Bible Stories for Adults (3 page)

Time came for the amniocentesis. It began with the ultrasound technician hooking Polly up to the TV monitor so Dr. Borealis could keep his syringe on target and make sure it didn't skewer the fetus. I liked Borealis. He reminded me of Norman Rockwell's painting of that tubby and fastidious old country doctor listening to the little girl's doll with his stethoscope.

Polly and I were hoping for a girl.

Oddly enough, the fetus wouldn't come into focus. Or, if it
was
in focus, it sure as hell didn't look like a fetus. I was awfully glad Polly couldn't see the TV.

“Glitch in the circuitry?” ventured the ultrasound technician, a tense and humorless youngster named Leo.

“Don't think so,” muttered Borealis.

I used to be a center for my college basketball team, the Penn State Nittany Lions, and I'll be damned if our baby didn't look a great deal like a basketball.

Possibly a soccer ball.

Polly said, “How is she?”

“Kind of round,” I replied.

“Round, Ben? What do you mean?”

“Round,” I said.

Borealis furrowed his brow, real deep ridges; you could've planted corn up there. “Now don't fret, Polly. You neither, Ben. If it's a tumor, it's probably benign.”

“Round?” Polly said again.

“Round,” I said again.

“Let's go for the juice anyway,” the doctor told Leo the technician. “Maybe the lab can interpret this for us.”

So Borealis gave Polly a local and then inserted his syringe, and suddenly the TV showed the needle poking around next to our fetus like a dipstick somebody was trying to get back into a Chevy. The doctor went ahead as if he were doing a normal amnio, gently pricking the sac, though I could tell he hadn't made peace with the situation, and I was feeling pretty miserable myself.

“Round?” said Polly.

“Right,” I said.

 

Later that month, I was standing in the apple orchard harvesting some Jonafrees—a former basketball center doesn't need a ladder—when Asa, our eleven-year-old redheaded Viking, ran over and told me Borealis was on the phone. “Mom's napping,” my son explained. “Being knocked up sure makes you tired, huh?”

I got to the kitchen as fast as I could. I snapped up the receiver, my questions spilling out helter-skelter—would Polly be okay, what kind of pregnancy was this, were they planning to set things right with
in utero
surgery?

Borealis said, “First of all, Polly's CA-125 reading is only nine, so it's probably not a malignancy.”

“Thank God.”

“And the fetus's chromosome count is normal—forty-six on the money. The surprising thing is that she has chromosomes at all.”

“She? It's a
she?”

“We'd like to do some more ultrasounds.”

“It's a a
she?
”

“You bet, Ben. Two X chromosomes.”

“Zenobia.”

“Huh?”

“If we got a girl, we were going to name her Zenobia.”

So we went back down to Boalsburg Gynecological. Borealis had called in three of his friends from the university: Gordon Hashigan, a spry old coot who held the Raymond Dart Chair in Physical Anthropology; Susan Croft, a stern-faced geneticist with a lisp; and Abner Logos, a skinny, devil-bearded epidemiologist who somehow found time to be Centre County's public health commissioner. Polly and I remembered voting against him.

Leo the technician connected Polly to his machine, snapping more pictures than a Japanese extended family takes when it visits Epcot Center, and then the three professors huddled solemnly around the printouts, mumbling to each other through thin, tight lips. Ten minutes later, they called Borealis over.

The doctor rolled up the printouts, tucked them under his arm, and escorted Polly and me into his office—a nicer, better-smelling office than the one we'd set up in the basset barn back home. He seemed nervous and apologetic. Sweat covered his temples like dew on a toadstool.

Borealis unfurled an ultrasound, and we saw how totally different our baby was from other babies. It wasn't just her undeniable sphericity—no, the real surprise was her complexion.

“It's like one of those Earth shots the astronauts send back when they're heading toward the moon,” Polly noted.

Borealis nodded. “Here we've got a kind of ocean, for example. And this thing is like a continent.”

“What's this?” I asked, pointing to a white mass near the bottom.

“Ice cap on the southern pole,” said Borealis. “We can do the procedure next Tuesday.”

“Procedure?” said Polly.

The doctor appeared to be experiencing a nasty odor. “Polly, Ben, the simple fact is that I can't encourage you to bring this pregnancy to term. Those professors in the next room all agree.”

