Small Changes (57 page)

Early in the ninth month she began to get so big that Neu teased her about twins. By the middle of the day her back ached. She felt like an obscene joke, the way people looked at her—as if she should not be out in public. Men made remarks, she was everybody’s thing to comment upon freely. She felt like a wounded whale. Her pregnancy that had felt pear-shaped and glorious now crushed her, as if inside there were no more room for organs but only a giant kicking and writhing.

“You must be going to have a boy,” Efi said, patting her stomach. “He’s so active.”

When she repeated that Beth got angry. “Will you do that to her? Dress her in pink and teach her to keep still?”

That Friday Ted and his wife Barbara came over for supper: roast duck she had made with a crisp skin, apple stuffing, bulghur wheat and broccoli with mornay sauce. For dessert orange mousse. Now they were all sitting in the living room. Barbara was admiring the new dark blue draperies and they were gossiping about Logical. Ted had not been interested in going along with her on the natural childbirth thing, Barbara said. Therefore she had had a spinal block to make sure at least that she would be conscious, even though she hadn’t felt anything.

“But you know, after they did it, my legs went numb. I got scared, because I’d heard about a woman who was paralyzed for life because the spinal tap had been done wrong. So I kept saying to the nurse, ‘Nurse, something’s wrong, my legs are numb.’ And she kept saying in that cheerful opaque way, ‘Now, dear, everything’s fine, be quiet.’ But damn her, it never occurred to her to tell me right out that my legs were numb because the injection always does that.”

She was not fond of Ted and Barbara, but in a sense these
evenings played themselves. Her job was to make the dinner a success and the house pleasant. Most of the time she was sunk into her body, lulled and communing with the child, who bobbed and swam and lurched there. For some time she had not been able to wear her contact lenses. Something about fluid balances changing. She had had to get glasses again. Neil did not like them. But he wore glasses. It wasn’t fair of him to make such a point of not liking her in glasses when he wore them too. Well, after the birth she’d immediately start in wearing her contacts again. But the unaccustomed glasses seemed to move her a little more distance from whoever she was talking to. She did not feel attractive, and somehow that took away some of the energy she used to make contact with others. There seemed … little point in trying hard.

Watching Barbara, listening, she remembered she’d felt sure Neil would be brought around to natural childbirth. One of the reasons she had felt secure enough to marry him, to entrust herself (Sonia’s mistake riding in her), was that she felt sure he loved her and felt lucky to have her. Had he not told her many times how lonely he had been? So she should be able to get her way a reasonable proportion of the time. She had agreed to have the baby now, so it had been only reciprocal for him to agree with her on the method: and he had.

When Ted and Barbara left, she dragged her heavy body upstairs after Neil. In ten minutes he was sleeping and she was launched on her nightly vigil. In the first months of pregnancy she had slept and slept and slept. She had dozed off in the office, head on her arms, in a movie theater once, often sitting in the living room. She had imagined she would snooze through her pregnancy, hibernating. But that excessive sleepiness had passed off and lately she could not sleep at all.

The baby was a night person. Soon as she got ready for bed he—it—started to dance. The moon must call to it. It thought her a ballroom. Or perhaps it had already started the Canadian Air Force exercises that Neil did. Not that she could find a comfortable position any more. She felt as if her bodily processes had taken over. She and the fetus inhabited this vast swollen body like mice in an old house, while the big dilapidated body farted and belched and had to piss every five minutes. Even if the fetus would sleep at night instead of the daytime, how could she sleep with having to pee every time she moved? She could not regain her warm complacency
of the middle pregnancy. She counted the days until the baby was due—in spite of Dr. Foreman’s warning that the baby would probably come late, she counted till she would get rid of this overstuffed disgusting body that could no longer do anything right—heartburn instead of digestion, backaches, water on the knee and swollen ankles. Soon she would have had her own body back, lively and properly shaped, and then
she
would do the dancing.

