What I Thought I Knew: A Memoir (2 page)

“No!”

“Yes you are. You have that erotic glow that only a pregnant woman has.”

“I’m not pregnant.”

He examines me more closely and whispers, “Then you had really hot sex last night.”

In fact, Michael and I did have hot sex last night, after he proposed to me and I said yes. My erotic glow is showing! In this deliriously happy spring, after my postdivorce winter that lasted half a decade, I have found the fountain of youth.

 

 

My unbridled good fortune gallops on at reckless speed.

My agent books a full season of performances of my solo theater works, in humble and exalted venues throughout the East Coast, lucrative and fun work.

The manager of my building evicts the drug dealers and hires a doorman.

The New School hires me to teach solo theater, starting in the fall.

My part-time editing job, plus the new part-time teaching gig, gives me a steady freelance income and a flexible schedule.

We can afford a family vacation—Michael, Julia, and I are going to Italy in August.

For the first time in years, I have time to write, I don’t have to buy clothes at the thrift store, I’m not worried about making rent. I can breathe.

I’m in love.

I lie in bed in Michael’s arms one night and tell him, “This is the first time in years that I am truly happy!”

... which is an idiotic and dangerous thing to say!

 

 

In Jewish folklore, declaring your good fortune aloud arouses envy and tempts the Evil Eye. To ward off this malicious spirit, the very moment after saying something so carelessly self-congratulatory, you must spit quickly three times through your middle and index finger—
Tuh! Tuh! Tuh!

Evil Eye? I’m neither superstitious nor religious. My assimilated Jewish parents rejected their own orthodox upbringings and kosher homes. They raised me and my two sisters without Hebrew school or bat mitzvahs. We celebrated the major Jewish holidays, supplementing our repertory with Christmas presents, Easter egg hunts, and marshmallow peeps.

My mother was a sociology professor with a well-developed sense of logic. But she retained some vestigial Old Country beliefs—from her father’s Russian side, her mother’s rural Oklahoma side, and her grandparents’ Latvian side of the family—which she synthesized into an eclectic array of rituals and phobias.

When Mom spilled salt, she threw it over her left shoulder for good luck. When there was an electrical storm, she made us sit in the middle of the room, out of reach of sinister and highly motivated lightning bolts. When she taught sociology at City University, she walked up ten flights rather than take the death-defying elevator ride. When we went to the beach, Mom parked our beach towels twenty feet above the high tide line, in case a shark decided to evolve on the spot into a predatory land animal.

But her most powerful protection against the Evil Eye was to make sure she was never happy for too long, a lesson she repeatedly demonstrated for me.

I am three years old. I’m sitting on the floor, watching Mommy dance in her friend’s living room, just for fun, for the pure joy of dancing. Her friend plays gypsy dances on the piano. Mommy spins and leaps, sweaty, red-cheeked, and laughing. “I love dancing!” she shouts, mid-leap. Then she crashes her foot into the piano bench and breaks her big toe. No more dancing.

I’m twenty-two. I have just graduated from college. Mom is fifty-seven. To prove to her that I’m a grown-up, I treat her to lunch at a nice, cheap Indian restaurant in the East Village. Mom has finally recovered from breast cancer and a long depression, and has found the teaching job of her dreams. Over vegetable pakoras and mango chutney, Mom tells me, “This is the first time in years that I am truly happy!”

We both forget about the Evil Eye. Mom speaks freely of her happiness. She arouses the envy of the gloomy professor at the next table. She neglects to break a toe. She doesn’t park our beach towels far enough from the sharks. She leaves the spilled salt on the table by the chutney. She forgets to spit three times. Two weeks later Mom died suddenly from a cerebral hemorrhage, caused by a ruptured aneurism.

 

 

So I should have known, happy as I was in the spring of 1999, that I was in grave danger. That the Evil Eye was lurking in the shadows, waiting for the moment when I dropped my guard and admitted to Michael aloud, with childlike glee and momentary suspension of my adult disbelief, “This is the first time in years that I am truly happy!”

