by Heidi Pitlor
“Why did he call me a girl?” Cass said.
“Because girls are wonderful.” I kissed his head, glad for my ready response. “Let’s go get you something to eat.”
I checked my email as he ate. At long last, Lana had gotten back to me.
I have to admit that I like having a professional write for me. I would not call myself a natural writer. It can be hard work!
Nice job with the first chapter. I do wonder about the passive tone—esp. that Elizabeth Noble quote. As I’m sure you know, a basic tenet of feminism is agency—becoming the person to make the biggest decisions about your own life and wresting that control from the patriarchy. So much about our medical establishment is patriarchal.
Please also address the big business of infertility. And I’d love you to discuss the history of medicalization of birth—this topic should be a gold mine. You might more assertively promote at-home birth, natural childbirth. And I think there could be more focus on midwives, doulas, birth plans. Birth plans are key to maintaining control, power, etc.
Could you write something about how birth can actually be empowering, to make it more upbeat and readable? Don’t some women even reach orgasm when they deliver?
I resisted the urge to reply that I had done the best I could with the nothing that she had provided me. That my mandate was to make her seem more relatable, not more academic. That climaxing while delivering a baby seemed about as likely to me as singing opera while drowning, although a hat tip to any woman who was granted the experience. That no one I knew would describe childbirth as “upbeat.”
My hands hovered over my keyboard.
Per the advice of my doctor, I labored at home for four hellish hours. After I managed to drive myself to Berkshire Medical, I curled up on the floor of the waiting room and screamed through the next contraction. Someone who worked there came over, and I begged her for an epidural, but she did not or could not find an anesthesiologist. I handed her my birth plan and never saw her again. I was wheeled into a room, and realized I had forgotten to bring my MP3 player that I had loaded up with relaxing but empowering songs. When I showed the nurse the lavender and the diffuser I had brought to help calm me, she just nodded as she ran out of the room to help someone else. She came back, though, and rubbed my back a little and told me the detailed story of how she had given birth on the floor of a ferry en route to Block Island. I told her to go find the anesthesiologist—I needed an epidural or I would die. My mother and Ed appeared in the doorway. My body felt as if it would split in half. It took forty minutes for the man to come—forty minutes of burning, searing pain and my parents snapping at each other to do something, anything, while trying unsuccessfully to find a nurse who would page a doctor and my telling them all repeatedly to go to hell. Eventually it was decided that Cass was too big and I too small to provide safe passage, so I was taken to an OR and had a C-section and passed out and did not meet Cass until someone roused me maybe fifteen minutes later. Most of the experience felt like warfare. Most of the time, I did not entertain one thought about trying to wrest control—if I had any thoughts at all, they were about survival.
Kurt was now puttering by the kitchen sink. “You almost ready?” he asked.
What was I doing, writing this? “Yeah,” I said. I had promised Kurt—non-owner of a car—a ride into town this morning, and Cass was due at preschool soon. “Jimmy came by to see if you’re going to work on his shed today.”
“But it’s pouring out there.”
“Yeah, well, he wants you to paint the inside of it,” I said.
“Are you kidding? If that isn’t busywork.”
“I know,” I said, my eyes on my laptop. “But I guess it’s also rent money.”
“I’m aware of that.”
My phone rang. My mother. “I only have a minute,” I said.
“I have a new one-upper story for you.” My mother had told me all about Patty Copeland the last time we spoke. Apparently “the one-upper” talked incessantly about her family. Patty had twelve grandkids, more than anyone else in their condo complex, and this was a symbol of status, I guess. “Remember my friend Louise? She moved down here about a year ago?” She went on to detail a spat between Patty and Louise.
Kurt gestured to his watch. Cass had to be at preschool in five minutes.
I held up a finger—one more minute—and he led Cass toward the door. “Mom, I have to go. Can I call you later, after I get some work done?”
“On your book for that important woman? I know you can’t tell me outright, but maybe you can just say something like, ‘I cannot confirm or deny it,’ if I’m right. Is it Meryl Streep? You know that I’ve seen every one of her movies?”