Still she must have slept because suddenly she woke and had to poke Neil in the shoulder, calling plaintively in the dark. The muscle of her leg was bunched up like a tennis ball, a hard painful knot of muscle cramping. Without fully waking, Neil reached under the covers and, clumsy with drowsiness, kneaded it, massaged until the muscle slowly relaxed and the pain ebbed.

Grateful for the easing of pain, she touched his cheek. He was sliding back into sleep. Very recently they had ceased making love. Neil and she had invented a theory that the fetus experienced her orgasms, but lately it had seemed to disapprove. Also Neil had become afraid they would hurt the child. His desire seemed to be in abeyance—indeed, who could desire her in her vast state?—although when she saw his morning erections she found herself making edgy jokes. If men and women each carried a baby half time, how different marriage would be.

Though parking had become difficult she went every few days to the women’s commune. Sally, who was in her seventh month, came to see her even oftener. She would not discuss the father. Miriam had started out keeping a journal of her thoughts and sensations, but she had found it monotonous. Talking to Sally was more satisfying. Sally was on her second child and that made her something of an expert, though she said every child was a different journey.

They talked about the dreams that nobody else wanted to hear. Miriam had dreamed vividly through her pregnancy and Sally had been doing so the last month, as if by contagion. Miriam felt as if she were describing a rich nocturnal country sometimes more real than her waking life. They wondered if their children dreamed inside.
What
would be dreaming to someone who had no images? But the blind must dream. Perhaps the embryos heard sounds or had motor dreams as Miriam used to see in Orpheus, when he would be chasing something or eating and little aborted motions would
jerk his paws and muzzle and his eyes would dart rapidly.

Miriam felt closer to Sally than she ever had. When Miriam had lived in the house she had sometimes taken comfort from Sally’s presence, but oftener she had been at a loss for things to talk to her about. One of Sally’s ways of making contact was by caring for someone, taking care—physically, emotionally. Miriam found it hard to accept nurture from another woman. That felt like childhood. After all, being supportive and helpful was a basic way she related to people too: it was as if she and Sally were both coming on along the same beam and thus had never been able to find in the other a reassuring response.

Now they revived each last detail of Fern’s birth at home, when Miriam had assisted. They discussed Fern and David at length. Miriam was furious with herself for having paid little attention to Fern when she was in the house. Now she was trying to catch up on Fern’s history. Suddenly she found children fascinating. She had liked children, sort of, but found it boring to discuss them. Now that she was to have a baby of her own, all other women’s children assumed a vividness and a particularity altogether new.

Sally attempted to teach her to sew. Together they had made bright comfortable smocks for the last months of their pregnancy. Miriam’s hands were awkward with the needle. Sewing made her twitchy and she was always pricking herself. In the meantime Fern and David would be running around screaming and giggling and tripping over things. It was amazing how many objects were around they could get hurt on. The house had to be childproofed.

Of course Beth was off at work during the days. Sometimes she would stop by on Saturday, but in general they saw less of each other. No more lunches, no more conversations on the way to work. Evenings of course Miriam was with Neil, and Neil and Beth had not managed to get to know each other. Once again the hierarchical situation at Logical made that difficult. Neil was never unfriendly to Beth; he simply did not quite see her. He did not mind her being around, but he never seemed to want to know her. He never asked Miriam why she liked Beth so much, thus providing her with an opening.

Not that they were as close as they had been. Beth lacked enthusiasm about her pregnancy, tending to want to talk about the same old topics. It annoyed Miriam. She felt as if
Beth accepted Sally as involved with babies and the kitchen and her own body, but was judgmental against Miriam for exactly the same thing. But then Beth had never been pregnant.

“Sometimes you make me feel like such a glutton, Bethie,” she said, sitting forward with legs apart to rest her belly. “I want to be a good technical person and creative in my field, I want to be happily married, I want to be a good cook, I want to be a good mother and have lots and lots of babies—I want everything! You’ve pared yourself down. You refuse most experiences. You get the same mileage out of less raw data. It’s very third world.”

“Thinking in metaphors the way Phil used to! It doesn’t look that way to me. It looks like you’re cutting back. Becoming more withdrawn and private in your life.”