One day in early April, three weeks after Michael and I were engaged, three weeks before my New School graduation, I woke up with an upset stomach. The nausea didn’t go away. New symptoms emerged each day. Insomnia, mood swings, sore breasts, low energy, an urgent need to urinate. When I missed a period, I called Robin, my gynecologist.

“We expected that. When I switched you to the lower dose of estrogen, I told you that your period would end.”

“But I’ve been so tired . . .”

“Welcome to menopause.”

“. . . and sick to my stomach.”

“See a gastroenterologist.”

 

 

I’m infertile.

When I was thirty and married to Brad, we wanted to have a baby. My period stopped for a year. One doctor said I lost my period because I had recently lost weight. Another insisted I was in menopause at age thirty. A third doctor suspected my fallopian tubes were blocked and sent me for a procedure called a hysterosalpingogram, which hurt like hell and which revealed my deformed uterus—
Bicornuate,
Latin for two-horned or two-chambered.

The deformity was caused by exposure to DES,
diethylstilbestrol
, the synthetic estrogen my mother took to prevent miscarriage when she was pregnant with me. I found out about DES when I was in college and
Ms.
magazine broke the story with the terrifying headline, “DES, Cancer Time Bomb!” My mother, heavy with guilt, brought me to her gynecologist to find out what injury she may have unintentionally caused me by taking the drug routinely prescribed as the “pregnancy vitamin.” Since then, I’ve had an annual colposcopy—a microscopic examination of my cervix for possible cancer.

Dr. Zagami, recently voted Best Fertility Doctor! by
New York
magazine, told me, “Your estrogen level is so low, the only way you could ever become pregnant is by immaculate conception. I’m putting you on ERT, estrogen replacement therapy, which I ordinarily prescribe to menopausal women twice your age. You could get pregnant with fertility drugs, but I strongly advise against it. As a DES daughter, your cervix is likely to dilate early in the pregnancy, resulting in premature birth. And with your small, deformed uterus, there’s no way you could carry a baby past six months, so you should never attempt to get pregnant. But look at the bright side; you’ll never have to use birth control again.”

That night I wept for a long time. Brad sat quietly on the bed and held me when I was too exhausted to cry anymore. Our grief satisfied Patricia, our social worker at Spence-Chapin adoption agency. She had met many infertile couples who treated adoption as an insurance plan, while secretly hoping to have a
real
baby, so that they could be
real
parents. We passed the cathartic grief test, and she signed us up.

We waited two years for a birth mother to choose us. Zoe was nineteen years old and didn’t realize she was pregnant till her sixth month, when it was too late for an abortion. She wanted to go back to college. It wasn’t the right time in her life to be a mom. We were at Julia’s birth, and held her moments after she was born. Though we knew Zoe didn’t want to raise a baby, it seemed like superhuman generosity for her to give her newborn baby to us. We were infinitely grateful to her for choosing us.

Julia has heard this story often. It is part of our family folklore.

 

 

At my New School University graduation ceremony in May of 1999, I walked down the aisle of the ornate chapel of Riverside Church feeling sick, anxious, and old. Michael was in the audience, briefly in town between performing gigs. He was touring for most of April. Tomorrow he would leave for two weeks in El Paso to create an original theater piece with Mexican American high school students. He had so much energy. I had so little. What happened to my eternal youth? Ubiquitous happiness? Was this menopause or was I sick? Was this misery my insurance policy against the Evil Eye, or did the Evil Eye cause this misery?

Dr. Kay, the gastroenterologist, sent me for an abdominal sonogram and a CAT scan. He diagnosed me with anemia and reflux, and prescribed drugs and a low-acid diet. I asked him if I had to avoid drinking wine on our August trip to Italy.

“Have plenty of wine, especially the local reds! I’d never forgive myself if you went to Tuscany and didn’t drink wine.”

In July’s heat, I felt worse. “My hip joints are sore, my breasts hurt, there’s a hard swelling in my abdomen, I’m depressed, I can’t sleep.”

Dr. Kay sent me to his wife, Dr. Jan Riley, a general practitioner. She sent me for a breast sonogram and a hip X-ray, both negative. “Ask your gynecologist to adjust your estrogen level,” she suggested.

 

 

With my feet in stirrups, I asked Robin about my symptoms, while she performed an internal exam.

