Preface

In 1956 my brand new transistor radio brought me the startling news of a pair of twins born with their heads stuck together. My ten-year-old imagination took flight, boggled by the possibilities. Did they share a brain? How would they walk? Most of all, what did they actually look like?

Excited, I ran home to deliver the news to my mother and my aunt, who was pregnant at the time. "Maybe," I said hopefully, "you'll have babies with their heads stuck together." My aunt gasped. My mother slapped me.

Wounded, I shut myself into my room to reflect on what I'd done wrong, but try as I might, I could come up with nothing. Apparently, these marvelous creatures I'd heard about weren't considered so marvelous by the grown-ups. It would be many years before I understood why.

Chapter One: A Child Is Born

August 3, 1965.

I awoke to find myself in a room with a woman sitting up in the bed next to mine, pulling metal rollers out of her long brown hair.

"Hi," she said cheerily. "My name's Jackie. God, am I glad for some company. Now that I'm leaving tomorrow they finally bring someone in here. Isn't it always the way?"

I smiled uncertainly through a sodium pentathol induced haze.

"I had a boy too," Jackie continued. "They'll be coming around for feeding soon. You'd better let the nurse know you're up if you want to see yours."

Without hesitation I obeyed this stranger who, by virtue of having given birth a day or two before me, qualified as an authority.

The nurse appeared in less than a minute, whirling through the room flinging open curtains, flicking imaginary specks off the sink. "Oh, so you're up, Mama," she said with a nod in my direction. "Have you urinated or had a bowel movement yet?"

I shook my head, remembering my sister Linda's vivid descriptions of the excretion ceremonies on the maternity ward; I knew if I didn't urinate they'd catherize me, an altogether unpleasant affair, and that I wouldn't be allowed to leave the hospital until I'd emptied my bowels.

I strained on the bedpan, examining my body. My belly was loose and flabby, still patterned by purple stretch marks: so, I was stuck with them for life. My vagina was a pathetic mess, having been not only assaulted by a razor, but cut and stitched as well, episiotomies being as much a routine of childbirth as cutting the umbilical cord.

"Have you done it yet?" called the nurse.

"Not yet."

"Well, dear, I'm going to have to catherize you."

Threatened with invasion, my bladder immediately released a healthy stream of urine. When the nurse returned with her equipment, she actually seemed disappointed.

"And now are you mommies ready for your babies?" Jackie and I nodded eagerly.

My newborn son slept in a tiny glass box perched atop four wheeled legs. At first sight he resembled my grandfather, or any old man, his red face scrunched up in denial of his new surroundings. The nurse gave him to me with a bottle of water. He took a few weak sucks, then fell back asleep. Jackie's baby sucked avidly.

"Don't worry," she assured me. "Mine didn't drink the first day either."

Holding Daryl, I felt far older than my 19 years. For the first time I questioned my decision not to breast-feed--I had thought it old-fashioned, an activity suitable only for cows, an attitude enthusiastically endorsed by my family, friends, and doctor. Well, it was too late now--I'd been given pills to dry up my milk.

Surreptitiously I unfolded the blanket and took a quick inventory: ten toes, ten fingers, all in the right places. One tiny limp penis. Relieved, I closed my eyes and leaned against the pillow.

Jackie's voice startled me. "Aren't you glad he's all right? I was terrified something would be wrong with my baby. But thank God, he's perfectly normal."

"Yes," I breathed, recalling the nightmares: attacks on my swollen stomach, hideous creatures clinging to my vaginal walls.

Every pregnant woman harbors the fear that something will be 'wrong' with her baby&emdash;but to give voice to such thoughts during the nine months of gestation would be to give them greater credence; admitting those fears is as much a part of the afterbirth as the bloody placenta

In the evening visitors filled our room. Jackie's husband and mother stood quietly by her bed, while my mother, father, sister and Bob, my husband, filled the rest of the space.

"Hey toots," my father boomed affectionately, giving me a wet kiss, grinning from ear to ear. When he smiled, his cheeks reddened like tiny apples in his shiny round face.

My mother pecked the air near my cheek, then took up a position at the foot of the bed. She stared without self-consciousness at Jackie's family and asked in a loud voice, "What did she have?"

