Mommies Who Drink Page 2

  Rananda continues, “I attended Anna’s last home birth. She was in labor for thirty-two hours. She managed the pain of her contractions by chanting and making a gorgeous daisy chain that encircled her garden twice.” She smiles at Anna and motions for her to sit down, a process I don’t watch. “During those hours, we laughed, ate peaches, and talked to Christie Brinkley on my cell phone. Christie reminded Anna that giving birth was as close as any being gets to being God.”

  I like the God part and even the little tidbit about Christie Brinkley. But my ass is killing me, and I wonder when we are actually going to get down to the yoga.

  “Everyone stand up,” Rananda says.

  The pregnant herd jostles and groans into position. It takes a good two minutes to get everyone standing.

  “Find a partner and hold her hand.”

  Now that they’re on their feet, the women match up very fast. I look around desperately. Moving through the pairs of women, I spot a short girl in a ripped Batman T-shirt backing into a corner. I make a beeline for her.

  “Hi. Want to be my partner?” I ask.

  “Sure.”

  I grab her hand, feeling the moisture between our palms squish. Rananda walks over to the sound system and fires up some chants.

  “Now just start walking,” she says.

  As we walk around in our twosomes, I listen to bits of conversations. Someone says that she just auditioned for a battered pregnant wife guest spot on ER, “but they gave it to someone who wasn’t really pregnant.” Her voice is tight with resentment.

  Rananda guides us through our walk, telling us to walk on our toes, step over imaginary boulders, and waddle on our heels—all while holding our partner’s hand.

  “I’m Ruth,” my partner says. “My husband and I just moved here. He’s a writer on Blind Date. So he’s gone a lot.” Her hand squeezes my fingers together. “I’ve been coming to Rananda every day. She’s terrific. Do you know that she coached Cindy Crawford privately? Of course, Cindy didn’t come here. She’d get mobbed.”

  Ruth scopes the room with hungry eyes.

  Rananda’s tinny voice rises over the chatter of the women. “Now stop where you are. Face your partner. Let go of each other’s hands and put your arms out to your sides, parallel to the ground.”

  She shows us—stretching her gauzy white arms out like a crucifix. I look at Ruth like, “Let’s agree to fudge on this one a bit.” But she looks back at me with a fixed, determined gaze. So I turn to face her, our bellies practically touching as we put our arms straight out.

  Rananda says, “Looking into each other’s eyes will give you the strength to hold this pose. We will hold it for as long as a contraction lasts. That’s three minutes. After having done this exercise for weeks, Leeza Gibbons said that she felt like she could have gone through three more hours of labor.”

  I hold the pose for a few seconds before I start to feel invisible weight pressing down on my biceps. I look into Ruth’s eyes for permission to put my arms down. She stares through my forehead into the back wall. She is all belly and will.

  Pain shoots through my shoulders and neck. My arms start to shake.

  I hear Rananda’s voice through the pounding of blood pulsing through my head. “While you are holding this pose, I want you to think of your birth and what you want it to be like. How do you want the lighting? Cindy had her birth at home on white sheets made out of one-thousand-thread-count cotton.”

  I feel the veins pop out of my neck like a relief map of the highway system to my heart. My chest clutches and knees buckle. I let out a moan and lower my quivering arms.

  I look at Ruth, who seems to have entered a misty realm, a ghostly otherworld. A world in which she is as strong as a Greek goddess. As beautiful as Cindy Crawford. A world in which there are no absent husbands working on Blind Date until two in the morning. She is the Venus of Willendorf—stone fertility goddess, timeless and iconic.

  And I am going to be sick.

  I grab my purse, stagger to the back wall, and lower myself to the floor, my legs wobbling. Two women sit there already, cross-legged, their backs resting against the cool, solid wall.

  “I think I had a small seizure,” I say, pulling a graham cracker out of my purse.

  One of the women dabs her forehead with her faded red T-shirt, her orb poking out for a moment.

