Authors: Angela Balcita
“Bed rest, I can do,” I say, confident that it would be like a vacation.
“We would have to make special arrangements for weekly labs and closer monitoring. But it can be done.”
“Have you delivered a baby from a transplanted woman before?” Charlie chimes in with a question that has probably been brewing in his head for a while.
He tells us that he had a patient who had had four kidney transplants and delivered twins. “She was fine; the babies were fine. Now, that's no indication of what your pregnancy will be like,” Silver Fox says, looking at me over his glasses. “I'm just saying that it's quite possible that you'll be fine, too.”
Quite possible
.
Driving south on Charles Street, the sunlit road before us is broad and unwrinkled. We're almost home when we pass an apartment window covered with a familiar poster: believe.
“It's a sign!” I point.
“Literally!” Charlie says. But I know it's an omen; the universe is guiding us. “So, we're doing this?” he asks, drawing in a long, slow inhalation before blowing it out.
I nod.
“Adoption is out?”
“Out!” I yell.
“Well, there are stipulations.”
“There are always stipulations.”
“You have to do whatever he says. I mean bed rest, and the weekly appointments, we'll have to look at your diet again . . .”
He goes on, his voice fading with the passing landscape. “So, let the procreation begin!” I hear Charlie's announcement, but I'm concentrating on an image slowly coming into focus in my head. It is a baby, sweaty and squirmy, in my arms.
That night, as we climb up to our apartment, i take on the staircase in giant, exaggerated leaps without holding on to the banister. “Slow down,” Charlie calls. When we get to our floor, a tiny spot of color hangs off the top step. Lying there is a knit cap, striped around the crown with all the colors of the rainbow, small enough to fit around a softball. Earflaps and straps hang from either side of its narrow brim.
Charlie holds it carefully in a nest of his fingers as if it were a bird with a broken wing. Somewhere in this place an infant's little head is cold.
“A sign!” I whisper, as we stand in the hallway and hover over it.
“It must be our neighbor's,” Charlie says.
“Can't we keep it?” I ask.
“No, because that would be psycho. I'll bring it back,” he says, heading down the dark end of the hall where we rarely venture.
Back in our apartment, I pull the blinds of the living room window up all the way. Outside, Baltimore teems with activity. There are sirens blaring down the alley behind us, and people are in the streets outside a local cafe. Three weeks ago, I stashed a jumbo bottle of neonatal vitamins in the back drawer of my bureau. When Charlie's not looking, I take two of them into the kitchen, and gulp them down with iced tea.
A few minutes later, Charlie is in the kitchen making himself a sandwich when there is a knock at the door. A woman in a pale cotton dress stands in the hall, and in her arms is a beautiful baby with silky black hair and full, pink lips shiny with drool. “Thanks for dropping off the cap. I just thought you'd want to know who's been keeping you up at night.”
“Oh, my god,” I tell her. “She's gorgeous.” I hold out my hand, but the baby pulls away from me. She digs her face into her mother's chest.
“This is Isabella!”
I stand there trying to put these two in the same family, but their differences are glaring. The baby has cafe latte skin and dark irises. She has thick everything: legs, head, cheeks, and arms. Our neighbor is pale and blue-eyed. And slim! She doesn't look like someone who's given birth recently.
“Is sheâ” My words come out quickly, and I'm still trying to form my sentence after they escape my lips. “Did youâ”
“Yes,” she says, happy to relieve me of my awkward questioning, “we just adopted her. I spent last month in Guatemala getting to know her. And now, she's mine!” She smiles broadly again, and this time I notice her dimples, which strangely now appear to be a trait she shares with her adopted daughter.
Charlie closes the door softly when they leave. “Cute,” he says, and goes back to his sandwich. I return to the bedroom.
So much for signs!
I think as I plop myself on the bed, but I don't dare say it aloud for fear the universe, or Charlie, might hear.
