Fury (33 page)

“Show us your belly,” my mother says. “Let's see what you've got.”

Reluctantly, I lift my shirt over my navel.

“Pssh, you've got nothing,” my mother says.

“Nothing,” mimics my sister, who is home with Riley for the summer while her husband is on another tour of Iraq.

I let my blouse fall in mild defeat.

In a far-off recess of my mind, I'm still preoccupied with what I saw at the rest stop. I'm not worried, not yet—I'd read in
What to Expect When You're Expecting
that spotting occurs in a quarter of all pregnancies—but I do make it a point to pour myself a big tumbler of water and climb the stairs to my childhood bedroom with the intention of putting my feet up.

I stretch out in bed with my feet on a pillow, trying to corral my brain into some peaceful pasture. I can't get there. I am still annoyed by the length of the ride, which had been made longer by the fact that my father had stopped off at the supermarket and a liquor store.

It's after 9:00. I ache to put on my pajamas and go to sleep at a geriatric hour, but there's still a late dinner to be had. From the sound of it, my dad is already halfway through a bottle of wine while he sautés something that hisses back from the stove. I can hear him shout something to someone who is too far from him to hear.

I get up and close my bedroom door. Every sensation is raising my hackles.
What's wrong with me? Why does the old quilt on my bed feel so oppressive? Why do the familiar smells (potpourri, Dove soap, wet fur) burn in my nostrils? How can I possibly be enraged by little more than the sound of my parents' dogs barking?

Later, at least two different voices screech “Koren! Dinner!” (To which I respond, “Yes! I hear you!
I'm coming!
Sweet Jesus, stop yelling!”)

At the dinner table, serving dishes pass from hand to hand. There's bok choy, mashed potatoes made fancy with wasabi paste, and salmon (ditto with a miso glaze; in his forced retirement Dad's gotten into fusion cooking).

The latter is on special request from my sister. Prior to her pregnancy, she'd claimed, “If it's fish it's not my dish,” but after giving birth to Riley she's been craving it morning, noon, and night.

I can tell that my sister and I make our parents feel uneasy, a consequence that pregnant women and new mothers will inflict on their loved ones. My parents are beginning to see us as strangers who act in atypical ways. We wear third-finger rings, eat oddities, trade off being sentimental and hormonal, litter our childhood bathroom with prenatal vitamins, and use phrases like “lactation expert.” Overnight we've become unpredictable to the people who share our DNA. My father, in particular, doesn't seem to recognize us. I watch him spoon a pink portion onto my plate, saying, “You're eating meat and your sister is begging for seafood. This family's lost all sense of order.”

“I don't think Dad's very pleased I'm pregnant,” I tell my sister later that night. “It's nothing he says, exactly. I could just feel it all day in the way he looked at me.”

My whole body aches from the move's strenuosities. Bed is beckoning. But my sister's been home for a bleak week already and is subsequently yearning for girl talk, so I recline on my bedroom carpet and shimmy my pounding feet up a wall, while we chatter on into the early morning.

My relationship with my sister has improved in recent months. Alice has helped me see that I've often treated my sister the way the hurt kid in me felt my mother had treated me. I can now see that there'd been times when I'd closed my ears to her feelings or, worse, reacted to them with shock and indignation, panic and aversion. Without even realizing it, I'd expected her to react to the world in the same ways that I did. Instead of accepting her as she was, I'd seen her as an extension of myself (the same way I'd felt my mother had always seen me). I'd inadvertently made her feel that she had to be exactly like me in order for us to feel close. This weakness was like a blind spot; simply knowing it was there seemed to reduce my chance of another major collision.

By the time I arrive at my parents' house, my sister and I have become as close as girlfriends. It is rare that we go a single day without speaking by phone, and we can fill hours with our talk about new loves, old grudges (save whatever ones we might have had for our parents or each other), dreams, desires, insecurities, ideologies, and our widely spaced childhoods.

“It's not that Dad's not happy you're pregnant,” my sister says. “I just think he forgets. He didn't see me for the first time until I was six months' knocked-up. I was so big then that it couldn't slip his mind.”

She's lolling on my bed in the prone position, flipping through a pile of pregnancy books. “Ooh,” she coos. “I forgot to ask you, is your sense of smell, like,
crazy
? When I was pregnant, I couldn't stand the smell of dishwashing liquid, or raw onion, or fabric softener sheets. How big are your boobs? I swear I was already up a cup size when I was as pregnant as you are now. Look, it says here that your baby's essential body parts are accounted for by now. His eyes are fully formed. He has tiny earlobes. He weighs just a fraction of an ounce.”

