So this went on hour after hour, but when the new doctor came in, it turned out our baby was stuck inside of me, and the head was jammed in like a cork inside a bottle, and the baby was in distress, so I was getting an epidural whether I liked it or not, since I was about to have a C-section.
“Please don’t feel that you’ve failed,” said the doctor.
“Fuck you!” I screamed. All I could think of was, I’ve gone through all that natural childbirth for nothing! Hour after hour after hour. Now in two seconds this interventionist prick zipped me open, and brought forth a nine-pound baby boy.
I was all spaced out. Somewhere far below me the doctor was stitching me up, and then up around my head Mikhail and the baby were floating, and he was carrying on about how the kid was perfect, and he was beautiful, and I said, “Good!” since I’d just decided he was going to be an only child.
I slept the most delicious sleep. I slept on clean white sheets. My soul was calm. My clenched-up muscles all at peace. My pain stood at a distance like a little cloud, since the nurses gave me codeine. And when I woke up I had that blurry wondering feeling that something had happened, but I couldn’t quite remember, and then I did remember, the baby was here. What a relief! Then I went back to sleep again.
All the next day I slept and woke and ate anything they put in front of me, and then I slept some more. People came to see me. Aunt Lena came, and Philip and Deb came with one of those balloon bouquets. But mostly it was just me and Mikhail and the kid.
He had tiny red hands and no hair. He knit his brow, and when he looked at you he stared so hard you could not look away. His eyes were dark. They were almost black. He was completely uncompromising.
I said to Mikhail, “He’s one day old and I feel like he’s already criticizing me.”
“He has wisdom,” Mikhail said.
“What do you think he knows about us?” I asked.
“Everything!” said Mikhail. “Only when he was born he forgot much of what he knew.”
“Maybe it’s better not to know everything right away,” I said. “Maybe that’s a good thing. Mikhail?”
“Yes?”
“He sneezed!” I said. “He sneezed at me.” I had never seen such a tiny sneeze in my life.
We stared at the kid in his tiny knit hospital cap and his flannel hospital blanket. He was all wrapped up tight with just his face staring out, solemn and worried when he was awake, and then tiny and shrunken up when he was sleeping. We stared until Mikhail went home for the night, because sleeping in the chair in my room hurt his back. He had to go home, but I got to stay in bed. Something like five days, I got to stay, and have my sheets changed and live in a haze, as if I were lying in a sleeper car on a train. The world was flashing by outside the window.
I didn’t keep track of the days or the visitors or anything. Between my exhaustion and my pain meds, and my great relief, I lay there in a dreamlike state. In the distance I heard Mikhail talking on the phone. He was organizing a bris. He was calling people and inviting them. In the most surreal way he was telling people the directions to the Sharon Community Center. He was actually speaking to my father’s wife on the phone. It was like something out of a dubbed late-night movie. Mikhail saying, “Cathy, yes, I agree. To him he will be a grandson to his grandfather. Of course, it will be important for him to see.”
Was this my husband, planning and organizing a whole large-scale event? Was this Mikhail speaking to my stepmom whom he’d never met—talking strategy about how to land Dad at the naming ceremony for his own psychic good? Normally I would have been startled, but as it was, my peace of mind was so great that all I did was beam at everyone who came by. I lay against my pillows and beamed at the nurses. I beamed at Philip and Deb. I watched their bouquet of balloons float up toward the ceiling. Mikhail reached for the ribbons to bring those “It’s a Boy” balloons down to earth. “Let them be,” I said. I radiated peace. “Let them be.”
Dreams passed over me like cool cloths on my forehead. I loved convalescence. Everything was wavy and soft. Everything was infantile. It was the world on drugs, but in a good way, because you were in the hospital. Because you deserved them.
I dreamed my mother was at my bedside and she was wearing crinkled cotton lavender robes, and her straight silvery hair hung down around her shoulders, and she was bringing me assorted loose teas, and telling me that she was proud of me.
