by Dawn Davies
Games I play while at dinner: imagining Jimmy and Deb breaking into spontaneous human cunnilingus across the dining room table, one kind of sex that does not result in a baby, shoving aside wedding-gift candles and the Le Creuset of Irish scalloped potatoes, a candle toppling to the floor and igniting their Pier 1 area rug, the deaf Dalmatian working itself into a frenzy, biting the flame and spinning until he knocks himself out against the breakfront, my husband pushing his wire-rimmed specs up his face, giving me one of his looks, heavy with implied meaning, saying, “Uhhh, I think maybe we should go.” Also: imagining the tight, itchy skin on my belly splitting open like a pod, releasing the baby, along with a halo of dandelion fluff, that we all blow into the corners of the room. Also: thinking of things they might say about the things we said or did once we drive off for Boston at the end of the night: Did you see how swollen her feet were? Who wears Birkenstocks with a dress and no socks in October? I wonder if they’re going to make it. Also: wondering if we are going to make it.
My husband has a wonderful time. The joy on his face is measurable, and because he is having fun, I have fun. I have never seen him this relaxed. He is lovely when he really laughs. During dinner, the dog licks my toes from underneath the table, a sensation that makes me nauseated and also reminds me that I have to urinate. I sign to him with my hands in the hammock of my lap, knees spread wide in my sacklike dress—signs that Jimmy and Deb showed us during drinks, such as the signs for Sit, and Stay, and Go away. Later I will teach the dogs in my life these simple signs I learned from Jimmy and Deb and this deaf Dalmatian, and they will obey, long after this dog is put down for becoming so agitated at the automobile light reflections in his living room window that he busts through it, slicing himself like a roast turkey.
After dinner, when Deb brings out a gourmet New York cheesecake that she has paid a fortune for at an upscale Providence bakery, she announces that she is quite wasted and will stop drinking to keep me company. She makes coffee, pours the men generous splashes of Sambuca in little clear glasses, plopping three coffee beans into each for good luck. My husband announces that I had better drive home, something I understood would be happening before we even sat down at the table, and I sniff his Sambuca, which quiets my stomach. He and Jimmy drink three Sambucas, growing looser and more theoretical and musing with each one, and also more relaxed in their chairs. I track their conversation from the aplomb of various managing editors they have known, to how journalism is affecting society, to the decline of the Roman Empire, and finally New York sports teams. Deb kicks off her heels and puts her tiny feet in Jimmy’s lap, where he rubs them while he talks about Thurman Munson. My feet feel like mangy seal pups, swollen hot and tight and thick, and when I look down at them they look like someone else’s feet. I put them up on my husband’s lap, and within a minute they are back down on the floor.
Games I play during dessert: thinking about curing the obesity epidemic by inventing a drug that mimics the same hormones that are coursing through me right now, making me wish I had never eaten. Also: imagining all of the vessels in my vulva engorging, rerouting into a pipeline to maximize the blood flow in preparation for the impending baby. My vulva is so full of pregnancy blood that it hurts. What I say: It’s time to go, babe. We have a long drive ahead of us, which is how we always end these dinner parties, by acknowledging the distance between Providence and Boston. What I think: We need to leave right now because my vulva is about to explode, though you won’t understand because you have had two stingers and several glasses of wine and three Sambucas and don’t even have a vulva.
So we say good-bye. I pour my husband into the car and begin the drive home. He turns on the radio to an alternative rock station and begins to head-bang in the abbreviated way one does in the passenger seat of a sedan. He shrieks things like, “Whoop-whoop!” and “I love this band! Love ’em!” and because happy drunks are infectious, I laugh. His frontal lobe is loosed and he is unguarded. He starts to talk about ridiculous possibilities with the enthusiasm of an eleven-year-old boy: winning the lottery and using the money to start a rally race team using only classic Saab Sonetts, building a house outside of the city from trees we mill ourselves. It will have a woodstove, he assures me, and an art studio, and a motocross track, too. He is tremendous in this light, and silly, and I love him, but also I wonder if I will see this glee again.
