by Heidi Pitlor
“Fill in?”
“You’re the writer,” she said. “You’re the expert!”
“Sure,” I said, still unclear just what she meant, but also glad that in her eyes, I offered some kind of expertise. “Or you could turn to a growing genre of mom-moirs,” I joked.
“Who has time for all those?” She laugh-snorted again, but this time let it hang in the air.
Gin chuckled as if she herself had not been the one to send us two such books.
“I think we only need to write about potty training if it involves teaching Norton about feminism,” I said.
“Right, of course.” Lana went silent when the woman I took to be Gloria came in to refill our goblets once again. After she left, Lana said, “I’m glad you understand about the need for discretion.”
“If it makes you feel any better, that nondisclosure agreement is airtight,” I said. The agreement stated outright that during the process of my writing Lana’s book, I was not to mention her name, that I was “to behave as if [I had] never heard of Lana Breban.” Some clients could be paranoid, although after her having been trolled mercilessly on Twitter and the way that Wanda Lesko had been weaponized, I could understand Lana’s desire to keep some things private.
When Colin returned, she said, “I’ve got to wrap up here. I have that meeting soon.”
We gathered our things and made our way toward the foyer. A sleek charcoal-colored dog, some kind of small greyhound or terrier, loped across the hallway and disappeared. How strange that we were only seeing it now.
“Well, I can tell I’m in good hands,” Lana said, as we reached the front door.
“Lana, can I just say—you are absolutely the rock star that I hoped you’d be?” Colin said.
“Stop. Go on.” She set her hand on his elbow.
“Oh, believe me, I could and for hours if you’d like, Darling—”
“Hours? Let’s see, I’m free tomorrow,” she said with a laugh.
I had seen Colin turn on this fawning persona before in the presence of clients.
Gin’s phone rang, and she glanced down at the screen. “I have to take this. We’ll talk soon.” She touched Lana’s arm and hurried toward the elevator.
After we had said our goodbyes and Lana had closed the door behind us, Colin turned to me. “This book is going to rock the world, Allie.”
“Or is it Amy?”
He just rolled his eyes. “She’ll figure it out.”
We rode the elevator without saying any more. It was stuffed with highly groomed, very attractive people. A woman to my left tried to comfort a squalling baby. I noted a couple of people subtly covering their ears. The woman followed us past the front desk, the baby still wailing, and outside, when Captain Kangaroo held open the front door.
Colin said, “A cab! Mind if I grab it?” He flung out his right arm and the car swerved over to meet us. “Give me a kiss goodbye.” He pecked my cheek and trotted toward the car.
I stood in front of Lana’s building for a moment, trying to assimilate all that had just occurred. I breathed in the smell of charred meat and cigars. A horse-drawn carriage clopped past, followed by another. The summer light was honeyed, the day far warmer here and now than when I had left home that morning. A town car pulled over and stopped before me, and Captain Kangaroo called hello to the man who stepped out, someone familiar-looking. It took me a few seconds to identify him as Alec Baldwin, and I quickly bowed my head and turned to walk the other direction.
I had read that in Bucharest, Lana and her disabled sister had witnessed their father’s heart attack in their kitchen. Soon afterward, their mother moved them in with another family of four. She had been a schoolteacher across the city, and had to leave Lana to tend to her sister and the other children in the apartment most days. Across the country people stood in food lines for rations of canned sardines and bread. Austerity measures dictated the rationing of electricity and heat, and residents burned soft coal in the winter, making the air thicken with soot. It was illegal to heat an office above fifty-seven degrees Fahrenheit. So many things were illegal. Thousands of women died from back-alley abortions. Hundreds of thousands of orphans were housed in rundown warehouses, some children even left chained to their bed frames. Lana had once described that time and place in an op-ed as, “Hell upon hell upon hell.”
Last year she had been invited to speak at the Library of Congress during Women’s History month. Two months ago, she had interviewed Ruth Bader Ginsburg for The New Yorker.
