Parachutes and Kisses (24 page)

Waiting for the contractions to begin, they read poetry—Whit-man, D. H. Lawrence, and Thomas Hardy—and they sat on the waterbed trying to fathom how this experience was going to change them.

Isadora had the sense of being on the brink of transcendence. She remembered how Papa had spoken of her grandmother's death—an event that occurred while she was in Heidelberg.

“She looked off into space,” he had said, “and her face became more beautiful than it ever was before. She was suddenly peaceful ; when she died, that transcendent expression remained.”

Isadora felt somehow that she was joining her grandmother, joining her mother, joining that long chain of women giving birth to women, transcending death. How unexpected this feeling was! How utterly without precedent in her life!

Dusk came over the ridge on which their house stood. Isadora and Josh got into the waterbed, cuddled together, and watched the film of
Tale of Two Cities
on their videotape machine. At about eight in the evening, in the midst of the French Revolution (as retold by Dickens), Mandy decided to make her appearance in the sublunary world.

Oh, she had been present before, present for years in dreams and for nine months she had breathed (though she had not breathed air), but now she was ready to join them in the world of air breathers, the world of mammals, the world of milk drinkers.

The contractions began coming closer and closer together. Josh was timing them with his stopwatch, and Isadora was practicing her pant-pant-blow. At first, it was all a lark. The pain was not severe, and Isadora was elated that she was about to have this famous rite of passage, was about to join the multitudes of women —alive and ghostly—who had made this trek up the Mountain of Motherhood before her.

They got into the Silver Nazi and roared along 1-95 to Stamford. The contractions got more and more severe and closer and closer together, and Josh ran the Norwalk toll booth, hoping to pick up a police escort. Not a police car in sight—now that they needed one.

The doctor had been called. He was to meet them at the hospital. Both Isadora and Josh had the feeling that they were rushing to an appointment with Destiny, but when they left the highway in Stamford, Josh got lost.

“God damn it,” he said, “I knew we'd never find the hospital.”

“Relax,” said Isadora. “First babies never come all that fast.”

“How are you, cookie?” he asked.

“Darling—I'm fine,” she said. And she felt fine, too. Though usually inclined to panic about physical pain, on this occasion, she was serene. Why was she so goddamned serene? It blew her mind to realize how ruled by her hormones she was, how much the Great Mother—Demeter, Persephone, or whoever—had imbued her with the strength of the species to face this coming ordeal.

Once they found the hospital, she was transferred to a wheelchair, while Josh was dispatched to park the car. Riding along the corridors of Stamford Hospital, starting to feel stronger and stronger contractions, she felt how central her role was and how vestigial his. She felt the unbridgeable chasm between the two sexes.

If I had had a baby earlier, she wondered, would I ever have written
any
of those books?

Yes, she thought—but what different books they would have been! Books that celebrated rather than bemoaned womanhood, books that knew the miracle of woman's strength.

In the labor room, the nurses come and go, talking—if not of Michelangelo—then of last night's pickup. Isadora was relieved of her clothes, given a green gown, and hooked up to a fetal heart monitor. She was watching the needle draw peaks and valleys on the graph paper, taking mental notes on this strange experience, when Josh appeared, camera in hand to snap pictures of her in labor. They got through just two pictures before the contractions became so strong that it seemed in bad taste to continue.

Isadora was suddenly lost in the pain, overwhelmed by it—as if the peaks and valleys on the graph had become blood-red mountains and she was climbing them, climbing from one surge of pain to the next. The Lamaze breathing was next to useless. As long as the pain was mild, it was sufficient distraction, but when the pain became really severe, it was all she could do to
remember
to breathe.

Josh breathed with her; but even through her pain, she could tell he was freaked out by his helplessness. This experience was dividing them somehow, as much as it was bringing them together. She remembers his hazel eyes, very spaced-out and fearful. She remembers Steve Lowenstein arriving, examining her, and declaring after barely two hours of labor, that she will need a cesarean. She remembers pleading with him to let her deliver the baby “naturally” —though what can be “natural” about this process, she does not know. She's amazed that any human being ever arrived on the planet before her—so inefficient, painful, and pointless the process seems. The pain goes on and on and on. Steve and Josh try to labor with her—panting and blowing—but she is still only three centimeters dilated and she's been laboring three hours already. The minutes crawl by on bloody feet. When she is given an injection of pitocin, the contractions get so close together that the pain is unbearable. Then she is given pain-killers and the contractions slow again. Then more pitocin, more pain. Then more pain-killer.

