What I Thought I Knew: A Memoir

by Cohen, Alice Eve

  Solo Theater

  My students liberate one another from the literal. Dani’s radical performance imagery has raised the stakes for the class. She has inspired them. I have inspired them. They are moved by our parallel secrets—the invisible, imminent life and the invisible, imminent death in the room.

  “Finding the story you want to tell is only the beginning,” I tell them. “There are countless ways to tell a story. You have to find the way to tell your story. If you’re lucky, your story will guide you.”

  Bella: “I ran away when I was two. I’m Lizard. Are you my grandma?”

  Dani: “Put your head on this moss. You are my song.”

  Miriam: “Tea has been ready for almost thirty years. Grandma has wrinkles you could swim in.”

  Telling the Story

  Michael’s mother tells the story this way. “It’s a miracle baby. It’s God’s miracle. Thank you, Jesus Christ.”

  Julia tells it this way. “My parents adopted me because my mom’s doctor said she could never get pregnant. But her doctor was wrong, and now I’m going to have a baby sister or brother!”

  Michael tells it this way. “I didn’t expect to have a child with Alice. I’m so happy we are.”

  The neighborhood gossip version. “She couldn’t get pregnant with her first husband, but Michael has really good aim.”

  My dad’s version. “Now you’ll finally know what it’s like to be a real mother.”

  Or Dylan’s version. “I can tell from your sexual glow that you’re pregnant.”

  A dozen doctors’ divergent versions: This is the story of . . .

  your infertility

  your early menopause

  your underwire bra

  your middle-aged loss of muscle tone

  your atrophied bladder

  your large tumor

  your emergency CAT scan

  the story of “we found something in you; we found a baby”

  the story of the girl with a penis

  the girl without a penis

  the girl whose penis I can carve and mold into a clitoris

  the girl who would grow up to be a lesbian, athletic, transgender

  activist, enraged that her penis had been mutilated to resemble

  a clitoris

  the story of . . .

  the late term abortion

  being stoned by right-to-life protesters in Wichita

  a five-day labor to deliver a dead, dismembered fetus

  the healthy baby who was given up for adoption to the corpulent

  couple on Long Island with the golden retriever in the front

  yard

  the sick baby who was given up for adoption to an evangelical

  Christian family in Salt Lake City

  the ten-page story I wrote to persuade a medical malpractice

  lawyer to take my case.

  Baby Shower

  The morning of the baby shower, I go stark raving mad.

  That’s what they say in fairy tales, when the evil kings and queens and lonely witches and demons and Rumpelstiltskins become the story’s losers.

  I wake up in the dark with a panic attack, sweating and hyper-ventilating. The baby shower is today. I have to face my women friends, and have them see me for the first time. My pregnancy was hidden from me for the first six months. For the last three months, I’ve hidden my pregnancy from the outside world. They don’t know that I neglected the baby, that I subjected it to terrible things, that I’ve wanted to abort the baby, give it away. All that sturm und drang has taken place in a hermetically sealed world that includes only my immediate family, a slew of doctors, a hyperactive birthing coach, an adoption social worker, and a receptionist at the Wichita Women’s Health Center.

  My belly is now huge.

  I am going to the gallows.

  They’ll laugh at me for being so foolish.

  They’ll pity me for being so miserable.

  They’ll stone me for being so hateful.

  Worst of all, there will be no turning back.

  Showing up at my baby shower is signing a contract to be this baby’s mother.

  At six in the morning I go stark raving mad. I wake up hyperventilating and then screaming and shaking. Michael holds me.

  Then it stopped as suddenly as it started.

  It was time to go to a party.

  I got dressed in the black, Indian cotton shirt my writer friend Patty gave me. She would be there.

  I put on the necklace my sisters Madeline and Jennifer gave me. They would be there.

  I helped Julia get dressed in her blue party dress.

  It was a great party.

