Queen of the Fall

by Sonja Livingston

  Sybil

  IT’S POSSIBLE THAT WHEN he called me Sybil, he didn’t mean the woman with sixteen personalities. He may not have meant the character played by Sally Field in the 1970s television miniseries, though her name had become a sort of cultural shorthand for spastic changes in personality and he did have a thing for Sally Field, especially in her Norma Rae days. I’d always been prone to shifting moods, but was especially temperamental in those days, my spirits rising and falling within the space of five minutes, spinning and flapping, moving from soft to raging without pattern or provocation, so he must have meant the TV Sybil. Still, the unconscious has its powers so that perhaps without realizing it my husband was invoking the title given to female mystics in the classical world. Sybils they were called, women populating ancient temples and sanctuaries, speaking their riddled truths and channeling the divine, including at Delphi, where the Oracle sat upon a fissure in the earth spouting her wisdom in a fevered rush.

  We’d been to Delphi on a trip to Greece the year before and maybe he’d remembered stories of the sybils. Perhaps he’d seen signs of possession, recognizing before I did the prophecy in my frenzies.

  The doctor wore the sort of clogs normally sported by certain unfussy women. His precise movements and German accent lent him a semi-robotic quality as he instructed me to insert the tip of the ultrasound transducer into my body—it was a sort of etiquette, I’d noticed, allowing the patient to insert the probe before the doctor took hold of the handle and navigated it around her pelvis. We’d look without speaking at the images that filled the screen, all shadowy outline and murky striation, repeating the procedure several times a week for months at a time. It was odd, yes, though the doctor softened after a few months. During the visit when I confessed to praying for a miracle at Delphi, he forgot himself and touched me, human-like, something about the Oracle or the desperation of admitting prayer melting him.

  “You will have your miracle,” he said—a promise I’d never hold him to, but how kind such promises sometimes. The sudden flush of warmth after so much coolness spun my head, but even this could not make the transducer appointments less awkward.

  The strangest thing was the latex glove slid onto the probe before it was inserted into the body. To keep it sterile, I suppose, and maybe surgical gloves were easier to come by than condoms, and with less troublesome associations. Or perhaps it was only the fact that gloves didn’t require individual unwrapping. Either way, a glove went onto the tip of the ultrasound probe—but a probe is a probe and not a hand, and only one finger was needed to sheath it. The other four fingers flapped to the side. The first time it was held out to me, the transducer with its slackened latex fingers, I measured the distance to the door with my eyes, wondering how many steps it would take to escape. By the time I was done I’d seen more images of my reproductive system than of my relatives, and modesty was a long-gone luxury. In the beginning, though, there was only the shock and the decision to stay put, doing what I could to pretend the probe was a wand, imagining the flattened fingers rising up to wave a tiny hello as they entered my body.

  He’s a magician, I told myself, a holy man, remembering the Sanctuary at Delphi, picturing lemon groves and marble columns as my reproductive universe lit up on the screen and we tracked the progress of my ovum like the movement of the moon in the night sky, watching over it, using salves and potions, and doing whatever was necessary to make it fatten and bloom.

  The ancient Greeks believed Delphi to be center of the earth. Zeus sent two eagles flying in opposite directions and their paths crossed at the site, which became known as the omphalos, the navel of the earth. It was marked with a sacred stone and was originally guarded by the serpent, Python, which is why the sybil there was called Pythia. The most important prophet in the classical world, she was also known as the Oracle and was consulted by warriors and kings on everything from battle plans to matters of the heart.

  The Oracle sat on a tripod over an opening in the earth where the slain serpent’s body released vapors that sent her into a trance. Intoxicated, the sybil could better tune into the words of Apollo and speak them as she sat draped in a scarlet robe and swaying upon her three-legged throne. Pilgrims came offering laurel wreaths and carrying goats for sacrifice. They came, full of hope and tired from walking, putting their questions to her and waiting as the riddles she spoke were combed for truth.

  I hadn’t lied to the German doctor. I had stood at Mt. Parnassus looking into a valley ripe with olive groves and whitewashed country houses in something close to prayer.

  We were based in Athens, which was dark with the hungry eyes of newly arrived Eastern European prostitutes, flies crowding stalls, and freshly slaughtered animals hanging in shops. Beautiful ruins around every turn, black coffee and sweetshops on every corner, and the orthodox priests with their vigorous beards, but there was no time in Athens when we weren’t plagued by stray dogs. Even on the islands—where we found pistachio groves and citrus trees, water so blue it hurt to look, late night meals of retsina and cheese—there were strays everywhere. Cats skulked in the shade of old windmills, their numbers multiplying with each glance—black cats on white-tiled terraces, tortoiseshells curled near the entry to cafés, kittens batting insects under olive trees. The cats couldn’t hop ferries or fishing boats to the mainland and had no choice but to stay in paradise making more of themselves.

  But at Delphi, the air was clear and fine, the scent of cypress combined with the sound of birds, so I stopped and made myself quiet. It was not a formal prayer. I did not fold my hands or make requests so much as breathe in the trees while feeling myself open to the largeness of things while laying down my desire like an offering to the gods. And why not? If the earth were a woman, Delphi would be her belly button—the place itself took its name from the same root as delphys, the Greek word for womb.

