After Birth (19 page)

It is upon us to
get this show on the road.
Sexy salt-and-pepper, scrubs, fluorescent rubber gardening clogs. Congenial enough, confidence like a birthright.
Baby’s gettin’ pretty big. Looks pretty well cooked. Don’t want him getting much bigger.
Lots can start to go wrong.
We need to take this show on the road. You ready to meet your baby?

I mean, listen. Historically I got that you had to own your body, that they’d take it from you and tell you not to trouble your pretty little head about it. I’m supposedly on my way to a doctorate in women’s studies, for shit’s sake. I had some awareness that Barbara Ehrenreich had done early work on midwifery, the witch hunts, the medical industry’s treatment of women’s issues. I’d heard Ani DiFranco had given birth at home.

But there I was: huge, disoriented, impatient, scared. Bellied, biconvex, bloated. I handed myself over. Gave them my precious protuberance to deal with as they saw fit.

Yes, I’m ready to have this baby.

No more free lunches for the little one
, joked an obese nurse in puppy scrubs while hooking me up to the Pitocin drip, which I’ve since learned is synthesized from cattle pituitary.

Induce:
trigger, arouse, wheedle into, set in motion, cajole, encourage, prompt, prod, prevail, spur, generate, instigate, trigger, engender, foster, occasion.

Move by force.

I mean, we use
motherfucker
in all sorts of contexts. We’re pretty liberal nowadays in our collective use of the word
motherfucker
. But let’s corral it now, shall we? Reclaim it. If you are an obstetrician or obstetrical nurse and your C-section rate is over, say, 9 percent, you are henceforth an official motherfucker.

I pity you
, Mina says, her eyes wet and sincere.

Well, that’s direct. It stings. Pity is so goddamn inescapable, infinitely sadder than scorn.

It’s clear that winter isn’t going anywhere. We can’t simply wait it out inside. We’re getting antsy and there’s supposedly some major storm coming tomorrow.

There’s this place.

I like places.

Road trip. The old mill in a tiny town called Victory. Used to be a textile mill. Opened in 1846. Closed in 1989, and sayonara, town. Goodbye, people. Hello, rot.

The co-op kids are talking about planning yet another benefit this summer to help pay for its conversion to an arts center. Which is so incredibly adorable of them, because from the looks of it Donald Trump would have to take out about seventeen mortgages to salvage this ruin.

They want to call it “the Downriver.”

Why?

Factories were usually built downriver with the town upriver. So the pollution from the factory wouldn’t poison everyone.

Well, eventually poison everyone.

Not for a couple generations, though.

So, no biggie.

This is not a cool town. No espresso, no hand-spun textiles, no vintage shops. This is not one of those secret hipster hideouts. Sweet enclaves where you can find well-dressed arty fuckers with kids named Zenith, Phoenix, Fidel; this is not one of those. This is a murdered corpse of a town. This is a decline-of-the-empire town.

The mill is expansive, room after abandoned room, sprawling. I used to go to the mall to get good and numb. Buy some underwear, eat something synthetic, drive home stupefied as an overfed farm animal on an indefinite course of antibiotics, forcibly separated from my young.

This is way better.

We wear the babies. Zev is asleep on her front and Walker’s asleep on my back. Postindustrial mountaineers, bundled against the cold. We’re on the third floor, probably forty feet from the ground. Ahead, the entire south wall of the place is gone and wood plank floor slopes off into thin air. I want to get closer, to peek over the edge, taste the fear, but Mina has my arm tight.

You’re supposed to take your baby to windowless baby gyms or basement baby music class or whatever the fuck. Not out into the actual grim, broken world, where glass might cut and the floor might collapse and there’s money to be made in fresh ugliness every day.

The whole world is new
, she says.
It’s an entirely new place. It’s the craziest. I don’t think I’ll ever be bored again.

A dried-out yellow wall calendar from 1989. Time officially stopped.

It’s balls cold.

