All about Skin (31 page)

“Heaven will be better than this world!” cried a woman under the giant pointing hand outside the wax museum. She held a white bullhorn to her mouth and appeared, for lack of a better term, Midwestern. “Repent! The flames of the apocalypse are licking at your ankles and you do not know it.”

“Shut up, lady,” a businessman yelled.

“Repent, sinner!” she screamed. “The world ends tomorrow. The earth will crack and storms will sweep the seas. Only those born again in his name will be redeemed. So it is written and so it shall pass. I am trying to save you from the fire and the flood! Repent and be saved! You!” she spotted me. “Yes, you with the unborn child. Do you hear me? Your world is about to be over and done.”

Anthony looked ready to pop her in the mouth. Instead he tugged at my hand and led me back underground to catch another train. It was sweltering down there. It was the first circle of hell. There were too many people yapping, shoving, piping loud music into their ears to block each other out.

“You okay?” Anthony asked, his eyebrows knitted in concern. I nodded, but it was getting even harder, if that was possible, to walk. I had a bowling ball in my pelvic girdle; I could barely lift my leaden legs. I was dense enough to sink into the subway platform, then the seat somebody relinquished on the Q train, then the massage table at the acupuncturist's.

Anthony kept hold of my hand while Kang, in a tight room in a tenement next to a seafood store on Mott Street, officiously read my tongue, pressed his thumbs against the dark circles under my eyes, stretched me out on a table, pummeled my back, stuck needles in my head, hands, legs, and feet to direct the energy of my blood, and covered me like a marathon runner with a silver foil blanket. I fell into a deep sleep and dreamed about fish. When I woke up at seven Anthony was still holding my hand. I could feel the overhead light buzzing in my teeth. “Let's get you home, darling,” he said.

Again, the train. What percent of our lives in this city do we spend underground in its bowels? The longest uninterrupted stretch of subway track in New York runs on the A line between 59th Street, Columbus Circle, and 125th Street in Harlem. Since the A train makes no stops between those two points, it attains its full speed on that ride. Twenty-five miles an hour may not be very fast but the A, compared with all the other trains, flies like a rocket. The wheels shriek on the tracks as the cars plunge forward. Children like to plant themselves in the grimy front window of the first car to watch the dark tunnel unfurling in the train's headlights. They press their foreheads against the glass and pretend they're conducting the voyage. I've done it myself. It's exhilarating. But on that night, the train's wild swaying made me feel the opposite. The faster it barreled, the more drained I became.

I was moving, I was being moved, and within me was motion. The train was a drunken cradle. I felt every bump, every shudder, and every blasted curve. My back was so sore. My sacrum, in particular, felt manhandled by the seat of hard gray plastic. The commotion of my bones and blood had me stunned. I felt a throbbing in my core. The clatter of the train rearranged my atoms until I was no longer myself. Dizzy, I was the train. I lay my head on my husband's shoulder and silently began to cry.

After a small eternity we arrived at our stop and somehow ascended to the level of the street. The sun slid down gorgeously, like a postcard of a sunset. I have to remember this, I thought, but I was already forgetting. Behind the bridge, the sky streaked pinkward to the Jersey horizon. Around us the apartment buildings glowed in the saturated golden light. Their bricks looked softer than usual. My edges also were blurring. I had to stop moving or I would seep into my elongated shadow on the gum-freckled sidewalk. I had to pin my shadow's feet with my shoes and close my eyes to keep myself together.

“Are you having a contraction?” Anthony asked. His hand was an anchor. If it wasn't for his hand I might have turned into a puddle.

“I don't know,” I groaned. I thought the contractions would feel menstrual, a vise-like clamping isolated to my uterus, but what I felt, I felt with my entire body. Everyone told me labor would hurt, but what I felt was unlike any pain I'd experienced before. It was ignited from within rather than inflicted from without. Not like heat but what makes heat hot. That burning entropy belonged to me. I knew how to run away from pain by clenching my teeth, tightening my abdomen, shrugging my shoulders, fisting my fingers, or holding my breath. But this, I had to step toward. It was happening. I couldn't protect myself from it and I didn't want to. Rather than curling inward like a snail into its shell, I would have to unfurl myself like a wave spreading onto the shore. I steadied myself to turn inside out by loosening my limbs.

