by Maud Casey
ASPECTS OF MOTHERHOOD
THEN how do men participate in pregnancy?” Ralph asks. “It’s as if the man flies to the place where the kid is born, and the woman takes the train, taking in all the scenery. Pregnancy is like a foreign country she’s traveled without him that she’ll never be able to explain in full. It’ll just sit there between them, untranslatable. The man hovers on the periphery.” Ralph can get carried away. He does telemarketing from home to support his painting.
“Oh, Ralph,” Rachel, his recently pregnant girlfriend and one of my oldest friends, says. “Enough with the drama. Pass the orange juice.”
Both Rachel and Margaret, another old friend of mine, had come to brunch in the cramped one-bedroom Brooklyn apartment where Willie and I live—the rent creeping up and up—each expecting to be the only one with the news. They are both pregnant—Rachel fifteen weeks, Margaret thirteen. All the women at the table have known each other since college; each man since whenever he became involved with whichever woman. We sit around a defective table I got for free from the furniture store where I am a floor hostess. At work I wear skirts that swish and swing. “I am a host-ess,” they swish. “I am a host-ess,” they swing. My boss, a caster of thick and sturdy shadows, is usually away buying furniture. When he hired me he told me that the way in which I hold myself is an important part of the store atmosphere. “You are a solitary siren,” he said. “Luring sailors to our port.” I hold firm to the belief that there is a specific kind of dignity in not fighting back.
“He doesn’t have to just hover,” Willie says suddenly. He’s been sitting quietly on the couch, separate from the rest of us, doing what he does best—being quiet but taking everything in, considering.
I met Willie in a car crash four years ago. We weren’t going very fast. It wasn’t serious. He made a left-hand turn without looking and landed a dent like a giant’s punch that still marks the right side of my car. “I’ll need your insurance information,” he said, realistic from the beginning. He walked toward me carefully, picking his way through glass, though there was very little. He looked studious as he approached me with pen and paper, like someone willing to take notes. “Tell me what I need to know,” he said, and I did willingly.
“Well then, tell us, O wise one, what can he do?” Margaret asks.
“Yeah, Willie,” Jake, Margaret’s husband, says, rubbing his hands together as if he’s plotting something. He usually is. “Lay your wisdom on us.”
“There are things a man can do,” he says mysteriously. He’s behaving very suspiciously. He’s not looking at me, and suddenly I panic. It’s an experience he’s had before me? Thinking about getting pregnant again after my miscarriage two years ago has made me extremely paranoid. Willie and I never told anyone about the miscarriage. It happened after eleven weeks—we hadn’t even told anyone we were pregnant. It happened so quickly that both of us wondered if it signified something bigger than science, deeper than the statistics that said it happened to one in four women pregnant for the first time. We knew we weren’t alone in the experience—we had friends who’d miscarried—but the experience was ours alone.
“What can he do?” I ask pointedly. I give Willie a what-are-you-talking-about look.
“He can educate himself,” Willie says. “He can find things out.” And then I recognize the tone in his voice—it’s the urgent tone he uses when he wants to make a point based on his own experience but he only half-tells because whatever it is he actually experienced is a secret. What he’s really saying is that I’m about to find something out, the something that he’s half-telling me now. He’s giving me that look that says he loves me and we’ll talk about all of this later. He’s prepping me for something he’s been meaning to tell me all along. “He can know the woman so well that he participates alongside her,” he says. He looks at me as if this is a promise, and I want to punch him.
This morning just before everyone arrived, I found a picture of Ella with a note from Louise saying hello, asking Willie to say hello to me. Nothing threatening, but there was Ella with a face so like Willie’s boyhood face that I’d pointed it out, held it up to Willie. The doorbell rang, and Willie just nodded, holding up a hold-that-thought finger as he walked away from me to answer the door.
Ella is Louise’s five-year-old child, and Louise is Willie’s ex-girlfriend, the girlfriend before me, the one who might have been with Willie now if it hadn’t been for a few random incidents. Before I met her, I turned her face into the sweetest porcelain doll in my mind; her hair curly like curly sheep hair; her breasts sweet nectarines. Then I met her, and she was kind, married with a child, and living far, far away, on the other side of the country. Because her husband was infertile, Louise used donated sperm to have Ella, whom I met only that once when she was a toddler. Her round face then was a generic sweet pudge, not the little-girl version of Willie’s I saw this morning in the picture.
“Let’s make a pact,” Jake says suddenly. “We’ll all start smoking again when we’re seventy.”
Margaret turns her back on him and says to Rachel, “Have you been eating food like eating is inevitable, like it’s fate? There was a piece of pizza sitting on somebody’s desk, somebody I barely know, the other day at work, and I felt drawn to it.”
“So what did you do?” Rachel asks.
“I ate it.”
It’s often on Sundays, the bare day stretched before us, that Willie and I discuss the possibilities. Though I organized the brunch, I was looking forward to after everyone had left, to the quiet afternoon hours alone with Willie when we could remind ourselves of the infinite times decisions like this were made before us—a decision my mother and father made in Georgia or Rhode Island or Colorado, a decision made all across the country as they looked for a permanent home, the right place, the perfect place they never found, until they decided at a certain point that now was as good a time as any, and this place would do as well as anywhere else, and then my mother watched her body grow, fill with a thing alive.
