Small Changes (58 page)

The father of Fern had been a member of Going-to-the-Sun when they were into blue-grass music. That was big around Boston always, no matter what other fads came and went. He had found a status symbol in having a real hillbilly girl friend for a while. She was a decorative accessory to the group. In fact she could play acoustic guitar as well as any of them, though she would never sing for embarrassment if her boy friend was around.

Sally played for her sometimes, as difficult as she found it with her belly. Sally thought it sad that Connie didn’t know any lullabies. She sang to both children. She thought it needful as changing diapers. Sally had brought over some good grass and they smoked some together. They were feeling relaxed. Sally wasn’t yet big enough to be bothered and Miriam was feeling a little better since her baby had descended from just under her breastbone into the middle abdomen. It pressed more on her bladder but less on her stomach. She found it easier to balance herself.

At one point they went to look in the big bedroom mirror side by side, undoing their smocks. “Look now, it isn’t fair,” Miriam complained. “My nipples are so dark, and yours aren’t. Look at that dark stripe down my belly. The doctor
said it would fade some but never completely. How come you don’t have a stripe?”

“I don’t know. See my stretch marks? They’re getting pink. Maybe because I’m a redhead and you’re dark.”

“I hope my breasts go down after I finish nursing.”

“Wait till you breast-feed. It feels heavenly.”

“Do you think they’ll go down? I must be a size E. I feel grotesque.”

“Oh, they’ll go down. Nobody stays that big.”

They closed up their dresses and shuffled downstairs, Miriam stopping to rest a moment at the window seat. She was short of breath. Then they continued to the kitchen. Miriam had decided she was sick of pink and blue, and they were cooking their baby blankets in a big pot of red dye.

“The stuff in the stores is so ugly.” Miriam stirred the cauldron round and round with a big wooden spoon already dyed red. “All covered with cutesy hideous humanoid birds and bunnies. Why not yellow and blue and green and orange and purple? Beautiful colors, subtle prints. Who decides that everything surrounding a baby in the first years be unmitigated crap?”

“That’s what comes out, you’ll see.” Sally leaned on the sink giggling. “Yellow crap, brown crap, white crap, black crap, crap, crap, crap, crap,
CRAP
!”

“Miriammmmm? Miriammmm?” Neil home early. He hardly ever arrived before Sally left. Usually she drove Sally home by four, but it was getting hard to fit behind the wheel. Today Connie was to pick up Sally on her way home from Newton.

With a little groove furrowed between his brows, he came into the kitchen sniffing. “Isn’t that grass? Who’s been smoking grass?”

“Oh, we have, love.” Miriam went to kiss him. “I think there’s a little left on the table, you want some?”

He jumped back from her. “Are you crazy?”

“What?” She stopped short. “Something wrong? You’re home early. Did something go wrong at work?”

“Something’s got to be wrong with you. What do you think you’re doing, smoking grass when you’re nine months pregnant!”

“Neil, I drink a glass of wine at supper, too. I wouldn’t get drunk and I wouldn’t get high. But what’s the fuss with a little grass? It’s not going to do anything to baby it doesn’t
do to me. Just turn him or her on a little.”

“How could you do it? You must be out of your mind! You ask the doctor, go on, you call the doctor and ask him what you’re doing to our child.”

“Neil, you’ve got to be kidding. I’m not going to say anything to him. He might be cool, he might not. What’s wrong with you? All of a sudden you sound like Straightman. Don’t you smoke dope? You’re scaring me, I mean it, and not for the baby.”

She had never seen him so angry: it was the first time she had got him really angry. He did not threaten her; after that initial bellow he did not raise his voice. He simply continued repeating his point again and again and again, stubbornly, monotonously, inexorably until she had a splitting headache. She was furious with herself for crying when she was right. She was furious with him for suddenly coming at her all fierce and patriarchal, as if he had become somebody else. Here she was married to him and he was acting like a stranger. Worse, he was yelling at her in front of Sally, who thought men were brutes. Sally would go back to the house and tell the women—tell Beth, who hadn’t got to know Neil; Connie, who obviously thought she was getting softening of the brain, so involved in babies when Connie was just building an independent life again; and Laura, who considered it Victorian to deal with men at all. Sally would tell them how Neil pushed her around. How he wouldn’t let her—wouldn’t
let
her—smoke grass when she wanted to.

