“Yes. But then, after I had her, Novella, something in me changed. It cracked open, and the love came pouring in. She saved me. She made me.”
I grabbed her hand and we were quiet for a while, feeling all the past swirling around us.
Before I left for France, I had sent Dad an e-mail message telling him my news. He wrote back his congratulations, told me that I would be a great mom, just like Pat. Terribly wonderful, I thought, remembering his haiku.
“I wish we could have saved Dad,” I said.
“Don’t you think we did?” she asked. Then Benji and Amaya were back and we drove home. Maybe we did.
• • •
That night, lying in the guest bedroom upstairs, I was awoken by their little town’s church bells, which rang on the hour. The baby liked to move around at night, and busily kicked my ribs. I pulled down the covers and watched the alien movements across my stomach.
We were going to have a girl. Just before leaving for France, I had an ultrasound appointment. The technician lubed up an ultrasound wand and stuck it against my swollen stomach. We were looking for internal organs and body parts. The heart, the kidneys. The baby bobbed around, and I loved the chance to see her instead of just feeling her nudges in my womb. The technician pointed out her brain, her lips, her stomach. We had a tough time finding the baby’s feet, and the technician wildly prodded my stomach with the ultrasound wand. I started to worry. I could feel the baby swimming around low, down near my cervix, which tickled. Then finally the fetus flipped around and we saw her foot—it was tiny, and looked like a badger’s paw. Then the other one. I was relieved. She would be able to walk. Then we looked for her hands. I had bargained with myself: If she were missing arms or hands, that would be OK. They make all these great bionic arms. . . . But then the technician found them—two perfect hands. One was making the Ozzy sign. The bones in her arms glowed white, and I could see each individual digit. That’s when I started crying. Despite our obvious genetic flaws, Bill and I had put together a healthy baby.
As I lay there in the dark French countryside, I thought of my parents, who had been here before, conceiving Riana. They had been young and hopeful, idealistic and enchanted with each other. Those days must still hold some magic for them. I know they do for me—I grew up listening to my mom’s stories about their great adventures.
My sister once told me that I always try to find the answers. Instead she tries to find the beginning of everything. I remember being annoyed and not fully understanding what she meant. It’s true that I do always look for an answer, something to explain why things are the way they are. Now I was here, where my parents had lived out the happiest part of their relationship. I realized that their beginning was just as important, as real, as their ending. There had been a moment of great love for them. To return to their stomping grounds felt like I had made it back to the beginning.
A few days later I flew home. “Have a great labor!” Riana joked. I waved. “Oh, yeah,” I said, “I’ve been watching the goats!” And I winked.
• • •
Eight months into my pregnancy, a burst of progesterone coursed through my body. The hormone gave my hair lushness and bounce. My skin cleared up for the first time since third grade. Men regularly stopped me in the street, asking for my phone number, even though I was clearly knocked up. My dream state had changed too. Instead of my usual anxiety dreams about failing a test or missing a train, I experienced pleasant, almost psychedelic dreams. One that stuck with me featured a group of Civil War veterans on horseback. They wore big beards—and, in the dream, I loved them, felt tender and grateful to them. I also once dreamed of my father as a boy—we were playing a game: I would make a scary face and then he would make the same face. In the dream, at first I was scared of his bulging eyes, but then I realized it was just a game, and started laughing.
Bill and I, embracing our inner nut ball, enrolled in a mindful childbirth class, though we had a hard time taking it seriously. “I just had a mindful poop,” Bill would say, flushing the toilet. “Can you mindfully wash the dishes?” I would say, snickering. But one night, that class busted me wide open.
We were doing an exercise where we looked into each other’s eyes and repeated some things the teacher, a crone-like midwife, said. There I was, belly huge, on a bouncy ball chair, staring into Bill’s eyes. “I am ready to have a child with you,” all the couples said in unison, looking into each other’s eyes, “and this child will hold us together for as long as we are alive.” As we said the words to each other, suddenly the enormity of the thing hit us. Bill and I both teared up. Though we weren’t going to get married, having a child would be as close to marriage as we would come.
Like my parents, when I was pregnant Billy and I bought some land together. Not 180 acres, but one-tenth of an acre, the empty lot next to our apartment that we had been squatting on for going on eight years. The owner of the land tracked us down and offered to sell it to us. The recession had lingered and they couldn’t get funding to build condos like they had once hoped. The price was right: $30,000, the same amount my parents had forked over in 1971 for their ranch.
Bill and I cashed in all our savings to buy it. After the paperwork had been processed, I wandered out to the lot and walked all forty-five hundred square feet of it with a new sense of ownership. Being a squatter, there had been no real plan. Willy-nilly I had planted vegetables and fruit trees, with no eye toward the future. Maybe I didn’t want to get attached. I was just surviving on a short-term basis, knowing one day I would be pushed off the land.
