Photos by Deb Orton
Belly with Hand
Hands
Debra Orton is a recent graduate of Stanford’s Writer’s Workshop and a past editor of “Top of the Western Staircase,” a literary publication of the University of Colorado at Boulder. Her short stories have appeared in the Ranfurly Review, Melusine, and Cosmoetica. Her novel, Crossing In Time: A Love Story, is awaiting publication. She lives with her husband and three sons in Colorado.
Fiction by Lara McLaughlin
How can I describe my marriage to Dag after twelve years? Neither of us felt completed. I had my photography, but only as a hobby then. Dag had his classes, but his writing had progressed poorly. When we got together with other professors and their wives, the evenings generated an air of desperation. We were no longer wild co-eds. We were the establishment, tethered by contracts, by research and publishing obligations, and for most, by family responsibilities. Never did it seem so depressing as when we gathered en masse in each other’s homes. Always there was the ubiquitous discussion of tenure.
One of these evenings I was in our kitchen, washing plates and glasses with Gina Sugarland, Howard’s wife. Howard was in Philosophy, and lay passed-out across the foot of our bed. Through the envelope-sized window over the sink I could see two other friends of Dag’s in a shouting match over which was more spiritual, the music of John Lennon or John Coltrane. One of them took a swing at the other.
“Holy Jesus,” said Gina, and without breaking her rhythm passed a glass to me for drying. “They’re like little boys.”
“I don’t know. The only little boy I’ve ever known is Dag,” I said, meaning that he was the only male I’d ever known well but as I said it, the comparison did not seem ludicrous. We looked at each other, then broke into laughter.
Gina wiped a tear from the corner of her eye and laid her hand on my stomach. I flinched. “When are you going to tell us?” she whispered.
I didn’t know how to respond. I had half believed I was only imagining the changes.
“Oh come on.” Her eyes grew big.
“I’m not sure yet.” The hope I’d been afraid of woke inside me.
“But it’s so obvious!” she said.
I tried to flatten the swell below my waistline.
“Not because you’re showing-of course you’re not. Look at you. Plus it’s the first and all-” Gina had three children. “But… well let’s put it this way. You’re either pregnant, or having an affair. Nobody looks like you do for no good reason!” She laughed. “You haven’t been to the doctor?”
I shook my head. I didn’t even have a doctor. Not since I had stopped taking the pill, and that was two universities ago. Years ago I’d played Russian roulette with the pill for excitement. We all did back then. It was a little trick on the husbands. I made one month of pills last for four, then for six, then for eight. My friends got pregnant. I took up photography.
The conversation with Gina gave me courage to believe that sometimes strange things, miraculous things, happen. The following week I dropped in at the campus clinic. The young woman at the front desk did not look old enough to drive. I was reminded once again how surrounded by youth Dag was. Compared to the girls floating through the halls of these buildings, I felt dried up, petrified. I was thirty-three.
“I was wondering if I could speak with a doctor,” I said, hating the timidity in my voice. The young woman looked at me as if I were a puzzling specimen that had been handed to her.
“Are you a professor?”
I shook my head.
“Student?”
“No-I…”
“An employee of the university? Spouse?”
“Yes. Spouse.”
She handed me a clipboard. “Fill this out.”
“I really just wanted to talk to a doctor, first. I-”
“None of the doctors are in right now. But by the time you fill out these forms, and wait your turn,” she nodded toward a room full of apathetic looking young people slouched in plastic bucket chairs, “then I’m sure-”
“I was hoping to not have to wait all day. All I really need is a pregnancy test.”
The woman’s eyes immediately slid down to my stomach and back to my face again. She raised an eyebrow. I have never lost my amazement at the unapologetic audacity of American girls. I raised a brow back at her, regaining a sense of outrage.
“Well,” she shuffled for something in a drawer to her right, “we don’t do those here. You’ll have to go to Planned Parenthood.” She handed me a card. “Here’s the address and number of the nearest one.”
I took the card. “Thank you.”
She pursed her lips, and looked back down at her desk.
I had to smile. I was the one carrying a life in me. For the first time I allowed hope to carry me through the lobby, back out into the glaring sun.
I should have called first. I had a habit, perhaps cultivated from childhood, of simply arriving places. It didn’t bother me to find that I had to wait or come back another day. I usually took my camera with me. In my mind, no venture was a wasted one, but Dag complained that the shortest errand became a field trip with me.
“This is not the third world, Riva,” he was fond of saying. “People run on schedules here.”
The lady at the Planned Parenthood was more forgiving. She acted as though my unexpected arrival was her personal failure. “Of course, we are happy to take drop-ins,” she explained, in a fluster. She flitted around, assembling a clipboard and plastic cup and label, all the while she was talking. “But we could have warned you that a first morning urine sample was preferable-unless you are quite far along in the pregnancy-” she paused to cast a discerning eye on me, “but, you will probably want to go ahead and have a blood test done also. Just to be absolutely certain.” She handed me the small pile of supplies she had assembled. “Don’t apply the label until after you collect the sample,” she added. “Then bring it to me, and you can fill out all the forms.” She smiled and nodded toward a door. “That’s the ladies room.”
I was dismayed to hear that it would be several days before I learned the outcome of the tests.
“You will need to make another appointment,” the woman said, labeling the vile of blood a nurse had just drawn from my arm. “In a few days.”
“Can I simply call? I have a telephone.” This was one of those things I was likely to say that made Dag so furious. Of course you have a telephone, Riva. This is America.
“Oh no,” the woman shook her head vigorously, and at first I believed she was taking exception to the fact that I had a telephone. That’s where my train of thought had taken me, and so I missed what she said next. Then she said, “It’s simply our policy. When would be a good time for you?”
“To make an appointment?”
“Yes, dear.”
I rehearsed the trip in my head, the long walk to the bus stop, two bus transfers, the shorter walk to the clinic, a wait, and then the return trip. It would be most of the day again.
“As soon as possible.”
“Well, how does Friday sound?”
Friday sounded far away. It was Monday.
“At two o’clock?”
A two o’clock appointment meant I would not get home before Dag that day- that was, if he came home at all. More and more he was staying on campus to write in his office. Sometimes he stayed all night.
“Do you have something earlier?” I asked. If he got home before me, he would want to know where I had been and why I hadn’t taken the car. I shunned the car for trips into the city. The traffic, the parking, the enigma of the streets terrified me; Dag said I drove like an eighty-year-old woman.
“No, but I can put you in at ten o’clock on Monday morning.”
“Friday at two will be fine then.” I had four whole days to wait. Days of wrestling hope pinned by fear. Of being consumed with wonder.
When I returned that Friday, a different woman was sitting behind the desk. I was directed into an adjacent office where another woman was watering plants. She seemed surprised when I entered. I just wanted to be alone in the safety of my home to ponder it all. I told myself that I had an open mind, that if I was not pregnant it only confirmed what I had felt all along, but as soon as I sat, and then she sat, I realized how much I had let myself hope there was a life inside me and how destroyed I would be if there was not. Before she ever said a word, I began to cry.
The woman quickly jumped up from her seat and came around to me. She held out a box of tissues, and put a hand on my shoulder.
“I’m sorry,” I sniffled.
She patted me. “It’s alright. Lots of women get very emotional about this.”
“It’s only that-”
“I know. I know,” she said. She sat in a chair next to me, and put a hand on my leg.
I composed myself.
“Your pregnancy test was positive.” She squeezed my knee a little.
“It was? Positive?”
She nodded. Her eyes were filled with sorrow, leading me to think I’d misunderstood.
“Positive means…”
“You are pregnant.” She offered me another tissue.
I blew my nose and smiled.
She withdrew her hand, and leaned back in her seat beside me. “Is this good news for you?”
“Oh yes!” I laughed, and phlegm sprayed out of my nose. “Oh!”
She laughed. “That’s okay. This is so wonderful! Most of our clients are not so pleased.”
“You are sure?”
She nodded, and stood to retrieve a file folder from her desk. “The blood test confirmed it. You are not sure when your last period was?”
“No. I thought I had it a few times but then it stopped and started and was not normal.”
She frowned. “But you have not bled recently have you?”
I hadn’t. Not in weeks. I shook my head. “I am so-I just got used to the idea of not having children.”
“Well you are fortunate to be so flexible. Not everyone can make the switch as easily as you. Mentally, that is.”
“Oh, I’ve always wanted children. I don’t have any.”
She smiled. “You have one.”
I stared at her, and then I understood. We laughed. A baby! My mind was so full of thoughts.
She wanted to talk about doctors and prenatal care, and I wanted to sing and dance. I wanted to fly to Tenerife to tell Consuela, as irrational as that was. My mother and my father! How pleased they would be. Gina Sugarland and I would go to lunch and celebrate. I do not believe I thought of Dag once.
I promised to make an appointment with one of the doctors on a list she gave me. I don’t remember leaving, or the walk to the bus stop, or the two transfers, or the long, hot walk back home. The house was dark and stuffy, but I flopped happily on the sofa and fell fast asleep.
I would name her Evangeline (I was certain it would be a girl) after my favorite poem as a child. In my mind, I lived out her entire life. How she would look at two and three, how I would dress her for her first day of school. How we would paint together and write bad poetry that would make Dag laugh after her bedtime. The pictures I would take of her, the stories I would read to her, the books she would learn to love to read herself. I would talk with her about life and love, and we would share great secrets, giggling in bed together at night, and holding tea parties in the yard for her dolls during the days. I would brush her long, glossy hair and tie ribbons in it. My mother and father would come visit us and perhaps even stay, all of us together in our home. They would see what a happy family we were. They would forgive me for marrying Dag, for not choosing their god, or their way of life.
Evangeline would be the strand that plaited us together.
I dreamt of the day she would come to me and tell me she was in love. We would talk about love and marriage and babies. Dag and I would love the boy also, and welcome him into our family. We would have grandchildren and they would play in our yard in the evenings while their parents went out. In our old age Dag and I would sit, graying but wise, and watch them play, smiling at the life we had created.
As soon as the pregnancy was confirmed, I wondered at the strength of will that had kept me from clearly knowing before. Suddenly none of my clothes fit. My belly was a small, but tightly stuffed pillow. I had lost my appetite for almost all my favorite foods. I craved salt but could not stomach the smell of vinegar. The signs had all been there I realized; little Evangeline had been speaking to me from her hidden nest deep inside. I determined to rejoice in every ache and pain for the rest of my pregnancy.
Dag was gone evenings most of the time now; he said he was happy and writing better than in years. I chose to not distract him in those first days and simply cherished the time that Evangeline and I shared. I fixed only meals that pleased me, and ate as much or as little as I wanted. I was under no one’s scrutiny. I felt exhilarated and free, even as I carried the weight of my responsibility to the tiny being growing within.
A few days of keeping the good news from Dag lengthened into a week, then two.
I told myself that it would be unkind to disrupt his attention at the height of his productivity. He was developing a body of work, he told me. He hoped to publish again in the near future. He was very secretive about his work, as always, and I comforted myself with the knowledge that I had a secret this time also.
I called a doctor, the only woman on the list that Planned Parenthood had given me. She was, thankfully, not in the city, but close to the University, and I drove the car to our appointment. Walking from the parking lot to the office building, in the hallways and elevators, the people I met were friendly and responsive to me. Evangeline had brought an aura of goodwill into my life and it must have showed in my countenance, even the way I moved. I felt blessed, touched by God for the first time since I was a little girl.
The doctor was a gentle, soft-spoken woman, much older than me, and kind. After her exam and some prodding of my belly, she told me she thought I was about fourteen weeks pregnant. She showed me how to count the weeks backward to when I became pregnant, and set the date of the birth for forty weeks from then. April 12.
“Of course, babies come when they want to,” she added.
