“What? Whose then?”
“They’re Alice’s. She likes to smoke after work.”
“Who the fuck is Alice? Stop lying. I knew it. I smelled it on your clothes. I didn’t say anything. But what the fuck is wrong with you? How could you?”
I’m trying to figure out what to say. Can I conjure up an Alice, who could be a friend, who could smoke, and who stores her cigarettes in my purse? Would he believe that? What lie can save me? My pulse is racing. I am a child again, exposed, in danger. A flash of Samson’s face. I have to claw my fingers against my palms to stay present.
He throws the two cigarettes on the floor, squashes them beneath his heel so that flecks of tobacco worm out of the paper.
“You’re a goddamn nurse. You know what could happen to the baby if you smoke.”
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to.”
I just want him to hold me and love me again. It feels like the world is ending inside my skin.
“No more cigarettes, okay? It’s too dangerous.” Then, his voice changing, “We don’t want a messed-up baby, do we?” He screws his face into a mask, grasps his hands into hooks like a mini Godzilla. “Look at me. My mom smoked when I was inside her and now look at what happened to me. I wish she hadn’t done that.” The voice becomes plaintive. “I wish I coulda been a nice normal bay-bee.”
The terror abates. I walk into his arms, his kiss. The earth slips back under my feet. But now I also know this: he loves this creature growing inside me more than me. Now I am only a body holding another body whose needs are more important than mine. Now an interloper lives between us, separating us with her inescapable presence.
Seventeen
I have put off telling my mother, but now it’s time. I have to catch her in those slivers of time appropriate to both of us, the hours of waking or just before going to bed. I tell her and I hear the joy bloom in her voice. She asks me to come and let her take care of me. Or, she says, she could come to me. This is the way it should be. Always among mothers and daughters on the island, this tradition: a woman is taken to her mother’s house far away from her husband. She is hidden away from men and tended to by the women of her family until the baby comes. For months after the birth she is not allowed to work. The women will surround her, will ensure that she and the baby are properly loved and tended until she is healed, until they are bonded, and only then do they return to the man’s house.
I say, “No, it’s fine. Come later when the baby is born. Then I’ll need help.” I can tell she doesn’t want to listen, but she has no power now. The baby inside me is already changing me from subject to queen. Now I am the mother and she has no choice but to listen.
*
Being pregnant is like falling into an alternate universe. In the places that are overrun with the fertile population of the city, young women in yoga pants pushing strollers, fathers with babies strapped to their fronts—a café in Noe Valley, for example—I feel a sort of beaming acceptance. I am being welcomed into an elite club. It is a cool club, a hip club. We are not parenting in the old-fashioned way our parents did. No, sir. This is all new. We are a new breed of parent, knowledgeable about water births, orgasmic births, prolonged breastfeeding, the fathers as conversant as the mothers in all this complicated jargon of the reproductive body. We won’t do anything our parents did, is the mantra. We are so much better than they were at this, is the unspoken mandate.
There are smiles and questions about my due date, my diet. The women with toddlers running around their feet relate their battle stories: twenty hours, thirty-six hours, forty-two hours in labor. The woman who says, “Pssshh … try sixty-five hours” is looked upon with the awe due a goddess.
One says, “I did it all naturally. Because you know, it’s better for the baby.”
Another says, “I had a home birth. Just Joel and the midwife and the doula. It was transformative.” They flash perfect, glossy smiles, kiss their cherubic children, and hand them to the Guatemalan or Salvadoran nanny waiting patiently by.