We were married in those dark ages before legalized abortion. I know that’s no excuse. There were always illegal abortions. But my social circles were limited and unsophisticated. The doctors in my life were of the old-fashioned, tongue-depressor variety, who probably accepted kickbacks on unnecessary, but lawful, hysterectomies.
I knew vaguely about worldlier women who flew down to Puerto Rico and other tropical places to have safe, painless surgery and probably even had time to get in a little sun and to dance the carioca. But I had never even been in an airplane. And the stories I knew by heart were of hapless girls in the back rooms of drugstores after hours, whose blood came in fountains; poor butchered girls whose parts were packaged and distributed among the trash cans of the city.
My mother dreamed of being a grandmother someday. It appeared to be her goal in life. She wanted to wear a gold charm bracelet dangling with symbols that commemorated the births of babies. She wanted an accordion folder of photographs, that first-class ticket to the society of grandmothers.
I was born late in her life and was an only child, having denied passage to any future brothers and sisters. My mother claimed that a few months after I was born, everything had simply fallen out of her one day. As a young, misinformed girl, I had pictured the worst: a giblet tangle of fallopian tubes, ovaries, and the little pear-shaped uterus lying useless on the bathroom floor. But first I had been born, dropped in agony like an oversized egg from a disconsolate chicken. And, way behind schedule, my mother was impatient for the natural progression of events.
When I was twenty, my goal was to lie meshed with Howard forever. Sex, which I had discovered like everyone else, in the misery of childhood, had finally advanced to the ultimate stage of partnership. And what a partner I had! I recognized with awe the glorious territory we had discovered together in such blind and blundering exploration.
Later, lying in bed alone, “in trouble” already, I kept a wad of Kleenex and a flashlight for undercover checking. Nothing. There was probably still a chance that I was mistaken, or that my body was only giving me some punitive suspense. As I had assured Howard, it was my safe time, and our pleasure didn’t have to be deferred for the sake of caution. Of course, he had hardly waited anyway, had barely missed a stroke.
I checked again, the flashlight locked between my knees. Nothing.
Howard advised hot baths. He lent me weights to lift. We ran together, forty laps around a school track in a neutral neighborhood, and then collapsed, panting, in the high grass behind it. All the evidence was in.
“What do you want to do?” he asked.
“You know,” I said. “What about you?”
His eyes shifted restlessly, and I imagined my mother’s pride and joy, a slender gelatinous thread riding the sewer currents of Queens.
“Are you afraid, Paulie?” Howard asked, and I knew then that he was.
I made him say it anyway. “Of what?” I asked, forcing his glance.
“Of … I don’t know … of complications.”
“Aren’t you?” I said. What a mess it could be! I concentrated, forcing terrible mental pictures at him, Daily News headlines, even threw in some war atrocities for good measure.
He shuddered, receiving my message. I couldn’t help thinking that men whose mothers have established an early habit of guilt in them are probably the easiest.
“So that’s it,” Howard said, and we were engaged.
I threw my arms around him, sealing the bond. “It will be wonderful,” I promised. “We’ll have a wonderful life together. We’ll have terrific good luck. I can feel it.”
He hugged me back, but all I could really feel were the doombeat of his heart and the collapsing walls of his will.
I planned to go on a diet right after the baby was born. But for now I was growing, stretching my skin to translucency, to an iridescent glow.
Howard assured me that he loved me this way, statuesque he called it.
“Petite is going out of style,” my mother said.
“Ah, beautiful,” Howard murmured in the husky voice of sex, as he burrowed in.
But I’m nobody’s fool. On Sundays I saw him look through the magazine section of the Times and pause with wistful concentration at those slender models in the brassiere ads.
There is desire beyond mere lust in that, I thought. He might have looked at girls in centerfolds instead, at the opulent ones who were there to inspire a different and simpler kind of longing. If, in his secret heart, he wanted me to be slim and trim, I would be. The women’s magazines were full of easy formulas I could follow: The Thinking Woman’s Diet, The Drinking Woman’s Diet, The Shrinking Woman’s Diet. It would be a cinch.
