My Year of Meats (37 page)

“Doctor, listen. I need to know. Why did the baby die? What caused the miscarriage?”

The doctor sighed. It was obvious that he didn’t want to go into it. He looked hard at me, then seemed to decide I wasn’t the type to give up easily so he might as well get it over with.

“In the case of a missed abortion—that’s what it’s called when a nonviable fetus is expelled—it’s almost impossible to determine the cause of fetal death. Possibly your uterus was too small and failed to enlarge rapidly enough. Possibly the placenta failed—maybe it was too low in the uterus or didn’t get sufficient blood. The miscarriage would have happened anyway—sooner or later nature takes its course. The accident might have helped it along a little.”

“Oh. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. They’ll be by to take you in for the D and C in about an hour.” He turned to go.

“Doctor ...”

He paused, patiently.

“I have a misshapen uterus, probably due to DES exposure in the womb. I’ve also had a neoplasia removed from my cervix. Could this have been the cause?”

He raised his eyebrows and nodded, vaguely intrigued. “Could be, yes.” He turned again and headed toward the door. When he reached it, one last thing occurred to me.

“Doctor ...”

He turned around again. “Yes?” He sighed.

“Was it a boy or a girl?”

He sighed again. “It
would
have been,” he emphasized, “a boy.”

 

 

When the phone rang, I grabbed it, but it wasn’t Sloan or Suzuki. It was Kenji. He’d just arrived at the ranch, called in by Ueno to take over the shoot.

“I’m sorry, Takagi. I didn’t have any choice.”

“I know. Listen, Kenji, just do me one favor.”

“What?”

“Find the tapes that I shot and save them for me. They won’t be any use to you. You’ll have to more or less start over again from scratch. Just don’t erase them. Don’t throw them out. I’ll tell you all about it later, but I need this footage we shot of Rosie. I promised Bunny.”

“I can’t. I’m sorry. It’s too late.”

“What do you mean?”

“Didn’t you know? The last batch of tapes you shot got destroyed in the accident yesterday. Oh had forgotten to take them out of the knapsack you were wearing, and they got crushed. Ueno was furious, threatened to fire Oh, but then Suzuki said he’d quit too. It was ugly for a while there, but things have calmed down now and Ueno thinks we can use most of what’s left. You can have copies of those, but there’s not much of Rose....”

“Oh.”

“Sorry about that.”

“Yeah, well ...”

“Takagi? Another thing ...”

“Yeah?”

“This is a lousy time to have to tell you, but Ueno is insisting ... he doesn’t want you working on the show anymore.”

“I figured. That’s fine. Good luck with it. Give Bunny my love.”

“No, Takagi. Not just this show. The series.
My American Wife!
What I mean is, you’re fired.”

“Oh.”

 

 

The phone rang again as soon as I’d hung up. It was Sloan.

“Jane, are you all right? Why are you in the hospital? What’s going on?” He was scared. So was I.

“I’m okay. We were filming at a meat-processing plant. I, uh, got knocked out by a side of beef. Pretty funny, huh?”

I paused, but he wasn’t laughing. “It’s just a minor concussion, Sloan. I’ll be fine.”

He was silent. Waiting. I paused again, to take a breath, to swallow my heart. “Sloan? I had a miscarriage. The baby’s dead.”

Still there was nothing but silence on the other end of the line. Then I heard breathing, a cough, maybe, a sigh, or a sob, and then nothing again.

“Sloan? Are you still there? Say something ... please.”

“What is there to say, Jane?” His voice was cold, a million miles away.

“It isn’t what you think. The doctor said the fetus had stopped growing. It wasn’t the accident....”

“I asked you to be careful. I begged you. You promised....”

“It was already dead, Sloan. It died sometime last week, possibly even when I was still in New York. You see? The point is, it would have aborted sooner or later....”

But as I was saying this, I realized it was sounding all wrong. Utterly beside the point. The words trickled off and disappeared into the black, empty space between us.

Sloan broke the silence with a bitter snort of laughter. “Sooner or later? Oh, good. That’s a big relief,” he said.

It felt like all the air in the room had been sucked out. There was no answer, nothing else to say. I started to cry, but no tears would come, either. I was all dried up.

“Sloan, I ... I don’t know what to say....” It was the truth.

“Yeah. Me too.” And that was it. He hung up.

