The Lit Report

by Sarah N. Harvey

  I sleep over at my dad’s every Friday and Saturday night. On Sunday morning my mom picks me up and we go to church, and then I go back to my dad’s and we have brunch and he returns me to my mom’s on Sunday night after dinner. Church attendance is non-negotiable. It’s a complicated arrangement, but it’s the only deal my mom would make. Take it or leave it. My dad took it. Every now and again Mom will ask me if I want to alter the arrangement, but since I don’t, that’s about the extent of our discussions. Mom starts stiffening up on Friday afternoon, and by the time my dad drops me off on Sunday, she looks like she’s taken a bath in a vat of starch. She and my dad are polite to each other, but you can tell that, even after more than ten years, just seeing him makes her feel shitty. She won’t talk about him with me; she never has. Not a word. It’s a bit creepy. Sometimes I think it might be easier if they weren’t so civilized, if they yelled at each other and called each other bitch and asshole and stormed around the house throwing dishes and slamming doors. It makes me wonder if there ever was any passion between them, and if not, how I was conceived. Politely, I guess. May I touch? Yes, please, by all means. Thank you. You’re welcome. Good night.

  My dad met Miki at the hospital a few years ago, and they got married last year on Maui. My mom let me go to the wedding, but only after my dad promised to take me to church on the one Sunday we were there. The whole thing was pretty cool—even the church part, which was simultaneously exotic (the choir wore really loud muumuus) and familiar (Say amen, somebody!). I discovered that singing “Just a Closer Walk with Thee” is tolerable when you’re wearing a sundress and flip-flops and you know you’re going to go surfing later and buy fresh papayas for lunch. My dad sang all the hymns and clapped and swayed as if he’d temporarily forgotten that he left my mother partly because she believed in what he called “a complete pile of horseshit.” I don’t think Miki was overjoyed to suddenly be the stepmother of a teenage girl, but she’s so busy it hardly makes any difference to either of us. If she’s around, she hangs out with us, but sometimes I think she arranges to work more weekends than she has to. We don’t kid ourselves. I already have a perfectly good mother.

  My dad had told me that Miki would be working, so I was surprised to see her red Mini Cooper in the driveway next to my dad’s dark green Honda. Early in December, I had helped my dad put up the Christmas lights—tiny white ones—on the branches of the arbutus tree in the front yard. It was festive, yet understated.

  “Hello,” I yelled as I dropped my pack on the slate tiles in the front hall. No reply. I slipped off my boots and wandered down to the kitchen. “Anybody home?” I snagged a banana out of the fruit bowl and continued my reconnaissance as I ate it. “Where are you guys?”

  “Up here.” My dad’s voice floated down from the top of the stairs. “Miki’s not feeling well. I’ll be down in a bit.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Anything I can do? For Miki, I mean. Tea, juice...”

  “Nope. I’m making risotto for dinner, so you could heat up some chicken stock if you like.”

  I went back into the kitchen and rooted around in the cupboards until I found a box of chicken stock. As I poured it into a pot, my dad came downstairs with some dirty dishes and loaded them into the dishwasher. He gave me a quick one-armed hug, and I caught a whiff of his awful medicated dandruff shampoo and felt the rasp of his beard in my hair. My dad is scruffy, but my friends tell me he’s cute. I really wouldn’t know. He has beautiful hands that he keeps soft with frequent applications of Jergens lotion (with aloe). He buffs his nails while we watch TV. He has a manicure every few months and he always wants me to come along, but that’s just too weird. Even though he wears gloves and a mask to handle the preemies, he always wants his hands to be soft. He sings to the babies, the same songs he sang to me when I was little. His repertoire is entirely composed of songs with the word baby in the title. The babies (and probably a lot of nurses and new mothers) love him. He’s always getting thank-you cards signed with tiny handprints. Thanks for everything. You’re the best. Dan and Sandy Jones and baby Georgia. Miki met him when he was cooing “Come on, baby, light my fire” to a crack-addicted preemie. For better or worse, it’s their song. He hired a Samoan band, complete with ukuleles and falsettos and a lot of tattoos, to sing it at their wedding. That and “Born to Be Wild,” which is so not Dad that even the band cracked up.