  I was finally coming out as a pregnant woman. I had to cram nine months of pregnancy into one afternoon. What was I thinking for the past three months? Why hadn’t I called on my friends? Here they were, happy for me, for my family. It was the most natural thing. I was having a baby, and my friends and family were there to celebrate with me.

  It was heaven having my wonderful women friends all together. From grad school, college, friends from Julia’s elementary and pre-schools, theater and writing friends, my sisters. It was fun to sit upright all afternoon, and not have to lie down on my left side and drink Gatorade. It was fun to open presents. The three children, Julia and Sophie and Ben, were in charge of organizing the presents, which included lots of giggling and oceans of tissue paper. My friends were happy for me. I was out of the closet, I was accepting gifts for the baby, I was welcoming my friends’ congratulations.

  It was the most natural thing in the world.

  It was the happiest I’d been in nine months.

  It was magnificently ordinary.

  It was a baby shower.

  It was a great party.

  I was so happy.

  Tuh! Tuh! Tuh! Don’t tempt the Evil Eye.

  Terror in the pit of my stomach. I’d thrown away the key to the escape hatch.

  Solo Theater

  There are only two more classes in the semester. Remarkably I haven’t missed a single class. Tonight is the rehearsal for the final performance next Monday. It will be an informal performance in a small studio theater at The New School. Each student will perform ten minutes of his or her original solo work-in-progress, for an invited audience of friends.

  After the rehearsal is over, I ask my students, “Why do people make theater? Why do you want to perform, and for whom?”

  Dani: “My performance is a gift for the class.”

  Miriam: “I’m going to invite my extended family over for dinner and make them watch my solo show about my two grand-mothers arguing over tea in heaven. After I perform, I won’t let them out till everybody puts this dumb feud to rest.”

  Kayla: “I want to perform my piece for inner city black teens and for rich suburban white teens at the same time—Yeah, right. In my dreams.”

  Jeremiah: “I’ll perform this everywhere, for everyone who will listen to me.”

  At Dr. Rosenbloom’s insistence, I switch to a new doctor she recommended, at New York Hospital’s obstetrics clinic. “If the baby has medical problems, your insurance won’t cover it unless your doctor is in-network. You could incur costs you would never be able to pay off in your entire life.”

  I like my new, in-network doctor, Barbara. I don’t have to tell her the whole story. She treats me like a regular pregnant woman, with no extra drama. She’s warm, confident. She speaks about my baby with great affection. I feel safe with her.

  “It’s getting close to your due date, and you haven’t begun to dilate. We should be seeing some action down there. I want you to get out of bed and walk. Have sex if you want. Get things moving. This is it, the final stretch.”

  I cup my left hand underneath my huge belly to support it, so it will hurt less. Walking a block feels like running a marathon. I get winded after a few steps and have to stop and rest. It’s thrilling and scary to be out of the apartment, making small talk with strangers and acquaintances, parents from Ju
lia’s school, store owners who haven’t seen me all fall. I accept congratulations and pats on my belly.

  Later, when Julia is asleep, I tell Michael, “My doctor says we can have sex . . . if you’re interested.”

  “I’m very interested!”

  We haven’t made love for three months. We’re out of practice and my belly keeps getting in the way, creating comic logistical challenges, until we assume the classic spoon position. It’s breathtaking and kind of scary when he enters me, and I’m soon transported into pregnancy-hormone-enhanced ecstasy. I lie in Michael’s arms in post-coital bliss.

  “I kept thinking, ‘I’m going to push the baby out with my orgasms.’ ”

  “And I kept thinking, ‘What if I’m poking the baby in the eye with my penis?’ ”

  “No, you didn’t think that.”

  “Yes, I did. I was worried my penis was poking her in the eye.”

  The next moment we’re laughing our heads off, and I can’t decide which I love more, laughing with Michael or making love with him, and I’m so glad I don’t have to choose. I hope our baby will share our goofball sense of humor. Our laughter wakes Julia, and we cover ourselves with a blanket just in time, as she staggers into our room bleary-eyed to find out what’s so funny.

