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Dead Baby Jokes
by Elizabeth Gonzalez James What's worse than ten babies in one garbage can? One baby in ten garbage cans. Don’t worry: I this that joke is disgusting too. When I was thirteen my girlfriends and I used to trade dead baby jokes the way some kids traded Spiderman comics. We’d snicker about them while leaning up against our lockers, we’d scribble them on college-ruled paper and sail them across the room when our English teacher’s back was turned, with poorly drawn illustrations in blue ink: babies on spikes, severed arms shooting out of blenders, tanks bulldozing our middle school and shooting aerodynamic babies like missiles through the windows of the cafeteria. It was no coincidence that my interest in dead baby jokes began in the fall of eighth grade, when I got up off the toilet one morning and looked down to find the bowl red with blood. When has anything good ever happened after finding the toilet filled with blood? I hadn’t wanted my period, hadn’t wanted to join my mother and her friends around the kitchen table as they smoked Winstons and drank pink wine from a box and commiserated over child support and unpaid bills and lost youth. Dead baby jokes were my rebellion against impending womanhood, me clutching at the doorframe and refusing to be pushed any further inside. I had the right idea. Here’s another one: How do you make a dead baby float? One scoop of ice cream, one scoop of dead baby. Sean brings me a pillow, a bolster from our bed, and props it under my knees. More things appear: hot tea, a tabloid magazine, Advil, a box of chocolate turtles. My husband is best when he’s doing something. Sitting and waiting are torture for him; I’ve come to terms with them. I flip through the magazine—so and so is pregnant again but who’s the father? Tabloid babies are a plotline, a B-story tacked on to make the protagonist more three-dimensional, more relatable. As if I could relate to someone who collects children like Faberge eggs. I drop the magazine on the floor when I feel my stomach tighten. I squeeze the bolster between my heels and my ass and try not to scream. It feels like my midsection is being strangled by a thick rubber hose, a hot, rolling band of pain working its way from my ribcage down to my rectum. Something sharp but amorphous sits at the base of my spine and I want Sean to take a knife and cut it out, whatever it is, squeeze it in his fist until there’s nothing left. A minute later the contraction ends and my forehead is slick with sweat. Sean holds up the tea for me to drink and I push it away so some sloshes over the top of the mug and splatters the carpet. He’s unfazed, only setting the mug on the floor and padding to the kitchen for paper towels. He won’t argue with me. That morning, at the doctor, when I said I wanted to come home, he’d begun to protest. I could see the argument sewing itself together in his mathematician’s brain, facts and logic shining a path through dark landscape, but I said no. I want to go home, I said. I want to go home. But home is a slippery concept. This condo, this nine-hundred-square-foot beige box overlooking a nail salon, has only been ours for a month. We don’t even have a coffee table. I walked through the door this morning and it felt like I’d entered a stranger’s house. Did we always have that ugly Guernica poster hanging in the dining room? Why did we buy a condo with orange linoleum in the bathroom? I wouldn’t go into the bedroom. Sean saw my face and hurried to close the door as I staggered to the couch so I could collapse and stare at the power lines hanging over our balcony. He knew, without me having to say it, that it would be his job to put everything back into boxes and drive it all to Goodwill: the onesies inherited from my sister, the stroller that had been an early gift from my parents, the rattle shaped like Peter Rabbit we’d seen in San Francisco and couldn’t resist buying. If I see them I’ll destroy them. I’ll find a sledgehammer and pummel that City Jogger until its carbon frame is as useless as I am. If we’d only been more restrained, less joyous. If only, if only, if only. Another contraction starts and I’m thankful for the pain bringing me back to the couch. Sean’s opened the sliding glass door and a hot wind blows in off the street. Why would I want it over quickly, I asked the doctor. And he looked at me with a furrowed brow, in the patronizing way old men have perfected for just such moments as when they need to tell women how to run their lives, and he told me most women do not wish to suffer more than is necessary. And I said, good luck with that. How many babies does it take to paint a house red? It depends on how hard you throw them. Disappointment is a slippery concept, too. There are five stages of grief and about fifty for disappointment. Grief implies an end, a finality. Dead is dead…until it isn’t. You can always try again, is what my friends will say. This is just a setback. Don’t give up. These are the things we tell our friends, that we tell ourselves, because to give up is to deny our own freedom to hope. But hope costs nothing. Lying here on the couch, rocking from side to side as I enter my fifth hour of labor for a baby I’ll put in a Ziploc bag and drive to the pathology department of Kaiser, I’m cycling through denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance at a pace of about one emotion every ten seconds. And when the contraction finishes—more disappointment. This is my birth story, the only one I’ll get to tell, and who the fuck would ever want to hear it? Sean pulls a dining room chair up behind the couch and strokes my hair and asks if I want something to drink. Vodka tonic I say, half-jokingly, and he tells me we can have a hundred vodka tonics as soon as I’m better. When will I be better, I ask. Sean just strokes my hair and we listen to the whoosh of street traffic filtering up through the open balcony door. The contractions are getting closer together. Sean tries to help me breathe through them but he doesn’t know how. I’m only fourteen weeks along—the childbirth classes don’t come until later. Was it the fourth course of in vitro or the fifth? When we spent Memorial weekend in Tahoe and I got my period at the Hard Rock Hotel? And I got so mad I threw an ice bucket at the bathroom mirror and we sat there waiting for someone to call security but Sammy Hagar was having a huge party somewhere else in the hotel so no one bothered to report us? The fourth, Sean says. I’m sorry, I say, and Sean kneels on the floor by the couch and I lean into him. He smells like dryer sheets. You changed your shirt, I say, and I pull