As Good as Dead (8 page)

Will returned from the pharmacy very quickly. I remember, as I’d watched him lope back across the parking lot with the crisp white prescription bags in his hand, I had a sick feeling that he would pretend not to see me looking out at him through my rolled-down window. I lowered my gaze, not wanting to be disappointed, and I noticed, then, how his pants—cheap gray work pants that he ordered from a uniform supply place; his old and slightly eccentric badge of solidarity with workers of the world—always showed their first sign of wear around his front right pocket, where he kept his keys. Then I lifted my eyes and I saw him smile at me as he passed in front of the car. A forced smile. Twitchy at the edges. Still, a smile. Over the years, I had told him, periodically, that I needed for him to smile at me more often, so I appreciated his effort; also the way, after we arrived at the house that day, he settled me in a chair at the kitchen table and put my feet on an upturned laundry basket.

“So I can be with my girl while I make her a cup of tea,” he said.

Three months later, right after we learned that my tenure bid had succeeded, I bought two pregnancy tests at the Safeway grocery near our house. I had intended to take the tests home, but even before the clerk—with a wink!—gave me the sales tape, I knew that I couldn’t bear the wait, and I headed straight to the store’s fluorescent-lit women’s room and locked myself into a beige stall.

Positive, according to “the urine stream.” I tore open the second test. Positive again.

I ran to the car. I was so wound up, so eager to get home and tell Will, that when I went to pull out of the Safeway parking lot and onto Broadway, to my shame and horror, I came within inches of hitting a teenage boy on a bicycle.
Where had he even come from?
I had not seen him until he was right in front of me, his face beneath his baseball cap pale with fury and fear as he swerved out of the way of my screeching, braking car! “Sorry! Sorry!” I called. I rolled down my window so that he’d hear. “So sorry!”

A warning:
You slow down, Charlotte! You take care, lucky girl!
That dear, angry boy. I might have had a child about his age. A boy whose voice was starting to break.

Will already was at the house when I arrived, and, after I told him the result of the pregnancy tests, we had a tomato juice toast with the pair of champagne flutes that someone had given us for a wedding gift. After the toast, we stood in the kitchen, holding each other. I stroked my hands down the back of Will’s starched and ironed white shirt. The cloth seemed like the ideal expression of smooth and cool. I felt blissfully happy.

“Remember, though, Charlotte”—he set his hands on my shoulders and stepped away from me and fixed his eyes on mine—“
you’re
the most important thing in the world to me. I don’t know what I’d do if anything happened to
you
.”

I smiled and nodded. Will, I was sure, would be fine if anything ever happened to me, but I appreciated his saying otherwise.

That spring—such a contented, joyful time—I was not only pregnant but in the glory days of starting a new book of my own and helping a talented graduate student with her thesis manuscript. I did not mind the morning sickness. How could I, given what it meant? At nine weeks, I went in for a sonogram and saw the tiny cloud of tissue that the tech assured me was the baby. I heard its heartbeat, and, all day long, after my appointment, I called up that sweet sound. Then, two weeks later, during the graduate workshop, I started having cramps. The cramps were bad enough that I broke out in a sweat. I stopped in the middle of what I was saying—something about double-voicing in the work of Henry James—and apologized. “I’m sorry, I seem to be sick,” I said and headed out into the hall.

The young woman whose thesis I’d been working on came after me and said that she could drive me home. I didn’t argue. By the time we got to her car, I was experiencing an urge to push. I did not know that this could happen to a person undergoing a miscarriage but felt certain that pushing could not be right. While the student drove, I telephoned the doctor’s office, which advised me to head to the emergency room at the university hospital, so we turned around.

A few hours and quite a few tests later—Will was with me by then—the doctors confirmed that I had miscarried.

No one ever had talked to me about what it was like to have a miscarriage. I was heart-broken, of course, but also unnerved at how long the bleeding continued. For days, I expelled pieces of bloody tissue—a couple as large as a deck of cards. I’d had no idea.

