Queen of the Fall

by Sonja Livingston

  Why, then, the pregnancy tests bought in bulk? Why so much time spent sitting on the edge of the tub and toilet lid waiting for pink lines and plus signs to appear? Why the slow tick of timer and the looking away from the little window because a watched pot never boils? Why the counting of tiles in the shower and the staring into my bent reflection in the faucet? Why the half-moon shapes of fingernails pushed into the palms? Two lines for positive, one for negative. Why the heaviness when the second line doesn’t appear? The closing of eyes? The long washing of hands to delay relaying failure to the one waiting outside the door? Why the cursing and crying, the brave faces and telling ourselves we’ll have better luck next time?

  Some say elevating the legs is useless, but I was a devotee. After shooting myself up and having my blood drawn—each possibility for life monitored and measured, after hearing the doctor say, We have a good one here, so go home and get busy, about the act with my husband that had once meant something else—after all that, I wasn’t taking any chances.

  I’d prop my body atop a pillow, point my legs to the ceiling, dreaming up a parade of womb-shaped things, letting them pass before me—mangoes, avocados, and pears, of course; bleached deer skulls from O’Keeffe paintings; light bulbs; certain knots in certain trees; the Toyota logo; bicycle handlebars when viewed head on; the blue swirls of a wallpaper from some long-ago room. I’d imagine meadows of poppies in bloom or conjure a flock of elderly virgins half a world away, the good Sisters, buone Suore, smiling at me, wishing me luck. I made the ceiling into a projector, saying no thank you when Paul asked if I wanted company while counting down the minutes. I told myself I was being kind when I said no, freeing him when he wanted to go, but the truth is that I was selfish in my grief but also in my hope, keeping for myself the expanse of white paint while holding my body in an upside-down pirouette.

  Meiosis. Mitosis. Cellular division. The girl across from me has hair like gold and the boy beside me smells like cut grass. The word tawny could be used to describe the hair, the word pastoral to describe the scent. My lab partners in college biology class. We’re supposed to be sketching the various phases of cellular division, but the boy makes jokes and something about the girl reminds me of Rachel Ward in The Thorn Birds so that I expect Richard Chamberlain as Father de Bricassart to stroll into the classroom. But the biology professor is the only one to stroll by. We laugh and scratch something onto our papers, marks made and forgotten as soon as class is over. Which may explain why I never mastered the subject of reproduction, and why, to me, cellular division is the scent of newly mown lawns and Rachel Ward playing Meggie Cleary on an Australian beach, setting a hibiscus in her hair and pushing bare feet through the sand while waiting for her true love to arrive.

  Sterile is a scalpel of a word. Barren makes a woman into a hillside where not even the bristly sedge will grow. Infertile is not correct because women bear fruit in ways beyond the womb. But we need a word, don’t we, for those times when the organs and the slush of hormones fail to negotiate the precise requirements needed to spark and sustain procreation? What to call it then? This resistance of the flesh, this thwarting of a process taken for granted, this inability to master the most basic of cellular activities. Come up with a word that says I’m unsure about what it means to be fruitful. Label my chemistry overly sensitive. Name my rising ambivalence with a cognate of Latin that means occasionally half hearted. Say my chakras are in need of alignment. Touch me with anything but a scalpel. Call me anything but a brown hill.

  I began to dream of finding babies. In overgrown lots. Stashed inside bathroom stalls at work, swaddled and lying in playgrounds. One appeared in the kitchen sink, all wet smiles and cooing as she floated between coffee mugs and cereal bowls. Mostly, though, they were desperate dreams and therefore given to cliché—babies left on church steps, the arriving priest finding the precious package and deciding on me as the perfect mother. The baby was a boy. The baby was a girl. A little pink bundle. A perfect weight of soft brown skin settling into my arms. An infant floating like Moses in a basket patched with tar and pitch hidden among the bulrushes. A gift from the river. A child offered up. A perfect baby waiting, just waiting, to be found.

