Milk (30 page)

The next contraction sends me across three lanes of freeway to the shoulder of the road.

By the time I reach the 405, I'm dripping like a faucet between the legs. By the Pacific Coast Highway, I'm timing contractions, about every six minutes or so. Every time one comes on, I pull into a side street, hoping it's Jackson's street. Two blocks from the beach, he wrote (“I've arranged to move in after Labor Day, once the season's over”)—but the beach, Newport Beach, goes on for miles and miles; I'd forgotten.
Thousands
of stuccoed apartment buildings in pale blue, pastel yellow, mint green, white, and every one of them sparkling like sugared candy.

I wail, “Jackson, you idiot, what color, what color?”

The next contraction's so bad, I'm lucky I make it to a phone booth afterwards, with three minutes to spare until the next contraction. Four dimes: one call. Who will it be? Maggie. Jackson. Gregg. 911. 411.

411 it is, figuring I'll get my dimes back. Shakily, I retrieve the coins from the pocket of my maternity dress—change I had to scrape from the floor of the Chevy while everything inside me ached and shuddered.

The phone, in this booth that reeks of urine, eats my dimes before I even get directory assistance. I slam my hand against the receiver. “Shit!” I'm crying, in the middle of another contraction, pounding my fists against the glass. Why don't I just scream for help? A couple strolls by with beach chairs under their arms, then a man with a dog, but no one notices me.

When I can stand up straight, I scan the instructions on the pay phone frantically.

Is it possible to make a local collect call? My eyes fall on a boy sitting in a camaro parked across the street, a Chicano guy, fourteen, fifteen years old. He's sucking on a pacifier of all things and I involuntarily smile. He sees me and smiles back, and then I'm doubled over with the next contraction.

“You need help?” It's him, speaking through the crack of the door of the pay phone. “You having your baby?”

I manage to grunt out a “Yeah.”

“Where's your husband?”

“Trying to find him. Long story.”

He walks me to his camaro and everything is spinning. He's taller than I expected so I come up to about his shoulder; I find myself staring at his pacifier, on a string around his neck. It's illuminated in the hard tones of sunset, orange, red, cerulean, but the pacifier is clear and plastic. Suddenly I've got my arms around his waist and I look down and see streaks of blood on my dress.

“Sorry.” So good to hold someone, it keeps the pain at bay. I'm starting to lose track of everything, up, down, sideways, time, night, day; it's just as likely right now to be sunrise, dawn. It doesn't matter where I am, who he is.

“We better get you to a hospital,” he says.

Hit with another contraction. He breathes with me while I hunch over the hood of the car. “How do you know about breathing?” I say afterwards.

“My sister's baby.”

“Good,” I gasp, afraid he was going to say his own.

His muffler is so loud it hurts my ears.

“Are you old enough to drive?” I shout over the roar. He's doing sixty at least, running stoplights, and I realize all this time I've been waiting for someone older to show up, his brother or a cousin. A grownup.

“Turned sixteen last week,” he says. In a trance I'm watching the pacifier glisten around his neck. He's wearing a huge T-shirt on his skinny frame, a baseball cap on backwards, and when he turns toward me, I'm amazed by the beauty of his eyes, deep and black and still, like something I remember from a dream, a good dream, the bottom of a well or the top of a lake. Then I remember: the swimming hole at Stonewall Creek, round and scattered with red rocks glowing like this boy's skin.

“Got my license last week,” the boy says. “Like I told you, my sister had a baby, two, three months ago. I got to watch her being born, it was cool.”

He pops the pacifier back into his mouth. Swinging from the rearview mirror are a dozen more, all different colors catching one last ray of light.

I stare at my hands in desperation as the next contraction slams through me. My fingers inches from my face, I twist them round and round, willing them to go numb. For my whole body to go numb. I'm in tears because it doesn't work, I can't go numb anymore. I'm human like anybody else.

“A favor,” I say to the kid running alongside the gurney as I'm being rushed to delivery. He's given me his pacifier to hold, which is sticky and clammy and sweet in my hand. “Call my husband for me. Call information. Jackson Zander, with a Z, he works at Costa Mesa Junior College and he lives in Newport Beach.”

