After Birth (14 page)

The baby’s an innocent. Clean slate.

Completely. Isn’t that the thing? Clean slate, in your arms, and: go.

Yeah
, I say.
That’s exactly the thing.

She’s awesome, Paul. She’s so great.

He nods.

She sounds cool.

I love her, Paul.

He wipes down the counters, straightens a pile of mail.

I mean, she’s way more fucked up than me.

Than I.

What the fuck, Paul.

Another thing I needn’t bother trying to explain. She’s like a big old bell I can feel ringing in the best part of me. The vibrations go on and on, clear away the cobwebs, all the dense, cluttered junk, and it’s like oh my god there’s so much space in here, I had no idea there was so much room in me, what a pleasant place I turn out to be. Recognition. Reunion. A light on that’s been out a long time.

I really like this one. I won’t wreck this one. I’ll take this one slow.

So start from the beginning. What happened in the beginning?

I called my friend Ilana, who agreed to doula for free while she was getting certified. Bryan was here. Bryan had been here for a few days. The midwife was driving up from Poughkeepsie, taking her sweet time. It went slow. Bryan was sleeping. There are those moments you realize holy shit I am all alone.

Were you scared?

I was serious. I was focused. I wasn’t tense. Tense is the worst. You’re not supposed to tense up. After a while Ilana shows up and Bryan thinks she’s cute, so they’re flirting and I’m, like, both of you go away. Couple hours went by. Contractions were chill, pretty chill, every few minutes, but I was totally present, just had to stop whatever I was doing, you know? It pulled me out of whatever I was doing. Cutting an apple, had to put down the knife and just give my full attention to the contraction. Perfectly doable. No biggie. Okay. Midwife continues to not show up. Contractions get more and more intense. Got so I couldn’t do anything else—couldn’t have a conversation, couldn’t eat, couldn’t do anything but manage. Get through them. Must’ve been, like, seven hours in at that point. Midwife finally gets here and checks me and goes upstairs to take a nap, because it can take hours and hours, but I don’t know. I was kind of looking forward to her being with me. Bryan was in charge of music, and he kept putting on this fucking cerebral indie-rock nonsense, like, trying to impress Ilana. I was, like, fuck you, I need some good R
&
B, some blues. Something. And the minute some detached new indie-rock number came on, I’d be, like, turn that shit off, off, off.

About nine hours in, Ilana vibed kind of timid to me, like kind of beside the point. Bryan’s not timid but Bryan aspires to exist in mainly virtual space. He could not handle it. He checked out. I didn’t care. The midwife came and went. I remember at one point watching her eat a sandwich in the kitchen, thinking what the fuck, lady?
I got down on the floor when a big one hit, and suddenly she’s paying attention to me.
It was so clarifying; it was like the most stupendous high. Everything was clear. There was no room whatsoever for bullshit.

Can I just—I mean, I’m sorry, but what if something went wrong?

Then we would have gone to the hospital.

You make it sound not scary.

I guess if it were scary, it’d be scary. I mean, if you’re scared, then it’s scary. Life is exactly as terrifying as you want it to be.

God, I’m such a failure.

The next part was something else entirely. There were no breaks. So it was continuous, really fast, waves one after the other with no break between: wave crash and the next one is already cresting. Total cacophony, overlapping, you know? So just this crazy storm taking its sweet time with me. Fucking relentless.

Like motherhood!

And I was, like, moaning and begging at that point, like, please, I need a break from this, but nope, no breaks. It’s got you by the neck, and it’s gonna drag you if you don’t ride it. So you’d better climb on and deal.

I couldn’t have done it.

Of course you could have done it.

I shrug. She is nearly scolding.

Of course you could have done it. You got sold some fucking bullshit. And listen, I mean, yeah, if a nice nurse had appeared at any time in there like “you ready for your spinal now?” I would have been, like, FUCK YES. I would have been, like, RIGHT FUCKING NOW, BITCH. It’s not that I’m supersonic or I, like, “don’t mind pain.”
She framed her face and batted her eyelashes.
I just knew that this is how I wanted it, and I knew what happens to women who don’t protect themselves. So I made sure I wasn’t in a position to get fucked over.