  Sometimes there is a God and two lines appear in the window of the plastic stick. You check and check again and yes, it’s still there, and birds swell in the sky of your chest. So many wings beating at once, starlings rising from the branches of a sugar maple, as if the tree itself has lifted into flight. A flock of starlings is called a murmuration and the word perfectly describes the feeling of two lines coming together on the pregnancy test—so many birds rising at once.

  Say a woman is more than the sum of her parts and I’ll listen. Say that she is more than fruit and blossom and branch and I’ll nod my head yes. But say the body does not want and I will fall to the floor under the weight of a world that does not heed the sweet talk of a heartbeat.

  Of course the body wants. It wants to pump blood. It longs for the chest to fill with breath, for the breath to be held a perfect interval then released back into the world. It wants to flex muscle. It wants to touch the shape of a song with the perfect shell of its ear. It wants to move toward other bodies, wishes it could push past walls of membrane and tissue and settle for a while into the impossible home of the other. Just as a plant bends its green toward the sun, the body is a field of pulsing chlorophyll, all stem and flower and root. It wants to turn over its shadowy blue cells while humming to the music of its own movement, to stretch and grow, to continue in its particular splendor.

  Our Lady of the Roses

  HERE I AM.

  Crouched in the space between kitchen and living room, my voice swelling with pride as I speak my words into the phone. My words. Just two. I’m pregnant. I turn my head from my husband as I speak. He’s on the sofa, a few feet away, and I’m shy about the way my happiness spills from me. And really there’s no time to worry over such matters because my mother has something to say, her own bit of news to share. Her whisper is giddy. My mother is in her late fifties, but the voice coming through the phone is a six-year-old who’s just stolen a sweet from the cupboard.

  “You’re not going to believe this,” she says.

  I steady my breath. There’s no telling what will come out of my mother’s mouth, but I breathe deeply and try to convince myself that I’m years of therapy past the point of disbelief.

  “I’m pregnant too.” Her voice is high and full, and cut only by the sound of cheering. I can see with a bend of my head that the clapping is for the ballgame Paul has flicked on, but it sounds as if the cheering is for my mother and her big news.

  “I’m pregnant too,” she repeats and I push as far as the telephone cord will let me, farther from the television and the sound of cheering.

  “What?” My voice cracks. Therapy is overated because she was right; I cannot believe it.

  “I’m going to have a baby,” she says.

  “But . . . that’s impossible.” My voice is hard, a pebble against the expanse of my mother’s sky. She turned fifty-eight back in January, and apart from a preference for black raspberry ice cream and the tendency to freckle in summer, January birthdays are the only thing we have in common.

  Until tonight. Now, it seems, we are both mothers-to-be.

  “I know,” she’s chuckling as if explaining a lottery win to a local reporter. “But I’ve always been so fertile. One look at a man and poof, I’m pregnant.”

  I squelch the desire to remind her that she does more than look while wondering whether she’s just sloppy in her excitement or if her easy fertility has been pointed out on purpose. Either way, she doesn’t seem to recall that I’ve spent the last year undergoing treatment accessing parts of my body I didn’t know existed, and it doesn’t matter, because the fact is this: my mother is a ripened tree, an avocado clustered with glossy fruit holding court over a small Mexican square.

  She’s laughing now, saying she’s told no one. Not even her husband. “But with
you sharing your news,” she says, “how could I keep this to myself?”

  I look into the other room. Paul is tuned into the game. This may be because he heard me pick up the phone to dial my mother and knows such calls to be punctuated by fits of chocolate and swearing or because the Phillies are playing and the game is good.

  Probably the latter. Paul is not complex.

  “You would not believe how thick my hair is right now, and one look at boiled chicken and I can’t keep a thing down.” Now my mother is listing her symptoms. Now she’s my best girlfriend, grieving over sore breasts and tight waistbands. She doesn’t ask how it happened. My magic. And I don’t tell her that this time feels different. I don’t say that this time I allow myself to collect tiny T-shirts and soft white pieces of cloth I store in the back of the closet and take out when I’m alone.

