The Senator's Wife

by Sue Miller

  The doctor said they were going to start her on a drip of Pitocin to speed things up. She was sorry to do it, it was likely to make the labor harder, she said, but she felt it was necessary. The concern seemed to be the possibility of infection after the waters were broken—but for whom? For the baby? for her? Meri wasn't sure. The doctor hadn't said, and Meri had felt too rushed, too confused to ask.

  They stuck a needle in her hand, and hooked her up to a bag of fluid on a pole. And then suddenly she and Nathan were alone in the birthing room.

  “Hey,” he said. He sat down next to her at the edge of the bed.

  “Hi,” she answered.

  “It's exciting, isn't it?” he said.

  She smiled at him, and nodded. “It is.” It was. She was excited. And scared.

  She looked around the room, only now really taking it in. Everything seemed to her like the adult equivalent of the crib sheet she'd put on the baby's mattress yesterday: everything was prettied up, everything was nice—the bed with flowered sheets, the La-Z-Boy reclining chair with its striped slipcover. Even the curtains.

  “What's dimity, Nathan?” she asked.

  “Where is this coming from?” He looked incredulous, and then amused too. He'd pulled on a T-shirt and some jeans, and his jogging shoes. His hair was still a mess.

  She lifted her hand toward the window. “Just that I have a sneaking suspicion those curtains are dimity,” she said.

  “Look, if you say the curtains are dimity at this particular point in time, I'm going to say they are too. But if I were you, I wouldn't waste my advantage on the curtains.”

  She laughed. And then a contraction started. “Here we go,” she said to him.

  It was harder, fiercer than any so far, and Meri wasn't able not to make noise through it. Nathan held her hand through it. As her noises eased, so did his grip, and only then did she realize how hard he'd been squeezing her.

  “Too tight,” she said, when she could speak. She was rubbing her hand.

  “I'm sorry,” he said. “Just, you scared me.”

  “Imagine how much I scared myself,” she said. “It really hurt, Nate.” He kissed the top of her head. “I'm so unbrave,” she said.

  “You are not.”

  “Am too.”

  After a minute she pointed to the pole, the bag of liquid dripping into her arm. “Did you get exactly why I'm on this?”

  “Because your waters broke a while ago? Because that's not good?”

  “But why?”

  “I guess you and the baby are sort of . . . open to the air, as it were. To germs. That's what I gathered anyway. And I guess the labor wasn't going much of anyplace on its own at this point.”

  She sighed. “How can it be that I'm a fuckup already?”

  “The kid will never know. We'll never tell him.”

  “Or her.”

  “Or her.”

  After a minute, Meri said, “But Nate, don't you have to tell the truth once you have a kid?”

  “Was that in the pregnancy book?” he asked.

  She smiled. “Neither of us has the least idea whether it was or not.”

  “Well, we're both fuckups,” Nathan said.

  Over the next half hour the contractions gradually intensified and the intervals between them shortened, and then suddenly Meri was swept by a wave of pain in her back and belly that grew so extreme that she cried out in a guttural deep roar of agony, of insult, a voice she hardly recognized as her own. The nurse, who had come in to check on the baby's heartbeat just before the contraction started, stood still and watched her.

  Even after the pain subsided, Meri was panting—grunting really, each breath coming out angry and deep. And it seemed to her that she barely had time to breathe normally again before the next contraction came and she was making her noise again, her mouth open wide now in shock. The nurse left to get the doctor.

  When she came in, she took one look at Meri, hunched over the end of the bed, roaring, and she grabbed the drip, she made some adjustment to it.

  After that the intervals between contractions grew gradually longer again, but the overwhelming force of them didn't change. Meri waited, dreading each one, grunting much of the time between them now. Each time she was seized, her knees bent, on their own it seemed. She squatted, holding whatever was closest—Nathan, the bed, the La-Z-Boy recliner. She felt as though her spine would crack, her body rip open. She couldn't believe there could be such pain without permanent damage, without death. She was terrified.

  She knew she was making too much noise—Nathan's frightened face showed it, and the nurse spoke gently to her over and over, trying to calm her: “Meri. Can you stop now, and just breathe? Just breathe. Just use your panting.”

