The Fixed Stars Read online

  I mean, I don’t really want to be touched. I don’t need it. I’d rather touch you. I’d rather give than receive.

  Is this queer sex? If she’s a top, do I have to be a bottom? What if I want to be both? What if I want to be neither?

  I said, I just want to be a person in bed with you.

  16

  One afternoon, June came home pouting. When I asked what was wrong, she said a girl in her class had called her a baby.

  I murmured sympathies. I wanted to drive back to school and pummel the kid.

  What do you think? I asked her. Do you think you’re a baby?

  June shook her head, dragged the back of her hand across her dripping nose. She was not quite four years old.

  Then there you go, I said. You’re not a baby, Junie. You know who you are.

  Easier to say it to her than to say it to myself.

  “Birth is not merely that which divides women from men,” writes author Rachel Cusk. “It also divides women from themselves. . . . Another person has existed in her, and after their birth they live within the jurisdiction of her consciousness. When she is with them she is not herself; when she is without them she is not herself.”25

  September 7, 2012: I went into labor late on a Friday night. Each time a contraction came, I wrapped my arms around Brandon’s neck and clung to him, hung from his chest in a perverse and painful slow dance. At five the next evening, sixteen hours into labor, I asked for an epidural. Another twelve hours later—twenty-eight hours into labor—I was ten centimeters dilated. As the sun rose that Sunday morning, I started to push.

  Thirty minutes, an hour, an hour and a half. I started to panic: I was going to split open like a piece of ripe fruit. I searched for my doctor’s eyes, told him I couldn’t do it, it was impossible, and with the next push, there was her head, outside my body. Another push and now her shoulders were free, her body sliding from me like a thing from the sea, my nine-pound prize fish.

  The effort of birthing her had forced small tears in my inner labia and ripped open my perineum, both the skin and the muscle beneath.

  It’s a significant tear, the doctor announced somberly. But, he added, you’re fortunate: you didn’t tear through the anal sphincter.

  I barely heard him. Purple and wailing, June was on my chest, and I prodded her upper arm gently, admiring its pudge. Brandon leaned over us, stroking my hand, which I now saw was smeared with my own blood. We studied the face we’d made. Nine pounds! The weight of two shrink-wrapped chickens at the grocery store. Here was the child of my body, our child, a round face with Brandon’s cleft chin and dark hair. I saw on her my father’s fingers, widest at their middle knuckle. Stitching me up took an hour.

  Brandon and I were the first of our friends to have a baby. I’m not sure the formidable physicality of birth can be imagined, envisioned, or prepared for. The contours of motherhood only appear in their true specificity once you’re inside it. Vaginal or labial tearing is extremely common, but I remember no mention of it. I might have heard something in passing, maybe in our childbirth class, but I’d never met a woman who spoke of having a tear. As far as I knew, I was alone in the wreck of my body.

  We came home from the hospital when June was thirty-six hours old. Who was this—the woman in my clothes, limping through our front door, holding this baby? My perineum was swollen as a soaked sponge. Using the toilet, I was certain I would rip down the middle. Why didn’t anyone tell me? I wondered aloud to the towels hanging on the wall. I knew I should probably look at the tear, make sure everything was healing all right. But I was too scared, so I asked my mother to do it. I never saw what it looked like.

  Before June was born, we’d devised a nighttime plan. We would set up the co-sleeper on my side of the bed. We thought that made sense, because I was the one with the boobs. In the night, when she would wake, I would be able to lift her out, bring her to my chest, and feed her, both of us pleasantly half-asleep. But because of my tearing, and because learning to breastfeed is not easy, I needed help.

  So we altered the plan, and in the beginning, when June woke in the night, Brandon and I both got up. He lifted her out of the co-sleeper while I wriggled out of bed. We shuffled across the hall to the nursery. He turned on the lamp and changed her while I settled into the rocking chair and positioned my various pillows. Then Brandon would place June in my arms. I’d been taught to hold my breast with one hand like a sandwich, compressed between my thumb and four fingers. I would tilt her chin toward my Dagwood sandwich and hope she’d open wide. If all went well, and it usually did after a few tries, she’d latch on and settle, and Brandon would lie down at our feet, his head on a pile of baby blankets. What I felt for him those nights was huge, vital, like its own presence, a fourth being in the nursery. I had never loved him more.