At the follow-up exam, my curly-haired doctor said, “Not to get discouraged!”

Will and I waited two months. Again, I quickly became pregnant. This time, when I went in for the sonogram, I made sure that Will came along (he was absorbed in studying the influence of Marinetti on contemporary Language, and I felt the baby remained a little too hypothetical to him). He stroked my forehead while the quick
lub-dub
of the baby’s heartbeat filled the room, and we watched the monitor’s little gray-and-white ghost that was not a ghost. “Spooky,” Will said, sounding to my ears appropriately enthralled.

During the eleventh week—morning, Will and I both at home, working—I started to bleed.

The third and final miscarriage happened in the middle of the night. My doctor was at the hospital, but in delivery. She did reach us as we were at the discharge desk. When we finished up, she steered us into a nearby alcove, settled us on a bench. Somberly, she explained that she had studied my records. The placentas, she said, were not attaching to the uterine wall. “I have to tell you: When this problem shows up, it signals the possibility that the placenta could grow
into
the wall of the uterus or even attach to another organ. Either can be very serious.”

Will stood. “That’s enough, then,” he said. His eyes were big and switched rapidly between the doctor and me several times. “That’s enough,” he repeated as, a short time later, his hand under my elbow, we made our way to one of that ever-expanding hospital’s temporary gravel parking lots. “We’re fine, just the two of us.” The cloudiness in his voice was something I’d heard maybe twice in all our years together. “More than fine! I don’t want you going through anything more, Charlotte!”

With Will sorry for me over something that was undoubtedly my fault, I felt too guilty to bring up adoption again, but the whole rotten mess sent me downhill. I couldn’t write. Stayed in my bathrobe a lot. Contemplated going on antidepressants.

Maybe therapy?

Then, a morning arrived when I thought,
Man up!
I didn’t even bother checking the time on my watch. I got right in my car and drove straight to a very funky place called the Alano Club, which I knew held AA meetings, off and on, all day and into the night. During our early days in Tucson, after years of not drinking, I’d nervously attended conference where a tray filled with glasses of bubbling champagne floated toward me and assured me that I was not a
true
alcoholic, and, naturally, I wound up plastered, hiding out in a hotel storage room filled with folding chairs. To get back on track, I’d started to attend AA again, often at the Alano Club. The Alano Club’s main building was a homely, stuccoed thing the color of an Ace bandage. It housed a big, high-ceilinged, no-nonsense meeting room, plus a low-ceilinged, boggy lounge where you could buy something to eat (coffee, soda, cellophane-wrapped muffins) and mostly men sat around watching TV or playing cards and pinging video games. The twelve o’clock meeting that I’d attended, though, took place in a tiny brick annex at the south end of the parking lot, and, the morning of my post-miscarriages despair, I headed back there.

The meeting had begun by the time I arrived, but one of the great things about AA was, even if you felt awkward doing so, you could enter a meeting late (yes, some individual member might look askance at you, but the program was based on principles and the principles welcomed you, no matter what).

All of the places at the big central table were taken that morning, so I wangled a molded plastic lawn chair from a stack by the door and joined the people who sat around the rim of the room. I recognized a few faces—the most important one being that of ivory-skinned, gray-haired Jacqueline C. In her matching pastel knit tops and pants and the bouffant hairdo of her teenage years in the 1960s, the stoutly pretty Jacqueline did not look like a sage, but she knew things (she had stayed sober even during the death of her son to a drunk driver some twenty years before). “Put on protective armor before you talk to your parents,” she’d told me back when I was a regular, and she had modeled the way by lifting an invisible helmet onto her head with her surprisingly slim and elegant fingers (their nails always polished in pearly pinks). Conversely, after a student had threatened to “punch out my lights” because I had given him a D, she’d advised, “What you do is, whenever he pops into your mind, you focus a beam of love at the center of his forehead. Just do that, Charlotte. You’ll see. It will help.”