“Neil, I haven’t become a baby just because I’m carrying one. I’m an adult woman, your wife—not a child!”

“Then act like my wife. You’re carrying my child, remember that. My child!” He heard himself and paused for a moment, to speak more softly. “I don’t want our child born feeble-minded. I don’t want him crazy with birth defects, chromosome damage. We work together learning natural childbirth to produce a healthy baby without anesthetic damage, and you go using drugs!”

“Neil, you’ve gone out of your mind! There’s more stuff can damage your chromosomes in a loaf of store-bought white bread than in all the grass from here to Algiers, you know it.”

“We don’t either of us know, and I don’t want you taking risks with our baby. After you have the baby, smoke as much as you want.”

Oh, it was incredible! Shortly Connie arrived and Sally,
who had already put on her coat and gone into the hall to escape them, ran out without saying good-bye. The argument did not miss a beat. Supper burned on the stove which they stood squared off, and only the fumes of lamb chops charring broke through their trance or anger.

The argument went on. She could eat no supper. The food disgusted her. He sat there methodically spearing his chop and slicing the meat into neat squares, talking between bites. He would not cease battering at her and denying her quiet until she started sobbing and panting hysterically.

“You’re a pig!” she screamed between sobs. “You’re trying to make me sick! You don’t care how upset you make me, so long as you get your way! You hate me! You have to hate me to treat me this way!”

“You disgust me. Look at you. Stoned out of your mind and blubbering! You’re not fit to have a baby.”

“I hate you! I hate you! I wish I’d never met you! What am I supposed to do, nine months pregnant with your child, and you treat me like this, chained to a self-righteous fink.”

“Act like a woman instead of an adolescent idiot, for a change.” He flung down his napkin and went off to his study, slamming the door on her.

Tears ran down her face until it was swollen and sore. Then she would pause for a while and sob dryly. Then the tears would resume. Above all she hated him for his ability to walk out. When they were quarreling, she could never tear herself loose from him, she could never leave him and walk off. She could not shut him out of her that way. She knew, and was tortured by knowing, he sat in his study working. He had banished her from his consciousness. It was so mean! She could not for one moment cease remembering that they had quarreled and that he had revealed he no longer loved her. He had withdrawn. Her misery felt vast and static as a lake of frozen lava. What would she do with the baby? What would she do with herself? What would become of them alone? He had pretended to love her and now he was abandoning her, with her looks shot, her belly huge, and her job gone.

Finally she could not stand it any more and she ran into the study where indeed he was reading a journal and began screaming at him. This time he did not give way to his rage but instead coolly he bored at her. Pressed and pressured until, sobbing again, she broke and agreed, promised she
would not smoke. It was maddening to think as she lay in bed unable to sleep that she simply could not tell him that she had been occasionally smoking dope all through her pregnancy, having checked with women she knew that it was fine. Like wine and booze, a little was fine and a lot was bad. Avoid the hard drugs and tobacco. Avoid processed foods. She felt humiliated, as if she had put herself into a totally vulnerable position, and now he could begin to insist on his whims and his prejudices.

A week before she was due, Neil’s mother arrived, announced only by her phone call from Logan Airport. Before Neil left to pick her up, Miriam made a stand in the hall. “If she’s around I will not be able to have the necessary concentration to go through the Lamaze method in the way we’re trained to do together. Now I’ll be nice, but tomorrow you pack her on another plane. Suppose I start labor early? She goes back tomorrow, I mean it!”

After Neil left and she remained in the kitchen, she was ashamed. All the old mother-in-law jokes: how humiliating to act in type. Her mother-in-law might not be the world’s most intelligent woman but she was well-meaning. Still, they grated. Emily had kept writing her, “hadn’t she stopped working yet!” Making it sound almost obscene. Actually she had quit early and could have worked another three weeks or more, and she knew it. She had twinges of guilt. She hadn’t set a good example. As the only woman with a choice position on the technical staff, she should have worked right up till she went into labor, so they could not use that excuse on the next woman who applied.

