The Recovery

I wake up in the recovery room and, surprisingly, I know where I am.

The surgery is over, and I’m lying flat on my back. I know where I am and who I am. I even know who the president is, if someone should ask me. I also know that I’m in pain. Deep, penetrating, frightening pain.

Something must have gone wrong. This pain is spreading across my stomach in every direction. The sutures seem to stretch from my breastbone to my pelvis and then some, but the stitches are separating, coming apart like an untied shoelace. What lies beneath my torn skin and thin layer of muscle is about to be exposed. I stay perfectly still. I am afraid that if I move, puss and blood will begin to fall out of me in buckets.

As if by divine will, a nurse is quickly by my side. I want to ask her to check my wound. Ask her if it is possible that they forgot to close me up tightly at the end of the operation, but I’m so weak and groggy that I can’t form words. She tells me that pain is not unusual. Soon I’ll be too doped up to feel it. She pats my hand, the one without the I.V. in it.

Soon I’ll be asleep again.

The drugs in the hospital are wonderful. I spend the whole day drifting between sleep and consciousness, and the pain is numbed, at least for now. The meds are giving me strange dreams, though. I dream that I am wandering around the mall, going from store to store, but no one has what I need. It must be holiday time in the dream, because there are little kiosks set up everywhere with specialty gifts for sale. I walk between the stalls, searching. Finally, I ask for help from a young girl sitting at a cash register reading a magazine.

“Do you know where I can get a good deal on a uterus?” I ask her.

“Is this a trade in?” she asks, cracking her gum.

“No,” I say. “I had one, but it’s gone now.” I sigh. “Never been used.”

She shakes her head no and goes back to reading her magazine.

The dream continues. Suddenly I am sitting alone in a restaurant. A French chef comes over to my table. He is all dressed in white with a floppy hat. He carries a domed silver tray in one hand. He sets it before me and lifts the metal lid. My uterus is on the plate, all clean and bloodless. The whole thing, too, from start to finish: vagina, ovaries, tubes, all laid out on a bed of lettuce. I sit there staring at it, holding my fork.

“This won’t work,” I say. “I’ll never get it back this way.” I look up at the chef. “Besides, they didn’t take it all,” I say.

“Most of it, Madam,” he says matter-of-factly.

Then I wake up. No longer in the recovery room, I am in my own hospital bed, a home away from home for the next few days. It seems pleasant enough. Quiet and white. The lights are dim; the blinds are drawn, but small streams of sunlight drift into the room. The other bed, the one closer to the window, is empty. No roommate yet, and I’m grateful for it.

This is the maternity ward, and the absurdity of my being here is apparently lost on the health care establishment. My mother said I should complain about that, insist on being cared for on another floor. She thought I could get some kind of discount if I complained loudly enough. But I told her that the doctors and nurses in this ward are especially trained to handle OBGYN cases. So, strangely, this is where I belong.

I should try and make the most of it, because barring any other future health problems, this is the only trip I will ever make to the maternity ward. A once in a lifetime opportunity. I am struck by the word lifetime.

I hear movement in the hallway just outside the door. The echo of voices and the sounds of wheels on carts or gurneys go by. Lots of people coming and going, squeaky shoes on the linoleum. My body feels heavy and immovable in the bed, but my mind is waking up now. I’m starting to wonder how long it will be before someone comes into this room and talks to me. I want someone to tell me that everything is okay. I want to hear that the operation was a success, that there was a purpose for all the pain. I want someone to go to the window, pull open the blinds, and show me that the world is still turning outside. And then I want someone to convince me that I’m still a part of it.

“Don’t worry,” Mike said when I told him about the surgery last week. “You can always adopt.” His idea of being helpful. But the way he said it – like saying you can always take the turnpike instead of the expressway, or we’re out of wheat bread; have the rye. Same difference. And I hated the “you”—You can always adopt.

“At least it’s not cancer,” he said. Right. It could be worse.

That was the good news. “No cancer,” my doctor had said. Then she touched my arm gently and explained that it was a cyst that had grown larger and heavier over time. I was carrying it around for years, apparently, until the flesh it rested on finally gave way. I had been sitting at my desk at work when it happened. I got up for more coffee and suddenly I was on the floor, clutching my abdomen. That was how this mass inside me had made its presence known, but I wondered how long it had been there, ticking inside me like a time bomb. Since I was twenty? Since I was thirty? Now it was wreaking all kinds of havoc inside me and it had to come out, along with anything else in there that was too damaged to survive. That was the bad news.