I would have loved to hear more about Lana’s childhood, those dark days in Bucharest and her move to New York. This sort of material was gold for a memoir. I wondered just how she and her mother and her sister managed after her new stepfather left them for another woman only months after they had arrived in the United States—and not only managed, but thrived. Lana got into Yale, attended law school at Stanford, worked at a law firm fighting workplace discrimination and harassment, married Lester, began publishing op-eds in local papers, then national papers. She had triumphed, really, and on her own blue-haired, pasta-burning, incompetent-with-laundry terms.
Chapter Three
Nearly four weeks later, I opened Lana’s first email with her notes for Chapter One, Pregnancy and Childbirth.
Hello! I hope you and your son are well. Please start chapter by encouraging reader to use midwives, doulas, birth plans (we had midwife, birth plan). Then a discussion of corporatization/medicalization of birth in U.S. For a thorough history with stats, see Cahill and Drum’s study @ Stanford, 2013; for recent overview, NEJM, Valentine, 2015ish. My assistant Valerie Val @LanaBreban.com can get you links. Happy writing, and all the best, Lana.
Each morning over the past few weeks, I had logged on, hoping to see an email from her so that I could get started at last. I still had yet to receive my first payment. Apparently the publisher was backlogged. No schools had called me to substitute-teach in weeks, and I had not gotten any landscaping jobs in over a month now.
I reread Lana’s note. This had to be the least amount of material a client had ever given me at the start of a book. I typed: “Great to hear from you! I’m eager to get to work. I’d love some anecdotes and memories about Norton’s birth and your pregnancy. Clients usually give me too much at first! If it’s discretion that still worries you, please be assured that you are in good and professional hands. I do think everyone wanted the book to be more personal and less academic?”
She switched to instant messaging. I carried to full-term. Labor went relatively quickly and birth was natural. I can find out Norton’s size if you want. He was a big baby.
Maybe she would be more forthcoming if we spoke. Can you Skype or talk on the phone?
She wrote: Sorry, busy day. (Busy life!)
I reread her initial email, and predicted Gin’s response to a detailed recap of our country’s corporate-driven medicalization of labor and delivery: “Zzzzzzz.”
Ok, I wrote. I tried to think fast. Just a couple little questions, if you don’t mind. What was pregnancy like for you? What did you do to prepare for the birth—any classes?
Lana: No classes. Lots of morning sickness, thrombosis, insomnia, but I got through it.
Me: Did you learn the sex before Norton was born?
Lana: Yes. Pls. remember to advocate for birth plans. Very empowering for women. Have to go now. Can’t wait to see Chap 1. Good luck!
The chat box disappeared.
On my counter, the jacket of Bootcamp Mama showed a photograph of the author, an attractive, athletic red-haired woman dressed in army fatigues and a cap. She balanced a crying baby in one arm and a sleeping red-haired toddler in the other. A silver whistle hung by a cord that rested above a centimeter of cleavage.
In general, I tried never to rely on Google when writing a book. I was hired to write what readers did not already know or could not easily learn, but in desperation, I googled Norton, Lester, and their family. I came up largely empty; Lana had given birth before becoming so
well-known. Almost everything I found related only to Lana’s and Lester’s work or Harding White. There was little evidence of Norton online, just a few pictures of him on Facebook at other children’s birthday parties, one with a woman who may have been Gloria, but the snapshot was too blurry for me to be sure.
I myself had learned I was pregnant when I was home alone. It was just me and a pee stick one wintry morning five years ago. The first person I told was Jimmy, who at the time was crouched up on his roof, chipping away with an axe at an ice dam. He said, “With whose kid?” “A guy I met last summer. It’s not relevant.” “Whoa. Al, you’ve got to think this through.” He lowered the axe and two poles of ice fell through a snowbank right next to me. The next person I told was Maggie, who said, “Is this a joke?” To Jimmy, I said, “I’m keeping it.” To Maggie I said, “Why would it be a joke?” To my stunned mother, “Enough! Enough about how hard this will be. Enough about what your friends will say. Just tell them that the baby’s father won’t be a part of our lives. How about, ‘Congratulations’?” And then I began weeks of cycling through fear, exhilaration, and aggressive self-doubt.
