Then we got on the issue of circumcision.
Perhaps the only real conversation Edward and I have ever had on the subject of religion came after our wedding. We’d been married with dueling officiants, now the village priest and his sonorous voice and official vows, now the American rabbi and the smashed glass and cries of mazel tov. I had been late to the service. To fill time, the church organist played first “If I Were a Rich Man” and then “Jesus Christ Superstar.” In other words, it had taken some work to appeal to both of our families.
“My mother says the next thing to worry about is christenings and circumcisions,” I said to him.
“No to both,” he said, and we solemnly shook hands on it.
So I didn’t say anything at all about it when the topic came up: we knew what we’d do. The nurse, who’d already distinguished herself by saying that the administration of eye salve was mandated in “all forty-eight states,” was clearly completely and totally against circumcision but knew that she couldn’t say so. Well, not in so many words. “The United States,” she said, “is the only so-called civilized country that regularly circumcises. So think about that.”
“It seems,” said one thoughtful young husband, “like a lot of people say that you should circumcise a boy so he’ll look like his father.”
“Yes!” said the nurse. “And you know what? How many men are homophobic? Let’s face it: all of them! So what are the chances you’ll be hanging around naked with your kid anyhow?”
Apparently I made a noise that was translatable as: lady, that is eighteen kinds of batshit.
“You don’t agree?” she asked me.
Now I should say I’d already gotten in trouble because she’d earlier heard me making fun of the swaddled infant she’d drawn on the whiteboard. Also, when she’d said the thing about forty-eight states, I’d turned to Edward, and said, “That’s not right,” just so that he, a foreigner, would not be confused, I swear that’s the only reason.
What I’m saying is I was already not Nurse Batshit’s favorite student.
“Well,” I stuttered, “I mean, I don’t know, it’s not, it’s just, I don’t think — listen, you don’t need to convince me anyhow: I’m married to a European.”
“I have a European parent,” she said, in a voice that suggested that I meant European to be a euphemism for nudist: she understood, but this really wasn’t the place to discuss it.
I’m glad I wasn’t being graded.
4. An infant CPR class. This took place in the basement of the public library and was the most oversubscribed class of all, as well as the most motley: there were two other heavily pregnant women, a bunch of day care workers, a few other couples, and some EMTs brushing up on their skills. The teacher was a pepper pot of a woman with six kids. She’d brought two of them with her, a pair of mismatched nine-year-old fraternal twin boys.
The rescue mannequins were the usual beige objects that looked as though they’d died of heroin overdoses, even the two infant dummies. There weren’t enough to go around, so to make up for the lack, the teacher had brought a variety of dolls. For instance, Elmo. And Kermit the Frog. And the green Teletubby, the Cat in the Hat, a Rugrat, a character I’d never heard of called Doug, Raggedy Ann, and a Cabbage Patch doll. The history of beloved commercial dolls. She gave us pieces of plastic to lay over the mouths — or muzzles, or whatever you call the thing through which a Teletubby takes its nourishment — dental dams, essentially, to make safe the practice of artificial respiration on toys. The man next to us had the green Teletubby. He was the only person there who was learning for a specific, already earthbound person: his son, he said happily in a Chinese accent as thick as his crew cut, was five days old. You would have easily picked him out as the new father, he was so tender with the Teletubby, so cautious as he supported its head and adjusted the bit of plastic wrap.
The twins stood in when we learned about older children.
“Here’s where you press,” the instructor said, indicating the spot on the littler twin. He had blond ringlets and a potbelly.
“And then they throw up!” he said.
“Yes, sometimes,” she said.
“And then they eat it!”
“That doesn’t happen,” his mother said, frowning.
“Who wants to save me?” the taller twin asked the students politely, but we were all a little shy about rescuing a perfectly safe boy, right in sight of his mother.
I made sure I got my hands on one of the actual dummies, the kind with a balloon down its throat, whose chest rose when you blew into the mouth: I needed the physical reassurance. I put my hand across its torso. As long as I breathed, the dying plastic baby breathed. When I stopped, it stopped.
“Listen,” the woman announced suddenly, in the voice I recognized from fourth grade, a room full of kids working on projects, a teacher with a point: listen up, people. “Listen, children don’t die. They rarely die.”
She said this to calm us. If you think that children rarely die, then it’s easier to save them. I dandled the plastic baby on my knee and bit my lip.
My notes from that class say:
WORRY IN THIS ORDER
A
ir
B
reathing
C
irculation
And that of course is why we were taking all those courses: We wanted to be told, Worry in this order. We were delighted to know the damage a single loose almond in the cab of a car could do in the event of an accident, because then we could remove that almond and be vigilant about future dropped almonds. We wanted to hear all the details of a caesarean just in case; we wanted to know ahead of time how common vacuum-assisted births were. Once, we had belonged to the school of Cross That Bridge When We Come to It. Now we wanted all bridges mapped, the safety of their struts, their likelihood of washing out, their vulnerability to blackguards, angry natives, cougars.
33
Here is the worst thing that happened during my second pregnancy.
Edward had gone back to England for a month so that he could come back to America. I went to the doctor because I was worried about some minor pregnancy symptom. The ob-gyn was a nice bespectacled woman in her fifties, who I’d never seen before. Earlier in the pregnancy a different doctor had said, “Now, this is just about the time when you can hear a heartbeat,” and she’d put the monitor on my stomach and found nothing and we’d been rushed into the sonogram room, where all was well. Now, weeks later, the bespectacled doctor could not find a heartbeat.
At first that was fine. I lay back and let her feel around and remembered the earlier impossible-to-find heartbeat.
“There it is!” the bespectacled doctor said, and then “No, that’s you.” She took hold of my wrist to feel my pulse, slower than a baby’s. Every now and then we heard a thud thud through the monitor, and she’d pincer my wrist and shake her head: me again. I had a heartbeat.
After a while, I thought, Well. What if this is it? What do I do next? Call Edward in England, of course, but then what? Do I go home and get drunk? Drive like hell in the direction of my nearest good friend? Throw myself into the Hudson?
She said, “It’s no good. Now your heart is beating so fast, I won’t be able to tell the difference.”