“You ready?” Chris called from the doorway. We were headed to Dr. Specialist for our routine sonogram. Maybe this time we’d get a more definitive answer about the sex of the baby.
“Pot roast for you when you get back,” said my mother, pointing at Chris. “Aileen, you don’t eat anything. Maybe a plate of celery.” She kissed me goodbye, shooing us out the door.
I stepped out of the house and began the slow journey to the car, stopping every few steps to do a strange little dance. I wiggled my hips left to right and then thrust out my pelvis in jerky movements until bones, joints, and ligaments clicked into place. It felt like I was channeling Elvis.
Chris took a seat next to me in the waiting room, flipping through a National Geographic magazine. It bothered me that he was so relaxed, that he had no outward anxiety about our appointments. We could have used this time to talk, catch up, joke around, reassure each other, but instead, he had become more like a chauffeur than a husband, as much a stranger as everybody else in the room.
The techs knew me by now. I was the irrational one, the high-maintenance one who disagreed with her husband loudly in public places. The one who liked to argue over the existence of penises.
Stripped from the waist down. Paper robe. Cold gel. Husband seated behind me. We had the routine down.
“Okay. We’re going to find out for sure. You ready?”
I strained my head back to look at Chris who nodded once. “We’re ready,” I said. Chris placed a firm hand on my shoulder while the tech glided the Doppler over my belly.
“Well, lookie there,” she said, pointing to the screen. “That, my dear, is a penis.”
I clapped my hands together. “Yes! I knew it!” I felt equal parts joy and vindication. I deserved a written apology from these nonbelievers . . . in glitter.
Chris squeezed my shoulder. He hadn’t said it out loud, but I knew he wanted a boy.
Dr. Specialist came floating in, offering me a perfunctory hello before raising his glasses to his forehead to look at the scans. “Seems like we sorted out the baby’s sex?”
“I knew we were having a boy,” I said.
“How’s the pressure on your cervix?”
Would no one give me the satisfaction of admitting they were wrong? “Slightly less unbearable, but there’s still pressure,” I replied.
“Well,” he said, sitting down in a chair and rolling himself over to the screen. “Your fibroids have shrunk. Your pain should continue to lessen. It seems that everything is headed in a positive direction.”
“I still hold the record for world’s largest fibroid though, right?” He flipped through my chart. “I hear it’s a coveted title,” I tried again. Nothing.
“You don’t need to be on bed rest anymore. You have to take it easy, but I don’t see why you can’t get up now.”
“What?” Chris’s disembodied voice came from behind my head. I parted my lips, but no words came out.
I made a few unintelligible sounds, and then blurted out, “Just like that?” Was this guy a magician? Did the barometric pressure shift? What had changed? I had a thousand questions.
“The truth is, I don’t think you ever needed to be on bed rest.”
“What?” Chris said again.
I brought my hand up to my cheek and slapped my own face. “I’m not understanding,” I said.
“The fibroid was pressing on your cervix, but now it’s shrunk so it’s just pressing the side. It’s actually keeping your cervix shut. You’ll definitely need a C-section. You know that, right?”
“Um, I did not know that. I mean, I suppose with a Monster blocking the escape hatch, there’s no other choice.” Until now, I didn’t even know for certain if there would be a baby. I had been trying so hard to keep it inside me; how could I possibly focus on its exit strategy?
“Well, there you have it. Anything else?”
Yes, there was something else. There were a billion somethings, but I couldn’t articulate any of them in a way that would sound rational. What did he mean, he thought I never needed to be on bed rest? Why was he so flippant about it? I wasn’t a statistic. You don’t stop another human being’s life for months and then say you didn’t have to go through that, but no biggie, right?
As I got dressed, I tried to process the next steps. Could I just stop bed resting and pick my life back up like nothing had happened? This was what I had hoped for, what I had prayed for every day. And now that it was possible, all I wanted was to get back in bed and hide. I had the bed-rest version of Stockholm syndrome.
“Good news, right?” Chris said as he held the car door open for me.
“I’m not sure.”
At home, I sat on the edge of the couch and held my belly. A voice inside me told me to ignore Dr. Specialist and lie back down, but I wasn’t sure if that was instinct talking or fear. And I wasn’t sure if it was my voice I was hearing, or my father’s.
Two years before he died, my mother made him go to the hospital for chest pain. She called a cab, and they checked him in for a few nights. He was pissed. He hollered at everyone and refused to cooperate. My brother implored him to listen and to do what he was told, but he only responded, “I want to speak to my daughter. These doctors don’t know what they’re talking about.” My brother called me at work and put my father on the phone. “Break me out of here, Kabeen.” I told him I’d be over after work and we’d hatch a plan.
That night I stood at the edge of his hospital bed.
“You believe this shit?” he said.
“I can get you out of here. What’s in it for me?”
“You’d bargain with your father? I’ll take you out to Nino’s.” It was one of our favorite Italian restaurants, and we had recently started a little ritual of going out to dinner together once a month, just the two of us. Then, to sweeten the deal, he pulled out a small wad of cash and said, “Take what you want.”