  Scene 10

  Labor

  Sunday morning, after two days off bed rest, I woke up at 6:30 a.m. with contractions every five minutes.

  This was going to be okay. I didn’t know what would happen the day after the birth, but this was today, I knew exactly what was going to happen and what I was going to do. I wasn’t waffling or ambivalent, thinking of alternatives and ways of backing out. I was absolutely clear that I was going to have this baby. It was December 11, not December 31. I wouldn’t have to face the Y2K global meltdown.

  We hadn’t chosen a name yet, because we couldn’t agree on one. We had agreed to choose a name after the baby was born.

  Tomorrow was my solo theater students’ end-of-semester performance. I asked my substitute to cover.

  I called Barbara. Alas, today and tomorrow were her days off. I was assigned Dr. Tara Carson—a gorgeous young doctor whom Michael and I had met at the clinic’s open house. Tara had chatted with us at the open house, and made us both nervous when she bragged that she was dating a New York Mets pitcher, and had stayed out partying all night before working a two-day shift. All the doctors at the New York Hospital obstetrics department looked like glamorous TV actors—understudies for the cast of ER. Tara would be appearing tonight in the role of my ob-gyn.

  Per Tara’s instructions, I called her with updates on the contractions throughout the day. She told me to spend Sunday night at home and come in Monday, or when the contractions were really hurting, whichever came first. Michael brought Julia over to Sophie’s, where Susan and Mark would take care of her.

  I had a sleepless night—every contraction woke me. Monday at sunrise the contractions were quite painful. Michael and I cabbed to New York Hospital on York Avenue and Sixty-seventh Street.

  “Your cervix hasn’t even begun to dilate,” Tara scolded, as if I hadn’t turned in my homework on time. Without warning, she dilated me by hand, using her fingers to stretch open the os, the hole in the cervix.

  “OW! OW! THAT HURTS,” I screamed, as I felt my cervix ripping.

  “You ain’t seen nothing yet. Now you guys walk back to the West Side, and keep walking. You got to get this thing moving. You’re nowhere near ready to deliver. Don’t come back until the contractions hurt so much you can’t stand it anymore.”

  We walked the width of Manhattan, from the hospital by the East River, to Riverside Park on the Hudson River. Every few minutes, as a contraction rolled through, I groaned and doubled over, using Michael’s shoulder for support. We walked in Riverside Park, with a halting rhythm—walk, contraction, groan, double over, walk, contraction, groan, double over—punctuated by conversations with curious and congratulatory passersby, my spontaneous nosebleed, and a sunset over New Jersey.

  We went to a coffee shop on Broadway for dinner, an absurd place to be in labor but Michael was very hungry, and in the ever-shorter moments between contractions, so was I. Squeezed into our booth at Café 83, with barely room for my stomach, I tried to silence my groans during contractions, between bites of a cheeseburger.

  “When are you due?” asked the young blond sitting with her boyfriend at the table next to us.

  “RIGHT NOW!” I roared through gritted teeth, gripping the table at an especially intense contraction. The couple quickly paid their check and left.

  “You just ended their relationship,” Michael teased. “They were probably talking about how much they both want children, but you put the kibosh on that, didn’t you?”

  Now I was laughing while having a contraction, a bizarre sensation. Michael enjoyed the spectacle, so he kept up a comic monologue while I alternated between laughing and roaring in pain. The biological imperative of going into labor, the adrenalin, the hormones, the cheeseburger, Michael’s sense of humor, the absurdity of the situation released me from my obsessive fears.

  At six in the evening, when I couldn’t stand the pain, we went back to the hospital. I clung to the reception desk, doubled over, as my next contraction reached a new level of intensity.

  “That’s more like it,” said Tara cheerily.