My stomach churned sour milk.

“I thought the amnio was normal,” said Polly.

“Try to understand,” said Borealis. “This fetal tissue cannot be accurately labeled a baby.”

“So what
do
you call it?” Polly demanded.

The doctor grimaced. “For the moment . . . a biosphere.”

“A what?”

“Biosphere.”

When Polly gets angry, she starts inflating—like a beach toy, or a puff adder, or a randy tree frog. “You're saying we can't give her a good home, is that it? Our
other
kid's turning out just fine. His project took second prize in the Centre County Science Fair.”

“Organic Control of Gypsy Moths,” I explained.

Borealis issued one of his elaborate frowns. “You really imagine yourself giving birth to this material?”

“Uh-huh,” said Polly.

“But it's a biosphere.”

“So what?”

The doctor squinched his cherubic Norman Rockwell face. “There's no way it's going to fit through the canal,” he snapped, as if that settled the matter.

“So we're looking at a cesarean, huh?” said Polly.

Borealis threw up his hands as if he were dealing with a couple of dumb crackers. People think that being a farmer means you're some
sort of
rube, though I've probably rented a lot more Ingmar Bergman videos than Borealis—with subtitles, not dubbed—and the newsletter we publish,
Down to Earth
, is a damned sight more literate than those Pregnancy Pointers brochures the doctor kept shoveling at us. “Here's my home number,” he said, scribbling on his presciption pad. “Call me the minute anything happens.”

 

The days slogged by. Polly kept swelling up with Zenobia, bigger and bigger, rounder and rounder, and by December she was so big and round she couldn't do anything except crank out the Christmas issue of
Down to Earth
on our Macintosh SE and waddle around the farm like the
Hindenburg
looking for New Jersey. And of course we couldn't have the expectant couple's usual fun of imagining a new baby in the house. Every time I stumbled into Zenobia's room and saw the crib and the changing table and the Cookie Monster's picture on the wall, my throat got tight as a stone. We cried a lot, Polly and me. We'd crawl into bed and hug each other and cry.

So it came as something of a relief when, one frosty March morning, the labor pains started. Borealis sounded pretty woozy when he answered the phone—it was 3
A.M.
—but he woke up fast, evidently pleased at the idea of getting this biosphere business over with. I think he was counting on a stillbirth.

“The contractions—how far apart?”

“Five minutes,” I said.

“Goodness, that close? The thing's really on its way.”

“We don't refer to her as a thing,” I corrected him, politely but firmly.

By the time we got Asa over to my parents' house, the contractions were coming only four minutes apart. Polly started her Lamaze breathing. Except for its being a cesarean this time, and a biosphere, everything happened just like when we'd had our boy: racing down to Boalsburg Memorial; standing around in the lobby while Polly panted like a hot collie and the computer checked into our insurance; riding the elevator up to the maternity ward with Polly in a wheelchair and me fidgeting at her side; getting into our hospital duds—white gown for Polly, green surgical smock and cap for me. So far, so good.

Borealis was already in the OR. He'd brought along a mere skeleton crew. The assistant surgeon had a crisp, hawkish face organized around a nose so narrow you could've opened your mail with it. The anesthesiologist had the kind of tanned, handsome, Mediterranean features you see on condom boxes. The pediatric nurse was a gangly, owl-eyed young woman with freckles and pigtails. “I told them we're anticipating an anomaly,” Borealis said, nodding toward his team.

“We don't call her an anomaly,” I informed the doctor.

They positioned me by Polly's head—she was awake, anesthetized from the diaphragm down—right behind the white curtain they use to keep cesarean mothers from seeing too much. Borealis and his sidekick got to work. Basically, it was like watching a reverse-motion movie of somebody stuffing a turkey; the doctor made his incision and started rummaging around, and a few minutes later he scooped out an object that looked like a Rand McNally globe covered with vanilla frosting and olive oil.

“She's
here
,” I shouted to Polly. Even though Zenobia wasn't a regular child, some sort of fatherly instinct kicked in, and my skin went prickly all over. “Our baby's
here
,” I gasped, tears rolling down my cheeks.

“Holy mackerel!” said the assistant surgeon.

“Jesus!” said the anesthesiologist. “Jesus Lord God in heaven!”

