Heartburn (18 page)

No one ever tells you these things—not that we would have listened had anyone tried. We were so smart. We were so old. We were so happy. We had it knocked.

“Can you feel this?” the doctor said.

“No.”

He was cutting now. Far, far away. A minute passed. Then two. Let the baby be okay, please let him be okay. I opened my eyes and saw a nurse crossing the room to the pediatrician. In her arms I could see the baby’s wet head and spiky black hair. I could see an arm, such a skinny arm. Long skinny legs.
Move. Please move
. A flutter kick. A noise like a tiny cough. A tiny cry.

Nathaniel.

I closed my eyes.

He was fine, I could hear them saying that.

He’s fine. He’s going to be fine.

So. Nathaniel was early. I could hardly blame him. Something was dying inside me, and he had to get out.

I
t was a complicated Caesarean, and there were complications. Nathaniel was on the eighth floor of the hospital, with tubes and monitors stuck all over his little froggy body, and I was on the fifth, with tubes and monitors all over mine. I lay in bed in a Percodan haze; I spent hours turning my marriage over in my mind. What had happened? What had gone wrong?
He was crazy
. I kept coming back to that. It was a simple enough answer, but accepting that answer meant accepting that I would never really know what had happened, accepting the mystery. I hate mystery, and I’m not the only one who does. Nature abhors a mystery too.

Vera flew to Washington. She spent a day with me in the hospital. She rubbed my head and listened while I floated trial balloons at her. I told her I thought I had spent too much time cooking and not enough time paying attention. I told her I thought that having a baby had changed our lives together. I told her I had been impatient and mean and snappish and irritable, and that it was no wonder Mark was drawn to
someone who hadn’t heard all his stories before and didn’t shoot him a reproving look every time he uttered an opinion he had stolen from his best friend.

“All this may be true,” Vera said, “but it isn’t the point. The point is to figure out what you want.”

“Maybe we just ran out of things to renovate,” I said. “Maybe that was the problem. Maybe if we’d just gone on buying houses and fighting with contractors and arguing over whether to bleach the floor or stain it dark, we would have lived happily ever after.”

“Did you hear me?” Vera said.

“I actually believed it was possible to have a good marriage,” I said.

“It is possible,” said Vera.

“No it’s not,” I said. “And don’t tell me about your marriage, I don’t want to hear about it. You got the last good one. For the rest of us, it’s hopeless. I know that, but I never really get it. I go right on. I think to myself: I was wrong about the last one, but I’ll try harder to be right about the next one.”

“That’s not the worst lesson to take through life,” said Vera.

“But it doesn’t work,” I said. “It’s kreplach. Remember?”

Vera looked at me, and her eyes filled with tears. She does this sometimes, especially when I’m being hateful and difficult; she responds by having all the feelings I’m refusing to have. Now she reached over and took my hand, and we both began to cry.

Mark came to the hospital every day. Every day except for Thelma’s birthday. On Thelma’s birthday, he called to say he
had to go to New York for an interview. I know it was Thelma’s birthday because Betty called the next day to tell me all about it. It seems that Jonathan Rice had planned a surprise birthday lunch for Thelma, and everyone gathered in the restaurant, ready to pop out from under the table when she arrived, but she never turned up.

“Can you imagine?” said Betty.

“I’m afraid I can,” I said.

“I wish I could figure out who she’s sleeping with,” Betty said.

“It’s probably Mark,” I said.

Betty laughed. “Rachel, wait till I tell that to Mark,” she said. “It’ll kill him.”

“I’ll tell him myself,” I said. “He just turned up.”

“What was that about?” Mark said.

Stifle yourself, Rachel
.

“Nothing,” I said. “Just the Ladies’ Central.”

