Hungry Heart

by Jennifer Weiner

  I nod, and think about how quickly a baby becomes a pregnancy, and how much I just want this over with. While I sit in a harshly lit office and try not to cry, the doctor outlines my choices. I can let things happen naturally, which would mean that I’d basically go into labor—“a little labor,” I think she says—and that “the contents of my womb would empty.” I can take misoprostol, the drug that had given me such a rough ride the last time. Or I can go in for a simple surgical procedure called a manual vacuum extraction—a quick, risk-free, new-age D&C that wouldn’t even require anesthesia.

  I don’t even have to think about it. No way am I going through the waiting and the pain and the should-I-even-be-at-home uncertainty of the drugs. I want the MVE. Get it done, let me go home and get on with it.

  I explain this all to the doctor, who says she completely understands. Except—oh dear—there’s a big maternal/fetal medicine conference in town, and all the practitioners are at that, and they do MVEs only on Fridays. Too bad, so sad . . . because by then the chances are pretty good that this will have resolved itself.

  I tell the doctor that I do not want to sit around with a dead fetus inside of me for the next five days. Friday’s no good anyhow—I’m supposed to be in New York and then in Michigan for a speech next week. Things to do! Places to be! And I know that if I keep moving, this won’t hurt me as much. I can outrun the sorrow, take a train past it, fly over it, stay so busy that I won’t have time to think, and then it will be one week later, then two weeks, then a month, and there will be a wedding, and Lucy’s bat mitzvah, and this will just be a thing that happened in the winter, a few weeks where I was happy and hopeful, a few days when I was sad.

  My doctor calls around. No luck. “I’m sorry,” she says, “but no one can do this before Friday.”

  At that point, I am pissed. The doctor tells me I am welcome to try other places. I tell her politely but forcefully that it’s sad enough to lose a pregnancy, but to then find out that you have to wait five days for a procedure, and get treated like you’re trying to jump the line at the hot new nightclub when you object, or that you have to call around, like you’re checking other dealerships because they don’t have the car you ordered in the color you want, is not improving the experience. Eventually I take the prescription for misoprostol and high-test Tylenol. Bill and I go to a coffee shop, where I start making calls. Clair says she can get me in at Yale on Wednesday, if I come up to New Haven. Susan’s husband knows someone at Temple who might be able to help. I call my old ob/gyn’s practice out in the burbs, and I call the obstetrician who belongs to my synagogue, and I say, “I need this to happen TODAY.” Just as I’m dialing the last number that I have, my midsection spasms. I bend over, eyes squeezed shut. Bill looks alarmed. “Cramps,” I manage to say. Here we go, I think.

  I stagger five blocks to the pharmacy, thinking I can at least get the Tylenol, for all the good that’s going to do. I try to breathe through the pain and try to remember the distraction techniques that they taught me in Bradley Method classes, which only makes me sadder. I stand in line, teary and frustrated, stuck behind some idiot who is arguing with the pharmacist because her insurance company won’t pay for her nongeneric blood-pressure medication, and poor Bill has no idea what to say or how to help.

  I finally collect my meds. The walk home takes me past the pet store, where they keep rescue dogs in the front window so that people see them and maybe adopt them. The little dog wags his tail at me. MY NAME IS MITTENS. LOOKING FOR A FOREVER HOME, his information sheet reads, and I think about how much I’d wanted this baby; how much I’d wanted to be its forever home, and I start to sob; great, heaving, wrenching noises that make it sound like I’m trying to expel an organ. Which, ha-ha, I sort of am.

  At home, I change into pajamas and crawl into bed with my heating pad. The cramps have me feeling like I’m in Alien, and there’s something trying to claw its way out of me. Every ten minutes I get up, go to the bathroom, change my soaked pad, lie down again, or get into the shower, leaning against the wall or squatting over the tiles, letting the blood wash down the drain.

