by Kim Wright
And then, sometime in the spring of the year I turned twenty-eight, my mother broke her foot. I was teaching at one of those post-hippie-quasi-Montessori-rich-kid schools and spring break was coming up. They didn’t talk about Easter up there—they called it the Equinox Festival. Either way I had a week off and it seemed unkind not to use the time to drive down and check on Mom, so I did. What was bothering her most was that she’d been forbidden to drive, which meant she couldn’t do all her volunteer work. Funny, but it’s lately hit me how much my mother is like Nancy, how completely she throws herself into all her good causes. She stays so busy that no one can ever criticize her, or say they really know her.
After three days I was screamingly bored with being in my childhood home, and I wondered why I’d never noticed that my parents kept the TV too loud and the heat too high. It was easy for Mom to talk me into driving a little boy named Keon to the free dental clinic. I borrowed her Volvo, picked Keon up at his preschool, and followed her carefully detailed instructions to a medical complex that was in the middle of a block of public housing.
Keon was a silent child. He had no idea who I was, but went with me willingly enough. Even at the age of four he seemed to be accustomed to taking the hands of strange white ladies and climbing into station wagons. When we got to the clinic there was a chalkboard in the waiting room with the doctors who were volunteering that day listed on it, as if they were specials at a restaurant. Phillip Bearden was the dentist du jour and I remember thinking it was a pleasant name. A pleasant name for a pleasant man, for who else but a pleasant man would volunteer at the free clinic?
When they finally called us back, Keon, who had been playing with blocks in the waiting room, panicked. I don’t think he’d realized where he was or what was getting ready to happen until the moment he saw the big hydraulic chair. He dug in his small heels with surprising ferocity and Dr. Bearden, a broad shaggy man with an unkempt beard and a gentle voice, was only able to persuade him into the chair by promising I would climb up too and Keon could sit on my lap.
That’s how I met Phil. He was one year out of dental school. I did the math. That made him at least a year younger than I was, maybe two. “The kids call me Dr. Phil,” he said, and it was before the TV show, so I didn’t laugh. Keon clutched my wrists with his small hands, pressing in as if he were trying to take my pulse, and Dr. Phil rubbed his cheeks until he was finally able to coax his mouth open. “This little guy was hurting,” he said, more to himself than to me. “Two of them need to go.”
You could tell he was used to children, good with them, so careful to cup his large palm around the novocaine needle that Keon never really saw it coming. He gave one little twitch as it slipped into his gum, and when Phil pulled his hand back, Keon spoke for the first time. He said, “Sing.”
“That’s right,” I said. “It stings a little bit but it’s over now.”
Phil shook his head. “He wants you to sing.”
“What am I supposed to sing?”
“Sing,” Keon said again.
“Apparently,” Phil said, and his eyes crinkled so that I thought he might have been smiling under his mask, “there’s someone who sings to him when he’s scared.”
“I don’t sing. I never sing.”
“Sing,” Keon said more forcefully, twisting his body so hard that he almost pulled loose the cotton bib.
“It looks to me like you’re going to have to sing,” said Phil.
So I started singing. I sang “Happy Birthday,” which was the first thing that came to my mind. I have a bad voice. My bad voice, in fact, is legendary among my friends, but I realized that Phil was right and that somewhere, sometime, somebody had sung to this child to keep him calm. Almost immediately his body slumped against me and when Phil told him to open his mouth, he did. So I sang “Happy Birthday” and then I sang “Camptown Races” and “Free Bird” and “Jingle Bells” and “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.” Every time I stopped Keon would say, “Sing,” and I’d start up with another song, something always different but always inappropriate, and I could tell Phil was trying not to laugh.