I got out of bed and into a wheelchair. Mark wheeled me and my intravenous equipment to the elevator and we went up to see the baby. We were lucky. I kept telling myself that. Nathaniel was on a floor with newborns who had real problems—there were blue babies, babies missing kidneys, babies with holes in their hearts—and there was nothing wrong with him except that he was small. He wasn’t even the smallest. Still, he was ours, and he looked like a sack of bones. They’d shaved his head for the monitors, and there were tiny Band-Aids all over his body, taping the tubes here and there. We couldn’t hold him. All we could do was reach in through the holes with our hexachlorophene-scrubbed hands and feed him, awkwardly propping up his floppy body
by the neck. He had weighed four pounds when he was born. He was feeding well, catching up, but he was such a tiny thing. I waved a little red clown we’d put into the Isolette in front of his face. Maybe he saw it. Mark sang him a song.
Hush-a-bye, don’t you cry, go to sleep-y, little baby
. I wondered where they had gone to celebrate her birthday.
When you wake you shall have all the pretty little horses
. I wondered what he had given her for her birthday.
Blacks and bays, dapples and grays, all the pretty little horses
. I wish I’d known it was Thelma’s birthday; I would have sent her a present myself.
Hush-a-bye, don’t you cry, go to sleep-y, little baby
. A garrote.

Arthur and Julie came to see me. One day while I was in the hospital, they discovered that their decorator had taken the four thousand dollars they had given him for furniture and spent it all on cocaine. The next day, their daughter was suspended from school for flushing six gerbils down the lavatory toilet. The next day, a bat moved into their kitchen. They brought me all of it, every day, and Julie rustled up a hairdresser to come wash my hair, and Arthur made rice pudding the day they took the tube out of my nose and I could eat bland food. Rice pudding is the only thing Arthur cooks, but he cooks it perfectly, with exactly the right proportion of rice to raisins. There’s an awful lot of nursery food in this book already, so I won’t give you the recipe. My feeling about rice pudding is that if you like it, you already have a good recipe; and if you don’t, there’s no way anyone will ever get you to eat it, unless you fall in love with someone who likes
rice pudding, which I once did, and then you learn to love it, too.

My last day in the hospital, Marvin, my obstetrician, took out the stitches. Then he swiped an apple from a big basket of fruit Betty’s boyfriend had sent me, and he sat down in a leatherette chair. I suspected he was going to ask if I was having a postpartum depression, but the last thing I wanted was for my obstetrician to know that in my case a postpartum depression would be superfluous. I am very fond of Marvin, even though he once asked me to endorse his book on premenstrual tension, but I wasn’t up for a heart-to-heart talk with him.

“Do you believe in love?” said my obstetrician.

This is what I get for calling him by his first name, I thought. This is the price I pay for insisting that if he’s going to call me by my first name I get to call him by his. Do I ask him if he gets turned on sticking his hands into ladies’ pussies? Do I ask him if he gets off feeling their breasts for lumps?

“What?” I said.

“Do you believe in love?” he said.

Sometimes I believe that love dies but hope springs eternal. Sometimes I believe that hope dies but love springs eternal. Sometimes I believe that sex plus guilt equals love, and sometimes I believe that sex plus guilt equals good sex. Sometimes I believe that love is as natural as the tides, and sometimes I believe that love is an act of will. Sometimes I believe that some people are better at love than others, and sometimes I believe that everyone is faking it. Sometimes I believe that love is essential, and sometimes I believe that the only reason
love is essential is that otherwise you spend all your time looking for it.

“Yes,” I said. “I do.”

I went home.

Nathaniel stayed in the hospital.

Both of us got stronger.

I behaved myself.

I said very little.

I attempted to follow the budget debate.

I went to a dinner party and held up my end.

They took Nathaniel out of the Isolette and I could hold him and feed him.

I read Sam a lot of stories about baby brothers.

I did not say, how are you, how are we, do you still love her, do you love me at all, are you still thinking of buying a house with her, what did you get her for her birthday, is it over with her, is it ever going to be over.

Two weeks passed.

Betty called. She asked if we wanted to come to dinner. “We have lobsters,” she said. “You bring dessert. Bring one of your Key lime pies.”

I
f I had it to do over again, I would have made a different kind of pie. The pie I threw at Mark made a terrific mess, but a blueberry pie would have been even better, since it would have permanently ruined his new blazer, the one he bought with Thelma. But Betty said bring a Key lime pie, so I did. The Key lime pie is very simple to make. First you line a 9-inch pie plate with a graham cracker crust. Then beat 6 egg yolks. Add I cup lime juice (even bottled lime juice will do), two 14-ounce cans sweetened condensed milk, and I tablespoon grated lime rind. Pour into the pie shell and freeze. Remove from freezer and spread with whipped cream. Let sit five minutes before serving.