When my doctor explained the surgery, she asked me if I had a will. I almost laughed in her face. I thought she was trying to lighten the mood. What kind of doctor asks something like that?

“This is a trick,” I said to her. “So that I won’t think about what I’m losing but what I have left, right?”

“You may think you can’t live with this,” she said, “but you can.”

The words hung in the air without being said: Because you still have a life to live.

A lifetime, I think again as I’m lying here, staring at the ceiling. My lifetime.

I always thought I would have children someday. It was never really a question. I just assumed it would happen. I guess most people do. We all start out as children, so it seems natural and normal: I’ll grow up. I’ll get married. I’ll have babies. Blah, blah, blah. It didn’t bother me when I turned thirty-five last year and I was still only one for three – I had grown up, as much as most people do. There was still plenty of time. After all, my mother had me in her thirties, and that was long before all the technology of today. Lots of time for that, I thought.

I begin to stir a little in my bed. I slowly move the sheet down and away from my hospital gown with my good hand. I lightly touch my belly through the thin fabric and feel the bulky bandages across my belly. The incision doesn’t seem so large, not nearly as big as I thought back in the recovery room. I trace the outline of the bandages with my fingers.

What happens to the empty space inside me? Does everything move around now to fill it in? Maybe I will feel lighter now, thinner. I wonder if I’ll look different in my clothes, and I wonder what will lie underneath my clothes – an ugly scar, a misshapen midriff? I quickly pull the sheet back up to my chin as far as it will go, and close my eyes. I never want to see myself naked again.

Mike always liked my body. I have long legs and a small waist. After we made love, he liked to take showers with me. He would hold me by my hips and look down at my body with such a smirk of pleasure and pride. Covered in suds, sometimes he would kneel down in front of me and kiss my breasts and my stomach and the front of my thighs as the water poured down on us.

Since I told Mike about the surgery, I’ve had a hard time even looking at him. When he insisted on driving me to the hospital and staying until the surgery was over, I told him I’d rather he didn’t. It’s not just the comment he made about adoption, either. I know we are drifting apart. From me, he will move on to other things and new beginnings relatively unscathed, and I resent him for it. Unlike him, these last days of our relationship will be etched in my mind and on my body forever. He’ll always be the one I was with when my life changed, when this thing inside me finally shook loose from its hiding place and exploded and tried to kill me.

I drift away again into a restless, drug-induced sleep. Later, a nurse comes into the room and tells me that I’m doing just fine and that my mother is waiting in the corridor to see me. Is this another dream? My mother has a morbid fear of hospitals. When I called her and told her about the surgery, she cried. She knew she couldn’t be here with me. She crumbles at the thought of sickness anyway. Once my brother Frank fell out of a tree and broke his arm. A neighbor had to take him to the hospital. We followed them in Mom’s car because she can’t drive anywhere she hasn’t been to before. It’s very limiting. We waited for a long time outside the emergency ward, until a nurse came outside to the curb to get my mother to fill out the paperwork. She just couldn’t bring herself to go in. That was years ago. Today they’d probably call the Pysch ward on someone like her.

As the nurse leaves my hospital room, my mother peeks in and our eyes meet. She stands in the doorway for a moment and I can see that she is trembling and trying not to cry in front of me. Her eyes are red and her face seems creased with worry lines digging new furrows across her brow and down her cheeks. She wears a phony smile that shows her second-rate dental work and only makes her look more helpless and vulnerable than usual.

“How did you get here?” I ask her. It’s all I can think of saying. She tells me Frank drove her. She comes in and takes my hand, but she feels very far away from me and I realize the drugs are kicking in again and I can’t quite understand what she is saying. Something about talking to the doctor…everything came out fine…I’ll be as good as new soon. With all the strength left inside me I begin to weep and then fall asleep again.

My dreams are gathering strength, becoming more like hallucinations with sounds and sensations I can’t bear to let in while I’m awake. I dream I am walking down the corridors of the hospital, surrounded by a milky-white pallor, traveling as though I were a ghost. I see babies through the nursery window and feel the skin over my wounds stretch and beg to be broken. No one sees me, not the staff, or the visitors, not even the babies. I disappear into nothingness.