But in the meantime I kept growing while, inside my bulk, the future me stepped daintily, waiting for release.
The baby grew, too, in its confinement, pulsed and sounded its limits.
And Howard was madly in love with it. It was a romance he had never experienced before. He had always had women, of course, and they still sought him out. I watched, narrow-eyed, as new ones came up, threatened, and disappeared. But Howard was inviolate. He was a family man now. And I was the monument to his new life.
“I’m going to diet when this is all over. Become très chic.”
“No,” he protested. “Don’t.”
I did a little pirouette. “This stuff is going to fall off like snakeskins.”
“Don’t lose my favorite parts,” Howard warned.
We went to visit other couples who nested in their apartments. Judy and Lenny Miller had a little girl named Roberta. Her toys were always in evidence; a vaporizer was her constant bedside companion.
Howard and I tiptoed in to admire her. When she was awake she was a fresh kid, the kind who screams whenever she speaks, and who answers civil, friendly questions with, “No, silly,” or, “No, stupid,” a precocious kid who makes nose-picking a public performance.
But now the steam curled her hair into heartbreaking tendrils. The hiss of the vaporizer and the sweet rush of her breath. We whispered in this shrine, made reverent by the miracle.
When we tiptoed back to the living room, I thought, Howard doesn’t even feel trapped. He actually wants a baby, wants this whole homely scene for his own. And I hadn’t really trapped him anyway, had I? Isn’t the sperm the true aggressor, those little Weissmullers breaststroking to their destiny? Or is the egg the bully, after all, waiting in ambush, ready to mug the first innocent stray?
“Who really did this?” I once asked Howard.
But he thought it was a theological poser. “God, I suppose, if you believe in Him,” he said.
We sat in the Millers’ living room among the debris and leavings of playtime. Howard rested a proprietary hand on my belly. All conversation came back to the inevitable subject.
“My doctor said he never saw anything like it,” Judy said. “He had real tears streaming down his face when he held Roberta up.”
It might have been sweat, I thought. Motherhood could make some women whitewash anything. She talked about the natural childbirth course they had taken, where she had learned to breathe the right way during labor, so that she was able to be a really active member of the delivery team.
Lenny had been there, too. Now he picked up a bronzed baby shoe and allowed us to observe the wonder of its size in the width of his palm. “It was a beautiful experience,” Lenny said. “Most of the time we’re working against nature in the births of our children. It’s hypocrisy to keep the father outside, a stranger at the gates, so to speak.”
What a metaphor!
He advised Howard not to be that notorious slacker, the biological father who drops his seed and runs. Lenny had been right there, rubbing Judy’s back, speaking encouragement, talking and stroking his child into the world.
I could sense Howard’s excitement.
Then Judy brought out the photographs. We had seen them before, of course, but it seemed appropriate to see them once again, at that moment. Lenny was careful to hand them to us in proper chronological sequence. Judy, huge, horizontal on the delivery table. Himself, the masked robber of innocence, smiling at her with his eyes. The doctor, glistening with sweat/tears, his hand upward and lost to view.
Oh, God, what was I doing?
Judy, grimacing, clenching, contracting, all her agonies reflected in the other faces.
“See?” Lenny pointed out. “I was in labor, too.” Then, “Here she comes!” he said, handing us the one with the emerging head, a small, bloodied, and determined ball. Judy’s own head was lifted in an effort to watch, and she was smiling.
Then, triumph! The whole family united at last on this shore. Mortal, tender, exquisite. These were winning photos—there was no denying that. Howard was speechless with emotion.
“I thought I was dying, that’s all,” my mother said. “You were ripping me to shreds.”
My father left the room.
“He can’t stand to hear about it,” my mother whispered. “They feel guilty, you know.”
“Howard and I are taking a course,” I said.