  But it seemed Meri couldn't, though in the intervals between blows she was sometimes quieter. But then the brute pain would seize her again, would hold her in its vise, and she would roar, she was so scared, she was so angry, she was so beside herself.

  The hours went by, though each time the pain came she couldn't imagine how she would bear the next minute. Her throat grew sore and dry from crying out, and they gave her ice chips to suck on. Sometimes she walked in the intervals, sometimes Nathan rubbed her back as she stood braced against the wall. For a while she found that she could endure the seizures better if she was on all fours, kneeling on the bed. She felt like an animal, a beast, braying in terror.

  At some point she noticed that the light in the window had faded, and then later, that it was gone. The nurse stayed in the room, checking the baby's heartbeat often, and the doctor came in frequently; and then, when the window had gone black, there was another, different doctor, one who had apparently taken over.

  By now, though, Meri had stopped caring who was there, whose hand was going up her. She was limp, lost, between contractions, and then helpless and lost too in their grip. It seemed impossible to her that it could go on, but it did. It went on and on.

  When she began to weep at the end of one long seizure, Nathan turned to the nurse. “Can't you help her? Can't you give her something?”

  Nathan. Nathan was her husband. Nathan would make them stop this. Meri felt such love for him in that moment, such hope lift her.

  The nurse said, “I hate to do that, when she's getting so close.” She turned to Meri. “Meri?” She spoke louder, as though Meri were deaf. “Meri, just a little longer, honey. You can do it. I bet you can.”

  “No, no,” she said, shaking her head. And then she bellowed through another long convulsion that seemed unending, unbearable. When she was done, she sat slumped on the edge of the bed. Mucus ran from her nose, tears from her eyes. She was panting. The nurse was holding her hand, her arm around the back of what had once been Meri's waist.

  “I want it to stop,” Meri croaked. “I want an epidural.”

  “You're sure?” the nurse said, disappointment in her voice.

  “Yes, yes, I'm fucking sure!” Meri said.

  The nurse went out. The doctor came in and checked Meri once more. She too asked Meri if she was sure, and Meri, weeping openly now at the start of another contraction, cried out, “Yes! Yes, yes.”

  When the anesthesiologist came, Meri had to lie down for a swab of something cold on her back, for the needle. Just afterward, just as she was curling tight on the bed through another hard seizure, she felt it—her body's easing. It seemed the most wonderful thing that had ever happened to her, it seemed a miracle. And in a few more minutes—so fast!—she was truly numb.

  She was still lying curled up on the bed, crying harder now in the gratitude that had swept her. Nathan, misunderstanding, held on to her hands, tight, trying to give her courage. “I love you,” he whispered. “I love you.”

  “No, no, it's all right,” she told him. But then she realized that her voice wasn't doing that, wasn't saying that. That she was still just making noise. She shut her mouth. She put her hands over it. After a minute of silence, Nathan brushed the hair off her face. She took her hand from h
er mouth. With the tears still streaming down her face, she said, “It's working, Nate. It's better,” and he bent over her in the bed in relief.

  AFTER THAT IT was bearable, the pain more a feeling of intense tightening, of great pressure, only her back still splitting, so that she moaned, sometimes she even cried out. But she was not, as she felt she had been before, reduced to some monstrous creature. And she was so exhausted by now that she actually dropped off into a dizzy short nap in the brief intervals between pains.

  Thirteen hours had passed in an eternity. She was barely aware of the next three as she drifted in and out of sleep.

  They stopped the epidural before the delivery so she could push. Meri heard her voice start up again, but there was some relief in the pushing, in feeling she was making something happen. She was sitting up now at the end of the bed, her legs spread wide, her feet planted in the stirrups she had asked for in order to brace herself. Nathan sat behind her, holding her up. She could feel him bearing down against her back, bending with her as she pushed, as she willed this baby—this horror that wanted to tear her apart—out. She yelled at it. She screamed. “Out! Out! Out!” This was the enemy. Never had she had such an enemy. “Out!” she screamed. She was full of fury.

  The doctor called back to her, “Yes! That's good, that's good!”

