1999, Portland, Oregon and Minneapolis, Minnesota

By Kelly Barnhill

At first I thought it was a tumor. This is not entirely my fault. I was two weeks late and took a pregnancy test. It was negative. I was four weeks late, so I took another pregnancy test. Negative again. I was six weeks late and went to the clinic in the windowless basement of some building at my university. In the box headed “Reason for visit” I scrawled in tiny letters, “cessation of menstrual cycles but don’t even bother giving me a pregnancy test because it’s gonna be negative and I think I have some sort of tumor.”

I don’t think they read it. When the nurse called my name she shooed me immediately into the bathroom so I could pee.

“Fine,” I said, not even bothering to take the grumble out of my voice. “But you know this is the reason for the skyrocketing cost of health care – you people and your addiction to pointless tests.” She had, of course, already left by then, and I was left with a plastic cup and a toilet and a strong urge to vomit.

This was not my first time, of course, in the university clinic. There were other girls like me, pale and swollen eyed, shooed from the plastic chaired waiting area into the bathrooms. We did not look at one another. There are rules down here.

Here is the procedure: Slide pants to ankles. Don’t, for God’s sake, allow pants to touch floor, as this is a university clinic, and God knows when it was last cleaned. Position thighs on seat. Spread. Prepare the three alcohol soaked sheets for inter-crotch sanitation. Yes, it must be three. No, you cannot ask me why. Forget that it will burn. Wince. Make calculations to hypothesize the trajectory of pee stream. Position cup. Vastly miscalculate and end up splashing on your hands anyway. Place cup on the paper napkin, apparently responsible for the cleanliness of the two-doored cupboard next to the sink, and slide the thin metal door shut.

As I washed my hands, I felt confident, grown up. Yes, it was a waste of time to take the test, but I was here. I was ready. I was going to face whatever was happening inside my body.

I slipped my hands into the back pockets of my jeans and regarded myself. I was young. I was healthy. I was cute. I had a runner’s butt. My boyfriend and I had just bought a house – well, he bought the house, but I helped. I was getting my Master’s, for crying out loud, which meant I could do anything. Health problems were simply one more challenge to be understood, mastered, and defeated.

I splashed water on my pale face, patted gently on the dark circles under my eyes. Whatever it was, it was making me tired. And sick. And possessed by a bizarre craving for milkshakes, although I had been a vegan for two years.

The nurse knocked on the door. “All set,” she said, her voice so perky I thought I might puke. In fact I did puke a little, into my mouth. With a grimace and a shudder, I swallowed it down. I opened the door and followed her down the hall. I remember that she talked to me. I remember her voice pelting my head at 100 miles an hour. I remember her face, milky pale with a spray of barely orange freckles across her nose, as she turned back to me to make sure I was listening. I wasn’t. The pregnancy test in her hands had already registered a result. She hadn’t noticed. I had. I was following a woman carrying a small white square displaying a gigantic red plus-sign.

She left me alone in the room. I sat down and cried.

Later, when I told my boyfriend, he cried, too. Then, recovering himself, he kissed my hands, my face, my belly. We laid side-by-side on our lumpy futon, wiping away tears, lacing fingers, promising love, support, heaven and earth, the sun, the stars and the moon. He brought his hands to my breasts, but I held them at bay.

“You have to be careful,” I said.

“Of what,” he said.

“My boobs. They’ve burst into flame.”

He nodded. “Ah,” he said. “Is that why they’re so gigantic?”

I opened my mouth wide, but no words came out. I tried again. “Excuse me?”

“Oh,” he said, reaching his hands back for a conciliatory butt squeeze. “Not gigantic. Bodacious.”

I looked down and shrugged. I hated to admit it, but he was right. After a lifetime of a Peter Pan figure, of barely filling out an A cup, there was no denying that they had arrived. They were big and round, and well, bodacious. My boyfriend, for the first time since I had known him, referred to them as ta-tas. And they hurt like hell.

I moved up to a B cup, then a C. They were white and swollen, the nipples like large copper coins that someone had polished for days until they gleamed. Around each breast, deep blue veins meandered and swirled, like ancient writing. I was a statue, an artifact, a goddess, a prayer. Plus, I was hot. And despite the pain, I really dug my new boobs.

By the time we started to tell a select few friends (all of them anarchistic, anti-establishment types, who looked at us strangely and said, “You’re having a what?”) my runner’s butt began to perceptibly alter. It wasn’t that I had stopped running at that point. I continued attaching my dog to her leash and running around the park until I got tired. And yet. And yet, by the third month, I pulled up my favorite stretchy running shorts, and they ripped in two ragged smiley faces just under each cheek. Boyfriend – about-to-be husband – was treated with a front row seat for this one. He opened his eyes to the ripping of fabric, only to find a little bit of panties peeking out from the tattered maw of my shorts, accented by my pale, pale skin.

“Nice,” he said.

“Shut up,” I said, hunting frantically for another pair of shorts. Unable to find a pair of mine, I made a show of grabbing his and slipping it on while glaring pointedly. I ran, but the shorts were too big, and the constant hiking up was killing my concentration. The dog and I walked home, where I was treated to no less than 14 stray pairs of eyes, checking out my ass, eight whistles, and one “Baby, I’ll follow that sweet caboose to the end of the goddamn earth.” It was that kind of a park.