  “I held it until I peed on myself,” she says.

  “It’s okay. Your pants are black,” I say. “I can’t see any wet spot.”

  The other woman turns to me. “Do I smell?” she asks.

  My heartbeat slows and I pull in a long breath.

  “I can’t smell you,” I say. “I don’t think anyone can smell you but you.”

  “Has anyone noticed,” says the first woman, “that there’s something oddly masculine about Rananda?”

  “I have a friend who thinks she’s a man,” I say. A feeling of deep contentment fills me. “Anyone want a graham cracker?”

  “Oh, yes.” They sigh like I have offered the gift of inner peace.

  My chest feels warm and tingly and the pain in my neck eases, as I break the graham cracker in half and hand it to the women to split among themselves.

  I have found my people.

  Busted

  He’s fine,” Pat says as I shudder on stiff white sheets in the recovery room. The shuddering a result of epidural withdrawal.

  He’s talking about our son, who was born half an hour ago.

  We have a son. After four epidurals, Demerol, and a C-section that terrified me so much I screamed, “OH JESUS OH JESUS OH JESUS” from first cut to last stitch. I didn’t feel pain exactly, but I did feel the pressure of the doctor shoving around my organs to find the baby who was pulled from my midsection and held high, screaming and dripping with blood like a satanic sacrifice.It is an image sure to dominate future dreams.

  “He’s fine?” I shiver.

  “He’s healthy,” says Pat.

  “Great.”

  My mind is dulled by drugs and, possibly, post-traumatic stress disorder. I have to look at Pat’s lips to make out his words.

  “He’s gorgeous,” say Pat’s lips.

  “Aww.”

  “He looks like you,” the lips say.

  “Really?”

  “There’s just one thing . . .” The lips make a thin line.

  I feel something sharp in my brain. I force myself to look from the lips to Pat’s eyes, which are soft.

  “A thing?”

  “His penis,” he says.

  “His penis?” I shake.

  “Yeah.”

  “Does he have one?”

  “Oh, yes,” Pat says casually, like this is no big deal. Which is what makes me think that it is a big deal. If I wasn’t numb from the neck down, I’m sure I’d feel my chest tighten.

  “They can fix it,” he says.

  “They’re going to fix his penis?”

  “Later. Not now.”

  I can’t grasp what he’s saying. We have a son with a broken penis, which they can fix, but not now?

  My teeth start to chatter, my shaking and mental fog becoming so severe that I feel like I’m in one of those movies in which the junkie-heroine has to cold-turkey it in a padded cell. I want to grab the collar of Pat’s borrowed surgical scrubs and beg for a teensy epidural bump. I need to get straight, man, if only to grasp what’s happening with my son’s penis.

  “Why can’t they fix his penis now?” I sputter.

  “They want it to get more mature,” he says.

  “A mature penis?” I quake.

  Even stoned, I can appreciate the oxymoron.

  “They said that this business about his penis is pretty normal,” says Pat.

  “Okay,” I say, not sure that we should refer to our son’s penis as business.

  “Sweetie, I’ve got to go now,” he says. “They said you have to be here for a couple of hours and I don’t want the baby to be alone.”

  “You’re leaving?”
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br />   “I’m sorry, honey,” says Pat. “It’s just that, remember, they said it’s a good idea for the father to stay with the baby.”

  I flash on our Lamaze class. The teacher with the crackly voice said that the father should stay with the baby, because sometimes they mix the babies up.

  “Right,” I say.

  Shake. Shake.

  Pat leans down and gives me a quick kiss on the cheek.

  I stare at the bouncing pale green wall, thinking that at least if they mix up the babies, we’ll know which is ours, because ours is the one whose penis is busted.

  My doctor assures me that the penis thing is no big deal, and I’m so stoned on a cocktail of painkillers that I forget to worry. The next four days in the hospital I actually have a blast. So many friends drop by that I think I should do this more often. It’s like having a long party that I didn’t have to clean or cook for, and I get to stay in bed. If I get tired or bored, I simply nod off and no one gets mad at me.

