Typesetting, 1964
A story about refusing to be anyone's Asian female stereotype
Originally published in The Ledge magazine, 2007.
THE day I became Lotus Blossom to my employer, Alan Nicks, I was wearing a sleeveless maternity blouse in what now seems to me an exclamatory shade of pink. Tired of donning my husband’s big shirts or the prissy, impractical maternity clothing of those days, I had purchased the bright fuchsia sateen with my first paycheck and taken it to my friend Sophie, who took in sewing for extra income. “Look at you,” said Sophie, “ready to pop any minute and Wayne expects you to bring home the bacon.” I shrugged. “Don’t make it sleeveless. This is for work."
Alan Nicks liked to stroll the shop floor wearing his cocked beret and glancing with a proprietary air over the shoulders of his girls. Sometimes he paused behind one of us, thoughtfully stroking the little point of his goatee. Punching keys takes real stamina. We five girls sat staring into our light tables for eight hours a day operating a type disk that spun, clattered, and stopped, one revolution per character. When I felt Nicks behind me for a longer than usual moment, I turned slightly to see him making strange postures on the other side of the glass. He dropped to his knees, snapping "photos" of me from various angles with an imaginary camera.
"Don't move!" he shouted. "That's perfect, peeking out at me like that. You need a little fan." The other girls snickered from their cubbies, all except Joan Banks. A blushing geisha, Nicks made mincing fan-like movements of his hand as two almost womanly mounds of flesh jiggled like a pair of pork chops under his wrinkled turtleneck. "Every Oriental beauty needs one," he suffused, hands stroking the airy waist and hips of the imaginary female form before him. “And what a delicious…”—he waved his hands around until he caught a word—“oxymoronic color is that pink you’re wearing, at once emboldened and demure. Young woman,” he continued, plunking a pointed finger onto my exclamation point key, “you are the reason men symbolize.” CEA!SAR SALAD read the words on my light-board, right in the middle of an hour’s worth of text.
Mistakes had to be pasted over by hand.
Toward the end of my pregnancy, fluid pooled in my ankles and my back ached from hunching forward to see my light table. But a blanket folded over the hump in my belly muffled the type disk racket. I hummed lullabies. I ate protein--boiled eggs, canned salmon salad. Things were going to get much better once Wayne passed his bar exams and I could stay home with little Mitchell and the new baby.
Early in our marriage, Wayne had taken a snapshot of me in his graduation cap studying with mock-seriousness my red-and-white-checkered Better Homes and Gardens cookbook. My heart actually pounded with enthusiasm at the idea that I would create for my family an everyday linens-and-chilled-salad-fork-at-dinner kind of life. Wayne had been driving a Wonder Bread route and contemplating his next professional move. Then came that afternoon in December when the country fell silent before the grainy image of Kennedy’s benumbed widow and her two young children. Suddenly, the future looked much closer. Law school became the wagon to which Wayne hitched his star. Time to put my typing skills to work. Wayne couldn't study with Mitchell under foot all day, so we tried a crash-course in potty training and enrolled him in pre-school. He was just too little. One day when I picked him up after work, an exultant Mrs. Kloberdanz plucked his soiled underpants from the nail she had used to hang them on the wall for all the other children to see and said, "I'll bet he stops wetting his pants before the week is out.” Also before the week was out, Mitchell stopped singing at the top of his lungs as I got him dressed in the morning, and he stopped looking people in the eye.
For my second child, Dr. Stabile planned to induce my labor on a scheduled date and time, like clockwork. This idea struck me as convenient for everyone except the baby. When I inquired about the possibility of having natural labor, I got a "Tsk tsk, Mrs. Teller, the next thing I know you’re going to say you want to try breastfeeding again, too, hmmm?"
Perhaps because Dr. Stabile had written me off as irrationally opposed to the advances of modern medical science, in walked a tiny, freckled woman with round spectacles and sandy colored hair in a long, loose braid down her back. "Mrs. Teller, meet Miss Standeford. She prefers to be called Isabella. Miss Standeford calls herself a midwife.” He raised his eyebrows at her. “There is no need to be alarmed, however, as she is merely a nursing intern like all the rest of them." Then he left us alone so Isabella could take my vitals and draw blood.
She murmured, "You can do it without drugs, it's true, especially if this is your second. That trail’s been blazed, as it were." She looked around and then spoke into my ear, "Now, in case I never see you again, let me give you one piece of advice: don't take it lying down."
"Don't take what lying down?"
