скачать книгу бесплатно
Every day, once Aaron has gone off to work, the next ten hours last a lifetime to me. Ten hours with nothing to do but wait until Aaron comes home to keep me company. Afternoons alone are lonely; dinners alone are lonely. I can’t fall asleep until Aaron, completely tuckered out from another work shift, drops into bed beside me, nor can I bring myself to admit to him that I am lonely and bored.
Before leaving Green Bay I worked reception for a local pediatrician. It wasn’t anything glamorous or ambitious, answering phones, greeting customers, coding medical records, tallying up bills, but it was something. But now Aaron has suggested that I not work, that I stay home, that soon enough we’ll have a baby to raise and then I’ll have something to do.
On occasion Miranda and her boys stop by for a visit, their afternoons long and lonely as well. We sit in the backyard, watching Jack and Paul wreak havoc on the tree swing, and as we do, I listen to Miranda depreciate parenthood, complain about her husband and her kids, knock the tedium of her everyday routine: the frozen waffles, the syrup in the hair, the messy bath times and all the books that she and her children are meant to read but never do because it’s far too easy to just let them watch TV. Her husband—Joe—wants her to limit TV time to an hour a day, and Miranda laughed at this, saying Joe didn’t have the first clue what it was like to be pregnant, what it was like to raise rough-and-tumble boys like Jack and Paul. She’d take any quiet time she could get, even if it meant they sat perched in front of the TV for five hours at a time, so close they were liable to go deaf and blind. She didn’t care. Anything so long as they were quiet.
These were the words Miranda used and I stared at her openmouthed; I could hardly believe my ears. I agreed with Joe, treading carefully, delicately, saying how I’d read that too much TV can lead to obesity in children, to aggressiveness among other things, and she made light of this, saying I didn’t know the first thing about being a mother.
“Just wait until you’re a mother,” she said. “Then you’ll see,”while hoisting her bare feet onto my patio chair and drinking her lemonade.
And then when adorable little Paul ran over and made every attempt to scamper onto her lap, hot and sweating, Miranda shirked away, saying, “Come on, buddy, it’s too hot for laps today,” while pushing him off as if he was some sort of bug who’d landed on her legs.
In that moment, what I wanted to do—what I ought to have done—was pull him up onto my own lap. Let him rest his tiny head on my shoulder for a while. He was tired too, in addition to hot and sweating, his eyes begging for a cool bath and his afternoon nap, though Miranda was too busy whining about the drudgery of motherhood and wasn’t yet ready to leave.
Suddenly I wanted to feel the weight of him on my own two legs; I craved the heat of his skin on mine. I wanted to press those blond curls away from his eyes.
I’ve started noticing kids with more frequency lately. Little kids, big kids. Babies. Kids at the park. Kids at the market. Kids walking down the streets of town, holding hands with their fathers and mothers. It seems everyone in the world suddenly had kids, everyone but Aaron and me.
Had they been there all along and I failed to notice?
Or did they arrive just then and there the moment Aaron and I decided to conceive?
I didn’t welcome Paul onto my lap as I wanted to do, but watched instead as he pouted and walked away, forced off Miranda’s lap with her own two hands. His eyes were downcast, his bottom lip thrust out. He cried, not big crocodile tears but rather quiet and ashamed tears, the tears of someone who’d been told one too many times not to cry.
And, as he disappeared to a corner of the yard to be sad, Miranda released a massive sigh of relief, grateful Paul was gone and she could once again breathe.
August 14, 1996Egg Harbor
It’s starting to become apparent that sex alone doesn’t lead to a baby.
