I thought, too, that my pregnancy would be softly all-consuming, that I would be as in love with growing the baby as Ethan is. And for a time, I was. When Elaine visited shortly after we moved here, she walked into the bathroom and found me naked before the mirror, admiring myself. I blushed, reached for a towel, but she said, “No, let me see.” We both looked at my rounded belly, my full breasts. “It’s beautiful,” she said softly.
I nodded. “You know, when I first started getting a belly I used to get up really slowly. I was afraid if I moved too fast, it would fall away. You know, disappear.”
“No chance of that now,” Elaine said.
“No,” I said. “Not now.” And we stared together again at my finally undeniably six-month-pregnant self.
Well, that was then; this is now. Let Elaine believe I am blissfully happy; let someone keep believing that. The truth is that I do not pay much attention to pictures showing how wonderfully developed my baby now is inside me, how talented, what with his thumb sucking, his somersaulting, his hearing. I pay attention to the fact that I need antacids for heartburn, and that I have suffered the supreme humiliation of asking my doctor if that was a hemorrhoid down there or what.
“Oh yes,” he said, his voice rising up from between my legs. “Uh-huh, that’s exactly what it is. Very common, don’t worry.” And he patted my knee, gave me a tight little smile.
“How was work?” I imagined his wife asking him at dinner that night, passing him the mashed potatoes. “Disgusting,” I imagined him answering.
I dressed in anger after the examination that day, my teeth clenched. And then, putting my hands to my belly, I wept, saying, “Sorry. Sorry.”
The phone rings. “What are you doing?” Ethan asks.
I hate when he does this. Because I’m never doing anything, really. But “Making bagels,” I answer, dutifully.
“You’re kidding!”
“No.”
“I didn’t know you knew how to do that.”
“Ethan? Let’s go out to dinner tonight. And to a movie or something.” Then on to Paris.
“Tomorrow, okay? I have to go out to dinner with a client tonight, that’s why I’m calling.”
“What client?”
“Bob Saunders is his name, I’ve never met him.”
I am silent, twisting the phone cord around my wrist, murdering it. I recall when we were in the grocery store last Saturday, and Ethan passed a handsome man who stared at him and Ethan stared back. Just a little. But enough. The moment had the simultaneous brevity and interminability of an electric shock.
“Patty?”
“Forget it, Ethan. I’ll just go alone to the movie.”
“You can’t wait one day?”
I stare out the window at the lake, blue-green today, just like yesterday, a sailboat off in the distance, free. “Fine,” I say, and hang up. My voice is so flat. My self is so flat. Well, my inside self. I feel divorced from my own vitality, my own life spark. I feel as though I could run a hand down between my self and my self, as though some distance exists there between what I used to be and what I am, no bridge between them. I remember hearing women gaily say, “Oh, when you’re pregnant, your mind just turns to mush!” I don’t know what in the hell they were so happy about.
I open the oven door, stare in at my creation. “You’re not bagels,” I say. I throw them in the garbage, put Janis Joplin’s “Ball and Chain” on the stereo. I turn it up high, then higher, then hear the neighbor pounding on the wall. I pound back, then turn the stereo down. There, I think. Okay? Okay?
“Now, I’m not going to kid you,” the childbirth instructor tells us. “Labor is uncomfortable.”
She pauses, waits. No one moves.
“But you’ll get through it just fine. Some of you will have to use a little something”—she pauses, ever so slightly—“but many of you will need absolutely nothing at all.” She beams.
“That won’t be me, I’m just telling you,” I say to Ethan.
“Shhhh!” He is nearly transfixed, watching the instructor pace before her blackboard, pointing to various disgusting illustrations. “Pay attention, Patty, we’re going to need to remember this.”
I don’t know why he thinks so. I don’t believe my time will ever come. I am not sure a baby is even in me. It’s probably a tumor. Maybe it’s gas. I have heard the rapid heartbeat, and I let Ethan be the one to be thrilled. I have rejected the earnestness of that rhythm. I refuse to believe the promise. I cannot engage.
When I see a newborn wrapped in a blanket and in my arms, maybe then we’ll have something to talk about. I do not look at pregnancy books anymore; instead, I look at books with pictures of live babies. I see them staring amazed at the sight of light through their fingers; chewing busily on the leg of a doll, their silky eyebrows furrowed in baby concentration. I see them bending one small finger against their mother’s breast, smiling with their whole bodies; I see them pushing Cheerios around on a high-chair tray. I look into their clear, wide eyes; I trace the lines of their hair with my finger. I ignore the Stages of Labor and focus instead on corduroy overalls, striped T-shirts, plastic butterflies trapped in clear balls that are held in the dimpled hands of tiny scientists. Until I have that for myself, until a real live baby is here, I am only enduring a state of body that makes tying shoes a near-Olympian feat. Ethan and Dr. Homer have had little chats about me, I know. I am a bit depressed, says Dr. Homer (who, by the way, has NO taste in clothes). Common thing in pregnancy, and in a move, too. When you combine the two, why …
Ethan and I both have a little crush on the father who sits on the floor beside us in childbirth class. I hear the gentle words of encouragement he offers his sweet-faced wife; and I see the difference between him and Ethan. Ethan may say many of the same things to me, but the source of those words, the impetus behind them—the meaning, ultimately—is achingly different. I know it with my head and my heart and my uterus and my lungs and the marrow in my bones. And I am tired of it. And so I am withdrawing from this pregnancy, which is not full of holiness and miracles. I quit. I just want a four-year-old who is my child, living with just me, thinking I am a yahoo hero and his dad is … okay.
“I want you ALL to practice your BREATHing,” the instructor says. “We’re in tranSItion, now.” She paces before us in her white coat, her pointer lightly slapping her leg like a riding crop. She has a very flat belly. “On three, all right? One … two … three!”
I want to kill her. I really might kill her.
That night, in bed, Ethan pulls me to him. “What is it?” he asks. “What’s wrong?”
“Oh, Ethan, for God’s sake, don’t be so obtuse.”
“Patty, I thought I made it clear, I can’t … I don’t—”
“I know!”
He pushes my hair back from the sides of my head, kisses the top of it. Big brother. “What can I do? What should I do?”
“I think you should move out for a while,” I say. And cannot believe I have said it. Because it is, of course, the opposite of what I want. I want him to live with me really, to love me the way a man loves a woman when a man loves women. I am as hopelessly stubborn as the child who stands at the window crying for the moon to live in her toy box, to be brought out at will and held in her hands.
Ethan’s arm loosens about me. I feel his chest rise as he takes in a breath. “You want me to move out? Are you serious?”
“Yes.” I sit up, look at him. “It’s not working at all, Ethan, the way we live.”
He nods slowly.
“I hate it. I’m starting to hate you.”
“Well. Jesus, Patty.”
I shrug. “It’s true.”
“You know, Dr. Homer—”
“Oh, fuck him. I hate him. I can’t believe Dr. Carlson even recommended him.” Inside me, the baby moves, and, instinctively, I put my hand there. Ethan reaches out to feel too, and I say, “Don’t.”
“Patty. Should we just go back? Do you want to go home?”
“I don’t know! I just want you to move out. I want … myself back. I don’t know why you asked me to do this, Ethan. What did you think? What did you want?”
He sighs deeply. “I wanted … I guess I hoped I’d change, Patty. I know now it was a stupid idea. But I felt a terrible kind of desperation. I just couldn’t … You remember when I was helping to take care of Bob Slater, the one that died right before we moved?”
“Of course. He’s the one that told you the good thing about having AIDS was charging things and knowing he wouldn’t have to pay for them. The one who was so good at Jeopardy.”