“What the fuck?” said the pediatric nurse. “She's a fucking
ball
.”

“Biosphere,” Borealis admonished.

A loud, squishy, squalling noise filled the room: our little Zenobia, howling just like any other baby. “Is that her?” Polly wanted to know. “Is that
her
crying?”

“You bet it is, honey,” I said.

Borealis handed Zenobia to the nurse and said, “Clean her up, Pam. Weigh her. All the usual.”

The nurse said, “You've got to be fucking kidding.”

“Clean her up,” the doctor insisted.

Pam grabbed a sponge, dipped it into Zenobia's largest ocean, and began swabbing her northern hemisphere. Our child cooed and gurgled—and kept on cooing and gurgling as the nurse carried her across the room and set her on the scales.

“Nine pounds, six ounces,” Pam announced.

“Ah, a
big
one,” said Borealis, voice cracking. Zenobia, I could tell, had touched something deep inside him. His eyes were moist; the surgical lights twinkled in his tears. “Did you hear what a strong voice she has?” Now he worked on the placenta, carefully retrieving the soggy purple blob—it resembled a prop from one of those movies about zombie cannibals Asa was always renting from Jake's Video—all the while studying it carefully, as if it might contain some clue to Zenobia's peculiar anatomy. “You got her circumference yet?” he called.

The nurse gave him an oh-brother look and ran her tape measure around our baby's equator. “Twenty-three and a half inches,” she announced. I was impressed with the way Zenobia's oceans stayed on her surface instead of spilling onto the floor. I hadn't realized anybody that small could have so much gravity.

Now came the big moment. Pam wrapped our baby in a pink receiving blanket and brought her over, and we got our first really good look. Zenobia glowed. She smelled like ozone. She was swaddled in weather—in a wispy coating of clouds and mist. And what lovely mountains we glimpsed through the gaps in her atmosphere, what lush valleys, wondrous deserts, splendid plateaus, radiant lakes.

“She's
beautiful
,” said Polly.

“Beautiful,” Borealis echoed.

“She's awfully blue,” I said. “She getting enough oxygen?”

“I suspect that's normal,” said the doctor. “All those oceans . . .”

Instinctively Polly opened her gown and, grasping Zenobia by two opposite archipelagos, pressed the north pole against her flesh. “
Eee-yyyowww
, that's cold,” she wailed as the ice cap engulfed her. She pulled our biosphere away, colostrum dribbling from her nipple, her face fixed somewhere between a smile and a wince. “C-cold,” she said as she restored Zenobia to her breast. “Brrrr, brrrr . . .”

“She's sucking?” asked Borealis excitedly. “She's actually taking it?”

I'd never seen Polly look happier, “Of
course
she's taking it. These are serious tits I've got. Brrrr . . .”

“This is shaping up to be an extremely weird day,” said the assistant surgeon.

“I believe I'm going to be sick,” the anesthesiologist announced.

 

Thinking back, I'm awfully glad I rented an infant car seat from Boalsburg Memorial and took the baby home that night. Sticking Zenobia in the nursery would have been a total disaster, with every gossipmonger and freak seeker in Centre County crowding around as if she were a two-headed calf at the Grange Fair. And I'm convinced that the five days I spent alone with her while Polly mended back at the hospital were vital to our father-daughter bond. Such rosy recollections I have of sitting in the front parlor, Zenobia snugged into the crook of my arm, my body wrapped in a lime-green canvas tarp so her oceans wouldn't soak my shirt; how fondly I remember inserting the nipple of her plastic bottle into the mouthlike depression at her north pole and watching the Similac drain into her axis.

It was tough running the farm without Polly, but my parents pitched in, and even Asa stopped listening to the Apostolic Succession on his CD long enough to help us publish the April
Down to Earth
, the issue urging people to come out and pick their own asparagus. (“And remember, we add the rotenone only after the harvest has stopped, so there's no pesticide residue on the spears themselves.”) In the lower right-hand corner we ran a message surrounded by a hot-pink border:
WE ARE PLEASED TO ANNOUNCE THE BIRTH OF OUR DAUGHTER, ZENOBIA, A BIOSPHERE, ON MARCH 10TH . . . 9 POUNDS, 6 OUNCES . . . 23½ INCHES
.