A bold, unapologetic first novel about a pregnant mother and wife who abandons her family in search of an identity that is hers alone.
"Deliciously, dangerously rogue." —Marcy Dermansky, author of Bad Marie
Sonia, a young Brooklyn mother shaken by her unexpected (third) pregnancy, abandons her husband and kids and takes off on a cross-country odyssey in search of an identity separate from her family. She does everything a pregnant woman shouldn't do—engaging in casual sex and smoking weed—as she retraces her past and attempts to reclaim her sidelined career as an artist. Nine Months is a fierce, daring page-turner of a novel—a lacerating response to the culture of mommy blogs, helicopter parents and "parental correctness" as well as an unflinching look at the choices women face when trying to balance art and family.
Release date:
August 21, 2012
Publisher:
Soho Press
Print pages:
272
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I DID IT!” She screams, “I DID IT WITH MY OWN BODY!” Her voice is ungodly deep. The veins in her neck thick with blood. And it’s true. Her body, once more, did it. What’s left of it. Bleeding, bloated, bruised inside and out. Ripped and torn, the yellowish, green umbilical cord resembling some sort of proof that aliens do indeed exist, they exist inside of our very bodies. The slimy, luminescent cord is proof of universal mystery, this strange device that attached her to her daughter—it’s from inside of her body, just like her daughter, too, the red-faced infant screaming in the doctor’s arms. Her insides came out. It’s the end of the world. Because each time it happens, she swears, never again, never again, even as she holds the tiny infant that, unbelievably, unfuckingbelievably, grew inside of her. She’s in awe of her daughter, in awe and also, not so oddly, rather unmoved by her. She feels no love, just wonder. No love surges forth, like it did with Mike her youngest (but not with Tom, it’s like it was with Tom, the confusion, the mystery). Funny, bluish, screamy wormlike thing. She puts her on her left breast and prods at the little baby’s mouth to take the nipple. The baby’s mouth roots around like a baby bird, unable to grasp on. So Sonia squeezes her nipple and colostrum comes out and the infant’s lips touch the pre-milk milk and then, it works—the baby tries to suck. First slowly, and then, as if something in her wired-for-survival brain clicks, she ferociously latches on to Sonia’s nipple and sucks on her like that’s what she’s been put on this earth to do. Which is, in fact, true. Her daughter is here to suck the life out of her, and leave her for the spent, middle-aged woman she soon will be. Nothing will be remotely the same again. No one has ever threatened Sonia as much as this unnamed infant. No one has ever made it clear how useless and spent she really is. She grew her, like she grew Tom and Mike. Like a plant, but inside of her, and with a brain, too. Sonia stares at the doctor for a minute. How can someone do this for a living? How can they do this for a living, watch women turn themselves inside out, and not have nervous breakdowns? It’s not that different than being a gravedigger. It’s just not. And then, Sonia, still deflating like a balloon, as a large liver-like placenta hurtles out of her, starts shaking with pain. Her teeth chatter. Her vision blurs. Is this the part where she dies? That was supposed to be earlier, thinks Sonia. The nurse, Beatrice, who is once again a normal, nice nurse—this, after Sonia saw her with that hallucinatory vision, with rainbows surrounding her and light glowing around her head, she had a fucking halo, she did, Sonia was sure of it—now this nurse is just a nice, normal nurse and gives Sonia a shot of Demoral in her thigh to stop the shakes. “Sometimes people shake real badly with the postbirth contractions,” Beatrice says. “The fluid leaving them so quickly sets the body off into convulsions. You’ll be fine. It’s nothing abnormal. Nothing to be worried about.” Sonia was in love with this woman only a few hours ago. And she still likes her, but now she just likes her. The magic is gone. Nothing abnormal? Everything is abnormal. There is nothing normal about what Sonia just went through. There is no normal. But that was later. First, there was more driving to be done. Sitting with her pregnant self in the black leather bucket seat of her Volkswagen Passat station wagon. It just crept up on her. She was never so lucky, with any of her kids, as to have the drama of her water breaking. No, for