“Yeah. I told you all the charming things about Bob. His Marilyn Monroe wig. His Kewpie-doll collection. I didn’t tell you he’s the nineteenth person I’ve helped die. I didn’t tell you about how it felt to drag him out of bed and put him on the commode and feel his head leaning into my stomach while he wept. I didn’t tell you about how it feels to change sheets that are just … reeking, and then immediately change them again. I watched him lose his vision, he screamed the night it was finally gone, he just shook and screamed. Patty, do you know how many memorial services I’ve gone to? At first, I always felt so moved. Now it’s like some horrible routine that just keeps going on and on and on. I’ve lost so many of my friends, Jesus, when I think of how many … I dream about them, once I dreamed there was a party and they were all there and I woke up sobbing, I missed them all so much. It got so that I was lying in bed at night, almost every night, thinking it’s not fair, why don’t I have it, I should have it, too. And then the phone would ring and it was the next new diagnosis. I just wanted out of that! At any cost. I was willing to try anything to … just … you know, live some normal life, and it’s true, I do want children. And I was just so tired of that phone and those apartments full of medical equipment and bottles of pills and the shades pulled all day, and then the dividing up of someone’s stuff—here, you take his CDs, you get his Armanis, you take the fucking Weber grill! I’m a young man and all I was talking about was dying and dying and dying!”
He starts crying, silently, but I can feel the bed shake. “Ethan,” I say, and I put my arms around him. “Ethan.”
“You can’t know,” he says. “It was such a relief to just think about life for a change! I just wanted so much to have a piece of a happy life. I’m sorry. I know I’ve hurt you, and I swear, Patty, I never meant to.”
“I know, Ethan.”
“I do love you.”
“I know that, too. You sleep, now, all right?”
“Patty? If you need me to go, I’ll—”
“No. It’s hard, Ethan, that’s all. You just have to let me be crabby sometimes, it’s hard to love you and not make love to you.”
“I could try. We could.” He kisses my forehead, my cheek, and I stop him.
“I think that might only be worse. We’ll just keep what we have, all right?”
“Do let’s keep it, though.”
I nod, nod, nod.
• • •
A week later, we go to the doctor’s office and hear that everything is proceeding nicely, that I should probably deliver close to my due date, in three weeks. We bring some groceries home and put them away and when we decide to go to a movie and get back in the car, it won’t start. And because I am tired and vaguely sad I am awful and I yell at Ethan for not knowing anything about cars.
“I do know something,” he says. “It’s the battery. We need a new battery.”
“Well, I’d like to know how we’re going to get to a store to get a battery without a car! And what if I go into labor right now!”
He says nothing. He crosses the road and stands there hitchhiking. Two hours later, a late model Mercedes pulls up in the driveway. I see Ethan emerge from the passenger side, carrying a battery and an armful of freesia. The driver, an older woman, toots the horn at him and waves when she leaves. Massachusetts license plates. I open the door, watch Ethan climb the steps up toward me.
“Who was that?” I ask.
“She picked me up hitchhiking,” Ethan says. “Nan, her name was. I didn’t have a car,” he reminds me.
I put the flowers in water, set them in the middle of the kitchen table, and burst into tears.
He crosses the room, holds me. “Tell me,” he says. “Tell me what you want; I’ll do it if I can.”
“You can’t do it.”
“But I’ll do anything else, Patty.”
“Yeah. I know.” I look around the living room, let out a shuddering sigh. “I want to go home, okay?”
“Okay.”
“You want to come?”
“Yes.”
“I think maybe I’ll live alone again.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I thought everything might change here, too.”
He lets go of me, looks down into my face.
“Don’t say anything,” I say. “I know.”
“I just wish you would be happy about the baby.”
“I’ll be happy about the baby when it gets here. If it gets here—it might not get here. I might be like this for the rest of my life.”
“It will be here in less than a month, Patty. Think of that! We can leave in a week, all right? I’ll give them a week’s notice, and we’ll drive back.”
“Maybe the leaves will be starting to turn.”
“Yes. Here, too.”
“Not the same.”
“You’re right. Listen, let’s go to the movie. I’ll put the battery in.”
I nod, feel relief filling my throat. When the phone rings, I answer it mindlessly.
