But pushing past that threshold I met such a red blaze of agony that I could no longer afford the expenditure of loathing. I screamed, and I didn’t care. I’d have done anything in that instant to get it to stop: hocked my company, sold our child into slavery, committed my soul to hell. “Please—,” I gasped, “give me—that epidural!”
Dr. Rhinestein chided, “It’s too late for that now, Eva, if you couldn’t take it you should have said so earlier. The baby is crowning. For pity’s sake don’t let up now.”
And suddenly it was over. Later we’d joke about how long I held out and how I begged for relief only once it was withdrawn, but at the time it wasn’t funny. In the very instant of his birth, I associated Kevin with my own limitations—with not only suffering, but defeat.
DECEMBER 13, 2000
Dear Franklin,
When I walked into work this morning I could tell immediately from a malignant Democratic sullenness that “Florida” was over. The sense of letdown in both camps feels postpartum.
But if my coworkers of both stripes are disappointed that such an invigorating affray is finished, I feel a measure more disconsolate still, banished even from their shared, binding sense of loss. Multiplied by many times, this loneliness of mine must approximate my mother’s experience of the end of the war, for my birthday of August 15 coincides with VJ-Day, when Hirohito broadcast his surrender to the Japanese. Apparently the nurses were so ecstatic that it was hard to get them to attend to the timing of her contractions. Listening to champagne corks pop down the hall, she must have felt so dolefully left out. Many of the nurses’ husbands would be coming home, but my father would not. If the rest of the country had won the war, the Khatchadourians of Racine, Wisconsin, had lost.
Later she must have felt similarly at odds with the sentiments embalmed by the commercial greeting card company for which she went to work (anything but Johnson Wax). How eerie, boxing other people’s Happy Anniversary tributes and having no need to slip one in her purse when the date came around in her own home. I’m of two minds as to whether I should be glad that the job gave her the idea of starting her own handcrafted greeting-card business, which allowed her to withdraw to Enderby Avenue in perpetuity. But I will say that the “On the Birth of Your First Baby” card that she made up especially for me—layered with bled tissue in blues and greens—well, it was lovely.
In fact, when my head cleared in Beth Israel, I remembered my mother and felt ungrateful. My father had been unable to hold her hand as you held mine. Yet, offered the clasp of a living husband, I crushed it.
Still, we all know that women in labor can grow abusive, so I’m tempted to admit to having gotten a little hostile in the thick of things, and to leave my confession at that. After all, I was immediately abashed and kissed you. This was before the days when doctors slid a newborn right onto the mother’s breast, gore and all, and we had a few minutes while they tied the cord and cleaned him up. I was excited, stroking and squeezing your arm, nestling my forehead into the soft inside of your elbow. I had never held our child.
But I cannot let myself off the hook so lightly.
Up until April 11, 1983, I had flattered myself that I was an exceptional person. But since Kevin’s birth I have come to suppose that we are all profoundly normative. (For that matter, thinking of one’s self as exceptional is probably more the rule than not.) We have explicit expectations of ourselves in specific situations—beyond expectations; they are requirements. Some of these are smalclass="underline" If we are given a surprise party, we will be delighted. Others are sizable: If a parent dies, we will be grief-stricken. But perhaps in tandem with these expectations is the private fear that we will fail convention in the crunch. That we will receive the fateful phone call and our mother is dead and we feel nothing. I wonder if this quiet, unutterable little fear is even keener than the fear of the bad news itself: that we will discover ourselves to be monstrous. If it does not seem too shocking, for the duration of our marriage I lived with one terror: that if something happened to you it would break me. But there was always an odd shadow, an underfear, if you will, that it would not—that I would swing off blithely that afternoon to play squash.
The fact that this underfear rarely becomes overweening proceeds from a crude trust. You have to keep faith that if the unthinkable does come to pass, despair will come crashing in of its own accord; that grief, for example, is not an experience you need summon or a skill you need practice, and the same goes for prescriptive joy.
Thus even tragedy can be accompanied by a trace of relief. The discovery that heartbreak is indeed heartbreaking consoles us about our humanity (though considering what people get up to, that’s a queer word to equate with compassion, or even with emotional competence). By way of a ready example, take yesterday, Franklin. I was driving to work on Route 9W when a Fiesta turned right, cutting off a bicycle on the shoulder. The passenger door made a pretzel of the bike’s front wheel, flipping the cyclist over the roof. He landed in a position that was subtly impossible, as if sketched by an unpromising art student. I’d already driven by, but in my rearview mirror, three other cars behind me pulled onto the shoulder to help.
It seems perverse to find solace in such misfortune. Yet presumably none of the drivers who descended to ring emergency services knew this cyclist personally or had any vested interest in his fate. Still, they cared enough to inconvenience themselves potentially to the point of having to testify in court. On my own account, the drama left me physically shaken—my hands trembled on the wheel, my mouth dropped and went dry. But I had acquitted myself well. I still blanch at the agony of strangers.
Yet I do know what it’s like to get off-script. Surprise party? Funny I should have cited that. The week I was to turn ten I sensed something was up. There were whispers, a closet I was directed to avoid. If that weren’t enough wink-and-nod, Giles crooned, “You’re going to be surprised!” The second week of August I knew what signal day was approaching, and by the time it came around I was bursting.
Early afternoon of my birthday, I was ordered to the backyard.
“Surprise!” When I was invited back in, I discovered that five of my friends had been sneaked in the front while I’d been trying to peek through the drawn kitchen curtains. In our bunted living room, they surrounded a card table spread with a paper lace cloth and set with colorful paper plates, beside which my mother had placed matching seating cards inscribed with the fluid calligraphy of her professional work. There were also store-bought party favors: miniature bamboo umbrellas, noisemakers that tongued and honked. The cake, too, was from a bakery, and she had dyed the lemonade a vivid pink to make it seem more festive.
Doubtless my mother saw my face fall. Children are so lousy at covering up. At the party, I was desultory, laconic. I opened and closed my umbrella and rapidly tired of it, which was odd; I had powerfully envied other girls who had gone to parties to which I hadn’t been invited and returned to school with precisely these pink-and-blue parasols. Yet somehow it was revealed to me that they came in packets of ten in a plastic bag and could be purchased even by the likes of us, and that devalued the favors more than I could say. Two of the guests I did not much like; parents never get it right about your friends. The cake was sealed in fondant icing like a plastic puck, and flavorlessly sweet; my mother’s baking was better. There were more presents than usual, but all I remember of them is that each was unaccountably disappointing. And I was visited by a prescient taste of adulthood, an unbracketed “No Exit” sensation, which rarely plagues children: that we were sitting in a room and there was nothing to say or do. The minute it was over, the floor messy with crumbs and wrapping, I cried.