  Brandon cooked in the restaurant every night it was open, five nights a week. When he needed time off, we closed the restaurant. That’s what we did when I went into labor: we closed for two weeks, and for those two weeks, he took care of June and me. I was exhausted, deranged with emotion, reeling with love. Brandon was a natural parent, calm and instinctive. He knew how to hold her when she cried. He changed every single diaper. I was doing okay, all things considered. I have to remind myself of that, because I forget.

  My milk came in when it should, and June was growing. But breastfeeding was painful, and week after week, it didn’t stop hurting. I’d try not to let June sense my discomfort, scrambling to make small adjustments, right whatever was wrong. But I didn’t know what was wrong, and no one else did, either. Everyone said breastfeeding might hurt, but not for long. Maybe my nipples just needed more time, they said, to toughen up.

  The day after June was born, Brandon had given me a present, a brand-new iPad. Neither of us had used one before, and we were giddy. He’d bought it, he explained, so I could watch shows while I breastfed. One of those nights when he lay on the nursery floor, he set it up for me. It was a dumb expensive thing, but there was care behind it, sweetness and intention. I never used it. The tablet was too big to hold with one hand, and I didn’t have a free hand anyway, because I needed both to hold and position June, to try to fix whatever was hurting me. I don’t like to think about the iPad, the measure in aluminum and glass of the chasm between our plans and reality.

  Not long after we got home from the birth, I remember sitting in our living room and imagining clearly, as though it were unspooling on the rug at my feet, a labeled timeline of my life. At one end was birth and at the other death, and in between were a series of notches, like markings on a ruler. Puberty. First Job. Lost Virginity. College Graduation. Master’s Degree. Marriage. Restaurant. House. Child. As I’d made my way along the line, each notch had felt triumphant. Now I’d passed beyond “Child.” This was different. This too was a triumph, but it was also, I sensed, a turn, a U-bend in the line. This notch seemed to mark a rupture, the end to some ramping-up.

  I hardly remember June as a newborn. I remember my love for her like it was a room I lived in. When she was born, her eyes were late-evening blue. I remember looking at her swaddled in the crook of my arm, thinking, This person is my child. This person will be with me when I die. This thought made my chest ache happily, as reassuring as gravity. But a thought like that, I sensed, was only sane within the specific context of my life, with its specific history of deaths: my uncle Jerry when I was not even ten, and then on from there. My father was dead. The year after my father died, an uncle went too, his aorta exploding while he raked leaves. At twenty-five weeks pregnant, I saw my aunt Tina die. To love my baby was to be haunted. Ghosts filled the room of our love, kept us company.

  I knew I probably shouldn’t tell anyone about the ghosts, though it didn’t feel morbid to me. I never thought of hurting my baby or myself; that would have been something different. I found no pathology in the act of looking at my baby and thinking about death. This was grief, and grief was something I knew well. It was part of the old me, the pre-motherhood me. I w
as still here.

  When Brandon went back to work, June was two weeks old. He was exhausted. I was too, but I was more worried about him. Since the early days of Delancey I’d had a strange emotional tic, an impulse toward panic whenever Brandon was run-down or sick. If he was out of commission, it would mean more work for me. This felt true, and sometimes it was. Of course the line of causation was never so direct, never without complicating factors. But this did not dissuade me: I should, and would, make sure Brandon was all right. New parents are famously short on sleep, but the ones I’d seen, or heard of, had been able to manage it. We would manage it. I would manage it. Other mothers were able to.

  It occurs to me now that I didn’t know many other mothers.

  When we became parents, I needed Brandon’s help. But I had trouble identifying what I needed, putting my fingertip on it. I’d had little practice. Wasn’t I supposed to be a modern, independent woman? Wasn’t that the idea?

