EXPECTING ADAM
A True Story of Birth,
Rebirth, and Everyday Magic

by Martha Beck







Published by: Times Books, Random House,
New York, New York. Further
reproduction or distribution in other than a
specialized format is prohibited.














Copyright 1999
by Martha N. Beck, Ph.d.
BOOK JACKET INFORMATION

"A wonderful book, funny,
unbelievably tender, and smart. It shimmers."
--Anne Lamott, author of Operating
Instructions

"He says you'll never be hurt as much by being
open as you have been by remaining closed."

The messenger is a school janitor with a
master's in art history who claims to be
channeling "from both sides of the veil." "He"
is Adam, a three-year-old who has never
spoken an intelligible word. And the message is
intended for Martha Beck, Adam's mother, who
doesn't know whether to make a mad dash for the
door to escape a raving lunatic (after all,
how many conversations like this one can you have before you stop
getting dinner party invitations and start pushing a
mop yourself?) or accept another in a series of
life lessons from an impeccable but mysterious
source.
From the moment Martha and her husband, John,
accidentally conceived their second child, all hell
broke loose. They were a couple obsessed with
success. After years of matching IQ'S and test
scores with less driven peers, they had two
Harvard degrees apiece and were gunning for more.
They'd plotted out a future in the most vaunted
ivory tower of academe. But the dream had begun
to disintegrate. Then, when their unborn son,
Adam, was diagnosed with Down syndrome,
doctors, advisers, and friends in the Harvard
community warned them that if they decided to keep the
baby, they would lose all hope of achieving their
carefully crafted goals. Fortunately, that's
exactly what happened.
Expecting Adam is a poignant,
challenging, and achingly funny chronicle of the
extraordinary nine months of Martha's
pregnancy. By the time Adam was born, Martha
and John were propelled into a world in which they were forced
to redefine everything of value to them, put all their
faith in miracles, and trust that they could fly
without a net. And it worked.
Martha's riveting, beautifully written
memoir captures the abject terror and
exhilarating freedom of facing impending
parentdom, being forced to question one's deepest
beliefs, and rewriting life's rules.
It is an unforgettable celebration of the everyday
magic that connects human souls to one another.

"Expecting Adam is Martha Beck's
meticulously written, uplifting, and
compassionate account of being gifted with a retarded
son who opens her heart to the deep intuitions that
love can bring."
--Judith Orloff, M.d., author of
Second Sight

Martha Beck is the "Quality of Life"
columnist for Mademoiselle, a career
counselor for Life Design Enterprises,
and the author of Breaking Point: Why Women
Fall Apart and How They Can Re-create Their
Lives. She also hosts a weekly TV
spot, "Ask Martha," on Good Day
Arizona. She lives in Phoenix with her
husband, three children, and best friend, Karen.




Advance praise for
Expecting Adam

"Set half in Harvard and half in heaven,
Expecting Adam is a tough-minded yet
tender-hearted book of spiritual discovery--a
rueful, riveting, piercingly funny, thoroughly
modern and deeply old-fashioned memoir. In
short, a book to be reckoned with."--Julia
Cameron, author of The Artist's Way

"I can't believe I almost didn't read this
book. The thing is, I thought it was about a lady
who had a baby with Down syndrome. This is like
saying Anna Karenina is a book about a
lady who commits suicide. In fact, this book
is about matters so important and yet so totally
way-out that I would accept no one but a comic
genius with seven years at Harvard under her belt
telling me about them. That's Martha Beck:
funny, companionable, razor-sharp,
down-to-earth, and onto the Big Secrets of
Life Itself. Anyone considering having a child should have
to read this book. It has changed some of my thinking
about pregnancy and about children with
disabilities, and I don't think it's too much
to say it could change my life."
--Marion Winik, author of First Comes
Love and The Lunchbox Chronicles

"Expecting Adam is not one of those
grit-your-teeth, lemons-into-lemonade
sagas that leave the reader feeling more besieged and
guilty than the writer. It is a long hymn,
from a practical woman caught flatfooted
by amazing grace. Martha Beck is a
celebrant skeptics can trust."
--Jacquelyn Mitchard, author of The
Most Wanted and The Deep End of the
Ocean

"I laughed. I cried. I couldn't put it
down. I didn't want it to end. I wish I
knew Adam and his family--and of course I do.
A brave, uplifting, life-transforming
book."
--Sophy Burnham, author of A
Book of Angels

"With uncommon sense and dependable wit,
Martha Beck unravels every assumption about the
meaning of life, choice, love--and the wisdom of
pursuing happiness through any of the usual routes.
If Expecting Adam raises suspicions
among more rational readers that Martha Beck is
slightly crazy, it raised my hopes that I'd
catch it from her."--Mary Kay Blakely,
author of American Mom












For my boy
EXPECTING ADAM



This happened when Adam was about three years
old.
I was sitting in a small apartment with a woman
I had barely met, talking to her about her life.
I'll call her Mrs. Ross, because it isn't
her name. I had been doing similar interviews for
months, collecting data for my Ph.d.
dissertation. Mrs. Ross was a scrawny
forty-five-year-old with a master's degree in art
history and a job as an elementary school
janitor. I was taking notes, considering what this
woman's experience had to teach about the real-world
value of the more refined academic fields, when
she suddenly stopped talking.
There was a moment of silence, and then I looked
up and said, "Yes?" in a helpful voice, which was
normally enough to keep an interview rolling. But
Mrs. Ross wasn't acting normal. She had
been sitting on a straight-backed wooden
chair, both feet set firmly on the floor and
her hands resting primly on her knees. Now she
was curled into an almost fetal position, forearms
crushed between the tops of her thighs and her chest, her
eyes tightly closed.
I became alarmed. "Are you all right?" I
said, trying to sound politely but not overly
curious.
Mrs. Ross waved a hand at me. "I can't
... quite ... make it out," she said.
I just stared at her.
"Usually," she gasped, her eyelids
clamping down tighter, "usually I can tell which
side of the veil it's coming from ... that's usually the
first thing I can tell ... but this time I ...
can't."
"Uh-huh," I said cautiously, glancing
toward the door, wondering if I could get to it before
Mrs. Ross leapt upon me like a mad dog.
"It's like ... he's not really on one side
of the veil or the other ... maybe he's on
both." She shook her head, troubled. "At
least I know it's a he."
"Uh, Mrs. Ross," I said, gathering my
notes together for a quick exit.
At this point Mrs. Ross's eyes flew
open wide, fixing me with a bloodshot stare.
"You know who it is!" she said in a low,
accusing voice. "You know who it is, but you're
blocking!"
At this point my curiosity began to get the
better of me. "I know who?" I said.
"That's right!" Mrs. Ross uncurled a little.
"You see, I have this ... well, it's a
gift." She sounded as though she wasn't quite
sure Santa had gotten her letters.
"Gift?" I repeated.
She nodded. "I get messages for people." She
sighed and sat up. "There was a point in my life
when I stopped talking about it, you know, because it's very
embarrassing."
"Oh," I said.
"And then, you know," Mrs. Ross continued,
"I began to lose it. It was getting fainter, and
sometimes the spirits would be angry at me, because I
wouldn't help them get through to people."
At this moment, I swear to God, a large
green parrot walked out of Mrs. Ross's
small kitchen and into the living room. It paced
slowly across the carpet, peered at me
suspiciously with one flinty eye, then proceeded
on foot up the leg of Mrs. Ross's chair
and onto her shoulder. She's a witch, I thought.
I'm sitting here talking to a genuine witch. The
parrot was obviously a familiar. I would have
been willing to bet it was her husband.
Mrs. Ross kept talking, stroking the bird
absentmindedly. "So I promised God that I
would always deliver the messages as soon as I
got them. No matter what."
"No kidding," I said this without any sarcasm.
That's how much I had changed. Four years
earlier I would have dismissed Mrs. Ross and her
"gift" immediately. Back then I had known
exactly how the world worked. Back then I had
been sure of my own intellect, sure of the
primacy of Reason, sure that, given enough time and
training, I could control my destiny. That was before
Adam. But now it was four years later, and
Adam was at home with the baby-sitter, and I had
learned a lot about how much I had to learn. So
I sat still and waited for Mrs. Ross to go on.
She did.
"The messages are usually from the other side
of the veil--I mean, from the spirit world," she said.
"Sometimes they're from living people who are far away and
need to get a message through immediately. But that's
always the first thing I can tell--which side of the
veil the message is coming from." Her brow
furrowed. "And this time, I can't tell."
By now, I admit it, I was hooked. I
wanted my message.
"Just relax," I suggested helpfully.
Mrs. Ross shot me a glance that would have
pierced steel, a glance designed to shove me off
her turf.
"Or not," I said.
"We should pray," whispered Mrs. Ross.
"Uh, okeydokey," I responded. I
mean, what would you have done?
So Mrs. Ross and I bowed our heads, and
I drew a deep breath and relaxed for just a
second, and then her head snapped up like a Pez
dispenser and she said, "All right, you stopped
blocking. It's your son."
"My son?" Even after everything that had already
happened, this surprised me. I had been hoping
the message would be from my guardian angel, or
perhaps a stray ancestor with an interest in my
career.
"You have a son who's halfway between worlds,"
stated Mrs. Ross.
I felt the hair go up on my arms. You
see, no matter how much evidence you have, over time
you tend to block out the experiences that aren't
"normal." Who wants to turn into a Mrs.
Ross, blurting out gibberish about spirits and veils?
How much of that sort of conversation are you allowed before
people stop inviting you to parties, and you end up pushing a
mop in an elementary school?
"Well," I said to Mrs. Ross, "maybe
I do have a son ... uh ... like that."
She gave me a withering look. "You do," she
said flatly. "And he wants me to give you a
message." The parrot nibbled tenderly on her
ear.
By now my whole body was bristling with a strange
electricity. The sensation had become familiar
to me over the past few years, yet it was always a
surprise. At least I kept my mouth shut.
Mrs. Ross closed her eyes again, gently
this time. "He says that he's been watching you very
closely from both sides of the veil."
The veil again.
"He says that you shouldn't be so worried. He
says you'll never be hurt as much by being open as you
have been hurt by remaining closed."
She opened her eyes, scratched the
parrot's head, and smiled. She didn't look
like a witch at all anymore.
"That's it?" I said.
Mrs. Ross nodded, smiling.
I didn't return the smile. "What the
heck is that supposed to mean?"
She shrugged. "Beats me."
"Oh, come on," I pleaded. "There's got
to be more. Ask him." This is not the way I was
taught to behave at Harvard.
"I don't ask questions," she said. "I just
deliver messages. Like Western Union.
What the messages mean is none of my
business."
And that was all she had to say.
After a pathetic attempt to pretend I was still
conducting an interview, I raced home
to confront Adam. He was in his crib, asleep.
He was about half the size of a normal
three-year-old, had barely learned to walk, and
had never spoken an intelligible word. I reached
down and poked him in the tummy, and he woke up
with his usual jolly grin on his face.
I looked into his small, slanted eyes.
"Adam," I said seriously. "You've got
to tell me. Are you sending me messages through
Mrs. Ross?"
His smile broadened. That was all. And he
hasn't said a thing about it since.

So here I am, still wondering what the hell
happened that day, wondering whether Mrs. Ross was
really channeling my three-year-old, wondering
what he meant. I wonder a lot of things,
since Adam came along. I wonder about all
the strange and beautiful and terrible things that
accompanied him into my life. My husband,
John, knows about my wondering--shares it, in
fact, since his life, too, was changed when we
were expecting Adam. But when I wasn't talking
to John, I learned to keep it all to myself. I
learned to ignore the miraculous in my life,
to pretend it didn't exist, to tell lies in
order to be believed. In short, I kept myself
closed.
This has not been easy. It is difficult not
to tell people when one of your interview subjects
turns out to be Parrot Woman. The
strangeness, the curiosity, the wonder keeps
pushing outward, begging to be communicated,
needing air and company. On many occasions, I have
tried to talk about Adam without letting on that I
actually believed in everything that happened to me. I
have written this book twice already, both times as a
novel, to wit: "This is the story of two driven
Harvard academics who found out in
midpregnancy that their unborn son would be
retarded. To their own surprise and the horrified
dismay of the university community, the couple
ignored the abundant means, motive, and
opportunity to obtain a therapeutic abortion.
They decided to allow their baby to be born.
What they did not realize is that they themselves were the
ones who would be "born," infants in a new
world where magic is commonplace, Harvard
professors are the slow learners, and retarded
babies are the master teachers."
You see, by calling it a novel, I could tell
the story without putting myself in danger from
skeptics, scientists, and intellectuals.
"Fiction!" I would assure them. "Made it
all up! Not a word of truth in it!" Then they would
all go away and leave me alone, and perhaps a few
sturdy souls would be willing to believe me, and I
could open up in safety to them.
It hasn't worked out that way. The editors and
agents and writers I respect most have always come
back, after reading my "novel," with the same question:
"Excuse me, but how much of this is fiction?" And
I would hem and haw a bit before admitting that
aside from making John and myself sound much
better-looking than we are, I didn't
fictionalize anything. It's all true, I would
say. Then I would sink into my chair five or
six inches and wait for them to call security.
So far, that hasn't happened. It has been
five years since Mrs. Ross reared back
against her parrot and delivered Adam's
message, and in all that time my favorite people have
continually repeated his advice. Open up, they
say. It will feel better than remaining closed.
I am none too sure about this. I am very much
afraid of being caught in the firestorms of
controversy over abortion, genetic engineering,
medical ethics. It worries me to think that I
will be lumped together with the right-to-lifers, not to mention
every New Age crystal kisser who ever claimed
to see an angel in the clouds over Sedona. I
am reluctant to wave good-bye to my rationalist
credibility. Nevertheless, the story will not
stop unfolding, and it will not stop asking me to tell
it. I have resisted it for what feels like a very long
time, hoping it would back off and disappear. But it
hasn't.
So, Mrs. Ross, wherever you are, thank you for
delivering my son's message. After all these
years, I've finally decided to listen.



John and I disagree about the precise moment
we lost control of our lives. He thinks it was
the car accident in New Hampshire. I say it
was two weeks before that, when Adam was conceived. Either
way, it was sometime in September of 1987, which
ever since has been known in our family history
as the month It All Went to Hell.
We had just returned to Cambridge from a
summer in Tokyo, where John had been doing
research for a Ph.d. dissertation on the
Japanese employment system. We were dazed with
jet lag, which is bad enough for an adult crossing
fourteen time zones but turns into an epic
struggle when you're traveling with a toddler. Our
eighteen-month-old daughter, Katie, was still
operating on Japanese time, babbling and playing
through the Boston nights while John and I took
turns trying to sleep. By the time the sun showed up
and Katie closed her maddeningly bright little eyes,
we would have to stumble off, haggard and woozy, to deal
with the welter of logistical tasks involved in
preparing to go to Harvard.
Again.
There are some things you have to understand about Harvard.
First of all, John and I both grew up there.
I'm not talking about childhood. I mean later
on, when all our adult thoughts and expectations were
being programmed. As for childhood, we both
spent that in the same small town in Utah, a
state that doesn't register as part of the known
universe to anyone in the Ivy League. (one of
my professors once told me he'd just
returned from my region of the country. I said,
"Oh really? Where?" He said, "Iowa." And he
meant it.) As a matter of fact, this writing
marks the first time I've actually admitted in
public that I am a child of the lovely Beehive
State. Harvard trained me to believe that this is
like admitting to a history of mental illness or
shoplifting. It would have bought me much more
credibility if I'd been able to claim that I'd
been reared by wolves.
The point is that neither John nor I relied
on anything that happened to us before Harvard to guide
our behavior once we got there. John arrived
when he was eighteen, and I showed up two years
later, in 1980, aged seventeen. We had known
each other in high school, but only vaguely;
by the time we really got acquainted, we'd both
managed to become thoroughly Harvardized. We
had a lot in common: the dirty secret of our
western public school past, an intense drive
to succeed, a longing to fit in. We worked like
demons, taking heavy loads of the most
difficult classes we could find, so that when we
got the phone call saying that the admissions
department had just realized its glaring mistake in
accepting us, we'd have a fighting chance of remaining
enrolled. As a result, we did well
academically and ended up going to Harvard over and
over again, like addicts. We both applied to combined
master's and Ph.d. programs before we'd even
graduated from the college. John pursued his
passionate study of Asia, while I focused
on the sociology of gender. By September of
1987 we had been Harvard students for almost a
third of our lives, and we weren't anywhere near
finished.
You might assume from all this that John and I
found Harvard pleasant. Oh, how wrong you would
be. Actually, I don't know if I ever met
anyone at Harvard who found it pleasant. It
seems to me (although I may well be projecting)
that all the people there scurry anxiously from one
achievement to another, casting wary glances over their
shoulders, never quite sure that they've managed to throw
failure off their scent. To me, being a student
there was heady, exciting, even thrilling, but these
sensations came laced with heavy doses of fear and
misery. It was like having lunch with a brilliant,
learned, witty celebrity who liked to lean across
the table at unpredictable intervals and slap me
in the mouth--hard. Was it interesting? V.
Stimulating? In more ways than one. Pleasant?
I don't think so.
And so, no matter how many times we did them,
the muddle of small tasks surrounding each
semester's registration always threw John and me
into jittering anxiety that made us snap at each
other and break things accidentally. Of
course, neither of us would have confessed this under
torture, not even to each other. We had been
trained against it. At Harvard, the appearance of
confidence is essential to social survival.
Without it, you're like the wounded animal in the herd,
attracting the full attention of predators and the
disdain of most potential mates. (it was only
after John and I fell in love, during finals
the first semester of his senior year at Harvard, that
I worked up the courage to tell him how scared I
was of failing. He had confessed to similar
feelings. This interchange was enough to bond us forever.
It was more intimate than sex.)
Now John was in the third year of his
doctoral program, and no one would have guessed
that he'd ever had a moment of lagging confidence. He
appeared sublimely self-assured despite the
fact that not only was he finishing his degree (which
would have been stressful in itself) but he had also
jumped at an opportunity to work as a
management consultant. The firm that hired him
had a branch in Boston and was opening a new one
in Singapore. John's job involved commuting from
New England to Southeast Asia every two weeks
during the upcoming year. This would be a tricky thing
to pull off without ruffling various feathers at
Harvard, so John was even more nervous than
usual. Of course, no one knew this except
me, and I was just guessing.
To say that hiding my fears did not come
naturally to me is to make a profound
understatement. I had a tendency to babble
hysterically and blink a lot whenever I dealt with
Harvard. At least I'd learned to fake
self-confidence, probably as well as the next
graduate student. I was very deliberate about this.
Before I went on the campus for any reason, I
would consciously call up a portion of my
personality I call Fang. I would focus very
hard on being Fang, until I could squash down
every thought or feeling that wasn't part of her. Fang
fit in beautifully at Harvard. She was
fearless, aggressive, sardonic, voraciously
competitive. She never ate entire pound bags
of MandMore's or sat with her feet in the bathroom
sink, crying, the way I was wont to do after a hard
day's lunch with the slapping celebrity. I had
relied on Fang since my freshman year, and
she had served me well. But for some reason, in the
fall of 1987 I couldn't quite get her
revved up. It wasn't just the jet lag, the
fatigue, the change of climate. Even then,
when Adam was almost entirely unassembled, I
knew it was something more.
I remember the very moment I felt the life
controls slip out of my fingers. It was the first time
since our return from Tokyo that Katie
actually dozed off before sunrise. John and I
were both trying, unsuccessfully, to fall asleep
ourselves. We stared fitfully at the ceiling, the
walls, the window that looked out over Harvard
Square, thinking about the dangers that awaited us at
daybreak. And then, somewhere toward morning, we
rolled over simultaneously, met in the center
of our queen-size futon, and began to grope for
comfort in each other's arms. I told myself it was a
bad idea. I told myself I'd better get
some rest while Katie was napping. I told these
things to John, too. He agreed with me. And
then, of course, we went right ahead with it.
In Japan I had seen a style of puppet
theater called Bunraku, where the puppeteers stand
right onstage, moving these elegant dolls around
without the slightest pretense of invisibility. The
puppeteers are so skillful that you actually forget
they're on the stage, even though there are often
three of them to each puppet. After a few
minutes, you'd swear the puppets were moving
themselves. That night in our apartment, I kept
expecting to see two teams of Bunraku masters
standing behind John and me, pulling levers in our
heads, sculpting every move we made. I could
feel them. And without letting it anywhere near my
conscious mind, I knew--I knew--that I was
in the process of getting pregnant, and that it was
exactly what I wanted to do.
Mind you, this was insane. I didn't have time
to be pregnant. I was well aware of this, because
I (or at least Fang) was the kind of person
who made elaborate and detailed plans for my
life several years in advance. I am not
exaggerating here. You could always tell where I'd
been by following the trail of paper scraps with time
grids and to-do lists scribbled on them. I was
the unofficial mascot of the Franklin
Dayplanner people, my schedule fixed in
fifteen-minute intervals for years to come. That
September was the worst possible time for me
to exercise my fertility option. I was taking a
full load of classes, teaching sections
for a course in Caribbean society, and planning
to be Katie's single parent when John was in
Asia. The very last thing I could afford to do was bear
live young again. For one thing, during my first
go-round, pregnancy had made me feel only
slightly better than the Ebola virus would have.
For another thing, I had to guard my reputation as
a scholar.
I understand that nowadays there are enough young parents in
the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
to support a graduate student "parenting
center," but this was not true when I was young and
fruitful of loin. Back then, even the
potential for motherhood was most definitely a
blot on the credibility of female students and
staff. I had several friends who obtained
abortions when accidental pregnancies threatened
to scuttle their academic progress. One
woman I knew decided, with her husband,
to abort a planned pregnancy when a crucial
three-day exam was scheduled near her due date.
I don't know whether she even asked if the exam
could be rescheduled. That sort of thing simply
wasn't done--especially not for "personal
reasons."
It often seemed to me that success at Harvard
depended on being willing to put "personal
reasons" so low on one's priority list that they
dropped right off the bottom. John and I had
learned this lesson the hard way. For instance, a
year and a half before It All Went to Hell, when
John was going through the first year of the Harvard
Business School curriculum (en route
to his Ph.d. in organizational behavior),
he missed a day of class taking me to the
hospital and Lamaze-coaching me through
Katie's birth. The next day, when he went
back to the Business School after forty-eight
hours without sleep, he received a tongue-lashing that
made him wake up in a cold sweat for months
afterward. It was delivered in front of the eighty-nine
other students in the class by one of his
professors, a world-renowned economic theorist
I will call Stinky.
"You are a disgrace to this institution," ranted
Stinky, while John's classmates sat
looking uncomfortably at the floor. "You will
never succeed in business, scholarship, or anything
else. You have set a bad example for this entire
section, and I intend to hold you personally
responsible for the poor performance of any student in
this room."
When John mumbled that he had wanted to see his
child's birth, the professor sneered, said, "You
probably think that's a good excuse," and
suggested that John should fail out of the class then and
there.
You've got to understand that we took this very
seriously. I had been away from Harvard for
years before I began to realize that not everyone in the
United States would agree with Stinky. What
amazes me now is that, at the time, both John
and I assumed that everyone in the Real World (read:
anywhere but Utah) shared Stinky's opinions. So
you can see why getting pregnant again on the very
eve of an academic year was not part of my
conscious master plan, and why that night on our
futon felt so trancelike and alien to me. It was
like swimming against a riptide: you think you're
making lots of progress as you slap away at
the water, not even feeling the current, because it is
so large and powerful that you aren't able to comprehend it.
Then you look at the shore and realize you are in a
place you never intended to be.
After that first moment, during our sleepless night
on the futon, I felt this sensation often. I
tried to explain it to John, but I didn't
really know how to articulate it, and he didn't
know what I was talking about. Then, of course,
came the car accident, and after that I didn't need
to explain.
We were headed north at the time, into the gorgeous
deciduous forests of upper New England. The
trees in that part of the country put on a truly
awesome autumn display. The sky is so blue it
makes you want to cry, and the leaves look like
they're on fire. The traffic out of Boston and
into the backwoods of New Hampshire is
pretty much bumper to bumper, although it moves
along at a good, fast clip. Everyone goes
north in the autumn. The volume and brilliance
of the foliage is a major topic of conversation
at the innumerable wine and cheese parties that kick
off every academic year. John and I didn't
own a car, but we were tired of being left out of these
discussions, so we'd rented one to go up to New
Hampshire. We were planning to spend a few
days at a cabin with some friends, to celebrate
surviving registration and returning to our native
time zone.
We had left Massachusetts behind us and were
cruising along on the freeway to Franconia
when, for no apparent reason, a battered Chevy
truck pulled off the shoulder, at right angles
to the flow of traffic, and stopped directly in our
path. There was no room, no time, to do anything.
I heard John give a strangled yell as our
car yawed violently and began to spin like a top
across our lane and into the path of the oncoming
traffic. The Chevy loomed up at me through the
passenger window, then disappeared into a blur of
leaves, which disappeared behind an eighteen-wheeler,
then leaves again, then a Volkswagen bus,
leaves, cars, leaves, cars, leaves. On our
way home, we would stop at the site and see from
the skid marks that we had spun around at least
four times, careening across both lanes of the busy
highway twice. I still can't see any way we
could have done that without being hit, probably several
times. But we did.
The odd thing is that I never had any doubt we
were completely safe. I remember being mildly
concerned that the spinning motion might make Katie
carsick. I tried to turn around to look at her,
strapped into her car seat behind me, but I was pinned
against my own seat by a centrifugal force stronger
than anything I had ever felt. I couldn't even
move my head. So I just relaxed and watched the
leaves go by.
All of this took about two seconds, maybe
three. As we Tilt-A-Whirled back into our
own lane and onto the shoulder, I could hear the
brakes screaming and feel the car slowing down.
Then there was a loud pop! and we were all thrown
forward against our seat belts. We had hit the
wooden post of a stop sign, breaking it in two and
denting our bumper. I watched the top half of the
sign tremble, sway, and collapse into the dust like
a martyred lollipop.
We sat in silence for a minute, taking a
mental inventory of our limbs and digits, before
John reached forward to turn off the ignition. His
hands, like his face, had gone bone white. I
felt fine, except that my seat belt had
clamped down too tight. I also detected a
strange sensation in my lower abdomen, as though
someone was pressing a firm but gentle thumb against
my bladder. I seemed to remember having felt
it before, but I couldn't remember when. I looked
over at John. He was clutching the
steering wheel as though his life depended on it, which,
come to think of it, it did.
"I lost control!" he gasped, as though this were
an unfathomable mystery.
"Uh-huh," I said. I turned around and
looked at Katie, who was beaming at me from her
car seat.
"Whee!" she said.
I laughed. "That was fun, wasn't it,
Boofus?"
"Do again?" she asked hopefully.
"No, honey, I'm not sure Daddy could do
it again." I turned to smile at John, because the
whole situation seemed so interesting. My reaction
could have come from shock, I suppose, but all I
remember is an entirely inappropriate--
though rock solid--sense of well-being. John
was still staring straight ahead, gripping the wheel.
"I lost control," he repeated. He was
trembling.
I began to wonder why John was making such a
big deal about this. True, it was probably the first
time since he was potty trained that John had ever
lost control of anything. But it was utterly
obvious to me that we had never been in any
danger. The Bunraku puppeteers wouldn't have
allowed it. At this thought, the hair began
to prickle all over my body, because I could
feel them again. They were all around us, all around the
car, as powerful and invisible as an ocean current.
And I suddenly knew why John was so thoroughly
spooked. He hadn't lost control to the forces of
nature. He had lost control to them.
There was a sudden, loud rap on the window by my
head. John and I jumped so violently that
only our seat belts saved us--again--from bashing
our heads against the windshield. I turned to see
two old men in overalls standing by the car, peering
into the interior. I rolled down my window.
"The grace a God was with you then!" one of the men
told us in a thin, accusatory voice, as though
we had stayed out too late after the prom.
"The grace a God," echoed the other man.
He was wearing a fluorescent orange hunting
cap, and his voice was thick and slow. He had the
strangest pale-silver eyes I had ever seen.
I could tell immediately that he was not, shall we say,
fully cooked.
"Car still running?" asked the first man.
John turned toward him and gave him
a huge smile. The more upset John is, the
happier he acts. It's a Harvard thing.
"Everything's great!" he said, grinning like a
maniac. He turned the key, and the car vroomed
obediently.
"Everything's great!" the man in the hat repeated
in a singsong voice. I couldn't stop looking at
him. Retarded people had always filled me with
revulsion. I wanted to look away, but I
couldn't. The puppeteers wouldn't let me.
"Okay!" John chirped, like Rebecca of
Sunnybrook Farm on an especially
magical day. "I guess we'd better get
going!" He put the car in reverse and backed
slowly, cautiously, away from the stump of the stop
sign.
The first man grunted, turned, and walked
away from the car. The one in the hat was still watching
me.
"He's a good baby, ma'am," he said. "You
take good care of that baby."
I remember being puzzled that he had taken
Katie for a boy. I thought of correcting him but
decided it wasn't worth the effort. For some
reason (probably the aftereffects of the
accident), I felt gooseflesh rising on the
back of my neck. I gave the man an
artificial smile, mostly because I was so glad
we were getting away from him. The pressure against
my bladder seemed to grow stronger, and I suddenly
remembered when I had felt it before. It was the first
sign I'd had that I was pregnant with Katie.
John was driving very carefully, searching the
road intently. "Did you see that idiot?" he
said.
"The guy in the hat?" I said.
John glanced at me as though I were short a
few brain cells myself. "No," he said. "The
guy in the truck."
"Oh, the truck. Yeah, sure ..."
"He pulled right into my lane!" John
fumed. "Right into it!"
"I know, honey," I said, trying to sound
soothing. "It was all his fault."
"I ought to report him," said John. He
wasn't trembling anymore, but his shirt was
soaked with sweat. I thought about continuing to play the
supportive wife, encouraging him to vent his
testosterone rage on the enemy trucker, but I was
too preoccupied searching my memory for
any acts of indiscretion involving birth
control.
"Let it go, John," I said. "He's long
gone."
We'd been very careful, I was sure we had.
I was particularly cautious about contraception
since my physiology had proven incompatible
with birth control pills. That night in the apartment,
when the ocean current had caught me and carried
me along with it, John and I had been as
conscientious as usual. But I was well aware that
the methods of contraception at my disposal were not
fail-safe.
"He's going to kill somebody," John
brooded. A car passed us on the left, and he
jerked the steering wheel much too hard to the right.
"Just relax," I said. "It was a freak
accident." I was trying to make my voice sound
the way Mister Rogers's does when he's
telling viewers they can't go down the drain, but it
cracked with tension. John didn't notice.
He was too busy slamming on the brakes
to avoid a falling leaf.
We went along that way for the next fifty
miles, John driving like someone's grandmother,
while I did my best to reassure him that
everything was fine. But deep down in my heart--
well, all right, deep down in my bladder--I
knew better.



Adam deals with many things more graciously than
I do. Take illness, for example. My first
clue that he isn't feeling well is usually a
polite knock on my bedroom door in the
middle of the night. After a pause, just as I'm
telling myself that I didn't hear anything and should go
back to sleep, a small, gruff voice will
rasp, "Mom, U'm gick."
I'll drag myself awake to find him standing by my
bed, fraught with some horrific assortment of
symptoms: blazing fevers, rashes that turn his
usually flat little face into a topographical
map of Nepal, chest coughs that sound like gang
warfare between two prides of lions. Adam's
immune system is weaker than a normal
nine-year-old's, and every germ he catches
rollicks gaily through his body, holding orgies
of self-reproduction and sending
enthusiastic invitations to others of its kind. When
Adam gets gick, he gets really, really
gick.
Gick, if you haven't figured it out by now,
is Adam's word for sick. He has learned
to speak fairly well in the last few years, but
the muscles of his mouth aren't formed for our
language, so he often uses his own. Adamic,
we call it. It is a strange dialect, in which
syllables are often reversed or replaced with
random consonants, sound effects, and gestures.
Our youngest daughter, Elizabeth, who learned it
along with English, understands Adamic quite well, and
often acts as my interpreter. But I don't
need a translation when my son wakes me up in
the night. "Gick," he'll repeat patiently.
There isn't a trace of a whine in his voice, just
a touch of regret. He is clearly sorry to have
disturbed me.
Eventually I get out of bed, and we go down the
hall together, Adam holding my hand in his small,
dry, stubby fingers. We stand in the doorway of his
bedroom and assess the damage. This is what
always amazes me: if he's thrown up, he will have
done his best to clean the room before involving me.
"Bleah," he will explain, flipping his hand from his
mouth outward, as though the smell alone weren't enough
to tell me what happened. "I keen."
"Yes," I'll say. "You cleaned up.
Thanks, buddy. Good boy."
Then Adam, ill and weary as he is, helps
me spray the rug with cleanser, scrub out the
stain, and change his sheets. He gamely
swallows a dose of Tylenol, says
"Unkoo, Mom," and flops down on his
pillow, already asleep. The genetic weakness of his
muscles (hypotonia, the doctors call it)
lets his body fall into strange shapes, as though
he has been dropped out of a plane to his death;
legs twisted under him, undersize head bent too
far back, chunky little arms flung wide. His
small, slanted eyes flicker behind their lids as
he begins to dream. Watching him, I think he is
the most beautiful child I have ever known.
The point here is this: Adam's gentlemanly
stoicism in the face of illness did not come from
me. My method is to rage against the dying of the
light, and I believe in getting started as soon
as the light displays the tiniest flicker. When I
was Adam's age, I would howl and whimper
in protest through the duration of the most minor illness.
I think I believed that if I could only make
the adults as miserable as I was, they would
arrange to give me general anesthesia. Perhaps
my reaction to pregnancy was Nature's way of
avenging my parents for the trauma they experienced
during my childhood.
Now, I am not generally a bitter person. I
don't even have to try to rejoice in the good fortune of
others. Usually. But every time I hear a woman
say something like "Oh, golly, for the first four
months I didn't even know I was pregnant,"
I find my hands clenching into fists and my upper
lip curling back to display my teeth--which, by the
way, had to be substantially reconstructed after
each of my three pregnancies because the enamel
had dissolved under a constant barrage of stomach
acid. It never took me four months to figure
out I was expecting. Oh, no indeed. From the
moment Mr. Sperm and Ms. Egg first encountered
each other in my fallopian tubes--before they
even had time to make any informed decision about going
steady, let alone forming a biological unit
--I could sense them conspiring to make my life a
hell on earth.
The nausea was the worst part. Saying that I was
nauseated during pregnancy is like saying that
Hurricane Andrew was "breezy with scattered
showers." This was not the morning queasiness my many
pregnancy books told me to expect. It
wasn't even the pretty awful feeling you get
when you contract an intestinal virus. I am
talking about an epic nausea, a vast and
overwhelming nausea, a nausea that, in my humble
opinion, deserves to be chronicled in song and
legend for centuries to come. Seven years after my
last day of pregnancy, I still have to swallow hard
just writing about it.
Unfortunately, things did not stop at the
digestive level. Pregnancy seemed
to attack every system and organ in my body. A
week or so after Katie was conceived, I took
what I thought was a bold step forward and was stunned
to see my foot swing out about five inches and
plop, like a well-boiled noodle, back to the
ground. I had always been very active, had run a
few honest-to-goodness marathons in my time, and was
used to pushing through pain and fatigue. But when my
body was in its reproductive mode, nothing
else worked. It was that simple. Throughout
each pregnancy, I went around with my teeth
clenched, trying to behave like a Harvard woman--
firm, strong, dauntless, intimidating--but
looking and moving like Deng Xiaoping just before they
fired up the cremation furnace.
Then, of course, there was the issue of fainting.
I go hot with shame whenever I remember the many
times and places my pregnant self passed out.
There was never much warning: I would be puttering along
pretty well, then suddenly everything would go an
unpleasant shade of green and I would pitch over
like a bowling pin, to wake up several seconds
later on yet another inappropriate
horizontal surface.
On most of these occasions, the people around me
assumed that I was simply having a normal
reaction to the final stages of a tragic drug
addiction, and paid no attention. A few thought
to call the police, but most exercised that
iron-willed inattention that is so basic to the
culture of the northeastern seaboard. I
remember, for example, that when I fainted in a
hardware store, several customers had to step over
me to find the right hammer. I was intensely
relieved that they pretended not to notice me.
Other than these small mercies, I can't say that
I found much to celebrate in my physical
experience of gestation.
Years after my final pregnancy "cleared"
(i borrow this term from the personnel at the
Harvard University Medical Clinic), I was
diagnosed with an autoimmune disease that
explains the severity of my "morning sickness."
By then we had moved away from Boston, first to our
hometown in Utah, where I wrote my
doctoral dissertation, then to Arizona. We chose
Arizona simply because it was warm and beautiful
(reasons that would not have impressed us at all before
Adam came along), and we set up our lives
to be as stress-free and comfortable as possible. By the
time my medical condition was diagnosed, these
changes had already made the symptoms much easier
to manage.
But back in 1987, when John and I took
our trip to New Hampshire, my life was not
arranged to accommodate ill health. I had no
idea that there was a name, let alone any treatment,
for the condition that made my body go wildly
haywire during pregnancy. I wasn't even
thinking about it. As we drove our dented,
rented car away from the scene of the accident, I quite
deliberately refused to admit that the peculiar
feeling in my abdomen was accompanied by an
overall sense of the Deng Xiaoping weakness I
remembered from the months I was pregnant with
Katie.
We eventually made it, bashed-up car and
all, to the cabin we had rented. The northern
New Hampshire woods were beautiful, in that
impossibly rich, fecund way that New
England forests are beautiful. The air was full
of the smells of pine and loam and autumn leaves,
a combination that ordinarily would have sent me reeling with
delight. The first morning we were there I went out
for a walk, and did in fact do a little reeling. The
delight part, however, was conspicuously absent.
I felt woozy and ill but told myself it was
only a little flu bug, possibly something I'd
picked up in Japan.
The second day, I was sitting on the cabin
steps watching Katie play in the leaves when
John rushed up to report that there was a moose,
an actual live wild moose, standing in a
streambed not a hundred yards from us. Well, this
stirred my nature-loving blood, I can tell
you. I leapt off the steps and ran to see the
moose, ducking swiftly and noiselessly through
brush and brambles like the Last of the Mohicans.
At least I meant to. What I actually did
was waddle forward a few steps like a penguin and
collapse.
John, who had already pivoted to lead the
moose-watching brigade, stopped dead and looked
at me uncertainly. I looked at John
uncertainly. Katie looked at us both
uncertainly.
"Oops," I said, grinning at them, my
Fang personality taking over to put all our
minds at rest. I yanked myself to my feet with a
burst of willpower and added, "I think I need
to get something in town."
And so, after watching the moose through binoculars
for a while, we all piled in the car and headed to a
nearby village. We found a small
pharmacy, and John stayed in the car with Katie
while I went in to look for a home pregnancy
test. Not that I actually thought I might be
pregnant, you understand. There was no way I could be
pregnant. I found myself arguing with some faceless
audience in my mind--the Bunraku
puppeteers, I suppose--insisting that, with all
the precautions I had taken, I was more likely
to be attacked by killer bees than to get
pregnant. I just wanted to rule out the
possibility, to get rid of the uneasy feeling that
had been nagging me since the car accident.
I bought a test and went back to the car. John
didn't ask what was in the little pharmacy bag;
I had simply told him that I wasn't feeling
well and needed some over-the-counter medication. We
drove back to the cabin, where some of our dearest
friends from undergraduate days had arrived in our
absence. I scurried into a back bedroom and
yanked the pregnancy test out of its wrapper,
intending to put my mind at rest then and there. Of
course I couldn't. Such tests require a
urine sample from the day's first piddle, or as my
particular test put it, "your first morning stream."
While I appreciated the poetic nature of
this instruction (it made me think of dawn light
on rushing waterfalls and crystal mountain
brooks emanating from my very own bladder), it was
extremely frustrating. When I'm not feeling
tip-top, my small stores of patience tend
to dry up altogether.
I slept restlessly that night, thinking about the
intense semester that would begin the day we returned
to Cambridge and worrying about the unpleasant
dizziness I felt even when I was lying down.
At 6:00 A.m., after staring at the ceiling for a
couple of hours, I got up and took the
pregnancy test into the bathroom. I produced
an entirely unromantic First Morning
Stream, mixed it with the chemicals that had come in the
little plastic test tube, and waited. It was
supposed to take five minutes. If the
liquid remained clear, I was not pregnant.
If it turned blue, I was.
I checked my watch, then looked
deliberately out the small window at the lovely
autumn foliage. I decided to give the test
ten minutes, instead of five, before definitely
concluding I was not pregnant--I had always been
conscientious and wanted to be absolutely sure
I allowed sufficient time. I didn't even
think about what I would do if the test came back
positive. There was always the unarticulated but
clear possibility of a quick, early abortion--but,
of course, I wouldn't need that. I looked at
my watch again. Thirty seconds. I
yawned, stretched--and froze. Out on the very edge
of my peripheral vision was a flash of blue. I
turned slowly toward the test tube, and there it
stood, a tiny, crystalline column of
turquoise liquid, blushing slowly into a deep
royal blue.
It was at that moment that the feeling came. Before
I had a single thought, before I was even able
to process the meaning of the blue vial, it flowed
clear through my body like warm honey, taking my
breath away. And instead of thinking through my Plan
for Life and clearing out time for the abortion, I found
myself lost in a memory so vivid it seemed I
had moved back in time.
During my freshman year at Harvard, I
ran for hours every day. I would set out for a run--
six miles, ten miles, twenty--in howling
blizzards, in the middle of the night, sometimes with
my backpack full of books still strapped to my
shoulders. I ran because I needed to; it muted
my anxieties and eased my loneliness. Running
was the only thing I did that year that wasn't
completely dominated by fear, or perhaps it was the
only time I responded to my omnipresent
fears in a way that felt like escape. I ran
no matter what the weather, and the winter was terrible.
There were times when the wind would blow me backwards
or sideways in midstride. There were days when the
tips of my toes froze black and I had
to wrap pieces of plastic bags around my hands
so that my fingers wouldn't do the same.
In March, as the temperature rose above
freezing and the sun began to linger beyond midafternoon for the
first time in months, running became an
intoxicating pleasure. A Boston Marathoner
told me that you could tell it was springtime in New
England because the saps were beginning to run. He was
right. The warmer weather brought hordes of joggers
into my usual path along the Charles River, and
I began to look for less crowded routes. That
is why, one Sunday in early April, I found
myself in the Boston Common, a wide, grassy
park in the middle of the city. I had already run
across Cambridge, over the long bridge
by MIT, and through the seedy Boston
neighborhoods near Chinatown. The city was
unusually empty that morning, very still in the warm
dawn light.
I reached the Common at about 8:00 A.m.,
and as I jogged onto the path beneath the
yellow-green leaves of budding trees, I began
to notice strange things. There were people in the park, but
not the usual gangs of spiky-haired teenagers
and scruffy, homeless beggars. The people were in
groups, all elaborately clothed; the men and
boys in suits, the women and girls in dresses
the color of flowers. There was a kind of quiet
decorum to the whole scene that was quite unlike
anything I had seen in Boston. A woman in a
lavender gown went past me, pushing a stroller.
Tied to the stroller handle was one end of a braided
leash. At the other end walked a small dog in
a checkered vest and a tie. As they went by I saw
that the stroller contained not a baby but a large
gray rabbit wearing a straw bonnet. I
stopped dead in my tracks--something I never did
during a run--and stared.
It was then that the sound began. I felt it before
I heard it. The soft ground seemed to swell like
something breathing, and through the soles of my feet, up
my legs, and into my body rose a thrumming
vibration that seemed to bond me with the earth. The
exquisite sensation grew more and more intense for
several seconds before I began to hear it. It was
the clearest, purest tone I had ever heard. As
it rose in pitch, I finally realized that it was the
sound of a bell.
Boston's bell makers (like Paul Revere)
were famous for good reason. I have heard many bells
in my time, but the best of them sound like bashing cooking
pots next to the bells I heard that morning. The
first one, the deep and almost inaudible one, was joined
within minutes by dozens of others, but I never heard
anything that sounded like a clapper striking metal.
Nor did the sounds seem to come from any particular
direction. Instead, the air simply filled with
sustained, meltingly sweet tones, like angels
singing. The whole scene was so strange and beautiful
that tears began to run down my cheeks, faster
than I could stop them. I stood in the Common
surrounded by this glorious sound, watching the strange
loveliness of beribboned people and animals, and
seriously debated whether or not I had been
transported to some bizarre but benevolent
alternate universe.
By the time I got back to my dorm and realized
that it was Easter Sunday, the impression had already
been made. Despite the perfectly rational,
ordinary reasons for that moment in the Boston
Common, I had stored it in my memory
as a glimpse into a magical world, and that image
would never quite go away. It did, however, fade
quickly into the realm of quirky and unusual
experiences that I was sure had nothing to do with my
Plan for Life. As the years went by, I
sometimes found myself longing for that moment when I
surrendered my common sense to enchantment, but I was
far too logical to allow myself to go back there--
until that morning in the New Hampshire
woods, when I glanced at a tube of blue
liquid and felt the magic flooding through me all
over again.
By the time the five minutes had elapsed and the
pregnancy test results were undeniably
positive, I knew that I would not be scheduling
an abortion. That was all I knew. I wasn't
sure why I had made the decision to continue the
pregnancy. I could feel the puppeteers around
me, sounding their invisible bells in some
inexplicable but irresistible celebration, and I
strongly suspected that this meant I was losing my
mind. I checked to see if I was still
pro-choice. I was. I examined my
internalized schedule for the upcoming year: my
teaching, caring for Katie, intense classwork,
John's travel. This was simply not the time for a
baby, I thought. But at the word baby, the
joyous carol swelled again, and the magic filled
my eyes with tears. I stood up, teetered a
little, and went to tell John that he was going
to become a father for the second time.



If you ever need some heavy winter clothes at a
good price, you should stop by the factory outlets in
southern New Hampshire, on the road between
Franconia and Boston. I still have some of the
sweaters I bought there in 1987, right after I found
out I was expecting Adam. They're good quality
--pure wool and all that--and they were dirt cheap,
especially considering how large they are. They
aren't what I would choose for my usual
wardrobe, but they were perfect at that time, when my
objective was not style but camouflage. I
intended to hide my delicate condition from all the
folks at Harvard for as long as ever I could, and
this meant swathing myself in so many yards of fabric
that no one could tell whether I was shaped like
Ichabod Crane or Luciano
Pavarotti.
The factory-outlet shopping spree was
John's idea. When I showed him the results
of the pregnancy test, he reacted with a very long
silence, followed by a shaky smile. Then he
launched into an enthusiastic diatribe about how this
was actually a pretty good time to have another baby.
After all, he reminded me, we had always wanted
two children. Graduate school gave us more
flexibility than our future careers
probably would. Furthermore, the baby would
actually be born right at the beginning of the summer
break, which meant that we would have three months
to raise it from a plasma pet, then get it into day
care before school started again. John babbled on like
this for half an hour, his voice so full of forced
confidence I thought he might become completely
manic and start ricocheting around the room. I
sat on the bed in our rented cabin and tried
to make myself believe he was right. Then I threw
up.
I made it crystal clear to John that the
pregnancy was to be kept secret. The thought of
my classmates and teachers finding out about it made
me throw up again every time it crossed my mind.
Since my academic focus was the sociology
of gender, most of the people I interacted with at
Harvard were staunch feminists. I had always
considered myself a staunch feminist, too, but it had
been clear since the moment I began my degree
program that I did not fully meet the
requirements. John and I had married young,
by Harvard standards, and my first year as a Ph.d.
candidate had been dominated by the struggle to finish
enormous amounts of academic work while getting
Katie through early infancy. This had led to many
humiliating experiences, like the time I
absentmindedly covered a statistics assignment
with Muppet Babies stickers, or the day one of
my famous professors uttered the key word
baby during a lecture and my milk let
down, soaking the front of my shirt.
The academic year of 1987-88 was going to be
my time to redeem my reputation, to put all the
mommy stuff behind me and prove that I could be
single-mindedly devoted to scholarship. Instead,
there I was--a day before the semester started--staring
down the barrel of yet another baby. The
curious elation I had felt since taking the
pregnancy test did not go away, but it
quickly became marbled with grim fantasies of the
things people at Harvard would say about me when my
condition became known. I could hear them in my
mind, comparing me to a rabbit, a brood sow, a
member of some primitive tribe that hadn't
figured out the connection between sex and reproduction.
My imagination broadcast these comments at high
volume as I plodded through the New Hampshire
factory outlets.
Meanwhile, John was also buying clothes that
did not match his style. He was preparing to enter the
workforce as a Management Consultant. For this,
he needed suits. John had never worn suits
by choice. He was wedged into them frequently as a
child; even his earliest baby pictures show him in
three-piecers with little bow ties, his hair parted and
Brylcreemed, looking like a tiny CEO.
John's conservative, churchgoing parents loved
to see him dressed this way. Every time we visited
them, at Christmas or during the summers, they
would murmur politely horrified comments about his
clothing, his haircut, the stubble on his chin. They
were disappointed to realize that Harvard is not an
executive's fashion Mecca. Actually, it
is quite the opposite. I think there is an
implicit understanding at the university that too much
attention to one's clothing signals a contemptible
lack of focus on the mind. The John I
fell in love with wore the typical Harvard
clothes his mother loathed: hiking boots,
moth-bitten sweaters, and jeans so worn they fit
like loose blue skin.
In the autumn of '87, it looked as though
John's days of slovenly comfort had come to an
end. While I was in one store, glumly paying
for a cardigan the size of Peru, John was in
another becoming a model from one of those business
hotel ads in airplane magazines. He bought
two Brooks Brothers suits (one gray, one
blue), some conservative ties, several white
Arrow shirts, suspenders, socks, and
Italian shoes. Then, to top it all off, he
got his hair cut.
I had always loved John's hair. It was
soft, curly, and very blond, and like most of the other
students I knew, he allowed it to grow
unpruned for entire academic years. When he
returned to his parents' house the summer after his
freshman year, John's mother had almost fainted
at the sight of all that honey-colored
hair curling into his eyes and over his collar.
To humor her, he cut it all off before he
allowed himself to be seen by her friends and neighbors.
He did the same thing every summer thereafter, and it
always made me sad. When we met just outside the
dressing room at the Brooks Brothers
outlet, his hair was shorter than I had ever seen
it. He looked plastically perfect, exactly
like every other business consultant I had ever met.
"So," he said triumphantly, "what do you
think?"
I began to cry.
John would have been hurt by this if he hadn't
known that during pregnancy I could be moved
to tears by televised golf. Still, he was
crestfallen. I think he expected me to be as
proud as his mother had been on the day she first
Brylcreemed his hair.
"Not good?" he said anxiously, looking in the
mirror.
Katie crowed at him from her stroller. They
had picked out the suits together.
"Boofus thinks I look good," said John
defensively.
"You do look good," I said, still weeping. "You
just don't look like you."
John shrugged resignedly. "Well, I
don't feel much like me," he said. "But I've
got to do this. I mean, now, with the ..." He
gestured meaningfully toward my stomach. "I've
got to make this work, Marth."
I managed to rein myself back to a moist
snuffle.
John forced a smile and put his arms around
me. His suit felt strange against my cheek, and
I worried about crying on it. I could feel the
tension in his chest, as though the burden of a second
child had already settled on him.
"I should probably get another suit," he
said in a distant voice, looking at the racks of
sober-colored wool around us. "It looks like
I'll be living in them from now on."
As I look back, there are a few things about
this scene that strike me as deeply ironic.
John and I felt so trapped by the pregnancy,
trapped by the necessity of making a home--not just
for a young couple, not even for a couple with a baby, but
for a family, an entire family: mom, dad,
and the kids. Somewhere in my subconscious mind
I know I was worried that I'd have to start
baking. John felt himself slipping into the role
of the Company Man, enslaved to an employer by the
needs of his dependents. Neither of us would have
believed that the little clump of cells creating itself
inside my belly would ultimately lead us to our
present lifestyle, where we spend most of our
time wandering around in T-shirts, shorts, and, on
formal occasions, beach thongs.
Another irony about our suit-buying
adventure is that the love of the "corporate
look" in John's parents seems to have skipped
a generation, missing John altogether but bursting forth,
splendiferously, in Adam. When he was tiny I
had nightmares about Adam growing up to wear
"retard clothes." These had been worn by every disabled
person at the American Fork Training School,
where my junior high school choir had gone to sing
Christmas carols. For me, the annual goodwill
trek had been terrifying. The children at the training
school (who were lumped together indiscriminately,
regardless of the differences in their abilities,
needs, and interests) were prone to strange
outbursts, lapses of attention, sometimes even
violence. They also sported outfits of
mesmerizing ugliness. Double knit was very big at
the training school, as were the colors mustard,
beige, and puce. In combination. Add to this a
random sample of broken fasteners, and the occasional
football helmet worn backwards, and you begin
to get the picture. This is how I thought Adam
was genetically destined to dress, and when he was very
small I swore a mighty oath to keep him in
Oshkosh overalls and little Guess! jeans until
he was strong enough to physically resist me. Little
did I know.
One day when Adam was four, he disappeared in
a department store. After a frantic search I
located him in the section labeled "Men's
Better Business Attire." He was trying
to drag two pin-striped suits into the fitting
room without getting all tangled up in the legs,
which were a good deal longer than his entire body.
Adam protested violently when I took the
suits away from him, stretching himself yearningly
toward the clothing racks. By this point I had
learned that there were times to simply let go of the reins
and see what he did next, so I took him to the
"Children's Formal Wear" section and showed him that the
store actually carried suits in his size.
He has never returned to casual
wear. Every day before Adam heads off to third
grade, he spends about an hour coordinating his
look. Some days he goes for Miami Vice
--a blazer over jeans and an expensive
T-shirt--but generally he prefers a
professional-looking dark suit, a white
shirt, and a tie. He's been doing this since he
started preschool. We have absolutely no
idea why. For the past three years he has taken
an extra suit along with him in his backpack for
his friend Joey, who also has Down syndrome.
They look like a couple of weird little
executives dashing around the playground. No one
understands what they say to each other, but I think
they're doing what all management consultants
do: coming up with marketing strategies, negotiating
intellectual-property agreements, pouring sand
in each other's hair when communication breaks
down.
When John and I go out to meet the school bus
at the end of the day, Adam gives us the same
look we used to get from John's mother, the
Oh-my-lord-is-that-what-you're-wearing? look.
And that's when we remember to put on our thongs.
It would probably embarrass him less if we
dressed the way most middle-aged people do. But
Adam the fashion slave has set us free.
He has only himself to blame.



Once we'd returned to Cambridge, I
managed to stay in denial for about a week. The
nausea and the weakness were still tolerable, as long as I
ate something every ten minutes or so. I was
determined to simply ignore my morning sickness
throughout this second pregnancy.
Fortunately, there was much to distract me. I
had signed up for coursework that fit well with my
interests: a seminar on the sociology of gender,
classes on research methods and economic
development, Japanese language. I had
also been hired as a teaching fellow for an
undergraduate course on the society of the
Caribbean region. This job was somewhat unnerving
to me, since it turned out that just about everyone who
took the class was actually from the Caribbean and
I had never even been there on vacation. I had
agreed to teach the class because I greatly admired
its professor, a brilliant man with
incredible breadth and depth of knowledge and a sense of
poetry rare among sociologists.
During that first week of classes, I met with
this professor and his other teaching fellows in the
Harvard Faculty Club, a venerable building
where geniuses go to eat lobster bisque and match
minds. The place was redolent of pipe smoke and
food smells, airborne ipecac for someone as
chock full o'hormones as I was. Clamping
my teeth to keep my stomach from taking off for the
Caribbean all by itself, I focused on the discussion
of my responsibilities. I would be expected
to attend lectures on Monday and Wednesday
mornings, teach a Friday "section" of about
twenty students, and grade exams and papers for the
same group. Once that was settled, the conversation
at the table turned to pleasantries. The
professor mentioned that a former student of his,
someone we all knew, had recently married and was
now expecting a baby.
Here's the big problem with denial: it leaks.
When you're trying hard not to talk about something,
trying hard not even to think about it, that very thing begins
to creep into places it never belonged, to spurt out
at the corners of everything you say or do. I have
always been especially likely to blurt out the
unmentionable, and pregnancy exaggerated this
trait, as it did just about every embarrassing quality
I possess. At the mention of the mother-to-be, I
began to babble like a brook.
"She's pregnant?" I heard myself say.
"Good lord, who isn't pregnant? Seems like
everyone I know is pregnant! Damn!"
Everyone at the table looked at me, with a
befuddled expression. I suddenly remembered the
way I felt the first time I went skiing. I had
expected to have trouble going fast, but I immediately
learned that going fast on skis isn't the problem.
The problem is stopping.
"I don't know what all these people think they're
doing, getting pregnant all the time," I
rattled on. "And those damn maternity clothes!
Are they ugly enough? Have you seen those "Baby
on Board" T-shirts? They're
ridiculous. And furthermore ..." I managed
to trail off into a grumble and finally brought myself to a
grinding halt. The others at the table took a
collective deep breath. Whatever, their
faces said. There are a lot of weird people around
this place. Appalled at my outburst,
I excused myself and went to the rest room to throw
up.

By the second week of the semester, it was already
becoming difficult to lead a normal life. I
could barely lift Katie; my arms felt as
though they had been filled with Jell-O. I was
consumed by an overpowering desire to sleep, but
whenever I got a chance to lie down, the nausea
made it hard to relax. One day I fainted on
the lawn outside Memorial Hall, an
elaborate architectural monstrosity built
around the time of the Civil War. As I lay there in
my very large clothes, watching the bright autumn
leaves flutter through the air above me, I
realized that looking like a stoned Annie Hall was
not my biggest problem. There was only one week
left until John's first trip to Asia. He
would be gone for two full weeks. How in the world
was I going to keep up with work and school while
taking care of Katie?
The previous year John and I had managed
to attend classes and still cover all our own
child-care needs. We had scheduled our classes
at different times so that we could pass Katie off
like a relay baton as we alternated between home
and campus. On a typical day, I would walk
a mile to my first class while John gave
Katie breakfast. Immediately after that class I
would run home and buzz the intercom to let John
know I had reached the lobby of our apartment
building. By the time I arrived on the tenth
floor, John would be waiting by the elevators with
Katie in his arms. I would grab her, John
would grab the elevator, and he would run to his
first class of the day. When his class ended I would
be waiting by the classroom door with Katie in a
backpack. We'd switch the pack without even
taking her out of it, and John would head home with
her while I skittered into a nearby room for my
next class. This went on all day, every day.
We had been tired beyond belief that year--had
to eat a large batch of chocolate chip
cookies every single day, just to keep up our
strength. There was no way I could match anything like
this level of activity while I was pregnant.
John and I had also made a fatal planning
mistake when he accepted the Asian consulting
assignment. We had assumed that we would be able
to hire a decent baby-sitter without any
trouble. We hadn't had the money for this luxury
before, but John's consulting would get us out of the
starving-student income range, and this year we were
ready to pay a good price for a reliable sitter.
It never occurred to us that we might not be able to find
someone like this--after all, we had both had college
students as baby-sitters when we were children, and
Cambridge is packed with college students.
Unfortunately, we failed to consider the fact that
the city where we grew up, while definitely a
college town, is also 90 percent Mormon.
Permit me to generalize: college students in
Utah like to baby-sit, but college students in
Massachusetts do not.
We got only one reply to the listings we
placed in the many student newspapers and
employment centers in our area. This candidate
proved to be a deathly pale teenager who
dressed completely in black, never made eye
contact, and spoke only in a hushed monotone.
It was obvious to me she was a heroin addict,
probably with Mob connections, who was just waiting
for John and me to depart so that she could sell our
daughter to slave traders in Pakistan.
Nevertheless, I was so desperate that I actually
left Katie with her a few times. Nothing went
obviously wrong, although I still have a little money
saved up for Katie's therapy in case she ever
starts having flashbacks of that bizarre,
black-clad young woman sacrificing pigeons
on the window ledge of our apartment. In any
case, after two days she stopped showing up, and when
I tried to call her, I found that her phone had
been disconnected. Thinking it all through as I lay
on the grass outside Mem Hall, I
decided that I had to find a good day-care center
near the campus.
This turned out to be a lot like finding a piece
of the True Cross. My friends and acquaintances
had heard rumors that there were day-care centers around
Harvard. Some claimed that they had heard tiny,
high-pitched voices in certain buildings, and a
couple of people swore they had actually seen such
centers in operation, but no one had ever, say, been
able to photograph one. After questioning several people, I
finally called the information number for the Boston area
and asked the operator to list every day-care center
north of the Charles River.
To my delight, one of these centers operated out
of an old student-soldier barracks
Harvard had built just after World War II. The
building was about a block from William James
Hall, where most of my classes and my office
were located. The next closest day-care center was
three miles from campus. The rest were much more
distant. This would have been fine--if John and I
had owned a car. As I checked my list of
addresses, I contemplated the prospect of
dressing Katie in winter gear, pushing her
stroller to the nearest taxi stand or subway
entrance, commuting to a day-care center, commuting
back, hiking from the subway entrance to the campus,
all in time to show up for morning class. As
laborious as it sounded, my nonpregnant self
could have done it. But with me functioning like Popeye
during the Great Spinach Famine, I knew it was
impossible.
I called the one geographically feasible
day-care center with my fingers crossed, hoping it
wasn't run by a bevy of pasty, funereal,
murmuring baby-haters. It wasn't. The
woman who answered the phone sounded warm and
competent, like Mary Poppins with a Boston accent.
As for the day-care center, she described it as
state of the art, a veritable Eden for a few lucky
tots and their parents. There were only twelve children
in each age-group (infants, toddlers,
preschoolers), and there were no fewer than four
teachers for each group. In addition, every child's
parents had to do weekly duty as volunteer
teachers, so that on any given day there was at least
one adult for every two children. Mary Poppins
hadn't even finished describing the operation before I
sang out, "That's enough! Sign me up!"
She chuckled. "Well, I'm glad you feel
that way. Could you give me your name and phone
number?"
I gave them to her.
"All righty," she said. "And when are you
expecting to have a child?"
I was stunned. I thought no one but John and
I knew about my condition. Did I somehow sound
pregnant?
"Um, well, it's due sometime in June, I
guess," I stammered.
"Oh!" said Mary. "Then you're already
pregnant!" Her voice was concerned.
"Yes," I said slowly, hating to admit it out
loud. "I am."
"And the baby's due in June?"
"That's right." I still couldn't figure out why she
was so interested in a fetus. I thought day-care
centers concerned themselves primarily with children who'd
gotten past that gills-and-a-tail stage of
development.
"June," she said dubiously. "That's a bit
tight. I assume you'll want to start the baby
out in our newborn age-group?"
I was rubbing my forehead, trying to figure out
where this conversation was going. From the next room came
the sound of Katie's crib mobile rattling, which
meant she was waking up from her nap.
"Uh, yes, I suppose so," I said.
"Okay. Well, I can't guarantee there will
be a space available, but I'll put you on the
waiting list."
"Thank you."
"Is there anything else?"
"Uh, yes," I said. "Yes, there is. I
already have a little girl, and I was hoping I could
enroll her in your center ... um ...
relatively soon."
"Mmm," said Mary. "How soon?"
I shrugged and went for it. "Today?"
A hearty peal of laughter rang from the phone.
"Seriously," she said. "When?"
"I was serious," I mumbled, listening to the
cheerful cooing sound coming from Katie's room.
"Oh!" said Mary. She was embarrassed, I
could tell--embarrassed that she had embarrassed
me. She coughed, said, "I'm sorry," and
continued carefully. "You must understand that getting a child
into the center is very competitive. The usual
waiting time is three to five years."
"Three to five years?" I repeated. "Your
waiting list is three to five years?"
"That's right."
"But you don't take kids older than four!"
"Yes, I know." Mary Poppins sounded a
little testy.
"Well then how can ..."
"Most couples put their names on the list before
they are actually--mean physically--expecting a
baby," she explained. "Of course they can't
control exactly when they'll conceive, but once they
do, there's a chance that the baby will be an
appropriate age by the time their name comes up."
I felt as though someone had dumped a load of
gravel on me. I slumped down and rested my
head on my desk, still holding the phone
to my ear.
"Okay." I sighed. "Well, I guess
that's good to know. Thanks anyway."
"So do you still want your name on the list?" Her
tone was delicate.
"Sure, I guess."
Mary must have heard the defeat in my voice.
"You never know," she said gently. "Some people get
boosted up because of the quotas."
"Quotas?" I murmured. I had closed
my eyes. Suddenly, my desk seemed to be the
perfect place for a long siesta.
"Race, gender, institutional affiliation,"
Mary said. "We have quotas for all of that.
We're an equal opportunity center."
"Ah," I said.
"So sometimes, children who fit the right profile can
get in quite quickly."
"Really. And how quickly is that?"
"Oh." She thought for a minute. "Maybe two
years. Not very often, but sometimes it's only about
two years."
"Fabulous," I said. "We'll be on pins
and needles."
She laughed sympathetically. "I wish we could
be of more help."
"Thank you. I appreciate that."
We hung up. I left my head on my
desk for a few more seconds. There was nothing to do but
keep calling through the list of day-care centers, but
I didn't know how I would manage to get my
daughter to them, even if they actually accepted her
before she was old enough to vote. I could hear Katie
talking in her bedroom.
"I'm awake now!" she sang. She
pronounced it "avake," as though she had a baby
German accent.
"Hi, Boofus," I said as I opened
Katie's bedroom door. She was standing in her
crib, holding the bars in her chubby fingers, her
fine blond hair fuzzed out around her head like a
halo.
"I yub you," she said, beaming.
"I love you too, kiddo." I picked her
up and put her on my hip. She weighed only
twenty pounds, but I felt as though I were lifting
Godzilla.
I took her into our bedroom, set her--
okay, dropped her--on the bed, and turned on the
TV to Sesame Street. Then I
flopped down on the bed myself. There was a stack of
about twenty books by my pillow. I had a lot
of studying to do. I picked up a dense
monograph on Caribbean politics, but I was
too worried to concentrate.
"What are we gonna do, Boof?" I asked.
"Big Bird," she said, pointing.
"Mm-hmm," I said, wondering if it might be
better, after all, to end my pregnancy early.
But that thought brought with it a shock of terrible
grief, almost a physical pain. And then there was
that other sensation, the one I had felt off and on
ever since Adam's conception. As I lay there,
I felt it rise around me like the tide.
If you have ever held two strong magnets
close to each other, you know a little of this feeling.
You see nothing, you hear, smell, taste nothing;
yet the energy, the pull and push of these
inert-looking objects, is undeniable. It
drags things around, rearranges them, puts them in
its own strange order. It reaches through blank
space to touch without touching, to move without moving.
I was becoming more and more conscious of this sensation. It
filled the air around me. At times it was almost
unnoticeable, but at other times it seemed
to crescendo. I was simultaneously fascinated
and frightened by it.
The phone rang.
I crawled across the bed and answered it.
"Mrs. Beck?" said the voice on the phone.
"Uh-huh," I said listlessly.
"Is your child a Harvard-affiliated,
eighteen-month-old Caucasian girl?"
I took the receiver away from my ear and stared at
it. "Who is this?"
"It's the center," she said.
"What center?"
"The day-care center. We just spoke."
"Oh!" I finally recognized the Mary
Poppins voice.
"Is your child a Harvard-affiliated,
eighteen-month-old Caucasian girl?"
It took me a minute to sort through these
descriptors. "Yes," I said at last.
A little squeal emerged from the receiver. "This is so
wild!" said Mary. "I hadn't been off the
phone with you two minutes when a family called
in to cancel. They're moving across town. They had
an eighteen-month-old, Harvard-affiliated
Caucasian girl. If you'd like their
slot, I'll give it to you."
I blinked. "You will?"
"Uh-huh!" Mary Poppins sounded mighty
cheerful. In fact, she sounded a little blissed out,
as though she'd just taken several Valium.
"Are you serious?" I said. She didn't
seem like a sadistic practical joker, but I
could hardly believe what she was doing. I
pictured the three- to five-year waiting list, the
virginal couples signing up for nonexistent
children, the parents waiting desperately for slots.
"So, do you want it?" Mary gurgled
happily.
"But," I said, "I don't think--I mean--
what about ..." I have this nasty fair streak. It
doesn't come up often, but the idea of cutting in
at the very front of a five-year line managed
to rouse it. I intended, even wanted, to tell
Mary Poppins that there was no way I could take
the day-care slot away from people who had been waiting
so long. But the magnetic sensation, the pull of
those puppeteers, was reaching such a pitch that it
clouded my mind and voice.
"We'll take it," I said.