about two weeks really, her lower body ached, and then hurt, really hurt, increasingly so. For two weeks, she felt so tired, so exhausted, with intermittent sharp headaches, that whenever she walked, even the littlest bit—from the hotel room to the car, from the front seat of the car to the McDonald’s, from the parking lot to the mall—she felt as if she couldn’t go on. Just physically moving her big body drained her utterly. She wanted to lie down. But then, as soon as she lay down, she wanted to move again. She was never comfortable. Exhausted restlessness. Bothness. It was time. It was going to happen soon. She’s been driving east for some time. She missed Christmas, which was the guiltiest pleasure of all, but the guilt almost ruined the pleasure. No wrapping presents. No buying presents for anyone. No in-laws. No decorating a tree. No goddamn cards to mail out. No having to do a million things at preschool. No singing. No special meals to prepare for her ungrateful family. No pretending that she lives for trying to make everyone happy, when no one noticed that she wasn’t happy herself, that she really didn’t give a fuck. She didn’t believe in Jesus Christ anyway. She didn’t believe that the son of God came and saved everyone’s souls, or just those who prayed to Him. Although, she did pray, just in case, because even though she didn’t believe in Jesus Christ, she didn’t believe there wasn’t anything out there. She prayed desperately to the random molecules to be kind to her. But Jesus? No. And yet, they were Christians in some vague, historical way, Dick and she, and they played the whole game. Told themselves it was about the kids. Every Christmas, they gave five hundred dollars to City Meals on Wheels and bought a ton of cheap plastic toys that made the boys freak out for about two days. It depressed her. It made her feel oddly guilty, an empty sort of false joy and yet the boys were genuinely happy, wasn’t that enough? This Christmas she spent laying her fat butt down at a Ramada Inn in Nebraska, watching TV and eating bags of chips and boxes of créme-filled oatmeal cookies. She fell asleep with the TV on. For some reason, she didn’t feel depressed and guilty about that. She felt guilty because she did nothing that she was supposed to do anymore. Missing Christmas was like having her very own Christmas for the first time since Tom was born five years ago. But the guilt was a wicked tongue telling her that she really was the devil. Jesus held no sway with Sonia, but evil was a scary force one saw on a regular basis. And who’s to say it wasn’t inside of her? For weeks and weeks now, the guilt ate at her as she ate her way around America. Her conscience spoke to her, and it told her horrible stuff about herself. She’d listen, and then move on. She wasn’t a monster as long as her conscience spoke, she reasoned. As long as she had a conscience, she wasn’t actually the worst person on earth, she was just rebelling. Or so she told herself. But everyone knows a mother who leaves her children is the worst thing on earth; a sinner, a loser, a person whose life isn’t worth living. She missed New Years. Happy New Year! On New Year’s Eve, she fell asleep at 10 p.m. in a Motel 6 in Illinois. But now, in the gloom of February, now she heads back. Because the baby is coming. And, guilt or no guilt, she has no control over what she has to do now. It was a relief, actually, the lack of responsibility. She has no choice in the matter. She has to push this baby out. When she walks around the malls that she haunts, she walks so slowly, like the baby’s head is right there, right above her vagina, like there is a bowling ball between her legs. She positively waddles. And it feels like a bowling ball is leaning on her crotch. It fucking hurts. How much does a bowling ball weigh? How much does this baby, the placenta, the extra pints and pints of blood and fluid weigh? The same as a bowling ball? Probably more. Sometimes, a sharp stabbing pain. Other times, just a dull throbbing that becomes like some horrible white noise; at first she ignores the pain and then it’s the only thing she can think of. So she sits down on a bench across from the indoor fountains at the mall—throb, throb, throb. She’s due. And, like the other two times, she’s in denial. Because, who after all wants to deal with that pain? Who wants to welcome the horror that is birth? Who joyfully embraces the thought of their body cleaving in two? Vague, nightmarish memories of the other births startle her, flash at her, as she does her thing, the driving, the walking around malls, the walking from her car to a gas station and then back again, the lying around hotel rooms. Meanwhile, she pretends this isn’t her labor very slowly starting. But it is. At a mall in Michigan, after eating an enormous steak and a baked potato for dinner—she never eats the potato, why now?