“I’ll call you later.”
I ran to the truck, but I still ended up drenched from the downpour, sidling in next to Kurt. I turned the key and Charlie Barleycorn came on and Cass began to sing along: Sing it now, sing it wow, black and brown together, pow! In the land of Canada, I have friends from Africa!
As I drove, I wished that I could I tell Kurt or even my mother about Lana giving me almost no material for her book. I had no colleagues, no comrades in the trenches. As I drove, I catalogued all the subjects that I had kept encased in silence over the years: the identities of my clients; my vacillating but often alarming levels of debt; from my parents, my relationship with Kurt and my fears of being an inadequate mother; my infrequent if consistent enjoyment of marijuana; my worry that working alone and being a single parent was turning me into a narcissist. If it were possible to x-ray my anxieties, my interior would have appeared as an opaque mass.
In the narrow parking lot outside Little Rainbows, Cass stalled by asking to hear one more Charlie Barleycorn song. A couple of mothers trudged through the rain carrying babies, lunchboxes, backpacks, jackets, boots, diaper bags, and their tiny daughters in tow. Some women’s ability to multitask was astonishing.
The director, a pious woman in her sixties with cropped gray hair, stood at the front door and waved at us. I reached back and pushed open Cass’s door. “Cass, Sweetheart,” she called. “Hello! It’s off to work we go, right? Come help me set up for circle time!” She wore a lilac-colored corduroy jumper and her signature rabbit slippers. Susan Ferrell was her name, but the kids called her Suze. She had the ability to put me completely at ease just by standing before me. I knew not to stay and make sure that Cass settled in. Suze had taught me this: my presence only made him more anxious.
I had wanted to send Cass to the Montessori preschool two streets over from our house, the small, red colonial where children climbed mulberry trees and sat criss-cross-applesauce next to a vegetable garden. I thought a small, individualized program might be better for a more creative kid like Cass. He and I went for a tour one day, and I took note of the low tables that held thematically organized tools and art supplies and maps. The ten children quietly moved from activity to activity whenever they felt they must. Afterward, we followed the director to her office and talked a bit, and I inquired about the tuition. When she told me the number, I said we would be in touch and marched Cass right back home. I ended up enrolling him at the cloyingly—and inaccurately—named Little Rainbows, part preschool, part daycare, all white children, a sprawling room in the basement of a Methodist church in town. The children ran amok at Little Rainbows with just an occasional organized activity. I had thought Cass would like the relaxed spirit of the place, but so far, he had found it a mixed bag. He did enjoy the arts and crafts, and Suze herself, but not so much Barton Haller, the kid who wiped his hands all over the walls after peeing or, in Cass’s words, the “footy, farty” smell of the Cheez-Its Suze gave them. So we bumbled forward, me hoping that Cass would grow to like Little Rainbows, and that Bertie would continue to watch him for criminally low pay the rest of the time I had to work.
I pulled up to Pete’s store. Kurt got out, but I stayed in the car and saw a blond guy that I recognized from my high school walk in after him: Sean Strum, or Strummy as he was
called back in the day, had been on my bus and had been the first child that I heard swear and use horribly sexist slurs. His presence used to feel like a loaded gun to me. I had not known that he still lived here.
Beside the store, a stray dog squatted and released a heap of shit, then trotted off.
I was not supposed to still be here. After Dartmouth, I had imagined finding a great job writing under my own name, moving somewhere like Paris or Barcelona, traveling, learning to scuba dive and play guitar. I would meet some foreign writer, have a kid or two. Then, when Cass was a baby, I daydreamed about the two of us living near the ocean. He would spend his childhood digging around in the sand and playing in the surf, learning to ride the waves, and maybe later he would catch fish and snorkel. I envisioned a close group of smart, witty, artistic friends who also had kids. Some of these friends would be single like me. We would all own small beach houses near each other and the kids would travel in a pack, in and out of our homes and around the beach, the older kids minding the younger ones, the adults taking turns overseeing the group when needed, and in this way, we would raise each other’s children when they were not raising themselves. We would have lives outside parenthood. We would have balance.
