Poor Your Soul

by Mira Ptacin

  But for now, Dad will pull our car onto the highway and drive us home. Through the back window, I will stare behind me at the airport as the bustling runway steadily diminishes into a thin, sharp, quiet line.

  three

  I wasn’t planning on having children, or at least I hadn’t given it much thought. Even though I’d been taking birth control pills and never missed a single dose, I still got pregnant. (I’m that 1 percent.)

  I was a graduate student in Sarah Lawrence College’s creative writing program. It’s fair to say that the hefty tuition influenced me to work that much harder, but that’s not what caused me to walk the thin line between ambition and obsession about my success. It was my neurotic tendency to avoid anything that would cause my parents to worry. They didn’t want me to go to graduate school for art, and so I felt compelled to work that much harder so they wouldn’t worry. They’d had enough anxiety in their lifetime. Plus, my mother had recently had a stent placed in her heart. I didn’t want to do anything that would bring her stress.

  Even so, age twenty-seven, September 2007, I bought a Metro North ticket from Grand Central Station to Bronxville, New York, and, twenty-seven minutes later, arrived at Sarah Lawrence College—the institution that, weeks later, was to be voted, once again, the most expensive college in the United States. Four months after that, I’d meet the man I was going to marry, despite the fact that on the train ride to my first day of class, I promised myself this: I would go, I would fight, and I would win. This meant no dating and no codependencies while I earned my MFA. No intimacies other than literary ones with my new classmates. Outside of graduate school, when the girls of Sarah Lawrence did hang out socially, we spent our time doing nerdily fruitful things like attending poetry readings or going to book launches where the most harm done was too many glasses of red wine remunerated by our Grad PLUS loans. No distractions until I’d earned my MFA, sold a book, and come up with a brilliant way to quickly pay off my loans. No relationships, at least not until the choice between purchasing a MetroCard and buying groceries was an old memory, fuzzy as mold. Which, back then, and on bread, I’d probably have eaten.

  It meant having to leave my desk and interrupt my work. I wanted success and there was urgency about it. My mother always told my siblings and me, “First you work hard, then you play hard.” This mantra worked for her quite well, so I reckoned the stricter I was about my labor, the quicker the payoff would arrive. When I wasn’t in class, I was sharpening my sword. I read and studied during the day and I wrote at night. Sometimes, I’d forget to eat. I would get annoyed when I had to go to the bathroom. I isolated myself. There was an imaginary hourglass sitting on my shoulder: the sooner I could soothe my parents’ discomfort, the sooner they’d be at peace with my decision to pursue my own path. I wouldn’t be causing any heart attacks. I didn’t know exactly how to achieve the sort of success I was after, but until it came, all I had to do was placate them. This is what I was thinking at the time.

  “You should go online.”

  I was home for winter break after finishing my first semester, and we were hiking—Dad, me, and our family dogs, Yolanda and Gonzo—in the Kellogg Forest the day after Christmas. Despite being bundled up in layers of mismatched wool, flannel, and polyester, I couldn’t cover up the fact that I was pale and slightly underweight and possibly in the beginning stages of becoming a recluse.

  “It’s important for you to meet other people, Mira,” my dad told me. “Get yourself out there and connect with others. No man is an island.”

  “But I don’t want to meet anyone. I’m too busy with school,” I said. “Plus, I’m not going to shop for a boyfriend the same way I shop for my shoes.”

  “The older you get, the harder it’s going to be to meet people. Several of my patients at the office have done it. You should give it a shot.”

  I wanted to suggest that those patients were probably divorced and over fifty, or that even if I were looking for companionship, it wouldn’t be some mail-order mate, but I said nothing.

  “Just a thought, Mira. Just a thought.”

  The next day, my mother found him. The minute I had given them permission to create an account for me, which, really, was so that my mom and sister could “window-shop for boys,” the two of them were glued to the computer screen, browsing men and reading their online profiles aloud to me as I ignored them from the other room. I was making guacamole.

  Big sister yells: “This one has a dog!”

  Mother declares: “Yes. Yes. This one. He is it, Mira. Good-looking. Good job. Nice boy. He is the one!”