When I wake up the next day I have a roommate. Her name is Courtney. She is very sweet and speaks with a hint of a southern drawl. She has honey-colored hair and lips like pink rose petals. She is hours away from giving birth, and she is eighteen and alone. Well, her parents are here at the hospital, but her boyfriend is long gone. She is here for a scheduled c-section, so there are no labor pains for her, which must make the whole ordeal seem very surreal. It’s never like that in the movies.

I’m still pretty doped up and tired, but Courtney is talky and nervous, manic really. After only a few hours in the room, I know her entire life history. She doesn’t know why I’m here, not really. “Female troubles,” I tell her when she asks. She is chatting away about how understanding and supportive her family has been through her pregnancy.

Her teeth are so white and her skin looks so creamy and clear. I can’t help picturing her with her boyfriend under the bleachers or in the woods somewhere. Maybe even up against a haystack. What a great time they must have had. I can picture Courtney in a red and white cheerleader’s outfit, her hair fanned out on the grass beneath them. The boyfriend is young and with wavy dark hair, and they are lost in those moments of abandon.

Then I notice that Courtney’s teeth are actually chattering as she speaks.

“Are you cold?” I ask her, interrupting her string of sentences.

“Just nervous.” She tries to smile.

“You’ll be okay.” It’s an instinct. I have no clue how she’ll be. But it seems to help. She takes two deep breaths and the pace of her conversation slows down a bit. Courtney’s doctor comes into the room followed by her mom and dad. Her parents are tall people, big boned. The doctor pulls the privacy curtain between our beds closed.

Alone again, I resist the urge to call Mike. There’s no point really. He’s at work by now anyway. He’s a chemist at a pharmaceutical company, researching the next great weight loss pill or baldness-reversal treatment. He was raised on ‘Scientific American,’ and he’s interested in every discipline. Lately, he’s been obsessing over genetics. Chromosomes are fascinating, but it’s really job security he’s thinking of. He’s afraid that gene therapy will replace the need for drugs someday.

“Remember that mouse that grew a human ear on its back?” he said over lunch one time. Suddenly full, I put down my fried chicken. “That’s just the beginning,” he said, still chomping down greasy diner fries. “Imagine the possibilities.” He was thumbing through a magazine, speaking as much to himself as to me.

I start to wonder if maybe someday science will be able to fix what’s wrong inside me. I feel so completely empty. “A human ear on the back of a rat,” he mumbled and shook his head. “You can make something out of anything, anything at all,” he said.

Yes, but can you make something out of nothing?

I hear Courtney giggling nervously on the other side of the curtain. When she’s my age she could be a grandmother. I want to stop obsessing over this, over babies and children. I close my eyes, but I can’t turn it off: I’ll grow up. I’ll get married. I’ll have babies. Maybe I never really wanted kids after all. If it had been really important to me I would have done it by now, wouldn’t I? It’s like losing your virginity. The circumstances are never what you want them to be, but when the need is there, you just let go and let it happen.

Maybe it’s not the lost children I’m thinking of anyway, but something more primal, something about survival. The mortality of our bodies, children are supposed to correct that. Because you have a child, your flesh is immortalized. Like seeds buried under the ground, they’ll poke through the dirt of your grave. A piece of you passed down from age to age. Reborn. Recovered.

I try to think about work instead. The Spring issue will be coming out soon. I’ll have a lot to do when I get back. “Issue,” I whisper. Another word for children: progeny, offspring, descendants, sons, daughters. Stop it.

I open my eyes and reach for the TV remote on the nightstand. I click through the channels and settle on a rerun of Gilligan’s Island, because there just isn’t anything else on, when my mother appears in the doorway of my room.

“Mom, what are you doing here?” I am surprised that she came back again, and I quickly turn the TV off. My mother is one of those people that who doesn’t* so much enter a room as she collides into it. Everything begins to shift. Her oversized purse will knock over plants; her shopping bags will spread on the floor like a fungus.

*Singular vs. plural verb, from Bartleby: It’s really a matter of which word you feel is most appropriate as the antecedent of the relative pronoun—one or the plural noun in the of phrase that follows it.