When I woke this morning with blood dotting the inside of my underwear, my belly seized by a cramp, I knew another month had come and gone without a child. After the second month of trying, that blood in my underwear came as a startling blow, and there in the bathroom, hunched over the toilet seat, staring at the candy-apple red flecks on the lining of my favorite lace underwear, I began to sob. I kept it quiet and stifled, so that Aaron, in the kitchen brewing our morning coffee, couldn’t hear. I didn’t want him to know that I was upset. For whatever reason, I’d convinced myself over the last few days that every single twitch and prick I felt were the earliest signs of pregnancy. The tenderness in my chest, the desire to lay waste to almost everything I could find in the pantry, especially that which was high calorie, high fat.
These weren’t signs of pregnancy after all, but rather signs of my period. The same ones I’d felt every single month for the last fifteen years of my life, since the middle of seventh grade when I started my period in science class, red blood seeping through a pair of white jean shorts. And now my biological clock had only convinced me I was pregnant. I’d been sure I was nauseated, morning sickness already, when what it was was a change in hormones, my uterus clearing the decks, paving the way, getting ready to welcome a life that wouldn’t be.
I feel empty now, robbed of something that was mine, but why?
How can I grieve for something I never had?
After Aaron left for work, I scrubbed my underwear clean with detergent and bleach and headed into town. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him about the blood. Of course we don’t much talk about babies and pregnancy or use words like ovulation or conceive. Ostensibly, we just have sex, though inwardly what I’m thinking about, what we’re both thinking about, as we lie together in the moments afterward, my head draped across his chest, his warm hands massaging me, moving yo-yo-like up and down my back, is the end product, our handiwork, our creation, Aaron and me coming together, the best of him and the best of me fusing to create a baby.
I know he wants this as much as I do.
Only one time did Aaron whisper to me as we lay there in the darkness of the bedroom, still trying hard to catch our breaths after we were through, that he wondered what she would look like and when I asked, “Who?” he said, “Our baby girl. Our baby girl.” I beamed there from ear to ear and when I told him I didn’t know, he said, “I bet she’ll look like you.”
And then he kissed me slowly and deeply, the kind of kiss I felt all the way to my every extremity, and though he didn’t say it, I knew that in Aaron’s eyes if our baby girl looked like me, that she’d be the most beautiful girl in the world.
In all my life no one has ever made me feel as special as Aaron makes me feel.
I’ve watched him garden, watched the way he carefully carries the peat pots from greenhouse to garden, his every move screaming of paternal instinct; the way he digs the perfect holes, assessing their dimensions twice for accuracy; the way he lays the tiny biodegradable contraptions inside as if setting an infant in a crib, scattering soil over the top as gently as drawing a blanket to a sleeping child’s chin. He waters and watches and waits, and as he does, I watch him, this solid figure who, by his stature alone should be anything but gentle and soft-spoken, and yet he is. He wears his chestnut hair short these days, easier to hide behind the chef’s cap so there can be no false claims of hair in food, at least not from him, his hands and forearms marked with a selection of scratches and burns. For as long as I remember, he’s had them, those scratches and burns: badges of honor, war wounds dating back to his culinary school years.
There are times I find that I can’t take my eyes off those scars.
Each time he steps carefully through the garden, tending the seeds, careful not to step on our seedlings, it strikes me what a good father Aaron will one day be, so patient, so protective, so loving, the way he is with me.
And so, to say the words aloud now, to tell him I’ve started my period, would be to confess to Aaron that though we tried again this month, tried to conceive a baby, we failed.
After I wiped my eyes, I joined him on the dock for coffee and together we watched the boats pass by and shortly before two o’clock, as always, he left for work and again I was alone.
jessie (#u298352a8-6366-5809-abab-2dbb2eb6f5bc)
Everything changes with the break of day.
As the sun rises, gliding over the horizon, the world turns bright. The oppressive burden of night disappears. For the first time in eight long hours, I can breathe.
In daylight, I find myself standing above the floor register on the bedroom floor, feet straddling it. I stare down at the black rectangle between my legs. There’s nothing ominous about it; it’s just an ordinary metal grate, cold now, the furnace no longer producing heat. I rub at my arms in an effort to warm them up.