"Childbirth." She breathed at me and smiled. "Two words, Mrs. Teller. Stand up."
"Her cloudy hair is sweet with mist," Alan Nicks intoned one morning in lieu of hello. "Her jade-white shoulder is cold in the moon." When I blinked at him, he asked me, "Li Po or Tu Fu?”
" I don't even know what you're talking about, Sir.”
"Why won't you call me Alan? Joan calls me Alan. Cynthia and Patsy and Louise and Eileen call me Alan. And the answer, young lady, is Tu Fu, great poet of the Tzu Dynasty. I would think you would be familiar with his work, Lotus Blossom.”
Joan Banks over in cubby five bit her lip hard. Here was a woman who sported what were arguably the first pairs of dangly, homemade bead-and-wire earrings in the entire city of San Francisco. She knew her dashikis from her daikon radishes long before either had become trendy.
TWO For ONE I typed. THIS WEEKEND ONLY AT THE SANDS! I’d toyed with the idea of asking Wayne if we could afford a little get-away like that for our upcoming anniversary. "Don't you parry, mademoiselle?" Nicks smiled broadly and struck a fencing pose.
I turned entirely from him, back to my work. "I'm no mademoiselle."
He clutched his heart, pierced, and then straightened. "Fair enough. But I thought you said you'd studied poetry in college."
"I studied English literature, Sir.”
"Alan!" he warned, finger unfurled.
"Wordsworth, Coleridge, the Brontes, George Eliot and so forth."
"Tu Fu was altogether more of a romantic, wouldn't you agree?”
“Than William Wordsworth?” I squeaked, taking the bait.
“Than Li Po.” He took a moment to savor this tiny triumph. “Was Li Po, then, a more accessible poet to the common reader? Yes, in fact," he conceded, his eyes scribbling up and down the pillow cushioning my belly. "But what is wrong with accessibility? Give me access! Poetry to the people!" he shouted, reassuming his guarde. His eyes narrowed. He stepped even closer. "You want a love poem to really kick it, don't you, Mrs. Teller?" From his back pocket he produced a slim volume, Poetry of the Tzu. The cover featured a drawing of the cold, white-shouldered girl of the Tu Fu poem gazing out over a moonlit landscape.
From his back pocket he produced a slim volume, Poetry of the Tzu. The cover featured a drawing of the cold, white-shouldered girl of the Tu Fu poem gazing out over a moonlit landscape.
"I dropped out of college before I had a chance to complete the requirements for my degree,” I told him.
Nicks left the book atop my Vari-Type screen as if it were any other work order. "A certain 'Lotus Blossom' has submitted some excellent Tzu-like verse to the Fringe. I believe she wishes to remain Anonymous.” Then his breath, minty masking fetid, actually brushed my cheek. "There's too few of us in the world. I want to share my love of poetry with," and here he passed a glance across the room as though all others were pedestrian souls, "like-minded women."
Joan Banks eyed me with a viciousness that could have started a Volkswagen. She had once bragged that she’d met Kerouac at a party in Brooklyn. He had squinched her shoulder affectionately with his big hand, she told us, and shouted into her ear, "So how do you like teaching high school French?" To preserve the moment, rather than attempt to explain that she was merely a typist, she’d nodded. If a woman could be Beat or hip at all, Joan was that woman. Too bad the scene she wanted in on was a boy's club.
Patsy, one cubby over, handed me a stick of cinnamon gum. “You know you really should put your foot down," she advised. I was pasting over an entire line--The RENO! The GOLD RUSH! The SANDS! All FREE!—that I had inexplicably typed in italics. I shoved the stick of gum in my mouth, savoring the spicy distraction and rested my eyes. Always, in negative imprint, a blackboard marred with white font. In my sleep, lettering scribbled the open field of my dreams.
"You know what's happening, don't you?" Sophie said when I told her about Nicks and the Oriental fan. "You're giving off some sort of signal you’re not aware of. It's probably the baby. You know, an excess of hormones or something."
"Well, I can't stop being pregnant. He can stop what he's doing." Sophie had a complete set of the new frosted pastel Tupperware. You just pressed in the middle and the thing sealed shut. Her white sandals clicked across her spotless linoleum as she tucked sliced cantaloupe and chicken salad back into her gleaming fridge. "Maybe he can stop, maybe he can't," she answered. "But don't you blame yourself for it. “
Sophie caught my glance. "I don't blame myself." She was a friend of my heart--had been since grade school and always would be. Whenever such moments arose between us, we clung to the belief that our differences were really just some kind of conjugation of the same verb. We stepped across the impasse toward one another and went on as if nothing had happened. We had to. We had the same face.
