“Our rideshare is two minutes away, but it’s been saying that forever.”came through the door and crowded
the nurses’ station. In the corner, a young
doctor with a shaved head and a young
doctor with a three-day beard stood
chuckling, their arms folded.
T
he first time I saw her, she was the
size of a lemon, fourteen weeks
old, swimming and slithering in mag-
nified staticky grays. As the technician
slid the thing across Kathy’s belly, the
parts ballooned, dissolved, flowed to-
gether like mercury. “Bladder, kidney,
thigh bone,” she said, as she captured
their images and checked them off on
a list. A black circle for the stomach, a
foot, the arm bones, two tiny rows of
what appeared to be teeth, curved into
a smile—the spine. But the woman
couldn’t find the nasal bone or the heart.
The baby was positioned so that her
skull cast a shadow. The O.B. entered
the room and frowned; the photos were
no good. Then Kathy pressed her fin-
gertips into her side, and for a second
I saw the baby’s four-chambered heart,
blood moving in a trapezoid, like the
ocean patterns around North America.
Kathy’s pregnancy ushered in a new
period of mystery, and was as unstop-
pable as the time that came before it,
the months that stretched into years of
hoping and trying and failing to make
a baby.
We’d met as housemates, over the
breakfast table, and, in the first endear-
ing sign, sought approval for other lov-
ers, her guy in the white leather jacket
with fringes, my scowling Teamster law-
yer. Kathy worked in neuro P.T., with
people who’d injured their brains, and
she was some years from having a doc-
torate. She was blond, Lutheran, selfish,
thin, and Nordic. She watched violent
cop shows at night, identifying (I as-
sume) with the victim. Every so often,
she knocked on my door at bedtime,
looking overheated and bloodshot, and
sat on my bed on a crying jag.
Her father died when she was a kid,
and an older brother was killed in a car
accident. Kathy’s mom, in a state of dis-
sociation from her remaining children,
moved out to the beach with a new
boyfriend, dropping off groceries once
a week for Kathy and her younger sib-lings back home. Kathy’s own brushes
with death soon followed, on the backs
of motorcycles, in cars that rolled. She
was, understandably, braced for disas-
ter. She’d been traumatized by her ca-
lamities and had a low tolerance for
suffering. Or high—I couldn’t figure
out which.
After the second miscarriage, we be-
came intolerant of people who were
pregnant or had small kids, and of peo-
ple with their own health problems,
and of people who did or said anything
that got in the way of their boisterous
commiseration with our struggle. Even-
tually, there was just my old friend
David, now wealthy from developing
shopping centers, and another barren
couple, Tom and Jessica, and my office
buddy, Maria, a loud, unashamed Greek
woman who looked like Fred Flint-
stone and told hilarious stories of her
one-night stands, and Kathy’s Water-
gate hairdresser, Amistad, and his shiny
boyfriend, Rick.
At some point, when it wasn’t going
so hot, I went to South Carolina to
write a report for the coalition I worked
for, on liquor-store employees who slip
on wet floors, fall on their own guns,
and shoot themselves. I left home again
for a bulletin on the rights of undocu-
mented immigrants being harmed in
industrial settings; it would be part of
a booklet we’d wave at Congress when
our bill came up, and ship to news bu-
reaus in our expensively illustrated year-
end portfolio. I met a man who’d been
crushed in an accident at an engine-cast-
ing factory near the Ontario border,
which the insurance people refused to
cover, then I spent two weeks at the
factory where he’d been crushed, sit-
ting at a card table by a two-story stamp-
ing machine, freezing my ass off. At
night, I’d relax at the dining-room table
in my bed-and-breakfast and talk with
the proprietor, sipping her rum, thank-
ful to have this work that was so re-
moved from reality.
Back home, there were blighted
starts and an ectopic pregnancy. We
took a break from trying, and rode our
bicycles together, and sat by the river
in Georgetown and chatted. “I guess
I’ve got a couple of good follicles,”
Kathy explained, and so we started
again. She had appointments and
things to inject herself with. “You