Chapter Twelve
Commencing on Dates to be Determined: The Starling of Great Imagination
I
haven't realized it until now, but Charlie and I have been prepping for the homemaking and parenting stages of our lives since coming to Baltimore. Once our lease is up, we settle on a skinny two-bedroom row house with hardwood floors and ceiling fans. The apartment was feeling too cramped, even with just the two of us. And while the market is filled with newly rehabbed houses, we get our first loan and make our first major investment.
Charlie starts to sweat as we sign the closing papers, and the stuffy old lawyer with the horn-rimmed glasses says to him, “It's just one responsibility after another from here on out.”
At first, the place seems like a good size for me and Charlie. But sometimes, when he is upstairs and I am in the kitchen, I can feel the whole floor separating us. We have so little furnitureâ really just the beastly beige couchâthat the floor plan, though skinny, looks spacious and wide. I tell Charlie that there is room to fill, and he nods. I assume we are thinking about the same kind of new occupantâa sleepy one that wears diapers. But Charlie thinks we are talking about someone else, and drives me up the hill to the local SPCA. Charlie's wanted a dog since we were living in Iowa. He always had one growing up, and I think he misses the silent companionship. We are greeted by a wall of sound, happy yelping and dogs bouncing off the high fences of their cages. There is one quiet fellowâa bluetick coonhound with silky black ears that hang below his handsome face. He keeps drawing us back to cage number three with his lonely eyes.
“That little grifter pulled a fast one on us,” Charlie says the month after we bring him home. For despite his gentle looks, the hound is a bad boy. His bark, which he kept hidden so well in the kennel, is loud like a foghorn, and it ricochets off the narrow walls of the row house, back and forth, and rings in our ears. The bark might be considered funny or cute if he could only control it. But Bluey has just one volume: deafening. And he unleashes that bark at every UPS truck, mailman, bus, cat, skateboard, bicycle, motorcycle, rollerblade, garbage truck, and horse-drawn fruit cart that goes past our front window.
Our quiet little home suddenly becomes a madhouse wherein Bluey is barking and I'm yelling at him to stop while Charlie is chasing him around so he doesn't jump on the windows and click his nails on the glass. Charlie holds our dog down for as long as he can, while, out of breath, he looks up at me and says, “And you want to add someone else to the mix?”
My new nephrologist gives me her blessing about getting pregnant, acting like it's not really an issue at all, and warns me that, in her experience with transplanted women, she finds that they don't usually worry about whether or not they should get pregnant. They worry about whether or not they can get pregnant.
Another dare
, I think. Clearly these doctors don't know with whom they are dealing.
Charlie's one stipulation is that if we are going to try to get pregnant, we are not going to become slaves to the fertility industry. “Your body doesn't need any more injections or medications or procedures,” he says, and I agree. “If we have to go through all that, then let's just assume that it wasn't meant to be.”
When I first got on the pill as a young twentysomething, I was amazed by its predictability. The doctors told me I wouldn't get cramps, and I didn't. The doctors told me I'd get my period on the same day of each cycle, and I did. I didn't get pregnant and my breasts did swell while I was on the pill, just like everyone said they would. So I just figured that coming off the pill would be the same: I'd stop taking it and my period would appear. I expected there would be some lag time, but after six months, there is still no sign of my old friend.
During my most recent visit with the doctor, I read in a women's magazine about the benefits of acupuncture to well-being and fertility. After Charlie deems acupuncture not medical enough, I make my way to a small office on the north side of town where there is no receptionist, just rows and rows of oriental herbs on a shelf against the wall.
“My system is whacked,” I tell the well-dressed Chinese man in his mid-forties. He wears a neatly pressed collared shirt and matching tie. His accent is sometimes hard to break through, but his friendly demeanor elicits my patience. Right now, he is confused by my vernacular. “It's not working,” I clarify. At first, I don't tell him that I'm trying to get pregnant, just that I'd like to start getting my period again.
“Oh, yes,” he nods.
