Handle With Care

  You stared at her. 'Why does Amelia have cotton candy on her head?'

  I sucked in my breath. 'I can't do this now,' I said, 'I just can't.' And I walked up the stairs as if each step was made of glass.

  During the last eight weeks of my pregnancy, there were three seconds every morning that were perfect. I'd float to the surface of consciousness, and for those few blissful moments, I would have forgotten. I'd feel the slow roll of you, the snare drum of your kicks, and I'd think everything was going to be fine.

  Reality always dropped like a curtain: that kick might have fractured your leg yet again. That turn you'd completed inside me could have hurt you. I'd lie very still on my pillow and wonder if you would die during delivery, or moments after. Or whether we would be lucky enough to win the jackpot: you'd survive, and be severely disabled. It was no small irony, I thought, that if your bones broke, so did my heart.

  Once, I had a nightmare. I had given birth and no one would talk to me, tell me what was going on. Instead, the obstetrician and the anesthesiologist and the nurses all turned their backs on me. 'Where's my baby?' I demanded, and even Sean shook his head and backed away. I struggled to a sitting position until I could look down between my legs and see it: what should have been a baby was just a pile of shattered crystal; between the shards I could see your tiny fingernails, a bloom of brain, an ear, a loop of intestine.

  I had woken up, screaming; it took hours to fall back asleep. That next morning, when Sean woke me up, I said I could not get out of bed. And I meant it: I was certain that the very act of living, for me, would be a threat to your survival. With every step I took you might be jarred; by contrast, with care, I might keep you from breaking apart.

  Sean had called Piper, who showed up at the house and talked to me about the logistics of pregnancy the way she'd describe them to a small child: the amniotic sac, the fluid, the cushion between my body and yours. I knew all this, of course, but then again, I thought I'd known other things that had turned out to be wrong: that bones grew stronger, not weaker; that a fetus not having Down syndrome must mean it was otherwise healthy. She told Sean maybe I just needed a day to sleep this off, and she'd check back in with me later. But Sean was still worried, and after calling in sick to work, he phoned our priest.

  Father Grady, apparently, made house calls. He sat down on a chair that Sean brought into the bedroom. 'I hear you're a little worried.'

  'That's an understatement,' I said.

  'God doesn't give people burdens they can't handle,' Father Grady pointed out.

  That was all very well and good, but what had my baby done to piss Him off? Why would she have to prove herself by being hurt, before she even got here?

  'I've always believed that He saves truly special babies for parents He trusts,' Father Grady said.

  'My baby might die,' I said flatly.

  'Your baby might not stay in this world,' he corrected. 'Instead, she'll get to be with Jesus.'

  I felt tears in my eyes. 'Well, let Him have someone else's baby.'

  'Charlotte!' Sean said.

  Father Grady looked down at me with wide, warm eyes. 'Sean thought maybe it would help if I came over to bless the baby. Do you mind?' He lifted his hand, left it hovering over my abdomen.

  I nodded; I was not about to turn down a blessing. But as he prayed over the hill of my belly, I silently said my own prayer: Let me keep her, and you can take everything else I have.

  He left me with a holy card propped on my nightstand and promised to pray for us. Sean walked him back downstairs, and I stared at that card. Jesus was stretched across the crucifix. He had suffered pain, I realized. He knew what it was like to feel a nail breaking through your skin, shattering the bone.

  Twenty minutes later, dressed and showered, I found Sean sitting at the kitchen table cradling his head in his hands. He looked so beaten, so helpless. I was so busy worrying about this baby myself, I had not seen what he was going through. Imagine making a career out of protecting people, and then not being able to rescue your own unborn child. 'You're up,' he said the obvious.

  'I thought maybe I'd go for a little walk.'

  'Good. Fresh air. I'll come with you.' He stood too quickly, rattling the table.

  'You know,' I said, trying to smile, 'I need to be by myself.'

  'Oh - right. No problem,' he said, but he looked a little wounded. I could not understand the physics of this situation: we were in the thickest, most suffocating mess together; how could we possibly feel so far apart?

