Disturbances in the Field

by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

  But why did I lose my children? Precisely that loaded question is what I want to ask, whose obvious, built-in answer is that I didn’t deserve to have them. That’s crazy, be quiet, I scolded Victor for thinking that way. Do you think the whole world revolves around where you put your prick? No matter. Why didn’t I deserve to have them?

  For the answer, months, years of my life that I repressed for my own ease come flooding back, now that I neither have nor seek any ease. They were not truly repressed, in the sense that psychiatrists use the term, but suppressed, as truth is suppressed but not forgotten under authoritarian rule and floods back with an upheaval. The dam breaks in one crucial place, we might as well let go the others. I need no longer pretend that I have always been this cheery, competent creature, my life a rational passage from sturdy rung to rung. Under interrogation, stripped and spotlighted, my body becomes an open book.

  There is an essential and profound strangeness about being a mother that is rarely spoken of, and yet religion does make much of loving others better than one’s self, which suggests it does not come naturally. Maternity, though, is considered in the nature of things: that mothers gladly endure pain so that their children may thrive is a useful, sustaining myth. Also something of a cultural joke: the mother as sucker. And between saint and sucker, two sides of one thin coin, is little room to maneuver.

  In childbirth we tunnel through a dark passage to the new and strange place, to find there that the myth about mothers is true and so is the joke, the corrosive humor. At one in the morning in a room barely lit, two nurses from Trinidad sat at either side of the bed where I sweated in panic my first time, and in between discussing young men they had known in Port of Spain—Desmond, a big spender, Hugo, a terrific dancer, and Patrice, out for what he could get—they peered up my legs. There was going to be a party on Saturday night. “And do you think William be there?” the plump one asked. The thinner one sounded irritated. “I don’t know if William be there, but if he be there he better not be looking for nothing from me. Or that brother of his either. No, mon, I finish with William and William whole family.” The plumper one giggled. “Not if he treat you right I bet. Offer you with sugar coating.” I groaned in pain, and she took another look. “Nothing doing yet, lady. You got a long time yet.” Panic locked like a shackle. This was another country entirely; I had no preparation, no passport. “I wept and mourned when I discovered myself in this unfamiliar land,” Gaby had read aloud in the dorm. She had a baby now, yet neither she nor any book had ever told me it meant this. I asked for the doctor. I only wanted a familiar voice and face. “Don’t put me to sleep. I told you I want to be …” But he jabbed me, stopped the world. I went out with the luscious West Indian rhythms vibrating in my ears—their voices were lilting and trilling and hard, like a xylophone.

  The drug was sodium pentothal, also called a truth drug, also used on criminals. You wake as though from heavy blank sleep, but in truth you have been awake all the time (telling the truth), living in scenes that live only once, never to be retrieved by memory and granted their proper place in your life. Sensations and all their possible harvest vanish without the supreme gift of the echo that graces them with humanity. For everything that promises our lives the resonance of a third dimension must recur. Even hearing music for the first time is not truly hearing it, only the prerequisite for hearing. The next time, and the next, we hear with the fullness of anticipation and foreknowledge, having had the pertinent nerve paths cleared for the feelings that will travel them, strewn like seeds. Everything destined to be real and permanent happens to us over again, in the act of remembering. What abides, along with Empedocles’ elements, fire and earth, water and air, is the past. We possess nothing securely but the past and that simple gift of turning and turning, to recreate it, to come round right. Nina was wise when she took those early morning solitary walks in college, trying to reconstruct the events of the previous day in their proper order, after the edict of the Pythagorean Brotherhood, “that there is nothing more important for science, and for experience and wisdom, than the ability to remember.” And for salvation, they might have added. This I know from my own life.

