All her life my wife has dreamed this rather common dream. She is falling. As she falls she thinks that she is falling and that she is going to die. She plummets, closes on the ground. And then wakes up. Sleeping after she delivered her first baby, she had the dream. She was falling. But this time, as she fell, she didn't think while she was falling that she was going to die. As she fell in her dream, she thought: "Who is going to take care of my baby?" Poets are drawn to a word like "cleave," a word that contains a meaning and simultaneously its opposite meaning. My wife is a poet. Birth is a cleaving and a cleaving.
After the third miscarriage my wife asked the young athletic attending physician when she could start up again. The doctor, perhaps distracted by her charting, perhaps simply self-absorbed, answered that my wife could resume exercise in a few days, later today if the signs indicated. Had we interrupted, with our emergency, this doctor's daily jog, her own regimen of working out? She was wearing running shoes, her hair tied back, sweats. Was she assessing my wife's bulked up body differently now that the body was no longer bulk for a purpose, was no longer pregnant? Time to get back into shape. Into shape. As the saying goes you can't be half pregnant. My wife in an instant had become out of shape. The doctor had misunderstood. My wife was asking how long before we could start again to have sex, to make a baby, to be pregnant. She wanted to get back into that shape.
9
We took pictures. A few days before she was due, she took off her clothes and posed in our sunny living room. There is an extremity to the nakedness during labor. The clothing of modesty is readily shed. The staged renditions of the moment on television and in movies are hilarious with their persnickety management of drapery and screens. We are all born naked. My wife had back labor, and for a while a warm compress on her lower spine helped relieve the pain. Until it didn't. She had dilated, was in the part of labor called transition. She had changed. I applied the heated towel again. "What are you doing?" she screamed. "It feels like you are ripping off my skin!" This nakedness was beyond skin-deep.
Back to the pictures, to the evidence of that body. We marvel still at its transformation. There is the apparent impossibility of it. How could it possibly work? It is freakish in proportion and scale, gravity-defying and grave. There is a luxuriousness as well. The skin, yes, glows. The darker skin of the aureoles, the eyelids, the lips grow darker. On the center line of the belly a vertical line appears running from the sternum, circumventing the belly from pole to pole. The telltale sign of the stomach's rectus muscle's separation, split open like, well, ripe fruit. You can't help it-all the cliches are true. The pregnant body is not a human body any more but a metaphor for ripe, for full. My wife no longer recognizes herself in the pictures. It was a strange visitation, her body inhabited both by a new body and this other body built to birth the baby. We look at the pictures with nostalgia and anticipation. Birth imminent. For me the pregnant body is freakish but irresistible. It is as if the human species is made up of three genders, this new other one, this thing. Or more exactly that the two sexes give birth to this new species. This other other. Obstetric, that Latinate word, means to stand in opposition to. I am sympathetic. But, finally, I have no choice. I must, we all must, wait on it.
Seven Dwarf Essays
I
Growing up, my son always said that when he grew up he wanted to be a seven dwarf. That was how he said it. "I want to be a seven dwarf." It was funny, of course, because he wanted the most out of that expressed desire. He wished to be both a dwarf-an interesting aspiration in itself-and all seven of the Disney alternatives at once. And this use of a singular plural could have also meant he also meant he wanted to be a whole new category of dwarf, an eighth dwarf-beyond Sleepy, Grumpy, Sneezy, etc.-while still retaining the magic completeness of the whole tribe, the one and the seven. Part of the gang but separate too. He wanted to be both uncharacteristic and characteristic at the same time. He was learning to sort by sorting. This bent had shown up quite early. In the crib he watched the floating flotilla of four stuffed bears circling above him, suspended from the twirling arms of a wind-up mobile. The bears were identical save for the different colors of their matching overalls. I cut them down when my son was sitting up, and as soon as he could, he sat for hours, it seemed, and arranged the bears in a line-red, blue, green, yellow; green, red, blue, yellow; blue, yellow, red, green. It seemed to be in his blood, this four-letter alphabet like the code in DNA. Later it would be flags-he could recognize all the different state flags-then di nosaurs, Power Rangers, Pokemon. Even now, in the next room while I type this, the teenage version of my son has been at it for hours, arranging the song titles, the artists, the lyrics on the expanding electronic litanies of his iPod. But nothing has ever quite taken him like the Seven Dwarfs did. Not the bears or the flags or the toys or the cards or the songs. "A seven dwarf," he answered when I asked.
2
When I was growing up my favorite comic book was Adventure Comics, featuring the Legion of Superheroes, kids roughly my age endowed with various powers-strength, speed, smarts. One hero could inflate and bounce. One could grow small. One could grow tall. One turned invisible. One turned into anything at all-chairs, rocks, light poles. The girl who could split into two, once could split into three. But one self had been killed long before I started reading the series. The twins treated their missing sister like a phantom limb. What I liked best was knowing that each hero had a specific weakness. Ultra Boy had ultra powers of strength, speed, etc., but could only use them one at a time. Then there were the cousins from ill-fated Krypton, Superboy and Mon-el. One could be mortally injured by Kryptonite that could be shielded only by lead; the other was vulnerable only to lead. The weaknesses and strengths were interlocking and always exploited by this month's villain. It was never the whole legion who did battle, only some subset, a team of seven, say, a lineup always shifting. Though they were heroes, those kids were freaks, of course, accurate metaphors for their teenage readers' sense of strangeness. They came by their powers by accident-swept by cosmic dust, blasted by gamma rays. Or did they simply drink the wrong drink? Issue from the star-crossed combination of parents? And there is that fatalism in their genes, the chromosomes those modern threads spun, stretched, and snipped by the three sisters. We all embody our own ancient tragedy-the very stuff that allows us to thrive as a race might well be the fatal flaw, the circumstance of our own demise. The fourhanded carbons are the little gods that destroy and create. The oxygen-hungry human brain we are so proud of is an accident, and the pride the brain can conjure will be the very thing to cause our extinction. It's an old message, these fatal flaws. I remember teenage superheroes sitting around their clubhouse (they had a clubhouse!) lamenting their fates, wishing they could be like other normal teenagers of the twenty-fifth century. Or I think I remember them wishing for that. But other "normal" teenagers are never normal. Or the normalness of teenagers never feels normal. The Legion of Superheroes characters embodied the body growing up, an analog of that awkwardness. It was the theater of between-ness.