John's first trip to Asia was scheduled for the
second week in October. To prepare for it,
he was expected not only to master a huge amount
of information about his new employer and the client
company but also to do two weeks of Harvard work
ahead of time, in compensation for the days he would miss.
Of course he never said so, but I had a strong
suspicion that John found this ever so slightly
daunting. Perhaps it was the way he paced around the
apartment, reading his way through immense stacks of
documents and rubbing his hand back and forth across his
newly shorn head, or the fact that every time I
asked him how his work was going, he got that
strange, distracted look you see on the faces
of Olympic sprinters just before the Big Race.
He would stare into the middle distance, shifting his
weight from foot to foot, answering questions like "Where
did you put Katie's bottle?" with a terse
yes or no. He started to look a little hollow
around the eyes.
I'd never met anyone who could work like John.
He was the kind of student who would hand in a final
term paper after two weeks of a class,
in order to get feedback and rewrite the thing,
often several times, before the end of the semester. He
had completed his undergraduate degree in three
years, carrying a double major, and was one of about
fifty students to achieve the coveted status of
summa cum laude, "highest honors." I
managed to love and accept him despite all this.
At his graduation, where he wore the prized red
tassel of the summa graduate and got to climb
up on the stage to personally shake the hand of the
college president, John's mother leaned over
and whispered to me, "John isn't really very
intelligent. He's just a hard worker." John and
I had just become engaged, and I was trying very hard
to integrate into his family. By the time we'd
all spent his graduation day together, it was
abundantly clear that no slacking was tolerated
among the Beck clan. It was my first tiny taste
of the subtle social dynamics that made John
labor like a field hand at everything he did.
In the autumn of 1987, he was working hard enough
to satisfy his family's wildest dreams.
Aside from the full-time consulting job, John was
taking a couple of classes and acting as a teaching
fellow for an undergraduate course. Much
worse, he had the brooding, loathsome monster that
is a Ph.d. dissertation sitting heavily on his
mind at all times. John's dissertation was about the
Japanese tradition of "lifetime employment."
His co-workers at the consulting company loved to ask
about it so that they could feign deathly slumber as
soon as he began to describe his research.
Even now, a decade later, when John runs
into people from the company, they will immediately say, "So,
John, remind us about your dissertation. We
remember how fascinating it was, but we've
forgotten the details." John will roll his eyes
and begin the description, knowing perfectly well that
the questioners will immediately drop their chins to their chests and
begin to snore extravagantly. I tell
John that he should refuse to play, but he feels
that would be like refusing to play peekaboo with a
baby. It makes them so happy.
At any rate, one of the reasons John
accepted the task of international liaison man,
with its requirement that he commute between Boston and
Singapore, was that he could stop in Japan en
route and pick up necessary information for the dissertation. This
did add three or four days to the duration of each
Asia trip, but we didn't expect that
to be a problem. At least, John didn't.
By the time his first departure date arrived, I was
getting worried. I worried every time I threw
up, and every time I worried, I threw up again.
I plied this new hobby so often I'd long
since run through a thesaurus of synonyms
to describe it. My personal favorite was the
term ovorp (pronounced "ov-v@orp") which
John had coined by spelling the name of our
hometown backwards. I finally learned
to ignore my occasional eruptions while having
conversations with him, as though I had nothing worse
than a serious burping problem: "So, what
airline are you--excuse me (ovorp)--so what
airline did you say you were flying?"
The morning John left for his first trip
to Asia was especially bad. The queasiness had
me up and reeling at the first blush of dawn.
John had never gone to bed; he figured that he
might as well get used to Singaporean time, which was
exactly twelve hours different from Boston's.
He had packed one of his Brooks Brothers
suits and was wearing the other one. He stuffed the
book he'd been reading into his hanging bag and
kissed me good-bye, the distracted-sprinter look
taking his gaze somewhere behind my head.
"I've got to go now," he said gently.
"Sure," I said.
"Well, au revoir." He smiled,
nervously.
"Bon voyage," I said. French, the
language of romance.
There was a long silence. Then John said,
"Honey, are you going to let go of my arm?"
"Oh." I looked down at my hand, which was
clutching the sleeve of his coat in a death grip.
I peeled my fingers away.
"You'll be fine," he said, with that enormous
smile that means he's really, really worried.
"Oh, I know," I lied. We kissed one more
time, and he left.

The first week wasn't so bad. It wasn't
good, but it wasn't so bad. Every day I forced down
some crackers and Coca-Cola. I got up on
time each morning, feeling the way Lazarus must have
after he'd been dead four days, and managed to push
Katie's stroller to that wonderful day-care center
in time to get to my own classes. It was true that
I occasionally tossed my cookies during
class period, and that I ended up lying on the
floor behind a partition during the lectures for the
Caribbean Society course, but by damn, I was
there.
By the end of the week, though, things began
to unravel. Attending classes was hard enough, but
that was only the tip of the iceberg. Each class
required an enormous amount of preparation,
studying, paper writing, and similar chores, all
of which were suddenly beyond me. My brain seemed to have
turned almost all its attention to procreation; my
memory went several volts dimmer, and my
analytical powers dipped below levels I had
observed in lab rats. I had to study twice as
hard as usual, just to cover the material. My work
was further limited by the fact that Katie needed
my constant attention when not at the day-care center.
She had inherited John's ability to function
on five hours of sleep a night. By the eighth
day of John's absence, I hit my first Death
Spiral.
Death Spiral is the label I use
to describe what happened when I was too
nauseated to eat and became steadily more nauseated
because I wasn't eating. I was dehydrated and
almost delirious from the constant losing of lunch, and
my body desperately needed food and fluid
to calm itself.
When this had happened during my first
pregnancy, John had been there to rush to the
rescue. He would hunt and forage in the small
grocery store that occupied the first floor of our
apartment building, looking for whatever peculiar
assortment of foods I thought I could keep
down. I never really experienced a craving for
any food during pregnancy--I just wanted
to stop eating forever--but there were certain items that
sounded less unpleasant than others; odd things
in odd combinations, like Spam and melba toast and
kumquats. Once I'd eaten a food for a
few days, it would inevitably become
associated in my mind with nausea, and I would
send John out to get something even more obscure.
After Katie was born, I looked back at
this behavior with great embarrassment. How
bourgeois to demand special delicacies, I
thought, how ... stereotypical. I vowed that if
I ever got pregnant again, I would simply
nibble on saltines and keep a stiff upper
lip. This is the kind of decision that people
make in badly written horror films, when
they decide to go into the mausoleum or over to their
unusual neighbors' house all by themselves. The
entire audience is throwing popcorn at the
screen, yelling, "Don't go! Stay home!" but
on they march, straight into their own B-movie
version of the Death Spiral.
It got me on Saturday. I had made it
through Friday by the skin of my teeth, plopping over
sideways every so often, dragging myself up with
willpower and constant, internal reminders that I
didn't have to go anywhere all weekend. I could
rest. Friday night, Katie slept on the
futon with me, partly because I was lonely and partly
because I could no longer lift her into her crib.
When I woke up in the morning, I was grateful
to see her sitting up next to me with a half-full
bottle, since this meant I could simply use the
remote to switch on Sesame Street, and go
back to sleep. When I woke up two hours
later, I realized that it had been a mistake.
My empty stomach was in the throes of such
gut-wrenching nausea that I could hardly breathe.
I tried to eat. No way. I couldn't swallow
to save my life.
For the rest of that day I got steadily weaker and
sicker. I managed to change Katie's diaper
a few times, which is not something you really long to do
when you're queasy. We sang some songs. We
watched Mister Rogers. Katie acted bored and
pent-up, but even at that age she was a very helpful
person, and she could clearly tell I wasn't
up to par. By evening I still hadn't been able to eat.
I felt as though I were caught in a tidal
wave of noxious hormones. When Katie fell
asleep, an hour or so after sunset, I finally
allowed myself to--very quietly--panic.
It never occurred to me to call anyone for
help. First of all, I had long ago
developed the habit of concealing all weakness from
anyone around Harvard, and I never had the time
to make friends away from the university. Then, too,
I was determined to keep my pregnancy secret
as long as possible. John was the only person in
the world who knew how incapacitated I could get
during pregnancy, and he was ten thousand miles
away. As Katie slept beside me, I began
to long for him, for his company, his strength, and his
understanding.
I'm pretty sure that was the first time the
Seeing Thing happened. That's what I called
it--the Seeing Thing--although I'm sure there are more
sophisticated words for it, defined in books I
refuse to read because they're way too flaky. I
was lying on the futon, staring up at the ceiling,
biting the tip of one finger because I had found that pain
distracted me from the morning sickness. The thought of the
long night ahead, of the next morning, was
terrifying. I was frightened for myself, but far more for
Katie. She was already becoming a quiet,
worried child, who watched me anxiously as I
dragged myself around the apartment. My fear almost
overcame me as I watched her sleep. I
couldn't eat the food I could reach, couldn't get
to any food I could eat, and didn't know what
I would do if something didn't break the Death
Spiral. I fought my emotions as long as I
could and then, abruptly, lost control. Tears
started running in two steady streams down my
cheeks to my pillow. I began to miss John with
an intensity that made me tremble--and then,
suddenly, I was standing on a small, crowded
street in Tokyo, watching the sun rise over a
row of buildings.
I blinked, startled. It had been as
instantaneous as a single frame of a movie shown
in a dark theater, and much more vivid. I could feel
the texture of the Japanese air against my
face. The image had startled me right out of my
doomsday mood, but only for a moment. I thought
about it, decided it must be a memory, and went
back to feeling deeply sorry for myself. I
want John, I thought, like a child pining for its
mommy. I want to be with John.
Poof.
The street ahead of me was crowded with the
miniature trucks and immaculate taxis that
always fill the streets of Tokyo. Ahead of
me, five workmen in spotless blue uniforms and
cotton leggings were clambering onto a
fragile-looking bamboo scaffold, preparing
to start their day's bricklaying. Steam and smoke
rose in misty white billows from a yaki
tori shop, where businessmen and "office
ladies" were stopping to buy grilled chicken and
soybean soup for breakfast. Then, suddenly, I
was looking down another street, adjacent to the
first. The rising sun burned splendidly before me.
It shone through the silk of hundreds of brightly
colored banners, making them glow like
fluid stained glass as they fluttered in the light
breeze.
I shook my head, and the image vanished. I
looked around my bedroom, focusing very
deliberately on the physical reality of the
place. The shadows were still lengthening across the walls
of our apartment. Katie still slept on the futon
across from me, her small blond head cradled on
one arm, her mouth slightly open. I still felt like
the bottom of a toxic waste dump. But I had
been somewhere else. I knew it--even though knowing
it made me feel insane. I had been with
John.
Once I had articulated this in my own mind,
I set out to do some objective testing. If
something is reliable, real, then it must be testable.
That is the single thing that establishes the
scientific validity of any hypothesis--if you
create the same conditions, any number of times,
you will get the same results. Being trained to think
this way, I decided to repeat the experiment. I
thought about how much I missed John. Nothing
happened. I concentrated on my husband,
repeating his name in my mind. I closed my eyes
and tried to send my thoughts across the vast distance between
us, imagined myself reaching across continent and ocean,
waiting for the Seeing Thing to happen again. Nada.
Zip. Zilch. I decided that the strange flash
of Japanese scenery had been my imagination,
ramped up by physical misery. Even so, I
fell asleep wondering, buoyed slightly by the
experience, as though I had taken a brief
vacation.

I awoke to the ringing of the telephone. The room
was light again, with the pale gray sunshine of dawn.
When I reached for the phone, my head spun
terribly. I had about as much arm strength as a
chipmunk.
"Hello?"
"Hi, honey." John's voice came through the
hissing wires of the transpacific phone lines.
I felt a surge of relief that brought tears
to my eyes again.
"Where are you?" I said, hoping irrationally that he
was calling from the Boston airport.
"Tokyo," he said.
"Oh."
"How are you doing?" he said. It wasn't
small talk; he was genuinely worried.
"Not well," I said stiffly.
"Are you okay?" His voice was anxious.
"No."
"Still sick?"
"Uh-huh." I was trying not to sound clingy, but
it wasn't working at all. My eyes kept
leaking all over the phone.
"You know," John said helpfully, "my mom
says she was sick when she was pregnant, too,
but if she just got herself up and kept moving, she'd
stop noticing it."
I felt a rush of anger, mixed with shame.
I had heard this repeatedly during my first
pregnancy, from many women and a few
obstetricians as well. I didn't know why
all these people were so much tougher than I was, but I
just didn't seem to have normal willpower.
"I'm sorry you feel so rotten," John
said, after waiting a minute for me to respond.
"I'll be back in just a couple of days, and
I'll take care of you. Okay?" I could hear
the restrained anxiety in his voice.
He sounded very tired.
"It's okay," I said. "I'll be fine."
I forced a little more energy into my voice. There
wasn't anything he could do from that distance anyway.
"So what have you been up to?"
I could almost hear him smile. "Well, I
got a lot of research done here," he said.
"Did Singapore go well?"
"Oh, sure. They put me in a disgusting
hotel, but work was fine."
"Good."
"I wish you'd been here this morning," he said,
his voice taking on the kind of excitement it always
did when he had seen something interesting. "I took
a walk through Akasaka."
Akasaka is a district of Tokyo. John
and I had often gone for walks there, with Katie in
her backpack, while we were living in the city.
"There must have been some kind of festival,"
John went on, "because some of the streets were full
of banners. I was there just when the sun was rising,
and the banners--it almost looked like they were glowing, like
they were made from neon or something."
I stared at the phone, feeling a slight
prickling sensation across my scalp. "Did you
see some workmen climbing a scaffold?" I
asked.
John paused. "Well, uh, yeah,"
he said, sounding confused. "Why?"
The prickles tiptoed down my spine.
"Was there a yaki tori stand?"
"Well, there might have been," he said.
"Marth, are you all right?"
"I'm fine. "I said. I ... uh ... I
think I've been there before." I briefly
considered telling him about the Seeing Thing, but I was
afraid he would think I was an idiot. John
was as resistant as I was to the idea of anything
paranormal. Growing up among religious
fanatics in Utah had made us both wary.
"It was beautiful." John had returned
to his story. "But I wish you and Boofus had
been here. It's not the same when there's no one
to share it with. I miss you."
"Me too," I said, wondering if the Seeing
Thing would happen again right then. It didn't.
"Well, this is costing a fortune," said
John.
"I know. I'll let you go."
"I love you," he said.
"I love you too," I told him. "Be
safe."
We hung up. I felt like a deep-sea
diver whose air hose had been severed. John
wouldn't be home for two days. Katie stirred in
her sleep, and her eyelashes fluttered. She
would be awake soon, needing food, attention, a
clean diaper. I wasn't sure I could
manage it.
I decided to head for the kitchen immediately,
to retrieve some food, so that Katie wouldn't have
to watch me trying to run this little errand. I tried
to stand up, but I had no equilibrium left, and
I pitched over onto the floor. I crawled
to the doorway and used the frame to pull myself up.
Then I set one shoulder against the wall, leaning
heavily, and scraped my way to the kitchen.
I knew I had to eat. The Death Spiral
would only get worse until I did. I
reached the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, and
immediately vomited into the sink. Of course, my
stomach was empty, so there wasn't much of a mess
to clean up. I filled one of Katie's
bottles with milk and found a package of
animal crackers she could munch on. There was
nothing I thought I could hold down. I hadn't
been able to absorb food or liquid for almost
forty-eight hours. I knew that prolonged
dehydration could affect the fetus I was carrying.
I began to think seriously about calling an
ambulance, but it seemed so idiotic. We had the
grocery store, Food Shak, just an elevator
ride away. I considered it for a moment, wishing
intensely that I could go there without actually having
to put clothes on my body and stand up in the
elevator.
Poof.
I was in the entryway to Food Shak, studying
the overcrowded shelves, glancing over at the
wizened little man who ran the cash register. Most
of the packages on the shelves made my stomach
lurch, but there were a few things--a bottle of
raspberry juice, a package of rice
cakes, a small cube of cheddar cheese--that
didn't look so bad.
I slumped over the sink counter, head spinning,
feeling loonier than ever. Naturally, I could
picture the grocery store. I had been there
hundreds of times. But the image had been so
real, so present. I dry-heaved into the sink a
few more times, shaking my head at my own
delusions.
The kitchen of our small apartment was right next
to the hallway door. As I puttered out of the
kitchen, I heard a brisk knock. I
groaned. It had to be the manager, or maybe the
elderly lady who lived down the hall. The
outside door of our apartment building was always
locked; visitors had to buzz the intercom and
identify themselves before someone in the apartment could
release the lock and let them in. No one had
buzzed our intercom. I shuffled over to the door
with great reluctance. I didn't want to talk
to the manager, and I certainly wouldn't be running
any errands for the neighbor lady, though I had
done so many times before. I looked through the
peephole and frowned. All I could see was a
mass of brilliantly red, curly hair. I
opened the door, wondering if someone had the wrong
apartment.
"Hi, Martha!"
The woman standing in the hallway was familiar
to me, though not very. I had to search my
pregnancy-dimmed memory for her name.
Sibyl, I thought at last. Sibyl
Johnston. Her husband, Charles Inouye, was a
graduate student in the East Asian Studies
Department. Their first child had been born at
about the same time as Katie. Sibyl and I had
met at a party when both of us were vast with child, and
had spent the evening talking about morning sickness and
laughing so hard at each other's jokes that I was
afraid we'd both go into labor. That was all I
knew about Sibyl, except that I was terribly
embarrassed to be standing in front of her wearing little
but an unwashed bathrobe.
Sibyl didn't seem even slightly
perturbed. She grinned, her red hair bouncing
around her face, and held out two large grocery
bags from Food Shak.
"I was just passing by," she said, "and I got
thinking about all the stuff we ate while we were
pregnant, and I decided I'd get you some."
I squinted at her. This was not normal
acquaintance behavior, particularly not in the
emotionally distant culture of New England.
"Look," said Sibyl, peering into the grocery
bags. "I got you some raspberry juice, and
some rice cakes, and some cheese ..." She
laughed suddenly, her fair skin going pink. "I
don't know why, I just thought I'd do it. Am I
way out of line here?"
I still hadn't said a word. I was slumped against
the wall, my mouth hanging open, the prickles
crawling across my scalp and down my spine. And
then, to my horror, I realized that tears had
formed in my eyes again, and were spilling out onto my
cheeks.
"Are you all right?" She was looking at me with
concern.
"Thank you," I managed to gasp. I was not
used to accepting help, and still less used to letting
anyone see me cry. But even my tremendous
funds of self-importance were beginning to give
way. "I ... uh ... I really needed ..."
I couldn't control the tears any longer. I put
my hands over my face and sobbed.
Sibyl Johnston, the relative stranger,
took a step into my apartment, set one of the
grocery bags on the floor, and put a strong
arm around my shoulders just as I was about to pass out.
"You okay?" she asked.
"I'm pregnant ... again ... can't eat,"
I gasped.
"All right, then." Sibyl has a low, strong
voice, the kind of voice that could calm a crowd
in the middle of a terrorist attack. "Let's
feed you," she said. She propped me against
the wall cautiously, as though I were a rag
doll she was setting aside for a moment, and bustled
into my kitchen with the two bags of food.
I stood there dazed, half-thinking about the
Seeing Thing, half afraid to think about it.
Once again, I was consumed by the eerie impression
that my life was completely under control--but not my
control. I watched Sibyl, who was quickly
unloading every type of food I had just selected
during my brief, incorporeal visit to Food
Shak, and wept as much with bewilderment as with
relief.



Sibyl stayed with me for over an hour, playing
with Katie, bathing her, and changing her diapers,
while I gradually relaxed enough to sip some
raspberry juice. She did all of this in a
pragmatic, unsentimental way, as though she had
been planning it for weeks, as though it were the most
ordinary thing in the world. Sibyl's
matter-of-fact demeanor was the only thing that
kept me from being utterly overwhelmed by her
kindness. But Sibyl was far from finished. I found
that out the next morning, when a buzz from the intercom
woke me up.
I got out of bed carefully, still feeling queasy
and weak, but not nearly as bad as I had the day
before. The grip of the Death Spiral had been
broken. I walked gingerly to the intercom and
pressed the talk button.
"Hello," I said. "Who is it?"
"Hi, Martha. It's me again." Sibyl's
voice came through, somewhat obscured by static.
"And I've got Deirdre with me--Deirdre
Hennesy."
I thought I remembered being introduced to the
woman I'll call Deirdre Hennesy at the
same party where Sibyl and I had met. I
winced. This was not the morning I would have chosen
to strike up a new acquaintance. I looked like
road kill.
"Um ... I'm not really dressed," I
stammered into the intercom.
The answer came from a new voice, higher
than Sibyl's. "Martha, it's Deirdre.
Listen, don't worry. I'm pregnant too,
and I look like hell."
"She really does," Sibyl
confirmed.
"Well, thanks a million," said the other
voice.
There seemed to be no polite option but
to invite them up.
It took Sibyl and Deirdre about a minute
to ride the elevator up ten stories. That was just
enough time for me to brush my grimy hair and look
despairingly around at the mess in my apartment.
Books and papers were stacked on every horizontal
surface. Katie's toys were scattered on the
floor. Dust mice had formed in all the corners
--large ones, more like dust German shepherds. I
knew Sibyl would be understanding, but I hated the
fact that there was anything about me that demanded her
understanding, anything imperfect or disreputable. As
for Deirdre, I seemed to remember that she was
sort of a Martha Stewart type, very beautiful and
aesthetic. There was no time to make myself or my
home look presentable.
"Hiya!" Sibyl grinned at me as I let
them in. "We're here for breakfast." As before,
she was carrying a large bag full of food. I
began to wonder if she just walked around that way, like
Johnny Appleseed, looking for hungry
pregnant women.
"We're going Continental today," said
Deirdre, coming in behind Sibyl. "We got
French pastries."
Deirdre did not look like hell. She
didn't even look pregnant. She was willowy
and ethereal, with flawless skin and huge, smoky
gray eyes. Sibyl looked gorgeous as
well. Her thick, curly hair was so deep red
it was almost crimson, and her eyes above her high
cheekbones were a shade of warm brown that matched
her hair exactly. Soaking wet and without a
trace of makeup, both of them would still have been
beautiful women.
"Sorry about the mess," I said lamely.
They didn't seem to register the comment. Sibyl
set her bag down on the kitchen counter and began
to pull out a variety of baked goods. Deirdre
was carrying a large bottle of apricot nectar.
She found the drinking glasses and filled three of
them.
"Here, Martha," she said. "Try this. It was the
only thing I could keep down for three weeks."
I was a little dazed. I took the glass
obediently and tried a sip.
Surprisingly, it tasted good.
"You were morning sick, too?" I ventured.
Deirdre rolled her enormous eyes.
"Don't get me started."
"She just hit fourteen weeks' gestation
yesterday," said Sibyl. "The nausea generally
trails off after twelve weeks." She found a
plate and began to arrange pastries on it. There
were muffins, croissants, rolls, cookies,
brioches. Sibyl had obviously been
determined to find foods I could eat.
"Actually, this pregnancy hasn't been all
that bad," said Deirdre, "compared to my first one.
Now, that was disgusting. Sick as a cow, the whole
nine months."
They carried the food and juice to the table that
served John and me as both desk and dining room.
I followed them, feeling a little strange because of the
fact that this didn't feel strange. I wasn't
used to inviting people into my apartment. I had made some
great friends during my undergraduate days, but most
of them had moved away from Boston. It had been
much harder for me to form friendships since I started
my doctoral training. Motherhood had made me
the odd person out among my classmates; they were
polite and kind to me but understandably less than
fascinated by the details of my life as a
nursing mother. I would show up at class after a
night in the emergency room, where Katie had
been put through a battery of hideously painful
tests to determine the cause of some raging illness,
and pretend that I really cared about the contrast between
Karl Marx's view of historical necessity
and Max Weber's. I would discuss
Durkheim's theory of social contagion with my
classmates during seminars, faking
intellectual passion the way a frigid woman
fakes orgasm, while I was actually worrying
about teething pain or the need to baby-proof my
bedroom. I had done this so often, under such intense
conditions, that I had forgotten what it felt like
to talk easily, freely, without any
camouflage.
Sibyl and Deirdre were obviously used
to communicating in this disarmingly open way. As I
joined them at the breakfast table and picked out a
brioche to chew, I watched and listened
cautiously. They were intelligent and accomplished
women, but neither of them displayed any of the interaction
patterns I'd grown used to at
Harvard. There was no sense of competition, no
feeling that I was being judged and found either
inadequate or threatening. Instead there was relaxed
frankness, and a kind of warmth I had almost
forgotten could exist. I didn't know how
to respond to this. It made me nervous.
"You look better, Martha," said Sibyl as
she refilled my glass of apricot nectar.
"I'm relieved. Yesterday I thought I was going
to have to haul you over to the hospital. Or maybe
the morgue."
"I feel much better," I said, still awkward
with gratitude. "Thanks to you."
Sibyl waved a hand dismissively.
"You're sorta thin, though," Deirdre
observed as she bit into a croissant.
"Well, you should talk," I said. "You look
about as pregnant as the Swan Princess."
"Mmm." She nodded, swallowing some
croissant. "It's all the barfing. I'm not
kidding, I could teach bulimia lessons. But now
that I'm not as nauseated, I'll make up for
lost time. I gained about a thousand pounds with my first
baby, sick as I was."
"Isn't there something they could give you guys for the
nausea?" said Sibyl. "Have you asked your
doctors about it?"
Deirdre snorted. "Oh, yeah, a lot they
care. They'd rather have you starve to death than take a
Tylenol."
I nodded in agreement. "I think the Harvard
doctors are afraid that if they give you
permission to take a drug and something goes wrong
with a baby, they'll get sued for malpractice."
"Doctors," said Sibyl, shaking her head.
She launched into a series of medical
anecdotes that had me laughing out loud for the first time
in weeks.
The conversation flowed smoothly on to some other
topic, and then another and another, all of them
quirky, funny, engaging. I sat there
cautiously, like someone who had suddenly been
transported from Antarctica to a beach in
Tahiti. Neither Sibyl nor Deirdre showed
a trace of the snobbery I have often seen in
beautiful women, nor was there any of the
professional puffiness that had grown so familiar
to me. Sibyl is a writer, Deirdre a
musician, and they are both exceedingly good at
what they do, but they spoke about their work the
same way they discussed their stretch marks, without
either conceit or false modesty. I found myself
relaxing as if I had known them for years.
Looking back on that morning, I realized for the
first time how lonely I had become. Harvard had
slapped me in the face often enough to make me
carefully self-concealing in any social
interaction, and since I had become a mother, I
had hardly spoken to anyone but John about anything
that really mattered to me. With John in Asia,
I felt as alone as if I were locked in a
space capsule.
Of course, I had Katie, but that is not the
same as having adult company. One of the great
myths of our society is that when women are left
with small children, they are not alone. The truth is that
a mother left with babies is far more alone than she
would be without them; every bit of energy, attention,
protectiveness, and care she might use to meet
her own needs must first be directed toward the needs
of her children. That's why the Bible always laments the
fate of "those who are with child and those who give
suck" in the middle of war and disaster. The authors
of the Good Book knew perfectly well that a
woman alone can run, fight, or hide, but a
woman with babies is toast.
I didn't think all this through as I talked
to Deirdre and Sibyl over apricot nectar.
I only knew that I was experiencing a strange
melting sensation, that my control of my own image
was beginning to get sloppy, and that it felt
dangerously good. When Katie woke up and
Sibyl immediately went to care for her, I was dismayed
to find that, for the second time in two days, I
couldn't help crying in front of someone. It was just
that I could hear Sibyl and Katie laughing, and the
thought that someone so loving was taking care of my
daughter made it impossible to control the tears.
At first Deirdre chatted on, diplomatically
pretending not to notice, but when I had to wipe my
eyes on the sleeve of my bathrobe, she fell
silent.
"I'm sorry," I said, half-smothered with
embarrassment. "I just ... I don't know how
to thank you. I can't figure out why you and Sibyl
are doing this. I didn't do anything to deserve
it."
Deirdre watched me for a moment in silence.
"I don't know how much Sibyl has told you
about me."
I squinted at her. "Nothing."
"Mmm," she said, nodding. After a pause, she
went on. "I'm on my second marriage,"
she said. "My first husband was Mr. Perfect--
handsome, charming, successful. He was also
completely psycho. Someday I'll tell you more
about it. Right now, all you need to know is that I
didn't have a clue who I'd really married.
He started acting strange the moment I said,
"I do." The longer we were married, the crazier
he acted. After a few months, I started
getting really scared. I left him when I was
three months pregnant."
I stopped crying and looked at her more
closely. She was as unruffled as ever.
"When I ran away, I was sick--sick like
you are now. I was also a complete emotional
wreck. Couldn't eat, couldn't sleep. I ended
up in the hospital."
In the other room, I could hear Sibyl and
Katie singing "Itsy Bitsy Spider."
"I thought I would die in that hospital bed,"
said Deirdre calmly. "My life had fallen
apart."
"I'm so sorry," I said, feeling even more
embarrassed to be making such a fuss about my own
situation.
Deirdre shrugged. "It was a while ago.
Things are good now. But I want to tell you about
something that happened while I was in the hospital.
It was late, after visiting hours. I had an
IV in my arm, which was a good thing, because I couldn't
even try to eat or drink. They gave me a
cup of water, but I was too weak to pick it up.
And I couldn't stop crying."
She noticed that I had finished my brioche and
pushed the plate with the pastries toward me as she
talked.
"Sometime around midnight, a nurse's aide
came in to mop the linoleum in my room. She was
a little woman--couldn't have been more than five
feet tall--with gray hair and dark brown skin.
She could have been Mexican or Filipina or
Egyptian, for that matter. I don't know. But
she didn't speak English. She kept looking
at me as she mopped, watching me lie there
crying. Then she said something in a language I
didn't understand. She put her mop in her
bucket, went into the bathroom, and came back
with a basin of warm water and a clean
cloth. And then she began to wash me."
Deirdre touched her own forehead, then each of
her wrists as she spoke.
"She cleaned my face, then my hands and arms,
and then lifted the blanket to wash my feet. The
whole time, she kept talking to me in this
language I didn't understand. But I knew
what she was saying."
Deirdre inclined her head toward the other
room, where Sibyl was making soft cooing noises
as she got Katie dressed. It took me a
second to figure out what she meant, and then I
suddenly understood. She was talking about the soothing,
singsong language mothers speak spontaneously
when they talk to babies. Baby talk is found
in all nations, all cultures; it is the
original Mother Tongue. It translates across
any language barrier because it is more about music
than about words; the sounds themselves, not their meaning,
give comfort and support.
Deirdre reached out one hand and laid it over
mine. "That's why I'm here," she said. "I have a
debt to repay."
By this time, of course, you could have used me
to irrigate the North Forty.
"That sounded wrong," said Deirdre. I mean,
I did come today to repay my debt. But I'll
come back because I like you." And she flashed me a
quick, gorgeous smile as Sibyl carried
Katie in to breakfast.

This was my first tentative, wary encounter with one
of the greatest gifts I would receive from Adam: the
understanding that the word mother is more powerful when it is
used as a verb than as a noun. Mothering has little
to do with biological reproduction--as another friend
once told me, there are women who bear and
raise children without ever mothering them, and there are people (both
male and female) who mother all their lives without
ever giving birth. The bad news is that not all of
us have the good fortune to be born to our real mothers,
or to stay with them as long as we need them. The good
news is that, while mothers are often in short
supply, mothering is not. Against all odds,
despite everything that works against it on this
unpleasant, uncomfortable planet, mothering is here
in abundance. You can always find it, if you're
smart and know where to look.
Of course, while I was expecting Adam,
I ended up being mothered even though I
didn't have a clue where to look. Not only did
I fail to go out and find people to mother me through that
difficult time, I actually tried to keep them
away when they showed up on their own. You have to let
down your defenses in order to be mothered, and after
seven years in a culture obsessed with
academic achievement, my defenses were just about the
only parts of my personality I had left.
Whatever force it was that brought Sibyl up to my
apartment, and made her return with Deirdre the
following day--and the day after that, and the day after that--was
also loving enough to make sure I was too sick
to send them away.
I'm not sure what that force was. For a while,
after that wild year, I tried to assign a name
to it: serendipity, good fortune, God, destiny.
If you want to call it any one of those names, you
are welcome to do so, but at this point I can't
say I know for sure. Whatever it was, I
suspect that, even then, Adam was working for it. I
wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that he had
picked out Sibyl and Deirdre, chosen them to show
up at my apartment. It sounds like something he would
do.



Sibyl and Deirdre fortified me with enough
apricot nectar and loving-kindness to keep me out
of the hospital until John returned from his first
trip. Unfortunately, he brought some uninvited
visitors with him.
We'd known when John took the Singapore
assignment that he would be exposed to some weird
germs. We had lived in Southeast Asia for a
year right after we were married (i finished my
junior year of college at a Chinese-speaking
research center in Singapore) and had suffered from a
number of strange diseases. One of them made our
eyelids go all scaly, so that it looked like we
had little lizards perching next to our noses.
Another caused our ankles to quiver
independently from the rest of our bodies. I had
a few embarrassing gynecological problems that
required visits to the Clinic for Wormen
[sic]. Mostly, though, the Asian germs
we'd picked up, and the new ones John caught
and brought back to Boston in 1987, caused the
same general assortment of symptoms that sweep
through the United States every flu season.
Body aches, headaches, toothaches, hair
aches, heartaches--you name it, in 1987, we
ached it. Exhausted, stressed, and constantly
shuttling around the entire globe, John was a
virtual petri dish for the transportation of
aches.
The physical problems he brought home that
November included a severe intestinal virus,
an antibiotic-resistant sinus infection, and
lice. I contracted all of these about five
seconds after he walked through our apartment door.
After a two-week separation, I didn't give
a damn about the infectious aspects of kissing.
John's mouth tasted like mentholated throat
lozenges and cough syrup, but it also tasted like him,
so I didn't care. His taste reminded me of
butternuts, which grew in abundance around my
house when I was a kid. They're similar
to walnuts, but wilder, with an aftertaste like the air
in a forest during a rainstorm. I inhaled
John's scent, with its mixture of woodsiness
and medication, like a glue-sniffing addict sucking
up a fix. It was the only smell in the world that
didn't make me want to throw up.
By midnight, however, the intestinal virus had
taken hold, and I was in the throes of truly
record-setting stomach upset. I spiked a
high fever and became delirious. I kept
swimming around in the bedclothes, making strange
muttering noises, trying to curse God and die
like Job's wife advised him in the Bible.
Eventually, John became concerned enough to take me
over to the University Health Services
emergency room. I barely remember getting
there. The doctor on call peered into my eyes and
ears, and informed us that I was severely dehydrated
and needed intravenous fluid.
Then, suddenly, the doctor's eyes opened
wide. She looked at me as though she were seeing
something wondrous and rare. Actually, she wasn't
looking at all of me. Just my arms.
"Janice," said the doctor softly. Then she
called, a little louder, "Oh, Janice! Come
here, please!" She kept her eyes fixed on
my forearms as though she had spent weeks of
unsuccessful whale watching and they were two baby
belugas.
Nurse Janice appeared in the doorway of the
small examination room. "Yes?" she said.
"Look at this," said the doctor.
She reached out and picked up my left hand.
The nurse looked, and her eyes widened.
"Oh, my," she said reverently.
"Go get Brenda," said the doctor.
At this point I was vaguely glad they
seemed to like my arms so much, but I had no idea
why. Now I know.
You see, I have these very large veins. Even
now, as I type these words, my computer screen
casts a blue-gray glow across my hands and
wrists, throwing those veins into sharp relief. They
are, indubitably, very large--and I am no
longer pregnant. When any woman is
pregnant, her veins get bigger to handle the
increased blood volume. That morning in the
emergency ward, my arm veins rivaled your
average garden hose in diameter and fluid
capacity. You could have driven a bus through them. I
was, of course, aware of this, but I did not know
what it meant to the medical staff at University
Health Services. Nor did I understand the
significance of sending for Brenda.
It turned out that Brenda was a brand-new
nurse, just finished with her R.n. degree,
embarking on an entire career of piercing people's
skin with sharp objects. To do this skillfully
requires a good deal of practice. This is
especially true for inserting IV'S, which are much
thicker than syringes and have to be threaded a fair
distance into a vein so that fluids can be pumped through
them. To learn this skill, nurses practice a
lot, first on citrus fruit, and then on each
other. Yes, each other! I have a wonderful
sister-in-law who used to come home from her nursing
classes with track marks like a heroin addict.
As far as I'm concerned, she and everyone like her should
be granted sainthood immediately, without further
discussion. But nurses only have so many veins
to offer up to collegial experimentation, so they are
always on the alert for patients with really big
veins. Persons like little old pregnant moi.
When Brenda came in, she could hardly contain
herself. She and Janice and the doctor all spent
a minute clucking admiringly at my vast
veins. Then they whipped out the IV equipment, and
Brenda gave it her best shot (so to speak).
She was really good at getting the needle through my
outer layer of skin and into a vein but had
considerably more trouble threading it through the vein without
punching it out the other side. She
punctured three veins in this manner, all the time
horrified to think she was hurting me.
This ushered in an era of my life I call the
Pincushion Period. I would require
rehydration every few days for the rest of my
pregnancy, and every beginning nurse at Harvard
University Health Services would get a shot
at me (so to speak). Years after Adam was
born, a friend gave me a recording of a song about
a woman who was pregnant and frightened and lost.
As I listened to it I felt a great wave of
sadness wash through me--not an intrusion of grief from
outside but a release from within. Someone understood
how I had felt. I was sitting alone in my
living room, listening to the song and crying, when I
felt a sharp pain in my right forearm, as though
I'd been stung by a bee. I looked down
to see that one of the veins in my wrist--the biggest
one, which was always the first target of the neophyte
nurses--had broken open. It was bleeding under my
skin, forming a maroon bruise that spread slowly.
There is research that indicates individual
cells might be able to learn, to remember, and
to replicate experience. I have no doubt that as
I listened to that song, the cells in my enormous
vein were telling their humble story as best they knew
how.

At the time I actually got all those
IV'S, I never minded the slight pain in the arm
that came with them. On the contrary. I came
to love those beautiful clear bottles of
glucose solution from the moment that Brenda finally
succeeded in hooking me up to one. As the liquid
dripped into my bloodstream, my vision slowly
cleared. The extreme weakness of dehydration was
replaced by something close to a sense of well-being.
Best of all, I didn't have to eat or drink.
Forcing myself to take in nourishment was a constant
struggle, and having calories and fluids pumped
directly into my veins was like having a
baby-sitter for the fetus. I lay back and
relaxed, grateful beyond measure for medical
science and its practitioners.
It takes a long time to funnel three quarts
of liquid into a human vein, even a very large
one. After making sure I was comfortable, Brenda,
Janice, and the doctor left me to rest and
absorb glucose solution on my own. I
fell into a deep, healing sleep.
And then I began to dream.
If it were possible to convey in words the true
experience of a dream, we probably wouldn't need
dreams in the first place. They come from someplace
beyond our rational and verbal minds, and are by nature
indescribable. The dream I had that day in
University Health Services is even harder
to convey than most. But I'll try.
I was sitting by a wooden table, in a room
filled with slanting light from a half-shuttered
window. Strewn across the table were hundreds of
documents, all yellowed with age and torn by rough
handling. I felt desperate and overwhelmed. I
knew for some reason that I was supposed to find
something of great significance in the pages, but I
had no idea where to look. As I searched through the
stacks of paper, the atmosphere around me seemed
supercharged, volatile, brimming with the
anticipation of some immensely significant
event. My compulsion to prepare for this unknown
occurrence was almost frantic.
Eventually I became aware that I was not
alone. I looked up from my papers and saw,
sitting across the table from me, a young man. At
least the form of a young man. I had the sense that this
person was in fact ageless, but from his appearance I
would have taken him to be in his mid-twenties. I
remember this even though I have no memory of what
he actually looked like.
"Here," he said, and reached across the table to hand
me a piece of paper. His voice was incredibly
resonant and gentle, so much so that it brought tears
to my eyes. I knew immediately that the page he
gave me was the one I had been looking for. It
contained exactly the information I most needed to know.
Nevertheless, I reached out to take it with great
reluctance--no, make that terror. It scared the
bejeezus out of me to open my hand and close it on
that single sheet of paper. The intensity of my fear
was matched only by the intensity of my desire
to see what was written there.
The memory of reading that letter is much fainter now
than it was later that night in our apartment, when I
wrote down everything about the dream I could
recall. Even so, ten years later the images
remain incredibly vivid in my mind. The letter was
written in characters I had never seen before, in a
language I did not know. However, I could
understand it immediately, and in fact it seemed a much
clearer language than English.
Reading it felt like coming home to my native
country after many years in alien territory. The
words of this unknown tongue had been laid down in
a firm, graceful hand, and they shone. Literally.
A brilliant golden light, like the reflection
of the setting sun over water, flashed and sparkled
from every mark and line. It was as though the pen had not
put down pigment but scraped away material
reality to reveal something inexpressibly beautiful
shining beneath it. As I read the letter, I felt a
deep comfort trickling into my heart the way the
glucose solution was trickling into my veins.
Brenda woke me by setting one soft hand on
my shoulder. I had been asleep three hours,
and the IV drip had done its work. I felt much,
much better. The virus was on the wane, my
tissues were plump with beneficial fluids, and
I could stand up on my own. But besides these
physical blessings, and far beyond them, the echo of the
dream remained with me. I felt as though I had
been bathed in light. Brenda left me to get
dressed, and for a few minutes I sat quietly,
turning over the dream in my mind as though it were some
complex and exquisite piece of jewelry. The
visual details were still breathtakingly vivid, but
to my great frustration, I couldn't remember
anything about the content of the letter--not a word, not a
phrase. However, there were things I knew after
having that dream that I had not known before. I was
irrationally certain of three things: that the ageless young
man across the table from me was the fetus I carried
in my womb; that this being loved and respected me as
his equal; and that there was "something wrong" with the baby.
I put my clothes on very slowly. For weeks
now strange emotions and impressions had swirled
around inside me like some strange drug. I was
constantly feeling things I neither expected nor
understood. As I pulled on my shoes, I
tried to dismiss my new irrational beliefs,
especially the one about the baby's having some kind
of problem. Ridiculous, I thought
defensively. Just the kind of nightmare any
pregnant woman would have after sucking up pizza
for twelve hours. The strange thing, though, was that
I didn't feel as if I'd had a nightmare.
The comfort that had settled into my very core as I
read the young man's letter had not dissipated when I
awoke. It had been a good dream. A very good
dream.

Brenda and Janice were manning the nurses'
station when I went to check out. They seemed very
pleased to see me on my feet, with my skin all
pink rather than dead-carp white. I thanked them for
their help as I gave them my Harvard ID
card and signed release papers. When I turned
to go, something made me hesitate.
"Um ..." I said awkwardly. I was
wondering--do you know if a virus like the one I just
had--you know, an ordinary stomach virus--could
cause some kind of problem this early in a
pregnancy?"
Brenda looked at Janice, who had more
experience. Janice furrowed her brow.
"Oh, I really don't think so," she said, in
that crisp, firm voice nurses use to keep
patients from delusions of catastrophe.
"Because," I went on, "I know what can happen
with German measles, and toxoplasmosis, and
things like that."
"Yes, of course," said Janice kindly.
"A lot of things can go wrong. But I don't
think you have anything to worry about. Eat right and
take care of yourself, and the baby will probably be just
fine."
For some reason, I couldn't seem to let go of the
subject. "If something were wrong with it--the
fetus, I mean--when could I tell? How would
I know?"
This time, Brenda got the courage to speak up.
"Usually, when something is wrong, the pregnancy
miscarries," she explained. "Other things we
don't know about until the baby's born--unless
we test for specific problems."
"So," I said slowly, "what kinds of tests
are available here? What do you test for?"
Janice took up the thread again. "Aside from
the usual checkups, where we listen for the heartbeat
and so forth, there are several kinds of tests
available. We can screen for some with ultrasound,
some with blood tests. There's always
amniocentesis, where we draw amniotic
fluid from the uterus and analyze fetal cells.
And then there's chorionic villi sampling--that's
where we analyze a bit of tissue from the
umbilicus, and it can be done a lot earlier than
amniocentesis. But those aren't standard
procedures. For a woman as young as you are, with no
family history of birth defects, they're
all optional."
I thought about this for some time.
"I don't think your insurance would cover most
of the procedures, anyway," Janice went on,
probably wondering how to get rid of this
strange, loosely clad, barnaclelike
creature that had attached itself to her nurses'
station.
"Which ones would it cover?" I asked.
"Well, the blood tests. AFP, if you
want it."
"AFP?"
"Alpha-fetoprotein," she explained.
"It's a waste product from the fetus. If
there's a great deal of it in the mother's bloodstream,
it can indicate spina bifida."
"Okay," I said. I remembered that they had
asked if I wanted that test when I was carrying
Katie. I had declined, since my risk
factors were so low. But now, something paradoxically
warm and terrifying was pushing at my consciousness.
I gave Brenda and Janice a final word of
thanks and took the elevator to the third-floor
obstetrical department. Before I left the
clinic, I wanted to make sure that I had
signed up for every single prenatal test covered
by my insurance.
Ten years later, I still believe that Adam
suggested this himself, as a way of helping me
prepare to become his mother.

Right now, from the room directly beneath my
office, I can hear Adam bellowing at his older
sister for taking a can of Coca-Cola away from
him. She took it because she knows that's what I would
do if I were downstairs. I don't give
Coke to my kids, but I keep a secret stash
of it for a writer friend of mine. Adam had just
located my latest hiding place. He had
guzzled one can and was on to his second when
Katie caught him. After that one Coke, we can
expect Adam to get totally wired on sugar and
caffeine, and spend several soulful hours strumming
away on his guitar and singing love ballads about
his girlfriend, Lonnie. (the first time I heard
him singing, through the door of his bedroom, I thought
he was having a seizure. I almost called 911
before I dared to go into the room. When I opened the
door, there he was with a small plastic guitar,
serenading the moon with sounds like a cat being run through
an electric lawn mower.)
What I'm trying to say here is that Adam is
not some oracular phenomenon, like Jesus in the
Temple astonishing the scholars with his insights,
or that kid in Seattle who was recognized
by Tibetan monks as the latest reincarnation of a
high lama, or even Shirley Temple, who
could really dance. He's just a kid with a boyish
enthusiasm for tormenting his sisters and a voice like
one of the Billy Goats Gruff. Most of the
time. I tell that part of the story to strangers and
friends alike. I generally keep quiet about the
fact that, every now and then, something different shows through
Adam's retarded-child facade. It glints like the
light that shone from the lines of that dream letter I read
ten years ago, and it can take your breath away.
When Adam was three years old, I began
to lose hope that he would ever communicate verbally.
His inability to speak was terribly frustrating for
him, and it just plain broke my heart. I worked with
him for hours, doing the exercises the speech
therapists had taught me, having no success
whatsoever. Sometimes Adam made random sounds that
could be force-fit into words, but not with any degree of
honesty. I had to face it: the kid couldn't
talk. Not at all.
One day, after hours of unsuccessful therapy,
I hit a low point. I took my children to the
grocery store and offered them all bribes to keep
quiet--I was too tired and discouraged to enforce
discipline any other way. I told them they could
each pick out a treat from the candy stands next to the
checkout counter. When we got there, Katie
chose a roll of Life Savers and Lizzie a
chocolate bar. Adam, who seemed to understand
everything I had said even though he couldn't speak in
return, went over to a basket of red
rosebuds and pulled one out.
"This is what you want?" I asked
incredulously.
He nodded.
"No, honey, this isn't candy," I said,
putting it back and turning him toward the rows of
sweets. "Don't you want candy?"
Adam shook his small head, walked back
to the bucket, picked out the rose, and put it on
the counter. I was baffled, but I paid for it. Adam
took it gravely as the girls unwrapped their
candy. He held the flower with both hands all the
way home. When we got there, I was immediately
engrossed in putting away the groceries
and forgot all about his strange request.
The next morning I awoke to find sunlight
streaming through my bedroom window. John had already
left for the day, and I could hear quiet babbling coming
from Lizzie's room. As I yawned and
stretched, I heard Adam's small feet
padding down the hallway toward my bedroom. He
appeared at the door with the rose, which he had put
in a small crystal bud vase. I looked at
him in surprise. I didn't realize that he
knew what vases were for, let alone how to get
one down from the cupboard, fill it with water, and
put a flower in it.
Adam walked over to the bed and handed the rose
to me. As he held it out, he said, in a clear,
calm voice, "Here."
It had been years since I had thought about my
dream at University Health Services, years
since I had heard the incredible gentleness in the
voice of the young man who had sat across the table from
me--the same voice I had just heard coming from my
mute son's mouth. I stared at Adam, almost
frightened, as the dream flashed into my mind. He
looked back at me with steady eyes, and I
knew what I had known--what I should have
remembered--all that time: that his flesh of my flesh
had a soul I could barely comprehend, that he was
sorry for the pain I felt as I tried to turn
him into a "normal" child, and that he loved me
despite my many disabilities.
Then he turned around, his little blue pajamas
dragging a bit on the floor, and padded out of the
room.



I don't think I realized quite how
obsessive people can be about appearances until I
began to talk to some of Adam's physical
therapists, who started working with him when he was two
weeks old. First of all, you must know that the people who
spend their lives working with disabled children are the most
accepting, loving, optimistic-but-realistic
human beings you could ever meet. To them, no child, no
matter how disfigured or inept, deserves
anything less than unconditional acceptance.
Adam's therapists probably don't know that
I, with my three Harvard degrees and my
relatively sound body, got more from their sessions
with Adam than did Adam himself. As
I sat watching them, feeling the kindness in the air
around them, all the parts of me that I had sent to the
Deepfreeze years before thawed and stretched and
began to consider the idea that the world might not be altogether
hostile.
This is not to say that Adam's therapists
didn't make any judgments. They were, in
fact, secretly appalled by some of the people they had
met in their line of work. Two of them told me this
one day when Adam was working out, trying to bulk up
from nine pounds. (the workout consisted of things like
grabbing for shiny objects, cranking his head back
and forth to hear interesting sounds, and rolling around in a
tub of dry beans.) The conversation turned to other
children the therapists had worked with--specifically, those
who were recovering from major surgeries demanded
by parents who were dissatisfied with their children's
appearance. The therapists had worked with children whose
thighbones had been shattered and reconstructed
to correct slight bowleggedness; others who had
undergone plastic surgery to correct
"defective" features that had not yet even
formed; still others who were given up for adoption because of
anomalies as minor as a harelip. The
therapists were outraged by these parents' inability
to see beyond the issues of appearance to the core, to the
child as a human being.
You must bear in mind that these therapists had
chosen to work with "different" children, while the parents
in question had had the experience thrust upon them. I'm
certainly not one to judge them. I've had a hard
enough time learning to handle difference without discomfort,
to look beneath the surface. I do feel sad,
though, for parents who might have had an
opportunity to learn a new way of seeing,
to look into the magical part of life, and let it
pass them by. Then again, it may be that not all
disabled children can do this. Maybe it's just Adam himself.
In his strange, not-quite-human way, he is
constantly reminding me that real magic doesn't
come from achieving the perfect appearance, from being
Cinderella at the ball with both glass
slippers and a killer hairstyle. The real
magic is in the pumpkin, in the mice, in the
moonlight; not beyond ordinary life, but within it.
Here's another "shopping with the kids" story.
One day when Adam was five, I took all
three of my children out to pick up a few household
items. I parked the car, extracted my children
(two from car seats), and began the
process of herding them all into the store without
getting killed by traffic. I had Lizzie by the
hand, and the older children were following--at least until
we reached the doorway. We were at someplace like
Kmart, where they sell gardening goods. That morning
the store was holding a sale on ornamental
plants. Flowers and shrubs were lined up on
benches and tables just outside the door. The display
drew Adam like a moth to the flame. His eyes
got round--well, as round as they ever get,
considering--and he began to coo with delight.
"Come on, Adam," I said, steering
Elizabeth over to an empty shopping cart.
"Keep moving, keep moving, keep moving."
By the time I had lifted Lizzie into the cart,
Adam had disappeared. I gave that weary sigh--
the one you remember your own mother sighing, the sigh that
is sighed at least once a day by every parent of
small children--and went back a few steps to look
for him. He was over by the gardening display, walking
away from me.
"Adam!" I hollered, trying not to sound too
much like a child abuser. "Come here! Get back
here!"
He looked up and blinked.
"Come on!"
Adam shrugged and, with a lingering look at the
gardening display, trudged over to my grocery
cart. I had the two older kids grab the bars
of the cart, as usual, and we headed into the store.
Just then I felt a tap on my shoulder. I
turned. A very tall, very craggy, very elderly
man was standing behind me. He was wearing a baseball
cap with the name of a cattle-feed company
emblazoned on it. He had the huge, rough hands
of a lifelong farmer.
"Excuse me, ma'am," he said, doffing the
baseball cap. "I was wondering if you noticed
what your boy was doing just now."
I felt a surge of apprehension. Adam
had done some profoundly embarrassing things in his
short lifetime. He had hidden his shoes in my
mother-in-law's microwave, crammed crayons
into the baby-sitter's heating vents to watch them
melt, gone over to visit the neighbors, alone,
wearing only galoshes and a bra. My bra. I
couldn't imagine what he might have done in the
brief time I'd lost track of him outside, but
his creativity in these matters always went well beyond
my imagination.
I answered the old man with a cautious no,
trying to look harried and innocent.
The old man leaned down to speak softly in my
ear. "Your boy," he said, "stopped to smell every
single plant in that display outside."
"Oh," I said uncertainly.
"He didn't just smell the flowers," said the
farmer. "He smelled the shrubs, too. He
smelled every bush they have out there. I think he even
smelled the dirt."
I blinked at him, not altogether sure I was
getting the point.
"Come with me." The farmer turned and gestured.
He seemed very pleased, almost boyish. I turned
my shopping cart around, children still attached, and
followed him.
We went outside to the gardening display, the old
man leading. I caught up to him next to a row of
ornamental juniper brushes. He was leaning
over, his eyes closed, inhaling deeply through his
nose.
"Smell this," he said, pointing to the juniper.
Katie and Adam had already begun sniffing. I
put my face close to the shrub and smelled it.
It had a tangy, sharp scent, somewhere between
citrus rind and sagebrush. The smell brought
back a sudden flurry of memories from my
childhood.
"Huh!" I said.
"It's something, isn't it?" The farmer gave
me a crusty grin. "Now try this one."
We went on smelling bushes for five or ten
minutes, until we'd sniffed our way through the
whole display. I was so relieved that Adam
hadn't done anything illegal that I hardly even
wondered why this gruff, practical-looking man
was so invested in the whole thing. Adam and the girls
thought it was wonderful; they snuffled through the rows of
plants like happy truffle hogs. As far as I
was concerned, the bushes beat Proust's madeleine
hands down; if you want to stir your imagination and
your memory, I recommend that you immediately
locate and smell some shrubs--whatever kind
grew in your neighborhood when you were younger and
closer to the ground.
When we were finished, the old man straightened
up to his full height and tipped his hat to me
again.
"Things aren't always what they seem, are they?"
he said.
"No," I agreed.
"It pays to look close," he said. Then he
leaned over again, put his lips near my ear, and
whispered, "My boy's twenty-three." Then
he turned on the heel of one enormous boot and
walked away.
Ah, I thought. No wonder. He's one of
us.
That's the kind of life you lead when you have an
Adam around. Oh, of course it's not all
lovely epiphanies. For every old man who
invites you outside to smell the bushes, there are
at least three obsequious salespeople who will
congratulate you on having "such cute little
girls," while they look awkwardly past the
boy with Down syndrome, trying to pretend he
isn't there. The prejudice, sometimes even
hostility, can burn like acid. But along with this
pain, Adam brought with him a sweetness that
surpasses anything I ever felt before he was
conceived. It comes from looking at the heart of things,
from stopping to smell not only the roses but the
bushes as well. It is a quality of attention
to ordinary life that is so loving and intimate it
is almost worship.

At Harvard, of course, I had learned
to pay attention to very different things. The importance
of prestige is so overwhelming in that culture that
people hardly look at each other, let alone their
environment. The attention goes to appearances:
appearing successful, appearing smart, appearing
utterly and absolutely unlike a retarded child.
I began to notice this when I was pregnant with
Adam, months before I had any solid evidence
that there was anything "different" about him. Maybe his
way of seeing, the depth of his appreciation for
life, seeped from him into my bloodstream, or
maybe it was the immediate proximity of his soul that
affected mine. Whatever the reason, things began
to look different.
It was mid-November and the few remaining
leaves rattled on the trees. I welcomed the
winter chill, since icy air helped keep my
mind off the nausea. I breathed it carefully one
day as I waddled over to William James
Hall (known to the intelligentsia as Billy
Jim) to attend a class. I arrived a few
minutes early and decided to use the extra time
to visit a friend in the Psychology
Department, one floor above the Sociology
Department, where my class was held. My friend was
in her lab, conducting an experiment that consisted of
implanting wires into the brains of live rats,
then making the rats swim around in a tub of
reconstituted dried milk. She told me why
she was doing this, but I have no memory of what she
said. Maybe she was making soup. Whatever the
reason, she had put the rats and the milk in a
children's wading pool, the kind you fill up with a
hose so that toddlers can splash around on a hot
summer day. The tub was decorated with pictures
of Smurfs. Smurfs, for those of you who are not
culturally aware, are little blue people whose antics
you may have observed on Saturday morning
cartoons during the 1980's. I personally
feel that the Smurfs were cloying, saccharine little
monsters, but Katie adored them.
After chatting with my rat-molesting friend for a
moment, I excused myself and headed downstairs for the
seminar. There were seven or eight other graduate
students in attendance, along with a couple of
extra professors who had come to hear the latest
twist on established theories. I felt the way
I always did when I walked into a classroom
at Harvard, that I had just entered a den of lions
--not starving lions, perhaps, but lions who were
feeling a little peckish. The people in the room were
fearsomely brilliant, and I was always terrified
that I would say just one completely idiotic thing,
make one breathtakingly asinine comment that would
expose me as a boorish, politically
incorrect half-wit.
"Ah, Martha," said the course instructor,
"we've been waiting for you."
I blushed. I had stopped at the rest room
to blow a few chunks, and had been hoping that the
class would start a bit late. I did not want
to be the focus of attention.
"I'm sorry," I said. "I was upstairs in
the Psych lab, watching rats swim around in a
Smurf pool."
"I see," said the instructor. "Yes, I
believe I've read about that."
A professor, one of the visiting
dignitaries, chimed in. "How is Smurf's
work going?" he inquired. "I understand he's had
some remarkable findings."
"Yes," said a graduate student. "I read
his last article."
There was a general murmur of agreement. It
seemed that everyone in the room was familiar with
Dr. Smurf, and his ground-breaking work with
swimming rats.
It took me a few discombobulated
seconds to figure out that everyone at the seminar
assumed a Smurf pool was named for some famous
psychological theorist. I guess they thought it
was like a Skinner box, the reinforcement chamber used
by B. F. Skinner to develop the branch of
psychological theory known as behaviorism.
Comprehension blossomed in my brain like a
lovely flower.
I think," I said solemnly, "that Smurf
is going to change the whole direction of linguistic
epistemology."
They all agreed, nodding, saying things like
"Oh, yes," and "I wouldn't doubt it."
I beamed at them, struggling desperately not
to laugh. It wasn't so much that I wanted to mock
these people. I was giddy with exhilaration, because after seven
years at Harvard, I was just beginning to realize that
I wasn't the only one faking it. I had
bluffed my way through many a cocktail party,
pretending to know all about whichever scholar or theory
was the current topic of conversation. I had always
wondered how I survived among the staggeringly
intelligent people lurking all around me. Now I was
beginning to understand.
"He's a good man, Smurf is," said the
instructor solemnly.
And thus I learned that at Harvard, while
knowing a great deal is the norm and knowing everything is
the goal, appearing to know everything is considered an
acceptable substitute. I pondered this great
truth during the two-hour seminar. I was so
buoyed up by it that I didn't pay enough attention
to snorking up little bits of food in order to keep
my nausea under control. I sailed right on
into my next class, another seminar, confident that
I could get through it without losing my lunch.
This was a mistake.
I still cringe when I think about that particular
class period. I will continue to cringe about it
until I am dead, and (who knows) probably
for a long time thereafter. The course was Sociology
of Gender, and the two instructors had managed
to book just about every famous scholar in the field as a
guest lecturer. I had been looking forward
to hearing that day's speaker, a specialist
on family structures and functions, for
weeks. It was worth the wait. I'll always
remember that scholarly gentleman. And I think
it's safe to say that he'll always remember me.
Oh, he doesn't know my name, and probably
couldn't remember my face if his life depended
on it. But I'm sure he can still recall that, right
in the middle of this particular guest lecture, one
student leapt to her feet, staggered toward the
door, and passed out, collapsing in a heap so that
she was lying with her lower body still in the classroom
and her head and shoulders in the hallway. I have
given many lectures myself since then, and I think
it is safe to say that this kind of event would be hard
to forget.
This was one fainting scenario in which the bystanders were
not apathetic. Both course instructors were warm
and considerate people. They immediately rushed to my
assistance. (i don't think it's any
coincidence that both these scholars left Harvard
after a few years.) I don't remember how, but
I ended up on a couch in the office of one
instructor, Annemette S@orensen, confessing
my pregnancy in a voice choked with shame.
"Well, there's nothing wrong with being
pregnant," said Dr. S@orensen, "and if
you're sick, you're sick. You might as well have
been hit by a truck." I lay back on the
couch, limp with embarrassment, warmed by her
kindness.
"I'm better now," I said.
"How are you going to get home?"
I squinted at her. "I'm not going home.
Class isn't over."
S@orensen pursed her lips, thinking. I could
imagine her concerns; she hardly needed a repeat
performance of my double-gainer to the class room
floor. To allay her fears, I took a long
breath, pulled myself together, and sat up. Immediately,
the hum in my ears increased to a loud buzz, the
familiar green darkness flooded my vision, and
I flopped back down again, briefly out like a
light. When I came to, the second
instructor, Lenore Weitzman, had joined
Dr. S@orensen.
"We've got to get her home," she said.
"No, she says she wants to stay,"
S@orensen responded.
I tried to talk, but the best I could manage
was an emphatic nod.
Dr. Weitzman looked at me as though I
had just told her I intended to climb down the
exterior walls of the building rather than ride the
elevator.
"She's just pregnant," said S@orensen. In
my seven years as a Harvard student, she was the
only faculty member I knew personally who
had actually given birth herself. "She'll be
fine."
We reached a compromise. I spent the rest of
that class period lying in the hallway next to the
classroom. The door was left open so that I
could hear what was going on. I had a notepad
on the floor beside me, and I took notes in that
strange, rambling hand you develop when your head
is actually lying on the paper.
After class, a woman I didn't
recognize asked if she could walk me home.
She acted quite concerned, and the instructors, who
seemed to have shouldered some responsibility for my
well-being, were glad that I wouldn't be lurching the
distance on my own.
My escort was another Ph.d. candidate.
She was not in my department but had come to the gender
seminar because of her passionate feminism. I, of
course, thought of myself a feminist as well.
Braced by the cold air and distracted by her
companionship, I managed to keep up my end of
an enthusiastic discussion of women's social
roles. I liked my classmate very much.
When we got within eyeshot of the apartment building
where I lived, I pointed it out and asked if she
would like to come up for a little apricot nectar. I
felt rather awkward doing this, but I wanted to thank
her, and my breakfasts with Sibyl and Deirdre
had made me bold.
She declined the invitation, smiling. Then her
face became very serious.
"I wanted to walk you home," she said, "because
I think it's time you stopped kissing up to the
enemy."
I didn't have the vaguest idea what she was
talking about, but I felt a chill in my gut.
"Excuse me?"
The woman's face went so hard you could have
chopped wood with it. "This crap about--what do they
call it?--morning sickness. You know it isn't
real."
I wasn't sure what to say. Morning
sickness felt exceptionally real to me.
"Men have been telling women for centuries that
it's hard to bear children," said the woman, as though she
were repeating obvious facts to an Alzheimer's
patient. "All that bullshit about the pain of
childbirth, the "delicacy""--she said the word
as if it tasted bad--"of pregnant women."
She shook her head in frustration. "Bearing children
is what women do," she went on. "There's
nothing difficult or painful about it--unless you
accept the party line. There is no such thing as
"morning sickness." All of those myths were
made up to justify denying women access to decent
jobs and positions in society. And look at
you--kissing butt like it's going out of style.
Don't you think it's time to stop faking it?"
I just stood there with my mouth open. All those
years of practice, and I had still let down my
guard long enough to get another slap in the face.
After a long time, I managed to say, "I
don't think I can help it."
She went on in a voice that made me think
of the feminist phrase "a pen dipped in anger,"
a voice that left no doubt that she put me in the
same category with plague-bearing rodents.
"I don't care if you think you can help it or
not," she said. "Stop it! It does not look
right. It makes us all look bad. You're a
dead weight on every woman alive. Just stop
it."
As I look back now, my strongest feeling
about this woman is regret that I didn't kick
her. At the time; however, I thought she was right. I
was so drenched in shame for being pregnant in the first
place, for not being a truly committed Smart
Person like everyone else at Harvard, that it was very
easy to accept the idea that my vomiting and fainting
spells were psychosomatic.
"Um," I mumbled. "Okay, I'll try."
The woman rolled her eyes. "Yes," she
said. "You do that." Then her face relaxed into a
smile again, as though we had just been discussing the
weather. "See you next week."
"Right," I said. "Next week."
I waited until she had turned and faded
into the crowd along Massachusetts Avenue before
I set out for home. Mind over matter, I
thought, and held my head up high. I took the
longest stride I could. Six inches, maybe
seven. Damn. I was suddenly hugely
self-conscious, and I felt a sense of
panic, not so much because I truly believed I was
ruining every woman's chances for a fair shot in life
but because I knew somebody thought I was. "It
does not look right," she had said. It does not
look right. You do not look right.
I felt tears, those appallingly
irrepressible pregnancy tears, forming in my
eyes. And then, in the window of one of Mass
Ave's many bookstores, I saw the cover of a
children's book that bore the image of a small blue
elf. It wasn't one of the Smurfs, but it
reminded me of them.
"He's a good man, Smurf is," I said,
imitating the professor who had said it earlier that
day. A couple of passersby looked at me
curiously but walked on. I felt the
blossoming sensation in my chest again, the feeling of
pulling back the petals and seeing the genuine
heart of things. As I crept the final block
toward the apartment building, I found myself actually
smiling.