As I walked and observed, I had regrets about things I had done when I had been a squatter, like planting a plum tree too close to an apple tree or letting the Bermuda grass take over. Now was my chance to dig in, the place was truly mine.
&
nbsp; My plan was to clear out my old mistakes and build anew. I actually hired someone to build a functional chicken coop, where I could raise my chickens and ducks. I attacked the Bermuda grass, channeling my energy toward this task.
I also got a hold of some historical maps of the area and discovered that before the lot had been vacant, it had been an apartment building with a small grocery store on the ground floor. They sold meat and vegetables at this store. Now I grew meat and vegetables in the footprint of the building. Rhyming, not repeating.
• • •
Preparations for the baby began to take over. Bill spent an entire afternoon wrestling with an umbrella stroller someone had handed down to us, trying to open it. There were so many baby items that required special knowledge and skill. I knew how to milk a goat and slaughter a chicken, but installing—and adjusting—a baby car seat? Folding up a stroller? Impossible. Bill’s a handy guy, up for the challenge, so I let him fiddle with the thing. I never planned on using it—I was going to wear my baby like an indigenous woman from a third world country. But Bill has a bad back. When someone offered us a stroller, we took it.
“What do you think of the name Babette?” I asked Bill. I’d just spent an hour writing out names for our daughter on a piece of paper like a lovesick eighth grader. “I like Louise too,” I said. Bill made a face. Bill’s mom had weighed in: She liked Sarah, but this didn’t seem right. My mom was so excited she couldn’t hardly believe it. Literally. She would send me e-mails asking, “Are you still pregnant?”
I had been thinking about her former self, sitting in the A-frame in Crescent, feverishly knitting baby clothes and reading Dr. Spock. At night, when the baby was moving around the most, Bill would bend over my pregnant belly, listening to the baby move around, smoothing my belly with his gentle, callused hands. I couldn’t help but think of my dad. Maybe he did the same thing.
Suddenly Bill figured out the secret, and the stroller folded out with a satisfying popping noise. He showed me the hidden lever to pull. I bought eco-paint and painted the baby room a pale green color. I hung a mobile over the changing table. I collected cloth diapers and learned how they worked. I was nesting like the rabbits out on my front deck.
However, as much as I was nesting like a bunny, my rabbits were starting to disgust me. It must have been hormones, but I had grown to loathe them. I could barely bring myself out to the deck to feed them. It wasn’t their smell—which can be quite fragrant—it was their demeanor. Timid and meek, hiding in their nesting boxes. It used to be so cute when they humped furiously, tails pumping. But now, watching the act made me hate them. I touched my bloated stomach and felt repulsed. Maybe I had become a self-loathing breeder, but they had to go.
I put out an ad on an urban homestead listserv, and within one day the rabbits and their cages were cleared out. My mouth tightened as I watched the rabbits disappear.
I had my front deck back. I maniacally scrubbed away years of splattered rabbit pee off the walls, power washed the floor, and put down a fresh coat of paint. Then I went to a hardware store and bought a gas BBQ to put on the deck. Even as I lit my new grill and roasted some ears of corn with a sense of satisfaction, I knew I was creeping toward what I have avoided my whole life: ease, comfort. The rabbit cleanse made me wonder how exactly I was going to raise a farm and a kid.
As the months marched on and my belly expanded, I felt more and more exhausted. Even though I owned it, the garden went fallow, then feral. I could only focus on one thing, even though at that point it was out of my control: making the baby.
Left: Novella and Mom in the vegetable garden on the ranch, 1975.
Right: Novella and Frannie on the urban farm, 2012.
Thirteen
This is punishment, I thought, panting. I was perched on a hospital bed, legs splayed out. I had just taken another shit on the hospital bed. I had been so cavalier about birth. That wink. In the back of my mind, I knew it was going to be painful. But not this painful.
I had walked to the hospital. Not because I’m a badass, but because I couldn’t bear the thought of getting into a car while having a contraction. So I walked with my doula while Bill followed along with us, slowly, in the car. It was a remarkably clear and bright December morning. Our neighborhood of Ghost Town was just starting to wake up. A few shopping-cart guys were cruising around. Every few minutes I would stop walking, lean up against a building, and have a contraction, groaning in pain.
The contractions had started in the late evening, so painful I couldn’t even see clearly. Later I learned I was having back labor from the baby’s head moving against my pelvis. The pain mounted and mounted until I had blinders on, and could only see a few inches in front of me. My eyes were unfocused, my pupils enormous.
