The offspring of the my parents, their offspring* and their partners. I love how much room we take up. If we held hands and stretched across a street, we would be on the sidewalk and lawns, too.
(* Rosie was supposed to come, and Jack, too, but both were too sick to be around their six-week-old cousin and so we sadly had to leave them at their mother’s house for our visit. The space beside Steve is where they would fit.)
This weekend we had the home tour where 200 people walked through our house and we disappeared for all of it. We scrubbed this house so well in preparation. It will never be so clean, except perhaps the day we sell it. Steve carved the backyard to be perfectly flat, built rock walls, and put compost and grass seed down on top of the clay dirt. He built a front walkway in two days, finishing at 7pm, just before we drove 7 hours to Maryland. Seven roofers put a metal roof over our worn asphalt shingles. Two carpenters built stairs down from the porch to the backyard. Two painters painted the new gables. Two cleaners cleaned the spots I didn’t. I painted walls and scrubbed floors and found a place for clutter. When you know that 200 people will walk through your house, suddenly everything looks wrong. By the end, we had done everything we could. I took pictures before we drove away.
We went to the doctor this past Thursday to have our seven-week ultrasound. I told Steve I loved him no matter what the ultrasound said. I was worried that all I had been feeling was for nothing, that there was nothing in me, or that something was wrong with it. The doctor put the probe in and I saw a blur of gray and black and white on the screen. Uh oh, she said. She looked at me and at Steve. I felt my heart deflate. After all we had done, to have to do it again. I hope you’re okay with twins, she finished. Now that I think about it, I want to punch her. Maybe that’s the hormones. I’m pretty sure that uh-oh is on the top of the list for things doctors aren’t supposed to say to patients.
Steve was so far across the room. He came over to touch my forehead, then he sat back down again. I just lay there very quiet, trying not to move, trying to absorb everything that was happening. Two. Don’t cry. Don’t pee. Those two tiny dots of steady beating, those are their hearts. She put on the sonogram and we could hear them. Not the feeling of a miracle, just a feeling of being stunned. It’s all a miracle. All of its feels too big to understand. This doesn’t really make it more real. My virtual babies on the screen, their yolk sacs which will become heads, the oblong thing extending from it which will become the body. Like a fat lollipop, two of them, with a tiny dot rhythmically beating inside the lollipop stick.
Twin A’s heart was very quiet and Twin B’s was very loud. Twin B measured exactly on par for its age and Twin A measured a week behind. Twin A was large enough to be considered within range, and if it were the only baby inside of me then no one would have any concern, but because Twin B is bigger, I have to go back in two weeks to see if Twin A has grown or if it will vanish, which happens 30% of the time. Then I will have one. Back to one, which puts a hole in my heart now that I know there are two, because I am one of two myself and cannot imagine being one of one, but I remind myself that one is not close to zero.
And fear, too: Two. Nursing two, birthing two, holding two, waking for two, eating for two. Two is a freak show: they don’t put women pregnant with twins on the cover of magazines, slyly wrapping her arms around her breasts. Two is beastly.
For now, two. This morning, a bout of morning sickness that left me in bed all day reading books about babies and maybe-babies and maybe babybies (baby/babies). I see my stomach now and think two. Then I have to think maybe two. What has happened between now and Thursday? Has Twin A grown or is it disappearing? I dreamt about it for much of the night, and I woke still inside my dream, ready to dress and go to the ultrasound appointment that my dream said was scheduled for today. It is hard to think of anything else.
I pilfered this photograph from my friend Frederique’s photo page. While in France, she photographed this sculpture of Jesus held by his mother, his heart pouring into a goblet. It’s so visceral for me, I can feel that feeling in my own heart when I look at this.
Right now there are two beating hearts. I saw them. (I will explain more later.)
Our home is on the remodelers’ tour this weekend, which has meant a flurry of sudden activity. Things we hemmed and hawed over for three years we’re suddenly doing or hiring people to do. I love the power of a deadline — twelve men, some on our roof, some in the backyard building stairs, steve covering our backyard with rich compost, his brother helping here and there, painters painting and staining new gables, me inside taking naps and intermittently painting with a mask on.
Everything that grows here starts invisible.
