Harvesting the Heart Read online

  I got up as usual at 4:30 a.m. and made Nicholas coffee to take on the road, and I packed a light lunch, as I did every day, because I knew he'd need it between his operations. Just because my husband was being an asshole, I told myself, was no reason for patients to suffer. He came downstairs with two ties. "Which one?" he said, holding them to his throat. I pushed past him and walked back upstairs. "Oh, for Christ's sake, Paige," he muttered, and then I heard the door slam behind him.

  I ran to the bathroom and threw up. This time I was so dizzy I had to lie down, and I did, right on the fuzzy white bath mat. I fell asleep, and when I woke I called in sick to Mercy. I would not have gone to Dr. Thayer's, either, that afternoon, but I had a hunch. I waited until she had a lull between patients, and then I left the reception desk and stood beside her at the counter where we kept the jars for urine samples, the Pap smear glass slides, and the information sheets on breast self-examination. Dr. Thayer stared up at me as if she already knew. "I need you to do me a favor," I said.

  This was not the way it was supposed to happen. Nicholas and I had discussed it a million times: I would support us until Nicholas's salary began to pay off the loans; then it was my turn. I was going to go full time to art school, and then after I got my degree we would start a family.

  It shouldn't have happened, because we were careful, but Dr. Thayer shrugged and said nothing was completely effective. "Be happy," she told me. "At least you're married."

  That was what brought it all back. As I drove slowly through the traffic in Cambridge, I wondered how I could have missed the signals: the swollen breasts and spread nipples, the way I'd been so tired. After all, I had been through this before. I hadn't been ready then, and in spite of what Dr. Thayer said, I knew that I wasn't ready now.

  The realization sent a shiver through my body: I was never going to art school. It would not be my turn for many years. It might never actually happen.

  I had made my decision to attend art school after I had taken just one formal art course, connected with the Chicago Art Institute. I was only in ninth grade; I had won free tuition for a course through a city-wide student art contest. Figure Drawing was the only class offered after school hours, so I signed up. On the first night, the teacher, a wiry man with purple glasses, made us go around the room telling who we were and why we were there. I listened to the others say they were taking the class for college credit or for updating a portfolio. When it was my turn I said, "I'm Paige. I don't know what I'm doing here."

  The model that night was a man, and he came in in a satin robe printed with theater ticket stubs. He had a steel bar he used as a prop. When the teacher nodded, he stepped onto a platform and shrugged off the robe as if it didn't bother him in the least. He bent and twisted and settled with his arms overhead, holding the bar like the Cross. He was the first man I'd seen completely naked.

  When everyone began drawing, I sat still. I was certain I'd made a mistake in taking this course. I could feel the model's eyes on me, and that's when I touched the conte stick to the sketch pad. I looked away, and I drew from the heart: the knotted shoulders, the stretched chest, the flaccid penis. The teacher came over shortly before class ended. "You've got something," he said to me, and I wanted to believe him.

  For the night of the last class, I bought a piece of fine gray marbled paper from an art supply store, hoping to draw something I'd want to keep. The model was a girl no older than I, but her eyes were weary and jaded. She was pregnant, and when she lay on her side, her belly swelled into the curve of a frown. I drew her furiously, using white conte for the shine of the studio lights on her hair and her forearms. I did not stop during the ten-minute coffee break, although the model got up to stretch and I had to draw from memory. When I was finished, the teacher took my drawing around to show the other students. He pointed out the quiet planes of her hips, the slow roll of her heavy breasts, the spill of shadow between her legs. The teacher brought the picture back to me and told me I should think about art school. I rolled the drawing into a cylinder and smiled shyly and left.

  I never hung up the drawing, because my father would have killed me if he'd known I'd willingly sinned by taking a course that exposed the bodies of men and women. I kept the picture hidden in the back of my closet and looked at it from time to time. I did not notice the obvious thing about the drawing until several weeks afterward. The images that came out in my sketches were not even hidden in the background this time. I had drawn the model, yes, but the face-- and the fear upon it--was mine.

