The washed blood arrived, was hung, and began to flow into my girl. She’d been pale, but after a few hours she pinked up. My favorite Irish nurse, now back on duty, came to check on us. “They are running it slow, so as not to overwhelm her heart,” she said. I liked this: her heart, not the heart. She was, I realized, even younger than I’d thought. Maybe twenty-two, twenty-three? Surely she didn’t have kids, but she had a fantastically wide smile. Warm, genuine, with dimples. I was so grateful to her and so unsure of everything that I wanted to take her hand. I wanted to ask her to take mine too, while I held the baby’s hand. In some alternate universe, maybe this was possible. We could sit in a circle, holding hands—she and I and the baby—and that would constitute healing.
In this universe, the best I could hope for was a chance, later, to thank her. In the notebook: “cookies 4 irish nurse.”
* * *
On the night my labor began, I was living with my little sidecar, as yet unnamed, and my mother’s dog, Lulu, in a studio (formerly the garage) beside the house I grew up in, on an acre of land my mom had bought for $70,000 in 1977 in San Anselmo, a small town at the center of Marin County. This was not the Marin of my youth. It had lost (almost all) of the funky cottages with flaking pastel paint and the hippies playing Hacky Sack in front of the health food store. It had succumbed to the abrading effects of money, chiefly: overly landscaped yards and overly sculpted people. But it was still Marin, rolling gold hills and eucalyptus trees and Lake Lagunitas. It was home and thus where I hoped to give birth.
By the time my labor began, I had adopted, publicly, the identity of plucky single mom but fell asleep most nights sobbing, wondering what Brian was doing. Was he washing his dishes? If so, his head would be propped against the cabinets above his sink, an oddly restive, thoughtful posture. As though, while washing, he was also working out a new social order. Was he wondering when he would meet his child?
None of this was as I’d planned. I had planned to be one of those pregnant women in baggy overalls with sinewy arms. Movie star pregnant. The fact that I was not movie star anything in ordinary life had no effect on my movie star pregnancy plans: I would bound around Manhattan doing yoga with my tidy fetus tucked into a discreet ball, eating organic. The father of my unborn child would beam as he rubbed coconut lotion on my belly.
Instead, I’d spent my final two trimesters alone, unless you counted Lulu (which I did). She had been a loyal stand-in for human companionship; another body in the bed when I needed one most. A body without demands, complications, or agenda. Lulu the Wonder Dog I called her. She, the fetus, and I spent each night as three creatures in a tight curl of sleep. But Lulu, for all her charms, was never going to rub coconut lotion on any part of me. That was a job for a man who, at the moment I entered labor, was almost certainly barricaded in his Upper West Side cubbyhole. I imagined him with his hands clamped over his ears, chanting banana, banana, banana as we had in third grade, to drown out the sound of anything we didn’t want to hear.
I lay in bed, in the dark, with a bright band of tension around my midsection, ambivalating. I hadn’t spoken to Brian in three months, maybe four. I could sense the phone on the nightstand, alive. Shouldn’t I hear his voice before undertaking an event that would link us, backward and forward, through all time?
He didn’t deserve to know, but I wanted him to know. And what about the baby, didn’t she deserve to have her father know? I dialed from memory. He didn’t sound surprised to hear my voice. “I’m in labor,” I said, then went mute. There was nothing more to say, nothing more important or clarifying I could add. Brian went silent as well. This was at least one definition of misery. Silence on the phone.
“I think I better get off,” I said.
“OK.” Long, long pause. “I love you.”
I think he said this. Memory is fluid and shape-shifts to our desires. But still, I think he said this.
I remember trying to suppress the hope that he might knock on the door.
When I tried to get up, Lulu pressed a paw on my chest and came in close for a nuzzle. I expected something more Lassie-like, a heroic leap through the skylight into my mom’s house to rouse the masses. But she was more committed to preserving the status quo than saving the day. I heaved her off me and made my way next door.
Evan, the older of my two teenage brothers from my mom’s second marriage, was up watching Law and Order reruns. He is sixteen years younger than I am, and we have a half-sibling, half-parental relationship. I asked him to go upstairs and wake our mom. “Go wake her yourself,” he said, with the dismissive air of a nobleman waving away a peon.