As my sister reads aloud, I'm aware of a sharp, quick pang in the northwestern hemisphere of my uterus, somewhere around Mongolia. I don't know whether it's denial or exhaustion that makes me disregard the feeling at the time. My sister has moved on to her old maternity folders and pregnancy journals. She's shuffling papers, looking for a better food-safety list than the one I'd received from my doctor.

The day has been difficult, and my sister is talking old wives' tales around the time I nod off. How's my skin? she asks me. Pimples mean I'm having a girl. Excessive leg hair is a sign it's a boy. Sleep pulls me under with the force of a riptide, and I don't even hear her kill my bedside light.

The next morning is the day before my mother's birthday, and my sister and I set out on a desperate hunt for a last-minute gift.

I watch my sandy-haired sibling push a cart at an obliviously slow speed down the aisles of a bargain basement store, stopping every few feet to scrutinize a porcelain vase or a sequined photo frame. It's in moments like these when I love her without restraint. She's twenty-three and becomes self-possessed only when she feels alone and unwatched by anyone in our family.

Riley is riding high, her car seat fastened to the cart's child-size basket. She sleeps, cocooned in fleece and stoppered at the mouth with a pacifier in the shape of a butterfly. Women of all ages pause to covet and coo over her as we pass through the clearance shoe aisle; they admire the newborn's wee hands and good show of serenity. Two gum-smacking teenagers want to know whether Riley is a boy or a girl. My sister spurns the gender-specific colors—pink, violet, coral—and dresses her baby exclusively in neutered creams. An older woman remarks on Riley's cherubic good looks and asks, rather intrusively, if my sister has a husband.

Like all errands we undertake with Riley, this one is an overlong mission. By the time my sister and I settle on an antiquish-looking tea set, I'm lightheaded and reeling with a woozy suspicion. I gather my strength. We still need to hit up the grocery store for ingredients. I'm planning three tiers of birthday carrot cake glazed with candied pecans and a marmalade cream cheese.

Back at home, there's blood in my underwear again. And this time, it's more decisive. The gore has lost its wavering. Gone is its initial hesitation.

I confide in my sister.

I shimmy my feet up a wall and try, with hush meditation, to lull my body back to ease.

When that doesn't work, I open my wallet with grievous decisiveness, remove my health insurance card, and phone the nurses' hotline printed on its backside.

Without thinking, I tell the RN who answers the line, “I'm bleeding.”

She responds with a question. “From the head?”

“No,” I say. “Sorry, I'm bleeding as in spotting. I'm nine weeks pregnant and I've had a rough week.”

Down the hall, my sister is talking loudly on her cell phone with her sister-in-law. It is no consolation when I overhear her say, “Did you spot during any of your pregnancies? No, I didn't either.”

When my father appears in the doorway to ask what's going on, I feel my temper rear up, pitch, and kick out. “Nothing,” I shout, cupping my palm over the phone. “Don't talk to me. Don't
you
talk to me!” I am irrational, bristling, frightened, convinced it won't matter to him anyway. He looks shocked by my tone, the anger that's come as a surprise to us both. Until now, I've had no idea how furious I am by what seems like, at least from my warped perspective, his lack of support.

No matter what I've told Alice, I haven't come close to accepting my family's limitations, because I still won't allow myself to really feel and grieve them.

This exchange with my father ought to be the first indication of what will happen next. Before the weekend is out, I'll plow headlong into the wall at ninety miles per hour. I'll make a mess of myself in my attempts to persuade my family to my side. I'll hurt and bewilder them with my efforts to convince them that emotion can bring people together instead of driving them apart, that we can still function as a family when we share what we're feeling and each person can experience his or her own reaction.

But as I finally try to confront my fear of anger, I'll be missing the point. I can't prevent something that's already occurred.

Ten minutes later my sister and I are in the car on the way to the only hospital she knows how to get to. We don't have much to talk about. We haven't fully absorbed the idea of an emergency.

As we drive my father's car past the ghoulish woods and darkened houses of my hometown, I'm choking back a torrent of tears and my sister is clawing the dashboard to reach her ringing cell phone. The moment she flips it open I can make out my mother's ear-piercing hysteria on the line's other end.