She comes over to the bed and smiles at me. “Where else would I be?” She gives me a hug and a sticky kiss on the cheek. She is wearing peach lipstick and has left some of it on my face, I’m sure.

“You didn’t have to come back.”

“Nonsense,” she says, waving her hand in the air dismissively. She tells me that Frank has brought her here and is outside smoking. She shakes her head in disapproval. “You should see the state of his car,” she says, waving her finger towards the window and the visitors’ parking lot beneath it. “And the smell.” The corners of her mouth recede into a sour frown. She’s been trying to nag him into quitting for at least fifteen years. I think she really believes that one day this approach will work. “He’ll be up in a minute.” She moves a chair closer to my bed and hangs her big pocketbook on the back of it, nearly knocking it over with the weight of the sack. She sits down and positions a red Macy’s shopping bag on the floor between us.

“What’s in the bag?” I ask.

“Just some things I thought you could use.” She gives me a sly smile. For a moment there is silence between us, then she takes my hand. “How do you feel?”

“Okay.”

“You look terrible.”

“Thanks.”

“You know what I mean. Let’s do something with that hair.” I try to protest but she is already digging through her purse to find her comb and is soon dragging it across my scalp. I know she wants to help, so I don’t try very hard to stop her.

“Mom, you really don’t have to do this.” The teeth of her comb scratch my head.

“How about a nice barrette?” She reaches into her shopping bag and pulls out a brassy hair clip. “Isn’t this cute? I knew you’d need this.” She attaches the clip to my head. It’s tight and it pinches me. “You have such a pretty face. Why are you always hiding it behind that hair?”

“Just didn’t feel like doing anything with it today, Mom.” She puts down the comb and takes my hand again.

“You know, Katherine Hepburn never had any children.”

“Huh?”

“It’s true. I just mean that you don’t have to have children to be happy.” My mother likes to use old movies and movie stars to explain her views on life. Some people use the Bible or quote Buddha – not in my family.

“I know.”

“In fact,” she says, “if I had my life to live over again, I wouldn’t have children.”

I start to laugh. “You’re just saying that to make me feel better, right?”

“No I’m not,” she says earnestly.

“Well then, that’s a pretty insulting thing to say to one of your children, Mom.”

“You know what I mean,” she says. “When I was young we didn’t have a lot of choices like you do today. We just got married and had babies. But you’re lucky.”

I should remind her that I am no longer lucky. I no longer have the same choices. But I don’t. Maybe it’s the drugs kicking in again, but I doubt it. I have grown used to my mother’s skewed perceptions. This is typical talk. The road not taken is the one she always wanted.

“You know, before I met your father, I thought about being a nun.” She sighs. “Plenty of times after he left, when I’d be at my wit’s end with you kids, I thought I should have done it. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a life so full of purpose and meaning?”

“That’s not reality, Mom.” I say slowly. “That’s ‘The Song of Bernadette,’ you know?” I’m pretty sure she doesn’t see the difference.

“And anyway, being a mother is a thankless job.” She is rummaging through her shopping bag. “Has Mike been up to see you yet?” When I don’t answer right away, she starts to look around the room for some evidence of him. No flowers, no balloons or teddy bears, not even a get well soon card.

“No,” I say. “I think that’s pretty much over.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” she says. “You know, Jane Austen never even got married.” That’s a switch. I’m not sure that I heard her right. Katherine Hepburn and Jane Austen on the same day.

“You must have a pretty high opinion of me,” I say. “What do you know about Jane Austen, anyway?”

“Well, you like her, right?”

I want to tell her that I am getting too tired, but just as I start to speak my brother Frank comes in. Frank, in his brown leather jacket and his faded blue jeans with a belt stretched tight over his wide middle, looks like a slightly overgrown teenager.

“How ya doin’, squirt?” He comes to the other side of my bed and kisses me on the forehead. I can smell the cigarettes on his breath and on his clothes. I hate to agree with her, but my mother is right about the stench. “Look at you, just layin’ around doing nothing.” He smiles and laughs. [“laying” is not correct; should be “lying,” but OK here.]

“You know all about that,” my mother mumbles.

Frank rolls his eyes then winks at me. “So how are you feeling?” he asks.

