by Emily Adrian
Walmart offers an alternative approach to new motherhood: Why should expelling a human being from your body mean missing out on this month’s rollbacks?
Disheveled employees stocking the shelves are annoyed with me for reaching around them to grab the Raisin Bran, the Diet Dr Pepper. I get it. The perk of the nightshift should be no moms in pajamas, no sour-smelling children. One shelf-stocker, a middle aged woman with a haircut from the past, frowns at Jack and says, “He should be in bed.”
“Tell me about it,” I say.
Upon closer examination of my infant’s furrowed brow, the woman concedes, “He’s cute though.”
Is Jack cute? Toddlers are cute. Puppies, kittens, bright-eyed creatures that scamper are cute. At ten weeks old, Jack is something else entirely. His movements are still stiff and erratic. His hands are pruned like an old man’s. When he sucks his lower lip and fixes his watery gaze on mine, the rest of the world recedes, irrelevant to our intimacy.
Jack isn’t cute, I don’t think.
Jack is a marvel.
We get everything on Carrie’s list, plus beer to replenish her supply. Almost involuntarily I find myself pushing the cart toward juniors’ apparel. The pants Nina wants are on display, front and center. Their camouflage pattern is more impressionistic than Carrie implied—a woodsy blur of green and beige, no distinct twigs or leaves. Remembering the size Carrie wore in middle school, I throw a pair into the cart. The pants are seventeen dollars. They will make Nina exceedingly happy, and Carrie only a little bit mad.
At the register, a blue-smocked cashier asks to see my ID. He holds my New York State driver’s license gingerly, as if it’s a photograph he doesn’t want to smudge. His badge labels him a Proud Walmart Associate. His age is somewhere between thirty and sixty-five.
“What brings you to Ohio?” he asks, passing my license back to me.
“Family,” I say.
CHAPTER FIVE
A couple of weeks after Carrie gave birth, she said to me, “You know how everyone thinks when you have sex you, like, lose your innocence?”
Newborn Nina was with Carrie’s mom. With our single hour of freedom, on a late July day without a breeze, we went to the dump. It was our old haunt, and not an actual dump but a network of seldom-used trails crisscrossing a retired landfill. The property, all rolling fields and wooded hilltops, was and remains beautiful; only on the wettest days does an odor expose the land’s unsavory past.
I flinched when Carrie mentioned sex. Although it had formerly been our favorite topic, we’d stopped discussing sex when Carrie started having it and I continued not having it. To bring it up now felt gratuitous, almost cruel.
“I guess so,” I said. My resentment mingled with irritation; we were walking so slowly. I had watched Nina emerge from Carrie’s body but didn’t yet understand how long the discomfort lasted—how, weeks later, it could feel like the floor of your pelvis was in danger of collapsing. Sliding forward across a chair or a mattress could make you howl in pain.
“That’s not how it was for me. Sex was just, like, another thing. On the same level as my first kiss or getting my driver’s license or whatever.”
My resentment surged.
“But I think I might have lost my innocence when I gave birth. I knew it would hurt, but I didn’t know how much I would suffer.”
I had already begun the process of forgetting Carrie’s labor. The experience had been traumatic for both of us, but for me the details were caving under the cultural consensus that birth is no big deal. It happens every day. On television women squint and pant until their husbands say, You’ve got this, or, You are the strongest woman I know, and they are inspired, finally, to push like they mean it.
Carrie and I had been getting on each other’s nerves. In a few weeks we were planning to become roommates—though, as it was, I’d hardly slept in my own bed since Nina’s birth.
“Isn’t suffering, like, Birth 101?” I argued. “Isn’t it on the first page of the Bible? In sorrow thou shalt . . . push out a thousand babies?”
Initially, Carrie looked bewildered. Then she laughed. “True. It’s like labor is the first thing people needed an explanation for. That’s how bad it is. For a while, about halfway through, I really thought I might die.”
I remembered. She had made the announcement to the RN, her mother, and me. I really think I might die. Carrie had gasped for breath then, but now she spoke placidly. At some point she had stopped looking to me for acknowledgment or approval.
“You were never going to die,” was all I said.
I didn’t think about this conversation—or about the light bathing the field, catching the coppery undertones of Carrie’s skin—for years. By the time her words came back to me, I was pregnant and smug.
Maybe it’s your prerogative as a first-time expectant mother to assume you, uniquely, have an advantage over all the women who have ever complained about childbirth. Because you took prenatal classes or herbal supplements or weekly drop-in yoga. Because your own mom described contractions as “bad period cramps” and you’ve always resembled her physically—you two have the same calves and elbows and detached earlobes. Of course, afterward, you’ll admit it was hard—you might even say “the hardest thing I’ve ever done”—but only so other women don’t feel bad that you were built for this.
Pregnancy could have been my excuse to finally call Carrie after years of silence. Several times, tempted to ask about heartburn remedies, whether she’d gambled on shellfish or dared to soak in bathwater above body temperature, I almost did. But I couldn’t gauge whether my questions would offend her. Or burden her. Forced to compare her own pregnancy—the chaotic end of her childhood—to mine, a natural development in my grown-up life, would Carrie grieve? Would she envy me?
