The Best American Essays 2013 (30 page)

The obstetrics nurse at Mercy Hospital dims the lights and draws the threadbare curtain across the center of the room, a flimsy illusion of privacy between me and my fourteen-year-old roommate. Both our babies had been born around midnight, and now, with babies swaddled and sleeping inside plastic, wheeled bassinets, sleep seems like a superb idea.

Everyone has gone home, and I’m alone for the first time with my newborn daughter. I can’t stop staring at her. She’d been the loudest, angriest baby in the nursery, apparently furious at having been exiled from the womb. With our bodies now separate entities, the world, to me, seems upside-down. Sharp-edged. Somewhere a car smashes into a tree. Airborne bacteria and spiky pollens float past. And who is this little human, anyway? What about her life comes predestined? I try to see the tiny, scrolled-up map inside her skull—the grid within her brain, the catalogue of her choices and, ultimately, her destiny and desires: an aversion to crowds, a deep compassion for animals, a love of money, a penchant for mathematics, a blind left eye.

Meanwhile, my roommate and her boyfriend are lying side by side in bed and watching back-to-back episodes of
Cops
. Crack addicts make excuses, a homeless woman sobs over a lost dog, a teenage girl’s baby-daddy just put a steak knife to her throat. My roommate’s baby-daddy adds his own running commentary:
Damn
, look at that dude! He’s so fucked-up.
Hey! Remember when the cops beat the shit out of my uncle?
My roommate murmurs something in reply. And what’s going through her head? I try to remember being fourteen. I try to imagine being a mother at age fourteen.

Then my roommate’s baby starts crying. The crying gets louder. Pretty soon the baby wails like a peacock. Ay-
ya!
Ay-
ya!
Suddenly the sound of a crying baby makes me feel crazed, like an animal with its paw caught in a trap about to gnaw off its own foot. My head throbs. My spine aches. I wonder if these fourteen-year-old children know what do with an infant. Do
I
know what to do with an infant? How will we keep these babies alive? How will these children survive the years ahead?
Jesus, where the hell are the nurses?
I think. I consider saying something, but I’m too exhausted. I’ve got seventeen years on her, and compared to her, I’m already an old lady.

6
.

The Lamaze teacher said, “Visualize that your uterus is a beautiful spring bud, slowly unfurling its leaves, blossoming right before your eyes.” This teacher talked so gently about the body and the birth process—how childbirth happens every single day—how women’s bodies are designed for birth. Her voice, like a drug, hypnotized me as I sat cross-legged with the other pregnant women—some with husbands, some with boyfriends, some with their moms. We breathed deeply and traced slow circles across our bellies—a technique that supposedly calms the body, calms the mind.

At the onset of my labor, then, I successfully envisioned a Georgia O’Keeffe orchid, a soft swirl of violet petals and leaves. As labor progressed and the pain intensified—surprise, surprise—my orchid melted away and in its place appeared an engulfing blackness. Eventually, as the pain intensified into lightning bolts, a creature took shape—half man, half goat, with horns, red eyes, and lobster claws, the whole bit; he could have leapt right out of a Francisco de Goya painting. By the eighth hour, the beast had burst right through the floor and had me around the waist and was trying to pull me into the hole that had opened up in the middle of the floor.

Lying in my hospital bed in the small-town Catholic hospital, I decided to surrender myself to the image; in other words, I would not swim against the current and try to turn the demon back into an orchid. Instead, I would face my nightmare head-on: I would grab that son of a bitch by the horns and peer directly into his flaming eyes.
Ha! Two can play at this game
, I thought. Here’s what the Lamaze teachers don’t tell you about childbirth—particularly childbirth without drugs: the goal is not really to stay calm and focused; the goal is to stay
alive!
Once, when I was eighteen, a fortuneteller peered at my palm and said, “Mmm . . . lucky you live in
these
times. One hundred years ago you would have died giving birth.” In this small-town hospital, though, one hundred years does not seem like that long ago.

