Chapter Eleven
I waited to tell Moth. I didn’t want to give him a heart attack.
One spring, a perfectly healthy advisee of mine, improbably named Frog McCormack, found out during lunch his girlfriend was pregnant, then passed out in seventh period Honors Tenth Grade Lit.
We were talking about “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” when Frog raised a trembling hand, moved, I thought, by the story, impatient to explore Gabriel García Márquez’s ingenious metaphor, but when I called on him, he keeled right off his seat and onto the floor. And he was fifteen.
Moth’s heart was seventy-eight, which seemed a little old to take news like this in stride. But I kept being pregnant—progressed, in fact, from queasy to actually throwing up—so he kept being worried about me. Which wasn’t good for his heart either.
“I know you’ve been to the doctor already, Sarge,” he said a week after Dr. Kim told me the news, “but maybe it’s time to go back.
” It was nice to be in bed together in the middle of the day, but it was nicer when the reason wasn’t because I’d just been sick in the bathroom and he didn’t think I should be alone.
“It’s not,” I said. “She prescribed time. There just hasn’t been enough, apparently.”
His eyes darkened. He had no idea what I meant, of course, and also every idea what I meant—of course—from having been to the doctor himself. “Maybe a different doctor? A second opinion? The food here is bad, but it’s not daily-vomiting bad.” He winked. “It’s not as if you’re pregnant.”
I looked at him. If we’d been in a movie, he’d have slowly stopped laughing then looked incredulous then begged, “You’re joking. Tell me you’re joking.” But it wasn’t a movie. So I had to give him a hint.
“I am,” I said.
“Ha ha,” he said.
“No, really.”
“Can you imagine?”
“Vividly,” I said.
“It’s brilliant, actually.” Jolly. Jolly was what he sounded. “The vomiting, the woolly head and dizziness, your feeling so knackered all the time. Your beautiful glowing face.” He leaned in and kissed me. “Old age and pregnancy share a lot of the same symptoms, now I think about it.”
“I know you can’t believe it,” I said. “And I know why you can’t believe it. But apparently it’s true. Dr. Kim ran and reran multiple tests. I’m pregnant.”
He looked hard at me and finally saw I was serious. That’s when he panicked.
“Sarge. Are you okay? What … what year is it? Stick out your tongue. Raise both arms.”
“Oh for heaven’s sake.” I levered myself off the bed and stalked across the room.
“I’m not having a stroke. I’m not delirious.
I have not spontaneously just this minute lost my marbles.
I. Am. Pregnant.” I rummaged around in my purse, found the paperwork from the appointment, thrust it at him. “Here.”
When he raised his eyes to mine, they were filled with wonder.
I know I said I wanted to tell him to see just this look on his face, but I’d imagined it in the past tense.
I was pregnant. I had been pregnant these last—now seven—weeks, but I wasn’t anymore.
I thought he’d get a kick out of it as a scientist, not as a father-to-be.
The present tense was a different thing altogether.
It was ruining, among other things, the moment. (Irony.)
“It’s a miracle,” he said.
“Of sorts.”
“That you’re not dying, I mean. I thought … I haven’t wanted to worry you, but you’ve been worrying me. You’re not sick! Miracle.”
“What about that I’m seventy-seven and pregnant?”
“That goes way beyond miracle.” He puffed out his cheeks. “Way beyond beyond.”
“Don’t get attached,” I warned him. “Dr. Kim says it’ll terminate itself. Any minute now.”
“Oh. Of course.”
“She says it’s so early, it shouldn’t be a big deal to miscarry at this point. When it starts, I’m supposed to call her. She says not to think of this as a pregnancy, just a weird diagnosis, but really good news.”
“Yes.” Moth nodded then nodded some more. “I see. Yes.” Then, after some more nodding, “Thank God for that. The good news, I mean.”
“Yes,” I echoed, no idea what either of us was affirming.
“But … what if …”
“What if what?”
“What if it doesn’t start? Or stop. Or what have you.”
“It will. Obviously it will. You think I’m going to have a baby?”
“No!” he said. “No. Not possible. Full stop. End of.”
“Full stop,” I echoed. “End of.” But it didn’t sound as good without his accent.
Then we sat and didn’t say anything. There was too much else to say.
There was nothing else to say.
Eventually, he said, “I guess we should go down for supper.”
And eventually I agreed, “I guess we should.”
There, since I’d told Moth, I could tell Maisie and Dot as well.
“I’m sorry.” Maisie fiddled with her hearing aids. “I couldn’t hear you. These things are pieces of shit.”
Vista View residents have what has to be the widest variety of hearing aids from the widest variety of hearing aid stores, and best I can tell, none of them work.
