Great With Child

by Sonia Taitz

  “Course he is, hon, but we’re closest to this hospital and that’s where you’d best go. Don’t want to drive all over the place if baby’s not getting oxygen or whatever.”

  “What do you mean—do you think he’s suffocating?” Abigail said in a panic. Having a child was a big enough sacrifice—she still had no idea, despite the bluster, how people managed—but having one whose brain was oxygen-poor was more than she could take.

  “I really don’t know, but that’s what the ambulance is gonna give you, sweetie. Lots and lots of good air, and your baby’ll get more than he needs.

  Why, I’ll bet with you and your husband so good-looking and smart, this boy will turn out to be a world-class athlete, and a doctor to boot. How’s that?”

  “Well, I didn’t want them to tell me what it was. But boy or girl, athlete or doctor or none of the above, all I want is a healthy baby,” said Abigail seriously.

  “That’s the way, mom, and I’ll pray for you.”

  Tim had resumed breathing into his bag at the mention of brain problems. Abigail, looking over, turned to the woman and leaned over to whisper in her ear.

  “Can I tell you a secret?”

  “Sure, sweetie,” said the flight attendant, pushing Abigail’s dark, damp tendrils out of her eyes.

  “That guy over there, the one I’m with? He’s not the father of this child. The actual father is married, with kids of his own. But the guy I’m with is—well, he’s unbelievable in so many ways, he cooks well, he kisses great—I mean I’m lucky he loves me in this state.…”

  “Aw, that’s a bittersweet story, sweetie. Don’t dwell on it just now when you need your strength.”

  “No, it’s not bitter … even without either one of those men, I’m fine. I pay my own bills, and—and my law firm needs me, so that’s why I went to Grenada, and—I’m up for partnership this year.…” said Abigail, straining to pull herself up again. The woman again firmly prevented her from rising.

  “There, relax now. You’re saying you’re ‘up for,’ for”—the woman was looking a bit anxiously toward the front of the plane.

  “Partnership. Real security. Forever.”

  “Real security, isn’t that something!” said the flight attendant, nodding to the EMS personnel who’d boarded.

  15

  One of the surprises of being hospitalized, Abigail found, was the havoc. She had remembered her mother’s hospice as a quiet place where even the sunlight was gentle and tempered. But that had been her last destination. All you could do in a place like that was wait for the inevitable, which rendered a certain sabbatical peace.

  Here among the salvageable, the hospital bustled with raucous, rolling gurneys and shouting orderlies, nurses sprinting down the linoleum. There was also the endless beep of the monitor attached to Abigail’s abdomen, recording a heartbeat quick as a rabbit’s. Her baby was alive within her. I’m coming, I’m coming, I’m coming, it seemed to be chanting, its voice low, relentless. Abigail’s heart answered with the plea, Not yet, not yet, not yet.

  If she was very careful, the pregnancy would go on to full term. Premature birth terrified Abigail even more than the usual sort; placental detachment had never been part of her plan. Abigail calmed herself, remembering that her condition had stabilized. Though she had not even had a chance to return home since leaving for Grenada, the baby paraphernalia would be arriving at her house any day.

  Some months ago, per her sister Annie’s advice, Abigail had ordered a wicker bassinet and changing table, a nursing pillow, a rocker, and an assortment of soft toys. These would go into her dining area (which angled off her living room). That space was never used, since Abigail tended to dine on takeout food, eaten on a tray in front of the TV. Annie said that some people felt that not waiting until the baby arrived brought bad luck, but that they were wrong. Abigail had of course preferred to be prepared.

  Now, in the hospital, Tim had brought Abigail a pile of classic books about child-rearing, and she had begun to leaf through them. She had culled the gist of the matter. There were five basic points to parenting:

  1: Never leave the baby on the changing table.

  2: Support the head.

  3: You can do no wrong as long as you love your baby.

  4: Love, or bonding, can take some time.

  5: Parenthood changes your life. There is no going back from it. Ever.

