Pierre hesitates before standing, following my directions. He walks out of our bedroom, and I bite back tears as I imagine him walking the short path to our lab without me.
I’m glad he can continue our work, in spite of my miserable condition. I can’t imagine how much worse I’d feel if I did not have Pierre now, if all progress had to stop while I am forced to lie here. It just seems so endlessly unfair, the inequity that comes to the woman when a married couple decides to have a child. That isn’t Pierre’s fault of course.
The baby kicks again, and I take the toast from the plate on the nightstand, where Pierre left it, forcing myself to nibble lightly on the edges, swallow it down, and take a sip of tea.
I put my hand across my stomach, stroke it lightly, hoping to calm both my nausea and the baby’s kicks. “You will come out soon,” I say to no one, to the empty room, to the being inside of me who does not yet have a fully developed sense of intellect. Rationally I know all this, but spending days on end with nothing to stimulate the mind but books and articles is turning me mad. “You will come out soon,” I say. “And your papa will teach you all there is to know about science.”
Once this child is outside of me, it will be Pierre’s turn to carry him or her. I plan to return to the lab as soon as I give birth.
FINALLY, I AWAKE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT ON SEPTEMBER 12th, my stomach clenched with labor pains, the bedsheet wet beneath me. I wake Pierre, tell him to send for his father. It is time. It is finally time!
“Are you all right, mon amour?” The nervousness in his voice cuts through the darkness.
“Yes,” I lie. “The pains aren’t that bad.” They’re worse than any pain I have ever felt, hitting every nerve of my body. But they are such a relief, too. I welcome them. These long sick months, these endless days in bed, they will be over soon.
Bronia had told me to remember to breathe in and out slowly to manage the contractions. But breathing doesn’t help at all, and each time the pain grips me, I begin equations in my head, focusing on calculating the kinetic energy I might be expending, with a variety of integers. I hold my focus on the numbers, on the mathematical probability. And then the pain subsides, and I leave off the equation and think, soon the baby will be outside of me, my life and my body my own again. Everything back the way it was. Tomorrow, or certainly the next day, I’ll get out of bed and I’ll walk to the lab again, and life and science will resume. I cling to that thought now as I push, as I push again.
Just one last push, Dr. Curie finally says. I look at the window and night has fallen, again. Through the haze of pain, the equations of my contractions, I have lost an entire day.
Pierre squeezes my hand, and I do as Dr. Curie says, muster up all my strength, push again. The pressure in my abdomen eases, and then with a gush, the baby is outside of me. I wait for it, the flood of relief I’ve been expecting, wanting, for months now. But my chest is tight. My legs are numb, and it is hard to breathe.
“It’s a girl,” Dr. Curie cries. He whisks her away, wraps her in a towel, and rubs her skin until she lets out a small cry, then a long wail. And suddenly, Pierre’s shoulders shake and tears flood his face. “She’s so small,” he cries out. “I did not think she would be this small.”
Dr. Curie hands me the baby, still wrapped in the towel, and I examine her: she is perfectly the right size for a newborn. She has ten fingers and ten toes, Pierre’s eyes, and my nose, a symmetrical face, and the softest flesh I’ve ever felt. This baby that Pierre and I have created, that my body grew and nourished and tortured me with over months and months, she is more perfect than anything we’ve ever done together in the lab.
I FINALLY DO GET OUT OF THE BED THE NEXT MORNING, BUT not to go to the lab. All that time spent in bed and it had never occurred to me how much the baby would need me once she came. Irène cries for me and then suckles me endlessly, leaving my body more tired, more sore, more nauseated than ever before. I go through weeks in a daze, my mind too numb and exhausted to even think in equations. Or about what I’m missing in the lab.
Irène begins to lose weight, and then all I do is worry over her. My mind is so consumed that I don’t even notice Pierre is gone all day or wonder about the work he is doing without me. He comes and goes with a kiss to me and Irène, and I say to him, “Should we call your father to examine her again? Maybe she’s sick?”
My love and worry for her is like nothing I can explain through any logical reasoning. It is an orchid, delicate and fragile. Beautiful and breakable. If anything happens to Irène, it will be my undoing.
Pierre summons his father, three evenings in a row. Irène cries and cries, and she is much too thin.
“Perhaps you should try a bottle instead,” Dr. Curie finally suggests gently, with the detachment of a doctor, not the attachment of a grand-père, who leans down to kiss Irène’s hollowing cheek after he examines her. “She is healthy, Marie, but I don’t believe she’s getting enough milk from you.”
As soon as I switch her to the bottle to feed, she begins to grow again, plumping up in days. Apparently, my body is not made for motherhood, the way it was not made for pregnancy. Once I accept this, a fact, the worry lifts, hovers above me, like lithium on water. My mind is open again.
“What a shame,” Bronia says, when she comes by to visit her niece and check up on us. “Feeding by breast is so much more convenient.”
But my breasts are also a tether, and once Irène only requires a bottle, which can be given just as easily by Grand-Père or Papa as by Maman, I begin to feel it so strongly: my deep and abiding love for science.
Then, when I awake each morning at dawn, it is the lab calling to me again—its cries now louder, more pressing than Irène’s.
Marya
Zoppot, Poland, 1897
In early February the Baltic was sparkling and cold: a cerulean gem. I stared at it from the upstairs guest bedroom window in the Zorawskis’ resort house, mesmerized by its breadth and depth and color, the deception of its beauty. Just before Kaz and I had arrived last week, a man drowned in the tug of the undercurrent. Or maybe it was that he froze to death—the water much too cold for swimming this time of year. Pani Zorawska had recounted it all to us with sheer horror and excitement upon our arrival, but I was exhausted from the long train ride, and I hadn’t really been listening. Her words buzzed above my head like flies, the way so much had these past few months.
It was remarkable the way my body returned to normal in such short time. Seven months had passed, and now my baby girl, my Zosia as I had named her in my own mind, had been deceased longer than she had been alive inside of me. My stomach was concave, empty. To look at me, one would never know that I’d carried a baby in my womb, then lost her. To look at me one would not see the emptiness I felt, nor the way, now, my body was a shell and I was a fragment of a real woman. Or that I could not stand any longer for my husband to touch me.
Pani Zorawska had disappeared again from our lives for a few months after my loss, and Kazimierz and I had gone back to at least the appearance of what we had been before. He returned to his studies with Hipolit, and if it was possible, was home even less than before. I returned to work at the Kaminskis and my Wednesday evening classes as a student, though I had not been able to teach again yet, which both Agata and Leokadia remarked on with concern. I told them I just needed time; I just needed to heal. But now months had passed; everything appeared to be as it once was. It was only inside that I felt the constant hollow, that I felt my friends’ and my husband’s voices buzzing around me all the time like flies, the conversations too hard to follow, too much to understand.