Why I Love Singlehood: (27 page)

The first thing that hit me was the smell. As in, the smell of birth. If you’ve never witnessed a birth, I’ll do my best to explain. It smells like pungent wet earth, with a tang of blood, which almost turns your stomach. But at the same time there’s an almost tangible excitement laced in the overpowering scent—it’s almost dizzying, so that even at four years old I knew that there was great power being unleashed in that scent. The power of life.

The cow was bellowing. And heaving and moaning and groaning. She was shaking. I looked at my mother in fright, but she hadn’t even noticed that I’d come in. She was too busy talking to the cow, coaxing her, trying to soothe her, I think. The calf was breech, and I remember tasting my peanut butter sandwich again as I watched my mother sink her arm in nearly to her shoulder to try to push the calf back and spin it around. I think that’s when my mother saw me. I can only imagine the look on my face. I remember her saying something about getting back inside and maybe next time. She gave me one last tired look before turning to the cow again. Coaxing again. Pleading with the cow, calling her “honey,” asking her to try just a little more.

I retreated to the doorway but couldn’t make myself leave. Instead I hovered just outside the threshold and leaned back into the barn, unable to take myself away.

The cow fought less and less. Her bellows turned to huffs, and eventually her head just hung in the mud before her. I was terrified for her, afraid we would lose her; I’d never seen anything die before. Been to the butcher’s more than once (and hid in the car each time—now there’s another smell I’ll never forget), but I’d never
watched
anything actually die. I was sure this was it.

In the end my mother had to sit in the mud and manure behind the cow, brace one leg up on each of her hips and pull the calf out by its hooves.

The calf was dead.

I think we all knew it from the beginning. It looked so small, puckered even. And it didn’t smell like birth. It didn’t smell like anything. It just looked wet and empty. Lost.

I watched through blurry eyes as the cow slowly got her shaking legs underneath herself and turned not to her discarded calf, but to my mother. She nudged my mom’s hand, bellowed softly, and sank to the ground again. It was the most human thing I’d ever see a cow do.

I remember hearing our herdsman laugh, “I think that right there is one grateful cow,” as I broke from the doorjamb and ran back inside.

I refused to eat dinner that night, and though I never asked Mom where the calf went, I made a grave at the edge of our field, marked with a stick, and visited it every day for a month even though there was nothing buried there.

Today I hovered by the doorway, unable to do anything but watch as my nurse coaxed the mother, who huffed and moaned and fought with all her strength, even though she knew it was for naught. She had lost her baby the day before, and had to be induced in the seventh month.

I barely remember what really happened, and I’m not sure I even saw it. I was too busy smelling birth and barns and hearing my mother coax that poor, young cow. She was the one bellowing. She was the one fighting. And in the end it was not a human child but a calf that the midwife held, puckered and empty and lost.

I knew an FTT was bound to happen. I know it will happen again. But I can’t help thinking that for all the babies I birth, for all the first breaths I hear and all the lives I see unfold, there will never be another like this one. And no matter how many stars there are in the heavens, and people on the earth, none can replace this life, nothing can take its place. Because this life, no matter how fleeting or fragile, was like no other.

But I guess that’s the beautiful thing about life: sometimes it isn’t—beautiful, or there.

Minerva

By the time I’d scrolled through and got to the end, I was so riveted that I didn’t even notice the tears rolling down my cheeks until one of them dropped onto my hand.

I sat on my bed, dumbfounded, not knowing what to think first. When we were classmates at NCLA (which had long felt like another lifetime, a dream, even), Minerva once told me that she didn’t care for memoir—she accused the genre of being kitschy, and said she’d do us all a favor by knowing better than to pretend that anything in her life was worth reading.

Clearly, she was wrong. Layers of emotions rolled over me like waves as I read the e-mail a second time. First was the empathy and simplicity of the four-year-old’s perspective, the helplessness and pain of being washed away in a flashback. Next were loss, horror, grief, fear, and finally, want. I wanted to drive over to her apartment, walk in without knocking, and hug her like a mom holds a child after the world has let her down for the first time. But it was almost eleven o’clock, and even that wouldn’t soothe the hollow ache either of us harbored.

I reread the e-mail, tried to draft a reply, but only managed a few sentences before erasing the entire message. The words sounded too banal, too artificial, too planned. With each attempt, I deleted and tried again.

Min,

I don’t know where to begin. I’m so, so sorry. Why didn’t you tell me in person

I stopped short. No need to attack the poor girl. I knew exactly why she didn’t tell me earlier, and it was probably the best decision. I tried again:

I’m so, so sorry. I can’t begin to imagine
where you’re at
how you must feel right now

No. Sorry didn’t begin to cut it, and I
did
know how she felt. Like total crap. Like she’d just watched death win a battle that was never fair.

Dear Minerva,

You’re right. Sometimes life isn’t beautiful and usually it’s not fair. If you think about it, some of the most beautiful and treasured things in nature are those that are so delicate that they rarely survive the smallest of changes: certain wild orchids, patterns on snowflakes, corals that can’t survive even the gentlest touches.