“I’m reading this book,” Margaret says. Everyone groans. Margaret is always reading some book that claims to be the definitive whatever. “No, really,” she says. “It’s one of many, I promise. I’m a multisource woman these days. Pregnancy has changed me.”
Jake nods mock-vigorously and Margaret mock-punches him. “I’ve read that book,” Jake says. “There’s a ritual called couvade. The man takes to his bed to simulate the delivery of a child as the woman is actually giving birth.”
“Oh, great,” Rachel says. “I can picture Ralph now—feet up in silk-laced stirrups as nubile young women feed him grapes while somewhere a creepy doctor is prepping me for an episiotomy.”
Willie and I have reached that certain point; we are married three years, him with a steady job teaching high school English, me a floor hostess at an imported furniture company. It’s not what I’d planned for myself in my mid-thirties, but for now it’s fine. Willie and I read a lot; we go to the movies; we take long walks after work. My job has very little to do with my real life.
“I still don’t believe either of you is pregnant,” Willie says, getting up to get more coffee. “It’s too perfect.” He raises an eyebrow the way only he can. “What are you really here to tell us?”
Now I’m in the mood for a fight. What if I miscarry again? turns easily into What hasn’t he told me? Who is this man? How can anyone really know anyone else? And I’m right back to How are we ever going to have children if we’re total strangers?
“Okay, okay,” Rachel says. “We’re really aliens. We want your firstborn.”
“There must be something in the water,” Jake says, holding out his coffee cup for more. “You better look out, Tanya.” He squeezes my knee.
Willie looks over and he’s smiling that smile again, that smile that tells me we’ll talk about all of this later and that he loves me, that we want our firstborn too. But I’m not having any of it. I look away.
“I had a dream we converted our house int
o a big meat factory,” Rachel says. “It was a huge success—people came from all around. It was awkward for other people in the neighborhood. There was tension. Our meat factory wasn’t entirely welcome.”
“Mmmm,” Ralph says, feeding himself a strip of bacon. “Meat.”
“Pregnancy dreams are the weirdest—I dreamed last night that I built a huge hand-painted cabinet for Willie and Tanya,” Margaret says. “You guys didn’t want it—you said it wouldn’t fit in your apartment. But it was really clear that even if you did have room you didn’t want it.”
“It’s true, no room at all,” I say to Margaret, waving a hand around the apartment but wanting Willie to hear my tone, read into my words. No room for Ella, no room for Louise.
Yesterday at work a woman and a man walked into the store, their bodies jostling each other affectionately. The woman’s breasts bounced slightly under her T-shirt as she carried them in on folded arms. The man was tucked safely inside his clothes. They walked as if they knew where they were going, and I curbed the automatic cheek-straining smile my boss insists upon, so as not to intrude. I watched them finger wrought-iron candlesticks and wondered if Willie was thinking of me at that very moment. I realized, not for the first time, that there are countless details in my day that I don’t tell Willie. I wished I could transmit all those images that rush through my mind into his mind at the end of the day when I’m too tired to explain; those reels and reels of time when my mind runs wild that he knows nothing about. I wished he could do the same thing for me—the yearnings of our whorish brains captured and transmitted. Sometimes I just stand at the front of the store and yearn for things I can’t articulate, and Willie doesn’t know anything about it. How can we have a baby if he doesn’t know about that yearning? If I can’t describe it to him?
“It’s just that time of life,” Margaret announces, putting her hand over her tea-filled mug as Willie comes toward her with the coffeepot. “The age of having babies. I keep wondering, How did I get old enough for this?”
“I know,” Rachel says. “There used to be so much time ahead of us. Pregnancy makes me think of death. Do you think that’s bad for the baby?”
“I’ll drink coffee for the both of us,” Ralph says, ignoring Rachel’s question. He holds out his cup.
“I see your pregnancy plane has already taken off, Ralph,” Rachel says. Rachel always said she never wanted children and now she’s pregnant.
Soon brunch is over. I hurry everyone out. I stop Ralph from doing the dishes. Good-bye. Good-bye. Good-bye. I’m so happy for you. Call me. It’s wonderful. So wonderful. It’s amazing. Kiss kiss kiss kiss.
Willie and I are left in the profound vacuum of silence that occurs after a group of people leave a room. Willie sits innocently on the floor as if it were a normal Sunday. His legs slide independent of the rest of him through sheaves of the Sunday paper filled with rampant disease in ravaged countries, murder, and the economy. He slides toward me through strewn papers while outside the day’s sleepy Sunday glaze that says stay inside and consider life from a distance has become suspect too.
Willie holds my face in his hands and says, “You are so beautiful.”
“So? What of it?” I say. “What were you trying to tell me in front of a group of people that you were too scared to tell me in private?”
“What do you mean, so? What is that? So.” He stalls, sprawling in the swish and crinkle of paper, among the politicians and killers.
