Chapter 23
23
Jane
On the night before Max is born, Jane sits by the window. There is a sketch pad perched on her belly and opera on low as Abe snores upstairs in a sleep so deep and blue he’s underwater. Outside, the sky over Columbus Avenue is bruised, flicked with dark slithery lines that remind Jane of her own veins and ankles at forty weeks. Behind the clouds, there is a tiny moon, pulsing. Jane realizes she missed it entirely the first time she watercolored the scene. Pregnancy has hijacked her ability to observe. Also, her inspiration, tastebuds, circulation.
She starts over on a fresh page, drops the first one on the floor. This time around, the sky is more ominous. The moon is a tiny tooth lost on pavement. She paints what she sees. When she paints, there is an unlocking in her chest, a lightening in her forehead. It relieves her but it also revives her. She has been so blurry for the last nine months—frosted over, the Arctic.
After a while, she stands up, all knees and elbows. At this stage of pregnancy, there is no grace. There is effort and will. She goes into the kitchen, makes herself a cup of chamomile tea in the dark, stirs in milk and creamed honey. Her mother was a great believer in honey for all things: rashes, insomnia, shivers. Lately, Jane thinks of her mother as often as she does not. She counts the years since she’s seen her. She was twelve when her mother died. Since then, Jane had always thought that she would not be able to have children of her own. Her mother died in a quick, brutal fight, rigged from the start. And though no one ever told Jane anything specifically—who would have? it was just her and her father, her father and her, and he was so detached, disinterested, disheartened by Jane, Jane alone—Jane assumed it. She had watched her mother writhe in pain, holding her belly, blood in the toilet. She’d uncross her mother’s legs when she fell asleep. Don’t hold on, she’d whisper. Somehow, Jane imagined the clenching making it worse. For Jane, it was a felt sense, like an imminent storm, or the last step on a staircase: Jane would not get pregnant. Jane’s mother considered Jane a miracle in more ways than one—and it had made Jane sure of this one thing. Until she wasn’t.
Two years ago, Jane lost the first baby. When this pregnancy held, week after week, month after month, she had to constantly remind herself that it was only her mind that had tricked her into believing something was wrong with her. That having a child was impossible. Sometimes, she would repeat over and over to herself: you are having a baby you are having a baby you are having a baby. She would look at herself in the mirror, check her profile, collarbones, as if knowing oneself as a mother had to do with one’s face. And although, in all those years, Jane never imagined pregnancy exactly, this certainly would not have been what she imagined. Jane is not in pain. She feels lucky for that. But her body has changed. Her thighs and arms and neck are soft, nearly purple. She is overripe fruit, touchy around her armpits and knees. She retains nothing. Creativity is slippery. Her work has suffered. She shuffles around in her studio, exhausted. She longs to nap but cannot get comfortable. Even the freshest strawberries taste woolly and dull in her mouth. She does not emote: cry or rage or laugh hysterically. Her face, too, as if to reflect her insides, has gone wan, especially around her eyes, as if she’s been powdered over, chalked.
Because of her belief, and because of her first pregnancy, Jane limits what she does. She treats her body as though she is something shatterable: old crockery, spectacles on the street. She’s quit smoking, stopped stretching her own canvases. She can’t stand high on ladders without feeling woozy. She doesn’t jog in the morning anymore—the shaking is nauseating—and she drinks so much water that she may as well float, but there is nowhere to do that. It is winter. The tub won’t stay warm. She was filling the tub? She’s thirsty again. Her thoughts are like fireflies when you turn on the lights.
Still, at this hour, in the dark, there is nothing to keep track of. The apartment is silent, safe. Jane’s paintings are all over. In ceramics she’s made, there are greens she’s cut from the Park: dogwood, reindeer moss, and wintergreen. Her studio is upstairs, neat and silent, the door closed, everything in its right place. There is the old photo of her mother on her nightstand—the almond Iraqi of her eyes—and also portraits in ink of Abe, inspired by moments that she committed to memory. He is eating watermelon and writing on a bench—final edits?—pointing at a cormorant in a stormy sky. Jane is in one: Abe has his arms around her from behind as if keeping her from a ledge or a fast black car.
