The Senator's Wife (25 page)

“No, no,” she said, shaking her head. And then she bellowed through another long convulsion that seemed unending, unbearable. When she was done, she sat slumped on the edge of the bed. Mucus ran from her nose, tears from her eyes. She was panting. The nurse was holding her hand, her arm around the back of what had once been Meri's waist.

“I want it to stop,” Meri croaked. “I want an epidural.”

“You're sure?” the nurse said, disappointment in her voice.

“Yes, yes, I'm fucking sure!” Meri said.

The nurse went out. The doctor came in and checked Meri once more. She too asked Meri if she was sure, and Meri, weeping openly now at the start of another contraction, cried out, “Yes! Yes, yes.”

When the anesthesiologist came, Meri had to lie down for a swab of something cold on her back, for the needle. Just afterward, just as she was curling tight on the bed through another hard seizure, she felt it—her body's easing. It seemed the most wonderful thing that had ever happened to her, it seemed a miracle. And in a few more minutes—so fast!—she was truly numb.

She was still lying curled up on the bed, crying harder now in the gratitude that had swept her. Nathan, misunderstanding, held on to her hands, tight, trying to give her courage. “I love you,” he whispered. “I love you.”

“No, no, it's all right,” she told him. But then she realized that her voice wasn't doing that, wasn't saying that. That she was still just making noise. She shut her mouth. She put her hands over it. After a minute of silence, Nathan brushed the hair off her face. She took her hand from her mouth. With the tears still streaming down her face, she said, “It's working, Nate. It's better,” and he bent over her in the bed in relief.

A
FTER THAT IT
was bearable, the pain more a feeling of intense tightening, of great pressure, only her back still splitting, so that she moaned, sometimes she even cried out. But she was not, as she felt she had been before, reduced to some monstrous creature. And she was so exhausted by now that she actually dropped off into a dizzy short nap in the brief intervals between pains.

Thirteen hours had passed in an eternity. She was barely aware of the next three as she drifted in and out of sleep.

They stopped the epidural before the delivery so she could push. Meri heard her voice start up again, but there was some relief in the pushing, in feeling she was making something happen. She was sitting up now at the end of the bed, her legs spread wide, her feet planted in the stirrups she had asked for in order to brace herself. Nathan sat behind her, holding her up. She could feel him bearing down against her back, bending with her as she pushed, as she willed this baby—this horror that wanted to tear her apart—out. She yelled at it. She screamed. “Out! Out! Out!” This was the enemy. Never had she had such an enemy. “Out!” she screamed. She was full of fury.

The doctor called back to her, “Yes! That's good, that's good!”

They'd set a mirror up so Meri could see herself, the impossibly distended version of her sex, made meat now, bloody and purple, unrecognizable as it gaped open. And now a flat
thing,
the whitish, blood-streaked top of the head appeared inside it, and Meri bellowed and pushed. It paused. It went back. It seemed stuck. Beside herself, enraged, Meri pushed and yelled again. She pushed so hard her eyes hurt, and Nathan pushed against her. And then it was out, the head was out! It was a creature down there, bloody, crusted with gunk. Her panting slowed. Her body wanted nothing but to rest.

“Just a little more now,” the doctor said. “One more, one more for the shoulders. Ah, it's easy now, it's easy.”

Meri pushed again as hard as she could and felt the baby, the pain, slip away. It was gone. It was over.

She sagged back against Nathan, and he held her. He was kissing her hair, her ear, he was laughing lightly in relief.

“It's a boy,” he said. He swept the hair off her face. “Look, sweetheart, it's a boy.”

But it didn't matter to her. She had turned to rest against Nathan's chest and she wanted only to stay here, to sleep, to be without pain. She didn't turn. She didn't look. Her eyes were shut. It just didn't matter to her.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Meri, May and June 1994

T
HE MEMORY OF
the labor was like a nightmare whose ugliness ran through the days afterward. Meri felt it as a kind of displacement from herself, a displacement that fed her sense of distance from Asa.