So with the fortuneteller’s words echoing in my head, I told myself to fight like a warrior. Screaming felt good. I screamed until my throat became sandpaper. Suddenly a nurse grabbed me by the wrist and said sternly, “Dear. You are wasting an awful lot of energy on all that screaming. Why don’t you get a hold of yourself? Just
calm
down.” I jerked my arm away and glared at her. How dare she tell me how to have a baby? How dare she intrude into my hallucination? Anyway, I thought, she had no idea what she was talking about—all those Lamaze lies, all that childbirth propaganda designed to shut us up—to keep the masses
sedated
so that nurses and doctors don’t get headaches.

So I decided that with each contraction I would scream every bad word I knew.
Bitch, motherfucker!
I didn’t care what anyone said, not Patrick, not my mother, not even the nuns. It felt good to fight, then, to unleash my rebellious tongue.

Later I wondered about my fourteen-year-old roommate, who had been giving birth at the same time. Why had I not heard her voice? Did she not feel such intense pain? Had she been given an epidural? Was
I
too melodramatic—me with my death-defying warrior fantasy? Now I wish I’d talked to her during those two days that we shared a room. We talked a little bit, but she averted her eyes. Painfully shy. Not much of a talker. I wish I’d asked her how she got through it and whether she dreamed up some flower or some other beautiful thing. What thoughts and images travel through the mind of a fourteen-year-old girl as she becomes a mother?

7
.

Carl Jung believed that his schizophrenic patients’ hallucinations should be treated with the same respect that one might treat any “real” scenario that one can see with one’s own eyes. Jung believed that if a person truly believes that he is being chased by wild tigers in a jungle, you should not remind him that he is actually sitting in a comfortable velour armchair and not running for his life through a jungle. Nor should you tell him that the tigers are simply phantoms or figments of his imagination. Instead, you should help him
to survive
. Instead, ask him, “Have you a spear? Have you a rifle?” Urge him to jump into the river or to grab a big stick. In acknowledging the phantom tigers, Jung believed that he could reaffirm and validate the contents of a mind, those contents being significant in their symbolism and necessary to the survival of their host.

8
.

Here is a true story that has become part of our local mythology:

Late one night, fifteen-year-old Benita Ramos pounds on the door of a random house. Crying and begging for help, she says that a man has just kidnapped her son—snatched the stroller right out of her hands. When police arrive, Benita explains that she was visiting the baby’s father (age seventeen) at his parents’ house, and as she was walking home and pushing the baby’s stroller down the dark path, a tall, skinny white guy tackled her from behind and then ran off with the stroller, her baby boy still strapped inside.

That night Benita appears on the eleven o’clock news, slurring her words and begging for the safe return of her baby. Her family—aunts, uncles, parents—all stand behind her with grim expressions on their faces. The girl’s story sounds plausible because terrible things happen to children in our town. Imagine a place of planetary misalignment, a celestial crisscross of weird energy. Imagine the Bermuda Triangle on dry land. Our town, home to the Pitchfork Killer and the Yosemite Killer, makes us believe that anything is possible.

Later that night, though, police find the empty, overturned stroller on the muddy embankment of the creek. In the flashlight’s white beam, they spot what looks like the baby’s body floating face-down in the black, stagnant water. (Bear Creek, a tributary of the Merced River, begins high in Yosemite backcountry; up there, it’s gorgeous and rugged and the water rushes across car-sized boulders, all framed by Douglas firs, sugar pines, and sequoias. Look up and see an impossibly blue sky with fast-moving wisps of vaporous clouds.) But here, far away from the creek’s source, the baby’s hooded sweatshirt is caught on some protruding branches next to an overturned shopping cart. (God only knows what else is down there.)

Eventually Benita confesses, though detectives observe that she is not very articulate; moreover, they say, she acts much younger than a girl of fifteen. Later, by piecing together her confession and forensic evidence, they’ll determine that Benita tried to drown the baby in the water fountain at Applegate Park. They’ll say that she then threw her baby into the creek and faked the kidnapping.

After this happened, we will always think of Benita’s dead baby when we go to Applegate Park, which functions as our town center; we go there most Sundays. Fragrant orange and pink rosebushes surround that fountain, and nearby children can visit a half-blind donkey at the petting zoo or an old bear that paces his enclosure for eighteen hours a day. If Benita’s baby boy had lived, surely she would have brought him to ride the miniature train that circles the perimeter of the same park in which she killed him.