  Sean assumed I needed to clear my head, think, reflect. But Father Grady's visit had gotten me wondering about a woman who'd stopped going to our church a year ago. She lived a half mile down the street, and from time to time I saw her putting out her garbage. Her name was Annie, and all I knew about her was that she'd been pregnant, and then one day she wasn't, and after that, she never came to Mass again. The rumor was that she'd had an abortion.

  I had grown up Catholic. I had been taught by nuns. There were girls who'd gotten pregnant, but they either disappeared from the class rosters or left for a semester abroad, returning quieter and skittish. But in spite of this, I'd voted Democratic ever since I turned eighteen. It might not be my personal choice, but I thought women ought to have one.

  These days, though, I was wondering if it wasn't my personal choice because I was Catholic, or simply because I had never been forced to make it in practice, instead of theory.

  Annie's house was yellow, with fairy-tale trim and gardens that were full of day lilies in the summertime. I walked up to the front door and knocked, wondering what I would say to her if she answered. Hi, I'm Charlotte. Why did you do it?

  It was a relief when no one answered; this was feeling more and more like a stupid idea. I'd started back down the driveway when suddenly I heard a voice behind me. 'Oh, hi. I thought I heard someone on the porch.' Annie was wearing jeans, a sleeveless red shirt, and gardening gloves. Her hair was caught up in a knot on the back of her head, and she was smiling. 'You live up the road, don't you?'

  I looked at her. 'There's something wrong with my baby,' I blurted.

  She folded her arms across her chest, and the smile vanished from her face. 'I'm sorry,' she said woodenly.

  'The doctors told me that if she lives - if - she's going to be so sick. So, so sick. And I'm not supposed to think about it, but I don't understand why it's a sin if you love something and want to keep it from having to suffer.' I wiped my face with my sleeve. 'I can't tell my husband. I can't tell him I've even thought about this.'

  She scuffed at the ground with her sneaker. 'My baby would have been two years, six months, and four days old today,' she said. 'There was something wrong with her, something genetic. If she lived, she would have been profoundly retarded. Like a six-month-old, forever.' She took a deep breath. 'It was my mother who talked me into it. She said, Annie, you can barely take care of yourself. How are you going to take care of a baby like that? She said, You're young. You'll have another one. So I gave in, and my doctor induced me at twenty-two weeks.' Annie turned away, her eyes glittering. 'Here's what no one tells you,' she said. 'When you deliver a fetus, you get a death certificate, but not a birth certificate. And afterward, your milk comes in, and there's nothing you can do to stop it.' She looked up at me. 'You can't win. Either you have the baby and wear your pain on the outside, or you don't have the baby, and you keep that ache in you forever. I know I didn't do the wrong thing. But I don't feel like I did the right thing, either.'

  There are legions of us, I realized. The mothers who have broken babies, and spend the rest of our lives wondering if we should have spared them. And the mothers who have let their broken babies go, who look at our children and see instead the faces of the ones they never met.

  'They gave me a choice,' Annie said, 'and even now, I wish they hadn't.'

  Amelia

  T

  hat night, I let you brush my hair and stick scrunchies all over it. Usually, you just made massive knots and a
nnoyed me, but you loved doing it - your arms were too short for you to manage even a ponytail yourself, so when other girls your age were playing around with their hair and putting in ribbons and braids, you were stuck at the mercy of Mom, whose braiding experience was limited to challah. Don't go thinking I'd suddenly developed a conscience or anything - I just felt bad for you. Mom and Dad had been yelling about you as if you weren't there ever since they'd come home. I mean, for God's sake, your vocabulary was better than mine half the time - they couldn't possibly think this had all gone over your head.

  'Amelia?' you asked, finishing off a braid that hung right over my nose. 'I like your hair this color.'

  I scrutinized myself in the mirror. I didn't look like a cool punk chick, in spite of my best intentions. I looked more like Grover the Muppet.

  'Amelia? Are Mom and Dad going to get a divorce?'

  I met your gaze in the mirror. 'I don't know, Wills.'

  I was already anticipating the next question: 'Amelia?' you asked. 'Is it my fault?'