“A course! What are they going to teach you—how to scream? You were feet first,” she said accusingly.
But I wasn’t put off by her. She had lied about everything else most of my life. “God helps those who help themselves,” she used to say. And, “All cats are gray in the dark.” That, about lovemaking!
Howard and I went to a class where I learned to breathe. We saw films on the development of the embryo and the benefits of nursing. Howard read aloud from a book on prenatal care, and I took a vitamin supplement that came in pink-and-blue capsules.
I learned to pant, little doglike huffs and puffs for the last stages of labor. I practiced smiling into the bathroom mirror while I panted, in imitation of Judy’s radiant Madonna smile of the last photograph.
We had decided against delivery room photographs for ourselves. Everything would be recorded perfectly in the darkroom of the heart.
Howard and I cherished our new vocabulary. Term. I was carrying to full term. Dilation. Presentation. Lactation. Gorgeous words from a loftier language.
Our lovemaking took on the added excitement of imposed restraint. “Are you all right?” Howard would ask over and over. What a paradox—to be so powerful and fragile at once! Soon we would have to abstain completely for a while and restore our previous virtue.
We played with names for the baby, from the biblical to the historical to the mythical. Nothing seemed good enough or suitably original.
We waited. I went for monthly checkups. Other pregnant women in the doctor’s waiting room and I smiled knowingly at one another. We found ourselves in a vast and ancient sorority without the rituals of pledging. Reducing us to girlish dependence, Dr. Marvin Kramer called us by our first names. We called him Dr. Kramer.
Opening my legs on the examining table while his cheerless nurse laid a sheet across my knees for the sake of discretion, I could just make out the crown of his head, halo-lit by his miner’s lamp. But I could hear his voice as it tunneled through me. “You’re coming along fine, Paulette. Good girl, good girl.”
Well, if you can’t be good, be careful. That wasn’t one of my mother’s chestnuts. But it could have been. I had been careless anyway, lost forever to the common sense of practical advice. So many future destinies, irrevocably set. It was astonishing.
“I can hardly move anymore,” I complained to Howard one day. He crawled to a corner of the bed and folded himself to give me the most possible room.
The gestation of a brooding elephant is almost two years. Mindless hamsters pop out in sixteen days.
“It will be over soon, Paulie,” Howard said, and he reached across the bed and touched my hair.
Then what? I wondered.
“Do the breathing,” Howard suggested.
“Take gas when the time comes,” my mother said. “Have I ever led you astray?”
Judy and Lenny came to visit with Roberta, who whined and tap-danced on our coffee table.
“I’m going on five hundred calories a day,” I said, “as soon as I drop this load.”
“Try to sound more maternal,” Howard whispered.
“Short skirts are coming back,” I said in a threatening voice. “And those skimpy little blouses.”
“Oh, just breathe,” he begged.
“I’m sick of breathing,” I said.
Labor began in the afternoon. It was a dispirited Sunday and we were listening to a melancholy symphony on the radio. Another station, with a Baptist church service, drifted in and out.
The elevator stopped five times for other passengers on the way down to the lobby of our building. Neighbors smiled at us and looked away, pretending they didn’t know where we were going with my inflated belly and little overnight case. Inside their pockets they counted on their fingers and were satisfied.
When we came to the hospital, Howard immediately declared to the admitting receptionist that he was a Participating Father and that he was going up with me.
She laughed out loud and continued to type information on the insurance forms.
“It’s not too bad so far,” I told Howard, wondering why my mother always exaggerated everything.
“I’ll be with you,” he promised.
They made him wait downstairs despite his protests. “We won’t be needing you for a while,” the receptionist told him, and she winked at me.
“Good-bye,” I said at the elevator. I wished we had decided in favor of pictures, after all. I would have started right there with a record of his poor face as the elevator door closed and the nurse and I went up.
“Primipara!” she shouted to someone I couldn’t see, as soon as we left the elevator.
Well, that sounds nice, I thought. Like prima donna or prima ballerina. We went swiftly down a corridor, past little rooms. Other women looked out at me.
