Stepping (28 page)

“The baby.”

“You’re sure?”

“Feel.”

With his hand on my stomach the clenching did not feel quite so bad. I wondered if perhaps I had made a mistake. Perhaps it was only a false alarm.

“Two minutes apart,” I said.

“Let’s go to the hospital,” Charlie said.

While Charlie dressed I made the bed, then sat on it and felt my stomach and panted. I wanted to call friends to tell them it was starting, but I realized that I was supposed to wait until it was all over to call. Still, I was terribly excited and happy, as if I were about to go to a marvelous party.

Charlie helped me down the stairs, then went out to start the Jeep and warm it. He put my small overnight bag full of nursing bras and nightgowns in the Jeep, then came for me. As I went out the door of my house I felt buoyant, as if I were stepping off the stoop into gravity-free air. I wondered who would be in my arms when I entered the house again.

I chatted gaily to Charlie all the way to the hospital. I felt I had never been quite so witty and enjoyable a conversationalist. Charlie had to concentrate on steering the Jeep over the snowpacked roads, and we slid once or twice on ice, but it all seemed distant and easy to me, although an occasional bump made me gasp. Everything seemed out of my hands now. I felt that if Charlie had settled back in his seat the car would have gently
moved itself along the snowy roads. It was beautiful out. Everything was white and soft and full of depth.

At the hospital I couldn’t help smiling at everyone. So this is what the janitor who mops the floor here every night looks like, I thought. How nice it must be to work in such a place of drama, and so this will be my nurse. The labor room they put me in had a window, and I could see the sky lightening and the windows of a white clapboard church begin to glow. I liked it when the nurse slipped a crisp white institutional frock over me; it was as if someone were taking care of me, someone were dressing me, like a mother.

I climbed up on a high white bed and the nurses covered me with a soft beige blanket, and Charlie came in and held my hand. He looked out of place in his green sweater and old gray corduroy slacks while the rest of us were all in white.

“Charlie,” I said, “you promised you’d come into the delivery room with me. You promised.”

“I will,” he said. “I will. I’ll get the hospital garb on when the time comes. But you’ve still got a long way to go.”

“How do you know?” I asked. I knew that Charlie had not been with Adelaide when Caroline and Cathy were born.

“The nurses told me,” Charlie said. “They said that if you’re still smiling and joking around, you’ve got a long way to go.”

Hah, I thought to myself, will they have a surprise coming! I’m going to smile and joke through it all. Why not? It’s easy. To Charlie, I said, “Do I need some more lipstick?”

Charlie said, “Oh, Zelda, I love you.”

And of course the nurses were right. After a while I stopped smiling and joking and concentrated on breathing correctly and not screaming. After a while the nurses didn’t seem so cute or sweet and Charlie seemed absolutely irritating. It occurred to me in a rush that I was going to have to surrender myself to something out of my control. It was as if my greedy hardening stomach was trying to pull myself—the “I” of my self—out of my head, to pull it down to the center of my body, and when I finally realized that this was what was necessary I let go. And things began to move much more rapidly. I let go of myself, of my “I,” the I who was Zelda, who was thirty years old and had curly black
hair and a ready smile, who knew about T. S. Eliot, who loved to ride horses through the woods. I let go. And my I, my self, seemed to suddenly sink and surge downward into the center of my being. I lost myself, I surrendered myself to the passionate lustful pain. Charlie held my hand and rubbed my back, but I was not with Charlie. And I was not with the baby. I was with, blended with, something else, some greedy, fierce, ripping power. Suddenly the clenched fist socked me in the small of my back, and my back arched, and I cried out in a way that I never would have let myself cry before. They took me to the delivery room.

For a moment the glare of that bright clean room startled me. I came back. I said, “Charlie, I’m going to have a baby.”

Charlie said, “Do you want something? For the pain?”

“I’m thirsty,” I said. “If they could just let me have something to drink—”

Someone wet my lips with a moist cloth, and I said “Thank you,” and then the fist inside my stomach reached up and pulled me down.

“Push,” someone said. “Really push. Get mad.”