  So that what happens only once, like Althea’s birth, never to recur in the life of the spirit, didn’t happen at all in any subjective sense. It happened like the tree falling in the forest: I not there to hear it, and yet all the while there for strangers, telling them the truth. What truths? Universal? Hardly. The most secret and incriminating, probably, the ones I would never have told a soul. That after Victor and I decided to marry I called George, one last fling for old times’ sake? And did I say what a good fling it was? Exactly how, and how many climaxes? That while in college I shoplifted a bra from Macy’s by wearing two out of the store, to see what it felt like? I had been reading Gide; I wanted to perform an acte gratuit. Or that earlier, much much earlier, against my mother’s express injunction I opened the locked drawer in my father’s bureau and found pulp magazines with stories set in Paris and pictures of girls in black stockings and garter belts kneeling with men’s penises in their mouths? What a peculiar thing to be doing. It didn’t seem quite sanitary. I was sure my mother wouldn’t approve. The doctor who heard my true confessions, the sloppy stitcher, is dead now, which gives me satisfaction. The nurses wouldn’t remember: they must hear volumes of it; they must watch that feather of truth rise on the balance scale every day, mortifying even us milder liars. But I, I remember all about Patrice and Hugo and Desmond and William!

  When I awoke, alone in a bare room, my stomach was flat. Hours later they brought me a creature swaddled in a pink and white checked blanket, and I was expected to assume that she and the lump absent from my stomach were the same. I did as commanded: civilly, I offered her a breast. Not till the next day did I undo the blanket, count her fingers and toes, look at her eyes, her ears, up her nose and in her mouth, and at the rotting black knot of flesh at her navel. Mark of Eve. In sorrow, meaning travail and pain, shall you bring forth children, but I had had little travail or pain. I had fallen in the forest; all unfelt. I had plenty of pain now—the stitches stung and ached—but even I knew that infected stitches from an episiotomy were not the pain God was referring to.

  Lying idle, I was able to sort out the pervasive din of the hospital into distinct sounds, like sorting out sections of the orchestra: wheels large and small, voices, footsteps (rubber-soled staff and clicking visitors), ringing telephones, buzzers, pagings of doctors for God knows what calamities, moans, baby cries, and an occasional shriek from the labor rooms across the courtyard. Time jerked by in green and white flurries—aides depositing trays or snatching them away, nurses with orders: get up, walk, urinate (“or else we’ll catheterize you!”), take a shower, attend a meeting. A meeting? I looked up, puzzled, from my Trollope novel of parliamentary intrigue. Yes, dear. Meetings for breast-feeders. Meetings on bathing the baby. The nurses reported to Victor that I was uncooperative. I refused to go to meetings and I refused to urinate. “Do them a favor,” he said to me, “and piss at least.”

  I woke from a nightmare to find a large man at my bedside; in the dim he resembled a Samurai warrior. “Give me your arm, please.” I didn’t remember the dream but knew it had been violent—it still wrapped me round in its terror. “Your arm.” He had come to chop it off—I looked for the sword and cringed in the bed. He reached for my arm. “Blood pressure,” he said. I have always thought the dreams I cannot remember are dreams of Althea’s birth, those buried few hours fighting to take their rightful place in my life, so I might understand where I had been. I gave him my arm. “What time is it?” “Early. You can go back to sleep.” “Goddammit, can’t anyone give a straight answer around here?” “Five-thirty.” I came to anticipate his footsteps and thrust out my arm at the sound. The fourth and last morning I raised my head and spoke. “Tell me something. Isn’t there any other time of day you could do this?” He smiled and said, “Sorry.”

  There was one moment of peace. Althea lay
asleep in my arms after nursing. No one came to fetch her and since I didn’t know what else to do with her, I held her. I lay back and placed her in the crook of my arm with her head on my shoulder, as you hold a lover after love. It was startlingly quiet—a lull in the usual din—and gradually, in the quiet, my terrors fell away like ugly old rags, leaving a brand-new skin, a layer of peace exposed to light for the first time. “We won’t let them get us, will we?” I heard myself whisper. “You and me, we’ll take care of each other, like now. Just quiet.” We were not in a hospital but on some blessed island, and I heard Debussy’s L Isle joyeuse. There was nothing I needed to do for her that would not come instinctively; tears of relief streamed down my cheeks. We had escaped into a state of grace, out of this world, isolated and safe, one flesh.

  After they took her away—“Anything wrong, dear?” the nurse asked keenly. “Anything wrong with Baby?”—I dried my tears and feared I was mad to be so frightened, living in madness like a place, a last resort.

