An exact replica of a figment of my imagination: a memoir (10 page)

And then I had an appointment with Dr. Knoeller.

Almost immediately Edward and I took to calling Dr. Knoeller “Bones,” because she was a doctor (short for Sawbones, like the doctor on
Star Trek
) and because she was extraordinarily thin, but mostly, I think, because we instantly worshipped the ground she walked on and it helped us to be irreverent about one small thing. The appointment was our last checkup of my first trimester, and she looked at the chart.

“Is this your first child?”

“I had a stillbirth last year,” I said.

“I’m so sorry,” she said immediately, words I’ve never tired of hearing. We went over the details a little, and then she said, “You’ve scheduled an amnio.”

“Yes,” I said. In France the blond Baltimorean asked us if we were worriers; when we said yes, she made an appointment for an amniocentesis. Even so, I’d been startled when I spoke to the French genetic counselor, who was heavily pregnant herself, and she informed me that if the results came back positive for Down syndrome, they “recommended” that we terminate the pregnancy. Edward and I hadn’t discussed what we’d do if it turned out that Pudding had Down syndrome, because we agreed that all the theorizing in the world would probably crumble to dust in the face of a fact.

But this time it was different. We simply wanted to know. It would only be information.

“I mean,” I said to Dr. Knoeller, “we figured we might as well. I guess. I don’t know. What do you think?”

Well, she said, the real question was, if we had an amnio, and the results were normal, but it was one of the one in two hundred pregnancies that miscarried after the procedure, how would we feel?

We were stunned into silence, because of course that was the question. Even if you rephrased it — as Edward pointed out, one in two hundred sounds worse than one half of one percent because with the former you visualize actual people — we weren’t willing to risk it. Once you’ve been on the losing side of great odds, you never find statistics comforting again.

She said in a manner both businesslike and warm, “Let me just say that I had an amnio myself, but I didn’t have your history.”

And just like that, our history was in the room, and I had found a doctor I loved.

Another woman might want a doctor who promised things: an optimist, a dreamer. Not me. I wanted exact realism and no promises. On one visit a nurse spoke of the kid as though he or she was a foregone conclusion, and I hated it, I wanted to correct her, I wanted to point out that I’d thought that once, and look what happened.

“Well, very good,” Dr. Knoeller said at the end of every visit. “So far, so good. Let’s hope it continues that way.”

And then I was twenty-eight weeks pregnant, and when Dr. Knoeller walked into the room, I swore you could see Walt Disney bluebirds toying with her stethoscope and bunnies congregating around her heels.

“Twenty-eight weeks!” she said. “Now we can relax.”

F
or my first pregnancy I couldn’t imagine not finding out the baby’s gender. I’d asked Lib why she’d allowed her two daughters to keep their mystery in utero, and she said, “I didn’t want to project who I thought they’d be. I wanted them to be themselves.”

This is exactly the kind of thoughtful and maternal answer I’d expected from Lib. Me, I
wanted
to project. I was impatient to make up stories about whoever Pudding was, kicking about in my midsection, but how could I without that essential piece of information? For our second child we decided to do everything differently — no amnio, no peeking during ultrasounds. Now and then I wondered whether that was wise: should something happen (it won’t!), should the worst happen (it’s not impossible!), wouldn’t we rather know? It’s terrible to miss Pudding, of course, no matter what, but — this is a total illusion, I understand, nothing but the sentimentality of expectant parents spinning fairy tales ahead of time, viewed in the rearview mirror — it feels like we
knew
him. I can’t wrap my brain around losing a child and learning only then whether you’d lost a son or a daughter. Not finding out felt like an odd form of optimism.

By the end of my first pregnancy I’d felt very tender toward Pudding — to my made-up companionable Pudding, an infant who would of course love us the minute he saw us, who loved us already, who contained within him not only infancy but babyhood and toddlerhood, who already listened to our voices, who was impatient to meet us (so why was he taking his time?). I stroked my stomach and told him stories; when he kicked, I poked him back. We went to the pool together, me swimming in the chlorinated municipal water of Bergerac, he swimming inside me, both incredulous at how the French could gossip while doing the backstroke. We went to the gym together, where the French not only gossiped and kissed each other in the squat rack, but tucked their shirts into their exercise pants. I ate so that he could eat: I announced what was on the menu.