We head back down the stairwell into a huge open space with floor-to-ceiling windows. Metal columns. Five hundred people probably worked in this room. She points out sheets of ice on the floor below a stretch of missing windows.

Women without sisters are at a marked disadvantage
, I say.

And women with crappy sisters!
she says.

It seems like the band might have been a kind of sisterhood.

She shrugs.
For a little while.
Early on.
Then it wasn’t.
Anyway, we really weren’t that good.

We make our way out, stepping over slippery frozen patches, scattered glass.

What are you talking about? Everyone loved you.

Maybe. But we weren’t that good.

She stops to catch her breath.

We were like
. . .
short stories about writers of short stories.

Those can be good.

I mean, it was this inside joke. We only had something to offer people playing at being people. There was nothing at stake. Irony isn’t some new thing, you know? We weren’t being sincere. And when you’re young, insincerity seems like this grand discovery? This noble fuck-you?

But it’s just a way of wasting time.

Kelly was pure, so it destroyed her straight off. But Stef bought into the hype. The littlest bit of recognition, no matter how small, just fired her so up. That was all she wanted. Her picture taken, her name in the paper.

Yeah
, I say.
Well. Karma’s a bitch.

I kind of envied her. Wouldn’t it be fabulous to be so simple?

God, yes.

They sometimes show Kelly’s picture alongside Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison and Kurt Cobain and them all. Dead at twenty-seven.
And they always leave out Mia Zapata, biggest badass of all.

Who’s Mia Zapata?

Exactly. I bet Stef is irritated to this day that she’s not as famous as Kelly.

Or as you.

She laughs.

Don’t get me wrong, I was a fucked-up lunatic back then
, Mina says.
But that bitch was the Devil.

Legend has it Mina and Stef had to be physically separated at Kelly’s wake. Stef says Mina indirectly killed Kelly by introducing her to heroin, the love of her life; Mina says everyone they knew tried it once. Stef says Kelly never wanted Mina in the band long term; Mina says Stef is a dumb fame whore.

Stef runs her Christian rock camp near Nashville now.
In a way
, she told some local arts rag a while back,
I died and then got clean. I mean not literally died but died in every possible other way except literally.

A deserted subway platform with Molly, drunk, late night, the Q slow to come. We were on a bench and Molly’s half-asleep with her head on my shoulder.

There was a woman loping unsteadily toward us from the other end of the platform. She shambled, she weaved. She stopped halfway to whisper with someone who wasn’t there. She was filthy.

I didn’t move.

My mother advanced.

What the fuck are you looking at?

I said nothing.

You think I don’t have regrets? You think I wanted this??

I couldn’t look at her.

I don’t know.

You worthless little shit. You think I wanted this? You think I chose this?

I refused to look at her.

Leave me alone.

I won’t take your crap, you ungrateful little shit! You think the world owes you something? The world owes you nothing! THE WORLD OWES YOU NOTHING! NOTHING! NOTHING!

My heart slammed: fight or flight? Flight or fight? What kind of pathetically damaged animal decides on . . . neither?

Couldn’t breathe. Tried to say
help
but it came out a stupid squeak.

Are you okay?
Molly finally wanted to know.

Couldn’t answer. Walls closing in.

A person who doesn’t have friends must explain himself to strangers
, I read in a poem once, and I saw how even my “best” friends were thusly unreal: I had to explain myself constantly, always, to everyone.

Why hadn’t she tried harder, my grandmother obsesses. Why hadn’t she worked to curry favor with an officer, insinuate herself into his affections, and thereby manage to somehow find and save even
one
of her siblings? Their names she can’t even bear to recall. And why can’t she stop this obsessing? It’s over. It’s past. They’re in America now. The war is behind them. Another life.

But she’s begun to miscarry. Something is very wrong. Her body keeps killing babies. She and my grandfather are getting rich now, really doing their part for the good old Dream. But she keeps leaking would-be fetuses, wakes up screaming, crying, sweating, bleeding.