There was so much that I didn’t know about growing babies. The doctor showed me pictures in a small pamphlet of what Evangeline would look like at each stage of development. She was already a little person floating inside me, with arms and legs and fingers and toes. I listened to her heart beating through the stethoscope.
“Are you sure that’s not just my heart?”
“No. Listen,” the doctor said. “It’s much faster than your own heart.”
Evangeline’s heart was thrumming at double time, a tiny, but steady pulse inside me.
The doctor gave me vitamins to take every day, and was surprised to hear that I had not told my husband yet. “I’m going to schedule you for a sonogram next week,” she said. “That’s where we will take a peek at the baby using sound waves. Your husband will want to be present for that. Couples get very excited about it. The pictures are grainy and difficult to understand at first, but the technician will help you figure it out. At this stage we should be able to see the baby’s spine and heart, most of its major organs, and even count fingers and toes if we’re lucky.”
Years ago, at Connecticut College, one of the wives had a sonogram picture of their newborn hanging on the refrigerator. It was a scratchy black and white Polaroid, but after looking at it a few seconds, I could recognize the outline of a baby’s profile. Their baby had its thumb stuck in its mouth.
I would see Evangeline in a week.
It was time to tell Dag.
He did not come home that evening. I called him at work the next day.
“Can you come home for dinner tonight? I have something important to talk about.”
I heard him take in a deep breath. “Is something wrong?”
“No. Everything is very good. This will be a good talk.”
“Okay. You scared me for a minute. Let’s go out to dinner.”
We almost never could afford to go out. But in my head I imagined the perfect meal, the perfect evening here at home. “I want to make you something special tonight.”
He laughed. “Okay. What is it? Can’t you tell me over the phone?”
“No. You have to wait. Just come home.”
“I’m dying of curiosity here,” he said. “Now you’ve spoiled any chance of my getting some work done.”
“Good,” I said mischievously. “Some things are more important than work. I’ll see you tonight.”
“Riva,” he said. “I love you.”
An hour later when he walked through the front door, I was resting in the dark on the sofa. I jumped up when I heard the door open and the daylight blinded me for a moment. He was just a large shadow in the doorway, but I didn’t have time to be afraid, because he spoke right away.
“You know I’m a terrible waiter.”
At first I was angry. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. I had it all planned, and, as usual, Dag dominated and changed everything. But when he turned on the light, I saw his face, like a little boy on his birthday, wondering what the surprise was.
“You’re such a baby,” I teased. We kissed. He smelled rumpled and musky, and I could smell the alcohol from the night before still on his breath.
“You’re drinking while you write?” I didn’t mean it as an accusation, but he was the one who always said that his writing was no good when he drank.
He stepped away from me. “Not much. And it’s working this time. It’s good stuff, Riva.” He sounded angry, defensive.
We were off to a bad start, so I tried a lighter tone. “When do I get to read it?”
“Why? So you can check it? You’re the one who doesn’t know anything about poetry, Riva. You don’t understand it, remember?”
I began to panic. This was not the way it should be. “I like to read your work, Dag. You know that. It always sounds beautiful to me.”
“It’s not ready,” he said grumpily. “Is this why you invited me home? So you could interrogate me?”
“I didn’t mean to interrogate you. And do you need an invitation to your own home? Isn’t that an odd thing to say?”
“Isn’t it an odd thing that I would feel that way? Yes it is. That my own wife makes me feel as though I need permission to be here? I think that is very odd.”
I didn’t understand what he was saying. I was dumfounded. As always, he was able to turn the tables and make the innocent words that came out of my mouth seem ugly. I knew I would not be telling him about Evangeline that day.
“You can go now,” I said, feeling stubborn. “The surprise is over.”
“Oh, big surprise. That I was invited to return to my own home. Do I owe you a thank you note for this, Riva?”
It was not what I had said, not what I had meant. “You were the one who talked about being invited. Not I.”
He backed even further away, mimicking me with his hands put up in mock surrender. “Not I, not I, she says. I am perfect. I am pure.”
I started to cry. “Please go, Dag. Go back to your classes, to your writing, or whatever you really do there.” It was cruel, I know. Just when I needed him to make us a family, I drove the wedge between us deeper.
He did go. He slammed the door so hard that it splintered on the hinge. I heard him on the front walk take the bicycle that he used to travel back and forth to campus, and smash it against the cement sidewalk. A moment later the car engine revved, then squealed, then roared away, fading as Dag sped down the road to escape from me.
He did not come home for three days. For the first two days, I was happy he was gone. I did not care if he ever came back. I entertained thoughts of leaving him and raising Evangeline on my own. It was a glorious fantasy. On the third day, I panicked. I began to imagine his dead body lying in the crumpled ruins of our car at the bottom of an overpass. Or worse still, dangling from a rope in his office. I tortured myself with grim scenarios, but my pride would not let me call the University. If he was still alive, let him wonder why I was not wondering. It was a silly game of chicken that I played with our lives that week, more stubborn and proud than humble and forgiving. As the third day became the fourth night I grew increasingly desperate, remembering only his arms, his mouth, his incredible whispering words of love. I told myself I would die of yearning before I caved in and called him, but there was no deluding myself- I was dying of yearning for him.
I tried to distract myself with thoughts of Evangeline and our new life together, but always those thoughts were of the three of us; I could not strain out Dag from the scenarios that played in my head. If only I was not such a mule when he got angry or moody. It was only the artist in him that made him the way he was. It was what I loved about him.
Evangeline, I knew in my soul, would have Dag’s temperament, but we would raise her in gentleness and mercy, not with the harsh, utilitarian outlook that Dag’s mother imposed on those around her. Dag would bring the light of language and philosophy into her life, and I would warm the cold winter of her father’s heart with the warmth of Mediterranean blood. She would be perfect.
Dag returned in the middle of the night. I was in bed, but not asleep. During my pregnancy sleep eluded me at night, then dogged me through the day. I heard the creak of his steps in the hall, and the weary drop of his body onto the sofa in the living room. He was not coming to me. He was merely seeking sleep. I listened to his snores until the sun rose. I fell asleep preparing the words to tell him about Evangeline.
When I woke, he was gone again. Of course, he had needed to return to campus, he had classes to teach. Still, I was despondent at the thought of another day stretching before me, waiting for when he would arrive home. I considered taking the bus to Price Club to look for baby furniture, but my heart was not in it. The only spare room we had was Dag’s office. I could not really submerge myself in redecorating when all his belongings cluttered the room. Dag was a wall that came between me and all my plans, my dreams. I despised him for his self-centeredness. I despised myself for my timidity.
That same day he surprised me by returning only a few hours later. I was ashamed to still be in my nightgown, and the look of disgust on his face when he saw me told me he felt the same way. Still, I was pleased, in a crafty way, because it was clear to see how my breasts had swollen and my belly brushed against the folds of the sheer gown. He would have to notice that. He would understand my listlessness also, once he knew about Evangeline.
“How nice,” he said, throwing his satchel down to the floor. “You’ve slept the day away.”
“I’ve been awake,” I said. “But I have something to tell you.”
His expression became guarded, frightened even. I took a small comfort in knowing that I still had some power over him, but it wasn’t the way I wanted it to be. Far from it. I touched his arm to let him know all was forgiven.
”Come sit down,” I said. He was reluctant, like a trapped animal. I pulled him to the sofa, and smiled for him, willing him to relax. If only he knew how fine it could be for us, the three of us, if he would relax. “You’ve been working too hard,” I told him. “And I’ve been selfish.” I began to massage his neck.
He tilted his head a little. I really did feel as if I was trying to soothe a scared rabbit. I had only my words, and I was not good with words. Not like he was. If there were a God in this world, he would surely make my words come out right this one time. So far, Dag had looked only in my eyes, not once at my body, which was screaming the truth for him to see.
“I am very happy for you-for us-that your writing is going so well. I also have a project, and it has made me distracted lately. That is what I wanted to tell you about.”
“Okay.” He was wary, but listening.
“This-project-is a secret from everyone but us for a while. It is growing in secret that is.” Dag was restless, shifting in his seat. I hoped he would guess what I was hinting at, but he continued looking at me with his scared, watchful, eyes. “We are going to have a baby,” I said quickly.
He said nothing, as if he was waiting for the interesting part. Perhaps I had said it too quickly. Perhaps he had not understood me.
“You and me,” I said stupidly.
“Maybe you’re mistaken,” he said, getting up.
“Well, no…” Was he afraid, like I had been? Afraid to hope? “The tests came back positive. I am pregnant.”
“Maybe you’re mistaken about it being you and me.” He took off his shirt and balled it up, tossing it in the direction of the bedroom. It came unfurled, caught the air like a sail and fell lazily to the floor.
“What are you saying, Dag?”
“Only that this is just a bad time, don’t you think? What went wrong anyway? I thought you were taking care of things.”
I had no answer for him. My mouth hung open, and I must have looked like a fool.
“Oh never mind, Riva. Just forget the whole goddamn thing.” He knotted the shirt and hurled it again; it flew like a missile into the bedroom, and he followed it. Moments later, wearing a new shirt, he walked out of the house. Our little house shuddered from top to bottom as he slammed the door.
I didn’t think of myself, or even Evangeline during those minutes I sat on the sofa. I thought only about Dag, how he was normally so undemonstrative, how much emotion must have been churning inside him to bring him to the point where he reacted with physical violence against his environment, first smashing the bicycle, now this. I remembered my father, the sounds behind closed doors, the soft cries, sharp bangs, and thuds of my childhood nights. A primitive fear shuddered through my body at those sounds, now experienced again as a grown up, with an illuminating understanding I had not had before. I saw that life could transform a quiet, disciplined man into a monster, and I knew the helplessness that my mother must have felt, the powerlessness to react.
Dag did not return for another three days. For most of it I lay curled in a self-hug, rocking, like some demented creature. Sometimes the endless hours of silence in the house were punctured by the startling sound of my own primitive wails. I cried for myself. I cried for my mother and father and the whole world of the broken hearted. I don’t remember eating, or sleeping, or getting up to go to the bathroom. By some miracle, the morning Dag returned to the house I was up and dressed and moving in a stupor of efficiency through each day. But I was not a real, waking person.
He never mentioned our conversation, or the baby. It was as though it never happened, as though it could be erased through the sheer neglect of it as a topic of conversation. We went for weeks like that I think. We ate dinner; we positioned ourselves side by side in bed like horizontal posted sentries. Gradually we relearned how to come in contact with each other, a graze in passing, a brush or tap in the bed. All the while Evangeline was a growing force within me, but I no longer entered the interior room of my thoughts where I considered such sensations.
Finally a morning came when, after Dag had risen, showered, and ridden off to school, the first concrete thought of what this all must lead to scrolled like Teletype across my thoughts.
I had a problem.
I knew, as women do, that there were places to go, things I could do. It was the eighties; such procedures were legal and safe. Gradually over the days, I had conversations with myself, coached myself, encouraged myself, fed myself bits and pieces of gleaned information. Dag became even busier with his writing, and I made excuses to friends who wanted to see us. None of us scrutinized the others’ lives so much that we couldn’t comfortably withdraw to tend to the underbelly of life. We were modern people, and understood that things happened.
I skipped the next appointment with my doctor, instead returning to talk to one of the endless parade of young women who staffed the front desk at Planned Parenthood. I found myself once again in an examining room with my legs splayed, knees and teeth chattering.
“You are quite far along,” the doctor said, in a way that indicated this personally annoyed him. The snapping sound of his gloves as he discarded them punctuated his disappointment in me.
The nurse quickly pulled the paper apron over my legs and lifted my wobbly knees, first one, then the other, out of their metal saddles. I struggled to a sitting position feeling betrayed by my body, ungainly beyond reason. I was only just beginning to show, I told myself. How far along could that be? The woman at Planned Parenthood had told me it would not be a problem, would definitely not be a problem, but this doctor wanted to talk about it. “Why do you want to do this now? Why did you wait so long?”