She grabbed me up in a sisterly embrace, waking Mitchell. "Gosh, I wish so badly you didn't have to work," she confessed. "I wanted us to raise our babies together."
I reached for Mitchell's naptime bottle to stop his cries. "I thought we were raising our babies together." Mitchell wrestled himself off my lap and stepped off to find Louise and Mary Sue. Sophie nodded vigorously, her eyes teary from withholding judgments about me she would never share.
Sophie didn’t know about the perfect moments. When Mitchell slept, I held him in my arms, breathing in the talcum-scented sweat of his scalp, the applesauce sweetness of his chin. I had attempted to nurse him those first days in the hospital, although I never let anyone see me try to do it. It hurt and nothing came out but a bit of fluid the color of earwax. Before I knew it Mitchell was hungrily sucking formula from his bottle and they were showing me how to bind up my breasts to stop the ache and catch the flow.
FOR our fourth anniversary, Sophie and Dan took Mitchell for the night while we drove out to North Beach where you could get five courses for amazingly cheap, including Peking duck, at the Golden Dragon. Poets from City Lights bookstore, the famous Beatnik hangout where Ferlinghetti ruled the roost, were said to have written the fortunes in their fortune cookies. Wayne filched a couple of them before our meal. His cookie read: A man who never tires of explaining himself is a thief. "I hate it when they give sayings instead of actual fortunes," he said, still brooding about the B- on his quarter-terms that had put him out of the running for some sort of law firm sponsorship.
Mine read: One inch of love is equal to one inch of ashes. "They're kind of unusual. Not what you'd expect in a cookie."
"Yours is sorta bitter. Love and ashes and all that."
I shrugged. "’One inch of love?’ “
Wayne squinted at me suspiciously.
"Okay, what would be a fortune, darling?” I tried. “Not a saying? Not bitter?"
“Anything I want?”
“It’s your fortune.”
“That tonight will be, you know, great.”
“A fortune can’t be something that everybody already knows.” I recited from memory, "A gold toad gnaws the lock. Open it, burn the incense." For a flash, there was that little gleam in his eye that he'd carried for me in our college days when I recited sonnets across the blanket to him, sprawled in my Capris and sandals out on the quad.
He poured us more tea.
"A tiger of jade pulls the rope. Draw from the well and escape."
"Where'd you get that? Sounds a little ominous."
"Risky, anyway. I think it's saying take your chance, seize your fate."
The waiter set a covered dish in front of Wayne, lifting the lid to fragrant steam. "Is that some new sort of poetry, then?"
"No, that’s spring duck.” I countered the glance he shot me with a playful smile. “Not new,” I obliged. “Ancient. From the Tzu Dynasty."
“You wanna fok?” asked the waiter, jabbing his finger toward the egg foo young.
Wayne’s chin lowered and came forward. “I beg your pardon?”
“Fok,” he insisted, his hand stitching the air in an eating motion. “Or chopstick?”
Chastened into clarity, Wayne replied, “Chopstick, please. Make that two.” The waiter darted off, shaking his head incredulously. We looked at one another and burst into laughter. “Not that I have anything against forking,” he joked. “So,” he tried again, “ancient poetry of the Shoe Dynasty? What happened to ‘ol Wordsworth? ‘Thou still unravished bride,' and all that?'
"That was Keats, dear. It's just a little book of Chinese poetry in translation that I picked up." And there lay the off-white truth between us, which kept tilting and shading the mood.
At home, we exchanged gifts sitting cross-legged on the bed in our stocking feet. He stared at the contents of the box. "Grace, I do love you," he said. "Happy anniversary and all that. But what the hell is this?"
"It's a Wernacke compass," I answered. "The finest you could own. " That show of blinking incredulity he could summon was going to serve him well in the courtroom one day. "Okay, so I bought it back when you were thinking about teaching geography.” It was a sore subject. I had been against his getting a teaching certificate, but had purchased the gift as a sort of consolation prize. “You can still own a really nice compass, can't you?" I peered at him. "You're truly angry with me?"
"Not at all, Grace. Why should I be insulted with a gift from my wife that says, 'Darling, you’re terribly lost. This will help you find your way.' "
"And you tell me I read too much into things?" I screeched. "My poetry professor would have loved you, Wayne. It's not symbolic, it's just a goddamned compass."
He threw up his hands. "You're the one who said everything is symbolic, but thank you for the goddamned compass."
