by Mira Ptacin
11:40 a.m. Twenty minutes before I am supposed to meet Andrew in Union Square and I’ve just now made it into the exam room. Soon, I’ll be meeting Andrew in the same spot where we first met six months ago. Since then, we’ve spent most of our “courtship” in the waiting room of a doctor’s office. We discuss the delivery more than our pending marriage. We have an obstetrician but no wedding planner, and I’m wondering if I’ve spent more times in this office than I have on dates with my fiancé, getting to know the father of this baby. I don’t even know what he thinks about God, or Christmas, or nursing homes, or rodeos. It’s during these life minutes I spend waiting in this doctor’s office that I loathe the fairy-tale ideal of marriage the most. It’s in this waiting room that I often feel sorry for myself, realize what I’m doing, then immediately make myself stop. We are talking about a baby here.
At 11:55 a.m. Danya is finally able to see me. She explains that around this time, the fingernails and toenails begin to appear. The eyelids, arms, and legs are formed. The larynx is beginning to form in the trachea.
“The voice box?” I ask Danya, wondering what the baby’s voice might sound like someday. Wondering if we’ll have a boy or a girl. Wondering if she’ll be a scatterbrained artist like me, or an organized engineer like her father.
“Exactly,” she says. “The trachea is the voice box.”
She explains more: All of the major organs and body systems are forming. They can be damaged if your baby is exposed to drugs, radiation, tobacco, and chemical and toxic substances.
“I’m not doing much of anything other than eating a lot of ice cream,” I say.
I remember my mother telling me once that during her pregnancy with my sister, she ate a banana split every single day. Sabina turned out fine. “An abundance of ice cream is okay, right?”
“Ice cream is perfectly fine. You’re pretty much all set to leave now, but before you make like a fetus and head out,” Dr. Reich says, “I need you to take a urinalysis for me.”
I sigh. Another step to complete before I can get out of here. Another task to cram in. I’m going to be late to meet Andrew; purchasing the wedding rings will have to be even more rushed.
“We just have to test for infection, sugar, and protein. Even though the organs and body systems are fully formed by the end of twelve weeks,” Danya says, “the fetus cannot survive independently,” and hands me the cup.
If Chinatown were an amusement park (which it could be: bright banners, plastic toys, and fried foods), Canal Street would be the bumper-car ride. The tunnel-bound traffic on Canal clogs the road and dumps smog into the air. Like it’s a game, drivers honk and threaten one another as they inch forward toward the entrance of the Holland Tunnel.
“Do you know the engineer of that tunnel died in Battle Creek?” I shout to Andrew. He’s several feet ahead of me and I’m not sure if he can hear me or not. I pedal faster and continue: “Clifford Milburn Holland. They renamed the tunnel after him after he had a heart attack on the operating table. He was getting a tonsillectomy.”
I follow Andrew’s fearless lead as he dodges aggressive trucks and whips past taxis until they, too, get trapped in the traffic jam like the rest of the gas-guzzlers. “Hey! Did you know the baby’s voice box is forming, right now, right as we speak?” I yell ahead. I pedal faster but I can’t keep up with him. He’s going too fast, zipping through lights seconds before they turn red.
“Andrew!” I yell as I tighten the brakes on my bike. “You’re running through all the red lights.”
“I don’t want to be late to work,” he answers.
“I’m not you, okay? I’m pregnant. I’m not you.”
“Sorry. I forgot, okay?” he says, pedaling ahead again.
This bike trip to Chinatown will be our second attempt at finding wedding bands, and at this point we are impatient. Our enthusiasm is gone and we are not even picky. It feels like we have trekked all around the world just to find something we can afford. Last week, we traveled to Little India in Jackson Heights, Queens, looking for rings. It was a Sunday. The air was hot as hell, humid and thick with incense and bus exhaust. On one particular drag in Jackson Heights, almost every other storefront is a 22-karat gold jewelry shop. They sell golden molds of nearly everything. As Andrew and I walked up and down the strip looking for white gold, not yellow gold, I saw golden statues of deities—Shiva, Ganesh, Durga, and other Hindu figures. “Good deal for you,” store owners beckoned from their doorways. “Cheap price on deities. Cheap price for you.”