It’s not until someone actually looks you in the eye that you realize how infrequently anyone actually looks you in the eye.

You were raped, essentially.

Thank you
, I say, and do my utmost not to look away.

For a few days a month I want to jump every man I see. Then I get bloated and the belly rounds. Then I want to shovel food into my face for a while, resort to sugar. Then I get suicidal. Truly hopeless, scary sad. Start to want my mother. Relate to her. I am her. She was me. And that’s when I start to really loathe Paul. Can’t stand the way he looks at me, speaks to me, touches me. Want away. Imagine setting myself on fire. Feel lied to, kept down. Am sure that when he’s sweet to me he’s faking it, doing his duty. That in his truest heart I am an inessential outline.

Today in the news: a story about a two-year-old Chinese girl abandoned to wander the streets of a large city. Surveillance cameras show her toddling into the street, where a white van hits and runs her over. The van stops very briefly, then moves on. For nine minutes the tiny girl lies bleeding and dying in the street while people pass by on foot and on bikes. The surveillance footage link warns EXTREMELY DISTURBING. I watch her toddling out in front of that van, see her struck, see her surprised small arms go up and out, almost like she’s reaching for someone.

I can’t stop seeing it. I light a candle and try not to throw up. All part of the cycle.

The rusty wheel keeps turning as if cranked by some invisible arthritic hand. Tomorrow or the next day or the day after that I’ll bleed. And it’ll be immediate, a lifted veil. All light and peace and the headlines won’t destroy my day. Everything is, will be, has always been, okay.

Volumes upon volumes on exploration, war, violence, the life-threatening transformative journeys of man. But you can’t talk about this. The fucking, the sadness, the dark, the blood, the light. They will burn you at the fucking stake for this shit.

In college there was the roommate with one fancy black bra she never washed. On scholarship, and
loathed
the rampant privilege. Which, yes, I got, and look, I’m really sorry, and please, I’m doing everything I can think of to live a life that’s not about money.

She was so obsessed with money. The irony! I was hated for being rich, but I didn’t
care about
money!
You’re
the one who cares so much about money! So who’s loathsome? Here, take my clothes. Here, let me get lunch. Sure, I’ll spot you some.
I totally do not care.
Take some, take more. How much can I give you to prove I don’t care about money? How much so you get that I’m not a greedy, selfish, walled-off princess? How tattered my boots, how cheap my T-shirts, how vintage my dresses? How many years wearing the same coat? How firmly steered in the direction of crappy café jobs and academia? It didn’t matter. She had made up her mind to resent the shit out of me.

Then the roommate with a drug problem. She came and went like a ghost, barely hello, did not want to know me. Was fucking a guy in a band. Rarely around. Beautiful guy, terrible band. The guy hit on me occasionally.

Then there was Shira. Sweet slut from a religious family in Jersey. Her mother was dying. Fall of our sophomore year, starting a second round of chemo. Lymph infested.

Mine died when I was thirteen
, I confessed over dosas one night. The dead mother game was old hat. I could be a friend to her.

Mine’s going to be okay
, she said. I froze mid-bite. She kept right on eating. Um, sure.

She was skinny with big tits. Completely obsessed with this very clean-cut guy who treated her like absolute shit. I still couldn’t sell my virginity, much to my despair. She refused to speak in detail, but she’d display this coy little smirk whenever it came up, so I’d know they were fucking. I was supposed to envy her for fucking him. She was a kind of moron, but she had the sweetest gap-toothed grin.

Our friendship ended when I went home with her for Rosh Hashanah and her father turned out to be this vile fulfillment of every Semitic stereotype you’ve ever heard. I mean, the guy was like a Nazi cartoon made flesh: greasy, fat, balding, hook nose, sallow complexion, spit when he talked, black standard-issue yarmulke. Overpowering body odor. Sweat spots in the armholes of his food-stained cotton-poly button-down. It was like he was done up as Dirty Jew for the KKK Halloween party.

