What We Have (5 page)

But with Julie, type A plus planner—
mon semblable—ma soeur!

 

I VAGUELY REMEMBER HEARING SOMETHING
that year about a “breast cancer gene.” Was it late in 1990? Or early 1991? A friend of a friend, an oncologist at the National Cancer Institute, was talking about it at someone’s house one night. I remember mentioning it to Julie, one Saturday afternoon, having coffee together in Virginia. It was all cast in the future tense—one day, they
may
be able to test women for certain kinds of breast cancer.

“I wonder what Mom would say about a test like that,” I mused.

My mother had had breast cancer—a tiny, curable tumor—four years earlier. It was a freak thing—like a meteor falling out of the sky, was the way my mother described it. You worry and worry about wearing your seat belt, drive as carefully as you can, and then
wham
—a meteor comes along and smacks you in the head. (My mother, mixer of metaphors.)

Thank God, this had been a small meteor. One that let her get up, brush herself off, and go on. Back to seat belts and ordinary worries.

“Oh, Mom would hate that,” Julie said. “You know how she is.”

I nodded. I knew. My mother, AP History teacher and ultrarationalist, was at heart more mystic than scientist. In her mind, asking too much of the future was bad luck.

“I wonder if I’d want to know,” Julie said, fiddling with her spoon. “If we had breast cancer in our family the way we have ovarian cancer. Would you want to take a test like that and find out?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. I didn’t give it a lot of thought—it sounded like science fiction to me. Some people like speculating about things like that—my roommate in college was always trying to drag me into hypothetical quandaries at three in the morning. Like cryogenics. Would you want to be frozen right before you died so they could wake you up in a thousand years, when ninety was barely middle age? Or would it be too lonely, wandering around in a world filled with unrecognizable gadgets and people ten or more generations younger than you were?

Personally, I’m not crazy about imponderables, which is what this breast cancer test sounded like to me. Like the movie I saw years earlier when a team of people got shrunk down and injected into a human body and shot through the arteries, wide-eyed, pointing at corpuscles like awestruck tourists.

No one had to tell me I came from a cancer family. Wasn’t it obvious? All you had to do was look at the pictures hanging on our upstairs wall. A blood test—what would be the point of that? Suppose it came back negative? Would I really believe it if someone told me I was home free?

Not likely. Not when I’d known about the sharpshooter since childhood. His X-ray vision, his slow, stealthy prowl.

Anyway I didn’t want to talk about cancer tests. I wanted to get back to the one subject that mattered: pre-pregnancy. The most fertile times of month. Whether it was true you could really tell you were pregnant even before you missed your period. How could that be? Could the body really be so transparent? When it came to conception, I wanted all the foresight possible.

Julie was moving to another branch of the would-you-want-to-know tree. Would you want to know the baby’s sex if you could tell from the ultrasound?

For Julie, that one was easy.
Definitely
. It would help when it came time to decorate and choose names.

I wasn’t sure. I thought maybe not. This must be why I get the minus in my version of type A, but I actually
liked
the idea of not knowing. A stretch when everything was up for grabs.

Boy or girl? I hadn’t gotten that far. I just wanted a
baby
.

“Do you ever worry,” Julie asked me, still fiddling with her spoon, “about passing on the ovarian stuff? If we have daughters?”

I shook my head, not really thinking before I answered. Maybe living with Jacques was rubbing off on me. “By the time our children have to worry about this . . . ,” I said, shrugging. It all seemed so far off, like a bright frontier. “By then,” I said, half-believing it, “they’ll have figured this whole thing out.”

Julie nodded. Thirty-five years from now. Who could fathom that vast a stretch of time?

“Besides, wouldn’t you still rather have your life than not?” I asked her. “Even if worse comes to worst?”

She nodded. Half a life was better than none, we’d always figured.

Lives half full, not half empty. Maybe we were optimists, too, in our own way. We circled around other topics, then zoomed back in. Who wanted to focus on doom and gloom when all of life lay before us?

All I wanted was to be pregnant. It was hard to focus on teaching, on researching time measurement in the seventeenth century.

I had an old empire-waisted Laura Ashley dress that looked like a maternity dress, and sometimes when I was alone, I’d try it on and sneak glances at myself in the mirror. I thought it looked great. Once I even wore it to Safeway.

WE COULDN’T HAVE PLANNED IT
in a million years. Julie’s due date: December 27. Mine: December 31. What are the odds, people would say. Of course there were jokes. “What is it, you’re getting a twofer? A special family deal?” a woman in the doctor’s waiting room asked when she saw Julie and me together. (We had the same doctor. Andrea Weiss, “expert” ob-gyn, top doctor in
Best of Washington
three years in a row. A friend of Lori’s campaigned for us, and Dr. Weiss squeezed us both in.) We’d laugh politely, but we both knew this was too important for humor. It was a modern-day fable.
Two girls from the same (previously unlucky) family get pregnant at the same time, break their family’s terrible spell, and live happily ever after
.