The first thing Emily said when she got through the door with her two suitcases—two—was, “What, you’re still not wearing a maternity brassiere? You’re going to injure yourself for life!”

“Mother,” Miriam began. How the word caught in her throat. It meant Sonia. But Emily insisted. “I am used to doing without. My muscles are developed. I can support myself, even if I am as big as a barn.”

“What does the doctor say about that?”

“The doctor has never said anything. I presume he’s accustomed by now to patients who don’t wear bras, as he must have become accustomed over the years to patients who don’t wear corsets.”

“Well, you ask him if you won’t end up deformed. Haven’t
you seen pictures of savages, women with their bosoms hanging down to their knees?”

Thinking Emily but saying, “Mother, they nurse their babies for five years.”

“I’m sure I never heard of any such thing!”

“Mom, if there was anything wrong, Dr. Foreman would have said something,” Neil assured her. “He’s a very forward-looking obstetrician.”

There seemed nothing neutral. Look at the new drapes, Mom, Miriam made them herself. And who hung them? Oh! Oh! Emily was as upset that she took a glass of wine with supper as Neil had been about the joint. The next morning Emily was still there and Miriam prepared to make a bad scene. But before she could work up to it, Emily made a mistake—a gross strategic error. Instead of getting into an argument with Miriam, Emily took on her son.

Neil was trying to explain the Lamaze method and how he would be helping Miriam through her labor. Emily was so shocked at the idea of him being present throughout in the labor room—it was as if he had said that he used the women’s lavatory in a theater—that she expressed herself loudly. That did it. Miriam could sit back and watch.

All of that Saturday the argument continued. Neil was determined to extract from his mother an acknowledgment that their way of birth was superior. He was after his initial desultory agreement committed to it. He identified with the Lamaze method more heavily than she did. She remained a little skeptical, saying to herself, Well, if it gets really bad, I can always ask for something. But Neu cared. The ideology appealed to him: birth could be beautiful and natural if only you wanted it to be and mastered the proper techniques. They would give birth according to the rules and together. It was almost scientific. It gave him a role and a purpose. Emily had stomped right over that commitment.

It was amusing to see that inexorable pressure, the steady bore of argument, the voice not raised but never ceasing and never yielding, the firm and self-righteous insistence, all brought to bear upon some other woman. It was relaxing to see Emily waste her energy trying to change her son rather than his wife. She could simply sit back and mull over the stirrings of her child in her vitals. The next morning indeed Emily left, still insisting as she was firmly hustled out by Neil carrying both suitcases, “You’re just like your father, exactly.
Both know-it-alls! Now I’m telling you, you ask your wife. Ask her if she wouldn’t rather have a woman at that time, rather than some man who doesn’t know a thing!”

It was a full week later, three o’clock on a Tuesday, when she called Logical. Efi said Neil was talking to Abe, could she call back? “No,” she said firmly, enjoying herself. “Put me through now.”

“Oho,” said Efi. “Good luck. Are you packed?”

“For a week already.… Hello, Neil? We’re starting, I think.”

He arrived all arms and legs and nerves and immediately could not find the stopwatch they had agreed to keep in an obvious and convenient spot, which suddenly neither could remember.

As his plaintive voice came to her cursing softly and begging the watch to appear, she resisted the urge to go. He was always mislaying things. He would find it. She made herself stay put on the couch with one hand resting on the heap of her belly. Yes, definitely a contraction. She could feel the uterus harden as the pain.… the contraction came. She wished she had had supper first, but that was silly. Nobody was hungry during labor, she had been told, and from now on she should take only clear liquids. She remembered the horror story of Phil’s about the first Mrs. Flynn, who had died under anesthetic from eating at a picnic. Miriam had gained fourteen pounds, not bad but not as good as she would have liked. If she had eaten as her body seemed to bid her, she would be as big as the elephant she felt like.

By the time Neil found the watch—on the dresser beside the bed in case she began in the night—and returned to time her, her contractions were occurring every fourteen minutes and lasted approximately twenty-five seconds. She felt them in the small of the back, although when she touched her belly it firmed each time.