To this day I still carry those extra fifty pounds, the current weight of my younger son. I carry the mass equivalent in size to this other person still. I have no other explanation for it. Sympathetic, my own gravidity.
4
The cravings were real but not at all original. Not pickles but ice cream. That fall we drove to Davis Square and Dave's Ice Cream and ordered dishes and cones of scoops and dips after test-tasting the new flavors, working our way through the tubs in the glassed-in frozen cases, collecting the tiny plastic spoons like charms. We drove to Harvard Square that fall, to Herrell's, who was also Dave but when he sold Dave's signed an agreement to stay out of the ice cream business. Dave loopholed his way back into the business on the strength of his family name. We were in a family way and craved ice cream. We craved chocolate ice cream, the subspecies of which (Dutch Chocolate, Belgian, Chocolate Fudge, Brownie, Chip, Double Chocolate, Mousse, White, Dark, Chocolate Chocolate Chip, Chunked, Cookied, Malted, Marbled, Mandarined, Mochaed, Minted, Plain) were as numerous as the other individual varieties found in the rest of the flavor spectrum. That fall we drove to Central Square and ordered ice cream at Toscanini's, asked that the various candies and cookies and fruit and nuts be mixed into our choice, folded together on a refrigerated marble slab. It looked, as the mixing commenced, as if the ice cream was consuming its ingredients, an enriching metabolism. We brought home pints and gallons of ice cream and didn't bother to decant the contents but spooned the confection directly from the container, producing deftly curling glazed and glistening waves of frozen ribbons rolling up into our mouths.
I marveled at the sculptural suggestiveness of this media. I loved how the shop scoops welded together. The balled ice cream towered, mounded, slumped into Willendorf Venuses atop a cone, how that hood ornament of ice cream modeled the rounded belly, breasts, and hips of a pregnant woman. Ice cream could be sculpted into bodies, and ice cream sculpted the bodies that consumed it. It layered and larded the articulated underlying skeleton. That fall, the fall of ice cream, under its influence and in its hands, we became these spherical corpulent snow people, artist's models. That fall our bodies bulged and bubbled. We became these B-shaped beings.
5
The story goes that my father, born at home, was thought to be, until the actual labor and delivery, a tumor. My grandmother, fearing the growth was a growth, ignored the symptom in order to ignore the expected diagnosis, and steered clear of doctors, denial being the only remedy she believed available to her. One hears of things like that happening, variations on a theme. The obese woman whose massive body masks to her and the world this other body swaddled within. And then there are the tumors that are, in fact, tumors but tumors masquerading as bodies. They are themselves the remains of other bodies of cells commencing on a reproductive journey only to lose interest-hair balls, sets of teeth, or even the mummified ghost of a fetal twin absorbed by the other in the womb, pregnant pregnancy, nesting nesting dolls. The belly and the womb may become confused. The swelling of one by all appearances identical to the other. There is the impolite inquiry of the heavy woman as to her due date. A man's beer gut distends in meticulous imitation or vice versa. And there is a further variation of our discomfort in our own skin. Shame, embarrassment, blush-this burning blindness of the body and it costume of skin. You hear of the impromptu birth in the high-school locker room, the bathroom at the prom. The student who abandons her baby after a full term of concealment. No one, when interrogated in retrospect, suspected, the complete camouflage of the body by the body. No one was able to distinguish the metamorphic growth spurts of an adolescent from those spawned by the spawn within. The body is so much about the Body. It grows, and it grows.
6
I do not faint at the sight of blood. I do faint at the mention of the word "blood." It has to do with the vagus, that vagabond cranial nerve that wonders down the neck and thorax and on into the belly. It is the conduit for sensation in a part of the inner ear, the tongue, the larynx, and pharynx, and it motors the vocal chords while it stimulates secretions to the gut and thoracic viscera. My friend, a doctor, called it "one very interesting piece of linguini." An overactive noodle can send the pulse racing and the blood pressure crashing, the electric schematic of sympathetic suggestion. In an instant the blood rushes to my feet, my wiring for some reason shorting out with this outsized response. I'm sensitive. To what? To words. I weathered the witnessing of the births of my two sons attending the attendant fluids, flesh, and surgery. But merely typing the above, thoracic viscera, had me going. I think it is the Latinates, the antique Greek, that medicine employs to sound disinterested that tweaks my vagal response. Doctors have this desire to explain, to render in that dispassionate vocabulary the description of the body. It backfires with me. Laceration for cut. Contusion for bruise. Hemorrhage. I'm more comfortable with bleeding. The impasse that necessitated my first son's birth by cesarean section was described as cephalo-pelvic disproportion. My heart, kardia, skips a beat, arrhythmic. These words for me are engorged, obese with what? Meaning? No, more than meaning. They are viral. They get under my skin, into my system. The codes wired into language still thrill my own harmonic neural strings.
I will tell you a secret. In college I wrote my stories and poems in the medical library, and between insights or inspiration, I sacked the stacks, looking for anatomies and dissection manuals, diagnostics and the casebook descriptions of diseases to read. They would produce in me when I read them a kind of high. These simple combinations of letters, of words, of sentences sparked a collapse of my involuntary systems and, in fact, revealed the existence of those invisible involuntary systems by this very intimate disabling. Mere words could do that. Make me sweat, pale, lose consciousness, collapse. The words about the body took on body. Words were impregnated with meaning, with power. Words have mass, weight, density, gravity. Words have a physics all their own-bodies in motion, bodies at rest.
7
She could keep nothing down. The paradox of morning sickness. Without ingesting any food she grew larger. The logic of dieting was busted. She busted open. The body reworked the material on hand, stored in a snub to entropy, a conservation of matter and energy. This was spontaneous generation. She was sick to death and brimming with health.
There was the time during her pregnancy where she could only stomach white food, beige food at best. Yogurt, rice, mashed potatoes, and oatmeal. As I remember this now, it seems I spent forever making oatmeal in the mornings so that she could get out of bed. I became attuned to the amount of water I added, the amount of time it took to boil. The consistency of the final gruel seemed vital. Too runny or too stiff would trigger another round of debilitating nausea. I was Goldilocks daily searching for this mean, obsessed with food that finally in the fairy tale seemed disconnected from nutrition, diet, weight gained or lost. I remember trying to secret a few raisins, disguised as lumpy clots of cereal, dusting them with camouflaging nutmeg or cinnamon that only initiated in her a gag reflex and revulsion. I finished up the starchy intolerable repasts, thinking I shouldn't let this go to waste, standing before the sink, the stove with a bowl and spoon, eating whitely.
8
There is so much we don't know about pregnancy. For instance, the reasons my wife lost two before the first baby was born and then lost two more before the second. At the time all the doctors vaguely indicated not to worry until the third miscarriage in a row, citing the hopeful notion of diagnostic drift to explain their nonchalance. They figured that miscarriages had been happening with similar frequency and number for all of human history; it's just that now our diagnostic tools were better able to record it. No worry. Come back if it happens again, we were told. The drift of such drift, however, becomes its own explanation. Miscarriages go unexamined-no longitudinal studies, no clinical analyses. Mothers who want to pursue the causes, of course, lose interest when the next pregnancy takes and goes to term, any study of past outcomes forgotten in the time-consumed present moment. We forget to remember. So no one knows. It's a mystery.