iii.
When it comes to physical detail, I’m not the most observant person. This is difficult to admit. A critique of my writing brought my attention to this. When I first started out, I’d written a few stories and showed them to friends. One said, “You have a flair for describing people’s actions and motivations, but you aren’t a visual writer.” I was defensive, but I took his critique to heart. It was a gauntlet he’d thrown down. If I hadn’t written in a visual style before, I’d learn. My next story would be so visually evocative, he’d have to admit he was wrong.
I was living in Rome, during a study abroad program. It was my junior year in college, and after he said this, I sat looking at things, examining them. I wanted to describe with precision everything I looked at. Yet, this was a strain. I could do it if I pushed myself, but I didn’t see the point in setting a scene when I wasn’t interested in it. The setting had to relate to character if I was going to use it, but I didn’t have the confidence to assert this, to understand what I wanted to achieve. So, I went overboard. I described buildings and statues and rivers for their own sake, even if they had no function in the work. My stories suffered bloat, lost momentum. It was a few years before I realized I had to find a balance between these elements. I understood that place mattered, but only in so far as it affected story. I liked watching people, but rather than catalogue physical features, I watched what they did—behavior, body language, intuiting how they felt, what they wanted, understanding why they did the things they did. To me, this was more interesting than the color of a sweater or the way the weather wore away rock over decades to form disparate shapes in the side of an edifice or the variation in textures of sunlight through the seasons.
I’m not without vision. I watch my wife sometimes, note the brown in her eyes, the way, now that I’ve known her a decade, small wrinkles have developed around the edges from lack of sleep, from worry, from waking in the middle of the night to care for our daughter. I watch her profile in the car as we drive and see these features, features that tell me she’s aging, features that, because they’re signs of age, are embarrassing to her. But no physical description of these lines can do justice to the beauty I see in them, the humanity of my wife.
When I married her, I’d taken a vow to spend my life with her, and I have every intention of making good on that promise. The beauty in those lines is the beauty of our union, of longevity. I’ve been around for every moment those lines were etched. And this doesn’t mean diminishment or weakness, but strength. The tasks that place these lines on our faces, the stressors that test us, these are the marks of marriage. We can see them as either ravages or testaments. Over time, the lines grow deeper; the strands of hair on my head, the little patches of brown I have left, will disappear; and rather than fight this, we should learn to love our captor, to celebrate time, to exalt it. Yet, to capture my wife’s face with words proves the futility of visual style divorced from emotion, from gesture. A description of these lines in her face means nothing without the way I feel about them. And this is what I visualize day-to-day whenever I’m away from her. And this is where my thoughts turn as I enter the building where my doctor’s office is housed. I think of this as I go through the sliding glass doors and hit the button for the elevators, as I waive my hands beneath the hand sanitizer dispenser and rub them together. Because maybe the point isn’t to get back to where we were, to capture past feelings, but to figure out how to make our present work, to go forward.
I’m almost ready to apologize, but there’s a time and place, so even if I’m ready, I have to wait for the right moment. It won’t do to say it over chat, given the number of times I’ve said it there and she’s missed it. I have to say it in person, in a quiet moment between the two of us, so she’ll hear it, understand I mean it. She needs to hear more than the words. She needs the tone, the tone that says, this isn’t contrition, it’s kindness, a coming together.
The problem is that these days, she seems to be in a bad mood more than a good one. Even when I do things right, when I try to surprise her and do something nice, I run into obstacles, a dour face, listlessness.
One afternoon, earlier in the year, she’d had to take Sadie to a doctor’s appointment. She dropped our daughter off at daycare afterward and then worked from home. When she got back, she messaged me.
“I should take a vacation week every year in January,” she wrote. “I’m bound to be sick or have other things to take care of. A morning like this makes me spend $19 on lunch.”
“Elaine’s Kitchen Table?” I asked.
“Yep, soup, sandwich, whoopie pie the size of my fist. How’s your day going?”
“Well, my sinus headache is gone, so it’s looking up.”
“This whoopie pie is disappointing. I can’t even eat it.”
“That sucks,” I wrote. I meant it. I wanted her lunch to be good. A few days later, I researched the best whoopie pies in Philly and found a place called The Flying Monkey in Reading Terminal Market. I bought three—classic, cookies and cream, and pumpkin chocolate chip. The clerk packed them in a plastic container and gave me a brown paper bag to carry them in. When I got home, I held up the bag for Justine. “Guess what I got for you!” I said. But she wasn’t interested. She sat on the couch and stared at me dully.
“I’ll see what it is after dinner.”
