by Carole Maso
These women. I forget for a minute that they are really just human. Shocked to hear one of them being catty and insensitive when talking to a couple in the room who is about to adopt. Yet even she somehow mysteriously transcends her own mediocrity—carrying a miracle as she is.
A white room. Eight states of grace.
Despite themselves they radiate mystery, incredible darkness and light. I must say they all seem dull when they speak, but they are doing this miraculous work.
The miracle of us in that room.
In these last weeks I already miss being pregnant. If it could only be like writing a book. I always have one begun before the previous one ends. Protection of sorts. I might have had twenty children. Alas. In another time or life. Am I crazy? Yes, a little, today.
Oh, the might-have-been—that melancholy tense.
My genuine physical aptitude for making and carrying children—the ease in my body, a certain animal trust—I feel a genius of sorts at it. I am happy and well, and without nervousness. Looking forward to the birth. Am I crazy? Probably.
“Think your way up and over this contraction, locating any tension that is left in your body and letting it go, letting it ease through your hands and feet” (Bradley Method). Think your way through?
In the doctor’s office today a lot of end-of-the-pregnancy people looking genuinely miserable. I am uncomfortable but really quite happy. I love my latest shape. True I am incredibly unwieldy, cannot turn over in bed. I am more like a beached whale than a person these days. Seem to only have beached whale thoughts. But I am happy. I am unfazed by the inability to sleep. I have never been able to sleep.
This will be a happy book.
The article in PW comes out, slightly more garish and sensational than one would hope, but all in all, all right. An old jab at Gordon Lish makes its way into the pages. Retrieved from old interviews, I guess. The Knopf-as-a-whorehouse quote—all the greatest hits—the wit and wisdom of C.M. How removed I feel from my former self and from publishing in general. It all seems silly from this vantage point. Only the work matters. Only the baby. Helen. My family. My handful of friends. I am back to the barest and most essential. Film, music, of course. The trees.
God, the trees this time of year in the country! Have they ever been so magnificent?
Exhausted by even the idea of Defiance in the bookstores.
Saw my first copy on a front table at B. Dalton today. Thought it looked beautiful. Really much more beautiful than the rest of the books. I pat it on the back. I wish it well. When I open to a random page and read, it still burns in my hand. A good sign, I think.
On Wednesday a book party at Cathy Murphy’s gallery, Lennon, Weinberg. Reading is hard with all the breathlessness. Reviews starting to come in. Great or terrible, over-inflated or condescending, they have never much mattered to me. Though some of the mean-spiritedness has hurt me, and some of the stupidity offended me.
The sudden need to finish Frida before the baby comes. My way of feathering the nest, I suppose. God, what kind of mother am I going to be? A bed of words.
For a soon-to-be-born present we get you Lolita read by Jeremy Irons on tape. Figuring she might want to hear something good by now.
Feeling very antsy to get to The Bay of Angels, but that is always the case when trying to finish up a book. The charge of the new versus the drudgery of the almost-finished. Also there are the essays to get together.
Very, very tired.
Feeling very vulnerable with the arrival of Defiance in the world.
Went shopping in my daze for something to wear Wednesday night. Can’t get away with any of the regular dresses—even the very largest sizes won’t accommodate this belly. No one in real life has a belly quite this big. I find something finally at A Pea in a Pod. Odd to be a pod. And yet that is distinctly the feeling.
Aishah presides over the baby blessing up at the house. Black matriarch—and my mother seated on my right side, white matriarch. Though I dreaded it (the very idea of a shower), still it was a very moving, very lovely event. My mother trying to remember a lullaby her mother once sang her long ago.
Friends not seen for a very long time. What keeps me separate, apart from even those I love?
More notations these days I notice—now that I am free of school.
7 MAY
The book party was fairly painless. Mercifully there was something else to talk about other than the book. The book always over for me by the time it is published. Trying to keep up some enthusiasm always a chore. But tonight there is a new subject. I am having a baby! Yes, we see! A surprise to many of the people there.
Back to quiet, after the book party, the baby blessing, the social whirl.
Purple lilacs against a blue field of hills, above it the lighter sky. My gray cat Fauve on my lap. All is still. The baby moving.
Dreamt she was born blind. Anxiety for the first time.
Dinner with Georges and Anne Borchardt. It was very nice to see them. Georges tells a funny story about ordering Anne’s dinner for her in the hospital after she delivers their daughter. Such a wonderful French man! I don’t see him much, but I revere and respect and in a strange way adore him. Irrationally. It has kept us from really being friends, I’m afraid.
Washington, D.C.—too long a ride just to do a reading. The car feels like a tomb. The book shall take care of itself. I have to stop this.
We all listen to Lolita the whole way.
Gordon Lish after all these years still acting like an ass. Saw the PW piece and is throwing a little fit.
Oh, for the days of Marimekko muumuus—who said that the other day looking at me?