“I can't wait to meet you,” I exhaled. I opened my eyes and looked at my husband.

“You beautiful superhero.” He smiled.

And then I was ready to walk again.

Once inside the apartment I slipped out of my shapeless maternity dress, turned off the bathroom light, drew myself a bath, and stretched into the warm water. The island of my belly contorted, convulsed. I watched my
linea negra
bend like a bow. Time passed. This was the first stage, Anthony reminded me. It would probably last a while—hours, maybe even days. He hovered big and helpless above me. “What should I do?” he asked. “Should I time it?”

I nodded and began to moan. It was eight thirty. Then it was nine and dark outside. The contractions seemed to be five minutes apart. Then three minutes. I could talk. And then I couldn't.

“I don't know if I'm doing it right,” Anthony said, fumbling with his watch. “It's happening too fast.”

“Call the midwife,” I told him.

What happened next is a blur. I can only remember it in uncontained bursts, out of sequence and, except for a jumble of inadequate metaphors, beyond description. But I will try.

I remember Anthony holding his cell phone to my head so that the midwife could hear the sounds I made. She'd been watching a movie in a theater downtown when he called. She doubted I was as far along as he suggested, even when she heard my voice. I think I lowed like a cow. I believe I tried every vowel and settled on O. She told him to call her again in an hour. By that point I was on my hands and knees in the water, tilting my pelvis forward and back. I remember Anthony disappearing in the back room to blow up the birthing pool, coming back to announce there was a part missing, disappearing again to put on the mix of songs he'd compiled for the occasion. The majority of the songs were by Metallica. I think I asked him to turn the music down before yelling at him to turn it off. I remember him reporting, with great relief, that the midwife was now in a taxi heading home to fetch her supplies and that she expected to arrive in Washington Heights, if traffic allowed, sometime after 11:00.

I remember radiating heat. I remember how good it felt when Anthony placed a cold washcloth on my forehead and another around the back of my neck. I remember how bad it felt when he coaxed me out of the tub to the toilet to empty my bladder, and that I wanted only to get right back into the water for the weightlessness it offered me. Fuck, I said. I kept saying it,
fuck, fuck
, like a thumb flicking a lighter. It was the best word because it was hard, it was what I had done and what I had gotten into by doing it, and because what I was doing now was so very hard. I remember my belly pointing like a football. I remember sipping coconut water through a straw in a blue cup.

Around midnight Anthony called the midwife again. She didn't pick up. I could hear his fear when he left her a message. Then I vomited over the side of the tub and the room tilted like a ship. The nausea came at me in waves that surged with greater and greater strength until the moments of relief between surges thinned to nothing and I could no longer hear the current of traffic on the bridge or the corner boys playing reggaeton outside and I could no longer speak. I knew this was the transition stage, the shortest and hardest part, the point of no return, the void. It was May 21. The end of the world. Soon I would have to push, whether the midwife came or not.

“Breathe,” Anthony reminded me, “breathe.”

We breathed.

Then again, the nausea. The nausea was the worst part. It carried me toward a black hole wherein my mind revolved and collapsed without room for thought. But to be unthinking was strangely freeing. I became sloppy. Loud. My throat was so hoarse from groaning. I used the ragged sound to bring my baby down. I visualized the vibration of my voice pulling him like a string as I steadied myself to push. I tucked my chin to my chest, planted my feet, held on to my knees, lifted my hips, and opened my thighs like a book. I felt the intense pressure of my baby's head nearly rending me apart, the tectonic plates of my pelvis shifting to allow for his passage. I pictured him moving like a train, rounding the curve of carus, sliding through the ring of fire.

“I have to push,” I told Anthony.

“Are you sure?” he asked, but I was already doing it. With each surge, I pushed again.

“Do you see the head yet?” I asked between surges.

“Not yet,” my husband said. He stood on his knees next to the bathtub in a half inch of water that sloshed over onto the tiles, his pants sopping, his face a picture of concentration.

“Is he coming?” I panted.

“I think so,” Anthony said.

“You think so?”

“He's coming,” he said more decisively. “You're doing great.”

I pushed again. I felt I was taking the biggest shit of all time.

“Don't you see the head now?” I begged.

“Not yet,” Anthony apologized.

