Laura Chapman’s love of music lived on in Mandy’s piano fingers. I’d often stare at my friend as if she were cut from stained glass, sacrosanct, golden, and godly. On the treble clef of my existence, a never-ending fermata lodged itself like jealousy. This girl had it all, except, of course, she did not have a mother, and I did. My parents often banned Christopher and me from their bedroom, the site of what they called “P and Q time,” for peace and quiet. On several occasions, though, my mom invited Mandy to stay and talk, Mandy accepting my mom’s generous offer. My friend suffered real pain, horrific compared to my annoying neediness and seemingly contrived emotional wounds. I left the bedroom, surrendering my mother to Mandy, the deafening click of the door blotting out my generic sadness.
I was born into a world in which fathers killed mothers, and mothers killed children, and further yet, intelligent and well-intentioned adults provided stories to explain these acts. Brenda Lund brutalized the baby her body had painstakingly created, and I was painstakingly obsessed with regenerating a baby from the one my body dispensed of too quickly. But even if Brenda Lund and I were flip sides of the same hot coin, I suspected we shared common ground in the crepuscular depths of our womanhood.
Between the day we returned from Door County and the day I began teaching my fall university classes, Ryan and I coexisted without speaking much, mostly out of necessity. We needed to buy school supplies, attend open houses, wash and sort school clothes, and worst of all, as usual, I needed to draft and post my syllabi. As if by osmosis, separated from me only by some permeable membrane, Ryan absorbed my emotions, disappointment and hopefulness, until we reached equilibrium.
Throughout our lives together, since sixth grade, he’d been making me laugh, often with such turbulence that I’d pass gas or wet my pants, but much to his disappointment, I had taken my period, and his celebratory jokes, not with the smallest dose of levity. Rather than tilting my head back, smiling wide, all gums and teeth, I curled inward, doubled over, ministering to myself, consumed by a covert longing for that fifth child. “It was easy to measure your sadness,” he later said, and whenever I could not soothe myself, Ryan would become my healer, if not with jokes, stories, and funny accents, then with something much deeper beneath the surface of tomfoolery and wisecracks.
Ryan had taken up recreational hockey to bond with our sons. Leo played beautifully and Frank could skate backward by the time he was two. Hockey was also indispensible to Ryan’s health-management plan, ever in flux. Once he began to shred ice, he also managed to cut pounds, progressing, gradually, toward a lower number on the bathroom scale. The league he played in ran late Tuesday nights, the only slot for which they could finagle ice time. He texted me after my first day back on campus: “Off the ice. Hitting showers.” He’d be coming home fresh, clean, and ready for bed, just before ten o’clock.
I nursed Franco to sleep and slipped out of his bottom bunk before Ryan’s keys jangled in the back door. As he climbed our creaky stairs and probed our room in the dark, we were strangers, my husband just a dark shadow having come by special request to my bedside. His skin was supple and moist from bathing. I could smell his cleanliness. Without notice or hesitation, he undressed and poured himself into the mold of my body.
Ryan and I talked about making a baby less explicitly since the miscarriage, but he’d been telling me for years, “A boy is the only way I can ever think of another baby.” Although we tried not to gender our children, inevitably the girls, like me, were emotive yet mercurial, intense but elusive, and because he himself had been raised in the absence of girls, Irie and Fern caused him greater anguish than Leo or Frank ever did. Our children took turns asking how babies were made, Fern the most earnest. When I described intercourse, she followed up by asking, “Do you do it in the bathroom?”
That narrow tiled space was where we most practiced intimacy, I suppose. It was where Fern had climbed into my bubble baths, or stood naked by the toilet, leaning over to touch her own toes so I could wipe her bottom from behind. She once caught me removing a tampon and gasped, “Is that a bone?” as if I’d reached inside and magically plucked a rib.
“No, we make babies in bed,” I said. “We like to be comfortable.”
Under perfect conditions, the male sperm, which are fast but fragile, will reach the egg faster than the female sperm, which are slow but hearty; this works, though, only if the egg has just descended through the fallopian tube. On that night, all signs pointed to “yes.” I imagined it dropping through a secret tunnel like a gumball in a machine. In my mind’s eye, it was sticky and translucent. We began in missionary style and never switched positions, rocking as quietly and as purposefully as ever. Though Ryan was nearly twice my weight, he felt weightless against me. Then, as my body swallowed his DNA, I closed my eyes and could see the sperm swimming to meet my egg as if illustrated for some kind of sweet children’s