I realize now that I should have thrown the pie (or at least done the thinking that led to the throwing of the pie) several weeks earlier than I did, but it’s very hard to throw a pie at someone when you’re pregnant, because you feel so vulnerable. Also, let’s face it, I wasn’t ready to throw the pie. I should add that the pie was hardly the first thing I’d thought of
throwing at Mark, but every other time I’d wanted to throw something at him, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Once, for example, right after I found out about him and Thelma, I’d been seized by a violent impulse, but the only thing I could see to throw at the time was a signed Thonet chair, and I am far too bourgeois to throw a signed Thonet anything at anyone. Some time later, especially while I was in the hospital, I gave considerable thought to smashing Mark’s head in with a very good frying pan I had bought at the Bridge kitchenware company, but I always knew I would never do anything of the sort, and in any case, smashing your husband’s head in with a frying pan seems slightly too fraught with feminist content, if you know what I mean.

(Even now, I wonder if I would have thrown the pie had we been eating in Betty’s dining room. Probably not. On the floor in Betty’s dining room is a beautiful Oriental rug, and I would have been far too concerned about staining it. Fortunately, though, we were eating in the kitchen, and the kitchen has a linoleum floor. That’s how bourgeois I am: at the split second I picked up the pie to throw it at Mark, at the split second I was about to do the bravest—albeit the most derivative—thing I had ever done in my life, I thought to myself: Thank God the floor is linoleum and can be wiped up.)

On Saturday afternoon, after Betty called, I went out for a walk to buy the pie ingredients. I took Sam with me. We had a long talk about how Nathaniel would be coming home from the hospital on Monday, and how much Sam was going to love him, and how he was going to feed him some delicious spiders. We bought the food at Neam’s. It was a beautiful day, so we decided to walk down to the toy store on M Street. On the way we passed the jewelry store where Mark had bought
me the diamond ring, and I remembered that I hadn’t yet taken it in to have it fixed. It was in a little envelope in my purse.

I could see Leo Rothman, the owner, sitting on a stool behind the counter—Leo, the dear, white-haired man who had marched with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the thirties and been thrown out of the Labor Department in the forties and was now a millionaire jeweler who buzzed only white people through his electronically operated door. He buzzed me in and gave me a big kiss. When Mark was courting me, when he was pursuing me with flowers and balloons and jewels, Leo was the man Mark bought the jewels from, and as a result Leo felt almost proprietary about our marriage: he had outfitted the courtship, the wedding, the birth of the first child, the first child’s silver spoon; and he didn’t seem to mind that except for the diamond ring, none of Mark’s purchases had amounted to more than a few hundred dollars.

I told Leo about the robbery, and he said it would take just a minute to reset the stone. Sam and I waited while he got out his instruments and went to work. We were making conversation. Chitchat. Nothing much. He said did I know the diamond in the ring was a perfect stone. I said Mark had told me that. He said it wasn’t the kind of diamond I’d ever have trouble selling if I ever wanted to—he had told Mark he’d be glad to buy it back for what Mark had paid for it. I said I was glad to hear that. He asked me how I liked the necklace. The necklace, I said. Leo looked up, and the loup dropped from his eye. “I must be thinking of another customer,” he said.

“No you’re not,” I said. “I knew Mark had bought something while I was in the hospital.” So he had bought her a necklace for her birthday. I was lying in the hospital with a
tube up my nose and he had bought her a necklace. “That rascal,” I said.

“I shouldn’t have said anything,” Leo said.

“I’m glad you did,” I said. “Now I know what to be prepared for. There’s nothing worse than opening a box with a necklace in it when you’re not in the mood for a necklace.” I kept talking, I couldn’t stop. “Once,” I said, “I was in the mood for a nightgown, and Mark kept dropping hints about what he’d gotten me for my birthday, and finally I said, ‘I don’t care what it is as long as it’s not a suitcase,’ and it was a suitcase. Was my face red.” Leo was focused on the ring again; I’d bored him so thoroughly he barely grunted a response. He finished resetting the stone and handed the ring back to me. It was such a beautiful ring. The diamond caught the afternoon sun and made a rainbow on the wall of the store. Sam ran to the reflection, and I waved the ring this way and that, moving the rainbow while he giggled and leapt and tried to catch it in his hands.