Milk Fever

by Lissa M. Cowan

  And, so, began my amorous alliance with the Man of Science who I also call River Man due to his habit of spending time on its watery banks.

  The baby kicks inside me now. I imagine gurgles that sound like words. She writes about father. Love growing, her and him. Just like me, though I am not yet born.

  A few months after that first encounter, I hardly recognized the man I wed. His attention shifted to exploring new subject matter. Nipples, shoulders, thighs, the curve of my neck and hair replaced his alpine flowers. It was as though his former self, which was shy, not at all interested in the fairer sex, suddenly became reincarnated into a physick with a fondness for the female anatomy. Where before, he spent hours examining the planets; stars became my nipples, his plants—my sex.

  I would be immersed in a good book or writing a letter when he commanded me to lift my skirts and, although I didn’t always wish to disrobe on the spot, as both his teacher and subject his intolerable thirst to learn from my anatomy was hard for me to resist. As were his thick almost-black hair, dark brows, and blue eyes, a constant reminder to me of the river he adores. He unfurled my crimson petals, and toyed with the lacy edges uttering exclamatory phrases such as, “I can’t get over it” and “Remarkable how a woman is made.”

  While exploring my nether regions he often drew pictures of his findings in his notebook. They were very detailed and as well drawn as the flowers he recorded on the pages of his botany books. What was I doing—legs akimbo—all this time? I was usually reading a book by Diderot, Crébillon or my beloved Rousseau to steady my mind. It wasn’t easy to be pulled and prodded for such long periods. At times, while he was working my fleshy blossoms and entering his fingers into my vessel, my body began to jiggle. The book fell to the ground and I grabbed hold of the Science Man’s wrist at which point he usually asked me to stop my bodily delights so he could focus on the experiment at hand. Ah, the pleasures I lived through in the name of science.

  My monthlies were his favourite time. When they came, I found myself making a formal declaration as an attendant declares the King’s arrival. Robert dropped what he was doing and fetched the notebook used to record the flows of my moon cycle. He washed my soiled rags and hung them out to dry. Writing feverishly, he recorded each day the flow of blood from my body, the texture and scent. He sometimes asked me to perch over a bowl and let the blood flow down so he could examine its thickness. During this time, he was like a boy who found veins of gold in a stone.

  “It is like being in a foreign land,” he said to me once about my monthlies. “Strange fruits, languages and perfumes are not the same as a man is used to in his own country.”

  His new hobby concerning my womanly state did not slow his romantic impulses. He rapidly transformed from a Man of Science to an experienced lover whose hunger for sensual pleasure could barely be satiated. He wanted me before each lesson. As his tutor, I not only found this distracting, but I feared my father could enter the library and catch us in the act.

  “My lessons will take place at the same time every week,” I explained. “Other plans will have to be made for our lovemaking.”

  Then he whimpered: “Don’t you see that the lesson and the lovemaking are one and the same?”

  Protestations like this made me love him even more. My admiration for him grew stronger each day, my heart’s desire being revealed to me in wondrous ways. At my insistence, the young man was finally agreeable to conducting our lovemaking sessions at a time when wet ink on the page of a notebook lying open on the desk, wouldn’t be smudged by a hot backside nudging against it.

  We were married a year after our first love encounter, precisely four months ago in the village church. It was a simple but joyous wedding, villagers crowded into the cold and thinly adorned place of worship while most camped outside in the snow. Even those who despise my father for his carrying on with women, and for not going to church, attended. The miracle of that is explained by the fact that after the ceremony, we had a gigantic cream cake and all the wine one could swallow. With these kinds of trappings even one’s enemies will come.