Did I want her to?
I was delusional enough to imagine not only my pregnancy but my own impending birth in opposition to Carrie’s. The delivery would be tidy. Straightforward and sweet, like in those movies.
It hurts to have been so stupid.
Now when I remember being in labor, my mind glosses over the good parts. The hours I spent at home, lurching around our apartment in Gabe’s old bathrobe, letting him apply counterpressure to my lower back and feed me bites of a chicken salad sandwich. The pain was astounding, but I had never felt stronger or more productive. All my wildest fantasies about myself were coming true. For a long time, Gabe and I laughed between my contractions.
What stands out is a moment thirty hours into the whole endeavor: A darkened hospital room. An RN with tight curls and breasts straining against the fabric of her scrubs, instructing me to calm down.
“Help me,” I kept saying.
“We can’t help you, Amanda.” The most generic of therapists, Linda, the labor nurse. “Only you can help you.”
“You have to help me. It’s your job.”
“My job is to make sure your baby gets here safely.”
The truth was I had forgotten about Jack, whom my body was treating like the last squeeze of toothpaste at the end of the tube. All I remembered was that afternoon at the dump, the boredom and the jealousy with which I’d dismissed Carrie’s suffering. She had tried to warn me.
“Forget the baby,” I told the nurse. “I’m the one who’s dying.”
* * *
April 2, 2016, 2:34 a.m.
Me: I’m in labor.
Carrie: You’ve got this! I love you.
June 19, 2016, 2:36 p.m.
Carrie: Hey, huge favor . . . can you pick up Nina and Maxine from the middle school?
I guess they missed the bus?
Me: Where should I take them?
Carrie: Home? I mean, Maxine can come to our place if she wants.
Me: Sure. No problem.
* * *
Once Jack is strapped into his car seat, solemnly sucking his pacifier,
I sprint back inside the house for a trash bag. The Subaru is so filthy it qualifies as an actual garbage receptacle. Any passenger who attempted to position her feet amid the granola-bar wrappers, flattened coffee cups, and mateless baby socks would be met with resistance from the organism that is the mess itself. Kicking around the floor mats are tangles of receiving blankets, crisp and sour with old breast milk; bloated diapers balled and Velcroed; half-empty water bottles; and the scattered contents of a toolbox Gabe purchased on a whim, and which was upended from the back seat during a near collision with an erratic Uber driver in Brooklyn Heights. I throw everything into the bag, the bag into the trunk.
I’m relieved to discover I still have the capacity for embarrassment.
The backroad to the middle school is potholed and lacking in landmarks, but I could drive it with my eyes closed. My body anticipates the twists and dips of the road moments before each appears. It’s like singing along to a song I didn’t know I had memorized.
Officially, New York is home. I would never go on record with another answer. But sometimes, in winter, the wind whipping across the East River and wet pellets of snow cutting horizontally through the air, I miss Ohio. I miss the whitewashed houses sharing sprawling backyards without defined property lines. The stacks of firewood, the faded hammocks, the Weber grills. The way every residential neighborhood yields to an open expanse of grass—fields that belong to the county but are quietly tended by old men astride their John Deeres.
The men in this part of the state love to mow, would mow all day if their wives would let them.
When Gabe took me to New York with him, I was eager to let the conventions and cadences of Deerling drain from my blood. I was ready to mock Middle America, to talk casually about flyover states. I wanted to eat in restaurants where no item was described as smothered. And I did. I do. The city is the choice I’ll make again and again, but it remains a foreign language in which I am only technically fluent. The truth is some frozen part of me thaws out here, where I can decode every look, every gesture. I know that when your neighbor says good morning, you say it back. Never hello or hi or hey-how’s-it-going; that would be rude. Deerling’s soundtrack is the one my ears still expect: Screen doors slamming. Trampolines squeaking. Siblings squabbling in the street. Tornado test sirens blaring on the first Wednesday of every month.
A few years ago, I was listening to NPR and I heard the words Deerling, Ohio. I was sitting in my parked car, waiting for the minute at which it would become legal to repark on the opposite side of our street in Queens, and I gasped. It was the same feeling that prompts people to go wild when a rock star addresses the crowd by the name of its city. The satisfying confirmation that someone so famous—so seemingly larger than life—navigates the same world as you.
The next words I heard were her name, and I stopped breathing. My first thought, irrationally, was that she had died.
My shock settled into relief, then rapt attention as the interviewer finished introducing her. The Subaru filled with Carrie’s voice. Her tone was friendly, unhurried, confident. “I never went to art school,” she said. “It never really seemed like an option, I guess. I had my daughter when I was eighteen. I’d always been creative, but after she was born I started drawing obsessively. Of course I was dead tired, and I didn’t technically have the time, but I couldn’t quit. I had the sense that if I stopped making art right then, I’d stop forever.”
the host: (in her inquisitive warble) And you began posting your work online?
carrie: Yeah, I had a blog. I was literally just taking photos of my sketches with this old point-and-shoot digital camera and putting stuff online as a way of connecting with people. As anyone who’s had a baby can attest, motherhood can be really, really lonely. For some of us, the internet is the only balm for that loneliness, right? And then what happened was people started asking if they could buy my stuff. And I was like, absolutely, you can do that.
