Rough Strife

by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

  “My feet are killing me, my head aches, and the kid is rolling around like a basketball. You stay and enjoy it. You can get a ride with someone. I’ll see you later.”

  “I’ll drive you home,” he said grimly. “We’ll leave.”

  An awful knot gripped her stomach. The knot was the image of his perverse resistance, the immense trouble coming, all the troubles they had ever had congealed and tied up in one moment. They smiled at passers-by while they whispered ferociously to each other.

  “Ivan, I do not want you to take me home. This is your event. Stay. I am leaving. We are separate people.”

  “If you feel that bad you can’t drive home alone. You’re my wife and I’ll take you home.”

  “Suit yourself,” she said sweetly, because the director of the gallery was approaching. “We both know you’re much bigger and stronger than I am. You’ve proven that already.” And she smiled maliciously.

  Ivan waved vaguely at the director and ushered her to the door. Outside he exploded.

  “Shit, Caroline! We can’t do a fucking thing any more, can we?”

  “You can do anything you please, as always. All you have to do is give me the keys. I left mine home.”

  “Get in the car. You’re supposed to be feeling sick.”

  “You big resentful selfish idiot. Jealous of an embryo!” She was screaming now. He started the car with a rush that jolted her forward against the dashboard. “I’d be better off driving myself. You’ll kill me this way.”

  “Shut the hell up or I swear I’ll go into a tree,” he shouted. “I don’t give a shit any more.”

  It was starting to rain, a soft silent rain that glittered in the drab dusk outside. At exactly the same moment they rolled up their windows. They were sealed in together, she thought, like restless beasts in a cage. Like the wolf beneath the magnificent piazza. The air in the car was dank and stuffy.

  When they got home he slammed the door so hard the house shook. Caroline had calmed herself. She sank down in a chair and kicked off her shoes. “Ivan, why don’t you go back? It’s not too late. These dinners are always late anyway. I’ll be okay.”

  “I don’t want to go back,” he yelled. “The whole thing is spoiled. Our whole lives are spoiled from now on. We were better off before. I thought you had gotten over wanting it. I thought it was a dead issue.” He stared at her bulging stomach with such loathing that she was shocked into lucid perception.

  “You disgust me,” she said quietly. “Frankly, you always have and probably always will.” She didn’t know why she said that. It was quite untrue. It was only true that he disgusted her at this moment, yet the rest had rolled out like string from a hidden ball of twine.

  “So why did we ever start this in the first place?” he screamed.

  She didn’t know whether he meant the marriage or the baby, and for an instant she thought he might hit her, there was such compressed force in his shoulders.

  “Get the hell out of here, Ivan. I don’t want to have to look at you.”

  “I will. I’ll go back. I’ll take your advice. Call your fucking obstetrician if you need anything. I’m sure he’s always glad of an extra feel.”

  “You ignorant pig. Go on. And don’t hurry back. Find yourself a skinny little art student and give her a big treat.”

  “I just might.” He slammed the door and the house shook again.

  He would be back. Only this time she felt no secret excitement, no tremor that could reshape into passion; she was too burdened down. The ugly words would lie between them like a dead weight till weeks after the baby was born, till Ivan felt he had reclaimed his rightful territory. Caroline took two aspirins. When she woke at three he was in bed beside her, gripping the blanket in his sleep and breathing heavily. For days afterwards they spoke with strained, subdued courtesy.

  They worked diligently in the natural childbirth classes once a week, while at home they giggled over how silly the exercises were. Ivan insisted she pant her five minutes each day as instructed. As relaxation training, Ivan was supposed to lift each of her legs and arms three times and drop them, while she lay perfectly limp and passive. From the start Caroline was excellent at this routine, which they did in bed before going to sleep. A substitute, she thought. She could make her body so limp and passive that her arms and legs bounced when they fell. One night for diversion she tried doing it to him.

  “Don’t do anything, Ivan. I lift the leg and I drop the leg. Surrender. Then you can have a baby too.”