But Benita won’t say more. She appears to be a broken girl. Detectives claim that because she appears to be mentally disturbed and because she functions below the level of an average fifteen-year-old, they might never get inside her head. What’s there to say when you have a baby at age fourteen and your seventeen-year-old boyfriend starts dating some other girl, some little slut from another high school, and now your whole life consists of Pampers and plastic baby bottles, milk-encrusted rubber nipples, and maybe once in a while your life gets supplemented by a Jerry Springer episode and an orange Popsicle?

I just went sort of crazy
, she might have said. And,
Having a baby is like really, really hard. Nobody understands
. And if you can love babies when there’s nobody else to love, sometimes you hurt babies when there’s nobody else to hurt. You don’t mean to, exactly—you just can’t control it. Maybe it’s payback for all that’s ever been done to you.

9
.

Our mothers tell us the story of La Llorona, which means the Wailing Woman. In the story, La Llorona’s husband leaves her for another woman. After being rejected and abandoned, La Llorona plots her revenge.

La Llorona decides to take her children on a picnic next to the river. She brings a quilt and a basket filled with strawberries, hard-boiled eggs, heart-shaped cakes, and honey water (because she really loves them). Imagine a spring day resplendent in all ways: the children play in the tall grass, they laugh, they tumble around.

But oh, what bad luck to have been born a child of La Llorona! (How many times, for how many hundreds of years, have these children had to endure the same fate with variations in details?) Soon she lures the children, one by one, through a low tunnel of shrubs to the river—probably across a raccoon or deer trail. The tunnel, enshrouded by eight-foot-tall reeds, leads to a waterside thicket; here frogs lounge on lily pads and dragonflies dive-bomb the water’s surface.

Then she drowns her children, one by one, and afterward she arranges their bodies side by side across the family quilt and kisses each of them in the middle of their cold foreheads. Later, when La Llorona’s husband finds the children, his screams can be heard for miles. She’s dragged away in chains and put into a dungeon, where she wakes up in shock and realizes what she’s done.

For all eternity she will cry out for her dead children. After she dies, her ghost will wander the riverbanks in search of new souls. Our mothers tell us that if we look carefully, we can see La Llorona crouching next to the water, furiously rubbing her hands with sand and gravel. They say that if we listen at night, we can hear moaning and rattling chains. If we’re not careful, they say, she might mistake us for her dead children.

Our mothers never talk about any moral of the story. They tell it because it’s a good story and they can alter the details as they please. But children are presented with the idea of mothers gone crazy, of mothers who use their children for revenge. Many children have nightmares about La Llorona, because all of our basic fears can be traced to our mothers, whether we realize it or not. During the day she combs our hair and kisses us. At night she’s the madwoman in the attic. It’s this duplicity that scares the hell out of us. All mothers have dual natures, and La Llorona’s pale face and leaf-strewn hair reminds us of this. So we dream about children floating beneath gentle currents, their faces obscured by the water, their small, icy hands floating to the surface. The simple lesson: Stay away from water! Don’t go out after dark! Be quiet and go to sleep! The deeper message: Do
our
mothers want to kill
us?
Is it not a question of
if
, but a question of
when?
And most importantly: If our fathers abandon our mothers for the “other woman,” should we opt out of the picnic next to the river? (We get these thoughts especially when walking next to creeks or canals or irrigation ditches.)

10
.

Once a girl brought her infant to the final exam. She arrived late, all sweaty and exasperated, and I don’t remember exactly
why
she brought the baby—probably that her mother couldn’t babysit, so I said,
Fine, fine, sit down, take the exam, don’t want you to fail on account of that
, knowing these girls have enough problems as it is. So I offered to hold the baby throughout the exam; I jostled it about as I walked up and down the aisles patrolling for cheaters. It was weird, because suddenly I became a mother, teacher, grandmother all at once. I lost a little bit of my authority. I became a relative. A regular person.