“You've got to be kidding me,” I shouted.

I pushed again, but really the baby was pushing himself. I hollered to bring him down. I remember the water bag finally bursting right before he crowned, a satisfyingly warm volcanic gush. Later Anthony told me the baby's head behind the bag of waters looked like a dark ostrich egg, the tiny hairs waving like cilia on clay. Clay's head was out, underwater. We didn't yet know he was a he. He turned his head to make way for his shoulders. Then with a roaring terrible cleavage that was the multiplication of my self, I pushed out the rest of him.

Anthony lifted our son out of the bathwater like a trophy. He laughed, a little maniacally, placed him on my chest, and kissed me. The baby bleated like a lamb and opened his dark eyes. I marveled at his head, the way his hair whorled like Van Gogh's starry night. I gave a great sigh of relief and gratitude. He rooted into me, grabbing at my breast as if to make sure I was real. Amazed, Anthony said, “You did it.”

In the days that followed we lost all track of time. What with the sleep deprivation, the isolation, the mess of diapers, piles of dirty laundry and dishes, the bloody nipples, the lapses into panic, the stab of love, the incontinence, the incoherence, the endless nursing and the baby's reversal of night and day, it was hard to say exactly how many days had passed. I couldn't say whether, when we finally ventured out of the apartment with Anthony holding Clay in his arms like a fragile lamp, and me taking tiny mincing geisha steps along 181st Street toward the river for our first walk as a family, only to discover at the lookout point over the Westside Highway that the bridge had collapsed into the water, I was dreaming or not. All I know is that those women were right.

Everything had changed.

But they were also wrong. I didn't recognize my son's face at all when my husband first handed him to me. He looked like a turtle, purplish and gray and totally alien. And I wasn't gobsmacked by love when I first met him. Not instantly. In that moment, still steeping in the water, I was just relieved to be done birthing him. I remember the surprisingly rubbery texture of the umbilical cord and that when the placenta bloomed out of me chased by a silk parachute of blood, it was time to separate him. Anthony clamped the cord close to the baby's belly with one of my barrettes and prepared to cut it. His hand shook with the scissors as if with delirium tremens. Adrenaline and terror mixed. Clay's color was changing like a mood ring from gray to pink. Me, I was riding the good raft of oxytocin, feeling the child squirm against me. Pain was the wrong word. I was just so motherfucking proud.

“Maybe we should wait for the midwife.” Anthony paused.

I knew by then she wasn't coming. “I promise you,” I bluffed, “everything's gonna be alright.”

And then my husband cut the cord.

Aracelis González Asendorf

E
fraín hadn't been out all day. He didn't really need anything from la bodeguita, but the house smelled like dirty, wet socks, and it would for the next couple of hours, until the dust burned off the coils. It happened every year the first time the central heat was turned on for the winter. Now the sour, musty smell combined with Emelina's cigarette smoke, and Efraín had to leave.

“Emelina, I'm driving to la bodeguita,” he said to his wife, who sat in a flannel robe watching television, her once-blue slippers propped on the coffee table. “Did you hear me, Eme?” Emelina didn't look away from the set. She tilted her chin up to exhale, and the details of her face were lost in a haze of gray. He knew he was wasting his words on the woman he'd met smoking behind a stand of palmettos forty-five years ago, but he added, “You shouldn't smoke inside the house. You shouldn't smoke at all.”

Emelina looked at him and blew two perfect smoke rings his way.

Efraín shook his head and shifted his weight from his weak foot to his strong one. Housebound after the roofing accident, he now knew Eme's afternoon routine. This was one of the four Newport cigarettes his wife allowed herself each day. After coming home from St. Anthony's Elementary School, where she worked as a kindergarten aide, she changed out of her work clothes and sat in front of the TV, placing her cigarettes single file, yellow filter tips uniformly aligned, on the coffee table. She smoked two while she watched
Ellen
, and two during that idiot
Dr. Phil
. Then, she showered and made dinner. That's when he would arrive from work before his accident, when Eme had dinner ready. He hadn't known that she even had a routine until three months ago, when he'd fallen and shattered his ankle. He was inspecting work completed by the crew of the small company he owned when the edge of his foot caught an upraised shingle, sending him, shocked and spiraling, down the length of the steep-pitched roof.