Authors: Ann Packer
Susan takes up the chalk and turns to the blackboard. “OK,” she says, “let’s go over what happens during labor.”
Halfway through the class she gives them a break. While the women line up for the bathroom, Dean climbs the stairs and goes outside to get some air. It’s an early October night, still and cool, the rains a few weeks away although the air feels moist already, expectant.
After a few minutes Lise comes out to join him. For work she wears her hair pulled back, but it’s down now, and the dampness has curled the shorter bits near her face. She looks pretty in the vaguely European way she looked pretty when they met, dark tendrils and dark eyes and a small, dark-red mouth. French or Italian, he thought then, and when they started talking it was all he could do not to compliment her on her excellent English.
He reaches out and fingers a lock of her hair. “Don’t they give us milk and crackers?”
“Juice and crackers. Little paper cups of apple juice and three Ritz crackers each.”
Back inside, the basement room seems overheated. All of the women are flushed. They’ve got something like two extra quarts of blood in their bodies, a slightly unnerving figure to Dean. Think of the pressure on their veins. How could you be the same afterward, shrunk back to your usual volume?
“Let’s wind up,” Susan says a little later, “by going around the room again and this time telling about any experience you’ve had with childbirth—if you’ve ever been with a woman during labor, or if you’ve actually attended a birth. And tell us your name again.”
Stricken, Dean turns to Lise, but she just smiles and keeps within herself, inside the chamber where she keeps all of that.
One woman tells about having been with a friend for the first part of her labor, another says she watched her sister give birth. None of the men has anything to say.
Lise and Dean have switched seats, so Dean has to go first this time. “I’m still Dean,” he says. “I have no prior experience with childbirth.”
Then it’s Lise’s turn, and Dean feels that the whole class has been waiting for this moment, expecting it somehow. “I’m Lise,” she says. “I went through childbirth myself, eight years ago.” She turns to Dean and gives him a look that’s almost—
apologetic
, he finds himself thinking. She holds her eyes on his, but just as he’s finally mustering a dumb smile she turns away.
“I had a little boy,” she says to the class. “I was married to someone else then. The baby died when he was five months old.”
Dean’s lips are dry, and he licks them. He doesn’t know how she can stand this—he can’t himself stand the fact that she has to. He looks around the room: the women are staring at her, the men at their own hands. Susan clears her throat. “How did he die?” she asks in a gentle voice that makes Dean think of murder.
“He died in his sleep,” Lise says, “crib death,” and then there are no more questions, no more answers, just the sound of the clock ticking and the feel of a group of people waiting for something to be over. Dean stares into the center of the room and waits, too, moment giving way to moment until finally, mercifully, the woman next to Lise takes her turn.
In bed at home later, Dean tries to look at proofs while Lise arranges the pillows she needs for sleep. He’s used to this, but he half watches anyway, thinking the pillows look different tonight, distorted somehow after their time in the bright lights of the church basement. Next week, Susan promised, they’ll use them.
Lise puffs a little with the effort of getting comfortable. She’s on her side with one pillow between her legs, another under her belly, and a third smaller one that she’s tucking between her breasts. “Can I get you anything?” he says, and she gives him a rueful look.
“A surrogate? I guess it’s a little late for that.”
“How about a backrub?” He gets off the bed and goes around behind her, easing himself onto the mattress. He lays his hands onto the soft flannel of her nightgown and begins kneading, pressing into her muscles with the heels of his hands. There’s more flesh than before, and it seems loose somehow, sliding across her back as if not quite a part of her but rather an extra layer of clothing.
“Right there,” she says, and he presses harder. “It wasn’t so bad, was it?”
“The class?” he says. “It was OK. Susan’s a bit caring.”
She laughs, but he feels tense. In her dresser, in the top drawer, there’s a picture of the dead baby, and as he stares at the drawer front he can almost see it: the blond wood frame, the baby with his little topknot curl and his toothless grin, his drooly lower lip catching the reflection of the flash.
“I thought what you said …” he says. “I thought you were amazing.”
“About Jasper?”
The name gives him a tiny shock, as always. “Yeah.”
“It was fine.”