  My monthlies stopped after hours, days, and weeks entwined in an embrace befitting a Roman orgy. Sun came and we laughed off its advances, pinning shut the curtains. Nightly winds made us rattle our bed even more. Barely a word was spoken between us: language of bodies sometimes demands we listen and not speak. Hand in hand, lips on lips, on ears, toes. Arms and legs twisted into a spidery jumble. Cool of his rings trailing along my spine and taste of his kisses. Our honeymoon. Love is a fruit, isn’t it? Our sex, at least the womanly kind, is like the inside of a melon or apple, the delicate softness, the shape of it. He tells me this and I believe him only because when he touches me there the sensations I feel are fruit-like. I am an apple being tasted and tasting a man with my sex, vibrations of this delectable flavour resonating deep within my womb.

  “Please me,” I repeated to him until my throat crackled and hissed like the vocal chords of Eve’s serpent. “You shall not surely die.”

  I expect the child around the festival of midsummer. Robert will have returned from Paris with a keener understanding of plant nomenclature. Before going into the fields to work, peasants will tie kerchiefs around their heads to soak up the heat. But what does that matter to me as I’ll be doing some heating up of my own, lying on a swampy bed, nightdress sticking to my thighs, a head between my legs. Pain will split me in pieces as an arrow through an apple. I have seen babies come, yes, how women struggle, pushing and heaving as though trying to shake the earth from its axis. Women around the childbed watch and seem with their wills to push also. It is as though their stone-hard intent makes the baby come faster. When the head comes into the world first, that is a good sign. I am not the superstitious kind, but a small part of me thinks that means the child will be clear-headed. What if the feet come first? Well then, they will run as far away from home as they can and never return. All this talk of childbirth is causing me to yearn even more for my Robert. I must write him a letter telling him of our little nut approaching. It has been far too long since I’ve heard from him.

  Could it be that while pouring through stacks of books in libraries and examining plant specimens with his scientific cohorts, he is all the while taking in other sights of Paris such as those of the female variety? No, I cannot allow my imagination to sway me in this fashion. If I listen very closely, I am almost certain to hear these words coming from the baby cradled between my hips. Gossip with oneself is as foolish as gossip with others. I happen to believe that learned women make far better lovers than the non-learned kind for we look upon love as one would a seashell offered selflessly up by the tide and not as an unavoidable procedure carried out between man and woman just as a rotting tooth has want of being pulled. Fleeting encounters fail to satisfy me if they are only a test of physical dexterity—a leg up here, knee over the shoulder. I hope that he doesn’t plan to stay away much longer from his pretty and learned wife than a husband should.

  My neighbour Nadine came by asking if I would care for her two children while she peddled eggs in the square? She is rosy-cheeked and tall and has all the simple charms of a country girl. She held a baby in her arms, which she proceeded to suckle as she spoke to me. I asked her whose little one she had, as I knew her to have only a boy who was four years old and a girl of two. She told me that she began wet-nursing as a way to supplement her family’s income and that she was given an allowance of nine livres per month by the Bureau des Nourrices. She proceeded to tell me that the poor infant she now nursed was female and that when she went to see her she was sucking her fingers in a room far away from her mother. It seems the mother was afraid of giving birth, and of having the child be a girl, as the couple desperately wanted a boy.

  “Since the woman gave birth she’s not seen the husband and as a result wants nothing to do with her offspring,” Nadine said with a deep sigh.

  I watched her for a moment, th
e baby’s eyes moving back and forth beneath the lids as it ingested the warm liquid. Although the child belonged to another, I soon saw that she bestowed upon it as much tenderness as if it were her very own.

  May 3, 1784

  My bedgown sticks to me as I write this; my skin is covered in sweat and my mind all in a whirl. In the nightmare I just had I was a little girl again. It is difficult for me to pick up the pieces as I’m still trying to make sense of it. We were playing Colin-maillard in the garden and it was my turn to wear the blindfold. I loved the game, but feared shutting out the sun would cause bad things to happen to someone close to me. Yet it was a nonsensical belief, so I put on the blindfold nonetheless. After all, why should I be afraid of such a simple gesture? My playmates stirred on the grass, laughing and brushing up against each other. I stepped forward, already wishing the game would end. Reaching out my arms, I caught hold of an object, pulsing like the heart of a frightened animal. It seemed I had quit the circle and was at my mother’s side, my hand resting on her pregnant belly. The children broke up and ran away, which meant that there was no one left but the two of us. The flesh between my mother’s hips was warm and tingling as though something was waking up inside her.