In a tiny but well-lit exam room, we go over my long, long medical history. As I speak, I occasionally look at the wall above the exam table, where there is a calendar with Chinese characters in red and gold. On the table at which we sit, there is a miniature plastic model of the human body, but instead of pictures depicting the human anatomy, it is marked by little dots in blue and red and cryptic coordinates: te 23, st 6. Dr. Cheng sees me concentrating on it and enlightens me: “Meridians,” he says. I've been to many a doctor's office, so I know what to expect: how to breathe into the stethoscope when a doctor puts it to my heart or to my back, what my pulse rate should be. But this office is like traveling in a foreign land. Even the examination customs are exotic.
“Okay. Show me your tongue,” he says. I open wide, assuming he is looking at my throat.
“Okay. Is very good,” he says, nodding as he jerks away from me to face the desk. “A good color.” He draws a U shape in his notes to resemble a tongue, and next to it he writes “Red.” He pulls out a small velvet pillow from a drawer and asks me to rest my wrist there so he can take my pulse. He presses with two fingers just below my palm, and I assume that he is counting the beats of my heart. He writes something down; it is not a number but a picture of a wavy line.
“Okay, other one,” he says, and points to my other wrist.
Wouldn't the pulse be the same?
I think, but apparently not, because this time after he listens, the line he draws has waves that are closer to each other.
He explains that he will work on my spleen, which I assume is, in some mythical way, connected to my ovaries.
Once I am lying on the table, he pins me with the hairlike needles. They are on my arms, on my legs, and sprinkled over my belly. They feel like tiny gnats sitting on the top of my skin.
“Is okay?” he asks, before leaving me in the room. For ninety minutes, I lie perfectly still listening to the Chinese Muzak playing overhead. The warm air coming through the vents and the soft lighting cause me to doze off for a while, but I awake with a jolt. It feels like my body twitched as I slept, strong enough to wake me up. When I ask Dr. Cheng about the sudden movement, he explains that, in that moment, my body became balanced. Oh, how I love this, the different systems of the body becoming perfectly aligned.
“I will give you six more treatments. On the fourth treatment, you will get your period,” he says, with such clear vision of the future that it is difficult to doubt him.
I treat my appointments with Dr. Cheng like spa treatments. On Thursday afternoons, I walk into his office, flash him my tongue, hold out my wrists, and nap as still as I can so as not to disrupt the tiny needles he has placed. I wait patiently for that balancing jolt.
On a Friday, the day after my fourth treatment, I wake up in the morning with a familiar cramp in my pelvis, and that afternoon, I see my old friend.
“Now, I want to get pregnant,” I tell him on the following Thursday.
He has no questions about whether I should or how it agrees or disagrees with my medical history. Instead he looks at my tongue, checks my pulse, and says, “First thing, you have to think positively. Some women, they think,
Oh, I won't have baby
. I'll never have baby. Not like that. You must think positively!”
“Now you sound like my husband,” I tell him, rolling my eyes.
“Your husband is good man?” he asks. “Then he is right. Think good thoughts. And you must eat a wide variety of foods: meat, fruits, vegetables. But not raw vegetables. Lamb is good. You eat lamb?”
“No, but I will!” I say, hoping that he will not think my enthusiasm is sarcastic.
“Your husband, too.”
“Okay, we will!” I say, with the same gusto as before. I gather my keys and my ChapStick from my purse and make plans to go to the store and buy lamb before I go home. “But when will I get pregnant?” I look up, brushing my hair from my face.
I don't know if he doesn't hear me, or if he is choosing deliberately to ignore me, but he leaves the question hanging in the air.
Charlie doesn't ask me about my acupuncture appointments. At first, I think he doesn't want this as badly as I do, that maybe he's giving our decision a second thought. But sometimes when I wake up in our bed in the mornings, he looks over at me and says, “You think you're pregnant yet?”
He doesn't ask often, but it makes me think that it's in the back of his mind and he doesn't want to talk about it simply because he doesn't want to jinx it.
“Maybe,” I tell him each time, trying to stay positive.
When I imagine telling Charlie about the pregnancy, it goes like those television commercials for pregnancy test kits, where the handsome, clean-shaven husband stands next to his glowing wife in their sunlit bathroom, waiting impatiently for the line to turn into a cross. Our experience doesn't go anything like this.
