The
bodies keep passing, like ghosts, part of her and not part of her.
The
first time, she's a child. Her grandmother gives her warm liquids and
bundles her in knit blankets, as if she is a swaddled baby. The girl is
sick, and it is coming out, the sickness. "It isn't your fault," her
grandmother tells her.
The
strong tea tastes like mown grass. Her grandmother's house smells old, safe.
She watches dust motes inside a bar of light slicing
through
the beige room. These motes are the only movement. Her
grandmother sits in a corner with her eyes shut. She may be sleeping, or
praying.
Days,
or hours go by. She can smell tomato soup. There's a tray of fig newtons on
the bedside table. And now, the only movement is her grandmother's hands.
The old woman's body is stiff, straight, in a captain's chair, but the long
fingers move in and out. She's knitting a periwinkle scarf.
"There
are things that happen, and we grow up and we forget about
them,
but the one thing to remember," her grandmother says, "is that it isn't your
fault. "
The
covers are off now, but she won't get up and out of bed. Her
grandmother asks nothing, says nothing. She dreams about oceans
filling
the world, and wakes up to see her grandmother watching her in the night.
"The
one thing to remember," her grandmother tells her when the fever is gone,
"is that there is no one hundred percent form of birth
control. Do you know my meaning?"
They
eat tuna casserole and listen to the Lawrence Welk show play in another
room. Her grandmother's hands shake, but it's from the Parkinsons. Her voice
is gentle. "I don't know why they do it, but they do, " she says. That's all
that's left to say. For dessert, angel
food
cake.
***
Then,
her grandmother is dead. Sometimes, she imagines the old woman listening to
her thoughts, and she tries to think clean, but it doesn't work.
They
move to another town. In this town, she wears black stockings and a jacket
from the navy surplus store. She lies and says the jacket was her uncle's,
that the bullet holes were his. She has a best friend. This friend is
beautiful in Chinese slippers. Her shaved head makes her look like one of
those sculptures you see carved out of marble, in museums.
They
don't talk to others. They are more than blood sisters; they are
kindred
spirits, twins. They decide to read only children's books.
"Have
you ever noticed, " she tells her friend, "that the main
character in the young adult books is always some nice girl? I mean,
she's
sensitive and smart, and her parents are fucked up but decent.
The
main character is never the drug addict. She's never fucking her
father.
It's her best friend who is fucking the father."
"So
that would make you the main character," she tells her friend. She smokes
clove cigarettes. When her period stops, she and her friend empty an aunt's
liquor cabinet. "There," she says. "That'll do it. Now I won't be tempted,
because who wants to give someone fetal alcohol syndrome?"
It's
raining when she walks home. The next morning, she calls her best friend. "
It was all a lie," she says. " You know that, right? "
***
She
lies to a boy she falls in love with and tells him she's pregnant
when he
leaves her. Then they have sex and when she does get pregnant, she doesn't
tell him. She drinks milk, goes to bed on time, decides to be a good person.
But this one passes through her in the night.
***
They go
to doctors. Each time, she feels, it's a different person,
another
soul. The one that can't get enough sweet and sour, the one that
vomits and smarts, the one that makes her dizzy, the one that wants
to stay up all night, polishing until the wood gleams. The one that
wants to eat rich soil. Then there are the ones that aren't spirits at
all; she thinks they are. There are no heartbeats with those, only
the swoosh of the monitor. Every time, she tells. "Why do you tell? "
Her husband asks her. " Wait, next time, just wait, okay? Wait until
it sticks."
It's
weird, those soulless clumps. And then there are two, two girls.
Twins.
They swirl inside her. She imagines them, twins. And aren't
twins
brilliant? And don't they speak their own language? And won't
they be
beautiful, her twins, in brown and pink? She's always imagined
a girl,
but two! It's magical, this luck. She wants them to have dark
hair
and pale skin, her husband's Snow White coloring. Maybe they'll
have
flower names, Daisy and Daffodil. Or, no, that's too frivolous,
they
should have simple, elegant names. Ann. Emma. Clara. Marie. Or
Kate,
for her grandmother. But what about the other girl? How can one
have
the beloved name, and not the other? But the girls pass through
her.
This
last one, though, has a name. Her husband calls him peanut. But
he has
a name, she's given him one. He hiccups, he has hair, she can
feel
it. This one, this one is bigger and better than all the other
souls.
This one, he's going to take. When she says "hello" he kicks.
When
she says "goodnight" he sleeps. They take home a video of the
sonogram, and she watches it every night. He somersaults, he rubs his
eyes,
he wants out.
"Don't
name him," her husband says, "not yet." But now it's almost time.
"I know
it's hard," her husband says.
"It
isn't hard at all, " she tells him. Nurses come to take her blood
pressure, her blood. They are waiting until she crashes to induce. She
has a
room without a view, and a television angled towards the bed.
She watches biopics on the television. Her husband takes calls on the
cell
phone, and worries about insurance. "Your husband needs to calm
down,
for your sake," the nurse named Florence tells her. The nurses
are the
only people she wants to see; they tell her the baby is
strong.
When they say this, they call him "your baby."
"His
name's David," she tells them.
The fat, pretty nurse in rainbow glasses brings her strawberry jello.
After a
birth, you can hear the nurses hooting and hollering.
"It's
as if they won a football game, isn't it?" She says to her
husband. He's in the corner, fielding calls.
Florence rubs Jergens lotion on the cracked marks where the monitor rests.
These marks are the size of two small hand prints.
"Like
his little hands," she says to Florence.
"His
hands will be even smaller, " the nurses tell her.
"It
must be hard," her husband says again.