McNally was tattooed from earlobes to knuckles. The inky scar tissue in the folds of his arms could be mistaken for old chicken pox, the same bumps all pre-vaccine kids scratched into permanence. When he balled his fists, they read B-O-R-N R-E-A-L. Drugs were emblems on his skin—marijuana leaves and pill-shaped outlines labeled XANAX, OXYCONTIN, and ADEROL [sic]. His face remained untouched by sun. He spent most of his adult life behind bars, according to the calendars above his pectoral muscles, etched like ancient scrolls.
My only markings are moles, a scar where I carved a boy’s initials onto my thigh with a razor blade, and stretch marks from pregnancy. I’ve always hated tattoos; ink on skin—from a marker, pen, ink pad, or needle—unnerves me, turns me queasy. Everybody is a puritan about something. McNally’s torso was labeled like an illustration in a textbook of anatomy: CARNEY, ANARCHIST, 100% FELON. In fine print the Bible passage: FOR THE WAGES OF SIN IS DEATH, BUT THE GIFT OF GOD IS ETERNAL LIFE. Smack-dab in the middle, where paramedics would perform CPR compressions if necessary, was a tattoo of Eeyore from Winnie-the-Pooh, whimsical yet despondent, fallen under the weight of his woes.
“My mom used to call me Eeyore because my eyes were always red. I was always like boo,” McNally told me, voice languid and faintly Southern. With nothing but an army bag full of clothes to his name, McNally flexed his forearm, lamented the serious matters. “I seen a lot of dirty stuff,” he said, but he refused to boo-hoo himself. “We’re all dealt a hand,” he continued, “and this is mine.”
McNally opted out of a GED in juvy but was proud of his street smarts. He gave me a detailed lesson in the alchemy of prison tattoos: “You take an electric shaver, the spring from an ink pen, and the pen itself. You cut the heel off the state-issued boots, catch the black soot in a bag, scrape it out and combine it with an ounce of water and a half ounce of alcohol. Ink is powder before it becomes a liquid form. It’s redefined soot.”
“You sound like you could mix up anything,” I told him. “You sound like a magician.”
While earning his law degree, Ryan received his lowest grade in criminal procedure because he idealized civil litigation, not a life defending addicts: his clients and eventually his wife, whose addiction to babies would become the most shocking but pleasant surprise of her life. Just as the state charged Rob McNally and Darlene Eaves with drug offenses, feminist colleagues accused me of delivering babies to sell women down the river, treating me as if pursuing maternity—to an excessive and environmentally dangerous degree—and a professional identity were a crime, a sign of witchcraft, or both. Plenty of women in academia chose not to become mothers at all.
“You’re a baby factory,” a friend told me, bitters on her tongue. In earlier decades, people seemed to gawk less in public at families of ten or twelve, and therefore I was slow on the uptake about how to handle myself socially when claiming three, and later four, children. People today expected me to be self-deprecating and humorously apologetic. “Oh, you know, I’m the old lady who lives in a shoe,” I learned to say.
While friends and family joked about our proliferation, oftentimes with sports references—“You’ll have your own basketball team” or “Now, you just need a goalie”—I’d always recall a colleague who pontificated about adoption when I was seven months pregnant with Fern, swollen as a planet. “I can’t imagine why someone would give birth when so many children need to be adopted,” she said. “It’s so wasteful to keep bringing babies into the world.” As Fern skinny-dipped through my waters, I nodded and tried not to appear like an extraterrestrial having descended on academic culture bearing the unsightly gift of Jupiter.
My closest students continued to confide that English majors and professors talked about me behind my back. “She’s no feminist,” they’d whisper. “She has babies and wears dresses.” I’d begin my courses in women’s studies with discussions on the misconceptions of feminism just to clear away the clutter before teaching about what I really loved—language and stories. The assumption also, of course, was that Ryan and I probably had lots of crazy sex, throwing caution to the wind.
Everyone, not the least of all Ryan, troubled over the rapid-fire pacing of our children. By 2009, a year after Fern’s birth, I’d begun to actively campaign for baby number four, hopeful I could deliver him on or around Fern’s second birthday. A MEG officer might argue, if babies were converted into bindles of dope, I’d delivered twelve kilos or forty-five thousand dosage units in little more than half a decade, serious drug trafficking, more heroin than Rob McNally could jack up in a lifetime without dying. I’d need to either cluck my habit or get more cunning about my grind. I was just as addicted to the birdie powder as McNally was, and Ryan was burned out, wasted, totally cashed. But facing neither prison nor execution, I was fighting my own demons. To make meaning of life, people I knew turned to religion or drugs, opposite ends of a continuum for solving the existential crisis, and I’d landed in some bizarre hybrid of both, feeling spiritually devoted and chemically addicted, simultaneously, to my body as vessel.
I wasn’t just imagining or willing it into existence. Babies had rewired the pleasure center of my brain. Like my aunt who was addicted to eating and QVC, my brother to drugs, my stepbrother and a half brother to booze, all I could fixate on was landing more pleasure. I reminded myself of those cautionary tales about Wisconsin sports enthusiasts. They’d drink to stay warm while deer hunting or ice fishing but then end up so numb, they’d fail to notice the frostbite as their toes
