Playing House (9 page)

“You could do it,” he said, his voice all jubilant. “You’re really prolific. You’re productive.”

“Fuck you,” I said. “I am not a machine. Maybe I don’t want to write magazine pieces for the rest of my life. Maybe I want to write fairy tales.”

“That won’t put bread in our basket,” he said, still maddeningly jovial.

“You want a second kid,” I said, “then get off your ass and drive a UPS truck if you have to.”

Our daughter looked at us, back and forth, back and forth, like she was at a tennis match.

“I don’t want a second child,” she said.

“You don’t want a brother or a sister?” I said.

“No,” she said. “I want a fox.”

The actual hard-core nausea started, and the accompanying fatigue. At five p.m., I was in bed, dragged down, each nap a small, delectable death. In my first pregnancy, this had been doable, as there was no child to care for. Now, however, I had a child to care for, and I wasn’t doing it well. My psychopharmacologist said, “This probably isn’t such a great idea, what with your history and all.” After that, my husband said, “You know, we don’t need to go through with this now. I read about a woman who had a second when she was sixty-three.”

Another friend said, “You could always adopt.”

“Now or never,” I said to my husband, because the baby was in me. In me! “You better get a job.”

To his credit, he looked and looked. He looked panicked. We hired temporary child care so I could earn and he could look. We began to see ahead of us a long life of serious toil, just to make ends meet. When we were fifty-three, we’d be scratching the bottom of our savings to pay for college. It wasn’t just the money. It was what the money represented, a life where you squeeze yourself out to the last drop, husked by a system that demands cash in exchange for basic needs, like health care, like education. My friend Elizabeth said, regarding money, “I’m having a second. I just figure there’ll be a way to do it,” and of course she was right. There’s always a way to do it. But at what cost? And why rock the boat, especially when it’s rickety? And, yet, to not rock the boat, to live a life only on the safe side . . . Risk and benefit. Benefit and risk. These are hard to assess even when your thinking is clear. My thinking grew muddied. The clock on the bedside table sounded strange, a rat, nibbling away at the night.

One night, late, I woke up. I was eight weeks pregnant now. Benjamin had sent out batches of CVs. He was getting worried, his face pale, his arms tensed and hurting. And I woke up, the house dense in its darkness, a single headlight sweeping over our ceiling, then gone. I turned in the bed and he was not there. I found him in his study, staring out the window. Here’s what was strange. It was snowing, and the window was open, and the snow was piling up in drifts on his desk. We couldn’t keep that weather out, you see. His computer was frosted, his pens furred, his hands speckled with white. “Benjamin,” I said, softly. “Benjamin, close the window.”

“The window’s broken,” he said in a soft voice, and as soon as he said that, I saw the baby recede from me; I saw the baby get very small and distant. I looked at my husband. There was something so sad and strained in his face, and in my face too, I’m sure. And it suddenly occurred to me that either way, no matter what we did, we were going to regret it. “I’m getting an abortion,” I said. I said it more to see what it sounded like, to try it on, but when he turned to me, I saw something hopeful in his eyes.

“We can’t have everything,” he said.

Back in our bedroom, I slid open the night table. I’d put the positive pregnancy test in there, a sort of souvenir. “Zebra,” my daughter had said. Now I saw the stripes as just that: stripes. Two lines. Our limits.

Research on the matter is mixed. Some say an only child risks narcissism and loneliness. Others say singletons are more mature and often become leaders. My neighbor Jessie is nine months pregnant now, and she is sure of her way: “I want my daughter to have family when we die.” So do I, oh, so do I! And yet this is what we decided: we are a family, a thorny, three-sided family that, like any business or organism, must know how far it can grow. What are the resources: internal, external? What are you willing to risk for the sake of growth? At what point do your gifts to your child become her liabilities as well, for, if we had a second who added so much stress that we weren’t able to be good parents, then what in the end was she gaining? A sibling to take care of her? A sibling to take care of? These were the things we started slowly to see.