  And now Brandon had little to give. He was our breadwinner. Anyway, I felt lucky: even with Brandon back at work, he would usually be with us until lunchtime. He held June for hours, played music and sang.

  I did ask for help with a few minor tasks, things I couldn’t seem to get done on my own. I asked him to empty the dishwasher and the diaper pail, replenish the diaper stack on the shelf, and take out the garbage. I listed the tasks on a slip of paper and taped it to the kitchen cabinet. This way he wouldn’t forget, and I wouldn’t have to remind him.

  The list helped for a few days, and then it stopped working. He said he forgot to look at it. I knew he too was tired, was struggling, overwhelmed. I knew he worried about me and June when he was at work and that he worried about work when he was with us. But I was furious that he couldn’t remember a few measly chores, that he could forget my requests so easily. I was furious that he didn’t notice when the tasks weren’t done. I noticed, because it impacted me.

  I just never think of it, he said. You know how my brain works. I just don’t notice the same things you do.

  I need you to start noticing, I said. I need you to try. This is our house. Our baby. I need you to do this.

  But I’m already doing so much! he cried. You never notice how much I am doing.

  I see all of it, I said. And I need more. Just for a while.

  But you’re better at these things, he said.

  I need you to figure it out, I begged. Get good at them.

  But these things are more important to you than to me. How am I supposed to remember stuff that’s not important to me?

  While a woman is taking care, who takes care of her? It’s an earnest question: I want to know.

  I wanted Brandon to care for me because I cared for him. Admittedly, it didn’t always look like care. When he was worn-out, I would snap, frustrated and bitter. He was bewildered by this and rightly asked why, when he got sick, I got mean. I flailed around like Oz behind the curtain.

  He was working hard, and I knew it. Every time we argued, we wound up here: I felt mean, cruel. I didn’t want to be cruel. I didn’t want to be crazy. I wanted to be reasonable. He was running Delancey and now Essex too, which was barely off the ground. We shouldn’t have rushed to open it before the baby came. It had been bad advice. We had three babies: Delancey, Essex, and June.

  At my six-week postpartum checkup, the doctor peered closely at my perineum.

  You can hardly even see a scar, he announced. It’s healed beautifully! I could hear the grin even with his face out of sight.

  Elation swelled my chest. He had expected this, but I hadn’t believed him. Now I lay on the exam table, heels in the cold plastic cups of the stirrups, and looked at June in her car seat on the floor, asleep in a green fleece hat. My body, I reeled, did all this.

  In my senior year of college, I’d taken a class about the ethics of medical interventions, and for it I’d written an essay about my irregular periods and probable infertility. I was stunned by how little it seemed we knew about bodies, despite centuries of scientific research and study. Female bodies, in particular, remain barely within our comprehension, because the majority of studies have been on male bodies, white male bodies.26

  I’d assumed that my body was one way, that it was empty. Now its tally of amazements was growing in plain sight.

  What birth control do you plan to use? my doctor asked matter-of-factly, peeling off his gloves.

  My eyes snapped to his face. Oh, I squeaked. I haven’t even thought about it. Condoms?

  Have you and Brandon thought about having sex? he asked. I shook my head. Well, you’re healed enough now to get back to it. You can have sex anytime you’d like.

  Okay, I said. I didn’t expect to want it soon, but okay.

  I know everything is different, he said, and that caring for a baby is hard work. But you should think about it soon—you know, get back on the horse.

  Hadn’t this man just been examining my injured vagina? Now we were talking about intercourse, and he was urging me to have it.

  Sex is vital to a relationship, he pronounced. If it’s not reestablished, the relationship can suffer. Sometimes a husband will look elsewhere.

  I remember the night it started. It was November 13, 2012, and June was nine weeks old. That night she slept from seven to seven with only one waking, our best night yet. I was awake for most of it.

  Sleeping as a new mother was never uncomplicated. Merely falling asleep required an assertion of willful ignorance, the ability to forget—or to not care—that I’d be up again in a couple of hours. But sleep was something that I knew how to do, and when I could get it, I took it.