The boy is racing down the hall.

“Tell him to hurry!”

Then I'm in a white room screaming with the best of them, a doctor's hand up me, some guy with a paper mask. “Okay,” he says. “I'm Dr. Frank. Now push!”

“I am! Jesus!”

“Push, push!”

I've got a nurse on either side, their arms under my knees, pushing my legs up and back.

“Good! Would you like to touch your baby's head?”

Hard and warm, it's almost hot—a shock that it's not myself I'm touching but another being.

“Let's get this baby out now! Push!”

The nurse I begged and pleaded with to go buy one of those insta-cameras from the gift shop is back now, taking pictures of the baby's head coming out, its mouth being suctioned.

The next push just about rips me in two. “What is this!”

“You're birthing the baby's shoulders.”

“They hurt … worse than the head.”

“Just one more push! Push! We're almost through.”

To push, I concentrate on babies, children. Images of Dylan and Willy, and my nephews when they were small, such as the day I held my nephew Bruce for the first time—how his parents and I joked that he resembled Queen Victoria, round and formidable, an eyebrow that went all the way across. And how I changed my other nephew's diaper once, Gabe like a frog on his back, legs bowed, belly out, delicate and pulsing, the wondrous mother-of-pearl skin. Then I feel this baby leave me, slithering out, now placed in my arms, this baby with red skin and smushed face, swollen genitals, her eyes focused on mine, her beating waxy cord, her warmth and bloody dank smell.

Part Three:

The Milk

T
WENTY
-E
IGHT

Theo's Letter

Dear Gena,

Three days after your birth when my milk came in, my breasts became puffy, swollen, practically suffocating you; when you nursed I had to make a space for you with my fingers. I leaked milk for months, long after the books said. At night I slept with a towel pressed to me and in the morning it was soaked.

So insistent was this milk, that if you began to nurse and stopped for even a second, milk would squirt you in the face. The first time this happened I was so surprised I just stared. So did you. I couldn't stop the milk shooting from my breasts and had to put you down for a moment while I marched around the room with my arms pressed hard against my chest.

Our whole lives revolved around the milk. First, in the hospital, it was learning how to breastfeed you, each nurse demonstrating a different method until the only way I could do it was to hunch over and stuff my nipple into your mouth. I kept thinking about what I'd read: that in our species, breastfeeding an infant is no longer instinctual behavior. It is learned behavior.

We left the hospital before my milk came in, while you were still getting colostrum. I think of how your father's bedroom looked after the first few nights, littered from one end to the other with the items I'd sent him running to the store for: diapers, blankets, pacifiers (rejected by you who preferred to suck on our little fingers); wrung-out tea bags and moist, flattened cotton balls we'd put in the freezer; washcloths wet from melted ice cubes—all those little tricks gotten out of baby books, none of which helped my poor cracked nipples—an open tube of A&D ointment, the only thing that did help; baby clothes fed-exed to us from Maggie, my own discarded clothes.… I could only nurse you stripped down to my underwear: shirts, bras, pants were just that much more interference and confusion.

I knew I had it down when on day six I was able to walk and nurse you at the same time, one arm free no less, holding it out for balance and dramatic effect,
voilà
. Your father was suitably impressed though bleary-eyed, watching us ascend the staircase from his bed on the couch, this mother-daughter duo like some two-headed beauty queen hybrid, me in maternity underwear (I was to look pregnant for months afterwards), you in a diaper.

It was four in the morning. You didn't see any difference yet between night and day, a condition that took months to change. Those first two weeks your father slept on the couch half the night so he could spell me in the morning, since I was up the rest of the night with you, either attached to my nipple or to my little finger. This is how we went to sleep those first few weeks: we swaddled you, laid you between us, taking turns on little finger duty (it isn't easy trying to fall asleep with your finger in somebody else's mouth). Even in the dark we could see your eyes were wide open, your mouth with one of our fingers in it bobbing up and down. Sucking, you'd observe us sleeping. Until feeding time. Anytime was feeding time. An hour, two hours after the last time, half an hour, forty-five minutes: you would scream and we'd scamper around like fools trying to please you. “The chair,” I'd tell your father. “No, wait, the couch, it's more comfortable. Get the pillows!”