  But he couldn’t master the technique of passivity. He tried to be limp, but she could see his muscles, precisely those leg muscles she found so alluring, exerting to lift and drop, lift and drop.

  “You can’t give yourself up.” She laughed. “Don’t you feel what you’re doing? Lie still and let me do it to you.”

  “Oh, forget it, Caroline.” He smiled up at her and stroked her stomach gently. “What’s the difference? I don’t have to do it well. You do it very well.”

  She did it very well indeed when the time came. It was an extremely short labor, very unusual for a first baby, the nurses kept muttering. She breathed intently, beginning with the long slow breaths she had been taught, feeling remote from the bustle around her. Then in a flurry they raced her down the hall on a wheeled table with a pack of white-coated people trotting after, and she thought, panting, No matter what I suffer, soon I will be thin again.

  The room was crowded with people, far more people than she would have thought necessary, but the only faces she singled out were Ivan’s and the doctor’s. The doctor, plump and framed by her knees, was wildly enthusiastic about the proceedings. “Terrific, Caroline, terrific,” he yelled cheerfully, as if they were in a noisy sports arena. “Okay, start pushing.”

  They placed her hands on chrome rails along the table. On the left, groping, she found Ivan’s hand and held it instead of the rail. She pushed. In astonishment she became aware of a great cleavage, like a mountain of granite splitting apart, only it was in her, and if it kept on going it would go right up to her neck. She gripped Ivan’s warm hand. Just as she opened her mouth to roar someone clapped an oxygen mask on her face so the roar reverberated inward on her own ears. She wasn’t supposed to roar, the natural childbirth teacher hadn’t mentioned anything about that, she was supposed to breathe and push. But as long as no one seemed to take any notice she might as well keep on, it felt so satisfying and necessary. The teacher would never know. The sound reminded her of something she had heard long ago, but she was so caught up in the pushing she couldn’t remember what. She trusted that if she split all the way up to her neck they would sew her up somehow—she was too far gone to worry about that now. Maybe that was why there were so many of them, yes, of course, to put her back together, and maybe they had simply forgotten to tell her about being bisected; or maybe it was a closely guarded secret, like an initiation rite. She gripped Ivan’s hand tighter. She was not having too terrible a time, she would surely survive, she told herself, captivated by the hellish wolf-like sounds going from her mouth to her ear; it was what her students would call a peak experience, and how gratifying to hear the doctor exclaim, “Oh, this is one terrific girl! One more, Caroline, give me one more push and send it out. Sock it to me.”

  She raised herself on her elbows, and staring straight at him, gave him with tremendous force the final push he asked for. She had Ivan’s hand tightly around the rail, could feel his knuckles bursting, and then all of a sudden the room and the faces disappeared. A dark thick curtain wrapped swiftly around her and she was left all alone gasping, sucked violently into a windy black hole of pain so explosive she knew it must be death, she was dying fast, like a bomb detonating. It was all right, it was almost over, she was almost dead, only she would have liked to see those flawed green eyes one last time.

  From somewhere in the void Ivan’s voice shouted in exultation, “It’s coming out,” and then the roaring stopped and there was peace and quiet in her ears. The curtain fell away,
the world returned. But her eyes kept on burning, as if they had seen something not meant for living eyes to see and return from alive.

  “Give it to me,” Caroline said, and held it. She saw that every part was in the proper place, and shut her eyes.

  They wheeled her to a room and eased her onto the bed. It was past ten in the morning. She dimly remembered they had been up all night watching a James Cagney movie about prizefighting while they timed her irregular mild contractions. James Cagney went blind from blows given by poisoned gloves in a rigged match, and she wept for him as she held her hands on her stomach and breathed. Neither she nor Ivan had slept or eaten for hours.

  “Ivan, there is something I am really dying to have right this minute.”

  “Your wish is my command.”

  She wanted roast beef on rye with ketchup, and iced tea. He brought it and stood at the window while she ate ravenously.

  “Didn’t you get anything for yourself?”