"You have to put it that way?"
"You just put it that way."
"In self-defense, Wayne."
"The compass. How's that?" He handed me the Macy's box.
"Wrapping's pretty."
He looked away; I would need to like this gift. Pale ballet pink shimmered between sheets of delicate tissue. I fingered a strap of slithery satin.
"Take it out," Wayne commanded. "You don't even know what it is."
A pink satin baby doll with spaghetti straps, a single pink rose clasp between the breasts and matching satin panties. "I've been waiting all day to see your little rosebuds poking through."
"It's not going to fit right now, Wayne. You know that."
"Come on. The top'll fit, barely,” he grinned. “You can skip the underpants.”
"Wayne, I'm too big for it. It'll have to wait until after the baby."
He turned me and began to unzip the back of my dress. "I don't want to wait until after the baby. I want you to be my little baby doll right now. My little China doll."
I wheeled back to face him. "What the hell's gotten into you?"
"Just cool it. " He did a little swag and shuffle. "You can swing, can't you? You can kick it, baby.”
"You've been falling asleep in front of late night again." He had been unimpressed with television in general until that day the entire nation sat down to watch the Kennedy funeral procession. Now it was on even during Mitchell’s bedtime story. He had set up a card table in there, where we could take our meals if we wanted to dine with him.
"This ain't television, baby, this is the Thing, and I've got it." Once we went dancing downtown at Joo’s old club, the Forbidden City. The band got a little crazy and some of the crowd let loose with moves that weren't so much dancing as shakes, jiggles, and twists. Wayne insisted on waltzing me that night, but now he let loose like the folks we’d seen. He scrambled to the Hi Fi and put on a big band record with lots of thumpy bass and jaunty horns. He lifted out the baby doll top and jiggled it in the air. I did pirouettes around it and the mamba under it until we collapsed onto the bed, gasping with laughter. He reached behind me again, panting. "Come on.” He tugged on the zipper. "Be my little China doll. What's it been, like two months?"
"It's been never. I've never been your little China doll."
"You know what I mean, Gracie."
I lay back, arms crossed behind my head like a kid looking up at the stars. “Your sister said to me before we married that I wasn't being fair to you. She said my Oriental novelty would wear off, and that it wasn't fair to our children to mix the races."
Wayne lay there blinking, finding other routes. "My dad’s from another time. What about what your mother had to say about me?"
"My mother only wanted to know why you didn't like Caucasian girls."
He put his hand on my belly. "I like beautiful girls. We have beautiful children.”
"So, why don't you?"
“Like Caucasian girls? This is a trap. And on my anniversary, too.”
"Oh, so case dismissed? And now it’s time to play China doll for you?"
"Hell, I'll play Superman for you."
I flipped the strap of the nightie around my finger. "Do I put this on and then tip toe around the bedroom in my bound feet, or what? Where's my chopsticks? Where's my fan? I mean for Chrissake," I shouted. " I’m not anybody's Lotus Blossom, okay? I’m a mommy and a wife and an employee, Wayne. I’m supporting my family. And doesn't anybody notice that I'm pregnant, here?”
I flipped the strap of the nightie around my finger. "Do I put this on and then tip toe around the bedroom in my bound feet, or what? Where's my chopsticks? Where's my fan? I mean for Chrissake," I shouted. " I’m not anybody's Lotus Blossom, okay? I’m a mommy and a wife and an employee, Wayne. I’m supporting my family. And doesn't anybody notice that I'm pregnant, here?”
Wayne turned on his side to face me. “Who the hell is Lotus Blossom?”
I blinked at him. “You know what I mean.” We lay through two whole torch songs until the Hi Fi needle started bobbing in the free space. Finally, Wayne got up, undressed to his boxers and went to lift the needle. The baby readjusted itself with a couple of decisive thwomps, after which I felt seriously better. I rolled onto my back, still in my make-up and dress and stockings and let my eyes fall shut to the sound of Wayne brushing his teeth in the bathroom. Then suddenly he was at my side in the dark. His hand found my cheek, my elbow, my belly. I lifted his hand and kissed his fingers open.
Monday morning a different and startling-looking Joan was making the same bad coffee in the break room. She had plucked her naturally bushy eyebrows into near-oblivion. Now they were penciled in, but poorly, so that they resembled a couple of sentences scribbled across her forehead rather than a pair of graceful arcs. Gone was her usual roller-set shoulder-length wave, replaced by a straight bob with severe bangs high on her forehead. She wore a white wrap blouse with a red satin frog-clasp at the throat. An orchid tucked behind her ear would have finished off her China Doll look, but I wasn’t interested in her story.