I had an abortion at eight weeks, and I am not proud to say that, god no, not at all. But I needed to protect what was definitely human, at the expense of that which was not. Soon after the abortion, the fatigue and depression ebbed as my hormones returned to normal, my hopefulness returned, and my self emerged again, hello. Good-bye. Today, two years later, I often wonder what that embryo would have been—boy or girl, brown or blue eyed, a cuddle bug or standoffish? Either way, I would have loved it, this I know to be true. But would my marriage and my mind have survived the strain of a second; would I be writing fiction as well as my more marketable magazine pieces; would Clara know how to read and write, skills she acquired early, because of the attention she has gotten? I don’t say these things to make it all sound okay. It’s not okay. Something serious was lost. And something serious would have been gained. An opportunity missed, but a space kept reasonably safe. We are a family that works the way we are.

Yesterday, I was with my daughter at the zoo. The white lion had just given birth, and her nipples were prominent and pink. “Why does she have so many of those?” my daughter asked.

“Because other animals have so many children, they all need a teat to drink from.”

She looked down at her own chest, covered in a coat. “I have two little breasts,” she announced. “Does that mean I’ll have two kids?”

“Do you want two kids when you grow up?” I asked.

“I want four daughters,” she said.

My heart felt heavy. “Do you wish I had more daughters for you?” I said. Leading the witness, I know. I do it all the time. How else to know what’s on her mind?

“Maybe,” she said. “But I’d also like a video.”

“You want to watch a video tonight?” I said. “A special treat?”

She nodded, big grin.

And so we did. We watched a video about how the earth began, the big bang, the silver scarf of our galaxy, my girl nestled close in the crook of my arm. I could feel her steady breath, I could see the stars. Downstairs came the smell of my husband’s cooking. On the screen, a planet was born in a milky swirl of blue. My girl said, “Mama, will my breasts make a sound when they grow?” I laughed and laughed. She’s three now, my one and only. Often she says things that make me feel so delighted, a swift swish of pure happiness, that we are the way we are, a triangle, a single sail, one half of a diamond, almost precious; this solid and difficult shape.

In May of 2001, I wrote an essay for
Elle
magazine explaining why I would only have one child. In this essay I described my rather wrenching decision to abort my second pregnancy, a decision based on solid common sense: lack of finances, lack of time, lack of personal and emotional resources, a marriage already strained to its breaking point, a commitment to career. This second pregnancy occurred when my daughter was very young. I made a firm decision at that time to parent only one.

Now, years later, from where I sit, high in my house’s attic, typing up these words, I can hear the caterwauling of my secondborn, produced from a third pregnancy. At six months old he has a head covered with the fine nap of blond fuzz and hands that look like a sage’s. His name is Lucas. He should not be here. He should be wherever it is the pre-birthed people live, in a sea of swarming atoms, or high, high up in the air, near Jupiter.

Despite all the common sense, the careful thought, the agonizing decision, the definitiveness of the door closed on whether or not to have another child—despite it all, I went against my better judgment and, two years after the abortion, I did it. I did it just as I rounded the bend into my fortieth year. I did it as my periods started to lighten and the skin began to look crumpled around my eyes. I did it after I bit into an apple one summer morning and heard the sharp crack of a splitting tooth; I did it in decline. I did it because of decline. I did it holding close to myself the image of me and my husband as old, old people (if we are lucky enough to get that far) and the thought of who would be there for my daughter when we died. I did it as a strike against death, but more importantly than that, I did it because, in the very end, having one, for me, was just too risky.

After forty-eight hours of grueling labor, Clara Eve was born in 1999. I don’t think I loved her right away. She was a truly beautiful baby, with interesting cheekbones and a mouth like a little red bow. She slept deeply. I kept thinking,
She’s mine she’s mine she’s mine
, but she didn’t feel like mine. She didn’t feel like someone else’s either. She felt otherworldly, as though she were surrounded by stars.