John hadn't begun to get over the jet lag
from his second Asia trip before it was time for his
third. He roamed our apartment at night, reading
documents, grading papers, crunching numbers in
the computer databases he was compiling for his
dissertation. During the day, of course, we both
went flat-out like racehorses in the stretch--
well, anyway, John did. I was more like a
hedgehog in the stretch. I had developed
nausea associations with everything I was studying.
I still get queasy when I see written
Japanese, which I studied intensively that
semester.
Even more distressing, my mental faculties were
getting duller by the minute. I felt as though my
brain had been replaced with a zesty blend of
oatmeal and pond scum; I had lost the
capacity for intellectual analysis, and my
memory, which had once been reasonably good,
seemed to have shut down operations altogether. After teaching
--not just taking but teaching--an entire course on
Caribbean culture, the only thing I can recall
from the class is that the U.s. military referred
to its attack on Grenada as a
"predawn vertical insertion." And the only
reason I remember this is that John and I
took to using the phrase to describe the act that
had gotten me pregnant in the first place.
Despite all of this, having John home
made the world seem a decent place again. A good
place. I once read the biography of a
woman who described her husband with one sentence:
"When he got home, the sun came out." Those were
my sentiments exactly. Even as the days grew
darker and colder, the time when John was home
seemed bright. The first few snows actually struck
me as rather festive. When John was there, it was
easy for me to remember that Cambridge can be one
of the loveliest cities on earth.
He left again on a Monday morning, early,
having packed the refrigerator with foodstuffs of
every possible variety in order to ward off another
Death Spiral. On the outside of the door
clung a set of magnetic letters, which John had
bought for Katie. We had learned, much to our
dismay, that two or three of the other
Harvard-affiliated eighteen-month-olds in her
day-care group were already reading. It was weird; they
could read the labels on their Binkys while they were
still using them. These children's parents had spent hours
using flash cards to induce reading comprehension in
their infants. John and I were amazed by this, and also
much chagrined. We had the sick feeling that
Katie had been inadequately trained, or
perhaps (god forbid) simply wasn't up to the
challenge of reading before the age of two. John
had bought the magnetized alphabet to help
launch her on the path to literacy.
I had thought that I would get used to letting him
go, that each time would be easier than the last.
Instead, it got harder. That day, after the apartment
door closed and I heard the elevator pick
John up, I went to the window and looked down
at Mass Ave, hoping to catch another
glimpse of him as he walked up the street
to get a taxi. After a few minutes he came
into view. He turned to look up at the window as
I looked down at him. I waved, but he
couldn't see me. Then he disappeared around a
corner, and I went back to the bathroom.
I realized that I was fighting with a strange
feeling. It was a sense of impending doom, a
deep, terrible fear that had no basis in logic.
I told myself it was normal that I should
feel apprehensive. But this was something different.
I searched my mind for a word to articulate the
feeling. It took me a few minutes, and then
I had it: premonition. I almost heard it, as
though it were being whispered in my ear in four distinct
syllables, pre-mo-ni-n.
I shook myself like a wet dog and brushed my
teeth. I didn't believe in premonitions, and
besides, the sensation brought with it no instructions about
how to avoid whatever it was I feared. I splashed
cold water on my face and proceeded to my
bedroom, where Katie was watching Sesame
Street. All the other parents in Cambridge
were flashing educational cards at their children, teaching them
Greek and art history and organic chemistry,
and Katie was becoming a one-and-a-half-year-old
couch potato. I felt guilty about this, and
worried about her educational prospects, but I was
too weak-willed to train her at home. I
hoped she was getting some academic skills at
the day-care center. Katie looked up and smiled
at me as I lay down next to her and dosed my
eyes.
Pre-mo-ni-n. The word seemed to spell
itself out in my head.
I put my hands over my ears, which was silly,
because the word seemed to come from inside, not outside.
It was only John's departure, I told
myself. The suspicion that his plane was going
to crash forced its way into my mind, and I began
to sweat with the effort of not panicking. Half of me
wanted to grab Katie, run outside, and catch
John before he could find a taxi. The urge
became more and more insistent. I shrugged it off,
certain that he was already in a cab and well away from
Harvard Square. But the feeling wouldn't go
away. Even if I couldn't find John, the
urge to leave the building was growing in me like a
monsoon wind. I scowled and pushed back against
it. I was too sick to go wandering through the city
streets, especially with Katie in tow. Besides,
it was snowing outside, and I was wearing nothing but one
of John's T-shirts and a bathrobe.
I sat up and thumped myself on the head. I
couldn't believe I was taking this thing seriously,
arguing with myself, giving myself excuses for not rushing
out of the building. With great effort, I wiped the
pre-mo-ni-n from my mind and lay down again.
I don't know how long I slept;
probably not more than fifteen or
twenty minutes. Sesame Street was still on
when I was awakened by Katie's insistent little
voice.
"Mommy," she said. "Red."
I peered at her through one eye. "What?"
"Red," she repeated. "Come see."
"What do you mean, Boofus?" I said.
"What's red?"
Katie had turned away from me and was climbing
onto the seat of a chair next to the window.
"One, two, three, four, five," she said.
"Come see."
At that moment, we heard a sound like an
immense duck quacking. It honked at regular
intervals, shaking the walls with its volume.
"Oh, great." I sighed. "The fire alarm."
The fire alarm in our building went off every
two weeks or so. When John and I first moved
in, before Katie was born, there had been several
weeks when it went off almost every night. Everyone in
the building knew there wasn't any fire, but
we'd all troop obediently down the stairs and
assemble in the parking lot out back. It got so
monotonous that people started bringing refreshments. It
was the closest thing to neighborliness I had ever
experienced in Cambridge. So when the alarm
went off that morning, even after the
pre-mo-ni-n, I did not panic. I went
calmly to the closet--walking, not running--and
pulled on a sweatshirt and a pair of jeans. The
jeans were getting depressingly tight around the
waistline.
"Big duck!" I heard Katie say.
"Big duck go quack!"
"Yes, honey," I said. "That's the fire
alarm." She was still in her pajamas, the pink ones
with the built-in feet. I went to get some clothes
for her.
"One, two three, four, five," Katie
counted again as I came back into the room carrying
her clothes. I went to the window and put my arms
around her.
"See, Mommy?" said Katie, pointing.
Ten floors down, looking like bright toys in the
morning light, was a cluster of fire trucks.
Five of them.
I still refused to panic. Every fire alarm in a
high-rise required at least one truck to show
up. It was just a precaution. We residents of
1105 Massachusetts Avenue used
to take down extra refreshments for the
firefighters. True, I'd never seen five
trucks at once. Maybe there actually was a
real fire somewhere, a tiny fire, maybe a
piece of bread lodged in someone's toaster oven.
As I slipped a warm sweater over Katie's
pajamas, I felt my fingers shaking. I took
a deep breath and forced myself to calm down.
When Katie was dressed I walked, I did
not run to the closet for a pair of shoes. I
slipped on some loafers and went to get my
daughter, who was still looking out the window. I
followed her gaze. The five trucks had
spawned a whole congregation of firefighters,
dashing around like ants whose hill was under attack.
I didn't recall their acting this way in the
past. I picked Katie up and was startled by how
light she felt; I could tell that my muscles
were getting juiced up with adrenaline. I shook
my head in self-disgust and carried Katie--
slowly, calmly, not running--toward the front
door.
As I turned the corner into the living room, every
one of my senses went on alert. The air felt
warm and almost thick against my skin. I noticed a
strange, toxic odor, faint but very pungent, that
hurt my nose and left a foul taste in my
mouth. Between the regular, deafening "quack,
quack, quacks" of the fire alarm, I could hear
the scuffling of feet in the hallway, a slamming
door, a man's voice shouting. Looking down,
I could see tentacles of thick, black smoke
curling lazily upward from the crack beneath the
door.
I tightened my grip on Katie, opened the
door, and ran.



The door opened on a scene out of a disaster
film. The air was billowing with noxious clouds of
smoke. I could barely make out the shapes of my
neighbors as they emerged from their apartments in
pajamas and slippers. I saw confusion and
panic on the nearest faces. I spotted a
next-door neighbor running by.
"Where is it?" I yelled, trying to make myself
heard over the fire alarm. "Where's the fire?"
He just shook his head and kept running. Everyone
on the floor was asking the same question.
I forced myself to think logically. The tenth story
was too far up for fire-fighting equipment to reach,
and there were no exterior fire escapes--no way
to get down without going through the building itself. The
amount of smoke made it clear that there was fire--
a lot of fire--somewhere in the building. Fire
goes up, I thought. It goes up. That meant that
if the fire was below us, it would reach us soon. If
it was above us, we were in less danger. Either way,
staying on the tenth floor made no sense. I
had to get Katie below the flames.
All of this registered in about six-tenths of a
second. A Vietnamese family from down the
hall came out of their apartment and rushed past me,
yelling to each other. They dashed through the doors that
led to the elevator.
"No!" I yelled, when I saw where they were
going. "Not there! Take the stairs!" I wondered
how they could push the elevator button every single
day without noticing the signs that said, "In case
of fire, do not use elevator. Take the
stairs." I had a sudden image of what it would
be like to be trapped in an elevator during a
fire, choking on smoke, helplessly waiting for the
flames.
The old woman for whom I had once run
errands appeared in her doorway, face pale,
eyes staring. She locked her gaze on me as
other occupants ran past us.
"I cannot run," she said, in her thick
Haitian accent. "I am ill, I can not
run!"
I remembered that she had asthma.
"Go into your bathroom!" I yelled. "Fill
the tub with water and get in. Keep your head
low. I'm going for help."
"Carry me!" she screamed, her eyes wilder
than ever. I moved past her, toward the
staircase door, and she reached out with one hand
to seize my wrist in an amazingly powerful
grip. "Carry me!" she pleaded. "I cannot
run!"
"I can't," I said desperately. I could
barely manage Katie; how could I carry her
too? "I'll send help!" The smoke was
getting thicker. I had to pry her fingers from my
arm. I will never forget the look in her eyes as
I pushed her hand away from me. It was the wild,
desperate gaze of an abandoned child. I felt as
though I were locking her in a gas
chamber.
I ran to the door of the staircase and opened it,
hoping to find less smoke inside. Instead, I
was almost pushed backward by a dense, tarlike fog
belching out of the open doorway. With my free hand
I pulled the collar of my coat over
Katie's head, trying to filter the smoke out of the
air she breathed, and plunged into the blackness.
The darkness was absolute. I could not see
Katie, could not see my own hair as it whipped
across my eyes, could not see the walls or the
floor or the stairs. I groped for the banister,
found it, and ran down the first flight. Up until
then, I realized, I had been holding my
breath. I gulped for air. It was like breathing
needles. Every cell in my lungs seemed
to explode at once. I gagged and coughed, trying
not to gasp, but it was impossible. My body felt
as though I had not inhaled at all; I might as
well have been immersed in a lake of poison.
I turned the corner at the bottom of the first
flight of stairs and ran down the next. Ninth
floor.
I could hear Katie's ragged choking from beneath my
coat. She had clamped her arms and legs around
me like a frightened baby monkey. I felt a
sudden surge of rage at the smoke. It seemed
almost conscious, like a sentient evil searching for my
child. I reached the bottom of another flight and
turned again. Where was the fire? I had thought I
would get below it quickly; there was too much smoke on
the tenth floor to have come from much lower. Turn.
Another flight. No light, no air. I
remembered that most people aren't burned to death in
building fires. The smoke kills them first.
The fire alarm was still blaring. It was incredibly
loud. It shook my whole body with every blast.
Between the deafening "QUACK QUACK QUACKS"
of the alarm I could hear people screaming, dogs barking,
feet running. I couldn't stop trying to breathe,
though my lungs protested violently with every
gasp. I was beginning to see spots and swirls of
light behind my eyes, as though I had rubbed them
much too hard. The air was getting hot. I
realized that if I ran into the fire, I would not have
enough oxygen to climb the stairs again. I reached the
bottom of another flight. How many had I
passed? I had lost count.
My lungs were almost numb, but now the rest of
my body was beginning to cramp, sending
stabs of pain the length of my arms and legs. I
recognized the sensation from running wind sprints;
it was the feeling of a muscle being pushed to move
without oxygen. My limbs stiffened as the muscles
filled with lactic acid. Another flight.
Turn. Keep running. Stay on your feet and
keep running.
Sparks of light were filling my field of
vision now. I could feel my head lolling to one
side. I slowed down slightly and was immediately
hit from behind by people running past me. I clutched the
banister to keep from falling. The arm holding
Katie had gone rigid, like the claw of a dead
bird. I began to weave slightly from side
to side, and more bodies bumped into me. I held
on tighter to the banister, pressed as close to the
wall as I could, and kept going. It felt as
though I had been in the stairwell forever. I was
panting uncontrollably, but there was no air,
no air, no air.
A woman screamed so close to my ear that I
felt her breath, and she fell against me. I
tried to scream myself, from rage and frustration and
helplessness, but all that came out of my empty
lungs was a strange, cawing sound. Another
flight. Turn. There would be twenty flights,
two to each floor. Where was I? And where in the name
of God was the fire?
At the end of the next flight, when I let go
of the banister and tried to turn, I fell
sideways, pulled downward by Katie's
weight. I grabbed for the wall, but my legs were like
water. Then my foot came down on something soft
and cylindrical, an arm or a leg. I could
hear its owner choking and gasping as others tripped
over him. I pitched to one side, fought for
balance, and then felt my head smack hard into the
wall. I fell.
It was anger that kept me from blacking out--anger
not at my own situation but at this thing, this
monstrous, evil thing that was trying to kill my
daughter. I struggled to get to my feet, but I
had lost all sense of which direction was up, where the
stairs were located, anything that could have helped me
get her to safety. Tears of rage ran down
my face as I searched in my coat pocket for a
mitten to tie over Katie's mouth and nose.
If I couldn't go on, I would push her toward the
stairs and hope that someone would find her, shove
her, even kick her down the stairs.
Anything but have her stay in that evil smoke to die
of oxygen starvation. I found a mitten, but I was
losing consciousness. I couldn't raise it
to Katie's face.
It may only have been a second that I sat
slumped against the wall, Katie whimpering and
coughing in my arms, or it may have been as long as
a minute. It seemed to be eternity. The anger
still burned bright in my mind, but I couldn't move.
My body had spent its last oxygen reserves,
and now my brain was sputtering like a candle in a
closed jar. The swirls of light grew brighter and
stranger, and the sounds of the fire alarm, of people coughing
and screaming, began to recede into a blank silence,
far away from me.
I felt a hand on my arm. It felt like the
neighbor lady's hand, the one I had torn from
my arm a very long time ago, before I entered the
smoke. It was bigger, though. Quite large, I thought
vacantly, with my lamed and halting awareness.
Probably a man. He was pulling on me. It
was very unpleasant. My whole body was screaming
for air--I was in enough trouble without panicky apartment
dwellers pulling on me.
I felt the man's arm slide behind me, between
my back and the wall, and he yanked me upward,
hard, to my feet. Katie was still clinging to me.
My right arm had stiffened around her so tightly I
thought they'd have to bury us together. Save money, I
thought distantly. Two people in one grave.
"Three."
I blinked, trying to figure out who had said that.
But everything looked the same, whether my eyes were
open or closed. Three. Oh, yes, of
course. Katie, and me, and the other one. I was
carrying two babies.
I fell backwards, but the man had moved behind
me so that I was leaning against him. He began
to walk, pushing me along. I wondered how he
could see in the smoke. The floor gave out under
my feet, and I fell forward, but the man steadied
me with his body, holding me upright. He was very
strong. I felt my way down another step, and
another, and another. I wanted to tell the man
to put me down, to take Katie and let me be.
I wanted to sit down again, go to sleep, give
up.
Another step, and another, and another. I hit
level cement and tried to turn, but the man wouldn't
let me. He dragged me forward toward
what I thought would be a wall--and then, suddenly,
I was standing in the lobby of the apartment building on a
bright December morning. The smoke in the
stairwell was so thick that I could see nothing six
inches into it. It was like a wall of sooty cotton
batting. I took one huge gulp of air, like a
swimmer emerging from a near-drowning, and the world rushed
back into focus. The distant cacophony came
back to surround me, the pinpoint stars were
replaced by dazzling sunlight, the world felt real
again.
I took another breath and went into a paroxysm
of coughing. My lungs seemed bent on turning
themselves inside out--anything to be rid of the gluey,
pitch-black poison that had been rising up the
stairwell as though it were an industrial
smokestack. The coughing was so violent that I would
have fallen again if the man had not braced me with his
arm. I felt a strong hand on my back as I
finally regained control of my breathing.
My eyes took a while to adjust to the
sunlight, because of either the Stygian darkness in the
stairwell or the lack of oxygen, or both.
All I wanted to see was Katie. She was
fine, not even coughing anymore, her white-blond
hair dark with soot and her blue eyes wide.
"It's okay, honey," I told her, holding
her more tightly than ever. "Everything is fine.
We're okay." My voice came out in a
strange, croaky whisper.
A firefighter in a heavy rubber raincoat
rushed up to me, gave a brief glance at
Katie, and said, "Ma'am, over here, please.
Away from the building. Please."
I felt a gentle push from the hand on my
back, and I staggered toward the far end of the parking
lot, where my neighbors had already congregated.
Most were in pretty good shape, if a bit
rattled. They had come from the lower floors, and it
had not taken them long to exit the building. The
higher up the residents lived, the more blackened
their faces. Those of us from the upper floors
looked like coal miners, with smears of grit around
our noses and mouths, where we had sucked in the
smoke trying to breathe.
"What's going on?" I croaked as I got
close to the group. "What happened? What's
happening?"
A man whose name I didn't know, but whose face
was familiar, turned to answer me.
"Food Shak," he said. "It blew up."
I stared at him. "The whole thing?"
"It was the refrigerators at the back of the
store," said a woman. "Something caught fire,
and then the whole thing just ... went up. Didn't you
hear the explosion?"
I shook my head, still dazed. My body was
finally beginning to realize that I was out of danger.
The adrenaline was seeping away from my muscles,
and Katie was growing heavier by the second.
"It blew debris all the way across Mass
Ave," someone else commented.
The same firefighter who had asked me
to move ran past, toward the fire trucks.
"We've still got people in there!" he shouted. "I
need a mask! Nobody goes in there without a
mask!"
It was only then that I turned to search for my
rescuer. I had never even seen him, and he
hadn't spoken to me--except to say that one word,
three, I wasn't even sure he had said that.
The word seemed to have come from somewhere inside my head,
although at the time I had been sure it was the man.
I searched the crowd, looking for him, but there were so
many firefighters and so much chaos that I knew it
was hopeless. Unless he came up and introduced
himself to me, I would never even know who he was.
I let it go. My legs began to give out under
me, as though I had just run fifty miles, and
I carried Katie over to sit on the hood of a
parked car.
During the next few minutes, as I sat
panting and listening to the imbroglio around me, I
learned that no one had been badly hurt by the
fire, although many of us were suffering from smoke
inhalation. The fire itself had blazed briefly through
Food Shak, which was on the ground floor, and gone
no further than that. The major problem was that the
staircases were inadequately ventilated, so that
they functioned as chimneys for the toxic smoke.
Most of the people who had run down the stairs came from
the first three or four floors and had simply
held their breath for the few seconds it took them
to get outside. Some upper-floor residents
had taken the elevators. All of these people were just
fine. The Vietnamese family, whose immolation
I had imagined so vividly, were spending a
pleasant morning breakfasting at the French
caf`e across the street, watching the firefighters
douse the remains of Food Shak with their
fire hoses. But I, with my unerring instincts,
had waddled my feeble self into the most dangerous
possible situation. I had taken the worse of the
two chimneys, run further than anyone else,
and because I was already sick, and carrying Katie, had
probably inhaled more smoke than anybody in the
building.
And that, sports fans, is how I made my
Television Debut. A whole posse of
cameramen and reporters rushed up and poked
microphones in my face just a few minutes after
my escape from the smoke, as I was wending my
way toward the front of the building to see if the
fire was out. They interviewed a lot of people that
morning, but I was the one who was actually shown, for a
few seconds, on the nightly news at six and
eleven. The reason for this is that I looked and
sounded about fifty times worse than anyone else
in the vicinity. Now, I am not such a treat for the
eyes on the best of days, but bear in mind that
(1) I had just woken up; (2) I was covered
with soot; (3) I was wearing glasses the
thickness of the Berlin Wall, which made my head
look strangely warped; (4) I had thrown up
at approximately twenty-minute intervals
for the previous two months, and was about to do so again;
and (5) I had that pregnant glow about me,
similar to the look you see on people who grew up in
Chernobyl. I was also carrying Katie, with her
blond, blond hair and her large, frightened
eyes. Put it all together, and you can see why the
TV newspeople were drawn to me like flies to a
pile of dog feces.
The next day, to my profound humiliation, almost
everyone I saw at Harvard would comment about my
appearance on the news. They attempted to look
concerned, but most of them couldn't help making that
snorting sound people emit when they're trying not
to laugh. The reporters in that parking lot had
immortalized the one moment in my life when I
looked absolutely as bad as I possibly
could, and broadcast it to the entire known universe.
It remains one of my life goals eventually
to locate all copies of that news broadcast and
burn them in a home incinerator I intend
to build for the purpose. We each have our little
daydream.
At any rate, the news broadcast was
short. I had been on camera for all of
fifteen seconds, croaking out some
lame comment about how scary it had all been, while
the pristine and comfortable Vietnamese elevator
family smiled and waved to the camera from someplace
just behind me. At least, I told myself, no one
would ever see that film again. Memories do fade.
By noon the next day I had decided that it
probably wouldn't be necessary to kill everyone who had
watched the news segment. Then, I happened
to glance at a classmate's copy of the Boston
Herald. The front page of the local news
section was devoted to the fire at 1105 Mass
Ave, and there were pictures. Large pictures.
The Herald photographer had caught me just
as I burst through the smoke into the lobby and went
into my coughing fit. My eyes were squinched tight
behind those immense glasses, and my cheeks were
puffed out as though I was pretending to play jazz
trumpet. At first I was so dismayed by the way I
looked from a distance that I didn't notice
What's Wrong with This Picture. I stopped and
stared at it, mesmerized by my total lack of
photogeneity, and remembered the moment. I had
been half-conscious, stumbling and limp,
collapsing backwards against the strong, reassuring
body of the rescuer who had found me and
half-carried me out of the smoke. The picture in
the Herald showed everything: my exhaustion, my
fear, my confusion and disorientation. But there was one
thing missing, one very large and important thing. As
I gazed at the newspaper, replaying that instant
over and over in my mind, the hair began
to prickle along my arms and the back of my
neck.
In the picture, there was nobody behind me.



I once saw a television special about a
woman who was saved from falling off a cliff by some
supernatural force, which she thought probably
consisted of one or more angels. The woman and her
fianc`e had climbed a steep hillside
to watch the sun set over the ocean. As twilight
fell, they decided to take a shortcut back
to sea level--an extremely short cut, as it
turned out. The path they chose went almost straight
down, and the rock face proved to be soft and
crumbly. By dark, the couple were in serious
trouble. The tide was coming in, and they were literally
clinging to the fragile cliff by their
fingernails. Then, just as the woman's strength
gave out, she felt a strong, warm power lift
her up, propping her against the rock. Aided by this
mysterious force, she gradually made the climb
to the beach, arriving safe and sound about fifteen
minutes later.
In the meantime, her fianc`e fell off the
cliff and died.
After some of the things that happened to me while I was
expecting Adam, I have no trouble believing this
woman's story. I am quite ready to accept that
Something helped her down that cliff, probably the
same Something that got me through the smoke of the
high-rise fire in Cambridge. But whatever the
Something was, I can't fathom its motivation. As
I watched the television special, I kept
imagining what the woman's fianc`e must have thought
as he plummeted past his beloved, perhaps even
seeing, as he went by, the angels who were gently
transporting her to solid ground. If I had
been in his position, I know what I would have thought.
I would have thought, "So what am I, bat
guano?" It would have been the last thing to go through my
head, if you don't count the rocks at the
bottom of that cliff. Perhaps the angels had a
chance to explain their reasons to the deceased
fianc`e later, but I, for one, don't understand.
I get the same feeling when I look back
on all the mysterious assistance I received during
Adam's gestation. I don't know if other people from
my apartment building had invisible helpers hauling
them out of the smoke the day Food Shak burned.
I doubt it. No one ever mentioned it. Perhaps, you
may say, I was the only one who really needed
paranormal assistance--but that logic doesn't
work for me either. How many times a day does some
poor hapless human really need a good
supernatural protector and fail to get one?
People are tortured and killed and raped and pillaged
on a daily basis, and if there are angels in
the vicinity, they apparently just sit around watching
--wringing their ectoplasmic little hands, perhaps, but
letting nature take its course.
A great deal of human energy, including mine,
has been spent trying to figure out why some people
get help from angels and some get lobotomized
by flying debris from freak wheat-threshing accidents.
Religious people always seem to have simple formulas
to explain this. If you're very, very good, say the
formulas, you can avoid the gods'
disfavor and court their assistance. If you
sacrifice a goat, you will be blessed. If it's
the wrong goat--say, one with a gimpy foot--you
will be smitten with a pox. If you join the right
church, you will live long and prosper; if you leave
it, you are consigned to eternal misery. Believe
me, you don't grow up in Utah without hearing a
great deal of this sort of reasoning. But none of the
causal connections I have heard preached by any
religion fits the facts as I see them.
All I can say for sure is that whatever
supernatural beings are operating around us, they are
working from a priority list that is very different from
mine.
Strangely enough, I have learned to trust them
anyway.
Of course, all of these thoughts have occurred to me
in the years since Adam came along. I
didn't do much pondering of theological
conundrums that morning in Cambridge. I
wouldn't even begin to wonder about my invisible
rescuer until the next day, when I would see the
picture in the Herald and, for the first time,
consciously articulate that something not merely
unusual but actually paranormal was going on in
my life. Immediately after the fire, I had more
pressing issues to consider.
Breathing, for example. Even after I'd
walked around in the clear, cool air for several
minutes, my lungs felt needy, as though I were
holding my breath, and whenever I inhaled, my chest
felt as if it had been filled with crushed
glass. To my relief, Katie was breathing more
easily. She said that her chest didn't hurt,
although she did cough when the breeze blew wisps
of smoke into our faces. I paced around, hacking
like a tubercular cat, and the paranoia that had been
haunting me since the beginning of my pregnancy
began to pick up more steam than ever. I
remembered statistics about the negative effects
of tobacco smoke on human fetuses. It
seemed possible that whatever blend of toxins I'd
just breathed would have an even more destructive
potential for the baby I was carrying. Perhaps this was
the "something wrong" I had been anticipating.
After worrying about this for a few minutes, I
decided to seek a medical opinion.
Two ambulances were parked beside the fire
trucks in the parking lot. A crowd of apartment
dwellers, many in slippers and
pajamas, had gathered around them. I carried
Katie over to one of the ambulances and set her
down on the feet of her little pj's. The burst of
energy that got me down the stairs was long gone, and
Katie seemed to have gained several hundred
pounds. She kept a tight grip on my hand and the
hem of my coat as I edged closer to the
ambulance.
I got close enough to see that a line had formed in
front of the ambulance doors. Inside the van,
on the long benches that lined the walls, sat a
group of my neighbors. They looked
considerably worse than most of the people in the parking
lot. Soot blackened their faces, and I could
hear the rasp of difficult breathing as they inhaled
oxygen through green plastic face masks. A
paramedic was working his way through the crowd outside the
van, lining people up to receive treatment in order of how
severely they had been affected by the smoke.
"Excuse me," I said, raising my hand
to get the paramedic's attention. He looked at
me. "I just have a question," I said. "I'm
pregnant, and was wondering if--"
But the paramedic wasn't listening anymore.
He was shouting.
"Move back, move back!" he yelled to the
people around the ambulance. "We've got a
pregnant woman here! Move back!"
The crowd parted, clearing a path for me to reach the
ambulance, as though the paramedic were Charlton
Heston with a magic staff. At first I was
confused, then embarrassed.
"Oh, no," I said. "No, thank you. I'm
fine. I just wanted to ask a--"
"Right here, lady." Charlton Heston's
voice was firm. He grabbed my arm with one
strong hand and propelled me toward the ambulance.
Katie pattered along behind me, and the paramedic
noticed her for the first time.
"Okay, folks," he yelled to the people in the
ambulance. "We got us an infant and a
pregnant mother here. I'm gonna have to ask a
couple of you to give up your seats."
"No," I protested. "Really. I'm fine.
We're fine."
There was a space for eight people in the ambulance.
As I peered inside, eight sets of
traumatized eyes looked at me from behind eight
green oxygen masks. And then, eight pairs of
hands reached up to pull those masks
free, every single one of them offering the precious
oxygen to me and Katie. Charlton Heston
took one from a pale, unhealthy-looking student,
and one from a black man with a gray beard.
"Hell, I don't need that shit, anyway,"
said the older man as he climbed out of the
ambulance. "I just need a cigarette." He
grinned and winked at me as he went past. It was
clear he was lying; his voice sounded terrible. I
tried to thank him, but no sound came out of my own
throat. I felt tears stinging in my eyes as the
paramedic half-pushed me into the van, then picked
Katie up and put her on the seat next to me.
In all my time as a New England immigrant,
I had never tested to see if there was kindness below the
terse, tough exteriors of my fellow
Bostonians. I had never known that such a thing was
possible.
I tried to help Katie with her mask, but the
paramedic pushed me aside and told me to put
on my own. He tightened the elastic straps
to fit Katie's small head, then talked to her
soothingly while he showed her how to breathe into it.
I held the soft green plastic to my mouth and
took a cautious drag. My lungs still hurt,
but the pure oxygen flowed almost tangibly into my
blood, and the awful sense of suffocating began
to lessen immediately. I fastened the straps around my
head and I looked up. My six neighbors were
all waiting politely, like guests at a
banquet waiting for the hostess to pick up her
fork, before they went back to breathing their own oxygen.
No one said anything.
I put my hand up, supposedly to straighten
my glasses, but really to hide the fact that, as
usual lately, I was crying. I had done an
immense amount of public crying since getting
pregnant, probably more than I had in my
entire life prior to that time. It wasn't that
things were difficult--life was easier for me than
it was for millions of people all over the world, and I
knew it. The thing that got to me was the kindness, the
thoughtfulness, the quiet and unassuming heroism of people
like Sibyl and Deirdre and the neighbors who
lived in my building.
Although it sounds crazy, I felt then, and still
feel, that these small miracles always have clustered
and always will cluster around Adam. When I was
carrying him, I had the constant sensation that I was a
kind of radio tower, within which Adam sat
broadcasting some kind of signal to the world around me
--not a verbal message but an unnamed energy, a
sort of goodness, that drew out people's best selves
and helped them connect with each other. Since
Adam's birth, I have come to take this for
granted. When he begins each academic year,
I am always surprised that school personnel who
aren't used to dealing with "different" children seem
concerned, and sometimes even a little angry, at the
thought of having Adam around. Even the wonderful
teachers and principals who are used to children with
disabilities don't act inordinately thrilled
by Adam at first meeting. I have to remind myself that
the mysterious force field around him takes a
while to affect people. By the second or third
parent-teacher conference, I introduce myself as
Adam's mother and wait for their faces to light up.
They always do. I have come to expect this, to see it as
normal.
It's not that he does anything observably
different from any other child. True, he is rather
clumsy and slow, and almost everything he says sounds
like the phrase "car wash" repeated several times
backwards, but these are not the kinds of things that you
would expect to create great outpourings of happiness
in the people around him. And yet, the happiness always
shows up. A friend of mine once observed,
"Adam has angels like a dog has fleas.
He came here with them, and the more time you spend around
him, the more likely you are to get them yourself." That's
as close as I can come to explaining Adam's force
field, although, like the story of the woman on the
cliff, there are many questions it leaves unanswered.
If you think all this sounds a bit odd, I
must assure you that, to me, it feels a thousand
times odder. This was especially true when I was
pregnant, before I got used to the sensation. I was
acutely aware of it as I sat between my
neighbors in the ambulance, breathing air that any
of them would have sacrificed for me, my baby, and
my unborn child. I could feel the strange new
energy radiating around me like the rings on the
surface of broken water, showing me all the good
in these people, helping them exercise it. I looked out
the window of the van and reviewed the past several
weeks, admitting to myself that I had felt this
energy for some time, since before I knew I was
pregnant. Then I shook my head hard and
told myself not to indulge in such grandiose
delusions. But the energy remained, and every
time I began to relax, I felt it all over
again.
I sat in the ambulance sucking up oxygen
until the paramedics were convinced that everyone had
escaped from the building. The last person to leave
was my elderly, asthmatic next-door
neighbor, who was carried out on a stretcher. She
was a very rotund woman, and it eased my guilt
a little to see that the four masked men carrying her were
having considerable difficulty. If I'd tried
to take her down the stairs with me, we'd
probably both be dead.
After she was safely deposited in the other
ambulance, the paramedics and firefighters began
putting up barricades to keep people from entering the
building. The fire was out, but the smoke was so
full of dangerous and volatile chemicals that the
entire place would be off limits to its
inhabitants for three days while cleaning crews
vacuumed the air. Please don't ask me how
they did this, because I don't know. It sounds like
something my mother-in-law would have done each and every day,
right after she finished ironing the towels. All I
know is that until the vacuuming process was
completed, we of 1105 Mass Ave had to seek
shelter elsewhere.
The parking lot began to clear as people resigned
themselves to the situation and trickled off to the homes of
friends or relatives, or to the school
gymnasium where the paramedics had set up a
temporary shelter. The paramedics wanted
to take me to the Harvard Medical Center, where
doctors could test the levels of dangerous
gases in my bloodstream. I was happy
to comply. The more medical tests I could get, I
reasoned, the more control I could exercise over the
course of my own life and that of my child. It was my
secular humanist's way of trying to sacrifice
the right goat.
We spent a couple of hours at the medical
center, where the nurses played with Katie and
brought us both food. After they'd drawn some more
blood and run a few tests, finding nothing
alarming, the nurses offered to call a taxi for
me. Now I had an interesting problem. I had
left my apartment with nothing but Katie and the clothes
I was wearing. I had no money, not even cab
fare to the gymnasium where many of my neighbors were
shacked up. Even if I could walk there, which did
not seem probable, the thought of throwing up
repeatedly in the communal rest room did not
appeal to me. I could think of only one person
to call.
Sibyl answered on the first ring. Fifteen
minutes later her husband, Charles, pulled up
with their daughter, Mie, in the backseat. Mie
is almost exactly Katie's age, and the two of
them looked at each other as though they had each
struck solid gold. Within about twenty
seconds, they were best friends, and would remain so
until John and I moved away from
Cambridge. Angels come in many shapes and
sizes, and most of them are not invisible.
Sibyl, Charles, and Mie lived on the
third floor of a quaint old mansion that shook every
time a car passed outside, which was two or three
times a minute. The structure had settled and
slumped so much that there wasn't a single right
angle left in it; the floor sloped gently
downward, the ceilings sagged, and the walls bulged
and rippled. The interior was beautiful; Sibyl
had filled it with classic Shaker furniture and
buffed the hardwood floors to a high shine. I have
never been so grateful to be anywhere in my life.
It was afternoon when we arrived, and the pathetically
weak winter sun was fading fast. I was not used
to relaxing or having free time--when I wasn't
caring for Katie or attending class, I was
studying. But I had left all my books and my
computer in the apartment, so there was little to do except
talk to Sibyl and watch Mie and Katie roll
around like two puppies in a basket. I was
simply amazed by how good this felt. Sibyl
seemed to know a great deal about prenatal medical
care, and we spent a lot of time discussing which
tests I was going to request to make sure my
baby would be born healthy. I even told her
about my gut feeling that there was something wrong. She
assured me that a lot of mothers had these groundless
worries. I nodded, but without conviction.
Katie and I slept on a makeshift bed that
Sibyl put together in the living room. I don't
know how much of her own work Sibyl had pushed
aside that day. She treated me as though she'd
been dying to run a little prenatal
bed-and-breakfast. Some angels have red hair.
I lay in the darkness as Katie fell
asleep beside me, feeling the house shake whenever a
car passed, listening to the scream of sirens from the
firehouse near Harvard Square. For
every wail, there was somebody, not so far from me, who was
scared, hurt, dying, watching a loved one die.
I knew that John was probably still en route
to Singapore, and against my will I began to imagine
his plane going down, smashing into the dark
Pacific a thousand miles from anywhere. My own
mortality, the mortality of everyone and everything
I loved, leapt up and down before me in the
darkness, yapping and howling for attention. Every time I
shut my stinging eyes, I was back in the dark
stairwell, struggling for breath and balance. I
began to tremble violently.
And then, just as I had in the smoke, I felt
the touch of a hand. This time, it rested gently on my
back, and from it emanated a comforting warmth that
stopped my shaking and let me drift almost immediately
into an exhausted sleep. I didn't look
to see where it had come from, whose hand it was. I
didn't even wonder. I seemed to know that touch
already, at some level far below my consciousness. The
next day, stunned as I was when I looked through that
copy of the Boston Herald and saw that my
rescuer had not registered at all on film, some
deep part of me wasn't surprised.



John arrived in Singapore almost a full day
after Food Shak had been reduced to a steaming
charcoal shell. He had worked through the entire
journey, reading and writing analyses of various
business data for the Singaporean client. He
called me from the Tokyo airport, where he
changed planes, but of course I wasn't
home. Because of the three-day restriction on entering
1105 Mass Ave, I couldn't even get
back into the apartment to find the phone number for
John's hotel in Singapore.
He was puzzled when no one answered his phone
call from Japan. When he reached Singapore and
called again, without success, his puzzlement changed
to mild consternation. John was a little worried about
Katie and me, but not much--he was pretty sure
that if there had been some sort of disaster, he would have
heard about it. His chief concern was more immediate. I had
promised to leave a message at his hotel,
relaying some information from a co-worker. The information was
a crucial part of a presentation John was
scheduled to give to his Asian client shortly
after arriving in Singapore. He called
again before he went to bed. Still no answer. After
three hours of sleep, he tried one more time.
Nothing.
This was becoming downright upsetting. John was
woozy from fatigue, had a terrible crick in his
neck, and could feel another cold coming on. He
wasn't in any shape to fake a brilliant
performance. The client meeting was due to begin in
thirty minutes, and he desperately needed the
information I was supposed to have sent hours earlier.
John made himself focus on this issue, so that
he wouldn't end up drifting into crazy
speculations about me and Katie being eaten by a
pack of rabid apartment poodles, or attacked
by our fat neighbor lady, who just might, now that
he thought of it, have revealed an occasional glint of
serial-killer psychosis behind her matronly
persona. Finally, feeling a trifle on edge,
he called his company's corporate headquarters
in Cambridge.
John didn't rank high enough at the firm to have
his own secretary, but the woman who answered the
phone knew him anyway.
"Well, hello, there!" she said. "I saw
your wife on the news!"
This was not precisely what John had
expected to hear. He just sat there for a second,
with his mouth open. Then he collected himself enough
to say, "Really?"
"Boy, that was some fire!" said the secretary.
"Do you know that ten years ago to the day, that very
same apartment building burned down? That time,
something like forty people were killed! Weird, huh?"
"Burned down?" said John. "My wife?
On the news?"
"Boy, did she look bad," said the
secretary. "Where were you, anyway?"
John jumped to his feet and began pacing
around the hotel room, the phone mashed up to his
ear. "What happened?" he barked. "Where is
she?"
There was a moment of shocked silence before the
secretary said, "You mean you don't know?"
"Don't know what?" John yelled. "Is
Martha all right? Where's my daughter?"
"Uh, well ..." The secretary stammered,
horrified by her faux pas. "I think--I
mean, they're fine, at least they looked fine.
I mean, not fine, fine, but they got out."
"Got out?"
"Of the building," she said. And she went on
to report everything she had heard on the news about
the destruction of Food Shak and the evacuation of the
building's inhabitants. John was first
horrified, then relieved by the story. When she
said that there had been no fatalities, he began
to relax.
I'd like to interrupt, at this point, to tell you
how I know all this. The easy answer is that
John and I have talked about the incident since, in
great detail. That is the truth, but it is not the
whole truth. The whole truth is that the moment the
secretary mentioned my appearance on the news and
John began to worry about me, I snapped
awake as though something had exploded next to my
head. In the thin dawn light of Sibyl and
Charles's living room, ten thousand miles away
from John, the Seeing Thing was happening, more
vividly than it had ever happened before. I could
see the hotel room where John was pacing, the
view from the window, the remnants of his
room-service snack (coffee and a selection of
tropical fruit, of which he had eaten everything but
the mango).
I could also feel the panic rising in John's
chest, then slowly ebbing as his conversation with the
secretary continued. I didn't know exactly
what he was saying and thinking--the images were
visual and emotional--but the feeling came through so
sharply that my heart began to hammer along with
John's. Much later, after lengthy discussion and
comparing of notes, John and I came to believe
that the Seeing Thing worked best when not only I was
thinking of John but he was thinking of me as well.
This was also the first time John himself would begin to feel
it happening. He didn't see anything, but he
had a sudden impression that I was in the room.
On my side of the planet, I rubbed my eyes
and told myself I was probably dreaming. On his
side, John found himself looking around, expecting
me to walk out of the hotel bathroom.
"Do you want me to find her for you?" the
secretary asked John. She could tell she had
scared him, and her voice was apologetic.
"What?" said John. He had been distracted
by the sense of my presence, to the point where he
hardly remembered the conversation he was having.
"I could do a little detective work," said the
secretary. "Try to locate your wife."
John began to say no thanks but
stopped. "Actually," he said, "that would be very kind
of you. Would you mind?"
"Of course not," she said. "I'll get right
on it and call you back."
"Thank you," said John.
They hung up.
That telephone conversation was a watershed for
John. For one thing, it was the first time he had ever
felt desperate enough to allow his personal life
to bleed over into his business persona. Under
ordinary circumstances, he would never have mentioned his
family to anyone at the office, much less
asked for help, God save us, on a
personal matter. It was also the first time he had
completely lost focus on his work, so much that
he'd forgotten the original reason for his call.
He never even asked the secretary for the information
he needed to make his dinner meeting go smoothly.
Predictably, the meeting didn't go very
well. John had trouble concentrating on the
business at hand--a bizarre and unprecedented
experience for him. He kept thinking about me and
Katie, and the new baby-to-be. He tried
to picture the fetus, though this was difficult. I
had told him a great deal about it, forcing him
to look at pictures in books that showed various
stages of human fetal development, but he'd
never really paid much attention. He seemed
to recall that the fetus was now about the size of a
golf ball. Or maybe a golf tee. He
couldn't remember. Something to do with golf. Couldn't
be a golf cart, or a golf course. Maybe
a golf shoe, one of the smaller sizes ...
The client, the very important Asian
client, was asking John a question, and John
hadn't heard a word of it. He gaped at the
client for a few seconds, trying to see if
he'd stored any words in his short-term memory,
but in the end he had to ask the man to repeat the question.
When John tried to answer, he found that his
vocabulary had diminished to about four words, and he
had to fill in the blanks with the syllable uh. He
could almost feel the eyes of his co-workers boring
into him, registering disapproval at the level where
his skin was thinnest.
Ordinarily, this would have bothered John
immensely. He could never tolerate turning in a
performance that was less than perfect. No minuses
had ever besmirched the monotonous string of A
grades on his report cards and
transcripts. But that night in Singapore,
John wasn't his usual self. His performance was
adequate but not stellar.
The really frightening thing was, he didn't
care.
It is difficult for a normal, mentally
healthy person to understand the enormity of this fact.
Most of us humans have long since accepted that a
good deal of the work we do is mediocre. But not
John. Not only did he come from a long line of
obsessive workaholics but he lived in a
culture where lovers sign their letters to each other
with phrases like "Wishing you a productive
summer." Emotionalism and sentiment have no
place at Harvard, except as topics of
discussion in courses like Nineteenth-Century
British Novels or Abnormal
Psychology.
As John sat in that Southeast Asian
restaurant, paying only dim attention to the
conversation, something began to shift inside him. It
made him think of the glaciers melting away at the
end of the Ice Age: the way he saw the world
seemed to be cracking, retreating, dissolving.
These peculiar sensations were both troubling and
fascinating. They did not disappear after the dinner
meeting. In fact, as he lay in bed that night,
he could feel them slowly intensifying. They made
John so restless that he finally got up and went
for a walk through downtown Singapore. The heavy
rain-forest air hung around him, so thick that he
wanted to push it aside with his hands, and the lights
of the city shone on empty storefronts and the
occasional skittering beetle.
I can remember that walk of John's, even
though I was picking Katie up at the day-care
center, as far away from John as I could be without
leaving the planet. I know, because I was with him.
Of course, I also now know where the massive,
tectonic shifts in John's worldview would
eventually take him--and me. Adam's arrival
transformed our relationship to work more dramatically
than any other area of our lives. It is
amazing to live with someone who genuinely couldn't
care less about Getting Ahead, someone who is
absolutely committed to finding joy in the present
moment. The belief John and I shared before Adam
came along--that rigidly disciplined, distasteful
work was the one and only path to a good life--now
seems both horrible and downright silly, like
believing that we could make it rain by performing human
sacrifices. Adam's birth convinced us that
fate was quite capable of crushing our best-laid
plans like so many dead beetles. In the face of
such uncertainty, the only things that seem to us
worth doing are the ones that allow us to experience the
strange and eventful journey of life in its
full richness.
Whenever John and I begin to forget this, our son
is there to help us remember. This happens often.
For example, there was the Testing Incident, which
occurred shortly after we moved to Arizona.
Adam was six at the time. We had spent his
baby years in Utah, while I finished my
dissertation and John and I taught at the
university where both our fathers had worked. Our
families, our hometown, and our jobs had
offered us the sense of security that comes with
familiar things, something we sorely needed after the
stressful period of Adam's gestation.
By 1993, however, both John and I were beginning
to feel confined by our jobs. So one fine day, we
both quit. Just up and did it. We didn't have
any other source of income waiting for us, but that
didn't matter. We'd grown so used to having
Bunraku puppeteers all over the place that
we were fairly sure they would take care of
petty details like money.
Sure enough, after a period of uncertainty and
wavering faith that seems brief (though only in
retrospect), John was recruited by a
business school in Arizona. He had had other
job offers, but none of them sounded appetizing
to him. In fact, John had turned
down the initial offer from the business school as
well. It turned out to be a great, though
unconscious, negotiating tactic. The school
kept coming back to him with revised contracts
until they'd structured a job so exactly
aligned with John's interests that he actually
preferred it to doing nothing. I had decided that I
wanted to write books, so I wasn't tied
to any geographic location. We moved our
family south for John's new job and took
to our new environment like hogs to slop.
The only serious difficulty I encountered
during our relocation was enrolling Adam in
elementary school. I'd heard from other parents of
children with Down syndrome that school systems are not
always eager to integrate "different" students, and
this turned out to be true. The kid had to pass more
tests before he was allowed to enter first grade than
if he'd applied to be a Green Beret. Every
day, after his sisters went to school, he gamely
put on his suit and tie and readied himself for
another testing session. Hour after hour, we sat
in tiny, airless rooms while Special
Educators of various stripes put him through a
barrage of incredibly boring procedures: IQ
tests, vocabulary tests, digital dexterity
tests, ear tests, eye tests. At the end of every
test Adam was given a small reward, like a can
of Sprite, and allowed to go out and play on the
swing set.
This was all very well for a while, but eventually
Adam got frustrated. This was not the way he
remembered school. Where were the other kids? The
crayons? The blackboards? I tried
to explain what was happening, but the truth was that I
didn't know much more than he did about the testing
requirements, or the date when he would finally be
allowed to go to a regular classroom. We were
both getting a little depressed.
And then Adam did something brilliant.
That morning, as usual, Adam and I dropped
Lizzie off at her Montessori school and
put Katie on the bus headed for third grade.
As we pulled up at a stoplight, another
yellow school bus stopped beside us.
"Ook, Mom!" said Adam, pointing,"
Tatie's bus!"
"No," I said. "That's not Katie's bus.
That bus is number five-seven. Katie's is
five-nine."
"Five-nine?" Adam repeated. He has this
way of asking for more information by repeating what you've
just said to him, in a tone that indicates astonished
fascination. It's as though you've just explained to him
that time is not linear, and he can see the logic of
it, but it's so amazing he can't quite quell his
astonishment.
"Five-nine," he said again, pondering it.
"Tatie's bus is five-nine."
Half an hour later we were sitting in yet
another tiny room, watching another special
education evaluator (i'll call him Mr.
Larvalform) prepare his testing materials. They
were pretty simple. The first thing Larvalform
pulled out was a stack of cards, each of which had
pictures of four objects on it. He held
the first card up where Adam could see it.
"I'm just going to ask him to pick out certain
objects," Larvalform told me.
"Right." I nodded, feeling my pulse speed
up a little. I have had mild testing anxiety on
my own behalf from time to time, but if you're a parent
you know that this is nothing compared with the anxiety you
feel when your kid's future is the one on the
line. I couldn't stop fidgeting until Mr.
Larvalform asked the first question. Then I relaxed.
He was playing right to Adam's strength.
"Adam," he said," can you point to the bus?"
I allowed myself a smile. There it was, in the
upper-left-hand quadrant of the card: a yellow
school bus. One of Adam's very favorite
things.
And yet, he hesitated. He peered at the
card as though it were an ancient and inscrutable sheaf
of runes he'd dug out of the ground. His
well-scrubbed brow furrowed, and he put one
finger to his lip in fierce concentration.
"Adam, honey," I said, feeling myself start
to sweat, "Adam, point to the bus."
Mr. Larvalform shook his head at me,
reminding me to stay out of it. I gave him a little
ingratiating smile. "He knows this," I said.
Very slowly, Adam extended his finger and pointed
to a picture of a rake.
"No, Adam," said Mr. Larvalform,
firmly. "Point to the bus."
Adam chewed his lip, eyes completely
blank. Then he pointed to an apple.
"No, no!" I burst out in dismay. "Adam,
come on, you know this." I turned to Mr.
Larvalform. "He really does," I said. "He
knows it."
Larvalform arched an eyebrow. Meanwhile,
Adam appeared to be lapsing into a vegetative
state. His head listed to one side, his mouth
dropped open, his tongue lolled out, and his eyes
crossed. He looked as though he couldn't win a
battle of wits with a landed carp.
"Adam," I whispered, as though Mr.
Larvalform wouldn't be able to hear me in the
five-by-five-foot room. "You little skunk,
what are you doing?"
He slumped down in his chair like a blob of
mud.
"Okay, then," said Mr. Larvalform
crisply. He flipped over the card with the bus
on it, made a mark on his evaluation sheet, and
held up the next card.
"Adam," he said, "can you point to the dog?"
There was the dog, plain as day. Adam could
draw one almost that well. Nevertheless, he raised
one lethargic finger and brought it down again on the
picture of a feather. It was then that I figured out
what was going on.
"Adam!" I said, shocked. "You're faking
it! Adam, stop it! Stop it right now!"
His eyes slid over toward me in dim
recognition. He started to drool.
"Mrs. Beck," said Mr. Larvalform
coldly. "Perhaps you'd prefer to wait in the
hall?"
"Listen!" I was desperate. "He knows
"bus"! He knows "dog"! He's acting
dumb because he knows that as soon as he maxes out,
you'll let him go play on the swing set!"
I was right. Adam had figured out how all
placement tests work: the questions start out easy and
get harder and harder, until the person being tested
isn't able to answer any more. Adam was sick of
being tested, he wanted to get out, and he knew
exactly how to do it. As I realized this, my
son's eyes met mine, uncrossed for an
instant, and revealed a brief flash of humor.
"Mrs. Beck," said Larvalform firmly,
"I know it's hard to accept, but we need to be
realistic about your son's abilities."
"I am being realistic!" I said. "I'm
telling you, Mr. Larvalform, he's playing you like
a piano--he just wants his Sprite!"
This time Adam grinned at me, his
eyes sparkling merrily. But by the time Larvalform
looked back at him, the lights had gone out again.
He half-lay in his chair, staring at his own
nose as though it were the only thing in the universe
he could even try to understand.
Eventually, I did get the examiner to write
my interpretation of that test down on his records.
I caught a glance of it later on. It said,
"Subject unable to answer Level One
vocabulary. Mother claims subject is
"faking it."" This made me feel like
Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing--you
know, the guy who says, "But masters, remember
that I am an ass; though it be not written down,
yet forget not that I am an ass." I can still
picture the school board sitting with that document,
sadly shaking their heads over my inability to come
to terms with my child's limitations.
Adam had a great time on the swings.
In the long run, he was probably saved from
institutionalization by a speech therapist who had a
three-year-old son with Down syndrome. She
knew perfectly well that Adam was capable of
gaming the system. She saw through his diversionary
tactics and placed him in a class where he
immediately began to thrive.

My own way of thinking, living, and working received
yet another gentle course correction that day in
Mr. Larvalform's tiny office. After spending the
first decades of my own life in a desperate
attempt to pass every arbitrary test placed before
me by the educational system and the rest of society,
I have to be constantly reminded that the end goal of
all this striving is to live joyfully, and that there
are often more direct ways of achieving this than
conforming to rigid standards set by social custom.
Strangely enough, this philosophy has
actually become my career, or at least a good
part of it. If you'd told me, ten years ago,
that I would one day completely surrender my
rigid efforts to conform with "normal" work standards,
I would have laughed in your face and then run for the
door, like Scrooge fleeing the Ghost of
Christmas Yet to Come. Living life as a
pursuit of joy would have struck me as lunacy,
if not blasphemy. But after a few years of
living with Adam, I developed so much confidence
in this idea that I became a career counselor.
A rather unorthodox career counselor,
to be sure. I'm always surprised by the way my
clients react to the suggestion that they structure
their lives around richness of experience, rather than
security. These are educated people, I think to myself.
During their many years of training, hasn't anyone
ever told them that life is pretty much a
crapshoot but one full of unexpected wonders?
Hasn't anyone given them permission to live for
their hearts' desires?
Then I remember that despite all my
years of education and training, I have learned most of
what I know about living joyfully from one person,
and he is not on any faculty. They barely
let him into the first grade. Since that night in
Singapore when both John and I began
to experience the slow warming of our personal Ice
Age, we have increasingly taken our retarded son
as our own counselor. People pay me good money
to pass along to them what Adam teaches me for
free. Luckily, I'm pretty sure he will
never demand a percentage of the take. It scares
me to think how much I owe him.




One of the cruelest things about Harvard is the
scheduling of its fall semesters. I don't know
who came up with it, but I picture a group of
seventeenth-century Puritans sitting around in
hair shirts, brainstorming about how they could take
as much joy out of the holiday season as possible.
Most colleges wrap up the fall semester in
time for the holiday season, allowing students
to visit family and friends in a state of welcome
relaxation before returning for the spring semester.
Harvard, by contrast, lets its students go for the
holidays with the fall semester still unfinished.
Students return to the campus in the coldest,
darkest part of the year, facing two more weeks of
classwork. They then enter two weeks of "dead"
time, during which no classes meet and everyone
writes term papers. In my undergraduate
years, when people had typewriters rather than computers,
you could hear the frantic tap-tap-tap-tap from
all directions, around the clock, all the way
through Dead Days. Occasionally, the typewriters
would be drowned out by the sound of someone screaming out of a
dorm window, begging for release like a prisoner in
a dungeon. The Dead Days were
followed by two weeks of exams, which swiftly
destroyed any lingering wisps of mental health that
remained among the student body.
This schedule means that just about every Harvard student
goes home for the holidays with suitcases full
of books and assignments, and firm intentions of
catching up in every class before returning to the
campus. Of course, no one--or at any
rate, no one I could ever really like--actually
carries through on this. But the blight of obligation,
the pressure to excel, and the fear of failure
manage to poison almost everyone's seasonal
cheer. You can practically feel John Harvard
and the rest of those Puritan forefathers looking down with
grim approval on the frigid campus.
As 1987 drew to a close, even after years
of experience had taught us how futile it was,
John and I packed more work into our vacation bags
than ever before. This time, we told each other, we
were really going to stay focused. In between visiting
our respective families, reconnecting with
old friends, and playing Santa for Katie, we were
going to Get a Lot Done. We had to. The
holiday pressure I had felt during my
undergraduate career was nothing compared with graduate
school's. This year, I knew that I'd spend
exam period grading the papers of the students from
my Caribbean Society section rather than studying
for my own exams. To make time for this, I
planned to have my term papers written well
ahead of time. John, of course, would be going
back to Singapore as soon as the winter break was
over, and absolutely had to finish his Harvard
assignments before then. Our carry-on bags were so
heavy with books that when I tried to pick mine up
I staggered into the wall. I think I actually
did read one of those books during winter break--
well, maybe just a chapter from one of them. All
right, so I didn't exactly read it. It was more
a kind of skimming behavior. So sue me.
The thing I always failed to calculate into my
holiday schedule was the emotional toll and time
involved in trying to meet holiday expectations for
both my family and John's. Since we had
grown up in the same hometown, going home for the
holidays usually meant that we were constantly torn
between our families' conflicting cultures and
traditions. You wouldn't think they'd be all that
different, two Utah families descended from
similar troops of pioneers, both
headed by university professors. Our fathers got
their Ph.d.'s from Berkeley in the same year. One of the reasons I married John was that I'd
read statistics indicating that the more similar two
people's backgrounds are, the more likely it is that they
will have a happy and long-lasting marriage. I
decided this meant that the fact that John and I were
delivered by the same obstetrician was a good thing.
(of course, if John had been from
Zimbabwe, I would have found some rationale for
marrying him anyway. Those of us who are trained in
the social sciences know how to find the data
to support whatever we want to be true.)
Anyway, despite the similarities in our
backgrounds, Christmas was always a festive time
to figure out how different my family and
John's really were.
The year I was expecting Adam, John's
parents were wintering in Arizona. This made our
vacation slightly less stressful than in other
years, when we would stay with them in the house where
John grew up. Everything in that house looked
perfect, from the crystal chandelier in the dining room
to the hardwood closets in the guest bedroom.
There was not a mote of dust on the premises, not
a crack in the paint, not a shingle on the roof out
of place. Everyone who went into the house, and
everything done in it, looked perfect as well. It
was an unspoken but clearly understood entrance
requirement. My mother-in-law, Faye, cooked
well-balanced and delicious meals three times a
day, and spent most of the rest of her time cleaning.
John's father, Jay (yes, Faye and Jay),
was just as attentive to the exterior of the house as his
wife was to the interior. They were as refined and
gracious as their estate, both small and well
groomed and white haired. They reigned over their
lovely, immaculate home like Mr. and Mrs.
Santa.
As much as I enjoyed and admired my
in-laws, their style of thinking and talking was
difficult for me to master--particularly when I was
pregnant. For one thing, Beck women do not
allow themselves to show weakness, much less illness.
They just keep cooking and cleaning, stopping
occasionally for Polite Conversation. During the
Christmas season of 1987, the only
activities that sounded even remotely pleasant
to me were lying absolutely still and moaning. In her
gracious way, my mother-in-law made
it very clear to me that she had experienced morning
sickness many times but that she had always mastered it by
"getting up and getting moving." By this she meant
cooking and cleaning, activities that were alien to my
nature at the best of times and utterly intolerable
when I was in a family way. For the first hour or
two after we reached my in-laws' rented condo in
Phoenix, I tried to act appropriately
Beck-like. But the first time I walked into the
kitchen, the central control headquarters for all
true Beck women, I threw up so violently
that I was positive my head would come off. After
that, I gave up on "getting moving." I had
to struggle just to meet the barest minimum social
requirements by participating in the Polite
Conversation.
In Japanese there are two words for "thing":
koto and mono. Koto means an intangible
thing, like a concept or behavior or idea.
Mono means something physical, an object you
could hold in your hand. I mean no disrespect when
I say that John's clan are mono people. The
hours and hours and hours of Polite Conversation
they engage in whenever they get together center almost
entirely on physical objects. They can
discuss the maintenance of the flowers in their yard or the
recipe for meat loaf for thirty minutes at a
stretch, never once letting their attention lag.
Whenever they go out to eat, the entire conversation is
likely to focus on any changes in the decor
or personnel of the restaurant since the last time
they were there. The most exotic and highly favored
topic for Polite Conversation, however, is
airplane travel. When we stayed with the Becks
in 1987, with John in the midst of his round-the-world
adventures, the conversation rarely strayed from this
subject.
"So," my father-in-law asked John, as we
sat in the condo's perfect living room, watching
a perfect fire crackling in the perfect
fireplace, "what airline do you usually
travel?"
John paused for three or four seconds before
answering. His parents' pace of speech was about
one-tenth the Boston norm, and John fell
easily into it.
"Singapore Airlines," he said at last.
"Oh," Jay responded, after some thought.
"Singapore Airlines."
"Yes," John agreed slowly.
"Singapore Airlines."
There was a long silence as everyone took this in.
Then my mother-in-law asked, "How's the food
on Singapore Airlines?" (the fact that food
is served on airplanes apparently created a
space for Beck women to enter conversations on the
subject.)
"Not bad," John said. "It's good food.
I go business class."
"Business class." Jay shook his head.
"Amazing."
At this, John and both his parents suddenly
emitted a pleasant chuckling sound. No one ever
laughed out loud during a Beck conversation, but there
was always an enormous amount of pleasant
chuckling. I could never tell when it was going
to happen, but the Becks all seemed to know when to do
it, and they appeared very bonded by the exercise.
"I remember once," Jay continued after a
minute or so, I flew on Singapore
Airlines. Let's see, that must have been in about
... oh, I'd say about 1979 or so." He
stopped to think for a minute. "Or maybe it was
1980." More thinking. "No, I think it was
1979. Yes, 1979. Anyway, I'll always
remember that stewardess. She had on a red
dress."
"No," Faye put in, "it was a blue
dress."
"Was it?" Jay's eyebrows lifted in
surprise.
"Yes, it was blue. A blue dress."
"Oh. I thought it was red."
More pleasant chuckling all around.
"Yes, it was blue," Faye repeated when the
chuckling was over.
"Well, I guess you're right," my
father-in-law said. "A blue dress. Anyway,
they gave us fish for dinner."
"Ah." John nodded appreciatively.
"Fish."
"Yes," Faye put in. "Fish."
Jay: And it was pretty good.
Faye: Did you think so?
Jay: Mine was.
Faye: I thought it was a little dry.
Jay: Oh, really?
Faye: Yes. Mine was.
Jay: Huh! Well, mine was pretty good.
Long before this point, I had begun
pinching myself violently to keep from lapsing into a
coma. Despite their sincere affection and the comfort of
familiar communication patterns, a Polite
Conversation at the Becks' affected me like
chloroform. I looked over at John for
support and comfort, but he was sitting there with this
goony little-boy smile on his face, like a duck
that had been brought back to its pond after a long
hike through the desert.
Of course, I wanted very much for John's
family to like me, and he was very anxious for me
to make the right impression, so sometimes I'd try
to participate in the Polite Conversation. It
didn't come naturally to me, but I'd do my best
to pitch in with a comment or two. It would go something like
this:
Faye: Well, I guess I'll go over
to Jolyn's tomorrow and get my hair done.
Jay: Jolyn? I thought that woman named
Bernice did your hair.
Faye: No, she moved. Now I go
to Jolyn's.
Jay: Huh! Jolyn's!
Faye: I didn't like Bernice much
anyway. She made my hair look terrible.
Everyone Except Martha: Chuckle chuckle
chuckle.
John: So, you'll be going over to Jolyn's.
Does she do a good job?
Faye: Oh, a pretty good job. I like the
way she combs it out.
Jay: Huh! Well, it looks good.
John: Yeah, Mom, it looks great.
Faye: Yes, Jolyn does a pretty good
job.
Martha: You know, humans are the only
species of primate that don't do much mutual
grooming. I think that's why women talk so much
to their hairdressers. Being groomed sort of
triggers the old social bonding instinct.
Don't you think that's likely?
At this, all the Becks would stare at me in
mute, unanimous horror for about thirty
seconds, after which they would begin to talk about
airplanes. Later, when we had retired to the
guest bedroom, John would throw a minor fit
because I had been so rude, and I would try to hit
him with the cardboard tube from a festive roll of
holiday gift wrap, and we would go to sleep in
icy silence.

