White Walls

by Judy Batalion

  “OK,” I said quietly, “I’ll ask them.”

  • • •

  I NEVER ASKED THEM.

  “Dad.” I shook him awake. “My water broke. I’m going to the hospital.”

  “What?” he mumbled. Then he opened his eyes wide. “OK, go!”

  He and Eli had arrived the evening before, and finally, everything had been going according to plan. I’d worried for weeks that I’d go into labor early, before the highly planned surgery; while other people ate spicy foods to get things going, I clutched and prayed. But at last the day-before arrived and I was still intact and undilated, so I finally relaxed. Me and my three guys, my labor team (who were engaged in intense conversation about the politics of insurance companies while I debated whether or not to pack the nursing pillow) went out for artisanal pizza and a walk. I wasn’t allowed to eat or drink after midnight, and complained about this as I downed water and slurped up delicious cheesecake. It was impossible to believe that the next time I ate, I would be a mother. Don’t think, Judy. Don’t. Think. It was all happening exactly right, or at least, as right as I could get it. I licked the final bite from my fork.

  Then, bed.

  Then, three a.m. A fierce urge to push. I heard a snap.

  I’d been worried that I wouldn’t notice if my water broke, but this rupture was torrential. I woke Jon (“you won’t fucking believe this”), then Dad, and then began frantically looking for what I needed to take to the hospital as I held a bath mat between my legs. “Bring more towels!” I shouted as we ran out to the elevator, the street. An empty cab was right there. “I can’t believe I’m going into labor twelve hours before the scheduled time.”

  “At least there’s no traffic at three a.m.,” Jon said as I stuffed another two towels under me. Fucking optimist.

  At the hospital, the nurses took their time. It was a slow night, and my water had only just broken. But sitting at check-in, the first wave of a contraction came on. Ha—I’d also been worried that I wouldn’t know what a contraction was.

  They put me in triage, and I met the doctor on call. None of the specialist surgeons were in, nor the anesthesiologist that had been recommended. The ward was calm, my dilation was minimal, so no one rushed, and they planned to do the C-section around seven a.m. “At least she’s ready to come out,” Jon and I reassured ourselves. Nurses and doctors came and went, Jon cracked jokes, I signed a slew of forms and they eventually brought Jon his surgical smock. I read aloud from a humor book about baby panic and Jon did a photo shoot of us feigning terror in blue hairnets. My contractions came every fifteen minutes or so. “Shit, I didn’t take the class for this!” I semijoked, but really, they were short and relatively bearable; I closed my eyes and squeezed Jon’s fists until they passed. Then I swore a little.

  Until a tidal wave of nausea, an unusual body-wide vibration, hit me.

  It felt like my whole insides had turned to Jell-O, like I was quickly losing clarity, control. Like something was wrong. “Jon, I don’t feel good.”

  “It’ll pass,” he said, now used to our improvised Lamaze.

  “No, really,” I said, my eyes closed. “Get a doctor.”

  I felt dizzy and woozy and turned to face the wall, my arms tingling. Echoing in the distance, I heard him Britishly, politely, tell a nurse that I wasn’t feeling well and asking if they wouldn’t mind coming in for a second to check on me.

  The nurse entered nonchalantly and I tried to explain how I felt. But my mouth was like rubber, my lips like gummy bands. She looked at the readout from the monitor, she banged the machine, she looked again. The next thing I knew she pushed a blue button on the wall and within split seconds I was living a scene from Grey’s Anatomy: dozens of doctors pounced on top of me, Jon was being thrown out of the room, I was being pricked, prodded, whisked down a hall. What’s going on? What’s going on? I kept screaming, or at least, trying to scream, as words like shots were flying around me. Dropping heartbeat, falling heartbeat. But no one, no one, was talking to me. Please, what’s going on? Low heartbeat. No heartbeat.

  Oh my God. I was losing her.

  I was losing my baby. It hit me like a ton of hoarded videos: I want this baby. More than anything. I. Want. My. Baby. What was with all my stupid selfish self-absorbed anxiety, my whining ambivalence? Was I crazy? Who would I be without her? I accepted losing control of my body, my sanctified office, my brain synapses, but not this. How would I ever survive if I lost my daughter? My daughter.