The high school where I taught became a new and different experience as well. My worst class, 11th grade remedial English, a class of 14 boys and four girls, known throughout the school as a rowdy, wise-assed group of knuckleheads, suddenly altered. I was still keeping my new – um – situation under wraps, but it was getting increasingly difficult to find pants to wear to work.

One day, I wore a pair of black yoga pants paired with a nice, form-fitting blazer that reached to the middle of my hips. It was forgiving, reasonably professional, but most of all, it made me look at least reasonably hip. Every time I turned to write something on the board, the boys fell into a hushed silence. I turned around, and they held their breath, as though unwilling to break the spell.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” I said. “Can’t anyone tell me the name of Scout’s older brother?”

Silence. The boys tilted their heads slightly, and gave me a collectively indulgent group of smiles. “Come on, people,” I chided.

“Actually,” one boy ventured, “if you could just write it down on the board for us, we’d all be happy to copy it down.” The boys nodded their heads vigorously. The four girls shook their heads and rolled their eyes.

The morning of my 22nd week my belly grew. And no, it was not the simple realization that my belly had been growing all along. It grew like those time-elapse scenes in a movie, when a seed goes from germination to flower to fruit to shriveling death in a matter of seconds. People stopped in their tracks and stared. My housemates looked up from their morning coffee and looked as though they were going to be sick.

Before our eyes, my reasonably flat stomach mushroomed forth into a lumpy roundness. The button popped off of my favorite jeans. My skin stretched. Lightning bolts etched themselves deeply in the pink underlayers of my skin. I was a logo, or a superhero.

The first day I left the house with my new belly, the world changed. Complete strangers crossed the street so they could lay their palms on my stomach, rub luxuriously, and scamper away without even introducing themselves. People said, “22 weeks? I can’t believe it. You’re so tiny!” People said, “22 weeks? I can’t believe it. You’re gigantic! Do you think it’s twins?”

The woman who rings up my dry cleaning asked me if I was remembering to take my folic acid. The man who pumps my gas told me to hold my breath because the fumes would give the baby cancer. The lady who ran the lunch line at school demanded to know how I felt each morning, and then would nod knowingly, saying that is exactly how she felt the morning of her miscarriage. My male students couldn’t keep their eyes off my belly. They stared at it, open-mouthed, as though hypnotized.

“Are you doing that on purpose?” one boy demanded.

“What,” I asked, only half paying attention.

“You’re pointing it at me.”

“Pointing what at you?”

“That,” he said, pointing at my belly. I stared at him. Honestly, how is a person supposed to respond to something like that? I made a mental note to write to my education professors and ask their advice. Fortunately, another boy leaned over to explain the situation.

“She’s not pointing it at you. It’s an optical illusion. You know, like the Mona Lisa. It just follows you around.”

My female students turned their faces in horror and revulsion, as though the very sight of my belly reminded them how close they had come two weeks earlier in the back of some boy’s pick-up. In my head, I made a tally of the days until summer vacation, like an inmate.

When the day came, I pushed so hard my skin stretched and ripped, my eyes watered and bugged out, my voice bounced off the sterilized walls in guttural howls. She emerged, moving chaotically through the birth canal, and shot out like a watermelon seed into limitless space. The doctor almost dropped her.

She was laid, as per my instructions, on my chest. She was red and gooey and bellowing. A heart-shaped face. A rosebud mouth. Lusty. Raging. Perfect.

After a bath and a few pokes and prods for her, and a series of stitches followed by what seemed like the entire hospital clean-up crew seeing to the mopping up of my crotch for me, I brought her back to my chest where she sucked and wailed, sucked and wailed, and finally gave up and went to sleep.

My husband – it still felt strange to call him that – fell asleep as well on the chair that supposedly pulled out to a bed, although the word “bed” might be a little generous for the measly amount of space provided for an exhausted partner. I pulled myself off the bed, tested my balance, and tottered into the bathroom and closed the door.

The bathroom was equipped with a full-length mirror on the inside of the door, apparently so the patients can have an unobstructed view of themselves while peeing. I stood in front of the mirror, regarding myself in my many layers of pale hospital garments. Slowly, I peeled each one off, let it fall to the floor, pool around my feet.

I looked at my shoulders first, and then my arms. I took a breath, and let my eyes go to my breasts. They were swollen and hard, the nipples rosy and pointed and about to leak, as though they were searching for a small, hungry mouth. They were water. They were cloud. They were dense earth. I looked farther down.

My legs still had the remains of blood and water and salt shadowing the skin from knees to tender inner thighs. My hips rounded sweetly into the curve of my belly. The stretch marks that reached from my panties to my belly button had organized themselves into some sort of pattern. I was a painted bride, a Star Trek character, an inscrutable map. I liked it. My belly, once flat and hard from obsessive sit-ups, was now wide and round and soft. I placed my fingers on my skin and pressed in deep. It felt like sex. Like love. Like women.

Yes, I told myself. I can live with this. The baby squawked in the other room. I went to the clear plastic bassinette and picked her up. Curling into the hospital bed, I fed her from my breasts. The milk poured out, ran down her chin, spilled onto the blanket in a sweet, wet stain. I didn’t care. When she slept, I held her close to the softness of my body and drifted away.

Kelly Barnhill is a writer, teacher and mother of three. Her short stories and essays has appeared in various journals and she has recieved a grant or two along the way to help support her work. Currently, she is finishing up a young adult novel.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Sunday, May 13th, 2007 | Email This Post

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