I shower and dress and head out into the day. Outside it’s a cold start, no more than forty degrees that will rise up to sixty-five by midday. The sky is blue for now, though there’s rain in the forecast. The grass is wet with dew. My fingers are cold as I lock the door.
From where I stand, I catch a glimpse of my landlord through the window of her own kitchen. It’s the back of her, just a pouf of hair and the ribs of a blue sweater before they meet with the wooden slats of a chair. It is a distorted image at best, muddled by the reflection of the outside world on glass. She doesn’t see me.
I could knock on the door, make an introduction, but that really isn’t my thing.
I round the side of the carriage home, gathering Old Faithful from the alleyway where I left her, leaned up against the side of the home. Ivy grows up the brick of the garage, the leaves starting to turn red. The alley is abandoned. There is nothing more than garage doors and Dumpsters here. City of Chicago garbage bins. No people. No rats. No feral cats. No signs of life anywhere. I settle Mom and her urn into the basket on back, nothing more than a metal milk crate that I keep secure with bungee cords. We set off down the street.
It’s no secret that Chicago is the alley capital of the country, with over a thousand miles of shadowy backstreets. The kind of darkened corridors where people like to hide their trash and vermin, and nobodies like me.
Morning traffic, as always, is a mess. Millions of people move this way and that like cattle in a cattle drive. My first stop is the same as always: coffee. I take it to go with a sugar twist from the bakery, where the donuts are fresh and the coffee is hot and cheap. I don’t have six bucks a day to spend on coffee, and the owner knows me, sort of. She always says hello and calls me Jenny, and I don’t have the heart to tell her that, after all these years, she’s got it wrong. I set my coffee in the cup holder, pedaling away, making my way toward the Loop. I take my time, moving in wide circles around cars and trucks illegally parked in the bike lines, careful to avoid the city’s sewage grates. I stay away from potholes.
Having no luck finding my social security card in the box of Mom’s paperwork, I started the day with an idea in mind: getting a new one. That and figuring out how to get my name removed from this inauspicious death index it’s on. I head toward the Social Security Office and there, wait in line for a mind-numbing hour, only to learn that in order to get a new social security card, I need to prove who I am. Something more legitimate than just my word. I need to provide some sort of official identifying documentation like a driver’s license or a birth certificate that says I’m Jessica Sloane, neither of which I have.
On the advice of an employee at the Social Security Office, I head next to the Cook County Clerk’s Office in the Richard J. Daley Center—the Bureau of Vital Records—in the hopes of tracking my birth certificate down.
When I arrive at the Daley Center, the plaza is teeming with people. I tie Old Faithful up to the bike rack outside, watching as men and women in business suits take wide strides across the plaza. I rush past the Picasso and into the imposing lobby, where I wait in line to pass through security, looking on as others empty their pockets with the speed of a snail. I make it through the X-ray machine and the contents of my bag are searched. When I’m deemed harmless, the guard sends me on my way to the clerk’s office, which is in the lower level of the building.
A surge of people wait before the elevator doors and so I take the stairs alone, heading down where I take my place in a long line, sighing in solidarity with those who also wait, avoiding eye contact, losing patience.
When it’s my turn, an employee beckons, “Next,” with a hand held up in the air so that I see her there, hunched over a computer screen, shoulders sagging. I go to her, telling her what I need.
Suddenly it dawns on me all the information I’m liable to find when the woman locates my birth certificate. Not only the documentation I need to prove I’m Jessica Sloane, but the place where I was born. The exact time I slipped from Mom’s womb. The name of the obstetrician who stood below, waiting to catch me as I fell.
My father’s name.
In just a few short minutes, I’ll know once and for all who he is. Not only will I have proof of my own identity, but of my father’s as well.
I would never have done something as flagrant as seek out my birth certificate from vital records if Mom were still alive. That would have broken her heart, my having access to all these things she never wanted me to have. Searching our home seemed innocent enough, but tracking down my birth certificate feels like a really egregious act were she still here.