  Through it all, Spence lies in the crook of my arm, breathing against my skin, warm like a puppy.

  I even love my catheter. The last month of my pregnancy I was going to the bathroom every ten minutes. Not having to get up to relieve myself is such a joy I wonder if they’ll let me take it home.

  My room is filled with flowers and cute fuzzy stuffed animals. Food is brought to me on a tray. Special long straws bend so that I don’t even have to lift my head to take a drink. Every meal is topped off with strawberry Jell-O. I start to wonder why I don’t make strawberry Jell-O at home. I resolve to eat it after every meal for the rest of my life.

  My mother sits by my bed during the day, flipping through People magazines, fielding my calls. She picks up the phone when it rings, repeats the name of the caller, and I give her a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down. This is what it must be like to have a personal assistant. I vow to myself that I will have a personal assistant someday.

  At night Pat sleeps next to me on a tiny cot. The baby wakes only to eat, then dozes off. When I need to sleep, I press a button and a nurse comes to take my baby to the nursery.

  I can’t imagine why anyone would ever want to leave.

  My last day I sit up in bed eating Jell-O. I’ve put in my contacts and fluffed up my hair in case I get any last-minute visitors. My mother packs my things as Spencer, wrapped tightly like a papoose, sleeps in his clear plastic box.

  A woman with long blond hair, sprayed and winged away from her face, walks into the room. She looks like she was separated at birth from Loni Anderson. Her canary-yellow jacket has huge shoulder pads and it matches her canary-yellow miniskirt. She walks expertly on impossibly high heels. Her salmon-colored fingernails match her lipstick.

  “I’m Dr. Hiya,” she says.

  My mother gives me her “only in Los Angeles” look.

  “Hello,” I say, putting down my Jell-O.

  “I’m the urologist,” she says. Her fingernails click against the metal bar of my bed as she grasps it.

  “A urologist?”

  “For Spencer. I just came by to take a look at Spencer’s penis before he goes home.”

  Oh, right. I remember Spence’s penis.

  I look at Dr. Hiya’s jangling multihooped earrings and can’t believe that Pat is shooting a “Six Flags over Texas” commercial instead of being here with Dr. Hiya, the penis doctor.

  “Um, okay,” I say, nodding at Spencer.

  “Aww,” she says, going over to him. “What a cutie.”

  Let’s not get personal, I think.

  “Such a cute nose,” she says as she unwraps him.

  Fuzzy with Vicodin, I watch as her salmon nails undo his diaper. I look away. My mother’s eyes are round and fixed on the action.

  “Ah, I see,” I hear the doctor say.

  I distract myself by thinking about how and why Dr. Hiya chose urology as her specialty. It’s hard to imagine anyone wanting to be a urologist, but it seems especially rare that a specialist should have to choose between being a urologist or a Laker Girl.

  “Okay,” she says.

  Is Hiya her real last name? Or is it a name she made up? Is it a stage name? Her stripper name? I imagine her in a smoky club, grinding against a pole in a see-through lab coat. Normally, I have nothing against strippers. But this one has her hands on my son’s business.

  “Right,” she says with finality.

  She closes Spence’s diaper (is he smiling?) and walks over to me, tossing her hair behind a sculpted shoulder. I can still taste the sweet strawberry Jell-O in my mouth. Her nails click again as she rests her hand on the bar.

  “It’s a relatively common condition,” she says, and goes on to tell me that the skin underneath his penis is not long enough to allow for a full erection. She can correct it with a graft from his foreskin, a pretty minor operation she’ll do when he’s about eleven months old.

  “It’s a good age,” she says, “because they’re old enough to operate on, but too young to really know that you’re doing something to their penis.”

  “Once you do the operation,” I ask, “will it work like everyone else’s?”

  She smiles. “Yes.”