The visit to my family was--er--somewhat
different. The house I grew up in was not on the
slopes of the Wasatch mountains, where the Becks
and all the other respectable folks in town had
their homes. Our house was down on the valley
floor, which was inhabited mainly by college
students and poor white trash. My family
intersected with both these groups, without really being
part of either. My father was a well-respected
professor, a popular speaker not only at the
university but also in the community at large. That
made my family part of the college crowd.
However, our modest family income, the number
of children in the family (eight), and above all, the
condition of our house, kept us in the
poor-white-trash range, socially speaking.
That house was the bane of my existence. I still have
nightmares about it. It was a small brick
structure that my parents, in some fit of
pathological creativity, had painted
swimming-pool blue. The house was this color when
I was born and had never been repainted by the time
I left for college. Small, crackling
strips of swimming-pool-blue paint kept
flaking off the house and dropping to the ground around
it, giving lead poisoning to the many stray cats who
lived in our garage. The garage itself was overflowing
with junk, far too much of it to leave room for a
car. That was all right, though, because no amount of
weathering could have made the car look worse. It was
a little yellow Datsun, so old and battered that the
doors flew open every time the car went around a
curve. My parents had solved this problem
by placing loops of twine around the headrests of the
seats, then hooking the twine around the little lock
knobs on the doors.
The car spent its time next to a yard that was
completely covered with dead leaves. My father
believed that they would act as mulch for the grass. Every
autumn, he not only left the leaves that fell
directly onto our lawn but raked leaves off
the street and sidewalk onto the yard,
bizarrely confident that the next spring grass would
burst through the leaves in emerald splendor. In every
season, the yard looked sort of like a compost
heap, only drier.
The inside of the house was even worse than the
outside. Much worse. When I was growing up,
my many older siblings warned me not
to let anyone near our house, and to throw myself in
front of a speeding car rather than let anyone
actually go inside. They told me that if any of
our acquaintances ever realized how we lived, we
would all become instant pariahs at school.
They were probably right.
To begin with, my parents' mysterious color
preferences showed up in every room. The living
room, for example, had walls and carpet of a
pale mint-green hue (although the carpet was so
dirty it was hard to tell the color). Sitting
near the center of the living room was an easy chair
made of hunter-orange polyester, which my
parents had purchased with Gold Strike
Stamps, thinking it would create a nice contrast
with the walls. Contrast, yes. Nice, no.
Granted, it was hard to really see the color
scheme in the house, because every horizontal
surface was covered with Stuff. I don't even
know what the Stuff was. I'm sure--you'll
think I'm exaggerating, but I am not--that some of
my elementary school homework was still lodged amid
the Stuff when John and I visited my
ancestral lodge in December of 1987. The
Stuff reached heights of eighteen inches or more
on the seats of chairs, the tops of tables and
shelves, and strategic parts of the floor. I still
have a habit of sitting down on things without even
noticing them, a skill my whole family had
to master if we wanted to sit down at all. When
we were growing up, my siblings and I would
occasionally launch a desperate attempt to clean
the house, but it never got very far. There were too many
of us in too small a space, and the place was
way too far gone for cleaning long before my time.
Couched as we were in the middle of so much
unattractive Stuff, my siblings and I had
grown up with a forced obliviousness to mono,
to tangible objects. Every trace of self-esteem
and family pride we managed to dredge up had
to do with koto--ideas, theories, concepts. All
of this was based on my father's legendary
intellectual brilliance. He was a bona
fide genius, who did research in upwards of
twenty languages and held dozens of
book-length works of literature and philosophy
in his memory. Everyone in town had heard of him,
and most recognized him on sight. My teachers
often asked me what it was like to be raised by the
smartest man in the community. Despite
our unkempt appearance and lack of social
graces, my father's much-lauded intelligence
gave us all a certain dignity, and high status
among our peers.
Brains were everything in my family. Some of the
few visitors allowed into our house when I was
little were college students studying psychology and
child development, who had been given assignments
that necessitated interacting with actual children. My
siblings and I were pretty much the only children in the
neighborhood. As a result, we were
frequently subjected to various types of
experimentation, involving everything from simple
observation to testing our IQ'S. My parents were
always especially happy to let them measure our
IQ'S.
I remember taking one IQ test with my father
in the room, looking on. I was three or four,
and the psychology student had me sit on the
floor while she gave me a number of tests
designed to measure memory and analytical
ability. She also tested my vocabulary. My
father was standing behind her, and I could see from the
expression on his face that he was deeply invested
in the outcome of the tests. At one point the
researcher asked me the question "Do dogs
manufacture?"
I was unsure of the correct response. I
knew that manufacture meant to make something, and
while I had never heard anyone say that dogs
manufactured anything, I was sure of two things
they made: puppies and poop.
"Yes," I said uncertainly, hoping she
wouldn't ask me any specific questions about the
poop.
My father reacted as though he'd been stung by a
bee. He had kept quiet up to that point, as the
student researcher had requested, but this was too much
for him.
"No, no, no, no, no!" he said, bouncing
up onto the balls of his feet as he did when
he got excited. "Dogs don't
manufacture! Think of the Latin roots--
manu means "hand," facture means
"make." To make with the hands. Dogs don't
even have hands, you idiot!"
Idiot was a popular word in my house. We
all used it frequently. It referred to anyone
who wasn't as smart as my father, and it protected
us against the humiliation that might have been
imposed upon us by our hand-me-down clothes and our
horrible house. Anyone who made fun of us,
or lived in a nicer place, or wore
expensive clothes was manifestly an idiot, and
therefore beneath contempt. Given this strategy for
propping up our self-esteem, it is little wonder
that my siblings and I were very concerned about the
results of our IQ tests.
My father was actually in the first wave of
American children to take intelligence quotient
tests when they were developed. After the results of
those first tests came back, the principal of my
father's elementary school called him in and told
him, "Hugh, if you were to go to sleep right now, and
stay asleep for nine years, and your classmates
kept studying that whole time, you would still be ahead of
them when you woke up."
This was the type of story that got me and mine through
the shame of growing up in squalor. It was the kind
of story we retold every year when we gathered together
amid the piles of Stuff to celebrate the
holidays. We retold it at top volume,
all eight siblings shouting to get a word in
edgewise. This was the way we always talked when you
got a group of us together. The conversation ripped
along at breakneck speed and numbing volume,
filled with stiletto humor, double entendres,
puns, and allusions. Anyone who couldn't keep
up, or who said something stupid, would be turned upon
and verbally mauled for a few minutes, until
someone else did something equally "idiotic," and the
focus of ridicule would shift.
Occasionally, especially at celebratory
times, the whole gang of us would launch into a
spontaneous mental game. For example, my
mother used to send me to our back porch (a room
containing no furniture but a simply incredible
mass of Stuff) to get flour for holiday cakes
or pies. I often returned to the kitchen, cringing
with disgust, to announce that the flour was full of
worms. No matter how sick this made me, I
knew it wouldn't bother my mother. She always just
sifted the worms out, saying that even if she
missed a few and they got into the food, they would
simply be an excellent source of protein.
Just as we were all beginning to feel thoroughly
downtrodden, my father would save the day. "Everyone
come up with a literary reference about worms!" he
would shout.
There would be a sudden silence as everyone
thought furiously, trying to come up with the first, the
best, the most worm references. Then someone would
shout, "Moby-Dick! Maggots in the ship's
biscuits!"
"Thomas Aquinas! Wurms!" someone else
would yell. And the literary contest would be off and
running. It was here, among my flesh and blood,
that my alter ego, Fang, had first learned the
fine art of intellectual competition. My
family might be worm eaters, but by damn, we
were smart.
As you can imagine, bringing John into this group was
like throwing a purebred, rigidly trained
champion show dog into a pack of junk-yard
mutts. John had learned witty repartee in his
club at Harvard, but the pace, intensity, and
decibel level of my family's banter was
hard to match. I knew John could hold his own
with my family, and I kept waiting for him to leap
into the verbal fray, but he never did. It felt
completely alien to him. The chaos of voices and the
abundance of Stuff made him feel dazed and
swamped, like a computer with too much data being
dumped into the hard drive. He would respond to this
in the only way permissible in his family
system: his eyes would glaze over, and he would
sit there emitting the pleasant chuckling noise
until he fell abruptly, inexplicably,
profoundly asleep. Later, when we had
retired for the night, I would throw my own fit at
his unwillingness to even try to fit in with my
family, and he would go into a huffy silence, and we
would, once again, end the day as enemies.
Christmas vacations had been this way ever since
John and I were married. This is one reason it was
so absurd of us to pack dozens of academic
books in our luggage. Surrounded by the masses
of social pressure from our families of
origin, and preoccupied by the battles that
inevitably ensued between us after we interacted with
them, John and I both allowed Harvard to fade
into the furthest reaches of our conscious minds.
Instead, our families' priorities came
roaring back from childhood; John remembered
once again how absolutely essential it was
to look perfect at all times, and I once again
set out to prove that I was not an idiot.
Both these impulses would make it very
difficult for us to handle the months ahead, but at
the time they were actually a welcome
distraction. They not only put Harvard in a
different perspective but also helped me cope with the nausea that was still my constant companion. The
concerns I had developed about the health of my
unborn child now seemed ridiculously unfounded.
I put them aside, along with the academic
books I was supposed to be reading.
John and I knew, as we did every year, that the
relaxation would end with a jolt once we returned
to school. Back at Harvard, our professors
were waiting for our term papers, our students were
waiting for their grades. What I did not know was
that the obstetrical nurse-practitioner at
University Health Services, who had just received
the results of my blood tests, was waiting for
me to return her increasingly desperate
messages. If she couldn't get in touch with me
soon, she was afraid it was going to be too
late.







We had turned off the heat to our apartment when
we left for the holiday break, and when we
returned, the place was so cold that our breath not
only froze but actually drifted toward the
floor in tiny crystal clouds. It seemed
to me, as I let Katie out of her stroller and
turned up the thermostat, that this apartment had always
been cold, even in summer. The chill was more
psychological than physical. The three
sparsely furnished rooms overlooking Harvard
Square contained places to study, places to work,
places to close our eyes for a few exhausted
hours before going back to work again, but not really
places to live.
The furnace began to pump warm air soon
enough, but I left my coat on while I
listened to the messages on the answering machine.
I was glad I did. The first message sent an
icy shiver through me.
"Martha, this is the nurse-practitioner at
University Health Services." The voice
sounded urgent, frustrated, almost angry. "I
need to get in touch with you immediately--immediately--
regarding the results from one of the tests you
requested. Please get in touch with me as soon
as possible."
She left the phone number, and I scribbled
it on a piece of paper with cold-stiffened fingers.
When I looked up, John was standing in the
bedroom doorway with Katie in his arms and a
look of startled concern on his face.
"What's that about?" he said, nodding toward the
answering machine.
I shook my head. "I don't know." But I
did know. The gut feeling that something was wrong with the
baby had just resurfaced and received an
unwelcome validation.
"Probably no big deal," said John,
flashing me his deceptively confident smile.
"Right," I said. "No big deal."
"You'd better call her, anyway."
John's voice was still casual, but it had an
undertone that meant he was as anxious as I was.
The nurse-practitioner answered her phone
immediately. I liked this woman very much. She was one
of the few medical personnel at University
Health Services who actually might have
recognized me on the street. While the
OB-GYN doctors rushed through the clinic,
checking as many pregnant women as possible in the
brief time they had to spend there, the
nurse-practitioner had (or simply took) the
time to really talk to each expectant mother. I'll
call her Judy Trenton.
"Hi, Judy," I said when she answered the
phone. "This is Martha Beck."
"Martha!" Judy said. "I've been trying
to reach you!" Her voice took on the tinge of
anger I had heard on the answering machine.
"Look," she went on, "when you request
tests and then leave town, you really must give us
numbers where you can be reached. You really shouldn't
even be leaving--what are we supposed to do when the
tests show a problem? You have no idea how much time
I've spent trying to track you down."
"I'm sorry," I said unhappily. "When
the tests show a problem." Not "if." "When." I
could feel my heart speeding up, half of me
wanting desperately to know what was wrong, the other
half ready to slam the phone down without listening.
"So, is there something wrong?" I managed
to keep my voice calm, but my hands were shaking.
Judy's voice went back to its usual
crisp-but-warm timbre. "Well, we
got an unusual reading on your
alpha-fetoprotein levels," she said.
"The AFP?" I remembered that a high
AFP indicated spina bifida, a condition in which
the unborn baby's spinal cord fails
to fuse. I had a sudden, horrible image of a
baby born with its back open and its internal
organs partially outside the skin.
"How high was the level?" I said.
"It wasn't high," said Judy. "It was
actually a bit below normal."
"Below normal?" I repeated. "Well, that's
good, isn't it?"
Judy made a noncommittal sound. "It's
not necessarily bad," she said. "But there is a
slight statistical correlation between low levels
of AFP and Down syndrome."
I felt an immediate surge of revulsion.
"Slight," I said at last. "A slight
statistical correlation."
"Yes, you shouldn't worry," she said. "We just
want to do the test again, to see if we get the
same results. Just to be on the safe side."
"How slight?" Now I was the one with tension in
my voice. "What's the correlation between this and
Down syndrome?"
"It depends," she said.
"What are my odds?" I snapped. Fang was
awake now, and she was not in the mood for vagueness.
"Well"--I could hear Judy flipping through
papers. "It depends on the actual level, and
your age. ... Okay, here, I've got your
file. How old are you?"
"Twenty-five."
We were both silent for a minute. John came
back into the bedroom and stood silently, watching
my face. I didn't meet his eyes. Then
Judy said, "All right, I've got it. Based
on this one test--which is only preliminary, of
course--your odds of having a Down's baby are
one in eight hundred ninety-five."
I almost laughed. "Eight hundred
ninety-five?" I said. "That's why you were chasing
me all over the country?"
"You're right not to worry about it," said Judy.
The warmth was back in her voice. "But we would like
you to come in to repeat the test today. We just want
to be on the safe side."
"Today?" I said, rather taken aback. It usually
took me a couple of weeks just to get
an appointment.
"You're at eighteen weeks' gestation right
now," Judy told me. "We don't have much
time."
I was confused. "Time? Time for what?"
"To terminate," she said. "If there's something
wrong."
I felt the chill again, despite all that
heavy clothing and central heating.
"Oh," I said. "Of course."
I shook my head, irritated at myself for being
so worried. I was young, I was healthy, I was from
a large family with no genetic defects
to speak of. Even my morning sickness, as
unpleasant as it was, signaled a healthy
pregnancy. I scheduled the blood test.
A few hours later, John walked me over
to the clinic. Katie rode in her backpack on
his shoulders. A light snow was falling on
Harvard Square. Students had returned from the
holidays, the many restaurants were back in full
operation, and the smell of food drifted on warm
eddies through the freezing air. The lights of the
storefronts, the snowdrifts on people's hats and
collars, the bright pink of Katie's cheeks,
all struck me as festive and somehow tinged with
nostalgia, as though I were looking back on a
time of my life that had already passed. I had a
strong sense that a chapter was ending, and another was
about to begin. I said nothing about this feeling to John.
It was too surreal, I thought, too hard
to describe.
"Natsukashii," said John as we passed
a French bakery and headed toward the door of
University Health Services.
"What?" I looked at him sharply.
"Nothing," he said. But I'd already heard him.
Natsukashii is a Japanese word that
described exactly what I was feeling: a
wistful sense of longing, an appreciation for
beauty laced with sadness at its transience. I
fell back half a step and watched John
trudge through the snow, wondering why we both felt
as though we were going to a funeral.
It took the nurse all of thirty seconds
to poke another hole in my arm and extract enough
blood to fill several test tubes. It took a
bit longer to bring me around after I stood up too
fast and plopped to the floor. All in all,
John and Katie spent only ten
minutes in the waiting room.
John grinned at me as I waddled out of the
elevator. I stood on my toes to kiss
Katie, still riding in her backpack. We headed
for a soup-and-salad restaurant near the clinic.
"So," said John, when we had stationed Katie
in her high chair and ordered lunch, "how was it?"
I shrugged. "They just took more blood.
Personally, I think they've got a vampire
on the staff and they're storing snacks."
"Did they tell you anything else about the
test?" John said. "What exactly is the
problem?"
I shook my head. "The nurse who took my
blood didn't know anything about it. The best info
is what Judy told me--we've got a one in
eight hundred and ninety-five shot at a
retarded baby."
John smiled. "I can live with those odds."
I tried to smile back, but I couldn't.
"I'm still ..." I wanted to tell John about the
worry in my gut. I wanted to tell him that it
was more than worry--that it was a certainty. Then I
realized all over again how preposterous that was.
"I'm still a little scared."
He reached across the table for my hand. "Sure,"
he said. "That's understandable. But even if there's a
problem, we've caught it in time."
"In time?" That phrase again.
"Yeah," said John. "The worst-case
scenario is that you might have to have an abortion, and
that's a long shot. Everything's going to be fine."
I stared at him. "I might have to have an
abortion? Have to?"
John opened a package of saltines and
gave the crackers to Katie. "Look, Marth,
the odds are so slim that--"
"I might have to have an abortion?" The chill
inside me was gone. Instead I could feel my
face flushing hot with anger. "Since when do you
decide what I have to do with my body?"
John looked surprised. "I never said I
was going to decide anything," he protested.
"It's just that if the tests show something wrong with the
baby, of course we'll abort. We've
talked about this."
I closed my eyes, trying to rein in my
temper. John was right. We'd discussed abortion
in general, once or twice, and both of us thought
it was a very good idea to abort fetuses
with birth defects. I remembered saying so. But
now that I was actually pregnant, now that the
abortion in question concerned a baby I could already
feel moving inside me, the very idea that anyone
could say I "had to" end my pregnancy
filled me with an almost primeval rage.
"What we've talked about," I told John
in a low, dangerous voice, "is that I am
pro-choice. That means I decide whether or
not I'd abort a baby with a birth defect. You
steer clear of this one, John-boy. It is not
your call!"
John looked at me as though I'd slapped
him. The anger in my voice shocked even me.
"I'm ... I'm sorry," I said. I
shouldn't have--I'm not mad. It's just the
hormones."
"Whatever," said John. He regarded me
warily as the waitress came back from the kitchen
with our lunch.
"It's just not ethically consistent," I told
John, as soon as the waitress went away.
He took a bite of his sandwich. "What
isn't?"
"Abortion," I said. "I mean, not abortion
in general, just this kind of abortion. This
designer-baby stuff."
"You mean screening for birth defects?"
John was giving me his surprised look every
couple of seconds. "What in the world is wrong
with it? It's better for everyone."
I shook my head. "I'm not so sure of that."
"You used to be," said John.
"I know. I used to be." I rubbed my
eyes. I felt terribly confused. "But now
... look, John, it's not as though we're
deciding whether or not to have a baby. We're
deciding what kind of a baby we're willing
to accept. If it's perfect in every way, we
keep it. If it doesn't fit the right
specifications, whoosh! Out it goes."
John shook his head. "Don't be silly,
Marth," he said. "You know that isn't true.
We're talking about the difference between a healthy,
normal baby and a defective one."
The word defective hit me like a hammer.
I folded my arms across my growing abdomen as
if I could shield the baby from it. I felt
irrationally, almost violently protective.
"So what exactly is a
"defective" baby?" I demanded.
"Calm down!" John threw an embarrassed
glance around the restaurant.
I lowered my voice. "I mean, I know there
are babies born so damaged they can't survive
on their own," I said, "but what about the ones that would
actually live unless they were aborted? Where do you
draw the line? Is a baby with only one hand
"defective"?"
John's eyes widened. "Did they say
something about its hands?"
"No, no, no," I said irritably. "But
what if they did? What if this baby had a
clubfoot or something? Would you tell me I
"had to have" an abortion?"
John was looking more and more confused. "Martha,
why are you on this soapbox? What's your point?"
"My point is," I said, "that I'm trying
to get you to tell me what you think constitutes a
"defective" baby. What about ... oh, I
don't know, a hyperactive baby? Or an
ugly one?"
"They can't test for those things, and--"
"Well, what if they could?" I said.
"Medicine can do all kinds of magical tricks
these days. Pretty soon we're going to be
aborting babies because they have the gene for
alcoholism, or homosexuality, or manic
depression."
I grabbed Katie's cheese sandwich from her
high chair tray and started chopping it
into bite-size pieces with my butter knife.
I think I looked a little deranged, because both
John and Katie just sat there, eyes wide,
watching.
"Did you know that in China they abort a lot of
fetuses just because they're female?" I growled.
"Is being a girl "defective" enough for you?"
"I didn't say--" John began, but I
cut him off again. Words I had never consciously
thought were spilling out of me in a torrent, as though
I had been desperate to say them for a long, long
time.
"Just exactly how smart does a baby have
to be before its parents accept it?" I said. "How
good-looking? How healthy? How strong?" I was
holding the butter knife in my closed fist,
pointing it at John, poking it forward a little with every
question. John waited until he was sure I
wasn't going to stab him, then reached over
and gently took the knife out of my hand.
"Honey," he said firmly. "This is not
eugenics. We aren't talking about breeding a
race of supermen. We're talking about taking some
of the tragedy out of life."
I squinted at him. "And you think that aborting
an abnormal fetus does that?"
John nodded. "Yeah. I do."
I shook my head. "You are so damn male,"
I said. "You guys think that just because a baby
isn't born yet, it doesn't exist. Get
rid of it before a man ever sees it, and it never
even happened. Well, that's bullshit, buddy.
Ask any woman who's five months
pregnant whether her baby exists or not. Then,
just for laughs, consider for once that her viewpoint
might actually count for something!"
"Martha!" John said. "Don't swear in
front of Katie!"
Katie was mashing a sodden saltine into her
mouth. She looked from me to John and back in
observant silence.
"My point is," I said, "that if a baby
is conceived with a birth defect, that's a tragedy.
Not if it's born with a birth defect, but if it
has a birth defect, period. It doesn't
matter whether you abort it or let it live.
It's a tragedy either way."
Suddenly, my eyes filled with tears. I
knew I was grieving, but I didn't know why.
The Bunraku puppeteers seemed to be crowding
around me, somber and patient, but relentless.
John was aghast. This was not the way Beck women
comported themselves, particularly not in public. He didn't know what to do.
"Look, honey, nothing's wrong with our
baby," he said. "Our baby is fine. And
yes, I agree with you that birth defects are a
tragedy any way you look at it, but abortion
is a way to deal with the problem, you know? To limit
it. That's all I was saying."
I wiped my eyes with a paper napkin and peered
at my husband's weary, frustrated face.
"And you'd still want me to abort this baby if it
wasn't normal," I said. "Wouldn't you?"
John pulled in a deep breath and let it out
slowly. He looked terribly tired.
"Look," he said. "I know I can't always
see things from your perspective, and I'm sorry
about that. But the way I see it, if a
baby is going to be deformed or something, abortion
is a way to keep everyone from suffering--
especially that baby. It's like shooting a horse
that's broken its leg." John's father had been
born to a clan of sheepherders, and he was always
quick with barnyard analogies.
"A lame horse dies slowly, you know?" said
John. "It dies in terrible pain. And it can't
run anymore, so it can't enjoy life even if
it doesn't die. Horses live to run; that's
what they do. If a baby is born not being able
to do what other people do, I think it's better not
to prolong its suffering."
I nodded. The torrent of emotion seemed to be
passing. I felt as though a hurricane had
swept through me, leaving me hollow and exhausted.
I swallowed a mouthful of orange juice and
closed my eyes.
"And what is it," I said softly, more to myself
than to John, "what is it that people do? What do
we live to do, the way a horse lives to run?"
I didn't expect an answer, and John
didn't give one. He just moved his chair
closer to mine and put an arm around my shoulders.
"You're awfully tired, aren't you?"
I nodded, trying to hold back another wave
of tears.
"Let's get you home," he said, stroking my
hair. "You look so pale--how much blood did
the vampire nurses take, anyway?"
I managed to smile. "Just enough for their midnight
buffet."
John smiled and began to laugh. Then,
abruptly, he fell silent. He held very still
for a moment. Then he said, "What?"
I opened my eyes. John was looking at
me, his brow furrowed.
"I didn't say anything," I told him.
He looked confused. "Then who did? Who said
that?"
Now I was the perplexed one. "Who said what?"
John turned his head, looking all around the
table. There was no one near us.
"John? Are you okay?"
He shook his head slightly. "I'm ...
yes, I'm fine. It's just jet lag. I
guess."
I didn't question him any further. I knew,
with the kind of knowledge that comes from your core, what had just
happened. The puppeteers were talking
to John. I was so sure of this that I didn't
even bother to articulate it in my own mind. I
didn't know what they had said, or why. I would
learn those things later. At the time, I just rested
my face against John's chest and closed my
eyes again.
John brought his other arm around and folded me
to his chest. He was still wearing his bulky down
parka. It was like a pillow against my cheek. I
could feel his heart beating beneath the coat. For a
moment, I let the anxiety in my chest relax,
let myself forget everything I had to do that day, let
myself feel utterly safe. And then I understood
that John was answering my question, even though he
didn't know he was. This is it, I thought. This
is the part of us that makes our brief, improbable
little lives worth living: the ability to reach through
our own isolation and find strength, and comfort, and
warmth for and in each other. This is what human beings
do. This is what we live for, the way horses
live to run.





I just cut Adam's hair. I've been
cutting it since he was a baby, and until today
I have made unilateral command decisions about
styling. His hair is the color and texture of
corn silk, and I've always left as much of it
on his head as I possibly could. Today, however,
Adam and both his sisters (along with John and my
friend Karen, who lives with us) got together and
decided that he needed a new look. It took
them a while to persuade me, but ultimately I
gave in to the pressure and cut it the way they
wanted me to. Now Adam's hair is short
all over, with one stylish lock left a bit
longer in the front. It's very dashing. His head
looks like a dandelion just before the fluff blows
away. No one who's seen Adam since the
haircut has been able to resist the temptation
to run up and rub it with both hands. The kid is
walking around charged with so much static electricity
I'm afraid he's going to burst into flame.
I am very relieved to see that Adam's new
'do looks good on him, because it was not easy for me
to pick up my handy home clippers and shear almost
all the hair off my son. Before I
let the family talk me into doing this, I informed
them that in ancient China, cutting one's hair was
considered an insult to one's mother. This makes
sense, if you think about it. You didn't make your
own hair. Your parents provided all the raw
materials, and your mother was a rent-free
production facility. (this argument didn't
impress my family, who reminded me that I
routinely allow my children to insult me in any
number of ways.) We Americans aren't
nearly as big on filial piety as the
Imperial Chinese, but still, I have never met a
mother of any culture who could just whack off her
children's hair without a few bittersweet twinges.
It's so astonishing to look at a child, an
incredibly complex, independent living being, and know
that it emerged from your own insides. It seems a
pity to throw any of it away.
I know an eighty-year-old woman who is still
amazed whenever she watches her own children, even though
those children are now grandparents themselves. "Look!" she
still says to herself. "Look--they're alive!" The
incredulity never wanes entirely. But I think
there are few experiences to match the very first time a
mother lays eyes on her child. It was one of the things
I looked forward to most when I knew I was
expecting Adam--one of the things that held me
back from an early abortion, and helped me get
through even the worst of the physical misery.
I had vivid memories of the first time I saw
Katie. At the time I had been in labor for
forty hours and was so completely exhausted that I
had all but forgotten why I was there. My only
thought was to get through the next contraction. The obstetrician, who had stayed with me through the
entire process and was almost as tired as I was,
delivered Katie's head and then suctioned out her
throat while I rested before pushing her body out.
There I was, draped in my little hospital
napkin-shift, surrounded by medical personnel,
dazed with pain and fatigue, and still pretty much
pregnant. Then, in the middle of all this
hurly-burly, I suddenly heard a small
cough.
I was confused. It sounded like a baby, of all
things! I looked around, wondering who on earth had
brought a baby into this sterile, high-stress,
professional scenario. This was a hospital, not
a nursery! Then I heard the small cough again.
This time John said, "Gee, it's ...
uh ... it's pretty purple."
He was looking at me--specifically, at that
portion of me which I had always been warned to keep
strictly to myself, and which was now being viewed by more
strangers than you could fit in a minivan. It
dawned on me slowly. Oh, my God, I
thought. That was my baby who coughed. I brought a
baby into this room! A person no one had ever
seen before, an actual human being who had never
existed until now!
A few seconds later Katie's body
emerged, looking very purple indeed. The doctor
let John cut the umbilical cord (a
privilege from which, I am proud to say, he
recovered without psychiatric intervention), and the
nurse wiped Katie off and put her on my
chest. We lay there, my daughter and I, looking
at each other, and I don't know which of us was more
astonished. I had been prepared for absolutely
everything that was going to happen when I gave birth,
and still it took me completely by surprise.
Seeing Adam for the first time was even more surreal.
It happened just a few days after my second
AFP test, some four months before he was born.
The results of the second blood test had come
back in the low-normal range, meaning that there was
no reason to fear Adam had Down syndrome.
However, I had badgered Judy Trenton with so
many questions and concerns that she suggested I might
want to schedule an amniocentesis, a
procedure in which fluid is taken from the uterus and
analyzed for fetal abnormality.
"We've got a terrific physician who's
studying prenatal diagnosis of birth
defects with ultrasound," Judy told me, "and
your AFP results would justify the
amniocentesis to the insurance company."
"You mean they'll pay for it?" I said. "The
whole thing?" Amniocentesis is often offered
to women who have their children later in their
reproductive years, but since I was still quite young,
my insurance coverage didn't include the test.
"I'm pretty sure I can convince them
to pick up the tab," said Judy. "And it would
give us useful data that could help other
pregnant women in the future."
This was great. A way to absolutely protect
myself from any degree of uncertainty, to put my
mind thoroughly at rest. A test that was in some
way altruistic and, more important,
free. "Let's do it," I said.

The ultrasound clinic was space age and
luxurious, very different from the stark,
utilitarian, metal-and-linoleum look at
University Health Services. The whole
place was carpeted, and even the walls had a
textured fabric covering that made them look
soft and pleasant. All that cloth muffled sounds,
so that everyone in the waiting room seemed to be
whispering. Come to think of it, maybe everyone
actually was whispering. The group of people waiting for
appointments was very different from those I saw at
UHS. For one thing, there were as many men as women--
almost everyone there seemed to have come in a couple. For
another thing, no one was smiling. There was none of the
light-hearted banter you often see between
expectant parents. As I signed myself in and
John and I found seats, I realized that all of
these women were here not for ordinary prenatal
treatment but for the express purpose of finding out
whether something was drastically wrong with the babies they
carried.
After a long wait in that hushed anteroom,
John and I were ushered into a small examination
area. There were several complicated,
impressive-looking machines next to the table where
I was supposed to lie down. One of them had a
little screen, like a television, mounted above a
keyboard and attached to a device that looked like a
miniature metal detector. As I changed
into the paper nerd suit that is the preferred
fashion statement for all medical environments,
John began poking around the device.
"This must be the ultrasound thing," he said,
picking up the metal detector. It had a
plastic handle, which was attached to a flat metal
disk. John held the disk to his ear, then
rubbed it along his forearm.
"Put that down," I said. "You're going
to break it."
"No, I'm not." He poked at the buttons
on the keyboard.
"John!"
"I'm just seeing how it works." John, like many
men, has never out-grown his two-year-old
curiosity about shiny toys. "Look," he said.
"I think this is how you turn it on." He
pressed another button. Nothing happened.
"John, cut it out! It looks
fragile!"
"Oh, not really," said a voice from the
doorway. John jumped a little and stuffed the
metal-detector paddle back into its position
on the machine. I arched an eyebrow at him.
"Hi, I'm Susan." A tall woman in
a spotless, pale blue uniform came into the
room and extended her hand to John. He shook it
guiltily, casting a nervous glance at the
ultrasound machine. "And you must be Martha."
Susan smiled as she held out her hand to me.
"Nice to meet you both."
We said that it was nice to meet her, too.
"I'm the technical assistant for the amnio,"
said Susan. "I'll be doing an initial
ultrasound exam before the doctor gets here.
She'll do the actual amniocentesis."
I nodded, trying not to look too eager. The
ultrasound was the real reason I had asked for this
procedure. Whenever I was pregnant, I had
recurring dreams about being able to see the baby through
the tissues of my abdomen, to check on it and
note how it was growing. The chance to see my
unborn baby with the help of an ultrasound
machine was literally a dream come true.
Susan turned off the lights. The room was
warm and close and somehow intimate in the dark. I
felt as though I had gone back to the womb myself.
"Martha, would you mind lying back on the table?
Just get comfortable." Susan's voice sounded
louder when I couldn't see her.
I eased myself onto my back, startled, as
I always was, by the way my abdomen stood up in
a solid lump. Susan looked like a bluish
ghost floating through the room. She took something that
looked like a plastic mustard bottle from a shelf
beneath the screen. Then she moved my nerd suit
aside to expose my midsection.
"This may be a little chilly," she warned,
squeezing the bottle onto my abdomen. The
clear gel that emerged was, indeed, very cool. I
shivered.
"Sorry about that," Susan said, and I could
see the white flash of her teeth in the darkness as
she smiled. "The gel helps conduct the
ultrasound through your skin."
She picked up the little metal-detector
paddle. "This is the transducer," she said. "It
sends sound waves through your tissues and creates
an image based on the way the waves
bounce back."
"Like radar?" John said.
"Something like that."
This was all old news to me. I had read up
on ultrasound at some length. The technique is
used for performing amniocentesis because a needle
has to be inserted into the uterus, and doctors
want to avoid poking the fetus with it. I had
read that the images on the ultrasound screen would
be vague and fuzzy, and that only a trained
technician or physician would be able to
"read" them.
Susan pulled the machine with the TV screen
closer to the examination table. Then she turned
to John. "This is the power button," she said.
"Would you like to turn it on?" Her smile flashed
again.
"You go ahead," said John sheepishly.
Susan laughed as she turned on the ultrasound
machine and the screen lit up. It showed only
gray static.
"This is one of the highest-definition ultrasound
machines in the world," Susan told us. "You may
have heard that we are developing a diagnostic
test for Down syndrome that uses only
ultrasound. It's quicker and a lot less invasive
than amniocentesis, but it does require
state-of-the-art equipment."
She manipulated some of the buttons on the
keyboard, and the static on the screen changed to show
a triangle of light, like a slice of pie.
"This shouldn't hurt at all," Susan told
me as she put the head of the transducer on my
abdomen. I wasn't worried, but I could feel
my heart thumping hard with excitement. John
reached out to take one of my hands. Both of us were
staring at the screen.
"Okay," said Susan. "There's the back."
She slid the transducer around on my belly,
trying to get a better angle. "See that? That's
a leg."
"Oh, right," I said. On the screen, an
out-of-focus white cylinder moved in the pie
slice of light.
"There's the head." Susan pointed to a blob
at the bottom of the screen. "Let's have a look
at the bone structure."
She punched a few buttons, and the image on
the screen sprang into recognizable shapes: a
tiny rib cage, the complicated ridge
of a spine, a pelvis.
"Wow!" whispered John. "Look, honey,
we're having a skeleton! Let's name it
Igor."
I didn't answer. I was utterly
captivated by the image on the screen. One of the
small legs, its joints still formed of
delicate-looking cartilage rather than bone,
kicked lazily across the screen. An arm reached
out, one small hand touching a foot, feeling it.
The baby moved like a diver in deep water.
"Skeletal structure looks good," said
Susan. "Now I'm going to have a look at the
organs. This machine gives us more capacity
to look at soft tissues than any other
technology around."
She punched more buttons, and the image went
fuzzy again. Then, as Susan readjusted the
transducer on my belly, the screen divided
into a strange symmetrical pattern, like two
halves of an inkblot.
"There's the brain, in cross section," she
said. The image moved, and Susan tracked it
expertly, sliding the metal disk across my
skin. "Everything looks fine. Now we're going
to move down through the body."
I could hardly breathe. The wonder of seeing through
myself and the awesome intricacy of the being growing inside
me were almost more than I could bear. Several times
during my pregnancy I had experienced something
miraculous--the Seeing Thing, the hand that had
dragged me out of the smoke, the sudden arrival of
help when I needed it most. But as I watched the
image shift on the ultrasound screen and felt
the corresponding movement inside my own body,
the miracle of simple reproduction seemed
to dwarf them all.
"Larynx is fine," said Susan. She
pulled a pen out of her breast pocket and noted
something on a clipboard next to the ultrasound
machine. "Now we'll go down through the chest."
That machine was truly amazing. A couple of
years later, I would have another ultrasound
to check on my third child's prenatal
development, and it would be nothing like the clarity and
specificity of this one. As Susan moved the
image through Adam's body, she pointed out all
the major organs: lungs, pancreas, stomach,
liver, kidneys. She focused in on the heart
for some time, and we watched the four
chambers pumping out a steady, rapid heartbeat.
"Is it all right?" I asked.
"Looks good," said Susan. "At this stage
of development it's sometimes a little hard to tell
if all the valves are working correctly. But it
looks good."
John was holding my hand very tightly. "Look
at that," he breathed. "It may beat for a hundred
years." I knew he was as enthralled as I
was.
Susan finished making notes on her
clipboard. "So," she said. "Do you want a
picture of your son?"
"Son?" John and I spoke in unison.
"Oh--I'm sorry." Susan sounded
embarrassed. "Didn't you want to know? I thought
you already saw--"
"No, no, it's great," I said, my eyes still
glued to the ultrasound screen. "A boy."
John squeezed my hand even harder. A
flurry of images came into my mind, images
of miniature blue jeans, of baseball
practice, barbershop haircuts, frogs and
snails and puppy-dog tails and every other
sentimental clich`e that I had ever associated with
little boys. I felt tears in my eyes.
"Okay," said Susan warmly. "He's
cooperating beautifully. We should be able to get a
great snapshot for your photo album." She
paused to punch a new set of buttons on the
keyboard. Then she slid the transducer around
my abdomen, pushing a little to get the right angle.
"And there we go," she said.
I heard John catch his breath. I had
stopped breathing altogether. The triangular slice on
the ultrasound screen showed a pitch-black
background. In the center of it was a clear, bright
white profile of a perfectly formed little person.
As we watched, our son turned his head slowly,
yawned, then put one finger in his mouth and began
to suck on it. The other hand reached out, fingers
curled into a fist, and pushed against the uterine
wall. I could feel the touch of that hand inside me
as I watched it on the screen. With my
peripheral vision I saw John swipe the
cuff of his shirt over his cheek, and I knew he
was crying.
I didn't question my own reaction at that
instant. I was too riveted by the image on the
ultrasound screen. It wasn't until
the amniocentesis had been performed and John and
I left the clinic that I would begin to wonder about
what I thought and felt the first time I saw my
baby's face.
The strange thing--the problem, if you want
to call it that--was that it wasn't the first time. I
was positive of that. At the sight of that little
face, I was flooded by unmistakable
recognition, a sense of d@ej@a vu beyond anything
I had ever experienced before. It was like seeing an
old friend with a new haircut: he didn't look
exactly the way I remembered him, but I
definitely remembered him. When I first saw
my daughters, I felt the reverent amazement of a
discoverer. I was consumed with the desire to get to know
them, to find out who they were. When I first saw my
son, there on the ultrasound screen, I didn't
have this response at all. Instead, I felt the
burst of joy that comes when loved ones are
reunited, and I thought, "Oh! it's Adam!"
Any way you want to look at it, this was
strange. I didn't even know anybody named
Adam, nor was it the name we had chosen for the
baby. When I was pregnant with Katie, I
had briefly considered the name Adam for a boy,
because I was looking for soft-sounding consonants to go with
Beck, which is one of those clipped Germanic
words that sounds absolutely militant when
paired with names like Kent or Mitch or Dirk.
But I had thought about a thousand names, and Adam was
nowhere near the top of the list. John had finally
persuaded me that, if we ever did have a boy, we
would follow the tradition of the Beck line by naming
him after John's Danish-immigrant
great-grandfather. The old man's name had been
Christen (pronounced "Christian"), and even
though I wasn't sure I wanted my son named
after a religion, I liked the idea of connecting
my children to their Scandinavian ancestry. When I
saw Adam on the ultrasound screen, however,
there was simply no question of tagging any other name on
him. He was Adam, I knew he was Adam, and
I'd known him as Adam forever. It was that
simple.
During the procedure that followed, I was
perplexed and distracted by the intensity of that
absolute recognition. The doctor who came
in after Susan finished her exam did a much more
detailed inspection, measuring skin thickness and
comparative bone lengths to add to her
data on prenatal diagnosis. She then
drew a red X on my abdomen with a Magic
Marker and had Susan hold the ultrasound
transducer while she pushed a large needle through
my skin and into my uterus to withdraw a vial of
clear fluid. It was a strange sensation, more like
being kicked by a horse than pricked by a pin.
John got a little green when he saw the size
of the needle, but I didn't focus on it. I was
still overwhelmed by encountering my friend Adam after such a
long separation, still resonating with the thrum of joy that
sang through me when I saw him again, and just beginning
to contemplate how irrational, how ridiculous,
how impossible this really was.



After the amniocentesis, Susan, the
technician, gave us a picture of our baby
on a strip of Polaroid paper. I thought
Adam was very photogenic. That afternoon we showed the
picture to Katie, explaining that it was a
portrait of her little brother. I let her put
one hand against my side to feel the baby kick
while she looked at the picture, trying to make
her understand that the image and the strangely active
lump in my torso were the same small person.
I stuck the picture to the refrigerator door
with one of Katie's magnetized letters and taught
her to spell "Chris" with some of the others.
John and I were encouraged by the fact that
Katie, who was now only a month shy of two
years old, seemed fairly interested in playing
with the letters. She had already learned to spell
"Mom," "Dad," and her own name. True, she
had also flushed several of the letters down the toilet,
but we felt these were acceptable losses in our
quest to raise a literate toddler. Before he
left for Asia again, John went out and got a
new set to replace the departed portions of the
alphabet.
The morning in January when John set out for
Singapore again, it was so cold that the engines of his
plane wouldn't start. When a replacement
aircraft also balked, the pilot told the
passengers to go home and wait for the weather
to change. John showed up at the apartment about four
hours after he'd left, with cracks in the soles
of his leather shoes where they had frozen solid and
broken as he walked. This is why we
now live in Arizona.
I was so happy to see John that I decided
to ignore all the work I'd planned for that day.
Of course, I would have made the same decision
if, for example, there had been a really good
episode of Mister Rogers'
Neighborhood on TV. I had finished
writing my term papers, handed them in, and moved
on to grading the papers of my students in the
Caribbean Society course. After only a few
minutes of grading, I came to the realization that as
horrible as it is to have to write such papers, it is
much more horrible to have to read them. My twenty-four
students handed in fifteen pages apiece, meaning
that I had to plow through upwards of 350 pages of
term paper.
Many of the papers were comparable to decent academic
articles, by which I mean that they were factually and
grammatically correct, as well as
extremely boring. But a considerable number were
much worse. They read as if they had been
written under intolerable duress, by people in advanced
stages of exhaustion and inebriation, who were trying
desperately to appear to know more than they did. The
reason was that this was exactly how they were written.
I was pretty sure of this because a couple of years
earlier, when I was an undergraduate, that's
exactly how I and all my friends had written
our term papers. My last paper as a
graduating senior was written on my fourth
consecutive night without sleep. I had to write
very short sentences because my brain was retaining
phrases of only five words or less. I would
forget, right in the middle of typing a phrase,
what the paper was about, and what the sentence was
supposed to say. May God have mercy on the
soul of the poor teaching fellow who had to read that
one.
A few days after John finally did take off
for Singapore, leaving me with now-familiar
feelings of isolation and vulnerability, I forced
myself through the last of the term papers. Most of the
really awful ones focused on reggae, a style
of music that originated in Jamaica and had many
avid fans among the students in the Caribbean
Society course. Reggae is heavily
associated with marijuana use, which may account
for the bizarre syntax and faint weedy aroma that
lingered on many of the pages. As I read them, my
family's battle cry of "What an
idiot!" rang through my consciousness many, many
times. I tried to rein Fang back and grade the papers fairly, writing the kind of supportive
criticism I would have wanted to receive myself. Then
I handed the papers back, turned in my
grades, and thought I was finished.
Hah.
I don't know if Harvard students argue their
grades any more vociferously than students at
any other university. It does seem likely,
however, that the place attracts a
disproportionate share of the kinds of folks who would
rather take a teaching fellow hostage than accept a
low mark. Almost as soon as I'd handed the papers
back, I was besieged by students wanting to come
speak to me about their grades. This meant that instead
of whiling away the days of John's absence eating
leftover Christmas bonbons and watching my
stomach grow, I had to show up at my office every
day and wrangle with people who were not pleased with me, oh
no, not at all.
After a couple of days, it began to get to me.
Once again, I felt as though I had nearly
emptied my small stores of energy and something
drastic was going to happen if I didn't get more
rest. This infuriated me. I wasn't accustomed
to cutting corners professionally just because I felt
awful. One of my favorite Harvard stories
(very apropos at grading time) concerned a student
who handed in a paper late, explaining to his
professor that he hadn't been able to finish it on
time because he wasn't feeling well. The
professor responded, "My boy, you will find
that most of the great deeds in human history were
accomplished by people who weren't feeling well."
Needless to say, the student got a very low grade.
The professor went on to become the president
of Harvard.
I reminded myself of this story on the seventh day
of John's January trip, as I dragged myself
to my office to hear more grievances from my students.
The first person to visit my office that morning
threatened to kill herself unless I changed her B
plus to an A. The next told me that she had
decided to use the Caribbean Society class not
to learn about Caribbean society but to come to terms with
her complete lack of interest in the subject.
She had written a paper about why she hadn't
read any of the text material or attended the
lectures, and she felt she deserved
an A for introspection. A third student had
produced a lively, well-written discussion of
Caribbean history, which would have been an A paper
if any of the events he mentioned--wars,
elections, droughts, plagues--had ever really
happened. When I explained that historical
treatises work best when they are related
to actual facts, the student burst out, "I
didn't come to Harvard to regurgitate facts!
I came here to learn to think creatively!" I
had to admire the boldness of his position, but even
in my state of diminishing mental acuity, it
seemed to me there were some flaws in the logic.
Things went on this way until it was time to pick
Katie up and go back to the apartment. Walking
over to the day-care center, I could tell something was
seriously wrong. I had long since accepted that
I would never feel great while I was pregnant,
but this was different. I was disoriented and extremely
weak. I felt as though there were a dreadful
struggle taking place inside me. Much later,
during my third pregnancy, this feeling would come
over me again. At that point, under close medical
supervision, I would learn that my hyperactive
immune system was reacting to the fetus in my
womb as though it were a foreign object, like a
transplanted organ that didn't match my
genetic code. I was having a severe toxic
reaction. At the time, I didn't know this. All
I knew was that I wasn't feeling well, and, as
we all know, most of the great deeds in human
history were accomplished by people who weren't feeling
well.
Right now, my great deeds were pretty much
limited to putting on Katie's snowsuit,
hat, mittens, and boots, and helping her into her
backpack. The normal procedure at that point
was to set the pack down on a table or desk, with
Katie in it, and slide my arms through the straps.
I did get that far, but when I stood up and
took Katie's weight on my shoulders, I
nearly collapsed. I backed up and set the
pack down again. Then I slid Katie out of it
and told her we would walk home together that day.
It took us about an hour to cover the mile to the
apartment. It was snowing heavily, and the fresh powder
rested on a layer of slick ice that coated the
uneven cobblestones. We both fell down a
lot. Every time I hit the snow, I had more serious
doubts about getting up. But eventually
I would grit my teeth, remind myself of the
Harvard president and his sluggish student, and
get back on my feet.
Looking back, I am amazed at how
flat-out stupid I was not to acknowledge, or even
recognize, my body's desperate attempts
to communicate to me that something was seriously wrong.
The only self-defense I have is that our entire
society celebrates people who push themselves
to extremes, who force themselves onward through pain,
fatigue, and injury to achieve all kinds of
improbable objectives. The message of a
million cultural icons, from sports heroes
to movie characters, is that if you could just try a little
harder, bear a little more agony, ignore a little more
of your desire to quit, you would be fabulously
rich and successful and get away from the bad guys
every time.
As we ended our slippery way home, I
thought about the week Katie was born. I was just
finishing a project I'd been doing for a
well-known psychology professor, making a
series of drawings for him to use in an experiment
on human perception. My labor started two
days before the drawings were due. As soon as I
realized that the birth was imminent, I began to work
frenziedly, determined not to let myself be
sidetracked. I wasn't going to be a wimpy
antifeminist who stops her career dead in its
tracks at the birth of her first child. No, I was
going to be a much stauncher woman, one of the sort
who politely excuse themselves for a minute or
two, go behind a bush to deliver, and come back a
few minutes later with babies strapped to their
backs to pick up work where they left off. I
kept working on those drawings until my
contractions were so intense and frequent that I
couldn't hold a pencil steady.
The labor lasted halfway through the day on which the
drawings were due. After Katie was born, I
slept for six hours, asked to be released from the
hospital, took the baby home, and handed her
over to my mother, who had just flown in from Utah.
Then I sat up all night finishing the drawings.
I only held Katie long enough to feed her.
Each time I did it, I had to muster all my
willpower to force myself to hand her back to my mother.
Every cell in my body resisted letting go of that
tiny, warm, miraculous little body. When morning
broke, I put on a huge down
coat of John's (to hide the distressing facts
that my abdomen hadn't snapped immediately back
to normal and that each of my breasts had suddenly
grown larger than my head), and doggedly trudged
a mile to the psychology professor's office.
"These are late," he said when I handed him the
pictures.
"I know," I said. "I apologize. I
went into labor."
He glanced at me. "You don't look like
you're in labor."
"I'm not. I had a baby."
"Oh," he grunted and went back to peering at
the pictures. He pointed out a few flaws and
asked for some changes. I noted them. We set
another date when the corrected final product
would be due, and I trudged home again. Nothing
further was said about the fact that I'd just given
birth.
The feeling I had as I walked away from that
psychology professor's office was the same
feeling that seized me almost two years later, as
Katie and I slowly covered the same route from
William James Hall to our apartment--an
immense, aching emptiness. Right after having
Katie, I had assumed that it was merely the
huge, aching emptiness of my uterus, which had been
through a lot over the previous few days and was used
to having more company. When I was expecting Adam,
this clearly was not the problem. It seems utterly
obvious to me now that the terrible yearning I felt
was the call of every part of myself except my
intellect--body, heart, and soul--trying
desperately to get me to listen to them.
Of course I didn't. I was doing my best
to follow the example of the action hero who charges
onward despite the bullets lodged in every
limb, the dancer who leaps through six hours of
rehearsal on nothing but breath mints and
willpower, the athlete who wins the championship
by ignoring injuries that will ultimately cripple
him for life.
It absolutely amazes me that I was so
proud of my own inner deafness. It's like being proud
to say that you've gone to the Grand Canyon and
refused to look at the scenery, focusing instead
on something like a bottle cap or a blown-out
truck tire. I am no longer proud that during
my daughter's first day of life I forfeited
holding her in order to finish some
trivial project for some trivial experiment.
I'm not proud that I spent years dulling any
impulse that did not motivate me to work. And I
am not proud that I forced myself to keep walking,
refusing to call for any help, on that afternoon when
Katie and I inched our way home from the day-care
center.
When we got there it was almost five o'clock, already
dark. There were two messages on the answering
machine, one from John and one from Sibyl. Ever
since the day she had shown up at my apartment,
Sibyl had quietly persisted in checking to make
sure I was all right--especially when John was
away. She had brought me food more times than I
could count, offered me a lift in her car whenever she
knew I needed it, and often brought Mie over on
weekends to brighten my day and make Katie's.
When I returned her phone call that night, I
could have told her that for some reason I was too weak
to help Katie off with her snowsuit. Knowing
Sibyl, she would not have rested until I was under a
doctor's care and feeling considerably better.
Of course, that is exactly why I forced myself
not to mention how rotten I felt. I was determined
not to be a burden yet again. When I spoke
to Sibyl, I was careful to inject some cheeriness
into my voice. I told her everything was fine.
Then I hung up the phone and burst into tears.
That inner voice was screaming now, begging me to get
some kind of assistance. I clamped my jaw and
reminded myself that I was strong, I was invincible,
I was woman. Years later, while reading
Chinese philosophy, I would stumble across the
Taoist saying that "when two great forces
collide, the victory will go to the one that knows how
to yield." The idea is that a fluid substance,
like water, may seem to give in to a rigid
substance, like stone--but in the end, it is the water that
shapes the stone, and not the other way around. That
evening in Cambridge, I was deliberately
trying to turn myself to stone.
I talked Katie through the removal of her
winter wear and managed to change her diaper. We
watched a videotaped version of Sesame
Street while Katie ate a peanut butter
sandwich and drained her bottle. Then we both
fell asleep on the futon without even
undressing.
I slipped immediately into a series of terrible
dreams. I dreamt about my next-door
neighbor, the woman who had seized my wrist
during the fire and begged me to get her out of the
building. I dreamt that Katie was drowning in the
sea and that I, for some reason, was refusing to go to the
rescue. I dreamt that John came home, but
as I reached to embrace him, his body grew
transparent and began to vanish from within my arms.
I woke up, covered with sweat, at about
2:00 A.m. I was incredibly tired. My
heart was hammering, and I felt curiously
breathless. I lay there for a few minutes, watching
the lights of cars and storefronts reflected on
the apartment ceiling from the icy streets ten stories
down. There was an uncomfortable buzzing in my
ears. I was extremely cold. I put out my
hand to make sure Katie was covered by the quilt
and felt a wet spot between us on the bed. I
sighed. I hadn't changed her diaper again before she
fell asleep. I patted her bottom to gauge
the wetness of the diaper and was confused to find it quite
dry. I felt the wet spot on the bed again and
discovered that it was spreading around me. Oh, this was
just great. Not only did I feel like dog chow, not
only had I become Our Lady of Perpetual
Nausea, but now I had lost bladder control.
I could hardly wait to find out what new
indignities awaited me as my pregnancy
continued.
I was tired, unbelievably tired, much too
tired to change the sheets, let alone do the
laundry. I decided that I would just change my
clothes, cover the wet spot with a towel, and clean
up in the morning.
The buzzing in my ears got dramatically
louder as I headed toward the bathroom, panting
rapidly. I had the kind of head rush you get
when you stand up too fast after a few glasses of
wine, except that this one went on and on and on.
I also felt even more disoriented than I had
earlier that afternoon. That was why, when I got to the
bathroom and started taking off my clothes, I
didn't even register that anything unusual was
happening. I kept my enormous pregnancy
sweater on as I peeled off my blue jeans and the
long underwear that helped me handle the New England
cold. I don't remember noticing anything
unusual about them. It was only when I turned
to wash my hands, and saw that the water running down
the drain looked strangely rusty, that I finally
realized that my hands--along with my
jeans, my long johns, my legs, and the bed in the
other room--were covered with bright red blood.



When Adam was about a year old and could sit up
well on his own, I used to let him take baths
with Katie. They had many grand times, splashing
water into each other's faces and coating the tile
with soap slime. One day, while I was bathing the
children, I smelled smoke and realized that a pot of
spaghetti sauce I had left on the stove was
boiling over. It had, in fact, started a small
fire. I rushed to the kitchen and began smothering the
flames. John, who had been working in his
office, was only seconds behind me. As we
doused the flames, we began to snap at each
other about whose responsibility it was to cook dinner
that night.
Right in the middle of this rather testy exchange,
both of us suddenly shut up. John says that at
that moment a vivid image flashed into his mind;
an image of Adam facedown in the bathwater.
At the same instant, I heard a voice in my
head--a very insistent one--say, "Check the
tub!"
I turned and ran the short distance to the
bathroom. As I neared the door, I heard
Katie's small, bemused voice saying,
"Adam, wake up! Adam, why won't you
wake up? Adam?"
Adam was floating facedown, just as John had
"seen" him. His little body was the color of
lilacs. I began to scream uncontrollably
as I lifted him out of the five inches of water--more
than enough, as I now know, to kill a child--and
John ran to the phone to dial 911. He was so
panicked that instead he kept dialing 411, which of
course is directory assistance. The operator
kept coming on and saying, "What city?" John
kept shouting into the phone, "There's a drowned child
here! My son is drowning!" Eventually, he
managed to dial the right number, and a team of
paramedics immediately set out for our house.
They would not have arrived in time. Adam wasn't
breathing at all when I picked him up. His
body was as floppy and lifeless as so much rubber.
But even as I continued to scream, the silent
voice that had alerted me to the danger in the first
place began to give me quick, clear
instructions. My body followed them with eerie
calm, as though it were under the control of someone far more
self-assured. I put Adam down on his
back, blew air into his nose and mouth, then
turned his head to one side and pressed gently on
his sternum. After five or six repetitions of this
procedure, a gush of water bubbled out of
Adam's lungs, and he drew a shallow breath.
I screamed one more time, "He's breathing!" and
kept up the mouth-to-mouth resuscitation until
Adam opened his eyes, blinked, and gave me a
tremulous smile. I had done exactly what
I was taught to do in an infant CPR course--
several weeks later. At the time Adam nearly
drowned, I wasn't trained in CPR. The
Bunraku puppeteers apparently were.
The fact that I was able to save Adam's life
assuaged some of my guilt at having been so
stupid as to leave him in the bathtub with only a
three-year-old's supervision. I eventually
managed to forgive myself, although I had a hard time
letting my children go near water for a long time.
(until they learned to take showers, which is not
easy for a toddler, they were notable for their
grubbiness.) The feeling that lasted longest after the
drowning incident was not guilt but the stabbing
realization of how precious Adam was to me, how
much my life is lightened by his presence, and how
lost I would be without the angels he brings with him,
as my friend says, the way a dog brings fleas.
For the awful minute or two that I thought my son
was dead, I wasn't feeling sorry for him. I
was feeling sorry for me.
I had exactly the same reaction the
January before Adam was born, in another
bathroom, when I saw the blood on my hands and
legs and realized that my pregnancy might end a
lot sooner than I'd expected. I've read
articles on obstetrical technologies that
mention how much more difficult it is for a woman
to lose a baby after seeing it on an ultrasound
screen, and it's true that the snapshot of Adam
on our refrigerator made him seem more real
to me. But I wasn't simply attached to a
generic baby, which is pretty much what Adam
looked like in the picture. I had the same
feeling about my son, already, that I had about anyone
else I deeply loved. I knew him. I
felt him, the way you feel any loved one's
presence when you are together, even when no
words are spoken. I don't know if it was because of the
strange experiences that began when Adam was
conceived, or the dreams I'd been having, or some
sort of metaphysical connection, but I had an
almost tangible sense of my son's personality,
his unique and indestructible identity. The idea
of losing him was simply unthinkable.
I sat down on the closed toilet, telling
myself not to worry. If I'd known why I was
bleeding, I would have told myself to go right ahead and
worry--a lot. The blood was coming from what is
known as a placental abruption, a condition in which
the placenta, which conducts nutrients from a mother's
bloodstream to her unborn baby, tears away from
the wall of the uterus. This rarely happens unless
a pregnant woman undergoes some dramatic
physical trauma, like a car accident in which
various auto parts are rammed directly into her
torso. After Adam was born, several people--
including some doctors--assumed that the problem must
have been caused by his Down syndrome. However,
exactly the same thing would happen two years
later, during my third pregnancy, when the
baby was as normal as pie. My gut feeling
(if you'll pardon the pun) is that I had these
placental abruptions because of the autoimmune
condition that made me so violently nauseated. I
guess I'll never know for certain.
Anyway, because the placenta is so rich in
blood vessels, a placental abruption is a
very serious condition indeed. The fetus dies in
most cases, and the mother can also bleed to death in a
matter of minutes, depending on how much of the
placenta has separated from the uterine wall.
Medical science can't do much about it, beyond giving
transfusions to save the mother's life. Of
course, I didn't know any of this as I
groggily washed the blood off my hands in the
middle of that New England night, feeling like
Lady Macbeth with a bad hangover. I was a
little shaky about the baby, but the idea that I might
die of pregnancy-related causes never even
occurred to me.
I'd like to say that at this point I calmly
phoned for medical assistance, then tidied up my
bloodstained apartment while waiting for the ambulance
to arrive. But the truth is that I panicked like a
gut-shot deer. My heart began to race, and my
hands started shaking violently with what felt like
cold but may have been shock. I had just
enough pragmatism left to install a maxi pad and
wipe some of the blood off my legs and hands. When
I stood up, I caught a glimpse of my
face in the bathroom mirror. I looked as
though I'd been made up for Halloween. My
skin was fish-belly white except for my
freckles, which never completely go away even in
winter, and my lips, which were a bluish shade of
mauve. As I started toward the bedroom my ears
began to ring, a sound that quickly escalated into an
unpleasant rasping hum.
Back in my bedroom, Katie was sleeping
peacefully on the futon, her curly blond
hair and fringe of black eyelashes making her
look like a Baroque cherub. She didn't wake
up when I turned on the bedside lamp and started
shuffling through the stacks of books I kept by the
bed. I found my favorite, a fairly dense
medical textbook. My hands were trembling so
hard that I barely managed to look up "bleeding"
in the index. Some part of my brain kept telling
me that this had to be normal, that somewhere in my
reference books I'd find a calming explanation
for copious blood loss in the fifth month of
pregnancy. It wasn't there. There were a few
references to bleeding, but none of them sounded like what
was happening to me, and all of them were bad. I
closed the book and tried to put it back on the
night table, but my grip was weak and my fingers were
numb and I dropped it on the floor. Instead of
picking it up, I pulled my hands back in to my
stomach, trying desperately to hold the baby
inside me, to protect him. I absolutely
refused to let him die. Not now. Not after everything
we'd been through together.
The humming in my ears was getting louder.
I've read accounts of near-death experiences in which
people report hearing a buzzing sound just before they were
declared dead, and although I don't think I was all
that close to expiring, sometimes I wonder if they
are talking about the same rasping hum I heard that
night. My head was beginning to ache. I wanted
desperately to just lie down and fall asleep,
to escape whatever was happening to my body. Still,
somewhere in my jumbled brain a tiny molecule of
reason shrilled at me to call the
obstetrician. I found the phone, dialed, and
got the answering service for UHS. They said they
would page the doctor on call.
I managed to get the phone back
onto its cradle and curled up on the bed again,
still wearing my heavy sweater, to wait for the
doctor's call. I was freezing. My hands and
feet were completely numb, and my teeth wouldn't
stop chattering. Katie had kicked off the small
flannel blanket I'd spread over her. I
reached over to replace it, but she rolled away,
still sleeping soundly. I touched her head and was
surprised to find that she was warm, her hair
slightly damp with sweat. I couldn't even
remember what warm felt like. The cold seemed
to have seeped right into my marrow. I pulled the baby
blanket over myself and tried to relax.
By the time the phone rang, the humming in my ears
had crescendoed into a roar. It almost drowned out the
sound of the doctor's voice on the other end of the
line.
"H'llo," I said through my chattering teeth.
The doctor introduced himself. The
obstetricians who dealt with Harvard worked in
rotations. This was someone I'd never met.
"So," said the doctor, "what seems to be the
problem?"
"Well, I seem to be pregnant," I
said, trying to sound jocular, "and I seem to be
bleeding."
He didn't laugh. "How far along are you?"
he said.
"About twenty weeks. Five months."
"Okay," said the doctor. "How much blood
is there?"
I looked at the stain on the bedsheets and
felt a trickle of fluid on my leg. "Not
a whole bunch," I said. "Nothing you could fill
a bucket with, or anything like that. But it got all
over my clothes."
"What color is it?" the doctor asked.
"Is it a brownish color, or bright red?"
"Um, bright," I said, my teeth clicking like
castanets. "Very bright red."
I could hear him take a deep breath and let
it out again.
"Okay, Mrs. Beck," he said. "You need
to get to the emergency room as soon as possible."
I closed my eyes. The thought of getting anywhere, especially anywhere outside the bedroom,
brought on a wave of exhaustion. I almost fell
asleep right then and there.
"Mrs. Beck?"
I jumped a little, startled by his
voice. "Uh-huh," I said.
"Have your husband drive you to the emergency
room, okay? Right now. The sooner the better."
I frowned, rubbing my free hand over my
eyes. I could have explained to the doctor that my
husband wasn't around, that I didn't have a car,
that I couldn't leave Katie alone, and that taking
her with me in a taxi in the middle of this freezing
night was utterly beyond my capability.
Anyway, I could barely hear the doctor over
that awful noise in my ears.
"Mrs. Beck? Are you there?"
I was irritated by the question. I didn't want
to answer any more questions. I felt as though I were
sinking into a deep, black pool. A cold one.
"I'm coming, I'm coming," I said irritably.
"All right," said the doctor. "Hurry."
I hung up and put my hands over my ears
to block the buzzing sound. It didn't work. I
could feel more blood on my leg, but I didn't
have the energy to get up and install a new pad. I
understood at some level that the doctor would not have
told me to go to the emergency room unless something was
really wrong, but I simply couldn't imagine
getting to the hospital. I could sense my
connection to the physical world slipping away,
drop by drop by drop.
As it did, however, I began to notice them.
The more my normal perceptions waned, the more
clearly I understood that there were other presences in
the room besides me and Katie. It was like watching
rocks and stumps emerge from the sea as the tide
pulls back, exposing them to the daylight. Of
course, I had been aware of the Bunraku
puppeteers for months--but I had never quite let go
of my disbelief in them. It was always "as if": I
felt as if there were people watching me, as if
small miracles were happening, as if some force
I could not see were conveying messages between me and the
people I loved. On the night I started bleeding, the
as if's melted away. I could not physically
see or hear the beings in that room, but their presence
was as real and ordinary to me as the presence of
oxygen. There must have been eight or ten of them,
standing in the bedroom, looking on with great concern as
I grew weaker and the roaring in my ears got
louder. Somehow, their presence allowed me
to realize the extent of my illness, and my fear.
I felt a sob force its way up my throat.
"You guys," I whispered to the beings in
the room. "Help this baby."
It was the first time I had spoken to them
directly. In doing so, I felt myself cross
a fine but very distinct line, the line between
speculating about the existence of a metaphysical
plane of some sort and climbing aboard for the
ride. I knew I had let go of my sanity.
It was terrifying. I only did it because my fear
of what was happening to my body had become greater
than my fear of holding on to irrational beliefs.
As soon as I asked them to help the baby,
I felt a flood of warmth rush through my
torso. It was extremely soothing, as intense as
it was brief. The bleeding stopped instantly. I
knew it. I knew it the same way that I knew
the beings were there. Then the warmth was gone, leaving me
aching with cold, dizzy with blood loss, and as
scared as ever. I ran my tongue over my
lips, which might as well have been filled with
Novocain.
"Please," I said, feeling strange and
awkward, like Oliver Twist asking for more
porridge, "please help me, too."
For some reason, saying this was one of the hardest
things I have ever done. I felt a crushing combination
of swallowed pride and unworthiness, along with that
sense that I was walking deliberately
into irrational territory.
The response was immediate. It came in a form I
had already experienced, that night in Sibyl and
Charles's house after the fire. First, a hand--or
in this case a set of hands--seemed to reach out of the
air and catch me, like a father catching a falling child.
One hand went around my back to support me,
while another rested flat on my chest, across my
collarbone. That incredibly soothing warmth
emanated from the hands into my body.
You'd think that at this point I would have been
transported in some kind of holy rapture, like
Bernadette communing with the Virgin Mary. Not
me. I'm afraid I'm just not saint material.
As the warmth from those two strong hands flowed into me
that night, bringing me a few inches out of my
numbed, bloodless daze, I did not just praise
the Lord and relax. Instead, I found myself bothered
by something about those hands. The problem was that they were
male. Like all little children in Utah, I had been
thoroughly saturated throughout my tender years with
images of God as a bearded Caucasian
gentleman with X-ray vision and a touchy
disposition. I didn't like that image as a child, I
rejected it as an adolescent, and I was
perversely peeved to have it reinforced, in any way,
that night in Cambridge.
"What do you know about being pregnant?" I
grumbled to the owner of those wonderfully warm hands.
I didn't have to explain what I meant. I
knew I had been heard. I didn't believe
a male, of whatever plasmic density, could understand
what I was going through at that moment. I wanted
someone who had been through it, someone who had felt
torn to shreds by the process of creating life,
by having to decide between her own welfare and the
welfare of the child inside her, between the care of the living
child and the child yet to be born. The horror of that
night was not so much my fear of death as my
realization that I didn't have enough resources to let
us all--me, Katie, and the little boy whose
picture was taped to the refrigerator door--
survive. I was facing an intolerable choice.
I felt wounded by that struggle in a way that went
beyond physical pain, and I did not merely want
to be fixed. I wanted--I needed--to be
understood.
As soon as this thought came into my mind, the hands
that had been touching me pulled back, leaving me
freezing and falling into the darkness. Before I even
had time to register another wave of fear, a
second pair of hands replaced the first. I could
feel them stroking my forehead and pressing softly
against my abdomen. They touched me the way an
experienced groom touches a panicked horse,
gently but with great authority. These hands were
smaller than the first set, narrow and quick as well
as very strong. They were definitely a woman's
hands. And in my head, without really hearing anything,
I had the impression that this female being was saying
to me, "Well, it took you long enough to ask!"
The twilight zone I reached that night, the
region between my world and the world of those invisible
helpers, was a place where certainty and
uncertainty seemed to be reversed. I was
unsure of everything that was happening to me
physically, but I took for granted a great many
things that I would have disbelieved at any normal
moment. Not only did I know that those incorporeal
beings were there, but it was utterly clear to me that the
only reason they hadn't been helping me all
along, taking out the garbage and delinting the couch and
so on, was that I hadn't wanted them to.
They wouldn't--they couldn't--do anything for me
until I asked. And I had to mean it. When
I finally did ask, I opened the cosmic door
an inch or so, but I opened it to the only image
of God I had ever encountered: God as a man.
Once I asked for a woman, shazzam, they
could send a woman. I felt very strongly that the
one thing these beings would never do, under any
circumstances, was override my will.
I don't know what they were. The word angel
never occurred to me at the time. Neither did ghost,
spirit, or any of the other terms ordinarily used
to describe such intangible visitors. Even
now, thinking back on it, I don't know what I
would call them. They could have been emissaries from the
Spiral Nebula for all I know. The only
word that comes to mind when I remember that night is
friend. They were my friends, and they loved me, and that was
all that mattered at the time.
Isn't it possible, you may well be thinking,
that I imagined these beings? After all, I was
dehydrated, had lost a good deal of blood, and
was definitely thinking-impaired. My answer to this
question is a resounding yes. It makes good sense
to me that the human brain would cook up a few
reassuring fantasies in conditions of extreme
duress. For years after Adam was born, I
tried almost frantically to figure out exactly
what was happening on occasions like this one. For now,
suffice it to say that any way you want to explain
"paranormal" experiences like this, from blaming them
on delusion to believing they are being broadcast
live from the Hale-Bopp comet, is fine with me.
The only thing I can tell you is what I
experienced.
Whatever they were, wherever they came from, whomever
they belonged to, the hands kept touching me, sending
that sublimely comforting warmth gradually through my
skin and into my muscle and bone. They calmed my
intense, animal fear, replacing it with the
security of a baby being rocked to sleep. I
knew that my little boy and I were both out of danger.
The same spent relief came over me that I
would feel more than a year later when Adam coughed
and gurgled and came to life again after his
misadventure in the bathtub.
Slowly, slowly, as those small, strong hands
radiated healing into my body, I began to trust
these beings whose presence had shadowed my life for the
past months. At a certain point,
without really articulating it, I silently agreed
to accept any and all help they were willing to give
me. The man's hands immediately joined the woman's.
Then another pair joined the two of them, and then
another, and another, until there seemed to be a
whole gang of them around me, putting that gentle
pressure against my body. I did not "fall"
into sleep that night. I rose into it, out of the
black, cold pool, as though I were being lifted
by a thousand wings.



