Playing House

by Lauren Slater

  7

  Isosceles

  Eighteen months after the birth of my first, the wand turned positive once again, the delft-blue lines unmistakable in their message. Actually, I’d known before the test; I had the tell-tale signs, the loginess, my sense of scent enhanced, so barbecue sauce, fresh snow, hot coffee, and catsup were broken down into their component parts: tang and iron, fruit and dirt.

  I took the test at Pizzeria Uno, where I’d gone with my girl after an all-too-common spat with my husband. What the spat was about, I don’t recall; money maybe, or you do the dishes, or you work too hard, or you accuse me all the time, stupid fights, dingbat fights, the sorts of fights we’d rarely had before we became proud parents, washed out, worn out, our child glowing with good health.

  So there I was, at Pizzeria Uno, single pie, deep dish, the crust with that golden flake to it. And I had the box in my pocket. And I stood up and carried my girl to the girl’s room, where I peed on the stick and together we watched the wash of blue saturate the window, the slow suffusion of a pretty color resolving itself into two lines, penned and indelible. My girl pointed. “Ooo,” she said. “Zebra.”

  I hadn’t planned on getting pregnant; it was an accident, as all pregnancies in some sense are. That the sperm ever reaches the celestial egg, that it ever manages to pound its way through the zona pellucida, that the egg cell splits with nary a rip, that it lodges in the uterus and flings itself towards human form; all of this is, if not an accident, certainly unbelievable, random, beyond even our best-laid preparations. As for me, there were no preparations; the diaphragm must have slipped, and the chain of coincidences that comprise humanity happened. It happened. There it was. Mother of one. Mother of two. Two! Did I want a second child?

  Who doesn’t want a second child? A one-child family curses itself forever into the shape of the stern triangle, all isosceles. The two-child family, though, or the three- or the four-, is where you get the stable squares, the whimsical octagons, shapes without point and problem. In our family, my daughter frankly loved my husband better than me. He was the magician; I, the administrator. He yelped and rolled and built huge snowmen with her, while I stayed inside and stocked the cupboards with Balmex and laxatives. I often felt left out of their rip-roaring cub play because I am not a cub. I am a woman. A second child, I thought, staring at the stick in that Pizzeria Uno, a second child will balance us out; one for me, one for him. Let’s do it.

  I put the pregnancy test, still damp, in my pocket. I took my daughter back to our table, which was situated directly under a wall sporting wooden signs with faux legends: “Farmacy,” “Olde Taverne,” “Psychiatrist, One flight up,” with a gloved hand pointing the way. I stared and stared at those signs. I felt a wave of nausea, although, it was too early for that. It was just my imagination. Another child, to even us out. Another child, a second expression of who we were, combined. A secret. An excellent surprise.

  And yet already, I had my misgivings: Money. Time. Career. The quote I’d read somewhere: “With one, you’re a moving target. With two, you’re a sitting duck.” I felt like a duck, heavy and webbed. I felt elation and fear.

  That night, at home, after I’d put my girl to bed, I said to my husband, “I’m pregnant again.” He was sitting at the dining-room table doing what he always does: making molecules. He’s a chemist, and in his spare time his favorite thing to do is to make model molecules out of toothpicks and marshmallows. A molecule with one added marshmallow turns Thorazine to penicillin; two added marshmallows and an antidepressant becomes speed; a molecule with six marshmallows arranged in a hexagon is estrogen; drop one, and poor progesterone emerges, the slightest shifts causing chaos in the world. Add one. Delete another. The balance is totally blown.

  He put down his work. His hands were dusted with white. He looked up at me and licked one finger. “You’re kidding,” he said.

  “No kidding,” I said. I showed him the test.

  “Do you want another child?” he said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Do you?”

  “If you do,” he said.

  “What do you mean, if I do? You can’t put it all on me.”

  “Why not?” he said.

  “Look,” I said slowly. “I’d maybe have another kid. But only if you really, really wanted it.”

