Sixteen
It’s an easy pregnancy. I have some morning sickness, the skin stretches and hurts, I can’t sleep much, but at five months there’s a softness emanating from deep inside me. From the ultrasound, the doctor has confirmed what I already knew: we are having a girl. I feel her move in the seas of my body and it makes me breathless. I pull Daniel’s hands onto my skin and we stare into each other’s eyes in wonder. How is this possible? How have we made a new creature, a person who will have her own life? A new person who is both him and me. The immensity of it makes us grin in delight.
*
His parents come to visit and we take them out to dinner. When he tells them, I watch their wide, ecstatic faces. His mother says, “Oh, I thought you weren’t going to. I mean, I didn’t know you were trying!” Then there are the cries of “How lovely. Congratulations. How wonderful.” The clink of champagne flutes for everyone but me. The father looking at the mother, saying, “We are going to be grandparents,” with so much joy.
*
My body stretches, craves strange things. I had always thought they were old wives’ tales, but now I realize that pregnancy cravings are real and insistent. I want foods I have always hated: brussels sprouts, raw carrots, and broccoli. I eat oranges by the ton as if unable to get enough of their sweet, sun-blessed flesh inside me. I eat apples fresh and unwashed from the farmers’ market. I like that bit of grit on them. This too satisfies some strange pregnancy desire.
The sight of meat nauseates me. The veined slabs of it make me feel as if my own flesh has been filleted and displayed behind the grocer’s glass. I have to avoid that entire section of the store now. How had I eaten these things before? They are so clearly organs, the workings of bodies so similar to my own, merely the skin stripped away to reveal the working muscles underneath the surface, living beings reduced to meat.
So many things I cannot have anymore! Wine, hot dogs, sushi, mushrooms, cigarettes. Such strict rules governing my body. At lunch if I even glance at a salmon roll, there are disapproving looks, which might lead to lectures about contaminated seafood and my child’s development. The other nurses eat crap and smoke like mad, but now that I am pregnant, they all have strict opinions about what I can and cannot do.
I realize that my body, which had always been my secret realm, is now public property. Women stop me at the grocery store to ask if it’s my first child. When I say yes, they nod knowingly as if they are the guardians of ancient and secret knowledge. “It hurts,” they say. “It’ll be the worst pain of your life,” as if I don’t know this, as if I am not already dreading what is to come. Perfect strangers come straight up to me and, if I don’t fend them off, put their hands directly on my stomach. People ask if I am eating enough folic acid, if I’m taking pregnancy yoga.
There are too many eyes upon me. It makes me long to hide away. This body that is expanding into something I barely recognize, it proclaims itself so loudly. I remember that other life, even before I met Daniel, when I belonged only to myself. Sometimes, traitorously, oh so insidiously, I crave that privacy, that perfect self-containment.
There are ways to rebel. There were those first illicit cigarettes with Dharshi in high school; then the habit picked up in college, compounded through the tough nights of nursing school. There had been sacred moments when we all gathered outside buildings to stand silently and puff together, the communion of drawing the smoke into our lungs. A hushed and long drawing in, an instant serenity, the ecstasy of the exhale. I had never drunk much, I did not have lovers, but this ritual, in the form of a small box in my purse—this I had loved. In those years before him, it had been my only vice. After we were married, it had dwindled down to whenever I was stressed and could hide it from him.
Now a sharp hunger grows. Once a week or so when I can’t stand it, I hide and smoke. The first few puffs calm me down. But then a hail of images of what havoc it might be causing within me rises. I imagine her, tiny inside me, gasping for air, twisting and hurting. Guilt paralyzes my throat. How weak I am. How selfish, not to be able to fight off this craving now when it is so important, when it can change everything. I throw away the butt, promise myself it is the last. I go a week without, and then like a person glimpsing an oasis after crossing the desert, I must have a cigarette.
One day I heft my bulk through the front door, and hitting my elbow on the jamb, I drop my purse. A hundred things roll out, the most secret of them landing at his feet. My heart in my throat, I watch him unwrap the toilet paper to reveal two cigarettes. He looks at me with narrowed eyes, sudden disgust. “What the fuck is this?”
A sort of chaos inside me. He has never raised his voice before. My mouth spits words: “Nothing. They’re not mine.”