Still, she’s okay. She doesn’t ask for an epidural, which seems to surprise the nurses. For a first-timer, they tell her, she’s doing Very Well. And she’s making progress. With each new exam, they tell her she’s dilating more and more.
At about seven centimeters, though, her labor slows inexplicably. “What if the two of you get in the whirlpool bath?” the nurse asks, and Jonathan blanches. But he gets in with her, in his underwear, and Rosie lies back against him, breathing with him through the contractions. And sure enough, when she gets out, labor picks up in intensity.
She’s in transition, the toughest part, the nurse tells Jonathan. Rosie, dazzled with pain, hears the nurse showing him how he could use the tennis balls to rub her back, and he’s laughing as he says, “Oh, this is what those were for?” If she didn’t hurt so much, she would ask him if he honestly thought they’d be playing catch in the labor room.
He turns on some music for her and gets her lollipops. But it’s too late for those. She tells him she’s scared, but she can barely get the words out because the contractions are coming so fast now. The edges of the room seem bright with shards of pain.
“You’re doing great,” he says, but he looks bewildered and overtired. They forgot to pack him anything to eat, and now it’s way past lunchtime. The nurse urges him to go to the candy machine, but he won’t go. Rosie closes her eyes, says, “Hee hee heee hee,” to stop the world.
“I have to stay here,” she hears him say. “I haven’t been much help during the pregnancy. I think that I didn’t even see her enough that my testosterone levels went down enough. I probably still have, like, at least ninety-five percent of what I started with.”
It’s all crazy at the end, the way these things are. Pushing and urging and promises made, the calm voice of the doctor instructing her when to push and when to breathe, Jonathan mopping her forehead, someone else supporting her back. She refuses the mirror at first, doesn’t want to see anything gory, even though the nurse says she shouldn’t miss this. So she looks—this is a once-in-a-lifetime moment, after all—and she sees the baby’s head emerging, little black squiggly lines of damp hair. Everything feels surreal, like the world is going in and out of focus.
The doctor says she’s doing fine, just to give him one nice, steady push, and she does that, and then there is a whoosh, and suddenly he has a baby in his hands, a rosy-grayish baby with tiny little fists by her face and a circle of dark, damp hair and a bunch of white creamy stuff all over her. Then Rosie, who is shivering, can see him stroking the baby’s back, and then the baby lets out a cry. A dim, lovely cry, not scared, just I’m here.
“An announcement from Beanie,” says Jonathan in awe, and Rosie loves him for this, and she starts to cry and she sees that his eyes are filled with tears, too, as he takes her hand.
In fact, she loves everyone there. Tears are streaming down Rosie’s face, and they hand her the baby, who is now beautiful and pink as can be with those wide, amazed eyes and little rosebud mouth, and she lies next to Rosie’s bare skin, and Rosie cuddles her close, the damp warmth and weight of her, and she drinks in those big, curious, bottomless eyes that stare intelligently back into her own. She has all the required parts—the fingers and the toes, the sweet little arms and thighs. A tiny little butt, and amazing fingernails. Fingernails! She didn’t know there would be fingernails, looking like they’d been freshly manicured.
“I’m your mommy,” she says, and just saying that chokes her up.
“Aww,” says the nurse. “Did you guys have to try for a long time to get pregnant?”
Jonathan and Rosie look at each other and smile. Rosie realizes she doesn’t want to tell the story about the forgotten condom anymore. “Actually,” she says, “we’re fertility champions. One try.”
Jonathan keeps his hands behind his back, leaning in to stare at the baby. His eyes are glassy.
“Look what we did,” she says. “Are you happy?”
He nods and says that labor was just about ten hours, really good for a first baby. Pretty soon he’s moved down to the end of the table and he’s talking to the doctor about the Internet’s information on lengths of labor and deliveries, and then somehow he veers into talking about the museum and how not nearly enough people know about it yet, and that’s when a nurse interrupts and points Jonathan back up to Rosie, which is where he should have been all along. Rosie isn’t mad; she laughs as he lumbers back up, and the nurse catches her eye and laughs, too.
