The Weight of Water (9 page)

I would not like to attribute the loss of my liberty, my uncompromised happiness, to the coming of my womanhood, and I believe
it is merely a coincidence of timing, but I was, nevertheless, plagued with extremely severe monthly pains, which may have
had, at their root, the more probable cause of my barrenness.

I must stop now, for these memories are disturbing me, and my eyes are hurting.

W
HEN
I
LOOK
at photographs of Billie, I can see that she is there — her whole self, the force of her — from the very beginning. Her infant
face is intricately formed — solemn, yet willing to be pleased. Her baby hair is thick and black, which accentuates the navy
of her eyes. Even then she has extraordinarily long lashes that charm me to the bottom of my soul and stop passers by on the
street. Our friends congratulate me for having produced such a beguiling creature, but inwardly I protest. Was I not merely
a custodian — a fat, white cocoon?

In the first several weeks after Billie’s birth, Thomas and Billie and I inhabited a blur of deepening concentric circles.
At the perimeter was Thomas, who sometimes spun off into the world of students and the university. He bought groceries, wrote
at odd hours, and looked upon his daughter as a mystifying and glorious interruption of an ordered life. He carried Billie
around in the crook of his arm and talked to her continuously. He introduced her to the world: “This is a chair; this is my
table at the diner.” He took her — zipped into the front of his leather jacket, her cheek resting against his chest or her
head bobbing beneath his chin — on his daily walks through the streets of the city. He seemed, for a time, a less extraordinary
man, less preoccupied, more like the cliché of a new father. This perception was reassuring to me, and I think to Thomas as
well. He discovered in himself a nurturing streak that was comforting to him, one that he couldn’t damage and from which he
couldn’t distance himself with images and words. For a time, after Billie was born, Thomas drank less. He believed, briefly,
in the future. His best work was behind him, but he didn’t know that then.

In the middle circle were the three of us, each hovering near the other. We lived, as we had since Thomas and I were married,
in the top half of a large, brown-stained, nineteenth-century house on a back street in Cambridge. Henry James once lived
next door and e. e. cummings across the street. The neighborhood, thought Thomas, had suitable resonance. I put Billie in
a room that used to be my office, and the only pictures I took then were of Billie. Sometimes I slept; sometimes Thomas slept;
Billie slept a lot. Thomas and I came together in sudden, bewildered clutches. We ate at odd hours, and we watched late-night
television programs we had never seen before. We were a protoplasmic mass that was becoming a family.

And in the center circle — dark and dream-like — was the nest of Billie and myself. I lay on the bed, and I folded my daughter
into me like bedclothes. I stood at the window overlooking the back garden and watched her study her hands. I stretched out
on the floor and placed my daughter on my stomach and examined her new bright eyes. Her presence was so intensely vivid to
me, so all-consuming, that I could not imagine who she would be the next day. I couldn’t even remember what she had looked
like the day before. Her immediate being pushed out all the other realities, blotted out other pictures. In the end, the only
images I would retain of Billie’s babyhood were the ones that were in the photographs.

At the Athenaeum, I put the papers back into the flesh-colored box and set it on the library table. I fold my hands on top
of it. The librarian has left the room. I am wondering how the material can have been allowed to remain in such a chaotic
state. I don’t believe the Athenaeum even knows what it has. I suppose I am thinking that I will simply take the document
and its translation and then bring them back the following week after I have photocopied them. No one will ever know. Not
so very different, I am thinking, from borrowing a book from a lending library.

I put the loose letters, photographs, sermons, and official documents back into the folder and eye it, trying to judge how
it looks without the box. I put the three books I have been given on top of the folder to camouflage the loss. I study the
pile.

I cannot do it.

I put the box back inside the folder and stand up.
Goodbye,
I say, and then, just as I am leaving, in a somewhat louder voice,
Thanks
. I open the metal door and walk evenly down the stairs.

When I emerge from the Athenaeum, Thomas is not on the sidewalk. I wait ten minutes, then another five.

I walk across the street and stand in a doorway. Twenty minutes elapse, and I begin to wonder if I heard Thomas correctly.