Everything she did for him—and when was she not doing something for him?—she did with a sense of belatedness, of absence, of exhaustion and incapacity. He cried. He cried because he was hungry, or because even though he was hungry, he didn't seem to be able to fix on her breast. He cried because as soon as he fixed on her breast and sucked for a few minutes, he fell asleep again, and then, within twenty minutes or so, woke, famished. He cried because no sooner had he nursed than he threw it all up, white curdish stuff with a sharp, sour smell.

He cried because he was sleepy and wasn't yet asleep, because he was waking up, because he was wet, because he'd shat in his diaper, because he was about to vomit, because, it seemed to her, he didn't want to be here. How could this be her life, this sleepless, exhausted stumble from one failed activity to another?

She was unable not to watch him. She sat by him as he slept, observing the puckering and smoothing of his face, the little convulsive starts of his body. He seemed so unhappy. Sometimes he stiffened and straightened out. Sometimes he lay with everything curled up, his legs and his pathetic arms folded in. He had oddly too-large hands—hands that were at the same time so tiny they frightened her. His hair was patchy, dry and black, unattractive. His head was elongated from the pressure of the labor and birth. His navel and penis were still bandaged. His open mouth, when he shrieked, was all tongue and naked gums. When she picked him up, he felt boneless, limp. His limpness itself felt like a rebuke to her.

She wished she had had a girl. She wished she'd said no to Nathan, that she wasn't ready, that she couldn't do it. She thought of the shock of the labor and the way it had changed her, taken her over. Asa seemed almost as unreal, as impossible as that.

The second weekend Meri and Asa were home, Nathan's mother, Elizabeth, came up from New Jersey. Meri felt so exhausted that she wasn't sure she wanted her, but once Elizabeth arrived, she was grateful. She was as undemanding as ever, and she took over Asa's care almost completely in the daytime. Meri napped twice in the two days Elizabeth was there, hours-long naps that felt like small, restorative deaths.

Waking, lying in their bed, she could hear the peace Elizabeth had brought to the house, the noises of kitchen work below her, sometimes Asa crying briefly in a way that didn't seem connected to her. She could hear Nathan talking, his voice alive and buoyant as it wasn't with her now, maybe because he was so shocked at what she'd gone through, at the state of fatigue she was in, at her bloodshot eyes.

Cooking smells floated up, food appeared, Elizabeth brought Asa in to nurse, and then whisked him away.

Nathan and Elizabeth went shopping, they got the things Meri and Nathan should have bought long ago. They showed her—the baby carriage on the front porch, the straw basket with handles for Asa to lie in, the little pack to carry him in. In the spare bathroom sat several enormous boxes of Pampers, and in Meri and Nathan's bathroom, a box of maxipads for her almost as big.

Elizabeth was small, plump, energetic. She made Meri even more aware of her own huge body, still sore, still so swollen she looked four months gone. And she made Meri feel inept—she seemed so utterly at ease with Asa. She picked him up unhesitatingly and walked around the house with him tucked back along her bent arm, his head resting on her hand. She popped him in the Snugli while she did the dishes.

Inspired by Asa, she spoke of Nathan as an infant. He too had regularly fallen asleep at the breast. He too had cried when he was in the process of falling asleep. “You can't pick him up,” she said to Meri. “It just makes it take longer. Just leave, you'll see. Leave, walk right out, and in five minutes’ time he'll be sound asleep.”

Meri was more dubious about some other things she said. That babies
ought
to cry sometimes, that you couldn't let them have their way or they'd be spoiled. That she should start bottle-feeding within a month or so, so Nathan could take some responsibility too. That it wasn't healthy for them to have him in bed with them at night, which they did.

Coming to bed a few nights after Elizabeth had left, carrying Asa—newly Pampered, powdered, and fed—Meri mentioned this to Nathan.

He looked at her—at her and Asa. “You know you don't have to do everything the way my mother did it. You don't have to do
anything
the way she did.”

“Yeah, but do you think she's right?”

“Right, wrong, I don't think those apply.”

After a moment, she said, “You sound so
wise,
Nate.”

