God and Jetfire (11 page)

An invisible curtain had been drawn, and I was pulled in gently by my elbow. Here was where the gears of the world were turned; here was who, without anyone's taking note, were turning the gears: not just the women of the world, but the childbearing women, the women whose roundness hinted at their special affiliation.

One morning on my bike ride to work, I noticed that with every pedal, my thighs had begun to tap the hardness in my abdomen. That fullness felt good. Passing the flat-bellied students on their way to class, I felt physical and fully realized. Pregnancy was pure creative force; it put the late-night efforts of my fellow design students to shame. What was an architect's aspiration except to mimic that inventive mastery, to replicate the miraculous form? I was building something singularly amazing and I didn't even have to think about it.

When I arrived at work, my boss had left a message that he wouldn't be coming in until the afternoon. We were accustomed to his absence; he always had meetings, but he also seemed to be going through some kind of crisis, all his friends peaking in their careers while he worked for the poor and drove a station wagon. His single indulgence was having the very latest smartphone, and when he'd describe its brand-new features, I would roll my eyes and take comfort in my certainty that I would never own a PalmPilot.

That day, Zhang Ying was the only other person in the office, so at lunch I asked if she minded my eating an egg out in the open. I peeled it and held my nose, suppressing my gag reflex.

“That egg smells funny!” Zhang Ying said as she stood up.

“I know; that's why I asked. I'm sorry!”

She came over and inspected it. Having been a vegan my entire adult life, I didn't know that eggs were not perfectly sealed natural packages. That you could not boil two dozen at once and eat them, day by day, over the course of a month. The flavor was so repulsive from day one that I hadn't noticed them getting incrementally more repulsive, a bit more blue, a tad more slimy.

“Amy, it's rotten!” she said as she nearly slapped it out of my hand, the girl from the land of the thousand-year egg.

 

TEN

It felt like we were getting close to finding a family. Our 111 questions had generated thousands and thousands of answers. It was still February, still a month to decide, but we were focusing our attention on two couples. Jevn liked Jeff and Cindy best. They had, by far, the best profile cover photo. Three pairs of muddy boots lined up on a doorstep. Papa-, mama-, and baby-sized boots. They were a family who explored the dirty world and arrived happily home together.

“Robert and Deb are good, too,” Jevn said. They lived in Colorado, where Robert was an architect and Deb was a banker. I wouldn't have liked the banker thing, except that she said she saw her career as a way to help people.

“Yeah, I really like them,” I said. It turned out that Robert worked for an architecture firm where Jevn had been an intern for several years. They knew some of the same people, people who had directly influenced Jevn's decision to become an architect. But there was something I didn't like. In an e-mail referring to all the things we had in common, Robert said that the Japanese character for
crisis
was a combination of one character meaning danger and another meaning opportunity. Both pregnancy and infertility were, perhaps in our cases, crises, I thought, but the opportunity he was referring to was certainly his own. I ignored this, because we had so many significant things in common.

“What do you think of that Indiana couple?” Jevn asked. Paula and Erik were theologians who had a two-year-old adopted daughter. We had liked their letter because it was straightforward, without zany captions or margin art, but I had already put them in the
no
pile.

“They have the other birth mother they're talking to, and they said they're probably moving right around the time I'm due. And, remember? They wouldn't tell us what names they like.” We'd sent them the 111 questions, but Paula didn't answer that one. If she withheld simple information from me, I thought, she couldn't really expect me to be forthcoming with my child.

But as rigorously as I was scrutinizing everyone, I had a pit in my stomach that made me wary I was in no state to make any judgment at all. The physical reality of pregnancy had finally taken hold; I was distracted and unfocused, exhausted and ambivalent—the last person who should be in charge of someone else's entire future.