  'No,' I said fiercely. 'Honest.' I pulled the barrettes and scrunchies out of my hair and started unraveling the knots. 'Okay, enough. I'm not beauty queen material. Go to bed.'

  Everyone had forgotten to tuck you in tonight - not that I was expecting any better, with the pathetic level of parenting skills I was witnessing these days. You crawled into your bed from the open end - it still had bars on either side of the mattress, which you hated, because you said they were for babies even if they did keep you safe. I leaned down and tucked you in. Awkwardly, I even kissed your forehead. ''Night,' I said, and I jumped under my own covers and turned off the light.

  Sometimes, in the dark, the house felt like it had a heartbeat. I could hear it pulsing, waa waa waa, in my ears. It was even louder now. Maybe my new hair was some kind of superconductor. 'You know how Mom always says that I can be anything when I grow up?' you whispered. 'That's a lie.'

  I came up on one elbow. 'Why?'

  'I couldn't be a boy,' you said.

  I smirked. 'Ask Mom about that sometime.'

  'And I couldn't be Miss America.'

  'How come?'

  'You can't wear leg braces in a pageant,' you said.

  I thought about those pageants, girls too beautiful to be real, tall and thin and plastic-perfect. And then I thought of you, short and stubby and twisted, like a root growing wrong from the trunk of a tree, with a banner draped across your chest.

  MISS UNDERSTOOD.

  MISS INFORMED.

  MISS TAKE.

  That made my stomach hurt. 'Go to sleep already,' I said, more harshly than I meant to, and I counted to 1036 before you started snoring.

  Downstairs, I tiptoed into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. There was absolutely no food in this house. I would probably have to eat ramen for breakfast. It was getting to the point, honestly, where if my parents didn't go to the grocery store, they could be called to task for child abuse.

  Been there, done that.

  I rummaged through the fruit drawer and unearthed a fossilized lemon and a knob of ginger.

  I slammed the refrigerator door shut and heard a moan.

  Terrified - did people who broke into houses rape girls with blue hair? - I crept toward the kitchen doorway and looked into the living room. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness again, I saw it: the quilt draped across the back of the couch, the pillow my father had pulled over his head when he rolled over.

  I felt the same pang in my stomach that I had felt when you were talking about beauty queens. Moving back through the kitchen as silent as snow, I trailed my fingers along the countertop until they closed over the hilt of a carving knife. I carried it upstairs with me into the bathroom.

  The first cut stung. I watched the blood rise like a tide and spill down into my elbow. Shit, what had I done? I ran the cold water, held my forearm underneath it until the blood slowed.

  Then I made another parallel cut.

  They weren't on my wrists, don't think I was trying to kill myself. I just wanted to hurt, and understand exactly why I was hurting. This made sense: you cut, you felt pain, period. I could feel everything building up inside of me like steam heat, and I was just turning a valve. It made me think of my mother, when she made her pie crusts. She'd prick little holes all over the place. So it can breathe, she said.

  I was just breathing.

  I closed my eyes, anticipating each thin cut, feeling that wash of relief when it was done. God, it felt so good - that buildup, and the sweet release. I would have to hide these marks, because I would rather die than let anyone know I'd done this. But I was also proud of myself, a little bit. Crazy girls did this - the ones who wrote poetry about their organs being filled with tar and who wore so much black eyeliner they looked Egyptian - not good girls from good families. That meant either I was not a good girl or I did not come from a good family.

  Take your pick.

  I opened the tank of the toilet and stuck the knife inside. Maybe I would need it again.

  I stared at the cuts, which were pulsing now, just like the rest of the house, waa waa waa. They looked like the ties of railroad tracks. Like a tower of stairs you'd find on a stage. I pictured a parade of ugly people like me, we beauty queens who could not walk without braces. I closed my eyes, and I imagined where those steps would lead.

  III

  In this abundant earth no doubt Is little room for things worn out: Disdain them, break them, throw them by!

  And if before the days grew rough We once were lov'd, us'd - well enough, I think, we've far'd, my heart and I - Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 'My Heart and I'

  Hardball: one of the stages of sugar syrup in the preparation of candy, which occurs at 250 to 266 degrees Fahrenheit.

