Breakable You (30 page)

He opened a bottle of wine. Maud wasn't drinking, but Ralph, during the last year or so, had been in the habit of finishing an entire bottle by himself.

"Any response?" she said. "Aren't you going to tell me I'm being ridiculous?"

"Do you want me to?"

"Only if you really think so."

"On the one hand, I think you probably don't have anything to worry about. The human body usually knows what it's doing. There's probably a built-in mechanism to protect the baby from—"

"Crack-ups. From Mommy's crack-ups."

"Right. So I think it's probably okay. But really, who knows?"

She respected him for not offering false comfort, but at the same time she wished he'd said something that could magically take her worries away. It was hard to stop thinking about how she might be fucking up this child. She had lurid pictures in her mind of what was happening inside her. A tiny helpless thing, a diaphanous floating thumbnail, slowly being sickened by the toxins of its mother's grief.

"Any other ground to cover?" he said. "We've established that life is horrible, and we've established that you may be poisoning your unborn child. Any reflections about the inevitable death of the universe?"

"That's old hat," she said.

She took the dishes away and put them in the dishwasher, and then they watched a movie he'd rented. She barely paid attention to it. It was some Asian mood piece, with two yearning lovers who never quite touched. She didn't much care for Ralph's taste in movies, but it was nice just to be here.

At the end of the night he was slowed down by tiredness and wine, but he suddenly perked up.

"I forgot about the taste test."

Taste tests were an old tradition with them, dating back to college, when they'd read an article that said that all brands of vodka tasted alike and had spent four hours in a bar assessing this claim. Their taste tests were milder now.

"I got two kinds of crackers from a health-food store. They're like Ritz crackers, but with no trans fats. Could you help me out of this thing?"

She could have gotten the crackers herself, but for some reason he wanted to get them, and she didn't question it. Neither did she question why he wanted to walk to the kitchen instead of using his wheelchair.

She stood next to his chair. He gripped her forearm with his left hand and lifted himself up.

"If you can just…" he said. He shifted his position so that one arm was draped over her shoulder, and they walked toward the kitchen.

She was taller than he was, and she'd probably always outweighed him; now she must have outweighed him by twenty pounds.

When you saw him in his wheelchair, you could forget how thin he was, how frail. But now, when she was pretty much carrying him across the room—carrying him in a way that maintained the fiction that he was actually walking and she was merely helping him out—his lightness and fragility were shocking. He was sweating: the smell was heavy and not pleasant, and it made her realize how much effort it required for him to move in his normal limited way—sitting in his wheelchair, opening the wine at dinner, tending the fire. The smell somehow jarred her into the realization that he was not an angel, wispy and insubstantial because he was a creature formed entirely of the materials of spirit, but a man who was struggling, a man who was being defeated, a man whose body had gone wrong. He stank, really. Poor Ralph stank.

It would have been easier on both of them if she'd gotten the crackers out herself, but if what dignity meant to him, in that moment, was making his way across the room without a wheelchair so he could get two boxes of crackers for a taste test, then she was going to help him do it, even if she had to carry him there.

They performed the taste test, and they agreed about which of the two crackers was better. She drank more soda and he drank more wine. They were both silent for a long time. He dozed off in his chair for a moment, and she watched him sleep. Or she might have just dreamed this, because she dozed off for a moment herself.

She'd stayed too long. He looked fatigued. Next time she would be more considerate, more observant.

She got up and fetched her coat from the closet. Ralph wheeled himself into the hall.

If she hadn't been so tired she just would have said goodbye. But as she looked at him wheeling his way ahead of her, the thought that he, like anyone else, could be gone before morning, made her frightened.

"If you die too," she said, "I'm finished."

"You won't be finished," he said. "I have faith in you. But I'll try to hang around as long as I can."

And then after the sonograms and the amnio and the buying . of a contraption to listen to the sounds the child was making in the womb, and after the childbirth classes she attended alone (because it would have been somehow humiliating to attend them with her mother and logistically difficult and anyhow wrong-seeming to attend them with Ralph, and because Celia was starting to annoy her and—well, it was just easier to do it alone), and after the visits to the doctor and the visits to the midwife and the visits to the doula, and the decision that even though she could probably use a doula, the word
doula
was just too stupid for her to want to have one of them in her life, and after the attempts to plan her life post-baby, even though it felt like planning someone else's life, and after the emergence of pains in her back and pains in her hips and pains in her legs, pains that reinforced her belief in the rock-bottom
unnaturalness
of this, the unnaturalness of being the host within which another being took form (though multitudes of people believed that pregnancy was the most glorious experience a human being could have, to Maud the hosting of another being within your body seemed like something that happened in science-fiction movies, not something that happened in life), and after the growth of a mental muzziness that she attributed to the growth of the fetus, as if the thing inside her, gathering up its vital forces, were draining hers, and after weeks of false and teasing contractions—after all this, on a cool gray day in October, her contractions assumed a different quality, and she took a taxi to the hospital and called her mother, who met her there, and after six hours of more pain than she would have imagined the world itself could bear, six hours of weeping and shouting and trying to follow the directions given in an infuriatingly patient voice by the midwife, directions that made no sense to her (the midwife kept telling her not to push when her entire being was shrieking at her with the primal need to
push this thing out)
, her child was finally born, her child, the child of the love that she and Samir had shared, and her mother told her that she had a beautiful new boy, and someone picked the child up and put him on Maud's breast, and the child yowled, and it was hard to see him clearly when he was so close to her and she was still in such pain, but from what she could see he was patchy and slimy, a slimy purple bag of lips and limbs, and although she couldn't see him clearly, in his nearness she had a strong sense of him, and what she sensed was that he was a creature with a frighteningly developed
will
—she wouldn't have been too surprised if he had leaped off the bed and slithered quickly out of the room—and he lay on her breast, howling, and the midwife moved him closer to the nipple, but he didn't take it; poor creature, he didn't know what to do.