I woke up to the ringing of the telephone. It was
nearly noon.
The voice on the other end belonged to the
obstetrician I had spoken to earlier, in the
wee hours of the morning. He was very worried. He
had gone off shift a few minutes after speaking with
me, and when he came back to work, he was shocked
to find that I hadn't ever arrived at the emergency
room.
I told the doctor I was fine and thanked him
for his trouble. This didn't satisfy him. He
wouldn't hang up until I promised to at least
go over to the clinic to have a doctor check me out.
I swore on a stack of Bibles that I would. I
lied.
There were two reasons I didn't go over
to University Health Services that morning. The
first was that I associated the place, above all,
with having blood taken. It seemed to me that the
nurses there drew liters of my blood every time
I went in, even if I was only dropping off
some paperwork. That morning, my large veins were
flat and limp, and I was churlishly
possessive about every drop of blood I had
left. But equally important, I stayed away
from UHS because I was utterly, illogically
certain that the bleeding had stopped, that the baby and
I were both fine. I could feel Adam kicking
away, but the reason for my perverse certainty
came from something even deeper inside me. I could
have told the doctor, "Lo, verily, I have been
healed," but I couldn't even articulate this to myself
without fearing for my sanity.
There was a kind of braced sensation in my body,
as though my tissues were being held together by stronger
material than had been available to them for several
months. Even so, I crept around the
apartment rather gingerly for a while, one hand plastered
to my abdomen to feel the baby's reassuring
movements. Katie had apparently been awake
for some time, sucking absentmindedly on her
bottle and playing with a set of educational blocks
John and I had bought her for Christmas. I
changed her diaper, got her some crackers and
fruit to go with the bottle, and switched on
Sesame Street, her true primary
caretaker. Then I turned my attention to feeding
myself.
For the first time since I got pregnant, I
actually wanted to eat. In fact, I had an
immense and highly specific craving for two
things: hot tea and sirloin steak. In the weeks
since Food Shak burned down, John and I
had discovered the highly expensive wonders of
grocery-store delivery. I called a nearby
store and ordered several pounds of sirloin. I
already had a couple of stray tea bags in a box
at the back of a kitchen cupboard. I brewed and
guzzled about a quart of it, enjoying it
immensely.
When the intercom buzzed, I welcomed the
grocery delivery boy with the enthusiasm of a cave
woman seizing fresh kill from a passing
Neanderthal. He seemed surprised that I was
alone--I think he had assumed I was in the
middle of some gala barbecue for a houseful of
farmhands. I tipped him liberally, then set to work
cooking and scarfing down more red meat than I had
eaten in the previous year. Ordinarily, I
avoid caffeine and meat, not because I'm trying to be
virtuous but because I don't like them. But my
blood supply was intent on rebuilding itself, and
to that end I had suddenly become devoutly
carnivorous. Wonder of wonders, the steak and
tea actually seemed to lighten my nausea. They
instantly became my favorite foods. For the
last half of that pregnancy I would subsist
almost entirely on Earl Grey and sirloin, with
an occasional sixteen-ounce bar of Belgian
chocolate thrown in for variety. (watch for my
new health and fitness best-seller, Eight
Weeks to Cardiac Arrest.)
It wasn't until I had finished my last
hunk of steak, dressed Katie, and taken a
shower that I set out to face the fact that there were
invisible people in my apartment.
I had pushed the memory of the
previous night into the same half-conscious area
of my mind where I stored the rescue from the smoke-filled staircase and the reassuring touch
I had felt in Sibyl's apartment. So far I
hadn't allowed either event into full awareness, because
I didn't know what to do with them. I was afraid
of the ramifications. Incorporeal hands did not
fit into life as I knew it. They weren't something
I could simply dismiss as pleasantly
unusual, like bumping into an old friend in an
unfamiliar place. The whole thing was a huge,
bright, mystifying, terrifying conundrum.
The first thing I did was to take a notebook
and a pen and slowly, methodically write down every
thought, sight, sound, and sensation I had experienced
the previous night. Then I reread the account
several times, as if it were a psychotic letter I'd
received from a previously sane acquaintance
("Yes, Officer, she was always quiet and kept
mostly to herself, although lately she'd begun ordering
all this meat ..."). It would almost have been easier
for me if I'd been able to believe I was
hallucinating, but although I knew I could have been
delusional, I couldn't honestly say that I
believed I was. On the one hand, to dismiss the
visitors as figments of my imagination would have
been a lie. On the other hand, to say that they were
real would rock my worldview to its foundation. I
reread my account of my own experiences over and
over, unable to live with either interpretation.
I decided to take it in stages. I stopped
focusing on figuring out what these visitors were and
turned my attention to the epiphany they had brought
with them, the one in which I realized that they would never
override my power to make my own decisions.
Until that moment, I had felt caught up in a
great tidal wave of forces stronger than myself: the
primeval urge to procreate, the
uncontrollable changes in my own body, the
need for John to build his career even if it
meant long absences, and above all, the towering
nightmare of requirements necessary to succeed at
Harvard. The morning after the bleeding incident it
suddenly seemed obvious--as it still does--that every
one of these things had much less power over me than
my own ability to choose. My responses to my
pregnancy, to my own bad health, to John's
career choices, to the requirements of school and
work, were entirely under my own command. This left me
nearly breathless with responsibility but
also awed and exhilarated by freedom. I had
to get up and pace around the apartment, trying to let
it sink in.
The realization that I was the captain of my own
fate had some frightening implications. For instance, was
I now responsible for acknowledging my new
belief system to people at Harvard? I tried to think
of ways I could defend myself from the criticism
I would draw if I did. Every step forward in
human knowledge, I told myself, looks and sounds
insane to everyone but the people who discover it. But I
knew how well that one would go over in the Ivy
League. After all, thinking there are invisible people in
your bedroom does not sound like a step forward in
human knowledge. If anything, it's a step
backward, to the time when everyone assumed illness
was caused by demonic possession and bad luck
always denoted divine disfavor.
I had been raised around people who believed such
things, devout Mormons who would credit God and
angels with just about everything that ever happened to them.
For example, when I was little my family knew
a woman who was so enormously fat that one day
she got stuck going through her kitchen door. The
woman's entire family prayed for her release
from the doorframe, until finally, with a great
heave, she popped loose and headed on into the
kitchen, presumably to get something to eat.
Another acquaintance had actually arranged for a
neighbor, who was not Mormon, to care for her pet
ducks after Jesus came again, since she (the
Mormon) was going to be caught up to heaven,
while her neighbor would be left behind with all the
other sinners.
I had spent most of my life trying
to disassociate myself from such people. It had not been
easy. My parents were Mormon, though by no
means typical; they believed in a strange
blend of religion and intellectualism that had
made me a childhood pariah among both my
Mormon and my non-Mormon peers. All the
neighbors and the kids at school believed in a
sort of Republican, apple-pie-eating
God, whose primary concern was that we all live
exactly like the von Trapp family in The
Sound of Music. My parents, by contrast,
believed in a God who backed the Democrats
in every election and whose pet peeves were brainless
evangelism and kitschy art of any genre. In
Utah, children take each other's views
of Divinity very seriously. I got beaten up
regularly in elementary school because of my fidelity to my parents' God. By sixth grade,
I--or rather, Fang--had become a "problem child"
who made Sunday school teachers cry with her
scalding sarcasm.
By the time I left for Harvard, I was an
atheist. I had come to agree with Albert Camus
that the only significant decision left in a
godless universe was whether or not to commit
suicide. The decision was pretty close to a
toss-up for me. It had weighed so heavily on
my mind that I took the next year off from
Harvard and read a lot of Western
philosophy, from the pre-Socratics to the
postmodernists. Then I read the basic texts
of several world religions and finished off with a
layperson's tour of theoretical physics. I
was looking, in case you haven't guessed, for the
Meaning of Life. I couldn't find it.
I did come out of that year with a new life
philosophy, a kind of skeptical
relativism that allowed me to operate in the
diametrically opposing environments of my
Harvard education and my Mormon heritage. The
bedrock of this worldview was the fact that no version of
reality is ultimately testable. In other words,
while there was no way for my family's bulky
acquaintance to prove that Jesus shoved her through the
kitchen door, there was also no way for me to prove
that he didn't. I respected my family and
friends' religious beliefs, in a detached,
social-sciency sort of way, while
secretly believing that faith in God was not only
the opiate of the masses but the refuge of people too
craven to accept the fact of their own mortality.
In short, I belonged to the same religion as
everyone else I knew at Harvard.
I began to wonder if my experiences during the
night meant that the deeply religious people who had
peopled my childhood were actually, empirically
right. The thought made me shudder. Fang rose
up from the left side of my brain, snarling and
disdainful. "Fantasy!" she said. "Wishful
thinking! Hallucinatory brain spasms!"
This sounded reasonable to me. "That's right," I
thought, breathing a little easier--but just then Adam
landed a solid kick to my kidneys, and I was
struck all over again by amazement at what was
happening to me.
Over the course of two or three days, I
gradually revised my own conception of reality.
I did not come to any firm conclusions. Instead,
I decided on a major change in the way I
would position my investigation. Until that point,
I had followed the good old Baconian logic
of refusing to believe anything until it was proven
true. Now I decided that I was willing
to believe anything, absolutely anything I
heard, saw, or felt, until it was proven
false. If this doesn't sound like a major
life transition to you, it's because you've never done
it. With this single decision, I expanded my reality
from a string of solid facts, as narrow, strong, and
cold as a razor's edge, to a wild chaos of
possibility.
When John returned from Singapore at the end
of that week, he looked different--not because he had
changed but because I had. It was strange to see my
husband with the new vision I had developed,
strange to see that he looked exactly the same,
and that I was as crazy about him as ever. He became
very worried when I told him about the bleeding
incident. He would have dragged me over to the health
clinic then and there, if it had been up to him. I
told him I was fine. I almost said that I knew
I was healed, because, see, these invisible people had
made a house call to our apartment and fixed me
right up, just when things had been looking a little
bleak. The urge to tell him everything and the fear that
he'd think I was crazy battled inside me with
considerable force, but in the end my fear of
ridicule won out.
This might seem strange in light of the fact that
John, like every teenage boy who grew up in our
hometown, had gone out to serve a Mormon
mission when he was nineteen. That was how he'd
fallen in love with Asia and become fluent in
Japanese. But John's religious views
were, if anything, less faith-directed than
mine. Whereas I viewed my religion as a
sort of ethnic heritage, like being born
Jewish, John saw Mormonism primarily
as a useful social institution, good for keeping
children off the streets and adults out of prison.
He was not into mysticism, or even the kind of
existential crisis I had been through as a young
adult. Such things would have been considered very
inappropriate in his family context. He had
followed his parents' religious standards
primarily because anything else would have looked
disgraceful to the neighbors.
The difference in our basic worldviews was the one
subject we had never been able to talk about with
any degree of comfort. You'd think it would be
essential for a married couple to discuss such things,
but we had always wordlessly agreed that issues of
faith would be a demilitarized zone between us, a
place where all comment and interaction were forbidden. The
life of the spirit was more personal, more vulnerable, more
embarrassing a topic than sex or politics
or emotion. It was territory we had never been
in together. We would both go a long way into that
territory--separate, isolated, and bewildered
--before the journey would finally become too
difficult and frightening, too comforting and beautiful,
to bear alone.



John was one tired hombre. He'd been
living on opposite sides of the globe for almost
five months, trying to get so much done that it would
seem he was actually living full-time in both
places. In pictures of him that were taken that
year, he looks older than he does today. His
circadian rhythm, the rise and fall of
temperature and other functions that was supposed
to tell his body when to eat, sleep, work, and
move, was thoroughly and miserably out of sync.
Since his latest return home, John
kept reaching over to touch me, as if to reassure
himself that I wasn't about to disappear. He had never
quite been able to shake the sense of wistfulness, the
natsukashii impression of lost sweetness, that
had come over him as we had gone to repeat my
blood tests a month before. This was not like John.
His upbringing, so rich in the twin ethics of hard
work and positive thinking, hadn't prepared him
to wrap his mind around such delicate and
unwelcome emotions. Years later, I would
tell Katie that John and I got married so that
he could teach me how to be happy and I could teach
him how to be sad. She understood this immediately, as
children always understand accurate assessments of their
parents' emotional lives. John and I were both
struggling, in our separate ways, to contain the
strange rising tide of feelings. We would talk
about it later; neither one of us mentioned it to the other
when it was actually happening. This strikes
me now as a terrible waste.
Of course, John had very little time for emotions
of any kind. There was work to be done. A lot of
work. An infinite amount of work. There is enough work
at Harvard to bury a lifetime's worth of
feelings, which is exactly what I think many of the
university's residents are doing there. John
got right back on the treadmill, if not
eagerly, at least with a sense of familiarity.
He was so used to the intense, constant pressure that
the very discomfort of his Harvard lifestyle felt
perversely comfortable.
Part of the reason John had so much to do was that he
was compensating for my fragility and lack of energy.
He urged me to do as little as possible and set out
to accomplish everything necessary to care for all three of
his dependents. Apart from his academic chores,
he also shopped and cleaned and scheduled backup
support for me during his future trips
to Asia. Sibyl and Deirdre had already
volunteered their services, and when they wouldn't be
available, Katie and I would be flying to visit
various family members who could care for us while
John was out of the country. I protested all of
this, feeling ashamed to require day care as much as
Katie, but my concern for my unborn baby's
health ultimately carried the vote, and I
consented to John's elaborate plans.
Of course, John and I never told anyone
connected to Harvard how close we were to cracking
up. I still hadn't admitted to most of my
acquaintances there that I was pregnant.
By January, they all knew anyway. As I
neared six months' gestation, my body
blossomed into full-scale, unmistakable
pregnancy. If you've ever been pregnant, you
know how suddenly this happens. Within a couple of
weeks my slight pot-gut became a prow
to rival the Queen Mary's. My abdomen
preceded me into rooms and lurked heavily on my
lap whenever I sat, so that I had to yank myself out
of chairs. I took to wearing a large woolen
overcoat that John had bought for himself at a
secondhand store when we were undergraduates. It
gave me a strong resemblance to Orson
Welles in his later years. I was afraid that
if I fainted on the street again, concerned
bystanders would focus all their rescue efforts on
pushing me back into the sea.
And so, as I waddled ever more slowly
through the subzero temperatures and dirty gray
light of that January, John dashed around
Cambridge at accelerating speed, doing everything
he could to keep our professional lives up and
running. On one morning in particular, he had a
great deal to do. He got up at dawn, fed and
dressed Katie, made her lunch, and hoisted
her into her backpack. Then he rushed over
to Memorial Hall to register for classes.
Next he proceeded to the day-care center, where he
unpacked Katie and stayed for several hours,
acting as the morning's parent volunteer. (in
case there's any confusion here, this task was not
voluntary. You could decide not to do it, but then your
child would be expelled from the center and probably end
up in some inferior day-care establishment, which would
give her a serious disadvantage when it came
to enrolling in the top kindergarten programs, which in
turn would hurt her chances for admission at the
best elementary, secondary, and high schools, and
possibly, God forbid, scuttle her chances of
getting into the Ivy League. I'm serious. This
is really truly how parents we met through that
day-care center talked as they picked up their children
in the afternoons.)
When he was finished at the day-care center,
John walked over to William James
Hall. He was carrying two large cards with
class listings on them, one for himself and one for me.
The cards had to be signed by the appropriate
professors before we could attend the classes
we'd chosen. Harvard professors try to be
accommodating during the first few days of the term, but
they are inundated by students, and it isn't easy
to track down all the right instructors and get their
signatures. It took John the rest of that
morning and half the afternoon to fill in most of the
blanks on our registration cards. By 3:00
P.m. there was only one signature missing.
The necessary name belonged to an academician who
had great power over John's educational career.
This man was a legend in his field--revered at
Harvard, recognizable even to lay readers of the more
esoteric magazines. I'm not going to tell you his
name, or his field, or exactly how he was
related to John's academic progress, other
than to say he was one of several people who would
ultimately advise John on his dissertation.
We will know him as Professor Goatstroke,
because he wore a short white goatee,
which he used to fondle a great deal, as though
stroking a cat.
Professor Goatstroke was one of John's
heroes, the closest thing he had to a mentor at
Harvard. On the afternoon John was collecting
registration-card signatures, the two had made
an appointment to meet and discuss John's
progress on his dissertation. To have a one-on-one
appointment with Goatstroke, who spent a lot of
his time with Nobel Prize winners and heads of
state, was a tremendous--and tremendously
high-pressured--honor.
John arrived a little early. Through the frosted
glass door of Goatstroke's office, he could
see the great scholar sitting at his desk, petting
his beard as he read through a stack of articles.
John paced nervously in the hall while he
waited for the precise appointed time to knock on
the door. He didn't want to stop moving. Every
time he stopped moving, jet lag and sleep
deprivation hit him like a board. Sleep had
begun to sneak up on John at odd times and
places; while he was waiting at a subway
stop, talking on the phone, reading in the library.
I would often come into our bedroom to find him sitting
in front of his computer with not only his hands but also
his face resting firmly on the keyboard. He
staggered around our apartment wearing little computer-key
indentations in his forehead, his dissertation progressing
at something less than the speed of light. He was
far behind the optimistic deadlines he and his
advisers had set earlier in the academic year.
This meant that his visit to Professor
Goatstroke's office that January day was
fraught with even more than the usual tension. John
took a deep breath before knocking on the great
man's door, trying to raise his energy to its
usual level, so that he could appear charming,
articulate, and self-assured. It didn't work
very well. He finally set himself the lofty goal of
trying not to doze off during the meeting, and
knocked.
Goatstroke's office was typical, for
Harvard: a small, warm, cluttered room with a
hardwood floor and a high ceiling. The rich
smells of books and coffee washed over John
as he went in. The view from the windows was partially
obstructed by the leathery, maroon leaves of winter
ivy. It may not have looked like much to an outsider,
but we Harvard types knew that an
office like this was the Olympic gold medal, the
Oscar statuette of the academic world. Only the
best of the best ever occupied one of them for an
entire career. Walking into it, John felt like a
child walking into a church.
"Oh, hello, John," said Goatstroke.
To have the scholar speak to him thus was, in itself,
a notable distinction. John had taken classes
from Goatstroke as an undergraduate, and the
professor had usually addressed him as Mr.
Beck. The formal address, though courteous, was
not a mark of respect. It stressed the fact that
Goatstroke and John were not peers. At
John's graduation, as at every Harvard graduation
for centuries, the president of the college
closed the ceremony by saying to the new
graduates, "I admit you to the society of
educated men and women." (the "women" part, of
course, was put in much later than the rest of it.)
John and I both laughed at the
self-congratulatory bombast of that little
phrase. A few months later, however, after
John had begun his doctoral work, we encountered Professor Goatstroke walking through Harvard
Yard, and he said, "Hello, John." I
swear John got visibly taller. It was like
having Jesus pick him out of a crowd.
"Sit down, sit down," said Goatstroke
cordially, waving toward a chair.
"Thanks," John said. He sat, hoping his
body wouldn't take this as a signal to fall
asleep.
"So, when did you get back from Asia?" Goatstroke smiled. He knew about John's
consultancy work, and he wholeheartedly approved
of it. The idea that one of his students was splitting
his time between the Far East and Boston tickled him
pink. He scratched his beard a little and then
smoothed it carefully back into place.
"Uh, let's see," said John, doing his
best to smile back. "I think it's been four
days."
Goatstroke chuckled. "Amazing," he said.
"When I first began studying Asia, it took ten
days on a boat to get to Japan--and you didn't
come home unless you had a damn good reason."
John shrugged amiably.
"So," said the professor. "Let's talk
about the dissertation."
This created a tiny surge of
adrenaline, as John prepared to confess that he was
far behind on his production schedule. He had
spent four hours at his computer the previous day,
and written exactly three sentences worth
keeping.
"I assume you've read Cantrell's
latest work," said Goatstroke. He patted a
book that lay open on his desk. "Groundbreaking
stuff, don't you think? You'll have to address it."
"Right," said John. "Of course. Oh, I
plan to."
Goatstroke looked at him knowingly. "What do you think of his arguments?" he asked casually.
"What are the logical flaws?"
John blinked like an owl. "I plan to look
at the book," he said, "but I haven't had a
chance to read it carefully yet."
Goatstroke nodded, arching an eyebrow.
John knew he had been tested and found lacking.
"So," said the older man, leaning back in his
chair and grooming the little white beard with his
fingertips, "exactly what have you had a chance
to do?"
John took a deep breath, which made his head
spin. "Well," he said, "I've done a lot
of fieldwork on the ground in Tokyo. Not
exactly the kind of stuff I can sum up until
I have a chance to analyze it all."
He stopped and swallowed. Goatstroke was still
looking at him, his fingers methodically massaging
his facial hair. He hadn't even blinked.
"I don't think I'll have any trouble meeting
my deadline," John lied. "It's just that the
research is following a different course than I
expected. I've basically just been putting all
my ducks in a row, so to speak. Once that's
done, you know how easy it is--you just knock them
all over."
"I see," said Goatstroke heavily. "And
when do you anticipate that this duck knocking will
begin?"
It was all John could do not to squirm in his
chair. The only thing that saved him was his complete
lack of physical energy.
"I should be ready to start writing any day now,"
he said. "Of course, there are still a few loose
ends in the field research. I'll tie those up
on my next trip."
"You know, John," said Goatstroke, leaning
forward and lacing his fingers together, "my
colleagues and I are expecting sound work from you."
He meant himself and John's other advisers,
all of whom were chock full o' fame and
prestige. "We admitted you to the program
based on those expectations, and you can fulfill them
--if you choose. You are capable of a great deal.
It all depends on your decisions. How will you
allocate your time? Your energy? Your thoughts?"
John nodded, dropping his eyes
to Goatstroke's desk. He knew what his
mentor had left unsaid. Many of John's
professors had been unpleasantly surprised
by the choices John made during his graduate
school career, specifically, marrying me and fathering
Katie. Goatstroke had often, though subtly,
expressed his regret that John had chosen
to dissipate his energy on "personal" issues at
precisely the time when he could have been a rising
star in his academic field.
Now, with Goatstroke's eyes boring into him,
John knew that he should have followed his mentor's
advice all along. He clamped his teeth a
little tighter and told himself that it was time to get back
on track. He had been weak. He had let
himself forget his real priorities. But from that moment
on, things were going to change. John would
resolutely close his mind and heart to anything that
would derail his work, pour himself into his research and
writing as though nothing else existed.
John raised his eyes to meet
Goatstroke's. "I'll have a chapter to you
by Thursday," he said.
Goatstroke continued to look steadily at
John for a moment. Then he smiled. His
all-seeing eyes had discerned the switch in
John's intentions, the firming of his resolve.
"Good," he said. "I'll look forward to seeing
it."
There was little left to say. Goatstroke
approved John's proposed course of study
for the next semester and signed the registration card,
they exchanged a few pleasantries, and John
got up to go. His head was still swimming, but his will was
strong. When he left the building and the blasting
wind took his breath away, he welcomed it,
opening his jacket so that the cold would keep him
awake. It galvanized him to action. It
reminded him who he really was, and what his
priorities should be.
It was 3:30 P.m., already getting
dark, as John rushed back to the day-care center
to pick up Katie. He kissed her, as
usual, before he strapped her onto his back, but
after that he broke their usual routine. Most
days, he would teach Katie colors by pointing out
different cars along their route. This, however, was the
beginning of John's new, more committed
lifestyle. When Katie asked about the colors,
he told her to hush and went back to thinking about his
dissertation. That was the real problem, he told himself
--not that he wasn't spending enough time writing but that
he had let his thoughts stray from academic
subjects. Colored cars, indeed. A
successful man, a scholar, lived in his
subject matter twenty-four hours a day. That
was what John intended to do, from that day forward.
As he and Katie rode the apartment elevator
up to the tenth floor, John rehearsed a little
speech he was planning to give me, explaining that
he simply couldn't afford to let his work slip
any longer, that from now on he would not be spending time
in rambling conversation or simple wordless
companionship. Nothing, nothing, nothing would be
allowed to distract him from his work. Otherwise, he
would lose the prize he had been working for his
entire life. John knew I wouldn't be
happy about this, but I would understand. After all, I
was Harvard too.
John opened the door firmly, with authority.
He unpacked Katie, wiped the salt and grit
off his heavy boots, and strode down the hall to the
bedroom. In order to soften me up for his speech,
he plastered a huge, sunshiny smile across his
face.
The smile faded as soon as John saw me.
I was standing in the middle of our bedroom, clutching
the telephone receiver to my ear, with no color or
expression on my face. I stared straight at
John as though I hadn't seen him at all.
Before I even spoke, before I even told him
what had happened, the world John had so carefully
constructed, the one he had resolved so
desperately to preserve, began to fly apart in
all directions. It would never be the same again.
21

I propose that those of us who know the truth about
telephones band together and form an association. We
could call ourselves Phone Phobics Anonymous
and hold conferences to discuss the many ways that
telephones threaten public safety. We could
commune about the way telephones make us feel;
about the sick ambivalence that strikes us whenever a
phone rings, about the way we sit and look at
one, wondering what might happen to us if we
pick it up. Veteran phone phobics such as
myself could advise neophytes about strategies for
refusing to answer the telephone at all, as
well as basic self-defense techniques for
those moments when their merciless attacks simply
can't be avoided.
Here in Arizona, during the late-summer
electric storms, the Powers That Be broadcast
warnings advising people not to make telephone calls
when it's raining. Lightning, they tell us, can
travel through phone lines, right into your house, right
into your ear. I once saw a man on television
who had heard this bit of advice but was afraid his
elderly mother hadn't. He called Mom during a
storm to pass along the warning. Naturally (you
saw this coming), while they were having the conversation a
bolt of lightning zigged right into the man's phone
line and up through the earpiece. Blasted the guy
plum across the room, and now he can't conjugate
verbs. That's what phones can do to you.
Of course, it would be a mistake to assume that
telephones are innocuous except during stormy
weather. No, no, no. They can deliver lightning
bolts into your life on the sunniest of days. This
is why we need our phone phobics association
--to warn the unsuspecting. I wish someone had
told me how much damage a telephone could do
before that January day when the nurse-practitioner from
University Health Services called me with the
results of my amniocentesis.
It was another colorless, frozen afternoon in
Cambridge. I was trying to get through some reading
for one of my classes. I wasn't having much
success. The books were incredibly dull, the
kind of material you can't force yourself to absorb
without entering some sort of sensory deprivation
chamber, alone. This had become impossible for me
--at five and a half months' gestation, I had
company wherever I went. Adam was now fully
formed enough to do all sorts of calisthenics
but not yet so big that his movements were cramped by the
limited rental space in my abdomen. It had
become disgracefully easy for him to tempt me
into coming out to play.
We had a little game we liked a lot. I
called it Prod. We didn't play much when
I was up and around, because the motion of my body
tended to lull Adam to sleep. But when I sat
still he'd wake up and thump on the walls to tell
me he was there. I'd be reading along, trying
to focus on something like statistical evidence of
long-term economic depression among
pink-collar workers in southwestern Detroit, when
suddenly I'd feel a firm poke from my
insides. I could rarely resist pulling my
sweater tight around my belly and watching in
amazement as the small, rather pointy shape of a hand
or foot bulged outward from my own body. I
would push on the protrusion with my hand and feel the
baby float in the opposite direction, until
he bumped against my spine or something and rebounded
outward. Then he'd prod me again and we'd
repeat the whole procedure.
We could play for hours.
This was what I was doing that day when the telephone
rang. I was enjoying Prod so much that it never
even occurred to me to be afraid. I was young and
naive; I just slapped the receiver to my ear and said
hello.
"Hello, Martha?"
"Speaking." I recognized the voice.
"It's Judy Trenton," she said. "From
University Health Services."
"Right," I said. "Hi, Judy."
I was pleased that she had called me by my first
name. Most of the clinic personnel called me
Mrs. Beck, which made me feel like an aged
hausfrau. I now understand that Judy's first-name
familiarity was a danger signal, a clear
sign that I should slam down the telephone receiver
and run away fast.
"I have some ... not so good news for you," said
Judy. She sounded strange. Robotic. "The
results from your amniocentesis are in, and they
show that you are carrying a Down syndrome
fetus."
I didn't say anything. I felt as though I were falling through space. What I remember
most about that moment are the details of the room: the
maroon quilt on the futon, the
clutter of papers on the desk, the smoke
smudges on the walls. The smudges had been
there ever since Food Shak burned. No matter
how we scrubbed at them, they wouldn't come off.
"Martha?" Judy Trenton's voice
wasn't so dispassionate anymore. Now she
sounded a little frightened.
"Oh, my God," I said. I sat down
slowly on the futon. The room began to turn
hazy. I pulled my feet onto the futon and
curled my head down between my knees so that I
wouldn't faint.
"Martha? Martha, are you there?"
"I'm here," I whispered.
Judy said something else. I don't remember
what. I didn't hear her, because there was someone
else speaking to me at the same time--or perhaps I
should say some-thing.
The voice was very clear. It didn't come through
my ears; it simply appeared inside my mind like
dew appearing on flowers at dawn. You couldn't
say exactly where it came from, but there it was.
Don't .be afraid.
Those were the only words. But words were just a tiny
fraction of the message. From the warmth of the voice,
from its incredible gentleness, I knew that "Don't
be afraid" was not a commandment to be brave, not a
dismissal of my fear, not a testament to the power of
positive thinking. It simply meant that there was
nothing to fear in the first place. It meant that I was
safe. That it would never let anything hurt me.
The comfort that voice brought with it flickered out in
a heartbeat. Then the apartment zoomed into focus
around me, and I was sitting in a cold room,
alone, with my world turned upside down.
"Martha? Martha? Martha?"
"Yeah."
Judy's voice had lost its mechanical
timbre. Now she sounded almost desperate. "Do
you still feel the same way about ... about not
terminating the pregnancy?" she said. "There's still
time if you want to change your mind. Not much, but
there is still time."
I took a long breath. Everything I had ever
striven for, every hope I'd ever hoped and dream
I'd ever dreamt, seemed to be poised like a
delicate Faberg`e egg between the tips of my
fingers.
"No," I whispered. The egg fell, smashing
into a million shards on the floor.
I want you to know that this was not a decision made
out of ethical principles. I was going on sheer emotion. If I had been one of those women whose
pregnancies progress smoothly and easily,
I might very well have chosen an abortion. But I
had struggled so hard and endured so much already, trying
to keep Adam alive, that I had built up
tremendous momentum in that direction. By the time the
Down syndrome was diagnosed, I could no more have
asked for an abortion than I could have shot
Katie in the head.
"No," I repeated to Judy, "I don't
want to terminate the pregnancy."
"I see." Judy sounded absolutely
miserable. I knew she was trying as hard as she
could not to second-guess my decision. "I'm
sorry," she said at last.
"Thanks."
"Is there anything I could help you with?" she
said. "Do you have any questions?"
I dosed my eyes. Of course I had questions.
I had nothing but questions.
"I guess ... I mean, I've heard
..." My voice faltered and went silent.
"Yes?" said Judy.
"I've heard that people with Down syndrome can be
..." I groped for the right word. "I've heard they
can be ... happy."
That is right.
It was such a calm voice, so completely without
judgment or condemnation. I felt absolutely
certain that if I had chosen to have an abortion, the
owner of that voice would have loved and approved of me
every bit as much.
Judy paused for a minute. "I guess they can
be happy," she said at last. "I don't really
know."
I appreciated her honesty. At times like that,
when you are stripped down to an intolerable reality,
glib reassurances stink of falsehood. Trust
me; I've heard plenty.
"I've been ... I've been looking things
up," said Judy. "About Down syndrome. The
fetus you're carrying is a typical
trisomy-twenty-one."
I was still curled into a ball on the futon, the
phone receiver crushed to my ear. "What does that
mean?" I said.
"It means that at conception, one of the haploid
cells, either the egg or the sperm,
failed to fully divide before fertilization. Then,
when the cells combine, you get three chromosomes
in the twenty-first position instead of two. The
fetus has forty-seven chromosomes, instead of
forty-six, and--"
"I know that!" I barked the words into the phone, not
caring how rude I was being. "I've taken
biology, for God's sake! I said what does
it mean?"
There was a pause. Then Judy said, "I'm not
sure I understand."
"What does it mean to my life--to our
lives?" I said. "What's going to happen?"
"I don't know." Judy sounded very sad. I
myself felt no emotion at all, only that
dreadful falling sensation.
"Well," said Judy, "I guess that's all
there is to say. Listen, Martha, if you have any
questions, I'm always--"
"Don't hang up!" I said desperately,
ashamed by the open neediness in my voice.
"Please, don't hang up!"
"Okay, okay," she said. "I'm still here.
Martha, is your husband home?"
"No, he's ... he'll be home ..." I
couldn't organize my thoughts at all. "We were
going to put the baby in the day-care center--we
already reserved a slot in the newborn room.
Now I guess that won't happen."
"No," said Judy.
"We won't even be able to get anyone
to baby-sit," I said.
"Maybe not." Judy Trenton had the
instincts of a true healer--she was kind, but even more
important, she was honest. She was also dead
wrong. But neither of us knew that at the time.
My mind was racing through that mass of questions like a
ricocheting bullet. I tried to focus on one
at a time, to say something--anything--that would keep
Judy from hanging up and leaving me by myself with a
deformed baby.
"How do you know?" I said, almost to myself.
"Know what?" Judy asked softly.
"How do you know who should live? Is it such a
bad thing not to live?"
Judy said nothing. She seemed to know that listening
was more important.
"I used to think a lot about suicide," I
said. During my teenage existential crisis,
I had thought that knowing the Meaning of Life
was an abstract, esoteric question. Now I felt
that it was an absolute necessity.
"Martha, please!" Judy cried. "Don't
talk that way--we have a psychologist here, I
could refer you--"
"No, no, no," I snapped. "I'm not
going to kill myself now, for crying out loud. That was
a long time ago, when I was trying to figure out the
meaning of life, and I read all this
philosophy, and--but you know what, Judy? They
didn't really understand. Not any of them. Not
Plato, not Kant, not any of the big boys."
I was aware, in a distant way, that I was
talking like the schizophrenic homeless people who
prowled the streets of Cambridge. There was one
old woman with a toupee who slept in the Science
Center at night, leaning against her brown paper
bag. The first year I was at Harvard, one of my
fellow freshmen sneaked a peek inside that bag
at about 2:00 A.m. on a sleepless night and
discovered that it held--more bags. I knew I
resembled that old woman as I babbled to Judy
on the telephone, but I couldn't seem to stop.
"None of those philosophers got the point,"
I told her.
"Oh?" Judy's voice was uncertain. One
can hardly blame her.
"No," I said. "Because they were always focusing
on what happens to people. The meaning of life is not
what happens to people."
"It's not?"
"No, it's not," I said. "The meaning of life
is what happens between people."
"I see," said Judy, though I wasn't
really sure she did.
The next thing I said was, "What?" But I
wasn't even talking to Judy. I was talking to the
other voice, the voice inside my head, the
voice inside my heart. This time, it asked me
a question.
Martha, are you happy?
"Happy?" I repeated. It seemed like a
strange question to me. I was used to thinking in terms of
whether or not I was successful, accepted,
noteworthy. It had been a long time since I
had even thought about being happy.
"Martha?" said Judy gingerly, no doubt
convinced that the bad news had driven me right over
the edge of the cracker barrel. "Martha, are you
all right?"
"Yes, I'm all right, I'm all right," I
said. I was still thinking about happiness. I had just
realized that I didn't have a clue what it was.
Then Adam kicked me in the ribs. It was one
of his "Come out and play!" kicks; he wanted me
to join him in a game of Prod. I felt a
gush of absolute horror, a mixture of
grief and fear so strong it almost knocked me out.
I wrapped my free hand--the one not holding the
phone--around my knees, so that my body formed a
tight little ball around Adam's playroom. Then
I began to rock slightly, back and forth, back
and forth, back and forth. It helped.
Judy Trenton had been talking into the phone
for about a minute, getting no response from me.
Finally she said, "Listen, Martha, how close
are you to Harvard Square?"
"Pretty close," I said, rocking.
"Pretty close."
"Why don't you come in?" said Judy. "My
last appointment is at four. Can you make it at
four-thirty?"
"Okay," I gasped. I had finally begun
to cry, but it was a weak, tepid sort of cry, not
nearly big enough for the emotions I had to process. The rocking numbed me, pushed the horror into a
kind of holding zone at the back of my soul. It
was like buying pain on credit.
"I'm sorry, Judy," I said.
"What?" She sounded confused. "You're
sorry?"
"I'm sorry you had to make a call like this.
It must be awful."
Long pause.
"It is." Now Judy was crying too. "I'd
like to give you a hug."
Then I realized that she understood after all.
About the Meaning of Life.
There was a thump in the hallway outside our
apartment door; the sound of the elevator arriving at
our floor. Then the jangle and click of
John's key in the lock.
"Judy!" I whispered, almost panicking.
"John's here!"
"Oh, good." Her voice was heavy with
relief.
I stood up, the blood rushing from my head and
making me teeter before I got my feet
solidly under me.
"I have to tell him," I said. "I have
to tell him."
John's voice, dreadfully tired and hoarse
but resolutely cheerful, came from the living
room. "Hi, Marth! We're back!"

I tried to pull myself together before he opened the
bedroom door. I tried to put on some kind of
smile, to greet him warmly, to give him a
moment of peace before he had to know. But as soon as
John saw my face, before I said a word, I
could tell it was too late for that.
"Good-bye, Judy," I whispered into the
mouthpiece, my eyes locked on John's.
"Thanks."
Then I hung up the telephone, that terrible,
terrible instrument of destruction. The phone just sat
there, as if it hadn't done anything bad at all.



Every December my friend Annette, who in other
respects is a very nice person, spends an
inordinate amount of time and money obtaining the most
obnoxious toy gun on the market for Adam's
Christmas present. I don't give my children
guns as toys, but as Adam's honorary
auntie, Annette feels that it is her right and
responsibility to indulge the kid's most
violent, macho, antisocial tendencies.
Adam loves her very much.
Annette's first criterion, when purchasing the
Christmas gun, is wattage. She looks for a
product that makes enough noise to disrupt the breeding
process for every bird living within a mile radius
of our house. Flashing lights rank a close
second. Annette prefers guns that flash
several colors, all bright enough to stun the average
person's retina, so that for a couple of minutes
after Adam fires the gun at you, you walk blindly
into walls and pillars and closed glass doors.
It is also very important to have an innovative
design, with various exotic flanges meant
to suggest deadliness of interplanetary
proportions.
It goes without saying that guns of this
magnitude require dozens of large
batteries. Annette never forgets this; she always
buys an ample supply of them, wrapping them in
a separate package, which she tapes to the
actual gun. I'm telling you, the
woman has absolutely no mercy.
The first Christmas after Annette and I got
to know each other, my children arose at a
predictably ungodly hour and descended on
their gifts like locusts on an alfalfa field.
Along with most other American parents, John
and I had spent a good part of the previous month
tracking down the items our children had requested in
their letters to Santa. Katie had asked for a set
of birdcalls she'd seen in an FAO Schwarz
catalog. Five-year-old Lizzie wanted
one of those dolls they advertise on Saturday
morning cartoons, the ones that have repulsively
cute names and have been engineered to mimic the least
pleasant behaviors of real human babies.
I think that year Lizzie's doll had an
anxiety-related bed-wetting disorder or something.
Adam wanted a whole brigade of toys with
names like Cretin Slime Monsters.
In the proud tradition of delayed
gratification John inherited from a long line of
Becks, the children opened their presents one by one.
Katie went first. The FAO Schwarz
birdcall set had turned out to cost several
hundred dollars, so John and I had purchased
what we thought was a reasonable facsimile. It
didn't cover quite as broad an ornithological
spectrum as the pricier set, but it could
produce a great duck sound, a good owl, and
several very convincing songbirds. When she saw it,
Katie's face fell. It is an awful thing
to see your kid's face fall on Christmas
morning.
"Don't you like it?" I asked anxiously.
"No, no, it's okay. I like it." Katie
smiled a stalwart smile, but her lower lip
trembled ever so slightly. I began to feel that
perhaps we should have taken out a second mortgage
to pay for the FAO Schwarz birdcall set.
Lizzie went next. She tore the gift
wrapping off her bed-wetting doll, and then she,
too, developed that troubled look around the eyes.
"What's the matter?" I asked.
"Well," said Lizzie, with her high voice
and precocious vocabulary, "it's not exactly
what I asked for."
John, who had fought his way through about seventeen
toy stores looking for that particular doll, burst
out, "I thought you wanted a Tiny Whiny
Princess Wee-Wee!"
"I did," said Lizzie, "but I wanted the
one with the pink jewels, and this one only has the
purple jewels."
Within minutes, both the girls had reconciled
themselves to their gifts. Like their pioneer ancestors,
many of whom had died crossing the Great Plains
on foot in the dead of winter, dragging their
possessions behind them in handcarts, my daughters were
able to steel themselves to the brutal realities of an
imperfect world. This was good, because I had been on
the verge of sending them both to military school.
Now it was Adam's turn. He fished around
under the Christmas tree until he found a
package with his name on it. It was from Annette.
He tore the paper off, holding his breath, and
found--batteries. An eight-pack of double
D's, still encased in plastic.
"Oh, honey," I said, "that's not the real
present. The real present is--"
But Adam didn't hear me. He was staring at
those batteries as if they were so magnificent he
couldn't quite take them in. His mouth fell open in
astonished ecstasy as he held the batteries up
to the light.
"Oh, wow!" he said. "Oh, wow! Mom,
look! Batteries!" (it actually sounded more like
"Mom, ook! Aggabies!" but the message was
clear.)
Before we could divert his attention to any other
gift, Adam leapt to his feet and began
running around the house, locating every appliance,
tool, and toy that ran on batteries. The whole
time, he babbled excitedly about all the things he
could do with this fabulous, fabulous gift. As we
watched, it began to occur to all of us "normal"
people in the family that batteries really were a
pretty darn good Christmas present. They
didn't look like much, on the face of it, but think
what they could do! Put them in place, and
inanimate objects suddenly came to life,
moving, talking, singing, lighting up the room. Something about Adam always manages to see straight
past the outward ordinariness of a thing to any magic
it may hold inside. We wouldn't even have
bothered to let him open the gun, except that we were
afraid Annette would buy him a neutron
bomb for his birthday if we didn't.
I bring this up because, looking back on the
journal I kept while I was expecting
Adam, I find that before he was even
born, I was already comparing him to a disappointing
holiday gift. I must mention that this journal was not
meant to be read by others. It was the secret
place where I poured out my most distasteful and
shocking emotions, to keep myself from going insane
during the endless, frightening months between his
diagnosis and his birth.
"Last week," I wrote one January
afternoon, "a homeless man I passed in Harvard
Square took one look at my belly and said,
"Congratulations, Mamma!" I've almost
forgotten what it was like to have people react that way.
Nobody does, since we found out about the Down
syndrome. The baby has become unmentionable,
like a gift everyone knows is inferior and broken,
before it's even unwrapped."
This comment was largely true, although perhaps a bit
too absolute. Not "everyone" stopped treating
me like a pregnant woman and began acting as if
I'd contracted a terminal illness. But
precious few of the exceptions came from within the
Harvard community, the community that had been my
reference group, my "ideal" culture, since
I was seventeen years old. No one at
Harvard seemed able to tolerate the thought of
Santa's leaving the wrong kind of baby under the
tree. It was very clear what kind of children most
Harvard types would have asked for in their letters
to Santa. I realized this not much more than an hour
after I learned about Adam's Down syndrome.
I left the apartment soon after John came
home. In our marriage, the unspoken rule had
always been that when one of us was upset, the other would
compensate by being strong and encouraging. We'd
switch roles after the upset person began
to feel a little better. It reminded me of
mountaineering teams whose members take turns
scaling unconquered territory, planting ropes
on a vertical rock face and then helping their
partners up a few feet. The day we found out about
Adam strained this system to its breaking point. I
was far too devastated to comfort John. Perhaps if
he'd been any less tired or jet-lagged or
worried about school, he could have soldiered through and
comforted me. But he was already carrying a heavy
burden, and the news that one's unborn son is
going to be mentally retarded isn't merely a
straw to break the camel's back. It's more like a
sack of headstones.
It's painful to remember the way
John's face looked when I told him; so
painful that I can barely summon the memory.
He went very, very pale. Then he came slowly
over, as though he were sleepwalking, and put his
arms around me. He was as cold as a statue.
"You're going to keep him, aren't you?" he said.
I nodded slowly, my face against his chest.
"So that's why," said John. "So that's why."
I looked up at him. "What do you mean?"
John was staring over my head at the window. The
light that came through it was dim and gray.
"In the restaurant, that day," he said. "The
day you got the tests done. Do you remember?"
I nodded again.
"We were sitting there, and you were talking about
abortion, and then ..." John's voice trailed
off and he shook his head. "It was probably just
my imagination. But it was so--so strong."
I felt a prickle of electricity go up
my spine. I pulled back my head and looked
up into his haggard, beloved face. "What was so
strong?"
He closed his eyes and swallowed. Then he
said, very reluctantly, "I heard this ...
voice."
I said nothing. I had known what he was going
to tell me before he said it.
John continued even more slowly. "It said
something."
I knew exactly what he was feeling,
exactly why it seemed physically painful for him
to tell me. He was fighting through the same walls
of disbelief, the same fear of ridicule, the
same shame I felt when I thought of talking
to anyone about the inexplicable things that had happened
to me. He didn't know about the decision I had
made--to believe anything, everything, until it was
proven false--and I was too stunned to explain.
I just asked, "What did it say?"
John shook his head, as though to apologize for
what he was about to tell me. "It said,
"John, keep the baby."" John
looked down at me, and his face suddenly looked
concerned. "I mean, I know it isn't my
decision, it's your decision, but--"
I set one finger on his lips. "It's
okay," I said, although of course nothing was okay.
"The thing is," said John, "it wasn't like an
order. It felt more like someone was giving me
advice, someone who knew more than I
did." He bit his lip hard, and I could see that
the memory made him want to cry. "It sounded very
kind," he concluded.
"I know," I said.
"Do you think I'm crazy?" John sounded like
a little boy.
I shook my head. "Look what I'm
doing," I said. I put a hand on my swollen
midsection. "Do you think I'm crazy?"
He shook his head but said nothing. We were both
too overwhelmed to talk anymore. I didn't
know how to begin telling John about the Bunraku
puppeteers, about the strange things I had
experienced during the last five months. I was
somewhat surprised and slightly comforted to know that
John, too, had heard one of the voices, and I
was immensely relieved that the experience seemed
to have discouraged him from pressuring me to abort the
baby. But what might have intrigued and excited
me in different circumstances barely seemed
worth thinking about now that I was trying to adjust to being
the mother of a retarded child.
John and I stood there in silence for several
minutes, until it was clear that neither one of us was
prepared to be the strong one, to take the lead on this
particular mountaineering expedition. We had reached
a spot beyond our ability to cope as a team. So
without another word, we disengaged, and each of us
reverted to the behaviors we had used to cope with
disturbing information for most of our lives.
For John, this meant a ferocious concentration
on work. He went into a frenzy of activity,
typing up notes for his dissertation, giving Katie
her dinner, making phone calls to Singapore,
doing the laundry. The movement of his mind and
muscles, the simplicity and solidness of work,
seemed to allow him to shut down his awareness of what
was happening to his personal life. He was a
Harvard kind of guy.
To me, John's behavior was
incomprehensible. I couldn't focus on anything
but my fear and grief. My way of coping with this
situation--with any situation--was to learn everything
I could about it, to follow my credo that knowledge is power.
Knowledge had helped me dull the pain and fear of being
different ever since I had learned how to talk.
And so, before I even stopped at Judy
Trenton's office on that day she called with the "not so good news," I made for the bookstore section
of the Harvard Coop to look for information
about raising a child with Down syndrome.
The Coop is Harvard's official
bookstore, the one that stocks all the textbooks
and required readings for classes. It sells
everything from Harvard insignia T-shirts
to snack foods, and it has one of the largest and
best-equipped book sections of any college
store in the country. I had never spent much time
browsing the "parenting" section. Before Katie was
born, I had a hard time believing that an
actual baby was going to come out of me, let alone
survive the event. After her birth, I was busy
forcing myself through thousands of pages of required
sociological theory--this at a time when I was
too tired to really focus on anything longer than
a haiku. I never got around to reading much about how
to raise children, not even an article in Woman's
Day. I decided that feeling guilty about not
reading such things would have to be good enough.
At least I knew which section of the Coop
contained books on parenting. I lugged my
abdomen toward Harvard Square, keeping my
eyes fixed on the cobblestones directly in
front of me. This was how I kept myself from coming
apart. I had never meditated before, but over the
next few months I would figure out how to do it
without any instruction at all. I learned to wash
my mind blank and stare at some object, real
or imagined, until I felt as though I were
floating in a state of being that was nearly, but not
precisely, alive. I devised mantras,
phrases I repeated over and over to help me
stop thinking. I remember vividly the mantra
that got me from my apartment to the Coop that afternoon. As
I walked along the slushy sidewalks under a
freezing rain, I murmured over and over, "Why
not me? Why not me? Why not me?"
I can honestly say I never did ask the
opposite question. The answer seemed obvious. I
have been the beneficiary of so much improbable good
fortune in my life that it's only logical
I'd have some bad luck as well. What I did
ask myself that day, what I continue to ask myself as
I watch Adam go out into a frightening world in all his
gentleness, sweetness, and hope, is, "Why him?
Why him? Why him?" The hardest lesson I have
ever had to learn is that I will never know the meaning of
my children's pain, and that I have neither the capacity
nor the right to take it away from them.
It was the thought of Adam's pain that
finally broke through my numbness and let the full
weight of my emotion bear down on me. Even
though I loved my unborn baby with unreasoning
intensity, I was terribly afraid for him. I was
also terribly afraid of him. The bulge of my
torso now seemed freakish, monstrous,
grotesque. The baby inside it was broken.
He was substandard. He was not what I had
wanted.
Once I got to the Coop and made my way
to the parenting section, I found a lot of
examples of what I had wanted laid out in
front of me. Four or five long
bookshelves were occupied by instructional variations
on a single subject: how to turn a human
infant into a genius in the shortest time possible.
The object, apparently, was to have every child--no,
I'm sorry, make that "your child"--contributing
important innovations to science and letters before it
achieved bowel control. There were books
recommending different shapes to hang from
mobiles, thus stimulating your infant's
intellectual development. There were sets of
flash cards designed to help your tiny scholar's
mind associate phonetic symbols with the
appropriate sounds. Others promoted
development across the whole behavioral
spectrum, teaching everything from ethics to "killer
competitiveness." I have seen many of these same
books in other bookstores at other times, but
only the Harvard Coop had all of them:
Teach Your Baby to Read; Born
to Win; Pre-Law for Preschoolers;
Toddling Through the Calculus.
Staring at these titles through tear-glazed eyes,
I felt like a kid holding a lump of coal,
watching everyone else open gorgeous, desirable Tiny Whiny Princess Wee-Wees with the pink
and purple jewels. For the first time in my life,
I began to question why there should be so much material
to help parents enhance their children's "excellence."
Slowly, slowly, standing in the Coop, I
realized that I was not looking for information to transform
my child into a prize every parent would envy. I needed
to transform myself into a parent who could accept her
child, no matter what. There were no books for that in
the parenting section of the Harvard Coop.
I left the parenting section without buying anything
and proceeded up the escalator to the textbook
section. There, after a half hour's
search through the textbooks for abnormal
psychology classes, I found a small book
on how to train and teach the mentally retarded. The
book was a mustard-yellow paperback with a
photograph of two children on the cover. They both
had Down syndrome. The picture was grainy and
out of focus; the two children, lumpish and
awkward-looking, stared dully at the camera through
small, misshapen eyes. I cannot tell you how
much it hurt me to look at that picture. It was
like getting my heart caught in a mill saw.
I turned the book facedown and carried it to the
cash register, focusing on the grimy linoleum
floor tiles to keep my mind in suspended
animation. Why not me? Why not me? Why not me?
The woman at the cash register flipped the book
over, and I saw the picture again. I almost ran
for the door. I forced myself to look at the book's
cover again as I handed over my money. Those two
children in the picture were everything I had ever learned
to avoid. Beneath a thin facade of polite pity,
I found in myself a roiling sea of fear and
loathing. The words that sprang to my mind as I
looked at that picture were bluntly cruel.
Stupid. Retard. Imbecile. Fool.
Moron. Before that day, I would never have admitted,
even to myself, that I ever thought such words about actual
people. Now I was thinking them about a being who was not yet
separate from me. I was a child on the cover of that
book, and the horror of it was almost more than I could
bear.
I finished paying for the book and rushed into the
small elevator that went from the third-floor
textbook section to ground level. The
elevator was barely big enough for two slender people,
and in my condition I pretty much filled it. I
waited until it was between floors, then hit the
stop button with a closed fist. I hit it much
harder than necessary. Then I leaned back against the
wall and covered my face with my hands, trying
to control myself. I felt as though some evil ogre
had killed my "real" baby--the baby I'd
been expecting--and replaced him with an ugly,
broken replica. My grief at losing that
"real" baby was as intense as if he had been
two years old, or five, or ten. The whole
thing seemed wildly unfair to me: my baby was
dead, and I was still pregnant. I was suddenly
seized by a rage so strong I wanted to bash in the
elevator walls.
Somewhere above the anger, my intellect
registered all of this, reviewing the emotional
stages of accepting a loss. First there was denial,
I knew, then grief, then anger, then bargaining
--no, wait, it was bargaining, then grief, then
anger--or maybe anger, then bargaining, then
grief? It felt as though all of them were
assaulting me at once. I remembered that the
final stage was acceptance. But then again, that was when
the tragedy was a death. What if it wasn't?
What if the tragedy was born alive? I tried
to force myself to reach acceptance immediately, right there in the
elevator, without wading into the morass of pain I
could sense just ahead of me. I considered abortion
again, but the pain that lay in that direction was even
greater. It was easier for me--not better, mind you,
not braver or nobler or morally superior, but
easier--to have the baby. I wondered why the
psychological stages of loss didn't
include fear. Maybe it was because fear pervades
and overwhelms everything else. I mashed my hands
against my eyes and shook so hard that the elevator
compartment trembled on its cable.
From here, ten years in the future, it seems
ironically fitting that I locked myself, alone,
into a cramped, cold, hard, barren space near
the Coop's textbook section before I let myself
feel my deep emotional reaction to Adam's
diagnosis. For a few of my Harvard years,
I taught drawing to architecture students, and
during that time I became convinced that we human
beings gravitate toward spaces that are
metaphors for our inner lives. That elevator
pretty much summed up the way I had learned
to exist. I went into it in order to gain control,
an effort that had consumed me for years. It worked
fairly well. After only a few seconds,
before anyone could hear the alarm and come to help, I
punched the button again and proceeded to the ground
floor. By the time the door slid open, I had
stopped crying. I would not lose control of myself in
public again for some time--definitely not when I
went to see Judy Trenton, to find out just how many
things were likely to be wrong with the unseen person
I carried under my heart.
It was between the Coop and the clinic that I passed
the homeless man who looked at my abdomen and
said, "Congratulations, Mamma!" I glanced
around, not realizing at first that he had been talking
to me. I had already stopped believing that
my pregnancy merited congratulations. If that
man only knew, I thought bitterly. Now the
memory makes me smile. I like to think that the
homeless man may have been acting under the influence
of the Bunraku puppeteers. Maybe he was one
of them. I have a hunch that if he had known everything
about my retarded baby, he would have congratulated
me just as warmly. In my mind, I picture him
showing the same astonished delight I saw in
Adam on the Christmas morning when he
unwrapped his batteries. This little boy may not
look like what you asked for, the man might have told
me. He may not have the features you requested,
or be able to perform all the tricks. But put him
in place, and he will light up your life. You have
no idea how much magic is in him.



You can tell a great deal about people by the way they
react when you tell them you're going to have a
retarded child. You might want to try this on a few
of your own friends, as a kind of litmus test to see
what the world looks like to them. Of course, a lot
depends on their personal histories--whether they
have ever interacted with disabled people and what that interaction
was like. But when you control for that factor (as we
sociologists like to say), a person's reaction
to the news of retardation is usually a distilled
manifestation of his or her view of the universe.
Within a few hours of hearing Adam's
diagnosis, John and I had called several of
our friends and relations, looking for comfort. Instead,
we found that we had bumbled into a place so alien
and unfamiliar that virtually no one we spoke
to had a clue as to what to say or do. My parents
reacted as well as they could, but though unquestioningly
supportive, they were almost as distressed as I
was. My mother had always taken great pride in
pointing out that she had borne eight healthy
babies, all with high IQ'S (as frequently
measured by our student neighbors). The concept
of a retarded grandson stunned her to near silence.
My father was so upset that he didn't even pick
up the phone. My strongest feeling as I hung
up was guilt at having brought this catastrophe
into their lives.
John called his parents right after I called
mine. I sat near him on the couch, my
eyelids swollen and stinging with tears, and
listened to his end of the conversation.
"Hi, Mom and Dad," said John. "How
are you?"
Pause.
"That's good. Well, I'm all right, I
guess. We just found out that the baby has Down
syndrome. The new baby."
Pause.
"Down syndrome. I think they used to call
it mongoloidism."
Pause.
"Um ... Delta. I flew in on Delta
last time."
Pause.
"I had chicken. It was pretty good. A little
too well done."
John's parents went on asking him about
airplane travel for ten minutes, and he kept
responding politely, in a voice that sounded as
though the blood had been drained from it. Finally,
John's mother said, "Well, just be grateful
you've got Katie." Then they hung up.
I was floored by the apparent indifference of this
conversation, but John assured me that his parents were
just trying to absorb the information. Sure enough,
half an hour later they called back with words of
support and sympathy. But the first go-round had
shown me that Faye and Jay were as lost in this new
obstetrical terrain as my own parents. It
seemed utterly impossible that John and I could
find our way back to a normal life.
I didn't sleep that night. I lay on the
futon and stared at the ceiling, as numb as if I
had been breathing nothing but airplane glue for
weeks. John rolled and thrashed fitfully beside
me, mumbling dark, meaningless syllables into his
pillow. When we moved away from Cambridge,
after Adam was born, we left that lumpy futon
behind. It was the scene of more sickness and sadness than
we cared to remember. We didn't even call it
a mattress--we referred to it as a "stress
mat." We hoped that its new owners would never know
how dangerous it could be.
The next morning I was scheduled to have breakfast
with Deirdre Hennesy and Sibyl Johnston.
Deirdre picked me up right on time, looking as
luminous as ever, with only a tidy little bulge below
the navel to reveal her own pregnancy. We
briefly discussed the best way to get to the little
caf`e where we were meeting Sibyl. I
thought about trying to keep Adam's condition a
secret. I thought about my parents' reaction, and
my in-laws', and wondered if I could handle
Deirdre's response should I decide to tell
her. In the end, I simply couldn't hold it
in. As she put the car in gear, I blurted,
"My baby has Down syndrome."
Deirdre moved the gearshift back to park.
Without a word, she leaned over and put her arms
around my shoulders. My eyes filled with tears and
I looked down quickly to hide them. Deirdre
bowed her own head until her forehead rested against
mine. I don't remember her saying anything.
There was no need for it. I could feel her
compassion, but what struck me more was her complete
lack of fear or awkwardness. An amazing calm
emanated from her to me. It was utterly different from
the panic I had sensed from John's parents, and
mine. I knew this was partly because Deirdre was more
distant from the baby than our families, and she
therefore had less to fear from his disabilities. But
I believe the strength she was able to give me
came from more than just that. I thought about Deirdre's
story, about the old woman who had washed her when
she was weak and defeated and ready to die. I felt
grateful to the soles of my feet for that old
woman's gift, a gift that was now being passed
on to me.
Eventually we both straightened up again, and
Deirdre drove to the caf`e where we were meeting
Sibyl. It was a cozy place with only a few
tables. Half of it was occupied by a glass
display case containing fresh baked goods. They
smelled exquisite. I ordered a cranberry
muffin. It looked and tasted delicious, but I
couldn't swallow any of it. I might as well have
tried to eat a lump of adobe.
Deirdre and I were sipping herbal tea when
Sibyl pushed open the door and entered in a
swirl of snow.
"Sorry I'm late," she said breathlessly.
"Charles just got back from class to take
Mie." She smiled. Deirdre and I did not.
Sibyl's face went sober. "What's wrong?"
I had asked Deirdre to let me deliver the
news myself. "My baby," I said. "Down
syndrome."
Sibyl sat down slowly, forgetting to take
off her coat. Snowflakes melted into tiny bright
beads on her coppery hair.
"Oh, Martha."
I shrugged.
"Has the shock worn off yet?" she asked.
I shrugged again.
"It will," she said. "It may take a year or
so until you feel normal again, but you're
probably going through the worst of it right now."
There was so much confidence in her low, soothing
voice that I felt something shift inside me, as
though she had just wedged her own shoulder under the
burden I was carrying.
"Have they put you in touch with anyone?" asked
Sibyl. "Parent to Parent? The ARC?"
I squinted at her. "The what?"
"The Association for Retarded Citizens,"
she said. She dug through her purse. "Here,
I'll give you their number."
Deirdre and I were both watching her
incredulously. Deirdre said, "You have the number
for the ARC in your purse?"
Sibyl nodded. "Here it is." She wrote
on a scrap of paper from her planning calendar and
pushed it across the small tabletop to me.
Deirdre and I just sat and looked at her.
"What?" said Sibyl. "What are you guys
staring at?"
I took the paper scrap off the table and held
it up between my thumb and forefinger.
"Why?" I said.
Deirdre nodded.
Sibyl's porcelain skin flushed pink.
"My book," she said.
I knew that Sibyl was a writer, that she
spent hours every day in her home office working on
her latest novel. But she had always been
reluctant to talk about the book's content. We
sometimes discussed her writing, but never the actual
story she was telling. She didn't want
to dissipate her energy in conversation, and I
respected that.
Now Sibyl took a deep breath. "A few
years ago, I got interested in a baby with a
genetic defect," she said. "That's what my
book is about."
"Down syndrome?" Deirdre asked her.
"No." Sibyl shook her head. "Worse."
I noticed that it comforted me to remember there were
worse genetic defects than Down
syndrome. My reaction made me feel
slightly guilty; it was awfully
close to rejoicing in the bad fortune of others.
The waiter showed up, and Sibyl ordered her
own herbal tea. Then she launched into a
description of the research she had been doing for the
past several years. It turned out that Sibyl was
an absolute encyclopedia of information about having and raising a child with a disability. She was a very
thorough researcher, and she had a mind like flypaper
--everything stuck to it. Even though the baby
portrayed in her book didn't have Down
syndrome, Sibyl knew the number of babies
born with the condition every year; the percentage of those
babies who had heart-valve defects,
seizures, and harelips; the organizations set
up to assist parents; and the latest advances in
"early intervention" to help disabled children maximize
their functional potential.
As I listened to Sibyl, I was once again
overcome by the strange, electric feeling that had
become so familiar to me during the past months.
It was the same thing I had felt the first time
Sibyl knocked on my apartment door, on the
day when I was losing my fight with the nausea.
Whoever or whatever had sent her to my aid that day
undoubtedly knew that she brought more than
groceries along with her. She also carried even more
information and understanding about my baby than I could have
gotten from the obstetrical specialists at
University Health Services. The electric
sensation tingled across my scalp until I
expected to hear my individual hairs
crackling against my ears like tiny power cables.
This is not accidental, the feeling said.
None of it is an accident. You are not falling
into nothing. Trust us. We will catch you. You have
never been alone.