How did I answer? I do not honestly know. The thinking, feeling part of me was not there. I was on the sidelines, snapping pictures, balancing light and dark, composition and details. It was a dramatic scene; patient, doctor, nurse, the nurse especially interesting, offsetting the central drama with a look of practiced distraction.
I was to be scheduled for a procedure the next day at the local hospital. If all went well, the doctor said, I would be able to leave the same day. He wore his distaste for me like a stain on his necktie. When he left the room, the nurse apologized for him, and assured me that they dealt with these situations all the time. I collected my handbag, checked my pockets, and smoothed my skirt. She laid a hand on my shoulder before I left, and I felt hardly able to bear the weight of it.
In the hospital waiting room the next day, I was like a child nursing a hurt, huddled in a corner with her belongings gathered around her. I was aware of all that was happening, but it was reduced to mere noise. I remember that a nurse called my name and at some point I put my belongings, car keys, purse, shoes and clothes, into a locker. I was ushered into yet another waiting room with a couple of other women. We wore flimsy hospital gowns, soft and nubby from washing. No one spoke. Another nurse offered me a pill in a little green paper cup. To relax me, she said. I took it obediently. It did relax me. In fact, before my wait was over I began to feel a tremendous sense of wellbeing, even hopefulness, something which had eluded me for quite a long time. Years maybe.
When they were ready, the room they shuffled me into was cold and bright. I lied down on a bed with a thin hospital blanket. The nurse put an IV into my arm. After a while a doctor came in, and the nurse held my hand and told me to look at her. I felt a sharp pain and a burning in my abdomen as the doctor pressed on my lower belly. When the nurse released my hand, the doctor flipped the blanket over me, and they both left. My legs began quaking, perhaps sensing the panic that was by passing my brain.
I do not know how long I was there. I wondered if it was over, if I was free to go. But I still had a bag of fluid draining into my arm, and my head was swimming with strange thoughts, waking dreams. I might have slept, but a rumbling woke me, a dreadful inner disturbance, like the onset of diarrhea. I needed to get up and go to the bathroom or I would soil myself, and I remember crying out for the nurse, but at the same time wondering how I would manage getting to the bathroom on my own when my head was in such a state.
The nurse appeared at my side, holding my hand again. She looked at the clock on the wall as she spoke to me.
“It won’t be so bad,” she said. “No worse than childbirth, really.”
I had heard childbirth was terrible.
Increasingly, the muddle in my head was not sufficient to distract me from the alarming thrashing in my belly, which no longer appeared to be the onset of diarrhea as much as a violent alien war that was taking place inside me. A grim tickle of a thought nagged at me, and as the inner struggle progressed I became more and more alert, more and more distraught. It was the baby inside me who was struggling, the baby inside me who was fighting for life, not me.
What was happening to me? To us? Evangeline!
It seems ridiculous in hindsight, but with my thoughts in a tangle, the mother in me went on alert. I called for the nurse again. I was frantic.
“There’s something terribly wrong with the baby,” I urged.
She pressed a hand on my belly and then took my pulse. “It will be over in a while. This is normal,” she said.
This is normal, I thought? “You don’t understand. The baby. Something is wrong.”
She patted my hand. “Any pain? Cramping? Anything at all?”
I shook my head. She was completely missing my concern. Part of me wanted to jump up and shake her in my frustration, but the other part was too tired, too bleary headed. I drifted off.
The pain woke me. It was iridescent and searing, a scalding clamp. I could not clear my head enough to make sense of it. It surprised me, like lightening, then left, striking again while I was miles away in my mind. I rolled my head and moaned. At one point a nurse put a cool washcloth on my forehead and checked the connection of the tube draining into my arm.
“What is happening to me?” I couldn’t keep my arms and legs still, every part of me was chattering in anticipation of the next wrenching cramp.
“It will all be over soon. Don’t worry.” She pressed down hard on my belly and prodded me from different angles. The blanket was tangled around my feet in a knot. My knees were blue. I wondered if I was so drugged that I was hallucinating. I bit down on my knuckles. It was sometime after that when I saw a man in the room-the doctor?-I couldn’t remember what he had looked like. He stood at the foot of my bed and made me scoot forward. The end of my bed fell away, and suddenly there were the metal stirrups where there hadn’t been any before. The nurse placed my convulsing legs into them. My mind and body coalesced in that brief instant to remind me of what was happening.
Evangeline!
I whispered frantic messages to her in my heart. Hold on Evangeline. Don’t let go. Hold on.
“Give a push now,” the doctor said. I was too terrified to respond. Although my body was rigid, inside I was writhing with panic. The nurse and doctor together placed their hands on my belly and pressed down hard. I felt a popping in my bowels, and heard a rush of fluid, like soup being poured into a pot.
Hold on baby. Don’t go.
Someone was talking now. There was a concentration of activity, and I felt the cold, invasive pinch of the speculum, hands from on both sides of me pressing down on my thighs, keeping them still.
“There you go,” the nurse said. She smiled brightly at me. “It’s all over. You rest now.” She patted the blanket where it was pulled up on my chest, and as suddenly as the room had filled with people, it emptied and I was alone.
I slept until they made me go home.
Lara McLaughlin is the author of the novel Alabaster Houses, from which this story is an adapted chapter. She is currently searching for an agent, while writing a second novel. She has published short stories in the Baltimore Sun Magazine, the Penn Union Magazine by Johns Hopkins University Press, and in a collection entitled Wednesday Night’s Harvest by Seedling Press. More of her writing can be found at www.laramclaughlin.org
Essay by Cara Holman
My miscarriage happened so long ago, that I rarely think about it consciously anymore. But when my gynecologist recently informed me that she needed to perform a uterine biopsy on me “just to be on the safe side”, memories and feelings that I thought I had safely buried, came flooding back to me.
It took me back to the time when I had a lively three-year-old at home, and was expecting my second child. I had just passed the second trimester mark, and now that the morning sickness was starting to subside, I was basking in the glow of my pregnancy. My life seemed picture perfect- I was happily married, had an active, healthy young son, and lived in the house of my dreams high up on a hill in Seattle, overlooking the lights of downtown at night. On a really clear day, you could even see Mt. Ranier through the window of our breakfast nook.
Motherhood was everything I had hoped it would be, and then some, in spite of the occasional temper tantrums- my son’s that is, not mine. I could hardly wait for the day when I would hold my second child in my arms, a day that I believed would cement us as a family, rather than merely a couple with a young child. I was one of the last of my circle of friends to get pregnant with a second child, believing that a three to four year spacing between children would be ideal. Jeff would be almost exactly three and a half years old when his new sibling was born in the spring, and I envisioned long days in the park nursing my newborn while I watched Jeff and his friends running around on the playground.
I woke that morning with a feeling of foreboding, but it had nothing to do with my pregnancy, or me either, for that matter. Today was the day my husband was scheduled to have arthroscopic knee surgery. Although his surgeon had assured us that it was a very straightforward procedure, with every expectation of success, still it weighed heavily on my mind as I slowly dressed for the day. I had made arrangements to drop Jeff off at a friend’s house, thinking that a hospital was no place for a restless young child.
“Don’t worry about what time you’re done,” Diane says cheerfully. “I’ll take the boys to the playground this morning so they can release a little energy, then I’ll give them lunch and they can play in our playroom or watch a video. He’ll be fine,” she assures me, nodding her head at Jeff who is already running around the house with Tyler.
As Tom and I head for the hospital, I notice the fall color by the side of the road, and relax just a bit. The muted October sunlight raises my spirits and I can’t help but think what a shame it is that we aren’t taking advantage of this nice weather. We should be heading out to watch the boats in the ship canal, or spending the day at the zoo instead of the hospital. Still, I have every expectation that in a few short weeks, things will be completely back to normal again, and maybe the nice weather will hold out for just a bit longer.
While we wait nervously for Tom to be wheeled into surgery, I suddenly remember that I have a prenatal visit scheduled for that morning, and in the flurry of activity with the pre-op and all, I had forgotten to cancel it. “Go ahead and keep your appointment,” he tells me. “I’ll be in surgery for several hours and it won’t take you long. Forty-five minutes at the outside.” He was right. Erica’s house is just up the road, and I could be there and back in almost less than the amount of time it takes to talk about it. We had thrilled at the sound of the first fetal heartbeat at the last visit, so this would just be a routine check, nothing to get too excited about.
I pause on the front steps of Erica’s house to once again take in the beauty of the day. There are some chrysanthemums blooming in her garden, in all shades of yellow and orange, and I am admiring them when Erica comes to the door. “Where’s Jeff?” is her first question, as she shows me into the upstairs room she uses to see her patients. While most other nurse-midwifes practice out of traditional offices, Erica prefers to see patients in her own house, and I fully appreciate the homey, non-antiseptic atmosphere. I look over at the toy bin in the corner, and smile as I remember how delighted Jeff was to discover it on our last visit.
I explain that I have left Jeff with a friend while my Tom has knee surgery. “I’m kind of in a hurry to get back to the hospital,” I conclude. “Anyway, I’ve been feeling fine. Great, in fact, now that the morning sickness is over. I guess it’s still too early to feel the baby moving?”
Erica does a quick calculation in her head. “Let’s see, you’re 15, no almost 16 weeks along. You could feel the baby move at any time now.” She works briskly and efficiently, all the while keeping up a conversation. It is when she pauses mid-sentence to listen for the fetal heart tones, that I see an expression of concern cross her face, and then just as quickly disappear.
“You know,” she says, in a carefully measured voice, “I’m not picking up the fetal heartbeat.” She glances at her clock on the wall. “I don’t want to take up any more of your time today. I know you’re in a hurry to get back to the hospital. I’ve been having a little bit of trouble with my equipment lately. Why don’t you just come back on Thursday and we’ll check again. I’m sure everything is okay,” she hastens to assure me.
I suddenly get a feeling of déjà vu. Everyone seems to be assuring me things will be just fine: first my husband’s surgeon, then Diane and now Erica. Still, I’m not overly concerned at this point. If Erica isn’t worried, why should I be?
I hardly give the matter another thought in the ensuing days, something highly unusual for a chronic worrier like me, to be sure, but my mind is on my husband’s recovery, and after all, hadn’t Erica assured me everything would be okay? Between taking care of Tom, and keeping Jeff busy, the next three days pass rapidly, until I am once again back at Erica’s to listen for the fetal heart tones.
It is when she still can’t pick them up, for the second time now, that the first inklings of fear begin to seep into my mind. With Tom well on his way to recovery, I begin to focus again on my pregnancy. Why isn’t Erica picking up the fetal heart tones? Is it still too early? No, that doesn’t make sense. We heard them clearly at my twelve week visit. Was her equipment really on the fritz last time, or was that just an excuse she made to make me feel better?
As I look up at her, I see at once that this time she is concerned, though she still keeps her air of brisk efficiency about her. “I think we should schedule you for an ultrasound this afternoon,” she says, “just to be on the safe side.” I notice she is not so quick to reassure me everything will be fine this time.
She steps out of the room to make the arrangements. I take a deep breath and try not to focus on the fear that is slowly threatening to engulf me. What possible logical explanation is there for her not being able to hear the fetal heartbeat this time around? If it is not her equipment that is at fault… But here my mind clearly draws a line. I will not think about the other possibility. What could possibly have gone wrong? Wouldn’t I have known it if there was a problem with my pregnancy?
An hour later, I am in a darkened room, while a young woman whose nametag reads “Jessie” runs a probe over my abdomen. I am not really in any discomfort, except perhaps a little from having a full bladder. As this is my first ultrasound ever, never having had the occasion to need one during my first pregnancy, I don’t really know what to expect. The grainy picture on the screen is quite frankly a disappointment. I have no idea what I’m seeing. I try squinting to see if I can almost make out the baby’s features, and I think I can see a head and body emerge from the black and white image. However, try as I might, I can’t seem to detect any movement.
