Cassandra Verhaegen
32
The bean and I took a trip to the City, because it’s Charles’ birthday and Little Italy is the only place I knew I could find authentic sfogliatelle to replace the “authentic” sfogliatelle I burned. Now we’re two hours from the Catskills, speeding along together up 287.
“Your grandmother—the one in Italy—used to make it for him,” I say to the bean through a fat mouthful of blueberries.
Antioxidants zinging through us. Slant of sun. Conditioned air. My words, our stories, shock of pavement, her DNA reeling and unreeling as we move.
In eighteen weeks she’ll start forming memories. Her eyes will be open, she’ll sense it when I move through bright lights, she’ll smell what I smell.
This morning’s sweet reek of burnt ricotta, the curls of smoke tendril-ing through early sun, the trash stink of the City, are mine alone for now. The story of today among the first concrete pours of our foundation.
The pastry box lid flops along with our forward motion. Charles will find five hours in the car for flaky Italian pastries excessive, but he’ll like it.
“These are the moments of excess he appreciates,” I say to the bean, believing it.
* * *
Sunny August wind through the kitchen window. I set the box on the counter, press my fingers down on my lower belly, feeling for the bean. I imagine a small dense roundness beneath my fingers, thumb it like a secret. My mother told me a few weeks ago, after the soft pink “+” which promised a shift in horizon, about the alien joy of sharing one’s body. How it was suddenly yours and not yours. As I scrub the city off my hands and wrists under the tap, I feel my body has never been more mine. The bean has unlocked the physical world with the ease of someone brushing crumbs off a map to reveal the terrain beneath. We’re a flood of sense—summer in all its warmth and fecundity and rot seeps into my blood, becomes her blood, circulates back through me again. Heatbugs and apples’ bursting sweetness by day. Evenings of shadow creeping down the mountains, catching itself on every jagged leaf edge. Peepers and bullfrogs at night. Milky black glow of deer’s eyes in the porch lights as they toddle by the hydrangeas.
And my skin—hairs along my arms alive with light and dark. The peachfuzz on my earlobes tickled by the least breeze. Harsh tingle of arugula and clover on my tongue.
It’s a truer kind of sharing than the most collaborative psychiatry, a more literal truth than sex.
Charles is fascinated by the body, its raw evidence of hours and moods, so these days I take notes on my changed world and he reads them at dinner, scores of Post-its flickering and losing their purchase on the slats of the picnic table I built for us when we moved here, now rough with two cycles of leafrot and ice. He has dedicated his life to the body, what he calls its symbiosis with the mind. I read of his days in the clean yet reliably impressionistic emails he sends from work. I read about synapses and serotonin and—once upon a time, before I made a fool of both of us—the scraps of toilet paper stuck to his coworker’s jaw.
When my sister set us up, I was wary of Charles’s title of scientist, his position with the NIMH. I’d always imagined myself settling down with an artist, someone dark-haired and thin-fingered and delicate. Eating pasta fagioli with someone who earned his livelihood mapping the genes of people like me felt somehow incestuous, like being fingered by the same hands that had crafted me. Not an artist, I said to Brynn, brow raised.
Aren’t you sick of being turned into flower metaphors?
She was referring to the last artist, a writer whose best crystallization of what he—with soft melodrama—called manic-depression was a California poppy, bright carmine petals opening at light and closing at dark.
So being unraveled and glued to a posterboard is better, I said, and she was quiet.
“Spoiler alert,” I say to the bean, opening the fridge and washing us with its coolness, “we went to dinner.”
I pluck a pear from the crisper, squeeze its cold skin before biting into it. Crisp meeting of teeth, hard sweet flesh. I eat a copious amount of produce now, a luxury we can afford because it’s summer—our trees and the brambles along the distant road grow heavy with fruit, our garden thick with tomatoes and cucumbers and squash. Elaborate salads for lunch, with dinner, popping cherry tomatoes into my mouth like candy and feeling their wet burst.
Charles says we’ll have the healthiest infant ever born. That she might pop out vegan. We only muse openly about her physical health.
* * *
The bean was neither planned nor accidental. My IUD had run its course, and the night before I went to the gynecologist to get it wrenched out of me, Charles asked if I was going to replace it. Distance—sudden—unfolding between us across the sheets of our full bed. Glass of water on the nightstand humming with uncertainty as if catching the resonance of a passing ship no one wanted to flag. We’d had names picked out for our figmented children since before we got engaged. Those names bobbed between us, their force gravitational, potential, as they slipped from joke to possibility.
Maybe not, I said, tonguing it.
