The technician zoomed in on an area, rendering it inscrutable to Natalie. After the birth, they would never want to see inside in this way again. The kid should be all smooth skin and ruffled hair, baby-plump flesh and solid limbs. Never the white bones, the pulsing organs. Never the body beneath its protective layer.
“Definitely a girl,” the technician said. “See those three dots? Those are the female genitals.” Natalie nodded, though she hadn’t really seen them.
“We’ll get pictures of this?” Ian asked.
“The radiologist will bring them in. She’ll look over the results, but I don’t anticipate anything out of the ordinary. Congratulations.”
The technician handed Natalie a paper towel to wipe the goop off her belly and left to find the radiologist. It was pleasingly cavelike in the room, the light a muted purple, as if a nearby lava lamp were oozing out blobs of wax.
“A girl,” Ian said. “Her features looked kind of feminine, don’t you think?”
“Sure,” Natalie said.
“Dahlia, then?”
“Dahlia.”
They hadn’t decided on a boy’s name. Devin was one idea, Daniel another. The Jewish tradition was to name a child in honor of a relative who had passed away—none of that goyish So-and-So-Junior stuff. A shared first letter would suffice between the namesake and the baby. Natalie wondered what the Orthodox rabbis would say if the relative’s death hadn’t happened yet. Would they adjust the rule considering the context, sign off on a couple’s choice to name a baby after a dying woman, or would they, in their stickler rabbinical way, insist that not taken by God yet was as good as alive?
* * *
—
Craggy and steep on a cliff above the Hudson River, Fort Tryon Park was wilder than Central Park, less cultivated by picnickers and bicyclists. Natalie’s mom and Dina had grown up a short walk away from the Heather Garden entrance to Fort Tryon. This park had been Dina’s escape when she was feeling angry or depressed. She came for the fortress of trees and the boats inching down the river. She came for the Cloisters, the medieval branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, built from the imported remains of French abbeys: a museum packed with so many centuries-old treasures, she’d told Natalie, that she found it impossible to remain stuck in twentieth-century gloom.
She was about to go into hospice care in Connecticut, and Natalie had driven the two of them here first. She unpacked the two lawn chairs from the trunk of Ian’s car and set them on the grass near a patch of daffodils. The shiny trees all boasted new leaves. It was the first week of April, stunningly pretty and temperate after the crushing winter. The turning of seasons felt oppressive to her now. If this was to be Dina’s last spring, better that it had stayed winter. She opened the car door and helped Dina over to the chair. At seven months pregnant, Natalie knew she shouldn’t try to bear the weight of another woman, even one as skinny as Dina was now. At seven months pregnant, she would do what she pleased.
From her lawn chair Dina asked, “How are you feeling? About the birth.” The way she spoke now, she seemed to use all of her breath, all of her remaining power, just to form the words.
“I don’t know. Weird. I told you we’re taking a class? Every time the teacher proposes one of her ‘journey to birth’ exercises, I can’t help groaning. Ian gets annoyed with me. And we have homework. For next week we have to bring in a song that somehow embodies our vision of the birth experience.”
“What will you bring?”
“ ‘Billie Jean,’ I think. Just to provoke the teacher.”
Dina smiled her cracked smile. “I barely remember it. Such pain. But I wasn’t there somehow. Not the best day of my life. The birth is just what has to happen.”
What had been the best day of Dina’s life? Natalie couldn’t bring herself to ask that.
“I’ve got a song,” Dina said. “For my journey, not yours.”
For a moment Natalie had an impossible thought: Dina was going on a trip. But no—she was just being ironic. She was DNR. She planned to be cremated.
“Pink Floyd. ‘The Great Gig in the Sky.’ You know it, right?”
“Yeah, it’s beautiful.”
“That male voice, so calm, ‘I am not frightened of dying, any time will do. Why should I be frightened of dying?’ Then that woman wailing. So alive. I always wanted her voice.”