  I felt the tug of the weird twilight sleep for many months. I wished I could sleep all the time, that same terrible Lethean sleep, being there and not there, and wake years later to find her ready for school. I couldn’t move fast. My legs dragged as if they pulled weights. I couldn’t read anything serious. I could barely think—my mind was milky fog. When I listened to music I heard only the surfaces of the sounds. While I nursed Althea I played endless rock and roll on the radio. The Four Seasons sang “Walk Like a Man”; I could barely stand straight. When she sucked at my breasts she was drawing the life out of me, and when she was done I swayed on my feet; sap gone, I was a brittle tree, liable to blow over in a breeze. I was cut off from the subtleties of common language, and like a non-native speaker, stopped short by idioms, arbitrary usages. My breasts ached with more milk than she wanted; when I asked the doctor how to give up nursing and he said, “Cold turkey,” I held the phone, dumb. What magic in chilled turkey could dry up my milk?

  A pamphlet suggested I would feel better if I expressed the milk. “Express the milk” sounded like something to do with a train. Oh. The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Any More, baby? But I figured it out, picking apart the syllables like a foreigner. I opened my old red terry-cloth robe, bent forward so my breasts hung over the bathroom sink, and squeezed out the milk. I was a machine or an animal, one side or the other of human. Dark blood oozed below, milk dripped above, my body was beyond control, churning out its liquids. Like a machine or an animal, I felt no modesty or desire for privacy. I didn’t bother to close the bathroom door. Edith, come to help, civilized Edith with her lightly sprayed fair hair and her sweet manners, passed by. Curiosity conquering discretion for once, she paused. “Lydia, what are you doing?” Edith had never nursed. “Getting rid of the milk,” I said ferociously. My face was contorted with concentration like a scowling animal’s. Edith drifted away. If she thought I was offended at her intrusion she was mistaken. I was bitter at being no longer human while she still was. See, Edith, I’ve become an animal! Grrr … grrr! The milk spurted out like semen, only thinner and not sticky, and swirled down the drain. Guilt! Think of the starving children in Europe! I didn’t care to taste it. Victor did. I imagine lots of men do, though at the time we thought it a highly original and slightly perverted thing to do. He tasted it in bed, in a boyishly salacious way, and we laughed. I could still laugh. Laughter was on the surface; my panic was deep, deep.

  “Well, how is it?” “Not bad. Try it. I’ll give you some on my finger.” “No, thanks.” He sucked some more. “Sweet. Aren’t you even curious?” “Not particularly. I’ll suck you, if you want, though. Do you want me to?” He looked up, startled. “Well …” “I thought maybe you could use something. I mean, those stitches, and all.” “You make it sound like … you’d be, you know, doing a service. It doesn’t feel right.” So scrupulous, so evenhanded, ah, he always was. Only it never occurred to either of us, back then, that I too might work in a bar and bring home the money and thus feel justified spending my mornings practicing. “Well, I’m offering. Take it or leave it.” “Lydia.” “What?” “Don’t … don’t talk that way. You never used to.” “I can’t help it. I’ve become an animal.” He laughed. He thought I was joking. “All right, let me see what it feels like with an animal.” I did it not with any particular allure, but in a serviceable way, just as I would willingly have spoon-fed him had he broken both arms. He didn’t seem to enjoy it very much—men with broken arms must not enjoy being spoon-fed either—and I didn’t offer again.

  There was another moment of peace, when the ugly rags of terror fell away. Althea was about two and a half weeks old. Amid the debris of jars and brushes and half-finished paintings, we sat side by side on the couch on a snowy afternoon, she in her infant seat, I with my legs cautiously crossed (the stitches refused to heal, itched and stung). Out the window was the small concrete park where in fine weather the Italian men played bocce; now it was patched with graying snow, deserted except for a lone boy in a plaid jacket, throwing snowballs at the iron fence posts. My mind was quiet and empty. I watched the boy scoop the snow in both hands, cup it, and pat it into balls. The time since she was born felt like time not marked by passages of darkness and light but one long span of wetness—diapers, laundry, nursing, bleeding. Life is a fountain, all right, and I smiled in spite of myself. It struck me that this was the first time in Althea’s life that she had been awake for twenty minutes neither hungry nor crying, neither being fed nor being changed, not needing anything, merely sitting on the couch and gazing at her surroundings, like any other person. I had a vision of such grandeur and beauty that I wept. It was only a vision of Althea growing into a real person, with longer and longer periods of just such commonplace peace, and myself someday not needing to devote every moment to her survival but sitting calmly beside her, living.

