TUCSON, MAY 2020, 97°
QUARANTINE WEEK 10, GESTATIONAL WEEK 27
Summer hasn’t officially started yet, but in Arizona the temperature has already spiked to nearly one hundred degrees and it is already so hot that it is difficult to think about anything else. I look with trepidation at the following week’s report and see a high of one hundred and four.
On a sweltering morning, I go walking with my friend Lucy. We mean to go at eight but don’t leave until eight thirty, which is late in the solar timeline of a desert morning. When I get back home my gray shirt is patched with dark sweat under my breasts and armpits. I drink three glasses of water, one after the other, filling a fourth with magnesium powder to try to keep my electrolytes in order. N and I are in the middle of slowly moving out of our tiny apartment and into a bigger house, and I have disassembled all our furniture to the point that there is nowhere to sit except the mattress and the toilet and the floor. I hack a piece of leftover rib-eye steak into vaguely bite-size pieces and crumple down onto the ground. My body feels faint and trembly, some combination of hunger and thirst and low blood sugar and heat and pregnancy and not enough sleep. I eat the steak out of the container, cold, and guzzle the magnesium drink, hoping for a sensation of groundedness in my body that does not come. I am so tired, though I woke up just two hours ago.
Today, this is okay. I am hungry so I eat, I am thirsty so I drink, I would have slept more if I’d had the time. There is no satisfaction in hurting or depriving myself. I feel like I can’t properly breathe, bound in the high waist of my leggings, my belly needing more room for expansion than the compression fabric affords it, so I strip them off when I finish the steak. I turn the air-conditioning up and sit on the mattress, waiting for the calories and salt and oxygen to fortify me.
In the midday sunlight of our empty bedroom I can see everything on my limbs: all the scars, even the ones faded or covered by my tattoos, their edges familiar to me because I remember the small violences that left them behind. On the front of my thigh, the worst of them, a patch of white keloid slash marks left by razor blades and kitchen knives and one fantastically dull sword from my friend Dahlia’s collection of antique weaponry. On the soft meat inside the other thigh, the whisper of burns Dean left me with paper clips and cigarette lighters and stove gas. I know on the flesh of my ass there is a similar one, etched with a knife during a moment of acquiescence, long faded but once bearing his initials, the same kind of mark you put on a cow before you let her go low unattended in a field. Underneath the bright tattoos splattered around my arms there are more scars: horizontal slash marks, small speckled circles the precise circumference of a Camel Light.
I used to feel self-conscious of these scars—maybe because they used to be more visible, and maybe because the second and third acts of my life hadn’t yet unfolded enough to counterweigh the senseless violences of the first. I felt made of scars, literal and otherwise, the walking wounded, a never-sealed rupture, a bag of need and dysfunction. When I felt that way it made sense—though the logic now seems flawed—that I would continue quietly hurting myself. Because I did not yet understand that pain was not a good long-term management tool for my feelings, it appeared I needed a cold blade or a hungry belly or a long rough run on a perhaps-broken heel to find some measure of peace within the hurricane of my selfhood.
The morning when N and I are meant to move our furniture to the new house, I am so tired I can barely rouse myself. I force myself up as early as I can to finish packing, after four hours’ sleep. I have pregnancy insomnia and grad school deadlines, and I know I need to do better than this for my body but I also accept that life sometimes includes long periods of rest followed by the need to get a lot of tasks done in a short amount of time. I tape up the last boxes of our clothes and belongings and together we go to pick up a U-Haul truck. N’s friend meets us at our apartment and the two of them move everything. I carry couch pillows and guard the truck, a job that I suspect is not altogether necessary but that N asks me to do and I gratefully accept. I cannot, with my protruding belly, reliably hold on to one end of a couch or a bookshelf, and this truth and the reality of my dependence make me uncomfortable, so it is a relief to sidestep them. It’s not just that my muscles have weakened; they have, but I am still stronger than a lot of women my size, thanks to the years of training that preceded my pregnancy. It’s that the geometry and physics of my body have changed: I can lift a box, but I have nowhere on my body to rest it. My sore swollen breasts and wildly expanded belly now take up the space where the box would rest. So many of the movements and positions my body is accustomed to no longer work: I cannot recline and rest my laptop on my body, cannot wash dishes without hunching my shoulders, cannot lift a barbell from ground to overhead, cannot easily hop-twist in and out of my truck.
I hate not being useful, but I also quietly love being cared for and the thrilling danger of my dependence. I watch N go up and down the staircase to our apartment, returning with dresser, couch, table, desk, bookshelf, bed. It is one hundred and one degrees and slow beads of sweat drip out of his hairline toward his beard. His shirt goes dark with sweat in the center of his chest. Some people walk by and I feel irrationally proud that somehow I have managed to deserve this beautiful man schlepping my furniture in the Arizona heat, that somehow I have managed to become so loved.