—she waddles out to her station wagon and gets in the car and heads toward New York. Not vaguely east. No, now she drives straight for New York City, straight for Brooklyn. She drives eighty miles an hour most of the time. She’s anxious. She wants to get there. She’s heading back to her boys. To her man. The father of this baby. But she doesn’t quite make it. She’s not a confident driver to begin with. When her stomach hardens up, it becomes hard to focus on the road. She can still see the road. In fact, morning’s pushing through, hazy and dark, a dark February morning, and she knows she’s been sitting in this car for that long now—and she’s been in Pennsylvania for a long time. God, she’s close, but the hardening of her stomach, the contraction—the word actually presents itself to her—is telling her to pull over and ask where the nearest hospital is. “Twenty minutes to downtown Philadelphia,” the man at the gas station tells her. Twenty minutes. She can do it. They are coming faster now, the contractions, regularly, too. Her first labor was eleven hours, not bad. Her second was eight hours long. How long would this one be? She has more than twenty minutes before the baby forces herself out, she must. She says to herself, “I’ve got at least a few hours. I’ve got time. Drive slow, breathe,” and she talks to herself like this until she enters Philly, a city she’s only been to once or twice with her family, long ago. Once, they stayed in a hotel and went swimming in the indoor pool and then walked around, sightseeing. What was the second time? She can’t remember now, the pain during her contractions distracting her memory for the most part. She does remember where the man told her to go and she makes the turns and there’s the hospital. She is the only white person in the waiting area. After talking to the triage nurse, she’s sent out to give her insurance card to the person at the desk and then she’s ushered out of the emergency waiting room into another room right away. Ahead of all the dark-skinned people. She wishes this was because she’s about to have a baby, but she knows it’s because she has a good insurance card. Once, when Mike had a horrible ear infection, she took him to the emergency room in a downtown Brooklyn hospital and the look on their faces when she produced her insurance card! It was as if she were holding out a bar of gold for payment. They have a room in their maternity ward. The nurse Beatrice comes in, a West Indian woman by her accent. She checks her pulse. She listens to the baby’s heartbeat with a long corded thing. She times her contractions. “They’re three minutes apart, but they’re not lasting very long. They don’t feel that powerful, do they?” “No, not really.” “The doctor will be here soon to see how dilated you are.” A handsome, middle-aged white woman appears. She looks tired, but she smiles. She introduces herself as Dr. Lumiere and then says, “Let’s take a look at you then.” She puts her hand deep inside of Sonia’s crotch. This hurts. She moves her hand around and Sonia can feel the hand twisting inside of her and she can see the doctor’s arm from the elbow up, moving this way and that. The doctor’s face held in concentration. Seeing with her fingers. “Where are you from?” “Brooklyn.” “Your husband’s not here?” “He’s in Brooklyn.” “You’ve had two other deliveries, I noticed from your chart.” “I have two kids, yes.” “And where are they?” “They’re in Brooklyn. With their father.” Suddenly, the hospital gown held loosely over her breasts and enormous stomach feels incredibly inadequate. Sonia feels ashamed. “I was heading back to Brooklyn from a business trip and didn’t quite make it.” She smiles. She’s a horrible liar. She fruitlessly tries to pull the crinkly gown over her body to hide her shame, but it doesn’t work. “Have you called them? They could make it here on time.” The doctor finally pulls her hand out of Sonia. “How dilated am I?” “You’re only three centimeters dilated, but you’re completely effaced. This being your third birth, it shouldn’t be that long. I’ll get the anesthesiologist on call.” “I don’t want an epidural. I didn’t get one with my other kids.” The doctor looks at her critically. “If the