*   *   *

We slid through the door and into class. As we settled onto the carpet, Nina turned and smiled at us. “Hi!” she whispered loudly, lifting her shoulders and waving fast. She was holding a diagram showing a happy cartoon face. “Don't go to the hospital as soon as you feel your first contractions. If you can smile, that's how you know you're not dilated enough; you'll be waiting there for hours, and they'll try to medicate you. If you're nervous and excited and you gotta go somewhere, go to the grocery store and stock up.”

Emotional Signposts, she explained, were the predictable sequences of feelings and attitudes that mark a certain sequence of physical progressions in labor. The happy face becomes a serious face, and then a very unhappy face as a mother approaches pushing. You can read slight changes in your feelings, instead of fetal monitoring or exams, to know exactly where you are in the progress of labor.

“Dads, you know you're about to have a baby when she loses confidence and starts saying, ‘I can't do it!'” That was when we wouldn't need confidence anymore, she told us, because the automatic processes within our bodies would have already taken over, and pushing would begin, with or without us.

Nina had us lie down and pretend we were getting ready to deliver a baby. She told the birth partners to make sure the mothers were breathing by repeating the words
Breathe, breathe, breathe
, interspersed with encouraging words like
You're doing great
.

“Breathe…,” Jevn whispered awkwardly above me. This was no special breathing, like the panting of Lamaze; it was a steady inhaling and exhaling at the frequency I accomplished involuntarily all the time. I closed my eyes, but I was concentrating on the mind game. What would it feel like to have a person inside me, and then what would it feel like for that person to come out all of a sudden?

“Are you breathing?” I felt Jevn above me, examining me from different angles. It was strange to be together in this context, to be asked to touch each other, or to simulate such intimate support, when we no longer had any physical contact in the real world. But we couldn't think about it. I kept my eyes closed. I felt him pause. He pressed his fingers to my wrist. He leaned in and put his ear to my mouth.

“What are you doing? That's not how you check my breathing!” I said.

“Oh!” he whispered. “You didn't look like you were breathing, so I thought you might be dead.”

*   *   *

Of the many women who reached out to me after learning of my pregnancy, I was most surprised to hear from my history professor, who invited me over early one morning for breakfast. In class, she would stand at the front of the darkened auditorium beside images of Rome projected to twenty feet tall and make you feel like architecture was a worthwhile thing to study.

I stepped nervously onto her porch and knocked.

“Amy, hey!” She opened the door and stepped back to invite me in. We didn't hug. She guided me into the living room, and we sat down at a small table. And then she began to speak in that somber way that had become familiar to me. One mother speaking to another about the burden we by nature bear. She was ready for kids when she had them, and yet, ready as she was, she said she hadn't anticipated how radically her life would change, while her husband's life remained largely intact. She said she was the one who wasn't allowed to forget the kids needed to be picked up from school, she who always made sure they were fed, who left work immediately when they were sick. She'd hoped to share some kind of enlightened partnership, but the asymmetry was ingrained and inescapable. “And, all the more in your situation,” she said, “it will probably appear that Jevn isn't an equal partner, and he can't be. You will just have to come to terms with that.”

There it was again, I thought: the difference between men and women. The most self-evident thing, the least of my concerns, and yet women everywhere kept slipping me notes in secret, ones that said, In the end it is all about that difference, and in the end you are alone. But little did anyone know Jevn. I was always having to tell people that, no, I had not been abandoned by my boyfriend. Yes, astonishingly, he stuck around to help me with the adoption. I was offended for Jevn and myself that people were impressed with his behavior. He was doing exactly what a man should do. And I didn't see what I would gain by fixating on the difference.

My professor wasn't wearing her glasses, and without them I could make out the young person she'd once been, the one who traipsed around Rome and Greece taking the black-and-white photos I loved so much. She said that as happy as she was to be a mother, she felt her child's birth was an ending, the last day her husband really knew her. And what made it even harder: from his perspective, they'd only that day begun.

We hadn't touched the bagels, but I had to get to work. She led me to the door.

“You're going to have to keep in mind, you might be an A student under other circumstances, but you can't expect that of yourself next quarter.”

