Chapter 6 The Whale
The Whale
It began, as all things do, with change.
She had always liked eggs, and then she didn’t. She never napped, and then she did. She was not exactly nauseated but felt an intermittent gastric unease that came on, like a sneeze, without warning.
“Maybe you’re pregnant,” Tess said.
“Not possible,” said Laurel.
She had been on birth control since the age of twenty-one. When she got home, she counted the pills in her yellow clamshell case and confirmed that she’d missed none. But her symptoms continued, and when she went to Noah and Maisie’s house for dinner, Maisie insisted that she take a test.
It was December of 2005. Maisie and Noah had gotten married earlier that year—aside from a turbulent hiatus as college freshmen, they had dated since the night of high school graduation—and Maisie kept a pack of pregnancy tests under the bathroom sink.
“I’m not pregnant,” Laurel said.
“Of course you’re not,” said Maisie. “We’re just making sure.”
She sat on the edge of the tub while Laurel peed. When a second line appeared beside the test line, Laurel put her hands over her mouth, and Maisie screamed for her.
“What will I tell Eli?” asked Laurel, over dinner. They had been dating for three months.
“You’re a freak of nature,” Maisie said. “He can’t blame you. Noah, what are the odds?”
Noah came in from the kitchen carrying bowls of his mother’s curry. He had just begun his pediatric residency.
“If you’re sure you didn’t miss a pill,” he said, “then less than one percent.”
“Fantastic,” Laurel said.
That fall had been the most blissful of her life.
She brought Eli back to the orchard, where he gamely helped with seasonal chores, even working a shift at the farm store.
Laurel had never been so unhelpful: she used any excuse to sneak him back to the storage room, where they made out against the old cider press.
On Halloween, one of his new colleagues hosted a party.
Laurel dressed as a bouquet, and Eli went as Einstein’s description of entanglement, “spooky action at a distance”: he hovered apart from the other guests, wrapped in an old white bedsheet and chuckling intermittently.
Often they woke up early, adrenalized by lust. They walked to the nearest coffee shop and kept going; sometimes they made it all the way from the east side to Picnic Point, a nature preserve on the west. Laurel wanted to know his opinion about everything: American Idol, the war in Iraq, Pluto’s demotion to dwarf planet.
During the week, they worked in different campus buildings, but texting—a new technology—gave them constant access to each other.
Sleep felt like the only time when they were truly separate.
If Madison wasn’t paradise, Laurel didn’t know it. If the ground was there, she never touched it. She floated, she breezed, she skated like a sail. She was twenty-five years old.
And now she was pregnant.
Days after the positive test, Laurel made Marcella Hazan’s fettuccine al limone in her galley kitchen.
The narrow stove fit little more than one large pan, and she could only open the refrigerator partway before it hit the wall.
After she finished the sauce, Laurel was sweaty enough to warrant a second shower, but Eli would arrive in ten minutes.
She changed into a dress, sleeveless and black with a boatneck, and smeared lipstick on her mouth.
She was pulling her hair into a claw clip when he appeared on the outdoor staircase, holding a bottle of wine and a bouquet of Chinese lanterns.
“Hi,” he said when she opened the door, nuzzling her neck in a way that made her feel she did want to have his baby.
Laurel didn’t have a dining table—she usually ate on the couch, or else at the desk in her bedroom—but she’d arranged a folding one in the living room, with a candle in the center.
“Look at all this,” Eli said, his palm on the small of her back, and Laurel tensed. He noticed. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” she told him, but by the time they finished their salads, she was blinking back tears.
In the kitchen, serving pasta, she tried and failed to slow her heart rate.
She had hoped to have the conversation after dinner, but now she knew it couldn’t wait.
She carried the bowls to the table and said, “I have to tell you something.”
Eli blinked. “Okay.”
“I don’t know how it happened. I’m really careful—you’re the only person I’ve been seeing,” she said, and now she was crying, with guilt as well as dread.
He whitened slightly. “You’re scaring me.”
“I’m pregnant,” said Laurel.
Eli didn’t move.
“I know,” she said. “I couldn’t believe it, either, and before you ask, I’m on birth control, and I haven’t missed a pill.