My name is a deity. One time I went to get my eyebrows threaded by an Indian woman at a salon on Fulton and Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn. The woman’s name was Rita, and when I told her mine, she asked how I got it. I didn’t know. Whenever I ask my mother how she chose Mira, she gives me a different answer. Sometimes she says she chose it because it means “sweet and sour”—“because dat is what you are.” Sometimes my mother says she chose it because it’s just a pretty name, or because it means “prosperous.” When I look up my name, I find different explanations. Mir means “peace” in Russian. And there’s Mira, the name given to a red giant star, an estimated two hundred to four hundred light years away in the constellation Cetus, which is more popularly known as The Whale. There’s also the Spanish verb mira, which means “to look.” Rita on Fulton Street told me that I share my name with a famous Indian mystic.
“Mirabai,” she said. “She is the incarnation of Radha.”
“Who is Radha?” I asked.
“Radha is the main companion of Krishna.”
“And what’s Krishna’s story?”
“Krishna is the reincarnation of Vishnu,” Rita said.
“Who is Vishnu?”
“Vishnu is the preserver of the universe,” she explained, “while Brahma is its creator and Shiva is the destroyer.”
“Brahma and Shiva?”
“Let me just tell you about Mira,” she said.
The story, according to Rita, is this: There was an Indian mystic, poet, and saint by the name of Mirabai, born many, many years ago in the village Kurkhi, near Merta, a small state in Marwar, Rajasthan. It is said that when Mira was a very young girl, looking out her window, she witnessed a marriage procession passing by in front of her home. There were painted elephants, flowers, music—a beautiful parade carrying a finely dressed bridegroom. And when Mira saw the bridegroom in the wedding procession, she asked her mother very innocently, Mother, who is that?
That is the bridegroom, Mira’s mother replied.
Where is my bridegroom? Mira asked.
Her mother smiled, pointed at a picture of Sri Krishna, and said, jokingly, My dear Mira, this is the image of your bridegroom. Lord Krishna is yours.
Shortly after, Mira’s mother died, and as Mira grew up, her desire to be with Krishna grew intensely. Through an arranged marriage, Mira wed Bhoj Raj, a prince, but she refused to commit herself to her husband. Instead, she spent more and more of her time praying to Krishna. This was not considered appropriate behavior for a woman. Mira rebelled and became a bhakti, devoted to Krishna and rejecting traditional customs and material wealth. There were three attempts on her life made by her in-laws, so Mira fled and became a wandering mystic. Legend has it that eventually her in-laws found her and forcefully detained her. But before she was taken back to their home, Mira asked to be allowed to spend one last night in a temple with an image of Krishna. The next morning, when they came to fetch her, the doors had to be broken down, for they were locked from within, and Mirabai had disappeared, nowhere to be found.
“How’s this one, Mira?” Andrew asks, extending his ring finger.
We are in the first jewelry shop that we saw in Chinatown. It’s 12:45, Andrew is late to work, glancing at the ring, then at the clock. It makes me feel rushed, and makes me feel wrong for not rushing, not wanting to hurry. “Sure, they’re just rings,” I say for him. We are the on
ly two customers here and the women behind the counter are very excited, either for us or for themselves.
“Or this one?”
“Sure. Looks good to me,” I answer. “Go for it,” I tell him, but I still haven’t found the right one yet: something simple, unassuming, and real. The size, the metal, the maker—none of that is really important to me.
“Try this on,” the store clerk says to me, handing me a dime-colored circle. I slip it around my ring finger. A little loose but a good enough fit. Lately, my hands have been swelling up.
“This is good for you,” she decides and I agree. The ring doesn’t have to be anything spectacular; it’s just a ring. No big deal. The hardest stuff is past us: we’re not a secret anymore. I love this man, and I’m pretty sure that’s all I need. That, and an affordable band. From here on out, this is what I am looking for: simple, unassuming, solid, and real. This will do just fine.