“Men, in the delivery room,” the nurse whispers to her later. “Mostly good, sometimes not. One guy we had to send over to fix the plumbing in the corner because he couldn’t handle it.”
But Rosie is in such a haze of love and relief and expansiveness. She is shaking with joy, with pleasure and relief, even as her eyes keep filling up with tears. Jonathan is just nervous, that’s all, and she is slammed with love. That’s what this is like.
“You should call your mother,” she says to Jonathan. “Call your brothers. Oh, and Greta and Joe, so they can call the others! People have to be told.”
“Can’t she be just ours for a little longer?” he says.
“Yes,” she says to him and smiles. “Yes, she can. Of course.”
She wishes for a moment that she could put everyone in suspended animation, in some kind of bubble perhaps, and she could call Tony. He needs to know. But of course there is no way. Around her, the medical workers keep doing everything they’re supposed to, getting her ready to be admitted to her room, and weighing and measuring and counting the parts on the baby, smiling and chatting and welcoming her and Jonathan to the world of parenthood. No, everything is going exactly as it should, and she has to be swept along in the flow. No looking back to Tony, who is the past.
They go home the next day, which seems insane. Rosie feels as though she has spent more time in line at the grocery store than she spent in this hospital.
“Can’t I stay a little longer? Maybe I don’t really know what I’m doing,” she says.
“You’re fine,” says the nurse. “The baby’s nursing, you’re all peeing, and that means you’re good to go.”
“I can’t believe they’re letting us leave with her,” Jonathan says. He spent the night in Rosie’s room with her and the baby. “Please tell me that while I was sleeping they made you pass a test for this and that you qualified.”
“None. Nothing,” she says. “Apparently they give babies out to just anybody.”
When he goes to use the bathroom, she can’t help it: she takes out her cell phone and punches in Tony’s number. It rings four times and then goes to voice mail, and she whispers, “Don’t call me back. Baby’s here. Leaving hospital. Everything’s amazing.” Which is all she has time for before Jonathan comes back into the room.
He sighs and says, “Well, I guess this is it, then. If they say we’re authorized to be parents, then I guess we can’t argue with them. We have to go home.”
Actually, though, she thinks later, there were a few things they might have mentioned before they put the three of them out on the street.
They covered the belly button thing falling off and the fact that babies cry sometimes for no reason whatsoever, and that breast-feeding hurts at first but it doesn’t mean you’re inadequate or that you should stop. But could somebody—Greta? Anyone?—have taken a moment out to describe the crushing weight of the love she’d feel for this baby, the way her heart would almost hurt with all that love? Sometimes in the first days, sitting by the crib and watching little Serena sleeping, she tries to recall ever knowing this kind of gripping feeling, and no, there has been nothing like it. It’s got to be dangerous, all this heart overload. No wonder Soapie tried to protect her from it. No wonder Greta wouldn’t ever let her pick up the newborn Sandrine. She sits and strokes the little shell-like ear, the soft cheek, the little button of a nose. It’s as though she’s been born again herself, some new raw part of her emerging from the wreckage of her grief and her longing.
It makes her want to cry,
how close she came to missing out on this.
She and Jonathan move through the first few days, sleep-deprived and stunned. He is excellent at keeping people away. He won’t let Andres and Judith Schultz drop by with their baby gift, and he avoids the nice condo dwellers who smile at him in the bright sunny passageways and politely inquire about the new baby. Greta says this is a good thing and is exactly what he should be doing: using his handy Y chromosome to protect his woman and the baby from marauders, but she argues that he really does need to let Rosie talk to her old friends on the phone. She doesn’t need to be deprived of everyone.
He also makes dinner, mostly his specialty items: hamburgers made with Worcestershire sauce, blueberry pancakes, grilled cheese sandwiches, and baked potatoes with broccoli and cheddar cheese. You can go a long way on that food, he tells her. Many, if not all, of the four food groups are represented there.