  They'd set a mirror up so Meri could see herself, the impossibly distended version of her sex, made meat now, bloody and purple, unrecognizable as it gaped open. And now a flat thing, the whitish, blood-streaked top of the head appeared inside it, and Meri bellowed and pushed. It paused. It went back. It seemed stuck. Beside herself, enraged, Meri pushed and yelled again. She pushed so hard her eyes hurt, and Nathan pushed against her. And then it was out, the head was out! It was a creature down there, bloody, crusted with gunk. Her panting slowed. Her body wanted nothing but to rest.

  “Just a little more now,” the doctor said. “One more, one more for the shoulders. Ah, it's easy now, it's easy.”

  Meri pushed again as hard as she could and felt the baby, the pain, slip away. It was gone. It was over.

  She sagged back against Nathan, and he held her. He was kissing her hair, her ear, he was laughing lightly in relief.

  “It's a boy,” he said. He swept the hair off her face. “Look, sweetheart, it's a boy.”

  But it didn't matter to her. She had turned to rest against Nathan's chest and she wanted only to stay here, to sleep, to be without pain. She didn't turn. She didn't look. Her eyes were shut. It just didn't matter to her.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Meri, May and June 1994

  THE MEMORY OF the labor was like a nightmare whose ugliness ran through the days afterward. Meri felt it as a kind of displacement from herself, a displacement that fed her sense of distance from Asa.

  Everything she did for him—and when was she not doing something for him?—she did with a sense of belatedness, of absence, of exhaustion and incapacity. He cried. He cried because he was hungry, or because even though he was hungry, he didn't seem to be able to fix on her breast. He cried because as soon as he fixed on her breast and sucked for a few minutes, he fell asleep again, and then, within twenty minutes or so, woke, famished. He cried because no sooner had he nursed than he threw it all up, white curdish stuff with a sharp, sour smell.

  He cried because he was sleepy and wasn't yet asleep, because he was waking up, because he was wet, because he'd shat in his diaper, because he was about to vomit, because, it seemed to her, he didn't want to be here. How could this be her life, this sleepless, exhausted stumble from one failed activity to another?

  She was unable not to watch him. She sat by him as he slept, observing the puckering and smoothing of his face, the little convulsive starts of his body. He seemed so unhappy. Sometimes he stiffened and straightened out. Sometimes he lay with everything curled up, his legs and his pathetic arms folded in. He had oddly too-large hands—hands that were at the same time so tiny they frightened her. His hair was patchy, dry and black, unattractive. His head was elongated from the pressure of the labor and birth. His navel and penis were still bandaged. His open mouth, when he shrieked, was all tongue and naked gums. When she picked him up, he felt boneless, limp. His limpness itself felt like a rebuke to her.

  She wished she had had a girl. She wished she'd said no to Nathan, that she wasn't ready, that she couldn't do it. She thought of the shock of the labor and the way it had changed her, taken her over. Asa seemed almost as unreal, as impossible as that.

  The second weekend Meri and Asa were home, Nathan's mother, Elizabeth, came up from New Jersey. Meri felt so exhausted that she wasn't sure she wanted her, but once Elizabeth arrived, she was grateful. She was as undemanding as ever, and she took over Asa's care almost completely in the daytime. Meri napped twice in the two days Elizabeth was there, hours-long naps that felt like small, restorative deaths.

  Waking, lying in their bed, she could hear the peace Elizabeth had brought to the house, the noises of kitchen work below her, sometimes Asa crying briefly in a way that didn't seem connected to her. She could hear Nathan talking, his voice alive and buoyant as it wasn't with her now, maybe because he was so shocked at what she'd gone through, at the state of fatigue she was in, at her bloodshot eyes.

  Cooking smells floated up, food appeared, Elizabeth brought Asa in to nurse, and then whisked him away.

  Nathan and Elizabeth went shopping, they got the things Meri and Nathan should have bought long ago. They showed her—the baby carriage on the front porch, the straw basket with handles for Asa to lie in, the little pack to carry him in. In the spare bathroom sat several enormous boxes of Pampers, and in Meri and Nathan's bathroom, a box of maxipads for her almost as big.

