Paradise, Piece by Piece

by Molly Peacock

  “Mussels to give me muscles for my big decision,” I said.

  Maggie laughed. “Well, you’re a grown-up, now, Molly P. Whitewater rafting through the rivers of the Big Choice. I’m glad I’m not joining you.” Maggie’s partner, George, had had a vasectomy.

  “What did you do before the vasectomy?” Lily asked.

  “I made him wear condoms and I had my IUD.”

  “Both?” Both Lily and I said.

  “You know I’m a birth control freak. If I ever, ever had to go…Oh, you guys, thank God you were both there in college,” Maggie said, “because I was such a numbskull. I never want to repeat that, ever.” She poured the Sauvignon Blanc. “So I tortured every man I was with. If they wanted to fuck me, they had to let me roll one on. Every time. AIDS test or no AIDS test. That wasn’t the issue. The issue was babies.”

  “You’re tough, Maggie Mack,” I whispered, awestruck. I tried to imagine a condom on my clitoris.

  “It’s a good thing old George came along,” Lily said, “to solve the problem.”

  Strangely, it didn’t feel like a problem to me anymore. It felt like an opening, like loosening the knotted handles of a string bag. I had an image of oranges rolling from that bag into a big, deep blue bowl, then looked at my friends and suggested that we all share the orange tart.

  —

  As Mariah made me hesitate, I realized that I’d brought the subject up because I’d wanted an opponent. I was ready for one.

  “I know you don’t understand this,” I said to her determinedly, “but having the tubal ligation will permanently settle something I have to resolve. It’s come to a crisis and I have to make a decision about motherhood,” I said quietly.

  “You’re sermonizing, Molly.” She grimaced.

  “I’m deciding that having children won’t define who I am,” I said with uncharacteristic explicitness. I was on the right path.

  Mariah, however, trod a path very different from mine, and as a matter of fact, would live an entirely separate life from mine in the future. Another dinner or two, a compulsory appearance at her Stonington wedding—a tiny snapshot of Tilla and me in the back of Harper’s Bazaar to commemorate nearly the last occasion of our crossing Mariah’s and Derek’s paths—then a tête-à-tête on a one-degree-below-zero winter Sunday afternoon at Minty Myths, home of the no-cal ice cream sundae, would finish us off.

  Slurping our lo-cal hot chocolates to warm up before our no-cal hot butterscotch sundaes, Mariah told me how disgusted she was with another friend of hers for not divorcing her no-good husband. I understood this to be a thinly veiled parable for me, spoken from the altitude of her new superior marriage, wealth, and career turnaround as an architectural writer. I walked home deciding not to call her again; after all, it was usually I who called, in one of my efforts at seamless life. It took many months of my not calling to cause her to leave a brief message on my answering machine one day, but I decided not to return it, and neither of us contacted one another again.

  —

  But I did call Eloise, so that Tilla and I might check with a professional before this momentous act. “In the end, it is your decision,” she said with a mild flap of her arm, her loose sleeve swinging. She and Tilla looked at me kindly, as did Ruta, and my gynecologist, and my other friends.

  Yes it was. And it was not Tilla’s decision, though he reaped its benefits. It was completely mine.

  —

  “When George volunteered to have his vasectomy,” Maggie said as we sat on a bench at the Central Park Zoo, “I felt so released.” It was a mild winter day, and we luxuriated with our heavy coats open. “It’s like some grubby hand finally let go of me, Mol,” she continued.

  “I almost can’t conceive of the amount of energy it took for you to insist on double protection every single time with every single man you were with,” I said, still in awe at the intensity of her determination.

  “I didn’t even feel it as a burden, Mol, until now, afterward. Now I’m on my own, all detached and happy—except I’m attached to George, and my sisters, and my cello, and my friends.” She beamed at me with loopy clarity. George Sinopolous was the reason we were sitting on this particular bench near the Upper East Side town house apartment Maggie now lived in, on the other side of the park from the ratty West Side one bedroom she used to have to sublet for extra cash when she went on the road. A music-loving businessman, he met Maggie when she’d played at a fund-raising salon for Lincoln Center, and then had backed a special tour for her string quartet. Her first nonmusician lover, George was older than Maggie, and long-divorced from his first wife. They’d had no children.