  The season began to change. The sun climbed higher each day. I didn’t need a hat and scarf and gloves any more when I took Althea out; she didn’t need sweaters under her snowsuit. Mornings, I scanned the sky like a farmer with his mind on crops. Beyond that I ignored the offerings of weather. I carried around my own weather, graceless January. I awoke from the twilight sleep: I could move quickly, I could read. But I did not pick up my life. A spiteful element in my nature took over, like an extremist political party that seizes power when moderate ones default. Compromise demands subtlety and inventiveness. All or nothing was my spiteful slogan. I had a baby? Then I would damn well be a mother. I took good care of Althea, much better care than anyone would have expected, those first foggy weeks.

  My mother helped, but she could not take my bitterness very seriously. And why should she? This was no crisis—this was the life of an ordinary woman. Everyone had to learn it sometime. She was not unkind; she had a certain perspective. “You’ll see. Right now you can’t wait to get a little time alone, but later on you’ll wish for company. Children get to be thirteen, fourteen, they come home from school and shut themselves up in their rooms—you’ll wish someone would come and pester you.”

  Did Evelyn and I, Ma? Sorry about that. Anyway, you were more correct than you ever dreamed. I wish for their company. Any of them, the living, the dead. The stillness of the house, and its neatness, are oppressive. No music is ample enough for its abandoned spaces. Things stay where they are put. The closet swells with clean towels, while the refrigerator is impoverished. Althea, who once trailed after me, seeking my company, my conversation, ferreting out our likenesses so that she could proceed to deny them, is occupied elsewhere these days; she returns with a flock of friends to cram the void in her twin-bedded bedroom. Their hellos are enthusiastic. They like me. I wear jeans and can speak their language, and they sense I like them too. I have always liked teenagers, their amorphous, spurting, ribald personalities. But chatty greetings soon subside, and the bedroom door clinches their withdrawal. Six months more and she will be away somewhere at college. Phil does not have so many friends. He comes home alone late in the day and is too big
for me to demand an accounting, too sealed for a friendly inquiry. I twitch at the sound of the key in the lock, step forward gingerly to say hello. The emptied apartment is suddenly warmer, habitable. My son, home. Snare him with offerings—brownies, an egg cream with George’s seltzer? No, thanks, he had something on the way. Stopped off for a beer? Or is he stoned? What are the signs again? Do his eyelids droop, his words sound remotely mumbled? Yes, but not from drugs. School okay? He humors me with a few scraps of unclassified data, goes into his room, and shuts the door. All those years I trained them not to disturb me while I was working! Too well-trained! It’s all right, I implore the closed door. Disturb me! Please!

  After the first birth many women swear they will never go through that again, but they do, soon enough. When Althea was ten months old we decided we might as well have the other one, the boy, while we were still awash in infancy and had nine hundred dollars in the bank. For Victor had been in his first group show and sold two paintings, miraculous in the age of op, pop. Representational was generally too multisyllabic a word, its visions too multifaceted, for the ruling simplemindedness. Paintings depicting the real world were called derivative, which was true enough. The thrill of the show was keen but brief, just enough to make his return to obscurity a letdown. Pregnant and dull, I would wander over to where he stood working in the living room and make encouraging remarks, wifely, ignorant, and I don’t think very helpful.

  Phil was born. I was no longer undone by the liquidities of the body, but when I found a roach in my hair I wailed and ranted, thrust my head into the kitchen sink and turned on the hot water full force. Anywhere else, I could slaughter them in cold blood. But my hair! And what if it had laid its eggs? I was a nesting place for vermin! In the midst of my wails I remembered that the effort by which each thing endeavors to persevere in its own being is nothing but the actual essence of the thing itself, from Spinoza, and I was disgusted. The person I had planned to become did not wail but was resourceful and stoical in the face of adversity. With a huge scissors I chopped at my hair in front of the bathroom mirror till I looked as ugly as I felt, and I vowed to be bitter in silence: I had some pride left.