WAS PREGNANT WITH OUR FIRST SON, I SUCCUMBED FOR a brief period to large ponderous reflections about the big stuff: Family. Motherhood. Lineage. Heritage. For a short time, I frequently thought about contacting my mother, whom I hadn’t seen in twenty years, but then I never got around to it. And then, very suddenly, my brother Todd died, and ten days later my own son was born and because of the inverted parallel of that, I wrote her a note. It was a clean, straight condolence note with appropriate compassion, and at the end I offered to arrange my family for a visit to Vermont, where she lives and rarely, if ever, leaves. After twenty or so years of being asked, when it comes up in casual conversation, why I don’t speak to my mother, I can still barely even cogently explain, because there was, wasn’t there, all that sitting in the lap and the wine going down her throat and the fun games in the pantry and the honeysuckle beads—and we were not, were we, burned with cigarette tips or made to sleep on dog mats leashed to a radiator. She was, wasn’t she, the very heartbeat of the most cherished period of my life? So what is there to make of the simplistic thing I’ve come to utter in explanation, which is so drab, so monochromatic, so water on top of ice even though it’s the most direct, most distilled path from my heart to my mouth: I feel better without her.
I don’t know if she considered declining, but, in spite of the twenty years, she accepted.
So in October that year, I rented a car, gathered my infant son, my husband of two years, and my milky self and all of our shit into the Volvo wagon and hit the road for the eight-hour drive to her home in the Northeast Kingdom, where she lives, just an hour short of Montreal. Michele loaded the car with a case of very good Italian wines. He figured out the rear-facing car seat. He was ready only thirty minutes late instead of his more customary hour when I arrived to pick him up at his apartment. We were still then living separately. He had figured out our route on the computer and printed out the directions. He was really stretching himself.
By contrast, on the day that I went into labor I called him first thing in the morning when I realized that the cramps I had been having all night were accompanied by some sharp contractions at the end of each one and that there was a little bit of blood in my urine. He was not yet awake when I called at seven-thirty and had that funny sleeper’s defense where you pretend that you are wide awake in spite of having just been roused and you want to sound like you know exactly where is where, who is who, and what is what when in fact you are still wearing a narcotic brain helmet of cement and foam.
“ ’llo?” he grunts.
“Hey. It’s happening. Here we go.”
“Okay.”
“So, I’m going to shower and then take a cab to your house. I’ll be there shortly. This feels like it’s really moving,” I said.
“Okay. Okay. Ciao.”
But when I arrived at his apartment with my sister in tow and all of my phone calls to the pertinent people—including the doctor—already made, and my little bag all packed just so, he was just turning on the shower, letting the water run to get hot. He was standing there in his boxers and a T-shirt. Melissa looked around the apartment, saw the crib in a box in the corner, and said, “Hey, Michele, you’ve got to get a move on here, guy. She’s having a baby, like, right now. This is it. This is real. You’re having a baby, Michele.”
“Okay, okay,” he said, making that very Italian gesture of shrugging his shoulders high up to his long, low-hanging Italian ears and holding open both of his hands as if to say: What can I do?
“Take your shower, man, and let’s go,” Melissa directed.
He got in the shower and meanwhile my labor came on hard and fast. Major contractions, five minutes apart. I was on the couch clenching my teeth and mooing like an angry cow every five minutes. Melissa paced around, cleaned up the espresso cups and grounds in his sink, wiped down the counters, and tried to straighten up his apartment a little bit to make