In the Flesh Read online

  “Here it is,” I told Howard, and I gave myself up.

  3

  Being born is something

  like showing up without

  cash in a small town.

  Try pretending vagrancy

  is only innocence.

  Learn the local lingo

  in a crash course,

  and make one good friend.

  PAULETTE F., January 5, 1958

  I PLANNED TO GO on a diet right after the baby was born. In the meantime I was growing, becoming bigger than life. I might have been a stand-in for the Russian Women’s Decathlon champ—a thing of beauty and power.

  Howard assured me that he loved me this way, statuesque, he called it, a word borrowed from false novels. He claimed that I was the first woman he could really sleep with, in the literal sense of the word. Renee, his first wife, had been scrawny and pale, poor thing. The knobs of her hips and elbows had poked him abruptly from dreams, reminding him of the skeletal frame underneath.

  “Everyone is big nowadays,” my mother said, her hands and feet like tiny blunt instruments.

  “Ah, beautiful,” Howard murmured, in the sleepy voice of sex, as he burrowed in.

  But I’m nobody’s fool. On Sundays I saw him look through the magazine section of The Times and pause with wistful concentration at those slender models in the brassiere ads. There is desire beyond mere lust in that, I thought. He might have looked at girls in centerfolds instead, at the opulent ones, who were there to inspire a different and simpler kind of longing.

  If, in his secret heart, he wanted me to be slim and trim, I would be. The women’s magazines were full of easy formulas I could follow: the thinking woman’s diet, the drinking woman’s diet, the shrinking woman’s diet. It would be a cinch.

  But there had always been more to me than meets the eye, more than can be seen on the wide screen. More than those breasts weighting their hammock or the frizzy-haired head ducking in doorways. Underneath there was a domestic heart with the modest beat of a ladies’ wristwatch. And inside my bulk, the future me stepped daintily, waiting for release.

  The baby grew too, floated in its confinement, pulsed and sounded its limits.

  And Howard was madly in love with it. It was a romance he had never experienced before. He had been married once and of course he had always had women. They would have followed him from Hamelin without even a note. They still sought him out. I watched, narrow-eyed, as new ones came up, threatened and disappeared. Howard was inviolate, he was a family man now. When he embraced me, he said, “I feel as if I’m embracing the world.”

  Confident, a veritable monument to his new life, I stretched and sighed in his arms. “I’m going to diet when this is all over. Become très chic.”

  “No,” he protested. “Don’t.”

  I did a little pirouette. “This stuff is going to fall off like snakeskins.”

  “Don’t lose my favorite parts,” Howard warned.

  We went to visit other couples who nested in their apartments. Judy and Lenny Miller had a little girl named Roberta. Her toys were always in evidence; a vaporizer was her constant bedside companion.

  Howard and I tiptoed in to admire her. When she was awake she was a fresh kid, the kind who screams whenever she speaks, and who answers civil, friendly questions with “No, silly,” or “No, stupid,” a miserable kid who makes nose-picking a public pleasure.

  But now the steam curled her hair into heartbreaking tendrils. The hiss of the vaporizer and the sweet rush of breath. We whispered in this shrine, made reverent by the miracle.

  When we tiptoed back to the living room, I thought: Howard doesn’t even feel trapped. He actually wants a baby, wants this whole homely scene for his own. And I hadn’t really trapped him anyway, had I? Isn’t the sperm the true aggressor, those little Weissmullers breaststroking to their destiny? Or is it the egg after all, waiting in ambush, ready to grab the first innocent stray? “Who really did this?” I once asked Howard. But he thought it was a theological poser. “God, I suppose, if you believe in Him,” he said. “Or else the life-force of nature.”

  We sat in the Millers’ living room among the debris and leavings of playtime. Howard rested a proprietary hand on my belly. All conversation came back to the inevitable subject.

  “My doctor said he never saw anything like it,” Judy said. “He had real tears in his eyes when he held Roberta up.”