She is not the
people are really good at heart
type. She wakes from nightmares in which the incinerated siblings shriek for help from a black sinkhole. Nightmares in which an SS officer lines her up with her primary school mates and massacres them all with a hailstorm of bullets coming from his very tiny dick.

Miscarriage after miscarriage, and by the third or fourth it’s into the loony bin for her. Back then a strong breeze could get a girl committed.

A rest
, the doctor assures my confounded grandfather.
A short rest will do her wonders.

Every family had one, batshit great-aunt, whatever. Even the Kennedys! Tie her down, force the tranquilizers, restart her brain. Take out her damned brain if all else fails.

Schizoid truth tellers, tortured soothsayers, haunted intuitives, furious denied lesbians.

She got two rounds of electroshock.

A mild case
, the doctor says, satisfied. No lobotomy. She is sent home to the new house in Westchester so she can continue the “rest” in the “country.”

Maybe now they will have their baby.

Enter the miracle doctor.

Enter the miracle drug.

And less than a year later, the terrifying tiny baby girl. A daughter.

But first: childbirth, midcentury American style. On sale half an hour downriver, at the good antique shops.

Now the nurses have her strapped down, drugged and thrashing, crying out, welts where the restraints hold her wrists and ankles. The masked nurses appear, disappear, reappear. One pushes down hard on her belly. The doctor arrives, selects his cutting instrument, and separates her with one neat movement. She can feel it, even though she’s not supposed to feel anything. She understands that she has been split at the root, loosened, just not very clearly, not clearly enough to know it’s
her
, precisely.

No good, being strapped down, heart racing, looking for the nurse, please, someone. She sobs, desperate. Tries to speak. No one hears her. The thing insists from within that
it
knows best. What kind of thing would do this to her? After their quite lovely time living together these ten months? She can feel it, so insistent.

She is thirsty. She will surely die of thirst. What wouldn’t she give for a drink.
Water
, she tries to say,
water.
They ignore her. Are they angry with her? Has she done something wrong? She has done so much wrong. She tries to say
water
, but no one understands. The thing wants out. The thing is trying to get out. It’s monstrous.
Please
, she tries.
Oh please help me.

Now the doctor wields another shiny instrument, big impressive one, opens and closes. A kind of trap. Two masked nurses hold her down. They terrify her. She can’t see their faces. A third pushes on her belly as the doctor goes in with those steel jaws, and this is his favorite part, oh yes, in past his nice, clean incision, clamp that soft head and give it a good tug.

The insistent incredible terrifying monstrous thing is removed from her.

Perfect!
says the doctor, holding it by its ankles. He smacks it so it shrieks and gasps and shakes, all purple. The doctor loves his job. Little lungs hard at work right away, yes, good, just what he likes to see. Ten fingers, ten toes.

They hold it up for her to see and then they spirit the thing away. An echo of its yelping remains. She has heard that sound before because she has
made
that sound, a long time ago, or not so long ago.

The new mother is half-conscious, vomiting, shaking, eyes searching frantically, blindly, for what? The doctor stitches her up and is gone.

Véronique and Helge never made it out, by the way. Mere weeks before liberation they went on a walk together on the outskirts of camp, just a quick taste of air, sharing a precious cigarette: so stupid, so arrogant! An idiotic Kapo didn’t recognize the officers’ vaunted whores, just saw two Jew girls and shot them both dead on the spot.

Later, for good measure, the commandant and a few senior officers beat the living shit out of that Kapo. The memory of Véronique’s perfect pink pussy spurred them into a frenzy.

But my mother’s mother survived, yes she sure did. Made it to America, to electroshock, to DES, to scopolamine. Tied to a bed in a different country, begging for someone to help her in a language no one could understand.

Husband, where is her husband, he’s not here, he’s not allowed. They’re giving her another injection now. Another drug, lead fist. Muted pain, it turns out, is much worse than clear pain. Clear pain is quantifiable. One can face it, reckon with it, come away braver. There is no way to understand what you cannot feel. No reckoning to be had. It will haunt you forever, make you afraid. Still, they call her this laughable word:
Survivor
.