  The doctor has sent me home with an illustrated instruction sheet that says to call if I’m soaking through more than two pads in an hour for more than two consecutive hours. After I have soaked through six pads in an hour, I’m debating whether to call, or wait to see if it continues, when I stand up to change my pad again and feel a slithery sensation, a sickening feeling of emptying. When I look down, there’s what appears to be half a pound of raw liver sliding down my pajama pant leg, to land on the bath mat with a wet plop. I think I shriek. Moochie, who’s been curled on top of the quilt with her bottom jammed up against me, hops off the bed and trots to the bathroom to investigate. “Moochie!” I say as she sniffs at the mess. I shoo her away and pull down my pajama bottoms to change my pad. My vagina appears to be dispensing Campbell’s Chunky soup. There is blood pouring out of me—not trickling, not dribbling, pouring, as if someone’s turned on a faucet—and there are clumps of tissue along with it, red, gooey, liverish, lumpy things. You might pass large clots, says my sheet. Some of them may be as large as a lemon. Are these as large as a lemon? I see a few tangerine-size lumps, and one that’s at least half a grapefruit. Oh, and also, according to the sheet, I’m supposed to be saving this mess to show the doctors.

  I shove a towel between my legs—at this point, I realize, my body is laughing at the pads. I scoop up the mess on the floor, and I call downstairs to Bill that I need some kind of container. A few minutes later, he sticks his hand through the opened bathroom door. “Don’t look!” I say, and grab what he’s given me, which turns out to be the fancy new Tupperware, not the quart-size containers from the Whole Foods olive bar that you reuse once or twice before tossing, which were what I’d been hoping for.

  “Goddamnit!” I yell. “NOT THE GOOD TUPPERWARE! I MIGHT WANT TO REUSE IT!” In the end, I sacrifice the container to the cause, and then I climb in the shower and stay there until the hot water runs out. For the next three hours, that’s how it goes. Cramps. Clumps. Blood, blood, blood. All normal, according to my sheet . . . and, the weird thing is, it feels normal. It feels like my body doing what it is supposed to do—however gross and weird and painful the task. I’m proud of myself for not needing medication, for not having surgery, for having a pioneer-style miscarriage, the kind my ancestors had as they plowed the potato fields of Krychyl’s’k. Maybe I didn’t have natural childbirth, I think, as I spray Shout on my towels and mop the bathroom floor with Clorox wipes (just like my Ukrainian ancestors in the potato fields). Maybe I never went all the way through labor, but, goddamnit, I had a natural miscarriage. Suck it, Naomi Wolf!

  Five hours, three pairs of pajama bottoms, two towels, a box of maxi pads, and a bath mat later, and it’s all over.

  I tuck the Tupperware full of placental gunk underneath the sink the instant before my twelve-year-old strolls into my bathroom, but forgot to grab the information sheet from the counter. “I’m not even going to ask,” Lucy says coolly. “Female trouble,” I manage, realizing that I’ve just given her a 2016 version of the childbirth scene in The Women’s Room, which had convinced me that I was never having children.

  I know, from my Googling, that it’s possible that somewhere in the mess was the fetus. According to the Babycenter e-mails that I optimistically signed up for (and from which I would need to remember to unsubscribe), it would have been the size of a walnut, or a prune. It would have had a head and a body; little limbs. The doctors can do testing, they can tell me, more specifically, what went wrong. I can find out if this would have been a boy or a girl. But I don’t want to think about it. I don’t want to look, to mourn, more specifically, what might have been. I think, instead, about how in both the hospital and the doctor’s office, as soon as there was no heartbeat, I never heard the word “baby” again, or even “fetus” . . . it was just “the pregnancy” or “the products of conception” or “the contents of your uterus.” The magic of lan
guage; the unmaking of a life, not by biology but by words. It was okay. What I’ve lost, I think, is a possibility, not a person. And because it’s just me, in my bathroom, with my Tupperware and my ruined towels, I can frame it any way I want. My voice, my words, are what matter here. No court or politician or outside-the-clinic shouter can tell me what happened or how I have to feel or what I need to believe. My daughters are children. This was a chance, a lottery ticket without the winning numbers; a dream that’s dissolved in the morning sunshine, something that could have been real but wasn’t. I am sad. I am grieving. But this isn’t the same as losing a baby.