  It might have been sweat, I thought. Judy tended to idealize things.

  She was talking about the natural childbirth course they had taken, where she had learned to breathe the right way during labor, so that she was able to be an active member of the delivery team.

  Lenny had been there too. Now he picked up a baby shoe and allowed us to observe the wonder of its size in the width of his palm. “It was a beautiful experience,” he said. “Most of the time we’re working against nature in the births of our children. It’s hypocrisy to keep the father outside, a stranger at the gates, so to speak.”

  What a metaphor! Lenny, who was a teacher in the city school system, was a pushover for any innovation in education. I imagined him whispering tips to his unborn daughter on the phonic method of reading.

  Now he advised Howard not to be that notorious slacker, the biological father who drops his seed and runs. Lenny had been right there, rubbing Judy’s back, speaking encouragement, talking and stroking his child into the world. I could sense Howard’s excitement.

  Then Judy brought out the photographs. We had seen them before, of course, but it seemed particularly appropriate to see them once again. Lenny was careful to hand them to us in proper chronological sequence. Judy, huge, horizontal on the delivery table. Himself, the masked robber of innocence, smiling at her with his eyes. The doctor, glistening with sweat/tears, his hand upward and lost to view. Oh, God, what was I doing? The evidence was all there. Judy, grimacing, clenching, contracting, her every expression reflected in the other faces.

  “See,” Lenny pointed out. “I was in labor, too.” Then, “Here she comes!” handing us the one with the emerging head, a small, bloodied, determined ball. Judy’s own head was lifted in an effort to watch, and she was smiling.

  Then, triumph! The whole family united at last on this shore. Mortal, tender, exquisite.

  They were winning photos, there was no denying that. Howard was speechless with emotion.

  “I thought I was dying, that’s all,” my mother said. “You were ripping me to shreds.”

  My father left the room.

  “He can’t stand to hear about it,” my mother whispered. “They feel guilty, you know.”

  “Howard and I are taking a course,” I said.

  “A course! What are they going to teach you—how to scream? You were feet first,” she said accusingly.

  But I wasn’t put off by her. She had lied about everything else most of my life. “God helps those who help themselves,” she used to say. And, “All cats are gray in the dark.” That, about lovemaking!

  Howard and I went to school where I learned to breathe. We saw films on the development of the embryo and the benefits of nursing. I could picture that small silvery fish already endowed with my genes and Howard’s, already bound to us by far more than the nourishing cord. I continued to grow, stretching my skin to translucency, to a new iridescent glow. Howard fed me tidbits from his plate to support my image and keep up my strength, and I took a vitamin supplement that came in little pink and blue capsules.

  I learned to pant, little doglike huffs and puffs for the last stages of labor. I practiced smiling into the bathroom mirror while I panted, in imitation of Judy’s Madonna smile of the last photograph. She had looked radiant, more beautiful even than in her wedding pictures.

  We had decided against delivery photographs for ourselves. Everything would be recorded perfectly in the darkroom of the heart.

  Howard and I cherished our new vocabulary. Term. I was carrying to full term. Dilation. Presentation. Lactation. Gorgeous words from a sup
erior language.

  Our lovemaking took on the excitement of imposed restraint. “Are you all right?” Howard would ask. What a paradox!—to be so powerful and fragile at once.

  We played with names for the baby, from the biblical to the historical to the mythical. Nothing seemed good enough or suitably original.

  We waited. I went for monthly checkups. Other pregnant women in the doctor’s waiting room and I smiled knowingly at one another. We found ourselves united in a vast and ancient sorority without the rituals of pledging. Reducing us to girlish dependence, Dr. Marvin Kramer called us by our first names. We called him Dr. Kramer.

  Opening my legs on the examining table while his cheerless nurse laid a sheet across my knees for the sake of discretion, I could just make out the blond crown of his head, halo-lit by his miner’s lamp. But I could hear his voice as it tunneled through me. “You’re coming along fine, Paulette. Good girl, good girl.”

