Because I Said So (49 page)

Even as I studied the book of Fayum portraits last spring, as I explained to my patient family and friends how and why they were painted—feeling a little more animated, a little less ground away by grief—I didn’t know how to articulate what
I
saw. How was it that Demos, confronting the end of her life, was luring me away from my own despair? It was my husband who suggested I go to Egypt to see her. I had a long-standing business commitment in London in June; I could extend my trip by a few days. It would be good for me, he said, speaking to me in the low, calming tones one would use on a frightened animal or a child. I didn’t know whether it was crazy for me to go, or not to. Within a week I’d bought my plane tickets.

Like Niobe, All Tears

In the classical Greek myth, Niobe was a Theban queen who offended the gods by her maternal hubris. Blessed with seven graceful daughters and seven strong sons, she dared to boast: how could any mother be as lucky as she? Even the worshipped goddess Leto had only two children. Furious at the slight, Leto called to her twins to exact revenge. The deadly archer, Apollo, and the divine huntress, Diana, took aim at Niobe’s children and shot them all dead. Niobe’s grief was so great that she turned to stone.

Only her tears continued, unstoppable. “Like Niobe, all tears,”

wrote Shakespeare in
Hamlet.

Through the fall of 2003
I relished in selfish privacy what I knew would be my last pregnancy. I was greedy for this long-awaited baby—my payback, I felt, for triumphing, however slowly,
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over marital ambivalence. My second marriage had been like a good wine opened too soon: The first seven years were tannic, but not undrinkable. It needed to breathe. After allowing my marriage to decant, putting a third child on hold as it matured, a decade after our wedding my relationship with my husband had finally become delicious. Our other two children—our seven-year-old daughter and my fifteen-year-old son from my first marriage—were sheer delight.

A third! We couldn’t believe our luck, late though it had arrived. We joked that we would tell people we’d planned our family with this age gap in mind: Where other parents might think two or three years is the perfect span between kids, we’d settled on eight.

My husband and I decided to wait until “everything was okay,” after the amniocentesis, to break the news about this baby.

It never occurred to me that anything might
actually
go wrong—I was only forty-one; some of my friends had had their first babies at thirty-nine, forty, even forty-three. Still, we opted for the magical landmark of that assessment as a knee-jerk caution against vague catastrophes we never even thought to discuss. Meanwhile, alone with my body through school days and after bedtime, I lived inwardly, just feeling my pregnancy and its cavalcade of coursing hormones. I gloated. I stared down at my expanding body and marveled at its power. I fell asleep at my desk and walked the dog in a self-satisfied daze, free from the necessity to hide how tired, fat, nauseated, and biologically distracted I was, a ruse I reinstituted while driving kids to school dressed in unre-markable overalls or ransacking my closet to find some sort of reasonable getup to disguise the obvious fact of my unannounced pregnancy at the family Thanksgiving gathering.

In fact, I loved keeping my baby to myself. I was so much older, my life so much more evolved, than when I’d first become a mother at twenty-six, or again at thirty-four. This was my chance, at last, to be fully present in my life and in my female body. This would be the pregnancy unmarred by a shaky marriage or by my apprentice status as a mother and a woman. This time I even had a house, a washer and dryer, a tiny space to work at home; I wouldn’t have to catch glimpses of my newborn’s babyhood as I
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rushed off somewhere else. I was good at this now. Not merely wine but champagne, this eleventh-hour pregnancy. I savored the tender ache, the percolating sensation of my baby growing cell by cell—like bubbles rising in a champagne glass.

The routine sonogram
I had in December in preparation for genetic testing showed that something was wrong with my baby.

It took three more sleepless weeks to get a diagnosis. For weeks after my baby died, my emotions were so paralyzed I could hardly feel them. Kept a secret for its entire duration, my pregnancy and all its attendant fantasies felt like a ghost event, something I had heard rumor of. I mimicked an adequate, if vague, version of myself. I brushed hair. I fed animals. I drove to basketball practice. I nagged people about homework.