“But, Bethie, what could be more real than having my own baby?”

“Alone. Inside a family. Just you and Daddy and baby makes three.”

“But you’ll come by. Won’t you?”

“But it won’t be my baby, the way Fern is.”

“Do you really think of Fern as your baby?”

“Yes. I feel responsible for her. I help support her. I raise her. She loves and trusts me. It isn’t intense as if I were her only mother, but intensity that way isn’t necessarily good. She has five mothers. I think that’s basically different from having one. Different not just in quantity but in kind.”

“Is David your child too?” Miriam could not help the teasing tone in her voice.

“At first I never thought he would be. After all, he lived in a nuclear family for his first three years. I can see differences between David and Fern from that. But he’s opened up. When I came back, he was still on the scared side of learning to live in the house. He’s still more private than Fern, he turns things inward. But he’s unlearning that. He’s much, much more affectionate and less whiny.”

“His home breaking up must be responsible for some of that whining. How can a little boy understand his father moving out? But do you really think it’s good for him, growing up in a house with only women?”

“Do you want him to model himself on what male means in this society—John Wayne and the green berets, a stiff upper lip and a successful ulcer? Control and dominate anything
that moves you or feel like a ninety-pound weakling if you can’t. He’ll grow up feeling loved and cared for and encouraged to feel, encouraged to learn to do things with his hands and his body and his head.”

“Besides, you’re going to tell me Sally says she’s carrying a boy.”

“I guess David’s superimportant to me because he’s the one male being I do love.”

“I tell you, this big and unwieldy, I can’t imagine doing it again. But I’m sure I’ll change my mind. They say you forget. Discomfort is so undramatic to remember.”

Beth rested her head against the glass of the tinted window—they were in the alcove on the stairs. “I hate Aldous Huxley! I don’t care if he’s dead, I hate him!”

Miriam sat up straighter. “What on earth is that about?”

“I read
Brave New World.
Connie gave it to me because I was saying women had to create a technology of birth—so we wouldn’t have to carry babies inside. Everybody jumped on me—even Laura! Well, that book did it. It was a new idea then—that was when feminist ideas were still strong, before the counter-revolution was really on top. He got in and creamed the idea before it could have a chance. He made it be associated with horrible people and a disgusting society where sex was a commodity. And it’s remained a nightmare joke ever since.”

“But, Bethie, discomfort isn’t a disaster. Learning to ski is uncomfortable, so is learning to swim. You imagine pregnancy is awful, but it’s satisfying too. I can’t imagine giving up bearing my own babies.”

“But you have no choice. I’m not talking
Brave New World.
I mean that women could choose whether to carry their babies or to have the embryo produced in a controlled environment. That would eliminate most birth defects. They’d be caught early and another egg fertilized.”

“Let’s talk about something else.” Miriam touched her belly.

“Like store-bought bread. People like you and Sally who like to bake bread could. But women who can’t bear babies and who plain don’t want to wouldn’t have to carry them inside.”

Miriam laughed. “Imagine! Where did baby brother come from, Mommy? Oh, we bought him at the department store.”

“I’m thinking of something like a community incubator. No more miscarriages, no more premature births—”

“Bethie, change the subject. I’m serious. I’m starting to feel nauseated.”

“I’m sorry.” Beth’s light eyes regarded her with surprise and disappointment. The incubator was an idea she was absorbed in.

Ah, if only Beth would meet a good man! She had tried bringing Beth together with every unattached man she could think of. The only one she seemed to get on with was Jaime. Every so often they went to a movie, to the zoo once with Fern and David. But she could not fool herself that anything more was going to happen. She liked Jaime, she loved Beth, but she felt impatient. How could anyone settle for so little?

With Sally she felt differently. After all, Sally had a child of her own and another on the way. That was half a life. She could understand why Sally lived in the women’s house. Her relationships with men had been brutal and abusive. Nothing much had changed since Sally was fifteen, when she had been raped by a boy she knew who gave her a ride into town.