Goodbye Without Leaving (11 page)

Mary was illuminated by her gooseneck desk lamp. From where I lay, she and William looked like figures in a painting by Joseph Wright of Derby. When she looked up at him I saw an expression on her face I had never seen before. Oh, the things I would never know about her!

She was in thrall to him. He looked down at her and put his hand on her shoulder.

“I think you've finally got that data right,” he said to her. It was clear that I was totally superfluous and it was time to go home.

27

The thing that is never emphasized enough in books on pregnancy is that it takes forty weeks, not nine months. On the other hand, it takes three trimesters of three months each, which equals nine months but does not equal forty weeks. The whole thing was explained to me by my husband, who shoved a hefty book at me and told me to read about the lunar calendar. I was emerging from my first trimester into my second, the harbinger of the miracle of life, as I liked to refer to myself.

Often when I could not get to sleep I made myself even more anxious by reflecting on the awesome notion that I would soon be responsible for forming another person's character. What if my darling child grew up and ran off to tour with some rock and roll act? A baby is one thing. A teenager is quite another. The whole prospect seemed too daunting for an exhausted person.

What was I going to do with a child?

I would teach it how to dance, and all the words to “Tutti Frutti.” We would take it to concerts and oldies shows. We would take it to see
The Nutcracker
at Christmas and to the circus in the spring. And in between times, we would worry about enormous issues such as how to find an appropriate school for a young child, how to manage a temper tantrum, how to deal with colic, how to get a child to sleep through the night. The road you walked with a baby was a long, hard one, it seemed, what with teething pain, controversy about whooping cough inoculations and the prospect of chicken pox. You had to teach a child to be fair and considerate to its peers, to have nice manners, not to draw on the walls or furniture. All this, and breast-feeding too! To say nothing of labor and delivery, which, no matter how you sliced it, sounded like being drawn and quartered. I took a deep breath and realized that some of my anxiety came from the fact that I had not yet told my mother or father, or my in-laws, this thrilling news.

We decided to do it by telephone.

“Preferably from a crouched position,” I said.

“Hello, Gertrude,” Johnny said. “We have wonderful news. You are about to be a grandmother. I mean, in the summer. Here's your daughter.”

“When did you find this out?” said my mother.

“Oh, just a little while ago,” I said.

“It must have been a good bit of a little while, since it's almost the new year. You were pregnant at Christmas and didn't tell us?”

“Well, you know,” I said.

“No, I don't,” said my mother. “Perhaps you'd like to explain it to me.”

“Well, there's a chance of miscarriage in the first trimester with a first pregnancy and I just wanted to get through it before I told anyone.”

“
Anyone
,” said my mother. “Your parents are
anyone
?”

“Well, I just wanted to make sure all was well.”

“And you thought that your parents shouldn't go through this with you if all was not well?”

The answer to this was a resounding
yes
. My mother would have driven me insane on various points such as my choice of doctor, hospital and method of delivery. But after she finished venting, she and my father were genuinely delighted, and Johnny's parents were thrilled. They looked forward to a future lawyer or doctor.

As I grew larger I saw them giving my belly musing looks, as if to say “I wonder who she's got in there.” At night I felt there was a lump under my heart—this was not the baby, I was assured by my doctor. It was some other heart in the shape of a valentine full of anxiety and uncertainty.

“They should make you take a test before you get pregnant,” I said to Johnny. “To see if you're mentally and emotionally equipped.”

“There'd be about four people on the planet who'd pass, Sweetheart,” said Johnny. “Get real. Even morons have perfectly nice children.”

“Really?” I said. “How do you know that? Do we know any morons?”

“You know what I mean,” said Johnny.

“Well, what about Steve and Ginger's children,” I said. Steve was a colleague of Johnny's, and Ginger, his repellent wife, was a city planner. Their two children, Jason and Samantha, were horribly ill behaved. They threw food, whined and had the posture of two almost empty sacks. They were the sort of children I liked least: scrawny and undercooked-looking, with what seemed to be some chronic nasal blockage that caused their mouths to hang open, giving them the aura of those very morons Johnny claimed to know something about. These gruesome children, who their parents claimed had the IQ's of geniuses, gave me new cause for insomnia. Supposing I produced a child like one of Steve and Ginger's?