But Mom told me to find myself, and that’s what I’m trying to do. To get into college, to make something of myself. To do something that would make Mom proud, all of which I can’t do without a social security card.
“I need to get a copy of my birth certificate,” I say to the employee. My heart quickens as she slides a request form across the counter. She tells me to fill it out. I reach for a pen, completing as much of the form as I can. It isn’t much. I can’t answer the question that pertains to place of birth or anything having to do with my dad—what his name is, where he was born.
It’s only as I pause in my writing that the worker takes pity on me. Her eyes soften ever so slightly and she says, “You don’t have to fill it all in,” while staring uncomfortably at the urn in the crook of my arm, seeing the way the pen in my hand hovers above the words father’s name. “Just as much as you know,” she adds, telling me she can try and look it up with what little I know. I slide the form back to her, half-complete, and she says she’ll just need the payment and to see a photo ID.
A photo ID.
It’s easy to explain why I don’t have a photo ID. Because by this point in most people’s lives, they have a driver’s license, which is something I also don’t have. Because the cancer came the year I turned fifteen, the year I was meant to enroll in my high school’s after-school drivers’ education program. Because after we learned that Mom had an invasive tumor in her left breast, knowing how to drive a car—in a city where we didn’t need or own a car—didn’t take top priority. Because my afternoons were tied up with Mom from then on, riding the bus with her to bajillions of doctor appointments or working to help pay for our home and her care. Because once I knew there was a good chance Mom would die, I wanted to spend every minute I could with her.
And yet I’m loath to tell the worker the bind I’m in because I know how it will sound. And so instead of coming clean, I root around in the pockets of my jeans, extracting the lining. I dive a hand deep into the depths of my bag searching for something I know isn’t there. I pluck thirty dollars out of my wallet—the cost of the birth certificate is only fifteen—and try handing it to the woman. “Keep the change, please,” I say, bemoaning in a low voice how my license was in my bag just this morning. How it must have fallen from my wallet on the way in. How it was there, but now it’s gone.
I press the urn to my chest, hoping the woman’s mercy will prevail and she’ll pocket the extra fifteen bucks and get me what I need. She stares at the money for a minute and then asks whether I have any other form of ID. An insurance card or voter registration, but I shake my head and tell her no. I don’t have either of these things. Mom had health insurance. A rock-bottom plan that helped pay for cancer treatment, though I’m still in the hole more than I care to think about. But Mom never added me to her insurance plan because she said it wasn’t something I needed. I was young and healthy and the rare trip to the clinic could be paid for with cash. Those required school vaccines I got at the Department of Public Health because they were cheap.
“Got any mail with your name on it?” the woman wants to know, but I shrug my shoulders and tell her no. She gives me a look. Disbelief, I think. I’m as much of a skeptic as the next guy; I know how this sounds.
“Please, ma’am,” I beg. I’m tired and I don’t know what else to do. My eyes feel heavy, threatening to close. There’s the greatest desire to lie down on the floor and sleep. Except that it’s only a tease, my body playing tricks on me. Even if I lie outstretched on the linoleum tiles, I still wouldn’t sleep.
“I really need that birth certificate, ma’am,” I say, shuffling in place, and it must be something about the way my voice cracks or the tears that well in my eyes that makes her lean forward and snatch the money from the countertop. She gathers the bills into her hand, counting them one at a time. Her eyes take a quick poll of the room to see if anyone else is watching, listening, before she whispers, “How about this. How about I see if I can find anything first. Then we’ll figure out what to do about the ID.”
I say okay.
She takes the form and begins typing information onto the rows of keys.
My heart pounds inside my chest. My hands sweat. In just a few short minutes, I’ll know who my father is. I start thinking about his name. Whether he’s still alive. And if he is, if he thinks about me the way I think about him.