But he got the one tooth out and then the other, and as I was sitting there, holding this boy in my arms and singing and looking at Phil’s large hands, I began to wonder exactly where I was going with my life and why I was still teaching when it didn’t pay worth shit and didn’t give me time to do my own pots. The idea after art school had been that I would teach part-time and spend my afternoons in the studio, but none of this seemed to be working out. The kids didn’t want to learn about weaving or watercolors. The kids were all stoned on better stuff than I could afford and it was the kind of school where I was expected to say everything they did was wonderful. They got certificates of completion just for showing up and their art was exhibited in the lobbies of buildings that their fathers owned, even if I sometimes suspected this work was done by the family domestics. I could only afford to rent six hours a week in the studio and I didn’t have health insurance. I started thinking that after Dr. Phil finished with Keon I should ask him to clean my teeth too. God knows how long it had been.
I thought about the guy I was sleeping with at the time, and for a second, just a second, but still—I couldn’t seem to remember his name. And I thought about how it had been snowing when I left Maryland but here the trees were already beginning to bud and I was ready for spring, damn it, my parents were right, there was no reason to live in the cold and why was I still being so pointlessly rebellious, here when I was closing in on thirty? I wanted to come home. I wanted a house. I wanted to be pregnant. Phil was singing too, softly and on-key, singing some song about a horsey and a frog. Some song that was a logical thing to sing to a child, because he was the sort of man who knew how to sing to children, he was the sort of man who knew lyrics about a horsey and a frog.
Maybe he wasn’t my type—he was too conventional, too big, and too nice—but who’s to say that your type can’t change? Who’s to say you can’t put your childish ways aside and find a deeper joy with the gentle and the gainfully employed? Maybe I was done with Baltimore. Maybe I was done with boys. I thought about my job and my apartment and the guy I was dating and the guy I dated before him and none of it seemed to matter much, not compared to being here with this child in my lap and this man before me, kind and smiling, with a smear of blood across his shirt.
Afterwards as I was carrying Keon, who was half asleep and clutching a balloon, out to my mother’s car, I heard footsteps coming up behind me fast, crunching in the gravel. I whirled around—it wasn’t my part of town, as Kelly would later point out—and saw Phil running toward me, carrying a jacket.
“You forgot your coat.”
“That’s not my coat.”
“I know,” he said.
And then he asked me if I liked Indian food.
Marriage didn’t seem that hard back then.
Witness the first holiday that Phil and I spent together as husband and wife. Thanksgiving is the major gathering time for his family, which is lucky, because it’s Christmas for mine. It seemed to bode well that we were able to negotiate this so easily; we agreed to drive north in November and south in December. We literally shook on it.
And so on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving we were on I-81, going toward his uncle Simon’s farm in Pennsylvania. We were running ahead of schedule and had decided to venture off the main road and weave our way through Amish country. It was beautiful, placid, a little misty. Like a picture on the front of a jigsaw-puzzle box. We stopped in a town with the ludicrous name of Intercourse and there, in a general store, we bought three things. The first was a quilt, which seemed a sweet and appropriate purchase for newlyweds. I think it even had what they called a wedding ring pattern, but no, that’s too sickeningly perfect, so I may have that part wrong.
We also bought pumpkin ice cream. I’m sure about that. It seemed odd to me even then, a bright adobe color, more red than orange, but Phil was uncharacteristically insistent that we try i
t. He said that pumpkin was the fruit of fall, and, looking around the yard outside this country store in rural Pennsylvania, I saw his point. Pumpkins were everywhere—lining the porch, heaped in piles near the parking lot, perched on fences out by the road. But I wasn’t sure about the ice cream. Later, two days after we got home from the trip, I learned that I was pregnant with Tory, but things had already begun to taste funny to me. I took one lick of the pumpkin ice cream and threw the rest away.
The third thing we bought was an Amish shirt for Phil. It was collarless, pale and stonewashed, made from a soft thin denim that crushed in my hand. The shirt cost forty-eight dollars, more than we paid for clothes back then, but I loved it.