“It isn't genetically possible,” said Johnny, when I shared this new fear with him. “We're very good-looking and, frankly, Steve and Ginger are not.”

“That doesn't guarantee anything. What about all the dope we smoked in our youth?”

“It's been metabolized out. Go to sleep.”

“If I had a child that looked like Steve and Ginger's, I don't know what I'd do.”

“Look, we'd give it to Steve and Ginger and start all over again. Now go to sleep.”

28

One cold night Johnny and I went to hear the blues singer Bunny Estavez at a club called Smokey Minnie's.

“I wonder about the lung function of the developing fetus,” said Johnny, surveying what looked like a roomful of smog.

“Maybe we can rent an oxygen tank for the evening,” I said.

We sat at a tiny table—I was aware of how small it was in relation to how large I was. I now had the belly of a pregnant woman. I found myself patting it, and I noticed other pregnant women patting their stomachs, too.

Bunny Estavez was very old. His wife and son-in-law had to help him onto the stage. He looked like melted candle wax. He could barely sing and the sounds he emitted were more like croaking hums, vaguely on key. His guitar style had once been florid, but he was so old now, he had stripped it down to something that sounded sort of Japanese. When the set was over we stomped and clapped, and then it was time to go home. As I leaned over to get my coat, I felt a strange sensation, as if something were darting across my stomach
inside
. It was not precisely
in
my stomach but only in the vicinity, and it was not any flutter I recognized.

“Oh, my God,” I said, sitting down. “It's the baby.”

Johnny turned green. He had been reading quite a lot about premature labor.

“I'll call an ambulance,” he said.

“Sit down, don't panic,” I said. “I
felt
it. I actually
felt
it. It's totally amazing. It's like having a little fish inside. Oh, God! There it is again!”

We staggered through the crowd into the night. It was very, very cold and I was wrapped up in my warmest coat. I felt quite toasty. In fact, I felt cocooned.
I
was a cocoon, and inside me some little boy or girl was swimming around in all that nice warm amniotic fluid, which Johnny pointed out in wonderment was mostly baby pee. “They float around in
baby pee
,” he kept saying.

“It's sterile,” I said. “It makes a cushion against shocks.”

“Baby pee,” he said, shaking his head.

Now my baby was moving around in its little sac of baby pee and I was wrapped up in my big warm coat. I was the big warm container for this tiny little critter, just as the coat was a container for me. Suddenly I felt as placid and serene as a cow. It was a transporting experience.

At home I lay in bed in a dreamy state, hogging all the pillows.

“I should get the Nobel Prize because I'm pregnant,” I said. “Women are so wonderful. Aren't you jealous?”

“I've never seen you like this,” Johnny said. “It's probably hormonal.”

“You could look it up,” I said helpfully.

As the weeks went by, my little fish fluttered more and more often. “It's his or her way of saying ‘Hi, Mom!'” said my doctor. As I got bigger and bigger, and winter turned into spring, these flutters became more like flutter kicks and then plain old kicks. One afternoon I felt myself the victim of a woodpecker drilling for bugs in my pelvic bones. I reached for one of Johnny's birth books, which I consulted to see what my developing fetus looked like. It now looked like an actual baby, only small. A drilling sensation, it said, is usually the fetus having hiccoughs.” I dialed Johnny right away.

“Mr. Miller's office,” said the smooth, cool receptionist.

“Oh, hello, Olivia. This is Geraldine. Is Johnny there?”

“I'm afraid he's not,” said Olivia, as if she had never heard of me and had no idea what I wanted. Olivia was small-boned and taut and wore her hair in a chignon, never had a hair out of place, a stain on her sweater or a sagging hem. She was perfect and distant and at office parties I found it was necessary to repress the desire to kick her.

“May I take a message?” she said.