A radio interview downtown in one of the federal buildings. When I’m done I look up and see a sign that says marriage licenses. We’ve been meaning to do this for years. I call up Helen and she comes down and we get our domestic partnership certification. Or do they call it a license? Practical reasons motivate me. If we don’t do this they could, in the event of Helen’s death, take the apartment away from me. She wishes I were more romantic. But I have always distrusted such conventions—the ceremonies and sanctions. The buying into a prefabricated value system. The assumptions. The burdens. It’s stifling. It makes it impossible to breathe or live anywhere. We are on line with two women who are going to have an enormous “wedding” that weekend. We hear about the invitations, the parents flying in, the church, the food, the band. They have set up a register at Ikea. Some of my usual condescension returns, some of the old disdain. Astutely they note my condition and I tell them that we’ve been together for twenty years and that she is finally making an honest woman of me.
The Afghanistani I bought a banana from downtown before my interview rubbed my stomach and said something in his language. What are you saying, I ask him?
I am praying for a boy.
Worries all of a sudden pile up. All that lead paint in our country house. And what about that antibiotic cream? Can’t sleep.
Dreams of the blind baby. Sunglasses and a little cane.
The baby’s nursery hardly begun. And the bathroom in the middle of renovation. Because the old bathroom is no place for a baby. Too much mess and chaos, however. Renovating in late pregnancy. Why have we waited until the last minute? I can’t live like this. Wake up with a hundred lists in my head.
bassinet
crib
bouncy seat
layette
Want only my solitude. To fall into the silence with you.
What is a layette?
15 MAY
How far off these days The Bay of Angels seems. My coveted time off from school, the beginning of my obscurity finally arrived—or so I had hoped. After three years at Brown in “show time” mode—a kind of party hostess/workhorse. One crisis, one festival, one dean or another every time I turned around. How much I have craved my solitude, my time alone. The book, after a lifetime of preparation, finally ready to be written. The time presenting itself at last. What am I doing? What have
I done? One month until the baby.
Dr. Matheson suggests I think about staying a little closer to the hospital now. So here I sit in the apartment, quasi-hysterical over the color of the walls. I can’t be in early labor in this color! And Helen, on top of everything else she is doing, begins to paint. And I can’t breathe with all these books. And let’s get a TV so I can rent movies—it’s no longer possible to read. I spend most of the day now just walking around. Visiting the doctor. On some weekends I still go to the country. As Dr. M. says, as long as you are only two hours away. The baby is not just going to pop out. That’s a good thing, I think.
New York is really the perfect place for these last weeks. I welcome New Yorkers’ indifferent attitude (seen that, been there) with relief. The hostility of some youngish women (Oh, God, I forgot to have a baby) now going completely by me. I am having one. There is nothing I can do about it. There is no room for anything else in my head.
Also the problem of having to cook anymore disappears here. Anything you want is already made. I carry a little vodka tomato sauce from Home Away From Home, toddling down Bleecker Street. Rented another armful of movies.
Less room in there for kicking and moving around. It’s getting pretty crowded, I guess. I read at an uptown Barnes and Noble.
Have dinner with Dixie and her friend Barbara. Do you want it to be over? I am fairly surprised by my answer. No.
Memorize this. For you will never feel or look this way again. You will never. There is a marked sadness about such a definitive statement now.
Dwindling last days.
Irrational last days. All the past months of serenity giving way to a kind of mania. Finishing the house, childbirth classes, things to buy: diapers, sleeping wedges—Oh, God. Impossible to focus.
Nietzsche: One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.
Oh God, I know I’m far gone when I start quoting Nietzsche.
Impatience today at being so unwieldy, and yet reluctance, even in this humidity, to let go of being pregnant. Having given over my body so completely at this point.
To be inhabited by an angel. How often does that happen?
An angel in residence.
Only weeks (days?) away from my life never being the same again. And after forty-plus years one is used to one’s life. Why this coincides with the chance to write The Bay of Angels I do not know, do not even pretend to comprehend. It haunts me. I cannot let go of it.
The gaze far off—a little sorrowful—carrying this mortal creature inside.
Something ending in me.
Pesticides, plastics, PCPs, dioxin in the breast milk in Japan, tears in the ozone, forests dying—I hand you this ruined planet—to cherish.
I get my lead level checked. What if I am poisoning her, living in that old house? All the renovation we’ve done in the last five years suddenly terrifies me.
Feelings that the baby has died. Every kind of nightmare.
Dr. M. says that she is in ready position.
Her head on my bladder.
The bones in the pubis opening like a butterfly.
The bones of the hips unhinging.
The ribs floating open like water.
All this to allow the child through.
More and more I long to swim.
A beautiful day in New York. I can see that. But everything is so far away. I feel so removed, as in the very beginning. This preparation for life. This rehearsal for death. Can’t touch, can’t reach anything anymore. Doesn’t everyone look busy out there going about their business—reading the newspaper and rushing to the subway and thinking about what they will do this weekend.
I open The Bay of Angels.