  Dad plugged the kettle in and leaned against the marble countertop as he waited for the water to boil.

  “So, Julia,” he said. “I need to talk to you...” His voice trailed off as he turned and opened the refrigerator and pulled out a hunk of fresh gingerroot. Ginger risotto? I hoped not.

  “About what?” I said. He was acting weirder than usual, which was saying something. Had someone spotted me at London Drugs buying the home pregnancy test? Had the library blown the whistle on my Internet searches?

  He peeled the ginger and sliced it into thin disks, which he then tossed into the teapot. The kettle clicked off and he poured the hot water over the ginger. The kitchen smelled momentarily like Hawaii.

  “Well, Miki’s not really sick. I mean, she is, but not, you know, sick sick.” He scratched his stubble and a few flakes of skin floated to the floor. “The ginger tea is for the nausea. You know, the morning sickness, except it’s more like morning, noon and night sickness.” He poured some tea into a cup and looked at me with a combination of pride and fear. “Miki’s almost three months pregnant. You’re going to be a big sister. We waited to tell you until we were sure everything was going to be okay. Miki’s not that young and there are risks when you’re older and...”

  The poor guy. He’d probably been freaking out about telling me. Since he seemed to have forgotten that I wasn’t seven anymore, I frowned and pouted for a while before I put him out of his misery. Long enough for him to babble on about not wanting to replace me and how I’d always be his baby and how there was no way they expected me to babysit all the time. Which was good news because extended babysitting didn’t fit into my plans at all. It was kind of strange—the idea of my dad with a new baby—but he spends his days with babies and so does Miki, so it made sense for them to have one of their own, although I hoped they’d forgo the masks and gloves when they brought the baby home.

  “What took you so long?” I finally said, and Dad, I’m ashamed to say, burst into tears and grabbed me and hugged me and danced me around the kitchen, singing “Baby Love” like Diana Ross on steroids. When he finally stopped, I handed him a square of paper towel and said, as nonchalantly as possible, “So, ginger tea is good for nausea?”

  If he thought it was an odd question, he didn’t say so. He just nodded and grinned idiotically and ran upstairs and dragged Miki out of bed and down to the kitchen. I have to say—she looked like shit on a stick. Way worse than Ruth. Miki’s usual style is what Nana calls “tucked.” She dresses in crisp white shirts and tailored suits—very expensive shirts and suits. She wears funky Fluevog shoes, multiple silver bangles and Venetian glass bead necklaces. Her black hair is short and spiky—sort of like the rest of her; her lips are full and red, her eyelashes thick and black, her skin white and unlined. Snow White with a stethoscope. Her bedside manner is as brisk as my father’s is mellow, but she has her share of fans. On this day her hair was matted and sticking to her head, and she was wearing fuzzy pink slippers, old yoga pants and my dad’s ancient gray UBC sweatshirt. Her face was the color of a pistachio and her lips were chapped.

  “Hey, Julia,” she said. “I take it he told you.”

  “It’s great, Miki,” I said, wondering if a hug was in order and then deciding against it. Why start now? “Congratulations.”

  “Thanks,” she mumbled as she took the cup of tea from my dad and lowered herself into a chair at the table. “Sorry to be so...lame. It’s just that I wasn’t ready for this.” She bent her head over her teacup, but not before I saw a tear trickle down her pale cheek. Now that was something I hadn’t seen before. “I’ve tried everything—ten m
eals a day, crackers at midnight, gallons of ginger tea. Nothing works. What if I’m one of those women who are nauseated for their entire pregnancy?” She looked up at my dad, who sat down beside her and took her hands in his.

  “Maria said that was really rare, didn’t she?”

  “Yeah,” Miki said. “Rare but not unheard of.”