In the meantime, on the other side of
Cambridge, John was trying out the bad news
on someone else, with rather less gratifying
results. He was scheduled to meet with
Professor Goatstroke again to review his
progress. Although he had managed to hammer out a
few pages of his dissertation the day before, the combination
of a raging sore throat and the news about Adam had
made it almost impossible for him to concentrate. The
chapter wasn't finished, and what he had wasn't
top quality. John's pounding head filled with
foreboding as he knocked on Goatstroke's
office door.
"Come in," said the professor.
John opened the door. Goatstroke was reading
an academic journal. He gestured toward the
wooden chair that faced his desk. John sat
down silently and looked around the room, waiting
for his mentor to finish. The coffeemaker was perking
away on the filing cabinet. The steam that rose from
it was immediately trapped by the icy cold from the window.
It formed feathery curls of frost on the inside
of the glass. The three windowless walls were
liberally adorned with evidence of Goatstroke's
prominence: honorary degrees from the most
prestigious universities in the world,
certificates of merit signed by various heads of
state, the cover of a magazine bearing the
professor's portrait. John remembered the
first time he had come to the office as a freshman,
how his heart had thrummed when he talked to the great
man. Since then he had grown fairly confident
in Goatstroke's presence--until a few
months ago, when he'd started commuting to Asia and
his work had slowed down so dramatically. As he
waited for Goatstroke to speak, John realized
that he was almost as nervous as he had been during that
freshman-year meeting, seven years earlier.
"All right," said Goatstroke, raising his
eyes and closing the last page of the article.
"How are you, John?"
"I'm fine," John managed to croak.
"Good," said Goatstroke. "Do you have a
chapter for me?"
John swallowed. It was a painful
procedure. "More or less," he said. He
managed to grin as he put the few pages he had
written on the professor's desk.
Goatstroke let the papers lie there. "More
or less?" he repeated dourly.
John saw that this would not be easy. He had
used up virtually every acceptable excuse for his
failure to complete his dissertation on his original
schedule. Before meeting with Goatstroke, he had
already decided that this time he would have to resort to the
bare-bones truth.
"We--I mean I--have had some ... uh ...
interruptions," he said. "Personal things."
Goatstroke's lips went into a thin, tight
line as his hand reached reflexively for his beard.
Looking at him, John realized that the meeting
might go even more badly than he had expected.
"Personal things," said Goatstroke
flatly. He raised one eyebrow to indicate that
this was a question, if not an open challenge. He was
calling John's bluff. All teachers do it.
John himself had done it, as a teaching fellow. The
usual line went something like, "I'll grant you
an extension on a due date if your mother dies,
but you'd better be able to show me the body."
John inhaled, painfully. "You know Martha--
my wife--is pregnant again."
Goatstroke inclined his head slightly.
"Well, we just found out that she's carrying a
Down syndrome baby."
John had been focusing on the window behind the
professor's head. Now he looked into the
professor's face, to see the reaction. There was
none. Goatstroke just sat there, his lips in a
line, as if John had said nothing at all.
"They used to call it mongoloidism," said
John. He hated the word.
Goatstroke's face curled up as though he
had just bitten down on a piece of aluminum
foil. His fingers pulled nervously at his beard
for a few seconds before he managed to say,
"Oh! Terrible!"
John nodded. He could feel tears burning
at the backs of his eyes, but he was far from shedding
them. It was a tremendous relief to have told
someone, face-to-face. John almost began
to relax. Fortunately, he had been around
Harvard long enough to avoid dropping his guard altogether.
"We just found out yesterday," he said. "I had
trouble getting any work done."
Goatstroke nodded. His expression was almost
earnest, as open and genuine as John had ever seen
it.
"So," said the professor, "I imagine
you'll have it taken care of as soon as possible?"
John blinked in confusion. "What do you mean?"
"It is still early enough to take care of the problem,"
Goatstroke said. "Isn't it?"
"Oh, you mean abortion," said John.
Goatstroke relaxed slightly in his chair.
"No," said John, "we're not going to do that."
At this, Goatstroke's white-tufted jaw
dropped slightly. He was generally an
inscrutable man; John had never seen him show so
much emotion in a single conversation. His face
registered both disbelief and outrage.
"Martha wants to have the baby," John finished
in a weak voice.
Goatstroke still looked dumbfounded. "For
God's sake," he said, "can't you convince her
to see reason?"
John blinked some more. His brain seemed to be
functioning very slowly. Reason, he thought. See
reason. He thought about the voice he had heard in
the restaurant. At some level, he'd been
thinking about it ever since he had learned about
Adam's diagnosis. John himself was not thinking
reasonably. He didn't think he had much chance
of bringing me around.
"It's not really my decision," he told
Goatstroke.
"Yes, but--" Goatstroke had to stop,
to collect himself. "Listen," he said. "You have
got to persuade her. If not for her career, then for
yours."
"Mine?"
"Absolutely." Goatstroke nodded.
"John, I'm telling you this not only as your
adviser but as someone who hopes one day to call you
my colleague. You must convince your wife to do the
right thing. Frankly, you've made a lot of
choices I consider unwise--but this one is a
disaster. If she has that baby, neither one of you will
ever get your degrees."
Goatstroke's tone and the look on his face,
the way he lowered his head and stared from under his brows
straight into John's eyes, made it clear that this
was not merely a prediction. It was a threat.
John felt as though his stomach had suddenly been
removed and his heart had fallen into the empty
cavity.
"I don't think ...," he began. "I
mean, I don't know ... I don't ..."
"That's right," said Goatstroke. "You
don't." Suddenly, his expression changed. His
face took on a look of solemn benevolence.
He steepled his fingers together on his desk and leaned
forward, pressing his beard to his hands in a
gesture that was almost intimate.
"Mr. Beck," he said, lapsing into the formal
address he used on undergraduates and other
lesser beings, "let me tell you something about myself.
When I was an assistant professor, working on
my first book and trying to get tenure, my wife
--my first wife, that is--discovered she was
pregnant."
"Oh," said John.
"I was quite moved, at the time--I
mean, it really is quite something, to think that a child with your
genes has been conceived. But you see, the timing was
all wrong. If that baby had been born, it would
have interfered with my writing, my research. I
decided that she needed an abortion, and I've
never regretted it."
"You decided," John croaked.
"What?" said Goatstroke.
"Nothing."
John was having one of those epiphanies men
sometimes get, where for a brief moment they can see
what the world must look like through a woman's eyes.
He was thinking about the way I pored over my
pregnancy books and felt for the baby's hands
against my sides and cried at the picture on the
ultrasound screen. He wondered how many other
decisions Goatstroke had made for his wives.
"You have got to understand," Goatstroke went on,
"that this is not some game we're playing. This is
your career, John. You must have your priorities
in order."
He was looking very earnestly at John, but
John was having a hard time looking back at
him. He could barely focus his eyes. It
suddenly seemed to him that he was looking at his
mentor from some other place, high up and far
away. From this new perspective,
Goatstroke's office didn't look nearly so
glamorous. The great scholar himself appeared to be
nothing more than a small man in a small life.
John blinked hard, wondering if he was becoming
delirious.
"This is the kind of thing that separates the men from the boys," Goatstroke went on. "When you run
up against one of life's obstacles--and we all
do, at one time or another--that's when you have
to prove yourself. Are you going to make the right choice
for your career, or are you going to crumble?"
John gave a docile nod. It suddenly
occurred to him that Goatstroke's beard was about the
same size and color as a hamster he had once owned. In fact, as he thought about it,
Goatstroke reminded John of a hamster. He
looked at the stacks of journal articles on the
professor's desk. He knew that his mentor's
life consisted largely of reading such articles, in
order to write other articles almost exactly like
them. These would be read only by other academics,
who in turn would use them to churn out more. It
reminded John of the way a caged
hamster could run on its little treadmill, exerting
tremendous amounts of energy, staying in exactly
the same place. He'd read that a hamster could
run up to eight miles a day this way, never
moving forward a single inch.
"At least," Goatstroke was saying, "at
least you will institutionalize the child once it is
born? Surely your religious strictures will
allow you that?"
John frowned. "Religious strictures?"
"We might as well be open about it, John.
I know your religion forbids abortion."
John was still frowning. "I guess so," he said
slowly. "I hadn't thought about it."
Goatstroke shook his head. "The Dark
Ages still cast their shadow on the brightest minds."
John thought about trying to convince Goatstroke
that my decision to keep Adam had virtually
nothing to do with organized religion. In the end,
he decided it wasn't worth the pain it would
cause his sore throat. The professor
didn't seem to have any desire to listen
to John's explanation about anything. He was still
talking, so John just sat quietly, folding his
hands in his lap like a little boy hearing a story.
"I'll be blunt," said Goatstroke.
"You've got to get back on track with this
dissertation. That should be your complete focus--not
worrying about some defective child that doesn't even
have to be born."
John nodded again, almost absentmindedly. A
peculiar thought had just occurred to him. At first it
was just a whisper, like the buzzing of a mosquito.
He brushed it away a few times, but it came
back, until suddenly it popped into clear
focus.
Professor Goatstroke was going to die.
This simple truth struck John with the force of a
subway train. He had never thought about
Goatstroke's death, not even when it would have saved
him from handing in a chapter of his dissertation. It
wasn't that the death was imminent, or even in the
middle future. The point was not that it was soon,
only that it was coming. Inexorably. Inevitably.
John looked around the office again, at the many
degrees and honors hanging on the walls. He
wondered what comfort the office brought
to Goatstroke, whether it helped him through the
nights. Maybe the ordinary nights, John
decided. The nights when tragedy was
comfortably far away, when bad news could be
flicked out of the room with the touch of the remote
control. But what about the other nights, John
wondered, the nights when Goatstroke was ill,
when he had lost a friend, when he saw in the
mirror that his body was acquiring the
stoop-shouldered fragility of an old man?
John's head ached mightily as he realized that
he, himself, could not have been comforted by anything in that
office. Maybe it worked for Goatstroke but not for
John. He saw nothing on the professor's
walls worth trading for a piece of his life.
Goatstroke had been talking for some time. He
paused, frustrated, when he realized that John
had barely heard him.
At the sudden silence, John's attention
snapped back to the conversation. He cleared his
swollen throat. He knew that what he was about
to say would ruin him in Goatstroke's eyes.
He didn't understand why he was going to say it, why
saying it seemed extremely important.
"It's not only Martha," John said. "I
mean, it is her choice to make, but I agree with her. I want the baby too."
Goatstroke's reaction, predictable as it
was, still stung. John watched the disbelief in the
older man's eyes turn to anger, anger at
John's decision, and even more, at what amounted
to insubordination. It was the first time in their
relationship that John had discounted his mentor's
advice.
"Well," said Goatstroke curtly. "It's
your life. I suppose you can do what you want with
it."
"Yes," said John. His head felt numb.
He took a final glance around the cramped, dingy
office, marveling that he had never put into words how
much it looked and felt like a cage.
"I'll read over this," said Goatstroke,
picking up the papers John had left on his
desk. "I certainly hope it's good enough."
John nodded. He knew it wouldn't be good
enough.
They made their formal good-byes, and John
turned and left the office, the professor's
eyes burning into his back. He stopped for a
moment in the hall as the door slowly closed.
Through the frosted glass he could see Goatstroke
bending toward another article, stroking the little
hamster on his chin. Eight miles a
day, John thought again, and never moving an inch.
As he took his first few steps away from the
office, John felt crushed, stunned by the
damage he had wreaked on his own career with a few
misplaced words. He began to berate himself for
speaking up to Goatstroke--but surprisingly, when
he reconsidered the encounter, he didn't feel
sorry at all. Instead he had a sensation of the
immense weight slowly beginning to slide off him.
The farther he got from Goatstroke's office, the
lighter he felt. By the time he reached the outside
door of the building, he was almost running, his toes
bouncing him into the air with every step. He left the
building with his head pounding, the soreness in his
throat spreading to his lungs, his heart broken,
and the wreckage of his fledgling career falling down
around his ears. He should have been devastated, he
thought. Any sane person would be. But instead, as
John emerged into the frozen afternoon and began
to sprint along the pathway that led away from
Professor Goatstroke's office, he felt
more and more as though he were flying.




Four days after hearing the diagnosis, I still
wasn't able to eat or sleep. My body
seemed to have decided not to go forward with any normal
functioning until it heard better news.
Better news was not to be had. I looked. I
looked everywhere. Information about Down syndrome was
surprisingly hard to find at Harvard, but I
read what I could find with desperate intensity.
Later, when the people around me had time to marshal
better resources, I would learn a few
not-so-awful things about my son's condition. But those
first few days, I swallowed thousands of appalling
bits of information from insensitive and outdated
sources. I swallowed them without even chewing.
I have seen the same sort of craving for information
in people who have lost loved ones to illness or injury.
They rivet all their attention on the postmortem
analysis or the police report or the black
box, clinging to the facts of the case as though understanding
the cause of death will soften its horrible finality.
As far as I can tell, this never really works. When
all the data are in, when the case is closed and
sealed, the dead are still dead.
My situation in the months before
Adam's birth was in some ways better than this,
and in other ways worse. On the one hand, I was
still having a baby. He still bounced around on my
bladder and invited me down for the occasional game of
Prod. On the other hand, the more I learned about
all the possible problems connected with Down
syndrome, the more I became afraid of him. I
went into a state of alternating protectiveness and
terror toward the baby. Half the time the
exploratory thumps from my insides seemed to come from a monster, like that disgusting creature in the
movie Alien that rips its way out of a crew
member's abdomen and sets out to eat every human it
encounters. Then, just when I was ready to lose my
mind, I would accidentally glance at the ultrasound
picture of Adam floating around in the
amniotic fluid like a perfect, sweet-faced
doll, and feel a love so strong it shattered the
fear like a pure, high tone shatters crystal.
Then I would set out to read more about Down
syndrome, by way of becoming a better mother, and the
fear would begin to harden all over again.
The little mustard-yellow book I'd bought at the
Coop was the worst. It had last been updated in
about 1950, when people with Down syndrome were rarely
seen outside of institutions. I understand now, and
I want to state for the record, that putting a
person with Down's into an institution is like forcing
an otter to live in a Pringle's can. There is
nothing wrong with the social adaptability of people like
Adam. They are as gregarious as any
"normal" person, more so than many, and thrive on
loving interaction. They also learn social
skills as quickly as any child, given normal
treatment. It makes me sick to think of the thousands
of children who were raised in institutions before the last
couple of decades. Isolated, bored, and aching
with loneliness, many literally turned their faces to the
wall and died by the time they were in their teens or
early twenties. The mustard book described this
as the normal life course for the human beings it
called "mongoloid idiots."
Oh, that book was full of tasty treats for the
parent of a child with Down's. I've met hundreds
of parents whose decisions about their children's lives were
made on the basis of such incredible misinformation.
My book declared grandly that the birth of a Down
syndrome child generally destroyed the mother's mental
health, as well as the life of any older sisters
that might be in the family (brothers, it
said, were exempt, since they were not expected
to fill a caretaking role). It gave
absolutely false information about the inability of
such children to control their bodily functions, and their
antisocial inclinations. It listed the typical
IQ for "mongoloids" as about 35, and by way of
comparison, mentioned that the IQ of a chimpanzee
is about 50 and that of the average oak tree is
3. (i don't know how you'd test the IQ of
an oak tree, but apparently the authors of this
particular book got one to answer at least a
few questions.) It was impossible for me to keep myself
from calculating that this meant my son's IQ would
be about 130 points below the average of my oft
tested siblings, and only 32 points higher than
the plants in Harvard Yard.
A year later, when we had moved to Utah and
I was doing research for my dissertation, I ran
across that mustard-yellow book in a box of
reference materials. By that time, Adam was an
adventurous, affectionate little boy who loved
to draw, tickle his sister, and explore all our
floor-level kitchen cabinets. I had learned
a great deal about the fear and misjudgment that had
been leveled at people with Down syndrome for so many
years. Just a glance at that book yanked me
abruptly back to the days after Adam's
diagnosis, when I hadn't learned any of these
things, when I'd forced myself to read and accept
claims that were both untrue and brutally unkind.
Before I was aware of having moved, I slammed that
book across the room so hard that pages flew like
feathers when it hit the wall. I chased it down,
grabbed it, and tore it straight across and then down
the middle, with the same kind of fevered strength that
enables a mother to lift a life-crushing weight, like
a tractor or a stereotype, off her pinned and
struggling child.
In the days following Adam's diagnosis,
however, I seemed to have no strength at all. I
made a halfhearted effort at sleeping but
barely even tried to eat. It had been
difficult enough before, with the nausea killing my
appetite. Once I heard about the Down
syndrome, it simply became impossible. After
four days of numbness and physical decline, I
finally admitted to myself that I probably needed
another IV. It wasn't as if this was a new
idea--I'd been getting them regularly for
months--but the thought of going back
to University Health Services was almost
unbearable. The place had become so aversive
to me that I would go blocks out of my way to avoid
walking past it. It took a lot of misery
to get me to the point of going inside and mentioning that
I was, once again, dehydrated. I felt like
a plant that had to be watered every few days. An
oak tree, perhaps.
Nevertheless, it was with considerable relief that I
finally lay down on one of the clinic's two beds
and allowed yet another fledgling Florence
Nightingale to try to lace the IV needle
into my legendary veins. They were so limp from
dehydration that this particular nurse punctured
all the available forearm locations and ended up
inserting the drip in my ankle. I didn't mind
at all, though, because before she even got started with the
needle, she read my chart and turned to me with a
look of such compassion that it almost unhinged me. Then
she set her cool, soft hand on mine and
whispered, "He's going to be a beautiful baby.
I have a brother." This is the way families who
have an Adam talk to each other, in a gentle,
indirect language that requires very little
explanation. I cried the whole time that nurse was
there, and it had nothing to do with needles.
By the time the glucose solution had begun
to plump up my veins and my head cleared a little,
it was 8:00 P.m. and dark as death outside.
The admitting physician had recommended that I
spend the night at the infirmary, to see if I
would be able to hold down food once my stores of
electrolytes were replenished, so I settled in
and prepared to try to sleep.
The infirmary was a small room with four beds,
steel ones, bolted to warped linoleum under harsh
fluorescent lights. I had been there twice
before, once when a friend of mine sicked out of a test
by eating a bar of soap, and again when one of
John's roommates had developed some sort
of psychogenic paralysis, also because of exam
anxiety. That infirmary filled right up around
exam time. The night I stayed there, however, was
near the beginning of the spring semester, and the room was
nearly empty. There was only one patient besides
me, a woman named Maude, who worked in the
dormitory kitchens. Maude had an
extraordinarily thick Boston accent and a face
like a lump of bread dough, from which her eyes peered
like inset raisins. She told me that she
was in the infirmary because she was unable to pee without a
catheter. The doctors were trying to figure out why.
Maude voiced my own feeling that the
fluorescent lighting was extremely
unpleasant. After pressing our "call nurse"
buttons for a while with no result, we decided
that I should get out of bed and hop over to switch it
off, holding my plugged-in ankle carefully so
as not to rip out the IV. My mission
accomplished, Maude switched on a little reading
light she had brought from home, casting a small
yellow glow. "Is this going to keep you awake,
Mather deah?" she asked kindly.
I shook my head and closed my eyes. My
body was feeling better as it absorbed liquid,
but my soul hurt so much I could hardly talk.
I didn't think I would be able to sleep.
"I'm just going to stay awake," said Maude,
"because I have a visitor coming. I'm helping my
friend study for the bar exam."
I opened one eye and said, "Oh. That's good."
I was a little surprised that Maude should be
helping someone become an attorney, then immediately
berated myself for being so classist. Still, I was
surprised again when Maude's friend showed up. I
had expected another woman, maybe someone
Maude's age who had decided to go back
to school. The friend turned out to be a huge,
twenty-something African-American man named
Emory, who wore so much jewelry that it jingled
faintly whenever he moved. Maude didn't
introduce us; she thought I was asleep, which was
fine with me. I watched through my eyelashes as
Emory pulled the visitor's chair close
to Maude's bed and handed her a book.
"Okay," he said. "Quiz me."
At the sound of his voice, I opened my eyes
all the way and looked at him in wonder. It was
one of those almost inhumanly beautiful voices, like
the deep, echoing hum of a cello played softly.
Emory kept his voice down, to avoid waking
me, and I found that just by concentrating on his lovely
voice, I could go to that soothing, half-conscious
state between waking and sleeping. To this day, whenever I
get a little anxious, I go back to the sound of
Emory's voice.
"Wheah should I staht, deah?" said Maude.
"Anywhere," Emory told her.
"All right, then," she said. "Margarita."
There was a pause before Emory said,
"Three parts tequila, one part triple sec,
juice from half a lime. Salt the glass
rim. Frozen or on the rocks."
They weren't looking at me, over in my
darkened corner of the room. This was good, because I'm
not sure exactly what expression showed up on
my face as I realized that when Maude had said
"bar exam," she'd meant bar exam.
"Whiskey sour," she said, and Emory
responded, "Four parts rye whiskey, one part
lemon juice, a teaspoon of sugar. Garnish
with a maraschino cherry and a slice of orange."
That was the first time since Adam's diagnosis
that I had been yanked out of my introverted
despair and into a kind of lightheartedness. I
remembered my older sister, in the midst of a
hellish divorce, mentioning that life would be
completely unbearable if it weren't so hilarious.
I began to laugh under my breath, and then the tears
came again, and I began to relax. The sound of
Emory's voice, listing the mellifluous
recipes for various alcoholic drinks, soothed
me to sleep like a lullaby.
The next morning I was awakened by four
doctors, who marched into the room in a vaguely
military procession. Three of them looked young
and were unfamiliar to me; the fourth was one of the many
doctors connected to the clinic's obstetrical
unit. This doctor, whom I will call
Grendel, was a popular topic of conversation
among the women who came to University Health
Services for their prenatal care. Everyone
wanted Grendel to be on call when they actually
delivered their babies. He was supposed to be a
wonder in the delivery room: gracious and
concerned and incredibly skillful. However, no one
wanted to have Grendel conduct her prenatal
exams. He apparently didn't think much of these
routine appointments, and his bedside manner tended
to be aloof, if not downright disdainful.
I myself had been examined by Grendel only
once, about three months into my pregnancy. I
was used to chatting a little with the doctors before the
actual exam, on the old-fashioned grounds that
it's nice to be on speaking terms with a person before
you allow him or her unlimited access to your
genital region. When I'd spoken
to Grendel, he'd look at me with an
expression of disgust and answered not a word. During
the entire exam, he remained silent
except to ask me medical questions. He never
looked at my face or smiled. He left me
with the impression that I was distinctly unworthy of his
time and attention. Judging from what other patients
said about their appointments with Grendel, this seemed
to have been his usual demeanor.
I was therefore very surprised to see Grendel
approach my bed in the infirmary that morning,
trailing his three disciples. The younger
physicians lined up against the wall beside my bed,
while Grendel walked right up and peered
earnestly into my eyes. He was short, with very
thick glasses, through which his eyes peered with
peculiar intensity, and the skin on his face was very
tight, as though it had been stretched across his
bones. He had no visible lips.
I blinked, pulling myself awake, wondering
what Dr. Grendel was doing at my bedside.
At some level, I jumped to the conclusion that
since mine was now officially a "high-risk"
pregnancy, Dr. Grendel had decided it was
worth his time. I felt a surge of relief,
knowing his reputation as a superb obstetrician and
believing that, somehow, his presence would give my
baby a better chance.
"Good morning, Martha," said Grendel. I was
amazed. He virtually never addressed his
patients at all, much less by their first names. His
voice was friendly and kind, with a little sadness around the
edges.
"Morning," I said.
"Do you mind if I sit down?" The only
visitor's chair was still over by Maude.
Grendel patted the foot of my bed, and I
nodded. He sat down sidesaddle.
"How are you feeling?" he asked.
I thought about it. "Better," I said. "I'm
not sure I'll be able to keep down any food,
but I feel like I could try."
Grendel nodded, the skin on his neck relaxing
and then stretching tight again. "Your chart says that you
haven't eaten for four days."
I felt myself blush, embarrassed. "I know.
I tried."
Grendel gave a long sigh, looking away from
me and down at the toes of his shoes.
"We all know what you're trying to do," he said
gently.
I glanced at the three young doctors, who were
looking on with apparent interest. "You
do?" I said. I myself didn't know what I was
trying to do. I was hoping they could tell me.
"There are more efficient ways to take care of this
problem than starving yourself until the fetus
dies," said Grendel.
I stared at him. "Excuse me?"
"Martha, it's obvious," he said. He
looked at me again, his face suddenly stern.
"Why else would you stop eating?"
For a minute I just opened and closed my mouth
without making any noise, like a fish. Then I
said, "But I've been sick all along. And
I'm upset, and--"
"Exactly," Grendel cut in. "You're
upset. I think it's time to let us take care of
it for you."
I was getting the picture. I felt myself go
cold inside, as though I had swallowed liquid
nitrogen.
"Martha, listen to me," said Grendel
urgently. His piercing little eyes were full of
concern. "I have been in this business for a very long
time. I've had several cases like yours, and in every
case, the woman has made ... uh ... the
other decision."
I was beginning to tremble. I wished that I had
my clothes on, instead of the hospital napkin.
I didn't know what to say.
"You are also the youngest woman I have ever dealt
with on this particular problem," said Grendel. He
paused meaningfully, glancing up at the three
student doctors arrayed along the wall.
It took me a second to catch on. Then I
said, "You think I'm making this decision because I'm
too young to know better?"
Grendel didn't even look at me. He
and the three disciples nodded at each other.
I felt dizzy, overwhelmed. It was true that
I was young and inexperienced, but the chief effect that
I could see was that I didn't know how to assert
myself with world-renowned obstetricians.
EXPECTING ADAM


"You realize," Grendel went on, "that you are
placing a very heavy burden on yourself and your entire
family. Did you know that eighty percent of
couples who have a child with this condition end up
divorcing?"
I swallowed, though my mouth was very dry.
"No," I said. "I didn't know that."
"I would not make the choice that you have made,"
he went on steadily. "I have never known anyone
who would."
The other doctors were watching me intently, as
if I were a tree that Grendel was chopping down and
they were waiting to see me topple.
"I don't know," I mumbled. "I guess
I just ... I just can't reject him."
It was a miserably inadequate statement.
My real feeling, the one I couldn't articulate
yet, was that my entire life hinged on knowing that there
were people who would continue to love me unconditionally,
even if I were damaged, even if I were sick.
Such love was the only thing that had sustained me
during the turmoil of the past months. If I
eliminated my child because of his disability, if I
put him out of my life, I would be violating the
only thing that was keeping me alive. I'd be
ripping the rug out from under my own feet.
Grendel was looking at me with obvious
frustration. The skin across his cheekbones tightened
even more as he pursed his lips.
"Well, I can't do the operation against your will,"
he said. "Of course, if a patient came in
here with a malignant tumor and refused to let me
remove it, I couldn't do that operation either. Even
if we all knew what was best."
The other doctors nodded.
It is difficult to convey the fear and despair
I felt as the weight of their collective
disapproval bore down on me. It was like a
wall of ice backing me slowly into a corner.
I could hardly breathe. I remember wishing
desperately that Dr. Grendel would move away
from me, get off the bed, give me some space.
Since that time, beginning a few months after
Adam's birth, I have addressed a number of
medical conferences on the topic of ethics
related to the new obstetrical
technologies. My firm opinion is that women
should be given all relevant medical information and then allowed to make up their own minds about whether
or not to abort their fetuses. Invariably, I
am approached after these conferences by doctors--never
nurses, always doctors--who disagree with me.
They argue quite explicitly that they are highly
trained professionals, that their opinions are far
more informed than the average pregnant woman's,
and that they are therefore in a much better position
to make the right decision about any particular
woman's abortion than the woman herself. Some of
these physicians are pro-lifers who would never
abort a fetus with Down syndrome, others would
do so without exception. I would like to take this
opportunity to invite all such doctors (and I
recognize that they represent a minority of their
profession) to fold it five ways and put it where
the sun don't shine.
Oh, I'm sorry--do I sound a little
bitter? H'm. Perhaps that's because, in the years
since that encounter with Dr. Grendel, I have had so
many physicians wedge their personal
prejudices into my life, into Adam's life,
and call it medical advice. Dr. Grendel,
who had never seen a woman elect to keep a
Down syndrome baby, was as ignorant as the
most severely retarded child when it came to the
actual consequences of my choice. I doubt very
much that he had ever really known anyone with Down
syndrome. I'd bet my life he'd never
loved such a person.
I once spoke to an entering class of
Harvard Medical School students about my
pregnancy and my decision. Adam was asleep
on my lap at the time, wearing a bow tie and a
dreamy expression. After the speech, I was
approached by an elderly professor whose name I
forget. He had just become the grandfather of a little girl with Down's. As he talked to me, he
stroked Adam's soft blond hair and wept.
He loved his granddaughter with inexplicable
openness, and the experience had changed his whole
life. Now there's a doctor with some real information
to offer the parents of a retarded baby. Whoever said
that love is blind was dead wrong. Love is the
only thing on this earth that lets us see each other
with the remotest accuracy.
I suppose that I am grateful to Dr.
Grendel for showing me so explicitly the
prejudice of the Harvard medical community. I
called the nurse-practitioner after he left,
to ask if any of the other obstetricians connected
with Harvard were in favor of my decision to continue
the pregnancy. She didn't think so. So after that
morning visit, I knew where I stood. Most,
if not all, of the doctors I would interact withforthe
remainder of my pregnancy disagreed with my
decision; would have considered it wiser to do away with the
baby they were helping me protect. An awkward
situation, to be sure.
At the time that Dr. Grendel sat on my bed
and tried to talk some sense into me, it was almost more
than I could bear. After all, I was a good
girl, a conscientious student, a high achiever.
I always did what the grown-ups said to do,
especially when they were prestigious and successful
grown-ups. I knew that I was still certain I
didn't want an abortion, but I was completely
unskilled in the practice of disagreeing with an
authority figure--let alone a whole team of
authority figures like Grendel and the Go-Gos.
Fortunately, the puppeteers were there.
Grendel was launching into a recitation of various
horrible things about children with Down syndrome when that
voice--the calm, inaudible voice I had heard
a few times before--drowned out the doctor's voice
with a simple question.
Why is he doing this?
I looked at Grendel closely, suddenly
feeling like an observer rather than a patient. Why,
indeed. This man always made a great show of being
too busy even to look at his patients. Why was
he spending this inordinate amount of time trying
to convince me to abort a child he would probably
never even see?
As I considered this question, a strange thing began
to happen. It was a little bit like the Seeing Thing, in
that I had a visual impression of something that
wasn't physically there. But I wasn't seeing
across distance this time. I was seeing through facades.
I looked at Grendel's face, and there, just behind
the tight-stretched skin, I seemed to see another
face appear. It was Grendel, but not the wise and
solemn physician who was displaying his
technique to the three students. This face was
terrified. The fear in its eyes were heavily
laced with pain, old pain, pain so deep it had
become a way of life.
Grendel was scared to death.
This kind of seeing has happened to me many times
since. I believe it happens to everyone. It
happens when you meet some smiling person and walk
away with the distinct impression that the person means
you no good. It happens when a teenager lashes out
at you, and instead of anger you suddenly see the
bewildered battle he is fighting inside himself.
It happens when you strike up an acquaintance
and, within fifteen minutes, know you have made a friend.
I believe our intuition is far more delicate,
and accurate, than we allow ourselves to admit. I
had to be pushed to the brink of complete breakdown
before I let myself trust mine, or even notice
what it was telling me. But that day in the infirmary,
it was so incredibly vivid, so visual, that it
stunned me. My fear of Grendel was completely
gone. The doctor was like a bee, a snake, a
dog; he was attacking me only because he felt that
I threatened his survival.
Why should this be? I relaxed and looked
frankly at the second face that drifted,
panicky and bewildered, behind Grendel's
strange, taut skin. I examined this new face
with some care. The fear in it spoke to me of a
lifetime spent desperately avoiding the stigma
of stupidity, of failure, of not measuring up.
I knew plenty of premeds at Harvard, and as
a group, I think they were even more obsessed than
the rest of us with climbing to the very top of the prestige
heap. They were famous for things like razoring out the
pages in the reserved readings for their courses, so
that none of their classmates could study the
material. It was said that it took two Harvard
premeds to change a lightbulb, one to change the
bulb and the other to push the ladder out from under him.
Dr. Grendel had fought his way through the
increasingly rarefied ranks of such people to achieve the
apex of his profession. Something had driven him
all that way, and it wasn't just affection for his
patients. I was convinced, looking at his
fear-face, that Grendel's entire philosophy
of life centered on obliterating the stupid little
boy inside him. It was that person he feared,
desperately feared, and this was why he was begging so
earnestly for a chance to obliterate the stupid little
boy inside me.
I looked at Grendel, and I looked at his
acolytes. They, too, had their fears and their
agendas. It was obvious to me as I looked through
the new set of eyes Adam had given
me. As Grendel finished his closing arguments,
I stretched out to my full length on the bed, pushing the doctor slightly aside with my feet.
"Thank you," I said. "You can go now."
Grendel and the gang stared at me in frustration
and disbelief. The doctor chewed his lip with
obvious anxiety, the fear-face trembling under
his physical visage like that of a man facing
execution. Eventually, he heaved a huge sigh
and rubbed his hands together emphatically, making a
clear point to the other doctors that he was washing his
hands of this matter, once and for all. As they filed
out of the room, Adam gave me a cheerful
wallop just below the navel. Grendel was last in
line, and before he left, his fear-face, though not his
flesh-and-blood head, turned to look behind him with
those terrified eyes. I could see the fear, as
clear as day, but I didn't feel it.
Briefly, for the first time since I had bought the
mustard-yellow book and started soaking in the
prejudices against the developmentally disabled world,
I was not afraid at all.




When Adam was a little bitty critter, about
two years old and not yet twenty pounds, our
whole family went for a ride on the World's
Steepest Skytram. The Skytram was located
near our home in the Rocky Mountains. John
had just received his Ph.d. and was teaching at the
university where both our fathers worked, while I
wrote my dissertation. There weren't many exciting
things to do in that region of the country, but the
Skytram was definitely one of them. It was
basically a Plexiglas box hanging from a
cable, with seats for passengers inside. It went
up from a canyon streambed to the top of a minor
mountain peak, rising about a thousand feet in less
than half a mile. It looked pretty darn
near vertical even from ground level, and when you
actually got in the box and it started chugging its
way up, any fear of heights you may ever have
possessed tapped you politely on the shoulder and
said, "What the hell do you think you're doing?"
The most frightening thing about the Skytram
experience was that the floor of the box was as clear as
glass. Looking out the side windows was slightly
unnerving in itself, but the first time you glanced
down and saw all that nothingness gaping below you was
truly a religious experience. I myself am no
more bothered by heights than the average person.
I'm not afraid to fly, and I've rappelled
down sheer cliff faces without hesitation or
alarm. But that day on the Skytram--when I first
saw my children sitting on slick plastic seats
above a sheer drop to the whitewater rapids below
us--there was a moment when I seriously questioned whether
Adam was the only one in the family who needed a
diaper.
Adam was sitting on John's lap. He was
going through a phase of farsightedness, which is common
in kids with Down's, and he was wearing these little
glasses that magnified his eyes. They made him
appear very solemn and wise, especially for one so
diminutive. As we rose from ground level,
Adam was captivated by the view of the mountain
peaks around us. He pointed and babbled as we
passed huge evergreen trees and outcroppings of
stone. Then, absentmindedly, he looked down.
I happened to be watching him at the time. He
froze the second his gaze fell to the invisible
floor, and his eyes went huge behind his glasses.
For a few long seconds he sat completely still
in John's lap, staring downward and taking deep
breaths, as if trying to collect himself. Then his
expression changed, as though he had come to some
sort of conclusion. He reached out one tiny, chubby
hand, put it under John's chin, and pushed up as
hard as he could.
"Whatcha doing, Adam?" said John, pulling
his head back.
Adam had to turn toward John's body and
struggle to his knees in order to keep his hand under
John's chin. Once he was firmly in
position, he reached his other hand over to me and
tried to push my chin up, too. At that time,
Adam was still years away from his first word. I
didn't know whether he had ever experienced anything
like an abstract thought, or whether he was just a
frisky, farsighted form of vegetable life. In
this context it was startling to realize how clearly
Adam had evaluated the situation on the
Skytram, and how he'd decided to respond
to it. He was protecting us. He didn't seem
to fear looking down himself, but he wanted to spare
John and me the terror of dangling out in space
with no visible means of support. Adam
clearly knew, even then, that he was much
better at handling anxiety than either of his
parents.
Looking back on the Skytram experience,
I am particularly struck by how solicitous
Adam was of John. My husband is not the kind
of person who shows his fears easily. As I've
already said, he hid his vulnerabilities better
than most people I encountered at Harvard--and that's
saying something. I know John as well as anyone
on earth, and even I often can't see through his
nonchalant exterior to any fears that may be
lurking inside. But Adam can. He can read
John like big red letters on a neon sign. He
knew perfectly well, that day on the
Skytram, that letting his father stare down at the
whitewater so far below us would have been a serious
mistake.
The sensation I had on that tram was very like the
feeling I lived with during the last few months
before Adam was born. I kept moving
inexorably toward having the baby, my body
growing, my mind disintegrating. As far as I can
tell, my connection to reality was about as tenuous as
that pathetic little cable stretched between streambed and
cliff. Unfortunately, Adam was not yet in a
position to keep me from focusing my full
attention on every possible danger. I "looked
down," so to speak, the whole damn time. I sat
around brooding and worrying and grieving as though
I'd forgotten how to do anything else, because I
had. I didn't sleep well, couldn't eat
much, cried frequently. I leaned heavily on
the care and generosity of Sibyl and Deirdre and
other friends. I grieved less openly around these people
than I did when I was alone, but when the chips were
down, I knew that it was all right to show how much
pain I was feeling.
John, by contrast, was Mr. Stoicism. His
mother kindly confided in me about the loss of her own
first and fourth babies, neither of whom lived long enough
for John to know them. I was comforted to know I was not the
only mother who had ever grieved, but I was also
amazed at my mother-in-law's pioneer toughness.
She never got so much as a quaver in her voice
as she described her babies' deaths. This was
John's family legacy--and John, we must
remember, is a guy. A male of the species.
Whatever changes the last few decades have wrought
on our culture's expectations of fatherhood, it
doesn't take a Beck to know that Real
Men don't sit around oozing tears and fears in
relation to unborn babies. A Real Man
stays out working or drinking while his wife throws the
calf; then he waits a few years, takes the
kid out to the corral, and teaches him to fight.
Without crying. The very thought of crying makes a
Real Man want to hawk up a big gob of
tobacco juice and spit it on your shoes.
It was especially difficult for John to take
in any of the emotional impact of Adam's
diagnosis when there was so much to be done just
maintaining our family. Much later, John would
admit to me that the only way he managed to keep
going, to keep getting up after two hours of
sleep and working on his dissertation and taking care of
Katie and dragging me to the hospital for
refills and preparing consulting presentations and
holding me while I cried and all the rest of it,
was to pretend that nothing was happening except the immediate
task before him. For the last third of my
pregnancy, John didn't really believe that
we had a baby coming, let alone a retarded one.
He couldn't. It would have been too much for him. This
coping mechanism got him--got us--through that time.
It also led to a lot of arguments.
"Look, Martha," John would say when he
found me snuffling and dripping on yet another
open textbook, "it's really time you got over this
and got on with your life."
"Got over it?" I would sob. "How can you
even say that? Doesn't this bother you at
all?" (i talked in italics a lot during
that time.)
John would look at me thoughtfully for a
minute, and then he would say, "No, not really,"
with the serene conviction of a man in complete denial.
"It doesn't?" I'd gasp. "Why not?
Why in God's name not? How can you .be this way?"
"I just think about something else," John would
explain patiently. "You should, too. Then
maybe you wouldn't get so hysterical."
"Just think about something else?" I'd shout,
almost frothing at the mouth. "Okay, tough guy,
let's try this--I'll get a retarded person
to kick you in the stomach every thirty seconds, and
then we'll see how easy it is for you to think
about something else!"
In short, as Grendel the obstetrician had
promised me, the whole Adam thing was getting very
hard on our marriage. It was years before
I realized how close I came to losing John
just when I needed him most. Since he was a Real
Man, or at least doing a reasonably good
impression of a Real Man, I actually
believed that all the chaos I felt in my own
life wasn't really bothering him. Adam was about
four or five before John told me that when he
left for Asia in March of 1988, he had
pretty much decided he wasn't coming back.
It was a long trip: ten days in Singapore,
another three in Japan. During the Singapore
phase, while he was working with the other consultants,
John felt like a wounded old man at a high
school pep rally. His heart felt too tired
to beat, his lungs to breathe. Instead of racing ahead
of everyone else at work, as he was accustomed
to doing, he had to force himself to keep pace. During
lunch breaks, when his colleagues headed off to a
restaurant or bar, he would excuse himself and
set out for endless, aimless walks through the muggy
streets of Singapore. He came home with a
brick-red upper body where the tropical sun
had burnt him through the fabric of his shirt,
except for a pale arrow in the shape of his tie
down the center of his chest. It must have been
incredibly uncomfortable to wander so long in that
suffocating climate, but John didn't
notice it. He was so far gone he didn't
feel much of anything.
I was in close contact with him during that trip,
although we didn't talk much on the phone. The
Seeing Thing happened to me intermittently the
whole time. It didn't surprise me; in
fact, I had come to expect it. One day, when
I had slipped into that half-conscious state between
sleeping and waking, I dreamed of a great, gray,
growling creature, like a Chinese dragon. It
had translucent skin, through which its veins showed in
vivid white flashes. This strange image
cheered me up. I'd done my undergraduate
thesis on Chinese folklore, so I knew that the
year Adam would be born, the Year of the
Dragon, was the most auspicious of birth
signs. When a mother dreams of dragons, it
sends a very positive message about her baby.
A few hours later, John called from
Japan to tell me that he had just flown over the
Philippines during a midnight thunderstorm. It
was, he said, as strange and beautiful a sight
as he had ever seen. The lightning flashing
within the smoky clouds had lit them with
brilliant, jagged lines, white and blue and
faintly pink. I remember feeling a moment of
genuine disappointment that the mental image I had
seen was not a Chinese omen but merely a
telepathic transmission from my husband, ten
thousand miles away. It is at times like these that
one realizes just how far off the deep end one has
really gone.
Whenever the Seeing Thing happened during that
trip, the emotion that came with it was one of almost
unendurable sadness. I believed--still do--that the
sadness I felt during those moments was actually
John's. What I didn't know was that he was not
simply grieving the loss of our son's
normalcy, as I was doing. He was on the verge
of something even more drastic. John had not yet
articulated it to himself, but in a wordless, deadened
way, he knew that he was about to make a choice.
He knew that he should return to Cambridge and
pick up his many burdens, as he had been trained
to do, without question or complaint. But what he wanted
to do was stay in Asia, perhaps move into a full-time
position with his company's Asian office. If
worse came to worst and the firm didn't need him
there, he could always teach English in Japan
until he got a better job. He would send
money back to me and Katie and the Monster
Fetus, and then later--much later, when the baby
was a known quantity and John was well rested again
--we could all join him overseas.
From John's perspective, there were many things
to recommend this plan. Long-distance relationships,
with separations of years' duration, are not uncommon
among international executives and their spouses.
John knew that he could make enough money as a
full-time consultant to support me and the children
comfortably, even though he wouldn't be physically
near us. And then there was the conviction that
Professor Goatstroke had firmly
implanted in John's mind: that if Adam
actually made it to being born (but not as far as
entering an institution), John would never earn his
degree. All his years of work and sacrifice,
all his hopes for his future career, would come
to nothing. It was an overwhelming thought. When he was
tired and stressed, which was always, it heavily
outweighed the memory of the strange voice that had
told him, John, keep the baby. Listening
to the voice was manifestly ridiculous.
In the final analysis, staying in Asia, doing
on-site research, and freeing himself from all but
financial responsibility for his family
seemed to John the only possible way to prove
his commitment to his work and become truly
Successful.
The worst part of the plan was the thought of leaving me
alone with two very dependent children. But deep in his
gut, John had reached the anger stage of the
grieving process, and much of his anger was
directed at me. In a very real way, I was the
one who had chosen to make our lives so hard. I
had unilaterally decided to keep the baby, early
on when I realized I was pregnant and later,
when we knew about the Down syndrome. John was
not one to butt in on a woman's right to make her
own choices in such matters. Nevertheless, he
felt profoundly helpless and disempowered. There were
two or three times after the amniocentesis
results came back that John hinted around about
how awful it was to have so little say in something that
affected him so profoundly. I responded
by narrowing my eyes and asking him if he liked
feeling the way women have felt throughout history,
at almost all times and all places. This tended
to close down the discussion pretty quickly, leaving
John's feelings unaired and his preferences
rebuffed without any hearing at all, let alone a
fair one.
So it was that on a chilly evening in March,
John sat in a Tokyo jazz bar and toyed with the
idea of boarding a plane for Singapore, instead
of Los Angeles, the next morning. He had
gone to the bar to hear the blues, which were being sung with
skill and passion by a little Japanese man in a
fez. It was a deeply incongruous scene.
Nevertheless, it helped John get through his
numbness. He sat in the dark, amid packed-in
Japanese customers, and began to feel things for the
first time in weeks. Then he immediately and devoutly
wished he could go numb again. His feelings, from the
ache in his head to the guilt and sorrow in his heart,
were all but unbearable. John dropped his head
into his hands and sat there aching. The people around him
politely pretended not to notice. The
Japanese are good at that.
John was not drunk when he left the bar, but
he might as well have been. The melting pot of
pan-Pacific germs in his body, combined with
fatigue and topped off by a hefty
dose of despair, made him stagger back and forth
on the narrow sidewalk like a long-term
alcoholic. It was past midnight and very cool.
The light of a bright half-moon shone on the
narrow, labyrinthine streets. John set out
along those streets, not caring where he went, just
putting his legs in motion. The motion, the sense of
physically running away, came as a great
relief.
He still hadn't made up his mind what he should
do about his future. No matter how many times he
went over it, staying in Asia seemed like the only
rational option. Rationality, of course, was the
essence of a Harvard man, but the rational course
ahead of him wrenched his emotions so hard he thought
it might destroy him. On the other hand, the thought
of going back to the wreckage of his life in
Cambridge was intolerable. John stopped thinking
and sped up a little. He had no idea where he was
going; he just wanted to move away from where he
was. It seemed advisable to continue walking
until he either felt better or fell over
dead.
John wandered for hours, away from the posh
thoroughfares near the jazz bar, past the light and
noise of other popular nightspots, through
centuries-old streets so narrow he could touch
buildings on both sides simultaneously with the
tips of his outstretched fingers. The previous
summer, when we'd lived in Tokyo, I had
managed to get spectacularly lost almost every time
I walked out of the house. John never did. This
was due partly to an excellent innate sense of
direction and partly to the fact that he had spent some
of his Mormon mission in Tokyo. John
remembered his mission as he trudged through the city
eight years later. The thought made him wince.
He had known so pathetically little then, had been
nothing more than a teenager with decent linguistic
ability and an unquestioning obedience to the norms of his
parents and his community. He'd fallen in love with
Japan, but he hadn't really been able to study
its culture and history until he'd returned
to Harvard as an Asian studies major.
As he walked, John wondered dully what
the streets of Tokyo had sounded like when thousands of
wooden sandals had clopped along them, what the
city had looked like when the great Japanese
heroes had lived. Their names rolled through his mind
as he walked: Fukuzawa,
Shibusawa, Iwasaki. It suddenly occurred
to John that during their lifetimes, none of these men
had been sure of his place in history--no more
sure than the competitors and enemies they had
beaten in their rise to power. It had never occurred
to John that these people might have felt vulnerable
to failure. And he had never quite realized that the
losers of those historic times, the men who had
faded into failure and oblivion, had probably
started out expecting to win.
It might have been two o'clock in the morning when
John finally got too tired to stand up, or it
might have been four. He had long ago stopped
keeping track of the time--or of his route, although he
had a vague idea which of Tokyo's many discrete
regions he had reached. He was standing by a row of
tiny, close-set houses. On the other side
of the narrow street, a high stone wall presented
a featureless front. John made his way
along the wall until he came to a sort of
doorway. As he had expected, the opening in the
wall was occupied by an H-shaped gateway. It
was the design that leads into most Shinto shrines.
John limped inside the wall. His right knee
hurt, and he had a large blister on the
opposite heel from walking so far in dress
shoes. He was shivering, either from the coolness of the
spring air or from fever. John didn't really
care. He knew he wanted to sit down, and he
didn't really feel capable of thinking beyond that.
The shrine held a simple rock garden
bordered with cherry trees, lovingly tended. The
cherry trees--sakura--were already beginning
to bloom. John could have smelled them if his nose
and sinuses hadn't been clogged for what seemed like
most of his life. In the center of the courtyard was a
small temple, really nothing more than a room
set on stilts. A gong hung from the roof beam.
Someone had placed a long chain of origami
paper cranes, symbols of life and hope,
near the gong. The rest of the shrine was bedecked with
small strips of white paper on which people had
written their prayers. John remembered how, as
a missionary, he had watched the Japanese stand
in front of such temples with their paper strips and
clap their hands to get the attention of the gods. He
and the other missionaries had often frequented the
shrines, hoping to find people desperate enough to believe
that a new religion, a strange American
one, might be the answer to their problems.
John thought back to the people he had actually
converted, to the things he had told them with
absolute, nineteen-year-old sincerity. He
had told anxious high school students that "the
Holy Ghost will bring all things to your
remembrance" during their excruciatingly
difficult exams. He had parroted memorized
scripts about optimism and eternal life to people
whose wounded, suspicious eyes had witnessed the
wholesale devastation of a lost war. He had
promised people maimed and damaged by that war that his
God would heal their bodies and their minds. Now,
standing in the shrine, John wanted to track down every
person he had ever spoken to during his missionary
days and tell them he was sorry. He had not
understood. He'd been callow, ignorant,
insensitive, and wrong.
There was a bench near the pathway that led up to the
temple. It was made of stone, upholstered in
moss, and rubbed smooth by centuries of use.
John walked over to it. On the way, he
stopped and faced the temple. He clapped his
hands sharply, three times, bowed as tradition
dictated, then raised the middle fingers of both
hands toward whatever gods happened to be looking
on. Then he lay down on the stone surface--
on his side, as he had seen homeless beggars
do--and closed his eyes.
Later, when John described what happened
next, he called it "a dream--sort of." I
recognized that ambivalence. I'd had the same
uncertainty about the unusual things I'd seen and
felt since Adam's conception. They had a
dreamlike quality, but at the same time they were
vivid enough to seem more real than waking experience. I understand that Jung used to call these "big
dreams." John's "big dreams," that night in
the shrine, started as nightmares. He dreamt of
fires, avalanches, and earthquakes, of
horrible accidents he could see coming but had no
power to prevent. The emotions he had stored
away, ignored, or run from over the past few
weeks surged around him like floodwater, drowning
him in rage and grief, but especially in fear.
The destruction in the nightmares seemed
simultaneously random and malignant,
absolutely indifferent to the pain it caused but
nonetheless carefully planned.
John fought to wake up, to come out of the dream, but
could only pull himself to the same place,
just below consciousness, where I had seen the
storm-dragon. The horrors in his mind's eye
continued, but at the same time John began to be
aware of his physical surroundings. He also
sensed the beginnings of an unfamiliar calm. It
was not simply absence of fear but an active
calm, a peace of enormous strength. It seemed
to emanate from everything around John, from the ancient
walls, from the stone and moss beneath his head, from the
string of paper cranes swaying in the slight
breeze.
John stopped shivering. He felt his body
relax completely, a sensation he had all but
forgotten. The nightmare was still running, but now he
observed it with curious detachment, as though he had
taken a few steps back to the cheap seats in his
own mind. He felt as if he were watching some
sort of game, looking down from the stands.
Moreover, he was not alone. There was someone
watching with him, a dear friend, someone he had known his
entire life--no, more than that. Forever. The
companionship John felt with this person was so
strong it brought tears to his eyes.
"Look at this," John said in his dream, as the
devastation continued to play out before him. "It's
horrible. It's too horrible."
The presence beside him smiled. John could feel
it. "No, it isn't so horrible," said the being.
"It depends on what you want to see. Look."
In the dream, two jumbo jets had just
collided in midair, raining twisted metal and
fire and broken bodies on the ground below. But
when John looked more closely, he could see that
every piece of wreckage was transformed as it hit
the ground. All the debris was recombining,
slowly growing into an airport. The people who had
been killed in the collision were walking through the new
buildings, boarding the new planes.
"You see," said the presence beside John, "they
are going places they could never have reached before.
It's not so bad, really. It's just that you don't
understand how it works."
Then, suddenly, John's eyes snapped open
and he was fully awake. The dream was gone. But
the calm was not. Now that he was alert, it had
actually gotten stronger. He could feel it almost
humming from the rocks and papers and cherry trees.
He could smell the scent of the sakura, so
sweet it was almost intoxicating, and he realized that
his nose had cleared. In fact, he
felt considerably better, as though he had
slept well in a good bed rather than dozed on a
stone bench after a sleepless night. But all of these
facts registered as second thoughts. John's
first thought, the one that had his full attention, was that the
presence, the calm, sympathetic being he had met
in his sleep, was still with him in the shrine. John
couldn't see him or touch him, but there was no doubt
at all that he was there.
John swung his legs over the side of the bench
and sat up. The crick in his neck that had
tortured him for months was almost gone. He sat
there rubbing his eyes for a moment. The thinnest streak
of gray had appeared in the sky above him. He
didn't know how long he had slept. He noted
all this carefully, trying to figure out if the being
he felt beside him was merely another dream.
"Who are you?" he whispered. It was awkward
and a little embarrassing to be speaking to the air. But the
answer came immediately. It came in that same
soundless, definite way I had experienced it in
the hospital, when Grendel and his fans had
assembled in my room.
"I'm Adam," said the being.
For the first time since It All Went to Hell,
John began to cry in earnest. He cried with
sheer relief, with the sense that everything was going to be
all right, even though he didn't know how. But
mostly he cried with joy at being reunited with
Adam. It had been so long since they had seen
each other that John had almost forgotten what he was
like.
John did not know that this was the same reaction
I had had six weeks before, when I saw the tiny
face on the ultrasound screen. "Oh! It's
Adam!" I had thought, not even recalling until
several minutes later that I didn't know anyone
named Adam. Now John was faced with the same
dilemma. Each of us had become privately
convinced, in the weirdest possible way, that the
baby we'd named Christian Jacob Beck was
actually an old friend of ours who went by the name of
Adam. Furthermore, each of us believed that if
we mentioned this fact to anyone, including each
other, we would be seen as mentally ill, seriously
disreputable, and possibly dangerous. I had
read a lot of books on pregnancy, including
What to Expect When You're Expecting, and
none of them covered this particular situation.
The night in the shrine was exemplary
of the way Adam operates. He goes along like
any other little boy, focusing on Star Wars and
pizza, ignoring his parents most of the time. He
lets us make our own mistakes. But I have a
theory that there are probably a lot of times when
it's hard for him to resist coming to our rescue.
I'm sure that Adam, like any good teacher,
understands that doing so would rob John and me of the
opportunity to develop qualities, such as
serenity and courage, that come naturally to him. Even
so, there are times--when fear pounces on John
or me and we feel too terrified to move forward
--that Adam shows his hand. Then he'll look at
me carefully through his small, slanted eyes and
buy me a rose, or send me a message through
Parrot Woman, or reach out, the way he did
in the Skytram, to keep John's attention from
being riveted on his fear.
I don't know the real explanation for John's
experience in the shrine that cold spring morning. But
I like to imagine Adam reasoning that John needed
his chin pushed up a little. Even though John was
perfectly safe and well supported, the
safety and support were invisible to him. His sense
that his life was falling apart was no less frightening for
being an illusion. I think Adam wanted to help
discredit that illusion. He didn't just distract
John from the terror of looking down but let him
briefly touch that invisible floor, to feel it,
to know that it was there by his own experience, rather than
mere suggestion. It would be a while before John
could stand on that floor, could get up and dance on
it. But what Adam did was enough. John came
home.



Take my advice: never attend classes
at Harvard when you're seven months pregnant
and the baby has Down syndrome and everybody
knows it. Awful doesn't even begin to describe
it.
I'm not really sure how the word got out, but it
did, and fast. Obviously, Professor
Goatstroke found out from John. I'd told some
of my own professors as well, to explain why
I looked so shell-shocked and inattentive in their
classes. I don't remember mentioning it to any
of my fellow students. It doesn't really
matter how they found out. Whatever the
mechanism, by the time I pulled myself together and showed
up on campus, Adam's diagnosis was
definitely hot news.
I didn't learn this because people talked to me about
it. They didn't. I think they would rather have died on
the rack than mention it outright. I could see that they
knew by their unnaturally cheerful smiles, the
strange, automatic tone of their voices, the
peculiar brightness of their eyes. What is it that
makes us humans stop and crane our necks
to get a view of catastrophe? I have gawked
at my own share of traffic accidents and disaster
scenes. They fascinate me, just as they do most
people, and it bothers me that I don't know why.
Maybe when I gaze at a hurt human being
I'm trying to take in the idea of my own
fragility, or perhaps I'm glad to see that some
sort of trauma has passed me by. Whatever
the reason, I am quite familiar with the feeling that
made my Harvard acquaintances stare at my
ponderous abdomen as though it were a particularly
exotic and unnerving insect they'd found under a
rock.
By sheer coincidence, my Sociology of
Gender seminar (the one in which I had so
dramatically fainted earlier that year) had
scheduled a session called "The New
Obstetrical Technologies" the very week I
found out about Adam's diagnosis. I skipped
that class, but the next week, when I returned,
the debate was still raging. The class consisted of
twenty or so graduate students, who sat around
a large table and discussed the weekly topic in
typical seminar style. I can't tell you how
surreal it felt to sit there, with Adam dancing
around my interior, while my classmates argued
about precisely the kind of highly unusual
situation I was facing.
Most of the students in the class seemed glad
that the New Obstetrical Technologies
existed but were somewhat ambivalent about their moral,
psychological, and social repercussions. This
was pretty much how I'd always felt. However,
there were other people in the class who energetically
voiced opinions that hit me like a truck. I
particularly remember one man leaning across the
table and declaring, "It is the duty of every woman
to screen her pregnancies and eliminate
fetuses that would be a detriment to society!"
At the time, I was too stunned and
exhausted to do anything more than numb out. To this day
I have no idea whether that particular classmate
knew about my situation. I don't even
remember the guy's name. But I still think about him.
I thought about him when I read an expos`e of a
Harvard-trained Latin American dictator
who tortured and killed thousands of political
opponents. I thought about him when we all
discovered that the infamous Unabomber was a Harvard
man as well--a genius, by all accounts.
I also thought about that seminar classmate on
Adam's ninth birthday. Adam had insisted on
going to a pizza-and-games arcade for his party. The
only person he'd invited besides his sisters was
someone I'll call Lonnie, whom Adam
claimed to be his girlfriend. Although I had often
heard Adam sing about Lonnie, I had never
met her, or seen Adam interact with any
girl. I was afraid that he would start humping her
leg the second she came in range. These were
fears I'd sustained since before he was born; I
thought all people with Down syndrome were grossly
overaffectionate. I was grossly wrong.
Lonnie turned out to be a beautiful child who
had a perfectly normal brain but had been
emotionally damaged by an abusive relative
during the first few years of her life. She
appeared timid and wary in the crowded pizza
parlor until Adam rushed to stand beside her. The
moment she saw him, she relaxed and broke into a
shy grin. Adam had donned his best suit and
tie for the occasion. He graciously took
Lonnie's elbow and guided her through the pizza
parlor, clearing the way in front of her with his
other hand, like a cross between a professional
bodyguard and the Disney version of Cinderella's
prince. Lonnie's father had warned me that the
rides would frighten her, and that she would probably
refuse to go on them. To everyone's surprise,
though, Lonnie seemed completely unafraid as
long as Adam was beside her. I will never forget
watching the two of them on the miniature roller
coaster, Adam's hand resting reassuringly on
Lonnie's arm, their faces transported with
identical, absolute joy.
Now then. If my unknown classmate from the
Harvard gender seminar of 1988 is anywhere out
there, I'd like to speak to him directly. I'd like
to ask him to put Adam on one side of the
"screening" scale and the Unabomber on
the other, and then tell me who is the "detriment
to society." If the brilliant bomber wins
out, I can only wonder, sir, exactly what
kind of society you are trying to create.
The whole semester was filled with encounters like that.
A couple of weeks after the New Obstetrical
Technologies debate, I got into a pitched
argument with a famous feminist who was visiting from
Europe. I questioned her stated belief that women have
babies solely to buy economic security from patriarchal power structures. I disagreed. I
had to; I couldn't stop thinking about all the
bizarre and intangible reasons I was having
Adam.
My argument was weak and, by Harvard standards,
insupportable. In any ordinary circumstances,
the whole group in the seminar room would have sided
with the famous feminist in wiping the intellectual
floor with me. However, my classmates--all
of whom, by that time, knew exactly what I was
going through--felt so awkward that they just sat there,
their eyes going back and forth between me and the famous
feminist as though we were playing Ping-Pong. I
felt a bit queasy about it, but at least I
knew exactly what was happening. It made the
famous feminist very nervous.
The only person at Harvard who came right
up and talked to me about my predicament was one of the
other teaching fellows from the Caribbean Society
class. She called me a week after the
diagnosis and told me that a relative of hers
had committed suicide. The immense pain she was
feeling seemed to level the ground between us, so that she
could suddenly talk to me in a very normal and
helpful way about my own fear and grief. She
put me in touch with a social worker who was full of
genuinely helpful information. She brought beautiful
gifts for Katie and the new baby. Since then,
I am always perversely happy to hear that a friend
has been knocked upside the head by some
unpleasant event. I am not glad they've
experienced pain, but I am profoundly grateful
for the down-to-earth compassion that emerges only when
people face their pain and absorb it into the fabric of
their lives. (this, by the way, does not mean that I
myself want to go through any more pain, of any kind,
ever.)
Aside from the Harvard community, there were other people
around Cambridge who heard about my story and
popped up out of nowhere to get a piece
of the action. One woman whom I barely knew,
the wife of a graduate student, started calling
me every time something bad happened to her, because it made
her feel better to know that my situation was more dire
than hers. She actually told me this. Once
she called me because her washing machine broke.
She literally said, "But it's not nearly as bad as
having a deformed baby, is it?" Someone else,
a friend of a friend, called to assure me that a child with
Down syndrome was "better than the best dog."
This has certainly proven true. I wish I
could say the same about the person who relayed that
piece of consolation.
The people who bothered me most were the ones who
wanted to make me a poster girl for the pro-life
movement. Now, I have to say very clearly, right up
front, that most of these were very nice people. Aside from
a few political differences, I got along with
them just fine. Some, though, were so pathologically
invested in their cause that they didn't seem
to take in anything I said. They'd be halfway
through planning my participation in some form of right-wing
activism before they even heard me say I
disagreed with them.
I always found the ideas of this far-right group
damned peculiar. They were invariably religious
folks, with a devout belief in the life of the spirit.
Nothing wrong with that. I myself had suspended my
disbelief in a spiritual realm and was stumbling
daily over more and more evidence that my world was full
of things rationalist science could not explain. But this
made me feel better, not worse, about the fate
of those who die young, including those who die as
fetuses. Why should people who believe that life
exists outside of mortal bounds be the very same
people who are so obsessed with a fetus's "right
to life" on this messy little planet? I was
confused by the pro-life position. I still am. At
times I've mentioned my confusion in lectures or
in print, and on some of these occasions there were
audience members with such a passionate commitment
to preserving life that they threatened to kill me. I
guess this should have cleared up my confusion, but it
hasn't. Ah, well. Perhaps in time.
There were other people who didn't seem to hear me
either. Once, after I gave a little speech to a
women's club and mentioned my experience having
Adam, a member of the group came up to me in the
women's room. She burst into tears and said, "I
wanted you to know that I had to make the
same decision you did, and I chose the wrong
thing!" She had, in other words, consented to an
abortion. As I watched her face contort with
anguish, I felt that my heart was being ripped from
its moorings. I don't know if she took in
what I said, so I want to say it again, in case
she's out there.
There's a Chinese word that means "soul sister,"
and that is the word I would use to address you in my
heart. Listen to me, soul sister: Fate or
luck or destiny already put you through hell once.
Please don't make it worse by condemning yourself.
There is no choice that would have left you feeling no
guilt. Every time I watch Adam struggle
to speak, every time I see another child laugh and point
at him, every time I watch his face fall as he
realizes he is not going to be treated like the other
kids, I feel wrenched by guilt just as you did
when you heard my story. Life is hard. We
make the best choices we can. Condemnation, whether
it comes from around you or inside you, only robs the
world of another dram of compassion. God knows, we
need all the compassion we can get. If you
promise to try to forgive yourself, I'll try
to forgive myself as well. I think, in my heart of
hearts, that there is nothing for either one of us
to forgive.
If I were to go on like this, to speak back to every one
whose personal philosophy rode Adam's
coattails into my life, this book would be way
too long. Believe me, it was hard to listen
to all the verbiage generated by people who heard about
Adam's disability and my choice. I never thought
of the right thing to say back to any of them until long
after they had gone away. I did, at long last,
realize that it didn't really matter what anyone
else's opinion of my decision might be.
What mattered was that I had made a choice that
felt as though, in the end, it would bring me to the
place I needed to go.
This became especially clear to me during one of
John's trips to Asia, the trip from which he had
decided never to return. Ever since it had
become evident I wasn't in physical shape
to handle John's absences alone, I'd been
shuttling off to visit various family members
during his trips as my own academic schedule
permitted. Two weeks after the diagnosis, when
John headed for Singapore, I went back to my
parents' home in Utah. I carried
Katie, Adam, an overnight bag, and a lot
of apprehension.
My family of origin was extremely
supportive during the last few months of that
pregnancy. My three sisters were wonderful,
calling me frequently to offer comforting advice or
just to listen. My sister-in-law (the nurse)
wrote me a letter so sweet it still moves me every
time I see it in my files. Her husband, my
eldest brother, was kind and protective in the
best fraternal way. My mother did everything she
could to help me feel better, but the truth was she
had enough trouble dealing with Adam's condition herself, and
found it almost unbearable to hear about the depth of my
own sadness.
That trip to Utah, though, was the first time I would
actually face anyone in my family knowing about
Adam's condition. I still hadn't spoken to my
father, who had never been much for phone conversation, and
I didn't know how to talk to him now that I had
besmirched my family's intellectual prowess
by conceiving a retarded child. Every time I ran across the
phrase mongoloid idiot, I felt the
weight of the thousands, maybe millions of times the
word idiot had been used to disparage and dismiss people
in my family's conversations. Now I was going
back, bearing a medically diagnosed "idiot" in
my belly. Part of me knew that no one in my
family wanted to hurt me. Another part was
terrified of what they might say to me, how they
might act, when I was with them in the flesh.
As it turned out, they didn't say anything.
I mean not one thing. My father picked Katie and
me up at the airport. All the way home,
about an hour's drive, he talked about some
obscure text he had encountered in his research.
When we arrived at my family's
swimming-pool-blue estate, my mother talked
to me about Katie and John and school. I'm
telling you, it was bizarre. I kept thinking about
Eug@ene Ionesco's plays, in which polite
society types sit around discussing the weather,
refusing to acknowledge that the people around them are on
fire, or turning into rhinoceroses. Perfect
strangers were calling me on the phone because they'd
heard about my baby and my decision, but here, in the
bosom of my natal family, nobody wanted
to talk about it.
At one point I figured I'd just have to take
the bull by the horns. I was sitting in
my parents' living room with my mother, father, and one
of my older brothers. Katie was playing on the
floor amid the piles of Stuff. Someone had just
said something about it's not being fair that some people have
successful careers and some people don't. I saw an
opening, took a deep breath, and said, "Yeah,
I guess that's just how life works. It made me
sad every time I saw a healthy baby boy in the
airport."
Even I, who know my family well, would
never have predicted their reaction. My father looked
at me and began to laugh--not just a little laugh, but a
loud, long, forced guffaw, as if I were a bad
comedian he was trying to encourage. My brother
laughed along, though not as heartily. My mother just
sat there knitting. Then my father launched into a
scathing attack on a local university, because
he had read in the newspaper that a woman with an
IQ of only 70 had managed to complete all
the requirements for graduation, after ten years of
diligent effort. My brother took this thread and
ran with it, commenting on a news story about two
retarded people who had gotten married. His position
was that if this were allowed to happen, the half-brains
in question should at least be voluntarily sterilized.
From that point on, it was as if, no matter how
hard they tried not to talk about my baby, they
couldn't help it. I know they weren't consciously
choosing topics that would eviscerate me right there in
the living room. They were very worried about me, and
meant nothing but the best. But, as I've said,
denial tends to leak.
Fortunately, although this conversation left me almost
completely devastated, I was, in the end, able
to cope with it. This is solely because after my first
year at Harvard, when I was feeling a tiny bit
down and spent most of my time comparison shopping
for the quickest and most painless method of suicide,
I had gone into therapy. On my first visit, the
psychologist asked me some questions about my
family, which I answered honestly, not suspecting
that our gang was much different from anybody else.
Then he asked me how many siblings I had.
I'd told him already--seven--but I repeated it.
"Holy mackerel!" he shouted jubilantly.
"I'm gonna cash in on this one!"
I think he gave me most of my therapy
free.
I'd been in Utah a few days when
one of my cousins came to visit me. Lydia
is almost exactly my age, and by the time we were
both in our mid-twenties she'd had enough troubles of
her own to satisfy your average small city.
When she showed up at the house, my parents and
brother had reverted to avoiding any overt comment
on my situation. I told Lydia about it, and
mentioned that it was making me a little uncomfortable,
sort of like having an armed nuclear warhead under
my bed. Lydia pointed out to me that our fathers (who
were brothers) had only one way of expressing
emotion, and that was laughter. They had passed this
imperative on to their children. Need to scream?
Scream with laughter. Need to cry? Shed tears of
mirth. Need to pretend that someone's baby isn't
disabled? Have yourself a good haw-haw-haw. Works for
any occasion.
Paradoxically, Lydia was also the one who first
helped me use that double-edged gift of humor
to cope with having Adam. We were out in her car,
cruising through the snow-covered mountains that had always
soothed me so much, with Katie strapped into the
backseat and Adam bulging out toward the
dashboard. Lydia asked a string of thoughtful
questions. We talked about how she had felt during
some of her own life crises, especially the
early death of her father. We got a little weepy.
At one point Lydia pulled over and stopped the
car, parking it near a snowbank until we'd
both cried ourselves out. Then she sat up straight,
wiped her nose, and sighed.
"Look," she said. "Here's what's going
to happen. You're going to have one really smart kid,
and one really dumb kid. Is that so bad?"
I found myself laughing--not the way my father had
laughed, but truly and spontaneously. That kind
of laughter doesn't drive tears away. It
complements them.
"No, I guess it isn't so bad," I
said. Then I bit my lip. "It's just so hard
to think about the way people will look at him. At me."
I had read about this in several books by parents
of disabled kids. They all agreed that one of the challenges of having a child with Down syndrome is
learning to bear the shame of being a public
spectacle.
"Okay, so let's imagine the worst," said
Lydia. "You're sitting somewhere--at the bus
stop, wherever--and you've got your baby, like this."
She pantomimed holding a little bundle
on her lap. "Then some fat, middle-aged
woman with bad teeth comes over to you and says, "Hey, you! Looks to me like there's something wrong
with that there baby!""
I shuddered. "Exactly," I said.
"Well, here's what you do," said Lydia.
She looked intently at the face of the invisible
baby. Then her eyes widened in horror.
"Oh, my God!" she shouted. "You're
right!"
We dissolved, both of us. I laughed so hard
that all my overstretched abdominal muscles
went into a severe cramp, and I had to get out and
walk around the car.
After that conversation with my cousin, it was a lot
easier to tolerate the strange, determined way
some of my other relatives were avoiding talking
to me about the baby. Nevertheless, three days before I
left Utah, I finally broke down. I had
been to the local mall, buying clothes for
Katie. For some reason, seeing the throngs of little
boys in the children's clothing store had made my
heart ache so intensely I could hardly even
drive. I wept all the way to my parents'
house, and when I got there I couldn't stop. My
father was there, reading a book, when I walked in.
"What's all this?" he said, in a jocular
tone. "What's all this?"
"I'm sorry," I sobbed. "I'm sorry,
Daddy. This is just so hard for me."
My poor father. He fell completely apart.
I have never seen any grown man cry the way my
father cried that day. The man was more Harvard than
Harvard: almost eighty years old,
white-haired, dignified, the very archetype of the
eccentric professorial genius. But he sobbed
like a five-year-old with a broken heart.
There was no question of his trying to comfort me; I could
sense that immediately. You can feel it when another
person's despair is deeper than your own.
Now that my father wasn't hiding behind his social
mask, it was clear to me that he was far less
equipped to cope with my situation than I was
myself. And besides, I had help. In the honesty of
that moment, I could feel the invisible helpers
ranged around me, surrounding me with empathy and
concern. Now that I had stopped disbelieving in them,
they were almost as tangible as my father. I knew they
were there for him, too. But he couldn't see them.
He couldn't feel them.
I looked at my weeping parent the way I
had looked at Dr. Grendel when he had brought
his fear into the infirmary at University Health
Services. I did not see the imposing, powerful
father of my childhood. I saw an old man who
had never, not for one moment of his life, believed that
it was possible to be loved for himself. A man who
had been raised to be a genius the way a Nazi
is raised to be a bigot, who had been judged
at every stage of his life by intelligence tests,
advanced degrees, and the rigors of academia.
His intellectual brilliance was the single barrier
that kept back the utter barrenness of a life without
love or belonging.
Or so he thought. It wasn't true. I
knew it wasn't, because I loved him. But ever
since I was a teenager in therapy, I had known
that all the love I felt for my father would never
make it through his defenses to be felt and understood.
Now, hearing him sob so hard he could barely
breathe, I knew he still couldn't feel my love,
lost as it was in the deluge of his own pain. At
least I realized I wasn't the only one working
on it. I could feel love radiating to my father from
the invisible people around us, from every corner of that
Stuff-encrusted room, from every corner of the
swimming-pool-blue house, from all the space
around us in every direction. It was there for my father as it
was there for me, for Adam, for Katie, for
Lydia, for every one of us.
I found myself hoping, all over again, my
childhood hope that somehow, something would get through
to my father's heart before he died. I wanted
desperately for him to feel the inconceivable comfort
of knowing that, brilliant or dull, genius or
idiot, he was and always had been essentially and
unalterably lovable. From my new
perspective, the one I had picked up while
expecting Adam, I hoped the Bunraku
puppeteers had a plan for how this might be done.
It seemed likely that they did--but on the other
hand, I knew that my father was as tough-minded and
terrified a soul as the puppeteers were likely
to encounter. I couldn't imagine any strategy
to break through his defenses. But what the hell, I
thought, maybe they'd figure out something that would work
for him.
After all, they'd figured out something for me.
27

When John and I were reunited in
Cambridge after the March trip, we weren't
exactly sure how to talk to each other. Both of
us had changed a lot in the short time we'd been
apart. We each felt as vulnerable as a chick
fresh out of the egg, stumbling around in our new
personalities with our feathers wet and our legs
all wobbly. We hadn't talked explicitly
about the shift of perspective that was happening
inside each of us; we both feared being
misunderstood, even ridiculed, if we revealed
how confused and how tender we were under the skin. So
we hid ourselves from each other in a delicate and
awkward wordlessness. Actually, I believe this is
pretty much what a lot of people do most of the time.
The bulk of our conversations consisted of my
conveying to John the latest information I had read
about Down syndrome. I believed that if I could
learn everything about the condition, I'd be able
to predict what our lives with Adam would be like.
Instead, everything I learned intensified the feeling
that our future, and the future of our child, was almost
completely up for grabs. To begin with, Adam had
about a 60 percent chance of living through his birth.
After that there were other percentages: 40 percent
chance of a serious heart defect, 30 percent
chance of kidney failure, 26 percent chance of
respiratory difficulty, and so on. And on.
Talking about actual problems is a wonderful
way to move forward through shock and grief
to acceptance. But talking about uncertainty can't
lead anywhere but back to uncertainty--and it is a
painful journey.
The more we realized this, the less John and I
talked. We kept up pragmatic, necessary
discussions about our daily schedules, Katie's
care and feeding, my medical appointments.
John's family socialization as a mono
person, someone whose entire conversational
repertoire focused on physical objects,
came in mighty handy at this point.
Still, there were wordless ways in which John and I
managed to connect during those difficult weeks.
One of these was nitpicking. You may have heard this
term used to mean petty criticism, but I mean
it literally. We didn't say a word. We just
picked nits. To understand this, you must learn a few
charming details about our insect friend the louse. As
a child I had picked up the impression that
lice were large, beetlelike creatures who
built major establishments, similar to termite
hills, in the wigs of Baroque Europeans.
Actually, they are tiny little things (the lice, not the
Europeans). They're so small you don't
usually realize right away that they're living on
your head. Ordinary shampooing doesn't kill
them or wash them away; in fact, they seem
to love it. And while our little buddies are
frolicking between the roots of human hair, they
lay itsy-bitsy eggs, which they anchor
to individual hair shafts. The eggs are called
nits. Yanking them out of your hair is the
literal meaning of the verb to nitpick.
I know this is disgusting. It's not like I love
to go around talking about it. I'm not sure I've
ever admitted it before, even to close friends. It's
just that to fully understand the condition John and I
reached when we were expecting Adam, you have to know that
nitpicking was--honest to God--one of the most
enjoyable things we shared during that time. I'm no
marriage counselor, but it seems to me that when a
lice infestation becomes the high point of your
relationship, things have gone seriously awry.
The first time John brought lousy associates
home from Singapore, way back in October,
we did everything short of sandblasting our apartment and
everything in it, especially our heads. I'd read
that hair dye can damage a fetus if the mother
uses it during her first trimester of pregnancy,
and it crossed my mind that the antilouse shampoo
we picked up from the pharmacy might have similar
effects. I didn't give a rat's ass. I
rubbed that stuff all over my body, and left it
there until I was afraid my hair would fall
right out. John, needless to say, was engaged in
similar pursuits. For a time, we were sure the
lice were dead and gone. But six weeks later,
I felt an all-too-familiar itch on my
scalp, and we both went through the entire delousing
project yet again. Katie never did get them,
but John and I had to sustain this on-and-off
battle until nearly the time Adam was born.
Anyway, after nuking the lice with the special
shampoo, one is left with the tiny dead nits still
stuck to one's hair. The antilouse shampoo is
sold with a little comb, which is supposed to remove the
nits, but it doesn't work. The only way you can
really get rid of the little bastards is to pick through
your hair with your fingernails. This became
an obsessive habit for John and me. People who
knew us at the time probably remember us with our
hands constantly twitching toward our heads, like
Son of Sam when the invisible dog was talking
to him.
This is a great hobby, as far as it goes, but you
always have the disadvantage of not being able to see the
nits in your own hair. I don't know when
John and I started taking turns holding each
other's heads in our laps and going through each
other's hair with intense concentration, like a couple
of baboons. I do know that it was really soothing.
It made me think of something I'd learned in
Folklore and Mythology 100, which I took
as an undergraduate (this course, arguably the
least challenging class at Harvard, was informally
known as FM 100: Easy Listening). In all
the Nordic sagas, you see, after the hero had
gone through some epic travail, he would be washed and
deloused by the heroine. At the time I read this,
I thought it unutterably revolting. Now it
makes me a bit nostalgic.
The other form of communication that held our
relationship together during that pregnancy centered on
the little plastic alphabet letters that we had bought for
Katie, the ones that stuck to our refrigerator
door with magnets. Katie liked them a lot,
although she didn't seem particularly interested in
learning to read. Mostly, she peeled them off the
refrigerator, chewed on them for a while, and then
flushed them down the toilet. We lost many letters
in this manner, and John kept doggedly buying
whole new alphabets, as though he could move
Katie to literacy by sheer persistence.
At one point, our fridge was left with an
odd and limited assortment of letters,
specifically (in alphabetical order),
E, F, L, M, n, O, and U.
I know the exact letters because one day I went into the
kitchen and discovered that they had been arranged
to spell the phrase "MOLE FUN." I
stood there looking at the refrigerator,
rearranged the letters to spell "FOUL MEN," and
left. The next day, I found the letter W in
Katie's crib. I soon had the words "MENU
FLOW" up on the fridge. Later, after John
had been there, it said "FUN LAME SOW"
(he'd gotten lucky and found A and S somewhere
in Katie's room).
This went on for weeks. We never,
ever discussed it, but we kept silently upping the
ante by adding new letters we found between the sofa
cushions and under the bed and behind the books on the
shelves. Over time, we developed unspoken
rules: at first, for example, we would invert
letters like M and W to get more mileage out of the
selection, but this quickly came to be considered a
cheap solution. Then there were random combinations of
unrelated words, but gradually it became clear that
a really diligent rearranger could always create a
cogent thought unit out of the available letters.
By the time we had found all the letters that remained
in the apartment, we ended up with a combination that could be
rearranged to form such thought-provoking phrases as
"MANGY SULPHUR COW FUEL" or
"LU, SPEW FANCY GHOUL RUM" or
"WHY GUMS FOR UNCLE PAUL?" For
me, the high point of this game occurred on the day
when, after half an hour of hard thinking in front
of the refrigerator, I realized that the letters before
me could spell out "WALL OF GRUMPY
EUNUCHS." It was a major epiphany. I
looked at my creation with almost sublime joy.
I could tell John was impressed, too, because
although he never mentioned it, he left the phrase
untouched for several days. The image of that wall,
of all those eunuchs crammed together, five deep,
three high, bitching at each other, remains
vivid in my mind's eye to this day. It is one
of the creative fruits that emerged from the pain and
suffering we went through while expecting Adam.
Sweet are the uses of adversity.