In this case, though, that was a blessing.
Word travels fast at Vista View (faster than its residents certainly), and I didn’t want anyone but these three to know. “Unfortunately, you heard me right.”
“I thought you said you were pregnant,” Maisie laughed.
“I did.” I pushed overcooked broccoli around a pond of what appeared to be ketchup. “I am.”
“No, pregnant!” Maisie said. “Like about to have a baby.”
“Well, no,” I conceded. “Pregnant but not about to have a baby.”
“No, really,” Dot said.
“Apparently.”
“How is that possible?”
“No one knows.”
“Huh,” said Dot.
“Huh,” said Maisie. “With what?”
“What do you mean with what?”
“If you’re pregnant but not about to have a baby.”
“Oh. Yes. Soon it will terminate. I’m too old.”
“For more things all the time,” Dot said.
“I’ll say,” Maisie agreed. “In my day, eighty-year-olds didn’t get pregnant.”
“I’m barely seventy-seven!”
“Oh. Well then.”
I was surprised by but grateful for Maisie and Dot’s nonchalance.
Everyone else in my life was so … chalant, I guess.
Distressed. Verklempt. I got it. Of course I did.
My diagnosis was not so much shocking as impossible, speaking of swooning Frog McCormack, because the person you could imagine having some actual insight here was Gabriel García Márquez.
Predictably, Frog’s class had been in too much of an uproar after he fainted to finish the lesson, but I’d taught it many times.
In the story, a couple trying to protect their baby during a storm comes across a very old man with enormous wings in the mud of their yard: an angel, they naturally conclude, a miracle.
Their friends and neighbors are curious but not kind, certainly not awed.
They cage him and mock him and throw stones, hurt and burn and abuse him, because yes, an angel looks like a human but with wings.
But not like any human. Like a beautiful one, heavenly, celestial.
Young. Whereas this one is old and smells bad and rants incomprehensibly.
People aren’t good at recognizing the hand of God in the aged or unsavory.
We like our miracles gold and glowing, not gray, not noisome, not mortal.
And not in our yards. Because that’s the other thing García Márquez knew—when miracles are actually miraculous, they’re too improbable to do all they must. Pregnancy is miraculous, yes.
Childbirth is miraculous. Babies are miraculous.
But only some pregnancies, some births, some babies—the ones we bargain and beg for, the miracles we seek, expect, even demand.
Me? I was unacceptably, uselessly miraculous, too old to be beatific, too unimagined to be believed.
I did not inspire wonder in the divine. If anything, I undermined it.
But the Vista View set? Good at finding the holy in very old bodies. Used to the unfamiliar. Expecting what is unforeseen, speaking of expecting.
So Maisie went right on, unfazed. “It’s never what you think, is it? Last week I assumed I had pinkeye because Cassidy stayed over Friday night and half her preschool has it, but it turned out to be arthritis.”
“How do you confuse arthritis with pinkeye?” Moth said.
“Half of Cassidy’s preschool doesn’t have arthritis.”
“I went in for a sore hip.” Dot waved a piece of chicken around on her fork. “They said my hip hurts because I’m too fat. I said I’ve always been fat, and my hip’s always been fine. They said I need a new one. But they won’t give it to me because I’m too fat.”
I nodded carefully. Lola reported that “fat” was in fact the preferred term these days—something about body positivity and slur reclamation—and surely Dot should refer to herself however she liked, whether it was preferred or not.
She did seem to wear her girth as a badge of honor.
All around us, residents were shriveled down to nearly nothing, and here she was, as Lola explained, claiming her space.
I admired this but had trouble overcoming my seventy-plus years of acculturation on the point to offer much more than an uncomfortable “Mm-hmm.”
Maisie, however, didn’t even blink. “Last month, I had shooting pains in my ankles. After a bunch of tests they decided it was a reaction to the pills they gave me for the shooting pains in my hands. ‘Which do you use more?’ they said.”
“So they said lose weight and we’ll give you a new hip,” Dot went on. “They said a diet will help. I said it never has before. They said I should exercise. I said I can’t because I have a sore hip.”
“I went in because my stomach was upset.” Maisie could play this game for hours.
We all could. “They said cut out salt, sugar, dairy, wheat, fruit, tomatoes, mushrooms, garlic, corn, potatoes, onions, and cruciferous vegetables. Basically, all I could eat was cucumbers and gin. I went back a month later because my stomach was still upset. They said I wasn’t eating enough. ”
“Then they did some scans or tests or who knows what,” Dot continued, “and decided my hip doesn’t have arthritis. It has cancer.”