We pass Pawtucket. We pass Attleboro. We pass Plainville. He stops talking and grows pensive. “I am a wolf,” he says. “You know that?” Then he grows quiet. Somewhere near the Foxboro exit, he decides that we need some air, because I have stopped him from opening and closing his window, so he slides the sunroof, sticks his head and shoulders out of it, and howls at the moon.
“I’m a wolf,” he shouts into the night. “A lone wolf,” and as he lifts his head to the sky to howl again, the wind liberates his glasses off his face and they fly onto the highway we are leaving behind. He won’t remember this, I think. He drops back into the car and says, “I think I lost my spectacles,” then falls asleep for the rest of the ride.
I pull up to our apartment and wake him. He fumbles for the door latch and can’t find it. I get out, suspecting that my belly has grown during the course of the evening. I now feel impossibly huge. I move slowly, carefully, lumbering around to the passenger side because late in pregnancy, the weight of your uterus stretches certain ligaments inside you, which makes it feel like something is going to rupture, something that maybe feels like your aorta, so you walk gently, waddling when needed, breathing carefully, turning in Tai Chi moves because the baby is shoving its heels right up your diaphragm. I open his door and help him out. “I’m okay,” he says, then stands up and announces, “I need you.” He lilts as if at sea, and when I go to grab on to his arms, he says, “I’m fine,” and shakes me off. He turns and vomits all over the sidewalk in front of the apartment. “Look, I’m you!” he says. He tries to laugh but it fades. He throws up some more.
“Get it all out,” I say. “It’s okay.” I pinch my nose and look away. I’m trying to keep down the cheesecake.
I unlock the door and guide him to the bedroom, where he takes off his sweater and his shoes. He seems suddenly sober, and because I don’t know better, I believe him.
“You good?” I ask.
“I’m good,” he says, and gives me a double thumbs-up. He looks different without his glasses. Younger, though he is plenty young already. “I’m going to go out front and clean up,” I tell him. “I’ll be right back.”
I walk back outside and around to the side of the building where the landlord’s hose is coiled onto the side of the house. I begin to hose off the vomit from the sidewalk, and the steps and the porch, the baby kicking me in the pancreas and punching me in the bladder, and rolling its head into my cervix. When I see the vomit roll off the concrete into the leafy grass, something uncorks in me and I yurp up the several hundred calories of cheesecake I was hoping would stay in me. I hose the cheesecake into the grass and hope for a good rain.
By the time I get inside and lock the front door, I smell smoke. I rush into the bedroom and find my husband bare-assed, passed out across the bed on his stomach, the knuckles of his right hand brushing the floor. He had turned on the space heater after I left, I notice, and discarded his corduroy pants on top of it. The pants are on fire, a slow smolder with small licks of flame beginning in the corner of the room.
I pat out the fire, put the pants in the bathtub, and run water over them. I open a window. The cold, late-fall air pulls the smoke out of the room. While my husband sleeps, I rake through the kitchen for something, anything that will stop the nausea. I rip open a red, white, and blue rocket Popsicle, which worked the previous week, though eating them fills me with guilt because they are full of chemicals. I suck on it, frantic to calm the nausea. It’s not enough. My skin grows clammy. I can feel my salivary glands starting to tighten. My belly tightens in a harmless contraction, and I grab it and hold on for the ride. I think the baby wants o
ut, though I can’t imagine why. I turn the lights off to calm my system. Even looking at something wrong will spark an upchuck at this point. I fry an egg in the dark, toast two pieces of bread, slather the toast with mayonnaise, slap the egg between the toast, and bite, quickly, dropping a bolus of food down the hatch like I am dropping sheep to a Cyclops.
Tonight my husband will sleep a dreamless sleep while the hothouse of my body ripens this baby. Tomorrow he will wake up, reach for his missing glasses, and try to hide his hangover. Tomorrow we will meet and try again to forge what we are attempting to forge, but for now, I chew. I swallow. I eat. Games I play there in the dark: wondering if the egg sandwich will work. Wondering if the marriage will. Wondering if this baby will split me in two.