It was Friday. She’d been home with Sadie, she was tired. But I needed some acknowledgment. I’d felt her disappointment Monday and wanted to see her smile. Sadie sat in front of the TV, watching Daniel Tiger. I went to the kitchen, placed the pies on the counter. Once we finished dinner, she saw them and she was pleased. The pies were better than the fist-sized one she’d had from Elaine’s, and she thanked me, but her enthusiasm was forced, as though she had to show gratitude she didn’t feel, and she showed it in words but not emotion. Was something else wrong, something I wasn’t seeing? Sadie was two, a bit late for post-partum depression, but still, it might be that—depression. I struggled from time to time, still longed for moments to myself, moments alone. But I’d known what was coming in ways she didn’t. Justine was the last of her parents’ four children. I was first. In both families, twelve years separated eldest from youngest. I was old enough to recall what my parents had been like raising my littlest sister, taking care of the rest of us, their tiny stresses, the way their time was taken up by their kids. I was a teen, self-involved, but I noticed, and when I looked back, I recognized what they sacrificed—taking us to sports practices and school plays, friend’s houses and work, dropping us off, picking us up. There was never a moment to sit still, to take a breath, and this took its toll.
Justine lacked this context.
Had she pictured this being easier?
Before Sadie was born, Justine had talked about getting new furniture, nice furniture. She’d talked about buying rugs.
“We can’t have nice things until the kids are grown,” I said.
At this point, Sadie was hypothetical, like the second child, the child we plan to have next fall.
“We’ll teach them not to jump on things. And they won’t be able to eat in the living room.”
“I’m not sure you understand what we’re getting into. Kids don’t have to jump on furniture to ruin it. They flop. I was a flopper. It doesn’t matter how many times you ask them not to flop. They don’t understand what they’re doing, so they keep doing it. They have no conception of worth. It doesn’t matter how much you teach them. They don’t understand until they’re older. And it won’t matter if they don’t eat in the living room. Kids get sick, they throw up on things. If we want a nice sofa, we need to wait. And as for the rugs, the darker, the better.”
So, maybe having a child wasn’t what she envisioned. But she’d prepared. And she’d prepared in a way that highlighted the differences between us. While I was timing the routes to Acme and daycare, keeping a carefully outlined schedule of my responsibilities so I’d know where I had room to fit the things I liked to do, she read books—What to Expect When You’re Expecting; What to Expect First Year. She’d scoured the pamphlets her OBGYN provided her. She was able to anticipate Sadie’s sleep patterns. She learned how to settle her down, help her sleep through the night. She knew when to introduce certain foods, when to start her using a spoon.
By the time my elevator arrives at the doctor’s office, half-a-dozen people are waiting. I board and press sixteen. Doctors in lab coats stand around me. There’s a pregnant woman and what I assume to be the child’s father standing there, too. I smile at them. I smile at all expecting couples. I don’t say anything, just nod, smile. I wish them the best, privately, in my head. I remember being there, waiting, expecting. You worry, hope nothing goes wrong, no miscarriage, deformities, abnormalities. You arrive at each ultrasound, frightened and hopeful, watch the grainy black and white blob on the screen, trying to make sense of the image. Is that a toe, an arm, a penis?
You spend nine months envisioning the child. Boy or girl? Some people opt to find out; we didn’t. We wanted to be surprised. During those months, I talked to Sadie in the womb. I made up a voice for her, pretended to be her. Since we didn’t know the gender, her voice sounded like a bad Louis Armstrong impersonation. I’d say things like, “Baby wants cookies, cookies are good, mmmm hmmmm.” I’d let the last sounds stick in the back of my throat, guttural, and Justine would laugh. “Baby wants some sweet potato pie, sweet potato pie is good, mmmm hmmmm.” They were joyous, nervous months. Were we ready? Ready or not, it was happening. And I know that, though it frightened me, it frightened her more. She had to give birth, to carry the child, to pass it from her body. The mere fact of my biology made in impossible to imagine what this was like. And I tried to remember this whenever I was upset with her—what she’d done, how brave she’d been.
In her first trimester, we’d gone to London. One of her company’s clients was holding a conference, and she managed to get her office to book a room for two. I paid for my flight, and we spent a week. Justine had lived in London during college. She had an Anglophile streak—the country’s music, its movies, its sights and sounds, its people, its pubs. She wanted to show me this, and she’d arranged for it to happen. And even though she’d been on call most of the day, running support for the conference, she encouraged me to wander, to explore, and I’d visited the Tate, the National Gallery, Buckingham Palace, the Globe Theater. I sat for hours, one afternoon, reading in Hyde Park. I visited Westminster Abbey. I lost myself and found my way again, as I like to do when I travel. And I’d only been able to do this because of she’d made it happen. She’d wanted me there, wanted me to have these experiences.
