Carry

by Toni Jensen

  Instead, he seems yet more suspicious, and later, I will wonder if he thinks I’m one of those women who run drugs, who pretend to be pregnant as cover.

  That night, when I tell him I’m coming home from work, when I name the fancy college across the bridges and tunnels of this city, he squints his dark eyes at me, clearly in doubt.

  I say that I haven’t bought Pennsylvania plates because we might not stay. I say, “It’s a one-year appointment.” I say, “I’ll get it taken care of, though. I will.”

  His hand doesn’t leave his gun, and his eyes never stop moving.

  None of what I say is true, or none of it is yet known to be true, but as I say it, I realize I want nothing more than for the lie to be made truth. I am seven months pregnant and so very, very tired. How am I going to have this baby and go straight back to work? How are the two or three days of maternity leave I’ve been offered going to be enough?

  The policeman keeps his hand on his gun while I tell him my lies, and he writes nothing down. In this behavior, in my lying and making him afraid, I’m like almost everyone else in our neighborhood ever to be pulled over or followed home.

  This man is dark-eyed, with dark hair and olive skin, and his surname suggests he’s Latino or Chicano. This is a Black and white neighborhood, with the nearby neighborhoods being predominantly Black. He’s the one with the gun, and yet he’s clearly scared to be here, clearly made uneasy by a white-facing, white-passing pregnant woman with nothing in her bags but books.

  How I would like to tell him I know where we live—though I don’t yet, not entirely. I have not yet received the many-months-past-due water bill for $1,132, a bill that explains why the sunporch off the kitchen was converted into a “greenhouse room,” a bill that explains why the former tenants moved out in such a hurry.

  As I stand there, in front of the concrete stairs up the steep hill to the front door, I would like to tell him I know what he thinks. I would like to tell him that the kid who runs the drugs behind our house is a white kid. I would like for him to understand that where a person lives isn’t always an indication of what he or she does, of his or her heart. But I know it sometimes is or, with time and necessity, is made to be. I know there are limitations we find ourselves unable to breach. I know sometimes we drown in the stagnant water of where we’re from.

  There is so much I’d like to convey, including this feeling—that I’m so close to drowning. But he keeps his hand on his gun, and I talk and talk—I use my most soothing of teacher voices—and he eventually seems to grow tired of my talking. Eventually, my white face earns me free passage. I get to climb the stairs. I get to go inside.

  III.

  When we moved to Pittsburgh from Texas, my boyfriend sold his guns. We were poor—the kind of poor where you have a garage sale to raise cash to move across the country.

  They had been family guns, handed down. He made sure I knew this. It’s fine, he said repeatedly. It’s fine.

  We had known each other about four years at this point, but we’d only been dating a few months. He had recently dropped out of graduate school, but still, our grad-school friend groups overlapped. When I expressed an interest in him to one of the women in the group, one of his close friends, she tilted her head and said only, “He’s a project. It would be a lot of work.”

  We’d been dating about five months when I learned I was pregnant, when I received the job offer. We’d already decided he would move with me, wherever the job. We’d already discussed having children but not, of course, this soon.

  One afternoon, in my rental house in Texas, he gives me a ring and asks me to marry him. I say I’ll think about it. I say thank you, which is, of course, not quite the right thing.

  I wear the engagement ring and also refuse all inquiries as to a wedding date with a polite smile and a “We’re so busy.” I haven’t said yes, though, not exactly. It’s too soon. I’m certain about the baby, but I’m waiting to see on this idea of marriage.

  My boyfriend sometimes works in geographic information systems, GIS, and as a field archaeologist, traveling around the region. Archaeology in Pennsylvania and many other parts of the country mostly entails digging holes called shovel tests, to make sure there are no artifacts in the way of the many pipeline and natural gas projects taking over the region. Field-workers without graduate degrees in 2006 make between $12 and $20 per hour, but the wage is usually closer to $12 an hour. They most often work far from home, ten days on with either two or four days off.

