Everything Is Under Control

by Phyllis Grant

  My doula places her hands on my shoulders, presses down so hard that I feel my heel bones penetrate the cold hard floor, and says, Phyllis, this baby is about to come out.

  I have several contractions on my walk to the delivery room. Each one more of a full-body experience than the last. Unlike my daughter’s birth, when the pain was isolated in the pelvic floor and belly, this time it’s an inner tornado corkscrewing down through my entire torso, as if I might fly apart, limb from limb.

  The doctor runs in out of breath, wearing jeans. I wonder why he doesn’t take the time to change into his scrubs. He checks me.

  You’re at ten, Phyllis. You can push.

  Three pushes and he’s out.

  I look down at my boy and trace his soft cheek with the back of my finger, checking to see that he is a complete baby, that he has ribs and kneecaps and shins and clavicles.

  I rub his vernix into my dry elbows. I massage his arches. I trip out on his blue eyes.

  I hand M our second baby.

  We did it.

  No, you did it.

  I lie on the mess of sticky, bloody sheets and let many sets of hands try to put me back together again.

  Someone shows me how to massage my uterus to help bring it down to size.

  Someone washes my torn labia with a peri bottle filled with warm water.

  Someone feeds me a chocolate chip cookie.

  Someone sneaks my placenta out of the hospital.

  My friends get the call. The placenta is waiting for them in my fridge. They try to hack it up. They gag. The organ is vascular and tough. My kitchen knives are dull.

  But they know I am desperate. They know that it might give me back some of what I lost so quickly in childbirth: the blood, the hormones. And they know I will try anything that might help me fall in love with my baby right away. Anything to prevent the violent images from coming back. They braise my placenta with their homemade ragout until it’s soft enough to eat for dinner. They stir in crème fraîche. This is a mistake. The placenta chunks stand out like sinewy beacons.

  They bring placenta Bolognese straight to my hospital bed. I eat it slowly, each bite a prayer. As my son is passed from one set of arms to the next, a familiar dysphoric fog rolls in over my toes and knees and elbows, in toward my center.

  I turn away. I don’t want them to see what I feel.

  I trick myself into loving him.

  I say I love you, I love you, I love you so much. Even though I don’t feel it. Even though I don’t believe it. Because love must be cumulative.

  This time I tell anyone who will listen. I describe the pit in my stomach. The deep sadness I feel all over my body. How I kill him over and over again in my head.

  I feed him solid foods as early and as much as I can. Anything to not feel like he is part of my body. I purée stew. I mix avocados with yogurt. I mash squash and potatoes.

  I take photos. Through the viewfinder, I watch him explore. I press the shutter of my camera down halfway, focusing on his eyeball. He looks up like a puppy. Those eyes. They help.

  After eight months, I start to tip over into love.

  I roll down, vertebra by vertebra, flatten my hands on the bottom of the tub, lean my weight forward into my fingertips, and exhale flip fly up into a handstand.

  My screaming babies are always with me.

  My feet flex back. My heels press into the tiles.

  I hear their screams in washing-machine cycles, squeaky drawers, car brakes.

  The water beats down on my upside-down face, burning my nose, my throat.

  I hear them in the roar of a crowd, the music at a café, the chirps of the birds.

  My fingers grip. My arms shake. My jaw trembles.

  I hear them in the silence.

  Upside down in the shower, I can almost erase them.

  One hour down, five more to go. Berkeley to Los Angeles. I am driving far away from my son for the first time since he was born.

  I start to cry.

  I can’t untangle the relief from the grief from the anxiety from the silence.

  Because he is that kid.

  The one who climbs out of a three-story window if it’s open, who scales the fence to see what is on the other side, who picks up the knife just because it is sitting there, who runs out into the street and almost gets hit by a car, who sees a mushroom growing in the grass and quickly eats it.

  The monotony of time and of the road feel alien. I can barely keep my eyes open. I pull off the I-5 freeway and into the Apricot Tree parking lot. I lock the doors and take a disco nap.