  “No, I’m too exhausted to eat.” He did look terrible. He was sallow; his eyes, usually so radiant, were nearly drained of color, and small downward-curving lines around his mouth recalled his laborious vigil.

  “You had a rough night, Ivan. You ought to get some sleep. What’s it like outside?”

  “What?” Ivan’s movements seemed purposeless. He was pacing the room with his hands deep in his pockets, going slowly from the foot of the bed to the window and back. Every now and then he stopped to peer at Caroline in an unfamiliar way, as if she were a puzzling stranger.

  “Ivan, are you okay? I meant the weather. What’s it doing outside?” It struck her, as she asked, that it was weeks since she had cared to know anything about the outside. That there was an outside, now that she was emptied out, came rushing at her with the most urgent importance, wafting her on a tide of grateful joy.

  “Oh,” he said vaguely, and came to sit on the edge of her bed. “Well, it’s doing something very peculiar outside, as a matter of fact. It’s raining but the sun is shining.”

  She laughed. “Haven’t you ever seen it do that before?”

  “I don’t know. I guess so.” He opened his mouth and closed it several times. She waited, eating her sandwich. At last he spoke. “You know, Caroline, you really have quite a grip. When you were holding my hand in there, you squeezed it so tight I thought you would break it.”

  “Oh, come on, that can’t be.”

  “I’m not joking.” He massaged his hand absently, then held it out and showed her the raw red knuckles and palm, with raised flaming welts forming.

  She took his hand. “You’re serious. Did I do that? Well, how do you like that? I finally won a round.”

  “I really thought you’d break my hand. It was killing me.” He repeated it, not resentfully but dully, as though there were something secreted in the words that he couldn’t fathom.

  “But why didn’t you take it away if it hurt that badly?” She put down her half-eaten sandwich as she saw the pale amazement ripple over his face.

  “Oh no, I couldn’t do that. I mean—if that was what you needed just then—” He looked away, embarrassed. “We’re in a hospital, after all.” He shrugged, not facing her. “What better place? They’d fix it for me.”

  Overwhelmed, Caroline lay back on the pillows. “Oh, Ivan. You would do that?”

  “What are you crying for?” he asked gently. “You didn’t break it, did you? Almost doesn’t count. So what are you crying about? You just had a baby. Don’t cry.”

  And she smiled and thought her heart would burst.

  THE BABY WAS ISABEL, an almost perfect baby. At birth she resembled her father, dark, long, and lean, and she remained so through the years of her childhood. Caroline and Ivan welcomed her with bemused surprise like an unexpected treasure, a windfall, so that she grew happily. It was natural to treat her like a treasure because she was so agreeable, as if upon joining their family—creating for them a family—she had pledged not to be disruptive, to do her necessary crying and falling and experience her necessary frustrations with the least disturbance. She was readily soothed. Nor did goodness make her bland. Her father’s daughter, she was a child of wit and energy and grace, who spoke, as an only child does, with a winning fluency. Envious friends warned that such children become terrible in adolescence, saving up, as it were, the powers of destruction, but Caroline and Ivan, restored to grateful calm after years of agitation, lived in the present. They had an elderly baby-sitter who took care of her during the days so Caroline could teach, but she dropped whatever administrative tasks she could, and did fewer projects of her own. Ivan became a true father as he had promised so long ago: not only did he tend and nurture, but he woke for night feedings, he diapered, he pushed the stroller.

  He was always glad, that first year, to get her alone. Filled with relief that her shape had re-emerged after the pregnancy, he pursued her greedily, reminding her of the high school boys whose hands had ceaselessly and involuntarily twitched and roamed. She would laugh to herself when she came downstairs after putting the baby to bed and read the jittery message in his eyes. Working and caring for Isabel, she was tired, and often she couldn’t fully savor his passion. But she was happy to know it existed, still, because of her. She was happy in his arms. When he told her she was growing passive she tried to be more active. It didn’t strike her as too important either way, active or passive, she was so relieved herself to have finished with pregnancy and childbirth.

