I opened Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, held it above my head, but lost interest before I made it to the second paragraph, my arms aching. There was a stack of unopened books sitting by my bed.
I had often fantasized about a forced hiatus where I could catch up on the classics and while away the hours. But the dark secret about this fantasy is that you only end up on a forced hiatus if something bad is happening to you. I was locked away, the world spinning along without me. I looked over at the unread pile of books and then up to the wood-paneled ceiling. This is what the inside of my father’s coffin must look like. Then, because I had frightened myself with that thought, I reached for the books and arranged them in the bed around me as if they were my talismans.
It was the children’s librarian at the Kings Highway Library who had first sparked my love of words. She had pin-straight brown hair parted in the middle and thick round black eyeglasses. Her plaid A-line skirts reached mid-calf and made a soft swishing sound as she floated through the stacks of books. For the life of me I can’t remember her name. She was kind but serious, and she loved Ludwig Bemelmans’s Madeline. Because of her, my career path was set by the time I was nine. I wanted to be a librarian just like whatever her name was. But my father had other ideas. “You’re going to be a truck driver,” he said. I was a dainty girl who looked very much like Shirley Temple, and I spent my afternoons in my mother’s closet trotting around in high heels and applying her lipstick. “Wipe that stuff off your face and come over here.” I stood before him. “Take off those shoes before you kill yourself and put up your dukes!”
I complied, scrunching up my face with my best mean look as I raised my fists.
“Throw with your right, block with your left. Loosen your fingers.” He was not going to leave his little girl too soft and tender for this tough world. But after we went a few rounds, he pulled me onto his lap on his Archie Bunker chair and let me paint his fingernails.
I held my pregnant belly and rolled to my right side, shielding my eyes from the light streaming through the window. I looked up at the ceiling again: my wooden coffin. Before his burial my mother, brother, and I had to identify my father’s body at the funeral home. Jews have closed coffins so this was the only chance we had to make sure it was Richard Weintraub being buried that day.
As we lined up in front of the casket, the funeral director asked if we were ready. I gave the smallest nod and swallowed hard. He opened the top half of the lid first, and I looked at my father. He didn’t look so bad. I put my lips to his forehead. He was cold. I hadn’t expected him to be so cold. The director opened the bottom half and stepped away to give us privacy. “Where are his shoes?” I asked. “You don’t need shoes in heaven; God pulls you up by your feet,” my mother answered.
We had brought a recording of Liza Minelli’s rendition of “Cabaret,” and played it while my mother sang the words. It was my father’s personal theme song, and he did make a happy corpse, as the lyrics suggested.
When there was nothing more to do or say, I walked into the sitting room and leaned against a wall, wrapping my arms around myself. A blur of faces offered condolences, and I nodded my thank-yous, watching the scene unfold as if I were a spectator instead of one of the lead characters in the main event. My father’s closest friend, Paulie, stood in front of me and said, “Richard was the most brilliant man I’ve ever met. He was the only person I knew who could convince both his children that each was his favorite.” Paulie was right. Both Mark and I still claim the title. But that was the first time anyone had referred to my father in the past tense, and it broke me.
I rolled over to my right side and began tracing my hand along the knots in the wall paneling, half singing, half humming the lyrics to “Cabaret.” At the end of the song I said out loud to my father, “Well, old chum, I hope you’re celebrating.”
I reached for the remote and clicked on the television to channel surf the morning shows. Every day of bed rest was a conscious decision. This could be a day that I spent looking at the wall, or a day when I felt part of the greater world. Determined to keep my head above the surface, I focused my attention on the morning show.
And so I began a secret affair with a new man. His name was Produce Pete. He was a robust older gentleman with a familiar New York accent. Not my usual idea of sexy, but he was talking about picking the ripest, freshest goods on the stand. This man was the real deal, hearkening back to the days when my mother and I would go to small fruit stands in Brooklyn to buy our vegetables. He was talking about strawberries, and I was hooked. It wasn’t lost on me that I had somehow developed a pattern of falling for men who knew a thing or two about produce.