But when I heard the news of my friend D.’s cancer, I started crying and I couldn’t stop. Literally, perpetually. Walking the dog at the beach on the moodiest of gray February days, tissues crum-pled in my fist. In the pickup line at schools, leaking tears through March, through April. Like Niobe, all tears. Broken down, help-less, wiping my face on the back of my sleeve.

Whatever restraint I had that winter and spring I put toward keeping my composure in front of my children. My daughter was deep in a maternal phase of her own. For months Celeste had been talking wistfully about wanting to be a big sister, not just a little sister, and she’d written to Santa for a particular cuddly cloth baby doll with a cap of mohair curls. On Christmas morning she found “Lora” wrapped in a blanket under the tree.

Celeste and I sat on the rug in our nightgowns undressing Lora to her dimpled bottom and trying out all the tiny outfits in her flannel layette. As I cradled the doll in my lap while Celeste dressed her, I slanted my mind away, refusing the creeping awareness that I was doing something more than acting a part in my daughter’s game.

Celeste had also asked for a set of twin toddler dolls for her birthday. Along with Lora, “Brian” and “Claire” became my
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responsibility during school days. It was my job to get them up from their naps, move them around the house, and help them pass the time until Celeste got home to take over. I didn’t go so far as to actually play with them while she was gone, but I felt a renewed stab of inadequacy if I saw them slumped on their faces on Celeste’s bed. “I’m so glad you love Lora and Brian and Claire as much as I do, Mommy,” Celeste once said as we drove home from school on an afternoon scented with new grass and blossoming trees, her dolls strapped into a single seat belt as she’d instructed, my shattered face, by then, hidden behind sunglasses.

“You’re really good at this mommy stuff,” my daughter continued, the echo of my earlier arrogance ringing hollow.

I could no more tell my son what had happened to me than I could tell his sister. Even while I was still pregnant I hadn’t looked forward to breaking that particular category of news to a teenager who’d just started dating. Zachary had been seeing another high school freshman, a sweet girl with braces on her teeth. Over the holiday break we’d forced a fascinated Celeste ahead of the rest of the family on a beach walk so Zachary and his girlfriend could enjoy a modicum of privacy. They strolled barefoot far behind us, their fingers knitting and separating as their awareness of the rest of us ebbed and flowed. One night I drove to pick them up after a movie. When I reached the fast food place where we’d agreed to meet, I spotted them through the restaurant’s plate glass window, heads tenderly inclined toward each other as they whispered and kissed. I could see them, but they couldn’t see me. I made a noisy racket as I entered, slamming the door of the newspaper kiosk, standing with my back to them as I pretended to read the paper, giving them time to register my presence. A few days before Valentine’s Day, Zachary told me his girlfriend had broken up with him. He shook his head, repeating over and over her inexplicable reason, and for weeks I listened and offered what advice I could as he sorted through his pain and frustration. My son didn’t need to know my problems. He had a heartbreak of his own.

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Searching for Demos

The Egyptian Museum was just a short, straight walk down a single street from my hotel in Cairo’s haphazard, confusing downtown. What I didn’t account for, that first morning, was the endless stream of randomly honking vehicles passing Midan Tahrir, the city’s central intersection, a traffic circle around which six or eight or eleven lanes of cars weave tootling past. I could see the pink edifice of the turn-of-the-century museum rising in neoclassical grandiosity on the other side, beyond a police barricade I would also have to cross. For half an hour I stood at the curb waiting for a window of opportunity, the ferocious sun’s hundred-degree heat baking my skull, watching blasé Egyptians walk out in front of careening trucks, then finally I made it myself, running and hesitating by turns, across the street.

Despite its high security, the Egyptian Museum is legendary for the stupefying immensity of its disorganized collection, the almost total lack of curatorial information for visitors, and the poor conservation inside the building. In contrast to the super-heated glare outside—light that had the quality of stripping one back to defenselessness—the light inside felt grainy, filtered through centuries of grit. There were no maps or museum guides or membership propaganda evident in the museum’s lobby, but I knew my destination: a gallery on the second floor.