Someone in white accidentally hit the mirror so that I saw my face. The sight shocked me. I was red and shiny-looking, and it seemed I had two chins, for I was digging my chin down into my chest as I pushed. I saw that I was not Zelda; I had become something else, not even a woman, but a female creature, sister to cows and bitches and tornadoes and floods, a shining hot dynamo exploding life.

“DON’T LOOK AT ME!” I screamed, and I grabbed the handguards of the table, and let go of myself, and arched my back, and pushed. I felt that if I pushed with one more ounce of strength I would burst apart and set the delivery room and everyone in it on fire.

“Keep your butt pressed against the table. Keep your bottom down,” a nurse said to me.

I pushed and screamed again.

Charlie said to the doctor, “Is she okay?”

The doctor said, “Look, the head is crowning.”

I stood on a high red cliff and pushed myself off, and shouted with joy as I fell.

“Zelda, Zelda, it’s all right,” Charlie was saying, pressing his hands on my
shoulders. I was shaking all over.

“Of course it’s all right!” I shouted, and pushed again, this time with a final furious, elated force that welled up easily within me. My baby slid out. He cried.

When he cried, I became myself again. It was very strange. I became myself again, a queer, wild, slightly drunk self, but still Zelda. “He’s here!” I shouted. “Let me hold him! Oh, too bad it’s over, that was fantastic— Look. Look. What a funny-looking little thing he is.”

So Adam was born. My son. Everything after that was reasonable and sweet: the tiny nightclothes and diapers, the trusting glazed gaze, the beautiful fist clenching my finger, and Charlie’s tears running freely down his face as he watched the two of us together, as he held his new son. It was a special time, those first few days of Adam’s life, and Charlie and I shared it together, like a fresh sweet fruit. I talked about feeding schedules and burping with nurses and other mothers and wrote letters to friends, and learned to nurse, and soon was a nice normal person again. Yet sometimes as I looked out my bedroom window on the fifth floor of the hospital, I would long to open it, to break it open, and to throw my body out into the cold wild air, so that I could experience it again: the terror, the pain, the wild spinning fall, the soaring on the back of some universal power that dipped me deep into the oceans of fear and joy, that soared me high into the skies of an agonizing joy where words can never go. I felt sorry for Charlie because he was a man. I knew I would have to have another child. I wanted to go soaring again.

Seven

“You are being ridiculous. You are being irrational. Zelda, get hold of yourself, for heaven’s sake.”

“I am getting hold of myself, dammit. And I am not being irrational. You’re the one being irrational. You’re being irrational and insensitive. Ouch—oh shit; oh, that was a good one.”

“If we don’t leave right now, you’ll have the baby in the car.”

“Then call Mrs. Justin and ask her to come over.”

“We don’t need Mrs. Justin. Catherine and Caroline are here. Now, God dammit, stop it!”

“Charlie, please, Charlie, I’m begging you. I can’t leave Adam alone with them. Please don’t make me leave Adam alone with them. Oh, fuck shit shit; oh, it hurts. Charlie, please.”

“Zelda, my love. Lie down a minute. Stop talking and do your breathing and listen to me a minute. Adam will be just fine with the girls. They’ll take good care of him. You’re being crazy.”

“Charlie. We are a good ten-minute drive from the nearest person. Your daughters have come to visit us only two times in the past two years, and they have not spoken one word to Adam, or held him, or smiled at him, in all that time. Just because you are paying them for helping doesn’t mean they’ll be nice to him. He’s just a little two-year-old boy, and he doesn’t even know who they are, and his mommy and daddy are going away to get a new baby. He needs someone he trusts. He’s got to have security today. Please. He loves Mrs. Justin.
Please call her
.”

“Zelda, you make the girls sound like monsters.”

“Well, they
are
monsters. They are spoiled, selfish, inconsiderate, unloving, hateful, spiteful monsters.”

“Zelda, calm down. We’ve talked about this before. There’s bound to be some jealousy. You can’t expect them to love your children.”

“Who’s asking for love? I’m asking for a smile now and then, maybe a hug or a nice hello? Jesus, Charlie, just think about how they were last night when they arrived. Have you ever seen two more sullen faces? Did they speak to Adam or smile at him? Did they offer to help me with anything? My God, they just sat there at the dinner table looking surly while I fixed the meal and set the table and did the dishes. When I brought Adam downstairs to say good night they didn’t even look at him, they just kept staring at the television. You think they’re going to cuddle and kiss him today? Not very damned likely.”