PIE
It was Thanksgiving week and my husband and I were living far from the South that I loved, far from deep-fried turkey, and my mother’s stuffing and my mother-in-law’s candied sweet potatoes, far from watching gauzy curtains wave in the breeze while the warm sun shone over the holiday feast. My family would pray over the meal, then consume it fairly quickly, after which the men would groan up and lumber like zombies for the football game while the women started coffee and headed off for the shade of the back porch where the fans were running. Thanksgiving week in the South usually afforded us some decent beach time, too, and I knew what to expect of it. But it was snowing all over this new place. In fact, New England had been blanketed by an early snow that lingered and depressed me, bringing with it a cold that stopped me in my tracks. There was no sun. I had had a baby fourteen days earlier and my hormones were starting to settle in that place you have to be careful about, the place that, if you don’t watch it, will lead you into a postpartum land empty of color and joy, but I didn’t know that yet, I was so bewitched by this little baby girl.
My husband’s friend David Blueblood, who had a kind heart and didn’t want to see a couple of transplants spend the holiday alone, had invited us to his parents’ house for Thanksgiving Day. On the Tuesday before, I called him and asked what I could bring. He reminded me that we must be exhausted, he urged me to not bring anything, but my mother didn’t raise me to be rude—you don’t show up to someone’s house empty-handed—so I volunteered to bring a pie.
“Don’t bring a pie,” he said.
“It’s fine. I’ll bring a pumpkin. I do a good pumpkin.”
“Honestly, I hate to say this, but my mother is very particular about her pies. In fact, our entire Thanksgiving dinner is homemade. Please don’t trouble yourself.”
“It’ll be homemade. Don’t worry.” I had easily baked pumpkin pie a dozen times before. When I hung up, I decided that I would make it the following day, Wednesday, so it would be fresh for Thanksgiving. This pie would be a piece of cake, so to speak.
That night, the baby had her first real bout of screaming colic, the kind where a kid’s face gets all stiff and dark and you can see it trying to shit itself in desperation, but it can’t, so it just screams instead. I stayed up most of the night with her because my husband, who had already worked thirty-six hours in three days, had to work the next morning as well, and I could at least nap during the day while the baby was asleep. At first we rocked in the living room, where her shrieks echoed off the bare walls and funneled into the bedroom, and then we ended up in the front room office, which was unheated and freezing cold. I stayed in there for several minutes, hoping the chill would startle her into shutting up. When that didn’t work, we took a drive around the neighborhood in the car, where I had my first taste of loving the baby fiercely while simultaneously resenting everything she stood for. Around six in the morning, she fell asleep, and I did too, for about two hours. By eight, she was up screaming and I had my hands full of salty, angry, drippy, writhing baby for the rest of the morning. I was exhausted beyond any previous knowledge of exhaustion, and I knew I still had to bake that pie.
I called my mother and asked what to do for colic.
“Put her down,” she said. “Let her cry.”
“I can do that?”
“It’s called self-preservation. For you, not her. Trust me; you’ll need to develop this skill if you’re going to make it eighteen years.”
I put the baby down on her quilt on the floor and she hollered herself hoarse while I preheated the oven of the old gas stove and chopped up the fresh pumpkin. I set the timer and baked the pumpkin chunks in the oven while I paced the dining room with the baby, clutching her like a football between my forearm and ribs. It was noon before she agreed to take the boob, but it only seemed to agitate her, and she screamed harder. At some point while she was trying to nurse, I smelled pumpkin, looked at my watch, and leaped up from the settled place we had gotten to, then ran to the kitchen with her tucked into my armpit, causing her to scream again. The buzzer on the old stove had not gone off and the pumpkin was turning a deep brown and starting to steam. The baby screamed and screamed. At around two, Sister Mary Clare, one of the nuns from the convent next door, came over to see if I was beating the baby, under the guise of asking if she could do anything to help.