“Tired.”

“Well, we’re not going to stay very long,” my mother chimes in. “Here, I want you to open these things.” She is digging around in her shopping bag. Frank sees the remote on the nightstand and turns on the TV. “Don’t you get enough of that at home?” my mother says under her breath. Frank is between jobs right now. He’s been staying with her, and the tension is beginning to get to them both.

“Lighten up, Ma,” Frank says.

“Now, kids…” I say as if to scold them. My mother ignores us both and pulls out some gifts for me from her bag: a quilted bed jacket to wear here in the hospital, fuzzy pink slippers, and a book of crossword puzzles. “Thanks, Mom” I say.

I start to flip through the book of puzzles. There are all kinds, word jumbles cryptograms, and some kind of connect the dots thing that you solve with word clues spiraling around the page like a whirlpool. It reminds me of the double helix diagram of DNA. I’ve seen it in Mike’s magazines and when we used to watch “Nova” on PBS. There was an episode about genetic engineering, about DNA being life itself.

Mike truly believes we will see the large-scale use of commercial genetic engineering of children in the near future. He says parents will be able to choose their babies’ sex at the very least. “People are afraid of what they don’t understand,” he said. “They’re afraid that we’ll end up with too many boy babies and not enough girls, because so many cultures value their male children over their females.” I think about the men in my life: my father gone without a trace, Frank living in a perpetual adolescence, even Mike with his rats with ears ranting. Law of averages: Maybe a few more males out there will mean a few more good ones.

Frank is deeply engrossed in some afternoon game show, but when the commercial comes on, he turns his attention back to me. “Do you need anything while we’re here?”

“Actually, I’d love a coke. I think you can get some down the hall.”

“Do they have any vending machines out there? I could go for a snack,” he says going towards the door. He looks at me. “Do you have any change?”

“Frank, just get your sister her soda,” my mother snaps at him. “I’ll make you something when we get home.” As soon as he is out the door, she turns to me. “You don’t know what I go through with him.” She shakes her head from side to side. But it’s not true -- I know everything she goes through with him. She reports on his lack of progress weekly. His sloppiness around the house, his worthless girlfriends, the job interview he was late for, and the job offer he didn’t take. I know it all. “I don’t want to upset you with my problems,” she says.

The privacy curtain between the beds is suddenly opened. Courtney’s doctor leaves the room followed by her parents. My mother pretends to be busy arranging my bedcovers when they walk past. She is shy and doesn’t know what to say to them, but I smile and nod as they leave and Courtney’s mother smiles back at me a little. I turn to Courtney. “Is it time?” I ask gently.

“Almost,” she says with another breathy, nervous giggle.

“It’s going to be fine.” I tell her.

“Thanks. Do you have any children?” She asks me.

I look over at my mother. She has moved to the doorway of the room. She is looking down the hall for Frank, who has probably escaped into the men’s room for another quick cigarette.

“Sort of,” I say.

Just then Frank returns and my mother moves back to her shopping bag, pretending that she wasn’t looking for him. He hands me a cold can of soda, but he is distracted by the beautiful Courtney in the next bed. “Who’s she?” he whispers. “Do you know her?”

“Forget it,” I say.

In spite of Courtney’s advanced pregnancy, Frank still manages to gravitate over to her, while my mother gathers her things to leave. A nurse’s aide comes in with a wheelchair to take Courtney to the OR. I imagine that later today Courtney will awaken in the recovery room as I did, with something precious taken from within herself. Only what’s been taken from her will eventually be placed into her loving arms. I feel so cheated.

Frank offers to help the aide get Courtney into the wheelchair. The aide smiles with big apple-cheeks but says no thank you, it’s her job. She is just as cute as Courtney, and I watch Frank try to make time with one or both of them, I’m not sure. I wonder if Frank has any kids out there that he doesn’t know about, and I wonder if anyone ever told him that being a father is a thankless job.

Mike will be a good father someday. He sees things I don’t, that’s a plus, even though I sort of hate him for it right now. Last night, when I was packing my suitcase for the hospital, he tried to help me and I wouldn’t let him. He was just getting in the way, going through my things. He didn’t know what I needed to take with me. It was getting on my nerves. Finally, I told him to leave.