  Elizabeth was small, plump, energetic. She made Meri even more aware of her own huge body, still sore, still so swollen she looked four months gone. And she made Meri feel inept—she seemed so utterly at ease with Asa. She picked him up unhesitatingly and walked around the house with him tucked back along her bent arm, his head resting on her hand. She popped him in the Snugli while she did the dishes.

  Inspired by Asa, she spoke of Nathan as an infant. He too had regularly fallen asleep at the breast. He too had cried when he was in the process of falling asleep. “You can't pick him up,” she said to Meri. “It just makes it take longer. Just leave, you'll see. Leave, walk right out, and in five minutes’ time he'll be sound asleep.”

  Meri was more dubious about some other things she said. That babies ought to cry sometimes, that you couldn't let them have their way or they'd be spoiled. That she should start bottle-feeding within a month or so, so Nathan could take some responsibility too. That it wasn't healthy for them to have him in bed with them at night, which they did.

  Coming to bed a few nights after Elizabeth had left, carrying Asa—newly Pampered, powdered, and fed—Meri mentioned this to Nathan.

  He looked at her—at her and Asa. “You know you don't have to do everything the way my mother did it. You don't have to do anything the way she did.”

  “Yeah, but do you think she's right?”

  “Right, wrong, I don't think those apply.”

  After a moment, she said, “You sound so wise, Nate.”

  He smiled, sheepishly. “I don't mean to,” he said. “What do I know?” He shrugged. “I just mean whatever you do is probably okay. Is probably just fine. As fine as whatever my mother does.”

  “She was a big help.”

  “I know. Just, she's not the source of absolute wisdom of any kind.”

  Asa wuffled and snuffled, then turned a little to the side and slept again. Nathan was reading. Meri was doing nothing. She was often doing nothing now, when she wasn't tending to Asa. After a while, she said, “The thing is, Nate, she's relaxed around him. She's not scared.”

  He put his book down. “And you are.”

  She nodded.

  “You're scared of Asa?” He sounded incredulous.

  She fought down the tears that threatened. “
I'm terrified,” she said.

  IN THE DAYS after Elizabeth left, Meri tried some of her tricks. She put him in the Snugli while she did the dishes, while she picked up. She even ventured out on a walk with him. But she was still waiting to feel what she'd thought she would feel. What she was supposed to feel. This was what she said to the pediatrician on the first visit.

  “Oh, don't worry about supposed-to feelings.” The pediatrician was another pretty young woman. All the prettiest ones must specialize in obstetrics or pediatrics, Meri thought.

  “But I feel so guilty. He's like . . . an alien, to me.”

  The doctor was bent over the baby, smiling at him, pulling her finger away from Asa's tiny grip. She looked over at Meri for a moment. “What's your model here?” she asked.

  “Model?” Meri said.

  “For mothering. Yes.” She stood up. She tilted her pretty head, smiled, and said, “What was your mom like?”

  Meri laughed sharply. Sadly. “Brain-dead?” she offered.

  MERI GOT ALMOST nothing done in the course of a day except tending to Asa. When Nathan came home—early now, and reliably, as he had no classes and was just trying to finish his book—he was astonished. Astonished at the dishes still on the counter and in the old sink. At the food left out, the bed unmade, the diapers heaped in the baby's room and the bathroom.

  She tried. Sometimes she started the day by tidying up, by doing a load of wash, by cleaning the kitchen. But usually by the end of the day, everything had gotten away from her. The only thing she did reliably was to listen to the radio every day from twelve to one, sometimes through Asa's wails. She listened to Jane's voice, to Brian's, and thought about how much she wished she were back there. How differently she would have done this piece, on girls’ sports; this other one on the building of a controversial dam. But mostly she just pictured it, imagined how it felt—the long dark corridor with posters on the walls, the glass windows between the engineers and the broadcast rooms, the coffee mugs everywhere. She thought of the afternoon meetings, the jokes, the excitement over some story idea or another. She thought of herself there, that other version of herself, unbruised, uncut—that whole, independent Meri—with a yearning that once or twice brought tears to her eyes.