Her feet at my heart.
Lead level comes back a minuscule 2.2 in my blood.
Dixie cooks us dinner. We see her once a week now. A great treat. And Ilene. I have lunch with her on Mondays and wait. A reunion—after all we’ve been through. This baby girl brings us back together. It’s one of the miracles of this time.
The mortal body—one cannot help but feel it. Carrying two deaths inside me now. I am responsible. I am indicted.
Laura sends Stein’s The World Is Round—starring Rose. Rosmarie sends a tiny baby-sized edition. One of my very favorites.
I am two whole people now. How to describe the strangeness?
Such mildness and surrender. The book out there. More reviews. Excessive praise means little. Being slighted makes no difference.
Are you afraid of giving birth? This answer less surprising. No.
Everyone else more nervous now than I am now. They all seem to be hurrying around me. I, motionless at the center. After a brief flurry of hysteria I am back in my Buddha zone.
The fact is by the time a book is published I have no stake in it at all—my writing life is elsewhere. This angle of mind has served me well. Afforded me a kind of useful distance. Odd to be interviewed though—can’t remember a thing really. How did you write it, what were your intentions—the usual questions.
The fact is no work of mine once it is published interests me in the least.
27 MAY
Helen’s six-year sober anniversary—without which there would be no house, no Coco, no Rose, no Carole—we count on our fingers at dinner, astonished.
Schneiders, 20 Avenue A—in the heat, in my blur, we look at carriages, cribs, the famous layettes.
28 MAY
The baby begins her graceful descent, undeniably.
Mozart’s floating line of sixteenth notes…
You need a great patience at the end.
“My patience is of wood, mute, vegetative.”
—Caesar Vallejo
No, there are no more somersaults now. She’s outgrowing her house of blood and light.
baby bonnet
pacifier
bibs
A long conversation in the rain with my friend Louis. I don’t want our friendship ever to change. I want it to remain exactly like this and forever. But with the baby—I worry I shall lose him in some way. God, can I find anything else to worry about?
The baby descends. Her head engaged in the tight-fitting circle of pelvic bones like a crown. I’d like to follow her dream down but I think I’d better make some arrangements for childbirth classes fast. The last time we tried to go, a Saturday, all day—seven earnest couples—the instructor failed to show. It felt like a reprieve somehow. Difficult to explain.
Suddenly I am panicked. What if I have the baby before the classes? Dr. M. looks at me bemused.
White people.
Private childbirth sessions at Soho Pediatric with Michelle Simon, who is wonderful. I will be a Bradley Method girl, more or less. Bradley, the other natural childbirth method. I hear you just act like you’re sleeping. Sounds OK. I can’t bear the idea of all that panting the Lamaze people do. Makes me dizzy just to think of it.
Lots to prepare for and learn. Helen seems nervous. I am alarmingly serene. Even when we go through what will happen in the last stage of labor—Michelle holds up a large poster showing impossibly jagged lines meant to denote pain. Lovely early rounded hills turns into Appalachian peaks. She walks us through all the various scenarios. This might happen, or this. Not that. Yes. We amble over to St. Vincent’s to see the set-up. Wept when I saw the Pitocin machine, the contraption that dispenses a medication to induce labor, because it looked enough like the I-Med, that thing Gary was on. These halls. The Coleman Wing. I’m in the same place he was. What shall be the proximity of our rooms?
Michelle says I will not be feeling like wearing my lipstick in the third stage of labor, but I find this rather unlikely.
Everyone has been born after all. How hard can it be?
Mystery of book and rose. Rose and baby snow.
Not one real drop of blood in all these nine months. I wonder about the effect of seeing it again after all this time. The violence of it, its vibration and hum. Always incredibly attuned to color. Thought I might be a pain
ter. No such luck. Insistence, loss, finality. Ruby flame, the grand finale. The shock of blood. Blood after no blood.
I feel in some actual emotional danger. Like I’ve gone too far. Like I’ve relied on a faulty sense of confidence and peace. Impossible to describe. On insanity’s verge tonight.
What was I thinking? To create a being who is going to suffer. To be responsible, utterly, for someone’s death. A grave indictment. It was not a lark. Did I take this all too lightly? How else was I to take it and still go forward?
I sit expectant in the big city, waiting. Helen up at the house with Angela. They’ve been moving in the bathtub. When the phone rings, she tells me later she hopes it is not me in labor because they haven’t eaten their veal chops—still on the grill—brought up from Balducci’s.
Is there a floor yet in the bathroom? I want to know. I need a floor.
I have many things to buy in the pharmacy for my impending labor. I waddle over there. It’s a weird list.
plastic shoes for the shower
a scarf? for my head? (It’s supposed to help you concentrate) tennis balls?
lollipops
candles
massage oil
lip balm
I have in my head that I will also need the Schubert Impromptus, but I keep forgetting to get them.
Doubt very much I am going to wear a scarf around my head during labor. The last thing I want is to look like David Foster Wallace.