“I’m in labor, Evan,” I said.
For once, he had no ironic reply. At last, something to trump adolescent insolence: labor! He stood up, clicked off the TV, and shot upstairs.
My mom took one look at me and said, “Let’s call the doctor,” as though it would be fun, like ordering Thai food.
The doctor was unmoved to hear my contractions were seven, sometimes five minutes apart and very regular. “Don’t rush,” she said. “This is a first baby. You’re in for a long haul.” So we lingered. When we called again around midday, she said, “Stay on your side of the bay until seven tonight; otherwise you’ll hit traffic on the bridge.”
I was panting and grim faced. When I relayed the message, my mom, whose strong suit has never been obeying authority figures, said, “She obviously doesn’t know what the hell she’s talking about. We’re leaving.”
My mom and Cassie (who’d arrived, as usual, at the precise moment she was needed most) half-dragged, half-carried me out the door. “I can do it,” I said. “Let go.” It hurt to be touched, to move. It also hurt to hold still. As soon as they let go, I sank down on all fours. Four-point locomotion, there was no other way I would reach the car. My mom and Cassie dropped down on either side of me. We were doing this ridiculous dance as a team, three abreast. “Sweetie,” my mom whisper-shouted, “a little faster!” Her voice had the urgency of a woman determined not to deliver her first grandchild in the driveway.
Between the studio doorway and the car lay a little Japanese path of pebbles and paving stones, which I’d always thought of as a tranquil transitional space. So wrong. When you are crawling on your hands and knees, nine months pregnant and perhaps fully dilated, pebbles is a cruel euphemism for gravel. “Someday you will laugh about this!” my mom said. “Maybe even tomorrow,” Cassie added. “Fuck off,” I said, to neither, or both.
I tried to remind myself of Mary in search of a manger or, worse, her wretched, weak-kneed mule. I felt for the mule! The mule had it hard. All I had to do was make it to the Volvo. And then to the nearest hospital, Marin General, which was legally bound to take us in.
“You can do this,” my mom enthused. “We’re almost there.” A benevolent lie. The car was as far as Fairbanks, Mongolia, the moon. I’d still be crawling toward it when the baby applied to college.
When we arrived at the hospital, we were greeted at the ER doors with a wheelchair. I grunted and made faces and waved my arms about, and somehow the staff understood that I needed a gurney, not a chair. The gurney guy, whose name turned out to be succinctly, perfectly, Ted, wheeled me into an elevator and pushed the button for the maternity floor.
In the elevator I regained speech. “Ted, hello! Ted, listen! Ted! I have to PUSH.”
“Don’t push,” Ted said. “Please don’t push.”
I was amazed at his confidence in me. He thought pushing was an elective activity.
To Ted’s and my astonishment, I didn’t deliver in the elevator. On the maternity floor, a small fleet of nurses and one midwife gathered around the spectacle: an off-the-street admission dilated to ten centimeters, fully effaced. The midwife had long silver braids; she stood ready at the end of the gurney, saying a few things I didn’t catch. My mom took my hand, and said, “She says you are tearing; try not to push.” Cassie held one foot with steady pressure. Every electron, every proton, not only of my body but o
f the gurney, the room, the hallway, the elevator shaft, indeed every electron and proton in Marin County with its show-offy hills, its serrated coastline sliding under the Golden Gate, the clouds above Marin, its undersea ledge—all of it shouted: PUSH.
My mom leaned in, “She’s going to cut you, so you won’t tear.”
“Just do it!” I panted or screamed or maybe only said in my head. I saw a glint, a flicker of metal pass between my knees, and then a person shot into the room. Time of birth, 6:54 p.m.
My mom stared at her, looking for the penis. Maybe because we’d all secretly wanted a girl (it seemed so much easier to imagine raising a girl as a single mom), we’d hedged against disappointment by believing I was carrying a boy. Plus I’d dreamt it was a boy. Several sage-ish women had confirmed this. When the baby materialized, penisless, we were disbelievers.
“It’s a girl,” the midwife said again. A true girl. A brand-new girl. A girl totaling five pounds, five ounces. A healthy baby girl. The midwife lifted her to my face, and I touched her cheek, slick with wax and blood. She was not crying; her clouded blue-brown eyes were open, as yet uncomprehending, but open. We looked at each other. Hi. My heart leapt and sang and did an Irish jig.
