Days of Awe (14 page)

“No more babies for me,” I said. I hadn't even known I was thinking it until the words came out of my mouth. But I heard the truth of them—that it didn't matter if Chris and I tried or didn't, if I kept on wanting or just stopped, raged against the unfairness of the universe or managed to find peace. This was finally the end of it. I felt a wave of sadness rise in me, flood my lungs, and I squeezed my eyes shut to it. I let it have me. I was done.

“Hannah…is spectacular,” Josie said.

“I know it,” I said. I wasn't even thinking about Hannah. I was thinking about how I had been pregnant four days ago. A Monday. I was thinking about how you could wake up in the morning in one place and then go to sleep that same night somewhere else. It was like traveling to another continent.

“Do you want to know something?” Josie said.

“Hmm?”

“It has nothing to do with this. Is that okay?”

“Yes, please.”

It was windy this close to the water but still warm, wetly cloying and a little fishy. It felt like we were being breathed on by an enormous dog. Josie pulled an elastic band from her pocket and gathered her hair into it. “I'm not telling you this so you can fix it, or to distract you from what you're going through.” She looked at me. I nodded. “This is just something I've wanted to say for a while. Okay?”

With her hair pulled back, her face looked small, childlike. I nodded again. Was Josie going to tell me she was pregnant? She and Mark had never wanted children, but these things happened. Was this what she had to confess? I wrapped my arms around myself, my lonely body. Smile, smile, smile.

“Sometimes I think…sometimes I feel pretty sure that Mark and I aren't going to stay together.” She spoke quickly, then bent and picked up a small stone and chucked it into the water.

I thought,
What?
and, on its heels,
Oh, of course.
Miscarriage, mismarriage. Nothing stays. I released a breath I hadn't realized I was holding. “I don't get it,” I said.

“It's not that I don't love him. I mean, of course I do. Of course I love Mark. Who doesn't love Mark? But sometimes I feel like I'm not meant to stay married to him.” Josie started walking, still barefoot, down the shore. I fell in next to her. “I don't even know,” she said. She hadn't rolled up her jeans against the water, and the bottoms were wet, indigo. “There's nothing keeping us together, you know, the way you and Chris have Hannah. And some mornings I wake up and he's still sleeping, and he's snoring, or whatever…I can smell his breath, or his hair is greasy, or he rolls over and farts in his sleep.” She laughed, shuddered. “It's all so disgusting! People! Are so disgusting! I know it's not just him. But I think, I don't want to be a
witness
to this, you know? I don't want to spend my days next to someone just…charting the decay.”

“Wow,” I said. “Tell me how you really feel.” We were nearing the end of the beachfront before it angled up sharply to the road, where we would turn back.

“I know. It's just…do you remember Teachers' Convention last fall?”

She knew I did. Teachers' Convention was the highlight of our year. A few weeks into every fall semester, we went to Madison for two long days of keynotes and focus groups and breakout sessions about everything from how to teach math to girls and how to keep at-risk boys from dropping out of high school to Integrating Drumming into the Teaching of Algebra and Curses, Cursive! and Grammar: Whom Needs It? Some of it was interesting, even enjoyable…but that wasn't why we attended Teachers' Convention. We went for the nights.

When I was growing up, I figured that my teachers existed solely to expand our young minds. Maybe they had interests outside of school—spouses or families or, more likely, cats—but if they had lives, they lived them, I presumed, in a minor key. Their nonschool hours were just filler, a place to sleep and maybe a microwaved meal for one until they—dedicated altruists, all of them—could bound back into the classroom where they truly belonged. If you'd shown me photos of Teachers' Convention when I was a kid, I would have gone hysterically blind.

Those two nights in October were an orgy of raucous complaining and drunken revelry, foul-mouthed ranting, sloppy flirting, and hilarious, alcohol-fueled gossip marathons. Transgressive desires that lay dormant during the school year surfaced during those two nights. For the unattached or the ethically unbothered, those desires were made literal, although the women outnumbered the men, so there was an extra buzzy, competitive edge to it. Teachers' Convention was a massive steam-vent, a wild party, and we giggled over the memories of it until June.