Waves of data, prognoses, statistics rolling between us. Disorder polygenic, nosology complex. Weeks of him doing the dishes while I stared at the wall, piles of collected glass and stones I’d fashioned into elaborate mosaics and sold leering up from the silty bottom. Linkage on chromosome 8q. White ER walls and the awful way they catch the fluorescents and beam them back at you. Connection to clock genes. The glitter of my eyes in a restaurant mirror as I touch his colleague’s arm. Population risk: 1-2%. Charles’s hands dry from winter cupping my face as I grip his hipbones tight enough to hurt.
Risk for first-degree relatives: 10-25%.
I knew how badly he wanted to be a father.
It’d be a sacrifice for you, you know, he said.
My scoff a ripple. I didn’t say what is parenting but sacrifice. I didn’t say how I’d been so good since last summer because didn’t he know better than anyone.
His voice leaned carefully towards me. As in lithium can cause heart defects.
There was also the issue of when. Would I wait for the fruit of this planned accident and then wean myself off the drugs. Would I wean myself off the drugs then fuck prodigiously until the planned accident bore fruit. Was the potential psychic stress on my body more or less harmful to a fetus than sipping my lithiated blood like the original 7-Up.
Would I sink too low, would I spike too high, would it ruin us after all that hadn’t.
I called my mother on the way to the gyno like a last prayer. She can rattle off every medication I’ve been given and when, what I’ve eaten in which hospitals and how much agency I retained there. I called her and asked her an impossible question because I knew it was impossible: if she’d seen my future would she have wanted me. What else could she say but: yes, for crying out loud, God-love-us, for someone so smart you can really be an idiot.
I wanted the bean. I took her answer as my permission.
* * *
“We’re gonna make strawberry shortcake too,” I tell the bean. Charles’ favorite.
It’s only one o’clock. Four hours until Charles will be home—32 years old. It’s important because there were 2 of us and now there are 3.
“It’s content mirroring form,” I say, the wooden spoon with which I am swirling the batter rough-grained against my hand. “Form mirroring content?” I pause to consider the valleys of my palms, find nothing but the usual creases which suggest nothing to me but a great deal to other people.
That’s something else which interests Charles. Insight. Once upon a time the word held a sort of indigo glow, something promising and bright, and then I was told I lacked it and it didn’t, and later in one of his post-work spurts of facts, he explained that in the mental health field, insight was a patient’s ability to assess their own condition. I refrained both from saying that I knew this alternate definition and from asking about my own insight, afraid of two possible answers: a truth that I didn’t have insight or a lie that I did. These places we evade conversation strengthen us. Even he, who dedicates his life to answers, couldn’t handle all of them.
“He’s humble in a way scientists usually aren’t,” I tell the bean, carefully pouring batter into two cakepans. “He wants to know everything but he accepts he never can.” He reminded me of this after the gyno, after we christened the freshly unobstructed route to my cervix, after my lip quivered and I told him he was brave for being open to procreating with me. That we couldn’t possibly know what would happen, that no one could. “It’s up to us,” I say to the bean without context. I don’t say the word doomed even to negate it. If we dodge whatever biological triggers she may have, she won’t walk down my road.
Charles says even if she does go down my road, we’re equipped to handle it. But by now he’s also taught me a lot I didn’t already know. Realities, etiologies, prognoses. The dark facets of related illnesses he lets slip as if the parallels are difficult to draw.
Oh baby, tell me how likely I am to attempt suicide, I said once as I hammered a nail into the wall to hang one of his Rothko prints. Pink. He laughed, but I caught the micro-quaver in his cheek, the edge in his timbre he quickly buried.
And don’t even the most equipped among us often fail?
The oven beeps to signal it’s preheated and I cringe, the sound an electric sizzle from my inner ear down to my groin. I curl into myself to protect the bean, relax my jaw, will the cortisol away before it can touch her. Stress stunts fetal development. Sound is one of my sensitivities. This is common for bipolar people. It’s one of the things Charles watches for—clench of mouth, squint of eyes, upward crawl of shoulders. He knows to wait before confronting me, until the feel of touching an electric fence has faded, until the flash of pain has passed.
I wonder what will happen when the bean is outside me, crying or clanging cookie sheets while I teach her how to bake. I can’t take lithium until I’m done breastfeeding. I can’t give the bean Similac, though Charles disagrees. And what if the bean can’t stand the sound of her own screams, if she understands torment before language?
“We’re okay,” I tell the bean and myself.