  “Well, if you can’t be good, be careful.” That wasn’t one of my mother’s chestnuts, though it could have been. But I had been carried away, lost forever to common sense and practical advice. In the back seat of a car, so many destinies irrevocably set. It was astonishing.

  “I can hardly move anymore,” I complained to Howard one day. He crawled to a corner of the bed and folded himself to give me the most possible room.

  The gestation of an elephant is almost two years. Mindless hamsters pop out in sixteen days.

  “It will be over soon, love,” Howard said, and he reached across the bed and touched my hair.

  Then what? I wondered. Was that when my magic would lose its potency?

  “Do the breathing,” Howard suggested.

  “Take gas when the time comes,” my mother said. “I wouldn’t lead you astray.”

  Judy and Lenny came to visit with Roberta, who whined and tap-danced on our coffee table.

  “I’m going on five hundred calories a day,” I said, “as soon as I drop this load.”

  “Try to sound more maternal,” Howard whispered.

  “Short skirts are coming back,” I said in a threatening voice. “And those skimpy little blouses.”

  “Oh, just breathe,” he begged.

  “I’m sick of breathing,” I said.

  Labor began in the afternoon. It was a dispirited Sunday and we were listening to a melancholy Ethical Culture sermon on the radio.

  The elevator stopped five times for other passengers on our way down to the lobby of our building. Neighbors smiled at us and looked away, pretending they didn’t know where we were going with my swollen belly and little overnight case. Inside their pockets they counted on their fingers and were satisfied.

  When we came to the hospital, Howard immediately notified the admitting secretary that he was a Participating Father, and that he was going up with me.

  She laughed out loud and continued to type information on the insurance forms.

  “It’s not too bad, so far,” I told Howard, wondering why my mother had to dramatize everything.

  “I’ll be with you,” Howard promised.

  They made him wait downstairs, despite his protests. “We won’t be needing you for a while,” the secretary told him, and she winked at me.

  “Good-bye,” I said at the elevator. I wished we had decided in favor of pictures, after all. I would have started right there with a record of his poor face as the elevator doors slid shut and the nurse and I went up.

  “Primapara!” she shouted to someone I couldn’t see, as soon as we left the elevator.

  Well, that sounds nice, I thought. Like prima donna or prima ballerina. We went swiftly down a corridor past little rooms. Other women looked out at me.

  What’s all this? I wondered, everything unlearned in that first bolt of fear.

  I had my own room. A Room of One’s Own, I thought. But this certainly wasn’t what Woolf had meant. The minute this was over, the first chance I could get to concentrate, I would start writing again. It was only a biological pause; just so much psychic energy to go around, one thing at a time. I climbed into the high bed like a tired and obedient child.

  The new doctors who came to examine me all seemed so short. And they smiled as they dug in and announced their findings. “Two fingers. Three fingers.”

  Why didn’t they use some secret medical jargon for what they were doing? It sounded suspiciously like a juvenile sex game to me, as if they were only playing doctor.

  It was such a quiet place. There was none of my mother’s famous screaming. Things must have changed, I decided, since her day.

  After a while I was shaved, for collaborating with the enemy, I supposed. More silence. Then a shriek! I sat up, alerted, but it was only some horseplay among the nurses. “What’s going on?” I asked someone who came in and went out again without answering. “Hello?”

  It was lonely. Where was Howard anyway?

  And then he was there. When had he grown that shadowed jowl? And why were his eyes so dark with sympathy?

  “It’s nothing,” I said severely. “Stop looking like that.” Lenny had seemed magnificent. Howard only looked mournful and terrified. So this was where his life had led him.

  Things didn’t get better. Howard rubbed my back and jerked me from the haven of short dozes with his murmurs, his restlessness. There were noises now from other rooms as well. Voices rose in wails of protest.

  But I had my own troubles. The contractions were coming so damn fast. I was thirsty, but water wasn’t permitted—only the rough swipe of the washcloth across my tongue. I caught it with my teeth and tried to suck on it, cheating.