March was almost over before John and I broke
through our mutual silence. I awoke from a fitful
sleep at about three o'clock on a Sunday
morning, when Adam socked me in the ribs. I
had been waking up regularly around `	this time, and it
was not fun. No matter how hard I tried to think
positively and keep my chin up, no matter
how much I reminded myself that many people had been through
far worse and come out intact, all the most frightening
things I had learned about Down syndrome
floated into my mind in the predawn gloom,
paralyzing me with dread of both the known and the
unknown.
After brooding for a while, I heaved my ripening
self off the stress mat and plodded down the hall
toward the kitchen. Perhaps, I thought, a slab of
steak would help. Once I got there and
flipped on the kitchen light, my attention wandered
away from food and toward the fridge letters, which now
read "WHELP YOUR FUNGAL SCUM." I
was busy rearranging them when a shadowy shape
loomed out of the darkness. I gave a sharp yip of
surprise and terror before I realized that it was
John.
"Don't do that!" I said.
John grinned wearily. He looked
hammered. His eyes had sunk so far back from
fatigue that they were almost completely hidden in the
shadow of his brows.
"Gotcha," he said.
"It's not funny, John." I was in no
mood for levity.
"What are you doing up?" he said.
"Couldn't sleep," I replied. "What are
you doing?"
"Hungry," he said. "And I might as well
start changing my body clock now."
I nodded.
"I want chocolate chip cookies," said
John.
My mood brightened a little. We are both very
big on chocolate chip cookies, John and
I. It was one of the major things that brought us together.
The previous year, when we had to walk more than
ten miles in the cold on an average day, we
had baked and snarfed down close to our weight in
chocolate chip cookies every week or so.
Since Adam was conceived, however, my cookie
consumption had fallen to nil, and John didn't
like to indulge alone--that, as we all know, is one
of the warning signs of addiction.
Now, after months of abstinence, John was opening
cupboards, pulling out the familiar ingredients,
lining them up on the counter. I felt an echo of the
festive tone that had always accompanied our
cookie-baking episodes. I waddled over to the
one chair that fit in our tiny kitchen and sat down
to watch.
"How are you feeling?" asked John
politely, as he pulled out a mixing bowl.
"Fine."
This was about as deep as our conversations had been for
several weeks. As I watched John get a
pound of butter out of the refrigerator and put a
stick into the bowl, I managed to say, "I
talked to my mom today."
"Oh?" John measured white and
brown sugar into the bowl and mashed the ingredients
together with a wooden spoon.
"Yeah," I said listlessly. "She met
another woman with a Down syndrome grandson.
The kid's fifteen. He's doing really well."
"That's nice," said John. He took the
electric mixer out of its drawer and assembled
it. For a truly great chocolate chip cookie,
it is essential to beat the sugar and butter together
very, very thoroughly.
"She said he cleans his own bedroom," I
continued. "Keeps it neat as a pin."
"Great!" said John, with obviously feigned
enthusiasm.
"I guess it should have cheered me up," I said,
"but it didn't." I could feel tears in my
eyes. I had been getting better and better at
repressing my grief in front of John, but
at three in the morning my emotions were hard
to check.
"The thing is," I said, "I don't want a
teenage son who just keeps his room as neat as a
pin." My voice trembled a little. "I kept
thinking while I was talking to her--people don't know
how lucky they are to have a teenage son who
messes up his room, and puts stupid posters
on the wall, and stays out too late, and has a
girlfriend, and applies to college." The tears
brimmed and slid out into my eyelashes. I
sniffed.
John said nothing. He turned on the mixer and
stuck it into the bowl. It snarled, struggling with the
cold butter. He pushed up the speed control,
and the snarl rose to a high, angry whine. This was
normal mixer behavior; I had seen it many
times. That night, however, instead of settling into a
healthy-sounding whir, the whine got higher and higher,
louder and louder. John tried to turn the mixer
off. It didn't work. The mixer screamed and
flailed like a huge, tormented insect. Then there
was a small pop, and a cloud of smoke rose from
its body. It stopped whining. It was dead.
"Oh, great," said John. "Just great."
For some reason, this was just one thing too much for
me. I curled up in my chair as best I could,
my knees pressed against my pregnant torso,
and started to cry in earnest.
John turned on me, his lips tight with
annoyance. "What are you blubbering about?"
"It broke," I wailed.
"Yes, I realize that," John snapped.
"I was holding it."
"Everything breaks," I sobbed. "Nothing goes
right, everything goes wrong. Something's happened
to us, John. We can't do things anymore. Not
anything. I mean, how could you expect us to make
a good baby when we can't even make a good
cookie?"
"Oh, for crying out loud, Martha!" John's
voice was getting loud. "Would you grab the reins?
I'm sick and tired of hearing how miserable your
life is."
I cried harder. "I'm just scared," I said.
John cracked two eggs into the mixing bowl and
started whipping them into the other ingredients with the
wooden spoon. He looked as though he had
plenty of energy to compensate for the broken mixer.
"Scared of what?" he said. "Of a little baby
who's not as perfect as you think he ought to be?"
He dumped flour into the mixing bowl and began
to thrash at it with the spoon. A mist of flour
rose from the bowl, covering his hands and forearms.
"I didn't say I wanted him to be
perfect," I said. "I just want him to be
normal. That's all I want. Just normal."
"Bullshit," John barked. He measured
salt and baking soda into the dough and went back
to work with the mixing spoon.
I raised my dripping face out of my
hands. "Excuse me?"
"That is total bullshit," he repeated.
"You don't want this baby to be normal. You'd
throw him in a Dumpster if he just turned out to be
normal. What you really want is for him to be
superhuman."
I squinted at him. "What the hell are you
talking about?"
John added chocolate chips and beat them in.
At this stage, of course, the dough is sticky and
stiff and hard to mix. But John whipped away
at it as if it were nothing but egg whites. He was
starting to sweat.
"For your information," I said in my most acid
tone, "I was the one who decided to keep this
baby, even though he's got Down's. You were the
one who wanted to throw him in a Dumpster."
"How would you know?" John's voice was still
gaining volume. "You never asked me what I
wanted, did you? No! You never even asked
me!"
I was so stunned I stopped crying. "What is
going on with you, John? I thought--"
"Yeah, that's right!" he shouted. "You thought, you
thought, you thought! You thought all kinds of things,
didn't you? You thought old John would just strap
on the saddle and take you wherever you want to go. And
then I'm supposed to feel sorry for you?"
"John--"
He went into baby talk. "Poor wittle
Mawfa," he simpered. "She has to have a bad
baby. She has to have a freak, instead of a
perfect little boy like she wants."
I was staring at him with utter incredulity.
"What planet are you from?" I said.
"You act like you're on some big moral
pedestal," John shot back. "You think it's
such a big deal to keep this baby. But I know
what's really going on inside you. You don't
want him. He disgusts you. The only reason
you're having this baby at all is that you didn't
have the guts to get an abortion."
I came out of the chair straight at him, my
head low, like a bull in the ring. I had a few
steps to pick up speed, and I weighed
considerably more than usual. My shoulder hit
John right below the rib cage, knocking him back
against the counter.
John had to struggle for a minute to get his
breath back. "Oh, that's good," he said. "That's
just wonderful. Physically violent women make
great mommies."
I wanted to kill him. All the emotion that had
been hidden behind weeks of careful, civilized
silence rushed from my guts into my head, my
heart, my arms and legs. I felt like a tiger
tearing down a trap. I wanted to rip the
plumbing apart with my bare hands and beat down the
walls with it. Instead, I grabbed a lump of
cookie dough from the mixing bowl and pushed it
into John's face.
"How dare you talk to me like that?" I
screamed. "How dare you? Is there one tiny
molecule somewhere in your brain that can begin to understand
what this is like for me?" I thumped myself in the
abdomen with both hands, so hard that I could see
John wince through his mask of cookie dough.
"This is my son!" I sobbed. "He's a
part of me! If you don't want him, you can leave
us both, but he is my son, and that's why
I'm keeping him, even if he is a
freak!"
"There you go!" John shouted. "You can't even
mention him without calling him names, can you? No
matter what he does, he'll never be good enough for
you. Never!" He scraped a lump of dough off his
cheek and threw it at me.
I dodged. "What the hell are you talking
about?" I hollered. "Are you completely
insane?"
"Do you know how this baby is going to feel?"
John yelled. "Do you know how you're going
to make him feel? Every day of his life, he's
going to know he's not good enough. He's going to try
and try and work and work and work and work and work, and it's
never going to be enough for you!"
He seized another piece of dough from the bowl
and slung it at me. I turned my head at the
last second, and it hit me just above the ear,
clinging to my hair like a misshapen barrette.
"Why can't he ever be enough for you?" John was
still yelling. Another lump of dough whizzed by me and
stuck to the wall.
"Why does he have to work so hard?" This one
hit me in the arm.
"How come he has to be perfect, and do
everything just right, and never make a mistake?"
Another dough ball landed on my shoulder and stuck
to my bathrobe.
"John," I said, in a low, dangerous
voice. "John, calm down."
"Why can't you just love him because he's a little
boy?" John screamed as a final
projectile missed me and landed in the sink.
"Why can't you love him as he is?"
His voice had degenerated into a hoarse sob,
and tears were running in two steady streams over the
cookie dough on his face. John touched his
cheek and brought his hand away slowly, staring at it
in amazement.
"There's water on my face," he said in a
baffled whisper. He looked at me with complete
bewilderment. "How come there's water on my
face?"
I don't think John had cried in front of
another person since he could remember. I
looked at him, and the anger seemed to drain out of
me all at once, leaving me scoured and
exhausted.
"Honey," I said, in my normal speaking
voice, "you realize that you're not really
talking about the baby, don't you? You're talking
about yourself."
John nodded.
"Do you also realize that you're not really talking
to me?"
He raised his eyes to mine and looked into them
almost desperately. "I'm not?" he whispered.
"No." I moved forward and wiped some of the dough
off his cheek. "Listen to me," I said. "I'm not
your mom, and I'm not your dad, and I'm not your
church, and I'm not Harvard. Actually, I'm not
much of anything. But for what it's worth, I love
you as you are. I thought you knew that."
John's dough-smeared face crumpled, and for the
first time ever, I saw him really cry. It seemed
that all the men in my life were doing it.
I put my arms around him. "Come here," I
said. I led him into the living room, pushed him
gently down on the sofa. John was as docile as
he had been angry. I sat down next to him.
The sliding glass door that led out to our tiny
balcony admitted a faint golden shimmer from the
halogen streetlights along Massachusetts
Avenue. All of Harvard was laid out below us, the
spires of its chapels and dormitories stabbing
up like dark blades against the dull reflected
glow of the low-hanging clouds.
We sat awhile without saying anything. John
cried for several minutes, the kind of healing cry
that most women know well, and most men never allow
themselves. I, for once, was not crying. I sat with
my arm around my husband, our sides pressed
together so that when Adam kicked, we both felt it.
After a while, John became quiet again. But it
wasn't the volatile, brittle, repressed
silence that we'd kept for the past few weeks. It
was the calm that comes when all the dirty truths have
finally been spoken.
"I thought I would be the only one who could love
him," John said finally.
"Me too," I said.
John reached over and pulled some of the cookie
dough out of my hair. "You're different than I
remember you."
"So are you."
He took a long, deep breath and stretched his
arms to the ceiling, bringing one down around my
shoulders. "You still scared?" he said.
"Yeah."
"So am I."
We sat with that one for a while. We could hear the
subway trains rumbling by under Mass Ave.
When they passed the sidewalk grilles, a
brilliant flash of blue light would briefly
gleam and then disappear. Three trains went by before
we spoke again.
"I have to tell you something," said John. He
sounded very serious, a little nervous. I felt my
heart speed up, anticipating at least a thousand
terrible things. I was getting very good at this way of
thinking.
"I don't want you to take this the wrong
way," said John slowly, "but I ... I
don't want to name him Chris."
I blinked. "You don't?"
"It's not what you think," said John. "It's
not that I wouldn't want him to have the family name or
anything, and it isn't that I feel different about
him now that we know about ..." His voice trailed
off.
"Okay," I said cautiously.
"It's just that it doesn't seem like the right name,"
said John. "I don't know how to explain it, but
it just doesn't."
My scalp was beginning to prickle, and it
wasn't lice. It was the familiar electrical
charge that seemed to run through my body more and more
often. It had reached the point where I felt it every
time I even thought about the baby--about Adam. That
was what I called him in my mind, now, all the
time. The name had pressed so insistently against my
brain that I had finally just surrendered to it,
wondering what I was going to say to John when it
came time to fill out the birth certificate. Or
the death certificate.
"Are you upset?" John's worried eyes were
studying my face.
"No, no," I said. "I ... actually, I
agree. I don't think Chris sounds right for
him." I remembered the ultrasound clinic, the
familiar little person on the screen waving at me
like an old friend.
"What do you want to name him?" I asked
John.
He sighed and scraped some of the dough off his
face with his fingernail. "I think his name is
Adam."
The baby did a somersault. We both
felt it. I looked at my husband,
wide-eyed, and my entire body began
to tingle as though I had been plugged into a
socket.
"John," I said, "we have to talk."



Adam was seven when my cousin Lydia and her
sister Sylvia talked me into visiting a
psychic. I'd never done it before, and don't
really intend to do it again, but my cousins convinced me
that until I'd gone in for a reading, I simply
hadn't been on all the rides.
The psychic wasn't at all what I'd
expected. She was an eminently normal-looking
woman in her mid-thirties, who lived in
Magna, Utah. Whenever I tell this story,
I always get the same question: "If she was really
psychic, why was she living in Magna, Utah?"
You will agree that this is a good question, especially if
you've ever been to Magna. Not being psychic myself,
I don't have the answer. I suppose it will have
to remain a Blessed Mystery.
At any rate, I showed up at the
psychic's place of business with my mind as open
as I could get it. I'd been trying hard to live
by my new credo, in which anything must be considered
possible until it is proven false. Still, I
expected the woman to say things like, "Someone you
once knew died in the last ten years, of a heart
attack or cancer or some other disease, or
possibly an accident. Or maybe you didn't
actually know this person, but you knew of him.
Or her."
Instead, the psychic parked herself in an easy
chair across from me and closed her eyes for about
fifteen minutes. Then, eyes still shut, she
gave me a detailed description of my life.
She included things I was positive my cousin
couldn't have known, such as the nature of this bladder
disease I have, which is too embarrassing to mention
to anyone, although I have now announced it in print.
I guess the secret's out anyway, because this
psychic knew all about it.
I have to admit, I was impressed.
I was so busy being skeptical that I didn't
do the logical thing, which was to ask the psychic about
stock investments. Instead, I had her describe
other people I knew. I'd give her the name and
approximate age of each person. She'd sit
there for a while with her eyes closed, and
then tell me about them. In detail. I threw
everything I could at her, to see how good she really
was. I asked her about people I'd met in
Japan, in Switzerland, in deepest Communist
China. I'm telling you, she was good. There was no
fumbling around. She knew who had lost a finger in
a factory accident, who had just gone to work for a
bank, who had been divorced and remarried within
three weeks. Nothing she said had any
implications for my life, but I enjoyed just
sitting there seeing what she could do. It was like
watching a contortionist: not particularly useful, but
most amazing.
Toward the end of the sitting, I asked the
psychic about my children. I gave her their names and
birth dates, starting with Katie. She told me
everything I already knew about Katie's sensitive
personality, her childhood bouts with ear
infections, her insistence on never being late, and
her love of Baroque choral music, which seemed
to spring with her from the womb. Cool, I thought.
Then I gave the psychic Adam's name and
birthday. She sat there for a while, as usual, with
her eyes closed. Then she said, "Adam isn't
like your other children."
I said nothing. I was careful not to change my
expression, in case she was peeking.
"I have to explain this to you," said the psychic.
"You see, Adam is an angel."
I felt a little bristly around the collar, but
I still didn't move.
"Angels are different from other
metaphysical beings," she went on.
"Occasionally they decide to incarnate--to become
human for a while. Not that they have to, you understand.
Sometimes that's just the best way to do what they want
to do."
The psychic then went into a quasi-technical
and very wacky-sounding New Age theological
discussion, which I found difficult to follow and even
more difficult to swallow. I tried to take it in
without rolling my eyes, but it was a struggle. After
about ten minutes or so, the lecture wound down.
I cleared my throat. "Adam has Down
syndrome," I said.
The psychic didn't seem at all
surprised. She just shrugged.
"That," she said, "has nothing to do with it."
This was what clinched my belief in her psychic
gifts. If she had said, "Oh, yes,
that makes it perfectly clear; all our little
retarded brothers and sisters are angels," I
would have looked upon her with a more jaundiced eye.
I've heard that line many, many times, from people so
sanctimoniously sweet that just standing near them will
rot your teeth. These are the same people who always
tell me that God would never give them such a child,
because they are too weak to be deserving. They are the
people who look at Adam and then tell me, in a
stage whisper, "Mongoloids are always so content,
aren't they?" I wish these "contented-mongoloid"
theorists had to deal with Adam when he's sleep
deprived or his dad is out of town or his sisters
are picking on him. It's true he doesn't
indulge in the sort of morose weeping to which I
am prone. Mostly he dismantles the
furniture. But there are definitely times when
he is not content.
At any rate, the Magna psychic did not
come back at me with any of the hundred clich`es
I'd heard targeted at people with Down syndrome.
She didn't even want to talk about genetic
disabilities. She wanted to talk about angels.
"Anyone you meet could be an angel," she
said. "Usually you just see them in passing--they show
up to do something and then discarnate again. But sometimes
they come the regular way, as babies, and live like
other humans for a lifetime. Like your son. I'd
imagine a few of them have Down syndrome, but
I don't know. It's an interesting question."
By this time I was squinting at her out of one eye
and contemplating whether I should ask her about what
research methodology she had used to get all this
information on angels. Then I remembered that,
without any research beyond sitting quietly, she had
just accurately described almost everyone I
knew. I decided to leave the question alone.
Of course, just because I believe that the Magna
psychic had a gift of some sort doesn't mean
I buy into her theology wholesale. Been there,
done that. I saw a bumper sticker once that said,
"My karma ran over my dogma," which pretty
much sums up my feelings about most religious
cosmologies. (ironically, it was after Adam
was born, when I began to believe in God, that
I explicitly left the religion of my
childhood.) Given the eclectic and constantly
shifting nature of my metaphysical
inclinations, I will probably never feel certain
exactly what an angel is. The
Magna psychic could have been 100 percent right,
all the way down the line. Or maybe the
ancient Chinese were on to something, and we're all
haunted by numberless ancestors. Or maybe
Catholic saints. Or leprechauns. Hey,
I'll go there.
One thing I don't believe, though, is that there
are no spiritual beings around us. They popped into my
awareness often enough while I was expecting Adam
to disprove that hypothesis to my satisfaction. I
don't know what to call them, I don't know how
they work. But I know they're there.
I have consciously believed this ever since the
night that John and I sat on our couch, looking
out over Harvard Square, and told each other
everything. I told him about the invisible hands that
rescued me when I was caught in the smoke and,
later, when I was bleeding. He told me about the
"dream--sort of" that he'd had in Japan. I
told him about the Seeing Thing. We talked about the
way Dr. Grendel's face had floated around
in two parts as he sat on my hospital bed.
We went over all the strange coincidences that
kept occurring, like the way Sibyl just happened
to show up with exactly the groceries I craved
exactly when I needed them, and later just
happened to know every little, tiny detail one could ever
hope to know about infants with birth defects. As
far as I was concerned, Sibyl alone constituted a
major miracle. John had to agree.
We didn't sleep at all that night. We
talked, and talked, and paced around, and talked, and
baked what was left of the cookie dough, and talked
some more. Our immense physical fatigue was more
than offset by an intoxicating sense of
freedom, as we both learned that we could talk
to each other about our bizarre new beliefs, and be
believed. More than just companionship, we found
validation in each other's experiences. It is one
thing to suspect, in your own fevered mind, that all
kinds of supernatural things are happening to you.
It is quite another to hear that someone else's fevered
mind has its own suspicions, and that your
experiences complement each other like two halves
of a broken seal. Reality has never felt quite so
surreal as it did to me that night. I had to keep
drawing in big gulps of air, as if I were
sprinting to keep up with the pace at which my worldview
was being transformed.
One of the things we talked about that night
was the name Adam. We tried to remember if
we'd discussed that name during some half remembered
conversation early in my pregnancy, but we
honestly didn't think we had. We'd both
simply felt an overpowering sense, not only of
rightness but of recognition, when the name and the baby
came together. I had felt it at the ultrasound
clinic, John in the Japanese shrine, but both
of us had the sense that Adam had been Adam
since long before then. It felt as though we had
known him by that name for years and years and years.
Forever.
I still don't know if there's any compelling
metaphysical reason for Adam's name, but I
know that it carries a lot of meaning. We looked
it up that night, and found that Adam is an
Aramaic word meaning "man of earth." The name
reflects an ancient belief that God made the
original man from mud, before breathing life into him.
This aspect of Adam's name wouldn't really come
home to me until a few months after he was
born. I was standing in line at an airport when
an old, very decrepit-looking woman went past
in a wheelchair, pushed by an airline
attendant. Suddenly, the woman slumped forward
and pitched to the floor. The attendant tried
to pick her up. When he couldn't, he ran
desperately for help. It didn't arrive in
time. While the attendant was gone, before I could
even look away, the woman died. It was the first
human death I had ever witnessed, and it was very
strange. Nothing about her was visibly altered at
the moment of her death; it's just that one instant there was
an old woman on the floor, and the next, there was
only a body. You could feel it. Whether she
went into oblivion or eternal life, I
don't know, but she was gone. The body, without her
in it, truly seemed to be nothing but clay. I
think about that sometimes, about the fact that the part of
Adam I see with my eyes--his round little
face, his disproportionate limbs, his unsteady
gait--is only a sort of housing, a compilation
of carefully organized chemicals animated
by some force that no one can really explain. It is
only a "man of earth."
Then there is the fact that the name Adam can be
taken to mean Everyman, the whole species of us.
The first time I changed Adam's diaper, when he
was stretched out in the hospital bassinet, as
scrawny and naked and vulnerable as a
bug without its shell, I thought that he pretty much
exemplified the human condition. I remembered
a quote from King Lear, one that had always stuck
in my mind although I'd made no conscious
attempt to memorize it. I said it to Adam.
"Thou art the thing itself," I told him.
"Unaccommodated man is no more but such a
poor, bare, forked animal as thou art." Adam
turned his delicate, fuzzy-peach head to look
at my face and snuffled a bit through his nose.
It was our first real conversation.
Then, too, the name Adam reminds me of the
Fall, that multifaceted legend of human
separation from some native spiritual realm, and the
mortality that is supposed to take us back to it.
It reminds me that we are born innocent but
ignorant, and that to remedy the second of these
conditions we inevitably surrender the first. The
word Adam has been used to signify a great
many things to members of my culture. Every time I
call my son for dinner, I am reminded of them
all. I like that. I like it a lot.
John and I spent a lot of time wondering about
meanings that first night we sat up and told each
other the naked truth. We came up with many
interpretations of the Adam situation and everything
connected to it. I'm pretty sure they were all
wrong, or at the very least much too simplistic.
The most important thing about that conversation was not
any dramatic conclusion we drew from our
experiences over the preceding few months but the
fact that those experiences supported each other.
For the first time, this made them harder for me to dismiss
than to believe.
The next day I dropped Katie off at day
care and set off for class as usual. I never
got there. I was too stunned, too full of
wonder, to sit still. I kept walking around
Harvard, staring at the familiar buildings, the
familiar people, as though I had just climbed off a
spacecraft from Neptune. The whole universe
seemed different to me. I didn't know how to be
at Harvard while believing such irrational things. I went into the Science Center, a huge, cold,
concrete structure designed to resemble a
Polaroid camera (edwin Land, the
photographic inventor, donated the money for the
building). The people in the Science Center
cafeteria were chatting and smoking and slugging back
industrial-strength coffee as usual, just
as if there weren't angels all over the place.
Part of me wanted to run up to everyone I saw
and shake them all by the collar, shouting, "Yo!
Listen! We are not alone!" right into their ears
until they really heard me. The other part of me
knew damn well that if I so much as whispered
what I was thinking, these people would set about destroying
me in a manner similar to the Chinese "death of a
thousand cuts," in which bystanders are encouraged
to slice off bits and pieces of a prisoner
until he expires. Of course they'd use
words instead of bamboo knives, but the
psychological effect would be similar. I
kept darting my eyes around, wondering if people could
sense that I had moved into a world where rationalism was
a necessary but insufficient explanation for what I
experienced. Some people did look at me rather
strangely, but I think it was just because any woman
at that stage of pregnancy walks like a big
duck. This is not a familiar sight at the
Science Center.
I moved on to Harvard Yard, where the trees
were finally beginning to put out tentative buds. The
trees must have known this was risky. One hard
frost, a week's unusual chill, could kill
off the tender green shoots and leave the trees
to struggle through a difficult summer. I walked
up to one tree and put my hands against its bark,
congratulating it on its courage, trying to draw
on its strength. The tree was warm under my hands.
I swear I felt it communicating back to me,
with its own brand of comfort and compassion. Even with an
IQ of 3, it had things to teach me. I had come
to believe that without any sense of false modesty.
After walking around in this contemplative daze for
half the morning, I went back to William
James Hall and took the elevator to the
Sociology floor. I had missed the gender
seminar. I was also becoming increasingly certain that
I would not be able to put aside the tempest in my
mind long enough to complete the research for my
thirty-page term paper. I dimly remembered
that five years, one year, ten months ago,
failing to turn in a paper on time would have been
unthinkable to me, unforgivable. Now it seemed
trivial. I decided to explain my situation
to one of the seminar's instructors and ask her for an
incomplete on my transcript. This would buy
me until two months after Adam's birth in which
to research and write my paper.
The course instructor, an assistant
professor, was in her office surrounded by a
colorful chaos of books, papers, and greeting
cards left over from the holidays. I waited
outside in the hall while she finished a phone
call. Given a few minutes to float free,
my mind zipped right back to the strange new
structure of my reality the way your tongue
goes to a new filling, exploring its shape and
dimension. Maybe Plato was right, I thought.
Maybe we really do live in a dark place, a
shadow world, a cave. The things I'd thought to be
improbable, nonexistent, ghostly,
insubstantial--all of these were quite possibly more
real than the physical things I could see with my
physical eyes.
I suddenly developed a craving to go back and
read Plato--to read the work of any mystic, past
or present. This seemed much more pressing than the
reading for my gender seminar. It increased the
electrical feeling that seemed to have become my
constant companion. The initial jolt that had run
through me the night before, when John said the name
Adam, had never quite faded. It stayed with me all
that night, through my wandering morning, and into my meeting
with the seminar instructor. It waxed and waned, at
times a barely perceptible tingle, at others a
rush of energy so strong it made my heart thump
like a kettledrum. I walked into the office still
prickling with it.
It took me less than five minutes
to state my case. I confessed that I hadn't
been able to focus on the course content, that my
attendance had been somewhat spotty, and that I
couldn't concentrate long enough to write a check,
let alone a term paper. The assistant
professor didn't take much convincing. She
already knew the basic facts about my
pregnancy, my ill health, and the baby's Down
syndrome.
"So," I said after I'd laid it all out,
"would you be willing to give me an incomplete
instead of failing me?"
"Sure," said the instructor. Then she
stopped. She got a disconcerted look in her
eyes, which appeared to be focused somewhere behind and
above me. The electric feeling swelled until
I shivered inside my maternity clothes.
"No," said the instructor slowly. "No,
I'm not going to give you an
incomplete. I'm going to give you an A."
"An A?"
She nodded.
"Surely you jest," I said. "I mean, I
appreciate it, but ..." I was going to say that
I didn't deserve an A, which was true, but
my voice trailed off. The professor
didn't seem to be hearing me, not at all. She
wasn't even looking at me. She was moving like a
robot.
Now, just to assure the folks at Harvard that
they don't need to track me down and revoke my
Ph.d., I must tell you that I did in fact
complete every bit of the work for that course. In fact,
I have never been so motivated to write a term
paper in my life. I finished it late, but I
didn't have to go back and cope with the bureaucratic
process of turning an incomplete into a letter
grade. The most probable reason for this is that the
instructor was a kind person. I happen to know that
this is true (i also happen to know that after a
semester or two she already hated Harvard). But
since then, I have often seen people's native kindness
spike upward just when I feel that strange
electrical force surge in the air around me.
The sensation has become a cue to me that something like
this is about to happen.
I like to think that this means there are angels at
work. As to the nature and identity of the angels,
I'll accept as many interpretations as you like.
Maybe the instructor for that gender seminar was,
herself, an angel. Maybe there were invisible
angels in the room, pushing on her psyche,
nudging her toward magnanimity. Maybe they were
my own, court-appointed guardian angels.
Maybe Adam was the angel, as the Magna
psychic said. Or maybe the answer is (do)
All of the above.
For now, it's enough for me to think that angels, or
for that matter any forms of goodness, function like
water; they run into any opening they are given.
There may be some people who are born open, who soak
up goodness like sponges and leave traces of it on
everything they touch. But even when an ordinary
person (like me), or a bad person (like, say,
Hitler), has a moment of openness, a moment of
compassion, goodness rushes in to fill that space,
to make us capable of receiving grace and
transmitting it. Mother Teresa called this being "a
pencil in the hand of God." There have been
times when I have felt this way, as though I were being
used as an instrument of goodness.
These moments are rare for me, and mostly
accidental. I think that they are much more frequent
for Adam.
The psychic from Magna may be right; Adam
may be a kind of angel. But I don't think
he's the only kind. Since that night on the sofa
with John, I have come to believe that there are
infinite passageways out of the shadows, infinite
vehicles to transport us into the light. One of
my favorite authors, Anne Lamott,
quotes Rumi, a Persian mystic. As he
wrote:

God's joy moves from unmarked box
to unmarked box,
from cell to cell. As rainwater, down
into flowerbed.
As roses, up from ground.
Now it looks like a plate of rice and fish,
now a cliff covered with vines,
now a horse being saddled.
It hides within these,
till one day it cracks them open.

With only a few weeks left until
Adam's birth, I was well and truly
cracked.



A friend of mine, who comes from a very religious
home and has a daughter with Down syndrome,
once told me that her mother blamed her for not
miraculously transforming her little girl into a
"normal" child. The logic was that if only my friend
had enough faith, God would somehow suck the extra
twenty-first chromosome out of every cell in the
kid's body. My friend tried, but all the faith
she could muster proved insufficient. She felt very
guilty about that. It's amazing what can make people
feel guilty.
If the theory espoused by my friend's mother is
correct, and parents really can transform their children
just by the power of belief, then the eighth month of my
pregnancy must have been mighty strange for
Adam. He must have spent his days morphing
rapidly back and forth, like a character on Saturday
morning cartoons; now the Barefoot
Boy with Cheeks of Tan, now the Hunchback of
Notre Dame. Most of the time I accepted the
results of the amniocentesis: Adam has
Down syndrome, and there was nothing I could do
to fix it. But often, when the fear and sadness became
unbearable, I would go back in my mind to all the
miracles that had recently occurred around me and
pray for just one more--a doozy. I created
elaborate fantasies in which the delivering
obstetrician hauled Adam out and shouted, "Oh
my God, we made a terrible mistake--this
baby is absolutely normal! In fact, he
seems much stronger and healthier than any other
baby I've ever delivered! I think he will win
a Heisman Trophy and a Nobel Prize!"
It was especially important--and difficult
--for me to find ways of coping when John was out of
town. He took off for Singapore again in late
April, leaving Sibyl to provide me with food
and company. Sibyl and I had grown pretty
darn close by then, what with all the dark hours
during which I anticipated everything bad that could ever
happen to Adam in his entire life, and she kept
telling me that somehow things were going to be all right.
Her tolerance for this kind of thing still astounds me.
Sibyl got a much-needed respite when I
took Katie to my eldest sister's house in
Florida for spring break. Like everyone else in
my family, Christina walks around in a
fairly brittle shell, communicating mainly in
sarcasm, puns, and analytical theories.
Underneath that, though, is enormous warmth, and a
capacity for empathy so strong that when my sister
sees people in pain, she seems to suffer more than they
do. That spring she joked and debated with me as
usual, but I could see how raw she was under the
surface. We didn't talk much about the baby,
mostly because I knew that if I started to cry, my
sister might just not be able to go on living. She was
thinking about Adam, though. One day she casually
tossed me an article she had ripped out of a
magazine. It was about a computer-enhanced way
to help nonverbal disabled people communicate. According
to the article, one teenager with Down syndrome,
who had never spoken intelligibly, learned how
to type out his thoughts using this system. The magazine
quoted one of his first sentences, which was, "I hear
God's finest whisper." I carried the article
back to the guest bedroom to read it. Then I
took a shower, so that I could stand under the
water and cry for a while without spoiling
anybody's day.
On Easter morning, Christina swamped
Katie with more presents than she'd received at
Christmas. Katie, needless to say, was
thrilled. It was better than Christmas not only
in terms of her total gift haul but also because she
wasn't expecting it. She didn't even know the
word Easter--she kept showing me everything she'd
gotten from the Mister Bunny. What little I had
taught her about the holiday was mainly concerned with the
connection between eggs and rabbits and ancient
Celtic fertility rites. For much of my
life, the story of the Resurrection figured
primarily as the basis for a tasteless joke in which
Christ comes forth from the tomb, sees his shadow, and
goes back in for six more weeks of winter.
Given my recent experiences and my new
philosophy of life, I sat around my
sister's house playing Prod with Adam and
wondered if the story of Christ's resurrection
could be literally true. I thought the same thing about
the stories of the Buddha and Mohammed (my
beliefs have never been exclusionary enough to make me
a really good Christian). One thing that was
powerfully attractive about the Greatest Story
Ever Told, however, was the link between Jesus and
miraculous healing. Like my friend's mother, I toyed
with the idea that Adam might be "cured" through divine
intervention. I actually spent a fair amount of
time wondering how God would choose which of Adam's
three twenty-first chromosomes would have to go. I
figured that any combination of two, minus the third,
would result in a slightly different person. This
is how one begins to think after eight months of
nausea and several weeks of grieving.
I was so ill and disassociated during that trip
to Christina's house that I kept breaking things.
I backed my sister's car out of her garage without
opening the door first, causing damage to both the
vehicle and the garage door. I fell asleep
and let Katie wander around unsupervised, until
I was awakened by the sound of something valuable
shattering on the floor in the next room. I
caused hundreds of dollars' worth of damage
during my brief stay in Florida. My sister
let me pay for some of it. By the time I left
to return to Cambridge, I had added guilt
to my long list of onerous emotions. I sincerely
regretted that my family of origin
hadn't just knocked me over the head and raised a
good pig.
While Katie and I were destroying property
in Florida, John was working flat-out to finish the
consulting project in Singapore. The rest of the
consultants on his team, who had been living in
Asia during the entire project, were jubilant
about their impending return to the United States.
There were several of them, all Ivy League--
educated, all young, all ambitious. Very
ambitious. These people made Macbeth look like a
monk. Ambition was what kept the junior
consultants at the office virtually around the
clock as the Singapore project neared
completion. It catalyzed many watercooler
conversations about the internal politics at
headquarters, about what the members of the Asia
team could expect when they returned to Boston,
how they could get in with the right people at the top and,
eventually, climb to the top themselves. The
none-too-subtle competition among the
individuals on the team picked up more speed and
heft as the time to go home approached. As one
consultant told John, during another
interminable workday, "These are great guys. Good
team players, yada yada. But if you ever shower
next to one of them at the gym, don't bend over
to pick up the soap."
The more intensely the team focused on their
ambitions, the less John fit in. For one
thing, he was constantly preoccupied with thoughts about
me, Katie, and the new baby. None of his
co-workers, not even the few married ones, ever
talked about family members. Doing so would give
too much ground to the next Young Turk in line, the
one who might not be diverting his attention
to domestic concerns. You had to cover your back.
Then there was the whole issue of the voices
John had heard, of the dreamlike experience in the
Tokyo shrine, of all the strange things I had
told him were happening to me. Sometimes, when he
allowed himself to think about these things, John would
completely lose his focus on his work, until his
colleagues--excuse me, his competitors--would
snap their fingers or wave their hands in front of
him, trying to wake him from his trance.
No matter how hard he tried to concentrate,
things like this kept happening. He seemed to be standing
outside some invisible wall that enclosed his
fellows, keeping them in a sphere of
concern and aspiration to which John was now a stranger.
He knew he had been just like the other guys
once, but he couldn't even remember what that had
felt like--actually, he didn't think it had
felt like anything at all. Feeling was not high
on the list of priorities for a star executive.
Now John was feeling, feeling acutely, and
although most of what he felt was painful, he
couldn't imagine trading it in for the anesthetized,
driven, merciless focus on success that had
once been his everyday condition. He remembered
what Andrew Carnegie had once said: "Show me
a contented man, and I'll show you a failure."
This used to make sense to John. Now it seemed
to beg the question of what a successful man must be.
Needless to say, John kept these thoughts
to himself. If he'd confided in any of his peers,
they could have ripped him apart. They were fully
invested in the rat race, fighting desperately
for the best spot in the cage--say, the one by the
water spigot. John himself had fought with all his
strength for such a spot. Now, events seemed to have
ejected him from the cage, and instead of a bleak
wasteland, he found himself in a world rich with
possibility. To trade that for even the best shot
at the spigot seemed absurdly undesirable.

A few days before John was scheduled to leave the
Singapore office for the last time, he went to lunch
with a rather large rat, an executive I'll call
Carver. Although Carver was not a member of
John's company, he was no stranger to consulting.
John had met him on an assignment and
considered him something of a mentor. Carver, being a
Texan of adventurous ilk, had asked John
to take him to a hawker center for lunch. John was
more than happy to comply. Food hawkers, who
used to stroll carts around the streets of
Singapore, sell the best quick eating from Indian,
Chinese, Malaysian, and some Western
cultures. They are confined to small areas now, for
sanitation and convenience. The air in these places
is so fragrant it can almost make you swoon.
John and Carver sat down by a stand selling
kway teow, which is a truly celestial concoction
of rice noodles, beef, and garlic sauce.
Once the food arrived and John's companion
had downed a liter of beer, Carver began giving
his usual career advice.
"Seems to me you've lost your
focus," said the older man, looking at John
with one eyebrow lowered.
"Maybe." John sighed. "It's been a
tough year, you know, with ... with this new baby coming and
everything." John hadn't told Carver about the
Down syndrome. He hadn't told anybody
at work.
"Well, that right there proves my point," said
Carver. "You should be letting Martha worry about the
baby. You're a man, son! That's not where your
focus should be."
John shrugged and shoveled in a little kway teow
with his chopsticks. The dish is spicy enough to sear
your lips right off, but due to another head cold,
John could barely taste it.
"What you want to do is get back to Boston,
get in on another key project, and push like
hell all the way from there to a senior-level
consulting position. You've got to stay hungry."
"Uh-huh," said John wearily.
"I'm not fooling with you here," said Carver
intently. "You've got to want it more than the
next guy. That's the only thing that sorts out the
men and the boys at this level."
John found his attention wandering. He looked
around him. The hawker center was under a big awning,
like a circus tent. Beneath the awning swarmed a
kaleidoscope of color, scent, and sound.
Half-naked Chinese chefs were sweating over
woks on open fires; boys with huge black
eyes and colorful sarongs served biryani
to Indian customers; Islamic Malaysian
women, their heads covered by scarves, fed exotic
fruits into juicers and sold the nectar in little
plastic bags.
"You know I'm right," said Carver.
"Uh-huh," said John again. He was
fuzzily aware that his mentor was continuing the
lecture on How to Succeed in Business, but he
didn't really care.
John was thinking about me. He was thinking about the
time we'd spent in Singapore the year after we were
married. We were poor as dirt, so poor we
carried everything we owned in two book bags. For
fourteen months neither of us owned a pair of leather
shoes--the ten-cent rubber thongs that the hawkers
wore seemed to work just fine in that climate. We
used to spend hours on the second story of the
double-decker buses, riding along with no
particular destination but a lot of
curiosity. That, it seemed to John, had been a
better way to spend a year of his life than
fighting for a space by the water spigot.

Half a world away, in our cold
Cambridge apartment, I was dreaming of the rain
forest. Instead of subway cars and sirens, the
deafening rasp of cicadas buzzed in my ears.
I could smell all the spices of Southeast
Asia. I was eating kway teow. This was
strange, because I hadn't been able to eat anything
like that for months now.
Slowly, I became aware of a squeezing
sensation in my middle. It was barely perceptible
at first but quickly grew stronger, until it began
to seriously impair my enjoyment of the kway teow.
I looked down, annoyed, and almost choked with
fear. There was a boa constrictor wrapped around
me. It was huge. It clearly planned to keep
squeezing until one of us gave up the ghost.
I woke up struggling for air, as though I'd
just spent several minutes underwater. The
Singaporean scene from my dream disappeared, but the
squeezing sensation continued. I felt as though
someone very large had decided to wring me out like a
wet towel.
The contraction that woke me up that night, five
weeks before my due date, wasn't strong enough
to make me panic. I was sure it didn't mean
anything. It wasn't time yet. The typical
human pregnancy lasts forty weeks. A
fetus born before the thirty-seventh week is
considered premature. Adam was thirty-five
weeks along, more than just a smidgen too young for
life in the great outdoors. Many children with Down
syndrome are born prematurely, and it does
not help their chances for survival or normal
functioning.
I told myself to calm down. It was only a
Braxton Hicks contraction, I thought. A
Braxton Hicks contraction is a sort of
practice tightening of the uterus that occurs during
the last weeks of pregnancy. These contractions
are similar to actual labor but much less
intense. They are called Braxton Hicks because
they were "discovered" by a physician named, yes,
Braxton Hicks. (what this actually means
is that in the nineteenth century a man finally thought
to attach his name to something that approximately 50
percent of the human race had been
experiencing since the beginning of time. And you men
wonder why we get so testy when we're
pregnant.) I got up and took a Tums,
which, along with chocolate and steak, had come
to constitute its own food group in my prenatal
diet. Then I lay down again and tried to sleep.
The second contraction came on very slowly.
I told myself it was nothing but my imagination,
until I felt Adam try to move and realized
that my uterus had clenched around him like a fist.
Don't panic, I thought. Mr. Braxton
Hicks wouldn't want you to panic.
Twenty-five minutes after the second
contraction, I had a third. Not close enough to mean
anything. I lay down again, closed my eyes,
rolled around on the stress mat for a while, and
actually wished I could get back into my dream
about the boa constrictor. It hadn't been all
bad. At least I could eat spicy food in the
dream--and now that I thought about it, John had been
there. My eyes teared up when I thought about that.
I missed him so much.
Poof.
I looked around the hawker center, at the
blue-and-white-striped awning overhead and the skinny
stray cats underfoot. It was very humid, as
Singapore always is. Carver was waxing eloquent
across the splattered tabletop, and the smell of
spices wafted sumptuously through the crowd.
This time, for the first time, I was not simply
dazzled by the experience of the Seeing Thing. I
believed that it was real.
So I asked John to come home.
"Listen, honey," I whispered to the cold
Cambridge night. "I need you. Please."
I think I expected the Seeing Thing to grow
stronger then, like reception improving on a TV
when you move the rabbit ears. Instead, the vision
of the Singapore food court was suddenly gone, and
I was left in the cold, dark apartment feeling like
a fool. A fourth contraction hit, twenty
minutes after the third.

"Play your cards right, and keep them close
to your vest," Carver told John. "Very
close."
They had finished eating and were polishing off the
last of their drinks. John had been feigning
attentiveness, throwing out the occasional
"Uh-huh," and noticing, for the first time,
that Carver didn't really care whether you listened
to him or not, as long as he got to talk. John
couldn't stop thinking about me, wishing I were the one
sitting across from him. He began to miss me
terribly. He closed his eyes and reminded himself
that he'd be home in just three days. It seemed
too long to wait.
"Hey!" Carver shouted to an Indian boy.
"You there! Give us another beer!"
The boy came over to the table. He looked about
ten, very slender, with deep brown skin and hair so
black it shone blue. He said something to Carver in
Tamil.
"I said another beer," Carver repeated,
drawing out the words. "No speaky English?"
The boy looked confused, then broke into a shy
smile. "English," he repeated.
"Good," said Carver. "Can you say beer?"
He held up an empty bottle and swung it
back and forth in front of the boy's face.
The boy brightened, nodding. "Beer," he
repeated.
"That's right." Carver nodded approvingly.
"Now, can you say, I am stupid? I am
ignorant? I have no class?" He bellowed
with laughter as the boy gave him a perplexed
frown and went back to his stall to get the beer.
"Retards," Carver muttered to John. "In
case they haven't noticed, English is their
national language."
"Shut up," said John.
Carver froze, staring. He was almost as shocked
as John was.
"I mean--listen, I'm sorry, Carver,"
John stammered, although come to think of it, he
wasn't sorry at all. "My nerves are a
little on edge," he concluded weakly. That was
true. He was extremely edgy, because the voice
that had just come out of his mouth, the one that told his
mentor to shut up, seemed to have come through him, without
being under his control.
"Whatever," said Carver archly, holding up his
hands, palm forward. "Whatever. Didn't mean
to offend."
John rubbed a hand across his brow. It was
damp. "Listen," he said, "I've got to go
home."
Carver looked at him with concern. "Okay,
son," he said. "You don't look too well.
I'll go back to the hotel with you."
"No." John shook his head. "I mean
home. I've got to get home." This, too,
seemed to come through his vocal cords almost before he
knew what he was going to say. As he paid the
check and hurried to hail a taxi, John knew
that he'd be on a plane that afternoon.
Back at his hotel, while he threw his
belongings into the hanging bag he always carried, he
thought over the few remaining tasks necessary to complete
his portion of the consulting project. As he
recalled each detail of the work, he instantly
saw a way that it could be performed by phone, fax,
or mail. There was nothing that really required him
to stay in Singapore. This was fortunate, because
John's body appeared to have decided to leave the
country with or without his consent. He heaved the strap
of his hanging bag onto his shoulder and sprinted for the
exit as if he'd heard a starter's gun.
It took him less than fifteen minutes
to check out, but when he left the hotel, he saw
that the line for a taxi was thirty people long. A
bellboy was whistling cabs over, one by one, at a
leisurely pace.
John carried his hanging bag up to the
bellboy. "I need a taxi right now," he said.
"It's an emergency." He still had that bizarre,
out-of-control sensation. He felt as though he were not
the one who had ordered the cab. If I'd been
there, I could have told him it was only the
puppeteers.
"Sorry, sir," said the bellboy. "Queue
up, please."
"No." John was almost pleading. "I've got
to get home now. Please."
The man shook his head. "Sorry, sir.
Queue up, please." He was a small man,
short and very slender. He was wearing a uniform that
looked like a cross between a suit of armor and a
Victorian party dress. The spike of his
helmet barely came up to John's nose.
"I'll give you twenty dollars," said
John. The bellboy's eyes flickered, first
at John, then at the people waiting behind him. The
other customers were all watching. The man shook his
head.
John didn't know what to do, especially
since he didn't understand why he was doing it. He
forced himself to think. He had been through thousands of
hours of instruction at Harvard, had read
millions of words and written thousands
more, all to learn how to do business in Asia. He
knew everything there was to know about bridging the
cultural divide with empathy and sensitivity.
He should be able to come up with a plan, he thought, but
nothing came to his mind. Instead, John
watched, transfixed, as his hands leapt out of their
own accord and grabbed the bellboy's collar
ruffle.
"Get me a taxi, right now," John said,
"or I'll kill you."
The crowd gasped in horror. The bellboy
gasped in horror. John gasped in horror.
He barely had time to begin apologizing before the
bellboy blew a piercing blast on his whistle,
opened the door of the next cab in line, and
fairly shoved John into it. He was halfway
to Changi Airport before the strange sensation in his
hands and throat subsided, and his body reverted
to his control.
Later, when John told me about how his body
had driven off without him, had taken matters
literally into its own hands, I knew just how he'd
felt. Because that's exactly what it feels like when
you're having a baby.



John had a lot of trouble getting home. It
just so happened that the very day he bolted from
Singapore was the beginning of a Japanese holiday
period known as Golden Week. This one week
contains no fewer than three important
holidays, all of which mandate travel to one's
place of birth. The Japanese travelers
during this one week clog up the entire Asian
air travel industry. Imagine throwing
Thanksgiving Day in between Christmas and New
Year's, and you'll have some idea of the logistical
problems one might encounter traveling through Asia
during Golden Week. The Singapore airport
was so packed that the lines extended through the outer
doors. The building teemed with Japanese
expatriates heading home for the week, as well
as the usual Chinese tourists going back to the
mainland, carrying live chickens and ducks in their
luggage.
John fought his way to the business-class line
at the Singapore Airlines counter. He waited
in it for over an hour, and as he drew closer to the
counter he heard several people ask to buy
tickets without reservations. Not one of these people was
successful. By the time John reached the counter, his
prospects of getting a ticket back to the
United States, which would necessitate going through
other parts of Asia, were looking mighty dim.
"Is there any way I can get to the USA?"
he asked.
"No, sir, I'm sorry," said the
attendant. "Not until next week. All
flights are completely booked."
John nodded dejectedly. "Could you check?"
he said, without any real hope.
The attendant shrugged. "Well, all right,
sir, but--oh, hold on! Jolly good!"
John liked the sound of that, even though it was
odd to hear it spoken by an Asian.
(singaporean English is chock-full of
British idioms.)
"I just had a cancellation," said the attendant.
"An economy-class ticket. It goes right
through from Singapore to New York City. Would you
like it?"
Well, thought John, there you go again.
John still thinks God was behind that cancellation, that
it was arranged specifically to get him back
to Boston. He has always wondered, though, why
God couldn't get him a better seat. He
arrived in New England twenty-three hours
later, having sat in the very back row of several
flights, in a middle seat, between two men who
smoked copiously and talked to each other
constantly but would not give up their window and aisle
seats to sit side by side. He had to stop in
Bahrain, where he hoped the two men would
deboard, but they got off the plane only long enough
to buy more cigarettes.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I continued
to have strong contractions every twenty minutes or so for a whole day. I'd been to University Health
Services, where the obstetrician on call said
that my cervix wasn't dilated and that I should go
home and rest. Sibyl and Deirdre had, of
course, called every hour or so and come by when they
could, in case things progressed any further.
When night fell and the contractions were still twenty
minutes apart, I phoned them both and told them
to go to bed. I promised I would call if anything
changed.
Nothing did. After Katie fell
asleep, I found myself once again on the stress
mat, dozing fitfully for twenty minutes at a
time. Saying that I was worn out would be like saying that
the World Trade Center is a split level with a
decent view. I was trashed. I had started
praying, had actually gotten quite used to it, but that
night I didn't know what to pray for. I lay
on the stress mat and felt a terrible struggle
going on inside me. One part of me wanted
desperately to end this torturous pregnancy
now, no matter what. Another part insistently
reminded me that I had to keep Adam in the oven
until he was well done, or at least medium
rare.
I was not my best self when John came in
at 3:00 A.m. He looked as bad as I
felt. He had two and a half days of beard
stubble on his chin, and his eyes were so bloodshot from
cigarette smoke that he looked like one of the
undead from a bad B movie.
I didn't care. When I heard John's
key click in the door of our apartment, all the
tension I had been holding back came bursting out
of me. I was safe again, safe enough to fall apart,
and that is what I did. As soon as John put
his arms around me, in the doorway of the bedroom,
I began to sob like a drunk at her mother's
funeral.
"I'm so scared, John," I told him when
I could speak through my sobs. "I don't know
what's going to happen and I'm so tired and I
want to get it over with but I don't want
to make it worse and I feel so awful and I
don't know if I can handle having a baby like this
and what if he's really sick or has to have
surgery or life support or what if he
dies or--"
"Calm down," John kept saying. "Are you
still having contractions?"
"Yes,," I said. "But it's too soon.
If he's premature he'll be even more messed
up."
"He's not going to be premature," John
said, "and he's not going to be messed up.
Remember all the things that have happened to you?
To us?"
I nodded.
"I believe he could be healed," said John.
"I do."
"He's not sick, really." I wiped
my face with the sleeve of my bathrobe.
"Doesn't need healing, exactly."
"Well, maybe fixed is a better word,"
John said.
I looked into his red, sunken eyes. "You
really believe that could happen?"
He nodded, his eyes very tired but steady.
"Look at everything else that's going on," he
said. He thought for a minute, and then said, "You were with
me in Singapore, weren't you?"
I had almost stopped crying. I nodded. "At
the hawker center. You had kway teow."
John gave a low, astonished chuckle.
"Damn," he said. "Even though I knew it
worked, it's incredible. Isn't it incredible?"
I finally smiled, the first smile I'd
managed in two days. "Yeah," I said. "I
guess it is."
"S." John gave me his own quick grin.
"Why not believe that other incredible things can
happen? Good things?"
I couldn't answer him. Another contraction was
under way, and I was trying hard to relax and breathe
through it. "I just wish I were sure," I whispered,
once the pain had passed. "I just want to know.
All those little miracles are nice, but they're not
enough."
John slid me from his lap to the stress mat as
though he were putting Katie to bed. "Martha,
Martha." He sighed. "What am I gonna do
with you? You know, there are millions of people in this world
who would give anything just to experience some of the things
that have happened to you over the past little while."
I nodded, too tired to talk.
"Most people go through their whole lives," John
went on, "and never have one miracle happen to them.
You've had dozens and dozens, and you still want more!
It's like God gives you a brownie, I mean a
really good brownie, but you can't be content with it.
You want the whole pan of brownies. Nobody
gets that."
"Maybe so," I said. "Maybe so. But I
still want it."
John shook his head, laughing. "You are a
case, Martha Beck," he said. "You are a
genuine case." He arranged a pillow under my
head.
"Get some sleep now," he said.
I lay there for ten minutes or so, waiting for
him to come to bed with me. He didn't. I
could hear him puttering around the apartment, first in the
kitchen, then in the bathroom. I was almost asleep
when another contraction gripped me and my body
flooded with adrenaline. When it was over I got
up and waddled down the hall.
"John?" I said. "Are you coming to bed?"
"No," he answered. "Not now." He was still in
the bathroom. He had dumped out the contents of the
laundry hamper on the floor and was sorting the
clothes by color.
"Aren't you tired?" I said, poking my head
through the door. "You look awfully tired. You
look like a sick terrorist."
John flashed his weary smile again. "I am
tired," he said, "but it's midday in Singapore.
I couldn't fall asleep right now if I tried.
Thought I'd get the laundry done instead."
I didn't bother to contradict him, but I
knew what he was really doing. He was comforting himself
with work, as he had always done. I figured this was a
better addiction than drugs or alcohol, so
I didn't ask him to come to bed again. I watched
while John sorted the dark clothes into a pile
and pushed them into an empty pillowcase. He
slung the pillowcase full of clothes onto his
back and told me he'd be back from the laundry
room in a few minutes. I was reluctant
to let him go even that long. When the apartment door
closed behind him, I finally accepted that no matter
who was around me, no matter how helpful and loving
people tried to be, I was still going to end up facing my
fears alone.
I walked into the living room and sat down on
the floor, looking out over Harvard Square. I
sat in the position the Japanese call
seiza, with my rear end resting on my feet.
It is a respectful posture, almost like
kneeling. I clasped my hands over my
enormous belly and tried to talk to God.
"Listen," I said. "I'm sorry the
brownies you've given me aren't enough. I'm
sorry I'm so weak. But I can't do this
anymore."
Another contraction hit, and I had to stop
talking. When it passed, I felt so exhausted
that I almost fell over sideways.
"I'm sorry," I gasped again, "but I
can't. It's too much for me. Please.
Please."

