Catherine Uroff

The Baby Held Up to the Window

She’d always start the story slowly. Well, darling, she’d say, reaching out to touch my hair and stroke it between her fingers, What do you know?

It was a rhetorical question. It took me awhile, too long really, to realize that she wasn’t really asking me for information. I’d stutter and try to think of something, anything to say. I wanted to be witty and clever in front of her. She was my mother. I wanted to impress her.

There I was, twenty one years old with a newborn baby. And your father chained to the hospital. They had him working double shifts every other day. He’d come home and sit down. Our only piece of furniture was this ratty armchair his great-aunt—you never knew her—had given us and he’d sit down in that chair and within two minutes he’d be asleep. He’d bend his head back and close his eyes and he’d be gone. I’d be in the kitchen, putting on water. I always thought it’d be good if he drank more tea. I don’t know why. Tea. How silly. Like that was going to help anything. Anyway, I’d be holding you and putting on water and then I’d come out into the living room and he’d already be asleep. You’d cry. You’d scream. For hours. But he’d never wake up.

My mother would laugh a little. She’d let go of my hair and the gold bangles she wore on both wrists would chime together. When I was little, I’d listen for her bracelets as she came down the hall each night and paused before my open bedroom door to wish me good night.

Did I ever show you where we used to live?

Yes.

Right across the street from the hospital.

Yes. Yes.

Of course, you’ve seen it.

Yes.

Horrible place, no?

Yes.

Looking right down on the Emergency Room. Sometimes at night I’d stay up late and listen to the ambulances pull up and I’d wonder what horrible, horrible thing had happened. When your father would come home, I’d ask him about it. I’d say, “What was it tonight?” Sometimes he’d tell me. It was a heart attack. Or a hit and run. But sometimes he wouldn’t know. Or if he did know, he wouldn’t tell me.

I never wanted to hear this story. When I was younger, my mother and father’s life seemed completely irrelevant to me. And then, as I got older, I dreaded this story because there was something unbearably sad about it, in the way my mother told it, how she touched the base of her throat, a girlish gesture, as if my father was right before her, twenty-eight years old again, vibrant.

Mom, I’d say, Really. Is this necessary?

Is what necessary?

Never mind, I’d say.

You have a horrible habit of mumbling. Felicia? Did you know that?

Sorry.

It’s quite easy to stop.

OK.

I don’t know how you manage.

That was another one of my mother’s refrains. When I got out of college, she constantly told me that she didn’t understand how I was making my way in the world. She seemed to gloss over the fact that I had a full-time job for a major computer company, I had had the same boyfriend for three years, my apartment was nice and roomy, I had a tight group of friends. I was, in everyone’s eyes except for hers, a success.

I’m doing quite fine.

Fine.

Fine.

My mother would adjust herself on the couch. She always sat with her legs tucked underneath her.

That god-awful Emergency Room. There’d be whole nights when I’d be up, tending to you, and I’d sit by the window and just look outside. The things I saw. You wouldn’t believe.

This part of my mother’s story always differed. One time she told me about an old lady she witnessed being helped by two young kids, perhaps her grandchildren, up the curb to the hospital’s automatic sliding glass doors. When they got close to the doors, the kids let go of the woman for some reason; they turned around and started to walk away. My mother watched in horror as the woman teetered, leaning one way and then the other, before crashing down on the pavement. The two kids whirled around and ran to her but it was too late. Someone came out of the hospital with a stretcher. My mother said it was an appalling sight, watching that woman so helpless right before she fell, her support suddenly gone. My mother wanted to bang on the window and in fact she did just that, she slammed the palm of her hand on the glass window but nothing happened. The woman fell anyway. My mother was just too far away to make a difference.

One night your father came home and he wouldn’t talk. He just sat down and put his head in his hands. You had just woken up for one of your feedings so I was holding you. What I really wanted to do was touch him, anywhere. He looked so alone. But you were feeding and I had to stay still. I said to him, I said, “George?” He didn’t answer me. When you were done feeding, I put you in your crib and when I came back to the living room, he was gone. He had gone back to the hospital.

