“How could you not know you were pregnant?” Jack demanded.
“I thought I was starting menopause.”
“At thirty-nine?!”
“It happens!” I defended.
“What about the weight of an entire first trimester of pregnancy?!” he asked, as though he was talking to an utter moron.
I started to feel more righteously indignant than apologetic, which is a great feeling to take into an argument. “Look, Jack, I just said I thought I was starting menopause. Women gain a little weight. Our periods stop. It’s not like I’m a twenty-two-year-old fertility goddess, now is it?”
He sighed in surrender because he knew I got him with that one. “You know the doctor said I’d probably never be able to conceive again. You know we never use birth control anymore. I’m just as surprised by this as you are. You’re not the victim here. No one tricked you into anything. You can still have your stinking divorce. You know I’d never do anything to stand in the way of you and your child. I know how you feel about being a dad. Don’t act like I’ve wronged you by getting pregnant, Jack. This didn’t happen to me alone.”
Jack sank into his chair, pursed his lips, and nodded his head. I knew this gesture too well. It meant I was probably right, but he needed a few minutes of quiet to digest it all. I’ve made the mistake before of interrupting Jack’s precious silence by interjecting a thought or two, and was always quickly met with a crossing-guard hand signal to stop. He’d then remind me he needed time to think. This time, I just cleared his plate and waited for him to respond.
“Okay, I assume that given everything, you’re going to keep the baby?” Jack asked. I nodded.
Given everything. Everything. What an amazingly nonspecific blanket statement for what we’d been through over the past few years. When I was thirty-three, I got pregnant for the first time and miscarried in the first trimester. I soon learned why people don’t tell their friends and family until after the three-month mark. It’s incredibly taxing to have to keep answering the same questions to beaming faces who want to know what names we’re considering, when the baby is due, and whether I’m planning to take time off. The next miscarriage happened a year later after fourteen more failed attempts to get pregnant. This one was a bit earlier in the first trimester, so no one knew except Jack and me. That was enough, though. I could already tell he thought the miscarriages were my fault. He would never say such a thing, but blame emanated from him like stink from a garbage dump. It wasn’t as though I drank or smoked, or went bungee jumping while pregnant, but coldly, silently, Jack wondered why I couldn’t do a simple thing like keep a baby growing inside me. All of his friends’ wives did so without much problem. The third miscarriage was also in the first trimester, and this time Jack was so detached, I told just about everyone about it in a desperate need to connect and mourn the way I should have been able to with my husband.
I was one of those people who always thought miscarrying in the first trimester was no big deal because there wasn’t enough time to get attached. What I hadn’t realized was that I’d been attached to the idea of having a baby since I was a child myself. I was in love with the possibility long before I saw the thin pink line. I realized that in the first trimester, pregnancies were more about hopes than babies, but I still missed the baby that would never be born. I missed the hope that died.
The fourth miscarriage was technically an abortion, but I have a hard time thinking of it as one. I have no problem with a woman who decides she’s not ready to become a mother and terminates an unintended pregnancy. It’s just that this was not the case for me. A little over three years ago, I was seven months pregnant with Jackson Jr. We were going to call him JJ
.
His room was dusty blue with Dr. Seuss characters that Jack painted on the walls of our new home in Caldwell. In the corner of JJ’s room was a white glider where I would nurse him, and boxes of stuffed animals, outfits, and toys we’d received at the baby shower a week before the miscarriage. It wasn’t a miscarriage like the others because it wasn’t spontaneous. This one was a thousand times worse than the others because I was so far along, and because I had to schedule it. I wasn’t hit with the piercing pain that prompted Jack to sweep me off to the hospital. The last time, I was in my doctor’s office for a regular prenatal checkup. All thoughts of losing the baby had long since passed, so my heart didn’t even speed the slightest bit when the nurse applied gel to my robust tummy and began scanning it with the sonogram.
