Originally published in Bard Institute for Writing and Thinking Journal, 2012
An outside observer might think the ground floor of this two-family Tudor-style McMansion in northeastern Queens is empty. Coming from a 500-square-foot junior 1-bedroom on the Lower East Side means that Maeve and Dan’s furniture fills only the southwest corner of the living room. Last month, Dan’s mom surprised Maeve with an elaborate baby shower, largely attended by women she did not know: perfumed and very made-up aunts and cousins wearing sequins, pants that swished when they walked, and impractically high stilettos. She was bowled over by their generosity.
An extensive layette of frilly white cotton, rosebuds, and embroidered birds was pinned across a clothesline that had been strung across the back room of Trattoria Lucia in Bellerose. She also received a bright green and blue jungle-themed play-mat with a gigantic plastic mirror on its surface, a Fisher Price Rain Forest bouncer, a Graco automated swing, an infant car seat, an infant stroller that could hold the infant car seat, a soft furry insert for the infant seat, a mock shearling blanket to fit over the car seat, a backseat mirror to place strategically so she could see the baby’s face in the rearview mirror while she was driving, a MacLaren Techno umbrella stroller, a Bugaboo jogging stroller, an Ergo baby carrier, a very confusing and extremely long piece of fabric called a Moby Wrap, eight different types of pacifiers, five different types of bottles, an electric breast pump, nipple cream, cotton breast pads, a digital ear thermometer, a Diaper Dekor Plus “complete disposal system,” jumbo boxes of fragrance-free wipes and Pampers newborn-sized Swaddlers, Kiehls foaming baby soap and shampoo, Mustela lotion, a cherrywood crib, an organic cotton bumper and sheets, a custom- made Amish quilt, and prints of baby jungle animals for the walls of the nursery, which is where she now sits, back against the recently painted lemon-yellow walls, between stacked boxes that contain nearly all the items listed above. The newly sanded and polyurethaned floors are dusty from two weeks of not being swept. Rose-colored light filters in through the over-sized arch- shaped windows. A moth haunts the windowsill, pining for the night.
This morning Dan is still out. He has been out throughout much of her pregnancy, but tonight it was with “his boys” rather than with the circle of artists and writers and bartenders who had been her friends, too, before she became pregnant. “His boys” was language she had never heard from his mouth. She didn’t know he had boys. Or a crew. So, here it is, 4:30 am on a sultry August morning and Dan never came home from a night out to celebrate his return to the tree-lined residential streets of his youth with his crew of boys.
Maeve is tired, already hot, and her feet are swollen. She has been waking intermittently since midnight with uncomfortable abdominal twinges and a restless, unsettled feeling. The windows in this room that will be the nursery are open, but the outside air doesn’t offer any comfort. She left the air conditioner unit in their old place; the movers didn’t look capable of carrying it down six floors. Dan had been too busy at work and “finalizing things,” he said, “with the move,” that he hadn’t yet purchased new units. They have a brand new car, a Mazda CX-7, that Dan’s parents bought them, that was simply parked on the street outside the day they moved in, the key placed on the kitchen counter as if new cars always accompany new apartments in Queens. All you need to do is get knocked up by the man you love, who, it turns out, you don’t actually know all that well.
Maeve’s girlfriends from before–before the EPT turned bright pink in less than 30 seconds, indicating that, yes, she was pregnant, very pregnant, and had been for several weeks–never liked him. They were all against the move out here. They have all sent her emails and texts over the past couple weeks, but she just can’t respond, can’t let them know that their dislike of Dan is founded, is accurate, is positively correct.
But now she must admit that she is definitely, most definitely, getting contractions every few minutes, and that they have been getting closer and stronger for hours. She feels afraid, ashamed by her inaction, bound to a steel wall of rules she cannot control. She devotes ten seconds to self-pity until the next contraction rips her open. No experience in her life has prepared her for this. One, two, three, four, five. Panic takes over. Six, seven, eight, nine–then, suddenly, her XX kicks in. She straightens her spine. She is not sad. She is not panicked. She is pissed. She is angry at Dan for not being here, at his mom for enticing her here with space and a car and baby stuff that she doesn’t know what to do with, at her mom for planning a vacation to Aruba with her boyfriend that overlapped the due date of her first grandchild. She is angry with Dr. Chin for not returning her several calls throughout the night.
Anger becomes her savior, her lover, her light in the darkness. When the next contraction comes, she just deals with it. She doesn’t define it, doesn’t think about it; she rides it through. When it abates, she stands up. She feels steady, clear-headed, and capable. She leaves the eleventh message in three hours for Dr. Chin, calls Dan’s cell for the millionth time, leaves no message. Grabs the keys to the Mazda from the magnetic hook on the coat rack. Gets in the car. Drives five miles to New York Hospital Queens. Tries not to crash the car during contractions. She gets there too late for an epidural, but she isn’t alone. She is surrounded by nurses, a medical student, an attending physician, and a resident. Dan comes in at the end, still drunk, eyes wild and glassy, and with a strange earthy smell she recognizes as the musk of another woman. She is so exhausted that she still lets his face be the first in the world that their daughter sees.