"A boy too," I murmured, wishing that for once my mother would keep her voice down. But she went on, talking about the nurses, the hospital décor, her disdain of the crosses on the walls.

"It's a Catholic hospital, Ma," I said in a low warning voice.

"Yes I know," she replied, her words dripping with hatred. The only aspect of Judaism practiced in my family, so far as I'd ever been able to make out, was an active dislike of the goyim.

Bob had brought a bouquet of roses, and Linda ran off in search of a vase. When she returned she made a great fuss with them, searching for a knife to cut the stems, filling the vase, arranging them just so. This domesticity was totally out of character; I wanted my older sister to sit down and commiserate with me about the maternity ward, but she seemed to be avoiding any intimacy.

Bob's face was covered with thick stubble, rendering his olive skin even darker. He slouched in the corner chair next to my bed, inexplicably subdued.

My father grinned from ear to ear, and my mother sported her usual stiff smile, worn through thick and thin--but I had the uneasy sense that they were disappointed in me. Maybe it was because I'd had a boy--in my family we coveted female babies --dolls to dress up and show off.

Everything was discordant. Feeling acutely uncomfortable, I suddenly had to go to the bathroom--a tedious event that involved pouring a pitcher of water over my stitched bottom in lieu of toilet paper, a procedure which everyone in the room could not avoid hearing. I should have been embarrassed, but I wasn't: the bathroom afforded me an escape from a claustrophobic atmosphere that I couldn't identify.

The next morning my obstetrician, a young crew-cutted fellow with an upturned nose and pasty skin, came in to check on me. As he poked at my breasts, lumpy with the strain of unreleased milk, he mumbled, "We're a little concerned about the shape of the baby's head. We're going to run some tests to see if he has hydrocephalus."

Life stopped. My heart skipped a beat; my facial muscles froze. The world narrowed, and it would never, never look the same again.

"What are you talking about? What's hydrocephalus?"

"Oh," he said casually, "it's a disease that causes the head to grow abnormally." He pulled up the sheet and headed for the door; hesitating, he groped for a comforting phrase. "Don't worry," he finally managed, "you can have more kids."

I sat there, totally stunned. So that was why everyone had behaved so oddly the night before: something was wrong with my baby. I should have known, dammit--should have known that a girl as clumsy as my mother always said I was could never pull off an uncomplicated birth.

Jackie broke the cold silence. "You're worried about what he said, aren't you?"

"Yeah. What's he talking about?"

"Oh, I wouldn't worry, it didn't sound too serious." She hid her face behind a hand mirror, and didn't speak to me again. I hardly noticed when she packed up and left the hospital with her baby, but sat immobilized, thinking not of my baby's probable pain, not of the uncertain future, but of the past: the past nine months. What had I done wrong?

I had conceived under less than ideal conditions: in the back of a car, unmarried. In a panic, I married a man who was a virtual stranger to me. During my pregnancy I'd had a vaginal infection, and, having no notion of what the itching signified, felt too ashamed to tell the doctor. I had watched my weight rather than nutrition, starving myself prior to checkups, and was proud to gain only sixteen pounds total&emdash;dieting was encouraged by my doctor, who'd asserted that that "eating for two is an old wives' tale"&emdash;but now this became another one of my personal wrongdoings. In my ninth month I'd gone swimming in a public pool, only to learn later that some doctors advised against this. Worst of all, I had made love beyond the allotted time limit, up until three short weeks ago.

The litany never ended. With each passing day, year, decade, new sins were added to the list. Cigarettes. Coffee. Alcohol. Aspirin. I devoured reports of new medical discoveries, acquiring ammunition against myself. Sodium pentathol: I should have had natural childbirth. Radiation in cow's milk: I should have been drinking soymilk. Zinc. Calcium. Iron pills. Every time that child cried in pain or staggered under the weight of his head, my heart would cry out mea culpa.

Foggily I climbed out of bed to join the other mothers walking up and down the corridors in their new E.J. Korvette bathrobes. I saw them as characters in a science fiction movie, machines that had fulfilled their baby-making function, now useless and bored. I don't know, maybe they were walking around in a state of grace, ecstasy even, but as I said, the world had narrowed.

Or perhaps it had widened.