By now, there are at least twenty people in line behind me. The room isn’t large by any means. It’s stodgy and drab, and everyone is looking at everyone else like they’re a common criminal. Ladies clutch their purses to their sides. A kid in line screams that he has to pee. As he yells, I glance over my shoulder to see this poor kid, maybe four years old, hand pressed to his groin, eyes wide and ready to burst, his mother reading him the riot act for nature’s call.
“There were no records found,” the woman says to me then. Not at all the words I expected to hear. My face falls flat; my mouth parts. For a second I’m confused, unable to produce coherent thoughts or words.
I fight to find my voice, asking, “Are you sure you spelled it correctly?” imagining her hunting and pecking for the letters, clipping the corner edge of some surplus letter by mistake, misspelling my name.
But her face remains motionless. She doesn’t attempt another search, as I’d hoped she’d do. She doesn’t glance down at the computer or check her work.
“I’m sure,” she says, raising a hand into the air to beckon for the next customer.
“But wait,” I say, stopping her. Not willing to give up just yet.
“There were no records found, miss,” she tells me again, and I ask, feeling incredulous, “What does that mean then, no records found?” because what I’m suddenly realizing is that, instead of being dead, the crux of the matter is that there is no birth record on file for me.
I can’t be dead because I haven’t yet been born.
The Bureau of Vital Records doesn’t even know I exist.
“Of course you must have found something,” I argue, not waiting for a reply. My voice elevates. “How can there be no birth certificate for me when clearly I’m alive?”
And then I pinch a fold of skin on my arm, watching as it swells and turns red before shriveling back down to size. I do it so that she and I can both see I’m alive.
“Ma’am,” she says, and there’s a shift in posture, her empathy quickly giving way to aggravation. I’ve become a pest. “You left half this form blank,” she says.
I argue that she told me I could. That she was the one who said I didn’t have to fill it all out. She ignores me, continues to speak. “Who’s to say you were even born in Illinois? Were you born in Illinois?” she asks, challenging me, calling my bluff, and I realize that I don’t know. I don’t know where I was born. All my life, I only assumed. Because Mom never told me otherwise and I never thought to ask.
“No records found means that I couldn’t locate a birth certificate based on the information you gave me. You want to find your birth certificate, you need to fill in the rest of these blanks,” she tells me, slipping the request form back to me as I stare down helplessly at all the missing information, name of father, place of birth, wondering if what I filled in was even correct to begin with.
Was Mom always a Sloane like me? That I’d also assumed. But if she was married when I was born, then maybe she had a different last name, one she ditched at some point over the last twenty years for some reason I don’t know?
“And next time,” the employee tacks on as I back dismally away, losing hope, running blindly into another woman in line, “be sure and bring your ID.”
I make my way out the door, climbing back up to the first floor two steps at a time. The building’s stairwell is industrial and dark, a flash of gray that comes at me quickly. It spirals upward in circles for thirty floors or more. When I arrive on the first floor, slipping through the stairwell door, crowds flood the lobby of the Daley Center. I’m grateful for this, for the anonymity of it all. I camouflage myself among the wayward teens who’ve been summoned here for court, those with purple-dyed hair and heads hidden beneath sweatshirt hoods. I make my way back outside, nowhere closer to finding my father or proving my identity.
As far as the world is concerned, I’m still dead.
eden (#u298352a8-6366-5809-abab-2dbb2eb6f5bc)
September 14, 1996 Egg Harbor
The town was mobbed with people today as it always is on Saturdays, vacationers trying hard to take advantage of the last few warm days before fall arrives. It’s September now, days shy of the equinox, and as September eventually bleeds into October, the seas of people will finally leave. They come for the hundreds of miles of shorelines, the extensive gift shops, the food. But by December, this far north into Wisconsin, the temperatures will hurtle to twenty or thirty degrees, mounds of snow will obstruct the streets, and the skies will be endlessly gray. And then no one will want to be here, least of all me. Aaron and I will spend the Midwest winter as we always do, imagining the warm places in the world we hope to one day go, places where cold and snow don’t exist. St. Lucia, Fiji, Belize.