  There was no discreet examination sheet in this place. Strangers peered at me in full view. They measured, probed and went away. A nurse pushed a hypodermic into my thigh when I wasn’t looking.

  “Hey, what’s that?” I demanded. “I’m not supposed to have anything. This is a natural case, you know.”

  “Dr. Kramer is on his way,” she said, evading the issue.

  “Taking his own sweet time,” I snarled.

  Howard seemed shocked by my rudeness and the abrupt shift of mood.

  “This is getting bad,” I told him, but it wasn’t what he wanted to hear. In the distance a Greek chorus warned—too late, too late.

  They wheeled me dizzyingly fast to the delivery room. Howard ran alongside like a winded trainer trying to keep up with his fighter. “Almost there,” he said, breathless.

  How would he know? It was miles and miles.

  Despite everything, they strapped me down. “This is barbaric!” I shouted. “Women in primitive places squat in the fields!”

  “Oh God, that bullshit again,” a black nurse said.

  “You trapped me into this,” I told Howard. “I’ll never forgive you. Never!”

  He was wearing a green surgical mask and now he stood as poised and eager as an outfielder waiting for the long ball.

  “Imposter!” I cried.

  “Paulette!” Dr. Kramer called. “How is my big girl?”

  “Just tell me what to do,” Howard said.

  “Why don’t you hold her? There. Lift her a little and support her sternum.”

  Sternum, sternum, what were they talking about?

  I yowled and Howard said, “My love, I’m here!” His eyes were brilliant with tears.

  The whole room shuddered with pain. And I was the center of it, the spotlit star of the universe. Who was trying to be born here anyway—Moby Dick?

  Oh, all the good, wise things I had done in my life. I might have done anything and still come to this. In school the teacher rolled down the charts on nutrition. We saw the protein groups, the grain groups. Green leafy vegetables. Lack of vitamin C leads to scurvy.

  Liars! The charts ought to show this, the extraordinary violence of birth, worse than mob violence, worse than murder, FUCKING LEADS TO THIS! those charts ought to say.

  “A few more pushes and you’ll have your baby,” Dr. Kramer said.

  Ah, who wanted a baby? For once i
n her whole rotten life, my mother was right. “Dr. Kramer! Marvin! Give me gas!” I cried, using his first name for equal footing.

  But instead he caught the baby who had shouldered through in the excitement.

  And I had forgotten to smile, had greeted my child with the face of a madwoman.

  Somewhere else in the room, a nurse pressed Howard’s head down between his knees.

  “No pictures. No pictures,” I said.

  4

  Stop me if you’ve

  heard this one.

  It’s about R. and

  his wife, B.

  locked in love or

  a murderous hold.

  Or maybe it was

  someone else I

  used to know at

  another time.

  The main thing is

  the way it’s told.

  April 27, 1958

  WE WENT TO THE supermarket together on Saturday to gather our weekly needs. Howard pushed the shopping cart with the baby asleep in the blanket-lined seat, and I walked alongside, pulling boxes and cans from the shelves. Anyone who saw us like this, strolling under the canopy of signs, SPECIAL!, FAMILY PAK!, SAVE!; under that photograph of a couple toasting one another with glasses of milk, must have thought we were an ordinary family. But was there such a thing? It seemed so extraordinary to be us, Howard and Paulette, transformed miraculously into these new people: husband, wife, father, mother, titles for greeting cards and tombstones.

  What was Howard thinking as we rolled past the, pyramids of fruit, the obvious seductions of the appetizer counter? Men have always been consoled on their loss of freedom. Howard had been given a bachelor party by his friends to ease the transition, a drunken affair with a great deal of sexual innuendo and half-joking-warnings about the imminent end of his liberty.

  I was given a bridal shower instead, a celebration of this next inevitable step in my career as a woman. I was encouraged by pot holders and nightgowns, the paradoxical equipment of wifehood.