“I wanted to tell you.” Natalie stopped, sunk her head in her hands, forced herself to keep speaking. “We’re going to name her Dahlia. And her Hebrew name will be Devorah—for you.”
Natalie lifted her head, opened her eyes. It was all still there: grass, trees, river, people.
“I like that so much,” Dina said.
* * *
—
It happened the way Natalie had hoped, if you could hope for such a thing: Dina going quietly, with Matt by her side, a few days before Natalie’s due date. She hadn’t really wanted to be there when Dina died, and yet, when the call came, she felt that she’d missed something it was unforgivable to miss. Though she couldn’t have done anything, couldn’t have changed anything.
Then the funeral, the week of sitting shiva at her parents’ house. This time she didn’t run away, like she had when her grandmother died, but did as the others did, sat in a chair and listened politely.
“She was so smart.”
“What perfect June weather.”
“She was so independent.”
“Did you know we’re going to Australia?”
“She was so strong.”
“Have some more potato salad.”
People hugged Natalie gently and said reasonable things: “Bet you’re ready for that baby to pop out already.”
“What a shame your aunt didn’t get to meet her.”
Natalie said “Yes.” She said “I know.” If this world without Dina seemed a fake, why not be nice, why not be agreeable? Why not let cousin Michael get her a pillow to ease her neck, a footstool to rest her legs? Why not smile when Great-Aunt Ethel said that having a child was the best thing you could do, the best thing she’d ever done?
At forty-one weeks, Natalie went into the hospital for a stress test. If she passed it, her doctor was willing to let her keep going for another week. But the nurse came back with the test results: she’d failed. Her amniotic fluid was too low. Natalie hadn’t been able to imagine what the pain of labor would be like. Now she didn’t have to.
“Tell me when you can’t feel any pressure here,” the surgeon said, and a minute later, Natalie couldn’t feel anything. Ian sat in a chair by her head, the curtain shielding below her waist. He’d been excited to watch her push out the baby. This he didn’t want to see. After a while the surgeon said, “Would you like to meet your daughter?”
Looking at Ian’s glowing face beneath the surgical cap, Natalie felt as if it were really to him that this remarkable thing was happening. The doctors pronounced the baby in perfect shape and delivered her to her father. Natalie’s arms were shaking too much from the epidural to be of any use. Ian cradled Dahlia, holding her up so that Natalie could see. The baby looked rosy and peaceful, with black tufts of hair and blue-gray slanted eyes. It wasn’t then—touching the tiny hands with trembling fingers, or fitting the pursed lips around her nipple, or seeing her mom weep, her dad kiss Dahlia’s forehead. It wasn’t until late that night—when Natalie lay in the hospital bed, a patient recovering from abdominal surgery—that she knew she’d been wrong.
Ian was asleep on the hard cot by the window. Dahlia was asleep in the metal bassinet. It wasn’t Natalie’s choice to make, but still she should have chosen, in that terrible game of hypothetical choice, to bring her baby to Dina—for however little time was left—and let them breathe the same air. She had been wrong to elevate a ritual of grief over a moment of joy. She didn’t really believe in the Judaism of old, but she believed in women,
in girls, watching the candles burn all the way down on the same menorah, generation to generation.
The Dissembler’s Guide to Pregnancy
Facts & Figures
He was twenty-nine, seven years younger than me, and we’d been together for over a year or not at all, depending on how you calculated it. Finn didn’t call me his girlfriend, or introduce me to his family, or suggest plans beyond next Saturday night. But he played me folk songs he’d composed himself on his guitar, baked cakes for friends’ birthdays, teared up at Pixar movies, and washed my feet in the bathtub. Children adored him—he worked twenty hours a week at a preschool, for God’s sake. Decades of potential eligibility, of far-in-the-future fatherhood, awaited him, while, fertility-wise, I was like an aging ballplayer: how many years could I have left?