I glance over at Jessie again. Her eyes are glued to the computer screen as she continues to move the probe around. “Can you see the baby moving?” I ask her hopefully.
“Well,” Jessie says, in the carefully measured tones that I have since learned to equate with bad news, “it’s difficult to say. The radiologist will read it this afternoon and call your doctor with the results.”
“Midwife,” I correct her. I try one more time. “If the heart was beating, would you be able to tell?”
Jessie’s face remains impassive. I notice she still studiously avoids eye contact with me. “The radiologist will read it,” she reiterates firmly, and chastened, I lapse into silence. Although it will be a full two more hours before Erica calls me at home with the news, in my heart I have already read the writing on the wall. I know not how, I know not why, but apparently my baby has died. I am only 31 years old. I have had one non-eventful full-term pregnancy. I have a healthy young son. I myself have always enjoyed good health, and now with no rhyme or reason, they tell me my baby has died.
I feel full of grief, heartbroken, bewildered and inconsolable. Why me? I keep asking myself. Why me? I quite honestly don’t understand. If the baby died, why didn’t I miscarry spontaneously? Why should I believe what they tell me? What if they’re wrong and there’s nothing wrong with the baby? My head is swirling with questions. It is all I can do to get through the rest of the day. Erica drives over and leaves me with some inspirational books about miscarriages and I try to make sense of them. I cry a lot, being careful not to do so in front of Jeff. Still, he senses something is wrong and he is very clingy and insecure that night, adding a layer of guilt on top of my grief.
I am scheduled for a pre-op the next day, and Tom accompanies me to the visit. Somehow, the irony of the situation strikes me. A week ago I was accompanying him to his surgery. Now it will be my turn. When we spoke our wedding vows a mere six years ago, who would have imagined that we would reach the “in sickness” part of “in sickness and in health” so soon? How can this be?
A very pregnant woman checks me in, chattering away about how she only has one more week of work left before she takes her maternity leave. It is her first child, she tells me, and she is very excited. I manage a weak smile. Here she is just bursting with life and vitality. She has a live baby kicking and turning inside of her, while my womb has become a tomb. A place of death. In a week or two, she will hold her baby in her arms. I never will. What went wrong?
As she checks my chart to see what lab work I am scheduled for, she breaks off suddenly, and a look of pity crosses her face. “I am so sorry,” she says in a low voice. “I had no idea what you were in for, and here I am chattering away about my baby…”
“You couldn’t have known,” I reassure her. Is everyone going to pity me now, I wonder. Be afraid to talk about babies in front of me? I am to find out later that the answer is yes, at least initially.
We finish with the financial office, the lab, the anesthesiologist, and now there only remains to meet with the surgeon, a Dr. Olson. He is a very young man and I feel almost sorry for him. Clearly he is in the awkward position of having to break bad news to a woman he has never laid eyes on before. Funny, I already seem to be in the pattern of trying to make others feel less uncomfortable, when shouldn’t they be comforting me?
Dr. Olson is talking to us in a calm voice, a tone I have since learned to be suspicious of. It seems that the calmness of a physician’s voice is in inverse proportion to the severity of the situation, and Dr. Olson is very calm. Too calm. He tells us he is sorry, that these things happen more often than one supposes, that there was nothing I did to cause it. In his way, he is trying to make me feel better I guess, but all I want to do right now is to curl up in a little ball and cry my pain to the universe.
He is still talking, and I struggle to keep up with him. He is saying something about some grape-like structures the radiologist saw in my uterus. I note that Dr. Olson is speaking very earnestly now, and searching my face as if there is something terribly important that I am to comprehend. Why would I care about these grape clusters in my uterus and why is he telling me this now? Does he think making small talk will cheer me up? If so, it’s not working. His words continue to wash over me, not fully penetrating until a single word lurches out at me. Chemotherapy.
I am stunned. I look around the room, searching for clues. Is he talking to me? Wrong patient, I want to tell him, but my lips won’t form the words. I’m the one whose baby died, remember? You’re confusing me with some cancer patient. But he goes on speaking. Apparently I have something called a molar pregnancy. A partial mole, he amends, since at one point there was a viable fetus. Well, maybe not so viable after all. He continues to tell me that the fetus had a condition which made it “incompatible with life”. There was nothing I could have done to save my pregnancy. Is this consolation? I hardly know.
What I do know, or least come to understand as I relive his words in my mind that weekend, awaiting Monday’s surgery, is that not only has my baby died, but my levels of hCG, the pregnancy hormone, are seriously elevated and this is considered a pre-cancerous condition. A week ago I was living in blissful ignorance, still believing I was carrying a healthy baby, when really all the while, some pre-cancerous cells were multiplying inside of me, and my baby had already died.
Cancer! Okay, pre-cancer, but still! I fluctuate between disbelief and horror. Except for fiery car crashes, there is scarcely anything else in this world that brings the same level of dread and horror to my mind. Cancer! This all seems like a bad dream. I wildly consider doing nothing, but how could the doctors be wrong? They do this everyday for a living. Surely they know what they’re doing.
Monday I check into the hospital for a D & C, and go home hours later. It is a long journey to recovery. There is of course the physical healing, which in a funny kind of way is the least of my immediate problems. A week after my surgery, I am back on my feet and more or less my old self. The emotional recovery is much more difficult.
I beg my friends to tell all of our mutual acquaintances about my miscarriage, so I don’t have to repeat seeing the shock on everyone’s face when I inform them that I am no longer pregnant. I still encounter pity, and it is wearying. Everyone means well, though. I keep reminding myself of that. The cards and flowers and meals come pouring in. Almost like someone just died. Wait, I guess someone did just die, but it’s hard for me to know how to think about my miscarriage. Was it a baby? A fetus? The words “incompatible with life” come back many times to haunt me. Was it ever a baby? I finally decide yes.
I also decide not to ask what gender the fetus/baby was, and consequently, I never name it. It is never to become “he” or “she”. It will always remain “it”. It hurts less that way. And because inducing labor was considered too dangerous and I ended up having a D & C instead, I never laid eyes on my child. In fact, the only tangible proof I have that I was ever pregnant in the first place, besides the mounting hospital bills of course, is the ultrasound. I ask Erica if she can get me a copy of the ultrasound picture as a keepsake of sorts, and she obliges. So now, all I have left of the pregnancy is the grainy picture.
But I understand, even as I grieve for the loss of my baby and the loss of my dreams, that I have far greater immediate problems to deal with. I myself am not out of the woods, with the risk of cancer looming over me. I learn at my post-op that I will have to have my hCG blood levels monitored for a year. If they don’t decline, and eventually go down to zero, I will have to repeat the D & C. And if that is not successful in eradicating the residue of these “grape-like” structures, then we will talk about chemo. Dr. Olson hastens to assure me though, that even if this worst case scenario comes to pass, this type of pre-cancer (or would it be considered full-fledged cancer at that point?) is highly susceptible to chemotherapy and very curable. This is like a bad dream. I simply cannot believe that Dr. Olson is sitting here calmly discussing chemo with me as if it was an everyday occurrence.
It is amazing however, what the mind can get used to. As the next few weeks pass, my life begins to return to normal. In the first place, I have a demanding three-year-old to care for and a husband also recovering from recent surgery, and knowing I am needed helps ground me back in reality. The frequency of my hCG tests decreases, and I start to tolerate being poked constantly by a needle, without feeling like I need to pass out. The trick, I soon discover, is not to watch the needle go in or to look at the vials of blood after they are drawn.
The much harder part is the waiting, between when I have my blood drawn and when my results are available. The uncertainty is almost worse than receiving bad new. I try so hard to put it out of my mind, telling myself that worrying about it won’t make things any better, but worrying is not a rational emotion and I am only moderately successful in talking myself out of my fears. The day at last arrives, three months later, when my hCG level is almost zero, and I finally let myself believe that I will soon be able to put this pre-cancer business behind me.
Friends and family have been tremendously supportive, and people finally stop treating me with kid gloves, and begin talking about babies in front of me again. I watch four women I know from Jeff’s co-op preschool, and then my own sister, go on to deliver healthy babies. I am happy for them, I really am, although inside I still feel a twinge of pain, and yes, some jealousy when I see someone with their newborn.
I also finally allow myself to think about what I will do when my twelve months of hCG level monitoring are up, if my test results are still clean. Will I still try for another pregnancy? I think yes, but defer making the decision until I am actually faced with it. I am seeing an ob/gyn now. Erica has sadly informed me that since I am now considered “high-risk”, she can no longer provide my care. It is a label that I never asked for, and have a hard time dealing with. How can I be high-risk when all my life I’ve been healthy? Why did this have to happen to me? What did I do, or not do, to deserve it?
There are two things that cause me to re-evaluate my life and contribute to making me feel less sorry for myself, and aid in my healing. In the first place, I find out that I am not alone. It turns out that when others learn of my miscarriage, it makes it okay for them to share their own miscarriage stories with me. I am simply amazed to learn how many women I know have experienced miscarriages in the past, and yet I never had any idea. I can’t decide if this is due to the taboo about talking about death in general, or if it simply doesn’t come up in the course of everyday conversation.
In any event, it gives me a tremendous sense of relief to be able to share my feelings with other women who have gone through a similar experience, because by now, most of my friends have made it clear that they think it is time for me to move on, and they are tired of hearing about my miscarriage. In a way I can hardly blame them, but should there really be an arbitrary time limit for grief? Eventually, I do arrive at the point where I can talk conversationally about my miscarriage without my eyes welling up with tears, and the need to discuss it all the time diminishes.
But I said that there were two things that caused me to re-examine all my belief systems. The second is that the day my hCG level finally drops to zero, and I am cautiously optimistic for the future, no, make that joyous, I call my mother to share the good news. After congratulating me, Mom, it seems has news of her own to share, and not such good news at that, although she tells it so matter-of-factly that I am momentarily caught off guard. She has been diagnosed with a pituitary tumor and needs to undergo surgery. Brain surgery. Oh, Mom! I am absolute convinced that this is a death sentence for her, and the thought of losing my beloved mother is unbearable. My own problems pale in comparison to hers.
I am to learn that day that problems are only relative, and that no matter how bad things seem, they can always be worse. Mom’s situation is hands-down worse. But not hopeless. I also learn that where there’s life, there’s hope, and that while time may not exactly heal all wounds, it at least it softens them and makes them easier to bear. I discover that contained within us, humans have an almost limitless capacity for physical, emotional, and also spiritual healing. It is not an easy process though. It takes time and patience to live life courageously in the face of adversity, and sometimes, just when you think things are getting better, bam! You are knocked down again by another crisis.
Life seems to be all about the process of reaching the pinnacle, being knocked off of it, and working your way back up slowly and painstakingly. I once believed that there was a point in everyone’s life when things kind of came together for them, and then they would ride off into the sunset without a backward glance. Now I know better. There are no happily-ever-afters. There are just happy-for-nows.
Although I never would have believed it the day Erica told me my baby had died, I did in time recover from my miscarriage, which is to say, I sometimes remember the time with sadness, but I have moved on with my life. Yes, it has helped that I was fortunate enough to be able to give birth to a healthy baby girl eighteen months later, and a second son, also healthy, five years after that. And that my mother recovered from her surgery and went on to live another nineteen years. There have been ups and downs over the years to be sure. One of the biggest “downs” was being diagnosed with breast cancer in October of 2006. But I have to quickly look on the bright side even of that. My cancer was caught early, and I was given an excellent prognosis, as good as anyone can get, although I understand now even more completely than I did 21 years ago when I had the miscarriage that there are no guarantees in life. Life is completely what you make it, and if my mother taught me one thing in life (and she taught me plenty!) it is always to look on the bright side and count your blessings. My mother’s cup was always full to the brim, never half-empty or even half-full. I strive every day to emulate her.
