A chorus of booing rang out in the kitchen, and Kyle grinned. “That’s truly messed up, dude. I’ve never heard of something so wrong.”
I turned away to hide my smile, because there was nowhere I’d rather spend my pregnancy than here, where I could be referred to as both mommy and dude in the space of a minute.
—
By my seventh month of pregnancy I could not walk. Not because I was so huge, but because after even three blocks of pavement a thick pain settled deep into my left side. My midwife group, the most laissez-faire bunch of birth professionals in the city, dismissed these as harmless Braxton Hicks contractions and alternately told me to take a chill pill, to try to ignore them, or just to walk less. I was already like a frail one-hundred-year-old lady, plotting whether or not I could make it the four blocks from the subway to my intended destination; in New York City it was pretty hard to walk any less.
One day in March I woke up, felt worse than ever, grabbed the phone to call Shea, and told him without preamble, “I’m sorry, I’m done.” I hung up and considered our next move. I was due June 1. When I weighed the prospect of staying in New York and spending the first relatively housebound month with a newborn in our apartment above a grease-belching deli, amid the clattering of the metal scrappers and the coffee klatch of methadone users who assembled every morning to gab around the piss tree, versus having our baby at the hospital back home and cuddling with him on our screened porch in the warm summer breeze, there was no contest. Besides, while I waited around for my baby to be born, I could begin diving into old Midwestern recipes. I could drive down the road to the dairy farm for unpasteurized cream and make naturally soured cottage cheese. I could spend his first few nap-filled newborn weeks making pickles and jam.
Within weeks we’d found a subletter to rent our apartment and Aaron’s studio and started packing. As usual our seasonal haul was significant. It included, in addition to clothes, all of my kitchen equipment, dry goods, all of my home-canned pickles and jams from last year that we hadn’t yet eaten, four boxes of my favorite cookbooks for reference and inspiration, plus the entirety of Aaron’s studio, his many chisels, art books, and three half-finished sculptures. One of them, seven feet tall, filled a third of our ten-foot box trailer.
We set out westward, on superhighway 94, and on the second day decided to make a detour to Bloomington, Indiana, to pay a visit to Aaron’s sister, Sarah, who had just the day before given birth to baby Irene. His parents, Maurice and Carolyn, were already there. We would surprise them all.
Driving through the mountains of West Virginia during an uncharacteristic cold snap, at seven o’clock in the evening, we hit a patch of ice on a bridge. The heavy trailer we were carrying turned into a pendulous weight, swinging our car in three circles, as if it were the ball at the end of a hammer throw. The last thing I remember seeing before closing my eyes were the lights of the big rigs behind us, boring straight at us. Our trailer flopped over in the ditch, stopping our motion and raising our back end, leaving our tires to spin in the air. On the other side of the road was a deep ravine. The accident made the local nightly news, but miraculously, no one was hurt. Our trailer was totaled, but the contents inside were all salvageable, except for my jars of fermented pickles, which had broken and covered everything with garlicky brine. It was April 5, seven years to the day of Aaron’s brother Matt’s death. And though I am generally not one to talk about signs or angels, as I stood in our hotel room that night, I leaned into Aaron and choked out sobs. I think we both felt the full weight of our baby’s determination to be here. The words flew between us: We can’t raise this kid in New York—we can stay while he’s a baby—until he goes to school—but then we have to take him back home, near his grandparents—all of them—I want him to grow up playing in the same lakes, knowing the same Main Street—the same three stoplights.
When we reached Bloomington, we were thankfully distracted by the new baby. The only hint of our near-miss showed up later in the photos, in the unmistakable gray cast to our skin. Aaron, Sarah, and I stood in a small clump in the kitchen and talked about the accident in fervent whispers that Carolyn, Aaron’s mom, wouldn’t overhear. We’d been warned over the phone not to bring it up. Aaron’s mom, who had lost her son almost exactly seven years to the date that Irene was born, wore a huge camera on her chest and a resolute smile of family expansion on her face. The minute she saw us, pale but intact—all three of us—she struck the accident from her memory and has never mentioned it since.
19
STALKING THE BEAST CALLED DINNER
If I hoped on my return to the country to dive deep into rural Midwestern food, then I’ve certainly achieved it. Here I am, three weeks away from my due date, full up to the lungs with my little fateful lump, squatting in our front yard, heaving a forty-pound hog’s head from a bucket into a pot. I am so far up the ass of rural and local that I can’t see the lighted tunnel out.
Vern, our builder, is banging away on our house addition, and I, with the ever-present dull pain in my side now shooting up into my shoulder, am making headcheese. Aaron and his dad, Maurice, are down the hill inside the rock-lined well hole trying to get the water going again, because our sand point has inconveniently decided to stop running. I only hope it hasn’t run dry. With the new addition we’d have real modern plumbing, both hot and cold running water, but I’ve insisted that we hook up the pipes to the same well we’d pounded ourselves a few years earlier. Filtered through about forty feet of pure sand, that water tastes faintly stony. It’s the white Bordeaux of water, and I figure there’s no point in living in the country if we have to dig a regulation deep well and risk tapping into sulfuric, brackish water. How would I cook with that hard, acidic water? My beans would never soften.