They are both silent, and for a while Dean just moves his hands across her back, kneading and pushing, pushing and kneading, until from her breathing he knows that she’s asleep. The light’s still on, but whereas before this pregnancy she was the finickiest sleeper he ever slept with, requiring perfect darkness and silence, she now falls asleep effortlessly, at will—even against her will, over books, carefully selected DVDs, sometimes even Dean’s conversation.
He turns off the light, but rather than climb in next to her he goes to the window and looks outside. A misty night, starless, the rooflines of his neighborhood jagged against the lightish sky. What happened to her is just too horrible. It’s unspeakable—
literally
unspeakable, in a way: when he first heard, it became for a while both all he could think of about her and also something they couldn’t really talk about—
didn’t
really talk about, because what was there to say? Horrible horrible horrible horrible horrible. In some true, essential way that was all that could be said.
By feel he finds shorts and his running shoes, then makes his way to the front door. It ca-thuds shut behind him and he locks it, then slips his running key into his Velcro pocket. He does stretches on the front lawn, just a quick set to take the edge off, then he sets out, first an easy trot but soon he’s running all out, heaving hard, racing toward the University. His first run in how long—a week? Ten days? The dark feels like a material thing he has to penetrate. He passes the development office where Lise does graphic design, the science complex, Oregon Hall. On Agate he turns and presses even harder to get past the track—track town, he’s a runner in a town of runners, out here again but alone this time, legs burning, lungs burning, sweat sliding off him in streams.
That weekend, Dean and Lise are in a Thai restaurant on Willamette when Gregor and his wife, Jan, come in. Dean hunkers in his chair, but of course Gregor spots him right away. “Dean and Lise!” he booms from across the crowded restaurant, his arm moving over his head like a windshield wiper at top speed. “Great! What say we join forces?”
Dean groans. After five years of working with Gregor, Dean thinks of him as a family member, but the kind with whom you don’t want to be seen in public.
“It’s OK,” Lise says.
The hostess leads them over, Gregor beaming, Jan just behind him with a shy look on her face, her brown hair in a new, shorter style that makes her look—there’s no other word for it—matronly. Dean knows her pretty well, from his bachelor days, when once or twice a month she’d phone the office late in the afternoon to tell Gregor to bring him home for dinner, but she and Lise aren’t well acquainted. The four of them have been out together only once before, back when Dean and Lise weren’t married yet. Jan was pregnant then, now that Dean thinks about it. Pregnant with two kids at home. She kept getting up from the table to call the babysitter.
She sits next to Dean, leaving Gregor the chair beside Lise. He sits down and pulls forward, then gives Lise a broad smile. “I haven’t seen you in must be ten or fifteen pounds,” he says. “Are you eating everything in sight? You’re just huge.”
Lise smiles good-naturedly, but Jan gasps.
“Gregor.”
She catches Dean’s eye and shakes her head apologetically. “Ignore him,” she says to Lise. “How are you? You look great.”
“Thanks.”
“Are you ready?”
Lise shakes her head. She tucks a strand of hair behind her ear and says, “All we’ve got is a bassinet, plus some boxes of old clothes.”
Dean swallows and stares at his placemat, the tips of his ears getting hot and, no doubt, red. The old clothes are the dead baby’s, and he’s afraid of what will happen next. Early in his relationship with Lise, he told Gregor about what had happened to her, and though he immediately felt he’d betrayed her and swore Gregor to secrecy, he can’t imagine Gregor didn’t tell Jan. He’s afraid to look up, afraid to see the sympathetic, probing look he’s sure Jan’s giving Lise.
But: “Go shopping,” Jan says, and now Dean does look up, to find Jan smiling innocently. “Seriously. Borrowed stuff’s nice to have, but you need to get your own stuff, too. I didn’t with our first, and I felt so guilty, putting him in these ratty little stretch suits. With the others I bought new stuff, and it really made a difference, really made me feel I was welcoming them right.”
“Thanks,” Lise says. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
Gregor gives Dean a defiant look, and Dean shrugs. OK, so he doubted Gregor. OK, so he was wrong.
“Do you have a stroller?” Jan says.
Lise shakes her head.
“That’s where to spend some money. The expensive ones really do last a lot longer. There’s probably nothing you’ll use more.”