 

 

Because of my concussion, the D and C was done with local anesthesia. I lay there, feet in stirrups, tears trickling down into my ears again, thinking this should have been a delivery table instead. After it was over, the doctor said both my head and my womb looked fine, ordered me a supply of maxipads, and told me I would be able to leave the next day. I booked a ticket to New York. Dave came to pick me up at the hospital the following morning and drove me to the airport. The crew was with the Dunns, filming happy family scenes to replace the ones I’d shot.

“You wouldn’t believe it,” said Dave, glancing over to where I sat, frozen in the passenger seat.

“Ueno is coming up with all these ideas, and Kenji is just going along with them. He made Bunny dress up in her Miss Teen Rodeo banner and tiara, and sit on John’s lap with a plate of prairie oysters. Then he did a scene of Gale and Rose riding off together on horse-back into the sunset. It was really creepy.”

I was holding a clear plastic bag on my lap, which I’d been given at the hospital when I checked out. It contained the bloodstained clothes I had worn at the slaughterhouse.

“Suzuki and Oh are just like automatons. They do what Ueno says, but it’s like there’s no life to it, you know? Everyone misses you.”

The bag was depressing. I wanted to throw it away, but then I thought I might look suspicious stuffing a large bag of bloody clothes in the trash can at the airport, and also I wanted to go through the pockets first. I leaned over to the seat behind us, opened my suitcase, and tossed the plastic bag inside.

“While you’ve got your suitcase open, you might want to pack this too. Suzuki and Oh asked me to give it to you.”

Dave reached under his seat, pulled out a box, and handed it to me. I opened it. In it were twelve Betacam tapes, neatly packed. I looked up at Dave, and he was grinning.

“I guess Kenji told you the tapes were destroyed? Well, it wasn’t exactly true. Oh smashed a couple of blank ones to show Ueno, but the ones you guys shot of Rose and Bunny that night, he had stashed at the motel the whole time. Then he and Suzuki stayed up all night and copied the rest of them for you too, including the interview at the feedlot with Gale and all the slaughterhouse stuff, so you have a complete set. Everything we shot. I took Ueno out for some lap dancing.”

At that moment I forgot all about everything except how much I loved my crew, and I told Dave to go back to them with that message.

“Listen, Jane,” he said at the curbside after he’d checked my bags. “I really enjoyed working with you, and if there’s ever anything I can do, you know, even working in New York ... well, just let me know.”

“Thanks, Dave. But I doubt it. I don’t have a job myself.”

“Yeah, well, just keep me in mind.” He hesitated, then wrapped his immense arms around me and gave me a hug that could have brought down a steer. “You remember what I said?” he asked. He was talking into the top of my head, but I could hear his words rumbling in his massive chest. “About nothing helping and no one caring and it being too late?”

I nodded, and he squeezed me harder.

“Well, I don’t believe that anymore.” He released me abruptly and looked embarrassed. “I’m really looking forward to seeing what comes out of those tapes.”

 

 

I bought a People magazine at the airport and read it very carefully on the plane, cover to cover, every word of it; I cannot recall a single story I read during the five-hour flight, but I cannot remember having a single thought of my own, either, and that was the point.

The air in New York stinks some days, like a viscous sludge in a turbid swamp. I took a taxi from La Guardia into the city, creeping fitfully, in jarring starts and stops, through the congested streets until finally we reached my block. The apartment was stuffy when I opened the door. I dragged my suitcase in and closed the door behind me. I unlocked the suitcase and overturned it, dumping its contents in the middle of the kitchen floor. The first thing I put away was the box of tapes, carefully, on a shelf at the back of my closet—it was too soon to think about them. Then I extracted the plastic bag of blood-drenched clothing. I opened it, and the searing stench of the slaughterhouse hit me like a blow to the face. I pulled out the jeans, and as I unfolded the stiff, leathery creases, it occurred to me: How much of this blood is slaughtered cow and how much is my baby? And then the sadness was back again. I pressed my face into the rigid fabric and wept, which got me all covered in blood again, and then I didn’t know what to do with the clothes, and in the end I just walked out onto the street and threw them in the garbage, figuring, It’s New York; there’s something bloody in everybody’s dumpster.

“Imagine,” said Mrs. Ueno. “Calling me from an airplane!” Akiko’s mother-in-law clasped her hands in front of her chest. “An airplane in the sky! It was flying. He said it was somewhere over the Pacific Ocean!”