No one has ever helped me move before. I’ve moved alone, always, which has been made easier by not having much stuff and by being recklessly stubborn enough to do things like push a queen-size mattress up five flights of brownstone stairs, solo. I feel guilty and grateful at the same time. When I drive him to the airport at six thirty the next morning after we have slept on the floor surrounded by unassembled furniture under the inadequate cool of the ceiling fan because the air-conditioning isn’t working at the new house, I tell myself that I will unpack everything before he gets home from his work trip, that in the four days I have until he comes back home, I will have the house cozy and comfortable and not full of tasks. I am committed, but foggy on details.
At the new house, our bedroom is flooded with light streaming through the large sliding glass doors, barely softened by the blinds. The bathroom has a huge mirror wall where I can see myself from the thighs up, and I put my full-length outfit-check mirror in the corner. In the brightness, naked, I really see myself for the first time since becoming pregnant, in full light, at full length. I am briefly horrified. My legs, in particular, are squat and lumpy, thigh backs pocked with cellulite, my ass and thighs running into each other without much discernment. My hips look sloppy where they used to look taut. I remember clearly loving the part of my body where the sides of my underwear would lie smooth across my hipbones, tendons and muscles visible, a lean clean place. Now everything is sort of smushed together, my hip is my leg is my belly is my ass. The sides of my underwear have rolled up alongside my hips, probably because I have outgrown them.
I have been waddling around our apartment as close to naked as possible for months—clothes don’t feel good, everything is wrongly constricting or baggily chafing. I cut the bottoms off a few tank tops and wear them cropped with my belly out, no elastic anything to cut into my newly pliant flesh. It had not occurred to me to question or critique my body. I knew, of course, that it looked different, but the smaller awful details were obscured by lighting and denial and concern with more important things. I take a moment, now, in front of the mirror, really looking, really seeing. I force myself to stop parting myself out into a list of complaints, to look instead at the curve of my belly and breasts, which I love, to appreciate that my body is now all softness and slope. I say You look great out loud, because it seems like something I should say to myself. It doesn’t feel true. I wonder how N has been looking at me. He has shown no signs, I don’t think, of seeing me differently, though I don’t know how that is possible. The moment passes and I throw on one of his tank tops, which fits me like a dress, and leave the bedroom to unpack some more boxes.
It was breathtaking, for a moment, to feel the heft of my self-loathing, and to remember that I used to walk around with that, all of it, the full weight, at most hours of all days. I was beautiful when I felt that way about myself, too—beautiful in the conventional way I was trained by culture to value, tiny and pale and delicate and young, my hair long and thick, my skin flush with twenty-year-old collagen, my body not yet tattooed. I was so pretty that I hardly had to pay for anything. Men fell over themselves to give me drinks, invitations, bumps of cocaine, business cards, taxis they had hailed in the rain. Yet I felt so ugly on some days that I could not bear to leave the house, especially not in Manhattan, where every outing includes a verbal appraisal of what is or is not working about your appearance, and I fantasized at night about slicing slabs of flesh off my body with a chef’s knife. I wanted to be small, smaller, as small as possible. I did not want to disappear. I wanted to be seen for my smallness, admired for my fortitude and style. I chain smoked and dressed exclusively in outfits I shoplifted from Barney’s Co-op and was, in ways I could not appreciate until later when I became something else, a quintessential New York girl.
Now, I’m not sure what I am. The conviction that my body—its beauty and its ugliness, its states of being and of disrepair—is who and what I am feels wobblier. For a moment it occurs to me that if N can love me like this—and I mean really see and love me, not just look past it—that must mean more than being loved for being thin or fit or beautiful. The logic fades fast like a hologram. I grasp for its pixels as it goes, but I can’t hold on.
I am alone for four days in our new house while N is in Vegas coaching a UFC fight. Las Vegas is closed to tourists for quarantine, and he sends me pictures of himself running on the empty strip, doing plyometrics on the lip of the Bellagio fountain. I miss him, and also this quiet time with myself and the baby is nice.
Our new neighborhood is nearly silent in the mornings, just the round sounds of mourning doves punctuating the stillness. At the apartment, there was the noise of loud traffic and often people screaming on the street early in the morning, which are sounds I am deeply adjusted to from growing up in Manhattan, so stillness really strikes me. Quiet is always a new sound, no matter how many years I spend away from New York.
