In another part of town, in the Mission, young hipsters look at my rounded bulk with the distaste of people who have just seen the movie Alien. They are skittish around me, as if at any moment my belly will rip open and a fanged and phallic monster will burst out to chomp at their own delicate flesh. Young women give me a wide berth as if sitting next to me on the bus will cause their own taut bellies to pop into eminent, bursting heft. Men with beards glance past my body as if unable to see it. My female body, no longer in any way desirable, but instead reminding them of the ugly end result of sex.
Environmentalist friends wrinkle their noses. “But it’s such a huge decision, isn’t it?” they say. “Such a drain on the resources of the planet. My god. Seven billion people.” They shake their heads. One friend of Daniel’s sniffs, “I wouldn’t ever do that. If the polar bears are dying. And they are.” She fixes me with a hard stare. “Dying because of us, you know. I don’t know why I have the right to reproduce if the polar bears don’t. It’s their planet too, isn’t it?”
I shake my head at her, not sure how to respond. Daniel says, “Yvette, how about we leave the polar bears outta this, okay? It’s just our baby. Hers and mine. We don’t have to bring the fate of the whole planet into the situation.” I press his hand in gratitude. With him next to me, I can do anything.
*
We learn that there are many things to buy. Strollers and car seats and nursing bibs and breast pumps and rocking chairs and clothes and pacifiers and on and on. I understand now why young parents look buried alive under mountains of things, why they buy larger cars and bigger houses. There is so much paraphernalia! His parents send us fat checks that he is loath to accept. But I tell him it’s not a time to be picky. We need the money, and if they can be generous, why not? It’s their first grandkid, after all. These days I’m paying most of the bills. We don’t talk about it, but I know it cuts him.
We go shopping at a place that proclaims, “We deliver everything but the baby.” I wander the aisles, thinking this is how a fifties housewife might have felt when she was asked to choose the perfect bathroom cleaner. If she could just master the uses of all these new scientific products, she would be perfect. Now an avalanche of things is targeted at me. I need to pick carefully so I can be the perfect mommy. It is a very, very important job. The most important one in the world, as the ads keep reminding me.
*
And lost under all this noise, the looks and the stares, the baby bump mania, the obsessive accumulation of things, is the absolute miracle of what is happening inside my body. Every week I read to him the newest accomplishment of our very small person, the acquisition of earlobes, the lengthening of the spine like a taproot, the spreading web of capillaries and arteries, the minuscule but rapid beat of that forming heart, the way this tiny human in me is replicating step by step the journey of our entire species, from tiny fish to curled-up mammal. We watch the sonogram screen and hold our breaths to see our baby girl. The technician knocks at my belly as if on her front door to make her move so that he can check her neck. It will reveal a wealth of information, he says. We watch spellbound as, legs tucked, hands in prayer, she turns to us with her huge, closed alien eyes. She is sacred; we are in awe.
These days she moves constantly. I can touch a hard place on my belly and say, “This is her head.” In another place, “These are her feet.” We watch the way my belly moves like a wave as she stretches an arm, moves a leg. Not gently, as one would expect, but assertively, just under my skin, as if she is saying, “I am here; I am alive; I am coming.”
*
Then as if one miracle engenders another, I walk into the apartment and he hands me a glass of sparkling apple cider, clinks it with his own rare tumbler of whiskey. His eyes are sparkling, some deep emotion barely contained in his body. I rest my hands on my aching hips and ask, “What’s happened?”
“You won’t believe it. It’s crazy. I’ve just sold The Coming,” he says.
“What? But that one’s not even in a gallery.”
The Coming of Civilization to California is an oil he completed in the Oakland warehouse studio he shares with three other artists. It shows a covered wagon cresting the horizon, pulled by a steer, a woman in lingerie splayed on its back. Small panels show parts of the steer, cuts for sale, the woman too dissected into bits for consumption. A Mexican man in a sombrero looks agog at this insertion of commerce and commercialism.