“Yes,” I said. “Tell him his baby has the hiccoughs in utero. I thought he'd like to know.”

“Thank you,” said Olivia, and hung up.

29

As I got bigger and bigger, I found that I was a magnet for advice.

Mrs. Willhall took one look at me and said, “Coconut oil.”

I asked her if I was supposed to drink it or cook with it or what.

“You rub it on yourself,” she said. “It keeps the skin pliant. And you'll never get any stretch marks at all. I know this because, aside from Desdemona, the Reverend and I have seven others.”

Although she did not look sylphlike, neither did she look like the mother of eight, so like a good girl I went around the corner to the botanica to get some oil.

I had passed this shop hundreds of times. In the window were holy candles, tiny plastic replicas of the Virgin Mary surrounded by what looked like the Seven Dwarfs, tin jars with labels that read “Power in Love” and “High Conquering Incense,” and large bottles of some kind of cologne with shells, herbs and charms floating at the bottom.

The man behind the counter was a squat, white-haired person with spectacles.

“Do you have coconut oil?” I said.

He produced a large brown bottle. “For ju,” he said. “Ju need candles? Or lotion? We also have these for praying. Ju have bad foot, ju take this.” He pulled out a little foot made out of shiny, silvery metal, which Mary later told me was called an ex-voto. “Or for a good baby, here.” He put into my hand a flat silver baby wearing an adult-looking smile.

“I'll take it,” I said. “Thank you very much.”

“Ju are going to have a gwomang,” the man said.

“Really?” I said. “A woman! I wondered who was inside there.”

Back at the foundation I showed my silver baby to the Bopper.

“Oh, you went to the voodoo store, yeah?”

“I did.”

“They sell some weird shit in there,” the Bopper said. “I had a Puerto Rican girlfriend once. She wanted me to marry her. She went and got this stuff called Agua Conunga. I woke up one morning smelling like a French whorehouse. She put it all over me while I was asleep.”

“Did it work?”

“Well, almost,” said the Bopper. “Then she painted it on this other guy and
he
married her. I got some for my sister. I told her, ‘This stuff is Get-him-to-marry-me lotion.' It worked on her boyfriend.”

“The guy in the botanica told me I was going to have a gwomang.”

“You're not,” said the Bopper. “I've got a great record on this. You're having a man, take my word.”

As I sat in my local coffee shop one morning putting Tabasco on my scrambled eggs, the woman next to me said, “Never eat pepper when pregnant. It makes the children excitable.”

I was told not to travel on the subway (because of squashing) or the bus (because of jolts) or by car (potential crashes). I was told to drink large quantities of milk (for bone development) or no milk at all (because it makes babies mucousy) and to eat lots of meat (for protein) or no meat (possible parasites).

As for my mother and mother-in-law, between the two of them I felt more squashed than in any subway. Finally they had me where they wanted me. I was something they recognized. The daughter who had run off with a rock and roll act and who refused to dress nicely, the daughter-in-law who worked up in God-knows-where for God-knows-who, had turned into a classifiable object: a pregnant woman. With Gertrude on one arm and Dolly on the other, I felt about to be led off to jail. They took me to a nice ladies' luncheon place and fed me chicken salad sandwiches.

“I'll have coffee,” I said.

“No, darling,” said Dolly. “Coffee's bad for the baby.”

“All right. Tea.”

“Tea has the same amount of caffeine and is more corrosive,” said my mother. “Now, after lunch, we thought we'd take you over to Saks to see about a layette.”

“I don't want a layette,” I said. “It's not even April Fools' Day. This kid isn't due till the Fourth of July. It's bad luck.”

“You ought to be prepared,” said Dolly. “My mother saw to it that I was totally outfitted long before Johnny came along.”

“Besides, first babies often come early,” said Gertrude. “Like that poor Feldman girl. Her baby looked like a mouse.”

“A mouse,” I mused “How interesting. Then it would have been way too small to fit into any regular stuff in a layette, right?”

The real purpose of this lunch was to get me to quit my job.