  "Hey," Marvela said to me as I walked into Mercy. She had a pot of coffee in one hand and a bran muffin in the other. "I thought you was sick today." She pushed past me, shaking her head. "Girl, don't you know you makin' me look bad? When you play hooky you supposed to stay away, not get them Catholic guilt feelings and show up mid-shift."

  I leaned against the cash register. "I am sick," I said. "I've never felt worse in my life."

  Marvela frowned at me. "Seems if I was married to a doctor, I'd probably be ordered to bed."

  "It's not that kind of sick," I told her, and Marvela's eyes widened. I knew what she was thinking; Marvela had a thing for National Enquirer gossip and larger-than-life stories. "No," I told her before she could ask, "Nicholas isn't having an affair. And my soul hasn't been stolen by aliens."

  She poured me a cup of coffee and leaned her elbows against the counter. "I s'pose I'm gonna have to play Twenty Questions," she said.

  I heard her, but I didn't answer. At that moment, a woman stumbled through the door holding a baby, a shopping bag, and a huge paisley satchel. As she crossed the threshold, she dropped the satchel and hoisted the baby higher on her hip. Marvela swore under her breath and stood up to help, but I touched her arm. "How old is that kid?" I asked, trying to sound casual. "You figure six months?"

  Marvela snorted. "He's a year if he's a day," she said. "Ain't you never baby-sat?"

  Impulsively, I stood up and pulled an apron from behind the counter. "Let me serve her," I said. Marvela was hesitating. "You get the tip."

  The woman had left her satchel in the middle of the diner floor. I pulled it over to the booth she'd gone to--the one that had been Nicholas's. The woman had the baby on the tabletop and was taking off its diaper. Without bothering to thank me, she unzipped the satchel, withdrew a clean diaper and a chain of plastic rings, which she handed to the baby. "Dah," he said, pointing to the light.

  "Yes," the woman said, not even looking up. "That's right. Light." She rolled up the dirty diaper and fastened the new one and caught the rings before the baby threw them on the floor. I was fascinated; she seemed to have a hundred hands. "Can I get some bread?" she said to me, like I hadn't been doing my job, and I ran into the kitchen.

  I didn't stay long enough for Lionel to ask me what the hell I was doing at work. I grabbed a basket of rolls and strode to the woman's table. She was joggling the baby on her knee and trying to keep him from reaching the paper place mat. "Do you have a high chair?" she asked.

  I nodded and dragged over the little half-seat. "No," she sighed, as if she had been through this before. "That's a booster seat. That's not a high chair."

  I stared at it. "Won't it work?"

  The woman laughed. "If the President of the United States was a woman," she said, "every damn restaurant would have a high chair, and mothers with infants would be allowed to park in handicapped zones." She had been balling up a roll into bite-size nuggets that the baby was stuffing into his mouth, but she sighed and rose to her feet, gathering her things. "I can't eat if there's no high chair for him," she said. "I'm sorry to have wasted your time."

  "I can hold him," I said impulsively.

  "Pardon?"

  "I said I could hold him," I repeated. "While you eat."

  The woman stared at me. I noticed how exhausted she seemed, trembling almost, as if she hadn't slept for a very long time. Her eyes, an unsettled shade of brown, were locked onto mine. "You would do that?" she murmured.

 
; I brought her a spinach quiche and gingerly lifted the baby into my arms. I could feel Marvela watching me from the kitchen. The baby was stiff and didn't fit on my hip. He kept twisting to grab my hair. "Hey," I said, "no," but he just laughed.

  He was heavy and sort of damp, and he squirmed until I put him on the counter to crawl. Then he overturned a mustard jar and wiped the serving spoon into his hair. I couldn't turn away for a minute, even, and I wondered how I--how anyone--could do this twenty-four hours a day. But he smelled of powder, and he liked me to cross my eyes at him, and when his mother came to take him back, he held on tight to my neck. I watched them leave, amazed that the woman could carry so much and that, though nothing had gone wrong, I felt so relieved to give the baby back to her. I saw her move down the street, bowed to the left--the side she carried the baby on--as if he was sapping her balance.