* * *
I chose green balloons, though they were the hardest to find. I located a bag of fifty under a rainbow of others at Party City, thin plastic tacky with dust. The bean and I have burned through a lot of gasoline today. Hiss of air as I siphon the helium, also procured at Party City. Throbbing fingers as I tie the knots. Stink of rubber like cheap condoms. I smell my hands and they smell like a first date, a stranger’s futon.
By three there are green globes everywhere, grasping at the light and glowing in beads along the ceilings and doorframes. I describe them for the bean as I scratch the words of this image and others on Post-its, teaching her the difference between pine and army and emerald.
For contrast, I’m making red wine sangria I can’t drink. The slug of wine burbling around air pockets as I pour it into the pitcher makes my eyes water.
Comorbid is another word Charles taught me after I knew it, first gently and then with a disappointment laced with threat. I didn’t really drink before I met him, started drinking on our honeymoon—Italy, clichéd if he didn’t have family there, potentially clichéd regardless but lush with food and wine, bare skin and sweat. Taste this, he said, and I did. Glitter of prosecco, tannic slap of cabernet. Then a steady acquaintance with the new sparkle and fizz in my blood, the promise of numbness, the welcome distraction of a hangover. It’s difficult to think or feel when your head is stuffed with gray cotton.
I don’t tell the bean, as I chop oranges into prisms, that this had almost ruined us. That I knew better, from the first months of bedroom talk with Charles, the way his eyes went glassy when he talked about his mother and her comorbidities. Before his job at the NMIH, he studied addiction. Before he studied it in PET scans, he studied it in his mother’s eyes. At least, he jokes, I don’t have to feel alone in strapping the bean with biological landmines.
Bottle in my fist light and drained now. Dry whiff of wine frothing purple up at me.
It’s nice to have the bean as a physical restraint, to dodge my disappointment in how simply I have proven myself capable of evading the emotional restraint of being married to somebody. To work from home, to use my own credit card, to wash my mug, rinse my mouth. To wait for six-thirty, to pour him a glass from a fresh bottle, to pour one for myself. To hide the bottles. To smash the bottles and turn them to mosaics and sell them to strangers on Etsy. To tell him before he discovers it and not know if he already had. I didn’t ask.
My phone vibrates in my pocketbook, softened by the canvas to a brief hum. Picture of Charles’s birthday lunch, faces conspicuously absent, man-hands grasping skewers and touching kebabs in a way which seems abruptly homoerotic. My mouth fills with saliva, my ache to bite his lower lip likely rimmed with red spice catches in my throat. Maybe when he gets home, after our hug—a daily moment he and I have set aside to choose embodiment with one another—I’m told skin-to-skin contact will be crucial between us and the bean too—I’ll get on my knees. He’ll start standing and then we’ll move to the couch—slick flesh, hard light, flour in my hair, graphite and dry-erase on his fingers—and afterwards eat sfogliatelle naked at the picnic table.
“Ass splinters—worth it?” I say to the bean.
I text Charles this because I believe he’ll find it funny. He does say lol, but he also asks if I’ve considered a nap, as he knows I work hard on other people’s birthdays and he loves that about me, and he knows it’ll be especially true today as he’s turning 32 and that is, after all, as we discussed, a significant age, and he’s sure that even if a nap doesn’t sound good to me I could take a break from the activity and watch some HGTV, give myself and the bean a rest, and then as I am squeezing a lime into the pitcher of sangria—tang, burn, green—wondering how I could possibly bear to sit on the couch with sunshine like this catching the balloons beading the ceiling like so many dewdrops, I realize he is writing to me in these gentle suggestions because I am lacking insight and it has only been eight weeks with the bean, fifteen without lithium, and a nap or “Fixer-Uppers” are his only plugs for the leak—tiny though it is—already sprung here.
* * *
I spend close to an hour rewriting my Post-its, approximating “normal” language: cut the alliteration—green globe becomes green orb—cut the snuck-in slant rhymes whose sound I so love, try to connect ideas through causation rather than association. It’s not challenging to do this, as I’ve done it for plenty of people nameless and faceless in their scrubs—I know the signs, the words, the ways I reveal myself and how to circumvent them—but it feels wrong.
“It’s one day,” I say to the bean, running my hands over my still-flat belly. Cotton prick like static. Head like static. Green globes so full of yellowing light I imagine them bursting and weeping pus onto me and the bean. Though he’s forgiven me, I ruined Charles’ 31st birthday. I seduced his coworker, took him to the women’s bathroom of the Italian restaurant in town where I’d reserved a whole room and buffet for eleven people. I didn’t kiss him—because I loved Charles more than sex, I noticed, as my back hit the door of a locked stall. The voice that replied somebody was in there came from a body with feet shod with the same brown boots as the coworker’s wife, and then the party was over. There is no party this year. The bean and I are the only 32 he has.
