White Walls

by Judy Batalion

  Which is why I was surprised to find a negative result on my pregnancy test. The single line that now resembled a stern frown, a solo I. And then, my period. An extra-long, unusual period. “Probably a very early miscarriage,” GP advised, cocking his head in sympathy. “Very common. Just try again next month.”

  A miscarriage? Me? I felt like I’d failed. It didn’t make sense. But I also felt unsettled. I called my OB. It was Friday afternoon. He asked me to rush in for a blood test. I did, then we set off for a road trip. But the bleeding worsened over the weekend. And on Monday morning the office called. “You are pregnant,” the nurse said, remarkably less chipper than during my first foray into conception. “You’d better come back for more tests today.” Scared, we turned the car around on the highway and headed straight to the maternal-fetal ward.

  And so began six more weeks of confusion, hemorrhaging, fainting, and daylong visits to the emergency room. My blood tests kept indicating a growing pregnancy, but neither the invasive exams (performed by the entire gynecological student population of New York) nor the ultrasounds could locate where this pregnancy might be. My increasing symptoms—heavier bleeding, weakness, paleness—endowed me with a bad feeling. I could be experiencing an odd miscarriage, a loss of one twin, or, worst-case scenario, an ectopic pregnancy, a life-threatening condition where the baby implanted in the wrong spot, risking a rupture of whatever organ it was in. But my case wasn’t presenting as any of the above. My work and my daughter were pushed to the side as I was either absent from home, or absent from reality, my anxiety full-blown. They couldn’t find my embryo. A million tests and yet no one knew what was going on inside me.

  Until one night when a whole new pain, like a shard of glass splicing through my thigh, took hold. “Jon, we have to bring Zelda to the neighbors.” Ten hours, ten doctors, and ten tests later, I was on the phone with Mom, my tone militaristic. “They’re still not sure, but they think it is ectopic, lodged on the very edge of my fallopian tube. In any case, they can’t take a risk anymore. They’re admitting me for an emergency abortion to be done with chemotherapy drugs.”

  “Oh my God, sweetie,” she said. “I’ll call Dad. We’re coming.”

  I’m coming, I remembered myself saying, a reverse Voyageur.

  “Why did this happen?” I drilled my OB, in shock. Ectopics occurred in less than two percent of pregnancies. I’d been hyperanxious, which was supposed to stave off bad fate, my shitstorm prophylactic. It was never supposed to actually be the worst-case scenario.

  “It could be due to scar tissue from your colitis surgery,” he said. “Or, it could just be completely random.” I didn’t know what upset me more. That the operation that had saved me was now, twenty years later, killing me? That the ways we heal come back to haunt us? Or that there was no explanation at all?

  My light-headed mind whirred. I couldn’t believe it. Any of it. Chemotherapy. My bad luck. My failed pregnancy. My loss of control.

  • • •

  AND THAT SHE was here, in New York. This was the first time she’d left her house in two years, the first time she’d visited me since my wedding. I’d been lying on my den sofa exhausted, my limbs on strike, my eyelids heavy from the weeks of emergency rooms, dizziness, blood loss, the stress of being constantly on watch (your fallopian, they said, could erupt at any second), the risk of death, of internal explosion, implosion, and finally the chemotherapy treatment to abort the misplaced fetus. After all that, I thought the sound of her voice in the vestibule might have been a fevered delusion. “We came up with the deliveryman,” she said, walking into the den with Dad.

  “Special delivery,” I said, pulling myself upright, heading to hug them. “Thank you for coming,” I whispered into my mother’s black sweatshirt. She had come to help. Despite everything, she had come.

  I was so happy to have them there, with me, in my space. Mom and Dad went on laughing about the coincidence of them arriving at the same time as the food, but suddenly I thought of the dwindling life in my stomach that would never get delivered. I lost my baby. Eyes, ears, nose. I might never be able to have another baby. I sat down, shaking. “Can I get you a drink?” I tried to sound fine.

  Mom stood in the doorway, behind her the teak dining room table—her table, which we’d had refurbished. She didn’t look around, didn’t ask for a tour, as I would have. As always, I wondered what she saw when she saw me. “Sure, some water would be nice.”