  Marvela came to stand beside me. "You gonna tell me what that's about," she said, "or do I got to piss it out of you?"

  I turned to her. "I'm pregnant."

  Marvela's eyes opened so wide I could see white all the way around the jet irises. "No shit," she said, and then she screamed and hugged me.

  When I didn't embrace her back, she released me. "Let me guess," she said. "You ain't jumpin' for joy."

  I shook my head. "This isn't the way it was supposed to happen," I explained. I told her about my plan, about our loans and Nicholas's internship and then about college. I talked until the phrases in my native tongue were foreign and unfamiliar, until the words just fell out of my mouth like stones.

  Marvela smiled gently. "Lord, girl," she said, "whatever does happen the way it's supposed to? You don't plan life, you just do it." She looped an arm over my shoulder. "If the past ten years had gone accordin' to plan for me, I'd be eatin' bonbons and growin' prize roses and livin' in a house as big as sin, with my handsome son-a-bitch husband sittin' next to me." She stopped, looking out the window and, I figured, into her past. Then she patted my arm and laughed. "Paige, honey," she said, "if I'd stuck to my grand plan, I'd be livin' your very life."

  For a long time I sat on the porch outside the house, ignoring neighbors who stared at me briefly from the sidewalk or from car windows. I didn't know how to be a good mother. I hadn't had one. I mostly saw them on TV. My mind brought up pictures of Marion Cunningham and Laura Petrie. What did those women do all day?

  Nicholas's car came into the driveway hours later, when I was thinking of all the things I wouldn't have access to that I needed for having a child. I couldn't tell Dr. Thayer about my mother's family history. I didn't know the details of her labor.. And I would not tell Nicholas that there had been a baby before this and that I was someone else's before I was his.

  Nicholas swung out of his car when he saw me, his body unfolding and straightening for an attack. But as he came closer he realized the fight had gone out of me. I sagged against the pillar of the porch and waited until he stepped in front of me. He seemed impossibly tall. "I'm pregnant," I said, and I burst into tears.

  He smiled, and then he bent down and lifted me up, carrying me

  into the house in his arms. He danced over the threshold. "Paige," he said, "this is great. Absolutely great." He set me down on the skin-colored couch, smoothing my hair away from my eyes. "Hey," he said, "don't worry about the money."

  I didn't know how to tell him that I was not worried, just scared. I was scared about not knowing how to hold an infant. I was scared that I might not love my own child. More than anything, I was scared that I was doomed before I began, that the cycle my mother had started was hereditary and that one day I would just pack up and disappear off the face of the earth.

  Nicholas put his arms around me. "Paige," he said, holding my thoughts in the palm of his hand, "you're going to be a terrific mother."

  "How do you know?" I cried, and then I said it again, softly: "How do you know?" I stared at Nicholas, who had done everything he'd ever set out to do. I wondered when I had lost control of my own life.

  Nicholas sat down beside me and slipped his hand underneath my sweater. He unzipped the waistband of my pants. He spread his fingers across my abdomen as if whatever was growing inside needed his protection. "My son," he said, his voice thick at the edges.

  It was as if a window opened, showing me the rest of my life as it lay, dissected and piecemeal. I considered my future, stunted and squeezed into boundaries defined by two men. I imagined being in a house where I was always the odd one out. "I'm not making any promises," I said.

  chapter 8

  Paige

  The first person I fell in love with was Priscilla Divine. She had come from Texas to Chicago and enrolled in Our Lady of the Cross, my grade school, when I was in sixth grade. She was a year older than the rest of us, though she'd never been left back. She had long blond hair the color of honey, and she never walked but glided. It was said by some of the other girls that she was the reason her family had to move.

  There was such an aura of mystery surrounding Priscilla Divine that she probably could have picked just about anyone she wanted to be her friend, but she happened to choose me. One morning during religion class she raised her hand and told Sister Theresa that she thought she might throw up and she'd like it very much if Paige could help her down to the nurse's office. But once we were in the hall she didn't look sick at all, and in fact she pulled me by the hand into the girls' bathroom and took a pack of cigarettes out of the

  waistband of her skirt and matches from her left sock. She lit up, inhaled, and offered the cigarette to me like a peace pipe. With my reputation hanging in the balance, I drew in deeply, knowing enough not to let myself cough. Priscilla was impressed, and those were the beginnings of my bad years.