“Ella’s your child,” I say. Just like that, so quickly, but I realize I’ve been waiting to say this sentence all morning. I ruffle the pages of the book review, clinging to the usual routine, as if everything weren’t irrevocably different. There’s an ad for a bestseller that Margaret told me she read about a serial killer who keeps the tongues of young women, indistinguishable in pickling jars, on the windowsill in his bathroom. They are blackening specimens, severed from their language.
Willie closes his eyes, and before the rush of everything else that I know I will feel, I am overcome with knowing this man so well that I intuited all of this from a comment he made at brunch to a group of four other people. More than rage, more than anything, this connection makes us not really alone for a moment, makes us as close to each other as we’ll ever be.
“Yes,” he says cautiously. He’s past the moment of connectedness to wondering how he should feel now that he’s been found out.
What to do with this information? He donated his sperm to his ex-girlfriend five years ago, before I’d even met him. Why didn’t he tell me? Maybe it became one of those reels in his mind that he was too tired to pass on, seemingly unimportant, less and less important as the years went by. What does it even mean? Am I supposed to yell and tear my hair out? Sometimes you just do nothing for a while. Willie stands up, circles around me in order to massage the perpetually tight spot underneath my right shoulder blade, pressing hard to release something deep inside.
“Don’t do that,” I say.
“I worship you.” He gets down on his knees and mock-worships, kissing my bare feet and bowing his head in deference. He puts his arm around me and I feel the warmth of him that over the course of the day, over the course of weeks and months and years, has left and then returns, leaves and returns, leaves and returns. “I want to have a baby with you,” he says, his face in my neck.
“Get off me.” I shrug him off. I get up and walk toward the sink filled with dishes from the brunch, which seems like years ago now, not sure what to do next. I pick up an apple, consider taking a bite and then drop it. It bounces red against the kitchen floor until it’s bruised.
“I’m going out,” I say. Willie knows not to come with me. He knows not even to speak. I take the pregnancy book I bought at the used bookstore in our neighborhood with me. I get on the subway and read from an interview with a pregnant woman who talks about sleeping while pregnant. “I am most myself when I am sound asleep,” she says. “I wish that I could talk in a dream to my unborn baby.”
A young couple not unlike Willie and me sit at the opposite end of the car. They have lots of scrap metal in a bag and a ladder, which they’ve unfolded so it stands upright in front of them. A man dressed in urine-soaked burlap bags wakes up from a nap at the other end of the car and walks over, considers the ladder, and begins to climb.
My life, this revelation, is not a catastrophe. I know that the secret of Ella will eventually be absorbed into the narrative of our relationship. She will become our secret together, and though there will be tears and we will be changed, we will remain inextricably intertwined.
I get off the subway and walk home, taking my time, in order to cover some terrain without Willie. When I get there, Willie’s in bed reading the rest of the paper. I linger between my clothes and my nightgown while Willie watches from the bed. The way he studies me each night like this fills me with significance, but tonight I won’t look back.
At work on Friday, there was a tall man wearing loose khaki pants, with broad shoulders, sent by a distributor to set up a display of Macao patio furniture. He carried settees, armchairs, tables, through the front door of the store to the back where the display was, setting them down in an arrangement he thought was best. I watched him move back and forth, smiling at him as if Willie didn’t exist, flirting silently until I tripped over my own feet and lurched toward a blue china vase with a tight waist that holds pencils.
There are my own fantasies: all my old lovers in one room. I walk in—surprise!—triumphant, always a little thinner and filled with good news of myself. These men in one room—short and tall, goofy and sophisticated, older and younger, those with whom I might have had a child. But these are just fantasies when I look down at the familiar thick bones of my body, at the veins pushing at the surface of the skin on the inside of my arm, twigs trapped beneath ice.
“That was a stupid way to tell me about Ella,” I say, even though I told him.
“I know,” he says. “I was going to tell you years ago, but then the miscarr
iage…It’s stupid. I thought you knew, that we had an understanding.”
“Out loud,” I say, overenunciating. “I need to understand it officially and out loud.”
“So now it’s official?”
“Don’t get so comfortable. This may take a while. I’ll need you to explain.”
“Well,” he begins.
“Not now.”
We fall asleep not touching, and I dream that the baby we could have is inside me made of glass. I walk carefully and don’t make any sudden moves. I realize I will have to hold still so it can slide out cold and whole. I clear a space on a shelf, move books and a framed picture to make room for the glass baby. I wake up terrified, the antiseptic smell of a hospital in my nostrils.
“It’s normal to have dreams like this,” Willie says when I wake him up. His head is still on the pillow and he speaks in a whisper though there is no one else to wake up. He’s always done this, as if he knew someday it would be necessary.
“I read an interview in that pregnancy book,” Willie says hopefully, now that he’s got my attention back. “A woman told the interviewer that she felt a strong beam of love. ‘I felt as if I were shining my light on the relationship with my husband,’ she said.”
I imagine her flashing her high beams on her husband, caught unaware on the road. “A few chapters later,” I say, “she tells her that she never imagined she could feel so sick.”
“Great,” he says. I fit myself reluctantly into Willie’s outstretched arms, putting my head on his chest the way we always do at the beginning of the night though we will end up on opposite sides of the bed by morning.