I sat back down and flipped through the stacks of magazines until I found a copy of O, with a cheerful, childless Oprah Winfrey on the front. Then the nurse called me in.
First the familiar urine sample. I carried the half-filled cup, as directed, down the hall to a far examining room, which was disconcertingly decorated with wood paneling and pheasant-patterned wallpaper and pheasant-themed prints. The doctor was a man in his fifties; the office was his. It felt like the den of a befuddled father of many daughters, the place he went for a little manly time alone with his pheasantalia, only to discover that no matter what, he was chased by damnable women who insisted on offering him cups of urine before dropping their pants. He flipped through my just completed records.
“This is your first pregnancy?” he asked. If I hadn’t become pregnant again, I might have gone years without saying it. This was the first time of many; I’d say it every month, then every week, then twice a week. “I had a child who was stillborn.”
The doctor was pleasant and kindly, but he seemed unsure of how to respond. Medically, I’m sure he did know, but personally he seemed uncomfortable, and who could blame him? Some things can’t be reduced to their medical facts. He cleared his throat. “Any postpartum depression with the last pregnancy?”
“Well,” I said. “Well.”
He nodded and turned back to his paperwork.
At the end of that first appointment I had to schedule the next. “Who do you want?” the receptionist asked. “Doctor? Midwife?”
“Doctor,” I said. “If that’s all right.” I didn’t blame midwifery for Pudding’s death, I just couldn’t bear the idea of too much warmth from a medical professional. All my romantic notions about collaborating on a birth had gone out the window. I wanted to be told what to do; I swore I would obey.
Besides, what were the chances?
When I returned for every successive appointment, the pregnant women in the waiting room made me sad: there they sat in the present, dreaming of the future. I couldn’t bear watching. I wanted a separate waiting room for people like me, with different magazines. No Parenting or Wondertime or Pregnancy, no ads with pink or tawny or pearly smiling infants. I wanted Hold Your Horses Magazine. Don’t Count Your Chickens for Women. Pregnant for the Time Being Monthly. Here I was, only in this second, and then the next, and nothing else. No due dates, no conversations about “the baby” or what life would be like months from now. No “This time will be different” or “Listen, it will all be worth it when you hold your child in your arms.” What I wanted, scrawled across my chart in shaky physician’s cursive: NOTE: do not blow sunshine up patient’s ass.
I rotated through the doctors, and they all seemed perfectly capable. In the unlikely event (my God, how we strived to ever lower our expectations) that I actually had a baby, any one of them would be welcome to extract it.
And then I had an appointment with Dr. Knoeller.
Almost immediately Edward and I took to calling Dr. Knoeller “Bones,” because she was a doctor (short for Sawbones, like the doctor on Star Trek) and because she was extraordinarily thin, but mostly, I think, because we instantly worshipped the ground she walked on and it helped us to be irreverent about one small thing. The appointment was our last checkup of my first trimester, and she looked at the chart.
“Is this your first child?”
“I had a stillbirth last year,” I said.
“I’m so sorry,” she said immediately, words I’ve never tired of hearing. We went over the details a little, and then she said, “You’ve scheduled an amnio.”
“Yes,” I said. In France the blond Baltimorean asked us if we were worriers; when we said yes, she made an appointment for an amniocentesis. Even so, I’d been startled when I spoke to the French genetic counselor, who was heavily pregnant herself, and she informed me that if the results came back positive for Down syndrome, they “recommended” that we terminate the pregnancy. Edward and I hadn’t discussed what we’d do if it turned out that Pudding had Down syndrome, because we agreed that all the theorizing in the world would probably crumble to dust in the face of a fact.
But this time it was different. We simply wanted to know. It would only be information.
“I mean,” I said to Dr. Knoeller, “we figured we might as well. I guess. I don’t know. What do you think?”
Well, she said, the real question was, if we had an amnio, and the results were normal, but it was one of the one in two hundred pregnancies that miscarried after the procedure, how would we feel?
We were stunned into silence, because of course that was the question. Even if you rephrased it — as Edward pointed out, one in two hundred sounds worse than one half of one percent because with the former you visualize actual people — we weren’t willing to risk it. Once you’ve been on the losing side of great odds, you never find statistics comforting again.
She said in a manner both businesslike and warm, “Let me just say that I had an amnio myself, but I didn’t have your history.”
And just like that, our history was in the room, and I had found a doctor I loved.
Another woman might want a doctor who promised things: an optimist, a dreamer. Not me. I wanted exact realism and no promises. On one visit a nurse spoke of the kid as though he or she was a foregone conclusion, and I hated it, I wanted to correct her, I wanted to point out that I’d thought that once, and look what happened.
“Well, very good,” Dr. Knoeller said at the end of every visit. “So far, so good. Let’s hope it continues that way.”
And then I was twenty-eight weeks pregnant, and when Dr. Knoeller walked into the room, I swore you could see Walt Disney bluebirds toying with her stethoscope and bunnies congregating around her heels.
“Twenty-eight weeks!” she said. “Now we can relax.”
31
For my first pregnancy I couldn’t imagine not finding out the baby’s gender. I’d asked Lib why she’d allowed her two daughters to keep their mystery in utero, and she said, “I didn’t want to project who I thought they’d be. I wanted them to be themselves.”
This is exactly the kind of thoughtful and maternal answer I’d expected from Lib. Me, I wanted to project. I was impatient to make up stories about whoever Pudding was, kicking about in my midsection, but how could I without that essential piece of information? For our second child we decided to do everything differently — no amnio, no peeking during ultrasounds. Now and then I wondered whether that was wise: should something happen (it won’t!), should the worst happen (it’s not impossible!), wouldn’t we rather know? It’s terrible to miss Pudding, of course, no matter what, but — this is a total illusion, I understand, nothing but the sentimentality of expectant parents spinning fairy tales ahead of time, viewed in the rearview mirror — it feels like we knew him. I can’t wrap my brain around losing a child and learning only then whether you’d lost a son or a daughter. Not finding out felt like an odd form of optimism.
By the end of my first pregnancy I’d felt very tender toward Pudding — to my made-up companionable Pudding, an infant who would of course love us the minute he saw us, who loved us already, who contained within him not only infancy but babyhood and toddlerhood, who already listened to our voices, who was impatient to meet us (so why was he taking his time?). I stroked my stomach and told him stories; when he kicked, I poked him back. We went to the pool together, me swimming in the chlorinated municipal water of Bergerac, he swimming inside me, both incredulous at how the French could gossip while doing the backstroke. We went to the gym together, where the French not only gossiped and kissed each other in the squat rack, but tucked their shirts into their exercise pants. I ate so that he could eat: I announced what was on the menu.