“Check this one out,” I say to Andrew, showing him my hand. It’s not what I’d imagined, but I’ll take it. “Look at this one,” I say. “Look.”
seven
We are in a cab headed straight to Phillips Family Practice from LaGuardia after spending Fourth of July weekend with my parents in Michigan. Andrew and I left New York with the hope of starting and then knocking out our list of wedding tasks in just two days in Battle Creek. We accomplished our tasks and I felt good about it. But right before we left Michigan, while I was in my bedroom packing up my suitcase for our trip back, Dr. Reich called to tell me she found a blip in my blood test—something about abnormal hormone levels. “Really, nothing to be worried about,” Danya had said; she just wanted to let me know. But still, I was worried.
“It’s a common thing,” my dad said when he and my mom dropped us off at the Kalamazoo Airport. “The results of these tests are never perfect. This happens to my pregnant patients often.”
My father is a caring man and a respectable man. He’s a man who kisses his patients on their foreheads, a man who makes frequent stops when we are out on a jog to pick up trash on the side of the road. Out of guilt, I’ll follow his lead, and by the time we’re back home, we’ll have accumulated armfuls of discarded soda cans, baby diapers, and empty Doritos bags.
My father told me not to fret about the abnormal results. But even he couldn’t calm me. I was frantic. I began to cry. I thought maybe it was my fault—maybe I forgot to take my folic acid one morning, maybe I was too stressed and cantankerous and it was poisonous to the baby. Maybe I wasn’t being sweet and motherly enough. “If it’s nothing then why am I crying?” I’d asked as we got out of the car and said goodbye to my parents.
“Welcome to the worried world of being a parent,” my dad said before they drove away. “Believe me, it gets worse.”
The days before we left Michigan, Andrew and I had been triumphant: first, a successful pursuit of the Reverend Al Schipper, the chaplain from the hospital where my father works. Even though my parents raised me Catholic and tithed a good portion of their income, neither my parents nor I could find a single priest to officiate our wedding—and not because I was four months pregnant. It was because Andrew and I hoped to be married outside of the Catholic Church. “Outside” as in out of doors, on the earth, on top of grass, under divine trees and a yawning sky. No priest, not even the man who gave me my First Holy Communion and performed funerals of loved ones, would marry us because of this. The outdoors was too wild.
But Reverend Schipper willingly agreed to officiate our wedding. He wanted to talk to us first, to be sure our desire to marry was legitimate. Andrew and I met him in a ketchup-and-mashed-potato-scented cafeteria in the basement of Battle Creek Community Hospital. Reverend Schipper had a white beard and a rosy complexion, and wore a pine-colored fleece. He asked us some questions, questions about ourselves—if we had any favorite Bible verses or poems or lyrics—then outlined the order of the ceremony on the back of a paper tablecloth. He said he could really see that we loved one another, “but I can tell you one thing about marriage: it’s not going to be easy. I’ve been married for thirty-some odd years and believe you me, I know.” Then he asked if we ever turn to the Higher Power when we need guidance.
“Do you belong to a church or some kind of spiritual community?”
I sank in my chair a little. I was prepping a shotgun wedding at warp speed, and not counting Christmas Eve service with my parents, I hadn’t been to a church service in three years. It had been on my list of things to do, but I hadn’t found the right congregation. I knew it would do me some good. I had noticed a change in my ability to center myself and remain calm since I had stopped attending, but the last time I went to church, I just couldn’t get into it. Something about the robed white man calling God a “he” felt funny and distracting. I was struck by the image of a pasty Caucasian sitting on a cloud, judging us as we judged each other, and how strange it was that I had accepted that for so long.
Andrew responded to Reverend Schipper’s question by talking about his volunteer work every Monday night chopping vegetables at a place in SoHo called God’s Love We Deliver. But it wasn’t a religious affiliation, just a charity. Then the reverend replied that being a Boy Scout wasn’t going to do much good when the shit really hit the fan, and before the boys could take it any further, I squashed it.
“We’re currently looking for the right spiritual community,” I said, smiling firmly and squeezing the top of Andrew’s knee, “and we go hiking in the woods a lot.”
We had just about two months to plan our wedding. We didn’t have a wedding planner, so my mother and I teamed up. The two of us booked a string quartet from Kalamazoo made up of former college classmates of mine, got a caterer from the nearby town of Climax, and then my childhood best friend, Amanda, picked me up from my parents’ house and drove me to the Crossroads Mall in Kalamazoo, where I chose the least expensive bridesmaid dresses and a matron of honor gown for her that didn’t make her feel uncomfortable and “fat.” “Fat?” I retaliated as I buckled myself into her Toyota. “Try pushing down vomit while browsing the Internet with your Catholic mother to find a maternity wedding dress,” I said.
Every detail I worked through for my wedding felt terribly awkward, like I had done something wrong but there was no way to apologize. My mother had me type a dozen or so word combinations into a search engine on her computer to relocate a dress she’d found on her own for me a week or so after I told her I was pregnant. I typed in the words “maternity wedding gown,” “pregnant bridal dress,” and “alternative wedding dresses,” and, eventually, the one Mom had scouted out popped up on a website from a maternity boutique in Australia.
If you knew my mother, even superficially, you’d know that she is Polish, that she is thrifty, and that she is direct. Maria Ptacin is a woman who puts sour cream on sunburns and makes you leave it on after it begins to stink. She is a woman who will return french fries at the McDonald’s drive-through if they do not meet her standards. A woman who, despite the humiliated pleas of her children in the backseat to just let it go, will circle her minivan around the restaurant again (most likely hopping up and over a curb), lean into the drive-through speaker, and explain in a shrill Eastern European accent that she asked for her fries to be piping hot, paid for her fries to be piping hot, but was given fries that were not piping hot. Those fries may have only cost her forty-nine cents, but those were forty-nine cents my mother had worked hard to earn. If she was going to hand her money over to someone—in this case, an oily-faced sixteen-year-old with gray dirt under his fingernails—she would make damn well sure she got the very best french fries Battle Creek, Michigan, had to offer. Meanwhile, my siblings and I ate our tepid fries in the backseat, flavored with embarrassment and muted admiration.
When I was ten years old, my family took a two-week trip to Europe. We started in Poland, my mother’s motherland, first traveling to Maków, the town where she was born. We picked wild strawberries off the fence s
urrounding her childhood cottage, and went hunting for morels in a nearby forest. We visited her parents. The cemetery was lush with overgrown shrubs and difficult to navigate, so the five of us pulled dandelions and crabgrass until we found the right grave. It was a small, silver tombstone that popped out like a Chiclet from the grassy, green lawn. It read Karol Piergies Henrika Piergies in faded letters and was speckled with moss. We scraped and raked and polished that headstone with our bare hands and the spit from our mouths, and I remember that my mom said very little. I don’t even think we prayed.
We drove to Kraków to visit her brother Lolek, a car salesman, and his wife Ala. They served us sausage and Ritz crackers and butter and Fanta, and my mother got to have an actual conversation in her native tongue, which she hadn’t been able to do for years. My siblings and I played with my uncle’s cats and listened to my cousin Magda’s Gloria Estefan tapes on a rug in the next room, but I kept my eyes on my mother. I couldn’t understand Polish or what she was saying, but I remember that she spoke in a guarded fashion, and her tone was conservative. My father stood next to her, arms crossed, listening intently to them speaking in their native tongue, chiming in when he thought he understood what was being said. Mom was solemn and less joyful than I was used to. She seemed so vulnerable. It was the first time in my life that I realized that my mother had once been a child.
On that European vacation, we depended on my mom much more than usual. Even my dad did. She spoke the language, she knew the culture, she was our guide. This was her country. How badly I hadn’t wanted to go on that trip, how I worried that my friends would forget about me while I was gone. I hated my mom for making me go, but once we were in Europe, I felt ashamed. I felt like one of those “stupid Americans” I’d heard her so often speak about. The McDonald’s Culture. That’s what she called it.