  The truth is that there’s also a part of me that’s happy; guiltily relieved that I won’t have to rock Lucy’s life with news of a new half brother or half sister and see her disgust and listen to her complaints and absorb her horror at what the baby signifies—a mother who’s still having sex. I like sleeping through the night; I like being able to have conversations with my kids; I love breezing through an airport, unhampered by a stroller or a car seat or a diaper bag, with my girls beside me, chattering about what they see. I’ve never been one of those women enamored by infants, intoxicated by the smell of the backs of their heads or the heft and folds of their little limbs. But this would have been my baby; our baby, an entirely new person that Bill and I had made together. I am mourning the loss of the possibility, the non-winning ticket; the door I won’t get to unlock, the dream that didn’t come true.

  I think, at least it’s over now. At least it can’t get any worse. Then I go to the obstetrician for a follow-up visit, to make sure everything’s out. There should be a separate day when doctors see women who’ve lost their pregnancies, or at least a separate place to wait, but there’s nothing like that, and as I walk into a waiting room full of happy, hopeful pregnant ladies, I try not to think about how I sat here not that long ago, how I’d been one of them and how happy I’d been.

  Waiting in line, a young woman in sweatpants and a T-shirt straining over her belly scowls at me and asks, in a taffy-thick Philadelphia accent, “Are you in line?”

  I nod, because I can’t talk. At the woman’s side is a little girl, in sparkly sequined shoes, with a pink bow in her hair.

  “Did you put your name in?” she demands.

  I shake my head. I don’t understand. I’m waiting to give my name to the receptionist, who is busy with someone else, all of which she can clearly see, so why is she asking . . .

  The woman jerks her arm in the direction of a computer keyboard in the corner.

  PLEASE ENTER NAME AND WAIT TO BE CALLED. Head down, I proceed to the machine.

  “Could’ve just gone right ahead of you,” the sweatsuited lady mutters. Later, in the waiting room, she’ll snap at her little daughter for spilling a paper cone of water on her dress. I will hear her hissing, Cut that shit out! I’ll see her yank her daughter to her feet when the doctor calls her name, pulling her down the hall as her little feet, in their sparkly shoes, stumble over the linoleum.

  I don’t curse at my children. I don’t yank their arms. I hardly ever yell. I give them only organic milk and antibiotic-free meat. I know their friends and their teachers; I go to conferences and concerts; I monitor their television time and check their homework. I want to tell this to someone, to explain that there’s been a mistake, that someone has screwed up. This isn’t fair. I should be the one having another baby, not her.

  “Jennifer?” A friendly-looking woman in scrubs is calling my name. I get to my feet and cross the room quickly. The technician smiles. “We have some doctors visiting from Turkey,” she says as she walks me toward the ultrasound room. “Is it okay if they sit in, and we can show them how to find the heartbeat?”

  I stop walking. “There’s no heartbeat. I had a miscarriage. I’m here to make sure . . .”

  The woman’s face is stricken. “Oh my God, I’m so sorry.” Glancing at her clipboard, she realizes that she’s got the wrong Jennifer. I slink back to my seat. I wish my parents had given me a less common name. I wish I were anywhere but here. I wish this story had a different ending. I wish that it was summer, and this was something that had happened half a year ago, and I wouldn’t feel this fishhook in my heart.

  Eventually there’s more gel. Another ultrasound wand. “It looks like it’s all over,” says the doctor, a guy this time. He’s younger than I am, with a calm demeanor and gentle hands. “Are you doing okay?”

  “Sure,” I say. I make my head nod. I make the corners of my mouth curve upward, an approximation of a smile, because this is what women do. We don’t want to scare anyone. We don’t want to be upset or cause concern. We don’t ever want to show how much it hurts. “Everything’s fine.”

  One Good Thing

  In March 2008, my life was in a good place. I’d wanted to grow up and be a writer and that’s what I had done, and now, in an unbelievable development, a television network was paying me to come up with ideas for shows. I’d packed up little Phoebe, just three months old, and we’d flown to California, where I’d spend the next few days having meetings, brainstorming and trading life stories and jokes with potential writing partners.