  Sybil of the book who spawned the television miniseries claimed to have sixteen distinct personalities taking turns with her body. One or two talked with baby voices. One was a boy skilled at carpentry. Another displayed an intense fear of Roman Catholics. A sophisticated blonde spoke French and another young lady played piano. Each personality seemed to have its specialty, so that I couldn’t help but envy the way they all chipped in. Still, sixteen is a heaping spoonful when it comes to personalities—but if I’m honest about my desire to become a mother, I have to admit I was of at least as many minds.

  Years before I’d known a man whose apartment was so hot in summer we slept near the window and took turns dousing each other with a spray bottle. Bouts of love followed by sections of cantaloupe and lazy drowsing, but mostly our bodies at work before the open window. I woke from a fit of sleep once, a word fixed in my head. I’d dreamt words before, but this one I didn’t know. Fecundity. I said it aloud and asked the man who scowled at the idea of dreaming unknown words, but finally, he answered, saying it meant fertility, a certain richness in women and plants. A fine word, don’t you think? He became philosophical as he thought of it, wanting to discuss the slow curve of certain letters, the way some words pulse under the surface of things, how we occasionally forget all that we know.

  I have to go, I said, citing the heat, and he—who did not normally risk expression except when it came breakfast, which he liked very much to prepare and to share—he felt acutely alone then and said, Just this once, stay the night. I was twenty or so and high on being desired, which rendered me occasionally without mercy. But I stayed, insisting on moving to the floor where I could be alone with the word expanding in me like an overripe pear. Fecundity. A cruelty to someone who’d only just made it out of a neighborhood that held its girls not with chains or cuffs but with the babies piled in their laps.

  I’d chosen the Man of the Most Generous Breakfasts because of how different he was from the other man, the one from my neighborhood, the one by my side during the talk by the visiting theologian a few weeks prior. We’d sat in the front row, his niece flopped across our laps, her dark curls captivati
ng all who passed—including the theologian, who’d said, What a beautiful family you have, when I thanked her for the talk. Something sank in me then. I’d wanted her to see the fire in my eye, not the child in my lap. I loved that young man and his gorgeous niece but wanted nothing to do with what they might mean. Which led to an overheated room and making a bed of the floor while a new word came to unsettle my dreams.

  How long to keep trying? The doctors couldn’t answer. I asked the German, who’d become so kind by then he only smiled gently and said, “I see no reason why things won’t work.” How young I was, still thinking the world was made up of answers waiting to be found, as if the solution might be sewn into the inside of a lab coat. I’d heard stories about neighbors or sisters or mothers who were told they’d never carry to term. Always these stories were punctuated with happy endings: “Then, when she’d finally given up any chance, my mother got pregnant and voilà, here I am!”

  If there were other stories, of sisters and neighbors and friends who’d stopped trying, women who’d learned to live fully without children, I didn’t hear them. Everyone loves a happy ending. Everyone wants to offer hope, so these were the stories people told.

  “Audrey Hepburn,” someone said, “suffered several miscarriages before having two sons.” People brought up Sophia Loren and the actress from I Dream of Jeannie. Goddesses of film and screen who’d struggled with pregnancy loss, but who’d persevered and become mothers in the end. One doctor told of a woman with fifteen miscarriages going to full term on her sixteenth try.

  “My God,” I said, “fifteen times.” I let my head fall into my hands as if to show how little I had left.

  “But she has a child now,” the doctor said. “She never gave up, and now she’s a mother.”

  The nausea came in gigantic waves. I leaned over and threw up in my hands, crying at the mess, resenting the lurching of body, saying, Why on earth did I do this to myself? Just once. I’d been sick on several occasions, but had the thought just once. But maybe having such a thought even once was still too much, I wondered later, thinking I’d always said my words too hard.

  “You don’t know the power of your words,” my sister would say when we were kids. She fought with fists while I used my mouth—and it’s true that while words came easily, they seemed to me choked and fleeting things and I had no sense of their power. All those prayers said back in high school, the teenager I was having sex without protection, my period late, tears taking the place of breath, moments of high drama, saying, Please God please God let me not be pregnant let my period come so I can finish high school oh please just this once and I will start showing up on time and doing my homework if you just this once have mercy God O God take pity and let my period come. Sitting on the edge of my bed, crying into my hands, so certain of my ability to bear children that everything in me played with it like fire, then prayed for its prevention. It’s possible that I repeated it once too often, my anti-pregnancy chant, and the words seeped into the fabric of my body, making it into a shield.

  I wanted a child, of course I did, but something else was going on as I lifted my legs and stared into the ceiling, imagining his cells as rockets and my egg as moon, visualizing their meeting, coaxing them into collision with the stream of my thoughts.