“Do you remember that social studies teacher we hung out with?” Josie continued. “Alex Cortez?”

Midmorning on the first day of the convention, Josie had gone to a session on current events, while I debated the finer points of close literary analysis with six elderly fussbudgets, three of whom sported what we called the Wisconsin perm. I'd come out flushed with a clearer understanding of how the Brontës used weather, and Josie had come out with Alex.

We all had falafels together on State Street. I accidentally dropped one on the sidewalk. Alex was a handsome, married high-school social studies teacher from Middleton whose wife was an environmental lawyer specializing in lawsuits against windmills, and until this moment on the beach, that was the last time I'd thought about him.

“Well, we struck up a sort of…friendship,” Josie said, a little dreamily. “An e-mail thing, just back and forth, the two of us. A lot of back and forth. A lot.”

We were standing at the edge of the beach now. The wind was picking up a little, blowing away the night clouds. Solid darkness had settled in. The moon was higher and fatter. Josie was barreling through this confession. I knew not to interrupt.

“We kissed once. And believe me, I feel terrible about that! But it was just a kiss. That's all. It was nothing.” She looked down. Her lips twitched in a secret little smile she could barely contain. She was lying. “We talk about everything, though. That's what's amazing. Lori—his wife—was pregnant when we met, remember?” I didn't. “And they were thinking about moving to Madison, they were tossing the idea around, and Alex was really decisive about it. One day they were thinking about moving, and then, a few weeks later, they moved. I mean, can you imagine Mark doing that? First he'd have to spend two months making a flowchart of all the pros and cons of moving. Then he'd have to spend another month researching moving companies.” Right before my eyes, Josie was molding Mark's talents and quirks, the imperfections and habits that made him Mark, into her own unappealing little sculpture. It was like I was watching her work. “Well, I mean, nothing happened,” she said again, to the lake. “But, Iz, I think something could. If we lived in the same city. If we let it. There's just this energy between us. Alex is so different from Mark. He's, like, bold and eager and straightforward. He's the anti-Mark.” She looked at me, her eyes bright. “And he paints! In his spare time. Which of course he doesn't have that much of, since the baby was born. And he has two older girls, too, Maya and Elena, so his work's cut out for him! But he's a painter. An artist!”

I turned slightly away from Josie; I couldn't keep her gaze. I clasped my hands in front of me like I was praying. I had the unaccountable feeling that all the days of my life were like the pages of a book fluttering away from me in the breeze, that I was blank, without history.

Was this how easily the ties of a marriage could be loosened? I didn't adore Chris every day. I didn't! Sometimes I looked at him and saw nothing more than a random collection of disgusting habits and dirty socks. The way he slurped his cereal. The dry spit on the corners of his mouth when he woke up. How he cringed when I got angry or upset, as if all emotions aside from gentle amusement and mild annoyance scared him. Sometimes he was unfamiliar to me, alien, a strange choice made by someone who used to be me.

Josie rocked a little on her feet. “Would you say something, please? This is really embarrassing. I'm suddenly really embarrassed.”

I had the thought that, if Josie and Mark split up, I would be one of those friends who took sides, who discarded one for the other. And I would take Mark's side. I would be a terribly loyal friend, I realized suddenly, to Mark. I squinted against the wind, against my rising fury. “This is so fucked up,” I said to Josie, and then regretted it a little, but not completely.

She gasped. “Oh. Yeah, okay. I'm sorry, Iz. I'm sorry I said anything. I'm an idiot.” She glanced at my belly, then quickly looked away and shook her head. Her ponytail bounced like a cheerleader's. “I'm really sorry.” Her voice was small and sad. “My timing sucks.” She jammed her hands into her pockets again and started walking. “We should get going, huh? Let's go.”

I waited for a few seconds, let her move several paces ahead of me. It didn't take us long to get to the other end of the beach, and we climbed back up the rocks, Josie ahead of me, quick as a goat. I had to concentrate hard on the slight, uneven incline, stepping from stone to stone, wobbling a little, righting myself. My body was off-balance, just like after my first three miscarriages, my center of gravity realigning. Josie waited for me at the car. I was out of breath. She wasn't.

