The Rules Do Not Apply

by Ariel Levy

  She pointed out a prim woman, who looked to be in her seventies, sitting on another sofa in the common room. She was addicted to painkillers, Lucy had learned in some kind of group therapy session they’d just had. This woman with stiffly styled white hair, wearing dainty navy flats, who looked like she might go to the same country club as Lucy’s mother or attend meetings with her at the horticultural society, had kept a stockpile of pills hidden in a couch cushion. It was occurring to Lucy (to both of us) that there were other people (addicts) who looked fine but could not stop themselves from taking things that were warping their lives.

  The doctors said Lucy had to stay one more night for observation. I was happy as I drove away toward the ferry, looking at the gardens glowing in the lambent afternoon light. Nature was thrumming with activity: insects, winding vines, bursting hollyhocks, all busy with the work of summer. Everything was growing.

  The secret had been revealed, the mystery solved. I didn’t need to convince Lucy or myself that this was an urgent problem. She would get help now. (Whatever that meant. I had no idea.) Things would soon be better.

  When I got to the house, I cleaned the kitchen. I watched an episode of 30 Rock on the computer while I made dinner out of what looked least old in the refrigerator. I went through the mail. Then I went to take the trash out to the shed in the backyard and saw that there was a noose still hanging from the oak tree.

  15

  A month later, I knew I was pregnant. I could sense it in every cell.

  I called Emma, who’d recently gotten pregnant, and described how I felt: slightly sick, slightly insane, zooming with adrenaline. “Is it like you’re receiving alien transmissions through your nipples?” Emma asked. I was. She told me to take a pregnancy test immediately.

  Sweating, I charged up Amsterdam Avenue, looking for a pharmacy. After I’d bought a test, I found a Starbucks and stood in the sticky bathroom, overwhelmed by excitement and the mingling scents of urine and macchiato while I waited for the lines to appear in front of me on the little stick. And then there they were: plus.

  It was like magic. A little eye of newt in my cauldron and suddenly I was a witch with the power to brew life into being. I called Lucy, but we kept getting disconnected. (She said she was in her office but it was noisy and chaotic in the background, and then she was gone, and when I called back it went straight to voicemail.) But who cares? I’m pregnant! It was much easier to reach my baby’s father, who was in Japan for work but somehow immediately available, and overjoyed. We were both giddy, dazzled by what we’d done.

  I called my own father, who yelped with delight. He said he couldn’t believe he had a daughter who was old enough to be pregnant. I told him that, actually, he had a daughter who was too old to be pregnant, but somehow I’d managed it anyway. I would be turning thirty-eight soon. Getting pregnant felt like making it onto a plane the moment before the gate closes: You can’t help but thrill.

  Emma and I are exactly two months apart in age, and our children would be, too. We gushed about the matched set of playmates we were making. She was due in February, I’d give birth in April, when the fresh air blew in through the open windows.

  My mother was happy in a way I never knew I could make her, and this made me love her with an openhearted abandon I had not experienced since childhood. It occurred to me that she was the one who had told me I could be the kind of woman who is free to do whatever she chooses. My mother had never once been surprised when I accomplished something. She had never believed me when I told her I would fail, even when she took me to the airport with my hulking backpack when I was twenty-two and afraid of Phnom Penh, afraid of Katmandu, and, of course, so was she. She didn’t say, “You’re right, it’s too dangerous—let’s go home.”

  She said, “Get on the plane. You’ll be fine.”

  —

  LUCY AND I FOUGHT less now. I was proud of her every time she ordered club soda at a restaurant. I had renewed hope in her business, her potential for success. Her human project.

  But I never stopped worrying. I worried that she wasn’t going to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. (Though what did I know? Who was I to say that AA was the only way to be sober?) I worried about the dozens of non-alcoholic beers she consumed; the sight of a pile of empty cans made me edgy. I worried about how covert she was about her sobriety: She would let people pour wine in her glass and then just not drink it rather than admit she wasn’t having any. (Why? Why wasn’t she impressed with herself? I was! Why did we have a new secret to keep about alcohol?) I worried that there was something insufficiently ardent about her sobriety. But what?