The whole cycle seems absurd—and the two men—doctor and husband—so utterly useless. They want to help, but don't seem to know how. They are as insubstantial as clouds reflected in a puddle of rainwater; and only she and her baby, she and her pain, finally exist at all.

She labors for hours. The clock on the wall, the peaks and valleys on the chart, and Josh's spacy eyes are all that she remembers.

“You are going to need a cesarean,” Steve keeps saying, at intervals, but he is too nice, too respectful of her desire to deliver “naturally” to press her. Only when the baby's heartbeat falters does he insist. And by then she is too exhausted by the pain to protest.

All systems go. They ready the operating room, call for a litter, and Steve himself pushes her along the neon-lit halls of the hospital. They find the elevator. He pushes her into it, pushes the button—and somewhere in the middle of a contraction, the elevator gets stuck!

She and her obstetrician stuck in an elevator at Stamford Hospital and her baby fighting for its life! Her heart sinks. She always knew she'd die in childbirth, always knew she'd die in some absurd situation like this. A stuck elevator and her nice gynecologist helplessly fiddling with the buttons. He presses the alarm. Through her excruciating pain, she hears a siren screech.

“Please don't let me die!” Isadora screams. “I'm writing the best book of my life!” She thinks of Charlotte Brontë, of Mary Wollstonecraft, of Paula Modersohn-Becker—all the women artists of the world felled by their own biology. The very protagonist of the historical novel she is writing—Marietta Robusti, La Tintoretta, daughter of the great Jacopo Tintoretto, died, in fact, in childbirth.

“Don't worry,” Steve says. Don't worry, they always say—but then,
they
don't have to worry, since women have the babies for them.

Isadora looks up. A black orderly in a green suit is climbing down the elevator trapdoor above her and his foot (in white crepe-soled shoe) hangs suspended directly above her enormous throbbing belly. Suddenly she thinks that all men have to do is build reasonably foolproof elevators, while women do the really
tough
work of the human race—bringing the next generation to birth.

“Excuse me, ma‘am,” says the orderly, jeté-ing away from her belly, as if trained for some minstrel version of a Harold Lloyd film. Even in her madness and agony, Isadora can see the humor in this situation. The nightmare of the stuck elevator—and she in labor, needing a cesarean.

“Don't worry, don't worry,” Steve Lowenstein keeps saying, as much to allay his own fears as hers. Meanwhile, the orderly is fiddling with the buttons, trying to get the elevator to work.

In the best of times, Isadora loathes stuck elevators with a passion bordering on panic. But in labor, when your whole life is flashing before you, when you are sure you'll die from the pain—all you really need is a stuck elevator to flip you over the brink into madness.

Lying on the litter, watching the men toy ineffectually with the elevator buttons, hearing the screaming sirens, Isadora flies back in her mind through all the days of her life. She is growing younger and younger—until she herself is this throbbing in her belly, longing to be born.

“Get me out of here!” she screams. “Get me and my baby out of here!” And just at that moment the elevator starts to move again, as if powered by her voice. They are all in motion now. The elevator ascends, the doors open, the litter flies along a hall leading to the O.R.

Nurses are waiting; an anesthesiologist with a long needle; lights; no camera; action!

There is a moment, before the needle pierces her back, when she remembers tales of women paralyzed by “spinals,” but then the blessed relief from pain floods through her and she is glad to be numb from neck to toes.

A sheet blocks her view of her belly, but down below, Steve is cutting, cutting.

Suddenly he lifts aloft a bloody bundle, cuts again, wraps the object in a towel, and lays it down in Isadora's arms.

“Is it the placenta?” she inquires—so bloody is the little mortal lump.

“It's your daughter!” he says with great delight.