  The photograph is of a dark-eyed, dark-haired guy on a couch with a dog on his lap. Cute dog, I think, and study the picture closer. White T-shirt, blue jeans, round head but not too big. Athletic build, sort of looks like a G.I. Joe figurine. Scar on left eyebrow. Pretty lips and a quizzical smirk. Quite handsome. Looks like he must have liked digging for worms as a boy. Looks like he’d be the kind of kid that tried to sell them for profit, too.

  I’d like it if you enjoyed words, alcohol, science, smooching, live music, art, and buildings. Or if you could teach me to like things that I don’t like right now. (I don’t really trust picky eaters.) But you shouldn’t be ugly either. Or male. Or an alien zombie, powerful in life, unstoppable in death. I ride a bicycle whenever I can. I have a puppy that loves the dog run and licking my face. I eat everything (except cilantro). I’m comfortable speaking in front of a crowd. I enjoy parenthetical asides, not abbreviating in text messages, and semicolons.

  Hooked and curious, I slide between my big sister and mother, tap the keyboard, and respond:

  My favorite place to be is outside. My idea of a comfortable relationship is not ordering Applebee’s takeout, renting I, Robot, and raising pit bulls. I have no tolerance for womanizers, aspiring Don Juans, Casanovas, wandering eyes, men on missions, etc. etc. etc. Who I’d like to meet: You. Or Abe Lincoln. Or Mark Twain. Or Sir-Mix-a-Lot. Or world peace.

  I remember what I was wearing the night I first met Andrew: a long black dress, brown boots, and a rose-colored wool coat—a gift from my mother. She said it made me look French. The ends of my hair tickled the tops of my shoulders, and I wore red lipstick, just as my mother had instructed me to do. It was January 4th, 2008. A Friday night. I did not shave my legs.

  Ten minutes before we were supposed to meet in Union Square, I slipped away into a bookstore. I wasn’t sure if I planned on ever leaving it, either; I was just being a coward. I wasn’t sure if I was brave enough to go meet this stranger, so a voice in my head suggested that I buy a book instead. I needed a book. I had to get a book, and I would stay in the bookstore until I found the perfect book for that moment. He could wait.

  The idea of Internet dating—digital window-shopping for a mate—struck me as extremely bizarre. The guileless logic of it, of paying money to proclaim your vulnerability and your need for care, was difficult for me to take seriously. I am looking for love. I was embarrassed. I am in need of love. I just wasn’t sure if I was willing to let someone else, some complete stranger from the Internet, know this about me. I am in need of love. I was. But who isn’t?

  Then I spotted the book: Pigeons: The Fascinating Saga of the World’s Most Revered and Reviled Bird.

  At 8:00 p.m., precisely when my blind date was leaning up against a brick wall outside a noodle joint on 17th Street north of Union Square, perhaps rubbing his hands to stay warm or checking his phone and trying to look like Mr. Cool in case I saw him first, I was inside a warm, crowded bookstore on Union Square and East 17th Street, reading about pigeons, trying not to think about what was going to happen next.

  Pigeons have a fixed, profound, and nearly incontrovertible sense of home. Pigeons have been worshipped as fertility goddesses and revered as symbols of peace. It was a pigeon that delivered the results of the first Olympics in 776 B.C. and a pigeon that first brought the news of Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo
.

  At 8:10 p.m., using my graduate school loan money, I purchased the book, slipped it into my bag, and walked out of the bookstore and into a gusty winter night. Two minutes later, I stepped onto one specific square of sidewalk in New York City where I met my match, Andrew Michael Jackson, my first and last blind date. I still have the receipt for that pigeon book, which I bought and never read.

  Three months later, I am cautiously aiming the stream of my urine. Knees bent, back hunched, panties shackled around my ankles. My hazel eyes are frozen in a look of punctilious concern.