  “Who’s Maria?” I asked. All the nausea talk was starting to make me feel ill.

  “Our midwife,” Miki said. “We’re having the baby at home.”

  “If we can,” added my dad.

  Miki shot him a look over her mug that gave me a pretty good idea of where their baby was going to be born.

  “Barring major complications,” Miki continued, “we’re having a home birth. Maria is the best midwife in town, and I’m healthy and strong and well-informed. It shouldn’t be a problem. I hate hospitals. We’ll set everything up in the guest room—and, hey, I’ve got the best neonatal nurse and doctor around.” She smiled at my dad, and I could see that she hadn’t brushed her teeth for a while. There was a poppy seed stuck between her front teeth.

  And since when did Miki hate hospitals? She practically lived on the wards, making life and death decisions on a daily basis and scaring the crap out of most of the staff. I thought she would love the idea of having her baby in a sterile environment where she could order people around, but apparently I’d misjudged her. She wanted to order people around in the comfort of her own home.

  “When’s the baby due?” I asked.

  “Mid-June,” my dad said.

  “June fifteenth, to be exact,” Miki said. If the baby knew what was good for it, it would arrive on schedule. Might as well start out on the right foot—punctuality is a big deal with Miki. Which is odd, since most of her little patients arrive really early.

  I did some quick calculations in my head; Miki’s baby was due six weeks before Ruth’s, which could be useful. I sat down at the table and my dad offered me a mug of ginger tea. Out of solidarity, I tried some. It wasn’t as bad as I expected, especially after I stirred in a couple of spoonfuls of honey, and I made a mental note to buy some gingerroot for Ruth. And some crackers.

  “So, do you think I could interview Maria for a school project I’m doing on modern women in the workforce?” I asked. “I really want to talk to someone with a kind of alternative job. Everybody else is doing, like, bankers or lawyers. A midwife would be really cool.” I wasn’t exactly lying. I really did have to do a report for Social Studies. It wasn’t exactly on women in the workforce—more like on why women shouldn’t be in the workforce—but Miki and Dad didn’t need to know that. With any luck, they’d put me in touch with this Maria person, and she could give me the lowdown on home birth. Maybe I could even convince Miki and Dad to let me assist at the delivery—although, to be honest, the idea kind of creeped me out.

  “You can ask her yourself,” Miki said. “She’s coming over in about half an hour to give me a checkup. You can hang around if you like.” Miki got up and headed upstairs. “Call me when she gets here—or better yet, talk to her first and then call me. I’m gonna go lie down—I feel like crap.”

  Dad rushed to help her back to bed, and I sat at the table, drinking ginger tea and formulating questions to ask Maria. By the time the doorbell rang, I had only thought of a few questions, but with any luck, Maria would be a talker. When I answered the door, the woman standing on the doorstep smiled and said, “Hi, Julia.”

  I blinked. I’d heard stories about midwives—how they were all old Birkenstock-wearing hippies who made groovy placenta stews after the babies were born and hadn’t seen the inside of a hair salon since 1965. The woman standing on the front porch couldn’t possibly be a midwife. For one thing, she was wearing stilettos; for another, she was Mark Grange’s mother.

  “Can I come in?” she said. “This bag’s kinda heavy.” She had a big red leather bag slung over one shoulder, and she carried a Starbucks travel mug in one hand and a cell phone in the other. Her fingernails matched her bag.

  “Sure, Mrs. Grange,” I mumbled as I stepped aside. Her stilettos clicked over the tile as she made her way to the kitchen. She looked at the pot of ginger tea and sniffed.

  “She’s still nauseous, huh?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “It’s pretty bad.” I hesitated. “Um, Mrs. Grange...”

  “Please, call me Maria—my last name isn’t Grange anyway. It’s Ramirez.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Sorry.” She put her coffee and her phone on the table, kicked off her shoes and hefted the big bag onto a kitchen chair. Her feet were bare and her toenails were painted squid-ink blue. Ruth would approve. She hauled a coil-bound notebook, a blood-pressure cuff and a thing that looked like a walkie-talkie out of the bag and then took a sip of her drink.

  “I’m always telling my clients to drink ginger tea but the stuff makes me gag.” She waved the travel mug at me. “Full-fat, mondo caffeine, that’s me. Don’t tell Miki. She thinks this is chamomile tea.” She laughed and I could see the resemblance to Mark—wide smile, great teeth, dark curls, wicked gleam in big brown eyes.

  “Um, Miki said it was okay for me to ask you a few questions before you do your checkup. She’s really tired, and I’ve got this report for school...”

  “Sure,” she said. “What do you need to know?”

  Five

  “Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents,” grumbled Jo, lying on the rug.

  —Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

  I don’t remember how old I was when I first read Little Women, but I do remember that for years I begged my mother for a little sister. I conveniently disregarded the fact that she wasn’t married, had no boyfriend, had never expressed a desire for another child and could not guarantee me a sister even if she wanted to. But I longed to be part of a big, warm, loving, noisy clan of females. I ended up with Ruth—the one-girl clan—and my own version of Jo’s castles in the air. I even called my mother Marmee for a while, and I identified with all the sisters except Beth, the sappy one who dies. I still think of myself as a composite of the other three: ultra-responsible, kind Meg; selfish, spoiled Amy; smart tomboy Jo. Although I draw the line at ending up with a middle-aged German husband. I gave up on the little sister thing a long time ago, but Ruth and I still build castles in the air. For years our castle has been a really funky (in a good way) two-bedroom apartment in a city far away. We work at fabulous, high-paying jobs and have fabulous, highly paid boyfriends who take us on fabulously expensive vacations and don’t expect us to cook, commit or clean toilets. The details are vague and variable—sometimes we live in LA and work in the film industry; sometimes we live in New York and work in the fashion industry; sometimes we live in London and work in publishing—but Ruth always works in marketing, and I’m always writing, and we always have a red leather couch. We remain inseparable and childless. Well, at least we got one thing right.

  I LEARNED A lot from Maria the day I discovered that I was finally going to be a sister. A lot that I didn’t need to know—like how long a midwife has to train and why some women give birth under water—and a lot that I did—like the importance of good nutrition and regular checkups. Lucky for me, Maria liked to talk and Miki stayed upstairs for a long time. When she finally did come down, I got to stay in the room while Maria examined her, which wasn’t as weird as it sounds, since it didn’t involve as much nudity as a day at the beach. Maria got me to record Miki’s weight and blood pressure in the spiral notebook. Then she got out the walkie-talkie thing—she called it a Doppler—and we took turns listening to the baby’s heartbeat, which was pretty amazing. I could hardly wait to tell Ruth. Miki gave me a little lecture about how much better Dopplers were than old-school fetoscopes, which couldn’t pick up a heartbeat until around twenty weeks. If there was anything wrong with the baby, you knew so much sooner, which I guess is supposed to be a good thing. She seemed really happy that I was taking an interest, and I felt pretty bad that what she interpreted as interest was really j
ust research. I mean, yeah, I was going to have a baby brother or sister, which was pretty cool—but I knew they didn’t really need my help. And Ruth did. Miki and Dad had Maria, and each other and all the money and medical help they needed. Ruth had me. And I needed all the help I could get. I also needed a regular stethoscope (for listening to Ruth’s heart), a Doppler and a blood-pressure cuff, at the very least. I had no idea how I was going to get them, but I knew I’d figure it out.

  When she was packing all her stuff up, Maria said, “Marco used to come and help me with my ladies—when I couldn’t afford a sitter. His job was to write the weights in the book. Just like you did today.” She reached out and patted my hand. “Don’t look so shocked. My ladies loved him— lots of kids are at home births, watching their little brothers and sisters be born—so they didn’t mind Marco at all. He was such a sweet little guy. It’s been a long time since he came out with me. Too long.”