It had helped. Everything she taught me helped. At one point, I’d almost asked Jacqueline to be my “sponsor,” but then I’d gotten insanely caught up in the pressures of academia. Such was the atmosphere of the university that I’d started to feel—embarrassing to think of this now—as if the world would end should I, after so much work, fail to win my tenure bid. About the same time—as had happened in the past—I’d also grown peevish at the AA meetings. Gritted my teeth if, say, a strapping young man, hair still damp from the shower, shared his joyful story of how, in crowded downtown Phoenix, God had kept a parking space open directly in front of the office building where said strapping young man was scheduled for a job interview. With all that I needed to accomplish, did I have time to listen to such nonsense? No, I did not!

I’d stopped attending meetings. Stopped calling Jacqueline C.

Who now raised her hand and said—her childhood in rural Ohio gave her voice a distinctive mix of gravel and twang—“I’m an alcoholic and my name’s Jacqueline, and I want to share a pet theory of mine. Those of you who’ve heard this from me before—I won’t take offense if you step outside while I talk.” She smiled her sweet, pretty-grandma smile around the room, and, here and there, people laughed. “So, my theory is we alcoholics get civilized here, at meetings. Most of us need civilizing. Maybe our parents”—she wagged her manicured fingers in the air—“through no fault of their own, mind you, they couldn’t give us the attention or upbringing we needed. Whatever the reason, we didn’t learn how to have healthy relations with other people, which I’ve come to feel, after sitting in these rooms a whole lot of years, is what most of our problems boil down to. Trouble with other people. The good news is, though, we can change all that by coming here! We learn we’re always welcome here, no matter who we are or what we’ve done, and if we keep coming back on a regular basis, we can learn patience and tolerance and to love ourselves and others. We get civilized and that changes everything.”

Was that for me? No, it was egotistical to think so. I didn’t know if she even had seen me. It was true, though, that much of what I knew about “healthy relations,” putting aside envy and resentments and having some integrity, I’d learned at AA. And that I probably would have been known more if I hadn’t stopped attending.

Before the meeting’s closing prayer—I was okay with reciting the Serenity Prayer, which did not promote the belief that everything happened according to God’s plan—the people who had been seated around the central table stood, and they stepped back to enlarge the circle to include those of us who’d sat against the walls. I joined hands with the people on either side of me, but then man on my right released my hand, and I felt someone slip between us.

Jacqueline C.

After the prayer ended, the two of us hugged. I apologized for disappearing and asked if I could buy her a cup of coffee. “Sure, honey, sure!” she said.

As I’d shared my personal inventory with Jacqueline, she knew more about my history than anyone in the world, really. After we carried Styrofoam cups of the clubhouse’s pretty bad coffee to a table in the corner of the lounge, I reviewed the more dramatic highlights (every now and then, she interjected with a soothing, “Oh, you’d be surprised how often I’ve had people tell me that, honey!”). Then I brought her up to speed (Martie’s death, the miscarriages, and my sense that I couldn’t push Will on adoption).

“This has been a sad time for you, honey,” she said when I’d finished, “but you’re rich in so many ways! Do you think you could get in touch with some of that? Try remembering you’re worthy of happiness and love, Charlotte! And, even though your husband is a saint”—she winked at me; she had a good wink—“could you work on not thinking of him as your HP?”

I laughed.
HP
stood for
Higher Power
in AA lingo, an out for those of us who got itchy at the more conventional talk of God.

“How about—if you don’t feel comfortable asking Will to think about adoption yet—how about inviting him to work with you on some little thing? That’s always good for Billy and me. You two cooperating on a project instead of your separate jobs? It wouldn’t have to be anything ambitious! Don’t even think ambitious! Think—maybe something from a list of chores you’ve put off.”

We had such a list. It was long and included items like
gutters
,
lights for ramada
,
reset bricks along front walk
. At the very top of the list, however, was an item that had been there ever since we had moved to Tucson:
boxes.
We needed to go through the bowed, dust-covered cardboard boxes that had passed a sealed-up life in the crawl space of our Minneapolis duplex even before we had hauled them to Tucson and the brick shed in our backyard.