I wish there was something I could do or say to make this even a little better for you, for that family, for the nurse even, but you know I can’t. No one can. All I can do is be here for you, and I am. (And for the record, this isn’t venting. This is grieving. And I’m glad you came to me.)

This too shall pass.

Love, Eva

No eloquent response could follow something like a failure to thrive, I decided. Hopeless, I closed the laptop and went to bed, feeling empty. Staring at the ceiling, I missed Scott (he had to get up super-early to fly to Denver, thus thought it’d be better if he stayed at his place), missed Jan and Dean, missed Olivia, missed my parents. I even missed Kenny.

The next morning before work, I called and left a message on Minerva’s voice mail. She returned it a few hours later, insisting that she was fine and thanking me for my concern, but I knew better than to believe her.

Two days passed before she resurfaced on Saturday afternoon with Jay in tow. I looked up to find her at the back of the line, pale and wearing sunglasses, staring at the menu board behind me.

I smiled tentatively at Jay.

The line moved up, and as if coming out of a trance, Minerva began to hunt through her purse. “I’ll have a chai smoothie, and…”

“Min, you OK?”

First she looked at me as if I’d just insulted her. Then she looked at Jay, as if to say,
You take care of it,
left, and grabbed her usual table, sitting with her back to the counter.

Jay sighed. “The smoothie and Cookie of the Week for her. And can I get a strawberry milkshake?”

I filled their orders and then attended to the customers behind them. When I had a free moment, I joined them at their table.

“How are you?” I asked, my voice full of compassion. I felt very motherly.

“I’m quitting,” she replied.

I looked at her, shocked.

“Quitting as in quitting school? As in,
dropping out
?”

She neither nodded nor shook her head, but I knew the answer.

“Min, I know it’s—”

“No. I’m done.”

“Wow,” I said. “Seems pretty final.”

“That’s because it is,” she snipped. “Don’t you think you should give it a little thought? Hold out for another week? Finish the semester?”

She stared at me as if I were speaking Klingon.

“You said it yourself: it’s terrible and heartbreaking, but it’s going to happen.” She shook her head as I spoke. “It doesn’t mean you should give up.”

“What, this too shall pass?” she snapped. Her words, despite their air of flippancy, kicked me in the stomach with a gale force.

I bit back my anger, knowing she was projecting her own pain and grief, and tried to rationalize for her. “That’s not what I meant and you know it.”

“Eva! It’s done. I can’t do it, all right? I’ve made my decision.”

“Well, maybe you should reconsider.”

“Not happening.”

“What will you do instead?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Be a hairdresser, maybe.”

My mouth dropped open. “You’re kidding, right?”

“Why not? They’re creative and they’re healers in their own way. And I don’t have to give away my firstborn to pay for schooling. I can make back my investment in less than a year if I can get a clientele going. Not to mention all that great product. It’s not that far-fetched, you know. I wanted to be a hairdresser when I was a teenager. But all the guidance counselors and my mom kept telling me I was too smart, too gifted, yada, yada, frickin’ ya…”

“Maybe because they were right?” I asked.

“Don’t insult hairdressers like that.”

Later, as they got ready to leave, Jay brought his empty milkshake glass to the dish bin.

I approached him. “Jay, help me out here.”

He smiled in a way that emanated understanding rather than aloofness, watching his wife wipe down the table. “Of course you’re right, Eva. She’d be a great midwife, and we all know it. And we’ve been through a lot to get her this far. But, well, I just can’t. She’s done, and that’s it.”

I wondered how many rounds they’d gone for him to be so resigned.

“What if two years down the road she decides it’s what she really wanted after all?”

“Then I pity the fool that tries to argue over matriculated credits with her.”

“Jay, she’s got a gift.”

“I know,” he said. His eyes were earnest. “But there’s no way I’m going to watch her punish herself for every FTT that happens. And she’s not the kind of person this will ever get easy for. She’s not her mother, and these babies aren’t farm animals.”

“Maybe she’ll change her mind,” I offered, trying to instill some hope in myself as much as him.

“She won’t,” he said sadly.

“I know.”

Damn.

For the next two weeks, I waited for the third bad thing to happen. I moved around skittishly, vigilant for books mysteriously falling off shelves, a rain of toads, coffee vendors going on strike, anything potentially cataclysmic.

But nothing happened.

At her insistence, Minerva helped out in the shop just so she could have something to do. She knew it was midterm week at the college, which meant we were short on help since Susanna had reduced her hours. Minerva told me to consider it “volunteerism.” It felt more like condoning slave labor to me; worse still, slave labor of my best friend. Yet, I knew she needed something to keep her mind off dropping out and the failure to thrive incident, and she needed a soft place to fall. The Grounds was that place. She did all the shit-work—cleaning bathrooms, the floors, the coffee machines—voluntarily and without complaint, and she was ecstatic when she got to help make the cookies. Her batches even rivaled mine. Almost.