  Though it would mean working in Pittsburgh or even from home, my boyfriend does not apply for any GIS jobs. He has some contacts in archaeology in the region and takes fieldwork jobs, one of which is local, and most of which are far-flung—all corners of the state, over into West Virginia, even back south to Louisiana. I had known when we started dating that he preferred the outdoor work, despite its lower pay. I had known how much he loved the bro culture of archaeologists—the long days of hard physical work in the outdoors, followed by long nights of pool playing and drinking beer.

  It hadn’t mattered much then, but now it very much does. He is mostly always gone—when the police officer pulls me over in front of our house, when I learn the kid on the moped deals drugs, when the first of the neighborhood kids throws a rock at our dogs, when it’s fireworks they throw, when it’s another rock then more fireworks—like that on repeat.

  He is not there one rare, bright-skied Saturday when I head down Carson Street to the SouthSide Works shopping area, to the grocery store.

  I don’t remember everything I had on the conveyor belt that day—apples, for sure, chicken and ice cream—but I know what I ate when I was pregnant and before regular paychecks started coming in. It’s one of academia’s dirty secrets—how you leave a job having received a half paycheck for May and you often aren’t paid again until September. If I had to guess, the conveyor belt that day held hummus, ice cream, apples, bananas, bread, bell peppers, canned tuna, and one package of chicken thighs, the smallest kind that holds four, skin on.

  The first weeks of the semester at Chatham feature parties with a lot of Brie I can’t eat and wine I can’t drink. The views are nice, though. The campus is set against impossibly green hills, manicured gardens of bright but not too bright flowers, each building a stone cottage or mini-mansion featuring the names of those synonymous with Pittsburgh’s oil- and steel-town roots—Mellon and Rea, Laughlin and Falk.

  Chatham’s campus sits about two miles from where James Stubbs is shot and killed in Homewood. But the worlds could not be further apart.

  Sometimes, when I went to campus, I’d bring along Jack, the biggest of our dogs, and we’d walk the paths, and students would pet his giant, square head and coo over his long, dark mane. I liked how beautiful it was there, how genteel, how quiet.

  At home, Jack had decided he hated Luna, my boyfriend’s dog. Lucy, the smartest of the three, had tried to intervene, had tried to correct Jack many times, as had I, but nothing was working. I was able to keep the warring dogs separated during the day because the old house still had one room with sliding pocket doors.

  On campus, though, Jack had good manners. He only ever barked at the rogue turkey who chased us sometimes, who chased co-eds, too, until it was relocated.

  The woman who ran the program brought her little dog with her every day, and so no one seemed to mind Jack or at least no one questioned me.

  That day at the grocery store, I am grateful for how we still have a bag of dog food at home. First, the nice woman behind the counter has to tell me my bank card’s been declined. It’s the kind of store where you bag your own groceries, so it takes me a minute to stop putting apples in a sack, to find my other card. Next, of course, it’s the other card, the credit card, declined.

  The cashier is white, late-middle-aged, and has glasses that cover most of her face. She looks tired in
her shifting side to side a little, or perhaps it’s time for her break, or perhaps she’s embarrassed for me.

  Sometimes, my boyfriend mails home to me from his job a little of his leftover per diem cash. This is not one of those weeks.

  I tell her thank you, which is not quite right, so then I say I’m sorry. I try to hold my back straight as I walk toward the doors, but I’m undone a little by how the chicken thighs and ice cream sit, huddled together at the end of the conveyor belt.

  It’s hard to explain properly how tired and low you feel sometimes when you’re pregnant and poor and employed by a place where everyone else seems to have enough, to have so much more than enough. I’ve worked all manner of physically hard jobs—waitressing, bartending, babysitting, cleaning hotel rooms, detasseling corn, helping tear down a half-burned house—but I have never before or since been as tired as I was when I lived in Pittsburgh.