Isadora does not remember a first cry, nor a first breath—but she does remember her first look at the baby who became her own Amanda.

The little moon face wore a crust of blood as if she were a planet rich in iron ore. The little eyelids fluttered on the little cheeks as if in greeting, a mat of auburn hair clung to the little dome of skull. The softness of the skull spoke of mortality.

“Hello, my darling, my daughter, my familiar stranger,” Isadora said, weeping. She and her daughter had come apart that they might come together.

Steve Lowenstein apologized for all his sewing.

“It takes longer to sew you up than to cut you open,” he said. “So many layers of skin and muscle.” So many layers. The baby, the book, the stuck elevator, the fear of childbirth, and triumphal reality. Her heroine would die, yet she would live, baby at her breast, to finish her book. She would have it all. Was that fair to all the women who had died? Was life ever really fair?

Josh was waiting in the hall outside the O.R. as a drained, tired, but ecstatic Isadora and a newly washed, newly named Amanda, exited on wheels through the double doors of that amazing room where her whole life had metamorphosed into something new. No longer would she be merely a woman, or a writer, or a lover. Before all else, she would be a mother: a mother-who-wrote, a mother-who-loved, a mother-who-mothered. Even if her baby were—0 unthinkable thought!—to die, she would be a bereaved mother. The identity was unbreakable, unshakable.

“Hi,” she said with parched throat. “Here she is.”

Josh came over to the litter, and with wonder and delight, viewed the baby. Little miracle, she opened her opaque deep sea-blue, unseeing eyes.

“I love you, little one,” he said, the tears streaming down his face.

 

At home, everything changed. No longer were Josh and Isadora ever alone. There was a baby nurse. There was a cook. There were all these people supposedly to help, but every one of them was as much a hindrance as a help.

The baby nurse ate and ate and ate. She resented Isadora for breast-feeding and she retaliated in the classic baby-nurse manner: “Mrs. Ace,” she would say nasally whenever the baby cried, “your milk's not rich enough—your baby is starving to death.” The baby nurse was an immense bewigged woman from Water-bury called Mary Hogg—which she pronounced to rhyme not with “log” but with “rogue.” No one was fooled. Hog it was—however much she might wish us to believe it Hogue. No Dickens character could have been more aptly named. Mary Hogg ate for herself, for the baby, and for Isadora, who wasn't exactly dieting, but who refused to eat ice cream and cookies—a fact which piqued Mary Hogg because it then became evident how much
she
was eating. She did little, in fact, besides change the baby and eat Isadora and Josh out of house and home. But the new parents were so anxious about their baby, so mystified by its habits, that they were almost afraid to touch it without an intermediary. Mary Hogg knew this and seized the upper hand. She had apparently taken up baby nursing as a means of feeding herself incessantly, almost as though she were compensating for the mothering she never had. An enormous bulk of a woman with black polyester hair and a snub face covered with wens, she cradled little Amanda in her huge arms, speaking for her, eating for her, interpreting her moods for the two bewildered new parents.

The little girl was beautiful but mysterious. Her sleep patterns, her bowels, her watchfulness—all of these seemed utterly without precedent. When the baby cried, Isadora's breasts leaked. When the baby was brought into the room by the nurse, Isadora roused herself out of a dead sleep and sat up in the waterbed to take the little bundle into her arms. The little rosebud lips latched onto her nipple with a prodigious force—the primal force of the universe, it seemed. And Isadora would look down on the suckling baby, feeling her womb contract and her eyes fill with tears—but tears for what, she did not know. Tears for Mandy's future, or her own? Tears for the unknowability of any baby's destiny? Tears for her own changed state? For never again would she go anywhere without thinking of her child; it was almost as if that cut umbilicus, now useless and dried, had ceased to be a physical object and had become a powerful moral one, a matrix in which her whole life was bound—so that never again would she make any decision just for herself. Every decision would include Mandy. Every thought that flitted through her mind would have Mandy lurking somewhere behind it. Every dream, every motion, every fantasy would mirror Mandy as the human blood mirrors the salt content of the seas in which we first received the gift of life.