  “Well,” he said, “I feel exactly the same way. I’d do it, but only if you really, really wanted it.”

  “What about money?” I said.

  “We don’t have enough,” he said.

  “We have a lot more than most,” I said. “People have done it on less.”

  “That’s true,” he said.

  “What about my mind?” I said. I have, after all, an impressive history of psychiatric problems; my first pregnancy had so destabilized me I’d wound up in bed most days, too weepy and frantic to go to work.

  “That’s a problem,” he said.

  “Who knows,” I said. “Maybe this time I’d be okay.”

  In the following few days, I pursued the question like a pollster. I called relatives and friends. My friend Corinna, mother of a three-year-old and a one-year-old, said, “It’s really no different having two. You’re all set up already. The second one sort of slips in.” But my friends Harvey and Lina said, “Two more than doubles the workload. You’ll never have downtime again.”

  That scared me. A lot. I am, after all, a writer and a depressive, both of which require downtime for their practice. And while I say this tongue in cheek, I’ve experienced both my vocations—the one I chose and the one that chose me—with a ferocious intensity. Writing takes mental space; even off the page, characters are calling out, talking, assuming shapes, so the goblet of your head feels, at times, uncomfortably full, and is there room for any more? Oftentimes, with my one child, I felt the pull between the page and her extraordinary self to be too much. My study is on the third floor of our house. It sits separated by a steep staircase and veils of unswept cobwebs. In here, I do my dreaming. And yet on so many days, she finds me, makes her way up, up, bangs on the door: “Mama, I made banana bread!” “Mama, I have water balloons!” And the crusty old conflict starts again; here or there, this or that; frustration that I’ve been disturbed, desire to be by her side, and when her footsteps recede, relief and grief. This is the life of a working mother.

  So, surely, to add another would be to uncomfortably crowd an already snug ship. And what would happen if the ship went down, if my mind went down, if the stress of a second tipped me over the ever-present edge? I consider myself a woman with a handicap, plain and simple. After five hospitalizations and two decades on a raft of medications, it’s hard to see myself as anything but. I do quite well, though, so long as the seas are smooth. Pregnancy, however, is never smooth. It’s a tidal surge of psychoactive hormones; it’s a blitzkrieg on the brain. Many women find it pleasant, those lapping waves of estrogen. Some, like me, find it corrosive.

  But then there are your dreams and models, neither of which goes lightly. Many people have, from their childhood, the formative stories, and mine were those of Gerald Durrell, who wrote a book I’ll never forget: My Family and Other Animals. I read it when I was twelve, under the arching elm tree in our backyard. I read it breathless and full of something brimming, both at the same time. Durrell described his family by a blue Aegean sea: there were brothers and books, sisters and singing, there were artsy bohemian parents with poetry and cigarettes. And then there was my own family, or rather, my foster family, where I did my growing up: a ramshackle house with a German shepherd, six cats, two albino rabbits with the palest pink eyes, a raccoon named Amelia, mice bred for blueness, mutton chops and roasted potatoes, a garden growing purple eggplants and tomatoes red as ornaments on their strong-smelling vines; a house crowded with kids and babies and animals and fruits, shouting, instruments, dope, fecundity everywhere, every one of us a practicing poet. What a situation! What a place! My foster parents read us Macbeth and showed us how to till the earth and taugh
t us Latin. Their kids were strays, like me. When I thought of family at its best I thought—and still do—of my foster home and my huge-hearted foster parents, who picked children from the streets and animals from shelters and patched together something crooked, chaotic, and sweet.

  Of course, I wanted to replicate this, though, unlike my foster parents and despite my unruly upbringing, my tolerance for the far flung and dissonant is minimal. But we want what it is we’re not. I wanted to be the best kind of woman, penning her poems while sprinkling sugar on cookies, a house full of scat and sweetness, a woman at once corporate and chaotic, artistic and organized, immersed and transcendent. I wanted it all.