  M’s voice blasts through the car’s Bluetooth: It’s up to you. It’s up to you. It’s up to you.

  I am scared that this time I won’t come back. That this time I will actually harm the baby.

  I get out of the car and try to peek into Planned Parenthood, cozily tucked between Jo-Ann Fabrics and Mel-O-Dee cocktail lounge, but the windows are tinted like my Volvo wagon’s.

  The waiting room is filled with women who all look how I feel. Nauseated, dragged down, confused, ready to run. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire flashes from a television that no one is watching, the volume set so high it makes me vibrate from sternum to sit bones. Harry is trying to murder someone without a nose. I almost throw up on the man next to me.

  They bring me back and sit me down.

  Do you feel safe at home?

  Yes. Oh yes.

  Do you want a photo of the sonogram?

  I text M, do you want a photo?

  too painful, he texts back.

  I lean back on the crinkly white paper, spread my legs, and feel a condom-covered vaginal wand enter my birth canal and magically transmit the image of a six-week, two-day-old embryo onto a screen above. The beginning of another one beats loudly in my ears.

  I ask for a photo.

  Are you ready to pass this pregnancy?

  My mouth can no longer form words, causing trapped animal sounds to escape my lips. I nod and she drops a pill into my hand that will stop the flow of progesterone needed to maintain a pregnancy.

  I swallow that first pill with very little water, as if letting it slide slowly down my raw throat will allow me the freedom to change my mind. They give me four more pills to take at home the next day that will cause my thickened uterus and the embryo that’s embedded in its walls to shed.

  I leave the fluorescent lights of Planned Parenthood and walk through the parking lot, my lips and fingertips and toes numb, pregnancy-hormone ravenous, high on abortion drugs.

  The next day, I kick M and the kids out of the house, take some Vicodin, and carefully place the four pills inside my right cheek. I’m supposed to let them sit in my mouth without swallowing for ten minutes. A chalkiness coats my tongue. I drool. I worry that too much of the drug is escaping my body and the abortion will only work halfway so I catch the liquid in a cup and swallow it back down.

  I get in bed. The Vicodin makes my bones heavy and my thoughts hallucinatory. I feel hands shoveling my insides out. I imagine what this baby would have looked like, smelled like, how deeply I might have been able to love it.

  I wake up and stumble into the kitchen. I sit in the hot sun on my back porch and eat ice cream.

  All I feel is the cold, custardy sweetness sliding over my tongue and down my throat.

  After too many falls and too many hips broken, my grandmother Phyllis can no longer live downstairs from us in Berkeley. I visit her often in her assisted living apartment in San Francisco, nine floors up, sealed in silence above the swirling Van Ness Avenue. Even when it’s foggy, the light slices through the living room windows. There are no dust bunnies. The kitchen is empty. Her bed is always made.

  How are you doing, Grandma?

  I miss all of your noise.

  I grasp my hands together. I want to throw something out the window. A phone. A set of keys.

  M stops the car. I grab my purse, slam the door, and cross the street. I internally rant I don’t want this, I don’t want
this, I don’t want this, flapping my arms like a distressed Italian mama from Fellini’s La Strada.

  I sit down on the corner and hold my head in my hands. I force my mouth closed. I am working on my temper.

  M turns the car around and parks across the street. He crosses in my direction but stays far enough away to let me know he doesn’t like me yet. That he’s not ready to move on. He’s not here to make things better. We start yelling.

  The children watch from the car. They pound on the window. I read their little lips as they repeat over and over again, stop fighting, stop fighting, stop fighting. Their big tears fall.

  Our words do not land. They miss each other entirely. They are predictable, they are loaded, they are twenty-five-years layered and bound.

  And then there’s nothing more to yell. And we’re still on the corner. And it’s dinnertime.

  We agree we must get in the car. We agree the neighbors don’t need to watch us fight. We agree it is now too much for our children to bear.

  He slips into the driver’s seat. I slip into the passenger seat, breathing as if I’ve just run ten times around the block.

  Mom. Dad. You know what you have to do?

  What?

  All you have to do is say you’re sorry. That’s it. That’s what you’ve taught us. Come on, Mom. Say it.

  Exactly. It’s that simple, adds my daughter. But say it like you mean it.

  Our son crawls up to the front seat and settles in my lap. He pulls my right arm as if it’s a seat belt, extending it across my body toward M. He takes M’s wrist and yanks. As hard as he pulls, my son is not strong enough to make us touch.

  We all take our arms back.

  We sit in silence.

  Say it, Mom. Tell Dad you’re sorry.

  I’m sorry.

  Dad? Say it.

  I’m sorry.

  We are good actors.

  Our daughter goes back to her iPod. Our son resumes his nonstop narration of the world.

  Awww. I saw a cat. I love cats. Can we get one? Please? Can I have some gum? That tree is so tall. Wow. Mom. Dad. Look. It climbs up to the sky. And then you can step onto the clouds if you want. Can you sit on a cloud? Mom. Mom. Mom. Can you sit on a cloud?

  You can’t sit on a cloud.

  Please, Mom?

  Some things, I can’t control.

  M and I fake it through dinner. Through bedtime routine. We fall asleep honoring the invisible line that divides our king-size bed into separate sleeping capsules. We wake up and fake it through lunch-making, shoe-finding, tooth-brushing, drop-off.

  Until I can’t bear it anymore. I ask M the question I’ve asked almost every night for twenty-five years. What do you want for dinner?

  I want some stew. And I want to drink some intense red wine with you.

  The meat cooks all day, the smell gets sucked into the wall-to-wall carpeting, the sofa, the winter coats. Meat is under my fingernails. Fat drippings speckle my boots.

  We fill warm corn tortillas with the spicy meat, cabbage salad, avocado halves, jalapeño pickles. We splash it all with crème fraîche.

  As I turn off my daughter’s lights and tuck in her sprawling legs, I get a whiff of her sweetness. I slip into her bed, press my lips to her temple, and hold her clammy hands. She feels so half-baked, her bones so close to the surface.

  I look in my son’s room. He is snoring and sweating, skin all second-grade shellacked with dirt and sweat.

  I check on M. Awake. I put on the lingerie I got on sale at Target.

  Have you seen my vibrator?

  I am not your vibrator’s keeper.

  The dog scratches on the door. I let him in.

  I turn off the lights and slide back into bed. The dog scratches to go out. I let him out. I get back in bed. I turn to M. Everything is in place.

  M turns on the light. I need to put the laundry in the dryer. And why are you wearing that thing, my love? I really want to see your body. I’ll be right back.

  I close my eyes. I ache with fatigue. My ankles throb. I don’t want to explain anything. How sometimes I don’t want to be seen.

  I hear M locking the front door, filling the dog’s water bowl, flipping the laundry.

  Mom! Mom! Mom! Mooooooooooooooooooooooooooom!

  I jump up, put on my bathrobe, and run out into the hall. There stands my daughter. I know what she is about to say.

  We make it to the bathroom just in time. I pull her hair back. I hold my breath until it’s all over.

  I guide her to our bed. She sleeps between us, my hand resting on her chest, my mind surfing the rise and fall of my twelve-year-old’s breath until the sun comes up.

  My grandmother Phyllis lies in a hospital bed, staring at the ceiling, hands wrapped around the club-shaped necklace that hangs from a heavy silver chain around her neck. Fifty years before, my grandfather soldered these three coins together.

  I blow her a kiss. She drops the necklace and extends her arms. I sink into her fragile chest.

  Grandma, how are you? What do you need? Are you hungry? Are you craving anything?

  I am craving you.

  I sit next to the bed and hold her hand. She closes her eyes and her mouth falls slack, causing her to look simultaneously young and old. I want to try her body on like a coat. To wear her ninety-three years.

  I close my eyes and see her in the kitchen scraping all the tuna out of the can and then whack whack whacking a big spoonful of Best Foods mayonnaise on the side of the bowl. I watch her chop the celery, the knife bouncing dangerously close to her fingertips. She cuts the green onions with scissors, adds a squeeze of lemon, and then a slow sprinkling of salt and a few turns of pepper. A thorough stir. I see her lean in and give it all a calm and steady stare. She rarely tastes. She just knows when it is right. She scoops the tuna salad onto toasted bread, places another piece of toast on top, and cuts it on the diagonal. Onto the tray with Fritos, a bottle of white wine, two glasses. You will join me for a glass of wine, won’t you?

  The nurse places dinner in front of my grandmother. Our eyes open.

  Tell me, Grandma. How was the emergency room today? You must be exhausted. I’m glad they released you.

  They told me I only weigh 108 pounds.

  I haven’t weighed 108 pounds since I was fourteen. How about you, Grandma?

  I was 108 pounds before I started this glorious string of people.

  She moves her arms open as if acknowledging generations, as if I’m not the only one in the room.

  I move my hand over the dough’s smooth surface, smiling when I see the chunks of butter.

  Damn, you are so beautiful.

  My son calls out from another room, Who the heck are you talking to, Mom?

  I yell, I am talking to my tart dough!

  He yells back, Mom, I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about numbers and how they go on and on and on without ever ending.

  I find him. He is in the living room. In a ball. On the sofa. Sunburn splashed across his cheeks like war paint.

  He unfurls his warm limbs, pulls me in, and squeezes my upper body until I yell at him to stop. I stack his body on top of mine. We compare leg length, arm length, tooth length.

  I feel the fidget that travels through his system like an electrical impulse. I wonder how he ever turns it off.

  How is forever even possible, Mom?

  I massage my way up his spine, our hearts punching beats back and forth, until his limbs drop down, all looseness and lead.

  I slip out and make a strawberry balsamic tart.

  My grandmother places her napkin in her lap and starts nibbling on a chicken wing.

  Grandma, what do you want for your birthday dinner?

  I keep thinking about your tarts. I love tarts. I want tarts.

  Oh, God, me too.

  And those avocado bowls you make.

  What about dessert?

  We smile. It must be chocolate.

  My son stumbles into the kitchen.

&nbs
p; How was your nap?

  What nap, Mom? I didn’t sleep at all. I was just resting my eyes. I haven’t taken a nap since I was two.

  I slide over some scraps of dough.

  Come on over. Make a mini pie.

  I watch. He rolls it out gently, adding a sprinkle of flour to prevent sticking, a quick flip, a bit more flour.

  He overfills the pocket with a spoonful of Nutella, a squeeze of honey, a large strawberry. As I open the oven door, he yells out, Wait, one more thing. He tops his pie with a pretzel. Yes, Mom, now it’s perfect.

  My grandmother Phyllis gets out of bed and starts putting on her shoes.

  You know we’re not going to celebrate your birthday for a few more weeks, right?

  She pauses. She nods. She continues getting dressed.

  I help her put on a sweater. She sighs and stares straight ahead. Her hair all two-year-old-rat’s-nest puffed out in the back.

  Grandma, do you have a brush?

  They took it away from me.

  I find it under a pile of New Yorker magazines.

  I might have some lipstick. Do you want some?

  Yes, they took that away too.

  I hand her a mirror and my darkest lipstick. She applies lipstick as gracefully as she cooks.

  Grandma, do you miss cooking?

  Yes.

  What do you miss about it?

  Absolutely everything.

  Phyllis, it’s Mom.

  The voicemail comes in right after I leave the grocery store. It’s a Monday in January. Martin Luther King Day. No school. The kids are in the back seat. We listen through the car’s Bluetooth.

  Call me please.

  I hear death in her voice.