“Honey?” my father says.
“What happened?” It is his voice that makes me say this, which is not his voice. I see Ethan step forward, his face full of questions. I hold up my hand. Later.
“Now, it’s not an emergency,” my father says.
“What happened?”
“Well, it’s just that … your mother … She has Alzheimer’s disease, Patty.”
I laugh. “No, she doesn’t.”
“Well. Yes, she does.”
“I … When did you find out?”
“A while ago. Now, we didn’t want to tell you, but things have really—”
“What do you mean you didn’t want to tell me?”
“Your mother was very firm on this point, Patty. She wanted you to get through this pregnancy without—”
“I’m coming home. Right now.”
“Well, don’t—”
“I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
“Listen to me. It’s not an emergency. You be careful.”
“I’ll be careful. I want to come home. I was coming home anyway. I’m coming home.”
“Oh, honey. Hey. Don’t cry. We’re all going to get through this.”
I hang up the phone, turn to Ethan.
“Get in the car,” he says. “You can tell me on the way.”
I throw some things into a suitcase, say nothing while I’m packing except “I knew it.” And realize that I did, too; of course I did.
22
My sisters and my brother are home, sitting at the dining-room table and having dinner when I walk in.
“Look at you!” my mother says, and embraces me. I am so sorry I left at all; my regret makes me dizzy.
“You just missed a couple of months,” I say. And do not cry. And do not cry.
She squeezes me tighter, says quietly, “I’m all right. I’m all right.”
I go around the table, hugging everyone, and then remember Ethan, who stands now in the corner of the room, unsure as to what he should do.
“Would you like to stay for dinner, Ethan?” my mother asks. She is like a Tupperware hostess: serenely surreal.
He looks at me. “I think … why don’t I come back another time?”
I nod, grateful.
He smiles, waves a general good-bye, and is gone.
I sit at the table, take a bite off Johnny’s plate while I’m waiting for my ow
n. “It’s good,” I say. Turkey. Green beans. Stuffing. She’s made it a million times, I know her recipe for everything. “So. We need to talk, huh?”
“Not tonight, Patty,” my mother says. “Okay? We decided we’d have a nice dinner, all of us together, and talk in the morning.”
“That’s fine,” I say. I look at my sister Donna, whose eyes are full of tears. “New ’do, huh?”
Her hand goes to the back of her neck. “I hate it. She used the shaver.”
“You’ve got to keep your eye on them every minute,” I say. And then, to my sister Phyllis, “How are you?”
She nods, starts to speak, then just nods again.
It is the oddest dinner, the gentlest thing. Truly. It is so gentle. We might be underwater, the way everything is so wavy and muffled.
Later, after everyone has gone to bed, I lie awake on the sofa bed in my father’s den. It feels so natural, so right, to have everyone back together under one roof again—no spouses, no children, just us. I remember the comforting clutter that used to be in this house: baseball gloves, schoolbooks, someone’s jacket forever on some chair. The phone rang and rang and rang; voices shouted up the stairs, answers came ringing down. The upstairs bathroom mirror was continually fogged. I recall so many Christmases, all of us in our robes, and I smile, remembering the year Phyllis wanted to wear a lit Advent wreath and singed her hair, the year our dog ate the gift cheese and threw up all over the sofa while we were at midnight mass. I think of how loud dinners used to be, with competitive stories, laughter, occasional fights—often over who got the last of something. My mother laid out snacks for us every day after school; I wonder if anyone does that anymore. We got peanut-butter cookies, we got oranges slices in pretty arrangements; we got cocoa piled high with marshmallows.
I realize I am hungry. I hate when ordinary needs intrude on a melancholy reverie, but there you are, that’s a body for you.
I put on my robe, head for the kitchen. I’ll have a turkey sandwich, heavy mayo, what’s the difference when you’re as huge as I am. I turn on the light, see my father at the kitchen table. “Oh!” he says.
“Hey, Dad.” I sit opposite him.