  Then a mask was being lowered on my face, how much does she weigh? the doctor screamed, and no one knew, and I called out, one fifty, or at least I tried, and then

  Black.

  • • •

  “JUDALEH,” BUBBIE SAYS, leaning over me into her cottage cheese, which shmears along the side of her forearm. She’s gotten older, more tired, her back fully humped into a parabola of experience, but she seems wiser too, her words coming out more slowly, her wrinkles deepening with every lip movement, making me wonder how far down the cracks ran. Skin is thick, I’d recently learned in sixth grade through diagrams that looked like cartoon sandwiches. Not simply a surface or a contour, but a dimensional volume, filled with organelles, activities, processes. Layers within itself. Entire worlds, complex routines. What I’d thought was transparent and flimsy had a whole inner life. “I’ll tell you when I knew.”

  Her eyes light up, her cheekbones gather at their tops, little round earths that protect her visage on each end. “Me, I have long legs, skinny. Not like your other grandmother. Feh.” She cackles. “Me, I not look Jewish so they put me in the ration lines. When the Germans come, I, Zelda, wait for bread with the Polacks. And Judaleh, that’s when the Nazis come over.”

  I’ve never heard this story before. My heart skips like a scratched record. Its beats are louder than her blaring TV, A Different World, Dwayne Wayne, louder than Bill Cosby’s Thursday night gyrations.

  “They ask where the Jews are hiding. And you know what I hear?”

  “What, Bubbie? Did they tell on you? Did they find your sisters?”

  “I hear the Poles tell them. She’s in a basement; she’s in an attic; he’s at Piotrek’s apartment.” She pauses. “That, Judaleh,” she says, leaning over as if she’s about to fall into her piles of bargain textiles, “is when I knew I had to leave. To run. Nothing was safe. Even my beloved Warsaw was not safe.”

  The TV booms. Energizer Bunnies. Kool-Aid. Cool Whip. The Colgate Pump.

  “Safety is a pushkeh in you,” she tells me, staring me straight in the eyes, transmitting to me that very pushkeh, that pouch—not of money, but of confidence. She puts her hand on her heart. Don’t fool yourself. Acknowledge the truth and you’ll survive. Home is not a building, a city, a relationship, a story. She puts her hand on my heart. “My only safety was in me.”

  4TH TRIMESTER:

  The Nursery

  • TWENTY •

  NO FORMULA FOR MOTHERHOOD

  New York City, 2011

  “Where is she?” I gasp. I want to say, “Is she alive?”

  My baby is dead, I am sure. How will I tell people? How will I live?

  The world is gray, the walls, the blankets. I smell astringent, bleached linen. Tubes attack my every side. I cannot move.

  “The baby is OK,” I hear a distant voice say. “K” echoes in the metallic room. She’s OK!

  “She is? Where is she?”

  Then black.

  “Judy, are you OK?” It’s Jon.

  “Is she OK?” Is this real? A dream? “Did she make it?”

  He chuckles. “I explained this to you five minutes ago. She’s fine. She’s with the nurses. The doctor said that the anesthesia would cause you to forget.”

  “Go to her,” I say. “She needs you more than I do.”

  Then black.

  “Is she alive?”

  “Yes.” I don’t k
now whose voice it is.

  “What happened to her? What happened to me? Did I have a baby?”

  “You’re in recovery. They had to staple your stomach. The baby is fine. We’re taking you to a room now.”

  “OK, a room now.” Things start to make sense. The gray is turning yellow in parts. She’s fine! I’m fine. Where is she? Where is she?

  “Where is she?”

  Jon is holding a wrapped blanket. Is that her? Her?! I am in my bed, in a hospital room. Needles prod every part of me. “Hold her,” he says, handing her over.

  I cannot move.

  “Skin-to-skin contact,” I say, try to say with thick lips, remembering the rules from my prenatal classes. Must do skin to skin. Or else. Attachment problems forever.

  “Don’t worry. I did that,” Jon says. He moves a web of tubes, places her along my torso. I feel warm, I feel skin, this thing that was of me and not me, weighing on me again, but in a different place, a new way, a companion to the air, the light, others. My body is confused. My limbs feel foreign; the baby, still me.