“OK,” Lise says. “We’ll look into that.” Under the table, she presses her stockinged foot against Dean’s ankle, and he brings his other leg forward and holds her foot between his calves until their food comes.
At childbirth class the following week, Susan has them all lying on the floor, heads on their bed pillows, tensing and then relaxing each muscle group in their bodies. Tense your toes. And now relax them. Tense your ankle. And now relax it. Dean’s nursing a cold and lying down should feel good, but the ceiling lights bore into his eyes and he can’t stop coughing.
After the break Susan shows a short movie. It features a couple straight out of the seventies—man with sideburns and a tight, striped sweater; pregnant woman with Farrah Fawcett hair and eyebrows plucked to oblivion. The film opens with them in their motel-style living room in early labor: Dean knows this because the first thing the woman does is lean back in her chair and start breathing very deliberately, as if she were following difficult instructions. Soon the couple is in their car heading for the hospital, and she’s breathing harder; next they’re in a hospital corridor, walking and then stopping and then walking; and finally she’s on the delivery table with a doctor nearby, his gloved hands ready. Dean turns away at the moment when the crown of the baby’s head first bulges out, but he forces himself to watch as it bulges again, and then the whole head appears and it’s all there, born, covered with white stuff, its arms and legs curled close to its body. Near Dean one of the women in the class sobs, and through the dark he sees Lise reach into her purse for a Kleenex and pass it to her.
Leaving the class later, the woman touches Lise’s arm. “Thanks for the rescue.”
“Oh, anytime,” Lise says. “I keep one of those little boxes of tissues in my purse.”
The woman smiles and waves, but she gives Lise a curious backward glance as she joins her husband at the door, and Dean knows she’s wondering about Lise’s emotional state. He understands: he used to assume Lise thought about her baby dying all the time. She’s said it’s not like that, but every morning she opens her top drawer and looks at his picture while she’s fishing for underpants, and Dean has to fight the urge to tell her to stop.
Don’t
, he wants to say.
That’ll just make it worse
. Like pressing a bruise.
Out in the parking lot, Lise hands him her purse to hold while she pulls her sweater over her head. Actually it’s his sweater, a baggy old shetland he’s had since college, burgundy and a bit moth-eaten, and he smiles a little, remembering a line from one of her pregnancy guides.
She tilts her head to the side. “What?”
“I was thinking of that book: ‘Your husband’s closet is a great place to find maternity clothes, but be sure to ask first!’ ”
She grins. “Like they know you better than I do. It should be called
What to Expect from an Annoying Author
. That’s the same book that told me to ask myself before taking a bite of a cookie whether it was the best possible thing I could be eating for my baby. When I want a cookie I want it
because
it’s a cookie, not just because it’s something to eat.”
“Do you want a cookie? We could go to that café.”
She shakes her head. “I want a quart of mocha chip ice cream, but I think I’ll just have an apple at home instead.”
They make their way across the rutted parking lot, skirting puddles, walking slowly. “She reminded me of me,” she says once they’re in the car.
Dean looks at her.
“That woman.”
His throat tightens. Was Lise crying during the movie? He was next to her the whole time, wouldn’t he have noticed? Shouldn’t he have?
“I mean the other time,” she says. “We saw a movie every week, and every single time I cried right when the baby was born.” She slides her car key into the ignition, then gives him a thoughtful look. “I don’t know why I didn’t tonight. I kind of thought I would, although I didn’t put the tissues in my purse for that very eventuality.” She smiles. “She sure thought so, though—did you see how she looked at me? Like she wondered why I needed a
box
, but it’s this little thing, look.” She fishes in her purse and pulls out a box of tissues about the size of a wallet. “So I blow my nose a lot.”
“People have an incurable interest in what’s not their business,” Dean says. “They want to
know.
”
Lise nods and then starts the engine, pulling onto the wet street with the car tires swishing. Dean looks out the window at the porches going by—the big, wide porches of communal living, fraying easy chairs in front of plate glass windows, bicycles chained to railings. The kind of place he lived when he was new in Eugene. He had a bedroom on the third floor, half a shelf in the refrigerator. Fourteen years ago. What he remembers is the dankness of the bathroom, how his towel never really dried from one shower to the next.