All about Skin (30 page)

By national, if not New York City, standards we were most of us old to be having our first children. Middle age was around the corner. Some of us were recovering from the desperation and fear that we couldn't conceive by choosing to birth naturally, to be present for every sensation. How else, apart from her ticking clock, could Beatrice's husband have pulled her off?

“Don't tell them,” she warned him.

“Don't tell us what?” Anthony asked.

“Nothing,” said Beatrice.

“But now you have to tell us,” I said.

“It's stupid,” said Beatrice.

“What's stupid?” Anthony pushed, taking my hand. “Let us be the judge.”

Beatrice was annoyed. “You tell them,” she ordered Nick or Dave.

“I'm sorry,” he said, looking at his shoes. “I shouldn't have brought it up.”

“But you did. You did bring it up,” Beatrice spat.

“Okay,” he said.

There came an awkward silence, which Beatrice finally broke. “Your due date—May 21, 2011? It's supposed to be the second coming,” she said.

“According to those evangelical yoyos,” her husband apologized, adjusting his glasses.

“That's awesome,” said Anthony, somewhat defensively. He refused to entertain bad omens as far as the baby was concerned. But also, because he loved comic books and horror movies and all characters with special powers, it appealed to his particular blend of optimism and drama to imagine our kid might be the savior.

“If you think the end of the world is awesome,” said Beatrice with a weird hostility. She was probably just angry with her husband for bringing up the Rapture in the first place, but Anthony and I automatically stiffened at her tone. As usual when we were the only brown people in the room, we were quick to guard ourselves against subtle and not-so-subtle slights. Who was she to tell us there was something wrong with our kid's birthday when he wasn't even born yet? Hadn't the guy who predicted May 21 as the end of days already gotten it wrong twice before? And didn't we already learn in the birthing class that our due dates were relatively arbitrary? Our baby was just as likely to arrive some other day.

The birth instructor would have clapped her hands to signal the end of the break right about then. She was an earth-mother type who'd failed to make it in musical theater but still pulled out her bright stage voice to discuss labor. I loved her for her naked enthusiasm. It was getting harder and harder to find people who weren't sarcastic. “When your contractions bring you to the transition stage, do a dance. Don't lose faith, people! Your baby's on the way. Remind yourself you're about to meet the love of your life.”

Maybe she showed us a homebirth video at that point, or had us look at a cervical diagram in the workbook, the stages of dilation configured in a bull's eye of concentric circles, or maybe she coached us to breathe through a contraction while holding ice cubes in our palms. She might also have demonstrated with her model pelvis and plastic doll where the baby's head would sit right before it was time to push. Anthony may have taken notes while I felt the baby quickening or hiccupping inside me. I'm thinking this couldn't have been the class where she told us how to deliver on our own in the unlikely event of an emergency. That probably came later.

Anthony and I first met at JFK when I flew in from my long sojourn in Brazil, finally exhausted from the effort of trying to find myself. There he was, as planned, standing in the arrivals hall with the cluster of chauffeurs, wearing a cheap dark suit from Big and Tall and holding a placard with a question mark on it. At that time I was a drug mule and he was living in Queens a mile away from the airport in his mother's basement. She charged him a little rent, which he earned from time to time by running errands, like this pickup, for an unsavory childhood friend.

I was a much bigger loser than Anthony. He just couldn't see it. I'd had my share of addictions, lovers, heartache, and STDs, and I was broke. I was smuggling five kilos of cocaine to solve this last problem but the fact remained that I was alone and unformed. I must have looked a soggy, frightened wreck when I got off that plane, but Anthony received me like I was the very answer to his unasked question.

“Here I am,” I said.

“Here you are,” he beamed.

I went home with him that night, partly because I didn't have anywhere else to go, partly because we were pawns in a crime that drew us together, and partly because he was so eager for me to read his latest screenplay, “The Devil's Razor Strap.” It turned out this was only one out of fifty or sixty unproduced screenplays Anthony had written. He'd neatly stacked his work in various draft form around the basement. The only other thing down there aside from those towers of paper was a twin mattress on the floor. This bed was very neatly made. His room reminded me of a monk's cell, a picture of devotion.