  “There was no brain damage?” I ask. “Are you sure?”

  “We’ve been through this ten times.”

  Now I’m waking up. I have a clear view of the East River, the November sky pert and blue, the water dark and moving quickly. Jon is talking. Six pounds, eight ounces. Six eighteen a.m. So many eights, so many sixes. He didn’t know if I’d make it.

  “What happened?” I ask, now with the weight of my child—my child!—on my chest, touching me, being with me. Her skin, her breath, her life. “What happened?”

  “The doctor took her out in one minute,” Jon says, looking at us, his head cocked to the side, his arms reaching out to embrace us both.

  “Makes sense,” I reply. “That’s about as long as it took to put her in.”

  “Touché,” Jon says. “You’re waking up.”

  I fall asleep.

  • • •

  I AWOKE WITH a start.

  A pang across my stomach, streaking through my shoulders. I’ve been sliced open. “Holy shit, I need drugs.”

  Jon showed me my morphine button. I pressed until it wouldn’t let me press anymore and then tried to sit up.

  “I’ll move you,” Jon said, using a remote to slide my bed upright until I felt a searing pain and shouted for him to stop. Fortunately, from that position I could see my baby sleeping, resting in the rolling plastic bin that was her first bed. Her first home outside of me. My baby.

  “Roll her closer to me.” I stared at her perfect chubby face, the button nose I recognized from the ultrasounds. “She looks like her,” I said. Was it my genetic prejudice or was she particularly beautiful? She had round rosy cheeks, a dusting of light blond hair. Fine features like a porcelain doll. Perfect and delicious like an apple you wanted to bite right into. She fluttered her eyes open: sky gray, mysterious, arresting. She was tall and thin, apparently. It was incomprehensible that this magnificent creature emerged from my stomach, that it had fit.

  Jon lifted her and brought her to me once again, and this time I pulled her in tightly, marveling at her silence, her calm. Feeling her warmth emanate onto me, heating my neck, I began to sense how different she was. There was a boundary between us—her temperature was not mine, her demeanor not mine, several layers of thick skin lived between us. I watched her breathe, in and out, felt her heart beat on my chest, her systems faster than mine, clockwork, perfect. I laid out her tiny toes on my pinkie, each one a marvel, lovely and so defined, her minuscule toenails crowned with slender moons of white. She smelled of sugar powder. I breathed her in. An impeccable white page.

  “Hey, hey.” I suddenly heard the familiar sound of Dad’s jangling keys as he stepped into the room, Eli close behind. They took turns holding the newest member of their family. They too were implicated—her birth changed their identities, changed us all. Dad, amazed at how she opened her eyes and looked around, at how eerily alert she was (“I can’t believe this is a newborn”), had joy crinkled into the sides of his face. Eli held her out flatly, carefully, with two hands, as if she was a fragile glass tray. “Dear Uncle Eli,” I said, recalling a childhood game of ours where I would write him pretend letters from my future children. Dear Uncle Eli, Mom is crazy, come save me, Mom is nuts . . . Now I had become Mom, for real.

  I watched my baby look around, take in the room, her first sights, first smells, sounds, colors. The world. She was alert—like me. Was she already nervous? Waiting for an attack? Was anxiety inherited, or had I done something to her already?!

  “She’s incredibly observant,” Dad said. Or maybe just that. Maybe she was perfectly fine.

  “She looks like Jon,” Dad added, but as my baby smiled, her first full one, my whole body chilled. It was a smile I’d recognize anywhere, the smile I’d sought for so many years.

  “She looks exactly like Mom,” I said, and Eli nodded fiercely in agreement.

  She looked nothing like me and Dad, but everything like Mom’s side. The genes were in me, dormant but just under the surface, waiting to be expressed. What else had she inherited?

  A nurse came in. “Do you want to breast-feed now? It’s time.”

  I knew it was—you were supposed to breast-feed within two hours of the birth. “Can I do it, with my emergency C-section and all these contraptions?”

  “Of course,” the nurse said.