You don’t need much to hang a personality on someone you haven’t met: a name, some knowledge of the parents, a gender. You can spin anything you want out of those things.

But it wasn’t all so easy. Every now and then, like any pregnant woman, I would panic.
When did I last feel this baby move?
Then I would lie on the sofa, and put my hands on my stomach, and wait to feel a kick, and then another. Both Dr. Baltimore and Dr. Bergerac had sonograms in their offices, and so for the first six months we saw Pudding on the Big Screen every month. Yes, I did worry, sometimes.

But mostly I didn’t.

This is one of the most painful things for me to remember. I was smug. I felt sorry for women with complicated pregnancies and gloated that I wasn’t one of them. I believed that the pregnancy would continue to be a delight. I imagined that traveling with him afterward, at four weeks old, to England and then to America, would be only an adventure, a story I would tell him for the rest of his life.

I believed he was perfect.

I don’t know whether my faith is explained by hormones or misplaced trust in medical science. I just believed he was perfect. I believed I understood him.

Of course that wasn’t true of my second pregnancy, when I was certain every other moment that something was going terribly wrong. I was neurotic about food; I washed my hands like an insane person. Among my many worries was that I would feel unconnected to this second occupant and that this indifference would travel through the placenta and warp the developing psyche. But I turned out to feel another sort of closeness. Pregnant with Pudding, I often didn’t even realize how big I’d gotten; we communicated via dream telegraph. During my second pregnancy, I was by necessity obsessed with the physical, and this baby — who was in there, anyhow? — was a great in utero kicker and squirmer. Once the kid was big enough for me to feel, I would think once a day, panicked,
When’s the last time I felt the baby move?
And then I’d palm my stomach. Thump, thump, thump. What a good baby, what a wonderful obliging baby, was there something
wrong
with that baby, to make it shift so? Was that a kick or a shudder or head banging? You couldn’t deny it: there was a baby in there. Even so, I sometimes wondered whether I was making it up.

“Shh,” I’d say to my stomach, “you’re all right,” and to Edward, “Who’s in there, do you think? It could be
anyone
.”

“Not
anyone,
” he’d say, looking a little troubled.

I taught my classes and grew subtly stouter but said nothing. It seemed as though something terrible would happen if people knew. By which I mean: not that we would be tempting fate, but that I would have to acknowledge that the pregnancy was real, and if I did that, I was sure, I would take to my bed until spring. I told a handful of friends in October, and a handful of relatives at Thanksgiving.

Lib insisted I was having a girl. Edward, who had correctly and with great certainty predicted Pudding’s gender, agreed. I had no idea. When I was four months in, Ann declared, no room for argument, that I was pregnant with a boy, and listen: her husband’s daughter was pregnant, too, and Ann had said Josephine was going to have a boy, and the first ultrasound had the temerity to disagree with Ann’s prediction, but Ann wouldn’t budge, and then the second ultrasound said, All right, yes, a boy.

This perturbed Edward. “I thought I knew,” he said. “Why’d Ann have to say that?”

At the hardware store a woman behind the counter said, “So do you know for sure you’re having a boy?” but a pedicurist the same day shook her head and said, Girl, and wasn’t a pedicurist almost a medical professional? It amused me to spend so much time pondering a question that could be at any time answered with reasonable certainty. By the last month of pregnancy I had my amniotic fluid checked by ultrasound twice weekly, not to mention plenty of other diagnostic tools. But I never bent.

Maybe I had just acquired new superstitions, and given them disguises.

W
e’d planned for Pudding in stories, plane tickets to see family, and tiny French outfits. Then I was pregnant again and we counted on nothing, and so we prepared for the future by taking classes. We signed up for four:

1. A four-week childbirth class through my ob-gyn practice, taught by one of my favorite people there, the nurse coordinator. Of course I already knew what to expect of such a class. I watched TV, didn’t I? We’d sit on the floor in the bobsled position, surrounded by other couples, and Edward would be told to tell me to breathe.