I considered tracking down some nugget of Romanian wisdom about love or pregnancy or motherhood, but any sort of stereotyping might prove dicey with Lana. I recalled my work with Tanya Dawson. Years ago known for her dead-on impressions of Scary Spice from the Spice Girls and Janet Jackson on Saturday Night Live, Tanya had asked me more than once to sound funnier, looser, “in general, less like you are a white person trying to sound black.” I was mortified, and asked if she would be more comfortable with a black ghostwriter, but she reassured me that she had heard worse imitations of her. “And the only two black ghostwriters that anyone seems to know of are working on other books right now. Your agent said you’re a chameleon, but if for some reason you did sound too white, I should just tell you. So, that’s what I’m doing.” Eventually I did learn to better reproduce her voice and sense of humor—at least this is what she told me.
At my kitchen table, I began what seemed like a journey in a rowboat to the middle of the ocean with no map or compass:
It was time for our first ultrasound, and in moments, we would learn whether I was carrying a girl or a boy. I tried to get comfortable on the examination table. The technician came into the room, squirted gel across my abdomen and flicked on the screen. Having endured everything from morning sickness to thrombosis to insomnia, I felt
She felt what? I had fattened up plenty of moments before, but past clients had at least given me the basics of these moments. I had written at length about walking in platform pumps in a runway show and sitting with Congress, listening to the State of the Union address. Hell, I had described the feel of a girl’s nipples through her shirt during a first kiss in Winnetka.
I turned back to Lana’s book:
Having endured everything from morning sickness to thrombosis to insomnia, I hoped that the worst had now passed. In a moment, I felt
I excised the word felt, and recalled the afternoon I learned that I was carrying a boy.
The rhythmic thumps of the baby’s heartbeat provided a soundtrack for the gray clouds ebbing and flowing on the monitor. It was impossible to make anything of what I saw. The technician nodded with the knowledge of our baby’s sex. Lester and I knew that this woman would not be the one to tell us, so we waited eagerly for our ob-gyn to join us ten eternal minutes later.
“It’s a boy!” the doctor said, and I laughed, because for some reason I had expected a girl. “He looks healthy,” he added.
I was growing a boy inside me! What did I know about little boys? I had no brother, no
“I had a dream that we hitched up to Newfoundland.” Behind me, Kurt cracked his knuckles.
“Give me a ‘heads up’ if you plan to be gone more than a week,” I said.
He had come to love road trips and solo camping, and went away sometimes for several days on his own. This arrangement was not a terrible one. When I needed to dive into work, he disappeared. When he began to miss me, he came back and helped out with Cass. The casual nature of whatever we were may have been the reason I had forgotten his birthday last month. I often chose to go check on Cass or shower instead of cuddling naked with Kurt in bed. He called me the guy in our relationship. I told him that this was sexist. “I mean that it’s a breath of fresh air after Birgitte,” he said. She had apparently been insatiable with his time and money, although who knew how she might describe their lives together. I had the thought that a lot of men secretly wanted women to behave more like them.
Kurt went into the kitchen, and I tried to concentrate again and think of ways to accommodate Lana’s few requests for the chapter:
For too long, a woman’s body has been public property. (Add quick bit of history.)
You have the right to be as private or public with your pregnancy as you wish. Sometimes, well-meaning strangers will approach you and touch your belly without asking. It may be wise to develop a stock response to this situation: “Hands off! It’s mine,” you could say. Or simply smile and respond, “I’m ticklish,” and back away.
No one has the right to touch you without your permission. If we draw boundaries when we are pregnant, we empower ourselves.
The tone was off. From across the room, Bootcamp Mama watched me, compelling me to be sassier or warmer.
Kurt walked by again and squeezed my shoulder and then stretched his long, freckled arms to the ceiling. He headed off to get dressed and finish rebuilding Jimmy’s carport, in exchange for half of our rent.
