“When I was in labor for Luke, I begged the nurse to kill me,” my cousin Nancy says, glancing down at the boy flopped across her lap. “I grabbed her pen and tried to stab myself in the chest with it. So they insisted on an epidural.”
“I was in labor for twenty-six hours with my first,” says my best friend from high school. We haven’t kept in touch, but it’s nice to see her freckled face again. She has three children, all apparently healthy and happy, and she seems not to have lost her mind at all. “They wanted to do a C-section, but I said, Hell, no. After all this, I’m pushing this thing out myself.”
I don’t fear giving birth. I’ll make it through that exercise just fine, as I’ve made it through more than a dozen marathons and a couple triathlons, as I got through earning my master’s degree in one year while teaching full time. I’ve been out winter camping in below-zero weather with my husband, and together we’ve hiked up mountains with heavy packs in hundred-degree heat. My body will come through for me, and I have little doubt that I will give birth to something like a perfect child. That’s not the problem.
Also, I have enjoyed being pregnant, have enjoyed doors being opened for me, seats being found for me in restaurants, my husband cooking all manner of weekend breakfasts tailored to my tastes. For months, other women have ignored the frown I’m told I wear perpetually, and they’ve smiled at me anyway. Being pregnant has not been a problem, for I know Baby is safe so long as she is inside me.
A siren sounds just as I am returning to my chair, and I fall heavily onto the cushion in such a clumsy, comical way that the women around me laugh.
“It’s just a test,” my sister says, speaking loudly and authoritatively enough that we can hear her over the siren, which emanates from the fire station a quarter mile away.
“They test the siren on the first Saturday of every month. This is the third Saturday,” I say as the mournful sound echoes inside me. “And it’s three o’clock. The test siren is always at one.”
Somebody looks up the weather on a smartphone (my sister tried to make everybody put them away during the party) and finds that a tornado was sighted just sixteen miles north of here. My heart pounds as I study the hallway through which the tornado’s winds will tear. Books about composition theory and French philosophers and even the Nancy Drew mysteries I’ve saved since childhood are missiles poised to fire. That floor-to-ceiling bookshelf I built last year is all edges, sharp corners, and metal screws. I must remember to ask David to bolt it more sturdily to the wall studs before Baby is born, and perhaps we can secure each shelf of books with a bungee cord across the front.
The bedroom door is closed, but atop my dresser are my old Kappa Delta Pi honor society pins, hair ties and barrettes, race medals, lapis lazuli earrings that hang down to my shoulders, corks from wine I drank in France—any of those could blow down in a tornado’s winds and slither toward Baby’s throat to stab or choke her. On my husband’s dresser are shoelaces, tie clips, cufflinks, and more medals. On his desktop in our shared office are rubber bands and paper clips galore. He has thus far not imagined his lifestyle poses any danger to Baby.
We all move to the basement, negotiate the steep stairs with the wrapped packages. I sit on the only comfy chair, while others sit on cushions they’ve dragged down; my sister perches beside me on her knees on the rug.
“I wish I had a bomb shelter,” I say. “Or one of those survivalist pods.”
Everyone except my sister laughs, but I’m trying to recall whether the siren cutting out means the danger has passed or if it means the fools at the firehouse think we’ve been given warning enough.
“Take a deep breath, Barb. You’re going to be fine, we’ll all be fine,” my sister whispers. She is holding out a box wrapped in lavender teddy-bear paper. Ten other women and one seven-year-old girl stare from a semicircle around me. The two baby boys are gazing at their mommies now, begging for protection, no doubt. My sister leans in again and whispers, “If it comes any closer, we’ll go sit against the west wall, but the chance of getting struck by a tornado is tiny.” She holds her finger and thumb an inch apart.
So is a baby tiny, I think, tiny and helpless.
“There was a tornado here in 1980,” I remind my sister. She’s right that we’re doing all we can, but after Baby is born, I won’t take a chance. I’ll build a kind of bunker below the level of this basement. I’ll stock it with baby food and enough pure water to keep Baby nourished for weeks if necessary in case of natural disaster. So long as it’s not a flood, in which case the unfinished attic would be a better place to hunker.
