Only Children (2 page)

“It’s up to you, Bear,” she called down to him softly. “You have to help.”

He picked his head up slightly. His forehead crinkled when he raised his eyebrows to look at her. “Why? This was your crazy idea.”

“Liar,” she said pleasantly, wistfully. “I want clear soup,” she added with a smile.

“Do we have any?” he asked. “What
is
clear soup?”

“Plain soup—broth with nothing in it. Nothing solid.”

Eric sighed. He rose to his feet slowly and shuffled out, head bowed, shoulders hunched, his walk exaggerated to mimic a burdened old man.

He’ll be fine, she thought. Eric’ll be fine? she repeated, amazed. Why am I worried about him?

Please don’t let me die, she said silently to the ceiling, with no panic in her, just a simple request.

There was a crack running across the middle where there had once been a light fixture. We should have painted, she sighed, before the baby came. In her mind, once the birth occurred, they would be imprisoned in the apartment, their life and things frozen in place until baby left for college. She had tried, bolstered by the so-called nesting instinct, to make a few cosmetic changes in the apartment, but she had let so many obvious things—such as painting—go undone. She imagined there would never be another chance. Motherhood seemed so awesome from reading the books, a kind of tightrope act across the chasm of time from birth to maturity: tilt to one side and the child would be cast into the gloom of permanent trauma; lean in the other direction and the abyss of self-abusive permissiveness was there to swallow her. There couldn’t possibly be time left over for things like painting apartments.

Eric appeared again, a can of Campbell’s chicken noodle soup in his hand. “This?”

She nodded. “You have to strain everything but the soup.”

He listened to this seriously, digested it, nodding, and then walked back to the kitchen.

From the floor, reverberating through the bed, she felt the distant thunder.

Eric reappeared with the can of soup and a colander. “Strain it with this or with a strainer?”

The middle of her body went—seized by an invasion, the nerves cut from her brain’s control. She started to rub the shaking territory, quelling the rebellion, breathing out, counting.

“Oh, my God,” Eric said, and dropped both items. The colander clattered; the can hit with a dull thud. She glanced at the floor to see if it had burst. Eric rushed to the dresser where he had left the notebook and looked at his watch while his hand fumbled for a pen in his shirt pocket.

There was a piercing stab in her spine. “A colander
is
a strainer!” she shouted through the momentary agony. It was gone, a candle snuffed out, with no smoky trace of its fiery presence.

He was writing. “That’s what I thought,” he said good-naturedly. “Was that one bad?”

“Just at the end. It’s hurting my back.”

He paled. He had remembered from the classes, she knew, even before he asked: “You don’t think it’s back labor?” the way one might inquire if a lump was cancerous.

“Maybe I just have to go to the bathroom,” she groaned, and began to get up.

“What?” he said, laughing. “I’m not charting constipation, am I?”

Nina smiled weakly. Eric moved next to her and offered his hands to help her up. She pushed off them and rose into his arms. She buried her head in his warm chest and listened to his anxious breathing, comforted anyway by his largeness, his size implying strength, inspiring confidence.

“I love you,” he said after a while.

She lifted her head to smile at him. She was surprised to see his eyes glistened with emotion. “We’ll be fine,” she heard herself say, again amazed that she felt called upon to reassure him.

“Don’t worry,” he answered, as though she had expressed worry.

She moved out of his arms. While she shuffled off to the john, he said, “I’ll make the soup.”

“You’re going to have to learn to cook,” she said.

“I’ll start tomorrow,” he said.

Sitting on the toilet, she felt ludicrous and she despaired of everything. Her enormous belly was exaggerated by the position; her head was filled with disgusting images of the baby falling out into the bowl. She had a dread—from her childhood—of constipation, a condition that pregnancy had returned to her. She was afraid to strain, but she wanted to make sure—imagine going to the hospital only to discover she had to make number two. She didn’t want the “fulfilling” experience of natural childbirth now that she had a taste of its emptying pain. She could tell from the look of her thighs and the painfully taut stomach skin that she would never be the same. And lastly, worst of all, she didn’t want this life inside her to emerge. Squalling and needing—expecting her to provide everything from milk to moral guidance.