I loved it so much that I insisted he wear it for the rest of the trip, and he did, stripping off his red plaid flannel shirt right there in the parking lot and putting on the denim. Phil’s neck is thick like that of a football player, with very little indentation, and this embarrasses him. He says it makes him look stupid, and I doubt that a collarless shirt was the right choice to minimize this condition, but in the early days of our marriage I was hypnotized by the muscularity of my husband’s neck. I used to dream about lacing my fingers behind his head, closing my eyes, lifting my feet, and just starting to swing back and forth. Back and forth with my eyes closed, hanging from this strong place.
I was drowsy all the time on that trip. On the way home I fell asleep in Fredericksburg and woke up in Durham, missing Richmond completely. But somehow I did not associate this mild nausea, this leaden tiredness, these sudden fits of petulance with pregnancy. Maybe I thought this was the way women felt when they had someone to take care of them. And I did have someone to take care of me. “Go to sleep,” Phil would say. “I’ll drive.”
* * *
Nothing prepared me for the violence of Tory’s birth. None of the books, none of the classes, none of the women who’d stopped me in the street to tell me their own horrible birth stories. The long labor, the despair, the moment when the doctor put his hands fully inside my body to turn the baby, saying, without irony, that I might feel a little pressure. I’d planned to be braver than this. The anesthesiologist showed up and introduced himself as Dr. Wineburg. He said he was sorry he was late but he’d just come from a pig-picking. I was the only one who seemed to find this disconcerting. It was like being the only sober person at a party of drunks. The nurse stretched herself over me so that I wouldn’t see the needle or jerk at the moment of puncture, but the epidural only worked on one side. I went half numb and Dr. Wineburg shook his head and said it happened this way sometimes, that they could always pull the needle out and try again, but the obstetrician said no, it’s coming too fast now. The side of me that could still move kept trying to crawl off the table and leave the side of me that was just lying there taking this shit.
In the end the doctor was pulling so hard that he braced one foot on the table and Dr. Wineburg stood behind him to hold him up. Dr. Wineburg’s freckled arms were what I focused on during the last contractions, and if anyone had told me that it was possible for one human being to pull this hard on another I wouldn’t have believed them. Phil snapped at one point, “She can’t take much more,” and I realized he was talking about the baby, whose presence I had long since forgotten. But Tory emerged in one piece, long and angry and blinking, and the nurse unfolded her across my stomach like a map.
The obstetrician knelt down with needle and thread, made some stupid joke about how tight did I want to be. I told him to just sew the whole damn thing shut. Phil was running from corner to corner with his camera, taking so many pictures that it looked like his face was flashing at me from every angle, and Dr. Wineburg, smiling, said not to worry about it, that the second one would be easier.
We went to stay with my mother after the delivery, ostensibly because her house didn’t have stairs, but the truth is that I needed to lie on the same saggy couch where I’d napped as a kid and have someone bring me cinnamon toast with the crusts cut off. Tory nursed every two hours and a deep exhaustion fell over me like a blanket. The memory of it scares me even now. My milk came in, wild and indiscriminate, so much that if I heard a baby crying in the supermarket or saw a commercial about starving children in Uganda, the front of my shirt would be flooded within seconds. At my insistence, Phil brought over my clay and drop cloths and set it all up in Mom’s dining room, and each day, when the baby napped, I would grimly shuffle to the table. I didn’t get much done, aside from making a stain on my mother’s oriental rug. Tory was a bad sleeper and I never knew how long I’d have at the table before our fragile peace would shatter. “I can’t work like this,” I told my mother and she said that nobody expected me to. After a baby comes things are never quite the same.
But I wanted to work. In the low gray moments of my own shallow sleep I would dream about the clay, then awaken with my hands cupped in front of me. I was trying to hold on to something, even though it was beginning to occur to me that when my mother said things weren’t going to be the same, what she really meant was I’d never be the same. One day when Tory was about a week old I locked myself in my childhood bathroom and held a mirror between my legs, straining to see over the mound of my still distended stomach. What was reflected back to me was such a tangle of gashes and stitches that I let the mirror drop to the floor. For a second I thought that the doctor had taken me seriously and stitched me completely closed.