I grabbed my laptop and looked online, as I often did, obsessively memorizing fetal milestones. I did some quick calculations and figured out that by the time Produce Pete was showcasing radishes, my baby would hopefully weigh just over a pound and his or her brain development would begin to speed up. I thought ahead, wondering if I could maintain this pregnancy until Pete began his segments on nightshades—eggplant, tomatoes, peppers. I’d be a full seven months pregnant, and my baby might have a healthy shot at life. I tried to hold on to the idea that apple season, when my baby was due, was just around the corner.
I dozed off, and when I awoke I was crampy and anxious. I’d always lived my life with a low hum of anxiety buzzing in the background, but the stress of being on bed rest had amped it up, and it was manifesting in my dreams.
Though practically doctor-prescribed, I was starting to dread my daytime disco naps. What should have been a guilty pleasure, a mark in the pro-bed-rest column, became the catalyst for a whole new list of worries. I didn’t even have to be fully asleep for the nightmares to begin. Every time I closed my eyes, they were there, waiting: My baby was gone. Stolen. Dead.
After waking up from another of these episodes, I called Watson.
“I’m having nightmares. I’m in this bar, and the birthing center is across the street . . .”
“You need concrete,” he interrupted.
“Like for mixing?”
“You live in the middle of nowhere. That’s why you feel like crap. Come home. For the love of God, get out of there, woman! It’s not too late!” Watson had been telling me to “come home” since the day I had moved to Saugerties.
“There’s always so much blood in my dreams.”
“Arterial spray or spillage?” I heard his chair squeak as he leaned back.
“Spray. No, spillage. Not helping.”
“Why don’t you work on The Ten-Second Seduction again? Given the circumstances, I don’t think your husband will be jealous,” he continued.
“Do I sound seductive to you? How am I supposed to be sexy? I have Monsters growing in my uterus.”
“Monsters are sexy. Remember Dracula? Not Bela Lugosi, I’m talking 1979 Frank Langella, when he was in his prime.”
“Who?”
“Everyone forgets he was one of the best Draculas.”
“What is your point here?”
“Use this experience for your book. Seductresses get pregnant all the time. I mean, if they’re good at what they do. You know, the seducing part.”
“Okay, fine, let’s talk about the book. I’m getting stuck writing about Yogi Man,” I said.
“Have you noticed that people who do yoga are the most stressed-out people?”
“True, Yogi Man was a tormented soul. So I think the lesson should be . . . what should it be?”
“Don’t do yoga.”
“No. More along the lines of we’re all struggling.”
“And doing yoga makes it worse.”
“Well, it brings it to the surface. And then I can explore whether or not that’s helpful. You know, repression does have its place. Look at my husband’s family. They’re experts at stuffing it all down. Sometimes we need to make a conscious effort not to suffer so much.”
“Right. Everything better now? ’Cause I got a meeting,” he said.
I got the feeling Watson was getting tired of hearing about my cervix and all the problems that went along with it. I got this feeling mostly because every time I spoke to him, he said, “Have this baby already. I’m tired of hearing about your cervix and all the problems that go with it.”
Maybe he was right. Maybe what I needed was concrete. Here in the country, with my friends and family far away, I felt alone. In Brooklyn I had a support system. Unfortunately, the main player in that support system was dead.
On Tuesday evenings, while I was still working in the city, I’d head over to my parents’ house for dinner. One night as we were finishing dessert, I began telling my dad about a co-worker who’d betrayed my trust. It was one of my first lessons in office politics. My father went over to the kitchen counter where he kept his Absolut and poured me a vodka on the rocks. “Drink this, then we’ll talk.”
He and I headed to the living room and sat on the floor watching old M*A*S*H reruns as I told him the sordid tale. He lay on his left side, propped up on his elbow, and then he opened an AARP magazine in front of him, using it as a place mat for his ashtray and his second vodka of the evening. Without turning his head from the television, he flipped his right wrist up, palm open, and said, “Who the fuck cares?” He handed me his lit Newport. I inhaled deeply, allowing the menthol to seep into my lungs.
Those four little words, “who the fuck cares,” became a cathartic mantra I’ve since used to deal with more than a few of life’s hurdles. My father had given me some useful tools to get along in this world. Vodka, a cigarette, and a one-line catchphrase turned out to be a handy arsenal.
Unfortunately, if there ever was a time that vodka and a cigarette just weren’t the answer, this was it. I couldn’t brush off bed rest or even my nightmares with a firm “who the fuck cares?” This time I really did fucking care. I cared about this baby and I cared about my relationship with Chris, which meant I also cared about fourteen-inch replacement blades and Toro Wheel Horse 8-25 air filters. Suddenly there was an endless tide of things to care about.
“Where are you now with your ‘who the fuck cares,’ Dad?” I asked aloud. I was angry. Angry because for all his work trying to make me tough, he’d forgotten to tell me what to do after the vodka was gone and I’d smoked the last cigarette. At some point we all have to confront our issues or they consume us . . . like they had consumed him. Oh. Right. So maybe he didn’t forget to tell me what to do; maybe he just didn’t know. I swung my body around to lie next to Satchie Red. “Well I finally have a big-girl glitch.” Satchie Red stood up, shook her wrinkly chops, and settled a few inches away.
I dialed Chris at the shop. “I need a Ouija board.”
“You have the wrong number.”
“I’m serious.”
“Me too.”
“Maybe therapy would help,” I said.
“For me or you?”
I had been going to a therapist on and off since I was twelve years old. It was like a bat mitzvah present for neurotics. You’re twelve, you’re a woman, here’s your very own therapist, enjoy.
But now, the logistics of speaking to a therapist while on bed rest seemed insurmountable. Even if I could do phone sessions, I’d have to find one who understood my circumstances and then try to develop a rapport. By the time a new therapist was caught up on all my baggage, my baby would be applying for a driver’s permit.
Chris came home that evening holding a small metal object in his hand. “This three-quarter-inch tire bolt has been giving me problems for the last hour.”
“Looks intimidating,” I said from the sofa bed. Satchie Red was now standing on my legs like I wasn’t even there, wagging her tail at Chris’s arrival.
“How was your day?” He threw the bolt on the table.
“Not so great.” I gave Satchie Red a shove, and she jumped off the sofa bed.
“I had this one customer today, called six times to find out when his tractor would be ready.”
“I’m having nightmares, during the day,” I said. “How come we don’t call them daymares?”
“You always have nightmares. A few months ago you stood on the bed screaming and pointing at the ceiling. I had another customer who wanted to return a tire he bought a year ago.”
“I did not stand on the bed. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I’m used to it. Ever since you insisted I fold laundry at 3:00 a.m. two weeks after we were married.”
“Yeah, that time I wasn’t sleeping.”
“So anyway, I tell the guy, you can’t return something from a year ago. Didn’t even have a receipt. Who does that?”
“In this dream I’m in a bar, I’ve just given birth, and there is all this blood. I’m still attached to the IV.”
“It’s just a bad dream. You’ll be fine. Then I had a customer who bought a tractor a month ago. Tells me he wants to return it. I go outside to take a look at it, and the guy bent up the whole left side, must’ve hit a tree. Now he doesn’t want it anymore.”
“I’m not fine, and you’re not listening!”
Chris was out in the world every day making money and pursuing his dreams. I knew it was hard for him, but he wasn’t trapped. He was building his life, while mine was on hold.
“I’m sorry. I’m doing the best I can. I’m trying to tell you something, too. What do you want me to do about your nightmares?”
“I don’t want you to do anything.”
“Can I make you more comfortable? Do you want another pillow? What if we go out for dinner?”
“We can’t go out for dinner. I can’t get out of bed. I just want you to sit here. And listen. I want you to listen.”
“Okay. Let’s talk about your dream.” He got into bed next to me. I looked at the side of his face, the way his ear, cauliflowered from a jiu-jitsu injury, puffed out at the tip.
“I don’t want to talk about it anymore,” I said.
“Just tell me.” He put a hand on my thigh.
I considered giving him the cold shoulder for a few more minutes, but I was eager to talk. “Like I said, I’m in a bar, and the neon sign in the window is blinking on and off, and I’m trying to shield the baby’s eyes.” As I spoke, I rested my head on his arm and I could feel him soften into me. It felt so good to have his full attention. “Why was I in a bar with a newborn? What kind of mother am I going to be?”
I heard a gurgle. I looked up and saw his head back, mouth opened. He was asleep, the sound coming from his throat, deep and guttural, not unlike that of a small brush hog.
“Chris, are you listening?”
“Yes, yes,” he said, roused. Seconds later his head dropped to his chin. Well, at least one of us had no problem sleeping. I lay there, thinking back to the winter morning I told him I was pregnant. In the short span between then and now, something unrecognizable had grown between us like a sharp and stubborn vine. I was alone. Here, with my child growing inside me and my husband sleeping next to me, I ached for a connection with at least one of them. They were both so close, but I couldn’t reach them.
I looked around the room. The house, too, felt like an acquaintance that kept me at arm’s length. Chris’s grandfather’s cowbells hung on a hook; his father’s wood-carved owl perched on a shelf. My memories here were topical, recent. I had no history, no portraits on the wall. I could no longer access the small studio space with my belongings that Chris had set up for me across the property. The only items we could claim as ours were a bookshelf, a dresser, and a new mattress. I grabbed a pillow to my chest and hugged it tight.
I gave up trying to talk to Chris that night, wishing I could pick up the phone and call Rachel. We would spend entire afternoons deconstructing our dreams, consulting books and searching for hidden symbolism. And then one day she said we shouldn’t talk about these things anymore; she was becoming more religious, and it didn’t feel right to discuss symbolism outside of Judaism. Missing Rachel, I picked up the phone and dialed my mother. I told her about my dream. After a long discussion, we mutually decided it would be best to blame it on the Cossacks. The Cossacks are a thing in our family, and my mother has a propensity for fitting them into conversations that have absolutely nothing to do with Cossacks or war or Poland.
“Why don’t I come for a visit?” she said abruptly.
“Sure, after I safeguard my house against Cossacks we’ll plan something,” I said.
“Okay.”
“Listen, Ma, before you go, have you heard anything about Rachel?”
“No, I haven’t. Do you want me to ask around?”
“I guess not.”
Finding a confidante who would listen to me was proving difficult. Much easier was recruiting support for things like groceries and other errands. I was anxious for obvious reasons, but there was so much more to it than saying, “I’m feeling these emotions because I might lose my baby.” It was more like, if I lose my baby, then what? Where do I find the strength to move on? And what about my marriage? It was under so much strain already; I knew in my gut that we would fall apart. I had given up my career, my freedom, and my ability to move to keep this baby alive; how would those things ever matter again if my baby didn’t survive? This wasn’t about feeling sorry for myself. This was about figuring out who I was and what I was capable of handling.
I was disappointed in my doctor for not mentioning how psychologically strenuous bed rest would be. It’s a fact of life that people miscarry. But like bed rest itself, it doesn’t seem to hold a lot of weight out there in the world. How would I recover?
That night, tossing around in bed, it was more of the same bad dream. I woke with a start at 4:00 a.m., consumed by the irrational fear that someone was trying to break into our house. Not long after my father quit his job in the garment district, I became preoccupied with home invasions. I awaited the day a masked man would burst through our door, slice open my parents’ throats, and sell me on the black market. I have no idea how I came up with this elaborate plot. Perhaps it was that one time after watching the news with Dan Rather, when my mother turned to me and said, “Creeps would love that curly hair of yours,” or maybe it was when my father had jokingly whispered in my ear that Dracula roamed the streets of Brooklyn sucking the blood from little children. Whatever the reason, I had some deep-rooted fears.
One rainy night, when I was about six years old, lying in bed, eyes wide open, I had worked myself up into such a frenzy that I jumped up and ran down the hallway to our living room in my fuzzy footed pajamas, convinced that I was being chased by something I couldn’t see. My mother picked me up and carried me back to my room. She tucked me under the heavy comforter and in a firm voice said, “Stay in bed,” before turning to leave. Deep inside my closet, with its chipping plaster walls, there was definitely not a secret door that led to a witch’s coven, but try telling that to an overtired child. I lasted all of five seconds before running after her, clinging to her satin chemise, begging her not to leave me. As she was prying my little fists from her nightgown, I heard my father’s voice: “I’m warning you, Aileen.”
He stood up slowly. Lithe he was not. The floor groaned beneath his feet as if the giant from “Jack and the Beanstalk” had just stirred. Fe Fi Fo Fum. “Get to bed!” he shouted. I put my hands on my hips and widened my stance: “No!” He scooped me up, carrying me to my room. I kicked him in the gut and pounded his chest, trying to bite him. He dropped me on the bed and left, but I could not be alone in that dark place. I ran after him. He stopped and turned, and I swear the whole house rattled with fury. He picked me up by my elbows, pulled me so close to his face that I could smell the remnants of the anchovy pizza he’d had for dinner, carried me down our steep flight of steps, opened the door, and put me on the stoop. The lock clicked behind me. I pounded on the door and screamed until my pajamas were soaked through with rain and the sweat of fear. Someone let me back in, hours, minutes, seconds, later. Most likely my mother, and probably not so much out of love but because I might wake the neighborhood.
My father and I never discussed the incident, but from that night on, he tucked me into bed and then sat on the floor of my room watching the small black-and-white television set, and I learned more about Larry Bird and the Boston Celtics than any other first-grader in Brooklyn. He stayed with me almost every night until I was about twelve, and after that I slept with the overhead light on until the day I moved in with Chris. Somehow my father had managed to be both my dragon and my knight rolled into one.
Now, I turned to face my husband in the dark, watching his chest rise and fall. He was my knight now, and he would protect me, but here I was once again worrying about home invasions and child snatchers, both real and invented. I squinted to see Chris’s features, the outline of his full lips, the curve of his chin, the stubble of his beard. I wondered if my new knight had his own dragon inside of him. I couldn’t imagine it. I threw my leg over his strong, lean body and gazed past him until I drifted off to sleep.
I woke up exhausted and called Jackie to invite her over for breakfast.
“I don’t eat breakfast,” she said. “But I’ll come.”
Satchie Red alerted me to Jackie’s arrival. She came in, put a bag of pastries on the sofa next to me, and then plopped her small frame down on the pink-and-blue-striped chair. Tying her red hair back into a bun, she launched into a list of physical ailments: arthritis, phlebitis, diverticulitis. I couldn’t keep up. “You think you have it bad? Getting old bites. Just wait.” She meant it to be humorous, but I didn’t smile. “What a sour puss on your face. Tell me, honey, what’s up? I’m going to help you.” Just the invitation I’d been waiting for!
“I have this recurring dream. I’m balancing my big postpartum body on this red leather stool in a bar, and a zombie dressed as a hospital orderly comes barreling toward me. He looks around frantically and then grabs my baby. I refuse to let go. But he’s yanking my child out of my arms. I don’t know if the orderly got my baby. Jackie, I have to find out if he got my baby.”
Jackie widened her green eyes, placed both of her pale sun-spotted hands on the arms of the chair, leaned in, and said in her harsh smoker’s voice, “Listen, honey, the first time a woman has a baby she’s scared shitless, whether or not she’s on bed rest. And now these doctors are telling you something’s wrong. Of course you’re having nightmares. All this newfangled technology with the testing and the pictures, I don’t know if it’s so good. What has it done for you? Nothing. It’s giving you so much stress. Bastard doctors.” She sat back in the chair, throwing both her hands up.
I let the truth of Jackie’s words settle.
“This is temporary, a small blip. Soon you’ll be able to put it behind you,” she continued.
“I hope so,” I mumbled.
“This is not a problem. A problem is something you can fix. You can’t fix this, so it’s not your problem.”
“Interesting logic.”
“You want to hear problems, let me tell you what my grandson was caught doing.” She shifted on her hip. “This grandson of mine, a problem. My phlebitis. That’s another problem.”
“What happened with your grandson?”
She leaned in close and whispered, “Drugs.” And then louder, “I’ll kill ’im. Look, you have to do something else. Try knitting.” She stood up to go. “I’m coming back. Tomorrow. I’ll bring more pastries.”
“Thanks, but I can’t eat pastries. Gestational diabetes.”
“Okay, so you’ll watch me eat them. Maybe you’ll have a bite.”
After that I began talking to Jackie almost daily. She was always home when I called, she never tired of hearing about my cervix, and not once did she mention Cossacks. As soon as she picked up the phone, I could hear the strike of a match and the clink of an ashtray. She settled in for the same conversation we’d been having for weeks.
“Honey, honey, I keep telling you . . .” She paused to take a long, deep puff. I waited with bated breath for her to exhale. “It will all work out. There are big changes coming for you. I feel it in my bones.”