Which brings me around to the beginning of the story. Six months ago when I was told I had to have a uterine biopsy, all I could think about was that this was somehow related to my molar pregnancy/miscarriage, and that I had been unwittingly harboring some kind of insidious slow-growing cancer inside my uterus for the past two decades. I was relieved to eventually receive a clean pathology report, along with the assurance from my gynecological oncologist that benign fibroids were the culprit this time.
I know this isn’t necessarily the end of the story, and that there will in all likelihood be other challenges in my life, possibly more cancer, and almost certainly more biopsies. The label “high risk” has stuck to me permanently now. I also know though, that I contain within me the capability for dealing with adversity, and for living life fully, and with courage. And perhaps that’s the most lasting legacy of all from my miscarriage.
Cara Holman joined The Women with Cancer Writing Group at Oregon Health & Science University after a cancer diagnosis three years ago. Since then she has had over three dozen personal essays, creative nonfiction stories and short form poetry published both online and in print anthologies. She blogs about books and writing at her blog Prose Posies .
by Elizabeth F.A. Meaney
When I watch Animal Planet
I feel bad for pregnant creatures
who heave breaths over swollen bellies,
bored with fly-flicked ears and enclosure fences.
You admire the devotion of coyote
forming soft dirt walls for a den.
You see them as beautiful—serene creatures,
sweet keepers of two heartbeats.
As we watch, the panda
abandons bamboo on the concrete floor,
ducks its head and licks a tunnel between its legs–
licks, licks, as cameras rest on tripods.
I laugh out loud, “A panda?”
when a blind five-ounce droplet slides forward.
Cameras jump but Mom keeps licking.
“To keep the cub clean and healthy,” you say.
Instinct. “We’re mammals, too,” you’re sure,
“—milked and lullabied.”
I’ll learn as moans come unsummoned, and
your fingers find the softest way into me.
Then a coyote cub is killed—
only child of the mother who dug underground.
With eyes dark and empty as her den, she asks,
“What did I do wrong?”
She circles the curled stain of a corpse:
a sad and sacred litany in motion,
the way Hasidic Jews rock as they pray.
I can no longer watch.
I retreat to the bedroom,
where I build a nest of pillows
and note through tears
the new shape my body imprints in the sheets
You call out news about the panda:
the licked pink slug has grown fur in its sleep.
It sleeps affably on mommy’s belly,
wearing a black mask like hers.
You sense me shaking my head.
“He’s walking,” you wheedle.
I hang at the doorway, require a pinky swear–
but he walks, between his keeper’s legs.
I return to my seat. When baby’s nose
bumps the lens, I hear your smile beside me.
Your hand reaches for my belly.
It finds the swell only you and I can feel.
Elizabeth F.A. Meaney is an alumna of the University of Notre Dame and a current student in the Hunter College MFA program. Her poetry has appeared in the Furnace Review, the Northville Review, the Literary Bohemian, Xenith , and Danse Macabre. Her first novel, Bloodthirsty, will be published by Little, Brown this fall under the name Flynn Meaney.
by Stephanie Tames
I
On the Epiphany my father went fishing. It was the day I was born, January 6, the day the Maji reached the Christ child in Bethlehem laden with gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. He drove to the Chesapeake Bay to an area he favored with a rock jetty, carefully picked his way along the sharp-edged rocks until he found one flat enough on one side to make a comfortable seat, and settled his gear and canvas bag into various crevices nearby. It was a bright and windy day, neither too gusty nor too cold, a perfect day for winter fishing for striped bass. The surf pounded against the rocks but it was still low tide when my father arrived so the spray from the plumes of cold salt water did not reach him. He kept a careful watch on the tide and the sea’s slow progress as it covered the rock jetty. He had come close many times to being stranded on the jetty as the tide rose and it was too cold that January day to risk getting soaked by the winter sea.
The story has become a family favorite. Everyone thinks it’s funny: as soon as he was told my birth meant another girl - the third in a row - my father gathered up his fishing gear and took off for the two hour drive to the bay. I guess he thought that since family and friends were watching his two older daughters and son he could take advantage of the time. He loved fishing.
I don’t think my mother thought the story was funny. Whenever it was repeated she would set her jaw tight and her lips would thin into what for my mother was neither smile nor frown but the expression she assumed often and which I imagined meant she was somewhere deep inside her head. She would stare at my father who would be telling this story, acting like he was George Burns on stage before an adoring audience.
I can imagine other families with this story: the father, like mine, guffawing, puffing out his chest as he told how it was just another kid, no big deal, the mother interrupting, telling her side like she was Gracie Allen, how she was screaming with labor pains and told him to get the hell away from her and he took her literally; how he’ll pay for that trip for the rest of his life (audience laughs), how he was really only gone a half-day and was back by evening visiting time to take all the children to see their mother and lovely baby sister with long dark hair.
II
My mother says that she and my father agreed on two children: a boy and a girl. And it happened. My brother came first, then a few years later, my oldest sister. My mother was happy. But just three months after my sister was born, my mother found herself pregnant again. She was depressed. Her health suffered. So when the baby came she asked but was denied a simple operation to tie her fallopian tubes, to wrap the tubes with thread pulled tight like a present so sperm swimming with speed and purpose can not reach the waiting egg. For my mother, it was the only thing she ever wanted.
She knew then she couldn’t take any chances. And she didn’t. But the diaphragm failed her and so did counting the days when an egg floated inside her and she was pregnant again. My father liked the idea of a big family; it was proof of his virility although he would have preferred that his virility made baby boys instead of girls.
After I was born my mother asked again, she said she begged, but the doctor refused to tie her tubes and two years later my brother was born. Whether it was her pleading that softened her doctor’s heart or my brother’s congenital heart defect, my mother finally left the hospital happy: three gifts, a boy and a knot around each of her tiny tubes.
III
We wanted to be Joni Mitchell’s Ladies of the Canyon. It was the late ‘60s and early ‘70s and we talked endlessly in a fog of pot about giving up our pampered city lives to live in communes, bake bread, reject the values that made our parents complacent and uninformed. We went to protest rallies, experimented with drugs, and took many lovers to beds on old mattresses thrown on bare wooden floors. We didn’t think about birth control. At least at first. But one friend, then another, got pregnant and we realized we didn’t want to be Ladies of the Canyon just then.
They must have sensed my mother as a kindred spirit, these young women, friends of mine but mostly of my older sisters, who always ended up at our house where my mother would help them not have babies. You had to know how to work the system and you had to have money. My mother had both. All it took was a psychiatrist who would certify that a pregnancy would be detrimental to the mental health of the mother and a doctor willing to perform the procedure. In the city it was easy to find both. It took time, however, and once it was too late. It was my cousin and she had come to live with us the year before. She hadn’t been getting along with her mother, my mother’s sister, but she fit perfectly in our big house and big, loud family, until she got pregnant. The other girls came to our house in their flowing long skirts and layers of beaded necklaces, sat at the kitchen table, and gave my mother all the details. But my cousin waited, withdrew. She didn’t want to tell her story. I don’t know why. Her mother came to take her back to South Carolina where she stayed indoors so the neighhbors wouldn’t know what she had done. There’s an old proverb: “a small town is a vast hell.” The next time we saw her she said she never looked at the baby, that it was wrapped up tight in a white blanket and given to someone waiting nearby, that the nurses gave her pills to dry the milk in her full breasts and sent her home. She didn’t come back to live with us.
My mother and I didn’t talk about whether or not I was having sex, or whether she approved. All she wanted was to make sure I wouldn’t get pregnant. I guess she didn’t trust birth control pills or trust that I would take them. She talked to her doctor and together they decided I should go to the hospital for a procedure and while there the doctor would place a tiny piece of metal shaped like a “t” in my uterus. There was no need for remembering. Pregnancy would never be an issue.
That night, still groggy from the hospital, I had a dream where I opened the front case of the big grandfather clock in the hall of my parents’ house and out tumbled hundreds of chubby naked babies smothering me under their weight.
IV
It’s barely a twinkle in his father’s eye, that’s what the doctor said to me from his seat between my legs. All I could see were eyes: his head was hidden under a white cap pulled low over his forehead. I could see his mouth forming words behind a mask that came up well over the bridge of his nose and tied high on the back of his head. He was old. It was his eyes, the only thing I could see, that told me how long he had lived.
The waiting area was crowded. There weren’t enough seats, people stood, leaning against walls. Some were so young, others looked old and worn out. Boyfriends and husbands and maybe some brothers looked uncomfortable, out of place. They kept pushing their sweaty palms down the front of their pants like they were trying to wipe away this place and glancing at the clock on the wall, counting down the hours until they’d be out in the pure light of the day away from the oppressive room, outside where they could finally breathe deeply and fill their lungs full to bursting, relieved that for them it was over.
The week before I had come in my Joan & David heels and Evan Picone suit and carried a small jar of pee in my purse. My purse was the same color as my shoes. You had to have a test before they’d put you on the schedule. I walked from the subway station but couldn’t find the office. Now I was late for work and my feet hurt. I was afraid my pee had gone bad but I had to give it to them, hand my little jar to the young woman at the counter and ask please if they would confirm what I already knew. When I walked in everyone shifted, looked up from the magazines they weren’t really reading or stopped their whispered conversations. I felt their furtive gazes. We all knew why we were there. The next week as I sat in the room in those same seats waiting my turn, I looked at every new face that came through the door and watched as unsteady hands held out jars of pee as bright as the sun.
You don’t have to take off all your clothes. Just from the waist down, that’s what they say, but leave your socks on because your feet will get cold. Lay down on the table and put your feet in the stirrups. You’re draped in white. I looked down my sheet-covered body between my legs and could see the doctor’s head, his mouth moving under his mask but I couldn’t hear anything he was saying. I looked at the nurse, she took my hand, said it was alright. That night I dreamed again of the grandfather clock and babies, all plump arms and legs like tootsie rolls, tumbling out and spreading across the floor.
V
When we got married, my husband and I didn’t talk about if we would have children, or when. There were a lot of things about our lives together we didn’t discuss. I had long since given up the tiny “t” in my uterus, been on and off various brands of birth control pills, used condoms and diaphragms, not used anything. Didn’t really think about it. I dressed in my suits, high heels and matching bag, went to work every day happy with my job, the paycheck, the way I felt. When it happened, I knew immediately and I knew it wasn’t right. Like my mother I did not want it, did not want it in the deepest part of my being.
I don’t remember how we made the decision. I don’t remember what my husband thought, if he needed convincing, if I threatened to leave, if I screamed and cried. I know he didn’t make the decision. It was me. Just me. I knew that it wasn’t a twinkle in my eye. I don’t know if it was in his.
VI
In Japan women visit Buddhist temples to pray to mizuko jizo, tiny statuettes that represent the babies they aborted. It’s not that they brood over whether they made the proper decision to have an abortion but to help the spirit safely cross the river that separates the worlds of life and death. Sometimes women dress the mizuko figurines like newborns and pour water over them to quench their thirst.
My mother was afraid of the water but she went with my father to the bay to fish and after some time she came to love fishing, too, although she never lost her fear, a fear of drowning of one sort or the other.
When I was young I liked to stand at the edge of the surf and feel the pull of the water and the sinking sand under my feet and dream that the earth wanted me and to prove it with each wave I sank deeper as the earth drew me to its core. I wasn’t afraid of filling my lungs with sand and salty water. But before I slipped beneath the surface I pulled myself from the earth’s sucking hold and dove into the waves and played in the surf as my father stood fishing nearby. Later, he taught me to fish and I too came to love standing by the water and casting my line as far as I could, from one world to the next.