The books all say that the genitalia of women are easily wounded and easily healed, something about the high concentration of blood vessels in the pubic region. Maybe so, but that image of the doctor propping his foot against the delivery table would come back to me at odd times, like when I was blowing Phil. It was pretty much the way we did things then, even after the six weeks they tell you to wait had come and gone. “As far as I’m concerned,” I said, “Intercourse is just some town in Pennsylvania,” and he laughed, a little uneasily because I could tell that I frightened him then, wandering around the house weeping, sleepless, dripping milk. He seemed to think that if we would just get into our bed naked together he’d somehow have his wife back, but I couldn’t see going back to sex—not real sex, not the kind that led you down this road. I could hear the baby stirring in the next room, the small hiccupping sounds of her rousing coming through the Fisher-Price monitor on the bedstand as I knelt, keeping my mouth as tight as I could, keeping pressure to the point of giving myself a headache, and prayed that he would come before she cried, that I would manage to get one thing done that day.
Phil had worn his collarless denim shirt for Tory’s birth. A few days after the baby and I finally moved back from Mom’s house I found the shirt wadded in the closet. I was shocked by the smell. I hadn’t realized how much he’d sweated during the delivery, and the shirt had been marinating for over two weeks. It was his favorite, my favorite too, and I felt compelled to save it.
I washed the shirt, using an extra scoop of Tide, and then I washed it again. It was the first time I had ever done his laundry. We’d more or less taken care of our own stuff the first year we’d been married, but now that I was going to stay home with the baby it seemed logical that I would do these little chores for him… Only logical, and yet I knew that I had suffered, through no fault of my own, a sudden and drastic drop in street value, like the way they say a car’s worth goes down five thousand the minute you drive it off the dealer’s lot.
I hung the shirt in his closet, but when Phil saw it he said that the odor was still there and we should throw it out.
I told him he was being ridiculous. The shirt didn’t smell, how could it? He didn’t argue, but he never wore the Amish shirt again.
Was I happy? Hard to say, even now, and maybe that’s the wrong question. I healed. Over time, I learned the art of the nap. I would catch myself sometimes singing little songs, even when the baby wasn’t in the room. I developed that great gift of wives and mothers: I began to see the beauty in small things. Mothers are like Zen monks who have no choice but to live in t
he present moment. I’d watch green beans rising through the bubbling water of a silver pot and stand paralyzed at the sight, thinking that it was beautiful, like some type of moving art that I would never capture and never fully see again. Kelly would call to tell me she’d spent the night in the rain making love on a picnic table and then she would say, very gently, “What are you doing?”
I would stand looking down into the violently roiling water beneath me. I would say, “Nothing.” And I would exhale in a kind of prayer.
One day, on an impulse, I pulled into the parking lot of a church with a sign saying they had a Mom’s Morning Out. Tory was getting old enough to leave her for a few hours every week and it was thrilling even to consider the possibility of running errands alone. Grocery shopping without her carrier taking up the whole basket. Getting my hair cut without having to make the stylist cut off the dryer every few minutes so I could tell if she had started crying. And oh dear God, just the thought of meeting a friend for lunch. When I was in college I used to say that churches are cults, but this particular cult was willing to keep my daughter two mornings a week, and that was good enough for me.
I put Tory into the Mom’s Morning Out and the next Sunday Phil and I went to the church. Just to check it out, I told him, to make sure it really was an okay place to leave her. It was a Presbyterian church, the denomination I’d been raised in, and when they sang I knew all the hymns by heart. Phil knew them too. He could sing through the first and second verses without looking at the hymnal and it wasn’t until we got to the third and fourth that we had to lift the book and really focus on the page. This surprised me about him, and I think it surprised him about me a little too.
