The Better Liar(90)

    When I told him I was ready to get pregnant, it was like everything else fell away. Sex became beautifully serious. He made me ride him while he watched with his mouth open, like I was all new to him again.

It took me almost four months to get pregnant. I took a test every month, and on the last month I was too excited to wait until morning. I got up at midnight and went to the bathroom, and then I crawled back into bed and whispered to Dave that it had worked. He started to cry, and I reached for the light so I could see his face.

I blinked. Eli was making spit bubbles, sinking down so that they would float on the surface of the water. He poked one with a stubby finger.

“That’s a bubble,” I tried.

He didn’t respond.

I held his head so he wouldn’t hit the metal faucet as he wriggled around. His skull was soft and warm in my palm.

Eli looked up at me. His eyes were dark and glossy like Dave’s. I didn’t know what his expression meant.

Would he remember me at all?

I had hated being pregnant. The baby sent a ripple across my body, disrupting even the extremities. Pimples broke out across my nose and cheeks, and I carried new weight on my hips and thighs. I’d always been long-legged, easily slender; now I was sluggish and heavy. Everything I ate sat on me like a snow. I had to take an antiemetic, which made dry skin peel off my lips and kept me from sleeping. I lay awake picking at the corners of my mouth and trying not to move too much, knowing it would upset Dave if he woke up and saw me half-dead and angry.

Three months in, I looked in the mirror and saw that a blood vessel had burst overnight, turning the white of my eye an alarming, febrile pink. At the same time my thighs grew hot. My underwear soaked through, purple-black with blood. It was over.

    Dave had been desperate to try again. After the experience of pregnancy, I understood my body in a way I never had before, as a kind of receptacle. I read pregnancy books, which called me a vessel, meaning it positively; but it implied a passivity I found demeaning. I could have been anyone under him. I knew he would have denied it if I said it. Later, he would not even remember the way he had looked at me during those nights—as if fatherhood was just behind me on the mattress and I was in his way.

I lifted Eli out of the bath and wrapped him in a towel. He protested wordlessly as I scrubbed his hair dry, twisting his body this way and that, and screeched when I tried to help him use his new teething toothbrush, a yellow banana-shaped thing that Dave had brought home yesterday. “Spit,” I instructed. He swallowed.

I sighed, and Eli began to cry.

I opened my mouth to soothe him, and my jaw sent a spear of pain through the right side of my face. I’d been grinding my teeth and hadn’t noticed.

Eli wailed.

I picked him up and held him to my chest as I didn’t often do when we were alone, and carried him to his room. In the corner was the rocking chair I’d used when he was younger and still on formula. I sat in it now and leaned back.

It had taken me half a year to get pregnant again. When I was congratulated by the doctor I made myself smile at him. I thought, It’s only nine months. You can do anything for nine months.

I didn’t think of Eli as a person until he began to move inside me. Then I waited to love him. When that didn’t happen, I waited for birth; I had read that the body released chemicals in the first five minutes of mother and infant meeting.

I asked Maria if she’d enjoyed being pregnant. She’d said it made her feel strong, and that she used to cry when Joachim sang to the baby through her skin.

People say you don’t remember the worst parts of birth, but I remember everything. To make room for Eli’s shoulders, they cut me open. Dave held me down while I screamed. The doctor said, It’s only a small incision to avoid any more tearing, and then Eli was born and they took him away to be cleaned. I lay panting on the bed, Dave’s hands still pinning me to the mattress as a nurse kneaded my belly until the placenta came free. It felt like something had been ripped out of me by the roots.

    They brought Eli back to me. I was half-conscious, black spots on my vision. I tried to stay awake long enough for the chemicals to release. Instead I felt nothing. I could have been holding my appendix. Dave was crying and I thought, Now we are really separate; he has been changed and I am the same. We can’t go back.

Because that was what I was hoping for, secret even to myself: that when I looked at Eli and felt the right thing, Dave and I would knit ourselves back together, and I too would forget the way he had driven himself into me when I was a vessel, and my mind could be open to him again, free of snakes.

I think that was the end of us, that moment. And yet if I could go back, I wouldn’t change it. I’d said I would give him everything he wanted. For him, I would let myself be held down and the weeds pulled from me.

Isn’t that what love is?



* * *



—

“Your timer went off!” Dave shouted up the stairs.

After a while he came upstairs. “Your timer went off,” he repeated.

“I know,” I said. “Take it out. We’re cuddling.”

“Looks like one of you is cuddling and one of you is screaming,” Dave said. “Do you want me to put him down for you?”

“Not tonight.” I held on to Eli even as he sobbed, red in the face.