When she tried to move her bowels, the beginning of the effort frightened her. She worried that it might provoke a contraction. She started to laugh at herself, but the release of tension in her face loosened a sob instead.

“Honey?” Eric called out nervously. “Are you okay?”

She pressed her forehead with her fingers to hold back more; her whole body was engaged in an effort to restrain nature, fighting the overwhelming uncivilized elements with thin weather stripping and tattered insulation. Nothing could stop this hurricane; it would blow through her, the swirling force blasting her open to take what it wanted.

Suddenly she was peeing. She had no memory of receiving a request from, or of sending an order to, her bladder. Already the mutiny had succeeded: the ship’s course was in the hands of the crew; she had become a bystander—locked below—forced to guess at what was going on.

Wiping herself was a joke. She caught a glimpse of the ridiculous maneuver in the mirror and winced.

Eric greeted her the moment she opened the door: “Soup’s ready. Did you have any luck?”

So now every body function was going to become an item on the news. Why should she tell him if she had crapped or not? She shook her head no.

Her disgust at having to answer was then misunderstood for upset at the failure. “They give you an enema at the hospital,” Mr. Information said with an encouraging smile. “Remember? They told us—”

“Thanks for reminding me,” she said, not concealing her sarcasm.

Eric laughed good-naturedly. He hovered beside her, walking awkwardly, matching her slow steps with halting ones of his own. Nina scowled at him. He scrunched his big face up: expectant, eager, ready to fulfill any request. The sight was charming and broke her irritation. She smiled at him and touched his chin with her hand. Eric caught it in his own and kissed it. “Mmmm. Warm,” he commented. He led her to the kitchen table, where a bowl of chicken broth sat forlornly—no napkin, no plate underneath. She sipped it, tasting nothing. Eric disappeared for a few minutes.

When Eric reappeared at the doorway, she stared in disbelief; he had the video camera to his face, the carrying case strapped to his back. The flashing light above the lens warned her he was taping, so she didn’t say the various obscenities that occurred to her. Eric wouldn’t edit them, and years later her child would be doomed to watch the spectacle of his mother cursing out Dad only hours before the moment of joyous birth.

“Well?” Eric prompted, his voice muffled by the camera.

“It’s a fabulous bowl of soup,” she said in a flat voice.

He laughed. “That’s great,” he commented. “This is the big day. How do you feel?” he continued.

The red light flashed at her impishly. “I feel like Greta Garbo.”

“What?” he mumbled. The zoom lens hummed as he came in for a close-up.

“I vant to be alone!” she snapped, unable to conceal that there was real anger in the joke.

Instantly he shut off the camera.

“You’re not taking that to the hospital,” she said in an ominous tone.

“Okay, okay.”

“Put it away and keep me company.”

“Okay,” he said in a humble voice. He carried his equipment out meekly. He reappeared moments later and seated himself opposite, rocking back on the kitchen chair, staring at her, his knees bouncing nervously.

“A watched pot never boils,” she said, raising a spoonful of soup to her lips. She smiled and then sipped cautiously.

A
T TEN O’CLOCK
in the morning Peter and Diane Hummel surveyed their preparations. The baby’s room—they would be having a boy—was in a ghostly state of perfection. Objects were placed in neat rows, obviously unsullied by use: the gaily colored hanging animals were still; the crib sheets were taut; the baby carriage’s rubber wheels were white and shiny, its chrome frame glistened, and the hood yawned its emptiness.

Diane stood at the changing table and pulled at the small mattress to make sure it was securely strapped. She had a frightening thought: what if something happens and the baby is born dead? Then this sleeping room, awaiting the life to waken it, would remain in a coma—a tomb for their expectations, its perfection mocking their arrogant preparations.