Gently, gently, he helped me cut away the packs of coke duct taped around my midsection, thighs, and calves. He pointed his scissors at my wrist and asked about the ratty red ribbon. I explained that a beggar woman had tied it there on the steps of Igreja do Bomfim, knotting it three times with a warning that if I ever removed it my wishes would not come true, whereas if I let it unravel on its own, they might. Years had passed and the ribbon was still intact. I was so sick of wearing it, I told Anthony, but I believed in magic just enough not to cut it off.

“What did you wish for?” Anthony asked.

“I can't tell you specifically,” I said. “But I can tell you generally. The first wish was for success. The second was for family. And the third was for love.”

Anthony surprised me then by taking a great risk. In every way, it was greater than the risk I'd just taken as a narcotics courier. He grabbed my hand and snipped off the ribbon.

“That was a bold move,” I huffed, unsure at first if I wanted to stab him or hug him.

Later on he built me a hexagonal terrarium, bought a star in my name, and hired a mariachi band to serenade me. But really, he won me with this initial gesture.

“I promise you,” he bluffed, still holding my hand, “that all your wishes will come true.”

Anthony held my hand on the day before the baby was due while the midwife swept my membranes. May 20, a Friday. The anticipation was killing us. Neither one of us could quite believe our good fortune. We'd made a little money by this point, enough to buy a small apartment at the top of Manhattan in the shadow of the George Washington Bridge. The windows looked out on an alleyway rather than the Hudson River, but still. It was ours. We didn't buy it with dirty money, either. We bought it with the money Anthony made for
Amsterdamned!
, the screenplay he wrote in the Netherlands on our honeymoon. The movie went straight to video but that was okay. We were too excited about what was going down in my uterus to be disappointed by anything else.

So the midwife had two fingers deep in my vagina. I looked up at the mobile strung from the curtain rod in the bay window behind the couch. It was my favorite gift from the baby shower because it was homemade—a pinecone, a spool, a prism, a shell. The other gifts and baby things were carefully arranged and folded on a tall shelf in the hallway. The ruffled bassinet waited next to our bed. The maxi pads doused in witch hazel to soothe my ravaged postpartum crotch were cooling in the freezer next to the Tupperware containers full of frozen soups and stews to sustain us through the first exhausting weeks. The cabbage whose leaves would relieve my engorged breasts waited in the fridge. The pink plastic sitz bath ring sat next to the toilet. The inflatable birthing pool was boxed with its electric pump in Anthony's office. The basket of clean rags and towels was tucked beneath his writing desk. And on top of his desk lay several envelopes stuffed with letters to slip under our neighbors' doors. He didn't want anyone thinking he was beating on his wife if I screamed, or worry that I was in danger.
Greet
ings! I am writing to share the good news that Emma is in labor with our first child. We are doing a home birth. If you hear strange noises coming from our apartment, please don't be alarmed
.

Most people
were
alarmed we'd opted to give birth at home. Namely, our mothers, which was why they weren't invited. We didn't need their nervous energy upsetting the scene. My mom had delivered my brother and me in the hospital and believed, of course, that I should do the same with my child. “Dad was born at home,” I reminded her, to get her off my back. He was caught by a woman called Nan Ophelia, the midwife who delivered all the black babies in that part of the Mississippi Delta. “Not by choice,” my mother reminded me. “It was Jim Crow. The white hospitals refused them. That was then. This is now. What are you thinking, honey? Your pain threshold is so low. You used to cry over paper cuts and when you bit your tongue. This will be ten million times worse. God forbid, what if something goes wrong?”

“Why should anything go wrong?” I countered.

Anthony's mother was even more mystified. She came from Uganda, had run from the backward hospital in the capital with its crowds of women writhing on the floor, its placenta pit, its bribes and its flies, among other wretched things, and never looked back. She couldn't comprehend how we could refuse the comforts of the first world. “This is how the Dutch do it,” I reasoned. “And the other mammals. The whales and the lions. Why not me?” But my mother-in-law only shook her head. “You know that it's going to hurt, don't you? My dear, it's going to hurt you like nothing you could imagine. My grandchild's sweet head will tear you from your hoo-hoo to your bumhole.”