She named him David. Although Islamic tradition had meant little to Samir and Jewish tradition probably meant even less to her, she liked the idea that their son would have a name that had meaning in both. If he wanted to call himself Daoud when he grew up, that would be fine with her.

Maud and David stayed with Eleanor for a week after they left the hospital. Eleanor wanted them to stay longer, and Maud was tempted, but after a few days she found it hard to breathe. Her mother was constantly on top of her, constantly asking faux-subtle questions designed to find out how Maud "really" was. The unexamined life, as Socrates said, is not worth living, but the life in which your mother is examining you every minute of the day is hardly life at all.

She'd always heard that it wasn't hard in the beginning. In the beginning, everyone said, they just sleep. But he didn't just sleep. He slept and he screamed. He slept and he shat. He slept and he screamed and he shat. He slept and he screamed and he shat and he screamed and he shat and he screamed and he screamed and he shat and he slept and he screamed and he shat and he shat and he shat and he shat. In the beginning, she'd heard, your life doesn't have to change much: you mostly just do your thing while the baby sleeps. She was so sleep-starved that she could barely remember if she
had
a thing to do.

She spent half her time worrying that she was going to damage him and half her time worrying that she already had. Twice she forgot to support his head when she picked him up and it flopped backward as if it had been lopped off. At night she slept with him in her bed, and she kept worrying that she'd crushed one of his fontanels with her elbow one morning when she was half awake—she kept checking the soft squishy center of his head for the imprint of her elbow. If she'd crushed one of his fontanels, she kept thinking, she might have caused him irreversible brain damage.

It was terrifying to think that he had a soft skull, vulnerable to the slightest pressure. And in the same way that it's impossible to walk across a bridge without imagining yourself jumping, she kept imagining herself pushing her fingers deep into his soft, gooey skull.

She kept worrying that his head was lopsided. She was sure it was her fault. She had read that a certain degree of lopsidedness was normal in newborns, but that the condition could get worse if the baby spent too much time in one position. She was always worrying that she wasn't paying enough attention to the position of his head, and that the claylike bones of his skull were being pressed into the wrong shape.

A week after he was born she'd bundled him up and taken him on the bus, and a woman in her eighties had scolded her for letting the flap of his little hat fall over one of his eyes. "Don't you know anything about child development?" the woman had said. "He has to learn how to use his eyes." Maud had fixed his hat and gotten off at the next stop, though she was a mile from her destination. She waited at the bus stop and took the next bus.

But she could keep it together. She could do this.

Life can be dealt with if you just resolve to keep it together. You keep it together by breaking things apart. Complicated problems can be reduced to simple component parts, and then you can deal with anything.

In the morning you feed the baby, then you change the baby, then you change the baby again, then you feed the baby, then you change the baby again. Then you go for a walk. Then you feed the baby. Then you change the baby. Then you remember you haven't eaten yet and you make breakfast for yourself while you hold the baby in one arm.

Make things simple. This, Maud thought, was how you avoid a nervous breakdown.

In addition to her two breakdowns, Maud had had two near breakdowns. During the near breakdowns, she had warded off the worst by simplifying life, just as she was simplifying it now. That was how she had kept it together.

But the problem was this: during the two episodes in which she had
not
been able to avoid the snake pit, she had tried to protect herself the exact same way. It had worked for a while, but she hadn't been able to stop it from going too far. Soon she had found herself concentrating on each individual step as she walked to work, and trying to brush her teeth one by one, and then she had found herself concentrating on each individual breath, as if her body would stop breathing if she didn't remind it, and shortly after that she had found herself in the psychiatric unit, engaged in a humiliating form of art therapy, concentrating on each individual crayon.

Sometimes she felt nostalgic for her old breakdowns. In memory, her old breakdowns seemed like vacations. Because she'd had no one else to care for, she'd been able to surrender to them completely. But now there was this new person, dear, doomed David, and she had to stay strong for him.

During her pregnancy she could stay home and try to lose herself in the fantasy that she was still with Samir, that he was invisibly beside her. That fantasy was gone. David was physically tiny but massive, roaring, and totalitarian in his needs. He left no space for fantasy. He left no room for philosophy. He seemed to occupy her entire apartment. There was no room for any competition. There was barely room for her.

He was still having trouble nursing. He would grope with his lips for the nipple but no sooner would she maneuver it into his mouth than he would lose it and start wailing again. Her pediatrician told her that this wasn't unusual, but Maud took it as an indictment of both of them. A bewildered mother had given birth to a bewildered child.

George and Celia came to visit. Maud met them at a restaurant, because she didn't want them to see her apartment, which was becoming more disheveled every day. Sometimes her own apartment struck her as a cry for help.

"No Zoe?" Maud said. Zoe was their daughter—the child whose crib Samir had been building when Maud met him.

"We shipped her off to my mom's for the night," Celia said. "We need some alone time."

Maud had brought David. She was wearing a carrier. He was sleeping, and she held his head up with her left hand while she ate. Don't let it flop.

Maud hadn't been in touch with George and Celia for months. They had undergone an alarming transformation. They'd recently been through the Forum, a self-help course that had left them with an unquenchable optimism, a new vocabulary, and a strange desire to proselytize their friends.

"Do you find that you're
always already listening
?" Celia said.

Maud didn't know what that meant. Celia seemed to be speaking in code.

Evidently Celia took Maud's silence as assent.

"You could get rid of that," Celia said. "You could really become unstoppable."