Someone whisked my poo away, and I felt grateful for half a second. I tried to breathe as I got ready for the next painful wave of contractions in my uterus. My uterus was actively trying to churn the baby out. What’s amazing is the little baby, not even born, knows how to wiggle and turn down the birth canal to get herself out.
Why it had to be so painful seemed wrong. I was trying to observe the pain of childbirth, like I had learned in our mindfulness class. I wanted to listen to it, and find it fascinating. But I discovered that actually pain made me want to run.
Everyone disappeared for a while. I had the vague sense that Bill was updating his Facebook status with new birth developments when I wasn’t having a contraction. When I was having a contraction, and had to push, Bill and the doula would each grab one leg and pin it behind my head. I had this idea that I would be on all fours, like a goat, and the baby would just slide out. Wrong. I would grunt and pant—and poop—while a full minute of absolute agony ripped through my body. After each push a nurse would tell me the baby had progressed a couple centimeters down the birth canal.
“How long is this going to take?” I had my eye on the clock, and vaguely sensed that I had been in active pushing labor for over five hours. I had been in labor—having painful contractions every five minutes or so—for almost twenty-four hours. My mom had labored to have Riana for only eight hours, and me for only six hours. Imagining birthing times might be hereditary, I had been betting on an easy labor, and now I was losing. A strange thought crossed my mind—I was giving birth like my father would have given birth. Fighting, cussing, scared. I was feeling wronged, like the universe had conspired against me. Trapped and feral. I needed help.
The staff wheeled a full-length mirror in front of me. I strained to see what was going on. Things down there sure looked messed up. Somehow the backs of my legs looked bruised. I really should have shaved. In good news, my vagina looked like a lotus.
I peered at the mirror. I couldn’t see much. My eyes had gotten really puffy from the effort of pushing. So much for the joyous photos of mom and babe, where mom looks radiant like the Virgin Mary. I could see a head.
A wave of pain arrived. I started howling. Deep groaning guttural howls. I arched my head up like I remember the goat doing, stretching, stretching. Then I realized that this was it. I had to die. I had to make the jump, to do the thing that I had resisted for so long. I bared down, became pure animal, not human. I went someplace else. They say the ring of fire—when the baby’s head passes out the vagina—is the most painful part, but I don’t remember that. I just remember hearing a keening wail, and the feeling that I had just taken the biggest dump of my life, and then Frannie was born.
She was bigger than I thought she would be, and she smelled sweet and milky. The nurses put her on my belly, and she slithered up, on her own, toward my breast. Babies’ instincts are strong. They know where the breast is and will crawl toward it because of a special scent the breast emits. But also because babies can see the nipple. In the last weeks of my pregnancy, my nipples and areola had turned dark brown. This contrast served as a signpost for baby: MILK HERE.
She looked just like Bill’s dad�
��with a square old-man face and a thatch of red hair. Bill took photos of the event, and it took me weeks before I could finally look at them, to see what had happened to me, what I had done.
Bill dialed my mom on his phone and held her up to my ear.
“I can’t believe you did this,” I shouted.
“Yup. It’s a big thing,” Mom said. She was suddenly my new hero.
Some women fall in love with their babies at first sight. I didn’t fall completely in love with baby Frannie until the second night we were together. We brought her home from the hospital, bundled up and red-faced. She woke me up that night, around three a.m., after sleeping for quite a few hours. She seemed to have a smile on her face, like she wanted to tell me something, some secret. Maybe it was gas, but that smile destroyed the old me, and in its place someone else emerged. This was forever, in a way nothing had been before.
• • •
Friends had milked my goats while I lay in bed recovering from the birth for the first two weeks. On Christmas, six days after she was born, I limped down the backstairs with Frannie. I introduced her to the goats. They were curious and excited to smell the newborn baby. I snapped photos of Frannie in the goat manger, surrounded by her new caprine friends.
A few weeks later, I was finally strong enough to start milking the goats. I opened up the back door and called out to Bebe. “Come on up!” I shouted. She clattered up the stairs and jumped onto the milk stand. I sat behind her, like I had done hundreds of times, washed off her udder with a wipe, and began milking.
It was back to the old routine, this time with Frannie snuggled up next to me in a sling. For the first minutes of milking, she quietly slept. Then, maybe smelling the goat, or the goat milk that was steadily being drawn into the bucket, Frannie started to wail. It was a newborn’s mewling sound, and it made Bebe nervous. She started to shift her legs about, and even raised up her back leg to kick me. I caught her leg in one hand, held the milk pail in the other. Jesus, I need a hubcap, I thought, like my mom had used. Then I noticed that Bebe wasn’t the only one letting down her milk. My breasts, hearing the sound of my baby, started oozing out breast milk.
Gone Feral: Tracking My Dad Through the Wild Page 15