  It is April and raining outside. To my left, a bathtub. To my right, a brown wicker basket of magazines—Cook’s Illustrated, Runner’s World, The New Yorker—all marked with a small white label revealing the address of the man who lives inside this apartment: 223 East 32nd Street, Apartment 1D. Across from me, a smudged window with a pigeon roosting on its ledge, and behind the bird, the superintendent of the building, tossing garbage into a bin. And then there’s me, a brown-haired, elk-faced, slender-bodied woman, straddling a toilet, peeing onto a plastic pregnancy test. My eyes, my face, my entire body—all numb. I am petrified, and targeting the stream of my urine as scrupulously as I possibly can, because I feel as if the fate of my life were being carried within it. My urine, like a crystal ball, will reveal my future.

  A one-knuckled tap on the bathroom door. “You okay in there?” Andrew asks.

  My knees lock together. Please don’t let him come in and see me like this. God, please don’t. What could be worse than a beautiful man walking in on me crouched over like this, trying not to pee all over myself?

  “I’m Fine! Fine in here. Just finishing up!” I sing. Frog-legged with your pants down, squatting like an old granny. Nothing much less flattering than that.

  I pull my underpants up, zip up my jeans. I am one of four million women living in New York at this very moment. What is the likelihood that one of those other four million women in New York is doing and thinking and feeling the same exact thing that I am right now? Who else is squatting over a toilet taking a pregnancy test? Who hadn’t planned on it? Who will be pleased with the results? And what will happen to those who aren’t?

  This is how it happened: It was wild and universal and complex. We were charged and unaware of what was going on underneath the surface. We let go, and I let him take me in. We fell in love. Exposed kneecaps and collarbones, and entire evenings spent devouring one another; we were like wild forces. I knew it was a bit much—we were just so drawn to one another; we were so brand new. Then suddenly, three months later, I was pregnant. I thought we were safe. I never missed a pill. We were safe. And then, pregnant. It was as if my body had been wanting and waiting for this and I hadn’t even realized it. Pregnancy. I didn’t find it beautiful. I found it disturbing. But can’t something be both disturbing and beautiful at the same time? Can’t things be tremendous and lonesome at the same time? Simultaneously heartbreaking and glorious? Wasn’t that New York?

  At first, I believe the plus sign is a negative sign, and a perpendicular line has floated out of its boundary. It has migrated out of its home base. At first, and deludedly, I am calmed by this. Not pregnant. But after I take two more tests, it finally sinks in.

  Next, we are sitting on his couch and I am crying. “I don’t even have health insurance,” I say between huffs. Plus signs. Sniff, sniff. Positive. Andrew is leaning on the windowsill, waving two pregnancy test sticks in front of him as if they are Polaroid photos. He is calm, and appears almost glad. This offers a tiny bit of relief, because I’m not yet thinking about my parents and what this might do to them. I’m not thinking about disappointment versus approval, or my mother’s heart. I’m just trying to formulate some kind of game plan, to treat this like a math problem. We look at all the other options and possibilities with barely a glance and say “no.” Abortion? We don’t consider this a mistake; we don’t want to wipe anything out. Adoption? Neither one of us can fathom having our creation disappear into the same world we live in. It would be like having our very own ghost.

  “I love you,” Andrew says.

  “I love you, too.”

  Behind us, the sound of children shrieking on a playground is making me want to smoke a cigarette, or maybe three hundred, all at once. It is spring, and I am not ready to be a mom. I don’t want to be a parent. But now I am. There is a baby growing inside my uterus and there is nothing I can do about that right now, so I will not smoke cigarettes and I will not drink alcohol and I will not do anything that may cause the least bit of harm to this tiny speckle of a human I’m nurturing. Is that what they call motherly instinct? Maybe jumps onto my lap and licks my face. I will do my best here. It is my responsibility.

  “Your dad is a doctor. Can’t he help?”

  I can’t think about my father, or my mother right now. Dad used to be in the seminary. He’s from a large Catholic family. And my mom is Eastern European, and intimidating.

  “My dad practices in Michigan,” I say. “And I’m not asking my parents for help. Or money.”

  “What about your school’s health insurance?” Andrew asks. He sits down next to me on the couch. “Doesn’t health insurance just come in the student package?”

  I explain: I have no health insurance because I opted out of Sarah Lawrence’s plan so I could save an extra two thousand bucks. I was willing to risk it. I have an excellent immune system. I wear a bike helmet. I hadn’t planned on getting pregnant.