away from him, feeling betrayed by his desire for clean clothes. How much can you wash out of a t-shirt? I’m making a sandwich, he says. And I narrow my eyes and pull my legs up to my chest as the next contraction begins. Sean is forty-seven, five years older than me, and though I know millions of forty-seven-year-old men help conceive healthy babies every year, I want him to feel responsible for this too, sentenced, as I am, to lie fallow. Why did the dead baby cross the road? It was stapled to the chicken. When we got the diagnosis of low sperm motility we actually celebrated. Huzzah! A cause! A plan! An antidote! But the giddiness waned when the treatments failed and failed and failed. Sean plugged numbers into spreadsheets—IUI post-wash counts, luteinizing hormone, human chorionic gonadotropin levels—but the faith he put in numbers was never repaid. The numbers we got from doctors were always of the declining variety: four viable embryos left, three, two, one, none. And then—a miracle! A natural conception. Twelve years and our life savings and it happened on New Year’s Eve in a friend’s basement bathroom after too many Mai Tais. I thought I had food poisoning. No person should ever be made to throw up so much. I remember joking that, if men got morning sickness, it would have been cured sometime in the nineteen-twenties. I left the stick on the bathroom counter for weeks, even brought it to the new house when we moved, planning to add it to the hospital bracelet and the first lock of hair and all the other tchotchkes I’d lovingly gather. My first pregnancy, my last—does pain have a chronology? A spasm in my lower back causes me to contort and lift my ass off the couch, as though being six inches higher will help. My moaning brings Sean back from the kitchen with garbage bags and a pile of old towels. It’s happening. This is where I push. My body doesn’t know how to make a baby but it apparently knows how to push one out. I see the Ziploc bag lying on the floor and I scream at Sean to get it out of my sight. Sean lays garbage bags over the dull brown carpet and then covers them with a layer of towels. He drops a few pillows to the floor as well and helps me down off the couch. As I hit the ground I feel a pop and a stream of amniotic fluid and blood flows out onto a beach towel printed with a surfing penguin. At fourteen weeks the baby should be about the size of a hamster—how can I be in this much pain? Sean puts a cold washcloth on my forehead and holds one of my legs up as I bear down. Spontaneous abortion is the medical term for a miscarriage. I saw a nurse write it on my chart like, whoops! I spontaneously aborted my fetus! My bad! Expectant management is the term for what we’re doing here at home: managing our expectations, expecting nothing, managing. What’s funnier than a dead baby? A dead baby in a clown suit. A lot of blood is coming out but Sean is calm. He’s saying something but I’m not listening. Our condo is west facing and it’s late afternoon and the sun is shining full bore through the sliding glass door and the light is blinding me but I don’t look away, thinking that it might actually be nice to go blind. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance, bargaining, acceptance, denial, depression, anger. The cycle continues in the span of one contraction. I can see the clock on the bookshelf. It’s been nine hours since the doctor told us there was no heartbeat. Pretty soon, twenty-four. Then a week, then a month. So this is how I will mark time: every moment defined by its proximity to the event. The clock of my life will reset and I’ll only know two phases: before and after. I’m so scared. I’m afraid to wake up tomorrow and have nothing. I’m afraid to walk downstairs to the bagel shop and have to listen to people talk about the Warriors and the new mayor. What if I grab some stranger by the shoulders and shake them and scream in their face about how afraid I am? Could they blame me? And then? Something new: relief. Two weeks ago I was on BART headed to San Francisco on my day off to meet Sean for lunch. As we reached the lowest point in our journey, as we rocketed one hundred thirty-five feet below San Francisco Bay, with sharks and humpbacks and sea lions swimming somewhere far above us, the train stopped. The main lights cut out and the brakes squealed and there was a long pause just as the car stopped when no one spoke. The emergency lights were on, filling the car with a thin red glow, and many smaller blue and white lights shone from cell phones scattered among the seats. A crackle came out over the loudspeaker but was followed with more silence, no reassurances of equipment failure or medical emergency or the ominous phrase, police activity at the Embarcadero Station. People were calm. Small conversations erupted—an older woman in the seat next to me tsked and lamented that she’d be late for work—but no one rose up out of the crowd with comforting words or timeframes. I tried to text Sean but I had no service. I tried to look up what was going on with the train but I couldn’t connect. Two rows in front of me a baby started to cry. I got a pain in my stomach which, at twelve weeks, was already grown past the waistband of my jeans, forcing me to undo the top button and keep the zipper down an inch at all times. The woman next to me must have noticed me wringing my hands because she smiled and said, This shit happens all the time. They’re gonna make us sit here five or ten minutes and then we’ll be on our way. Five minutes turned into ten into fifteen. The baby was crying again and I’d almost broken the leather strap of my purse from how hard I was twisting it. And the mother of the baby, who wore a Ramones t-shirt and looked to be my same age, put the child on her shoulder and jiggled it up and down while she sang something softly in Spanish. The baby, hairless except for a set of impossibly long brown eyelashes, surveyed the train car with sleepy interest. He blinked once, twice, and opened his mouth for a prolonged yawn before resting his head on his mother’s shoulder and falling asleep. I looked down at my hands, red and raw, and my stomach, performing its own anxious aerobics under my skin, and I was afraid. I wondered: what have I done? Sean is crying. I can count his ribs, he says. I can see all of them. They’re perfect. I drop my head on the ground and stare out the patio door. Three floors below me Oakland hums. The thing with jokes is they let us make fun of the things that scare us. We lift the veil and say boo to whatever monster is hiding underneath. Sometimes the monster says boo right back. |
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