Chapter 33
Long before Leonard and I got married, even before we were sleeping in the same bed, I told him I wouldn’t have another child.
He did ask me why, just so he could understand, and I told him that the social workers and nurses and volunteers who told me she could be replaced were wrong.
I didn’t tell him that I also worried I just wasn’t cut out for the job, that I wasn’t fierce enough, or smart enough.
That I’d already been given a test, and failed.
I told him that when I thought about having another child, everything in me said no.
With this, as well, I worried I was making him choose.
But when he said he understood, I knew he meant it.
And he never once tried to change my mind, not before we were married, and not after.
Leonard was the one who told me that a miracle birth control pill would soon be a reality, available to any married woman.
He was doing his rotation in obstetrics, and one of the doctors had told him it would be more effective than a diaphragm.
“It’ll just be a little pill you take every day,” Leonard told me. “And you won’t have to worry.”
That seemed too good to be true, that just a little pill could be so powerful.
When Enovid came out the following year, I got right on it, but I planned to keep using my diaphragm as well.
By the time I swallowed the fourth pill, I was sure that both the magic pill and the diaphragm had failed me, as I felt so nauseated that I had to call in sick for work.
My doctor assured me I was not pregnant, and that I was just feeling the first side effects of the hormones.
Within a month, my clothes were tight. Painful, white-capped pimples grew and ruptured around my mouth.
My doctor told me this was all to be expected, but that if I felt chest pains, or any tenderness in my limbs, I should get to an emergency room right away.
“Makes you wonder if you’d be better off just having a baby,” he said, and laughed.
Soon enough, I could see for myself that the nausea and weight gain and acne really were all par for the course. A lot of married women worked at the library. Nobody talked about it, but I could tell, just looking around, I wasn’t the only one who decided the magic pill was worth the trouble.
I can’t say a particular sight or experience made me start to question my resolve.
It was more that I just started thinking about it.
I’d grown older, and a little wiser. I knew how easily I could settle into certainty, and be completely wrong.
I also think I finally felt safe to even consider the question because I had both the diaphragm and the magic pill, and because no one was pressuring me.
The decision would be my own. I had that, and felt it, for the first time in my life.
Except by then I was thirty, no spring chicken.
I knew I might be out of time. But for almost another year, I thought it over without saying anything to Leonard.
I was thinking of his feelings, and how much he’d already lost. I didn’t want to bring him into the argument until I knew my own answer, in my own heart.
When I finally asked him for his own thoughts on another baby, he was caught off guard, to say the least. Phoenix had died of old age the year before, and Leonard said when I first took his hand and told him my grief was still with me, but changing, he thought I was going to tell him I was ready to get another dog.
I had to spell it out. I told him I was sure of my own thoughts, of what I wanted, but he had full veto power.
For years, he’d given the same to me. We’d both lost our first child.
If it would hurt him too much to try for another, I’d accept it.
“You’re earning a good salary now,” I said. “I’m just saying. If you decide yes, we could afford it.”
He gave me a look. We both knew money wasn’t the issue.
If I got pregnant, I’d lose my job at the library, married or not.
But Leonard had finished his internship and gotten a job in an emergency department.
I’d worried that would be exactly the wrong place for him to work, but he said it was nothing like Korea, because in the ER, he wasn’t helpless.
He didn’t have to just watch people die.
“I don’t know,” he said. He looked as if I’d hit him with something heavy. Not pained, though. Just struck.
He said he needed time, at least a few weeks, to think.
—
On my last day at the library, the rest of the staff threw a little party for me, and they all went in on a sleeper stroller with a sunshade.
The head librarian wheeled it in with a big red bow tied around the handle.
There was a card for me, too, full of congratulations, and assurances that I would be a wonderful mother.
I wanted to ask What makes you all say that, exactly? But I knew they meant well.
Within a few weeks, I was wearing maternity clothes, and strangers on the street would smile at me, and rush over to hold open doors.
Everyone at the obstetrician’s office called me “Mrs. Lifton” or “Ma’am,” always speaking to me politely.