"These are bad, aren't they?" I asked her, handing over a sheaf of poetry Nicks had given me to look at. I had taken the papers from him only because I'd thought it was a work order. They were his attempt at verse in the Tzu tradition.
The percolator quieted. I filled Joan’s paper cup and pushed the sugar shaker across the breakroom table towards her. Then I linked my thumbs into twiddling position across my belly and kept a watch out for Nicks.
Dark clouds up in the sky
Yellow leaves down, down on the ground
My heart is lost in the mists of autumn
Your head is buried in the sands of time.
Her lips parsed the lines with a hunger that gave her away. She knew whose they were and how I'd gotten them, although she hadn’t seen him touch me. "Do me the honor, won't you, Lotus?" he had said, coming up behind me and placing a folder down, his hands on my shoulders. "I'm not Lotus," I told him. "Really, I'm not." "Yes, yes," he murmured. His fingertips traced the sides of my arm, massaged my neck a little. I stiffened with the weight of knowledge suddenly upon me that Nicks had crossed the line and I had done nothing to prevent it. I had failed to be vigilant and this was my reward--his fingers creeping from my neck to my throat. Since I made no protest, his fingers slid down my front to the collarbone. "You're so full," he whispered. "Ripe and full." And then his hands lifted and he was gone.
My little skiff bobs where I tied it this morning
The whippoorwill sobs miserably overhead
I cannot sail to your home so far to the east
This river doesn't wind as far as that.
Joan handed them back like they were currency I'd tried to bribe her with. "Why are you giving these to me?"
"You told me once that your parents were missionaries. You were born in Shanghai, isn't that right? I thought you went to school there."
"Until I was five," she snapped. "Do you know what they taught us? American propaganda about the evils of Communism. We were educated by the Foreign Service. So why should I know anything about Chinese poetry? And what are you up to, anyway?”
"Look," I countered. "I know we're not bosom buddies, here. I just really want to know if you think these are as bad as I think they are."
She, too, looked around for Nicks and then picked up the cup of coffee I'd poured for her. "Are you kidding," she muttered. "They stink."
"Good. I thought so," I told her, snatching the papers back. "You're Lotus Blossom, aren't you?" When she merely pursed her lips, I added, "You'd think he could see that.”
She glanced heavenward. "It's not like I'm trying to be obvious."
"Oh, I won't blow your cover. I just meant I like what you've done with your hair."
Nicks knew he was no Ginsburg. Better to try out his poems on someone whose opinion didn't really matter. He may truly have believed I was Lotus Blossom. He may even have respected what he thought was my work. But I wasn't one of them and didn't, like Joan, aspire to Beatnik status. If he shared his poems with Joan she would show them to his cohorts. He'd be laughed off the Fringe. Lotus Blossom was their détente, Joan and Nicks.
"He's not the same man outside of this place," Joan insisted.
"Thanks. I feel ever so much better."
She shrugged. "He just thinks you look the part.”
I leaned across the table at her. “I am the part,” I told her. “I just didn’t sign up for it.”
I thought about this statement on my next visit to Dr. Stabile’s office, where Nurse Isabella Standeford went about her work like a brisk and capable Mother Superior. I wondered if some man at home loosed that braid at night, admiring the ripples. She checked my urine and found blood high sugar. "He's going to give you a pill called Vlandine,” Nurse Standeford explained. “It'll get your sugar count back down but it's really not good for your kidneys. Drink tons of water, and try upping your grains.” She caught my puzzled look. “Fiber, Grace. May I call you Grace?” I smiled at her. Of course she could call me Grace. “You can get whole grain bread at that little gourmet store on Beaumont, the one with the Cheshire cat on the door? You should also try their breakfast cereal. It’s good but crunchy. It’s called granola.”
I nodded, feeling unduly grateful to this woman. I worried that I might become confessional. Nurse Standeford was so very who she was. Her presence felt safe as a warm bathtub. "I'm glad you know you can get away with this with me," I told her. "But it seems awfully risky.”
She untied the blood pressure strap from my upper arm, and shrugged. "Don't worry for me. Things are changing."