My mother sent me articles about how to freeze your eggs. I had nothing against the idea in theory. Biology, not to mention patriarchy, levied a fundamental injustice by giving women a ticking clock and men a remote control with a pause button, and why shouldn’t women do what they could to subvert that system? But the thing was, I’d already found the man I wanted to have a baby with, and we were having sex—delicately-dancing-up-to-it-and-talking-long-into-the-night-afterward sex, which I wanted to keep having for the rest of my life.
When I told Finn I was pregnant, I pointed out that the pill is, on average, ninety-one percent effective. “So nine out of a hundred women get pregnant on the pill.” I told him that almost half of all pregnancies in the U.S. are unplanned. “Half! Jesus!”
The times I’d seen Finn get upset, he didn’t become stonily silent or passive-aggressive or accusatory. He got pensive instead. That’s how I could tell—well, one of a million reasons—that he would be a great dad.
“I’m not ready for this,” he said. “I’m almost thirty, but I still feel like a kid.”
“I know.” I squeezed his hand and modulated my voice to an appropriately hesitant register. “But maybe we could make it work?”
Conception
On the Fourth of July, we’d dragged a futon onto the tiny deck of Finn’s fifth-floor studio apartment and pressed against each other under a blanket as we gazed up at the fireworks being set off from the park. I’d always wanted to make love while watching fireworks, and it was as I’d imagined, with the exploding lights in the sky like the explosions inside our bodies, bright colors illuminating everything before fading out into kaleidoscopic dust. “I love you,” Finn breathed, just after he came. I was stunned; he’d never said that before. We’d been seeing each other off and on for ten months, and Finn had told me—in the gentle, reasonable voice he might use with three-year-olds resistant to naptime—that he understood my wishes and concerns, and there wasn’t anyone else, but he didn’t want a relationship right now. I was willing to take what I could get.
As the moment calmed, I said, “I love you too,” but while his declaration had been a radiant burst vanishing into the night, mine stuck around like a red flare. The sky churned with the cloudy residue of powder and metal, carbon and hydrogen. And then the fireworks were over and we were left with the stars.
I thought of a poem, one of the few poems I had memorized and could summon up whole. “The More Loving One,” by W. H. Auden—four quatrains in iambic tetrameter, about stars but not really. I’d been assigned to read it in college, and the meaning eluded my nineteen-year-old brain, until my literature professor explained it in class. The professor was probably younger than I am now, and he had a handsomely brooding air and alternately wry and tender views on literature and life, which he confided as if we students were his intimates. Naturally, I was in love with him.
Humans are captivated by stars, but the feeling is not mutual. And this state of things, the poem tells us, is preferable to the opposite scenario: “How should we like it were stars to burn / With a passion for us we could not return?” We would not like it, Auden says, in so many (so few!) words.
Better to be the lover than the beloved, if one must choose between them. Amid the imbalance of the universe, let me be the one lit up with want.
Nothing really changed after that. We continued seeing each other without discussing the future or even defining the now. I didn’t try to pressure him into more; only a crazy lady would make demands of a star. But I staked my greater lovingness as a kind of claim. I aimed my telescope toward the celestial being yet to be born.
Nutritional Supplements
Finn came back from a shift at the preschool fretting about the state of childcare in America. “Parents are paying a ton, and childcare workers barely make enough to live on. But we can’t have the government helping people out—no, that would be socialism.”
So let’s move to Europe, I wanted to say, but restrained myself.
I suspected this was Finn’s way of expressing concern about the financial strain of parenthood, and some reassurance was in order. As the development director for a community foundation, I had a stable job with a salary sufficient to meet my needs and those of a child, as long as we lived frugally. I knew how to manage money and how to wheedle it out of other people. What worthier things could they spend it on than public art, and food for the hungry, and afterschool programs for low-income kids?
“Yeah, it’s criminal, but I’ll be the breadwinner, okay?”