“Fine,” he said sharply. “Don’t let me help you or anything.” He put on his jacket and started to go. “I don’t know what you’re so upset about anyway. It should be a relief to you,” he said half under his breath. I stood in the doorway, in the dark, my arms folded across my chest. He stomped across the porch towards his car.

He turned back one last time. “You really think you could have kids, anyway?”

“What’s that suppose to mean?” I asked, spitting the words out at him.

“You really think you’d let a whole other person live inside you for nine months? I’m lucky you let me in long enough to have sex.”

“Go to hell,” I said as his car pulled away.

Then he was gone.

“Would you look at him,” my mother says, nodding towards Frank. “He’s pathetic. Those girls are probably still in high school.”

“At least the aide has a job,” I say. As Courtney is wheeled past my bed I notice a small book in her hands, a leather-bound pocket Bible.

“When you get home, we’ll have a movie night. Just you and me,” my mother says as she leans over my bed to kiss me good-bye.

“Sure. How about ‘Long Day’s Journey Iinto Night?’ Isn’t Katherine Hepburn in that one?”

“No, something funny,” she says.

I start to tell her I was only joking, but another thought catches ms. “Movies are like a piece of immortality, too,” I say. “For the filmmakers, for the actors, they just go on and on. Always vital, always beautiful.” I know she doesn’t understand me. Doesn’t know what I’ve been thinking of for the last two days. She looks at me in silence and I realize again that she has been holding back tears.

I can’t let it go.

“Mom?” I hold onto her hand before she can escape. “Where do you think you’d be right now if you had never had children?” I can see she doesn’t know how to respond. The words are caught in her throat. I can almost see them sticking out of her 67 year-old neck, all knotted together, but I can’t let her off the hook, not this time. “If you really had become a nun,” I say, “I know where you’d be. You’d be in a dark, quiet room right now, looking back on your life and wishing you had children.”

She doesn’t answer.

My eyes are getting heavy again. It’s time to sleep. I can feel the drugs begin to sway my senses again. “It’s okay, Mom,” I say, letting go of her hand. “You want to know a secret?” I whisper to her and don’t wait for an answer. “I couldn’t keep a child in my womb or a man in my bed, even if I wanted to.” I want to turn over, turn my back to her, but I’m too tired to move.

Her lips are trembling now. “You were a beautiful little girl,” she says. “Like a little china doll...” Her voice trails away. For a moment I glimpse everything she can’t express. She grabs my hand again and squeezes, but I can hardly feel it. Must be the meds. I’m slipping away again.

“Let’s go, Frank,” she calls to my brother. He leans down to hug me and leaves. “I’ll stop by tomorrow,” my mother calls out from the hallway.

The aide returns with new sheets for Courtney’s bed. “Nice that you had visitors,” she says to me as she makes the bed and fluffs the pillow. “Some people don’t have any family here at all.”

“Lucky,” I whisper and reach for the remote control as she leaves. I’m tired, but I can’t sleep. I wish there was an old movie on. Something black and white, pleasant and familiar to lull me to sleep. I’d even watch ‘The Song of Bernadette’ for the millionth time. My eyes move around the room for something to focus on, and I realize how much this place is like a nun’s cell, plain, pure, antiseptic. Nothing can be hidden here. Everything is in view. There’s nothing to hide now anyway.

I imagine that I am Bernadette Savigin being visited by Mary, the Blessed Mother at Lourdes. Together we dig in the grotto until the healing waters are released from beneath the dirt and begin to flow. I am immersed in the water, and everything inside me is healed. The water from the spring joins the rivers of the earth. One.

I am one. Alone. There will never be another copy of me now.

Someday I’ll go into the sea and be gone, lost to the world, and I’m afraid that the world won’t even notice because they never knew I was here at all. I never told them. I should tell them now. I should rise up from this bed and open my mouth and say something, anything. I want to say: “Look beneath my broken skin and let me be recovered like a lost treasure…”

But I’m falling into dreams again. I’m on my deathbed and the priest is telling me that soon I’ll be rejoined with all the lost souls who went before me, my father, my mother, even Mike. My essence will travel down the river of time. All rivers are one river, he’ll say. We go into the sea from whence we came. In that sea, I’ll move forward with new certainty, into my own awaiting arms.