What I Thought I Knew: A Memoir (3 page)

Signora Francesca Gimaldi, our eighty-five-year-old landlady, whose leathered face was crosshatched with wrinkles, greeted us in Italian. She took a grandmotherly shine to Julia and promptly flagged down the rickety local bus, returning three hours later with two brown paper bags filled with fresh figs—one for her and one for Julia.

Michael and Julia drove down the mountain to Florence over the next few days, to visit the Uffizi Gallery and to explore the city, but I was too tired to join them, so I stayed at our cottage. Signora Gimaldi and I rested on the gray slate patio together, two old ladies quietly gazing at the parched yellow grass, olive trees, and vineyards, the vines tethered to wooden stakes to support the ripening bunches of small, green grapes. I followed Dr. Kay’s orders, and drank lots of local red wine.

Rome was beautiful but too hot to breathe. While Michael and Julia explored ancient ruins, cathedrals, and gardens, I became the American expert on Italian park benches. A Roman policeman shook me awake from a nap at the Villa Borghese Gardens and ordered me to leave.

I was famished, but after a few bites I couldn’t eat. My cheeks were sunken, my stomach was bloated. On the last night of our trip, unable to sleep, I ran my hand over my abdomen. The swelling was bigger than at the beginning of our vacation. I put Michael’s hand on my belly.

“What do you think it is?” he whispered, half-awake.

“Either I’m pregnant or this is a tumor.”

“You’ll be okay,” he said uncertainly, his hand tracing the hard curve.

Back in New York City on Labor Day, I bought an over-the-counter pregnancy test kit. “Negative,” I told Michael.

“How does that make you feel?” he asked.

“Relieved. Disappointed. Scared.”

“Me too.” He hugged me, picked up his suitcase, and left for the airport. He would be performing in Chicago all week, and would return late on Friday night.

Scene 5

The Jewish calendar is a combined lunar/solar calendar. The months correspond to the moon’s cycle, the year to the Earth’s rotation around the sun. Because twelve lunar months is eleven days short of a solar year, a thirty-day Leap Month is added every few years to keep in sync with the seasons. Jewish holidays begin at sundown, and the first evening is called “Erev” or “eve of.” In 1999 the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, begins at sundown on Friday, September 10, four days after Labor Day.

That afternoon I had a 1:30 appointment with Dr. Jan Riley. In the waiting room I thought about anything to get my mind off the frightening bulge in my abdomen.
My first faculty meeting at The New School at 4:00 today. Rosh Hashanah dinner tonight at Sue and Larry’s. Julia has a play date with their daughter, Adria, after school. I’ll pick up a bottle of wine after my faculty meeting. Tomorrow I take Julia to Rosh Hashanah children’s service. Her choice. Funny how I grew up with minimal Jewish education, I only go to synagogue on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, but Julia has been the driving force for her own Jewish education; she asked for Hebrew lessons from the age of six and is committed to having a bat mitzvah. So foreign to me, but I take her to Hebrew school every Monday with her friend Sophie. I adore Sophie’s mother—we’re on the cusp of a genuine friendship. Damn it, I’ve been waiting for Dr. Riley for two hours. I can’t be late for my meeting.

“How long have you had this?” asked Dr. Riley, pressing her hand on my swollen belly.

“I noticed it a month ago. My gynecologist said it was loss of muscle tone.”

“Did she do an internal exam?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sending you to Lenox Hill Hospital for an emergency CAT scan.”

“I have a meeting for a new job in twenty minutes. Can I do this tomorrow?”

“No. I think you have a large uterine or ovarian tumor. I can’t let you go the weekend without having this seen. It’s Friday. Radiology closes at four. I’ll call them and tell them to stay open for you.”

It surprised me that I was so terrified to hear I had a tumor. It’s what I expected. Michael wouldn’t be back from Chicago till midnight, and was unreachable by phone. I called Sue from the hospital and told her I’d be late to dinner.

“Can I to come to the hospital to be with you?” Sue offered. “I can get Larry to take care of the kids.”

“No, I don’t want to worry Julia. Thanks for offering. I’m okay.”

“This will make your organs glow,” said the nurse in the crowded Radiology waiting room, handing me a quart of a gluey, white, vile-tasting liquid. “When you finish drinking it, take a walk, and come back in an hour.”

 

 

In the middle of Central Park, in the center of this frenetic city, Turtle Pond is an oasis. On this insanely beautiful day, the sun was just slipping behind the treetops. A redwing blackbird perched on a cat-tail. A white heron gracefully fished along the far shore. Five turtles, lined up on a log, stretched their necks toward the afternoon’s last rays of sun, toward the impossibly blue sky. The pond was framed by weeping willows, the willows framed by the Manhattan skyline. This might be the last time I would see Central Park in late summer. This might be my last Rosh Hashanah. Would I live long enough to marry Michael? To help Julia grow up?

I walked back to Lenox Hill. I was the only one in the now shadowy waiting room, except for Jim, the young, black-haired radiologist, and his white-haired assistant, Jane, who were staying late just for me. The incandescent lamps had been turned off, leaving a bluish glow over the reception desk. They ushered me into a fluorescent-lit room and hooked me up to an IV, which made my mouth taste like aluminum, and dyed my glowing uterus and ovaries—and whatever hard and unwelcome mass was growing in them—purple.

Directed by Jane over a loudspeaker, I lay down on a metal tube, which transported me inside the human-sized white cylinder, a sterile and profoundly lonely place. I wished I’d asked Sue to come to the hospital with me. Between repeated immersions in the cylinder, I glimpsed Jim and Jane through the glass window. Their faces, which I tried to read for clues, looked troubled and confused. Jane apologized over the monitor. “The X-rays aren’t clear. We’ll have to run it again.”