He smiled, sheepishly. “I don't mean to,” he said. “What do I know?” He shrugged. “I just mean whatever you do is probably okay. Is probably just fine. As fine as whatever my mother does.”

“She was a big help.”

“I know. Just, she's not the source of absolute wisdom of any kind.”

Asa wuffled and snuffled, then turned a little to the side and slept again. Nathan was reading. Meri was doing nothing. She was often doing nothing now, when she wasn't tending to Asa. After a while, she said, “The thing is, Nate, she's relaxed around him. She's not scared.”

He put his book down. “And you are.”

She nodded.

“You're scared of Asa?” He sounded incredulous.

She fought down the tears that threatened. “I'm terrified,” she said.

I
N THE DAYS
after Elizabeth left, Meri tried some of her tricks. She put him in the Snugli while she did the dishes, while she picked up. She even ventured out on a walk with him. But she was still waiting to feel what she'd thought she would feel. What she was supposed to feel. This was what she said to the pediatrician on the first visit.

“Oh, don't worry about
supposed-to
feelings.” The pediatrician was another pretty young woman. All the prettiest ones must specialize in obstetrics or pediatrics, Meri thought.

“But I feel so guilty. He's like . . . an alien, to me.”

The doctor was bent over the baby, smiling at him, pulling her finger away from Asa's tiny grip. She looked over at Meri for a moment. “What's your model here?” she asked.

“Model?” Meri said.

“For mothering. Yes.” She stood up. She tilted her pretty head, smiled, and said, “What was
your
mom like?”

Meri laughed sharply. Sadly. “Brain-dead?” she offered.

M
ERI GOT ALMOST
nothing done in the course of a day except tending to Asa. When Nathan came home—early now, and reliably, as he had no classes and was just trying to finish his book—he was astonished. Astonished at the dishes still on the counter and in the old sink. At the food left out, the bed unmade, the diapers heaped in the baby's room and the bathroom.

She tried. Sometimes she started the day by tidying up, by doing a load of wash, by cleaning the kitchen. But usually by the end of the day, everything had gotten away from her. The only thing she did reliably was to listen to the radio every day from twelve to one, sometimes through Asa's wails. She listened to Jane's voice, to Brian's, and thought about how much she wished she were back there. How differently she would have done this piece, on girls’ sports; this other one on the building of a controversial dam. But mostly she just pictured it, imagined how it felt—the long dark corridor with posters on the walls, the glass windows between the engineers and the broadcast rooms, the coffee mugs everywhere. She thought of the afternoon meetings, the jokes, the excitement over some story idea or another. She thought of herself there, that other version of herself, unbruised, uncut—that whole, independent Meri—with a yearning that once or twice brought tears to her eyes.

D
ELIA WAS HOME
. Meri heard her one evening in the kitchen—the pipes thumping and a distant clatter. The next morning the phone rang. It was she, wondering if this was a good time to come over “for a viewing,” she called it.

Meri was wearing Nathan's jeans and a T-shirt with milk stains where her breasts had leaked through it. She was standing in bare, dirty feet in the kitchen. She had just buttered some toast to have for breakfast. Asa was upstairs, beginning to stir, to make the little scratchy noises that signaled the onset of waking, of hunger.

Nathan had cleaned the kitchen carefully before he left for work, so things didn't look too bad, but Meri was not ready, she felt, for Delia. It wasn't just that she needed to clean up, to wash her hair, to change clothes. It was also that she needed to change
herself
somehow to meet Delia, with her lively presence. With the way in which that presence demanded your energy in return.

“I'm just about to go through the cycle with the baby,” she said. “You know, changing, feeding, changing, et cetera. So it's not so good right now. Could you come this afternoon? About two or so?”

“Two is
perfect,
” Delia said.

And at two promptly she rang the bell. Meri opened the door, and Delia stepped in. Meri was holding Asa curled up against her shoulder and neck. He smelled of Pampers and baby talc. She smelled clean too—her hair, her body. She'd put on an old sundress that was still snug, but not as bad as it had been last week. As usual, she had a towel slung over one shoulder.

“Here you are,” Delia said, her arm sweeping the air grandly in Meri's direction. “The one, miraculously become two.”