  “Everyone leave, please,” I said, nervous, as the nurse took my baby and draped her across my chest. Suddenly, myriad theories about football holds and sandwich wraps, head support and neck massage, swirled through my mind but I couldn’t recall which way was best. I did not want to make a mistake, harm her forever. Calm down, Judy. I didn’t want to pass on my crazy genes either. How could I shield her from, well, from me? “Please,” I said to the nurse, as I opened my gown to reveal my comically enormous breast, “stay here and help me.”

  But before I could get the words out, my daughter—my daughter—sidled up to me, shimmied her way straight to my nipple, and firmly, confidently latched on. I felt the snip of suction, and let out a gleeful yelp. “Is it working?” I asked, and the nurse nodded. We did it! I was feeding my baby, thanks to her. My tiny little girl was a person who would teach me a thing or two. Motherhood, I understood, was something we’d figure out together.

  • • •

  THE NEXT MORNING, when I was finally mobile, the nurse showed me the security alarm on my baby’s leg and warned: “Take her with you everywhere.”

  So there I was, going to the bathroom with my child. No longer in my belly, but as her own entity, wheeled into the fluorescently lit room, watching me. Then she began to cry, little whimpers of discomfort. “Mommy is going to the bathroom,” I explained, instinctively. “Then, I’ll wash my hands.”

  I turned on the faucet, and she fell silent, opening her eyes wide. “That’s water,” I taught her, watching her experience what was for her a pleasant sound. She had her own sensations, feelings. It blew my mind. We were two separate entities now, which made our bonding all the more real, exciting.

  I rinsed, she listened. Up to now, my worries had been so much about me, about how I feared being tied to yet another human being, a new identity, squashed, lost, suffocated, no longer in control of the mechanisms that had saved me, made me. But somehow, in all that, I’d forgotten about her. I’d been so anxious about what becoming a mother would do to me, but the real concern is what I would do to her. I had to be a competent mother. A good mother. I was responsible for another being’s emotional development, her psychic welfare, her ability to form meaningful relationships over a lifetime. Not to mention, her basic breaths. My own mother had had so much power over me, catalyzing my life direction, and now I had that degree of influence over someone else. What a colossal responsibility it was to scribble on the beautiful blank slate.

  I picked her up, held her tight as
she breathed in molecules that were no longer me. I needed to own my role, even if I had no role model. I had influence. I could not be afraid of it.

  • • •

  FOR SEVERAL DAYS at the hospital, my baby ate, slept, and expelled waste. When she cried, Jon and I held her, moved her, or fed her, and she stopped. There were answers. Sucking a finger. A burp. Drying her off. I’d been so worried about the unmanageable screams of the newborn, but so far, at least, they weren’t. I could satisfy her needs, sate her unlike I could ever do for my mother, whose needs seemed bottomless. I was exhausted, but swimming, floating even, and not drowning in her being.

  “Judy!” Mom’s voice boomed through my phone several times a day. “How are you? How’s she doing? What’s she doing? Is she eating? Sleeping? Sucking her thumb? Cooing? Smiling? Opening her eyes?” Mom may not have made it to New York, but she was certainly excited.

  At night, when I heard my daughter’s particular little cry coming down the hallway toward my room, a cry I couldn’t believe I recognized, I awoke with a jolt. After placing her on the pillow and making sure that she latched on, that I could see her tiny cheeks puff in and out with activity, my mind scurried. I imagined Mom after my birth—how thrilled she must have been, present and loving. Red and elated, shining and hugging. The image was bright, energized. Then I imagined the spark that had slowly leaked out of her, the one I’d craved reigniting my whole life.

  I squeezed my baby tight.

  We made it through the danger. We survived.

  My sciatica had not fully healed, my thigh pelted in pain, my horrific red scar—two dozen staples punched right into my abdomen—looked like dirty, twisted stitches on a baggy old boxing glove (and to think I’d been concerned about stretch marks). But I knew these traces were tattoos of transition, blemishes of birth and rebirth. I had survived the making of a new generation.

  I had also survived the Survivors. Jon and I talked about her open eyes, her awareness. “She has a feisty, fighter, colostrum-seeking spirit,” Jon said the day before I was due to be discharged, making the strong decision that—with its massive implications—was hard for me. “Let’s name her Zelda.”