* * *
Two days after the baby’s first blood transfusion the Red Team decided we could go home. They still had no idea why the baby couldn’t “hold her numbers,” but they had stabilized her. She had enough blood to last for a few weeks and they hoped that, whatever her red cell problem was, it would fix itself. Plus they were tired of looking at each other with blank faces every morning at our bedside.
The blond doctor said, “I’m referring you to an excellent hematologist here at UCSF. It’s quite possible your daughter will require another blood transfusion soon, but for now she’s stable and she’s taking up space.” I wasn’t sure whether to be horrified or relieved that we were leaving without a diagnosis. It was like a fable without a moral lesson. But I didn’t argue.
At last I got to dress her in the outfit I’d bought months before, a white sack with small rosebuds around the collar and a matching hat. She was so petite the dress nearly swallowed her, but she was in store-bought clothes, a massive improvement over hospital issue.
When my mom saw the baby in her own clothes, she burst into tears. “She somehow seems more real,” she said.
I knew what she meant. Stripped of the arm band and ID bracelets, the myriad wires leading to multiple monitors, the baby at last looked less like a subject in an experiment on pain and more like what she was: a week-old infant on her way home.
My mom and I rode the elevator down to the lobby in a giddy state, cracking jokes about getting away before they could change their minds.
Outside I was surprised to find weather. I’d forgotten about weather. San Francisco was draped in its famous fog. I kneeled, shivering, in the backseat of the car, trying to install the car seat, while my mom waited with the baby in the lobby. On one side of the seat was a small color-coded dial with a needle, which indicated if the seat’s angle was safe; green was good; red bad. I put us squarely into green, but the steep hills complicated the whole procedure. As my mother drove, I sat in back, frantically adjusting the knob. This was a crash course in baby safety and also in the irrational fears that were now going to trail me, a collection of cans clanging at my heels.
If I had glimpsed the horror that lay ahead for this girl, I would have wanted to jump out of the car. But I couldn’t see anything, except the baby as she was now, head tossed back, sleeping, listening.
What I had to give her included my useless, cyclical worry. True. But also joy. Happiness—slippery, mobile, sneaky, and spry—enters the most unlikely rooms, unbidden. It can sneak up on you nearly anywhere and likewise wisp away. She was alive; she was wearing her soft cotton clothes, her rosebud hat, breathing in the car in the dark as a light rain touched everything with what e.e. cummings once described as “such small hands.”
SAN ANSELMO
5
Arriving back at the studio in the dark in the rain, with the baby asleep in her carrier, felt miraculous. Ten days before, I had crawled on my hands and knees out this door as, more or less, one person. Now two of us passed back through. It was a dove-from-a-hat act; the world’s greatest magic trick.
I looked around the room. In the corner was the rocker I’d hoped to whitewash before going into labor. It was a hideous pool-floor blue, but it rocked. In my arms now, the baby was sleeping. My girl, Gracie. I had settled on a name, splitting the difference and hyphenating Amelia-Grace. I crept over to the bassinet and poured her down in the careful choreography that kept her asleep, head, shoulders, torso, legs, tiny feet, lowering her into gravity. Her bones, leaving my hands, were a set of fragile sticks.
I sat down in the rocker and tried to take in our good luck. The baby was OK, and we were home. Lulu was sniffing circles around the bassinet, sniffing the baby’s carrier, sniffing the baby’s stuff. It was an olfactory feast; a new creature to profile in her scent catalog.
“Lulu,” I said, “she’s a girl like you. Can you believe it?” Maybe Lulu knew this before I did. Maybe dogs could detect gender in utero? I gave her a dog treat. “Why didn’t you warn me, wonder dog?” She looked up with her concerned eyebrows, her open-mouthed smile.
My mom came over with dinner, arms overfull with roasted veggies from Whole Foods, a steak (“The baby needs you to eat red meat,” she’d said), and an entire chocolate cake. We clattered around the kitchen as the baby slept. The doorbell rang as we were eating, flower delivery from my dad and his wife. A huge bouquet of white lilies and a note: “Welcome home, Baby Grace.” I held one blossom to her nose. “Smell what your grandfather sent,” I said. But on she slept.