Noah said the chances of this are less than one percent—he’s a doctor, that’s how he knows; or he will be—anyway, I wanted you to know, because…
well, obviously…and in case you’d like to come with me to the appointment, to have it”—she paused—“removed? Obviously, the timing isn’t right, I’m still in school… ”
Three floors down, a car stopped in front of the apartment. Laurel heard her downstairs neighbor—another graduate student—laugh goodbye, drunk. Eli looked dazed.
“I mean,” Laurel finished, “it doesn’t have to change anything between us.”
There was a pause the length of which she could not possibly identify.
“Well,” said Eli, slowly, “of course I would come to the appointment, if that’s what you want.”
“Isn’t that what you want?” Laurel asked.
“It certainly makes the most sense.” He took a bite of pasta, then gestured to Laurel. “Sit.”
His voice was gentle. She spread a napkin on her lap.
“The pasta is excellent,” Eli said.
“Thank you,” said Laurel.
Quietly, they ate. At one point, she stood to open a window, and cool air flowed in.
“But say we were to play it out,” Eli said.
Laurel speared a tomato. Her surprise was so total that she nearly choked as it went down.
“The baby would be due—when?” he continued.
“August.”
“August.” Eli folded his hands. “My postdoc would be finished.”
“They’ll ask you to stay. The physics department will create a position for you if they have to.”
“And we would live…where?” he asked.
“Well, I suppose we’d have to move in together.”
“Don’t sound so excited,” said Eli, and Laurel laughed. “The house next to my apartment is for sale.”
The thought was enchanting—for panic was not the only thing she’d felt since learning she was pregnant. A rabbit hole had appeared in the flat ground of everyday life. If she skirted it, she would always wonder where it might have led.
“Can you afford a down payment?” she asked.
“No,” he admitted, and she felt dizzy again, not because of the down payment but because she knew nothing of his finances at all.
“We can’t do this,” she said. “I’ve never even met your parents. I don’t know your middle name. You could decide I drive you nuts.”
“This may not be relevant,” said Eli, “but you should know that I love you.”
It took a moment for the words to reach her. “You…?”
Eli put his fork down. In the candlelight, his face was speculative. She never wanted to stop looking at it.
“Have you ever been on a walk,” he said, “going nowhere in particular, or so you think, when you feel pulled in a certain direction?”
Laurel nods. “Like—you think you’re walking aimlessly, but then you come to an intersection and know you have to turn that way, even if you aren’t sure why.”
“That’s how I felt when I saw you in San Francisco,” Eli said. “Didn’t you?”
Her face was very warm. “It was different. You were taken. The choice wasn’t mine.”
“It’s yours now,” said Eli.
—
Unlike Maisie, Laurel had never babysat.
Though she had raised plenty of lambs, human infants made her anxious: their unrelenting need, their puckered faces vaguely blameful.
She expected pregnancy to feel alien, but her body knew what to do.
There was a sense of underground construction—joints wiggled; ligaments loosened—and she felt the way she had when Eli came to Madison: gravity, momentum, a strange and knowing déjà vu.
January was the first time they saw the baby, a dark lima bean against a roving backdrop of white; its heartbeat was an oceanic suction sound, and from then on, they called it the whale.
In March, they moved, not to the yellow house across from Eli’s apartment but into one of the full-sized units below Laurel’s garret.
Eli and Noah lugged furniture through the snow, and Clare brought an apple pie.
That night, for the first time, Laurel felt a kick.
She tugged her shirt up, calling for Eli, and they watched the limb move beneath skin as if under a sheet.
Later the baby’s entire body undulated, so that it seemed to cruise the surface of her stomach.
One night, she dreamed of her own severed head.
Eli drove them to a diner on Willy Street, where they ate scrambled eggs and hash browns and hypothesized.
Eli thought she was afraid of losing her intellectual life, and Laurel suspected that was true.
Eli had been hired by the physics department.
Laurel had begun to apply for postdocs—she still wanted to pursue her electricity experiment—but she felt a disturbing lack of urgency: her mind was elsewhere.
By summer, her stomach was a taut dome. Her heart sank when she dropped something; it was such a long way down.
She had begun to think of herself not as me but we, and felt guilty that she meant a duo—herself and the baby—and not a triad, including Eli.
She was utterly in love with him, but Eli had not grown the child in his body, had not felt its foot in his ribs or soothed it with the rhythm of his heartbeat.
Her relationship with the baby felt private, inarticulable, and profound, an experience that went back to the first woman, the first mammal—even back to primordial oceans, when the first cell became two.