WHY DON’T POETS WRITE ABOUT
pregnancy? All that spring, my second in Washington, Julie and I were transformed. Separately, together. I’d never felt anything like this. Expansive. Exquisitely sensitive to everything—smell, taste, touch. Excited, exhausted, exhilarated, nauseated, sleepy, giddy. Craving salt. Craving sleep. Dreaming of light, shadow, membrane. Bewilderingly, absurdly happy. Calling Julie constantly. For once, our timing was defiantly, spectacularly right. My mother was beside herself with excitement and planning. First she’d come to me, then to Julie. Or first to Julie, then to me. Even her maddening comparisons struck us now as funny. Who cared? Life was blessed, the rhododendrons brimming with color—magenta, fuchsia, lavender. Next came the cherry blossoms, garlanded with tourists. We moved through bloom and bracken, delirious, counting forward. How had we managed—without planning—to get pregnant, both of us, at more or less the same minute? What god smiled down on us? This one small miracle apparently lifted the spell, my parents were charming and benign, good humor reigned on our planet, schedules relaxed, warmth encircled us, released from anxiety, from high-risk gynecology, free to eat, nap, dream, grow larger.

Starting now, we told each other, our luck would be good. We’d have these babies and the old nightmares would evaporate. The babies would grow up together, sturdy and smart. We’d push strollers together in Rock Creek Park. We’d find playgroups. We’d be our own playgroup! For once, everything we didn’t know seemed luminous.

Our family history was starting over. That’s the thing about babies—they reset the clock.

 

WE’VE ALWAYS BEEN CLOSE, JULIE
and I. It’s funny, because we’re farther apart than Sara and I in actual years. Maybe in this middle phase of life, our real age gets overwritten by our age as parents—instead of being twenty-eight or thirty-two, we become instead “mothers of toddlers” or “young women trying to have babies.” I’m not sure. I just know that spring and summer Julie and I became inseparable. We talked twice, sometimes three times a day. She’d find a sale at A Pea in the Pod and call me; I’d find an article on mercury counts in dolphin-safe tuna and call her back; we’d have the Morning Weight and See, as Julie called it, with my mother joining in for rounds of the Comparison Game on the phone every afternoon. “Julie,” she’d tell me, “has already interviewed
five
pediatricians,” or “Julie only gained two pounds this past month,” or “Don’t you think that having a fenced-in yard with actual grass might be nice, once the baby comes? Julie and Jon
love
northern Virginia. . . .” The minute the conversations with my mother ended, I’d call Julie back to do my meanest imitation of them, except for the days (of course there were days) when my mother actually got to me, and after I hung up I sulked and refused to answer Julie’s calls.

But most of the time, we derided her together.

Julie and Jon drove into the city and we took long walks in Rock Creek Park, throwing sticks for Bacchus and scolding him with experimental voices when he loped too far away. After our walks, we’d order takeout and Jon and Jacques would joke about time-sharing a crib. Time-sharing a doctor. Julie was ahead of me, planning-wise. She’d picked a rug for the baby’s room by May, a pediatrician by June, and by month four, just after my mother’s birthday, had already chosen a name. Emily. I figured Julie needed to be ahead, since their baby was due four whole days before ours. Sometimes she’d call me just to say the name out loud, like an incantation. “Em-il-leee.” She’d speed it up, slow it down, the way she used to play the Chopin prelude she labored on all through eighth grade. It was always Emily. Once, I think, it may have been Margot—then Emily again.

“What if it’s a boy?” I asked. As if I didn’t know. In my family, we just have girls.

“It’s not a boy,” she’d say, and laugh.

She kept a calendar; I kept a calendar. We pawed through little outfits at Baby Gap, honing our taste. We both liked primary colors— hated lace and pastels. The babies were due in the same month. December, Capricorn. Patient and practical. Solstice babies, due in the month when the northern hemisphere goes dark and cold, like a closed fist. Two small sparks of light and life.

Julie usually had her appointments before me—days before, sometimes a week before—and afterward we’d compare notes, doing a postmortem on the nurses. The one with the icy hands. The one with the overbite and the compulsive questions about acid reflux. Julie took her alpha-fetal-protein test, I took mine; she Scheduled her ultrasound, I scheduled mine; like a two-step, a fox-trot, she stepped forward, I stepped back. It was July, I had goose bumps from the air-conditioning in the study, I was poring over photocopies of calendars from the sixteenth century, trying not to listen to Bacchus scratching the kitchen door, wanting out, and when the phone rang I started laughing when I saw the number on caller ID, having already talked to her twice that morning, once to hear that her boss had reassigned her to yet another dismal case, once to complain that my mother had returned the perfectly nice scarf from Nordstrom we sent for her birthday because it was “too expensive” and she’d never wear it. I was all set to hear another story about the Justice Department or those anticipated syllables—“Em . . . il . . . leee”—but it wasn’t Julie, weirdly enough, it was Jon, and I was still half-laughing as I tried to change gears and make sense of what he was saying,
hospital, ultrasound
, it was all jumbled, I could barely hear him, and then it wasn’t him. Julie took the phone, her voice clear as a bell. “I had my ultrasound, hon.” Pause. “The baby—” Her voice broke. She was nineteen weeks pregnant, half a week in front of me. Beginning of month five. “The baby died. I have to go to the hospital.”

I was trying to catch up with her. My heart began to pound, long, slow beats.

“I have to have it anyway,” she said.

It was a girl. They could tell from the ultrasound.

Jon took the phone again. Tried to fill me in. The technician had taken forever. She kept fiddling with the monitor. Finally she left to get the doctor, and then the radiologist herself came in and fiddled some more, and then, after two or three agonizing minutes, she told them: She couldn’t find a heartbeat. “She thinks,” Jon said brokenly, “it may have happened a week ago.”