  She does not ask and I do not tell. My mother prefers to speak of pleasant things and besides, this call I’ve made to south Texas has turned so fully on its side that I’ve almost forgotten my news as she talks now about missed periods, how she hasn’t had one in over four months.

  “And I’ve always been so regular,” she’s saying. “Every twenty-eight days, steady as the moon.”

  She can’t be pregnant. I think of my six siblings and the child that was stillborn before most of us came. My mother has had eight full-term pregnancies, I remind myself, so she ought to know. If it were not for the limitations of time and gestation, she would have churned out a hundred children by now. I cover my face with my free hand, imagining a shared baby shower, the competing pile of presents, her wide grin as she opens a package of burping cloths.

  I look at my husband to squelch the scene. Paul’s on the sofa, face turned toward the game so that I’m left with only a head of hair the color of straw and a view of a uniformed man on TV. The batter is on the plate, scraping his feet against the earth like a bull, making circular movements with his body.

  “The strange thing,” my mother says—I’m still digesting her news but secure in my belief that nothing could be stranger. The man on TV winds at the plate, making the whole of his body into an extension of the bat—“The strange thing,” she says again, lowering her voice, “is that Joe and I haven’t had sex in awhile.”

  The man on the screen holds the bat so tightly it looks as though the wood might fly apart. He’s waiting for the pitcher to let loose, tracing circles into the sky with the tip of his Louisville Slugger.

  “What’s awhile?” I ask, turning back into the call. “How long?”

  “I don’t know.” She’s a child again. “Maybe six months.”

  I almost feel the crack of bat breaking ball, as the sound of the television explodes. I turn to see the crowd is on its feet, gone crazy over the out. The Phillies must be playing in Atlanta because the crowd wears war paint and makes chopping motions with the tomahawks of their arms. They do their chant, their mock Indian chant, and I find myself wanting to melt into the television screen where I might join them and make a tomahawk of my arm.

  Instead, I straighten my back and turn from the game. She hasn’t had sex since before the missed periods, I think; well then, that’s it.

  “Okay,” I say. “It must be menopause.”

  The silence on her end tells me she’s offended by the very suggestion.

  “All women go through menopause,” I say, suddenly taking on the role of a supportive daughter in a Lifetime movie for women. Mother-Daughter Body Talk, it would be called, or Menopause Moment.

  Only my mother’s not buying it. She’s not everyone. Hasn’t she spent years convincing us both of that?

  “I know the signs,” she says, voice chilly.

  I shake my head and lean into the call. “I’ve had a pregnancy test,” I say. “Have you?”

  “No,” she answers flatly, disgusted by the sterility of my suggestion. “I don’t need a doctor to tell me about my own damned body.” She’s annoyed. The notion that she requires intercourse to become pregnant seems limiting to her, fun spoiling. Like someone admitting they’re using a hand to push the heart-shaped piece of wood along the surface of the Ouija board.

  “I’ve done this many times,” she says, “and it’s always the same, the puffiness in my face, the swelling of my belly, the sharpened sense of smell . . .”

  “But Ma, if you haven’t had sex . . .” I look to the sofa. Despite the pairing of the words “ma” and “sex,” the fine blond head does not move.

  “When was the last time you saw a doctor?” I ask, but she interrupts.

  “It’s happened before, you know.” There’s something new on her end of the line. Something expectant and so full it breaks apart in my ears. Her voice is shooting stars, all glitter and shine, and I know by the shimmer of her words and this new quality in her voice that she’s referring to Mary. Jesus and Mary. Or Sarah from the Bible, her post-menopausal body made fruitful after a covenant with God.

  It’s happened before, you know.

  A knot begins in my stomach. I know this woman, my mother, is given to flights of fancy and will always prefer a Hollywood-style miracle over the cool scalpel of logic; still, I swallow hard, pushing a hand through my hair.

  “What do you mean?” I say, my voice becoming a knife. “As in the Virgin Mary?”