I nodded, but I hoped being pregnant would in fact make me more intuitive, more decisive, extra creative, and that compared with everything else I was going through, school would seem simple.

“I'm teaching a studio; maybe you should think about taking it. Architecture and the Body. I'll keep in mind everything that's going on with you, you know? It might make things a little easier.”

*   *   *

On my way home from work that night, I passed the architecture building, buzzing with fluorescent lights, perpetuating buildings illuminated by fluorescent lights. When I fell asleep, I dreamed that the baby was a cat. It came out of me slippery and wet and licked its paws and cleaned itself. I swaddled it carefully and loved it instantly. And I was relieved; I knew from experience that I could manage a cat. But I felt confident that in the end it would be a girl. If men were so deeply different from women, I couldn't imagine I'd be creating one in my sleep.

 

ELEVEN

A yellow rubber ducky teetered on the edge of the bathtub. A child's footstool stood by the sink, a bucketful of bath toys beside the toilet. The walls of the tub were decorated with colorful foam letters, and the shower curtain was a vibrant display of deep ocean life. It looked as though someone had just that morning lifted the baby out of the bath and, token of a life lived fully, neglected to put one last toy back in the bucket. When I went to use the bathroom, I felt I'd entered a secret chamber of their marriage. Sitting on the toilet, you would never believe that a baby didn't live there or hadn't disappeared that morning, moments before you arrived.

The nursery was painted light green, for a girl or a boy. The white slat crib was full of pillows, the shelves a clean display of classic infant toys, wooden blocks, a teddy bear, a pyramid of colored doughnuts. Between them, generous intervals of white space. Everything perfectly positioned, untouched. Books beautifully bound but unbroken. Was it a child's bedroom or a gallery, exhibiting precious artifacts of infancy, commemorating the fleetingness of childhood? It echoed with a deep stillness. I walked past it back to the kitchen, where Jevn was talking with Bob and Tami.

“It's so warm for February!” Tami exclaimed. “Bob and I thought we could sit out on the terrace.”

Another alien world had opened itself to me. Bright and sterile, like the Neighborhood of Make Believe or a 7-Eleven at midnight. An imitation of regular life, shimmering with artificial color. All the evidences of normalcy, but barren and dormant, buzzing with man-made energy. I could hardly believe I was a part of it, the other half of an unnatural partnership.

We'd been communicating for a couple of weeks over e-mail, but the real reason we decided to meet them was simply that it was time to take the next step and start meeting people, and they lived close by. They gave us a tour of the house, and then we went outside to sit on the terrace. Tami scurried back and forth to the kitchen, bringing us refreshments on a tray. They hovered around us, chatting nervously and making sure we were comfortable.

“We use this table for parties sometimes in the summer … and I grow vegetables in the garden over there, beyond the hydrangea. Tomatoes, squash, just a few things. We just got this patio furniture last year.”

I wondered how often that ducky got knocked over stepping into the shower. Whether visiting nieces and nephews were allowed to play with it. Was it put there in the hope the baby would somehow follow? Was it there for a home study, a subtle communication to a social worker that they were prepared to parent, down to the rubber ducky at bath time?

Or was it teetering there for me? Had they anticipated the moment when I'd find myself sitting alone in the bathroom? Was it there to help me more easily project the life of my child into this place, down its corridors and into its rooms? Imagine, as I sat peeing, its life unfolding, growing up within these walls, waking up every morning in the green room just around the corner, light combing through the clean white shutters with the sunrise? Did they put the ducky away when no one was coming or going? Was it braver to have a place where you stash your rubber ducky, or braver to face it every day, in the absence of the thing it stands for?

Bob was a pilot, and he guided us around the side of the house to show us the Cessna parked in the driveway. I told him that my father had his glider license, and I'd been flying since I was young. It was my dad's favorite thing to do and his single extravagance, experimenting with physics in an engineless plane. I might have mentioned it as a thing we had in common, a familiarity with small planes and airfields, an intimacy with flying. We could have smiled at the implication.