What’s all this? I wondered, everything unlearned in that first bolt of fear.
I had my own room. A Room of One’s Own, I thought bitterly. But I climbed into the high bed anyway, like a drowsy and obedient child.
The new doctors who came to examine me all seemed so short. And they smiled as they dug in and announced their findings. “Two fingers,” they said. “Three fingers.”
Why didn’t they use some medical jargon for what they were doing? It sounded suspiciously like juvenile sex play to me, as if they were only playing doctor.
It was such a quiet place. There was none of my mother’s famous screaming. Things must have changed, I decided, since her day.
After a while I was shaved, for collaborating with the enemy, I supposed. More silence. Then a shriek! I sat up, alerted, but it was only some horseplay among the nurses. “What’s going on?” I asked someone who came in and went out again without answering. “Hello?”
It was lonely. Where was Howard, anyway?
And then he was there. When had he grown that shadowed jowl? And why were his eyes so dark with sympathy?
“It’s nothing,” I said severely. “Stop looking like that.”
Lenny had seemed so splendorous. Howard only looked mournful and terrified. So this was where his life had led him.
Things didn’t get better. Howard rubbed my back and jerked me from the haven of short dozes with his murmurs, his restless movement. There were noises now from other rooms as well. Voices rose in wails of protest.
But I had my own troubles. The contractions were coming so damn fast. I was thirsty, but water wasn’t permitted—only the rough swipe of a washcloth across my tongue. I caught it with my teeth and tried to suck on it, cheating.
There was no discreet examination sheet in this place. Strangers peered at me in full view. They measured, probed, and went away. A nurse sneaked a hypodermic into my thigh when I wasn’t looking.
“Hey, what’s that?” I demanded. “I’m not supposed to have anything. This is a natural case, you know.”
“Dr. Kramer is on his way,” she said, evading the issue.
“Taking his own sweet time,” I snarled.
Howard seemed shocked by my rudeness and by the abrupt shift of mood.
“This is getting bad,” I told him. But it wasn’t what he wanted to hear.
They wheeled me at breakneck speed to the delivery room. Howard ran alongside, a winded trainer trying to keep up with his fighter. “Almost there,” he gasped.
How would he know? It was miles and miles.
Despite everything, they strapped me down. “This is barbaric!” I shouted. “Women on farms used to squat in the fields!”
“Oh, God, that bullshit again,” a nurse said.
“You trapped me into this,” I told Howard. “I’ll never forgive you. Never!”
He was wearing a green surgical mask and now he stood as poised and eager as an outfielder waiting for the long ball.
“Impostor!” I cried.
“Paulette!” Dr. Kramer called. “How is my big girl?”
“Just tell me what to do,” Howard said.
“You’ve already done your part, pal,” Dr. Kramer told him. “Now just hold her hand.”
I yowled and Howard said, “My love, I’m here!” His eyes were brilliant with tears.
The whole room shuddered with pain. And I was the center of it, the spotlit star of the universe. Who was trying to be born here, anyway, Moby Dick?
Oh, all the good, wise things I had done in my life.
I might have done anything and still come to this.
In school the teacher rolled down charts on nutrition. We saw the protein groups, the grain groups. Green leafy vegetables. Lack of vitamin C leads to scurvy.
Liars! The charts ought to show this, the extraordinary violence of this, worse than mob violence, worse than murder. FUCKING LEADS TO THIS! those charts ought to say.
“A few more pushes and you’ll have your baby,” Dr. Kramer said.
Ah, who wanted a baby? For once in her whole rotten life, my mother was right. “Dr. Kramer! Marvin! Give me gas!” I screamed.
But instead he caught the baby, who had shouldered through in the excitement.
And I had forgotten to smile. I had greeted my child with the face of a madwoman.
Somewhere else in the room a nurse pressed Howard’s head down between his knees.
“No pictures. No pictures,” I said.
(1976)