  That last one gave her pause. Abigail did not want her life changed too much; she had worked too hard to make it what it now was. She had put together a list of potential caretakers from a reputable agency. Just before her trip, she had begun calling some candidates, all claiming to be “experienced, mature,” and to “love children.”

  Some voices seemed disappointing. One of the answering machines featured a woman saying, “I’m not here, I’m out,” in an apathetic, unsure way. A pause, then, where Abigail could hear children screeching in the background, and then a slow, clattery hang-up. Another was answered by the rumbly voice of a male, saying, “Who the hell is it?”

  To the best of these candidates, Abigail gave information about her need for “an absolutely take-charge person.” The sound of her own voice, crisp and confident, reassured her. She could settle this matter satisfactorily. Every pot had its cover, as her mother used to say. And every child, doubtless, had a nanny out there, ready to help a frightened mother through the shoals of baby love.

  Despite these preparations and consolations, Abigail was aching to get back on her own two feet. At first, the firm had not forgotten her any more than she had forgotten them. They had called her at the hospital with a few questions about her Grenadian case. But how could she think with all the noise and bustle around her? Her work product was beginning to suffer.

  It tortured Abigail to imagine the office wisecracking about her being like all the rest of the women, whose brains said one thing and their bodies another. She would become a long, windy anecdote like Dana Kidder. It rankled that she couldn’t, at that moment, disprove them by jumping to her feet and running to the library. There was a baby in her uterus, a thick napkin between her legs, and a large waterproof pad—the kind used for puppy-training—under her behind.

  Already, she was being replaced. Dave Biddle-Kammerman would pick up the threads she’d left and begin weaving them into a coherent strategy for their client. He had sent Abigail an expensive bunch of flowers, with an attached note that said, “Everyone is pulling for you.” What did that mean, exactly? Was her life in danger? But no one actually came to the hospital see her. It was as though she had leprosy.

  Abigail didn’t have many personal friends, either. There was a woman she had known in law school, but they had fallen out of touch when Gwen had decided to drop out and become a play-wright. Abigail had once seen one of poor Gwen’s “showcases,” which took place in a dank room somewhere near the West Side highway and featured two markedly hideous actors, one more miserable than the other, talking about “anomie.” (She remembered an exchange. One actor: “Oh, anomie.” The other: “I know you know yourself, but brother, do you know me?”) Gwen would probably not be good company in a health-care crisis.

  There were also some old college girlfriends who had called from time to time over the years, but they now lived out in the suburbs, Scarsdale and Summit, and none of them “needed to work” anymore. Some kept on expanding and wallpapering their houses, laying down tiles within and paving stones without, and planting perennials up and down their gardens. One said she might go back to school when the kids were grown, to be a therapist, and the other had joined the Junior Leagues. The momentum of success seemed to have stopped for these women; something in their lives had slowed them down to the pace of human growth. In many ways, Abigail felt, they were the lucky ones to whom real life—the invisible, non-corporate one—belonged.

  Abigail felt she now wanted to talk to these old friends, to plumb their world and understand it. But she dreaded the weight of their contempt. From their perspective, she would be th
e freak now: an unwed, pregnant, workaholic woman with a detachable placenta. Men might be more understanding of her anxiety to get back to the mill—provided she kept mum on the gory details—but all the men she’d known, boyfriends and platonic male friends, had married.

  Of course, there was Tim, who visited faithfully, bringing good, hot, homemade food. But somehow in his presence Abigail felt bereaved. She was missing her real mother, she realized. That quiet, strong, forever love that nothing else had ever equaled. Now that she was going to be a mother herself, Abigail began to see how rare and irreplaceable it was.

  16

  There were a few career women at Fletcher with whom Abigail had shared moments by the office microwave, but only one, Rona DeWitt Miller, cared enough to visit her now. It was odd; they had not had much in common before, and had rarely spoken more than a perfunctory word or two. Now their shared condition—motherhood—seemed to open the floodgates, at least on Rona’s side.