  That night I couldn’t get back to sleep after her feeding. It was barely midnight. I studied the fuzzy edges of the halo cast by the nightlight. The bulb was the color of the pumpkins still on our front stoop. Maybe the nightlight is keeping me up. I rolled over. My people were breathing loudly. I reached for a pillow, pressed it over my ear. Hours passed this way. When the slits between the blinds began to lighten from black to silver, I got out of bed and tiptoed to the kitchen. There was a cottony fog blowing up the street, thick enough to obscure the house across the way. The streetlamps were still on; I watched the fog rush by them, steady as a sheet of frosted glass.

  Later that morning, once Brandon was awake, I would joke about not sleeping. I didn’t want to panic anyone, least of all myself. How crazy, right, that June slept so well, the same night that I slept so little?

  That evening, in the bathroom mirror, I noticed with a start that June and I were wearing identical striped shirts. We’d worn these clothes all day, and I hadn’t noticed. It was a little thing, but it unsettled me. I’d been in the bathroom with her multiple times, and it was like I hadn’t been there at all.

  A night of sleeplessness is normal. Difficulty is normal. I’m supposed to remember this. It’s supposed to reassure me. That night, I was reassured by my own exhaustion, because when people are exhausted, they sleep. Sure enough, I fell asleep easily, as I always had. But after June’s first feeding, I was again awake. Don’t rush to catastrophize, I thought. Difficulty is normal.

  But now every night is the same, always present tense: I am awake.

  It doesn’t get better with time. It gets worse. All day, I dread the night. I call the doctor. He too struggles with insomnia, he confides.

  If you find yourself awake, he says, get out of bed. Don’t force yourself to keep lying there. Make a cup of herbal tea, take a book to the living room. You’ll sleep again soon, he says. No one can go without it for long. Remember: if you don’t sleep well one night, you’ll probably sleep well the next night.

  I didn’t. Each morning I woke up at one of the hours that’s not night or day, hours familiar only to nightshift workers, cashiers in convenience stores, and mothers. I cinched the belt of my terrycloth robe, the flesh there soft and dimpled as focaccia, and shuffled to the living room to wait. June was eleven weeks old. She was sleeping the kind of long, reliable stretches we’d fantasized about tw
o months earlier. Now I had a new fantasy: to sleep like a regular person again. During the day I’d sometimes nod off, desperate for a nap. But if I napped during the day, I’d sleep even less at night. I told Brandon that we’d made a mistake. We shouldn’t have had a baby.

  My doctor wrote a prescription for Ambien. I’m so sorry, he said. I took one tablet, ten milligrams, at bedtime. That first night I was hopeful, though I worried: With me drugged like this, would I hear June when she woke? I fell asleep quickly, but five hours later I was awake, without a peep from June. Before sleeping pills, at least I’d sleep until she woke me. Now there was an alarm in my bloodstream: the half-life of Ambien. Now I started to feel able to point to it: this was not normal.

  “After I became a mother,” writes author Sarah Manguso, “I became at once more and less lonely. I feel less lonely when I consider the nameless others, the unknown billions, who have participated in this particular loneliness.”27 I wanted to lose myself in their number. But most nights, I could imagine no other existence. Manguso again: “Whatever you’re feeling, billions already have. Feel for them.”28 I couldn’t get far enough outside my skull to try. Like physical pain, like a broken bone, this being-alone was inside me, with no beginning or end. No one could reach it. This is when I agreed to give it a name.

  Had my doctor suggested this earlier, and I’d rejected it? Had he tried to name this problem earlier, and I’d refused to hear? It had been four weeks since I’d lost the ability to sleep. It felt like decades. I don’t know.

  I gave June to Brandon and went into the nursery, which was empty, to take my doctor’s check-in call. I paced while we talked, my eyes grazing every object, nervous as a hummingbird. There’s Goodnight, Moon, the well-worn copy from when I was a baby; there’s the diaper pail, oh, we should empty that; there’s the mobile we got off our registry, a trio of paper swallows that dart and wheel. There’s the swaddle she slept in last night, a few hairs stuck in the Velcro. My doctor would phone in a prescription for Zoloft, fifty milligrams a day.