She sold each drawing for five dollars plus shipping. Her medium was black ink with occasional splashes of whiteout on recycled scraps of cardboard or newspaper. She took commissions, allotting herself a half hour to complete each piece. By the time Nina was a year old, Carrie was squeezing two or three drawings into each nap. Every other day she would drive with the baby to the post office and wait in line, struggling to keep Nina from crumpling the sealed envelopes between her frantic fists.
carrie: And then, one day, someone emailed me to ask if they could get one of my drawings as a tattoo.
the host: Can you describe the drawing?
carrie: It was an early version of one of my characters, a sort of scowling teenage girl.
the host: Did you say yes?
carrie: I did. And then, as my blog gained more and more traffic, I kept getting the same request . . . and it really started to bug me that some other artist somewhere had earned hundreds of dollars recreating my work. And at the same time, people would send me pictures of the finished tattoos and I was like . . . damn, that’s cool.
Carrie’s blog gained in popularity. Tattoos became a staple of mainstream hipster aesthetics. By the time her daughter was two, Carrie knew of a dozen people who’d had her work permanently etched into their skin.
In every case, their skin was white.
carrie: It was definitely something I noticed. At the time I was starting to think about getting tattooed myself, but every artist within driving distance of where I lived had portfolios featuring only white skin. Even when I was totally in love with a person’s work, I had no confidence they could, or even would, be willing to create something equally beautiful on me.
the host: Are there challenges associated with tattooing darker skin?
carrie: Sort of. Black skin is more likely to scar, so you have to be extra careful with your needle. And obviously, certain shades of ink won’t show up as well. But looking around, especially in the Midwest, and especially back then, you’d think dark skin was impossible to tattoo. I couldn’t find anyone who was doing it. And even if these white artists weren’t outright refusing to tattoo black people, none of the work ended up online.
the host: Did you set out to specialize in tattooing people of color?
carrie: I wouldn’t say that.
the host: What would you say?
carrie: That I fell in love with an art form. That as a black woman, I wasn’t interested in working exclusively with white skin.
Limited by time and money and motherhood, Carrie traveled no farther than Mansfield, Ohio, to learn her trade. At twenty-one years old, she walked into the curtained tattoo parlor that had been festering on a far-flung corner of Mansfield’s downtown for decades and asked the owner, Shirley Hayes, for an apprenticeship. (I held my breath, but Carrie didn’t mention having been there before.)
carrie: I was lucky the only shop I knew of happened to be owned by a woman. I can imagine how the whole thing would’ve gone down if I’d approached a man with the same request. I mean . . . I was a kid, a girl, a mom. The odds this would work out in my favor were low.
the host: But they did.
carrie: Shirley was definitely skeptical, but she agreed to train me. The first tattoo I ever did was on myself.
the host: And was it . . . your first?
carrie: (laughing) Yeah, my first tattoo was my first tattoo.
the host: And how long ago was that?
carrie: It’s been about seven years.
It had been at least as long since I’d seen Carrie. I listened to her describe the sleeves on both her arms—flowers, birds, and ivy starting at her wrists and curling around her biceps, grazing her shoulders. The interviewer read aloud the URL of Carrie’s website, where listeners could check out her portfolio and see examples of the work for which she was now famous: “intricate, striking designs on skin of every shade.”
Smooth jazz signaled the end of the program. I was glued to the driver’s seat, stunne
d. Half our neighbors had already moved their cars to the opposite side of the street. Ahead of me was the task I’d been trying to avoid: parallel parking between a minivan and a sausage delivery truck.
My eyes burned.
I had known about Carrie’s blog and her apprenticeship and her blossoming fame—but only now did I understand these events as installments in a triumphant narrative. I should have called her. I had the perfect excuse: I heard you on NPR and realized I don’t know the first thing about your life. But, as always, I refrained. I worried she hated me, of course. I worried my own name on the radio would compel her to turn it off. That if I illustrated a children’s book, she wouldn’t buy it; if I died under newsworthy circumstances, she wouldn’t tell a soul she had known me. But most of all, I feared the call would mean nothing to Carrie. Confused, she would answer, the only thought in her head: But why?
I couldn’t face her indifference, not even the remote possibility of it.
Pulling up to the middle school, I scan the ragtag assortment of kids dawdling outside the entrance. Nina and Maxine are sitting cross-legged at the base of the flagpole, their knees touching. I honk my horn. Nina squints in my direction, shielding her eyes from the sun. She’s wearing the camouflage skinny jeans that appeared, neatly folded, at the foot of her bed while she was brushing her teeth this morning. By the time she found the gift, I had made myself scarce, but from the guest room I overheard her lavishing gratitude on Carrie. “Thankyouthankyouthankyou,” Nina had trilled.
Carrie’s confusion was briefly evident in her silence, before she said softly, “You’re welcome.”
Maxine wears her bleached hair in short pigtails and an oversize denim jacket with something scribbled in Sharpie down the sleeve. In one hand she clutches a box of Little Debbie Cosmic Brownies.