“Some miracle,” Meri said.

“Oh, I know!” Delia said in instant sympathy. “No one has ever truly conveyed the scope of it.
Labor
is finally such an . . .
inadequate
word.”

She was holding a basket again—she must have a closetful of empties, Meri thought. It was full of things tied with gold ribbon. They sat down in the living room, and Delia asked to hold Asa. “We'll trade,” she said, and held up the basket. Meri passed him over to the old woman, as an afterthought passing the towel from her shoulder too. And then it occurred to her: “But don't you want some coffee, Delia? Or water?” She realized abruptly how little there was in the kitchen to offer. “A beer?”

“I don't want a thing, dear. Just to gape at this darling boy. What have you named him?”

Meri told her.

“Asa,” she repeated. “How lovely he is.” Delia laid him on her lap, his head in her hands at her knees, her arms resting on her legs along his sides. His face was looking up at her, he was frowning. “Hello, beautiful boy,” she said, smiling down. “Hel
lo,
beautiful boy.” She lifted him gently, up and down, rocking her whole body. “What are you like, you lovely new person?” She looked up at Meri. “Is he what they call ‘a good baby’?”

Meri shrugged. “I wouldn't know. He's sort of . . . not
there
yet, as far as I can tell.”

Delia's gaze sharpened. “Ah, you're having a hard time with it all.”

“Yes. Well, no. I'm doing okay. I'm just . . .” Tears suddenly sprang to her eyes. “It's okay, really. It's just that I guess I'm not by nature very maternal.”

“You will be. You will be fine.”

“Well,” she nodded, “thanks for your vote.”

“It's very hard, I think, caring for someone so . . . utterly dependent, especially when you haven't before. But it will ease, very soon, really, and
you
will be easier, and at some point you'll realize that you've passed through this, that everything is just as it should be.” Delia's voice was warm and gentle. Her body was still moving slightly as she rocked the baby, but her attention seemed to be focused entirely on Meri, and Meri felt it as another kind of gift. Maybe this was what she had wanted from Delia all along. She was afraid she might cry.

“Open those presents, dear,” Delia said abruptly.

Meri looked down and took the first of the presents out. None of them was wrapped, just tied with the ribbon. There was a striped T-shirt and matching shorts for Asa, and a book,
The Shipping News.

“To read while you're nursing,” Delia said. “It's supposed to be quite good.”

There were several pacifiers in different shapes, one with a straight short nipple, one with a longer one, one whose nipple was wide and curled. “Apparently there's some disagreement about the way a baby's mouth is formed,” Delia said. “But if you don't believe in pacifiers, you can just chuck them all.”

“
Do
I believe in pacifiers?” Meri asked. “This is not something I know about myself, I'm afraid.”

Delia smiled and said, “You'll make lots of discoveries about what you believe in and what you don't as this one grows up. Children: if nothing else they force you to take a stand. On practically everything.”

“Like what?”

“Well, for now, pacifiers or not. Then there's the question of breast-feeding versus bottles. Later it will get even more complicated. Later come sex and booze, and maybe drugs. ‘Are any of these okay for my darling child? And if they're okay, how much? at what age?’ And on and on and on.” She smiled and shook her head. “It's endless, really.”

Meri reached into the basket again. There was a rattle, a simple picture book, and a short nightgown for Meri. Black. Sexy.

Meri held it up. “It's gorgeous, Delia.” Delia had the baby against her shoulder now. “And maybe in a year or two, I'll find a use for it.”

“Nonsense. That will come back too, sooner than you think.”

“It seems unlikely. I just feel so exhausted. So
mired.
”

“We're both mired, dear. Perhaps we can help each other out.”

“You're mired?”

“With Tom. He's to come home in a few weeks.”

“Home. To you? Here? To the house?”

“Yes. He's in a rehabilitation place in Putnam for a bit, but then I'll have him, until he can manage on his own. Assuming he'll be able to. We'll see. But I think it's going to work just fine.”

“But I thought he was going to stay in Washington.”

“Oh, no.” She shook her head. “That was never the plan.”