Last weekend I told my sister that an earthquake struck southwest Michigan in 1947, and she accused me of being paranoid. I told her she could look it up online, see old black-and-white photos of cracked plaster and toppled chimneys. At this moment, it is far too easy to imagine my new baby crawling through glass shards while I am trapped under a fallen beam.
“Here’s your first gift. It’s from Maxine.” To get my attention, my sister pokes me in the belly with the corner of the lavender teddy-bear box, and I shoot her a glare. I smooth my hand over my belly and accept the thing.
There’s a comforting daydream I’ve had lately: a cushioned world without edges, a world of foam rubber, cotton balls, warm air of optimal humidity, a world in which walls are covered with quilted fabrics, soft and washable, or coated with a high-density gel like you find in those shock-absorbing bicycle seats. If only there were a way to make walls bend and curve in response to pressure, so the walls of baby-safe rooms could gently enfold bodies. Give me sagging Claes Oldenburg typewriters capable of producing only nursery rhymes and simple, hopeful sentences, beanbag chairs plump with Styrofoam balls. In tornadoes such furnishings would blow about harmlessly. In case of flood, Baby and I would use the pieces as rafts.
The lavender teddy-bear box is nearly weightless, and I rest it on my knees as I remove a long purple snake of ribbon. What are these women thinking? Such a thoughtless object could travel into Baby’s mouth, down Baby’s esophagus until it clogged. I stuff the thing into the paper bag beside me—there will be no more ribbons after this baby is born. I remove the box lid to find a newborn’s snowsuit, yellow.
I hold the snowsuit up to show the women the darling duck embroidered over the heart, and my best friend from high school says, “You’re sure going to need that suit this winter. I feel lucky my babies were born in spring, so all those early doctor appointments were in the warm weather.”
“Thank you, Maxine. It’s really nice,” I say to my aunt, who is only ten years older than me. She has two teenage boys as well as the seven-year-old girl who is sitting beside her now, vigorously working her finger around in her nose.
“Look at that sky!” says Cousin Nancy, pointing at the little slider basement window. She loosens her grip on her baby to such a degree that I want to thrust my arms under hers to catch him when he falls. The spot of sky I can see is undeniably the gray-green color that bystanders report before a tornado demolishes a trailer park. There is a trailer park a half mile down the road.
The snowsuit is cute, but it isn’t waterproof and doesn’t look warm enough to protect against frostbite. Cold and snow like we had last year could imprison us in our home and cause us to miss scheduled vaccinations, and the ice-covered roads could even render me unable to rush Baby to the doctor for a choking or bleeding emergency. I can’t imagine how to protect her if we have to leave the house in winter, especially since David will probably be at work or out of town when trouble strikes. Despite my generally good balance, a slippery spot on a walkway between the house and the car might result in my slamming to the pavement on top of Baby. Perhaps David can rig up some battery-operated space heaters to warm the walkway between the house and garage.
“You shouldn’t use that in a car seat,” Cousin Nancy says. “They’re saying now that it’s dangerous to have kids dressed in fluffy fabrics. The fluff compresses in an accident, leaving the straps too loose.”
&n
bsp; “Really?” I ask.
“And kids can overheat,” my freckled former best friend says. “You don’t want to cook your baby. The little ones can’t let you know they’re too hot.”
If I wrap her for protection against the weather, then I risk cutting off her air supply. I squeeze the puffy fabric in both hands and try not to cry. As soon as these people leave, I’m going to look up the safety information regarding snowsuits. If Baby is not safe in something so soft, then where can she be safe?
The next gift is a monitor that allows David and me to listen to what’s happening in the baby’s room—as if I’ll let her out of my sight! For this, I thank my sister, who helped David and me find this house, which is turning out to be ill-suited for a child, with its freestanding garage, its tile and hardwood floors, and steep basement steps down which a baby could tumble. Baby reads my mind and shifts in my belly.