He rototilled a quarter-acre.
Juniper down. Vibernum up.
Dawn redwood saved from the shadowing pines:
two pines down with the glue inside. Four hundred tulips up.
Pull the ones called weeds: Dandelion yes, hellebora no.
Cut the long grass yes, the ferns no, ferns spreading, unfurling tadpole evening.
We are genetically one-quarter related to daffodils.
He transplants the tadpole daffodils here by the stop sign.
By the oak trunk: an episode of tulips.
He planted the beating bulbs when it was cold.
Squirrels disassemble poppy patterns.
Dog kick. Dogs kick soil and piss on arborvitae.
Everything starts invisible, you don’t know where to step, then tadpoles.
In an hour the tulips will relax, like I am supposd to.
The daffodils didn’t bloom. There is no answer.
The tulips sometimes come back.
(I want to fall asleep in the poppy bed with the fat squirrels.)
There are so many pictures of her from before I knew her where I’m not sure it’s the same girl. Steve’s girlfriend from when Rosie was 3 through 7 wouldn’t recognize the girl she’s become — that’s what I sometimes think. But in these two pictures, it’s clear that she is the same girl. Those lips, that nose, that fear in her eyes covered over now. Not smiling then, smiling a little more now. We aren’t sure what parts of kids will stick around for their whole life — my brother has always been the more reserved one — and what parts will go to the wayside — my brother used to love cheeseburgers. So much of Rosie has stayed solid, and now that her face is losing some of its pre-adolescent chubbiness, you can see it, she looks more like her young self again.
So tired. It’s part of the hormones and I’m not concerned, but it makes me feel bad for people with iron-level problems or with mono. I can’t make it up the hill by our house without holding Steve’s hand to keep up. I sound like there’s no oxygen inside of me at the slightest amount of exercise. I have to pause halfway on staircases. Getting from a seated to a standing position involves lots of gripping onto things around me. I try to be graceful, and usually I look fine, just slow. Today I asked a man at the grocery store where something was, and he belonged in the Olympics he walked so quickly to show me and I barely could keep up. It was an exhausting enough outing that I went home and fell into a nap. I feel like I live in San Francisco, and it’s beginning to make me not want to go downstairs or take walks downtown, it just takes too much out of me. We walk each morning and I haven’t fully recovered until noon. So tired, conversations wear me out. Having to both focus on a human being and think at the same time and also articulate something smart and funny is all too much for more than a few minutes. I feel like boring company. My brain feels covered in gauze. I forgot what I’m saying part-way into a sentence. I have to go to a play tonight and it starts at 8 and that sounds so late. I don’t know how other people manage, but I’m only interested in what I can eat next and then where I can sleep. Apologies for the boring company. Let’s order a pizza.
For nine years, ending in 1986, a company in Ann Arbor sprayed wastewater containing 1,4 dioxane on their lawns and stored the dioxane in unlined lagoons. This chemical carcinogen seeped through the soil and rock layers and began to spread down to the Huron River. I can’t imagine a worse place for this to happen, in some ways: one of the most liberal and organic hotspots clashed with toxic industry.
That part of town is where the houses are cheapest. That’s where Rosie and Jack’s mom lives, and they’re not permitted to plant edible gardens in the ground — they have to be in raised beds or in pots. And they are certainly not permitted to draw groundwater from their residence. It has felt real to me because they live there — I see how they can’t sell their house and I see the lack of interest in gardening on that side of town.
But the dioxane keeps spreading, and now there is a prohibition zone on our street, too. We could walk fifteen minutes to the river, so the chemical is getting that close, and when it gets in the river it eventually enters Lake Erie.
As far as we know we can still have our garden, but we can’t draw well water. It feels haunting that an invisible toxin from twenty-five years ago has crept into our yard. It feels unfair. I am maniacal against toxins, especially now. It makes me want to move.
Somehow I want to correlate this to Detroit — a place so close to us that doesn’t seem to touch us, nobody visits, yet everyone here is somehow connected to it, and the idealism of this town is scarred by how many people are losing their jobs. More people worked for Ford than I knew, or worked for a company that worked for Ford in some way. Industry and university clashing, personally, under our house.