“It’s their age. And it’s a tough situation. You’ve got to understand. It probably looks as though I love Adam more than I love them because I’m always holding him on my lap. He can say, ‘Daddy, Daddy,’ and run to me and I’ll pick him up, and they can’t do that anymore. They’re bound to resent him.”

“Well, dammit, Charlie, if you know they’re bound to resent him, why in God’s name did you ask them to come up here and help us now? If they resent Adam, they’re going to hate taking care of him while we have a new baby.”

“Look. We’ve been through this before. Caroline is in college and Cathy will start in another year. They need money. They need lots of money for tuition and books and clothes. I don’t have lots of money. I can’t afford to pay for help for you and the farm and Adam and take care of their needs, too. It is only sensible that they come up now; it’s summer, they don’t have jobs, they ought to earn some of the money I give them.”

“Oh, Charlie, I understand all that, and I wanted it to be that way, too. But it’s not working out that way, can’t you see? Charlie, please. I hurt. Listen, let’s do this, let’s make a deal. I know you’ve got to go to that fucking conference, and I want you to go. I’ll manage here somehow after the baby’s born, when I can be here to watch the girls with Adam. But please, today, please let’s have Mrs. Justin come. Let Adam be with someone he loves and trusts for this one day. Please.”

I was sobbing. The sun was rising and I was rolling on the floor in my summer nightgown, sobbing. My contractions were coming every two minutes. The hospital was a good twenty-five minutes away, but I would not leave Adam, my helpless sleeping son, I would not leave him alone with my stepdaughters. I could not.

“Zelda …” Charlie began again.

“Charlie. Help me. I hurt.”

Charlie went to the phone and dialed Mrs. Justin, our good old reliable babysitter. She was a grandmother who lived on the same farm she had been born on seventy years before, and she was the closest thing to a grandmother that Adam had, because Charlie’s own mother was dead now and my mother was a snazzy businesswoman, not at all interested in coming back to a New Hampshire farm to help with diapers and housework and gardening.

“She’s coming right away,” Charlie said to me. “Now let me help you get up off the floor. Let’s get you to the car.”

“I don’t want to leave until she’s here.”

“All right. Let’s just get you down to the car.”

“I want to go look at Adam before I go.”

We shuffled slowly into his room. I bent and clutched the bedpost and panted through a contraction as I looked at him. He was wearing light blue summer pajamas, and his hair was curly from the heat, and his face was rosy and flushed.

“My little boy,” I whispered.

“Don’t wake him up,” Charlie said. “Come on, Zelda. He’ll be fine.”

As we slowly made our way down the stairs, I thought how different the house looked this time: in the two years since I had had Adam, I had devoted myself entirely to the house. I had scraped off old paint and wallpaper in each room and repainted, rewallpapered. I had learned to garden, to can and freeze, and cook and bake. I had the house looking lovely, perfectly lovely, and I had the cookie jar full of homemade oatmeal-raisin cookies, and the freezer full of nutritious casseroles. If I hadn’t been roaringly happy during those two years, at least I had been content, fatly, gooily content, loving my living child and then the new kicking secret in my tummy. I had done the best I could to live up to a certain fantasy, a certain image in my head of motherhood and the good life on a farm.

Charlie had been in paradise. He had taught at the university, and spent his free time chopping firewood for the winter or helping with the garden. He enjoyed writing in his study and stepping out into the fresh country air whenever he needed a break. And Adam bloomed on the farm like one of its natural wildflowers. He toddled after
butterflies, and ran splashing in the pond, and tried to catch frogs, and wandered through fields of grass higher than his head. I sat in the sun reading all the useless pleasurable novels I had deprived myself of during my PhD-oriented years, and Adam dug in the sand or chased chickens or played with our cats. From time to time I surfaced enough to go around to the colleges within driving distance to see if they needed anyone to teach, and they didn’t. It was 1975. The money was disappearing from colleges and universities. Jobs were getting harder and harder to find. I moved slowly, read and rested, took care of my little boy, fixed up the house, and grew a new baby inside me.