“But it’s so hard to keep my eyes open,” I said. “Do you know what I mean?”
“Oh, yes,” she said.
“Do you know what you look like right now?” I asked her.
“What?”
“You look like the lilac fairy,” I said. “Am I sleeping?”
“No, I think you’re awake,” she said.
Then I remembered I was awake. At least half awake. I wasn’t dreaming about my mom at all. She was standing right there. “You can still be a fairy if you’re a witch, right?” I said.
“I only practice part time,” she said modestly.
“But you have some powers, right? I wish you’d have some powers.” Then I had an insight. “You knew about the baby, didn’t you?”
“I knew after Mikhail called me,” Mom said.
“Oh,” I said. “I thought you just knew.”
I was holding the baby, and she bent over us. “Oh, he’s beautiful.”
“Are you going to make a wish?”
“All right.”
“It’s just you keep reminding me of those fairies who come to make a wish.”
“He doesn’t have any hair at all,” she murmured. “Is that a wish?”
“Isn’t that something? You had a whole head of hair.”
“I know,” I said. Then I felt confused, because I didn’t know. I’d been told, and I’d seen pictures. So was that knowing?
“When your brother was born, he had a whole head of blond hair. When I saw him … They put me out completely, I think. In those days they put you out, you know, and then you came to, and they had the baby all washed and dried and clean, and like a little angel. Just like you!” she said to the baby. “Aren’t you? Aren’t you? What’s your name?”
“We’re going to name him at the bris,” I said.
“Oh, yes. You’re getting your name at the bris. Poor baby! It’s not easy being born!”
I looked down at him, busy sucking at my breast. “He knew everything about us,” I said. “He knew everything in the whole world, and all the alphabets and all the languages, and the laws of physics, and then when he was born he forgot. An angel stood at the gates. She put her fingers to his lips. Now he has to go back to school. Now he has to go back and learn the hard way. Which, if you think about it, is why he didn’t want to come. Did you ever think about that? How it’s so warm in there, in the womb, and red? Mom, tell me the truth. Am I awake, or am I asleep? I’m feeling a little bit in between, you know?”
“That’s all right. Do you want a little more light? Do you want me to open the curtains? Here, I can open the curtains. It’s so beautiful out. Do you know there was one tree on the way here that was completely red? …”
She was still talking, but I fell silent. I sat in the bed and I saw that the baby had fallen asleep sucking. His eyes were shut. His head was down. His tiny cap had fallen off. I picked him up, and I held him in the crook of my arm. His head filled the palm of my hand. That’s how I was holding his head. Right in my palm. “Mom?”
“What is it?”
“He’s asleep.”
“Oh, is he sweet.”
“Mom?” I said again.
She looked at me.
“Could I close my eyes now?”
“Oh, sure. Is that too much light, now? Do you want to rest?”
“I like the light,” I said.
“Do you want to put the baby back in the nursery?”
“No, I like it like this, holding him,” I said, settling back. Maybe I had been awake before, but I still didn’t think so. But then if you were sure you
were asleep and dreaming, could this really be a dream? All my thoughts were loose around me. Only my arms firmly held my baby boy. I said to my mother, “How could you have left me?”
Mom started back.
“I thought you’d left a note. I was looking everywhere. I looked through the whole house. I was sure you’d left a note.”
“A note!”
“You probably weren’t thinking in terms of notes. I thought there’d be a note explaining the whole thing, and when you’d be back—and if I could just find the note …”
“Well,” she said, and then she started to cry.
Then I knew this was no dream, or shouldn’t be. I swallowed. My hands tightened around the baby, as though I’d lost my balance, and he had been about to fall. “Wait. Wait.” I shook myself. I forced my eyes open. “I’m sorry. No. Wait. No, see, I’m not thinking about that now,” I said. “Please don’t think about that now. I just didn’t understand then. I was thirteen—how could I? You were sick, Mom. You couldn’t help it. Alcoholism is a terrible, terrible disease! You were in the grips of a terrible, terrible thing. How can I blame you for what happened when you were so sick? I don’t,” I said. “I really, really don’t.”