What I remember most about that moment was a
sense of letting go. For the first time, I prayed
without trying to control whatever the answer might be.
I was just too tired to hang on, to control
anything. It was almost like getting out of the driver's
seat of a car and handing someone else the keys:
"Hey, I'm sozzled. In no shape to get behind
the wheel. Maybe you should drive." I had been
drunk for years, on the illusions I had thought
meant happiness. I had drunk myself
into oblivion on prestige and intellect and
praise. I was in no shape to be driving my own
life.
At the moment when I stopped fighting for control
of my little universe, I noticed something that had
been there all along, except that I hadn't seen
it. It was slightly to the left of me, maybe
eighteen inches off the floor. It was a person--
or rather, a person's feet. That was all I saw
--a pair of bare feet, standing in the air, with the
hem of a robe falling around the ankles.
I didn't even bother to look up at the
person's body or face. Some of the few people I
told about this experience asked me why not. All
I can say is that when you are reunited with the love
of your life, you don't hold yourself at arm's
length. This being wasn't unfamiliar to me at
all. I wasn't surprised or stunned or
frightened. I felt that the natural order of the
universe had been restored, not disturbed, and I
was immensely, overwhelmingly relieved. And so
I simply leaned forward, letting my forehead
rest against those suspended feet, and began to cry like
a child who had been found after being lost in a storm.
"I've waited so long," I sobbed. "I've
waited so long."
I don't remember the slightest feeling of
surprise. The situation didn't seem strange
to me at all. I didn't want to stare, or
run, or even wonder. In fact, what I would
once have called my "normal" life--a life
in which there seemed to be no spiritual beings around me--
was the state of being that seemed bizarre to me now.
It was absolutely clear, as clear as reality
becomes when you waken from a dream, that I had been
waiting all my life to be with this person again.
What amazed me more than the physical
presence in the room was the love that came with it.
I felt as though I were caught in a glowing
tidal wave of love, a love so
strong that all the pain on earth couldn't even begin
to put a dent in it. I have sometimes wondered why
I didn't feel cheated at having spent so many
terrible days on earth before I found that love again.
But once I was back within it, all the frustration
and loneliness I had ever suffered seemed
completely inconsequential.
I was still crying, my forehead resting against those
feet, when I felt two strong hands reach under
my arms and pull me gently upward. I had the
impression that I was being lifted out of my body,
which was still kneeling on the floor. I felt
connected to it, in a distant way, but not inside it.
It was only, after all, a woman of earth,
wrapped around a child of earth. I, the part of me that
constitutes my identity, was lifted away from it,
into an embrace so sweet that for years and years it
never for a single second left my mind. Still today,
when I hear a song on the radio about finding the
ultimate love, the perfect love, the love
one cannot live without, I think about that being who
picked me up and held me like a baby, on that
chilly spring night near Harvard Square.
I don't know how long it lasted; maybe
thirty seconds, maybe ten minutes. Not more
than that. Whatever it was, my entire existence still
hinges on that brief encounter. It is the center
point for me, the single event that divides my
life into Before and After.
I don't know how unusual it is to experience
this kind of thing. It's not something you want to run out
and recount to the neighbors over pound cake and
tea. If it is rare, I would guess that its
rarity has to do with the immense difficulty it brings
into your life. I know this sounds strange. I always
used to think that if I just knew there was Someone Out
There, if I had some evidence of a Higher Power
that I could trust completely, life would be a bowl
of cherries. Nope. If you have ever experienced
something like this, you know that it doesn't automatically
make the rest of your experience easy to tolerate.
On the contrary, after tasting that kind of love, that
kind of belonging, it is almost unbearable to feel
separated from it again.
In the months and years after this experience I would
practice every form of religious and mystical
discipline that I thought might have the slightest chance
of bringing me back into the presence of that overwhelming
love. A lot of mystics fast; I would go days
without eating. Others meditate; I
spent hours and hours--at night, when the kids and
John were asleep--clearing my mind and waiting
for the Being to return. I kept every rule of every
religion I knew anything about. I was kosher and
halal and vegetarian. I didn't smoke,
drink, or swear. I gave money to the poor.
I tried to be kind to everyone and everything, to the
point of groveling, although my motives were
purely selfish.
Most of all, though, I fell in love with the
thought of death. I was in no way suicidal, but
I believed that death was the one sure passage
back into the presence of that love, and I could
hardly wait. A few years later, I confided
this whole experience to a woman who had "died" of a
heart attack. She'd gone through the whole
near-death thing, with the tunnel and the light and so on.
Given a choice whether to live or die, this
woman decided on a compromise: she'd come
back to life just long enough to give her children a few
instructions, then die again. "I'll be right
back," she assured the Being of Light. When she
came to, in her body of clay, she was outraged
to find that a crew of paramedics had shocked her
heart back into its regular pattern. It took
her a long time to get over the intense disappointment
of living. She told me she takes great comfort from
knowing she gets to die again.
For a full three years after God gave me a
whole pan of brownies, the thing I wanted most
in the world was to die. I was half crazy with longing
for it. I guess I got so obsessive that the
Powers That Be concluded I needed something to knock
me back on track, like the Skipper whacking
Gilligan on the head to correct the amnesia
caused by a previous whack on the head.
So I got another pan of brownies.
At the time, Adam was three and a half, and my
health was lousy. What with my still undiagnosed
autoimmune disease and all the fasting and the death
wish and so forth, my body kept breaking down and
requiring surgery for one thing or another. During
one of these operations, I suddenly found myself alert
and aware and gazing at a brilliant white light
that had appeared directly above my head. The
light was shaped like a sphere, not a person, but there
was no doubt in my mind that it was the same being who
had held and comforted me that night in my apartment.
I started to cry from pure joy, alarming the
surgeons, who knew I was still under
general anesthesia. The anesthesiologist would have
sedated me even further, except that the light
told him not to, assuring him that I was crying because
I was happy. (that doctor came and talked
to me after the surgery, to ask me what in the world had
been going on, and later wrote to me about the
experience.)
While the surgery proceeded, the Being of
Light gently explained to me that I was barking up
all the wrong trees. I would not find my way
back home by fasting, it told me, or
by meditating, following endless lists of rules, or
even dying. All those things might help, given the
right conditions, but not unless I was willing to do something
much more difficult.
The light didn't use words--I simply
knew what it wanted to tell me--and so it's hard
for me to explain in words what it communicated. I
tried to tell John, after the surgery, and he
assumed I was babbling through a drugged haze, which was
true. However, there was a concrete message that
remained even after the drugs had left my
system, and this is--sort of--what it said. It said
that the way back to my real environment, the place
where my soul was meant to exist, doesn't lie through
any set of codes I will ever find outside of
myself. I have to look inward. I have to jettison every
sorrow, every terror, every misconception, every lie that
stands between my conscious mind and what I know in my
heart to be true. Instead of clutching around me
all the trappings of a "good" person, a
"successful" person, or even a "righteous"
person, I have to be exactly what I am, and
take the horrible chance that I may be rejected for
it. I can't get home by cloaking myself in the
armor of any system, social, political,
or religious. I have to strip off all that comforting
armor and go on naked.

Back in late April of 1988, I was so
stunned by the flood of love that swept me off our
living room floor that I couldn't yet begin
to put words around it. By the time John came back
in and rinsed the laundry soap off his hands, the
living room was dark again and the sirens blared through the
night beyond Harvard Yard. I was back in a world
where death and taxes are the only sure things, where
the fear of oblivion taints every moment of
consciousness, where we struggle and struggle and
struggle against entropy, knowing every second
that we are losing the battle. I was back in the
shadow world.
Sibyl would tell me later that she hadn't
really worried about me until after that night. "You
seemed to be going through a normal grieving
process," she said, "and then, all of a sudden, you
just stopped."
It was true. I was completely dazed. Trying
to integrate the immensity of that love into my mind
and heart became my full-time occupation for
months. When the being disappeared, leaving a
residue of love on every surface in my
apartment, my uterus was still contracting
enthusiastically. But my fear, and the sense of
pitched battle, were gone. I no longer worried
about going into labor. I felt utterly trustful
that things were under control, though no control of mine.
I was willing to bet that between them, Adam and the Being
of Love probably had some kind of plan.
Whatever it was, I was in it for the duration.



I hung on for another week, the contractions
gradually speeding up. Obviously, I didn't
sleep a lot during that week, but then, I
didn't really want to. I wanted to sit around
and think about what had happened to me the Night of the
Magic Feet. The peace from that moment glowed in
me for a long time, making me want to hush everything
and focus on it the way you would listen to very soft,
supernally beautiful music. People who knew me
well started to wonder if I had gained access
to some sort of recreational drug.
Even with the warmth and wonder to shore me up, the
repetitive stress of those endless contractions
slowly eroded my endurance. I had a distinct
feeling that I was postponing Adam's birth
deliberately, that if I decided to let go,
he'd pop right out. I was determined to hang on
to him until the thirty-seventh week of gestation.
It wasn't the easiest thing I've ever done.
While I lay around, watching Sesame
Street with Katie and trying to carry Adam
to term, John was busy finalizing all his
business at the consulting company. He had
arranged a meeting on the seventh of May with the
man who had hired him. John had decided
to quit. I knew how much this hurt him, how
deeply it felt like failure. I
remembered how excited we had both been when
he'd gotten the job, and how intent he'd been
on proving himself. Nevertheless, we were both coming
to accept the idea that our lives would be very different
once Adam was born. We weren't sure
exactly what it would be like, but we were sure that our
burden as parents would be much heavier, and that John
wouldn't have the kind of freedom he'd need
to succeed in such a competitive industry. Ever
since the night he'd spent in the Japanese
shrine, John had known which way his choices would
take him. But that wasn't the easiest thing he'd
ever done, either.
John kissed me good-bye that morning, carried
Katie out to the elevator, and took her over
to Sibyl's house so that I could get some rest.
When they were gone the apartment felt too empty,
too silent, and too dirty. It had been a
mess for months, but now the need to clean it took
on a sudden urgency. I'd begun to experience the
"nesting" urge that precedes labor. There have been
only three times in my life--once for each
child--when I actually wanted to clean the
refrigerator. This was one of them, another sign
that labor was proceeding ahead of schedule. I
held myself back, hoping that if I refused
to nest, my body might not eject Adam quite so
soon. The refrigerator sat there, humming
to itself, taunting me with the smudges on its
shelves.
I knew I was supposed to stay in bed, but I
felt as if I'd go completely mad if I
didn't do something. I dressed myself and hit the
streets of Cambridge, bent on one thing:
shopping. I decided that it might curb the nesting
urge if I at least purchased a few feathers.
John and I were never very conscientious about
preparing nurseries for our children. We had an
unspoken suspicion that Something Bad Might
Happen, a feeling that it was bad luck to count
chickens that were still in the egg. When Katie was
born, we hadn't even bought a blanket to wrap
around her on her way home from the hospital.
She slept in a dresser drawer until we
managed to find a crib, a week later. Of
course, our trust in Adam's chances at
survival were even lower. We still had Katie's
old crib and plenty of used blankets, but we
didn't have one single article of clothing for a boy
baby. On the bright May morning when
John set off to quit his job, I decided
I'd remedy that.
I waddled the half mile to the Harvard
Coop, stopping and trying to look casual when a
contraction came on. Once I got there I
went straight to the insignia section. Neither
John nor I had ever worn anything with
"Harvard" written on it. It seemed so
pretentious. We hadn't ever put any Harvard
insignia on Katie, either, even though the
sweatshirts and baseball caps looked adorable
in baby sizes. But with Adam, I would break the
mold. I was going to put the word Harvard all
over that little retarded boy. I figured that any
statement this made, about either Adam or Harvard,
would be apropos.
The nesting energy that got me over to the Coop was
pretty much gone by the time I got home, with a
tiny "Harvard" sweatsuit in tow. The walk
seemed to take forever. When our apartment door
finally closed behind me, I leaned back against it and
slid all the way to the floor. Another
contraction hit. It was intense enough to make me
grit my teeth.
"Um, God?" I said. I always talked this
way now, whenever I was alone. "Listen, I know
it's still a week early, but I'd really--oof."
The squeezing sensation was getting fiercer, too
fierce to allow conversation.
"I'd really like to end this," I said, when I
could. Then I waited. I didn't know what
to expect; a voice from heaven, a burning bush,
a talking pigeon. I didn't care. All I
wanted was some sort of permission.
"So, how about it?" I asked the Great Beyond.
Nothing.
Eventually I heaved my bulky self up and
proceeded to Katie's bedroom--I guess you
could call it the nursery. There still wasn't much
furniture in it; just the crib, a chest of
drawers, and an easy chair so battered that it had
been left in the apartment by the previous tenants.
I went to the chest of drawers and opened the bottom
drawer, the one where I'd stored all Katie's
outgrown clothes and baby blankets. I was going
to put Adam's little "Harvard" sweatsuit
underneath everything else, so that John wouldn't see
it. Then, if the baby died, I could dispose of it
on my own. No one would ever have to know.
I was pushing the clothes aside, digging
for the very bottom of the drawer, when I heard the
rustle of a plastic bag. I frowned, curious,
and dug further. Underneath the blankets and
T-shirts and sleep suits I found a small
package. The bag bore the label of a
Singaporean sporting goods store, one that sold
Western products at near-black-market
prices. Inside was a tiny pair of Reebok
tennis shoes. They were exact replicas of the
adult versions, hardly bigger than your thumb, as
miniature and perfect as two matched
hummingbirds. Shoes like that are common in the
United States now, but I'd never seen anything
like them. I took them out of their packaging and held
them, one in each hand. They felt solid and
surprisingly heavy, the way a sleeping baby
does. I put them up to my face and realized
I was crying. That was the first time since Adam's
diagnosis that I realized how desperately I
wanted him to live.

Two miles away, John was having another
of those bizarre 	conversations, the ones that never happen
in real life, the ones where God descends
directly out of the machine and fixes some
difficult situation while the chorus chants its
approval. Later, when John described it
to me, I couldn't stop thinking about the strange
look on my Sociology of Gender
instructor's face the day she had insisted on
giving me an A.
John's meeting that afternoon was with a man named
Mark Fuller, one of the company's founders. Mark
was not your typical business executive; he was
a quixotic dreamer, thoughtful and innovative, a
man who inhaled books and listened intently
to everyone he ran across, from CEO'S to tollbooth
attendants. I had met him when I was
noticeably pregnant with Katie, and he had
immediately begun to describe to me his idea for an
in-house day-care center at the consulting firm.
This was the man who had hired John, and both of us
respected him. One of the main reasons John
regretted quitting was that he felt he was failing
Mark.
After some initial pleasantries, John cut
to the chase. "I came in today to resign," he
said.
Mark stared at him. "What?"
"I think we'll probably be
moving," said John. "Our baby is due in a
month, and I think we should be around family. It
would be best for my wife." He winced when he
heard himself, remembering the way Carver had
reacted to him in Singapore.
Mark still looked stunned. "I'm not sure I
understand," he said. "You never mentioned this before."
"Yes. Uh, well ..." John cleared his
throat. "In the last few weeks we've ...
we've gotten more information."
Mark shook his head. "John, what are you
talking about?"
There didn't seem to be any way out of it.
John took a deep breath. "The baby has
Down syndrome," he said.
Mark's eyes widened even more. "Oh, my
God," he said. "Are you sure?"
John nodded glumly. "Amniocentesis,"
he said. "Hundred percent accuracy."
As John recalls it, Mark's own wife was
pregnant at that time. That may have been why Mark
became very pensive at this point in the conversation,
falling silent and pacing back and forth, as he often
did when presented with a problem.
"Are you finished with your dissertation?" he asked
suddenly.
John felt lower than slug slime.
"No," he said. Not "I'm very close," not "The
research is locked away," not "Ninety-five
percent." John was tired of giving everything a
successful spin, especially now, when he thought the
real odds of his completing his degree program were
slim to none. He had to find steady work
to support us all, and that didn't leave much time
for academic research.
"How long would it take you to finish the
dissertation," Mark asked, "assuming that you had
nothing else to do?"
John thought for a minute. "Six months,
give or take."
"Okay, okay," said Mark. "How about this:
We'll pay you as a full-time employee for
six months while you finish your dissertation."
John opened his mouth and then closed it again.
"And?" he managed to stammer.
"And then we'll still have a relationship with you," said
Mark. "Professionally."
He seemed very pleased with this idea. John
thought it through carefully and could find in it virtually
no financial "upside" for the company.
"I'm not sure I understand," he said at last.
"Your dissertation will do the company good," said
Mark, although he did not specify exactly how.
Nevertheless, he seemed to mean it. He was, after
all, the only person John had ever met who
would actually read a Ph.d. dissertation for
pleasure.
"I don't know what to say," John
stammered, half-expecting Mark to smile
sweetly, yank out a magic wand, and tell him
to click his heels together three times.
"How about yes?" said Mark.
"Okay," said John. "Okay, yes.
Yes!"
Mark extended his hand. "Resignation denied."
He beamed.
John reached forward with his own hand, feeling
dizzy and surreal. It was as though he had come up
too quickly from the depths of the ocean, from a place
where intense pressure had been crushing in on
him, to some mellow, bounteous Fantasy Island.
For the first time in his life, John thought he might
be about to faint.
That's how everything went when we were expecting
Adam: bizarrely badly, or bizarrely
well. Those puppeteers turned the whole damn
world upside down. You might say that I am
putting too much stock in the workings of spirit, in the will
of God. You might say that John and I were
simply discovering the goodwill that had lain, all
along, in the hearts of some decent human beings.
But you would be assuming that these two things are
different, and that is an assumption I reject.
I have been blessed with love both human and
divine, and I believe that there is no essential
difference between them. Any person who acts out of
love is acting for God. There is no way
to repay such acts, except perhaps to pass them on
to others.
At about the time Mark Fuller was doing his
Glinda the Good imitation, I was counting the days
left until the magical thirty-seven-week
gestation point. I didn't think I could hold the
contractions at bay much longer. I put the little
Harvard sweatsuit next to the tiny Reebok
shoes in the bottom of Katie's hand-me-down
drawer and crept into the bedroom to lie down.
"Pack a bag," said a voice by my
elbow.
All my hair stood on end.
"What?"
"Pack a bag."
I knew what it meant. I was supposed
to get my things ready to take to the hospital.
I went to the closet and pulled out the bag I
had used to heft all my belongings when John and
I were newlyweds in Southeast Asia. Another
contraction came on, hard. I put a robe
into the bag, and a pair of slippers. Then I went
to the bathroom and dug out an extra toothbrush,
toothpaste, mouthwash, and a hairbrush.
"It's early," I said. "It's too early."
The voice said nothing. I went back
into Katie's room and opened the bottom drawer
again. I stood looking into it for some time, wondering
if I would need any baby things, wondering if
Adam would go directly into surgery as two out of
five Down's babies do, wondering if yet
another dreadful decision, or a series of them,
lay ahead of me.
"What should I pack?" I asked. I
didn't expect an answer, not really. But I
got one.
"What do you think?"
"Would you cut that out?" I said fretfully.
"Would you please, for once, just give me a
direct answer?"
For just a moment, I had a flash of insight--
or rather, outsight, where I could see myself from the per-
spective of the person I'd been a few short
months before. I was standing in an empty room, not
only talking to a disembodied voice but arguing with
it. I'd left the typical definition of sanity
so far behind that, although I saw the absurdity in this,
it didn't even faze me.
The fact was that the voice was right. When I
looked inside myself, I knew exactly how
Adam's health was going to be. He would be fine.
He wouldn't require surgery, wouldn't get
sick very often, wouldn't even have the frequent ear
infections we'd been warned are typical of
kids with Down syndrome. Aside from his extra
chromosome, he'd be a perfectly healthy little
boy.
How did I know this? I just did. I have always
liked Albert Einstein's comment that "people like us, who
believe in physics, know that the distinction between
past, present, and future is only a
stubbornly persistent illusion." Every now and then
I have had premonitions strong enough
to convince me this is true in practice, not
merely in theory.
I've experienced this kind of foreknowledge half
a dozen times since Adam was born. It never
happens when I try to force it. Instead, it pops
up from nowhere when I meet a person who will later
become important to me for one reason or
another. It hits me like a brick when I
visit a place I will later come to live. So
far, this sense of knowing, which feels a lot like
"remembering" something that is not past but future,
has never been wrong. I don't think I'm
unusual in having these premonitions. It's just that
when I was expecting Adam I was lucky enough to be
forced to notice them, and trust them. Of course,
no matter how many times they prove correct,
I am always afraid to trust them again. But in my
more lucid moments I believe that if we pay
attention, all of us occasionally bump into our own
futures.
When John arrived home from his resignation
excursion, staggering like a junkie with gratitude
and relief, he found me poking around my
premonitions like a child playing with a strange but
fascinating animal. He rushed through the door,
swept me up in his arms, and kissed me for a long
time. He didn't even notice that he had to step
over my packed bag, which was standing in the doorway.
"You know what, honey?" John said
exuberantly. "The most incredible thing just
happened! I think everything's going to be all
right!"
I nodded. "I know it is."
"Listen." John grinned at me. "You're not
going to believe this."
"Oh, I think I am. Whatever it is, I
think I am."
"No, really," said John. "I have to tell
you--"
"Sibyl and Charles are waiting for us in the
parking lot," I interrupted. "Come on--you can
tell me in the car."
"The car?" John looked puzzled.
"On the way to the hospital," I said. "This
is it."
John's eyes and mouth opened wide. "But
isn't it too soon for--"
"Don't worry," I said. "He'll be
fine. Everything will be fine."
I said it with such conviction that John
had no choice but to believe it.



When John and I got to the parking lot,
Sibyl, Charles, Mie, and Katie were
waiting, the door of their car already open. We
drove through a late-spring snow flurry
to Brigham and Women's Hospital in
Boston. Between my contractions, I smoothed
Katie's hair and talked to her softly about what
was happening. We'd discussed it all before, of
course, but she listened with rapt attention, her
blue eyes huge and solemn.
John had brought a little Japanese stopwatch
with him in his coat pocket. Whenever a contraction
came on, I'd tell him, "Now," and when it
ebbed away, I'd say, "Over." John would
check the stopwatch and let me know how long it had
lasted, and how long the interim had been between it and the
previous contraction. It sounded a little like Mission
Control:
"Now."
"Over."
"One minute thirteen seconds."
"How long since the last one?"
"Ten fifty-three."
"Roger."
It was a half-hour drive. When it ended, I
kissed Katie and told her that we'd call her
on the phone later that night, while she stayed
over at Mie's house. I thanked Sibyl and
Charles, hoping they could sense the depth of my
gratitude, since it was impossible to express
in words. Then they pulled away, and John and I
were on our own again.
I thought about how different this was from Katie's
birth, which had felt like a party by comparison. I'd
reacted to a shot of Demerol by seeing boats and
horses in the delivery room. I don't
remember it all that well, but John says I
was a laugh riot. Once Katie was born, the
party got even better. There was a small
blizzard of happy phone calls and cards and
flowers. John's Business School section
took out a whole column in the Harbus, the
HBS newspaper, to run a congratulatory ad
that said "The Section H class of 1986
welcomes Katherine Beck, class of
2010." The day I had Adam was as
different from Katie's birthday as bungee
jumping is from a high-risk rescue operation.

I refused the offer of a wheelchair and paced
back and forth in the hospital lobby while John
filled out the entry forms. At one point, he
came over and asked solicitously if it wouldn't
be better for me to sit down. He pointed toward
a small lobby, where a sign said PATIENT
WAITING. I told John that he knew I'd
never been a patient person, especially not when
waiting. If he could find an im'-patient
waiting area, I'd be happy to patronize it.
He grinned at me and went back to filling out
forms. Within a few minutes, before he had finished,
I'd run out of spunk. I sat down on one
of the hideous orange vinyl chairs in the
PATIENT WAITING lobby and curled up around
my bulging torso. I didn't even argue much
when a nurse rolled another wheelchair over and
invited me to climb aboard.
The nurse walked beside us as John pushed the
chair to the elevator, then out onto the labor and
delivery floor. She led us down a long,
sterile-looking hallway to my assigned labor
room. The hospital was busy that morning; most
of the rooms along the hallway were already occupied.
Nurses in white pantsuits and doctors in
those blue pajamas with the little shower-cap hats
bustled through the corridor. The maternity floor
is generally the happiest place in any
hospital. Even though the atmosphere was
eminently professional, people smiled more on that
floor than any other. It made me feel
simultaneously glad and wistful, cheered to be in
a place where good things happen, scared that nothing
good was going to happen for me and my family.
The room next to mine was particularly
lively. Nurses rushed in and out like worker bees
in a honeycomb, carrying various implements and
linens. I couldn't see the expectant mother
inside, but I could hear her. Everyone could hear
her. This is what really bugs me about the labors
you see on television; the tiny starlets who
play expectant mothers gasp and moan when
they're having their television babies, but on the
whole they do it delicately. You rarely hear
them bellowing like cows being led to the slaughter, which is
how my next-door neighbor sounded. It was a
truly awful noise, almost inhuman.
John and I looked at each other in alarm.
"It's okay," our nurse said in a stage
whisper. She jerked a thumb toward the room whence
the bellowing-cow sounds were emanating, and added,
"She's Hispanic." I nodded bleakly, too
concerned by what lay ahead of me to challenge her
political incorrectness.
As it turned out, I did my part to correct
that nurse's impressions about Caucasian
versus Hispanic reactions to the pain of
childbirth. My stiff-lipped Nordic
ancestors would no doubt have been appalled by the
way I comported myself over the next few hours.
I hadn't attended a Lamaze refresher
course to prepare for Adam's birth--I
didn't think I could handle going among so many
"normal" pregnant women--but I remembered
that before Katie was born, my Lamaze
instructor had commented that the pain of labor is much
worse if the mother is afraid. She was right. I
wasn't frightened by the actual process of
delivering Adam, but I was terrified of what
might happen afterward. Between contractions I'd hold
the fear at arm's length, but when the pain came on
again, I'd just lose it. The next day I
didn't recall much about my labor. I mentioned
to John that I had a sore throat, but I
couldn't figure out why. He just looked at me and
said, "Duh."
At one point I remember a nurse (who was
probably about to offer me a little Demerol,
to take the edge off the contractions) coming into the
room, parking herself next to the bed, and saying,
"Don't think about the pain, dear. Just think about the
baby. Think about that wonderful, beautiful,
perfect little baby you're going to have in just a few more
hours ..."
I was in the middle of a contraction, so I
couldn't really answer her. I remember giving
her a wild-eyed look and beginning to sob
convulsively. The nurse who had been assigned
to my room grabbed the visitor by the arm and hauled
her into a corner. While I was gathering my
strength for the few minutes between contractions, they had
a brief, whispered conversation. Then the visitor
came back to the bed, took my hand, and said,
"Okay, dear, don't think about the baby.
Don't you think about that baby, just think about getting
through the pain." I was already into another contraction, and
once more couldn't talk. Instead I
started laughing, a savage, insane sort of
laugh. I was probably the most unnerving
patient that nurse ever encountered. I certainly
hope so.
Every few eternities, the obstetrician on
call from Harvard University Health Services
would come in to see how I was doing. He'd check
to see how far my cervix was dilated, tell me
I was doing fine--a little slow, but fine--and go
away again. I had met this doctor only once,
and never since Adam was diagnosed, but I knew
from Judy Trenton that none of the obstetricians
at UHS agreed with my choice to continue the
pregnancy. I remembered actually wanting the
doctor to come in when Katie was being born. I
didn't feel that way now. It sounds harsh, but
I really believed that this obstetrician would rather have
delivered Adam dead than alive. He was
helpful and comforting, in a pragmatic way, but my
suspicions about his position on the Down
syndrome issue made it hard for me
to completely release myself, or Adam, to his
tender mercies.
Roughly four hundred years after I'd entered
the labor room, the doctor announced that I was
sufficiently dilated to receive an epidural. I
managed to stop yelling long enough to give my
heartfelt approval for the procedure. I
don't remember being even slightly discomfited
when the needle was placed in my spine. Needles
I could cope with. Once the anesthesia kicked
in, I stopped yowling like a rabid mountain lion
and began to notice my surroundings again. John
held a plastic cup of water to my lips and
told me I was doing great, just great. People always
say this when you're in labor. It's always heartening
to hear, even though everyone knows you don't have an
ounce of control over what your body is doing.
If there really is a way to excel at the task
of labor, I definitely wasn't doing it.
After the epidural kicked in, the room went
very quiet. The Hispanic woman next door
had been delivered of a healthy little girl. The
quiet sounds of welcome and congratulation coming from
her room were drowned out by the almost funereal hush in
mine. After a couple more hours the obstetrician
gave the order to move me into the delivery room,
a place of cold, burnished metal and bright,
sterile fluorescent lighting, just down the hall from
the labor rooms. Before he could come in with
me, John had to scrub up and put on one of the
blue pajama outfits worn by the doctors. I
would have made fun of the way he looked in the little
shower-cap hat, but lying naked with your feet in
stirrups and your body extremely distended is
no position from which to be mocking anyone else's
appearance. I just smiled when John came into the
delivery room, and took his hand. He offered it
gingerly. It was covered with little red half-moons
where I'd gripped it with my fingernails, back
before the epidural.
The obstetrician examined me and pronounced
that it would probably be only another ten minutes
or so. John and I squeezed each other's hands and said nothing.
"He's crowning," the doctor told one of the
nurses. "Get the others down here." The nurse
ran into the hallway.
"This your first baby?" the obstetrician asked
us.
We told him it was our second.
"Was your first one born with hair?" he said.
I shook my head.
"well, this one's pretty bald, too." He
smiled at me. In his face I could see
compassion and regret, as well as a kind of
businesslike focus. I felt a little warmer
toward him, but considering my encounter with Dr.
Grendel, I kept my emotional guard up.
The metal doors swung open, and a group of
five or six medical personnel came through it.
Most were women, dressed in a variety of white,
pink, and blue uniforms, all wearing gauze
masks and, of course, the obligatory shower
cap. I had been told these doctors would be
there. They were specialists in various areas where
Adam might have trouble. As soon as he was
born, they would evaluate his health and take
whatever action might be necessary: heart surgery,
incubation, intravenous feeding, and so on. Without a
word, without a sound, they lined up with their backs
against the wall. Their eyes above their gauze
masks regarded me seriously.
It was so quiet in that room. The births of my
daughters, by comparison, were rowdy, noisy
affairs, with doctors cracking jokes and John
coaching me through the breathing and me occasionally mentioning
that I would have preferred a quick, painless death. In
the room where Adam was born, there were many more people
present, but none of us made a sound.
The obstetrician murmured his instructions under his
breath, as though speaking loudly would have violated
some private code.
I stayed silent. I could hear my own
heartbeat, rapid and strong, pushed by the exertion of
my anesthetized body, and by my fear. I'd
forgotten the calm certainties spoken inside me
back at the apartment. I was terrified. I felt
as though the jury were filing in, ready to pronounce
the sentence that would determine the whole of my
future. The tension was unbearable. I pulled my
hand away from John's, needing to face this by myself,
too focused on being strong to connect with anyone.
There in the center of that small but distinguished crowd,
the focus of so much attention, I felt as
deeply alone as I ever had in my life.
And then I remembered.
I don't know if one of them touched me again,
or if they called through the silence to get my
attention, or if I was the one who reached out to them,
by some method I still don't understand. All I know
is that suddenly I could feel the same presence,
the same many presences, that had rescued me so many
times while I was expecting Adam. I closed
my eyes to see them better. They stood around the
delivery table next to the doctors, between the
instruments, over and around and through everything in that
room. And they were not silent. In some wavelength
beyond the range of my physical ears, I could
hear the same sound that had flooded into me when I
first realized I was pregnant: the singing of those
great, sonorous, jubilant bells; the music
of rejoicing.
"Okay," said the doctor quietly. "Give
me a good strong push."
I pushed, or rather my body pushed on its own.
I felt as though I were simply there for the ride.
I kept my eyes closed, partly from the effort and
partly because it helped me sense the silent
celebration in the air around me. At that moment it
was so strong, so clear, that I couldn't believe
none of the doctors noticed it.
"All right," murmured the obstetrician.
"There's the head."
There was no small cough, as there had been with
Katie. No baby voice broke the hush.
There was only that incredible sweetness, that joyful,
wordless, soundless song. It was as real to me, at that
moment, as if a door had been opened to another
dimension, allowing me to stand for a moment on
the threshold and feel that I was home.
My body tightened into another contraction, and the
obstetrician pulled Adam free. As he
did, the door to the bright world swung slowly,
gently closed.

The doctors didn't show Adam to me or
John right away. The instant he was born, the
medical team that had been lined up against the wall
converged inward, like a football huddle with Adam
at the center. They whisked him over to a small
table, where they put him under a heat lamp and began
to examine him.
As I tried to lift my head for a view of my
baby, a rush of fear swept through me. I
couldn't hear the singing as clearly anymore. I
tried to feel the presence of the comforting beings who had
been my friends and guardians for eight months. I
could still sense them, if I concentrated, but the
feeling was much fainter. Ever since Adam's
conception, I had been experiencing things beyond the
range of normal experience. Now that Adam was
separate from me, I no longer felt like the
focus of all that magic. I felt ...
normal. I felt exactly the way I wanted
my son to be. It was a tremendous letdown.
I looked up at John, wanting to ask him
if he could feel the angels in the room. I
wanted to tell him how bereft I suddenly was,
how much I wanted that strange, metaphysical
connection back. But John wasn't looking at
me. He had taken my hand again, but his eyes were
fixed on the backs of those huddled doctors. I
knew what John was hoping. I was still hoping for
it, too: the sudden announcement that there had been a
mistake, that Adam was fine. It never came.
Suddenly, as we watched, a long, clear,
golden stream of urine arched upward, above the
doctors' heads. It shifted course slightly
in midair, hitting the obstetrician in the
face. He jerked backward, sputtering.
"Well, his kidneys are fine, he said
wryly, wiping himself with a towel.
It was the first of many, many times I would find myself
swelling with pride over Adam's
accomplishments.
I took a deep breath as the obstetrician
came back to the table to help deliver the
placenta and sew me back together. No miracle
had happened. No mistakes had been
made. Adam was exactly as medical science
had predicted he would be. I guess I was a
little sad about that. Resigned is a better word.
Much worse than the confirmation of his diagnosis
was my feeling that his birth had ended my sojourn
into the bright place beyond the cave of my normal
existence. I had been left here, in the shadow
world, after only the barest glimpse of home. I
didn't know the way back. I wasn't sure
I could find it.
The obstetrician was almost finished with me by the
time I caught my first glimpse of Adam in the
flesh. My little man of earth. A doctor moved
aside just as one tiny foot, about the size of a
man's thumb, kicked out sideways, allowing me
to see it for a fraction of a second. That was all the
time I needed to see that it was not a normal foot.
The big toe was set just slightly too far apart
from the other four, and the two smallest toes were
connected almost all the way to the tip. To most people,
these abnormalities might not have been obvious,
perhaps not even discernible. But I was watching for them.
I knew that this was definitely the foot of a baby
with Down syndrome.
I loved that foot as much as I have ever loved
anything in my life.
By the time the doctors had finished their
inspection, pronouncing Adam hale and hearty
(except, as they delicately put it, for "his
problem"), I realized that I had not been left
alone after all. I was no longer the center of the
high-voltage energy that had surrounded me while
I was pregnant, but I was not without resources.
I loved my baby. My love for him was
ordinary, limited, mortal. Nothing any other
mother doesn't feel. But it would do for me, because as
soon as I felt it, I recognized it for what
it was.
It was the way home.



My freshman year at Harvard, during one of
my endless runs along the Charles River, I
saw something glinting in the grass. It was small and
pink, about the size of a pecan, and it shone in the
late afternoon sunlight. I knew right away what
it was, because I'd spent hours looking for things just
like it during childhood hikes in the Rocky
Mountains. It was a piece of rose
quartz, a semiprecious stone that is supposed
to symbolize compassion and friendship. When I found
the chunk of quartz in Cambridge, I felt the
same small thrill of delight and discovery
I'd experienced as a rock-hounding child. It lay
there in the emerald grass like a tiny, rosy, translucent Easter egg.
Naturally, I stopped to pick it up. As
soon as I touched it I knew something was wrong.
Instead of being heavy and cool and slick, like any
self-respecting piece of quartz, it was very
light and rather crumbly. I hefted it in my
palm, looked at it more closely, and realized that
this beautiful object I'd picked up was nothing
more than a chunk of Styrofoam. I dropped it
instantly, revolted. Instead of a lovely
product of the natural world, I'd been holding
a piece of pollution. I wiped my hand on my
T-shirt and looked at the Styrofoam in
disgust.
As I continued my run, it occurred to me that the
piece of Styrofoam hadn't changed at all
between the time I first saw it, when I was so drawn
to its beauty, and the moment I realized what it
was, and was disgusted by its ugliness. The only
change was inside my head. I had assigned
two different labels to that small pink object,
and those labels, not the thing itself, had determined my
reaction to it. This was enough to make me wonder if many
of the things I reviled as ugly might not in fact
be beautiful, if I might be robbing myself of
beauty with my own cognitive prejudice.
I finished my run just in time to show up at one
of the dormitory kitchens to work as a dining-hall
grunt. My job included mopping floors and
washing dishes and ladling out food to dorm
residents. On the way to work, I decided
to try an experiment: for that one evening, I would
resist assigning any labels to my
classmates as they filed through the dinner line. I
would try to look at them without preconception, the
way I had first looked at the Styrofoam in the
grass. Of course, this is nearly impossible,
but I did make an effort--for a few minutes.
After that I had to stop, because I was so overcome by the
beauty of every person in that dining hall that my eyes
kept filling with tears. I think maybe that's one
reason we screen out so much loveliness. If we
saw people as they really are, the beauty would overwhelm
us.
I thought about the Styrofoam quartz the first time
I held Adam in my arms. Even after he was
born, in the silent intensity of the doctors'
examination, I was afraid of how he would look.
When I caught that first glance of his foot, I was
passionately relieved it did not disgust me. I
was still afraid of the rest of him. I held my
breath as, one by one, the doctors concluded their
examinations and left. Finally, only the
pediatrician was left bending over Adam. She
was a short, gray-haired, fiftyish woman with a
motherly voice. I watched her back as she
bundled Adam into his first set of clothes. I
still couldn't really see the baby.
"There we go now, little guy," said the
pediatrician. At last, at long last, she
picked up my baby, one hand bracing his tiny
head, and brought him over to us.
He was gorgeous.
Adam was sound asleep, worn out by the
process of being born. The doctor had put a
little stocking hat on his head to keep him from losing
body heat. The hat was striped, with a knot on
one side, the tight cap of a low-ranking
pirate. The head inside that hat was about the size
of an orange. I could easily cup it in one
hand. Adam's nose and lips and eyes were all
built to scale, so tiny it was hard to believe they
were real. Most babies are born looking a bit
weird, their features oversized, the skin
wrinkled, so that they resemble elderly
relatives. Babies with Down syndrome, because
their features are smaller than normal, don't
look this way. They look incredibly perfect.
"Isn't he something?" said the pediatrician
warmly.
John and I both jumped a little at the sound of
her voice. We had been leaning forward toward
Adam's face, like lovers anticipating a first
kiss.
"He's not ugly," I whispered.
"Well, of course not!" said the doctor.
"They're the cutest babies on earth. I have a
cousin who works for Mattel. I told him they
should make a Down syndrome newborn doll."
She laughed. "He asked me if I'd been
drinking. People don't realize."
I nodded. This doctor clearly understood about
labels, how they can blind you to the beauty of things.
"Watch this," said the pediatrician.
She carefully took Adam back and leaned
forward, so that he was turned almost upside down.
Then she lifted him upright. Adam's eyes
opened, then blinked and squinted fiercely at the
unaccustomed light.
"It's a reflex," she said. "It's the best
way to get them to open their eyes."
Adam was already asleep again. The doctor
gave him back to me, and I took him
greedily. I had to force myself not to grab. The
heavy, soft, warm little mound of his body inside the
hospital blanket seemed to give off some kind
of soothing radiation. It was highly addictive.
"Well," said the pediatrician, "I'll come
up to your room later to check on him again. Right
now, he looks great. You guys stay here and
bond for a few minutes."
John thanked her as she left the room. I
was too busy looking at Adam, drinking him in
through all my senses. I loved the weight of him,
the sound of his breathing, the intoxicatingly clean,
sweet smell of his skin. In Adam's first
portrait (taken by the hospital photographer
as a service for all new babies) he
resembles a cross between Mr. Magoo and a
duckling, all squinty little eyes and soft blond
fuzz. To me he was an infant Adonis.
"Look," said John. He reached out and
picked up one of Adam's hands, which was too
small to grip John's fingertip.
I stared at the hand. I will never cease to be
captivated by newborn hands, and I know I'm not
alone. They are so tiny, so intricate, so
utterly amazing. We adults must be hardwired
to react to these little hands with awe, or Lord knows
we'd never do all the work required to maintain their
owners. Adam's hands were even more
miniature-looking than Katie's had been at
her birth, because he was holding them like a grown-up;
not scrunched into fists, but relaxed and open. I
knew this was because of low muscle tone caused by the
Down syndrome, but that was just another label. His
hands, in and of themselves, were astonishingly beautiful.
I stroked one with my finger. It was as soft and
delicate as a wilted rose petal.
"Well," said John, after a few minutes,
"here he is."
"Here he is," I agreed.
"Just like they told us."
I nodded.
"You were great, honey," John lied.
"Thanks."
"I love you." John leaned down to kiss
me. Then he put one of his hands under mine and
lifted Adam very gently to his face. He
brushed his lips against Adam's cheek, and then his
ear. The ear, I saw, was a bit too small.
But it was unquestionably beautiful, a tiny,
perfect, pink-and-white seashell.
"I really thought there would be a miracle," said
John softly, stroking the fringe of downy
white-blond hair that protruded from under Adam's pirate hat. "I really thought God
would fix him."
I considered that for a minute. "Maybe he
didn't need fixing," I said. "Maybe he's
the only one of us who was never broken."
John looked at me. "Are you broken,
sweetheart?"
"I was," I said. "Not anymore."
"Same here," said John. He paused, then
gave me a smile--not his manic Harvard grin
but a real smile, one that contained all the sorrow
of the past months, along with the joy. "So," he
said, "there's your miracle."

We didn't stay at the hospital long.
After that first bonding session, we couldn't seem
to get any time alone together. We were sorely
afflicted by a gaggle of unbearably solicitous
candy stripers, who talked about everything but Down
syndrome, and hordes of aspiring doctors,
who talked about nothing else. Brigham and
Women's is a teaching hospital, so every ten or
twenty minutes another troupe of medical
students, led by a full-fledged physician, would
show up to see the Anomalous Baby. The
students would gather round while the real doctor
pointed out the symptoms of trisomy-21: the
single transverse crease on the palms, the
short limbs, the small facial features, the
low muscle tone. I was glad that Adam was doing
his part to advance medical science, but I quickly
tired of his being a specimen. I took him home
after barely twenty-four hours.
The only noticeable effect of his four-week
prematurity was a little liver trouble. At two
days old, Adam developed a slight case of
jaundice, which turned his pink skin a jaunty
orange. The treatment for this mild
affliction involved exposing Adam's skin
to direct sunlight, which helps the body
synthesize vitamin D. Those first few days at
home, Adam hung out in nothing but his diaper,
soaking up rays from dawn to dusk. Any time a
patch of sunlight came through our windows, I'd
strip him down and set him on a little blanket in
the light. He lay there most contentedly, his little
hands gracefully limp, looking like a
Chee-to-colored iguana basking in the sun.
He was as lovely and amazing as any new baby,
only better behaved. Katie spent hours
sitting beside him, stroking his back, setting the tone
for the relationship they maintain to this day.
As for me, I was doing a little basking of my
own. My body was so happy not to be pregnant
that I fairly floated around the apartment,
buoyant with relief, the way you would if you'd
suddenly recovered from an eight-month siege of
stomach flu. My physical well-being almost
made up for my greatly diminished sensitivity
to the Bunraku puppeteers. When I tuned
into them, when I really paid attention, I could tell
they were still there. But without Adam inside me, it was
like looking through the proverbial glass, darkly.
During the day this was enough. At night, however, it
was not sufficient.

If you have ever been the primary caregiver of a
newborn baby, you know how long a night can be.
Adam was what we call a good baby, in that he
slept a lot and only cried for food and
interaction two or three times a night. However,
his tiny little nostrils clogged up frequently, and
he hadn't caught on to the backup strategy of
breathing through his mouth, so I had to suction out his
nose with a little rubber plunger every half hour or
so. Thus, like most new mothers, I didn't have a
lot of uninterrupted sleep to help me recover
from the long ordeal of pregnancy. When you're
tired, really tired, brand-new-parent tired, your
view of reality can get more than slightly
distorted. At 4:00 A.m. on your fifth or
sixth night with virtually no sleep, the
healthiest of babies can loom up before you like an
immense and frightening troll who has completely
taken over your life.
With Adam, I had more fears than usual
to plague me during those long, long nights. The
problem was that it was impossible not to fall
in love with him. It is a frightening thing to love
someone you know the world rejects. It makes you so
terribly vulnerable. You know you will be hurt by every
slight, every prejudice, every pain that will befall your
beloved throughout his life. In the wee small
hours, as I rocked and nursed and sang to my
wee small boy, I couldn't help but worry.
Will Rogers once said that he knew worrying was
effective, because almost nothing he worried about ever
happened. That's a cute statement, and I'm
glad Will's life worked this way. But mine
hasn't--at least not where Adam is concerned.
Almost everything I worried about during the nights
after his birth, almost every difficult thing I feared
would come my way as a result of being his mother, has
actually happened.
Thank God.
I was afraid Adam would slow me down, and
he has. Not because he has required more care and
time than a "normal" boy (he is the most
helpful and least demanding of my children) but because the
immediacy and joy with which he lives his life
make rapacious achievement, Harvard-style,
look a lot like quiet desperation. Adam has
slowed me down to the point where I notice what
is in front of me, its mystery and beauty,
instead of thrashing my way through a maze of
difficult requirements toward labels and
achievements that contain no joy in themselves. Adam
takes his joy straight up, in purer form than
most of us can handle. He was the person who, at
two years of age, spent enough time experimenting
to learn that his four-month-old sister was capable of
laughter, and determining exactly what would make her laugh. He is the one who goes
into transports of delight over clean sheets,
or packaged waffles, or batteries. He is
the one who taught me to appreciate rainbows--not
only in the sky but also in lawn sprinklers and
dish-soap bubbles and patches of oil. He is
the one who stops, and makes me stop, to smell the
bushes.
I was also afraid that Adam would always be
different from "normal" people. He is. If you'll
cast your mind back to high school biology, you
may remember that a species is defined, in
part, by the number of chromosomes in every
individual. Adam's extra chromosome
makes him as dissimilar from me as a mule is from
a donkey. He is, in ways both
obvious and subtle, a different beast. I have
learned that this does not mean he is simply
disabled. Adam doesn't just do less than a
"normal" child his age might; he does different
things. He has different priorities,
different tastes, different insights. Adding him
to our family was like going to the pet store to buy a
puppy, wanting exactly the kind of puppy
all your friends are getting, and winding up with a
kitten instead. You can spend a lot of time trying
to get the kitten to fetch and bark and wag its
tail, but you may also find that there is much to enjoy,
to emulate, to love, about the way kittens
naturally behave.
It didn't take me all that long--two or
three years, I think--to stop measuring Adam's
value on the barkingstfetchingsttad-wagging scale and
notice that his "differentness" is as wonderful as
I once found it frightening. His view of the world is
quirky and funny and, in its own way, highly
sophisticated. He is unimpressed
by pretense and unmoved by convention. Don't make
the mistake of thinking Adam doesn't see or
understand these things. He does. He's just not
interested in making them the foundation for his life.
Power, wealth, prestige, and influence are not his
primary concerns. I always coveted these things because
I was under the illusion that they would bring me
happiness; Adam goes for the happiness itself, and
damn the detours. I've occasionally tried living
this way since Adam came along, discarding
social conformity and pursuing my heart's
desires. It is as scary as the most extreme
of extreme sports, but even more exhilarating.
Then, too, I was afraid that Adam would never
think the way I was taught to think at Harvard.
He doesn't. This was especially clear, for
example, in the way Adam learned to read. He
inherited our immense supply of magnetic
refrigerator letters once the rest of us had
stopped using them, but he didn't pick up the
alphabet as Katie eventually had. Because his
speech was almost completely unintelligible, I
had no idea whether he was even capable of
grasping the idea of written symbols
representing phonetic units that can be combined
to make words. Written language requires
several impressive cognitive leaps, and I
had no idea whether Adam would ever make even
one. Nevertheless, from the time he started
preschool at three, we kept running Adam
through the alphabet, repeating the name of each letter,
along with its major sound, thousands and thousands of
times in the strained voices of tourists who
believe they can overcome any language barrier
by sheer volume.
It didn't work. When quizzed without
prompting, Adam never recognized the letters on
his own. By the time he was six I was ready to give
up.
Then one day John was holding up a plastic
letter and making its sound, which happened to be
"EEEEEEE," when Adam suddenly perked up and
said, "Wizbef!" This is the way he
pronounces his sister Elizabeth's name.
Naturally, John and I took this as ample
cause to stay home from work and celebrate.
During that day, we discovered that Adam's learning
capacity went way beyond anything we expected--as
long as everything he learned related directly
to someone he cared about. He had absolutely no
interest in, for example, "E is for egg."
But E for Elizabeth--now that was crucial
information.
In the end we all learned the alphabet this
way. The symbols we had been trying to link
to abstract sounds ended up as a parade of
personalities: Adam first, of course, and then
Billy, Caleb, Diane, Elizabeth,
Francine, Grandpa ... As we figured out how
he learned, the landscape of our son's mind
began to reveal itself to us. Instead of a rationally
constructed structure of empirical observations,
logical conclusions, and arbitrary symbols,
Adam's mental world seems to be more like a huge
family reunion. It is a gathering of people, all
linked by Adam's affection into a complex universe
of relationships and characteristics. In this world, Adam
learns as fast as anyone I know. Long before he
could read or write even the most basic words
(or so I thought), Adam came home to tell
me, in his garbled tongue, about the new boy who had
just moved into his class, and who had become
Adam's friend. When I couldn't understand his
pronunciation of the boy's name, Adam grabbed a
pencil in his stubby, grubby little-boy fingers, and
wrote "Miguel Fernando de la Hoya" on
a piece of paper--a piece of paper, needless
to say, which I intend to frame. If I ever need
a dose of Adam and he isn't around,
I'll be able to look at that clumsily written
name and remember what it is like to tap into an
intelligence powered exclusively by love.
All of this makes Adam react in ways that
are utterly different from the "Harvard
responses" I had learned to venerate. While
I was trying unsuccessfully to understand his
pronunciation of his new friend's name, for example,
Adam got laughing so hard at my wildly
inaccurate guesses that he could barely breathe.
Now, there are many moments when I can tell Adam
is terribly frustrated by not being able to speak
clearly. It bothers him. A lot. There are many
times when I see the pain on his face as he
struggles to communicate. These moments are
intensely painful for me as well, because I know that
if I were in his situation--comprehending everything
around me and yet being unable to express myself--
I'd want to slit my wrists. But just at the
moment when Adam's frustration is most intense and
I expect to see him fall into rage or
despair, something changes--or rather, Adam
changes something. I don't know how to describe
this, except that he appears to make a conscious
choice to see the situation as ridiculous.
He'll take a deep breath, as though he is
letting the frustration slide off his shoulders, and
begin to laugh.
This is not the laughter of an idiot. It is the
laughter of a person who chooses to see humor in
his own discouragement, and to me it is not only
intelligent but wise. In fact, I think it is
wisdom in its purest form. Adam laughs at
himself every day. He laughs at his own bizarre
pronunciation, at the inaccurate attempts
others make to understand him, at his strenuous efforts
to communicate with them. He laughs as though he is
being tickled over every inch of his body, finding his own
plight--the plight that for me, the Harvard
graduate, would be simply awful--awfully
funny.
The thing is, he's right. The impromptu
games of charades I play as Adam tries
to talk with me are often hilarious. Because Adam
is so willing to realize this, he gets everyone
else to realize it, too. His laugh is so
belly-deep, so apropos, so genuine, that every
person within earshot ends up laughing along with him.
His laughter is one of the most potent means by which
he achieves his trademark effect:
puncturing pomposity, posturing,
self-importance, and especially intellectual
pretension, wherever they occur. No indeed, Adam
does not think as I was taught to think at
Harvard. I hope he never will.

What my fears all boiled down to, as I
sat with my tiny orange son in the days after his
birth, was an underlying terror that he would destroy
my own facade, the flawlessness and
invulnerability I projected onto the big
screen, the Great and Terrible Martha of Oz. You
see, I knew all along that there wasn't one
label people might apply to Adam--stupid,
ugly, strange, clumsy, slow, inept--that could
not, at one time or another, be justifiably
applied to me. I had spent my life running from
this catastrophe, and like so many other things, it
caught up with me while I was expecting Adam.
In this regard, as in so many others, my worst
fears have come to pass. But as they do I am learning
that there is an even bigger secret, a secret
I had been keeping from myself. It has been hard
for me to grasp, but gradually, painfully, with the
slow, small steps of a retarded child, I am coming
to understand it. This has been the second phase of
my education, the one that followed all those years of
school. In it, I have had to unlearn virtually
everything Harvard taught me about what is
precious and what is garbage. I have discovered that
many of the things I thought were priceless are as cheap as
costume jewelry, and much of what I labeled
worthless was, all the time, filled with the kind of
beauty that directly nourishes my soul.
Now I think that the vast majority of us
"normal" people spend our lives trashing our
treasures and treasuring our trash. We bustle
around trying to create the impression that we are
hip, imperturbable, omniscient, in perfect
control, when in fact we are awkward and scared and
bewildered. The irony is that we do this to be
loved, all the time remaining terrified of anyone
who seems to be as perfect as we wish to be.
We go around like Queen Elizabeth, bless her
heart, clutching our dowdy little accessories,
avoiding the slightest hint of impropriety,
never showing our real feelings or touching anyone
else except through glove leather. But we were
dazed and confused when the openly depressed,
bulimic, adulterous, rejected
Princess Di was the one people really adored.
Living with Adam, loving Adam, has taught
me a lot about the truth. He has taught me
to look at things in themselves, not at the value a
brutal and often senseless world assigns to them. As
Adam's mother I have been able to see quite clearly that
he is no less beautiful for being called ugly,
no less wise for appearing dull, no less
precious for being seen as worthless. And neither am
I. Neither are you. Neither is any of us.
Of course, I haven't gone far enough in my
reeducation to have left my early training completely
behind me. The stupidity, the shortsightedness, the
narrowness of this shadow world still hurt me from time to time.
It hurt me when, three days after his birth, I
carried Adam in his little front-pack to finish up
my year at Harvard, and not one student or
faculty member commented on the fact that he'd
been born. They wouldn't even look at him.
Those who had to speak to me kept their eyes
resolutely fixed on my face, as though
looking down a few inches at Adam's would
pull them tumbling into some inescapable abyss.
That was only the beginning. Just as I feared,
Adam and I have experienced mockery and judgment
and exclusion, and they have all been painful. It
hurts every time people look at Adam and see only
the deformity of their own perceptions, instead of the
beauty before their eyes. But more and more, I feel this
pain not for my son but for the people who are too blind
to see him. The lessons I have learned from Adam
have hurt more than just about anything else I ever
felt in my life. And it's been worth it, a
thousand times over.

EPILOGUE

I started dreaming about dolphins when Adam was
about two, right after his younger sister was born. It was
always the same dream. It began with me standing on the
shore of a glassy-calm sea, watching the sun
rise. Then suddenly (and no matter how many times
I dreamt it, this always startled me), a dolphin
broke the surface of the water in front of me,
throwing itself skyward. Drops of water scattered
from its fins and flanks like a shower of diamonds in
the slanting light. The dolphin seemed to hang in
the air for a moment, then arced downward and disappeared
into the sea again.
At this point, I always experienced a
feeling of intense yearning, a passionate desire
to go toward the dolphin. I waded into the dream
water, frightened by its depth and unfamiliarity. I
am a land animal, through and through; I have always been
afraid of deep water, especially in dim
light. The urgency I felt to join the dolphin
fought with my timidity and barely overcame it,
pulling me step by frightened step into the ocean.
Then I would always look up again, out at the
sea, and notice that Adam was in the water as
well. He would be playing with the dolphin, his bright
blond head shining like flax just above the waves. I
could hear the two of them talking to each other, a
strange, squealing, clicking chatter that meant
nothing to me. Then the sand of the sea floor would
disappear from beneath my feet and I would find myself
flailing, sinking, and scared, in this world that seemed so
comfortable to Adam. I wanted to go out farther--almost
thought I could--but I was so terribly out of my
element.
Then I would wake up.
It always took me a few minutes to come out of
that dream. Even after I'd rubbed my eyes hard
and climbed out of bed for a drink of water, the sense
of longing that overpowered me during the dolphin dream
would remain as keen as a blade. Sometimes it
lasted for weeks.
Then, just when it had begun to fade from my
memory, I'd go to sleep one night and have the
same darn dream, all over again.
This went on for a couple of years. Every time it
happened, I'd spend hours trying to figure out
what it meant. I tried Freudian free
association and Gestalt analysis and a booklet
called Translating the Language of
Dreams that John picked up for me at some
airport newsstand. In the end, I always came
back to the same conclusion: the dolphins in my
dream represented ... (drumroll, please)
... dolphins. Porpoises, to use their
technical name. Those brainy sea mammals with the
endearing expressions and the highly social
personalities. I was a little chagrined to have
developed such a trendy passion, but there was nothing
to be done about it. The dream kept coming back.
One day, when Adam was four, a neighbor of
ours dropped by for a visit. When she saw
Adam, she said, "I just read the most interesting
article about a little boy with Down syndrome.
After he was born, his mother started dreaming
about dolphins. Couldn't get them off her mind."
I was so taken aback I didn't say
anything at all. I had that old bristly feeling
again, the one from my pregnant days.
"This woman--the mother, I mean--heard about a
place in Florida where they put disabled kids in
the water and let them swim with dolphins. It's
some kind of therapy, I think. Would you be interested
in reading the article?"
I swallowed. "Uh, yes," I said. "I
think I would."
"Well, I'll just go get it now," she said.
And she did.

A few months later, when the Atlantic
waters had warmed up enough to make swimming comfortable,
I found myself standing on the shore of Grassy
Key, Florida, helping Adam into a little
yellow diving suit with pictures of Snoopy
printed on it. John and the girls sat nearby,
on the shore of the lagoon, talking to the animal
trainer and the psychologist who ran the Dolphin
Research Center. Seabirds wheeled above us,
arguing with each other in raspy voices, the dawn
sunlight flashing off their wings. A few feet
away, watching Adam and me with eyes as brown and
intelligent as the eyes of a spaniel, bobbed a
dolphin by the name of Alita.
It wasn't exactly like the dream, but it was
similar enough to make me unsure whether I was
asleep or awake.
I slipped on my rubber diving shoes and
lowered myself into the water. For just a moment, I
wondered what my old classmates and
professors at Harvard would think if they knew
that I was paddling around a Florida lagoon with
my retarded son because a recurring dream convinced
me he could talk to dolphins. I didn't know,
but I could make a guess.
The psychologist lowered Adam into my arms.
Alita the dolphin moseyed up to me to get a
closer look. I looked back at her, feeling
just the way I did in my dreams.

John and I have experienced this sense of living
a wonderful dream many, many times since Adam was
born. The choice we made to accept him into our
lives has done much more than give us a son we
love to distraction. It has made risk takers
of us. We are now irrationally convinced that
there is little to lose by taking the road less
traveled, by making decisions based on nothing but
dreams, or intuition, or our hearts'
desires. Since Adam came along we have
quit good jobs, formed unusual relationships,
undertaken projects that seemed crazy or
quixotic or just plain dumb. Sometimes we
succeed and sometimes we fail, but it's always a great
ride.
This way of living is what took us to the
Dolphin Research Center. Of course, we had
a rational explanation if one should be called for.
The psychologist who ran the center, Dr.
David Nathanson, had a great track
record helping disabled children learn to move and speak
more effectively. Dr. Dave, as his patients
call him, explained to me that he believes the
water minimizes problems caused by lack of
muscle tone, and that the dolphins are just interesting
enough to distract the children from their handicaps and motivate
them to learn. Right, I said. Sure. That sounds
logical. But in my mind I responded, No,
Dr. Dave, there's nothing logical about it. You
know it and we know it. That's why we're here.
After watching Adam and the dolphins together, I was
convinced that they were communicating in some method
indiscernible to my mundane senses, the way the
Bunraku puppeteers had communicated with me
while I was pregnant. The article I got from
my neighbor--the one about Dr. Dave's first young
patient with Down syndrome--mentioned that the little
boy had woken up one night in his bedroom,
several miles inland, to grieve for a dolphin friend
of his who had just died. That day in the lagoon, I
could feel the same strange electric energy between
Adam and the dolphins that I'd sensed around me before
he was born. Go ahead and laugh, but I've been
through too much to dismiss these things. I've also
learned that I will probably never fully understand
it. That's okay. Just being nearby is a
privilege.

I swam a little way off from the shore,
Adam's arm still wrapped firmly around my
shoulders. We couldn't see Alita; she had
disappeared into the clear green depths beneath our
feet. Suddenly she shot out of the water a yard
away, dousing us with a mighty splash as she belly
flopped onto the surface. I nearly had a
heart attack. Adam squealed with
pleasure. He held his hand out, palm down, just
over the water. Alita made a deft
jackknife turn and came alongside, rising
smoothly until her head brushed Adam's hand.
I reached out to pat her as Adam grabbed her
dorsal fin. Her side was as slick as a
speedboat, and the muscles flexed under it like steel
springs, incredibly powerful. Adam let go of
me without a second glance. Alita set out for the
far end of the lagoon, pulling him through the water,
careful not to dunk his head. They both seemed to be
laughing. Again, I had that dizzy sense of being
back in my dreams. Only the chill in the water
convinced me I was still awake.
What amazed me most was Adam's utter
lack of fear. Before we'd come to the research
center, Dr. Dave had sent us a pamphlet,
warning that our child might be afraid of deep water,
or large animals, or both. To prepare
Adam, I'd taken him swimming once a week
at a community pool. We had also visited a
farm to meet some cows, which, though decidedly less
streamlined than dolphins, are about the same
size. Adam hated these training sessions. In the
pool he clung to me like a wet mouse. The cows
terrified him so much that he once used his
overcoat to tie himself to a fence post, refusing to go
one step closer to the pasture. I was afraid the
Dolphin Research expedition would be a complete
bust.
As it turned out, I was more scared than Adam.
There in the waters off Grassy Key, I
floundered around nervously, trying to do everything
exactly right, to control this unstable, unfamiliar
environment. I am, after all, still a land
animal, still fond of feeling solid earth beneath my
feet, afraid of deep water. The sea is
beautiful but frightening, like the fluid world I entered
during the time I was expecting Adam, when the
rock-hard structures of Pure Reason
failed me and magic came to the rescue.
Maybe my life has always been as rich in
mystery as it now seems. Maybe Adam merely
called my attention to it. Or maybe his presence
has trailed enchanting, enchanted moments into my
life the way a comet trails sparks of light.
Either way, I know I have far to go before I can
inhabit that world without astonishment and uncertainty.
It calls to me with a siren's song, but I still get
scared.
That day with the dolphins, Adam wasn't scared
of anything. Alita rounded the curve at the edge
of the lagoon and headed back toward me, pulling
him like a towrope from her fin. Adam was still
laughing, the face below his golden hair radiating
happiness. It is impossible to look
into Adam's face when he smiles this way and not
smile back. For some reason, that incredibly
contagious grin reminded me of something else
Albert Einstein said: that the single most
important decision any of us will ever have to make
is whether or not to believe that the universe is
friendly. Adam appears to have made that decision.
Alita slowed down as she neared me, one mother
graciously returning her baby to another.
Adam swam over and seized my hand, lifting it
into the air and hailing me with a triumphant shout.
He didn't use words, but he didn't need
any. The sound of his voice said it all. It was a
cry of exultation, an expression of the pure and
absolute delight Adam experiences in
simply being. He put his arm around my shoulders
again, but I had the feeling that instead of clinging to me
for support, he was holding me up, embracing
me, trying to help me trust that everything around
us--the dolphins, the birds, the sun, the sky, the
whole vast, blue Atlantic--was there to bring
us joy.
I think he may be right.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It is stunning to think about all the people who made
it possible for me to write this book. The thing about
a memoir is that there are so many to thank; those who
helped me live through the experience, as well as
those who helped me write about it.
There are a few individuals who belong in
both these categories. I will never be able
to fully express my love and appreciation for
my husband, John Beck, who is as
indispensable to me as breathing, and who stuck by me
through the whole damn thing. Katie Beck, though
only eighteen months old at the time this story
began and only twelve now, cared for me as best
she could while I produced her brother and this
book. (i hope it will serve as a pre-written
confession to any therapist who may someday end up
helping Katie process her childhood
traumas.) Sibyl Johnston, brilliant
writer, loyal friend, and poorly disguised angel
of mercy, also has my endless gratitude, as
does her husband, Charles Inouye. My cousin
Lydia Nibley brought an unexpected ray of
hope and delight into one of the worst periods of my
life. She and her sister Sylvia Nibley have
continued to dazzle me with their love and support.
Other people who saved my life while I was
expecting Adam include my parents, Hugh and
Phyllis Nibley, and John's parents, Jay
Beck and his late wife, Faye. My sisters
--Christina Mincek, Rebecca Nibley, and
Zina Petersen--provided endless physical and
emotional help, as did my brother Paul and his
wife, Bronia. On the Harvard front,
John and I received still more kindness from friends like
Anne and Kenneth Morrell, Diane and
Lant Pritchett, and other friends from the
graduate-student community. Faculty members
who were particularly thoughtful and supportive
include Will Reimann, Dr. Annemette
S@orensen, Dr. Lenore Weitzman,
Professor Aage S@orensen, Professor
Ezra Vogel, and Professor John
Kotter. Bev Douhan of the Department of
Sociology was also unfailingly generous with her
time and compassionate advice. Dr. Walter Ames and Mark Fuller were especially crucial
in helping John continue his career despite the
complications caused by my poor health and Adam's
diagnosis. They may never know how
deeply I appreciate them.
A whole new division of helpers came on
the scene once I had finished living the story and
started writing it. My third child, Lizzie, was
on the way. From the moment Adam first discovered how
to make her laugh, when she was still so small her
head fit in the palm of my hand, Lizzie has
been his best friend. Like Katie and Adam, she
has forgiven my many parental weaknesses and brought
me enormous happiness. Other than John,
Dr. Ruth Killpack was the person who most
consistently convinced me my story was worth
recounting. Her love and expertise helped me
find my voice. My fellow travelers
Connie, Anne, Olga, Marcy, Melanie,
Pam, and Linda all cheered me on in my
writing and my life, and I adore them as well.
Silja Allen and Patricia Holland helped
me make sense of my own experiences so that I
could write about them with something approaching clarity.
Dawn Swanson gave me crucial input and
camaraderie soon after we relocated
to Phoenix. Annette Rogers was my first
(informal) editor. Her patience and constructive
criticism would have made her my sworn friend,
even if she hadn't been one already.
After the first version of Expecting Adam was
finished, Susan Schulman, my agent, read it and took me in off the street. She provided
feedback, encouragement, advice, and a lot of
hard work to get the book published--and was great
fun to talk to, besides. I'm grateful for the many
people at Times Books who assisted in the
publication process: John Rambow, Peter
Bernstein, Mary Beth Roche, Carie
Freimuth, and Nancy Inglis, to name a few.
Special love and thanks to my amazing editor,
Betsy Rapoport, whose intelligence and
sensitivity set the right course for this book, and
whose friendship gave me the courage to follow it.
Finally, I want to thank Karen Gerdes, whose
constant wisdom, compassion, and clarity of vision have
healed so many wounds and brought so many hopes
to fruition. Seeing all these people listed on one
page is truly overwhelming. If you'll
excuse me, I think I'll lie down and cry
for a while.
AUTHOR'S NOTE

This is a work of nonfiction, meaning that it
contains a rigorously factual account of real
events, along with the occasionally bald-faced lie
about the people involved in them. Allow me to explain.
In writing Expecting Adam, I made a
scrupulous effort to report exactly what
happened to me during my second pregnancy.
One of my reasons for putting it all down in the
first place was to fix the details of my experience
on paper so that my memory wouldn't distort them
over time. This was intensely important to me,
since I was recording events I myself found
incredible, events that ultimately changed the way
I see the world. Moreover, I knew that if the
book ever got published, I would promptly
achieve the status of Certified Fruit Bat
among all my academic friends and acquaintances.
If I was to be accused of exaggeration or flat-out
invention, I wanted to be absolutely sure these
accusations were ungrounded.
I have had plenty of training in recording "just the
facts." My schooling as a Harvard-pedigreed
sociologist involved being violently attacked
(not physically, but close) whenever my accounts of
events were sloppy, inflated, or poorly
substantiated. Over the years, I've made
habits out of taking exhaustive notes,
recording interviews, and rechecking my own
interpretation of events against other people's
perceptions. I spend thousands of hours before
writing my first book, Breaking Point,
sifting through every bit of data to make sure I could
confirm it factually. I have done the same thing
here.
TO ASSIST my memory as I wrote
Expecting Adam, I had a voluminous
journal that I'd kept during my pregnancy.
It was packed with every minuscule tidbit of my
thought a nd experience, including the gist--and often
the exact words--of important conversations. For
years I kept reminding myself to burn this
journal, until I finally realized that any
sane person would prefer being deep-fired
to actually reading the thing. It survived to become the
main information source for this book. John's
experience was partially available to me through the
journal and the Seeing Thing (as I explain in this
book), but I also forced him to slog through hours of
reminiscing and fact checking to ensure that
I'd captured his experiences fairly and
accurately. When the manuscript was finished,
I called the friends I'd portrayed in it to make
sure my memories squared with theirs.
As it turned out, my quest for accuracy
became something of a problem. I found that when I was
writing about real people in a nonfiction format, I
ran a considerable risk of causing them distress,
often by revealing things about them that seem completely
innocuous to me. I have therefore changed the names and
identifying characteristics of many people described in these
pages; I have indicated all of these disguises in
my text. My objective is to protect the
privacy of both dear friends and those whose
unflattering words and actions (which appear
unaltered) speak for themselves.
You are therefore holding a book that recounts
(1) a lot of ordinary, believable stuff
involving people you'll never be able to pick out of a
police lineup, although I believe some of them
belong there; and (2) some really weird,
unbelievable stuff, all of which is recorded
exactly as it happened. In other words, the harder
something is to believe, the truer it is likely
to be. The more I think about it, the more this seems to be
the way things are with life in general.

THE END