  I spent the first nights of my known pregnancy with all these thoughts, the back and forth, the ambivalence of the bourgeois woman. I focused on the conundrum of the car. How, I wondered, does a woman get one infant and one toddler into two car seats? Do you put the infant on the lawn while you strap the two-year-old in? Do you tether the two-year-old to the fender while you buckle in the baby, who is, in all likelihood, screaming? It was difficult getting out of the house with one. Even going to the grocery store felt like packing for a camping trip, exhausting. Two baby bags? Two different-sized diapers? At $17.44 a box? On the other hand, two together on a snowy day, two sisters telling secrets, a scrumptious baby to bury my face in. Lovely. Awful. The only thing I could see clearly was my status as a pregnant woman, which allowed me to agonize and weigh, in my Crate & Barrel bed.

  Morning came. It came in an unpleasant way, the sun slitting open the sky, the rays streaming in through the window sharp in my gritty eyes. I got up. Cold. Cold. Cold. I’d forgotten how cold one gets in early pregnancy, the uterus taking all the blood.

  Downstairs: “Wake up, Clara, it’s time for school.”

  No go. “Clara? Clara?” Her eyelids were white and shut; her chest, unmoving. Early in her life, I used to check on her several times a night, just to make sure she’d keep going. Now I yelled, “Clara!” No response.

  Slowly, slowly, I lowered my hand to her heart. Even as I did it, I knew exactly what I’d find: her breath. But there is always the fear that this time she won’t be there, your one and only, your best beloved, felled by some accident or disease in her sleep. And if it happened, you would not go on. This is not an idle fear. It’s an everyday occurrence, how your only child heightens your awareness of risk, sharpens your love to a painful point. “Clara!” I shouted. She opened her eyes, smiled a sly little grin.

  As it turned out, she simply didn’t want to go to school. At two, she was already an adolescent. No, not the pink sweater. No, she wanted pants beneath the skirt, not tights, no tights. And then when it was time to finally head out the door, she decided to be a dog. She grabbed the dog’s collar and put it around her neck. She attached herself to the leash. She insisted on walking to our car on all fours: Hello, neighbors, hello, no I am not a dominatrix mother. My daughter barked. I started our SUV. This was insane. One was definitely enough.

  Our neighborhood is full of children. The days of being socially responsible appear to be over. My neighbor Jessie said to me, “We’re trying again. I can’t stand the thought of Maya being an only.”

  “You think an only’s bad?” I said. Only. Only. What a terrible word. It implies lack, wrongness, something missing. And yet, who doesn’t have something missing? Even mothers with two children, three, four, some say they’d want more if they could. The idea that a second child would fulfill you could be as misguided as the idea that, really, anything would, because life is always lived in gaps.

  I turned to Jessie. We were standing in the schoolyard, waiting to pick up our kids.

  “Only one,” she said, repeating the words. “It’s not ideal. Who will they have to share their memories?”

  I watched my daughter playing in the sharp light of winter. She swooped down the silver curves of the slide. She held hands with a black-haired girl in bright-red tights. “I love you, Lily!” she yelled out. How could I deny her a built-in biological friend?

  Later on, I mentioned that to my husband.

  “Friend?” he said. “I never much liked my sister.”

  Then this happened: my husband lost his job. He has a chronic arm injury that makes computer use excruciatingly painful, and frankly, he was grateful for the layoff, a time to rest. It occurred to me, though not for the first time, that we lived in the shadow of sickness; we were both wounded, in different ways. He cannot use a screwdriver or hold a pen; I can hold a pen, for sure, but I take six pills per day. So, he was out of work, and the Dow had, at that point, started its gruesome slide. We could no longer afford our child care, which shouldn’t have mattered, given that now he was home, but how could he stay home and look for employment at the same time? Money. Money. Money. Meanwhile, inside the capsule of my uterus, this being was forming, the size of a bean, with two embossed spots inked in. We calculated—how horrible—what a second would cost us, extra years of day care, high school, college. I went to the ob-gyn and heard the heartbeat. It was going so fast, like it was anxious. I started to cry.