  That day, I had thought I might drive over to the Babies “R” Us in the suburbs later, at least to window-shop. Instead, I go home, and there’s peanut butter, and some pasta and a few other odds and ends, and it is, of course, enough. The dogs greet me with wagging and licking and only the smart one, Lucy, seems to understand anything’s wrong. She sits at my feet, and I scratch the back of her head like she likes and then the wide, husky ruff and under her collar, and we sit like that a long time.

  When my boyfriend calls, I tell him we’re out of money until I’m paid, but I don’t tell him about the specifics of this day because what is the point in spreading the humiliation? I’ve learned already in our short time together that he reacts poorly to humiliation, to any insinuation that what he’s contributing is not enough, to any insinuation of insufficiency.

  And there also is how he’s trying, at least after a fashion. We’re still in a world where I think he’s doing the best he can. He’s sending home some of his per diem in cards decorated with his drawings or funny stories. It’s hard for me to parse sometimes, whether this sentiment is for me or for the baby.

  It shouldn’t matter, perhaps, but it does. Am I enough without this baby? Am I enough without the sentimentality of motherhood attaching itself like an anchor around my already swollen ankles?

  At least every other night, when he calls, his voice is thick with beer. Hanging out with the guys and drinking beer is what field archaeologists do, but I’m here alone, my chicken thighs conveying and conveying, and I’m not even able to drink the Chatham wine, to eat the Chatham Brie. I’m feeling sorry for myself, which is something I’m good at, which is something I hate. This is how both the dog days and fall pass, me hating my boyfriend more than a little for his part in how I’m hating myself.

  IV.

  Our daughter is born on that bitter cold December morning, on the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year. She’s eleven days past her due date and most welcome.

  Here, throughout my pregnancy, no one shifts on a bus, even as I grow larger and larger. In Pittsburgh, people will cross an icy sidewalk to yell at a pregnant woman that she has no business being out when it’s so slick, but no one will offer an arm. This happens to me twice in the Southside when I go to deliver our rent checks and once on our own street. No one else offers to shovel the sidewalk. I am glad for this baby I carry inside me to be arriving.

  Because she’s so many days tardy and seems content never to arrive, the doctors induce labor. I labor for twenty-two hours, and my boyfriend’s family arrives, descending on the hospital with their loud Texas voices, their swagger, their holiday cheer. They had planned to arrive a suitable amount of time after the birth, yet they are thrilled with the timing.

  My boyfriend’s father spends the most amount of time in the room with me, reading aloud from a book and then from the newspaper while I labor. I’ve met the parents twice, and there isn’t anyone I want in the room, except the nurse or perhaps the doctor. Really, I’d like to do this myself. Really, I’d like to do this unaccompanied by recitations from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s news and sports sections.

  The one person I can imagine wanting is my grandmother if she were still living, and so I think of her, I focus on her—her calm and strength, the way she’d rock my brother and sing to him when he was small, the way her voice and body reflected peacefulness. I mimic it the best I can.

  I have read three books on birth and early parenting, yet I am unprepared for a late baby. I have had many conversations with my mother and my sister, too, but both of them report they loved being pregnant. They report it so many times with so little variation that I begin to question both their veracity and my sanity. I have spent the last months swollen and over-warm, a baby’s foot kicking my ribs and bladder. I have spent the last few weeks working and then lying on my left side, on repeat. My blood pressure is not yet too high but is higher than normal. I have not experienced the bliss of my mother and sister. I do not glow.

  My mother and my sister and my grandmothers all gave birth to many early babies, and a few were perfectly on time. It never occurred to me to study this late-birth scenario. I studied premature babies, premature labor, uterine prolapse, and breech births since they run in the family.

  I’d thought the most about the breech—the way the baby has to be turned and redirected seemed so dramatic, so unnatural. This type of breech is Webster’s second definition: “a: the hind end of the body: BUTTOCKS” and “b medical: BREECH PRESENTATION, also: a fetus that is presented with the buttocks first.” Its first definition is plural, dealing with short pants, breeches. Its third is “the part of a firearm at the rear of the barrel.”