Stephanie Tames is a writer, longleaf pine needle artist, and yoga instructor living in southeastern Georgia. Her publications include Self, Parenting, the Washington Post, and the Atlanta Journal Constitution. She has essays forthcoming in the Nature Conservancy Magazine. She is also a regular commentator on Georgia Public Radio.)
Fiction by Curt Alderson
So I stop by the apartment during my lunch hour the other day, and there’s this little yellow slip in the mailbox telling me Sonny’s at the downtown branch and I’ve got to go sign for him. I got, like, thirty minutes before I’m supposed to clock back in, so I drop the rest of the mail on the kitchen table and hot-foot it to the post office.
Sonny’s there, waiting, all bubble wrapped and stamped. I hand my little yellow slip across the counter to the clerk. She slides another one back at me. I sign the thing, scoop up the package, then race back across town. By the time I make it to the office, I’m ten minutes late. But nobody seems to notice.
I take the package in with me and prop it against the wall of my cubicle as I check the messages on my voice mail. I lean back in my chair and stare at the row of stamps in the upper right-hand corner. There’s no name on the thing (other than my own), but the return address is from Richmond so I figure it’s from Megan. We talked the other day. She called to tell me all about it. This was two days after the service.
She was wrung out-you could hear it in her voice-and I really felt bad for her. But I was put off too, at first. Genuinely pissed. I mean, my best friend dies and gets planted; he’s six-feet-deep and cold before I so much as hear about it. Megan says she didn’t even think to call me until it was too late. Somebody said something at the service-asked about me-and that was the first time I crossed her mind.
So we’re talking on the phone and she ends up falling to pieces before she can even finish whatever it is she wants to tell me.
“Look,” I say, “forget it. It’s okay. I understand.” Jesus. Her old man dies, and she’s apologizing to me?
I finish the day out. I do my time until four, then split. I tuck Sonny up under my arm and head for the parking garage. Traffic is hell outside, so I decide to let things simmer down before I make my way back home. I stop off at Leon’s for a cold one. Out in the parking lot, I lock my doors, leave Sonny on the passenger seat.
They got the overhead fans turning inside, but it’s hotter than forty hells. Geraldine’s tending bar. She says the AC’s on the blink, but Happy Hour’s been extended until eight. “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away,” she says to me with a wink.
“Seems I heard that,” I say back.
I get home close to nine. I can smell whatever my neighbors had for supper as I move down the hallway. It’s a weird combination: meatloaf, spaghetti, tuna, grilled onions. The stale air hangs hot and heavy all around me. It’s like breathing someone else’s body heat. A couple of folks have their TV’s going full tilt. I hear them through the doors. Sit-coms. Hollow laughter.
There’s a cool rush of air when I open my door. It’s dark inside. I cut on the lamp next to the easy chair and make my way into the kitchen. There’s some cold fried chicken in the fridge, leftovers from a couple of nights ago. I pull the plate out, snap a beer off the six pack I picked up on the way in, and settle into my chair.
I get the TV going and dig in. I left it on some God-awful station the night before-the Learning Channel or something-but by the time I figure this out, I’m up to my elbows in chicken grease. The remote’s sitting next to me, but I figure what’s the use? I just sit there, stripping meat off a breast bone, watching this geek go on and on about plankton levels in the North Sea.
After the chicken, I think of Sonny. He’s still out in the car, waiting like he has been since work. I drop my dish in the sink with the others and go out to the parking lot to fetch him.
Megan’s a very meticulous girl. That’s not something she picked up from her old man; I can assure you of that. She’s triple wrapped everything in plastic and used up almost half a roll of Scotch tape. Eventually, I pull the videocassette free from all the wrapping and pop it in the machine. There’s a note-card taped to the side of the bubble wrap. I peel it off and hold it up under the lamp to get a better look.
Ben,
It’s not the same as being there, but I wanted you to have this. I know how much my dad meant to you. He talked about you lots.
Look me up the next time you’re in town. We’ve got a spare bedroom and would love to have you as our guest. Mi casa, su casa.
Take care,
Meg
I set the note down on the coffee table. For a second, I think about going back out, maybe catching a band somewhere. Megan’s all heart. I know she means well. But I’m creeped out by the whole thing. No other way to put it.
I go back to the kitchen, open the fridge, and check for limes. There’s one left. It’s rolled behind a can of Hi-C, so I almost miss it. I reach in and pull it out. I take it to the chopping block by the sink, cut it into four fat wedges, and mix a gin and tonic. The tonic water’s half-flat and the gin is rot-gut. Just like Sonny used to like them, I think to myself, almost smiling.
Sonny and Tina had been married only a year or two when I first met them. Back then, I was still living in this little three-bedroom cracker box out in the burbs. Sonny and Tina lived next door. Our houses were the last two in the cul-de-sac and we had adjoining backyards that ran right up to this thick stand of trees. The woods were choked with kudzu. In the summer, the vines turned dark green and snaked through the high branches until they formed a canopy so thick no light could get through.
Shortly after they got settled, Sonny built a big deck on the back side of their house, overlooking the woods and our two back yards. When the weather allowed, the three of us would get together back there in the evenings. We’d grill out, maybe have a few beers, shoot the breeze. After dark, we’d lean back and listen to the stereo play through the screen door as the fireflies danced all around us.
Sonny and Tina had moved from Montana and Sonny liked to brag on the fishing he’d done back there. He’d tell me all about the cutthroat he used to go after along the Gardner. Said how some days you’d have bighorn ram or bull elk coming right down to the waterline for a drink, with you standing just a few feet away. I told him about Little Buckhorn and the monster browns you’d find there in the back eddies of the north fork. Tina never said much once we got started. She’d just sit there grinning, shaking her head every now and again like she’d heard it all before, which I’m sure she had.
A lot of nights went that way. But this, of course, was long before the rabbits, long before Sonny and Tina’s marriage went south and Sonny followed suit, splitting for Phoenix.
As soon as their trouble started, I could sense a change. Things got weird. Tense. The three of us didn’t get together as much, and the two of them started spending more and more time apart. Tina would take these weekend trips to Baltimore, where she had people, and Sonny would stay home alone for no apparent reason. He’d mope around for days, doing bullshit stuff just to keep busy. I figured a fishing trip or two might help to take the edge off. I mentioned it to him one night. He didn’t seem thrilled, but he didn’t say no either. We talked about heading out early-before daylight-and hitting the mountain streams, but we never made it any farther than Hollet’s Pond.
Hollet and I used to work second shift together at this ceramics factory. One night we’re sitting in the break-room drinking coffee, and he tells me about his farm-a little fifteen-acre plot about twenty-minutes outside of town. Said he bought the place with some money he’d had willed to him. Hollet was what you might call a gentleman farmer. He kept a half-acre garden, raised a few beef cows, but that was about it. He wasn’t much on fishing either, but when he figured out I was, he told me about the pond he had, nestled in the far corner of the back pasture. Said I could come on over and give it a try any time I felt the urge.
“Don’t really know what you’ll find there,” he said. “Bluegill’s about all, I suspect.”
He was right. After he gave me the green light, I fished Hollet’s Pond every day for a solid week but never caught anything bigger than my hand. Still, it was nice to go there in the evenings.
Sonny liked it too. Whenever the two of us went, we’d take our fly rods and one dry fly apiece. Then we’d make a game of it, keeping track of who caught the smallest fish, because that was something too. Getting a hit was nothing, but setting the hook could be a trick.
One evening, after we’d been out there a few hours and caught maybe a dozen each, Sonny walked over to where I was still fishing and took a seat on the berm. The light was fading from the sky and the bats were coming out to feed. I wanted to get a few more casts in before we headed out. So I kept at it while Sonny sat in the grass breaking his rod down. I knew he was right there next to me, but when he finally spoke, it made me jump a little.
“I don’t think we’re gonna make it,” he said.
I thought I knew what he meant, but I didn’t say anything right at first. I just stripped a couple yards of line from my reel and made a cast for a cattail stand near the opposite bank.
“You remember that night I took her to the emergency room?”
I did. He didn’t say her name, but I knew he meant Tina.
“It was real late,” he said. “Past midnight. You remember?”
I nodded.
“Well, I told you she had the stomach flu, but that’s not how it happened exactly.”
I reeled everything in, and snipped the fly off the end of my line. Sonny didn’t say anything for a while. I had almost finished packing up all my gear when he started up again.
“We’d been trying to make a baby, see. But we lost it that night. That’s why I took her to the hospital. That’s why we both stayed home from work the next day. She took to the bed and I stayed home to look after her.”
“Damn. I’m sorry,” I said. “I hate that for y’all.”
Sonny nodded. Then he caught a glimpse of a bat circling high above our heads. It swooped down on the pond for a drink then flew away. Sonny watched the little ripples moving toward him across the surface of the water.
“Thing is,” he continued, “it wasn’t the first time for us. Same thing happened once before. Back in Bozeman. She was further along that time, so it was pretty bad. We been to see a few doctors, but I don’t think they know what’s going on exactly. They said we shouldn’t give up. Said it was a fairly common thing. But when it’s happening to you, it don’t feel common at all.”
“What’s Tina saying?”
“Not much. She’s turned quiet on me. It’s hard to tell what she’s thinking anymore.”
“So you imagine the worst.”
“Pretty much. Sometimes I think we should try again, but I don’t know. I’m scared to even bring it up. I think she blames me.”
That was August. By December of that year, Tina was pregnant again. She and the baby made it through the first trimester without a hitch. But the doctors ran a sonogram the first week of March, and things didn’t look good. The baby died before the month was out. The doctors said they couldn’t do anything with it on account of Tina being so far along. So she carried it, dead inside her, a solid week before her water broke and she finally had the miscarriage.
Sonny and Tina missed a lot of work through all this, and money started to get tight. The doctor bills piled up, aggravating an already miserable situation. Their house fell into disrepair. The bushes and shrubs along their property-line grew wild, ragged. One gray afternoon, a storm blew through the neighborhood and knocked down a couple of limbs from an old Dutch elm at the edge of their driveway. The limbs stayed right where they fell in the front yard. Weeks passed. The green leaves withered and slowly fell away.
Weeds took over the yard, out back especially. Come May, when the days grew warmer, they started blooming. It was a strange scene, peaceful almost. The buttercups would bob and sway in a gentle cross-wind. The purple clover came alive with bumblebees. I said something to Sonny once-offered to push mow for him, clean things up a bit. But he just looked at me like I was speaking a foreign language and disappeared back into the house.
A couple days later, I noticed Tina’s car missing from the driveway. But I didn’t bother going over to see Sonny. This once, I figured some time alone might do him good.
Later that afternoon, I’m stretched out on the couch watching a ball game. It’s halftime and UNC is whipping the piss out of Virginia. They’re getting ready to sound the horn for the second half when I first hear the commotion outside. It’s Sonny. He’s dragged his push mower out. He yanks the rip-cord ten or twelve times before the engine finally comes to life, choking and wheezing at first, then gradually smoothing out to a steady hum. I lay there on the couch a while longer with the volume on the TV turned down low, listening to Sonny tackle his back yard. I hear him grinding away for a moment or two before the inevitable “CHUNCK” of the mower locking up. I raise up and peek out the window. I can see him, creeping along, an inch at a time. When the mower starts to bog down, he tips the front of the deck so the blade can spin freely. I think about getting my mower out, maybe starting on the far end of Sonny’s yard, meeting him in the middle. Then I remember the look he gave me the last time I said something.
I give up on the ball game midway through the fourth quarter when UNC starts running four corners. It’s not quite suppertime but getting close. I go to the kitchen to see what I can dig up. I’m standing there looking through the perishables, listening to the refrigerator motor buzz, when I realize I haven’t heard Sonny for a while. I swing the door shut and walk over to the kitchen window. From where I’m standing, I can see him. The bright sunlight glares against the curve of his bare back. He’s sitting in the tall grass, hunched forward, shoulders trembling.