Places we will never go.
I spent the day while Aaron was at work wandering the town’s streets, simulating a tourist. I visited gift shops; I bought a T-shirt and ice cream, a book on sailing. I rode the Washington Island Ferry through Death’s Door, spending the late-afternoon hours exploring the crystal clear waters and the polished white stones of Schoolhouse Beach, trying to skip rocks out over the lake, and like getting pregnant, failing at that too.
Back in town I watched families wander from store to store, mothers with buggies, fathers with toddlers perched on their backs. I stared at them as afternoon blended into evening, seated on a bench at Beach View Park, watching as families laid out blankets, staking their claim to a patch of land for the night’s sunset display.
The children were everywhere, and I started to wonder why something in so much abundance could ever be hard to achieve.
October 8, 1996Egg Harbor
Each time Miranda and her boys stop by, she has a new suggestion for me, some tip on how to hasten conception. No subject is too personal or too taboo to discuss, from the style of Aaron’s underwear to various positions that supposedly aid in fertilization as she lounges on my back patio or living room sofa, weather depending, and cites for me the reasons she believes Aaron and I are not yet pregnant—though never once did I ask.
As she talks, Jack and Paul loiter before us, performing for me a song they learned, a magic trick, how they can make their eyes go crossed. They stand before me as Miranda spells out the effects of tight underpants on the male genitalia, saying over and over again, “Look at me, Miss Eden. Look what I can do,”while folding their tongues in half, or trying to make them stretch clear to the ends of their noses, and, as Miranda talks louder to counter their escalating tones, it hits me how attention-starved they are, how they would give anything for her to watch them for a minute, to praise their talents. Every day, there is dirt wedged beneath their nails and some sort of food on their cheeks and chins. Their outfits are cobbled together with clothing that doesn’t match and hardly fits.
I clap my hands for Jack and Paul, but Miranda tells them to go away. To go play.
Every day.
As her baby bump swells more and more, I’m pestered by Miranda to hurry up, to get knocked up, so that her baby and my baby can still go to school together as I’ve promised her they would.
If I wait much longer they’ll be in different grades.
That’s what Miranda has told me.
“September is the cutoff, don’t you know?”
According to Miranda’s timeline, I have until September of next year to have a baby. Twelve months, which leaves only three to get pregnant.
“It’s not that we’re not trying,” I’ve tried to explain, and she counters with a flip of the hand and a slapdash “I know, I know,” and then it’s back to the underwear we go. To help with Aaron’s and my fertility issues, she suggested a pillow beneath my hips to help steer sperm in the right direction. “It’s all about gravity,” she says.
At every visit I watch the size of her own baby bump swell, her maternity shirts no longer able to cover its overwhelming girth. I tell myself that her suggestions are only old wives’ tales, not rooted in truth, but how am I to know if that’s true?
But today when she lounged on my sofa, peering at me with that same expression on her face—mouth parted, eyebrows raised—and asked if I was keeping track of my ovulation, I realized how stupid it was of me, how naive.
This was Aaron’s and my first foray into babymaking. I was sure it was something that just happened, that there was no need to time or plan. In the moment, I told her yes, of course I was keeping track of my dates, because I couldn’t bring myself to say otherwise, to admit to her that it never occurred to me to figure out when I was and when I wasn’t ovulating. Aaron and I both come from large families, and the number of grandchildren our parents have been blessed with is in no way in short supply. It seemed a given that after ample time, after many months of waking up in the morning to Aaron’s soft fingers tracing my bare skin, thumbs hooking through the lacy edges of my underpants, gliding them proficiently over my thighs, sooner or later we’d succeed. We’d make a baby as we intended to do.