We never left our chairs, and in fact we knew most of what was taught, having been through childbirth before. I wanted to raise my hand and interrupt the lovely nurse every other sentence to say: “You mean
if,
not when.”

2. An infant car seat installation class. We were the only ones who showed up. The instructor was a thin blond woman, I think in her late forties, who had four sons, aged four, seven, seventeen, and twenty-five. I was dying to know her story, but I didn’t ask. Her teaching style appealed to us, because like auto safety professionals everywhere her message was: YOU COULD EASILY GET DECAPITATED OR DECAPITATE SOMEONE ELSE! But! DECAPITATION IS EASY TO PREVENT IF YOU AREN’T DUMB AND CARELESS LIKE THE REST OF THE WORLD. The worst could happen, here’s how to minimize it. That’s what we wanted.

We started the class with a short test, which included the question “What is an accident?”

The answer she was looking for: an accident is force times mass. That is, she wanted to impress upon us that in an accident, loose objects in the car — water bottles, spare change, and so forth — could become imbedded in, or pass through, your child. Everything should be locked in the trunk, though purses were fine as long as they were zipped shut and seat-belted in.

We’d already had our seat installed at the local firehouse by two policemen who’d struggled with the job. One had the sort of authoritative, well-tended mustache that only police or firemen can carry off; the other was tall and curly-haired. Together they crawled into the backseat of our car and frowned. “This is a hard car,” one had said, and I theorized that the Cadillac Catera — my parents had given it to us when they’d bought a new Subaru — had not been designed for the childbearing demographic. The policemen pushed and pulled and used a wedge of foam noodles duct-taped together, and then, as they showed us how to buckle a baby doll into the removable seat, told us not to move the base if we could avoid it. We told them we were taking a class in a few days, but we wouldn’t let the teacher move it. “You’re taking a class with Cindy?” one of the policemen said. He looked frankly a little frightened.

Cindy, it turned out, had taught the policemen how to install seats, and she was skeptical about the foam noodles. “Right,” she said. “Let’s see what one woman can accomplish compared to two men.” In three minutes she’d reinstalled the seat without the noodles, and then she taught Edward.

“Can I keep this?” she asked, slapping her palm with the noodle wedge like an old-fashioned movie policeman with his nightstick. “I’m going to see those guys next week at a safety event, and I’d like to give them this as a present.”

3. An infant care class at the local hospital. In truth, neither Edward nor I knew anything about babies. Surely most of it was on-the-job training, but some advice on, say, diaper changing and bathing would help. For the first three hours of this session, the labor and delivery nurse who taught it explained the various things that could make your newborn baby look unsightly — stork bites; tarry black stool; rashes of all kinds; thick, greasy, channel-swimming fat; back hair; lumps from vacuum deliveries; dents from forceps deliveries.

Then we got on the issue of circumcision.

Perhaps the only real conversation Edward and I have ever had on the subject of religion came after our wedding. We’d been married with dueling officiants, now the village priest and his sonorous voice and official vows, now the American rabbi and the smashed glass and cries of mazel tov. I had been late to the service. To fill time, the church organist played first “If I Were a Rich Man” and then “Jesus Christ Superstar.” In other words, it had taken some work to appeal to both of our families.

“My mother says the next thing to worry about is christenings and circumcisions,” I said to him.

“No to both,” he said, and we solemnly shook hands on it.

So I didn’t say anything at all about it when the topic came up: we knew what we’d do. The nurse, who’d already distinguished herself by saying that the administration of eye salve was mandated in “all forty-eight states,” was clearly completely and totally against circumcision but knew that she couldn’t say so. Well, not in so many words. “The United States,” she said, “is the only so-called civilized country that regularly circumcises. So think about that.”

“It seems,” said one thoughtful young husband, “like a lot of people say that you should circumcise a boy so he’ll look like his father.”

“Yes!” said the nurse. “And you know what? How many men are homophobic? Let’s face it: all of them! So what are the chances you’ll be hanging around naked with your kid anyhow?”