I rush out my back door and cross over into Sonny’s yard. He doesn’t turn when I call his name. The mower’s sitting right beside him. I can hear it pinging as it sits there cooling. The heavy scent of burnt motor oil hangs in the air. Sonny just sits there, shoulders hunched, eyes red, face wet. He’s trying to say something, but his lips are drawn tight so the words never make it through.
Then I hear something rustling. I catch faint hints of movement out of the corner of my eye. They lay there, squirming in a tangled heap, inches from where Sonny sits. Baby rabbits. He’d run up on a nest of them. Some are cut clean in two, others lay thrashing, half-dead on the grass.
I get Sonny to his feet and help him into the house. He’s crying but he doesn’t make a sound, only jerks at the shoulders some. Inside, he sprawls out on the couch while I go over to the stereo and cut the tuner on. I get it set on something mellow, but crank it loud. Sonny never so much as looks my way.
I leave him there, go back to my place, and head straight for the nightstand next to my bed. I open up a box of shells and fill the chamber of the .38 I keep stashed there. I drop a couple extra shells in my pocket for good measure then cross back over to Sonny’s yard to finish the job.
After I find a spot for them deep in the woods out back, I go in to check on Sonny. He’s up from the couch, sitting in a recliner. The music’s still blaring through the speakers, but Sonny just sits there, staring dead ahead at a stack of magazines on the coffee table. Zoned.
I turn down the volume and move into the kitchen. Sonny always kept his fixins up under the sink. I pull everything out, get some tumblers, and mix us up a couple. Sonny snaps out of his trance long enough to latch on to the highball I hand him. I turn the stereo down a click or two then sit in a chair opposite him. The shades are drawn, and it’s good to be in from the heat. We don’t say nothing, just sit there listening, drinking. Then the music stops all of a sudden. An announcer comes on with the weather forecast. He’s talking in this whispery voice, makes some remark about the barometric pressure or something. He’s trying to be clever, but I don’t catch the gist of what he’s saying, and my lack of understanding depresses me.
Next thing you know, Sonny and Tina are packing their stuff in two separate
U-hauls-a his-and-hers set. Hers heads for Baltimore, his for Phoenix.
I stayed put a few more years, got new neighbors. But things never were quite the same. And after a while, I put my house on the market too, got the apartment I live in now. I’m closer to work this way, which is nice in the winter when weather hits.
I kept in touch with Sonny through the mail mostly. The first letter I got from him was signed “Your Pen Pal.” I chuckled when I saw that. But really, that’s how it turned out for us: friendly but distant. After he moved away, it was like there was always something between the two of us, something more than miles.
We were still friends, sure. When Sonny re-married, I rented a monkey-suit and booked a flight. Never thought twice about it. I was there when Megan was born too. But those visits never came off the way I thought they would. Sonny had moved out there to make a fresh start, maybe forget a few things. Then, every two years or so, I’d show up. New salt for old wounds. Of course, Sonny never said as much-treated me like family, in fact-but I knew what my being there did to him. So I decided to more or less phase myself out. I pulled a disappearing act. Sonny’d made a good life for himself out there. I just left him to it.
Now he’s gone. Now, this thing’s all I got-Megan’s video.
I sit back in my chair for a time, stirring ice cubes with my index finger, listening to them clink against the glass. I press play on the VCR remote. The TV goes black. Everything’s quiet. Sonny’s name flashes up on the screen, followed by two dates. Then they start up with the organ music.
Next comes the picture, a full view of the casket. There’s flowers piled high on top of it, flowers to either side on wire stands. I can see the backs of the heads of all the people in the first couple of rows. I scan the crowd, over and over, but can’t seem to recognize a soul.
They’ve got the lid up, but with the angle of the camera, I can’t really get a good look at the body. I figure it’s best that way. It’s not exactly Sonny they got boxed up anyhow. I been to enough funerals-enough “viewings”-to know that much. Wax dummies. That’s all I ever manage to think.
The camera must be mounted in a far corner or something, because the shot never changes. Every so often, somebody comes in frame, walks over to the casket, peeks in, then walks off the screen. Some are clutching hankies. They walk up, dab at their faces, then move along, their shoulders all hunched up. A few people walk by with their hands stuffed in their pockets. Real casual, or so it seems. Like they do this every day or something. After ten minutes of this, I still don’t recognize a single one of these people. The family’s most likely in another room, out of view, hidden.
The organist plays all the old regulars: “Just As I Am,” “Peace in the Valley,” “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” I take another swig. The gin sits cold on my belly.
They finally lower the lid and a preacher comes into frame. He stands behind the casket, offers a few words. Says he didn’t know Sonny but that, over the past few days, he feels like he’s gotten to know him some. Says he’s talked to family and friends. Says he’s heard stories. He tells a few and I watch a couple of heads nod up in the front pew. The preacher does what he can, but he misses a heap. A life’s a big thing, and he’s pressed for time. Gotta get on with it, clear the room for the next set of grievers.
He says a few words about Jesus, closes with a prayer. Someone says “Amen.” A couple fellas in dark suits show up. They each take an end of the casket and wheel Sonny down the center aisle. Then the music starts up again. But it’s not the organ this time. They got pickers somewhere, guitar and autoharp. They play “The Old Gospel Ship,” and I think how it’s about the only good thing to come out of the whole damn production.
I watch as the last part of the casket slips away from the bottom of the TV screen. The people in the pews all stand up. I stand up too. I hold my glass up high, tip it to one side, and let the rest of the highball fall to the carpet. I don’t spare a drop.
Curt Alderson has been writing stories and poems for fifteen years. He lives with his wife and two sons on a small family farm in southwest Virginia. His work has appeared in various publications, including Currents, Red Crow, Pitch Weekly, and Aura Literary Arts Review. For additional stories, poems, and readings visit curtalderson.blogspot.com
by Leslie Contreras Schwartz
My right boot ruptures like a heart valve tearing,
tenderly and exact-a zipper splits while I think
of the being inside, housed in a pyramid
in the hushed, broad portion of myself that waits.
Sting hums in the abdomen, an invading horde
of hungry bees swelling to a foreign hive. Holding in
what must look like a just-discovered ruby,
stained with the soil of the body, rust-raw,
it climbs from the rooms of some god’s foggy breath,
as if to rise after the heat of a boiling rain that falls like a salve.
Yet who says I am ready to be someone’s mother?
What room of myself-O lord of seed and sinew-
will muscle, bone, blooming, find a place to reside?
What-part of me bubbles over, to disappear in the thirsty earth.
Leslie Contreras Schwartz is an MFA Poetry student in the Warren Wilson College program. She lives in Houston, Texas.
by Aida Zilelian
“I hope that when you have a daughter she is as horrible to you as you are to me!”
I shift in my seat on the living room couch and stare blankly at my mother. If I love her I don’t feel it. I am thirteen. I stare at her bulging belly; she is pregnant with my soon-to-be sister Ani. I can never remember what had transpired between us that afternoon, why she had said what she did, but I am convinced that hearing her utter those words somehow altered the future. The arguments that would erupt between us in the ten years that followed would be venomous, malevolent, and would leave me completely shaken.
***
I always make decisions with my gut.
“I’m going to start looking for an apartment,” I told my mother one quiet evening after dinner. I was twenty-three. I wanted a life I had tried forcing her to give me - a life that demanded unconditional freedom. She still ransacked my room, opened my mail, and eavesdropped on phone conversation until I had a private phone line installed in my bedroom. Not surprisingly, we fought. She accused me of abandoning her and disrupting the family unit. I moved out and she disowned me for a year, but I knew all along how necessary it was. I had also heard that a mother’s love is boundless.
***
“The embryo is intact,” my obgyn tells me.
***
I spent my 20’s trying to recapture a childhood I didn’t have; I had slumber parties with my girlfriends, stayed out late until dawn sometimes, I threw parties at my apartment - the thrill of freedom so exhilarating that it felt unreal. Strangely, I felt an innocence that accompanied the newness of my life, and I wasn’t willing to give it up until I met Brian. And then I realized I didn’t have to give up anything. He loved me and accepted me for who I was; he was warm and passionate, playful and at the same time responsible. When I married him I shook off the creeping sensation of adulthood by spinning it into my own new reality - I had found a playmate who wanted to share my carousing lifestyle with me. Even when we bought our apartment - an experience that Brian jokingly claimed “drained the adolescence right out” of him - it felt less that I was an adult, and more that we had a secure place to live and have dinner parties.
“I’m worried for you,” my mother told me when I was married after four years and not pregnant. “I’m worried that if you don’t have a baby you will regret it when it’s too late. Think of all your friends with babies and how you two will feel going to baby birthday parties with no baby of your own. It’s a sad thing.”
To me, a sad thing has always been not doing something out of fear when I know it’s what I want. It is why I left my mother’s apartment and why I married Brian. I had to stick my fingers in my ears and chant loudly, “LA-LA-LA-LA-LA,” to really know that I wanted a baby. Not because my mother wanted one, or because when we went over our friends Randy and Laura’s house their son Logan was precocious and alarmingly entertaining. When the decision came whether or not to have a baby, both Brian and I were perplexed.
“We couldn’t travel,” I told him grimly as I sipped my glass of wine.
“You’re not wrong,” he said, holding the same serious expression as mine.
“I don’t get how people just do it!” I said, feeling something akin to anger. “You can do your very best job and they could still turn out to be a crack addict.” I realized how cliché my argument seemed, but it was one of many on a long list that truly frightened me……
***
Magically, I was pregnant after one month. The exhilaration of that felt unreal as well; it had happened too easily.
It was right before my thirty-sixth birthday when my doctor confirmed the news. I had friends coming over that night and had taken the day off from work to cook for my dinner party.
“I’m bringing over a special treat,” one of my girlfriends told me, referring to the bottle of Patron tequila she always brought over for special occasions. I didn’t feel right telling her yet, or anyone else for that matter. I wanted a birthday party, not an “Aida’s pregnant” party.
“I’m actually on antibiotics for an upper respiratory infection,” I told her. “I can’t really drink.”
Everyone who came that night seemed to believe my lie, and they all crowded into the kitchen with their cigarettes because Brian had stressed to them how the smoke really affected my breathing. But I had a secret and I relished keeping it for the time being. Yes, I was sitting on my couch alone nursing a glass of club soda - but who cared? I already had fantasies of our son or daughter, three or four years old, sitting in bed with Brian on a Sunday morning, both of them engrossed in whatever cartoon they were watching on T.V. I had an image of what our child would look like, taking the best features of both Brian and I and synthesizing them into a little human being. He would have Brian’s big brown eyes, his graceful feet, his ability to not take everything seriously; he would have my passion for cooking, my thick brown hair and mischievousness. Admittedly, I wished for a boy. The idea of having a girl scared me. As the years had passed I remembered that afternoon with my mother when I was sitting on the couch, and felt cursed by the inevitability of her wish.
***
“You’re going to have to go get a sonogram. The bleeding could be nothing, but you should double-check.” Click.
***
My mother’s care for me seemed inspired by a checklist of responsibilities that she had conjured up - perhaps from her own mother: daily baths, packed lunches, nice clothes, pocket money, and maybe things that I was still unaware of. I knew the two traps that most mothers fell into: they either did the exact opposite of what their mothers had done, or they fatefully turned into what they feared the most - their own mother. I vacillated between this haunting anxiety and an extreme optimism where I reassured myself that I would take what I admired about my mother and practice it accordingly.
“You can still have a life after having a baby,” one of my girlfriends told me. “It’s what you make of it. Of course you can still have dinner parties and still do your writing. Everything just needs to be modified a little bit.” After my thirteen-year emancipation, I was worried that I would resent not having the freedom I had grown accustomed to. And although I was a woman I still didn’t feel like one. In my mind, I was a responsible pregnant teenager, who abstained from cigarettes and drinking during her pregnancy because she loved herself and her baby enough to keep both healthy. The reality was that I was in my mid-thirties, happily married, owned an apartment, worked a full-time job and was five weeks pregnant.