THE year I started high school, my parents allowed me to spend a week with Sophie at her grandparents' farm in Stockton. They grew lichee, bok-choy, and other Chinese produce on a few acres nestled in the coastal range. Every day that week, we put our lunches in a pail and went for long walks with her grandfather's dogs over the crispy grass of the hills dotted with manzanita, granite, and scrub pine. One afternoon we hiked up to Serrano’s Pass, where you could catch a glimpse of the mission nestled between slopes and, on sunny days, the ocean. The dogs barked crazily when they saw two sheep from someone's pasture bleating and hollering near a barbed wire fence. The bloodied ewe kept trying to right her front hooves as the ram pushed her raggedly into the barbs, its hind legs doing a wild balancing dance.
Sophie screamed with something like outraged delight and ran downhill, the dogs bounding after her. I stood watching the pair, the impassive face of the ewe. Later, I found Sophie sitting on a rock picking at the inside of her sandwich and feeding it to the dogs. "Aren't you having any?" was all she said. That night, we lay wordless in the dark. Lately, I had begun to wake to find that I had been touching myself during my dreams, lust bent in my gut like a dirty spoon. Now Sophie’s whimpering awakened me. She clutched her pillow, her back to me, in a fetal position.
"Sophie!" I whispered. "Are you all right?"
I dreaded hearing some bitter confession from her, some raw truth that would make things never again what they were. I lay back flat on my pillow staring into the caving dark. As far as I could tell, Sophie was fast asleep.
That was the same loneliness I felt on the last day Nicks walked up behind me. I’d been finishing the Hungry Tiger dessert section--"topped with creamy caramel" in 14 point New Roman--when with nearly ox-like stoicism Nicks reached over and cupped his hand over my left breast for what was not two seconds. He didn’t squeeze. He said nothing. My breast might have been my shoulder. The mundanity of the gesture seemed to present the option of behaving as though it hadn't happened at all--a tempting option. My husband and son depended on me. My world would tilt to something that required a huge readjustment and resettling. Nothing would be like it was, like when you changed the font on your document and all four margins had to be adjusted. Line-breaks, hyphens, punctuation, orphans and widows had to be checked and rechecked.
He didn’t squeeze. He said nothing. My breast might have been my shoulder. The mundanity of the gesture seemed to present the option of behaving as though it hadn't happened at all--a tempting option.
Nevertheless, some other part of me began to act. I could not both eat whole-grain breakfast cereals on behalf of my unborn child and let this man frighten and insult me. These were not the same woman. Besides, it was becoming clear that Nick’s transgression was merely an early paragraph in a story it was my job to keep him from writing. Thus, at the end of the day, I told Patsy that I was leaving early and gave her instructions on the menu job I had left unfinished. She hugged me and gave me her fresh, unopened pack of cinnamon gum. I filled an empty paper box with my few personal belongings, typed up my resignation, and left it on Nicks' desk under his pipe stand.
I watched myself with a distant curiosity as I went to pick up Mitchell early from pre-school. Uncharacteristically, I lingered to chat with Mrs. Kloberdanz, who told me Mitchell was speaking in two-object subject-predicate sentences. I drove the few miles to the Weinstocks’ tearoom in Oakland, where Mitchell and I shared a slice of pineapple cake and a glass of milk. He sat next to me in the little booth, his ear at my belly so he could listen to the baby. I stroked his head. I watched myself stroking his head. I became aware that the maternal scene we made was touching to look upon. Vaguely, I hoped that if I could imprint the scene on enough hearts--of the waitress, Velma, and the hostess, Charlene, and the manager in the tie and shirt sleeves who didn't wear a name tag, and the lunching ladies all around us, and the shoppers who wandered in looking for something cold to drink--then perhaps the momentum of that feeling would serve as a tide against whatever was going to happen next.
For three days I lived a secret, unhinged life. I got up in the mornings on the pretense of going to work, kissed my husband goodbye and took Wayne to preschool. On the first day, I wandered the shops, waddling with a purposeful click down one street and up another, as though I had a long list of errands and little time. When I caught my reflection in a storefront or the window of a passing bus, I nearly gasped at the unconvincing picture I made. I had visions of backing out of rooms with my son under my arm as Wayne upturned furniture in his rage. I wandered into a diner, lowered myself onto a stool and ordered a ham on rye, my face tucked self-consciously into Poetry of the Tzu. According to the radio newscaster, they had found the bodies of those three young men who had gone down south to teach in the newly integrated schools. A Jew, a Yankee, and a black man.
Petals fall
in flowing water spring passes --
Within a dream, my body forgets
it is a prisoner:
A flash of greedy pleasure
Sorrow of parting.
Cut it, it does not sever.
Sort it, it ravels more .
To heaven? Or on to others?