“Deal. But first you need some tests.” I pocketed forty bucks and handed him back his cash. We both knew that he wasn’t going anywhere, but I understood that he needed someone who would pretend with him. It was the only way he could accept sympathy. “I know you’re fine, but these doctors can’t release you until they’re sure. So the quicker you sign the papers and take the tests, the quicker you’re out of here.”
When I was done talking, my mother came over with a washbasin, pulled back the edge of the blanket, and washed my father’s feet while he grumbled about how I was the only one who understood him. I will never forget the image of my mother standing there washing the man’s feet while he yelled at her. When I asked her about it later, she said, “He was scared. He needed someone to yell at. After thirty years of marriage, you know when it’s personal and when it’s not.”
My father never trusted doctors. He’d tell me not to listen to what they said and do what I thought was best. Then again, look where that got him.
My mother handed me a plate of sliced vegetables. “I can’t talk about it, Ma,” I cut her off before the interrogation began.
“Okay, fine. Chris told me, but I don’t believe one word these mamzer doctors say. This one tells you one thing, the other says another thing. Call your OB. He’ll tell you.”
“You just said you don’t believe anyone.”
“Well, at some point you have to believe someone, right?” She waved her hand and left the room.
What would it mean to be liberated from bed rest? We were nearing the middle of August, and I had less than two months left to go. How would I fill that time? What about my hip dysplasia, the gestational diabetes? They weren’t going to disappear. I didn’t enjoy bed rest, but I was even more afraid of what would happen if I got up. I was like those prisoners who commit petty crimes just to get rearrested; I was safer on the inside. So taking my mother’s Yiddishkeit logic into consideration, I called Dr. Enchanté and explained the new turn of events.
“You’re so close. Why risk it? If you stop bed resting now and, say, deliver prematurely, you will have a much more difficult road ahead. Now, that’s not to say it won’t happen anyway, but your course has been steady. It’s almost, almost, but not quite, in the bag.”
“Okay. So stay on bed rest?”
“Yes, I wholeheartedly disagree with the specialist.”
“Well, there goes the gospel,” I said mostly to myself.
“I’ll give you this. You can have about an hour a day upright. Don’t overdo it, but as long as you’re not straining yourself, you can spend a small amount of time out of bed.”
“Can I walk the dog in the yard?”
“Yes.”
Mental high-five! “What about exercise?” I had become so weak and so soft that it was hard for me to imagine even lifting a baby. I needed to build some muscle.
He told me he would approve basic exercises like arm curls and leg lifts in moderation to keep the blood flowing and my muscles toned.
As soon as I got off the phone, I began doing reclined leg lifts. I had a new purpose. I was going to find my muscles. I started counting aloud, “One . . . two . . . one . . . two . . .”
“What are you doing?” My mother’s panic-stricken voice echoed across the house.
“One, two, one, two, one, two.” I sped up.
“Stop, you shouldn’t be doing this.”
“Ma, the doctor said it was okay. One-two-one-two-one-two.” Even faster now.
“I don’t agree with this.”
“I’ll get you a doctor’s note. Will that be enough for you?”
“So you can’t work out for a while. You think that’s sacrifice? You should only know what I sacrificed for you.”
“It’s just a couple of leg lifts. I’m sorry that you had to sacrifice for me. I can’t take it back. Okay?”
“I can’t take it back either. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“I’m glad we’re all okay.” She stormed out of the room, and I could hear my father’s voice in my head, “Don’t fight with your mother.” He had said it a million times before, and he was right. Besides, I could see her point. You don’t fold your son-in-law’s underwear and not expect to at least get a healthy grandchild out of the deal. My mother was here to help, but we were in danger of falling back into old patterns. At least now I understood that this latest disagreement would blow over within approximately three minutes.
I stopped exercising and switched to visualization to lessen the strain on my mother’s heart. This visualization exercise involved imagining blue beads slowly filling my body from head to toe, stretching muscles, tendons, skin, pelvis, torso, and chest. Toward the end of the exercise, the beads were supposed to spill out of my body and I would feel like putty. I pictured myself filled with beads. I was relaxing. It was great. But then the beads started multiplying. I couldn’t keep up. I needed them out of my body. They were wrapping themselves around my throat. They were bearing down on my abdomen. And then, bam! I opened my eyes. The baby had kicked me right in the rib.
My mother was standing in front of me with her suitcase. She said she was all schvitzed out. It was too hot, too meshuganeh, she was getting the next bus home. “You’ll be fine,” she said. She leaned down and hugged me around my neck, which felt not unlike a choke hold, and then kissed me hard on the cheek, leaving a red smudge on my face. “I’ll call you later. Maybe I’ll come up again in the next week or two.”
She pulled a chair up to the door, parked herself there, and waited for Chris to get home from work to drive her to the bus stop. She left us with a huge pot of brisket, enough chicken to last until my son’s bar mitzvah, and a pile of Chris’s neatly folded underwear.