  Priscilla and I did everything we weren't supposed to. We walked through Southside, the black neighborhood, on our way home from Our Lady. We stuffed our bras, and we cheated on algebra tests. We did not confess these things, because as Priscilla taught me, there are certain things you do not tell priests. It got to the point where we had each been suspended from school three times, and the sisters suggested we give up each other's friendship for Lent.

  We discovered sex on a rainy Saturday when we were in seventh grade. I was at Priscilla's, lying on my back on her lollipop bedspread and watching lightning freeze the street outside into still-life photos. Priscilla was thumbing through a Playboy that we'd stolen from her brother's room. We had had the magazine for several months and had already memorized the pictures and read all the letters to the "Advisor," looking up the words we didn't understand. Even Priscilla was bored by the same old thing. She stood up and moved to the window. For a moment a trick of lightning darkened her eyes and created shadows that made her look drained and disillusioned, as if she had been staring at the street below for ages rather than seconds. When she turned to me, arms crossed, I barely recognized her. "Paige," she said casually, "have you ever kissed an actual boy?"

  I hadn't, but I wasn't about to let her know that. "Sure," I said. "Haven't you?"

  Priscilla tossed her hair and took a step forward. "Prove it," she said.

  I couldn't; and this very topic, in fact, had been one of my biggest worries. I had spent entire nights awake, practicing kissing with my pillow, but I couldn't figure out the finer points, like where my nose should go and when I was supposed to take a breath. "How am I supposed to prove it?" I said. "Unless there's a guy in here that I can't see."

  Priscilla walked toward me, thin and almost see-through in the purple afternoon. She leaned over me so that her hair made a quiet tent. "Pretend," she said, "I'm the guy."

  I knew that Priscilla knew I had been lying; just as well as I knew that I wasn't going to admit it. So I leaned forward and put my hands on her shoulders and pressed my lips against hers. "You see," I said, dismissing her with a wave of my hand.

  "No," she said, "it's like this." And she turned her head and kissed me back. Her lips moved as much as mine hadn't, molding me beneath her until my mouth was doing
the same thing. My eyes were wide open, still watching the lightning. In that instant I knew that every rumor told about Priscilla Divine in school, every nun's warning and every altar boy's sideways glance, was justified. Her tongue slipped over my lips, and I jumped back. Priscilla's hair clung to my shoulders and my face like a web, that's the kind of electricity we had generated.

  We spent time after that getting kissing down to a science. We'd borrow Priscilla's mother's red lipstick and make out with the bathroom mirror, watching our own faces fog up as we learned to love ourselves. We went to the public library and hid in the stacks with adult romance novels, skimming the pages until we came to the sex scenes, and then we'd whisper them out loud. Occasionally we kissed each other, taking turns playing the boy. Whoever was the girl got to swoon and to lower her eyelashes and to whisper breathlessly like the women in those forbidden books. Whoever was the boy had to stand still and straight, to accept.

  One day after school Priscilla showed up at my front door, out of breath. "Paige," she said, "you've got to come now." She knew I was supposed to stay at home alone until my father returned from the office where he worked as a computer programmer to supplement his income from inventions. She knew that I never broke promises to my father. "Paige," she insisted, "this is important."

  I went to Priscilla's that day and hid with her inside the hot dark closet in her brother's room, which smelled of gym shorts and bologna and Canoe. We watched the room settle, split through the closet door's slats. "Don't move," Priscilla whispered. "Don't even breathe."

  Priscilla's brother, Steven, was a junior in high school and was the source of most of her information about sex. We knew he had done it, because he kept condoms hidden in his nightstand, as many as twelve at a time. Once, we had stolen one and opened its silver wrapper. I had unrolled the pale tube over Priscilla's arm, marveling as it stretched and grew like a second skin. I had watched my fingers slip over and over as if I were stroking velvet.