“I wish we could forget this ever happened,” Josie said to me over the top of the car.

Just before I opened the door, I scanned the dark street, half hoping to see a police car's flashing light, to hear its siren revving up. I was wishing for a dramatic end to this, but there was nothing. It was just us and the warm, black, empty night.

My mother picks a bit of fluff off of her scarf and adjusts herself in her chair. A weak, liquid March light seeps in through a wall of windows. From somewhere nearby, there is the sighing, rhythmic shush of an oxygen machine. We're in the kind of waiting room that stops time.

Behind the desk, two receptionists, both wearing pink sweaters, are speaking into their headphones. “Does it itch?” one of them says. “Tuesday, Tuesday,” the other says. It reminds me of an assignment I give my fifth-grade students every year, where they have to write poems from bits of overheard conversation.

Helene looks around and sighs, then plucks a yellow foam ball out of her purse and begins squeezing it rhythmically, like she's been taught but rarely does. Printed on the ball in jaunty, bright red type are the words
SQUEEZE ME FOR STRENGTH
!
With her good hand, she reaches up and touches her hair.

She looks around the open-plan room, the rose-colored chairs clustered in little groups to give the illusion of cozy sociability. “I've spent too much time in waiting rooms.”

I called in for a substitute so I could keep her company at this appointment, where she will find out how much more of her strength is likely to come back after the stroke. These last couple of months her progress has slowed, like a train coming to a halt. She drags her right foot still, especially when she's tired, and her right hand is so weak she can't open a quart of milk. At her last few appointments Dr. Petrova has started saying things like “Yes, but under the circumstances” and “Well, all things considered,” little linguistic inoculations against further hope.

“Isabel,” Helene says. “Thank you for coming with me today. I know you had to give up a personal day.” She picks up a magazine from the side table, then puts it down. “Then again, I gave up my youth for you.”

“Oh, Mom. Doctors' appointments always make you so sentimental.”

“You're all right,” she says. “But do you know who I really love? Hannah.”

“I know.”

“Why are you keeping her from me?”

We had, of course, come over for dinner two nights ago. And the two of them had gone to a movie together last weekend. “I'm punishing you for things you did to me when I was a kid that neither of us remembers.”

She smiles and takes my hand, then presses the squeeze-me ball into my palm. “This damn thing,” she says, “is just an attempt to keep me from dwelling on my troubles.”

“What troubles?” I ask, thinking we're still just joking around, trying to make each other smile here in the hushed waiting room of the hospital—the architectural equivalent of a clenched stomach. I'm a little distracted, thinking about Cal, the visit with his mother, and everything that came after. I feel a blush rise to my cheeks and hope my mother doesn't notice.

“That I won't regain any more strength. That I'll be limited for the rest of my life. That I'll always need help. Your help.” She shakes her head. Her hair is sprayed hard, the way she likes it. She's wearing a turquoise scarf knotted around her neck, little gold hoop earrings, and a long, soft, camel-colored sweater with small shoulder pads and pockets. She looks like she's ready for a ladies' luncheon in 1985. “That I'm at a steeply increased risk for a second stroke. That it will happen some night when I'm alone, and it will be so much worse than this one, and I won't be able to call for help.”

I stare at her, speechless. Sometimes I just want to crawl into the lap of the person who has loved me the longest and the best—and how is it possible that this is the same person who is looking at me now as if I'm the only one who can save her?

The other day on my way out the door I caught a glimpse of myself in the hall mirror: heavy-lidded brown eyes and thick, slightly uneven eyebrows in desperate need of grooming; long, inelegant nose and lips that curve up at the ends; wavy, uncooperative dark hair with strands of gray shooting up at the crown like popped wires in a burned-out lightbulb, and I had the strange and fleeting feeling that in that moment I was both Hannah and myself: I was staring at the face Hannah sees when she needs her mother. This was the face that came to her when she had to get a signature on a permission slip or when she wanted a grilled cheese sandwich, when she hated me or woke up from a bad dream or wanted to know if she could use the microwave, when she missed me in the middle of the day at school and no one else would do. And even after twelve years, the idea that I am someone's mother stunned me.