Akiko lay perfectly still and stared up at the ceiling. She was pretending to be in a coma. When her mother-in-law first came, she had greeted her and tried to be polite, but it soon occurred to her that this wasn’t necessary. In fact, it was not a good idea. A good idea was to try to discourage her and make her leave as quickly as possible.

“... I couldn’t imagine how you could make a telephone call from a moving airplane. At our house we have wires connected to our telephone, and the voices go through the wires. So at dinner I asked my husband, Joichi’s father, and he said it was done with radio waves. He is smart. He knows these things. Joichi takes after him. It is such a comfort for a woman to have a smart husband, don’t you think?”

It was strange to hear her say “Joichi.”

“I told my neighbor, Mrs. Saito, about Joichi’s telephone call, and she said, ‘You are lucky to have a son who is getting on so well in the world!’ Of course I denied it vehemently, but between you and me, Akiko-chan, I do think she is right. I am lucky. And so are you....”

She reached out and tentatively patted Akiko’s hand. Akiko lay there and tried to feel lucky. There must be a trick to it, she decided. A knack to luck.

“‘It is expensive to telephone from an airplane,’ Mrs. Saito told me. ‘Very expensive indeed.’ So you see, Akiko, he must care about you very much.”

 

 

“Fractured,” the doctor said. “Most definitely fractured. I want you to have an X-ray tomorrow, so we can see how bad it is. Nurse, can you take care of this?”

Nurse Tomoko nodded and smiled reassuringly at Akiko, who nodded too and braced herself.

“Do you remember how this happened?” the doctor asked.

“I fell,” whispered Akiko. She was nervous, but this time she was prepared. “When I fainted I must have fallen onto the edge of the bathroom counter. I hit my face too.” She pointed to her lip.

The doctor leaned in to look at it more closely. Then he stood up and shook his head.

“Mrs. Ueno, I’m sorry to have to say this, but that cut on your lip is at least several days old. And the black eyes, the bruises on your abdomen, they are not fresh, either. I hate to doubt your word, but ...”

Behind him, Nurse Tomoko cleared her throat. “Doctor ... ?” she said. He paused for a moment, then continued.

“Well, you’ve had a long day. Why don’t you just get another good night’s sleep and then think about it some more tomorrow. Maybe it will come back to you.” He smiled and placed his hand on her forehead. His hand was dry and cool and heavy. It triggered memory, comforted her and made her feel like a child. “You’ve had a bad time, that’s for sure. But don’t worry. Nurse will take care of you here. Nurse, could you come with me....”

“Good night,” whispered Nurse Tomoko as she slipped through the curtain. “Sleep tight.”

As the curtain swung shut behind her and her gum-soled foot-steps faded away, Akiko relaxed. The hospital was exhausting, but it was night again, so she could sleep without interruption—she had been sleeping a lot, even during the day, dropping off without warning into a profound oblivion, from which she woke needing to sleep again. Now, feeling the luxury of her privacy, curling deep into its folds, she ran her fingers over her fractured rib and thought about her bleeding anus and the X-ray the following day. Nurse Tomoko and the doctor frightened her with their questions, their almost clairvoyant intimations. They made Akiko feel like a child caught lying, yet at the same time they inspired in her a child’s total confidence in their custody. She felt secure. Protected.

It was dim in the ward now, and hushed. Akiko lay there, listening to the muffled creaks and humming, the snores and shuffling, when all of a sudden an overwhelming sensation of well-being flooded through her, rising from the pit of her stomach and radiating out to the tips of her fingers and toes. Amazing, she thought. You wake up one morning in a hospital, battered and bruised, and you should feel scared. But I don’t. At all. I feel wonderful.

It was the first time she’d felt wonderful in a long time. It seemed as if a fresh breeze had blown in from somewhere out-of-doors and was making the curtains around the bed billow and glow. The air in the room eddied about her head and Akiko watched its particulates glitter in the moonlight like a bloom of phosphorescence on the incoming tide. Something was happening, she realized, though she didn’t know quite what. But she could feel it and knew it was a miracle of sorts, watery, lunar, and profound. She looked down the length of her body, skeletal beneath the thin hospital sheet, and that’s when she saw. Not saw, as with her eyes, but conceived, in her mind,