And then Ed had had a heart attack on my seven-year-anniversary at the equity firm in New York, and I had left my job and moved back home to help my mother. We were told that he might not make it, and I knew that she would need all kinds of help if he did not.
This was about ten years ago, and every now and then I continued to research different places for Cass and me to live. With each year of motherhood that passed, though, moving came to seem more complicated and unlikely. Still, I sure as hell did not want to stay put forever in the same town where I had grown up, where I ran into former classmates, a few who were now struggling to find work—like me sometimes—or tragically hooked on painkillers, most who spoke to me with disdain, as if I thought I was too good for them. If any of them had asked me and Cass to get together, I would have said yes. Not to Strummy, of course, but yes to most of the others. I really could have used more friends.
Kurt hefted three cans of Benjamin Moore paint into the bed of the truck and climbed back up beside me. I brushed the raindrops from his face and saw that the rash on his neck had mostly disappeared.
“I picked up a can of white that was on sale,” he said. “I figured I could plaster up the ceiling in your hall and then paint it. Maybe this will earn a few brownie points with Jimmy.” He set a hand on mine.
“Thanks, Kurt.” I felt gratitude, almost choked with gratitude, for him. “That’d be great.”
“And I’ll ask if he has other work for me. Maybe I can cover half of November’s rent.”
“That would be a huge help,” I said. “You know that Benjamin Moore is one of the pricier brands, right?”
“Jimmy thinks the cheaper stuff won’t last. I went through this with his carport. His old, makeshift, half-rotted carport.” Kurt raked his fingers through his hair that had grown almost to his shoulders by now. “This work—this life here was supposed to be soul-enforcing.”
“Yeah.” I could not remember the last time I had used the word soul.
I reminded myself that, for over a decade, Kurt had worked eighty-plus-hour weeks managing a stable of demanding clients while married to a gruff, two-timing Danish woman. He was still in recovery.
The cab of the truck smelled of soil, an odor I had come to like. It was dry and cozy in there, and we sailed through the rain. I felt the satisfying splashes whenever the tires cut through deep puddles.
He said, “Let’s get pizza and watch The Muppet Movie with Cass later. He’s never seen The Muppets, has he?”
I shook my head.
“And after he goes to bed, you and me?”
“Deal.” I smiled over at him and pictured the day ahead, Kurt out painting Jimmy’s shed, me holed up in my kitchen sipping a mug of coffee as I forged ahead on Lana’s book.
Back at home, I opened my laptop to see my earlier rant about Cass’s birth. I reread it, selected the whole passage on the screen, and clicked “delete.”
Chapter Five
Sometimes I kept the radio tuned to the news in the kitchen. This is how I first heard the Access Hollywood tape, while playing Go Fish with Cass: “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”
“What’s wrong?” Cass said to me.
I hoped he had not heard the radio in that moment, or if he had, that he was too young to understand. “I don’t—nothing. I’m fine,” I managed, my face hot, and I rose to turn off the radio. “Go fish.”
That afternoon, I happened to see Strummy again at a gas station. The sight of the mudflaps on his old Ram pickup, those naked girl silhouettes that I had seen plenty of times before, made me recoil now. At Price Chopper, I eyed every other person that I passed. Had they heard the tape yet? The cashier, an older man, winked and kept his fingers on mine as he handed me the receipt. I jerked my arm away and hightailed it out of the store. What had always seemed like a persistent virus now resembled a cancer.
I added to Lana’s first chapter a discussion of infertility and the medical establishment’s pigheaded insistence on “fixing” the woman’s body, despite the fact that 30 percent of fertility issues could be traced to the male partner. I wrote:
We women are our own best advocates. We know our bodies better than anyone else. We are the ones to give birth—not our doctors, not our anesthesiologists, not our partners. My birth plan allowed me to create my own experience, and to exert a measure of control during a time that can feel chaotic at best. We must each be the author of our own story.