When I told him I was pregnant, though he was too polite to mention it, I’m sure he must have been thinking: there goes my dream. He wanted to become a great singer-songwriter—and I wanted that for him too. Think of those lovely songs Paul Simon wrote for his children.
“You’re sure you want to do this?” he asked. He had also been too gentlemanly to directly suggest the possibility of abortion.
“The circumstances are not ideal,” I said. “But there might not be another chance. I’m thirty-six. ‘Advanced maternal age,’ they call it.”
He sighed, presumably not in reaction to unflattering medical jargon used for women past their childbearing prime. “You’ve seen a doctor?”
“Not yet. There’s not much to do at this point. Just take prenatal vitamins the size of horse pills. I hate swallowing pills.”
He patted my thigh sympathetically.
The birth control pills were such smidges that I hadn’t minded taking them for over a decade. Now I had to choke down one of these monsters every day. I did it by imagining a baby as I slugged my glass of water—one of those clear-eyed wonders they use in magazine ads for investment firms and car insurance, looking devastatingly wise in his or her fledgling innocence. It didn’t always work, though, and sometimes I’d spit the pill out into my hand, gasping and heaving, conjuring the threat of a malnourished, birth-defect-ridden baby, until I finally forced it down. And sometimes, dutifully swallowing the horse pills, I thought about how I’d neglected those other, tinier ones. Then, I imagined the scores of women who hadn’t wanted babies, who’d been forced into motherhood by men—because of their time and place in history, because of religion and social convention and poverty and rape. I worked myself up into a righteous frenzy so populated with brutish men and maltreated women that a slender, mild-mannered twenty-nine-year-old male couldn’t be spotted amid the throng.
Growth Chart
Throughout the first trimester and into the second, the misnamed plague called morning sickness (it was not limited to the morning) descended upon me. Throwing up, which had only ever happened to me a handful of times before, each occasion marked by horror and a particular food I was never able to eat again, became an almost daily event. My breasts ached, especially when I went out in the cold. Underneath the down parka, I banded my wool scarf around my chest instead of my neck, and still my nipples stung like frostbitten fingertips. My pelvic region quaked: strange throbbings, sudden pullings, subterranean pangs.
The consolation was a magic bean expanding in placental water, growing slowly toward the light. On
the nights Finn stayed over, he lay beside me with headphones on while I fell asleep early, as if knocked out by some fairy-tale potion. At work I bookmarked a website that compared the baby’s weekly dimensions to fruit and other dainty foods.
It was a poppy seed, a peppercorn, a pomegranate seed, a blueberry.
Sometimes I thought my ballooning body was beautiful. I climbed up naked on the edge of the bathtub, trying not to lose my balance as I ogled myself in the medicine cabinet mirror. I liked the way the skin stretched so tightly over my belly. I liked how my small breasts had plumped up. I even liked the curious brown line that had emerged right down my middle, running from the bottom of my rib cage to the top of my pelvic bone, as if I were, for some mysterious purpose, being divided in half. I wanted to have this baby for all the reasons people want to have babies: to carry around a warm bundle with a brand-new face; to witness the dawning of all kinds of consciousness; to laugh more; to learn things I’d forgotten; to celebrate birthdays instead of lamenting them; to not miss out on the meaning of life—that is, to continue it, a purpose that could seem utterly banal if one was standing, guts emptied, in front of a toilet bowl.
Cranberry, cherry, kumquat, passion fruit.
Midway through the second trimester, when the nausea faded, pregnancy-related carpal tunnel began to set in. The fingers on both hands tingled; my wrists hung heavy as saddlebags. I had a hard time operating the gearshift in my car, turning the crank on the can opener, gripping my toothbrush. The ob-gyn said the condition could last throughout the pregnancy and for a while afterward. “But I try not to speculate too much,” she said. “Every pregnancy is different.”
“So it might go away?” I asked hopefully.
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