By the front door, there is a large linen bag holding her favorite dyed pajamas from her shibori phase, rose water (the kind her mother used), a box of Californian dates from David, a book of Picasso’s sketches, ivory slippers, the tiniest yellow sleeping set you’ve ever seen, and a stuffed frog. Will her son like frogs? She doesn’t feel like she knows him yet. He is so active, intense. She is sure of that. Perhaps he’ll do hurdles, boxing. He is particular too. Whenever Jane eats anything other than grapefruits, he flails in disgust. She has lost weight, unbelievably, but if she even tries asparagus, walnuts, or a bagel, he rages. What a juxtaposition he is to her. Jane: content with fresh air, toast, and paintbrushes. She could sit here, right here, and watch the sky until dawn. She could move only to get into the sunlight, and another fruit.
He kicks her again, as if to chime in. Jane feels, and has felt, ever so slightly sick.
And though Abe has been helpful, supportive—what can I get you? she doesn’t know—he cannot understand. It is a feeling from the inside out, Jane thinks, and deep within her. A place she never knew was there. It howls. Abe continues to sleep and work and write and eat normally. He is a person in the world, unchanged biologically, physiologically. Jane wonders if she’ll ever do anything normally again. In the beginning, she was so sure she would. She is less sure with every passing day.
Jane sips her tea slowly. She sways, standing. Soon, she moves through the house like a moth. In the library, on Abe’s desk, leaning on a string sculpture Jane made forever ago, is Jane’s old pack of cigarettes, half-smoked ten months ago. She picks them up, smells them, wonders if they will appeal to her after her son is born as they’ve appealed to her every day since he’s been in her belly. She’s heard of tastes changing dramatically after labor. She feels suddenly protective of cigarettes and milk. Cigarettes and milk and honey.
Jane opens the window. On the side of their brownstone, up high up here, there are lighter-colored rectangular stones, fanning out like sculptural flowers, heavy, grand. Jane takes a permanent marker, thick and moist, from Abe’s desk. She strains to get half her body outside the window. Her belly accommodates; the baby stops kicking for once. The cold is enlivening. Maybe he likes that. There is light from the moon. She is Santa’s sack, bulging and ungainly. She holds on with one hand. With the other, on the sandy stone, Jane draws a tiny nude, all breasts and belly. Underneath, she signs her name. Below that: Jane drew this when she was able . She dates it. No one could ever see it from the street. Won’t. Still, it will remain. Jane will know it.
Jane closes the window. The room sucks in on itself again. It insulates. The woman is outside still, Jane thinks, permanent and lined. The baby shifts.
Jane isn’t alone exactly, but at this hour, in this room, it feels like that. Months ago, when Jane was the sickest of sick, heaving and shuddering over the toilet, begging for it to be over, Abe had come in. I want to be sick by myself, she said. Abe can be too kind.
That’s too bad, Abe said. Our child is in your belly.
It isn’t as simple as that, Jane thinks. Abe is asleep. Could not be roused. If Jane dies at this very moment, she thinks, the baby will die too. A mother is always and never alone. Responsibility strikes her like a silver spur to the back. She goes to the living room again, to her watercolor of the sky. She isn’t finished yet. She must make something.
Jane watercolors until she doesn’t know when. All she knows is that she wants to finish. The desire goads her like a strong wind. There are drafts on the floor, a steady hand behind her. Perhaps it is her mother.
When does Jane go into labor exactly? It is hard to know.
Jane is watercoloring, and then it is morning and there is something happening, low and animal-like, in her body. She must go for a walk. She walks the west side of the Park in the sunshine, alone, full of purpose. Abe sleeps on.
Jane carries a book; she doesn’t wince. She is a penguin, a hard-boiled egg. She is able to watch her own breath. It is the tide, she tells herself, as it suggests in the book. Jane is the shore.
When the pain feels like a jab, Jane exhales loudly. She shakes her pocket for change. She considers finding a payphone, calling Abe’s mother, who would know what to do. But it is out of routine more than need. Jane inhales. She knows.