When she knit her brows and said, “Hmmm” quizzically, I didn’t give it a second thought. She shot a series of questions at me so intensely, I began to lose that mother to-be calmness I had been settling into so well over the last month. Then, the nurse called the doctor, who made a disturbing series of sounds and began ordering tests with names so long I couldn’t even pronounce them. At the end of the day, the only phrase that stuck with me was “severe fetal anomalies incompatible with life.” Apparently JJ’s heart was forming outside of his body and his lungs were so malformed they could never function outside the womb. The doctor rattled off numerous body parts I’d never heard of, all of which were also not developing properly. The doctor recommended I have a dilation-and-extraction abortion immediately. He recommended a physician in New York who was one of a handful of doctors who could perform the procedure, and within a couple of days I was scheduled for the late-term abortion.
There was no surgery that could be performed in utero. JJ would most likely die in my womb within the next two weeks, they said. There was no chance of a healthy delivery and no surgery that could ever bring JJ back to the healthy baby I assumed he was.
“What if I take my chances and see what happens?” I asked the doctor.
“It would be extremely dangerous, perhaps even fatal for you, Mrs. Klein,” he said.
Three years later, in our kitchen, I told Jack that I desperately wanted to have this baby. He nodded furtively and agreed that it was probably my last chance to have a child.
If the pregnancy even makes it to term,
neither of us said aloud, but could not help thinking.
“That makes sense,” Jack nodded. “I respect that decision.” Funny, the qualities I once found so attractive about Jack were the very ones that now infuriated me. When we first met, his pragmatism was so incredibly sexy. Because I was raised by a family ruled by passion and contradiction, Jack’s measured demeanor was like a rare delicacy for me. I found it intriguing that a man who was in a Master of Fine Arts program for visual arts could be the polar opposite of what I expected an artist to be. He reminded me more of my mother’s boyfriend, a businessman, which is what Jack wound up to be, so I guess I wasn’t too far off.
After the second miscarriage, I asked Jack if he blamed me for losing the babies. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said, half listening as he ate a sandwich. I know what he meant. I did nothing to cause the miscarriages. Of course, they weren’t my fault. Intellectually we could both understand that. But deep down, on a purely emotional level, wasn’t there part of him that was angry with me? “No way,” he dismissed. I thought perhaps he was just trying to spare my feelings by shielding me from the truth. I definitely got the sense that Jack harbored some resentment toward me, but he felt guilty about feeling this way because it was so illogical and patently unfair. So, I thought I would open the door and reveal a deeply vulnerable truth to him.
“I do,” I barely was able to utter.
“You do what?” Jack asked, genuinely concerned by the tone of my voice.
“I am so angry, and so incredibly disappointed, and sometimes I do wonder what’s wrong with me that I can’t make it through a pregnancy. So, I guess what I’m trying to say is that if you have anything you need to talk to me about, I’m listening. I mean, about your feelings about the miscarriages, you can tell me because they’re probably some of the same thoughts that have crossed my mind too. Maybe it’ll help us get through this together. So, Jack, let me just put it out there: sometimes I wonder what’s wrong with me. I wonder if I’m being punished. I wonder if this is God’s way of telling me that I’d be a really shitty mother.”
“That’s silly, Lucy,” Jack said kindly. “Don’t feel that way.”
Don’t feel that way. That was Jack’s advice. I shouldn’t feel that way. But I already did. And the only thing worse than feeling this way was telling him about it, reaching out for some sort of emotional connection, and discovering that I was alone.
Chapter 3
Jack and I were both enrolled in the same MFA program at the University of Michigan when we met. He was a painter, but also did disturbingly insightful charcoal sketches of the grittiest side of street life. I remember one sketch he did of police officers taunting a hooker that just brilliantly captured a moment of cruelty and humiliation. Jack was never a happy-go-lucky kind of guy, least of all in his art. He did a sculpture of Jesus on the cross made entirely of two-inch nails bent and twisted every which way. That won a prize at the Ann Arbor Art Festival the town put on every summer. His art always had a similar theme-death, pain, and isolation. Not exactly the most commercial stuff. I mean, who wants to decorate the family room with Jack’s painting of a nude street urchin held captive in a church basement?