  Motherhood and daughterhood kept me on my toes.

  • • •

  THE NEXT MORNING, Zelda awoke at six a.m. “She’s up, Mom.” I nudged her. Mom was sharing my bed and had planned to wake up with me and help me take care of Zelda, especially since I still wasn’t allowed to lift things. Mom was being like a regular mom!

  “Coming, coming,” she said, but she didn’t move.

  Attuned to Zelda’s cries, the most extreme of alarm clocks (no snooze button once you have a baby), I rolled to my side and out of bed as gingerly as possible, darting to her room. I’d wanted Jon, who’d been taking care of the two of us for weeks, to sleep in.

  “Mama,” Zelda said when she saw me, and I hugged her in the crib. I’d been trying so hard to keep my normal routine going these past two months, to be there for Zelda as much as possible between hospital visits. To at least be physically present, even if mentally I was panicking. “Out!” Zelda instructed.

  I stared at the door. No Mom. I sighed. “OK, sweetie.” I lifted her as carefully as possible, trying to concentrate all my effort into my arms. I placed Zelda down on the floor and she ran out of her room to an approaching Bubbie.

  “Judy, why did you lift her? Why didn’t you wait for me?” Mom asked, finally appearing.

  “You weren’t here,” I mumbled. “It’s fine. I’m fine. Just help me feed her.”

  Zelda was already at the kitchen table, her arms reaching up to her high chair. I knelt down. “Bubbie’s going to put you in your chair this morning.”

  Mom held her arms out at a distance. Zelda looked at her awkward pose. “No!”

  “It’s OK, sweetie. Bubbie is going to help me carry you today.”

  “No!”

  I watched my mother’s face crumble. She backed away.

  “Mom, just do it,” I said.

  “But she doesn’t want me to,” Mom whispered.

  “She’s just a toddler,” I whispered back, annoyed. She’d been so good with Zelda as a baby, but it was different now that Zelda had opinions. Or was it Mom’s increasing age? Her condition? Regardless, I saw in my mother’s eyes the hurt of rejection that I now understood too, a primal insecurity, a horrid sense of failure. I saw the disappointment of her life: how she’d wanted nothing more than to be a mother but could never play the role as she dreamed.

  I recalled a few months earlier, during our last trip to Montreal, when Mom had pulled me aside, told me she’d found a letter I’d sent her from camp when I was eleven. I wrote that I saw how stressed and tired she was; I promised that when I got home I would cook my own dinners and take care of myself so she would not have to take care of me. How could I not recognize how horrible that was? she’d asked me, twenty-five years later, tearing up. If I read it in a book, I would have found it an awful, heartbreaking scene, but in my own life, I just didn’t see the problem.

  Despite this revelation, she had not changed. She’d been hospitalized several more times, but each time had been so useless, so traumatizing for her, I began to wonder who was crazier, her or her psychiatrists. And here she was. Our connection might have been dysfunctional, but it was fierce. My family was both more pathological and more loving than I ever remembered.

  “Just pick her up,” I said softly.

  Mom halfheartedly put her arms out again. Zelda cried “No!” even more loudly, and I couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t bear the hurt my mother was experiencing, all the hurt I’d put her through, admi
tting her to hospitals, yelling at her—I wanted only the best, but still, I caused her so much pain. She was so vulnerable, her emotions like a toddler’s.

  “Don’t worry,” I said, and quickly picked Zelda up and put her in the chair.

  • • •

  AN HOUR LATER, I saw that Dad wasn’t all that different. After he awoke at seven, complaining he was still tired from his night on the couch, he came into Zelda’s room where we’d been playing. “Zaidy!” Zelda shrieked excitedly, which delighted him. For about a minute. Then he got up.

  “But Zelda’s so excited to see you,” I said quietly as he left.

  “Boy, she has energy.” He shook his head in pleasure as he waddled to the den to watch his new favorite cable channel (There’s a Jewish Channel?—who knew?) which he’d discovered the night before.