When they were done, I sat in the chilly waiting area and fell asleep.

“Mrs. Cohen. Mrs. Cohen.” Jim was gently shaking my shoulder. “We did find something in you, Mrs. Cohen.”

“You did?”

“We found a baby.”

“What?”

“We found a baby.”

“What?”

“We found a baby in you. Congratulations, Mrs. Cohen!”

Obviously, this is a dream. I argue with him in my dream.

“That’s impossible.”

“Well, yes, we’re very surprised. Your medical records say you’re in menopause, and we didn’t expect to find a baby. It’s not customary to diagnose a pregnancy with a CAT scan. Not recommended. Nevertheless, as I say, there is a baby in you.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“We found a baby.”

Maybe this is a semantic misunderstanding—a slapstick “Who’s on first?” dialogue, with “baby” a proper name standing in for something else. I try to figure out the joke.

“What do you mean by ‘baby’?”

“I think you’d better come to the ultrasound room and see for yourself.”

I can tell it’s a dream by the script. It has that hard-boiled, noir dialogue of movies and dreams:
“We found a baby in you, Mrs. Cohen!” “I don’t believe you!” “You’d better come to the ultrasound room and see for yourself!”

Since my identity is predicated on my infertility, the statement, “Mrs. Cohen, we found a baby in you,” made no more sense than if he’d said, “Mrs. Cohen, we discovered that you’re a man.” Or, “Mrs. Cohen, we found out that you’re black.” Or, “Mrs. Cohen, the CAT scan revealed that you’re a billionaire, or a dog, or a registered Republican, or a right-to-life lobbyist.” However, I’m beginning to believe the radiologist, in that way you believe what a dream character tells you, no matter how lunatic it might be. In fact I’m beginning to warm up to this idea of being A Little Pregnant instead of having A Big Tumor. Given a choice between a few life-affirming embryonic cells and a lethal mass of cancer cells, I’ll take the embryo!

I can tell it’s a dream because, as so often happens in my dreams, I’m both inside and outside myself. It’s another recurrent dream of mine. I wrote a solo play about this dream of me, on the ceiling, looking at me on the examining table, looking at me on the video screen. It always starts out this way, in my dreams and in my plays, but I never know what’s going to show up on the video screen.

The radiologist slathers my belly with warm gel and moves the ultrasound device—kind of like a computer mouse—over the gooey surface, matched by a slurpy,
gloop
,
gloo-oo-oop
sound. The video screen is filled with shifting patterns of gray dots.

Maybe, in this dream, the video screen is a Rorschach test, an opportunity for self-analysis. In a dream a baby represents the self—I took a course on Freudian and Jungian dream analysis at Princeton—I’m going to give birth to my self.

He stops moving the sonogram camera over my gloopy belly.

Out of the gray haze, there is now a baby on the screen. It has a baby’s profile, rather pretty, with a button nose, parted lips, and an enormous forehead. A rhythmic flickering of light is its tiny heart, quick as a little bird’s heartbeat—
ta-tinn-ta-tinn-ta-tinnta-tinn
. . . . A thick, coiled umbilical cord floats from its baby belly, a teeny penis peeks between his legs. The baby has two feet, five toes apiece, two hands, each with five fingers.

He is waving his right hand. There’s a distant, high-pitched voice from inside my head, a fairy’s voice. “Hello, Mommy. I’m here. I slipped under the radar. I hid from you, but now I’m here, and I’m waving at you. See me? See me, Mommy? See me waving my little hand? See my heart? My little heart beating so fast,
ta-tinn, ta-tinn, ta-tinn, ta-tinn, ta-tinn
? Now you see me? Ha! Ha! Ha!”

“I’m here with Alice Cohen. . . .”

Jim is on the phone with Dr. Riley, while Jane silently pats my hand and smiles her worried, lips-together smile. “No malignancy. No. She’s pregnant. . . . Yes, that’s what she told me. . . . She’s in her third trimester. Twenty-six weeks. . . . Yes, the fetus is moving, heart rate is good. . . . Your patient appears to be in shock. . . . You need to talk to her.”

I wrench my brain out of believing I’m in a dream so that I can give all my attention to believing I’m in shock. That’s as much as I’m ready to believe. The radiologist hands me the receiver.

“Congratulations, Alice, this is great news!”

“Dr. Riley . . . I don’t want to have a baby. I can’t have a baby. Can I get an abortion?”

“No, it’s too late for that. An abortion is not legal after twenty-four weeks. This is really very good news, Alice, but you’re in shock right now. I thought you had a tumor, I was afraid you had cancer, I really did, or I never would have sent you for a CAT scan. But you don’t have a tumor. You’re healthy. The fetus is healthy. Call me Monday and I’ll refer you to a high-risk obstetrician. Go home now. Take it easy this weekend. Drink lots of water. Oh, and stop taking the estrogen! Start taking prenatal vitamins.”

“Do you want to know the sex of your baby?” the radiologist asks.

“Yes. No. Please don’t tell me.”

I know already, but I don’t want him to tell me. Knowing it’s a boy makes it worse, somehow. If I don’t hear it from the doctor, maybe I will have been mistaken and it will be a girl, or this will still be a dream.

But I know it’s a boy. And I’ve rejected my son on the first day I met him. “I don’t want to have a baby. Can I get an abortion?” I said out loud in front of three doctors. And worse, before rejecting my son, I neglected him for six months. I starved him, and probably injured him, subjected him to drugs and CAT scans, purple dye, Italian red wine and caffeine and X-rays. And now I don’t want him. What kind of a mother am I? A monster.

“Take the sonogram image home with you. Your first baby picture.”