Fifteen
How you kept checking your panties, leaving Algebra II every twenty minutes or so, hoping, hoping, looking for a trace of blood, one spot, a pinkish tint. You had, you were sure, detected the hint of a menstrual cramp, certainly you had, there was no mistaking — and you were elated. You pressed your belly in, you prayed. You walked home in such a way as to pass the maximum number of red street signs, so as to suggest something to your body. You sang every song in order on the Rolling Stones’ Let It Bleed album. You played it over and over. You bargained shamelessly. Promised you would change everything about your life if only, if only — this once. You jogged in place. Lifted weights during fencing practice, and hit the red heart on your opponent’s jacket with great accuracy. You were all focus, all will. Another chance. At home you kept closing closet drawers — hangers frightened you, what in a few days you might be capable of. You took scalding hot baths, said to bring on menstruation — you could no longer bear the suspense. Never in your young life had you felt such dread. The next day in Home Ec while making the improbable Welsh rarebit you felt a twinge — you were sure. And you were getting that headachy feeling you always got. But nothing more. It was winter and you thought if you saw a red bird eating a berry in a tree — you thought. Spicy foods, standing on your head, praying to the Virgin, shoveling snow…
Forty
You check your panties every half hour or so. You are not really late yet, but you are almost late, meaning you are right on time. You are almost always early and so in your mind you think: I am already quite late. And your excitement rises. You discount the stress you’ve been under lately and its role on the body’s course. You reason, when in the last, oh, say twenty years have you not been under great stress? Good point. You count and recount the days on the calendar. You’ve got absolutely no menstrual cramps of any kind, and that in itself is a kind of miracle. By now you are usually doubled over in pain. Your breasts, which you check, stripping to the waist even during breaks in your writing workshop, seem to be swelling, my God, in fact they have never been so engorged — the first sign, is it not, of something nesting inside you? When did this desire for a child sharpen? You’re not really sure it has. But it is not so much about the child maybe — it’s simply the challenge now, the wanting to succeed at this thing — it’s odd, you’re the first to admit. You try to eliminate any ambivalence from your mind, knowing full well that this could throw off the whole project. You convince yourself you are nauseous and dizzy, and you’re sure. But it passes. It passes so quickly that you can’t be sure now you haven’t invented it. You are disheartened. You pray, bargain, beg, if only this, you would become a different person. Motherly, in fact. Maternal. And at this moment you believe yourself — a good sign. You would, you think, do anything. You’ve got a desire for chocolate, which is an unusual desire for you. You check your panties in between meetings with students. You pray there is no stain, no blood. When the red dog passes you avert your eyes. You walk in such a way as to avoid the red signs. You decide to walk all the way home from Columbia University — a long walk — and on the way back you stop in at any number of houses of worship, as they are called — all faiths. You kneel at the holiest place in each. You feel like a pulsing, open secret. You are full of grace. When you arrive downtown and walk into your apartment the room is lit by roses.
How many times have I kissed the feet of the Virgin?
Back on that plane where, over the ocean, the stranger appeared in the night. Handing me a little note.
The silly things people say to one another: You are exactly my type. Or, I changed my seat to be near you. Don’t move. Stay just like that. So I might memorize this moment.
Once many years ago, I met a Hungarian girl of about sixteen on a plane flying back from I cannot remember where, and I thought to myself, she is my daughter. It was the strangest sensation. I remember her exactly.
Somewhere between darkness and light. The moon on the wing. High up, close to heaven.
“An experienced seductress.”
The press of water in the dark. A delectable darkness. Where the ocean opens up into a kind of infinity. And the sky.
An ocean in the window. I recall the vastness. He took my hand.
“Vintage Carole Maso,” Helen says, after the shock wears off.
I carry the lines of her palms and the lines of her feet — unique to her, hers alone, in my body.
On day forty-four, twenty milk teeth are embedded in the gum ridges
I return to Blistein House, where the Creative Writing Program resides. In the past two years five baby girls have been born here. After the initial shock Helen, who has always risen to every occasion, rises again. Helen, who has wanted this in many ways more than I have. In that kind of direct way of wanting.
We’ll be a family: a baby, two cats.
We’ll make it up as we go along. As we always have, I think to myself.
Deeply suspicious of convention as I have always been. Of what most people will take for granted.
In the air I told him I was writing a book about a professor who murders her students and he thinks I am a trashy novelist and I like the idea of that a great deal — free of the burden of seriousness.
I have written for the past few years again and again of children and sometimes it seems of this very child. The way the writing has worked as charm. Calling forth the child, inventing it. The word made flesh. In the perfection of the love and the faith — the writer’s faith, strange talisman, protection, guide. This amazing, unlikely life of mine.
Heartbeat cling.
Now it begins: pain au chocolat! I cry out to Helen in the next room.
She sends pears to me in Providence. Always our lucky, our most precious fruit. They always feel like a celebration to me. A gift of pears arrives. Everything will be all right.
In the fallen leaves I see all the miscarried children.
Heartbeat cling.
And Chloe, what does Chloe mean? Helen thumbing through the baby name book. Too early for me to be thinking of such things. I make up a list:
take the megavitamins
no hot baths
no lifting
no caffeine
Tiny heartbeat cling.
I am like the cat who keeps turning and turning in circles trying to get comfortable. Trying to find comfort. The comfortable spot. I am like the cat. Asleep eighteen hours a day.
How Helen prayed through every village, to every saint for the child.
The grand finale in Assisi. Maybe we should name her Chiara.
On her knees in the modest chapel of Santa Chiara. She turning and mouthing the words in the silence: Pray for the child.
“The forty-day-old human is so small it would fit into a walnut. It weighs less than a book of paper matches.”
Somehow, miraculously, the desire for alcohol has completely left me. And so I am not even tempted. Mercifully. And my usual desire for oblivion? The sleep of the dead that I sleep now helps that. A sleep I have never before experienced. I follow it like an addict now down into blackness.