Winnie
When Miranda called to tell me the whole story of her pregnancy and engagement, and asked me to be her maid of honor, I barely avoided throwing myself on the floor and wailing my own misery to her. My sister did not need my depression when she was this happy.
I waited a few days, then called her after psyching myself up to not bring her down.
“Hey,” I said, “I didn’t want to rain on your parade the other day, but I have some news of my own.” Then I explained my own pregnancy story.
“So you’re keeping it?” she asked. “If you didn’t want to, I’d understand, and I’d do anything to help you. You know that, right?”
Her unfailing sisterhood brought those ready tears right to the surface. I cried at least twice a day during my pregnancy.
“It’s too late to do anything else,” I said. “I’m about three months further along than you are.”
“Come home! We can do everything together. Baby clothes, and cribs, and whatever else there is to do.”
“I can’t,” I rasped. “I might offer it for adoption. I don’t know. I’m just a mess right now. And I think that playing house with you would just remind me of everything I’ve lost.”
“I’m sure it must feel terrible right now, and I could kill Lincoln, but it won’t feel like this forever.”
“It feels like it will.” I was a snotty, teary mess. I was sick of myself.
We were both quiet for a bit, then I remembered something important. “Can you not tell Mom? I want to know what I’m going to do before I tell her.”
“Of course,” Miranda said. “Anything you need. Where are you right now?”
“I’m with Bernard.”
“That’s something, at least.” My sister had always loved him.
“Have you and Tom set a date?” I wanted to take the spotlight off me.
“We decided to wait until after the baby is born. We want to have a big party and there’s no need to rush. We don’t want it to feel like a shotgun wedding.”
“That makes sense.” I said the words, but nothing made sense to me.
I couldn’t bring myself to visit her. Couldn’t stand the idea of being home, in my childhood bedroom, which was haunted by memories of Lincoln as well as hangovers and now, thanks to my very active imagination, little Winnie alone and afraid after seeing her father’s dead body.
When I was small, I was afraid of monsters and ghosts and whatever other creature I might have seen in a movie, and so I used to tell myself, If you pull the covers up so they cover your chin, they can’t get you.
No matter how hot it was, I would sweat beneath my sheets and blankets if I was having one of those nights.
Miranda came to San Francisco once, though, and I was so exhausted and depressed that I couldn’t protest or even be embarrassed that I was sleeping on Bernard’s couch.
I have no idea where she stayed, and I didn’t ask, but she came to Bernard’s for three days straight, breakfast through dinner, and just sat with me most of the time.
She’d also bring what I assume was delicious food and make me eat it.
“Even if you give the baby up,” she said, “you need to feed it so it’ll be healthy. ”
So I ate. It all tasted like sand.
The night before she left, Miranda asked, “Have you spoken to Lincoln since you told him?”
“I wrote him a letter and told him he didn’t have to worry about me or the baby, and if I decided to have it and keep it, we wouldn’t bother him ever again.”
“Did he reply?”
I leaned over on the couch to where I had an old Pee-Chee folder with Lincoln’s letter, and handed it to Miranda.
Dearest Winnie,
I’m sorry I can’t do this with you. You were always the stronger of the two of us, and I think it’s always scared me.
If you do decide to keep the baby, he or she will be very lucky to have you as a mother.
I was lucky that you called me yours. I’m sorry I failed you.
If the child ever asks, you can tell him/her that its father wasn’t strong enough to be a parent and he’s sorry.
All my love forever,
Lincoln
When she finished reading, Miranda looked back up at me and said, “At least he knows he’s a weakling and a coward.”
My chin trembled at her words, and Miranda held me close and said, “I’m sorry, Win. I shouldn’t have said that. I know how much you loved—love—him.” She said the right thing, but I could hear the relief in her voice. Lincoln’s letter felt very final.
I wished I felt released from his hold on me, but somehow I still felt the magnetic pull.
She left an enormous hamper with baby supplies—diapers, diaper cream, nipple cream, burp rags, tiny kimonos, and lord knows what else—“Just in case,” she said. I told Bernard to put it in his closet so I wouldn’t have to see it.
I slept so much in those months. Sometimes in that almost-asleep, not-quite-awake state, I’d hear Bernard talking in hushed tones in the other room. I couldn’t even bring myself to care that he was surely talking about me with Miranda on the phone. I was glad they had each other.
He forced me to get checked out at the free clinic in Daly City.
A kindly, grandmotherly midwife gave me a gentle exam and proclaimed me healthy and advised me not to drink or smoke.
I tried to drink less, but I couldn’t stop entirely.
Wine and weed were my only coping tools; they helped me feel outside myself. It was impossible to be inside myself.
With Lincoln gone, and with a stack of new rejections on my poetry, I had nothing to hope for. And without that hope, I found myself with my toes curled over the edge I’d been peering over my whole life. I dreamed of falling through starry space, unencumbered by gravity, forever.
When I went into labor in November, Bernard rode in the taxi with me to St. Mary’s Help Hospital. I pushed and screamed, and when they put a perfect baby girl in my arms, the nurse told me I was made for having babies.
In my mind, I named her Phoebe, a Titan, mother of gods, whose name means “light,” but I never spoke her name out loud.