  “Medicaid,” I decide. “That’s the only option I can think of. Tomorrow I will go to the Medicaid office and fill out an application.” It’s government assistance or no health care. They can’t turn us away. Medicaid. Just until we figure out what to do next.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Andrew says.

  “Don’t say that. You don’t know that,” I tell him. You can’t go back from here, but you can always go away. Things will never be like what they were five minutes ago, two hours ago, two weeks ago, one month ago. Nothing will be the same from here on out. We’re not just dating anymore. The simple stuff is over. We won’t be fresh anymore—we’ll be raw.

  “I love you. We’ll get through this together,” Andrew says.

  “I love you, too.” And I do.

  It’s only been three months since we met, but we are in love, and we can’t really comprehend much more than that, so love is what we agree on. Love, and just letting the rest unfold on its own, seems to be the right choice for now.

  four

  Eight days or so later, Andrew asks me to be his wife. When he proposes, we are at the edge of a pond at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden. It’s afternoon in early April, right in the prime of the cherry blossom season.

  Everything about the day feels like an impressionist painting—vibrant, floral, blurry, blue. I am feeling hopeful, confident. No one knows the secret that Andrew and I are sharing. We saunter through the gardens without motives, or so it seems. Every time we see a baby or a family, we softly elbow one another and smile, even though I’m not exactly sure what I mean by it. But I feel strong.

  We walk through the Japanese gardens and stop to look into a pond. The carp are thick and surreal. Scattered families of Hasidic Jews are regrouping, and groundsmen impatiently shuffle loners toward the exit gates. It is closing time. Andrew and I finish a loop around the water.

  “We should go,” I say.

  “Just a second.” He has stopped, and is staring at a bird on the shore. I watch him for several seconds, and then he turns to look at me. He put his hands on my shoulders, steadies me, then kneels down. “Will you marry me?” he asks, and I give a short, breathy laugh.

  “Get up,” I say, feeling embarrassed. “Get up.” I don’t like seeing him on his knee, proposing. It’s almost like we are acting out a script. He looks so vulnerable down there, almost naïve; it makes me feel sorry for him, love him more. At the same time, this act—the act of getting
engaged—is being performed in such a generic, old-fashioned, archaic way that it makes me feel uncomfortable. It is not ours.

  “I love you,” I say, pulling him up and telling him that of course I will marry him. We kiss, hug, and ask a stranger to take our picture. The photo still sits on my parents’ mantel in Michigan.

  In the weeks that follow, we tell our parents the news of the engagement, but tell very few people—only my sister, my best friend in Michigan, and our new doctor—that I’m pregnant. It’s my request.

  I cry, and often. During the day, alone and in hiding, I cry because I feel like I failed. I worry that when they find out about my pregnancy, I will be perceived as lazy, reckless, irresponsible, selfish. By whom? No one in particular. I feel defeated because I don’t want a baby, but know I must keep the baby. Andrew and I loved one another and we had sex and the pill didn’t work and we made a baby. The question of whether I wanted one is moot. It doesn’t matter because somehow I know that my whole life has led me to this place; this is what has happened and I will have to take responsibility for my actions. The time has come for me to step up. Grow up.

  At night, and quietly, I cry because I am in mourning. I am suddenly pregnant. This makes me feel suddenly apart. Isolated. In an instant, I am separated from my life as I knew it. Separated from my classmates at Sarah Lawrence. I am no longer a writer to be critiqued so much as the subject of their popcorn gossip. Separated from my role as a sibling, I am no longer the spirited younger sister but the knocked-up one. Suddenly separated from the layover I’d been enjoying between youth and adulthood. And, even though they don’t know it yet, I am suddenly separated from my parents. I am no longer their daughter so much as I am now one of them—a parent, with her own child. I will have to learn, and quickly. Learn how to support the head. Learn how to breastfeed. Audition for daycare. Make budgets. Meal plans. I am pregnant. And defeated. Andrew already has an established career as an engineer; I am a struggling writer with impending student loan payments. How on earth will we make this work? What kind of mother will I be?