  There are shotgun weddings in my family history, but no C-sections. Still, when after all those hours of labor the operation becomes necessary, becomes urgent, I agree.

  No one tells you when you have a C-section, they strap you down. It’s important you don’t move. They draw a white curtain across at the midsection, so it’s like the theater except for how you can’t watch.

  My boyfriend watches. He’s wearing white scrubs and a mask over his dark skin, only bits of his dark hair poking out, his large, brown eyes made more giant with fear. His fear irritates me. He is not the one who labored, who’s drugged, who’s strapped down. The very least he could do while wearing a literal mask is to mask his fear.

  Before my daughter is born, this will be the dominant emotion I remember—irritation at her father. I should have known then that we were not to last. A part of me probably did.

  But then she’s born, and the nurse says, “They never do that—look right at you. I almost dropped her,” before saying, “Girl, it’s a girl,” and handing her off to me. And she looks right at me, too, and I don’t let go.

  A few months later, the day before my birthday, on Valentine’s Day, a daughter is born to Joseph Hall and his girlfriend. He’s still in jail, awaiting trial. His mother gets to meet his daughter before he does. According to his interview with City Paper reporter Bill O’Driscoll, Hall has never seen his daughter outside of jail or prison. The visitor Joseph Hall sees the most during these years is his mother.

  V.

  Why I don’t expect my own mother or bring myself to want her there for my daughter’s birth can be traced back to my own childhood, perhaps, but certainly the year before is an easy dot on the line of the why.

  Back in Texas, the year before, in my rental house in Lubbock, I awoke one night with a headache of intense, singular focus, and my grandmother’s voice narrating to me the steps of what I should do. It wasn’t a dream, and I pulled from my head one lone hair as she told me, and I followed the rest of the steps, her instructions for this ritual, and I fell back into dreams, despite the headache, and when I awoke in the morning, fevered, my vision blurred and narrowed as if I were in a tunnel, I felt ill, very ill, and also very calm. I called my friend Gail to drive me to the urgent care and then the hospital, after.

  I was so calm at the urg
ent care center that the doctor, Jack Dubose, hesitated before sending me to the hospital. “I have a high pain threshold,” I told him, and he nodded, his glasses slipping down his nose. I didn’t elaborate, didn’t explain my childhood, didn’t debate nature versus nurture. I was lucky enough not to need to have this conversation. My simple sentence was enough. He listened.

  It is such a rare thing for an older, male doctor to listen to a woman. Factor in West Texas. Factor in how this is the year Lubbock is named the second most conservative city in the nation. Factor in that I’m Métis. Dr. Jack Dubose, then, is a miracle. At the hospital, Gail and I learn I have meningitis, probably viral, perhaps bacterial.

  To be clear, to be transparent, I am withholding the details of the nighttime ritual because they are ritual or ceremony and are, therefore, not for public consumption. I am naming these doctors here because they all paid attention; they all offered good care; they all seemed to me to be miraculous. It is not an exaggeration to say that if not for their attention and good care, for the miracle of each of them, I would have died. I still almost did.

  At the hospital in Lubbock, I have my first spinal tap, am given pain medication and then released with orders to stay home from work for a few days, to rest.

  Nearly two days go by, and I don’t feel worse. I’m taking half the prescribed amount of Vicodin, am watching television through the tunnel of my vision and am cooking meals. I’m cleaning out my sweater drawer when the hospital calls. The culture they took has grown bacteria. They should not have released me. It’s urgent that I come back. It’s urgent. The woman’s voice on the phone is trying for calm and is failing.

  Later, I will realize she’s thinking of a lawsuit. Later, I will learn this delay in treatment often results in a lifetime of serious health consequences ranging from seizures to hydrocephalus to worse. Later, I will learn that the odds of survival for people with delayed treatment are 14 to 1, that according to the National Center for Biotechnology Information, “up to 50% of survivors of bacterial meningitis suffer from disabling neuropsychological deficits,” and that a delay in treatment makes that number rise and rise and rise.