I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl (2 page)

Her arms are like bridges, transporting my son to me in this breathing world. I feel as though my vision could fill with white clouds at any moment, that I could fall to the floor. I feel that someone should be steadying me. But then the weight of him is in my hands. And it is like carrying him inside my body—something
I already know how to do. There is no thought of letting go. The bones in my arms use all their hardness, my blood, my skin itself, all the force in my body holds him, will keep him safe against any harm. My legs are metal. “You can sit in the rocking chair,” the nurse says. I relax against the cushion beneath me, the chair’s wooden bars supporting my back like little trees. “Hold his head up,” she says, and hands me a bottle. The nurse leaves. We’re quiet. My son and I like it, not rushing. I introduce myself for real: “It’s Mom.” He likes me. I place the bottle on his little rose mouth, let him take the nipple in his mouth. But he’s not hungry yet. A little milk comes out on his lips. I don’t know how much time I have. I say, his name, “Tommy.” I’m the first one to call him by his name. I say, “I love you.” I want to take my time, tell him everything. But he’s so content. We rock a little. Hang out. We would have been so good together with silences. The nurse comes back.

I never feed him again. No matter how many Kleenexes I put in my bra cups, despite the pills I take to dry up my milk, it leaks through all my clothes. My small breasts become so heavy and hard they are like mini basketballs. I could feed ten babies with this milk. During the day, a nurse brings a heat machine, a bright electric sun, and shines it between my legs to dry my stitches. The curtains are drawn. I can hear my aunt and uncle outside the cloth, the joking about my suntanning machine. They are kind, jubilant to become my baby’s parents. His eyes are still closed. During the day, I break the doctor’s rule and stand at the glass for every feeding. I dismiss the doctor’s warning about causing damage to myself. I need to see my son. It’s like the need to push when he was being born. There’s no choice. Watch a nurse hold my boy in her arms. Sometimes she stands while she feeds him, sometimes she sits. When she’s standing, she holds him up high, as if showing him to someone—a king. Here he is. The nurses scowl at
me. But what can they do? One nurse comes to me at night, opens my curtain. She sits on my bed as if she is my friend. “Would you like to talk?” she asks. “No,” I say. Maybe she was doing something extra, trying to be nice, helpful. But I am in no mood for pity. At the glass, I watch the nurse give my son a bottle, my breasts leaking dark quarters through my bra, my gown. I stand there, and watch him held in her hard arms and think, I can do that. I can do that.

On the fourth day, I am discharged. The air is tense when my family arrives—my mother and father, my aunt and uncle—because they are afraid. They are afraid that I will take him in my arms and not let go. That we will hitch a ride out of town, and I will bleed all over the front seat, massaging my uterus with one hand. Trying to bring it back to size. Calm the blood down. My breasts have all the food my son needs. And finally he’ll be able to latch on, to relieve this pressure, this store of milk I’ve been saving for him. The nurse shows my aunt and uncle my son’s belly button, she explains how to care for it, where we connected. She opens his blanket to do this, my naked boy. My aunt has clothes for him. She has a baby snowsuit. It envelops him in cushy plastic. Like an Eskimo baby. My mom is motioning me out of the way. But the nurse who never smiled, she says, “No matter who is adopting the baby, the mother takes him out of the hospital.” The mother, the mother. That’s me. I’m visible again. It’s a rule, so no one can disagree. I make my arms into the shape of a cradle. The nurse places my son in my arms. His snowsuit is soft and puffy. He looks comfortable nestled in there, eyes closed. I’m not yet afraid of doing anything wrong, of holding on to him. I know this is just for a few moments, and it’s not private, but I’m so grateful to have him back. Light and space around us, despite the others crowding. I walk down the white hallway. They are all around me, anxious. But we are calm. Then the front door is open, and the air
blows cold on us. I’m at the threshold, stepping onto the hospital porch, and my mom commands, “Hand Julia the baby.” And I do. But it is as if I am an orange, an apple, some fruit with skin that a knife has been taken to, cutting. The watered air around me is the seen world. The porch has a few wide steps, as if the hospital was just a house. My aunt is smiling so wide, her smile is all I can see of her face, except her eyes locked down on him. In the world, he belongs to her now.

Before Mark and Julia leave for the airport, before Tommy leaves us for good, they come to my parents’ house, our house, for a couple of hours. We leave the hospital. We all get into one car. I have no memory of the ride, of being in the car with my mother and father, Mark, Julia, and Tommy. It must have been tight—five adults and a baby in one car. It might have been a station wagon. Maybe I was in the backseat. It’s as though I disappeared when I gave Tommy away—I can’t even see myself.