  Zelda was hyper, a handful, and he was older and exhausted, but still I felt upset. I remembered him playing with Eli and me all the time, though mainly games like “crazy hospital” where he was the patient and lay on the sofa reading newspapers as we operated on him. Were my parents always this removed from me and Eli, or was it their age? The nature of grandparenthood? I was noticing different things about them now that I was a parent too, which was both elucidating and unsettling.

  Denise arrived and we got Zelda ready for a concert in the park a few blocks away. I’d suggested that we all go, but as soon as I corralled the Batalions, trouble ensued. Mom insisted on bringing her wheeled suitcase filled with documents. It was too heavy for me to roll even without my recent fallopian drama, and Dad didn’t want to help either. Mom hollered that we were walking too fast, and she couldn’t make it to the park. Like my childhood self I dashed between Mom and Dad and then even Zelda and Denise too, trying to negotiate everyone’s wishes, everyone’s paces, a frantic mouse scurrying along the sidewalk. “I can’t go on,” Mom said, after one block. Dad, though he refused to walk next to her, also refused to go on without her. I waved Denise and Zelda away along with my own sadness about the lost bonding opportunity. There were so few chances for us all to be together. I didn’t understand how my parents couldn’t see that.

  “Let’s just get something to eat,” Dad said.

  “I don’t care,” Mom said, in a huff.

  “There are lots of breakfast options,” I began, eager at least to show them Chelsea dining. I ran through the list of bagelerias, Italian bakeries, Israeli and French diners, breakfast taco joints, high-end sit-down.

  “What’s that?” Dad interrupted, pointing across the street.

  “Oh, it’s just a deli.”

  “That’s as far as I can go,” Mom said.

  To the deli? There was nothing for me to eat at the deli. It took every bit of strength left in my overworked dying cells not to scream that if she didn’t drag around her bags, she might be able to go a bit farther. In every way.

  “Fine.” I sulked like a teenager, still playing pinball between them, knowing it was easier to be angry than sad.

  • • •

  AN HOUR LATER, Mom walked home with us, but didn’t enter the apartment. “I have things I’d like to attend to,” she said. Was she getting Zelda a gift from buybuy Baby? A breakfast I’d like? I wondered why she could suddenly walk. I knew she moved literal mountains of junk to be here; I knew leaving her house for another country was an enormous emotional challenge; I knew she wanted the best for me. But still, I felt rejected. “Where’s she going?” I asked Dad to break the new silence.

  Dad deliberated. “Probably banks,” he said as we got in the elevator.

  We rode up in the rickety car, and I waited for Dad to explode, but he was silent.

  “What can you do?” He shrugged his sagging shoulders. “I used to get angry, so angry. But she’s sick. She’s really sick. It’s pathetic that such a brilliant person lives in a state of constant internal terror, as if she’s the victim of a massive impending threat.”

  His resignation seemed noble, his sad acceptance honest. In his way, he loved her; he really, really loved her. Just as he loved delis and didn’t need fancy croissant hybrids. His needs were different from mine, his happiness achieved in ways that I might deem codependent or false, but who was I to say? I reminded myself how terrifically lucky I was that he’d stayed with her, cared for her, been so utterly dedicated, allowing me to have all the freedom in the world, to run away and have my life.

  “Are you still hungry? Do you want anything else?” I offered, as if that would make up for my leaving him.

  “No, no, I’m stuffed. Delicious eggs.”

  It was strange to me, how hard it was to make peace with my own parents’ happiness. Or at least, their comforts.

  As soon as we entered the apartment, I plopped down on the sofa, convinced I couldn’t have walked another step. My uterus was contracting, the abortion at work. I did anything not to imagine my baby being squished, suffocated, my fallopian tube like a noose. It took all my strength to turn on the TV to The New Adventures of Old Christine. I lay on one side of the couch. Dad sat with the New York Times and the remote on the other. For nearly forty years, I thought, these were our positions. I’d be sick, he’d be there, mirroring me, watching reruns alongside me.

  “Hey, you think we can change it?” he asked this time. “I can’t even hear what they’re saying.”