I recalled, during those days of recovery in the hospital, reading that there had been a study, or maybe several studies, showing how mothers instinctively recognized their babies by smell. If you put a new mother in a roomful of babies, according to the study, her nose would take her lickety-split to her progeny, and vice versa for babies. If you gave a newborn baby milk-soaked rags from her mother and milk-soaked rags from another mother, the baby would always put her mouth right up to Mom’s, closing around the cloth, drawing in and down. These studies haunted me. While still recovering from my C-section, I would visit the hospital nursery, where troops of babies, all in blue-striped hats knotted at the top like gnomes, slept in plastic bassinets. I remember walking from crib to crib, trying to guess, or smell, which baby was mine. I purposely did not look at the nametags. All the babies seemed exactly the same to me. Maybe it was just my bad luck, but every one of them had the exact same color hair and hands that were indistinguishable from one another. All their mouths were adorable. All slept intensely, as though dreaming of the place they had left. My heart would quicken, there in that nursery, and I would peer and peer and, at last, pick a baby, the one I believed to be mine. I played this horrid little game many times. I picked my baby maybe one-quarter of the time, and the rest of the times I picked someone else’s baby, and it was with dismay that I would focus my eyes on the bassinet nametags: Jack, Mary Lou, Annabelle, Galileo. Where was my girl, Clara Eve? Oh, there she was! Two rows over. Either the nurses had washed her fragrance away, or there was something seriously wrong with my nose.

And so the story goes. You know what happened with my firstborn. I took her home, and time passed, and clocks ticked, and days folded into nights spent rocking and feeding. Her cries were singular, the only ones I’d heard, and she started to smile, and she started to haul herself up by holding the edges of things, and I came to love her. I fell in love with my baby girl when she was just about eight months old. I fell hopelessly, horribly, dangerously in love. She was reaching up to grasp the rims of whatever she could find, pulling herself unsteadily to her tiny feet, and I saw, then, I saw with total clarity how from this point on her world would be full of sharp points and hard floors and so many dangerous angles. This sense, that my child is in danger, has not abated over the years. Perhaps this is what mother love is. Perhaps I have finally entered into instinct. The older my child gets (she is five now), the more ferociously I worry about her, and there are sharp shards everywhere. The one thing I absolutely could not bear would be to lose her or have her hurt. And precisely because this is so unimaginably horrible to me, I spend an obsessive amount of time trying to imagine it. The world is now a series of distinct, personal flesh threats. When the children were taken hostage, and then killed, in Beslan, Russia, in 2004, I spent as much time trying to imagine what it was like for the parents to suffer such a total loss as I did imagining the terror inside that gym, where bombs were put into basketball hoops.

I attribute my decision to have a second child, in part, to terrorism. When I wrote “Isosceles,” when I had that first abortion, the planes had not been taken. We didn’t know what the world was. We were blind Americans. Then we saw our blindness. It’s not only that I’m afraid my child will be the victim of a terrorist act—though, of course, I worry about that—it’s more the sense that I now see the world stripped of its pretense. I see that we are all still primitives living on Pleistocene plains; I see that we are slaves to rage and greed. I see that we have weapons, that we are tool builders, that we hunt and are hunted, and that even sleeping in trees will not save you. While I’ve always “known” this, it became glaringly obvious to me on September 11, and its obviousness grew with time.

Having a first child was not an instinctive act for me, just its opposite. But having a second? In the end, I had to do it. I did it out of raw, primitive terror and the age-old threat of loss. My own hypothesis—utterly untested—is this: the drive to have a first baby varies from person to person, but the drive to have a second, as a means of protecting yourself against loss and your child against loneliness, that is where pure biology begins to play its role. If you have a first, not having a second will always seem sad and dangerous. But if you never have a first to begin with, then you’re free and clear.

When I got pregnant with Lucas, I tried to talk myself out of it at first. I tried to think it through rationally, although rationalism is not a strength of mine. I thought about overpopulation and dwindling food sources and global warming. I thought that this was not my second pregnancy; it was my third. The second one I had aborted, and what was different now? The truth is, everything was different. In between having the abortion and having Lucas, I had come, finally, to really know mother love and to understand that the world around me was gobbling up its citizens with ferocious speed. These two facts made my initial qualms seem almost irrelevant. We didn’t have the money? Never mind. My marriage was already stressed? Too bad. Let’s go. I tried to get pregnant; I did it on purpose, and it worked right away. We were blowing up Afghanistan and Iraq. While all over the globe bombs were falling and people were ripped up, I did what the human race does in such situations. I had sex. Two weeks later I began throwing up. My husband and my doctor said it was all in my head. No one gets nauseous so soon into a pregnancy. But I did. I didn’t even have to take a test. I knew I was having my second. I was sick for eighteen weeks, retching, dehydrated, anemic, and not once did I seriously think of aborting it. I ate only watermelon.