I was in for creative writing, and had planned to write women’s fiction, short stories, and eventually a novel. Jack’s and my first date lasted two days. I don’t think we stopped talking for a single waking moment. The deal clincher for both of us was when we both shared the same fantasy—to start an artist colony where musicians, painters, sculptors, and writers would stay with us anywhere from six months to two years. We would provide food and housing, and artists would be free to focus on their art. People from all over the world would stay with us, creating a rich cultural Mecca. I pictured myself wandering the property in a white gauze dress, popping into studios and watching painters capture onto canvas every wonderfully insane image they conjured up. I’d hear music as it was being composed, watch glass being blown, and run my hands through raw, wet clay that would soon become sculpture. Of course, I imagined my children being beneficiaries of this explosively creative environment as they learned about social studies by living it instead of reading about foreign lands in textbooks. Jack and I planned to home school our three children. He would paint. I would write. Other than the occasional anxiety over our eldest daughter being seduced by the visiting French poet, it seemed like our own personal Valhalla.
We used to spend hours drinking sangria on the upper balcony of Dominic’s, a woodsy-looking pizza place popular among University of Michigan students. When we agreed with each other, we completely agreed. I’d squeal, “I have always thought that!” It was like Jack had flown to Manhattan one weekend and read ten years’ worth of my journal entries. When we disagreed, it was always with great passion. We seemed to be the only two people on the planet who hated the
Breakfast Club
and
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
even more. And yet our favorite meal was breakfast. At every meal, we always agreed on the best two entrees on the menu, so we could always share. Food was as important to Jack as it was to me, so we never wasted a meal on drive-through or bad take-out. Meals were our foreplay. Neither of us needed poetry or slow caressing. The better the food, the more likely we were to sweep our dishes off to the side of the table and make love right there next to a casserole.
That was life in our early twenties. In our late thirties, Jack was no longer painting, but owned a gallery and represented a handful of enormously talented artists. I had spent the last ten years writing incredibly important literary works. Perhaps you’ve heard of my best-known work: Peanut Butter Cheerios; you’ve never tried nut, nut, nuthin’ like ‘em! Or maybe you’ve seen my television work where two gaggles of blond ‘tweens face off at a skateboard park because they each want the last of the Sunny Delight. The script that nearly sank me into a job-related depression was one where an overly amped-up man with a mop of red hair completely lost his mind over how sticky Doubly-Sticky adhesive tape is. He was thrilled because it solved his huge problem of tape insufficiently adhering to surfaces. (Doesn’t that just happen to you all the time?) Thank the good Lord for Doubly-Sticky! No wonder Red was willing to risk head injury running around crashing into walls with excitement. A combination of severe budget cuts and an obvious repulsion for my job put me at the top of the list for layoffs at the advertising agency where I worked. For the last year, I’ve been writing freelance for second-rate magazines and drafting newsletters and annual reports for small businesses.
As I mentioned, we live in Caldwell, New Jersey. Suburbs, that is. Not an arts community where our precocious children wander freely and critique the painters for being overly influenced by Goya and inhibiting the development of their own style. Jack hasn’t painted in years. My novel has yet to be outlined.
We bought this house in the second trimester of my last pregnancy, the one we were sure would last. The suburbs are the last place on earth I ever imagined myself, but Jack insisted that we move from the city to raise our kids. His adamancy was a tad insulting. It was as if he thought being raised in Manhattan was the worst thing you could do to a child. I spent my early years on West Eleventh Street in a brownstone building in Greenwich Village that my mother bought when she divorced my father. The building had four apartments, one in which we lived. She rented the other three.
My mother took the nicest apartment, which was a triplex six-bedroom with a common area that rose through all three stories. My bedroom was on the top floor and I used to love peering from the wooden rail and looking down forty feet into our living room. In the center of the living room was an enormous brick fireplace surrounded by a leather sectional and chairs so comfy they could absorb you. Some walls were brick, while the others were a light wood that continued up the rails and on to the upper floors. On the brick wall, my mother hung a dark-blue neon light outline of the Manhattan skyline. The rest of the space was covered with posters of shows she produced.