All this time, I’ve wanted her to recognize the small kindnesses I do for her, but I’ve forgotten the kindnesses she’s done for me. Is there some kind of statute of limitations on kindnesses? Why do the kindnesses we do each other fade? Of course, when I think of it, that trip to London, I think of how she’d put me ahead of herself, how my happiness mattered. And I want to let every bad thing that’s happened between us, every slight, fall by the wayside. So, why do we fight? Is it simply because I haven’t seen this kindness recently? That kindnesses, large or small, need to be repeated? That my minor kindnesses aren’t being reciprocated? Gratitude is difficult to sustain. It’s too easy to see what you’re doing and fail to recognize your partner’s efforts. Maybe my gestures have become too frequent, too routine. Maybe hers, as grand as the trip to London was, are too far in the past, the memory fogged by closer, more distinct offenses. Maybe a balance can be struck, an alchemy between small and large gestures that will make us both content. But I harbor suspicions all the flowers or chocolates or whoopie pies in the world aren’t going to make her happy. But if these gestures won’t, what will?
The elevator arrives at my floor. I stop at the receptionist’s desk, give my name, fill out forms for the shot. I’ve been coming to this practice for a decade, but this is only the second time I’ve been to their new office. They used to have a floor in the Curtis Center, which was catty-corner from the building where I work, but they’d moved. I could see why. The old offices were dim, dreary. Most of the rooms faced the building’s interior. There was no sun. There were no windows. The waiting room had that congested feel waiting rooms do, as though the patients’ maladies were stored there, mingling, a yellow haze filling the stagnant air, lingering illness.
The new space is full of light, modern. Sixteen flights above the city, a series of plate-glass windows overlook North Philadelphia, which isn’t the most scenic region from the street, but most cities become picturesque from a bird’s-eye view, and North Philly isn’t any different. From this distance, you can’t read the graffiti sprawled across the sides of abandoned buildings, see the scores of homeless people propped against their sides, living in gutted rooms. Instead, there’s the outline of tall structures, evidence of once impressive feats of engineering, and the chairs in the waiting room face out on this. And the seats are new, plush, ergonomic. They’ve gone, in the course of their move, from the practice feeling like a place where the sick get diagnosed to an atmosphere of healing. It must have cost them, the polished wooden floors, the space so far up in a newly-constructed building.
A few months after their move, I received a bill. They claimed I owed them thirty dollars for appointments I’d had three years before. It was the first I was hearing about it, though the notice stated that after repeated attempts to contact me, they’d be turning it over to a crediting service at the end of the month. “What the fuck?” I thought. I’d never received anything. Where were the pervious notices? My copay for years had been thirty-five dollars. It had gone up to forty-five at some point, but I couldn’t remember when. I had the feeling I was getting strong-armed, but this was impossible to prove.
I called the number listed. A woman answered.
“How can I help you?”
“I got this bill that goes back three years,” I said. “This is the first I’m hearing of it, though it claims you’ve tried to contact me before.”
“Can I have your name and information?”
I could hear her keyboard clacking. I waited a moment, then she spoke and offered the explanation I’d intuited.
“Your copay at the time of service was forty-five dollars, but you only paid thirty-five.”
“You only charged me thirty-five.”
“What?”
“I paid by credit card. I always do. If I only paid thirty-five, it’s because you only charged me thirty-five.”
“But the copay was forty-five.”
“If I buy a two-dollar loaf of bread at the grocery store, and they only charge me a dollar, the grocery store can’t show up at my house three years later and ask for another dollar.”
“I’m not sure what you’re getting at, sir.”
“I can see that.”
I hung up. I’m not sure what I expected. Did I think they’d waive the cost if I raised hell? It wasn’t the woman’s fault. It’s how the system works. I considered changing doctors, but it wasn’t worth it. Not over thirty dollars. They wouldn’t notice I was gone. An angry letter would land on one of the customer service reps, get filed, forgotten. The wheels of bureaucracy chew up individual complaints. Besides, the location was convenient, and if I decided to change, I’d have to have my medical records transferred. I’d have to put in the effort to search for new doctor, then decide if I liked the new doctor. And if I didn’t, I’d have to look again. I only came here once or twice a year. Did it matter? It wasn’t the same as when we switched hospitals before Sadie was born. We’d had reasons then, legitimate ones, reasons of service.
In the beginning, we’d opted for the hospital closest our house. It was ten minutes away, they had a good reputation, but from the outset we’d had problems. Justine’s primary care provider and OBGY were located in Radnor, through the Penn Healthcare System. She could get appointments easily. Test results were available online within twenty-four hours. But the hospital near our house had no such system. She’d had to wait weeks for results. When she called for appointments, the automated service didn’t connect her with a receptionist, but asked her to leave a name and number and the office would return her call at their convenience. We should have switched earlier on, but Penn was a forty-five minute drive away. Since we’d never had a child, the idea of driving farther made us hesitate. What if there were complications? What if something went wrong? It was the difference between three miles and fifteen, and we weren’t sure we wanted to risk it. If the car broke down, we could call for an ambulance. But the added distance didn’t make sense.