The old Dominican women around the way were no better. “
Sin drogas, mi hija, por qué?
” they asked me on the street or in line at the Quisqueyana Deli. Was it that my husband couldn't afford the doctor? Labor was a curse best slept through and forgotten. The drugs were a triumph over suffering, they said. Why be a martyr?

To prove to myself I am brave, I told them. That was the main thing. To feel the most ordinary of miracles. To have something that wasn't bullshit to boast about. To be able to carry the knowledge of my own strength with me for the rest of my life.

But those women took a perverse pleasure in telling me my life, as I knew it, was about to be over. That after the baby came I would never be free from worry again. They told me to get to the hospital right then, that very second, that I looked ready to go, I looked like I was carrying twins, I was as big as the earth itself, I was carrying low, I was carrying a boy. I would recognize his face and never remember not knowing it. They offered me blessings. They offered me unsolicited advice. They lay their hands on my belly and told me I could kiss my sex life good-bye.

Inside my vagina I felt a vague tugging. “I am circling the crown of baby's head,” smiled the midwife, who was well-regarded, fifty, Chinese, and no-nonsense. “Your cervix is softer than butter. I can feel the tops of your baby's ears.”

“What does that mean?” Anthony asked. “Is that normal?” He squeezed my hand in his. One of our hands was sweaty, I couldn't tell whose.

“Emma is fully effaced,” the midwife explained.

“A face?” asked Anthony.

I hoped the baby would have his hair, my eyesight, his cheekbones, my ears.

“It's fine,” I said, interlacing my fingers with his. We'd learned in class that birth was 90 percent mind. After so much waiting, we were finally going to see our baby's face and that was nothing but wonderful. It was time for “positive affirmation,” for “refusing fear,” for “mind over matter,” for the powerful sincerity of clichés. I said, “The baby will come when it's ready to come.”

I knew the baby was low, had been feeling the pressure of his head behind my pubic bone for days. I felt he was molding himself, preparing to make his grand entrance. But I also knew that most mothers delivered their first babies sometime beyond their due dates. And maybe, in spite of all our preparation, a part of me was counting on that extra time to ponder what possessed me. I was incubating a real live person. I couldn't really comprehend it.

“Everything's progressing normally,” the midwife confirmed. She had a midwifery conference to attend in Texas on the twenty-fourth. She'd promised that if I gestated long, she would cancel the trip, but here she was with her agenda, intervening to make the baby come as scheduled. When she pulled out her fingers there was blood on her rubber glove. That too was normal, she said, before deciding to send me to somebody called Kang to help move things along.

Suddenly I was nervous. She was rushing me. I realized I was going to have a baby imminently. And, if we were blessed, the baby would always be there, would never not be. Sweet Jesus, we would no longer be without a baby. “Who's Kang?” I asked. “And why do we need to move things along if everything's normal?”

“My acupuncturist,” the midwife answered. She pressed my knee, firmly. “It's time. He'll see you tonight at five o'clock.” She scribbled his address in Chinatown on her pad, tore off the page, checked my blood pressure, told me to call her if I felt anything, and was gone.

Anthony held my hand on the A train down to Chinatown. He held my hand at 42nd Street, where the conductor barked we had to switch trains due to track work. My husband held my hand in Times Square, where we moved through the rush hour crush of tourists, pickpockets, panhandlers, buskers, hustlers, street preachers, theater-goers, pigeons, drunks, and crazies holding homemade signs: THE END IS NIGH. I enjoyed my volume, the real estate I took up on the ridiculously crowded sidewalk, the way my husband protected me with his arm, the way New York City parted for us like the Red Sea.

“This is the last walk I will take as a childless woman,” I thought. “Every walk I will take from now on, I will be somebody's mother.” I was so much more overwhelmed by this thought than the out-of-towners were by the blaring, blinking billboard lights. But something in the posture of their upturned heads was in sync with my feeling of awe, my awful feeling. My senses were overloaded, scrambled. I could taste the tourists' perfume. I could hear the shutters clacking on their Japanese cameras. I could feel my baby revolving his head. I could see my husband's jumpy nerves. A cartoonist beckoned us to sit and have our caricatures drawn. A comedian pleaded with us to take an electric blue flier advertising his stand-up show. A hot dog vendor barked at a man with a tambourine standing in his customers' way. A footless diabetic banged out his story on an upside-down bucket.