  —

  NATURE DOES SOMETHING VERY shrewd to pregnant women. She makes them preoccupied with the babies inside of them so that by the time they give birth, they are already accustomed to being focused on their offspring, obsessed with their well-being, and so it is that infants survive. I was intent. Who was in there?

  “At week seven your baby is the size of a blueberry,” the woman in the video on the pregnancy website told me, “with dark spots that will become eyes.” It seemed silly to be fixated on someone the size of a blueberry. But things were happening so fast! Just a few weeks later, I could hear the galloping heartbeat of the person inside me on a machine at the doctor’s office.

  I was meant to keep my obsession to myself, though—Lucy told me so, and the baby’s father did, too. Miscarriages are common during the first trimester, and just think how awful it would be to tell people you were pregnant and then have to face them after everything ended in disappointment. But it was difficult. People would say, “What’s new?” and it took all of my self-restraint not to reply, “Well, I’m cooking a human being inside my body. So there’s that.”

  I pictured him shy and contemplative, a tiny human Ferdinand the Bull sitting under a cork tree in my stomach.

  —

  I WENT TO SAN DIEGO on Labor Day weekend to interview Lynn Vincent, a ghostwriter who had worked on Sarah Palin’s memoir. I was expecting her to be strident, ignorant, nasty: my natural enemy. Instead she was fascinating. She told me about her harrowing childhood near Cape Canaveral, with an alcoholic mother who would lock her in the closet when she went down to the local bar—the Missile Lounge, it was called. They were evicted from several places and eventually ended up living in a tent on the beach in Hawaii. Vincent ran away with nothing but a sundress and a bikini after she was attacked by her mother’s boyfriend one afternoon when she was fifteen.

  She took me to her favorite store in Old Town, where I saw something that made me weak: a blue-and-white Pendleton baby blanket with a whale leaping in the waves under a setting yellow sun. After I bought it, Vincent asked me if I had a friend who had just given birth. I couldn’t hold it in. “No, my baby is going to lie on that blanket and look up at the oak trees this spring.”

  I knew Vincent was vehemently opposed to gay marriage and I waited for her to tell me that I had no right to be a mother. She looked like she was going to cry. “Oh, Ariel,” she said. “How wonderful.”

  It seemed like the whole world was pleased for us, proud of me. You’re going to have a baby? Yes, truly. A living person will be coming out of my body. I know it sounds ridiculous, but apparently that’s just how this works.

  Good tidings kept falling from the sky. At the twelve-week sonogram, Lucy and I gasped when we saw the baby on the monitor, flopping around like a fish—healthy, normal, alive. We both left the technician’s office with a certainty that it was a boy, though we couldn’t say why. A month later, I took a new blood test that read DNA in maternal plasma, and the results confirmed our hunch: It was a boy. And he had the right number of chromosomes.

  I left a voicemail for Lucy’s parents, telling them they would have another grandson soon. When they didn’t return my call, I was crushed and angry and refused to be understanding when Lucy told me to think of the world they were raised in, and how far they’d come. My parents called every day: obsessed. I started exchanging letters with t
he parents of the baby’s father. I was so excited when I received mail from them my hands would sometimes shake as I read. They were elderly and religious and lived far away but now we were kin. My son was drawing them toward me, a magnet for love.

  We started to look for a bigger apartment. Lucy bought me white peaches at the farmers’ market, because that was the only thing I felt like eating besides saltines. My friends asked me if I wanted games at my baby shower. (Definitely not.) Lucy’s aunt Hope sent us a very small set of socks.