  An associate in divorce law, Rona had recently had her own baby and was on maternity leave. Abigail had not even realized that her colleague was pregnant, she had “carried so small.” Now, Rona arranged herself on the corner of Abigail’s hospital bed and burst out:

  “Oh, Abigail, just look at us now!”

  “What do you mean, Rona?”

  “Forgive me,” said Rona, weeping, “I didn’t mean you, Abigail, you’re just stuck in bed with that big, you know, baby in there, looking pale, guess you lost lots of blood, huh? I meant me. This week I’m dealing with a green poop situation. Giving birth was a nightmare, but then you have to do all these things, and see all these things, and the weirdness of it all does not end!”

  “Boy or girl?” said Abigail, willing herself to be calm.

  “Oh, the baby? Girl. Dylan Molly Miller.” Reciting the incantatory name seemed to fix things for a moment, and Rona’s face lit up. Then her face fell again and she resumed: “The green poop’s better than the awful Grey Poupon stuff that came before, or no, maybe the worst was the black tar—”

  “The black tar?” said Abigail, despite herself.

  “Comes out in a glob like toothpaste from the devil. Those first few poops? You will freak, Abigail. But does it end there? Apparently not. Sometimes I can’t wait to leave that nursery, and get back to my nice clean desk!”

  Abigail understood that. “So you’re back at work?”

  “No, not yet. It’s only been four months.”

  “Four months! But I thought we only get six weeks.”

  “That’s paid leave. I’m actually taking a longer break—unpaid.”

  “But why? They’ll forget you—you’ll never make partner, and Rona, I saw you, you worked so hard!”

  “Oh, Abigail,” said her colleague, her voice warm with pity. “‘Partner.’ It all seems so far away. So pointless.” She paused and looked at Abigail. “You really don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?”

  Abigail did not immediately respond. “I guess not,” she said finally.

  “You’re due any minute, huh?”

  “Early December.”

  Rona was silent for a moment. “Abigail, your situation, as I see it, is fraught with obstacles. And as I understand it, you’re entering this foreign territory alone, without a—without a partner. In the family, not law firm sense, I mean.”

  “I do have someone.”

  “You ‘have’ someone? We’re not teenagers now! Substantially, do you have someone? People are talking, they know you have someone, a cute guy, I’ve heard. But you don’t even live with him, right? Kind of ‘now you see him, now you don’t’?”

  “I live alone and like it that way,” said Abigail mechanically. Having Rona sit on the edge of her hospital bed and judge her love life as she lay there with a torn placenta (and pre-term fetus) under her blanket was just about intolerable.

  “Well,” said Rona, “I have my own theory. You’re a bright woman. An independent woman. A practical woman. And in your mid-thirties, my age, right? Your fertility was about to start falling off the charts.”

  “Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m only thirty-two.”

  “Great, but what if you wanted more than one, adequately spaced? Right? So I figure you went out and found some genius sperm.”

  “Hey,” said Abigail, “have you been talking to Tina?”

  “Who’s Tina?”

  “My administrative assistant. That’s one of the pet theories she mentioned, that I haunted some Mensa meetings, then used a turkey baster. Well, she didn’t actually mention Mensa. But you get the point. Tots in the test tube.”

  “Well, OK, let’s not judge. I may end up doing that to get a normal second one. I’m just kidding—Dylan’s my heart and soul.”

  So weird, thought Abigail. No matter how much mothers complained, how many awful truths they divulged, their children were always the “meaning” of their lives, their “heart and soul.” Where was that meaning and soul before? And would Dylan’s life be just the same—no meaning until she had a baby herself? It was all so absurd.

  “Now let me tell you my theory,” said Rona.

  “About what? Child-rearing? Normalcy?”

  “Stay on point, counselor. I’m talking about your conception.”

  “OK.”

  “It was love-based.”

  “And then what happened?” Because clearly, these days, love was nothing you could lean on.

  “Right. Something must have happened. Maybe you did have a real guy, you might have even loved this guy—but something prevented you from being with him.”

  “No comment.”

  “You’re taking the Fifth?”

  “I’m calling on the entire Bill of Rights, and the fact that it’s nobody’s business.”

  “And if that’s the case, and I hope it wasn’t, that’s sort of sad,” continued Rona. “Because then it could have been that Richard Trubridge.”

  “You have been talking to Tina!”

  “No, but thanks for the confirmation. I had my own hunches. I knew Richard way back when, and I think he always had his eye on you. He used to be in my department, you know. And—well, Abigail, you were seen with him down there in Palm Springs.”

  “I was?”

  “Of course. People have eyes. And ears. And mouths to talk with.”

  “And what do they say?”

  “Here’s what I say: What a mean way to treat a smart, accomplished girl like you. I know you’re not a ‘girl’—you’re a professional, accomplished woman—but deep down, you’re a ‘girl’ at heart, and easily swayed. So he did what he did, and he swayed you.”

  “Huh?”

  “He knew you had a great career ahead. But did he care? He wanted what he wanted, as ever. Bad enough he hurt his own career with the stuff he got up to at the firm before they kicked him out. But to take it out on a promising associate on the verge of partnership, to grab someone and knock her up for a cheap thrill. Or wait—do you think he was getting back at the firm? Like a ‘fuck you right back’ sort of thing?”

  “Rona, please, that’s not what happened. But I really don’t want to talk about this.”

  “Right. Sorry, sweetie. I mean it’s probably not him anyway, huh?” Rona paused, but Abigail said nothing. After a moment, she spoke again.

  “Hey! Do you want to talk about what it’s like to give birth?”

  “OK.” Abigail was glad to change the subject, although the sudden gleam in her friend’s eyes warned her that Rona’s memories of birthing would not be reassuring. In a sense, this comforted Abigail: if Rona always saw the worst of everything, maybe Richard was not as professionally venal as she had just suggested.

  Rona took a deep inhalation and then sighed it out.

  “I was in labor for twenty-four hours,” said Rona. This was her war story, Abigail sensed; she had told it before, and she would tell it again. As a prospective mother (and stuck in bed), Abigail knew she was the perfect audience.

  “I absolutely thought I was no
t going to make it. Either the baby would die, or I would die. You really begin to understand how it’s possible to die. In fact, you want to die, Abigail. You want them to cut your throat so it can be over. And yet it’s just beginning.”

  Abigail wondered about this. Had her mother really given birth three times? Had her sister? She’d seen mothers all her life. She just hadn’t realized that they were all veterans of a battlefield. And yet here she was, in a hospital. And Rona had a post-traumatic glaze in her eyes.

  Her voice went monotone: “By the end you’re no lady. You’re ready to shred your twat in Macy’s Christmas window just to get it out! But you know what happened to me?”

  “What happened?” said Abigail, dragged along. Like the baby itself, she was caught in the long tunnel of Rona’s maternal darkness.

  “After all this, they tell me I have to have a C-section, which of course I had vowed never to have. That’s the credo, isn’t it? Breathe, and pop, simple. Who wants to admit that they’ve failed at the first challenge? The Demerol was really nice, like being drunk in the sun. I wanted to keep pushing. But the baby’s heartbeat was slowing. They started rushing me into the operating room. Of course, then I begged for the famous epidural.”

  “Good for you,” said Abigail, who had also hung on to the concept of getting out of this without pain. She was relieved to be learning about the drugs that brought relief. First the Demerol, then the epidural. A C-section didn’t sound too bad, either—someone helped you get the baby born, quickly and efficiently.

  “Do you have any idea what an epidural really is? It’s a huge needle jammed into the middle of your spine. And what’s more, you hurt so badly that you want this needle in the middle of your spine!”

  “Oh,” said Abigail, her voice conciliatory. Rona was having a flashback, and she tried to be kind. “That does sound terrible.”

  Rona, silent, had apparently worn herself out. She’d blown some kind of anecdotal fuse. She sat down, pulled up her shirt, and put a small apparatus on her breast. It looked like a big plastic test tube with a rubber funnel on the top and a large bulb on the side. Rona pumped the bulb and grimaced. Finally, she resumed speaking: