The baby descends. Her head engaged in the tight-fitting circle of pelvic bones like a crown. I’d like to follow her dream down but I think I’d better make some arrangements for childbirth classes fast. The last time we tried to go, a Saturday, all day — seven earnest couples — the instructor failed to show. It felt like a reprieve somehow. Difficult to explain.
Suddenly I am panicked. What if I have the baby before the classes? Dr. M. looks at me bemused.
White people.
Private childbirth sessions at Soho Pediatric with Michelle Simon, who is wonderful. I will be a Bradley Method girl, more or less. Bradley, the other natural childbirth method. I hear you just act like you’re sleeping. Sounds OK. I can’t bear the idea of all that panting the Lamaze people do. Makes me dizzy just to think of it.
Lots to prepare for and learn. Helen seems nervous. I am alarmingly serene. Even when we go through what will happen in the last stage of labor — Michelle holds up a large poster showing impossibly jagged lines meant to denote pain. Lovely early rounded hills turns into Appalachian peaks. She walks us through all the various scenarios. This might happen, or this. Not that. Yes. We amble over to St. Vincent’s to see the set-up. Wept when I saw the Pitocin machine, the contraption that dispenses a medication to induce labor, because it looked enough like the I-Med, that thing Gary was on. These halls. The Coleman Wing. I’m in the same place he was. What shall be the proximity of our rooms?
Michelle says I will not be feeling like wearing my lipstick in the third stage of labor, but I find this rather unlikely.
Everyone has been born after all. How hard can it be?
Mystery of book and rose. Rose and baby snow.
Not one real drop of blood in all these nine months. I wonder about the effect of seeing it again after all this time. The violence of it, its vibration and hum. Always incredibly attuned to color. Thought I might be a painter. No such luck. Insistence, loss, finality. Ruby flame, the grand finale. The shock of blood. Blood after no blood.
I feel in some actual emotional danger. Like I’ve gone too far. Like I’ve relied on a faulty sense of confidence and peace. Impossible to describe. On insanity’s verge tonight.
What was I thinking? To create a being who is going to suffer. To be responsible, utterly, for someone’s death. A grave indictment. It was not a lark. Did I take this all too lightly? How else was I to take it and still go forward?
I sit expectant in the big city, waiting. Helen up at the house with Angela. They’ve been moving in the bathtub. When the phone rings, she tells me later she hopes it is not me in labor because they haven’t eaten their veal chops — still on the grill — brought up from Balducci’s.
Is there a floor yet in the bathroom? I want to know. I need a floor.
I have many things to buy in the pharmacy for my impending labor. I waddle over there. It’s a weird list.
plastic shoes for the shower
a scarf? for my head? (It’s supposed to help you concentrate) tennis balls?
lollipops
candles
massage oil
lip balm
I have in my head that I will also need the Schubert Impromptus, but I keep forgetting to get them.
Doubt very much I am going to wear a scarf around my head during labor. The last thing I want is to look like David Foster Wallace.
About a home movie made right before his birth, from Nabokov’s Speak Memory:
He saw a world that was practically unchanged — the same house — the same people — and then realized that he did not exist there at all and that nobody mourned his absence. He caught a glimpse of his mother waving from an upstairs window, and that unfamiliar gesture disturbed him, as if it were some mysterious farewell. But what particularly frightened him was the sight of a brand-new baby carriage standing there on the porch, with the smug, encroaching air of a coffin.
People who have vaguely despised me for having something they did not: love, talent, confidence. Now their rage, undisguised. Who do you think you are?
I rent three films at a time now from Evergreen. Have a list of really mindless ones (any Hollywood movie) for when early labor begins. Something meant to be vaguely amusing, but not too demanding, as the event begins.
Ambivalence, obviously, at the end.
Yes, but can one imagine completely forgoing a major life experience? Yes. Today, yes.
Once there was almost a child with apple cheeks conceived in snow and she was called Rose. Apples and roses and snow. Angels at our feet. Mercy.
Almost a child, I had written in 1993. Angel. What did I know? Uneasiness at the end. Not to see portent in everything. Especially not in this.
Are you afraid? The question surprises me every time. I am many things, but I am not that. It has never occurred to me to be afraid. Afraid of what?
I sing her an old Kinks song all day long: So tired, tired of waiting, tired of waiting for you.
I’ve got my hot rice sack to use during labor. They’ll microwave it right up at St. Vincent’s, Michelle chirps. And afterwards for those tender breasts — bags of frozen peas!
Take out almost every night now from Home Away From Home on Bleecker Street. Carrying my little container of vodka and tomato sauce. Can’t be bothered to think of what else to eat. Find the old urge to drink beginning to return. The vodka tomato is as close as I get though.
The physicality of pregnancy — a most exhilarating thing. I am grateful, have been grateful, for all of it.
Plush, lush, luscious. Flushed with blood and beating life. Oh!
This lovely trusting little passenger.
We orbit one another. I, her — or she, me. Hard to tell anymore. This universal music. This feeling more and more each hour of being on the verge of some impending revelation.
A bizarre suspended life in the weeks just before the baby. Time hanging in abeyance. An odd concentration moves in. Also weird lapses in memory, time. Little sleep now. It’s too hard to find a good position. I use three pillows. Also walking in the city streets a bit more challenging. They’re uneven as always and my bones are all wavy now. My little collapsible ankles. My body opening up like a door, like a rose.
My life in abeyance. My life, two lives.
Rose, on the very verge.
I hear Grieg’s Cradle Song and weep.
We are two souls in one body. I am holding two souls. Moving and not moving through time and space.
They are fixing the steps in front of Our Lady of Pompeii in the heat and I am in one instant back in Italy.
The Cafe Milou, new on Seventh Avenue, in one moment takes me back to France. Intense heat. And then suddenly I am in Greece. How many places have I wandered through alone? Loving that feeling. I am never to be singular again. Always double — wherever I walk in the world.
Even if I were to go somewhere without her, already it is clear, she will always be there by my side. Perhaps the reason most people have children in the first place — and the reason I almost did not.