  The nurse helped me into a cotton gown and into a high-tech bed, surrounded by machines and monitors. The young Indian anesthesiologist came in to give me an epidural. “I am going to insert a catheter into the space at the bottom of your spine. For one-out-of-a-hundred women, it will feel as though you have been shot in the back with a gun. If that is the case, your left leg will kick involuntarily.”

  It felt like I was shot in the back with a gun, and my left leg kicked involuntarily. I’m the queen of the one-in-a-hundred chance. I guess dying in childbirth is next. The pain quickly subsided, but the violence of the sensation made my body pessimistic. I distracted myself from this newest trauma by wondering if the baby would have a penis or something penislike. What would it look like? Would it be an entirely new genital shape? Would it be nameable? Would the baby be nameable?

  Michael stayed close to me. He charmed the nurses. He held water to my lips when I was thirsty. He stroked my shoulders and held my hand. He talked to me, and stopped talking when I wanted him to stop talking. He was fantastic. I felt entirely distant from him.

  “I want to ask you a favor,” I said to the nurse. “When the baby is born, please don’t say ‘It’s a boy!’ or ‘It’s a girl.’ Dr. Christopoulos, from endocrinology, is going to look at the baby’s genitals when it’s born. I’d like her to tell me the baby’s gender.”

  The nurse noted this on my chart, in case the next day’s nurse switched with her at midnight before the baby was born. I told her I hoped she didn’t have to show it to the nurse on the next shift. My contractions had started thirty-six hours ago. I was running out of steam, and I wanted to get it over with.

  Things weren’t moving as quickly as my doctor wanted. She gave me a drug to induce labor. The epidural started wearing off. They dripped more into me. I hadn’t slept for two days. I hadn’t moved for three months—until today when I walked for miles. I watched my contractions on the monitor. Hours passed. The epidural wore off, and it hurt like hell. They dripped more painkiller and I had no awareness of my lower body. It wore off again, so that all I was conscious of was the pain in my lower body. Numb. Pain. Numb. Pain. Numb. Pain. . . . This cycle repeated, part of a polyrhythmic symphony of lights and beeps and contractions, my heartbeat, the baby’s heartbeat, my blood pressure tests, the crescendo and decrescendo of pain. Ten hours had passed since the epidural. At four in the morning I asked for a C-section. Tara said no.

  The nurse told me to push. Michael told me to push. I couldn’t push. I was numb from the waist down. The idea of pushing had no physical meaning for me. I didn’t know how or where to push. Tara told the nurse to stop the painkillers. I felt
the pain and the baby and the contractions, but I had no strength, and the pain was frightening. I didn’t know what I was pushing. My useless attempts to push bore no resemblance to the Lamaze-approved labor of the three women with different-colored hair in the movie.

  “I’m going to give you an episiotomy.” I heard the snip through flesh. I was sad for my vagina. Two nurses and a doctor and Michael screamed at me to push. “I don’t know what to push, I don’t know where to push,” I cried.

  “Push like you’re having an enormous bowel movement!” ordered Tara.

  I could work with that. I had forty-five-years experience shit-ting, and my body remembered how to do it, even paralyzed from the waist down. “C’mon, c’mon, harder, like you’re having an enormous shit!” No painkiller. “Keep pushing! Just Push Push Push Push Push Push.”

  At 5:30 a.m., on December 13, 1999, forty-seven hours after the contractions started, I gave birth.

  “Umbilical cord’s around her neck. . . . She’s okay. She’s breathing.”

  ACT III

  An Unexpected Life

  Scene 1

  In Hospital

  There was once a poor woodcutter and his wife who had longed for many years for a child. Finally a tiny little girl was born to them. “She’s no ordinary child,” her father declared when he saw how small she was. “She must have come from the fairy world.” His wife nodded as she stroked the tiny form beside her on the pillow. “Why, she’s no bigger than your little finger,” she said. And from that day the child was known as Little Finger.

  —From Little Finger of the Watermelon Patch, a Vietnamese tale