  My eyelids at half-mast, I looked over to Dad, his crouched back, his deepening web of wrinkles, his sinking features. He was nearly eighty. He had recently sold his parents’ house on Carlton. I could barely believe it, but he had, ridding himself of almost all the contents, letting go. Kildare remained a disaster, but my parents had sold their parents’ homes, overcome their attachments. I wondered, what was left?

  And then, as I dozed off, the fear and anxiety of the past ten weeks, the past two years, crashed through my mind. Birth was so much about death. Zelda’s dangerous delivery, the incredible fragility of newborn life, the way that having a child made me realize that I was next in line, a cog in a very simple generational scheme, your-job-on-this-earth-is-done-thanks. We are all replaceable, the life cycle cackled, just as I’d begun to realize how important my existence was to someone else, how utterly damaging my end would be to Zelda. Reaching thirty-five, middle age. And then, this. The pregnancy that nearly imploded me, my fetus that had to be aborted.

  I touched my stomach that was contracting in more toxin-fueled cramps, and held back tears. I would have to wait at least three months for the chemo to leave my system before trying to conceive again. But I knew with a ferocious certainty that I wanted to have another child, to make more life. And pronto. I wanted to be able to spend as many days with my future as possible.

  I wanted to mother.

  “Are you coming out to the diner tonight?” Dad asked when I awoke from what must have been an hours-long nap.

  I wanted to hang out with Dad. I wanted him to enjoy himself. He never traveled anymore: this could be his last vacation. Then again, I could barely move. “Not sure.”

  “Come on,” Dad said. Though he’d taken a backseat in this diagnosis, he’d still been dissuading me from even Motrin. “I want you to come.”

  My whole life had been trained by Dad’s bravado, his refusal to surrender to the elements and facts, but even he’d finally given in to the reality of my mother’s illness. Some things were unchangeable. Death was everywhere, bigger than me, poking into my every organ, obvious.

  I could have done it, could have taken on his challenge, beat the body, asked Jon to babysit. But I was sick. I was really sick. “Not tonight,” I said softly. “I don’t feel up to it. But you and Mom can go.” That’s what was left. Them. Mom would go with him. And they’d be fine. Even happy, in their way.

  • • •

  “OH, HONEY,” MY mother said, sitting on my side of the bed late that night, her weight pressing down so that my head popped up. My bed. My king-size
marriage bed, in my white-walled bedroom, with white carpets, white fixtures, a white light, and nothing more. Her presence, heavy, dark, ungeometric, was in every way out of place. Talk about ectopic.

  “Sweetheart,” she said, shaking her head. She took my hand in hers, and I felt her fingers, still so skinny, so elegant and smooth, anachronistic. The lock of our grip recalled a yoga gesture, the kind when the instructor tells you to intertwine your fingers with the awkward hand on top, the unfamiliar feeling like you are holding hands with a stranger instead of yourself. Only now we were bonding two different bodies, strangers and selves. The blue light of the baby monitor cast a shadow over us, and I looked to the screen to see Zelda, sprawled out like a sunbathing angel, dreaming in her own head that somehow came out of me. What did I know of my daughter’s inner life? What did Mom know of mine? As if in response, my stomach jolted with a pang, and I was reminded of the “fetus reabsorbing into my abdomen” as they put it, its juices merging with mine, its tiny cells becoming one with my own, squeezing in between my organelles, forever a part of me. We are not just made up of our dead ancestors, I thought. We are also our dead children.

  “It’s so unfair,” she whispered. “It’s so unfair that this happened to you.”

  “Thank you,” I said. Things had been going so well, calm, settled, happy, forward. And then this. God’s little trick. As if he was saying, you did it. You learned to have a positive attitude, to dream, to want. Learned to feel good about your life. So now: life.

  Or not.

  “It’s so, so unfair,” Mom repeated, her hips sinking farther into my mattress, her fingers squeezing tightly. I recalled once again how she was the one who was there after my colitis surgery, in the recovery room, holding my hand. That very surgery that was, twenty years later, possibly responsible for this disaster. She was right. It was so unfair. That our cures created their own problems. That I’d spent so many years in hospitals. That she was how she was.