I sent it to Lana, and hearing nothing back, I wrote her a few days later to confirm that she had received the pages.
Yes, thanks, she finally replied. Will take a look when I can.
Google Alert kept me posted on her comings and goings. She was the keynote speaker at a fundraiser in Miami for Emily’s List. She engaged in a Twitter war with an outspoken Texas congressman. She spoke at a Planned Parenthood luncheon in Seattle, and a snippet of the event circulated on social media, this footage of her recapping the beginnings of the movement for birth control one hundred years ago: “A young pregnant woman named Sadie Sachs, who already had three children and did not have the money for a fourth, gave herself an abortion. Her children were the ones who found her passed out in her own blood. When Margaret Sanger met Sadie, she said, ‘I was resolved to seek out the root of evil, to do something to change the destiny of mothers whose miseries were vast as the sky.’ ‘As vast as the sky,’ ” Lana repeated, and set both of her hands on her heart. I saw that, without realizing it, I had just done the same. Her eyeglasses had been replaced by contact lenses, and as she went on, she blinked constantly. “We cannot wait for men to do something to make the lives of women better. We must act now to starve the roots of evil. They grow deeper and stronger every day. Each person here must act. Every one of us has to vote in every election. We have to teach our daughters to do the same.”
What an enormous gift, I thought, to be writing for this particular person right now.
A couple of days later, she published an op-ed about the big business of treating infertility and in the first paragraph, utilized my phrase “the medical establishment’s pigheaded insistence on ‘fixing’ only the woman’s body.” The rest of the piece was a barely tweaked version of what I had sent her for her book, and she closed with this: “We women are our own best advocates. We must each be the author of our own story.”
I clicked out of the New York Times website, with thoughts of dashing off a passive-aggressive email to her congratulating her on such a well-thought-out and well-written op-ed. But I was just going to have to pretend I had never read the piece, and continue to await her response. At this rate, I would be lucky to finish Lana’s book by the time Cass started elementary school.
“Come on, let’s you and me go find a b
ear,” I said to Cass on our way home from Bertie’s late one afternoon. We’re Going on a Bear Hunt was his latest favorite book. We found some sticks by the new stone birdbath at the end of the Myerses’ driveway and there we were, armed and marching around, ready for anything. Cass suggested that we think more about how to protect ourselves. “We need a plan,” he said. “A bear can be anywhere. Those people in the book should have come up with a plan.” The characters in the story encountered all sorts of difficult terrain and weather, although in the end, only one bear.
We ran behind Bruin’s plastic log cabin doghouse, crossed the street and passed the Scannellos’ wildflower garden and the Myerses’ driveway. We debated whether it was best to freeze like statues or fight or run away in the face of a grizzly. A dog barked and a car screeched in the distance.
“I’m scared,” Cass said.
“That was just a dog and a car.”
We crouched behind a row of dried-out rhododendrons.
“What if it wasn’t? Maybe it was a bear.” He looked terrified.
I imagined him saying things like this when he was a little older, and I imagined other boys—and girls—mocking him. “This is just make-believe. Try not to be scared. Try to be brave,” I said.
“How?”
“Pretend. I do it all the time,” I said.
Maggie drove by, and when she saw us, she pulled over and got out. “What are you guys doing behind that bush?” she asked.
“Hiding from bears,” I said, winking.
“Oh, I see. Good idea. There are bears everywhere in this town.”
I motioned for her to say no more.
“Do you two want to come over for dinner?” she said. “Kurt’s welcome to come, too. Liam’s having some friends over and Brian’s making quesadillas.”
Although I liked the idea of sitting around with Maggie in her pretty ceramic- and South-American-textile-filled living room, sipping a drink while Brian made dinner and the kids ran off and played, I knew that this latter part was unlikely, given Cass and Liam’s experience at the playground. Brian loved nothing more than the Celtics and cigars, and had little in common with Kurt. The only time they had met, the two had gotten into a charged debate about gun control. “Thanks,” I said, thinking fast. “Let me check with Kurt?”