Before he comes back from his morning walk with the dog, I breathe slowly, pacing up and down in front of the bathroom preparing my delivery. I can't think of a way to properly say it, so I decide to use a visual. He is sweaty and worn out, resting on the couch for a second before he gets ready for work. I hold the urine stick in front of him so he can see the lines that make a cross. It takes a long while for him to understand exactly what he is looking at. I realize at that moment that this is probably not the smoothest way to tell my husband that we are pregnant, forgetting of course that he has probably never seen a positive pregnancy test, or any pregnancy test, in his life.
“We're going to have a baby?” he asks, trying to piece together the clues I'm giving him.
“Yup,” I say, biting my lip, waiting for the eruption.
There is a pause. A pregnant one. Pun intendedâbecause, yes, it is heavy and bloated and hangs out there waiting to give birth . . . to what? Charlie's forehead beads with sweat, and he looks like he is in a state of shock. He has every right to be. He is about to be a father. We just made a baby together. I stood in the bathroom alone just minutes ago in that same stunned silence.
“Congratulations,” he says quite properly. “It's what you've always wanted.” He holds out his hand waiting for me to shake it.
Shakes my hand! Like I have just been given a promotion at work, and he is the surprised, but jilted, co-worker. I cannot remember a time when I heard Charlie tripping over his words. But there he stands, paler than usual. I take his hand to shake it, like the graduate who's just been handed her diploma by her principal. And in doing so, I cannot help but laugh. Looks like the sharp-tongued bastard can get rattled! I ignore the fact that he has said this is what I've always wanted; I know he couldn't control his reaction. For the rest of the week, I watch as Charlie runs into the banister while walking up the stairs and trips over the dog's leg in the kitchen.
Then one night, while we are sitting on the couch reading, I notice him looking over at me. Then he holds his hand over my belly.
“Feel anything yet?” he asks. “Charlie, it's only been a week.”
“There's someone in there,” he says. “That's wild, isn't it?”
“Yeah, it's what I always wanted,” I say, smiling devilishly at him.
“You caught me off guard!” he protests. He slinks down into the couch cushion, and looks despairingly up at the ceiling fan. “I know. I'm an idiot.” He shrugs his shoulders like a shy little boy. “Just, don't tell anyone about that.”
“Yes, Charlie,” I say, assuring him. “I'll never tell anyone.”
Dr. Cheng applauds when i tell him the news.
“It's happening! It's happening!” I tell him, looking to him to confirm my disbelief. He says that I shouldn't stop getting treatments, which I don't quite understand since I am pregnant already.
We did it
! I want to say to him.
“Now we will prepare your body for the baby,” he says, reminding me that the hard part isn't over. “Your body is still vulnerable. So is this fetus. You must think of your uterus as a house.” He holds the tips of his fingers against each other to make an A-frame roof. “You have to make sure that the walls are strong, that the roof does not leak. Otherwise, you would not want to live in it, right?”
I could listen to his poetic imagery all day long. I could stand here and visualize my body as a house now. Not a thing that doesn't work, but a house that protects another being.
As my belly grows bigger, I dive into pregnancy full force. I have been editing a magazine in Baltimore for about a year now, and since I've been pregnant, I sit at my desk rubbing my belly and asking other mothers what I should be doing to prepare.
“Relax,” one colleague says. “There will be enough to do when the baby is born.”
I take a yoga class with a new-age instructor who has a tight Afro and tattoos around her neck. “Breathe deep,” the yogi says. “Breathe the good air into your womb.”
I start keeping a journal, writing down what foods I am eating, what new sensations I feel. It seems now like I have influence over how this pregnancy will turn out, like if I am determined to make it work out, it will.
It's the books I'm reading about pregnancy that aren't working out so well for me.
“Bleeding nipples? Misplaced placenta?” I read to Charlie aloud in bed. I grab my breasts and hold my belly. Charlie covers his ears with his hands.
“Don't read ahead!” my officemate tells me when I pull out
What to Expect When You're Expecting
from my backpack. “My friend read ahead and her husband found her in the nursery crying hysterically with fear! She was only in her second trimester.”