None of this was as I’d planned. I had planned to be one of those pregnant women in baggy overalls with sinewy arms. Movie star pregnant. The fact that I was not movie star anything in ordinary life had no effect on my movie star pregnancy plans: I would bound around Manhattan doing yoga with my tidy fetus tucked into a discreet ball, eating organic. The father of my unborn child would beam as he rubbed coconut lotion on my belly.
Instead, I’d spent my final two trimesters alone, unless you counted Lulu (which I did). She had been a loyal stand-in for human companionship; another body in the bed when I needed one most. A body without demands, complications, or agenda. Lulu the Wonder Dog I called her. She, the fetus, and I spent each night as three creatures in a tight curl of sleep. But Lulu, for all her charms, was never going to rub coconut lotion on any part of me. That was a job for a man who, at the moment I entered labor, was almost certainly barricaded in his Upper West Side cubbyhole. I imagined him with his hands clamped over his ears, chanting banana, banana, banana as we had in third grade, to drown out the sound of anything we didn’t want to hear.
I lay in bed, in the dark, with a bright band of tension around my midsection, ambivalating. I hadn’t spoken to Brian in three months, maybe four. I could sense the phone on the nightstand, alive. Shouldn’t I hear his voice before undertaking an event that would link us, backward and forward, through all time?
He didn’t deserve to know, but I wanted him to know. And what about the baby, didn’t she deserve to have her father know? I dialed from memory. He didn’t sound surprised to hear my voice. “I’m in labor,” I said, then went mute. There was nothing more to say, nothing more important or clarifying I could add. Brian went silent as well. This was at least one definition of misery. Silence on the phone.
“I think I better get off,” I said.
“OK.” Long, long pause. “I love you.”
I think he said this. Memory is fluid and shape-shifts to our desires. But still, I think he said this.
I remember trying to suppress the hope that he might knock on the door.
When I tried to get up, Lulu pressed a paw on my chest and came in close for a nuzzle. I expected something more Lassie-like, a heroic leap through the skylight into my mom’s house to rouse the masses. But she was more committed to preserving the status quo than saving the day. I heaved her off me and made my way next door.
Evan, the older of my two teenage brothers from my mom’s second marriage, was up watching Law and Order reruns. He is sixteen years younger than I am, and we have a half-sibling, half-parental relationship. I asked him to go upstairs and wake our mom. “Go wake her yourself,” he said, with the dismissive air of a nobleman waving away a peon.
“I’m in labor, Evan,” I said.
For once, he had no ironic reply. At last, something to trump adolescent insolence: labor! He stood up, clicked off the TV, and shot upstairs.
My mom took one look at me and said, “Let’s call the doctor,” as though it would be fun, like ordering Thai food.
The doctor was unmoved to hear my contractions were seven, sometimes five minutes apart and very regular. “Don’t rush,” she said. “This is a first baby. You’re in for a long haul.” So we lingered. When we called again around midday, she said, “Stay on your side of the bay until seven tonight; otherwise you’ll hit traffic on the bridge.”
I was panting and grim faced. When I relayed the message, my mom, whose strong suit has never been obeying authority figures, said, “She obviously doesn’t know what the hell she’s talking about. We’re leaving.”
My mom and Cassie (who’d arrived, as usual, at the precise moment she was needed most) half-dragged, half-carried me out the door. “I can do it,” I said. “Let go.” It hurt to be touched, to move. It also hurt to hold still. As soon as they let go, I sank down on all fours. Four-point locomotion, there was no other way I would reach the car. My mom and Cassie dropped down on either side of me. We were doing this ridiculous dance as a team, three abreast. “Sweetie,” my mom whisper-shouted, “a little faster!” Her voice had the urgency of a woman determined not to deliver her first grandchild in the driveway.
Between the studio doorway and the car lay a little Japanese path of pebbles and paving stones, which I’d always thought of as a tranquil transitional space. So wrong. When you are crawling on your hands and knees, nine months pregnant and perhaps fully dilated, pebbles is a cruel euphemism for gravel. “Someday you will laugh about this!” my mom said. “Maybe even tomorrow,” Cassie added. “Fuck off,” I said, to neither, or both.
I tried to remind myself of Mary in search of a manger or, worse, her wretched, weak-kneed mule. I felt for the mule! The mule had it hard. All I had to do was make it to the Volvo. And then to the nearest hospital, Marin General, which was legally bound to take us in.
“You can do this,” my mom enthused. “We’re almost there.” A benevolent lie. The car was as far as Fairbanks, Mongolia, the moon. I’d still be crawling toward it when the baby applied to college.
When we arrived at the hospital, we were greeted at the ER doors with a wheelchair. I grunted and made faces and waved my arms about, and somehow the staff understood that I needed a gurney, not a chair. The gurney guy, whose name turned out to be succinctly, perfectly, Ted, wheeled me into an elevator and pushed the button for the maternity floor.
In the elevator I regained speech. “Ted, hello! Ted, listen! Ted! I have to PUSH.”
“Don’t push,” Ted said. “Please don’t push.”
I was amazed at his confidence in me. He thought pushing was an elective activity.
To Ted’s and my astonishment, I didn’t deliver in the elevator. On the maternity floor, a small fleet of nurses and one midwife gathered around the spectacle: an off-the-street admission dilated to ten centimeters, fully effaced. The midwife had long silver braids; she stood ready at the end of the gurney, saying a few things I didn’t catch. My mom took my hand, and said, “She says you are tearing; try not to push.” Cassie held one foot with steady pressure. Every electron, every proton, not only of my body but of the gurney, the room, the hallway, the elevator shaft, indeed every electron and proton in Marin County with its show-offy hills, its serrated coastline sliding under the Golden Gate, the clouds above Marin, its undersea ledge—all of it shouted: PUSH.
My mom leaned in, “She’s going to cut you, so you won’t tear.”
“Just do it!” I panted or screamed or maybe only said in my head. I saw a glint, a flicker of metal pass between my knees, and then a person shot into the room. Time of birth, 6:54 p.m.