  I feel my body go soft. Until this moment I’ve been unaware of holding on to anything other than my buzz. But here it is—a letting go. Muscles going slack. Muscles do not lie. This letting go must mean I’m relieved. Relieved of what? Relieved of worry? Was I worried? Worried about Spence’s penis?

  I look over at him.

  It’s not his penis I’m worried about, I realize. It’s his happiness.

  Dr. Hiya reaches over and pats my hand with the IV in it. I flinch.

  “Mothers worry,” she says.

  Without thinking I look over at my mother.

  Then I think, Oh, wait a minute, it’s me. I’m the mother.

  I’m a mother.

  Friday

  I sit at Bird’s alone, pretending to read a book. It’s the same paperback I’ve dragged around the house, attempting to read, since Spence was born three weeks ago. Anne Tyler. I picked it because it’s easy for me to get lost in a Tyler novel. And I’m looking to get lost.

  I gaze at the words on the page. They bounce and merge randomly.

  I look up. Lana is late.

  Lana and I used to hang out here before I got pregnant. I remember the last time. We sat outside on a long summer day, sipping margaritas like there was nowhere we had to be.

  I look at my watch. Pat’s with Spence. He took off early from a stand-in job he’s been doing all week.

  The shape of Lana appears in front of the spill of afternoon light from the windows.

  “Traffic sucks,” she says. “I hate auditioning on the Westside.”

  “Sorry,” I say. I’ve walked here from my apartment just up the block.

  Lana slips onto the barstool next to me and plops her tiny purse onto the bar. The orange purse is so stuffed that the unzipped sides bow into a circle with papers, a wallet, sunglasses, and a phone spilling out.

  Why doesn’t she buy a bigger purse?

  “Hey, Mack,” she says to the bartender. “Pour me something sweet and hard.”

  She glances at my full glass of cabernet. “How’s that?”

  “I haven’t tasted it yet,” I say.

  She takes my glass and sips.

  “Not bad,” she says, putting it back on the napkin, matching the base to the red circle left by the spill of my glass.

  “So Pat called me,” she says.

  “He did?”

  “He thinks you should talk to me.”

  My eyes hurt. The bartender (Mark, Max, Mike?) places a golden drink with a submerged cherry in it in front of Lana. She smiles at him like he’s given her the perfect gift.

  She turns to me. “Mack works Fridays. About a month ago I was in here bitching to him about Tony.”

  Tony is Lana’s boyfriend. He’s a hunky Italian—ten years younger than Lana—who fathered her daughter. Lana doesn’t do anything safe.

  �
�What does Pat think I should talk to you about?”

  “Um . . . how about why you cry all the time and say that you want to give Spence back?”

  I take a sip of wine.

  “You know, Rananda says that you shouldn’t leave your house or your baby for forty days,” I say.

  “Sure,” says Lana, pulling stuff out of her purse that seems to expand and occupy more space than can possibly be contained in orange leather. “That’s what I thought I was going to do. Forty days of bonding in bed with Daisy. Breast-feeding. Rananda makes it sound like fucking bliss.”

  “Yeah.”

  “On the third day I started to think about how big a box I needed to get in order to send her somewhere.”

  “When did it get better?” I manage to ask. It’s the question I haven’t asked anyone because I’m afraid that the answer is “never.”

  “Um . . . ,” she says, her hand sifting through purse clutter until it locates a crumpled pack of cigarettes. “I don’t know. But it does. It’s kind of a slow thing. One day you wake up and you look at your kid and you like what you see and your head feels clearer and you think of things you’re going to do that day. And you don’t know what switched.”

  “That’s good,” I say.

  “And other days you find yourself wondering if throwing yourself out a five-story window would kill you outright or just make you paralyzed.” She pulls a cigarette out of the pack. “Want one?”

  Do I want one?! I look around to see if anyone’s looking. I haven’t had a cigarette since the ceremonial last one on my balcony when I was seven weeks pregnant.

  “God, yes,” I say.

  “Hey, Mack,” says Lana, “we’re back in a few.”