At our house, we all sit in the living room. There’s an open box of doughnuts on the kitchen counter. Mark and Julia have been staying here with my parents and my brother while Tommy and I were in the hospital. He’s in my mom’s arms when he opens his eyes for the first time. She’s the first person he sees. Unless he opened his eyes in the car, after I’d disappeared. Or on the walk into the house. Sometime before the photograph of him looking up at her in sleepy astonishment. My mom smiling, holding him close in her arms. Both of them in the brown rocking chair. He’s wearing a soft aqua outfit that covers his feet. A tiny, yellow Winnie-the-Pooh is to the left of his heart. My brother, smiling and newly mustached, holds my son too. Up high, so they’re face-to
face. Tommy holds two fingers to his own mouth, looking at my brother.

Someone says, “It’s your turn, Kelle.” They aren’t going to let me go in the car with them to the airport. When Mark and Julia get up to leave, head toward the door that leads into the garage, I’ll get up too. I’ll walk with them. My mom will say, “No, you’re not going. This was your time.” After the door shuts, I can hear Tommy crying. It’s the first time I’ve heard him cry since he was born. He’s loud. He doesn’t stop. The car doors open, slam, slam. He’s still crying. It’s the last thing I hear.

When someone said, “It’s your turn,” and handed Tommy to me, I knew he wasn’t mine anymore. That they were all watching, uncomfortable smiles, afraid I won’t give him back. In a gold chair, I hold him so lightly his head drifts out of my arms, touches the arm of the chair. I was trying to show them I could be trusted. Show them I could let go. Someone gasped, and I thought, this shows I’m no good at this, I can’t even hold him, keep him safe. I envied Mark and Julia their parenting classes, the way they held him right, close to their chests, their future.

When Mark and Julia take Tommy away in the car, with my parents, I tell myself they’re going to the 7-Eleven. I say it over and over, to give myself a chance to get to my room and lock the door. “They’ll be right back. They’ll be right back.” Only my brother is home, banging on the door. “Are you okay?” he keeps asking. But I won’t be able to say anything. Facedown on the carpet, hanging onto the floor. It feels like it’s slanting, like the floor is a roof. I’ll be screaming without making any noise.

That day, I wore a pink dress with red flowers, as if I were going to a wedding, a party. Not like a mother. More like Isabelle Adjani in
Camille Claudel
when she goes crazy, red lipstick smeared. While we were still together in the gold chair, I tried to play with Tommy’s toes through the terry cloth, as if he were an older baby
to be entertained, not just born. In the one photo of us together, I hold one of his feet in one hand, the palm of my other hand cups his other leg, his bent knee. He has one arm against me, the other reached out to the side, into air. His head is barely resting on my white cardigan, almost as if he’s levitating. But he’s at ease with me, nearly asleep in the red flowers.

I was afraid I’d hurt him. Before he was born, I was afraid that I would hurt my son. That there was something wrong with me, an evil gene inside my DNA. I didn’t always believe this. I had loved babies. When I was a young child, a baby in the room had a magnetic pull on me. In my own baby book, under “Favorite Things,” my mother wrote “Babies.”

When I was eleven years old, I started babysitting for a neighborhood family. The boy was about eighteen months old. His sister was in first grade. I was fine until the boy cried. I don’t remember hitting him so much as I remember the anticipation, and the red mark. I wanted to spank him, but I also wanted to comfort him. I loved being the consoler, that the boy could be soothed by me.

I hated being hit myself. After the first time I spanked the baby, I couldn’t wait to do it again. I’d sit on the couch and hope he would cry. Hope I could check on him. Spank him. Comfort him. His sister looked at me once suspiciously. This made me nervous. The baby was born brain-damaged, but no one told me this until much later. The last time I agreed to babysit for this family, it was daytime. The baby was in his high chair, and he’d spilled his milk on the floor. I was going to yell when the doorbell rang, my mother appearing. She’d said, “It’s okay, he’s just a baby.” And she mopped up the milk with a paper towel. I had never seen this
before, a spill forgiven, or anything else. Another afternoon, I was in our front yard, and the baby’s parents saw me, called me over. They were sitting in lawn chairs in their garage, the baby with them. When I approached, he began to cry. “No, no, we’re not going anywhere,” the mother said, laughing. As if that was why the baby was crying.