He went out of his way to welcome me, zeroed in.

Ariella. Grandchild of survivors, I hear.

Yup.

And somehow within about three minutes we arrived at how the Palestinians didn’t deserve to live.

They’re lucky we let them exist. It’s charity.

Shira was helping her mother serve soup, back and forth between the kitchen and the dining room. She made a sad face like, yeah, whatever, he’s a little over-the-top.

It went on and on. He hit all the high notes.

We could wipe them out like nothing. We should. Israel has always belonged and will always belong to the Jewish people. The concerns of a filthy bunch of nomads are not our problem.

Excuse me, but that’s, like, really racist.

Shira came back with the last of the soup. Everyone else at the table was eating or nodding or staring off into space.

They want us driven into the sea, and I suppose you think we should let that happen. In the interest of—what?—political correctness? Well, I’m sorry, little girl, but the survival of the Jewish people is paramount, and the fact remains. Hiding their weapons stockpiles in the midst of women and children so they can cry horror when the women and children get hit. I would happily round up every last one of those animals and gas them. Israel’s economy is larger than all of its neighbors’ combined! The highest ratio of university degrees to population in the world! Cell phones come from Israel. Modern fertility science. A tiny strip of desert turned into a blooming paradise, a light unto the nations. You can go live with the Arabs if you like, knuckles dragging on the ground, wear a veil, why don’t you, and then come to my house and tell me what a worthy people they are.

You’re a total jerk.

Shira switched rooms before winter break. Her mother died in the spring. After graduation the very attractive guy must have broken up with her for real because last I heard, she had married a pediatric dentist, made a bunch of kids, and lives in one of those upstate towns full of Orthodox Jews. It’s probably not far from here.

Christmas Eve at Cam and Betsy’s. The house is done up pretty festive, and everyone’s in a good mood.

Cam and I do that thing where we both go in to kiss the right cheek, then both correct to the left, then very subtly freak out about how close we are to meeting at the mouth.

Aren’t you, like, Jewish?
I ask him.

So they tell me.

All righty, then. Merry Christmas.

Cat is dying for the scoop on Mina. She hasn’t even paused to hate what I’m wearing.

I heard she had her baby.

Yeah.

She seems really cool.

She is.

Walker climbs into my lap.
Boobie
, he says.
Boobie?

I let him nurse pretty much whenever he wants, and occasionally people ask in this airy voice
oh, are you still breastfeeding?

Sure enough, condescending poli-sci guy’s dead-eyed wife:
still breastfeeding, huh?

Whoa
, says condescending poli-sci guy.
If they’re old enough to ask for it . . .

In August at a café in Chatham, a second-home grandma type sat down at the next table and said, quite companionably,
you know you can breastfeed that kid until he’s twenty, but you’ll fuck him up for life.

Oh, don’t worry
, I told her, just as companionably.
He’s not mine.
Downright clairvoyant, wasn’t I.

The look on her face! (“I don’t argue where there’s real disagreement,” says the woman in my favorite Grace Paley story.)

Like they wish you would just stay home, out of sight. No, I will not stay out of sight. I will not go sit in the toilet in the middle of my dinner so you don’t have to trouble yourself about the fact that you’re a bipedal mammal, bitch.

I wish Crisp and Jerry were here.

Yes
, I say.
It would appear that I am breastfeeding.

Well, that’s okay
, Dead Eyes says.

Well, thank you.

Is it painful?
Cat wants to know, ever the academic.

No. The comments are painful. The stares of disgust kind of hurt.

Who cares what anyone thinks?
Paul says. A for effort, sweetheart.

My sister-in-law still nurses her kid, and he’s, like, twelve
, Cam says.

He’s three!
Betsy hollers.

Whatever, man, it’s weird. He, like, massages her other one while she tries to carry on a conversation with you like nothing’s happening.