  And yet something was urging me onward, onward. Brute physiology. And the fact that once you have a child, abortion is never what it was. You’ve looked at all the pictures. You’ve seen how the flippers become fingers, how the iris is developed, how the webwork of the brain gets laid down like filaments of the palest pink. When you’re twenty, you can pluck it from you rather carelessly, but when you’re thirty, when you’re forty, you know just what the embryonic blob becomes.

  “Maybe I should just stay home,” he said to me. “And be a house husband.”

  “You want to live off my writing,” I said, my voice flat, exhausted. “I’d have to publish hundreds of pieces per year.”

  “You could do it,” he said, his voice all jubilant. “You’re really prolific. You’re productive.”

  “Fuck you,” I said. “I am not a machine. Maybe I don’t want to write magazine pieces for the rest of my life. Maybe I want to write fairy tales.”

  “That won’t put bread in our basket,” he said, still maddeningly jovial.

  “You want a second kid,” I said, “then get off your ass and drive a UPS truck if you have to.”

  Our daughter looked at us, back and forth, back and forth, like she was at a tennis match.

  “I don’t want a second child,” she said.

  “You don’t want a brother or a sister?” I said.

  “No,” she said. “I want a fox.”

  The actual hard-core nausea started, and the accompanying fatigue. At five p.m., I was in bed, dragged down, each nap a small, delectable death. In my first pregnancy, this had been doable, as there was no child to care for. Now, however, I had a child to care for, and I wasn’t doing it well. My psychopharmacologist said, “This probably isn’t such a great idea, what with your history and all.” After that, my husband said, “You know, we don’t need to go through with this now. I read about a woman who had a second when she was sixty-three.”

  Another friend said, “You could always adopt.”

  “Now or never,” I said to my husband, because the baby was in me. In me! “You better get a job.”

  To his credit, he looked and looked. He looked panicked. We hired temporary child care so I could earn and he could look. We began to see ahead of us a long life of serious toil, just to make ends meet. When we were fifty-three, we’d be scratching the bottom of our savings to pay for college. It wasn’t just the money. It was what the money represented, a life where you squeeze yourself out to the last drop, husked by a system that demands cash in exchange for basic needs, like health care, like education. My friend Elizabeth said, regarding money, “I’m having a second. I just figure there’ll be a way to do it,” and of course she was right. There’s always a way to do it. But at what cost? And why rock the boat, especially when it’s rickety? And, yet, to not rock the boat, to live a life only on the safe side . . . Risk and benefit. Benefit and risk. These are hard to asse
ss even when your thinking is clear. My thinking grew muddied. The clock on the bedside table sounded strange, a rat, nibbling away at the night.

  One night, late, I woke up. I was eight weeks pregnant now. Benjamin had sent out batches of CVs. He was getting worried, his face pale, his arms tensed and hurting. And I woke up, the house dense in its darkness, a single headlight sweeping over our ceiling, then gone. I turned in the bed and he was not there. I found him in his study, staring out the window. Here’s what was strange. It was snowing, and the window was open, and the snow was piling up in drifts on his desk. We couldn’t keep that weather out, you see. His computer was frosted, his pens furred, his hands speckled with white. “Benjamin,” I said, softly. “Benjamin, close the window.”

  “The window’s broken,” he said in a soft voice, and as soon as he said that, I saw the baby recede from me; I saw the baby get very small and distant. I looked at my husband. There was something so sad and strained in his face, and in my face too, I’m sure. And it suddenly occurred to me that either way, no matter what we did, we were going to regret it. “I’m getting an abortion,” I said. I said it more to see what it sounded like, to try it on, but when he turned to me, I saw something hopeful in his eyes.

  “We can’t have everything,” he said.

  Back in our bedroom, I slid open the night table. I’d put the positive pregnancy test in there, a sort of souvenir. “Zebra,” my daughter had said. Now I saw the stripes as just that: stripes. Two lines. Our limits.