I see them coming from the corner. Thomas and Adaline have Billie between them. They count
one, two, three,
and lift Billie high into the air with their arms, like a rope bridge catching a gust of wind. Billie giggles with the airborne
thrill and asks them to do it again — and again. I can see Billie’s small brown legs inside her shorts, her feet kicking the
air for height. People on the sidewalk move to one side to let them pass. So intent are Thomas and Adaline on their game that
they walk by the Athenaeum and don’t even see it.

Adaline lets go of Billie’s hand. Thomas checks his watch. Adaline scoops Billie up into one arm, and hefts her onto her hip,
as I have done a thousand times. Thomas says something to Adaline, and she tilts her head back and laughs soundlessly. Billie
pats her hair.

Moving fast, I cross the street before they can turn around. I reenter the Athenaeum and take the stairs two at a time. When
I open the door to the reading room, I see that my neat stack of books and folders is exactly as I have left it. The librarian
hasn’t yet returned. I walk over to the long library table and remove the box from the folder. I put it under my arm.

I nearly slap the door into Thomas, who is looking up at the tall building, trying to ascertain whether he is in the correct
place. Billie has climbed down from Adaline’s hip, but is still holding her hand.

“Sorry,” I say quickly. “I hope you weren’t waiting long.”

“How’d it go?” he asks. He puts his hands in his pockets.

“Fine,” I say, bending to give Billie a kiss. “How about you?”

“We had a good time,” Adaline says. She seems slightly flushed.

“We found a park with swings, and we had an ice-cream cone.”

She looks down at Billie as if for confirmation.

“Where’s Rich?” I ask.

“He’s buying lobsters for supper,” Thomas says quickly, again glancing at his watch. “We’re supposed to meet him. Right now,
as a matter of fact. What’s that you’ve got there?”

“This?” I say, holding out the box. “Just something they lent me at the Athenaeum?”

“Useful?”

“I hope so.”

We walk four abreast along the sidewalk. I am aware of a settling of spirits, a lessening of exuberance. Adaline is quiet.
She holds Billie’s hand. That seems odd to me, as if she were unwilling to relinquish the tiny hand, even in my presence.

Rich is standing on the sidewalk and cradling two large paper bags. His eyes are hidden behind dark glasses.

We set off for the dock. The sky is clear, but the breeze is strong.

Rich and Adaline go ahead to prepare the Zodiac and to get the life jacket for Billie. I stand beside my daughter. Her hair
whips across her face, and she tries unsuccessfully to hold it with her hands.

Thomas is staring into the harbor.

Thomas,
I say.

Billie was six weeks old when she began to cough. I was bathing her in preparation for an appointment with the pediatrician,
when I observed her — as I had not been able to when she was dressed — engaged in an awful kind of struggle. Her abdomen deflated
at every pull for air, like an oxygen bladder on a pilot’s mask. I picked Billie up and took her into Thomas’s study. He glanced
up at me, surprised at this rare intrusion. He had his glasses on, and his fingers were stained with navy ink. In front of
him were white lined pages with unintelligible words son them.

“Look at this,” I said, laying Billie on top of the desk.

Together we watched the alarming phenomenon of the inflating and deflating chest.

“Shit,” Thomas said. “Did you call the doctor?’

“I called because of the cough. I have an appointment at ten-thirty.”

“I’m calling 911.”

“You think -?”

“She can’t breathe,” said Thomas.

The ambulance driver would not let me travel with Billie. Too much equipment was needed; too much attention. They were working
on her even as they closed the door. I thought: What if she dies, and I’m not there?

We followed in our car, Thomas cursing and gesturing at anyone who attempted to cut us off. I had never seen him so angry.
The ambulance stopped at the emergency ward of the hospital in which Billie had been born.

“Jesus Christ,” said Thomas. “We just got out of here.”