**********

I walked to the phone booth and began dialing Bob's office, but stopped midway, remembering his demeanor the previous night: surely he had known. He had known something was wrong with our baby and he'd deliberately kept it from me. I hung up the receiver and sat in the booth absorbing this information.

Never had I felt so betrayed. However well-intentioned were Bob's motives in withholding vital information from me, I would never fully recover from this sense of betrayal; if we'd been strangers when we'd married, we were now on our way to becoming enemies.

I picked up the phone again and called my sister.

"Linda? I just found out that the baby might have something called hydrocephalus."

"Dammit. Who told you?"

Again the bottom fell out of my world. "You mean you knew?"

"Well, Bob didn't want you to know until you'd had a chance to recover from the birth, so we all had to act like nothing was wrong."

My husband. My sister. My parents. I was surrounded by a band of lying traitors.

Stunned, I walked slowly back to my room. Bob was sitting in the armchair next to the bed. He didn't notice me at first, so for a minute I was able to observe him. Suddenly he seemed smaller than his six-foot-four and two hundred pounds, weaker than the burly football player he was, more vulnerable than the barroom bouncer he'd been when I'd met him. My anger at him dissolved, as I realized that he too was suffering. This baby was his child also; his first child; his son--with all the weight that word carries for a man like Bob. He looked up and, seeing me, opened his big bear arms. I fell into them, sobbing.

Silently we comforted each other. Finally I said, "To tell you the truth I can't imagine this happening to anyone else we know."

"What do you mean&emdash;you think we're losers?" he asked.

"Yeah," I said softly, feeling a great wave of shame flood over me. "That's what I mean."

I had, after all, failed the greatest test of womanhood--for women ultimately prove their worth by bearing healthy children. Indeed, in the recovery room Bob had whispered, "You came through with flying colors, kid." Now I'd learned that I had not, in fact, delivered flawlessly.

I had not been a rockbed of self-esteem to begin with; now I felt as if some inner deformity had manifested itself in my child, who would henceforth provide living proof of my defectiveness.

The hospital suspended normal visitation rules, allowing Bob to stay with me all day. On and off I cried, on and off I raged. I wanted the baby to live. I wanted the baby to die. I wanted the baby not to have this disease with the evil-sounding name.

When Daryl was brought in for feeding again, I studied him with a more critical eye. I saw what I'd missed before: his head was only slightly larger than normal, but asymmetrical. Tentatively I touched it: it seemed so vulnerable, he was so vulnerable. I felt a fierce desire to protect him, and at the same time, a certain amount of fear--not fear of what might happen to him, but an inexplicable fear of him, of his strangeness.

My parents came to visit again; this time we had the room to ourselves. My mother stood at the foot of the bed, smiling brightly, chattering inanely.

"We're getting the room ready," she said. No preparations had been made before I went into labor, out of the traditional Jewish superstition that this might hex the outcome of the pregnancy. Thinking of this archaic ritual and how it so obviously meant nothing, I laughed bitterly and said, "Ma, you do know about the baby, don't you?"

"Know what?"

"About the hydrocephalus."

"Oh, that. So, he'll have an operation."

Her characteristic lack of emotion suddenly enraged me. "You don't care, do you?" I shouted. "You don't even care!"

Her smile never wavered, but her eyes burned like dry ice, imparting their usual message: Get control of yourself.

I had no intention of getting control of myself: my mother had known something was wrong with my baby, and had marched in here smiling. Worse, she had somehow led me to this hospital bed with never a hint at what might transpire. A husband might betray, a father, even a sister--but a mother was not supposed to betray.

"You're like some kind of robot," I shouted, sobbing and hurling accusations. The nurse, who must've heard the commotion, came scurrying in.

"Visiting hours are over," she announced briskly, shooing everyone out, though there were at least another fifteen minutes left. After she'd emptied the room, she returned with my usual vitamin pill and, beside it, a new pink capsule.

"What's this?" I asked.

"Just a little something to help you sleep."

Dutifully I swallowed my "medicine" and awoke the next morning not only refreshed but optimistic. Suddenly I, like my mother, felt that nothing was terribly wrong. When I thought about it, what was the big deal, after all? My baby had a medical problem; the doctors would fix it; and we would all live happily ever after.