***
“Let me check the book,” my cousin Jacqueline told me. She had two young daughters and had miscarried once after they were born. “Would you be having your period right now if you weren’t pregnant?”
“No,” I said, cradling the phone between my ear and shoulder as I got dressed in the women’s locker room at my gym.
“Have you been overdoing the exercising?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “I’ve been very careful. Just walking and lifting low weights.”
“Hmmm,” she said, and then paused. “What did your gynecologist say?”
“That I have to wait until Monday to get a sonogram.”
As I walked on the treadmill I saw an Indian woman sitting across from me, pedaling on a bike energetically, her pregnant belly bulging under her t-shirt. I approached her and asked her how many months along she was.
“Eight!” she said, wiping the sweat off her face with a towel. Hesitantly, I told her I was five weeks pregnant.
“That’s great!” she said. “Just keep at it with the gym. Go slow, though. And congratulations!” I suddenly felt renewed. It was just spotting, that’s all. I knew it was very common.
By the next morning I knew to call into work to say I wasn’t coming in. I made an emergency appointment with another gynecologist, since mine had not been very helpful about seeing me as soon as possible.
My mother called early afternoon. “What did the doctor say?”
“She said the embryo is still there, but that I have to rest.”
I laid in bed watching cooking shows, feeling the tugging sensation below my stomach turn into severe cramps. I sat on the toilet, trying to shake the draining feeling that began to overwhelm me. I sat, crying, not wanting to get up because I knew I would only have to return. I called Brian and told him to stay at work.
My mother called again. “What’s going on?” She was infamous for her follow-up phone calls - anything ranging from a new recipe I was trying out for dinner to whether or not I had remembered to rsvp for a relative’s wedding.
“What’s going on is that I’m having a fucking miscarriage!” I screamed into the phone. “And I want you to do me the goddam favor of not calling every half hour so I can tell you about it!” I hung up the phone sobbing.
“Are you happy?” I screamed at the phone. “Now we don’t get to find out if she’ll be as terrible to me as I was to you. Are you happy?” I knew I was yelling not at the mother I had now, but the other mother I was scared to forgive.
***
At least I had the weekend to recover. There was no baby. No little boy or girl sitting in bed with Brian. Neither of them would look at me with the same large brown eyes.
A week later Brian and I went to a nearby park where we took our dog Champ for long walks. We sat on a bench that overlooked the lake. Although it was April, we could still see our breath form little clouds in the air. I watched the geese padding around the edge of the grass. I grew quiet.
“Are you okay?” Brian asked. “What are you thinking?”
Now I knew what it felt like to want to hold onto something so desperately that it was consuming. I wondered if that was how my mother felt all those years fighting with me - if it was her way of trying to hold onto me for her own reasons that I could not understand.
“I’m thinking how strange it is. I’m thinking how I feel so changed, that I’m not the same person. I feel,” I said, trying to find the words, “that I have lost something. Not a baby only. It may sound terribly foolish coming from a grown woman, but I think that somehow I have lost my innocence.” He took my hand and squeezed it.
Prophetically, a little girl came towards us, wobbling on her bicycle. She looked behind her where a young man was standing, most likely her father. “You’re doing great!” he called out waving. “Keep going! I’m right behind you. I’m watching.”
I watched her as she pedaled away, her father following her with his eyes. It all seemed too easy. And I knew then that everything I had so desperately wanted in my life I had struggled for. I am waiting to find out if I am still willing for this struggle.
Aida Zilelian is a NYC teacher. Her work has been featured in Pen Pusher (UK), SN Review, Visions, Slushpile Magazine, Suss: Another Literary Journal, Wilderness House Literary Review, and the upcoming issue of Halfway Down the Stairs. She has written two novels and is currently looking for representation.
A short story by Jeff Bowles
I can’t cry. The worst thing to ever happen to us and I can’t cry about it. I’m tired. My mind is shot. Jagged black spots flutter in my peripherals, my bowels gurgle, loud noises make me wince. I tell myself that sleep deprivation must be keeping the pain at bay. I still feel ashamed.
I hate the hospital, hate the emergency room. I cuss every time I have to come. Before I met Stephanie, I’d only been here once. This is my sixth visit, and it’s all because of her. Abscessed teeth, Bronchitis, stuff you usually go to a doctor’s office for. The only good thing about the hospital is that they accept Stephanie’s crap insurance, worthless coverage that the state of Colorado hands out like “How was your visit?” questionnaire cards.
I glance at Steph. She’s curled up on a double-wide chair. Her bare feet dig into the light-blue vinyl cushion, causing it to pucker and stutter and hiccup rudely. She rocks uncontrollably, twirling her red hair with a finger, breathing as if she were in a Lamaze class.
“I’m sorry, baby,” I say. “I shouldn’t have stayed up all night. I do it too often. Maybe every weekend is too much-”
“It’s okay.” It’s more of a coarse grunt than fluid speech.
The cramps had begun in the afternoon, just before I was about to go to bed. We worried, began to panic as they intensified. I called a nurse hotline. The woman told us it was okay, that light cramps and a bit of spotting were normal. Then Stephanie started to bleed, and the cramps grew until her face paled and she had to bite her lip to keep from moaning.
She’s not the only one in pain here, of course. A family huddles around a kid with a broken arm over by the soda machines. A woman in a neck brace behind us cries and wails. An obese man with an oxygen tank and wheelchair is being led past the security guard. If I weren’t so tired, all the pain and suffering gathered in this waiting room might really get to me. I usually have a hard time dealing with this kind of stuff. For an instant, I’m glad I haven’t slept.
Calm, pulsing tones sound from the hospital’s speaker system. Another ambulance coming in; we’ll have to wait even longer. The sound forces my mind to sharpen. I glance at Steph.
“You doin’ okay, baby?” Somehow I feel like I’m only pretending to care. “Do you need anything?”
“It hurts.”
“I know it does.”
“I’m sorry. It’s my fault. I didn’t eat…right or I got too wound up about…work.”
I can’t tell if I’m imagining the faint sting behind my eyes. “It’s not your fault. Maybe it was me. I read that smoking does something to men genetically, you know, reproductively. Maybe that’s what did it.”
She touches my hand, almost speaks, but her face suddenly contorts. She whimpers and her hand presses into her abdomen. It’s another two hours before we’re taken to a room.
#
Finding a good ER doctor is like playing a game of Go Fish. You keep asking for hospitality or a bit of humanity and they keep sending you back to the deck. Sure, occasionally you’ll get a decent one. They’ll speak to you like you’re a human being instead of trying to rush you out the door. Still haven’t pegged our doctor tonight. He gave Steph pain killers, said comforting things. He said Steph might see some tissue but that it wouldn’t be the fetus. He let her wear her coat over the hospital gown when she said she was cold. He tried to comfort, but it didn’t seem to register in him that we might have actually wanted a baby.
The doctor ordered a vaginal ultrasound because Steph wasn’t far enough along for the other kind. A nurse led her from our room ten minutes ago. I wasn’t allowed to come with.
I have no hope, no illusions. I know it’s over and done with. It’s been a weird two months. Stephanie had time to come to terms with it. It was in her body; it was a part of her. I was just the guy being asked to rub feet and prepare meals. It was never real. That’s it. I can’t cry because it was never real. It was a game of pretend, like playing dress-up. I was never going to be a father. It’s time to take off our mommy and daddy clothes and go home.
This notion is comforting. My mind tosses it back and forth, allowing it to strengthen and fade along with the waves of fatigue. There’s no shame in feeling nothing if you were never attached to begin with.
The curtain parts to reveal the nurse. She says something I don’t catch. Steph follows and replies, “Thank you.”
She doesn’t seem sad. She looks at me and gives a bitter smile. She still clutches her abdomen, but I think she might actually be okay. I think that maybe neither of us will be in much pain.
Then the nurse lets go of the curtain, leaves, and Stephanie’s face changes. Her smile vanishes, trembling slightly before it does. Her eyebrows lift, her free hand passes through her hair. She starts to cry.
“I’m so sorry,” she whimpers. “I couldn’t leave it there on the floor. It was ours. I’m sorry. It’s all my fault.”
She climbs into the hospital bed, won’t stop repeating herself. I slide my chair closer and wrap my arms around her. She lays her head against my chest.
“It isn’t your fault,” I say. “These things happen. Maybe…maybe it was just a bad pregnancy. Maybe it never really had a chance.”
“I know I did it. I ate wrong, too many sweets. I forgot my thyroid pill for a couple nights. I didn’t take my prenatals as much as I should have.”
“Babe, please stop.”
She sobs for a time. I can feel that stinging behind my eyes again, but that’s all. She speaks again.
“I couldn’t leave it on the floor.”
“Couldn’t leave what on the floor, baby?”
Steph wipes her eyes. “She put that thing inside me. It was so cold. It hurt. There was nothing left. I didn’t see the monitor, but she said there was nothing left. She pulled it out and went to get me some pads. I looked on the floor and…”
She begins to cry again. She tries to speak through it, but I can’t understand her.
“Slow down,” I say. “What happened?”
“It was on the floor. Just lying there. Bloody. Small. I wrapped it in a napkin and stuffed it in my coat before she came back. I didn’t know what else to do. They would have just mopped it up.”
I suddenly feel so tired, like I’ve been awake for weeks.
I brush her cheek. “Baby, he said you might see some things, but that it wouldn’t be-”
“It was our baby. I know it was. It’s still in my pocket. I don’t know what to do with it.”
The stinging intensifies, but still, nothing. I want so badly to feel and to let that feeling out. I want to be miserable with her. I want a connection. A jagged black spot flutters in the corner of my vision, my bowels gurgle, I just want to sleep.
“What do we do with it?” she asks.
I’m silent for a moment, but I don’t need the time to think.
“Throw it away.”
She raises her head. “What?”
“Throw it away. It’s not the baby. It isn’t anything. Don’t do this to yourself.”
She stares at me. She isn’t angry or offended. She isn’t accepting and she doesn’t say no. She stares long, unblinking.
I shrug. “What are we going to do with it, Steph? We can’t take it home. That’s not good. That’s not healthy. Throw it away.”
She finally blinks, reaches into her coat pocket and pulls out the waded napkin.
I don’t look at it. I take it, stand, and walk to the garbage can. I don’t pause or think or let it bother me. I let it fall, hear the light rasp as it makes contact with the plastic bag. I move back to my seat and don’t feel any different. Still tired, still pent up, still ashamed of both.
Stephanie’s stopped crying. I can’t tell if she’s angry. Can’t tell if she ever will be, if she’ll ever resent me, if she’ll ever forgive me. For now, at least, she isn’t crying. I take comfort in that.
The doctor enters. We tie up the loose ends. Follow up information is given and discharge papers are filled out. Stephanie asks if she should see her doctor, have a pelvic exam. He says she could, but that he doesn’t think there’s any danger. It’s all gone. He’s sure of it.
Steph changes back into her clothes and we stand to leave. As I make my way to the curtain, I look at the garbage can. I start to wonder if Stephanie was right. I start to wonder what kind of boy or girl it would’ve been, what kind of man or woman. I think of all that potential nestled against the plastic sack, cradled next to Styrofoam cups and discarded Kleenex. I think these things to force the tears, but I’m not surprised when they don’t come. Maybe that’s the good part of not sleeping. I don’t have the choice to feel or not to feel. I’ll cry. Tomorrow I’ll cry. Tonight I’m that man who rubs feet and prepares meals. Tonight I’ll sleep.
Jeff Bowles is currently pursuing a BA in English from the University of Colorado Denver. He spends his nights writing creatively and his days preparing for a hopefully not too boring career as a technical writer.