I finished the ultrasound scene, then herded Cass out of the house toward Bertie’s. He stopped to examine an empty Happy Meal container on the lawn.
“Come on, no dawdling,” I said. I took the box from him. “I’ve got to get back to work.”
“Dawdle, bottle, waddle. Can’t I stay home today?”
“No. Sorry.” A Pathfinder splashed a mud puddle on us and sped off. “Thanks, Ron! Appreciate it,” I muttered. Ron Garbella and his wife had recently moved into a house across the street. With my bare hands, I did my best to wipe the mud off of Cass, but he began to whine.
“It’s just rain,” I said, taking Cass’s hand and nudging him forward. “Hey, Love, please keep walking. I have so little time to work.”
“I can’t go to Bertie’s today. That car got mud in my mouth.”
“Then spit it out.”
“You always say no spitting.” Maybe he would become a lawyer someday. And then he could support me.
Out of desperation, I offered to take him for a Happy Meal at McDonald’s later if he reached Bertie’s house by the time I counted to twenty. He made it there before I had reached ten. When I saw Bertie waving a spatula from her front door, I turned to head back home, relieved, then felt guilty about having resorted to a bribe, and one whose primary appeal to him consisted of French fries and a flimsy toy.
Back at home, I opened my laptop.
I may not have known much about boys, but I did know that our son would have our love and best intentions and unconditional acceptance. Our son! What a wonderful sentence.
After our doctor and the technician left us alone, I looked over at Lester. “What if he only likes sports? What if he is aggressive?” I said.
He chastised me for assuming that a boy would automatically like or be any particular thing at all.
“You’re right.”
We decided we wanted to try natural childbirth. Births in our country have become overly and unnecessarily medicalized, institutionalized, and doctor-driven. We wanted an experience that
I went online and clicked on a website about natural labor and delivery. I opened a page to find several gruesome and graphic accounts of unnecessary, ultimately disfiguring episiotomies and C-sections. The pictures began to transfix me—was there no injustice women had not sustained? Who had taken these photographs? Who were these women who had allowed it?
We wanted an experience that reflected our own values, that honor
ed our
Another dead end.
Across the street, Jessica Garbella lowered herself onto a yoga mat in her bedroom and stretched into cobra pose. I watched her for a moment. Ron had been brought here recently from New York to start a new summer theater, not that the Berkshires needed another cultural venue catering to the people who summered here. The Garbellas had bought the three-bedroom Cape from the Newtons, a couple who had moved to be closer to their college-aged kids, or more precisely the Garbellas had bought it from a builder who had flipped it. Maggie and I had gone to an open house and had gawked at the gleaming quartz counters, the black clawfoot tub in the master bathroom and the in-ground pool surrounded by Japanese silver grass and blue hydrangeas. I could taste my own envy. Jessica taught Ashtanga yoga in the back room of a food co-op. We’d had coffee once, and she had given me a 10 percent–off coupon for her yoga class. She was nice enough, but went on a little long about Ron’s controlling sister and mother. She stayed in cobra pose as I watched now, going nowhere for an impressive amount of time. The Garbellas did not have children.
Motherhood changed everything. You could no longer practice yoga consistently—consistency itself was no longer a predictable thing. You could no longer get high so often or drink milk from a carton—you were a role model for someone else now. You could not blast Janis Joplin in the kitchen without causing your son to scream at the noise. Janis Joplin sounded different to a young child. She sounded awful. You could not go skinny-dipping with your tenant/partner in Goose Pond late at night unless someone was at your house, watching your kid, and even then, as the warm water held you and the sky blinked with stars and the black pines smelled of freedom, even as you moved through the dark water with this man inside of you, the man whispering how good you felt, how right this was, how your wet skin drove him crazy, your thoughts turned to your son in his bed and your elderly neighbor probably asleep on your couch and the way she coughed as if a brick were lodged in her neck and how she forgot your son’s name the other day and you worried that she might die right there in your house, and then what would you do?