  Her silence is all the answer I need. I see her face on a tabloid then, the headline rising before me: SOUTH TEXAS SENIOR PREGNANT BY GOD. I imagine the way I’ll have to explain to friends, she just gets carried away sometimes.

  She stays quiet and I’m somewhere between guilty that I’ve ruined her news, envious over a fertility so lush it doesn’t require intercourse, and ashamed that I have a mother who not only believes in pregnancy without copulation but practices it.

  But then I remember a friend’s mother whose belly swelled with tumor when she got sick, whose cancer mimicked the signs of pregnancy in the months before she died.

  “Ma,” I say, “you have to see a doctor.”

  And there’s just enough space before she speaks so that I think maybe she’s heard. But no.

  “I’ll talk to the priest this Sunday after Mass,” she finally whispers, and I know she doesn’t intend to get advice so much as to secure his backing on the possibility of biblical-style conception. I imagine the poor padre trying to pick his way through a conversation with my mother, who will cause more grief over her condition than the most inspired pilgrim in his flock. She will test the man’s faith. She will not see a doctor. And I know of no way to sway her.

  Instead I consider chucking something at the body on the sofa. I want to throw Paul a look that says help me, you shit, my mother thinks she’s pregnant by God. But even with all the expressive power at my disposal, I have no access to looks that make such statements. I think back to when we first started trying, when Paul had to give a sample to make sure all was right on his side. A private person and a Protestant to begin with, he’d hated the functionless sexuality of the task and stood straight-backed, resisting, while I’d ranted over his stubborn timidity, saying no wonder I wasn’t pregnant and crying over how very wrong and broken everything was.

  When he finally submitted and the doctors declared him fit, confirming that the problem was mine, I began sticking myself with needles and propping my legs skyward until finally I was pregnant and Paul looked somehow redeemed; and despite our losses, we kept trying and sometimes winning so that I’d allowed myself the collection of soft white things and kept my secret safe for the prescribed amount of time. Until this moment. Until this phone call.

  Which is where we are.

  Me, wondering how to snare my husband’s attention with a loose potholder or a shoe, but knowing that certain attentions can’t be demanded. Paul sprawled out on the sofa watching players running toward well-marked goals in a game five states away.

  Here I am. Sitting on a strip of carpet listening to my mother rise into happiness again. Only this time I stop talking. I let her words come and decide to receive them without the cru
elty of common sense. And in my quiet the image of my mother is transformed. She becomes clearer, without the muddle of words. She’s no longer a woman sitting in the cracked chair of a kitchenette, white hair newly cropped, something growing in her body she can’t yet name. Instead, she’s part of the night sky, my mother. Cloaked in a blue-green mantle, light spilling from her in jagged angles, surrounding her body in a wash of gold. Now my mother is Nuestra Señora, bare feet set upon a sliver of moon, angels gathered round, mouth bent in satisfaction.

  I close my eyes as she speaks and imagine roses opening from her fingertips as she moves once again into a steady stream of chatter, her voice finding the cushion of my ear as she nurses her pregnancy myth. Together we avoid the obvious. Together we enter into a collusion of foolishness, the best sort of kindness we have. I listen as my mother tells the story of her many labors, trying my best to keep sight of the pink petals as they open around her, almost managing a smile as she tells me of her plans to scour the thrift shops of Brownsville for a crib.

  Time will pass. My mother will see a doctor when she no longer has a choice. All talk of babies will have stopped by then—will have stopped, in fact, after that first phone call. There will be nothing so ordinary or miraculous for either of us, and it turns out that we were both delusional in our own way. Later, she’ll say the weeks she spends in Houston are tough not so much for the cancer treatment she undergoes but because until then she’s never spent a night alone. I will hear the fear in her voice and think of my own nights, the way my solitude feels sweeter than it should. She may hear the catch in my voice and wonder what kind of woman wants to sleep alone when there’s an offer to share her bed. I will do my best and so will she, and the phone calls will stop coming until they come again— for we will always be partners in some things, my mother and I, and strangers in others.