CHAPTER 34

Pregnancy

After the wedding Leda felt a sense of euphoria she hadn’t thought could be possible from the signing of a legal document. She and John were married. It was a cozy feeling. It was them against the world in a way that was damning to everyone outside of their small, satisfied couplehood. Their life seemed settled and the uproar of the engagement was no longer present or pressing. Together they were peaceful and joyful and skated around through breakfasts and shallow silences that filled Sunday evenings. Her mom would call and Leda would answer, “Hello?” but it was sweet and unburdened and triumphant. These were the greatest “hellos” of her life. Now I know why people get married, she thought. Now I know that before marriage I was unhappy. This euphoria lasted three and a half weeks. It slowly drained away from the moment it began but subsequently came to a full stop the day she received her wedding photos and unrelentingly decided that in each and every single one of them her head looked small.

“John, is my head small?”

“What does that even mean?” John said.

“It means just what you’d think it means. Do I have a small head?”

“No, Leda, Jesus.”

“But look at me here.” She clicked open the photo of herself standing against a lattice of grapevines. “Do you see how small my head looks? It makes my body look huge. I’m a freak.”

“You’re insane,” John said, but she didn’t believe him. In the end she found three wedding photos out of the bunch that she thought least made her head look small and had them all framed.

During this time Leda didn’t think about writing much. The same momentum that had led up to the wedding was redirected toward buying a house. It was to be expected. The natural progression, as it were, or so she felt in that moment. There was a shift in the foundation of her being. Now she was working toward a level of domesticity that would be as precious as that euphoria had been. Tutoring, which had formerly acted as a pincushion between phases in her life, became her focus. She no longer had a desire to reapply to grad school. It seemed silly in the context of window treatments and finished basements. She and John were saving up for a house and she would do her part. She took on as many hours as she could and often worked through weekends right into the new week with little sense of loss. Happiness seemed so blissfully achievable that she nearly felt unburdened by her lack of drive to be a writer. She was in control of her fate. And it was here, flittering in this rigid sense of self, that she suddenly and without warning wanted a baby.

At first she hardly noticed it. There was just a mild strain that some part of herself was missing. She thought buying the house would soothe her (they’d found a three-bedroom in Belmont that was “a great location” and “just perfect”), but as they signed their mortgage papers and as she stacked mugs in her new kitchen cabinet the feeling didn’t wane. She felt continuously frantic and then one day it clicked, just like deciding her head was too small in all those wedding photos, just like a blooming rose opening to face the heavens. I want a baby, she thought.

Never before in her life had she considered that this would be something she would want so young. She tried to talk herself out of it, to think of everything else that needed to get done, that should be done in her life before having children, but the need was so stark and burning that she almost had a hard time concentrating on anything else.

“Would you like that order for here or to go?” the lady at the sandwich shop would say.

Who cares about sandwiches? I want a baby, Leda would think to say back.

Whenever she’d see mothers in shopping malls or second cousins posting pictures of their young children on Facebook, she’d feel an irrational pang of angry jealousy. You don’t deserve a baby. I deserve a baby. She put it aside and told herself she’d just have to hold on until her early thirties. HER EARLY THIRTIES had been a fantasied time in her mind when everything in her life would come together, and she’d be ready for all the many things that she knew she needed to be ready for at some point.

“I want to be pregnant by the time I’m twenty-four,” Anne had said once.

“Why?”

“Because I want to be a young mom. I don’t want to be some old lady running after little kids.”

“Well, I definitely don’t want kids until I’m, like, thirty-three at the earliest.”

“Really?”

“Yes, I don’t even want to get married before I’m thirty,” Leda had said before being married at twenty-six.

In late August she came to an epiphany of sorts, a visceral clarity about her life and future, where all the momentum was leading and what it was she truly wanted. It was early afternoon, and she’d just finished tutoring and was waiting for John to pick her up. The day had been exceedingly hot. Originally she’d planned to just sit in the little nearby park to wait for him, but once standing outside, the blinding concrete walkway reflecting the humidity back at her, she knew that there was no way she’d last. She looked around. There was a café about a mile down the road, but it was too hot to even consider the walk. Across the street was a small chapel that always had its doors open.

“Welcome all,” the sign out front read.

Leda had seen the chapel many times. The boy she tutored had even mentioned it once.

“Ricky goes to church,” he’d said.

“Who is Ricky?”

“The boy that mom watches on Wednesday nights when his mom is at work. He’s kind of my friend, only I don’t really like him that much.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, he goes to church across the street. He says God is always watching us.”

“Does he?”

“Do you think God is always watching us?”

“I don’t know.”

“I think he’s wrong. I think no one is watching.”

Leda had only ever been to church a few times in her life, twice on Christmas Eve as just sort of a festive outing for the holiday and once for a friend’s wedding. Her family wasn’t religious at all. When she was very young, she told a girl at school that there was no God. The girl was so upset that she had to go home early.

“Do you think God is a woman?” Leda had asked her mom when she was seven.

“Of course God is a woman,” her mom answered.

Her mom had never tried to instill any sense of atheism in her, really, but she did want her daughter to believe in what was empirically there. She wanted her to be someone who considered facts before all else, to build her life around reality. In retrospect Leda felt very grateful that her mom had instilled these kinds of values in her as a child. She felt free to believe whatever she wanted, and even now she questioned the validity of the idea that God would have a penis.

Despite her misgivings about going into the chapel, she decided there really was no other option. It was just too hot out, and she figured if they had a welcome sign out front they wouldn’t hassle her if she went in and sat down.

The chapel was built from a warm-colored adobe. It was a smaller structure with big, low arches in the Spanish style. Inside it was even tinier than it looked on the outside. There were only a few wooden pews and a short aisle leading to an elaborate golden altar. In front of the altar were some candles that had yet to be lit. No one was there. Leda sat down in the last row. She wasn’t sure what to do with her hands so she laid them across her lap. She closed her eyes and leaned her head back; it was so much cooler than it was outside. It was nice. She thought of her day. The boy she’d tutored. The way he’d snapped his fingers as he read My Side of the Mountain. She thought of summer and the impending fall. She also thought of California and how the hills just rolled on and on, vast and golden. She turned her head to the left and opened her eyes and there before her was a huge painting of Mary holding the baby Jesus. She hadn’t noticed it when she’d sat down, but now, looking at it in its massive scale compared with the rest of the chapel wall, she couldn’t believe she hadn’t. Mary was sitting upright. Her expression was stoic and soft looking down at her baby. The baby was round and angelic; above him was a bright ray of light. His expression was stoic but not soft. He was looking straight ahead, as if he were looking right at her. It was then that she felt the same familiar pang of jealousy she had so many times before, only this time it was stronger, this time it was irrational, this time it was as startling and reassuring as walking from the burning sun to the cooling shade. It was unavoidable, it was overpowering. She doesn’t deserve a baby. I deserve a baby.

That night she lay in bed with John and told him that she wanted to start a family. Nearly seven months later she was pregnant. She hadn’t waited till her early thirties after all, but she was never sorry that she hadn’t. It was a feeling so strong in her that the rest of her life just seemed like a blur of stupid pursuits and empty ambitions. Wanting a baby was as close as she’d ever come to wanting something real. It’s as close as she’d ever come to God.