The baby, however, terrifies him. He gingerly holds her in his outstretched arms, as if she’s made of the thin porcelain they used to make antique teacups out of, and when he gazes at her, he looks like someone who’s fallen hopelessly in love but secretly hopes the authorities will come soon and tell him to cease and desist.
Mostly he tries to hand the baby back to Rosie. “I don’t know how to do this,” he says.
“Pretend she’s a cup. Pretend her head is a thousand-year-old cup, and you’ll be fine,” she tells him, but he says the cups never look at him like he’s incompetent, the way this baby does. She knows, he says.
One night after they’ve collapsed into bed, his disembodied voice comes out of the darkness, rough and whispery: “So is this really what you wanted?”
“Yes,” she says slowly.
“But are we doing it right? I mean—God, Rosie, she’s going to need people who are competent. What’s going to happen when she needs to learn to ride a bike, or when somebody doesn’t take her to the prom, and she’s crying? What about all that?”
“I think we have some time,” she says, but then she thinks, Yeah, what about all that? And her heart starts beating so hard that it’s like the time she took Sudafed and then drank two cups of coffee. And then she starts to cry—huge, great, gulping sobs, for Serena’s bad luck in being born to them and for the prom date that won’t materialize and the fact that they waited until they were beyond the age of competence for this stuff—holy God, they’ll be in their sixties when the prom date doesn’t show up! Senior citizens! How are they going to be able to fix anything for her and make it all right? She cannot stop crying.
Jonathan holds her, he says, “Shhh, shhh,” and he says, “Do you want me to call someone?” and then he gets up and turns on the light and says, “Could I bring you an antihistamine or something so you can try to fall asleep?” She shakes her head, unable to even form words, and when she can’t stop crying, he finally falls to his knees beside the bed and says, “Rosie, you are scaring me more than anything ever has. Are you going to be crazy from now on and leave me to raise this baby by myself? You have to tell me.”
His expression is so dire that it actually makes her laugh. She’s laughing and sobbing at the same time. Finally she’s able to catch her breath enough to say to him, “It’s okay, it’s okay, I’m just postpartum.” She tries to wipe the snot and tears off her face with her hands, and he stares at her in abject fear, so frozen he’s unable even to get a tissue.
Then he whispers, “I can’t do this. Please, for God’s sake, tell me that you have some maternal instincts that are going to make this okay.”
When Beanie is five days old, Jonathan goes back to work. Rosie can tell that he can’t wait to get out of the house. He’s thrilled. And as soon as he’s out of the door, she walks around and around the apartment, holding Beanie on her shoulder and bouncing her, and then—what the hell—she grabs her cell phone and calls Tony.
“I can’t believe you didn’t call me before now,” he says. “Have I been dying here, or what? I finally had to call Greta just to get the details.”
“Well, good, I’m glad you did. I tried to call you from the hospital. You didn’t pick up.”
Silence. “I do occasionally get into the shower, but I was told I couldn’t call back.”
“Yes. Sorry about that.”
“So it went well, I take it.” His voice is still a little stiff. He’s annoyed, she can tell.
“Really, Tony,” she says, “how could you have ever thought I could get away to call you again? How was that going to work? Jonathan would have had a fit.”
“Would he?”
“Yes. He’s no dummy. He knows stuff is going on.”
“But that’s just it. Nothing is going on,” says Tony. “Of course I’d be interested. It’d be weird if I didn’t care, wouldn’t it? I mean, I went through the whole pregnancy with you, didn’t I? Would any reasoning person declaim that I wouldn’t want to know the outcome?”
“You’re right. I’m sorry. Don’t make me start crying, okay? I feel guilty enough.”
“All right. For God’s sake, don’t cry. Tell me everything. Every detail. What did you name her?”
“Beanie.”
“You did not name that child Beanie.”
“Okay. Serena Sophia.”
“Beautiful,” he says.
“Jonathan says it’s two doomed names, so we call her Beanie.”