I walked briskly through a gallery of colossal sarcophagi and up the stairs past the royal mummy rooms, into a long hall displaying the seemingly innumerable, priceless treasures of Tutankhamun, all gold. Near the very end of the hall, in a gallery built around a balcony open to the room below, I thought I saw her. At first glance it could have been Demos: in a mauve tunic, three-tiered pearl earrings, three necklaces of gold and emerald.

But this woman’s face had an expression of poised elegance, as if she were aware of the opulently bejeweled mummy case to which her portrait was still attached. I scanned the room and saw a glass case on the next wall in which three shelves of detached portraits were propped up against a linen backdrop. Looking carefully at
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each portrait, I saw that there were empty spots in the case where at least two paintings might have been—a noticeable layer of disturbed dust on the glass shelf indicated that objects had been removed—and that Demos and her baby were not there.

There was a sonogram,
and another the next week, and another the next, my baby fading more each time. After they told me that my “fetal tissue was not viable,” while I was resisting whatever terrible thing they wanted to do to my baby and me next, I began to contract and bleed at home. It hadn’t seemed so dramatic, the bleeding; I held it, bulky and hot and contained, in my cupped hand, before it sank heavily through the water and I flushed it down. At the next sonogram, there was simply nothing there. My baby had slipped out of me, and I hadn’t known. What mother would not have been ashamed?

I had lost my baby like a set of car keys. Lighter than car keys, actually—two inches long and the weight of fifty paper clips, or so I read on the fetal development e-list I’d signed up for and that, after my miscarriage, I could not manage to get myself deleted from. Even at that I was a failure.

At my age, the rate of fetal death from natural causes rises precipitously, I was told by the young obstetrician who couldn’t remember my name from one appointment to the next. At my age, seven years between pregnancies was not a hopeful sign. At my age, first-tier treatment drugs to boost fertility, like Clomid, were unlikely to be helpful, because my eggs were already old.

She counseled me to think “good and hard” about how much money, time, and energy I was willing to put toward getting pregnant again, at my age; after all, she said, consulting my chart, I already had two healthy children.

At my age, I had grown complacent about the femaleness of my body. The shock of monthly blood and developing breasts were long past; so too the mysteries of birth control, the awkwardness of discovering sexual satisfaction, the righteous indignation of the first experiences of blatant mysogyny, all replaced,
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over the course of adulthood, by a sense of relief in the unshake-able reliability of my female body: its rhythms, its sensations, its varied physical, emotional, and intellectual capacities. Being a woman, having a mother’s body, had become the seat of my power in the world. I thought I still had the luxury of assuming that my sexuality had purpose—the erotic a means of procreation and influence, my femaleness something inexhaustible and primi-tive, like the flooding of the ancient Nile.

Yet all of my friends had developed cancers in the cells that made them womanly: in their breasts, in their wombs, in the cushioning flesh that had comforted children in their laps, that had fed or grown their babies. After the counterattack of chemicals and scalpels, the flesh that remained was different, no longer what we think of when we think of a mother’s welcoming, enveloping body. The flesh that survives is scarred, knotted, hardened, tight; the emotions, in some cases, equally embrittled.

When had our bodies so viciously turned on us? I wasn’t a young, fertile Venus of Willendorf with long honey-colored hair, not anymore. When I looked in the mirror I was fat and not pregnant, a tired, dumpy, forty-something mother going gray, who could walk unnoticed down any city street. How I defined myself had changed, slipping away from me unknown, unseen, like my baby, like the cells shifting ominously in the bodies of my friends.

I remember seeing D. before she was diagnosed with cancer, all self-possession and refinement on a university stage, preparing to give a lecture—wearing different colored shoes! One black, one red—an audacious expert, in even the most staid circumstances, at maintaining her feminine originality, her personal flair. I remember a series of black-and-white nude photos taken years before my friend C. saw a strange and minatory bruise on one of her breasts: her body turned toward the window light behind her, her legs twisted together in shadow, her skin as perfect and shapely as the contours of a Noguchi sculpture.