Fault line rocking me belly to teeth. So many of our days that could more aptly be called mine.
Mess of glass on the kitchen floor, vomit in my hair, neck-sore nights in an ER chair.
Not the moment, now, to remind myself of all our days we could more aptly call his, all the ways I have not governed our life and he has.
A Catholic wedding, a house far from my mother in the middle of nowhere, 10-25%, these facts which break my heart.
He gave me—us—the bean, and his birthday is the wrong day to make him question this.
When I’m done, I tear the original Post-its to pieces, the shreds fringed with roughness. I gather them in my hands, hold them under the tap, watch the ink—green, carefully chosen—bleed into my palms and down the drain, and I crumple and mash the paper mess into a ball resembling papier-mâché of the variety I might one day teach the bean to make even if she doesn’t need to make things to keep herself alive.
I consider the trash can and then I let myself out the back door, walk a few dozen yards past the picnic table, and duck behind an apple tree, peering around to choose a spot which can’t be seen from the table. Bare feet moist and prickling at the root of my calluses. Toenails in need of another coat of paint flecking with dirt as I dig. The apples hanging above are far from ripe—if I were to bite in now, I’d get a tart mouthful of starch, my tongue and teeth would go thick, the tree would stand firm as if to ask me what I expected from something so clearly in progress.
I smear dirt over the clot of post-its and stand, one hand on my belly, the other on the tree trunk. The artist who called me a poppy would have a field day with this image, all these seeds in the golden hour, the staggering intrusion of their physical presences, tiny though they seem. He hadn’t wanted children. I was too naïve to know I did, what that meant.
* * *
“There’s his car on the gravel,” I say to the bean, who is covered by my best most casual dress. It’s a sheer frock my mother would be horrified to see me wearing without a bra. I smudge my lipstick with my finger to make it faint in the bathroom mirror. Round stain of nipples like another set of eyes, though my real eyes are far brighter. I stare myself dead in them, squint, try to dull them to normal. Charles knows the studies by name—scientifically un-rigorous though they may be—the ones which support the idea that a manic episode can be spotted in the exaggeration of space between brow and eye, in the saturated iris, the changed pupil.
Break of gaze, brief eye contact with a past self in the framed picture of Charles and me by the ocean hanging over the towel rack. He hung it there because he thought it would be funny—to be one of those young white couples who need a beach-themed bathroom. In the picture I’m not quite squinting. I’m smiling genuinely but not feverishly.
In the mirror I try to match this past self, to be a woman happy to be at the beach with her lover on a warm night, a woman capable of sitting down and letting the sand stick to her ankles, who can forget about the sand and wait before rushing to the waves, who can’t feel these waves rolling through her ribcage even now years later standing in a see-through dress on the lover-turned-husband’s birthday pregnant with his child and saturated with her own fear, so close to bursting with the fear of his fear.
Gentle thump of hip against the front door to jar it open.
I flick off the bathroom light, step into the entryway. He is here smelling of kebabs and dry-erase and sweet summer sweat and relentless forgiveness I may or may not deserve. He smells like love and I smell like burnt custard and lime rinds and love, I think, too.
I will my eyes to relax before meeting his, try to say with my smile that I forgive him too, and does he really want to spend the rest of his life forgiving me, because a manic wife’s rabid attempts at seduction at her husband’s 31st birthday party is beginning to seem tame compared to what we’ve set in motion here, another human being made of us for better or for worse, and we know what the worst looks like.
Our arms wrap around each other’s backs, stomachs pressed flat and close, the bean splitting and growing between us. One day he’ll feel her as I feel her. One day we’ll sit spent on the couch watching her play. One day she’ll bake us an anniversary cake, and before that she’ll shape one of mud and twigs, patting it with fat little palms.
“How was your day?” he says, and I restrain myself from nibbling the spot on his neck where his pulse pounds, by his jugular. Soft brush of lips instead. Gooseflesh.
“Happy birthday, baby,” I say.
Cassandra Verhaegen is a multi-genre writer and teaching artist based in Detroit. She received her MFA from Oregon State University. Her debut novel is currently shortlisted for The Master Review's 2022 Novel Excerpt Contest, and her fiction has appeared on Terrain.org as a finalist for their 13th Annual Fiction Contest. Past awards include the Seidel Scholars PRISM Grant, the Olga & Paul Menn Foundation Prize, and runner-up in Glimmer Train’s Summer 2018 Short Fiction Contest.