By the Seventy-Second Street entrance, Jane passes two men in khakis, shiny shoes, and crossed legs. They must think, she thinks, this is a very pregnant lady. I hope she doesn’t give birth here. They would never think: This is an artist. This is a woman who can make anything. And when she makes it past them, no labor right here, right now, they won’t think of her ever again, will they? Jane wants to tell them something. It feels critical and pressing. I make things, she wants to say. I have always made things. I made a three-foot Great Dane out of paper clips and twine.
Exhale.
When is it—Jane will never know—that the pain intensifies so much that all she can do is stand outside their building, put her cheek to the cold of it, rock and sway and pray and rock? How did she get here? Abe is with her. Did she make some sound? Did she call his mother? How did he know?
When she cannot feel herself in herself, when she is afraid of losing her mind, she asks herself her birthday. The name of the president. The ingredients in her mother’s orange-blossom cookies. Her favorite line from Abe’s first novel: about the suburbs. She would be able to tell you her name if you asked her, but no one is asking. Jane, because my mother wanted me to be American on the page in case I wasn’t American in the eyes. She was so afraid of a pogrom, a long list because of growing up in Baghdad, being a Jew. Don’t be a Fakhria, a Smadar, a Samira, she’d thought. Safety over grandness in a name. Grand, she said, Jane would just be.
Now Abe is rubbing her back, asking if she’d like a grapefruit.
Soon, water floods out of her. Jane closes her legs to keep her baby in. Abe wants them to go to the hospital. It is time. No, Jane says. She is sweating. She is freezing. She thinks of her mother. She has occurred to Jane during every moment of this pregnancy. She never got the chance to ask her what it was like for her, this part, any part. Jane was so young when she died. She didn’t know the right things to ask. Now those things are the only ones she feels she must know.
The sky is bright and colorless, bleached with cold. Jane does not want a grapefruit. She wants to ask her mother what is coming: if it is, in fact, time. If she will be all right.
Jane wakes up, or maybe she was never asleep. Later, Abe will tell her that there were eighteen hours of agony. Maybe it never really ends. Some of it, Jane spends on the front stoop. She will not leave. Abe, bless him, listens. He knows her well. People walk by, but Jane doesn’t notice them. She sits and she stands. She holds Abe and asks him questions, or maybe she’s asking her mother. She throws up and he wipes her face with a towel he’s brought from inside. She eats two dates. She walks around the block once, and then the sun sets.
When they finally get to the hospital, the baby goes upside down. Downside up. He swivels. This feels like a mutiny, Jane says to a nurse at some point.
It always does, honey, she says. Always.
When Jane swims out of it, upstream, everything feels like slicing. The baby is shrieking. Jane asks for her mother and then closes her eyes.
Abe is holding the baby. Has she held him yet? She’s afraid her arms cannot bear his weight. She is afraid of him. Or is it that she’s afraid of herself? She cannot do this, she thinks. She wants to reverse time, turn off the volume, shut everything off.
He is healthy, Abe whispers.
Thank you, Jane says.
But she doesn’t want to hold him. Not yet.
On the first night and every night after, Jane closes her eyes against Max’s crying. She knows it is wrong but she cannot help it. His voice makes her itch. Worse. It makes her ache but not like longing. Like disgust. And Max will not latch. Jane cannot feed him. She cannot nourish her own son.
Jane has heard other mothers talking of the deliciousness of babies. Jane doesn’t think Max smells delicious; he smells rotten. She gets close and then squinches her face as though she herself is rotten from the inside, vinegared, soured. There is something wrong with her to feel this way, and yet she cannot help it. She doesn’t want to hold him, be alone with him, rock him. Everything is all wrong.
And though Jane longs to feel peaceful, strong, despite, she cannot. There is no break. It just starts up again. It hurts to walk, to eat, to cry. The only thing that doesn’t hurt is dreaming. At the window, Jane dreams of her watercolor. It is unfinished. She dreams of her mother. Sometimes, she can hear her. Sometimes, she cannot. There is so much crying.
And yet, Abe is here. He is holding them both. His mother comes. Takes the baby. But still, there is no rest. Jane is not dreaming but it is a nightmare, this. No sleep. No waking up.