In the emergency room, Billie was stripped naked and put into a metal coverless box that later Thomas and I would agree looked
like a coffin. Of course, Billie was freezing, and she began to howl. I begged the attending physician to let me pick her
up and nurse her to calm her. Surely the crying couldn’t be good for the coughing and the breathing? But the young doctor
told me that I was now a danger to my daughter, that I could no longer nurse her, that she had to be fed intravenously and
pumped with antibiotics. He spoke to me as though I had been given an important assignment and had blown it.

Billie was hooked up to dozens of tubes and wires. She cried until she couldn’t catch her breath. I couldn’t bear her suffering
one second longer, and when the doctor left to see to someone else, I picked her up, wrapping the folds of my quilted jacket
around her, not feeding her, but holding her to my breast. Immediately, she stopped crying and rooted around for my nipple.
Thomas looked at us with an expression of tenderness and fear I had never seen on his face before.

Billie had pneumonia. For hours, Thomas and I stood beside a plastic box that had become Billie’s bed, studying the bank of
monitors that controlled and recorded her breathing, her food intake, her heart rate, her blood pressure, her blood gases,
and her antibiotics. There was no other universe except this plastic box, and Thomas and I marveled at the other parents in
the intensive care unit who returned from forays into the outside world with McDonald’s cartons and boxes from Pizza Hut.

“How can they eat?” said Thomas.

That night, Thomas was told that he had a phone call, and he left the room. I stood beside the plastic box and rhythmically
recited the Lord’s Prayer over and over, even though I am not a religious woman. I found the words soothing. I convinced myself
that the words themselves would hold Billie to me, that as long as I kept reciting the prayer, Billie would not die. That
the words themselves were a talisman, a charm.

When Thomas came back into the room, I turned automatically to him to ask him who called. His face was haggard — thin and
papery around his eyes. He blinked, as though he were emerging from a movie theater into the bright sun.

He named a prize any poet in America might covet. It was for
The Magdalene Poems,
a series of fifty-six poems it had taken my husband eight years to write. We both sat down in orange plastic chairs next
to the plastic box. I put my hand on his. I thought immediately of terrible contracts. How could we have been given this wonderful
piece of news and have Billie survive as well?

“I can’t digest this,” Thomas said.

“No.”

“We’ll celebrate some other time.”

“Thomas, if I could be, I’d be thrilled. I will be thrilled.”

“I’ve always worried that you thought I was with you because of the poems. That I was using you. As a kind of muse.”

“Not now, Thomas.”

“In the beginning.”

“Maybe, for a while, in the beginning.”

“It’s not true.”

I shook my head in confusion. “How can this possibly matter?” I asked with the irritation that comes of not wanting to think
about anything except the thing that is frightening you.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “It doesn’t matter.”

But of course it did matter. It did matter.

I learned that night that love is never as ferocious as when you think it is going to leave you. We are not always allowed
this knowledge, and so our love sometimes becomes retrospective. But that night Thomas and I believed that our daughter was
going to die. As we listened to the beeps and buzzes and hums and clicks of the machines surrounding her, we held hands, unable
to touch her. We scrutinized her eyelids and eyelashes, her elbows and her fat calves. We shared a stunning cache of memories,
culled in only six weeks. In some ways, we knew our daughter better that night than we ever would again.

Billie recovered in a week and was sent home. She grew and flourished. Eventually we reached the day when she was able to
irritate us, when we were able to speak sharply to her. Eventually we reached the day when I was able to leave her and go
out to take photographs. Thomas wrote poems and threw them away. He taught classes and gave numerous readings and talked to
reporters and began to wonder if the words were running out on him. He drank more heavily. In the mornings, I would sometimes
find him in the kitchen in a chair, his elbow resting on the counter. Next to him would be an empty bottle of wine. “This
has nothing to do with you,” he would say to me, putting a hand on the skirt of my robe. “I love you. This is not your fault.”

I have sometimes thought that there are moments when you can see it all — and if not the future, then all that has gone before.
They say this is true of the dying — that one can see a life — that the brain can perceive in an instant, or at most a few
seconds, all that has gone before. Beginning at birth and ending with the moment of total knowledge so that the moment itself
becomes a kind of infinite mirror, reflecting the life again and again and again.