  I remember that next my mind peeled back layers of her skin, each layer drawing me closer to a pulsing strangeness. At last, I reached the end of veins, blood, tissue and the being inside her spilled fiery light all over the lawn. Then it came to me: this thing inside my mother was I. As I quickly but ever so gently replaced the layers of her skin I began to weep. “You will die if you give birth to me,” I said using the language of my hands moving across her belly. A wave of warmth coddled me and steadied my fast beating heart. “Don’t let me live mother. For if I live you will die. I don’t want you to die.” She caressed my cheek wiping away tears. The garden was hotter than Hades. Birds sang and the sun’s heat scorched the petals of flowers that sent a sickly sweet fragrance into the air. There was no wind and the incessant heat of August stung my skin. When I took off the blindfold, I saw my mother dead on the manicured grass, her summer skin turned to winter.

  I awoke very troubled and went to the window. I opened my diary and sat there for a moment to collect my thoughts. Dreams are powerful forces that can make one forget one’s head sometimes. I feel numbness at the temples and a sense of needing to be cautious or feeling afraid. The dream has left me yearning for my mother, wishing for her to observe me as a mother also. That is if I live through the torment of childbirth and my infant doesn’t die. If I hadn’t removed the blindfold, perhaps the dream wouldn’t have ended with my mother dead? At least that’s how it appeared to me in the strange place of the dream. It doesn’t matter how it ended anyway as I know all about what really came to pass: how Margot tried to save my mother by vigorously rubbing her abdomen, hips and flanks with oil of violets. She gave her sugar and vinegar to drink, mint and a dram of absinthe. Her eyelids grew heavy; she took quick breaths and clutched the sides of her childbed. Margot bathed her with water from chickpeas, flaxseed and barley, but this did little good for life was quickly draining from her. Every cloth in the house was soaked with her blood. She breathed her last on her childbed, clutching an amulet to her chest.

  The surgeon came and lifted my infant body from the belly of my dying mother. Margot said I was first seen crying tears of blood. Along with a simple linen cloth, aspen leaves were gathered to wrap me in so I would sweat out my mother’s toxins and take in the virtue from the leaves. My father claimed that I looked like a freshly bound book.

  “Perhaps that is why you found your nature in books,” he said.

  Never did he express in words how beside himself he was that his clever and pretty wife bled to death. Nor did he tell me that a piece of him shrivelled up and blew away along with her, though I saw that it had. That is why, after her passing, he burned all the embroidered landscapes that she had sewed on cushions, quilts, gowns and wall hangings. The only thing I have of hers is a gold locket, now the amulet I wear around my neck—my mother’s and father’s portrait.

  The moon peeks through cloud. I place my free hand on the infant growing inside me. The lump the boy or girl makes in my belly is shaped just like the moon. I’ve heard it said that if a pregnant woman looks at the moon, her child will turn into a lunatic or sleepwalker, but my father taught me not to be swayed by superstition. Contrary to popular belief, sinister beings don’t take the form of old women, black dogs, wolves, or monks. It is all just folk legend, a way of scaring peasants to keep them in their ignorance and misery so they can be taxed to death and remain the King’s humble servants. The angle at which bread rises in the oven means this or that and the pattern of clouds in the sky. To attribute meaning to these accidental things and base one’s decisions in life on them is nothing short of lunacy, a condition that cannot be blamed on the moon or anything else.