  There was the shock of the body not doing what I’d expected. Failing at what even a twelve-year-old could master. I didn’t know one relative or neighbor without her own stories to tell when talk turned to pregnancy and labor. Women had children, plain and simple—the trick to success, it seemed, was to delay it and make it through high school—but that children would come was a given. Pregnancy was as effortless as waking in the morning, as natural as the inhalation of breath. My mother could make a baby as easily as she made biscuits: sifting the flour, adding the salt, using an empty can to cut the dough into perfect circles.

  So I became Sybil. Or a sybil. Only instead of unearthing my various personalities or sitting on a fissure over the center of the earth, I stood in the bathroom searching the face in the mirror for signs. It was not an omphalos; there was no sweet-smelling stream to send my body into euphoria, no line of priests waiting to make poetry of whatever fell from my mouth. The only marble in sight topped the vanity. There were no columns, no oleander and cypress, no channeling of the divine. Just a young woman in a mirror, looking like someone I recognized, but different somehow, something gone hazy in the eyes.

  Then came the day that Paul strode into the bathroom and came out carrying the tray of glass ampules over his head like a waiter at a pizza parlor. He rushed past, long legs pumping toward the trash closet.

  “This has to stop,” he said. “I can’t take this anymore.”

  He opened the door, ready to dump thousands of dollars of fertility drugs into the garbage. I stopped him; whether by laughing or crying, I no longer remember, but I won him over somehow and he apologized, later saying, “Of course we should keep trying.” But some things can’t be taken back and probably shouldn’t be, and while I managed to save the drugs, I couldn’t undo the sight of a man whose only weakness was how mild he was trying to dump all that magic and nuns’ urine into the trash.

  I smiled at my appointments, went along with the injections and blood draws, joking with the phlebotomists, showing up on time—a model patient. But no matter how much I smiled, there were times when a follicle failed to develop, or too many developed, or they developed beautifully but were not fertilized. Failed cycles, they were called, during which one of the doctors said, “We’d achieve better results if we inseminated you here.”

  It was a cold notion; everything spun and measured under the hum of bright lights. Each time we failed, I’d sit with the doctor who’d prod me to reconsider and each time, I’d resist. Time went on and the doctor pushed a bit more, reminding me of percentages and odds; I knew she was right but I’d politely decline as if she were offering tea instead of processing and placing my husband’s semen inside my body.

  “Not this time,” I said. “No, thank you.”

  Strange the limits we come to. I’d allow the wand with its ill-fitting glove and slack fingers. I’d allow the bouts of daily blood draws, the injections, the constant monitoring of hormones, the wild flare of body and mood, but would not budge when it came to this.

  “Next time,” I’d say, and when the next time came, “Just one more try this way.”

  The doctor would look at me sideways, lips curving playfully at first, then flat-lining and eventually becoming a full-fledged frown. She was nearing the end of her rope. So was I. And it turns out that my desire for a child was not as great as my desire to believe certain things about this life and the ways in which I wanted to go through it.

  What would have happened if I’d given in? If I’d held out and tried just one more month? I’ll never know because one day I sat there surprised as an ancient Greek seated at the feet of the Oracle at Delphi when a voice rose up from my body and said no.

  “I’ll donate the rest of the drugs,” I told the doctor, “but no more.”

  I’d had enough of pins and needles and the sight of a gentle man gone wild.

  Once and for all. No.

  I never called them by name. I touched my stomach, of course—a comfort cultivated since childhood, hands tucked into waistband, feeling for the soft pool of flesh. I might have touched with greater purpose, willing something beyond the body to seep into the skin—but I did not even once say to them their names. Never heard them tendered until a friend arranged a Mass and a woman sang a song so sad the entire church became lit with the scent of talcum and someone stood within spitting distance of the Virgin and read the names as though they were lost soldiers. I could only watch as the names were batted about by the flicker of altar candles, floating past the golden doors of the Tabernacle, finding their way to the great panel of stained glass, eventually slipping out into the cold. I stared straight ahead as they sailed away, telling myself they were less like names than seeds from a maple, whirlybird
s that hadn’t taken to soil. I closed my eyes then to keep what remained of them from falling away like grains of sand in an oyster. For another lifetime perhaps, for the blue undertow of dreams.

  How hot and cold I ran in those days, how feverish my wanting, how bitter my disappointment. Silent around most people, at home words tumbled forth. Perhaps I was a sybil. If I could go back and retrace my words, what might wash up in the froth?

  The path is never easy, I might have been saying.

  Sorry, my dear, but this is not the life for you.

  Perhaps the messages weren’t so much like fortune cookie wisdom as questions, and if so, what was being asked by the syllables that fell like loose stone from my body?

  When was the last time you felt as if of feather?

  The last time you felt as if you might float?

  What else might it mean, this longing?

  I might like to go back. I might like to look again into the eyes of the woman in that mirror; a woman I now see was still a girl. I might like to chew on bay leaves while cloaking myself in scarlet and sitting for a time upon a gilded tripod, listening with new ears to the work of the girl’s mouth as she grieves over the body—the futility of pushing them together, the impossibility of breaking them apart. I’d send her patience, perhaps—and kindness—while listening and combing through the scree. Together we’d wait, me on my golden tripod and her standing before the mirror, until the scent of cypress eventually fills the air and a truth rises up from the sound of all the chatter: