Before the waves come
by Cat Dixon
Image by Kristina Paukshtite for Pexels
“I’m pregnant,” I whisper into the phone while hiding in the bathroom at work.
My friend, who I’ve known since fourth grade, replies, “Shit. Get an abortion. Don’t tell him.”
I gasp. Raised as Catholics, attending private school, we’d been taught that abortion was murder, a sin. The video from our eighth grade health class spins in my head, Let me live. Let me walk into the sunlight. Let me live. I can’t recall anything else from that lesson, but the song that played. I think there were images of children playing outside as well, but I’m not sure—only the chorus remains.
“I can’t do that.”
“What the hell are you going to do then?”
“I don’t know. I’ll call you back.”
Nola, the coworker who said I should run to Walgreens to get a pregnancy test when I confessed earlier that I was late, bursts into the bathroom. She must know from my look that it’s positive. She smiles and hugs me, “You’re blessed. Congratulations!” Most of the time, I shrink away from touch, but I allow her to hug me. I hug her back.
****
I wring my hands, pace my apartment’s small kitchen, and check the clock again. Mark’s 36 years old and has a good job as a software engineer. He’s a volunteer fireman. He has a new house. He seems to have his shit together. Perhaps he’ll take the news well, but I don’t really know him. We met on December 12—just three months ago. He took me to a dinner theater show. He’s 14 years my senior.
I’m set to graduate in May with my bachelor’s in creative writing. My first divorce isn’t even final yet. I don’t know what I’ll say to Mark when he arrives. On the phone, I asked him to come over for dinner. I’m a woman who plants a bomb and then waits nearby to make sure the thing goes off.
Mark arrives with a large blue bottle of SKYY vodka. He asks if I’m ready for a drink. That’s what we do—drink. The first time we had sex in January, I’d been blacked out. I woke up the next morning naked in my bed next to him naked. Once I realized what had happened, I resigned myself to the fact we’d done it and there was no turning back. I wrapped myself in a sheet, embarrassed of what I might’ve done or said while blacked out, worried if he used protection, but too shy and immature to ask about any of it.
“I need to talk to you,” I say as I take the bottle out of his hand and place it on the counter. Now I’m backing away, pressed up against the fridge, and my hands shake. My eyebrows twitch which only happens when I’m over caffeinated or nervous. He nods. Perhaps he thinks I’m calling this off. He’s ready for it, and a breakup would make more sense. I’m selfish and wild and not even legally divorced yet. He’s twice divorced and likes to spend his free time at the fire station trainings where he learns how to save people who have fallen through broken ice or had a heart attack. Every weekend, I go dancing and drinking, and the few weekends we’ve shared out and about, it’s been more like a babysitter and designated driver at my side than a boyfriend.
“I’m pregnant,” I whisper. “I took a test at work. And I got another test on the way home. Look here.” I hold up the positive pee-stained tests in the Ziploc baggie. My arm extends out to him and it’s like I’m offering a penance for some wrongdoing.
“It’s okay,” he says. “We’re in this together. It’ll be okay.” He hugs me. We stand in the kitchen, my hand still clinging to the bag of pregnancy tests, and I cry. He’s never seen me cry. Only three months in and he doesn’t really know me. But perhaps in those blacked-out nights he’s witnessed the real me. There’s no way to know and I won’t ask. I’ve been putting on a show.
We move to the living room to sit on my black leather couch which my mother bought months earlier when my ex-husband Hugh moved out. Hugh took the couch and the coffee and end tables. I kept the bedroom set. Like usual, my mother wanted to fix my problems with a shopping trip. I picked out the most expensive living room set which featured glass tables with sharp corners. Everything in my apartment is stark—black and white—and not child-friendly.
“We can do whatever you want.”
“I can’t get an abortion.”
Maybe he’s surprised by this given my atheism. That’s one thing we have in common—we know there’s no higher power. Can I explain how my years in private school fueled my depression, self-harm, guilt? Going into it all here, when I’m still pretending to be the new improved woman who has her shit together, will remove the mask I’ve spent months sculpting and decorating. The scab of my real self lies under these bandages of poetry, vodka, and sex, and I’m not ready to open it—not ready to let the air in or to allow light on this darkest part.
I say adoption. His body jerks and he pushes the white pillow into my lap as he readjusts.
“I was adopted. We can’t.”
I’d known that, but in the moment I’d forgotten. One night at the bar, he’d told me about a dinner table scene with his father, stepmother, and sisters. A sentence was dropped casually—
Mark was adopted. This was the first time he learned of it—after his parents’ divorce, after his father’s remarriage, after he was already wondering why he had blond hair and blue eyes, and everyone else was black-haired and brown-eyed.
“That doesn’t give us a lot of options.” I hug the pillow to my chest.
“Let’s get married! I’ll take care of you and the baby. We can do this.”
I excuse myself to the bathroom. The panic clutches my throat, and I gulp down a couple Dixie cups of water. I pretend they’re shots of vodka for what I really want is to drink, to dance, to blackout, and wake up in bed with nothing to be worried about except the assignment I didn’t complete and what time I needed to clock in at work.
I’ve never changed a diaper, fed a baby, or babysat. When a coworker brings a newborn to the office—like a show-and-tell item—I hide in the bathroom until it’s gone because it’s embarrassing when someone asks you to hold a baby, and it makes you want to puke because it’s a wet delicate worm that you fear you’ll drop or crush or throw. My only friend with a baby, Samantha, invited me over a few months earlier before I started seeing Mark. I held the two-week-old and it spit up on my brand new brown leather jacket. She’s studying to be a nurse and able to stomach such things. People like Samantha are meant for babies. People like Nola at work, who has three kids, are meant for babies. I’m not meant for this.
I swallow another cup of water. This is what I get for drinking. This is what I get for cheating on my first husband, for divorcing him, for having sex. I’ve scaled a mountain over these months and dangled my feet over a cliff that stretches out over deep water, and now I’d slid to the bottom in a three-minute window—waiting for that test to come back. The rocks all rain down in an avalanche of despair and self-pity. I hope that Mark can shovel me out—rescue me before the waves come. When I return to the couch. I say, “Okay.”
****
I find my mother in the front-end of the grocery store pushing carts. She’s surprised to see me on a Saturday morning, but as always, she wants to show me off to some of the cashiers.
“I need to talk to you.”
We end up in the cereal aisle. It may seem weird to have this conversation here, but it’s normal for us. As a single mother, she’s worked seven days a week my whole life. As a child, I spent the days at Rose’s, Tommy’s, Betty’s and day-care centers. As a school-aged child, I attended the before-school and afterschool programs. As a teenager, my mother finally found love, but she kept her jobs and their long hours, so she moved into her boyfriend’s leaving me home alone. Sometimes weeks would go by without seeing her. Most days after school, I went looking for men to get me drunk or high. If I wanted to talk to my mother, I had to go to the grocery store on the weekends.
After I tell her I’m pregnant, she grabs my hand which is a surprise. We aren’t the touchy feely type and she goes into fix-it mode, “We’ll find a nice family at the church to adopt the baby.”
I pull my hand away, “I’m keeping it.”
I’ve rarely talked back to my mother. Not when she was cussing me out when I was a small child huddled in my closet wishing I was dead, not when I was a teenager when my boyfriend punched out my bedroom window, and my mother tongue-lashed me for calling the police which required her to come home, missing a couple hours of work, not when she told me if I was going to write suicidal poems for my English class that required my teacher to call her, she’d just lock me up, not when she insisted that she’d pay for my first divorce—my only job was to get Hugh out of the place. I’d cry, but not argue or defend.
This time, finally at 22, I stand my ground. Perhaps I’m worried she’ll talk me out of these lovely plans Mark and I spent all night dreaming about on my couch.
“We’re going to get married.”
Mark and I haven’t said I love you. We haven’t spent much time together except nights out at the bar or at his house drinking and watching South Park or Seinfeld. I met his mother once. She seemed nice.
Perhaps my mother doesn’t want to push because she knows I have a way out of this toxic mother/daughter relationship now. I wonder if she’s thinking about the cost of the recent divorce, the new furniture, all the financial help she’s given since Hugh moved out. She doesn’t mention these things; instead, she’s now on Team Baby—she’ll help me with the nursery. We’ll talk more later. She has to go back to work. I can’t remember if we hugged, but I doubt it. I hate hugs. I hate saying I love you. I hate myself.
****
They say when it’s your own baby you’ll feel differently. I guess that’s true. I quit my job and stay home with my son—I breastfeed, burp, change diapers, cradle, and sing. I married Mark—my belly bump a glaring reminder to all who attended that we had to do this. I graduated from college while pregnant—the framed diploma on the wall laughs at me. There’s still a panic coursing through my veins, and I can’t drink it away unless I want to pump and dump which I won’t do. All those baggies of breastmilk in the freezer are trophies—I am a good mother. The trap I fell into feels like drowning. I never learned how to swim, and I’m scared of water. The waves crash against my craggy shore of isolation. The waves won’t allow me to sleep, so I write during his naps and after he’s down for the night, ignoring the fact that this isn’t my life and soon I will drown.
Cat Dixon (she/her) is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee. She is a poetry editor at The Good Life Review and the author of six poetry collections and chapbooks.