Peter had no such morbid fantasies. He had praised the existence of amniocentesis: knowing the sex, they could buy clothes in advance; with the assurance that the child was healthy, anxiety was minimized; and they didn’t have to go to the fuss of picking a girl’s name. Peter also maintained he was happy about the fact that their doctor, once Diane was two weeks late, decided to schedule a Caesarean. He regretted that their natural-childbirth training would be wasted—they had put a lot of effort into it—but after all, there would be no pain, no exhausting vigil, only a neat scar, cleverly placed so that even if Diane wore a bikini, it would be hidden. The process would be sensible and orderly. They weren’t hippies anymore—actually, they weren’t when everybody else was—and this procedure seemed civilized, coordinated, and convenient. Peter had been a reluctant father (she bullied me into it, was the way he described it to himself) and had agreed only on the condition that Diane guarantee him his work and their social life wouldn’t suffer. Many of their friends, when Peter told them of the conditions he had set before he agreed to have a child, had said that his vision of fatherhood, besides being coldhearted, was impossible; this scheduled birth reassured Peter that raising a child could be neat and organized.

From the window, Peter watched for the car while Diane had her premonition of disaster at the changing table. Peter remembered what his mother-in-law had said a few months ago when he confessed his worries. “When you see that beautiful angel’s face,” Diane’s mother told him, “you won’t mind giving up a little sleep.” The hell I won’t, he thought. He saw the limousine pull up beside the dull green awning. “It’s here,” he said.

They went downstairs. Peter smiled at the obsequious doorman, who made a big show of rushing to the door to open it for them. “Good luck,” the doorman said in his Spanish accent. Peter smiled confidently.

Diane kept her head down and watched her big body move. She put a hand on her belly when she felt the air rush over her face. Poor thing, she thought about her child, you don’t want to come out. The chauffeur had already opened the black limousine’s door. Lights glowed from the interior, darkened by its green tinted windows. The chauffeur offered his hand to help her in. “Watch your step, ma’am,” he said. She looked at his face. He was young, no sign of a beard on his clear skin. That, and his attitude toward her, made her feel ancient or, worse, finished as a sexually desirable woman. Not merely for now, in the full state of pregnancy, but forever.

Peter doesn’t look at me anymore, she thought to herself as they got under way. She stared at her husband’s profile, intent on the view ahead, and tried to remember the last time they had sustained eye contact. Whenever Peter glanced at her, his eyes immediately trailed down to her belly and then, guiltily, away from her altogether, as though he had been caught staring at a cripple. Diane hadn’t expected Peter to remain sexually interested once she began to show, but to avoid even looking at her suggested a deep loathing and disgust. And right now he wasn’t solicitous or tender. On the brink of this fateful event, just when she imagined Peter would hold her hand or put a reassuring arm around her shoulder, instead he sat a foot away, his body held rigidly, as though he feared she might touch him.

She did. She reached for Peter’s hand, resting on the leather next to his leg, and covered it, her fingers arching over his knuckles—a crab climbing a rock. To her surprise, he turned his palm up and grasped her firmly. Peter’s cold hand squeezed desperately as though he were drifting toward a waterfall and she were a rope to the safety of shore. But the rest of him remained aloof. He’s scared, not disgusted, she thought with relief.

Peter hated hospitals. He had had an appendectomy in the middle of his sophomore year at Harvard, and all his dealings with doctors, nurses, orderlies, admissions and billing bureaucrats had been infuriating. Throughout Peter’s life he had had great success dealing with institutions—indeed, he worked for a large organization—but hospitals were the exception. Because one was ill, there was no way to bargain successfully with the medical establishment. Going into a hospital was to be stripped of all civil rights, Peter often said, and having lost battle after battle in the past, he was now shy of the simplest encounter. He fully expected them not to have Diane’s operation scheduled, to have no idea of who she or her doctor was, in short, to find everything in a mess. This pessimism wasn’t alleviated by the precautions he had taken—namely, getting to know the chief of medicine at New York Hospital through his boss at the Stillman Foundation as well as using the top obstetrician (Dr. Stein) despite the fact that Diane didn’t like Stein’s manner. One of the good things about the Caesarean was that it guaranteed the presence of this hotshot. Stein’s associate might have ended up doing the procedure if Diane went into labor at an inopportune time, which, in the case of Dr. Stein, seemed to be any hours after six at night and before nine in the morning on weekdays. Weekends were totally out of the question. Peter didn’t say so to Diane, but he suspected Dr. Stein ordered the Caesarean because Peter, using his cultivated acquaintance with the chief of medicine as a lever, kept tilting Stein toward an agreement that he would be on call outside his normal hours.