So compared to my first pregnancy, as far as how I was treated, it was night and day.
Some things were harder. In my seventh month, my ankles swelled up so much I could only wear flip-flops.
And I was far more tired than I remembered being in New Jersey.
Once, I went for a walk, and didn’t get far from our apartment building before I got so worn out I sat down on a bench, thinking I just needed to rest my eyes.
I woke to a woman tapping me on the shoulder.
She told me she was about to call the police, as she’d worried I was on heroin, or that I was dead.
The nurse I saw wasn’t worried. She said third-trimester fatigue was hardly unusual.
“Especially when the mother is a little older,” she said. “Do you have anyone to help you when the baby comes? Is your mother nearby?”
She asked this brightly, just making conversation. I thought of Mae, so far away in Florida. She wouldn’t be able to come out.
“My mother’s dead,” I said. I didn’t say it to make her feel bad, but it seemed like she should have already learned not to assume. “I have friends here,” I added. “And my husband.”
“Sorry to hear about your mother.” She turned her back to me, washing her hands. “What about your mother-in-law?”
I was silent. I didn’t think of myself as having one. The nurse looked back at me, waiting.
“She’s far away,” I said. “In New York.”
“Oh! Is that where you all are from? I love New York.”
I told her no. She turned back to the sink.
“Well, I bet she’d come out if you asked her. Most people would fly to the moon to see a new grandchild.”
“She’s not most people,” I said.
It wasn’t completely a lie. Leonard’s mother certainly wasn’t most people, not to me, and not to him. But I knew I’d implied she wouldn’t want to come out, and I knew that wasn’t the truth.
People say that pregnancy softens your heart, and makes you see all the world like a child in need of love.
That’s not what it was for me. When I’d been eighteen and pregnant, I’d had plenty of rage in my heart.
The next time I was pregnant, at thirty-one, I had less reason to be angry, but I most certainly did not feel maternal love for everyone.
It was time, I think, that softened me. Time and thinking.
—
At dinner, Leonard told me about the people he’d seen at the ER that day: a woman on her second cardiac arrest who was still alive, a man who’d been stabbed in the back who wasn’t, a toddler who just needed a nebulizer, a milkman who tripped on some stairs and bit off a chunk of his tongue.
Even when I’d been working at the library, my stories could rarely compete.
But he asked for details about my appointment with the obstetrician, and how my grocery shopping had gone.
I told him everything except for what I’d been thinking about the most.
For that, I waited until after dishes, when we adjourned to the couch.
We’d gotten into a routine of listening to a record while he gave my ankles what we called the World-Famous 8-Fingered Massage.
It should have been world-famous, what Leonard could do for my swollen ankles, for all of me.
I told him he was the only doctor I’d ever met with warm hands.
“What do you think of the name Jennifer?” He dug his expert thumb into the arch of my foot. “You don’t hear that too often.”
I told him I liked Jennifer fine. The week before, we’d decided on Diana for a girl.
The week before that, Colleen. Our front-runner for a boy, Marcus, had held steady for over a month.
Girl or boy, we both wanted something strong, and something people would spell right on the first try.
But for a girl, we wanted a name that was a little unusual.
We didn’t know the name of our first child. We’d probably never know it. But still.
“Jennifer Lifton,” he said. “Jennifer Lorraine Lifton.” He kept working on my ankles, moving his head to the rhythm of the record.
The previous year, the frostbite on his cheek had turned into skin cancer, and the surgery to remove the lesions had left scars.
Sometimes, when I saw him in profile, when he didn’t know I was looking, his eyes had a weary, wounded expression that disappeared when he faced me. There was no one I’d rather look at.
He pulled on my big toe. “Why’d you only paint the nail of this one?”
I told him it was the only one I could reach. He said he’d paint the others for me, after he got my ankles in better shape. I knew by then he might be mad at me, but he’d still do it.
“Leonard,” I said. “I think you should write your mom back.”
His hands lifted from my feet. The record kept playing, the snare drum steady. I pulled my feet from his lap and sat up as best I could.
“We should invite her out here. She should meet this grandchild.”