  And then, when the baby began to sleep and eat on a civilized schedule and amuse herself for spells during the day, Caroline’s passion returned. Ivan’s cooled. Isabel was more of an intriguing presence now. She was delighted to greet her father at the door each night. Ivan saw his face mirrored in hers. He whispered words to her that Caroline couldn’t hear, he took her for walks alone at twilight on the shady green streets and returned proudly bearing anecdotes of her wit. It was Caroline, more often now, who pursued with a glittering eye. But she hardly worried; she understood it was rare for lovers’ cycles to coincide. He would be back.

  Isabel had just one noticeable flaw, and that was a right eye that did not focus properly. It turned in. The doctor said to operate, the sooner the better. She was four. Caroline spent the night before the operation tossing on a cot alongside Isabel’s hospital bed, getting up intermittently to watch snatches of old movies on television in the patients’ lounge. Ivan came the next morning, barely in time to say hello and good-bye to Isabel as a young bearded attendant strapped her to a wheeled table. She was holding a stuffed replica of Babar the elephant and seemed inordinately cheerful, far more interested in the handsome green-coated attendant than in Ivan. They gazed after as the attendant wheeled her, much too quickly, Caroline felt, to the doors of the elevator. He jiggled the table in time to a Beatles tune he was singing to Isabel.

  “You’re wearing your glasses,” said Caroline.

  “My eyes were burning.”

  A passing nurse suggested they might want to go to the staff cafeteria, since it would be a long wait.

  “How long?” asked Ivan.

  “Two hours. Maybe more. We’ll let you know as soon as she’s in the recovery room.”

  At the words “recovery room,” Caroline’s heart leaped to her throat. Her father had gone to the recovery room but never recovered. Now Isabel was her only blood kin.

  The staff cafeteria, at the end of a series of musty tiled basement corridors, was filled with young men and women in white uniforms, chattering and laughing.

  “Do you mean to say these are doctors?” asked Caroline.

  “They must be students. Anyway, they’re down here, not up there. Look, Caroline, you get a table and sit down. You look terrible. What do you want to eat?”

  “Coffee, black, with something. Anything.”

  He brought two coffees and two pecan danishes with coconut sprinkled on top. His hands trembled when he set down the mugs. After eleven years of marriage, she thought, coconut. She hated coconut, but she bit
into it.

  “Isn’t it strange that we can sit here and eat while our child is being cut up?” she said.

  “Don’t you remember what that lady in Rome told us? You have to eat no matter what happens. Wars, assassinations, minor surgery. Just keep eating.”

  “Maybe I’ll have another, then.” It was amazing how, since her pregnancy, she had never had any more stomach trouble. She had developed what Ivan’s father called a cast-iron stomach. They must remember to call Ivan’s parents later, to let them know everything was all right.

  Ivan started to get up.

  “No, it’s okay. I’ll go this time. How about you?”

  “Oh, all right, bring me a roll and some scrambled eggs and bacon, and more coffee.”

  She found a pastry without coconut. After they ate, Ivan took a deck of cards out of his pocket.

  “Do you want to play gin?”

  “When you play with me, it’s not even a challenge.”

  “You have a chance,” he said. “I’m not in my best form. Anyway, you have the basic ability. Your problem is that you don’t concentrate.”

  “Thank you, Jerome.”

  They went up to the main floor to play. The waiting room was enormous, with deep brown leather seats and huge teardrop chandeliers. The few people scattered about were reading newspapers. War was raging. Students were demonstrating. Ivan shuffled the cards and they cascaded to the floor. “I guess I’m nervous,” he said, picking them up. “Did I ever tell you that I had an operation like this when I was a kid?”

  “No, you never told me,” she said. “How come you don’t tell me these things?”

  “I was seven.”

  “Well, how did it feel?”

  “It wasn’t bad.”

  She looked up and hesitated. “They didn’t fix it exactly right.”

  “I know, but it came out much better than it was. They did the best they could. They’ve improved the technique a lot over the years.”

  “We’ll soon see.”

  Ivan won four games handily. He put the cards back in his pocket and got up to pace the room. When he returned he said, “Caroline?”