  “Wow, he volunteered to get a vasectomy and you’re not even married!” I said, impressed.

  “Yep.”

  We sat with our eyes closed, our faces tipped to the weak sun. Maggie’s voice hung quietly in the air near my ear as I absorbed the sunlight in the dark relief of having closed my eyes.

  “He loves my story of the day I wanted children for exactly twenty-four hours,” she went on. “He says he’s using it as his own.”

  “What day?” I said lazily.

  “You know, the day I woke from the dream of the beautiful little girl!”

  “Yes?” I wasn’t sure I remembered.

  “Remember, Molly? I was her mother in the dream, taking care of her, seeing she made the right choices. I woke up utterly bereft, thinking, My God, I’ve made the wrong choices in my life. I should have had a child and it’s too late, and I rushed to Dr. Fish to tell him all along I’d wrecked my life and not known it.”

  “Then you found out the little girl was you.” I supplied the answer. I had remembered, after all. Beyond us the seals splashed.

  “She was me,” Maggie said quietly, “the me I wanted to take care of.”

  “And now you can,” I said.

  “Now I do,” she said.

  Hardly anyone was paying the entrance fee at the zoo. Midweek, and no weekend fathers stood in line to mollify their kids. A few nannies wheeled strollers by.

  “I haven’t told my mother.”

  Maggie laughed her coral bells laugh. “Oh God, are you planning to?”

  Although the statements of my parents that I should have children only if I wanted to contributed, in part, to this decision, I could not tell Polly, risking her condemnation, or her disappointment, or her interference. I had had a long, complex separation from her. This was my decision, just as my artistic decisions were mine. I couldn’t guarantee that Polly would be behind me, but I let her know in many ways, at many times, that I did not intend to have children. “It’s not for me,” I said clearly whenever the subject came up, though it rarely did. I did not know how to explain the paradox of emptiness and fullness I felt, even though I saw it in her own life, the solitary life she luxuriated in, and might not easily have given up for grandchildren.

  A woman who does not have children, whether she chooses not to have them or simply ends up not having them, is always defined by a kind of minus. Whether she calls herself childless or childfree, motherhood is so entrenched in the definition of female that not mothering comes to be seen as not fully female. The move a woman has to make is from feeling negatively empty to openly empty.

  The defining of a self is not the same as the defining of a role. I felt fully female, completely identified with my sex. And I felt capacious, roomy, open, and ready to be who I was and take on the tasks that would fall to me. That capacity came from a feeling of ready emptiness. It was being full of what I did not want that incapacitated me, afraid of getting pregnant, afraid of never having good sex.

  I made my decision because of my examples, Flo, Hazel, the post-child world of my Grandma Ruth, because of Maggie’s parallel life, and Lily’s desire to be loved wholly by one man without interruption, and because of Marianne Moore, and Elizabeth Bishop, and Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Emily Dickinson herself, all poets who were not mothers. And I made my choice because the medical technology was there, and,
in a beginning form, the ideology was there: It was a developing ideology that said one could be a woman and a mother, that “and” separating, maybe for the first time in history, femaleness from childbearing. It was an unusual decision, I thought, but it was all right if I was sure. My mother had made it all right through the living of the compromises of her life. My good friends had made it all right through their confidence in me. Tilla made it all right because of the feeling that he was with me—as with me as he was capable, which I knew was not fully with me of course, but he did not lie about that. Our therapist had made it all right by confirming that the decision was mine. And Ruta had been making it all right all along, since she had helped me to come to know who I was.

  In the gynecologist’s waiting room with its fascinating wall sculptures by people I knew, Tilla and I sat. When we entered Sarah’s office, I asked her just how many of these tubal ligations she had performed.

  “Molly!” Tilla was horrified. He considered this a breach of politeness.

  “Lots,” she said. “Don’t worry. I have all the experience I need to do a good job.”

  She was going to do a good job. A permanent job. I was going to say no forever. I was going to interfere with my body, as I had interfered before with the abortion. And Tilla, as before, was going to witness. He was passing me the consent form to sign, and I was signing it, and he was going to drive me to the outpatient unit of the hospital the following week, and he was going to wait in the waiting room, and drive me home, and put me to bed, and my biologically reproductive life would be over. And the emptiness that is fullness would begin.

  —

  A different hospital this time, crowded and more confusing. Tilla had to wait floors away and I lost track of him. In a surgical gown on a gurney I was wheeled and left, wheeled and left, by attendants so preoccupied I couldn’t believe that they would correctly identify what procedure I needed. Wheeled first into an elevator for an upper floor, then wheeled into an elevator for a lower floor—then to a little green room. I heard my doctor’s voice somewhere. I’d had a general anesthetic. Had I known how deeply it would disorient me, I would have objected. The shadow of an early panic hovered over me, not like an angel’s wings spread, but the spread, tipped wings of a raptor. You still might be meat for someone’s else’s hunger. “It’s th’ law a th’ jungle, Molsie,” my father would say to me when I looked disappointed or alarmed, “the law a th’ jungle,” and laugh and turn away.

  In the operating room, confused about our plans, I imagined Tilla driving in his ancient car up First Avenue. Where was he going? I panicked, then settled down at the sight of Sarah, her curls neatly packed under a green surgical cap, joking again that here was ten good years of sex—why ten? Delivering me through to menopause, I suppose. And the anesthetic deepened and I was out.

  I did not see her make the small incision in my navel, a navel so deep that if I do not dry it carefully in humid weather, it gets an irritating infection. There was my stomach with its escutcheon of hair—a stripe down the middle of it from my navel to my pubic hair, a line that had embarrassed me into one-piece bathing suits. My mother had this stripe. It was like a stripe of independence connecting me to another line of women with escutcheons. The curious word comes from medieval heraldry and means the shield shape of a coat of arms. In preventing myself from becoming a mother I felt attached to this independent heritage, one in a long line of women claiming themselves, saying yes to something important inside themselves through a refusal, the saving no. The escutcheon fastened me through time, geography, and centuries to all women who understood that they were women without being mothers.

  I did not see the scope Sarah used, or the clamps she fitted so nicely and later was so proud of since she had done a perfect job. I did not hear her joke with the others in the operating room which I know she must have done. Here was possibility literally, physically being cut off and I, unconscious, deep under blackwater, lay forming a link to all those born of themselves, possibility becoming possible through its severing. Paradox bloomed out of paradox like the rings from the stone of consciousness thrown into the still pool of the anesthetic emanating larger and larger rings and I was waking.

  The recovery room was cramped, crowded, and confusing, and I was in pain I had not anticipated. Of course, why not hurt? I had had surgery. My whole life had been a matter of surgeries, fixing and forming and restoring. I was a kind of renovation project, after all. Two enormous hands pushed me down on my cart and a contralto voice I attached to the hands but to nothing else said, “You’re not ready yet. You’ve got another hour. Your cranberry juice is on the way.”

  Cranberry juice? I suddenly screamed, “Tilla!” just as if I were waking in a war movie hospital, calling out the name of my lost love. I yelled it louder. After a third time, the hands came back with the glass of juice.

  “You are not ready yet, lady,” said the contralto voice.

  So I put my head down. I was not ready yet, the voice had said. Yet. Soon I would be who I am.

  Groggy and woozy and wobbly and shaky and weak-kneed and weak. Tilla had gripped my arm when I came into the waiting room and steered me out, bouncing me home in the car. It was awful. The tubal ligation was much more physically painful than I had expected. I’d never had full anesthesia and did not expect to feel so enervated, and subject to a curious glitch in my sense of smell. Suddenly, I would sniff a smell not in the room, a distinctive odor of rubber, as if I were inside an industrial balloon and had stuck my nose up to its inner wall. A whiff of the birth canal I arranged for myself. For that’s what I had done, given birth to an identity.

  “Yes,” I said to the caller, I would look at a sunny one-bedroom apartment at the same price as my mortgage on Wednesday morning. Wednesdays had been the days of my appointments with Ruta, but now I did not have to get up appallingly early to see her before school because I had graduated from therapy. I considered myself a complete woman now. So why would I need a therapist? Ruta had accepted my decision graciously.

  Then I decided to rent a bigger apartment and sublet the one I owned. At last I’d have a real bedroom and no bars on the windows. And live downtown. I could walk to my job! The morning I was to look at the apartment, Tilla and I had breakfast in a Polish restaurant on Second Avenue. “It has finally happened,” he moaned dramatically over his pancake. “The real Szabo troupe is no more. There is not one single member of my family left in the troupe. They are all strangers, they are all clamoring to get paid their astronomical salaries, and none of them would know a true Hungarian step if they stepped on it by mistake! Girls, these dumb American girls they should be doing the jitterbugs!”

  Tilla looked at the waitress and began playing the Hungarian spotting game. “She is not a Pole, even though this is a Polish restaurant. She is Czech. I can tell. I will ask her.” He spoke to her in Polish, though, and she answered in Polish that he was right, she was indeed Czech. Tilla munched pancakes and distracted himself by determining the ethnicities of the other waitresses and the cooks behind the counter. Finally when they were all tagged and verified through our waitress (he made only two mistakes), and when his pancakes were finished, he looked up at me and said again, “It has finally happened.”

  “You mean something more has finally happened?”

  “I closed up shop.”

  “What do you mean, you closed up shop?” I said suspiciously.

  He sighed.

  He signaled for a coffee refill. “Decaf, darling,” he said to the waitress. To me he said, “I have canceled the spring season.”

  “Are you kidding? Canceled it? The whole thing?”

  “I who have never canceled a performance in my life, I have done this.”

  I stared in the disbelief that accompanies change you hear will happen but never truly expect. He had lost the last bit of public funding he had. All his family had deserted him for air-conditioned offices, brass-railed restaurants, and distant malls. His cheeks were a mass of popped blood vessels
from screaming at the new girls.

  “I have told them all to go home,” he said. “I cannot pay them, these little jitterbuggers. Two of them are suing me. Let them sue. I have nothing. I am wiped out from Nina’s lawsuit, and even she, I am satisfied to say, got very, very little from me.” Bulging his eyes like a frog, crouching his body in the chair, and angling his arms on the Formica table, he exclaimed, “I am a frog! On the highway about to be squashed!” He went limp, then into the death spasm of the amphibian. By now he had an audience in the restaurant. Two people actually clapped.

  OK, you’re a frog, I should have said, so hop away. Instead I said, “Oh, Tilla! What will you do?”

  “I can do nothing,” he said, assuming human form and slouching in his chair like his father in front of the TV. “I am broke. I have given notice at the loft. I will have to leave. I will go to live again with my mother and father. In their basement. I will have to live in their basement like a toad.”

  —

  Spare me the toad imitation, I should have said. Instead I said, “In their basement?” I was horrified. I did not see his parents’ carpeted, stuccoed, well-lit half basement with actual full-size windows. I saw instead my parents’ basement in Buffalo from long ago, the coal bin, the furnace, the cobwebby darkness, and the screaming from the kitchen overhead.

  Oh, monster, what shall I do to cure you? To take away your talons and scales? Surely you are under a spell and my real father is buried beneath you, waiting to be released so he can love me.

  “Oh my God, your appointment!” Tilla shrieked. “It is ten o’clock!”

  “It’s only a few blocks away. We won’t be that late,” I said, not minding being a few minutes late. But for Tilla timing was everything.

  “Come on, come on, pay the check, darling, let’s get going, let’s get out of here, my God, they are waiting, let’s go!”

  I paid our bill. It went without saying that I paid our bill.