  I felt less and less like a bad person. There was something so good inside of me—I was making something so good out of my very self—how rotten could I be? I started talking to the baby in my head instead of to myself. Even if you are not Robinson Crusoe in a solitary fort, as a human being you walk this world by yourself. But when you are pregnant, you are never alone.

  —

  AS MY HIPS WIDENED and my breasts grew turgid and tremendous, I felt myself turning into an animal, an actual biological creature ruled by my body, engrossed in its work. I realized I was falling in some kind of hormonal love with my baby daddy. There was nothing romantic or sexual about it; it was much deeper. It was primal. I craved his presence. I wanted to look at his face and watch his hands move. We were out to lunch with him one day when I noticed I was sitting weirdly close to him in the booth, so that I could smell him. I knew that some miniature version of him would be coming out of me soon, and that I would love this person with a ferocity—a passion—that rendered all of my other emotions secondary.

  This was not a fantastic feeling for Lucy. She felt demoted. She felt excluded. She started spending even more time than usual at work. (Though, oddly, it seemed like anytime I tried to call her at the office she was out, and her employees never knew where she had gone.) I remained anxious about her business, but it was a more detached concern now, because my baby was insulated by someone else’s money: wealth, the world’s greatest amniotic sac.

  —

  I RESERVED AN UGLY JEALOUSY for friends and acquaintances who came from rich families and never worried about their financial fate, for whom money was ultimately symbolic: They had careers and were glad to get paid, but what they were really living off was a pond of money that had been filling up for decades, in some cases generations. Their jobs were to some extent a matter of principle—one has to do something. Some of my female friends of this variety felt compelled to do something only until they had children. (“That is doing something!” Yes, of course it is. But it’s something that a person can only do exclusively for a short period of time unless someone else is paying all the bills.)

  I had gotten to a point where I could pay for myself. The idea of having financial responsibility for a child (to say nothing of the infuriating notion of having financial responsibility for Lucy if her business failed, when she was supposed to pay for me) had made me frantic. But now I was protected from all that! My baby’s father was not only rich, but also self-made. (Not just wealth, but wealth I could respect.) He would pay for our child. There was no cause for fear. What’s the worst that could happen—the baby needs the most expensive medicine in the world? No problem. To say that I was thankful for this security is to put it rather mildly.

  Lucy resented my gratitude for the baby’s father. She worried about her role in our family: “He’s the father, you’re the mother, what the hell am I?” I told her that, to the baby, she’d be the real parent—that at present, biology seemed like a big deal, but once our son was among us he would be closest to the people he lived with, his parents. His “dad” would really be like an uncle (a rich one) and she would be the point man. We’d even give the baby her last name!

  But she yearned for the devotion she could already feel me directing toward my child, a devotion she had not experienced from me in years, if ever. She did not want the baby to be more important to me than she was.

  “That’s motherhood,” I told her. “I have no choice.”

  16

  It would be at least a year, maybe two, before I’d be able to leave home for weeks on end and feel the elation of a new place revealing itself to me. I wanted one last brush with freedom. I wanted to make one last offering to my career—the thing I’d made of which I was most proud, but not for long. My doctor told me that it was fine to fly up until the third trimester. When I was five months pregnant, I accepted an assignment in Mongolia.

  Over a third of the country’s population still lived nomadically, in felt tents, or gers, as they’re called in Mongolia, herding sheep, goats, and horses on the steppes in the warmer months, almost exactly as their ancestors did. And yet Mongolia had attained an extraordinary level of advancement for women—the country beat Australia in the 2012 Gender Equity Index, I noticed, as I scrolled through the document on my computer at the office. Mongolia had vast supplies of coal, gold, and copper ore; its wealth was expected to double in five years. Ulaanbaatar, the capital city, already had a Louis Vuitton store not far from the ger camps where people gathered in winter, when the average temperature was negative thirteen degrees. Before the boom, Mongolia’s best-known export was cashmere. As Jackson Cox, a young business consultant from Tennessee who lived in Ulaanbaatar, said when I called, “You’re talking about an economy based on yak meat and goat hair.” I would report on the country’s impending transformation as money flooded in through the mining industry, and what it meant for women.