“Eh. She’ll refuge them.”
“Thank you. That’s what I thought, too. She’ll take these names and cure them.”
“The only better name would have been Toni, with an I. But I suppose you couldn’t do that.”
There are whole, long days she doesn’t even get out of her room. Serena stays at her breast, happily bludgeoning one nipple at a time, while the other breast weeps and spurts milk out, in sympathy. But then there are the days—more and more frequently—when she gets up and, after some ninja bouts of concentration, manages to dress not only herself but the baby, too, and they go out into the world. They venture through the little lanes of the condo, Rosie pushing the stroller, staring down at the beatific face of her baby as she walks. She’s now one of those moms, walking along with a baby carriage. She’d had no idea of the heroic effort it took.
They go to the playground, where she sees Tayari and her friends. But Rosie doesn’t have the energy to make her way across the asphalt to them, only to be seen for what she is: an old hag with a healing episiotomy and huge, leaky breasts and no clue of how to be in polite company anymore.
She calls Tony every day while she walks home. She has made fantastically funny stories out of the labor and delivery and even her postpartum tears, and yes, her discovery that she is now consigned to a life of abject fear and devotion. She tells him how she wanted to throttle a two-year-old who zoomed past Beanie’s stroller and rattled it so violently that it startled the baby into tears.
“Blinding rage,” she says, and he says, “I know. Oh, I know.”
One day she puts potatoes on the stove to make mashed potatoes, and then she goes in and starts nursing the baby and falls asleep and doesn’t wake up until she can smell the pan burning. She’s horrified; she could have killed everybody in the entire building—but when she calls Tony, he thinks it’s the funniest story ever. She wasn’t going to kill anybody, he says. She killed one pan. And it’s because she’s not getting any sleep because she’s been held hostage by somebody who weighs seven pounds, three ounces.
“Six ounces,” she says.
“Ah, so the milk is working,” he says. “Three ounces of weight gain.”
“I’m not cut out for this.”
“Awww, Rosie, you’re doing fine.”
The next time she calls him, his voice is worried, and when she makes him tell her what’s going on, he says he didn’t want to bother her, but that Milo isn’t doing well in school, and Miss Minton called in the school social worker, who thinks that he’s depressed.
“But, don’t you see him, like, every week?” Rosie says.
“Yeah, but he’s sa
d, they say.”
“What does he say?”
“He says he doesn’t know. He says that everything has changed.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“Well, we’re all going to sit down together and talk it through. Now that Dena’s pregnant, she’s really being kind of—”
“Wait. She’s pregnant? You didn’t tell me that!”
“Didn’t I? Yeah, well, she found out just when you left, I guess.”
“Wow. So is this a good thing or a bad thing?”
“Good, bad, who knows? It’s made her more intensive in a way, but I also think that she might like some time away from Milo and his problems. Sad to say, but she’s not the most clued-in person when it comes to the actual kid, you know.”
“And now that she’s having her own …”
“Exactly. That may be what he’s feeling. She doesn’t have the patience for his stuff anymore.”
“Oh, poor Milo!”
“We’re all sitting down next week with the mediators. I’m going to suggest I become the custodial parent, and they can have unlimited visitation.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah, I can’t take this.”
“I can’t either,” she says. “You have to get him.”
“Yeah, well, I’ll let you know. I may need you to write me a letter.”
Andres Schultz and Judith invite Rosie and Jonathan to dinner one night. It’s April, the baby is six weeks old by now, and they know of a very competent, good babysitter—actually their niece, Eliza, who’s in college and is home on spring break. She’s great with kids, Judith says, as though Serena needs someone who is “great with kids.” What she needs is someone who has a lactating breast and a reasonable desire to walk her for hours on end. It also helps if that person knows the words to the Beatles song “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” and can read minds.
Jonathan thinks it will all be fine. “We have to go out sometime,” he says. “Americans are allowed to leave their infants, if I’m not mistaken.”
The Opposite of Maybe: A Novel Page 33