“Why is my abdomen swollen?”

“Middle-aged loss of muscle tone.”

“But my stomach has never been so firm in my life.”

“You’re a middle-aged woman in early menopause, and your figure is changing.”

“Why do I feel like I have to pee all the time?”

Her rubber-gloved fingers pressed on my cervix and the walls of my vagina. “You have a bladder disorder called cystocele. Atrophied bladder muscle, a common symptom of aging. You’ll experience some leaking when you sneeze and walk. The only way to cure it is with surgery, but the risks are worse than the cure.”

She removed her gloves and examined my breasts.

“Why are my breasts so sore?”

“You have hard ridges as a result of wearing underwire bras for so many years.”

“I don’t feel ridges.”

“I do.”

“What about my depression and insomnia?”

“Welcome to menopause!”

“Can you retest my hormone levels?”

“No. I’d have to take you off the hormones for several weeks to get an accurate test, and your estrogen is too low to do that. Increase your exercise, start a weight-loss diet, continue the hormones, and see me in a year.”

I dieted and forced myself to jog three miles a day, adding abdominal crunches and weight lifting to my regime. “Middle-aged loss of muscle tone,” I reminded myself, popping the button on my pants, then popping a Premarin—
pre
- for
pre
gnant,
mar
- for
mare
, a female horse. My daily dose of pregnant horse estrogen.

Scene 3

Michael and I set a wedding date of June 11, 2000, which gave us nearly a year to plan. In July, while Julia was in LA, we visited the short list of wedding sites in our low-budget range, though I wasn’t exactly in the mood. After Robin’s diagnosis, I had a recurrent fantasy of walking down the aisle at my wedding, having hot flashes and wearing Depends, Michael looking like a college kid, holding hands with his ancient bride.

The round-faced young woman who gave us the tour of the Victorian wedding factory in central New Jersey wore a pale peach polyester bridesmaid dress, which matched the drapes, her hair ribbons, and her blush. Michael bated her with his charming smile and intentionally dumb questions. Unaware of Michael’s sarcasm, she rattled off at lightning speed her script of menu options for the tightly scheduled nuptials, the breakneck pace of her delivery mirroring the pace of the ceremonies—eight weddings each weekend, a feat accomplished by herding the guests at each wedding to a different room every half hour.

The rustic Bear Mountain Inn, nestled in a beautiful mountain valley, was briefly the top contender, but we ruled it out when we returned with dozens of other betrothed couples for the complimentary food tasting, a parade of unidentifiable, identical fried things, variations on a theme of “pigs in a blanket,” introduced ceremoniously as
fromage en croute
and
saucisses feuilletées
.

We weighed the merits of a civil service at City Hall, and reconsidered getting married at all. In late July, we found a place we both loved—an affordable, big old house in the country, ninety minutes upstate, with a wonderful in-house caterer. We paid our deposit and took a break.

Scene 4

It was our first vacation as a family. Julia, who would celebrate her ninth birthday in Tuscany, was an adventurous and uncomplaining traveler—open to trying anything new—especially gelato, but even the cathedrals and museums at which most kids balk. Michael, also on his first trip to Europe, had an obsessive drive to see everything, and set a manic sightseeing pace. We sped around Venice for three days, riding gondolas and water taxis, taking in Renaissance sculptures and the Biennale exhibit of contemporary art, viewing the city itself as a work of art slowly being submerged in water—like Michael’s beloved and vulnerable hometown of New Orleans. At first I was energized by Michael’s and Julia’s high velocity tourist style. But each day I found it harder to keep up with them.

Driving into Tuscany, Michael at the wheel, he took a wrong turn and we ended up in downtown Florence, stuck in traffic outside the city hospital. My hand on my hard belly, I had a fleeting fantasy of checking into the hospital. I would point to my Berlitz phrasebook at the Italian for “What’s wrong with me, Doctor?” He would smile condescendingly, borrow my book, and point to the phrase “Welcome to menopause!” which he would announce loudly in two languages, to the amusement of his colleagues. The Florentine traffic jam ended, Michael found the narrow, unpaved road we were looking for, and we drove up the mountain to our rented Tuscan cottage.