The pediatrician came to explain my baby's condition and probable operation. Hydrocephalus, he told me, is a disease of the central nervous system wherein cerebro-spinal fluid, rather than circulating normally, accumulates in the head, causing it to grow rapidly and exerting pressure on the brain. The word literally translates as "water on the brain," a phrase commonly used to denote stupidity in popular "jokes," a phrase that would from this day forward cause me to cringe reflexively. In the past, I learned, babies with hydrocephalus either outgrew the condition--sometimes with brain damage--or died. In the late 1950s an operation was devised wherein a plastic tube, or shunt, is inserted beneath the scalp, stretching into the chest or stomach cavity, draining the fluid. Daryl's head was only slightly larger than a normal infant's, so his prognosis was good.

Under the effect of pills, which I never suspected until years later were mood elevators, I began to view Daryl's condition as if it were no more significant than a mole or a wart.

When my obstetrician came in later, he asked if the pediatrician had been to see me.

"Oh sure," I said, waving my arm in the air. "He told me all about hydrocephalus. Did you know Winston Churchill had it and he outgrew it?"

"No, I didn't," said my doctor, frowning as he checked my breasts.

"Well, he did. But I guess Daryl's going to need an operation."

"Hm. Well, anyhow, you can have more kids."

I snapped my gum in his face, mentally willing him out of my consciousness. "Daryl is going to be fine," I said, despising him.

My grandfather called to suggest institutionalizing the baby.

"Just think," he reasoned, "you'll be stuck for the rest of your life."

"He's going to be fine, Grampa," I said. I rolled my eyes at Bob, who was trying to follow the conversation, and mouthed something about my senile old grandfather. "He just needs an operation."

A friend who'd heard something was "wrong" with my baby telephoned.

"Oh," I said casually in response to the concern in Louann's voice, "he has something called hydrocephalus. They're going to do an operation and then he'll be okay."

"Thank God," she said. I could almost hear the rosary beads clicking in her devout Catholic hands. "At least it isn't a missing limb or something really bad."

"Oh, no, nothing like that. Really. He'll be fine."

Bob was astounded by my change in attitude. Beneath my bravado and drug-induced oblivion, though, I was feeling more and more isolated from the mainstream of humanity, a feeling that would intensify and affect me for the rest of my life. There were those who, like my grandfather, acted as if Daryl's birth was a dire tragedy, while others, like Louann, were relieved that he didn't have "something really bad." Both attitudes denied reality. Neither left room for my complex bundle of feelings.

But deep in the stillness of the hospital night, I took out a pen and paper and wrote a long letter to Angie, who'd been my best and closest friend since we'd met as fourteen-year-old high school sophomores. Shortly after graduation she'd gone off to Japan to marry her Navy boyfriend, and was now herself pregnant.

Dear Angie, I began, There cannot possibly be a God.

Surely this would end our years of theosophical debate, during which she had almost persuaded me to convert to Catholicism. At seventeen, I finally rejected her religion as well as any belief in God, but we still debated the matter with great passion. Now at last she would see my point of view: she would have to admit that no God would inflict pain and injustice upon an innocent baby. Of course, I was really writing about the pain and injustice inflicted upon me. I told her, letting loose the flood of emotions I hadn't expressed to anyone else, just how heart-broken I was. When I'd finished the letter and read it over several times, I firmly sealed the envelope. There. I'd had my say. Would Angie at least hear me? If she, who understood me so well, didn't understand me now, then there was no hope that anyone on this earth ever would.

For who could ever understand the depth of my disappointment?

I may have gotten pregnant by default, but the truth was, I had wanted a baby for as long as I could remember. I adored my little cousins, and once I was respectably married, I'd been ecstatic to be pregnant-- in fact, I'd admitted guiltily to Linda that I had, at least subconsciously, engineered my pregnancy. I basked in the doting smiles of strangers as my belly grew, and devoured books on child rearing. I fantasized dressing up my baby, taking her (invariably I imagined a her) out in the stroller, playing with dolls in our apartment. I couldn't wait to have my very own little baby, for in my limited experience, babies were delightful playthings.

Most parents eventually learn that babies are much more complicated than mere playthings. I learned it in one brutal day.