I decided not to sit for them anymore. It was the year Shaken Baby Syndrome was named, a constellation of signs. I’d shaken the baby a little, but I don’t remember the shaking being hard. Because my real desire was to spank the baby, and then provide solace. But years later, when I saw a British au pair in court for killing a baby by shaking it, a mother or father charged in the death of a baby shaken, I was shaken, I felt the reprieve. But first I’d imagine the baby in the news in my hands, shaking it, and then the limpness afterwards. I’d imagine standing in court with nothing in my hands. The emptiness where the child had been. This must be what a murderer feels: adrenaline, horror.

I never told anyone what I’d done, but I remember learning from my mother that the neighbor’s baby had brain damage. She mentioned it in passing while she washed dishes at the kitchen sink. “It happened at birth,” my mom said. But in the moment between hearing the boy had brain damage and learning he’d been born with it, I thought I had caused it. There was a window over the sink that looked out on the house of the family across the street. My mother was a little distracted with the water and dishes, but she raised her head, looked at their house with sympathy.

Though I babysat for many years afterward, I never hurt another child. Ever. Why him? Why the first baby? The boy. A few years later, I babysat for a family with two small children, including a two-and-a-half-year-old boy who had a terrible disease. One fall, and he could bleed to death. His parents were huge, obese. Their cupboards were open—cookies, candy. An array of
chocolate. They told me I could eat anything I wanted. Outside was a jungle gym in their backyard with more dirt than grass. I hated going outside with their kids, afraid the baby would make one wrong move. I thought of his blood pooling out, inside his body, outside his veins, me calling the emergency number. But what choice did his parents have? It’s not as if they could have afforded to hire a health care worker to watch their kids. They probably went out to a movie or dinner. When I was there, the children were in constant motion, running around the small, dark house. Who would begrudge their parents a few hours to themselves, out of here? I discovered their huge stacks of pornography. In the bathroom, they kept the magazines in a basket. But in their bedroom, the knee-high stacks were against the walls, a barricade of porn. I’d never seen anything like it. Fleetingly, I’d lock myself in the bathroom to study the photos, the positions of the bodies like a game of Twister. The older child banging on the door, and every second I left the baby unattended, he could have an accident. I’d flip the pages, thinking,
Don’t fall, don’t fall
.

In my early twenties, I went to my parents’ new home, which was in the same large development where we’d lived when I was eleven. The baby I’d hit had grown up. He was about fourteen then. He had learning difficulties, and my mother, after teaching first grade all day, was tutoring him. They sat together in my parents’ living room, at the round table we’d used every day. Heads bowed together over his paper. He lifted his head and looked at me with a shining smile, almost a crush, as if I were beautiful. I don’t even know his name. I don’t know how to ask for forgiveness. The baby is in his thirties now.

We’d moved when I turned fourteen. A brief move from Orlando to an army base in El Paso, just the first half of eighth grade. Out there in the desert, I felt even less grounded. There were no neighborhood kids my age. I had one friend from school,
but we weren’t that close. My role model became the girl in
Go Ask Alice
. Years later, I found out the supposedly true story wasn’t true, that the book was written by several adults, not a fifteen-year-old-girl. I wanted to drink like her. The girl in the book felt more real to me than anyone else, her loneliness. I was drawn to the way drugs unlocked and brought her into the world. At the end of the diary is an epilogue that says the girl died from a heroin overdose. I knew I’d have to be careful when I was older, that there would be drugs I wouldn’t be able to take.

We’ll move from El Paso to a beach in Florida for a few years, another military base. The obese porn collectors lived here. They didn’t have alcohol. But the neighbors who called me Helen did. I hadn’t corrected them the first time they’d called me the wrong name, and later it became impossible to tell them their mistake. I didn’t want to embarrass them. As Helen, I would try not to wake up their child, but I loved to hold her. Her room had a rocker, and all night, I’d rock her until the lights from her parents’ car shone in her window as they came up the drive. Some nights, I’d steal their alcohol instead. They had the 1975 Cat Stevens album with the poster of him singing in Hawaii, a lei around his neck. I’d play the record over and over, assessing how much was gone from each of their liquor bottles, where it would least likely be missed. I liked to bring a bottle with me, pour their alcohol, save it for later to drink with my best friend, Sharee. Underage, it was always work to get alcohol outside of a party. Finding someone to buy for us, or trying to pass as older to buy it ourselves. We’d walk across the street to the beach with other kids who lived on the base, Kathy or her band friends. Sit beside the ocean, pass a bottle around. Just the sound of the waves coming in. I never liked drinking alone. It’s June 1976, the year of my first alcoholic blackout. I’ve just turned fifteen.