We stuck with the local hospital until summer when they’d called and asked Justine to drop off paperwork right before Fourth of July weekend. She told them she could have it there by two-thirty, and they assured her they’d be open. But when she arrived, the office was closed. It was hot, upper-nineties, and she stood before the closed building and cried. “I want to switch to Penn,” she told me when she got home. I wasn’t going to protest. Checkups were closer to her office, so she didn’t have to miss work. The technology at Penn was more up-to-date.
By the time her water broke, the drive didn’t matter. It happened around midnight. I was watching TV and heard her hurry down the hall upstairs and slam the bathroom door. She went back to the bedroom, and I heard her talking. This is it, I thought. We got in the car and went. It was a few days after Christmas, past midnight, and the roads were clear, empty. We made what should have been a forty-five minute drive in twenty. I pulled up to the ER and got her out and into a wheelchair and went and parked the car and came back.
For the next three days, our world became that hospital room. In the months leading up to this, I’d been nervous that my anxiety attacks might return, that I’d break down, lose all composure, and fail my wife. But this didn’t happen. Rather, knowing that she was scared, that she was going to experience something that would change the shape of her body and cause her intense pain, my focus on her was complete. All trace of self-interest was gone. My senses were heightened, not to the extent that I perceived everything, but I sifted out the unimportant. The road before me, the presence of other cars, my ability to direct my vehicle from here to there was all that mattered. And once we arrived and they brought us into delivery, all that mattered was her.
As the contractions came and she pushed, I locked my hand with hers. I’d positioned it in such a way that she could grip it as hard as she needed. Crush it, it wouldn’t matter. The midwife was there, calling out encouragements, providing instructions, urging her to push, while I stood by with a cup of ice chips to feed my wife during her most intense moments. I massaged her back. I offered what counsel I could. She’d wanted a natural delivery but hadn’t slept most of the night. She’d known other women who’d done it, women she thought she was stronger than.
“If they could, so can I,” she screamed, and I responded, “It’s not a competition.”
She looked at me, and through the haze, she could see I was talking sense. She asked for an epidural and slept. And when Sadie arrived, when the first bit of her emerged, Justine clutched my hand and pushed, and it happened all at once. I’d expected a gradual emergence. But as soon as Sadie’s head sprung free, the rest of her body slid from my wife. I stood, looking, thinking, that’s my child, I have a child now, and they held her up. I hadn’t seen the sex, but my wife called out, “It’s a girl!” and they gave me scissors to cut the cord. I held my daughter for the first time, and a wave of the most immense elation swept through me.
The nurses took Sadie’s footprints and tagged her so she couldn’t be taken from the floor without setting off an alarm. They injected her with vitamin K, swabbed her eyes, and left us alone. In the recovery room, Justine and I watched her. The time felt otherworldly, removed from this realm of existence. There wasn’t a clock in the room—or if there was, I didn’t consult it—so we measured day by the light coming through the window. At night, our daughter cried, and Justine fed her. We changed her. I went to Wawa and got my wife something besides hospital food—donuts, a pretzel.
Sadie was now real for me in a way she hadn’t been before. I hadn’t felt her hiccupping or rolling over. When I’d felt her kick, it happened from the outside, with a hand pressed to the smooth flesh of my wife’s stomach. Sadie hadn’t grown inside me, so she’d been an abstraction. I knew she was inside my wife. I knew that a child would come into this world and we’d have to take care of it, but this was an amorphous idea. I even referred to her as “it,” since I didn’t know whether to call her “he” or “she.” My daughter had a powerful voice, her cry. She’d emerged with a wild shock of dark hair atop of her head. But most of all, I watched her eyes. They were keen, sharp, intelligent. I knew she couldn’t see clearly yet, focus on images. But she had an awareness from the outset that made me think she was special. All parents think this. But that didn’t matter. I convinced myself of her uniqueness. I was full of hope—hope she’d be intelligent, hope she’d be kind. She was brand new, and as someone new, she was full of potential. All the world’s potential, all of life, was there. And right then, I believed, whether true or not, that she could be anything, do anything. I didn’t have a specific plan in mind. I wasn’t going to chart the course of her life, imagine professions, urge her to like what we liked. My role was to introduce her to ideas, to possible areas of interest, to read to her, to help her know the world, to pay attention and guide her. I stood in that little room and watched her. I was letting my dreams take hold, and I didn’t care, it was all so wonderful. We stayed in that room—that little room where everything was new and strange, that room without time, divorced from time—and got to know our daughter.