  Nougat, marshmallows, rock candy, gummies - these are all cooked to the hardball stage, when the sugar concentration is very high and syrup will form thick ropes when dripped from a spoon. (Be careful. Sugar burns long after it comes into contact with your skin; it's easy to forget that something so sweet can leave a scar.) To test your solution, drop a bit of it into cold water. It's ready if it forms a hard ball that doesn't flatten when fished out but whose shape can still be changed with significant pressure.

  Which, of course, leads to the more colloquial definition of hardball: ruthless, aggressive, competitive behavior; the kind that's designed to mold someone else's thinking to match your own.

  * * *

  DIVINITY

  21/2 cups sugar

  1/2 cup light corn syrup

  1/2 cup water

  Pinch of salt

  3 large egg whites

  1 teaspoon vanilla

  1/2 cup chopped pecans

  1/2 cup dried cherries, blueberries, or cranberries I've always found it interesting that a candy with a name such as Divinity requires so much brutality to create.

  In a 2-quart saucepan, mix the sugar, corn syrup, water, and salt. Using a candy thermometer, heat to the hardball stage, stirring only until the sugar is dissolved. Meanwhile, beat the egg whites to stiff peaks. When the syrup reaches 260 degrees F, add it gradually to the egg whites while beating at high speed in a mixer. Continue to beat until the candy takes shape - about 5 minutes. Stir in the vanilla, nuts, and dried fruit. Quickly drop the candy from a teaspoon onto waxed paper, finishing each piece with a swirl, and let it cool to room temperature.

  Hardball, beating, beating again. Maybe this candy should have been called Submission.

  Charlotte

  January 2008

  I

  t had started as a stain in the outline of a stingray on the ceiling in the dining room - a watermark, an indication that there was something wrong with the pipes in the upstairs bathroom. But the watermark spread, until it no longer looked like a stingray but a whole tide, and half the ceiling seemed to have been steeped in tea leaves. The plumber fussed around under the sinks and beneath the front panel of the tub for about an hour before he reappeared in the kitchen, where I was boiling do
wn spaghetti sauce. 'Acid,' he announced.

  'No . . . just marinara.'

  'In the pipes,' he said. 'I don't know what you've been flushing down there, but it's eroding them.'

  'The only stuff we've been flushing is what everyone else flushes. It's not like the girls are doing chemistry experiments in the shower.'

  The plumber shrugged. 'I can replace the pipes, but unless you fix the problem, it's just going to happen again.'

  It was costing me $350 just for this visit, by my calculation - we couldn't afford it, much less a second visit. 'Fine.'

  It would be another thirty dollars for paint to cover the ceiling, and that was if we did it ourselves. And yet here we were eating pasta for the third time this week, because it was cheaper than meat, because you had needed new shoes, because we were effectively broke.

  It was nearly six o'clock - the time Sean usually walked through the door. It had been almost three months since his disastrous deposition, not that you would have known it had ever happened, from our conversations. We talked about what the police chief had said to a local newspaper about an act of vandalism at the high school, about whether Sean should take the detectives' exam. We talked about Amelia, who had yesterday gone on a word strike and insisted on pantomiming. We talked about how you had walked all the way around the block today without me having to run back and get your chair because your legs were giving out.

  We did not talk about this lawsuit.

  I had grown up in a family where, if you didn't discuss a crisis, it didn't exist. My mother had breast cancer for months before I realized it, and by then it was too late. My father lost three jobs during my childhood, but it wasn't a topic of conversation - one day he'd just put on a suit again and head to a new office, as if there had been no interruption in the routine. The only place we were supposed to turn with our fears and worries was the confessional; the only comfort we needed was from God.

  I had sworn that, when I had my own family, all the cards would be on the table. We wouldn't have hidden agendas and secrets and rose-colored glasses that kept us from seeing all the knots and snarls of an ordinary family's affairs. I had forgotten one critical element, though: people who didn't talk about their problems got to pretend they didn't have any. People who discussed what was wrong, on the other hand, fought and ached and felt miserable.