“All right,” she said, just to appease me.
“And you believe that, don’t you?”
“Yes,” she said, in a small voice.
But I did blame her. I held the baby and I blamed her with all my heart, and she knew it.
“Good,” I said. “Okay.” I took a deep breath. “Because, I’m just saying, I’m actually at a more enlightened place than I sounded like back there.”
“You are. No question you are. Enlightened, and everything else. Jewish! Who would have thought?” My mother’s mouth twisted. Her mouth was covered with fine lines. All her face was lined from sun and trouble, but her mouth especially. All around her lips. More than anything I wanted to go back and be asleep again, or at least half dreaming. More than anything I wanted to forget our whole conversation. Where was that angel of amnesia? Too busy attending births and making babies ignorant. Now I was wide awake, and there was my mother, and she was oblivious a lot, but she was not stupid. She was crazy, but she had feelings. I’d hurt her, and I didn’t know how to fix it. I didn’t know what to do.
Dirty sunshine shone all over the room. It must have been clean sunshine outside, but the windows needed to be washed. I thought awful thoughts. I wished my mother would go away, far away down the hall. I wished that having disappeared before, she knew how to disappear again. I wished her dead because it made me so sad to look at her.
“Do you want to hold him?” I said at last.
“Me?” she said. “Could I?”
“Here.” I gave the baby to her. Asleep as he was, curled up in his blanket. She held him for a long time, and she whispered to him. After a while some happiness came back into her voice. “Look! Look!” she was telling me. But I couldn’t. I guess I just wasn’t enlightened enough.
22
Prodigal Sheep
MAYBE within one lifetime a person lives several lives. Maybe people have that in them, similar to cats. So you can say—those other times I was confused, but then I was reborn. Or, that time I was reborn—that didn’t work, but give me eight more births, and I’ll get it right. Definitely. Just give me all my chances, because how can you know while it’s happening which way your soul might grow? Whether it might sprout seed leaves, or whether it would rather tunnel under all alone in the dark like a root vegetable. You might be born with temporary wings like some of those termites and flying ants, and then your wings fall off. But if you get a chance to start all over again, maybe next time you could fly better, and you could, spiritually speaking, be more of a bird.
But on the other hand, you might say, No! That’s not right! It’s a continuum who you become. Not first you’re one thing and then another, but rather, your whole experience is woven together like a single golden thread. Because who am I to say the person I used to be was mixed up or wrong or somehow inferior? Who am I to judge anybody? Least of all myself. You look back and see all your mistakes, but what if, actually, they were all part of God’s design? People always say to themselves: I was young then. I was foolish then, and I’m so much wiser now. They say: I had a change of heart. But your heart is the same now as it was then. It’s always been the same heart beating inside of you.
So actually I have two theories about one’s being, and I’ve gone back and forth a million times between them trying to figure out which one is right until now, the only thing I can think of is that maybe they’re both right. I mean, why can’t you be a person with many different lives and a person with just one thread? Why can’t life be both a wave and a particle? …
It was three o’clock in the morning, and I was sweating it trying to finish my letter to the baby that I’d been working on ever since Telemachus had told me that when he was born his parents had written a letter to him with all their thoughts and hopes and dreams for him, and now it was one of his most treasured possessions. So there I was sitting on the floor scribbling for all I was worth, and the baby kept waking up and wanting to nurse and scream and be carried around. “You’re defeating the purpose of your own letter!” I kept telling him.
“Sharon, you must get some rest,” Mikhail said.
“I have to finish!”
“But, Sharon,” Mikhail told me, “tomorrow is the bris….”
“That’s the whole point!” I said. “I have to write him the letter now, because tomorrow it’ll be too late.”
“How can it be too late when it is just eight days he is here in this world?”
“But he’ll be named!” I said. “He’ll have a name, and then he’ll be a completely different person … because he’ll have this public persona—he’ll be part of a social contract—do you know what I mean?”