He'd race, collecting pillows on the way: one for under my arm, two for my back, another for my other arm, several beneath my feet like a footrest. Meanwhile I'd strip off my clothes (soon I got smart and skipped wearing them altogether), panic-crooning, “It's all right Gena baby, Mama will be there, Mama's hurrying—” and carry you football-style to the next nursing destination, milk squirting every which way. The screams! Like you'd turn yourself inside out. Like your head would pop off your neck and hit the ceiling. Like you'd die it hurt so much, this hunger. You'd attach yourself fiercely, sucking so hard you practically knocked yourself out breathing through those tiny nostrils. The squeaking wheel, we called you.

During pregnancy I'd imagined gauzy scenes of me all in white, my baby plump and content, the two of us gently swaying in a rocking chair, pink booties on the baby's feet that I'd knitted myself. I wasn't prepared for a baby who sounded like she needed WD-40, a baby with bowed skinny legs who needed me desperately; I wasn't prepared to feel so in love; I wasn't prepared for bucketfuls of sweat pouring off my face so that in all the early pictures of me holding you, I look like I'm crying, about to drip away.

That was something else no one had told me: that some women sweat the extra water weight strictly through their faces. Another thing: very suddenly, my hair grew two inches, thick, wild in the humidity of my face.

The milk.

Mornings, after the six o'clock feeding—or thereabouts—your father would take you and pack you in the snugly. Up and down the beach he would walk, or over to Balboa Island; he was practically a local landmark, the town greeter. He'd walk to the pier, to the post office, to the store to buy milk, ironically, for me. He planned his trips to the minute, making sure he never went so far that he couldn't hurry back in a quarter of an hour or less. In case you needed to nurse. You'd begin by squirming, smacking your lips; within moments you'd be up to your full-tilt, heart-wrenching cry.

Sometimes I heard you proceeding up the boardwalk, my drenched towel held to my breasts; sometimes, in a dead sleep, I didn't wake up until you were beside the bed. That was the reason for these walks—so that I could sleep, so that my milk supply would build. As soon as I tied the snugly in back for your father, I'd down a glass of juice or milk or water, then fall on the bed asleep. An hour might pass, or two, but it seemed you were back in minutes, wanting me, screaming. Exhausted as I was, I was as glad to see you as you were me, my breasts engorged and hard as bricks.

You'd drink until you were stuffed, milk dribbling down your chin, then you'd sink into slumber, me beside you, and beside me, your father. All of us like rabbits in a hutch, curled around each other, helpless in sleep.

Colicky evenings your father took to walking you, too. In his arms facing front ways, cradled sideways, or held against his chest; over his shoulder as he did what we called the ‘horsy walk,' a bouncy, slip-gaited stride that seemed to calm you. Or he walked you swaddled in blankets we'd warmed in the dryer, or pushed you in your pram back and forth across the apartment until he scratched out a path in the hardwood floor. Walking you was his equivalent of nursing. Colicky evenings were the only times you didn't like to nurse, and your father became an expert.

Bedtimes he racked up another five miles at least. First I nursed you, then changed you, dressing you in your nightie with the drawstring at the bottom; next we eased you into the snugly and turned off the lights. Your father did laps around the apartment until we were sure you were asleep. Both of us holding our breaths, this was the tricky part—getting you out of the snugly and into your cradle without your waking up. Which happened about half the time anyway, meaning another five miles for your father.

By ten weeks you were as plump as you see in magazine pictures, your bowed legs rounding out, wrists like sausages. You nursed a little more regularly, more predictably; you went to sleep a little more willingly. You smiled and showed your gums, your eyes were bright, focused. I exchanged my maternity underwear for the other kind, although it was a tight fit; your father was a little more awake at work. I could change diapers with the best of them now and on good days life was smooth, easy, sleek, and I felt filled with the milk of life itself.