After dinner my brothers, Evan and Dylan, showed up, bearing gifts. They are almost a generation younger than I am; my mom had me at twenty-one and then had Evan at thirty-seven and Dylan at forty. They came in shouting at each other, punching arms, half wrestling, a couple of self-appointed, badly behaved Magi.
Dylan shouted, “Evan, shut up, the baby is sleeping.”
“You shut up, Dyl,” Evan replied. “I’m mad ninja quiet.” He mimed tiptoeing. The baby still slept.
Dylan was carrying the oddest-shaped gift; it looked like a small, crooked man in a padded suit. “I brought her something,” he said. “What do you call her, Amelia or Grace?”
“I don’t know yet,” I said.
“OK, for the baby.” He handed me the gift. Dylan can make wrought-iron stairs, outstanding blackberry ice cream, an entire album of original folk music—pretty much anything. I couldn’t imagine what this was. I ripped through the paper to find … a little hat rack. The bottom was shaped like a free-form pond, painted pink, and from that rose a sturdy white spool with lots of little pegs for her collection, already growing, of pint-sized chapeaux. I love hats, and he’d been teasing me, through the pregnancy, about how I’d impose them on the baby.
“Thanks, Dylan,” I said, and tried to sound more gruff than teary. That’s what my brothers liked, keep the sloppy stuff at bay.
Evan was less handy but equally devoted to being an uncle. He’d come with a gift wrapped in paper towels, tied with a rubber band.
“Nice wrapping, Evan.”
“Don’t mention it,” he said. I unrolled a hand-sewn onesie, cut from an old T-shirt. There was a skull with a Mohawk on one side, on the other glittery letters spelled Metallica. This was a shirt he’d worn almost every day of high school, not because he particularly liked Metallica, but because he’d grasped, from an early age, that irony was the key to everything. It had been worn and washed and worn again so many times that the cotton was downy soft.
Evan looked down at the baby. “It’s so tiny,” he said, “and alive.”
“You really have the gift of summary, Evan,” I said.
“Dyl,” Evan said, “check out its minuscule fingernails.”
Dylan looked. “Cool.”
As the boys t
alked over her, the baby didn’t stir. Our discharge paperwork read, “Needs easily met,” and it was true. She was easily comforted by nursing or a song. She’d wake up for a few minutes and then drift back to sleep. In the back of my mind I knew the chance that we were done with hospital life was wafer thin, but I simply refused to think about it. And that worked well.
Together, away from the hospital, we were a closed, reciprocal system of delirium and euphoria.
Each forearm was a cushion of plush velvet I could rub or kiss for hours. The only thing that alarmed me was that her body now existed outside my own. Harm could come to her without passing through me first; amateur design flaw.
Daily, hourly, Gracie and I were entranced by the essential acts of infancy; the trope, the trifecta, of babyhood: poop, sleep, eat. Repeat.
Our third day home, Cassie arrived with ginger soup, an Anne Carson book, and her wind of good cheer. After lunch she baked brownies for us (that is, for her and me since the baby would only receive brownie by-products in the milk stream). Cass and I sat in my mom’s garden while Lulu ran up the hill pursuing a scent only she could smell, and the baby slept beside us. It was a gorgeous California day, light wind, puffy clouds at high altitude.
Cassie, in a red silk blouse and black jeans, was the most beautiful woman ever to sit in a California garden on an April afternoon. Not that she cared, not that she noticed. She was interested in ideas over surfaces; she always had been.
We met when we were ten, in an alternative classroom run by a daft but darling man named Bernie, a fuzzy-haired progressive educator who liked to inspire us with aphorisms (“The only way to take responsibility is to respond with ability!”). Cassie would roll her eyes at me; I’d roll my eyes back. She didn’t try to embarrass Bernie; she’d respond to his suggestions respectfully. But she could think circles around him. In my view, a fifth-grade classroom was way, way too small an arena for her. She was meant for bigger things; she should be riding into battle to save the French or performing lifesaving surgery or writing a poem. Most of all, always, writing a poem.
Happiness--A Memoir Page 5