“No,” Mikhail said, as he strode up and down with the baby in his arms.
“He’ll belong to everyone else,” I said, looking at the baby’s little bald head. “And now—he’s just ours.” I admit, I choked up a little bit.
“But he will always be ours,” Mikhail said. “Even if you finish the letter tomorrow.”
“It won’t be the same,” I said. “It’ll never be the same!” And then I started writing some more, but then I lost the whole thread of my argument, and I meandered, and my head ached, until finally I threw down my pen. “What’s the use! It’s hopeless. Throw it out,” I told Mikhail, and I thrust my whole yellow pad at his free hand.
“But, Sharon, you are writing page twenty-three!” Mikhail exclaimed, looking down at the scribbled pages.
“Just throw ’em out,” I said. “They’re no good. They’re all about me, not him. They’re all about my dreams and my hang-ups, not his. God, I’m so selfish.”
“Sharon, Sharon,” Mikhail said. “Isn’t it natural to write more about yourself than about him, since he’s only one week old? Isn’t it normal that you, the parent, have more hang-ups, because you have lived a longer time?”
“I just don’t want to make a mistake,” I said. “I just don’t want to do this wrong, and I’m already messing up. I’ve already messed up the letter.”
“Where are the rules to write a letter?” Mikhail asked.
“I wrote too much!” I said. “I already overdid it. What I wrote was overkill. It was pure self-indulgence! You’re going to have to write it,” I told Mikhail as he dragged me off to bed. “You’re going to have to finish it.”
Mikhail said, “You are a very serious mother.”
I was serious, which is why I didn’t do too well at the bris. I mean, at the business end of the bris. The rest was beautiful.
We had this mohel who drove up in a car with the license plate MOYL, and he made jokes all the time—or, rather, not so much jokes, but he talked in a jokey way, like he kept calling the baby young man, as in “Come here, young man, let’s have a look at you.” And he took our precious baby and undressed him, and ope
ned up his diaper to check him out, and said in this cheerful voice, “I think he’s in the top fifteen percent already!”
And I thought, Go ahead, baby, pee all over him. How dare he talk about you like that!
The mohel was into putting people at ease, usually at the expense of his patient. This mohel’s name was Steve, and he was also a doctor. He was clean shaven, and about fifty, and very, very short, and with wry smiles, and a million personal anecdotes, and he wore a suit and tie, and aftershave, and as I said, was jocular and relaxed and he had a piercing tenor voice, so that when he laughed he had that slightly manic girlish laugh that really high obnoxious tenors have. I hated him right away.
People were congregating at the Sharon Community Center. The bris fell out on a Sunday, so the parking lot was filling up with all our friends from work, and from the Havurah, and from the music community. Everybody brought a vegetarian dish and laid it on the table, and Telemachus and Chris brought gallon containers of our Fresh Squeezed organic apple juice, so we had quite a feast. There was spinach lasagna, and zucchini lasagna, and rice pilaf, and Waldorf salad, and tortilla chips, and salsa, and guacamole, and pita and hummus, and baba ganoush, and I don’t know what else. Aunt Lena was organizing the food. She was wearing a black-and-white suit in an oversized houndstooth check, and she had a black patent leather purse and pointy little black patent leather pumps. Her whole face was full of joy. Everyone was congratulating her. People were congratulating us too. They were mobbing Mikhail, who was holding the baby, and crowding around me, asking about the birth, but I was almost too distracted to notice. Both my mom and dad had come.
My mother came in and kissed me on the cheek. “This is my mom,” I said to everyone who happened to be standing next to me. She gave me a big flat tissue-paper-wrapped present, which I later found out was one of those Native American dream catchers to hang above the baby’s crib.
Then my father came up with Cathy, and not to be outdone, they both kissed me too. And they gave me a box professionally wrapped with blue ribbons cascading in corkscrew curls. When I opened it later I saw it was a little tiny navy-blue sleeper with red trim, and red pompoms on the toes. Cathy must have picked it out.