nurse can give me a shot of Demoral, I’ll be fine. Really. I prefer Demoral. I like drugs that mess with my head better than the ones that just numb you.” “Would you get a tooth pulled without the numbing pain reliever?” “No. But I’m not getting a tooth pulled. I’m having a baby.” And if I were getting my tooth pulled, thinks Sonia, I’d ask for the gas, too. It’s like doing whippets. “But getting a tooth pulled isn’t nearly as painful as giving birth. And it doesn’t make sense that you’d get numbing pain reliever for pulling a tooth but not for having a baby. There’s no reason to feel all that pain.” “I’m one of those weird people who kind of gets off on pain, OK?” “You really should have someone here with you. A sister or your mother, if you’re not going to call your husband. We can’t really let you leave unless you have someone here to take you home.” “Well, I just got here so let’s not think about me leaving yet. I just got here.” Dr. Lumiere frowns at her. Sonia feels high. The endorphins, in reaction to the contractions, must have just kicked in. She gets a rush to her head. She says, “You’re beautiful when you frown.” “Are you on any medication? Lithium? Prozac?” “No,” she says. “No high blood pressure, no diabetes . . .” “Oh, no, nothing like that. I’m healthy.” “When was your last prenatal checkup?” “I’m not sure.” “Were you having weekly checkups?” “It was a while ago, my last checkup. It was a couple months ago.” Dr. Lumiere frowns again. “Well, everything looks fine.” The room is smaller than the one she had both her boys in. Both of her boys were delivered in the same room at the same beautiful maternity ward in Manhattan. But although the room is small, it has a nice view and it’s clean. Sonia is happy. The nurse comes and checks her contractions again. They’ve slowed down, they’re now five minutes apart, but they’re getting deeper. She can really feel them, they pull at her, and she stops thinking about other things—about her boys, about her husband, about Phil Rush, the man, her old professor, she’s just come from visting—and just feels the pain. The nurse says, “Your contractions have slowed down. Probably because you’re more relaxed now. You’ve been lying down for a while. It’s OK. Don’t worry. This baby’s coming today.” Today? Today? God, she’s going to have a baby, she’s going to give birth, a fucking baby is going to come out of her, a person. Another goddamn person. She shudders. The nice nurse may know the baby is coming, and may tell this to Sonia, but Sonia doesn’t believe it, exactly. She is suddenly struck with the enormity of it all. The panic it causes her to think of it! So she just stops thinking about it. That pain that she’s feeling? She’d rather be in her pain, right now—live for the moment!—than think about what’s ahead. Sonia gets up from her bed. She puts on a robe from a bag of mall clothing she’s acquired on this trip. A huge, gray maternity robe. She shoves her feet into the hospital slippers, flimsy, paper things, and decides to walk around the building a bit, to fend off her thoughts. In the hallway, at the nurse’s station, she asks Beatrice if they sell good slippers, fluffy slippers, at the gift shop. “I’m not sure. You could take a look, though.” Sonia walks toward the elevator. A contraction comes and she stops for a moment, puts her hand on her belly. Her stomach gets hard as a rock, it’s like a smooth, rounded stone, and Sonia stands there and feels it. It hurts nicely, purposefully, rightly. And then it’s gone. And she’s in the elevator. The gift shop isn’t so bad. Really. Some T-shirts, some cheap jewelry. Coffee mugs. No slippers though. Sonia thinks of talking to the woman behind the desk about how slippers would be a good thing to carry in the hospital seeing as how the slippers the hospital gives you aren’t very nice. They barely stay on your feet. But as she smilingly walks toward the saleswoman the woman glares at her and Sonia decides against giving her any advice. She decides against striking up a conversation with this woman. This woman doesn’t want to talk to her. And who does, really? Is that why she keeps having kids, so someone will want to talk to her? Someone had said to her once, people have kids so they don’t have to deal with making friends. You have kids and they have to be your friends, or, at the very least, your company, your human interaction, as they live with you and off of you for years and years. God, how she misses her boys. And Dick. Yes, and Dick.
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