Once upon a time while waiting for the birth of my son, I indulged in a frenzy of cleaning and organizing, putting my house in order. I made the landlord climb a ladder and wash the outside windows in our second floor flat. I labeled things in closets and medicine cabinets. I used toothpicks on grime. What inspired industry could I promise my husband and children now? At best, I must continue on gratefully with the trivial tasks of the day and somehow use the momentum to propel myself forward.
I went home and made chicken a la king for my family.
The next day I pretended to be a tourist. I strolled through botanical gardens and boutiques and natural history museums, keeping my chin at the appreciative, inquisitive tilt of someone from out of town.
On the last day, I knocked on Sophie's door. She told me she'd been thinking. She handed me her gorgeous penny-colored wool cape that fit over my bulk and, together, we plotted the downfall--the literary downfall, anyway--of Alan Nicks.
Wayne and I had browsed at City Lights a few times; he loved their history section, but we’d never been to a poetry reading, never rubbed elbows with actual Beatnik types. Using up my remaining store of post-anniversary goodwill, I had talked Wayne into accompanying me to a Fringe reading but decided not to tell him about the "open mic" portion after the program or about the little sheaf of poems I had tucked away in my purse. Instead I told him that, being the clean-cut law student from Arcadia, California that he was, he might as well expect the unexpected. I wore Sophie’s cape, which deep down I had believed only Sophie could pull off. Now with the fog already settling thickly for the evening and my husband on my arm, I swept it over my shoulder, enjoying the space it took up just getting into it.
Pipe smoke haloed an aloof Ferlinghetti stooped behind stacks of new and used books. A jazz trio was playing. We followed the music up a staircase to a room set out with old couches and coffee tables and a few folding chairs in rows. A Chinese fellow bald on top but with hair to his knees perched atop a paisley cushion playing a recorder. A noncommittal-looking percussionist in a baseball cap and a smiling bassist in a purple and green dashiki rounded out the trio.
Wayne gulped. A microphone stood in the corner near an elongated music stand. Several women with a Joan-like slouch,and Joan herself, chatted while either guarding or proffering the wine and cheese at the table, I wasn't sure. Nicks strode in from what looked like a closet with a toilet in it, touched Joan's arm lightly, and lit her cigarette. This was their world. A few of the couples there looked like Wayne and me--foreigners with visas. The Asians in the room had already scoped one another out and turned back to our respective business. I was the only noticeably pregnant woman there. An Asian man and a white lady chatted with a couple wearing matching fisherman sweaters. A very tall but stooped and kindly looking white man in what looked like batik-print pajamas accompanied a regal-looking black woman draped in jewel tones. Several university types hovered, men with scraggly beards and white women dressed like Chairman Mao down to the black cloth Chinese sandals that had recently become the rage. There really were lots of different kinds of white people; it was easy to forget that.
Too self-possessed to do a double take when he saw me with Wayne, Nicks squinted a knowing smile our way and cocked his chin in greeting. We took folding chairs in the second row and had just begun to sip our cups of Chianti when Nicks sidled over to us bearing copies of the Fringe. My former employer and my husband had a moment to recognize that they were entirely different animals. Nicks was perfect, no insinuations. "Magnificent, aren't they?" he said of the journals. "Spread the word." He handed us a stack of four or five and then winked at me and made an el with his thumb and index finger. Lotus, I guessed. I nodded, my face pulsing hot in anticipation of the moment I had come for.
After the jazz trio solemnly wiped and packed their instruments, Ferlinghetti materialized at the makeshift podium, puffing on his pipe. He gave a little talk that seemed less exciting than it should have about the importance of the Fringeand journals like it for the counter culture, and by association, for mainstream culture. Then he read from his new work. My husband perspired at my side. Next came a fellow named Dunbar, another named Croy, and a few others who began to blend together. People started getting up to use the john between poems, instead of between poets. The evening's claim to fame was a dark-haired Swede, Krieger, and after Krieger, still more poets. People started getting up duringpoems. I was one of them. The baby's position hurt in a way that made me want to elbow people with a hard jab in the gut to clear my path.
Finally, came "open mic." Nicks urged me toward the podium with a little scoot of his hand, causing Wayne to raise his eyebrows first at Nicks, then at me. Nicks believed I had come to own up to my true identity as Lotus. Hawk-eye Joan trained her glance on it all.