  People were alarmed when I told them where I was going, but I liked the idea of being the kind of woman who’d go to the Gobi Desert pregnant, just as, when I was younger, I’d liked the idea of being the kind of girl who’d go to India by herself. I thought of Christiane Amanpour, pregnant at forty-one, flying off to Sarajevo to report on the war. I thought of a sunbaked blond documentarian in cargo pants with a bulging belly whom I’d just seen on television interviewing a woman in Mali who was also pregnant—they had smiled as they touched each other’s stomachs.

  “Are you insane?” my friend Ted asked when I told him about my upcoming trip.

  “No, I’m rational,” I replied, and thought, But you aren’t. I am not superstitious and I’m not a sissy: If a doctor tells me there’s nothing wrong with doing something, then I consider the matter settled. Lucy was the same way. If the baby’s father felt any differently, he did not say so.

  I observed among my peers a self-righteous sense of entitlement for the optimal pregnancy—prenatal acupuncture, organic everything—that I found distasteful, the antecedent to the frenzied efforts to transform a normal home into a precious babyland. One needs a Diaper Genie, a wipe warmer, a special changing table—no regular table could possibly suffice!—a six-hundred-dollar stroller, a BabyBjörn, a baby monitor, to say nothing of a night nurse and a nanny. And yet women have been having babies since the beginning of time without any of this and somehow the species has endured.

  So much of the panic around pregnancy seemed like fussy yuppie nonsense. Secretly, I judged Emma for following all the rules so fastidiously, for getting edgy around deli meat and treating coffee like crack rock. I would teach my child the power of fearlessness. I would tell him, “When you were inside of me, we went to see the edge of the earth.”

  I wasn’t truly scared of anything but the Mongolian winter. The tourist season wound down in October, and by late November, when I got on the plane, the nights were dropping to twenty degrees below zero. But I was prepared: I’d bought snow pants big enough to fit around my convex gut and long underwear two sizes larger than normal.

  To be pregnant is to be in some kind of discomfort pretty much all the time. For the first few months, it was like waking up with a bad hangover every single morning but never getting to drink—I felt nauseated but hungry, had a perpetual headache, and was always desperate for a nap. That had passed, but a week before I left for Mongolia I started feeling an ache in my abdomen that was new. “Round-ligament pain” is what I heard from everyone I knew who’d been pregnant, and read on every prenatal website: the uterus expanding t
o accommodate the baby, as he finally grew big enough to make me look truly pregnant, instead of just chunky.

  That thought comforted me on the fourteen-hour flight to Beijing, while I shifted endlessly in my seat, trying to find a position that didn’t hurt my round ligaments.

  —

  WHEN MY CONNECTING FLIGHT landed in Mongolia, it was morning, but the icy gray haze made it look like dusk. Ulaanbaatar is among the most polluted capital cities in the world, as well as the coldest. The drive into town wound through frozen fields and clusters of gers, into a crowded city of stocky, Soviet-era municipal buildings, crisscrossing telephone and trolley lines, and old Tibetan Buddhist temples with pagoda roofs. The people on the streets moved quickly and clumsily, burdened with layers against the bitter weather.

  I got together with Jackson Cox on my first night in town. He sent a chauffeured car to pick me up—every Westerner I met in UB had a car and driver—at the Blue Sky Hotel, a new and sharply pointed glass tower that split the cold sky like a shark fin. It was named for Tengri, god of the eternal blue sky, who was once worshipped by the Mongols, Turks, and Huns as the father of everything, along with Eje, mother earth. The hotel was across the street from Sükhbaatar Square, where young Mongolians had staged a hunger strike in the winter of 1990, waving banners with pictures of Genghis Khan and sleeping out in sub-zero temperatures, demanding the end of seventy years of Soviet control.