I am bone tired from unpacking and assembling furniture, more tired than I can remember ever being from working out, though this is probably a failure of memory. My feet have a hard throb from walking back and forth over the Saltillo tile all day with fifteen extra pounds on my body. I want to sleep but I cannot: pregnancy insomnia is the body’s way of preparing for the months and years of sleep deprivation to follow, and mine has manifested as early morning waking no matter how late I stay up the night before. I wonder why my body is acting like it doesn’t remember that I am already very familiar with sleep deprivation, why it is being coy and pretending it forgets ten years of chaotic drug addiction and more years after that of being so mentally unwell and swirled up in compulsion that sleep was a distant idea. I am comforted, oddly, by knowing this body can, if it really has to, run on two hours of rest and chewing gum and coffee, that it has been proven able to do pointless battles with itself and survive.
I don’t want to think about our baby this way—as an experience of lack or trauma or stress. I want only to think of our baby as a new friend, a very high-maintenance one, perhaps, but a tiny friend, the person I am closest to, half made of my favorite person in the entire world. I feel myself closing up when people talk about how hard parenting is, how obnoxious their kids can be (followed, always, by some version of But I’d die for them!), how much they have lost themselves. It’s not that I think it will be easier for me, for us. The weight of it all feels clear. I do not expect raising our baby to be simple, or neat. I do hope, though, that suffering and personal disintegration will be optional. N is not like that with his son—doesn’t carry him as a weight, doesn’t appear to suffer for his parenthood. He enjoys him and honors his personality as it unfolds and changes and develops. I have never once heard him talk about parenthood as a chore, though he works harder at it than anyone I know. And for my part, I understand better than most people how to accept unacceptable weight, how to carry it as if it has always been a part of me, how to get cozy in discomfort.
I clean and unpack compulsively for the entire time N is away, through exhaustion and lower back pain and feet that ache so loud I start walking funny. I do not eat a proper meal for days—I am acting unhinged. I know he will not care at all if he comes home and finds the boxes right where we left them, the mattress still on the floor. But I want to finish everything, to make the house nice and comfortable and free of chores. I want to do something for us besides being a baby incubator, something tangible and material, some load of work taken off his back.
My nose is steadily streaming thin clear mucous and my eyes are swollen and itchy. I have never before had allergies, but some combination of pregnancy and poor air quality and Tucson tree pollen has turned me into a sneezy, leaky mess. I sweep a huge load of mesquite beans and palo verde buds from the patio at the new house and when I go inside I am covered with their dust, my hair smelling botanical, my nose pouring straight water.
The connection point between my belly and my hips is streaked with a deep ache, ligaments deep in my body pulling at themselves, growing painfully longer. I am so hungry that my mouth and jaw feel odd from the absence of food, as if they have lost track of what their work is.
I am wearing a filthy slashed-apart tank top and a pair of soft shorts that are now several sizes too small, my hair piled in a tangled knot on top of my head, my face streaked with dirt and shiny with sweat. I take a shower, scrub at my blackened feet with a rough stone, wash the front of my hair, and slather myself in coconut oil. The midday sun floods the bathroom as I stand before the mirror, seeing myself, making myself not look away.
Since becoming pregnant my once-glorious eyelashes have mostly fallen out, bald spots have appeared in my eyebrows, and I’ve developed patches of rosacea on the apples of my cheeks. Because of the quarantine, I haven’t needed to dress for work in months. I cannot recall the last time I felt beautiful or pulled together or like a viable human woman. I have relished the sloth of allowing my beauty to deteriorate, but it eats at me at the same time, watching my stock fall one ungroomed eyebrow at a time.
N’s fighter wins his Vegas fight in just over three minutes, a triumphant victory I watch on my grainy laptop streaming ESPN, squinting to see N leaning on the outside of the octagonal cage, his beautiful face obscured by a UFC-regulation face mask. His fighter’s opponent taps almost as soon as he finds himself in a guillotine choke, back pressed against the mat, neck cranked upward, head twisted around its axis. I watch the fight as I sneeze and ache, my heavy body draped over a large U-shaped pillow, thinking about pain and ambition and the fundamental inability of anyone, even someone whose very profession it is, to accurately predict their ability to withstand pain in the future.
It is easy, always, to watch the fights and think that whoever taps or falls or fails to advance could have done better—they could have taken more pain, shown more bravery, eaten more punches. Half the people in the crowd at any given fight are, at any time, voicing such sentiments, so much so that the unathletic UFC fan—the “couch coach”—giving frustrated direction to their fighter is a whole genre of meme. Watching someone else endure is a two-dimensional experience, fundamentally unrelated to actually enduring with your own body.
I cover the red splotches on my face with concealer, and for the first time in months I spread some makeup across my face. I groom my eyebrows and fill them in with some brown pomade, put two coats of the most dramatic mascara I own on my stubby lashes. This is all it takes—I recognize myself again. My body still feels sloppy and my face is missing the angles that used to make it noticeable, but I feel pretty, not haggard, and it is a relief bigger than I could have imagined.