  Because good fortune is best enjoyed with company—and because I’d had a baby twelve weeks earlier—I was rolling with an entourage. My assistant, Meghan, was in a room down the hall in our hotel in Burbank, and my sister, Molly, was on the pullout couch in the living room of my suite. The first day of my trip, I woke up at five in the morning because the baby and I were both still on East Coast time. My phone was plugged into an outlet in the bathroom. Washing my hands, I glanced at its screen and saw that I had three missed calls from a number with a Connecticut area code that I didn’t recognize, plus six calls from my mom.

  I called Fran first. “Dad died,” she said without preamble, her voice uncharacteristically quiet and low. “The police called and told me but they won’t give me any information because I’m not the next of kin.”

  The tiles were cool underneath my feet, and I could see my reflection in the mirror, the circles under my eyes, my hair in tangles, my face looking tired and pale and old. I could hear Phoebe stirring, and my sister breathing, and the silence all around us as the hotel and the city slept. The sky outside the windows was still dark. There was no name for what I was feeling. There was relief that he’d never hurt me again, never scare me; never have a chance to hurt or scare my daughters. Sorrow that there would never be a reckoning or an apology, a day when my father would come back to himself and be the man who’d tucked me into bed and read me poetry when I was a little girl. He would never regain his perspective, or come to his senses, or look at what he had done and be able to tell us he was sorry. Deep down, I think I knew that would never happen. My mother had denied the possibility frequently enough. If your father ever had any idea of what he’d done, he’d kill himself, she would say.

  I’d had Phoebe in the bed with me, and when she started to fuss, I picked her up and nursed her, sitting up against the headboard, cradling her body with one arm, holding the phone with my free hand, tucking it against my shoulder when I needed to readjust. I dialed the first number, for the Rocky Hill Police Department. The detective told me my dad’s body had been found a few hours before, at six in the morning, in the bathroom of an apartment in Rocky Hill—his girlfriend’s place, she said. She couldn’t tell me much more. She said that it must have been a shock, and that if I called later the detectives who’d been on the scene would be able to give me more information.

  I hadn’t spoken to or seen my father since 2001, after a reappearance that began when he’d called me on Father’s Day in 2000, asking for money. “I need to start over,” he told me. “I’m homeless,” he said. I was engaged to Adam then, living in an apartment with my husband-to-be, and had just sold my first book, a bit of news that had been reported both at the paper where I worked and in the one I’d grown up reading. He’d seen the news; hence the call. Feeling very responsible and adult, I asked if he was getting help, if he wa
s in therapy, and offered to speak to whoever was treating him, to see if they could confirm what he was telling me, help come up with a plan. But, I said, “it would be irresponsible” to just hand him a check. He understood that, didn’t he?

  For a moment he didn’t answer. The silence stretched just long enough for me to imagine that he would agree to my terms and would tell me that they made sense, and thank me. Then I heard him inhale, and heard him begin, “You stupid bitch.” I put the phone down on the bed. I didn’t hang up, which would have been answering aggression with aggression. I just put it down on the comforter, so that his voice turned into a blur of sound, and I walked away and left the apartment. When I came back there was a dial tone.

  He’s lost his mind, my mom would say, and that was what I thought had happened. In the years after the divorce, he’d been inconsistent with his presence and his child support, but he was, at least sometimes, still the same smart, darkly funny father I’d had for the first decade or so of my life. He’d crack mean jokes about my mother’s lawyer, whose name was Barry Armata, chuckling every time he blew off a court date or got away with not paying his alimony, “I sunk Armata.” He’d dictate letters to his secretary and send them to my mom, missives that began, “Dear Frances, In light of our recent conversation, it is clear that negotiations with Muammar Khaddafi would have proceeded more smoothly.” When I’d spoken to him when I lived in Lexington, when I’d seen him at his second wife’s house and heard about what he’d done, he’d sounded weird and unhinged. I knew he’d lost jobs and had been arrested for assaulting a girlfriend. Mental illness plus booze equals a life in ruins. Also, there had been a whole mess in 1998. My father’s ex-girlfriend had found him in bed with another woman and had attacked him, ripping his scrotum open, tearing it so badly it took more than sixty stitches to repair. The new girlfriend, who’d hidden in the closet during the attack, called an ambulance, which arrived with the police, and the story was in the papers—the Hartford Courant, the Middletown Press, even the student paper at the University of Connecticut, where my brother went to school. The last name, of course, didn’t help.