  One silly superstition that some scientists try to explain using flawed logic is that women—because of their moon cycles—are unable to reason or decipher mathematical equations. I recall a picture in one of my astronomy books that shows women dancing. Ribbons of light connect them to the moon as though they have no power over their own minds. Yet there is no evidence to suggest these moon dances exist, that maidens leave their marriage beds in the dead of night to go whirling around like disturbed hens with no rooster in the chicken coop. My father tells me we are entering a time where reason will prevail over superstition, yet many so-called reasoners use formulas as nonsensical as any village gossip.

  Margot taught me that the moon is the first mother of all things. As a child, I used to wave goodnight to her before sleeping. She governs the waters of oceans and rivers. Seeds germinate and plants grow wondrously of her influence. Women’s monthlies flow in accordance with the rhythms of the moon and babies are born under her watchful eye. Her light stirs the humours of trees and guides the smallest insect crawling upon the earth. Humans are so enamoured of their own handiwork, yet they do not always regard Nature so highly. Landscape planners are devoted to the mathematical organization of gardens, fields and hothouses. They shape Nature according to their own visions. Pastry chefs who fancy themselves more architects than creators of sweets construct temples with sugar paste. They add life-like flowers and colours to their buildings that one can barely dream. Some of us applaud the man who makes a tower from sugar, but then are blind to the truth that the moon above us has a hand in manufacturing the ocean’s tides, the seed’s growth. What one might see as superstition, another sees as wisdom. How can we tell the two apart?

  In the midst of this moon gazing and musing the dream of my mother suddenly revisits. It is the same garden and the same unbearable summer heat. Where before I saw my dead mother on the grass, I now see an infant before me. No, it’s a little girl. Why does my mind torment me this way? Pieces of her are scattered upon the earth: an arm like a tree branch snapped off in a storm, a leg as small as a stick of bread. Pray thee moon, make the unspeakable picture go away.

  Part 2

  Disappearance

  THE SUN HAD BARELY RISEN when I dressed, opened the shutters and looked outside. I knew Armande did not come home in the night because I got no sleep for worry, and so I would have heard her. Besides, the storm made it impossible. I arranged Nathalie in a sack of rabbit fur as she cried and fussed, while on her head, I placed a woollen cap. The top of her skull poked out so all that showed were her eyes and nose. A fierce north wind cast hazy white bands of snow like ribbons across the hills. My legs were not visible to me, neither were the nearby trees or houses. I walked about ten steps in the direction of Margot’s house before turning back. Inside, Nathalie took the scraps I gave her, yet cries told me she wanted Armande’s milk. I was all thumbs. I smelled different; my skin and voice were not like hers. I thought about what I read in her diary the night before. What would she say when she found out I saw her most private thoughts? How shameful my actions were. Yet I only did it to be close t
o her. Anyway, she would never know as I put the diary back in the drawer under the stack of letters just as I found it.

  In the afternoon I set out again with Nathalie as the wind had died down. There was a way we went each time to see Margot. That way was different in winter and different summer to spring, as the river was higher then. I took the familiar path through the forest and then hugged the river. Armande’s tracks from yesterday were long erased. Cold air pinched my cheeks. Fingers burned with cold. I reached in to pat the baby’s soft head and felt her quick breath on my hand. Nathalie made a squeaking sound like a mouse and quieted. I tried to walk faster but almost fell as my bad leg was sore and snow was thick on the ground. I stopped on the bridge that crossed the river.

  Ice broke into tiny shapes at the edge. Snow made the place where I stood wet and frosted like sugar on the tongue. Dead grasses twisted and danced like snakes. All was still. No wind, no current of water, not even a drop from snow melting on trees. I looked down into the frigid water as questions crowded my head: What if she went away for good? Whose petticoats would I mend? Whose kindling would I carry? How would I eat?

  The snow deepened, making it hard for me to walk. Only when I arrived at the forest on the other side of the field was I able to go faster. I bent my body to stay clear of cedar branches thick with snow.

  Before long, I arrived at Margot’s village. As I walked past the houses I felt eyes looking out at me from every window. Nathalie found her tongue and let out a noisy cry.