“It’s just colic,” I said as I stood in my doorway. The baby screamed over top of me.
“Ahh.”
“I’ve got it covered,” I said. I held the baby up against my shoulder and rocked from side to side by slowly bending one knee at a time.
“I see that. Are you still in your nightgown?”
“It’s been a long day.” My bottom lip quivered, and something broke in me. I began to weep quietly. “Nothing I do makes it better. She won’t stop.”
“Give her over,” the nun said. She held out her old, bent hands and I handed her the baby, who took a deep breath and stopped yelling. She rested her chin against the nun’s shoulder like nothing had been wrong. The baby, whose eyes were learning how to focus, looked around curiously.
“We’re going to go next door for a little while. Between me and the three old fools I live with, we should be able to pass a crying baby back and forth. Go relax. Take a bath. Come get her in a half an hour.”
I did not have time to take a bath. I needed to make that pie crust and roll it out and get it in the oven, then I needed to peel and puree the pumpkin, and make the filling, then bake a pie good enough for a New England family that liked everything homemade. I made one pie crust properly, with Crisco and vinegar, rolled it out, lifted it into the pie plate, fluted the edges of the crust like my grandmother had taught me, put it in the oven, set the buzzer correctly this time, for five minutes, then went to the bathroom for the first time since early that morning. I sat there on the toilet with unease, feeling strangely alone, then I got up and brushed my teeth, and brushed my hair, then had time to put on a pair of jeans and a clean sweatshirt before I realized the buzzer had not gone off again. I ran into the kitchen and opened the oven. Smoke rolled out. I had burned the pie crust black.
They don’t tell you about the level of exhaustion you will face when you have a baby. They say you won’t get much sleep for the first few months, but they don’t tell you that it will affect your ability to think, that you will become so tired that you will fail at the simplest of tasks, because you are so exhausted that your brain is impaired. I quickly made another crust, then put it in the pie plate, then fluted the edges, then set it on the counter while I pureed the pumpkin. As soon as I turned off the beaters, I could hear the baby screaming from next door, so I grabbed a blanket and went over to get her. It was snowing harder. The twenty-foot walk between the two houses seemed to take a considerable effort. I could feel my thighs burning and I was afraid I was going to slip in the new snow. I knocked on the door.
“She’s a pistol,” Sister Margaret Mary said. I stepped in and Sister Mary Theresa handed her over. Sister Mary Clare prayed over the roaring baby while we stood awkwardly in the foyer of their little convent.
Back at the house, I put the baby in the baby sling, a bright cotton granola-head gift from a hippie friend, a gift that I had had no intention of us
ing, and hoisted her onto my back, swaddled tightly onto me as if we were from some other country, a place where women routinely cook difficult things from scratch over hot fires with babies hanging on them like possums. She immediately quieted, and I put the pie together, rocking my way through the kitchen, singing softly, admiring my own brilliance. I gently placed the pie in the oven, set the buzzer for fifty-five minutes, then lay down on the floor quilt with the baby, who was now soundless and sleeping deeply for the first time in two days. I closed my eyes for a moment and it was a beautiful moment.
I woke to thick smoke filling the house. I left the baby on the floor, raced into the kitchen, and pulled the charred pie out of the oven and tossed it onto a snowbank in the backyard. Then I opened all the windows and doors in the house and started crying. Screw this buzzer, I thought. Screw this broken buzzer and this Northern gas oven that I didn’t know how to control. The baby, who was low on the floor, in the only space free of smoke, woke up and started screaming. Every time she cried, it made my milk flow, and two wet circles appeared on the front of my sweatshirt and grew clammy in the cold air that was beginning to fill the house.
By the time my husband drove up, the pie was generating a cylindrical smoke signal straight up through the neighborhood like a beacon leading him home. He found me in the kitchen weeping softly and fanning the smoke out of the open windows while the baby roared from her smoke-free space on the floor.