“I’m so sorry,” I say, putting my hand on my stomach. I am considering not having this baby at all, but may keep her inside me indefinitely
The women all smile, except Cousin Nancy, who tilts her head at me in puzzlement, maybe waiting to hear what I’m so sorry about. I wish she’d just pay attention to the squirming boy on her lap. Next I open the envelope containing the gift from my seven-year-old cousin, and find a package of a dozen of those child-safety plugs that prevent kids from sliding keys into sockets. I look around and imagine every wall-mounted outlet hissing with vipers of electricity. And in the kitchen, the appliances! Dear God, the oven is a crematorium, the refrigerator—I can hear it humming from down here—is a suffocation chamber. Give me stoves with smooth, flameless burners made to warm food only to the temperature of breast milk, hot water heaters set to tepid. Cousin Nancy’s best friend puts her infant on his blanket at her side, as though nobody could accidentally step on him, as though there’s no mildew in the basement rug.
The tornado siren sounds again, and this time everybody jumps a little. My sister checks her phone and says, “There’s been a sighting of another tornado ten miles from here. But it’s north of us. Nothing to worry about, Barb.”
By the time the siren peters out, I feel exhausted. Fifteen minutes after that, as I’m numbly opening the last package, the sun shines through the basement slider window, and my sister announces that the warning has passed, that now it’s just a tornado watch for the rest of the afternoon, as if that’s fine with her. We all trek back up the steep stairs. After the gifts are passed around again and admired, everyone sighs in relief, and folks fill plates with snacks, pretending the world is a perfectly reasonable place to raise a child. Somebody brings me quarter sandwiches without crust and little balls of fruit scooped out of a watermelon carved like a cradle—inside it is a grapefruit made to look like a baby head with halved grapes inset for eyes. Really it looks like an alien invader. Finally my aunt brings me a cupcake with a naked baby made of marzipan curled atop it as though asleep.
Because I am readjusting myself, I accidentally knock away the cupcake, whacking it like a softball into the three-tiered diaper cake, which falls over with a whoosh.
“You’re going to be glad to have those diapers,” my sister says. “For emergencies. Sometimes you won’t want to bother with cloth diapers.” She has railed against cloth diapers from the start, and at another time I would have argued with her, but I am starting to appreciate the padding in those diapers, which might be perfect for covering hard surfaces. While everyone is eating, I study the booty and sense a kind of violence in the brash primary colors before me: the plastic blocks from my neighbor Suzanne, the star-shaped sun catcher, and even that stuffed fish mobile my friend Jenny showed up with. I don’t like their cartoon separation of blues, yellows, and reds. Colors should blend into one another the way they do in rainbows, which show the storm is over. Let reds dissolve into purples which blend through a thousand blues to blue-greens, to true green.
Without warning, my seven-year-old nose-picking cousin casually plops an infant boy onto my lap, and I grab hold. He is a warm, soft blob, utterly helpless. And surprisingly heavy. The greatest danger for babies, I realize, is gravity. Gravity is the problem I must solve before this baby leaves my body. Once I find a way to free Baby from the terrible pull at the center of the planet, she will float through rooms and glide helmeted through bumper-car doorways as if swimming. Thus ungrounded, Baby will be safe even from strikes of lightning.
I wrap my arms around the plump creature and hold him securely against my belly, but he soon begins to struggle. When he starts to cry, the other little boy cries, and then I begin to cry, too. I can no longer trust this strong body of mine that I have worked so hard to maintain, especially my big, solid bones—ribs as inflexible as jail bars, sharp elbows and scapulae, axe-blade pelvic bones, long, hard femurs. And what about this spine against which Baby will continue to be pressed, as if crucified, for another month? I am thinking I could make incisions in my skin and slide these bones out to make of myself a vessel of all-enveloping softness. And that way, if a tidal wave engulfs this neighborhood, we might bob and flow atop the currents together, like jellyfish.
The Fruit of the Pawpaw Tree
Susanna O’Leary had long tended the biggest garden in Potawatomi, Michigan, and she planned to keep on, one way or another, even if she had to do it without the Ford tractor. That tractor had given forty-five years of faithful service, but the unholy heat had plain worn out the old engine. This summer’s heat and drought were also causing the pumpkins to ripen early, and when you hefted one of those big fruits by the stem, you found it almost as light as a gourd. The cucumbers and zucchini were shriveling, and the tomatoes clinging to scorched vines were small and strong-flavored. Susanna spent summers in her garden and barnyard and during the school year worked as a junior high school cafeteria lady, which meant that in a week and a half she’d be hellaciously busy with feeding lunch to two hundred kids and then coming home to can tomatoes and to freeze beans. But there was no law saying a woman couldn’t work hard.
The heat had settled into the walls and the floors of Susanna’s rambling one-story house and had taken its toll on the occupants, rendering everyone as slow-moving as snakes. Three of Susanna’s grandchildren, ages four, five, and seven, who lived in her house, spent a lot of time lying in the shallow creek letting the current run over them while their ma worked as a receptionist in a cool dentist’s office a few miles away
Susanna was sitting at her desk this afternoon with her feet up, reading a magazine article about a garbage collector in Egypt, swatting occasionally at a housefly, and pressing a mason jar of iced tea to her forehead, trying to gather her energy for Junebug’s next bottle-feeding. A floor fan blew hot air across her in what felt like slow motion.
When Larry slogged into the room wearing his towel like a skirt on his skinny-legged way from the bathroom to the back porch where he slept, she felt like tripping him just to make something happen. Larry’s neck was long and thin, and his Adam’s apple protruded to an alarming degree.
“Hope you didn’t use all the hot water,” she said, her standard refrain, but even her words felt slow and burdensome.
“I took a cold shower,” he said and clutched at his towel as though he couldn’t trust it to stay up. Larry’s parents had kicked him out, and in a moment of weakness, Susanna had taken pity on this kid and let him move in with nothing more than the first week’s rent. She liked him well enough, but was determined not to let on.
“Why aren’t you at work?” she asked.
“I was late again.” He stood there dumbly, his curly black hair hanging across one eye. “I just can’t get there at five in the morning, so Theo fired me. I don’t know what’s the matter with me.”
“If you don’t know, then nobody knows. But you’re two weeks behind on rent, and I’ll have to kick you out if you don’t pay.” She tried to hide the sympathy she felt, sympathy she would never have extended to her own children, though they’d been ambitious, responsible youths. Maybe it was that Adam
’s apple that made her feel strangely tender toward him.
“I’m looking for another job,” he said and sighed.
“Don’t you have to leave the house to look for a job?”
“It’s so hot riding my bike,” he said. “I’ve been trying to talk my uncle into taking me on as an assistant. He’s in heating and cooling. You might have seen his van. Wendell’s Heating and Cooling.”
“We could use some of that cooling about now.”
“I seen in that hall closet you’ve got a big central air unit,” Larry said. “I guess it doesn’t work.”
“Hasn’t run for twenty years, and it’s not going to start anytime soon. I can’t afford to have it fixed when people don’t pay rent.”
“I could call my uncle, see if he can come over and check it out.”
“Just get a job and pay your rent.”
“His wife divorced him last year, and now he’s sleeping in a tent over by Old Douglas Road. He cooks his food on a campfire.”
Susanna watched the housefly land on the edge of her desk, and she slowly raised the flyswatter and whacked it, causing Larry to jump a little. She put down the swatter and wiped a bandanna all over her face and then applied the iced tea again, but the cubes had melted. Nobody’d had a good night’s sleep in weeks.
When the ducks erupted into loud quacking and yakking, Larry started so vigorously that he almost dropped his towel. The donkeys’ braying had terrified him his first morning here, when he thought the wheezy honking might be coming from swamp monsters. The kid had so far proved himself to be as hopeless as Junebug the donkey or Bullet, her son Jeffrey’s old blind 4-H horse, who spent his day grazing and turning in circles trying to catch sight of whatever showed in his remaining sliver of peripheral vision.
Mothers, Tell Your Daughters Page 20