Here was an occasion when I actually enjoyed the comedic aspect of my late-pregnancy waddle. I removed my pillbox hat--I had worn a hat! Sophie had thought it would be just the right touch. I looked over to Wayne, who wore a look of sympathy mixed with horror. I hadn't stood in front of a sea of faces since my marriage. Pins of sweat pricked my upper lip. I breathed in carefully through my nose. "I am not a poet," I began. "It is my understanding that participants may read from work they admire by poets who are not…." I cleared my throat and tried again. "It is my understanding that we may read the work of others. Therefore I would like to say that I am the humbled and grateful recipient of several poems penned by a man who I am sure you all respect and admire. Please allow me to share with you some poems by Mr. Alan Nicks, producer of the Fringe. "
A wicked smile spread across the face of Ferlinghetti. There were murmurs of interest and curiosity and a knowing little buzz from Nick’s compadres. Nicks narrowed his eyes at me in what everyone else thought was a smile. It was after I read the Little Skiff poem that I felt my first contraction, a wave that caused my knees to tremble behind the podium. I gripped the sides, smiled at everyone and read the Sands of Time poem. Someone snorted. Another fellow chuckled behind his fist. I’d timed my reading for twelve minutes, forty seconds. Another contraction before I finished would mean this baby was ready. A couple of short pieces later and still in the clear I figured I had just enough time to wrap up with Nicks' piece de resistance before I waved my husband over and leaning heavily into his side made my exit.
I pulled back the curtain and there you were
My Lotus, my Blossom, my Prize
What color is the hair that runs down your back?
No matter
We've snuffed the candle, Baby
It's black as night.
As for Joan, if she ever decided to play her trump card—that she was Lotus, the real poet of the two--her triumph would be all the more satisfactory after this evening.
At the hospital, I tried to stand up as Isabella Standeford had advised me to, but they gave me an old warhorse of a nurse who believed that beds were for lying in. By that point, I quite agreed with her. The nurse did make me get up and walk to the bathroom once, bringing on considerable progress. On the way back to the bed, I paused and sank to my knees as earth and heaven thundered through me. No more of that; I was going back to lie down. Dr. Stabile arrived when they announced the baby's head was crowning. The nurses changed shifts and--joy of joys--it was Isabella Standeford. She placed my hand in hers with calming surety, but was unimpressed with my progress. She had to be made to accept by Dr. Stabile that no one was making me stand up again for anything.
Isabella simply breathed in, closed her eyes, and concocted her plan B. "Grace, I'm going to tell you something that should make all this much easier. Now, with the next wave"--her word for contractions--"don't try to push the baby down or out. Push back. You'll rip yourself wide open if you push out, and you'll give yourself a nice, fat hemorrhoid or two if you push down. Push back, Grace. Save yourself the stitches. Now, try."
I tried.
"You call that pushing? Come on!"
I hissed at her through gritted teeth.
"Pretend it's a big wall trying to close in on you, and push push push against that wall. Don't let it squeeze you. Push!"
I pushed so hard something clicked and came loose in my temples. Insect-like lines and curls of various fonts arked and burst at the edges of my sight, wiggling and illegible. It was almost comical how all that effort made so little difference in my progress. Between contractions I dropped into a profound, momentary sleep still gripping Isabella Standeford’s hand. Someone seemed to be speaking a foreign language. I woke to a glint of stainless steel on a surgical table they'd wheeled in. "Step aside, Miss Standeford," Dr. Stabile ordered. Forceps.
"You don't need those, Grace," she warned. "Your baby doesn't need those. You don't even need to tear if she comes out gradually."
Dr. Stabile switched on a very bright light. "Isabella," he intoned.
After my next forty-second nap, I tried to sit up. "She?”
"I'm almost never wrong."
Dr. Stabile shook his head.
"And you don't need to look at me like that, either," Isabella told him. "I didn't learn all this from the witch at the edge of town. I learned it in the army."
"You just keep it up, Miss Standeford. Just keep it up." Were they lovers, I wondered helplessly? I didn't get it, the kind of pushing she was asking for. "She?" I asked again, and fell into another forty-second dream, this time of a clear, font less, light board. I woke screaming my husband's name in outrage and elation and pain. Wayne was somewhere where they kept the fathers. This push was for him. She, if it turned out to be a she, would be born with a clear light board, no squiggles and loops hovering over her bright future.
"Yes!" screamed my formerly becalmed mid-wife when my daughter’s head emerged. The hardest part was finally behind me. I hadn't been able to take it standing up; I was no Isabella. But finally, finally, with an immense shuddering sense of rightness, of relief, I began to push like I meant it. Back.