My father became chief orthopedic surgeon of that hospital. And my parents had the kind of life that came with such a career. They were long standing members of the town’s only country club. My mother drove a gold-colored Mercedes. They went to Europe every summer. But still, it was always this story she came back to—when they were young and alone and struggling.

Well, of course, it all became too much.

I can see that.

I was alone and taking care of you. Your father was rarely, if ever, home. I didn’t know what I was doing. I was trying so hard to be a good mother but what did I know about being a mother?

This was the only part of the story that was hard for me to believe. It seemed impossible that my mother would ever question her mothering skills. She always seemed so firm, so definite in her opinions. Eat vegetables every night. Have fruit for dessert. Get straight A’s. Make the right friends. Play outside for at least 30 minutes a day whatever the weather. Don’t slouch. Don’t mumble. Even during my brief and ultimately unsuccessful turn at being a rebellious teenager, her rules didn’t deviate. She treated my adolescence like a war to be won by strategy and perseverance. There was never any doubt about who would be the ultimate victor. When I fell in love with Gus O’Brien in the tenth grade, she welcomed him into our family, inviting him over for dinner, spending long hours talking to him about his dreams, his thoughts. When I realized that the most attractive thing about Gus—with his greasy black hair and scuffed biker boots and older brother who sold weed to our high school—had been his utter unsuitability and now he was sharing Thanksgiving dinner with my family and helping trim our Christmas tree, I quickly lost interest in him. After it was over, my mother briefly gloated. “They say,” she told me, “keep your friends close and your enemies closer.”

So I decided to leave. I told your father, “I can’t do this anymore. I’m going back home.” Well, I’d never seen him fall apart the way he did that night. He got down on his knees, his knees, Felicia, and begged me to stay.

For my parents’ twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, they went to Bermuda. My father seemed tired and preoccupied. My mother tried to find out what was wrong. “If I didn’t know better,” she said to him one night lying in their suite’s massive king sized bed, a yawn of bedspread between them, “I’d think there was someone else.” My father said nothing. He just looked at her, forcing her to ask more. He had suffered a heart attack the year before and during his stay at the hospital he’d met a young nurse named Carly. “It’s such a cliché,” my mother complained although clichés were always a part of her life. “To thine own heart be true,” she advised me when every girl in my third grade class ganged up against me. “When life hands you lemons, make lemonade,” she said when I didn’t get into my first choice of colleges. After the divorce, my mother started doing yoga every day. Pretty soon the YMCA asked her to teach a class. On the day my father and Carly got married, my mother went to a retreat in the Berkshires where she mediated in silence for seventy-two hours. When she came back, instead of asking me about the wedding, she went on and on about her retreat. “I feel refreshed,” she told me, “like a whole new person. It’s been a rebirth. Really.”

I was happy when my mother stepped out of her New Age phase. But she never talked about my father again, never even alluded to their past life together. It was as if twenty five years of her life hadn’t happened. The only time he was ever mentioned was in this story.

So we made a plan. It was quite simple really. Just a matter of timing. He had a break at seven fifteen every night, a window of about five, ten minutes where he could just relax. That’s an intern’s life for you.

Yes.

At seven fifteen every night, I’d stand in front of the living room window. And at the same time your father would go to the break room on the hospital’s fourth floor because there was a window there that was level with our apartment. I’d see him and he’d see me. Then I’d raise you up, almost pressing your nose against the glass, so that your father could see you. We’d stay like that until his break was over. He’d just look and look at you, like you were something he needed to memorize for a test or something. Sometimes my arms would get so tired, holding you up like that, but I never lowered you. It was a wonderful moment, Felicia, those nights when that was the only way your father could see you, us. It made me feel so powerful.

She always ended the story like that, talking about her feelings of power, as if just by holding up a baby, she’d become completely rejuvenated. My father, apparently, felt the same way. He’d go back to the ER with an extra jolt of energy, some enthusiasm that he didn’t have before.

The last time she told me that story was about two weeks before she died. I was six weeks pregnant but my husband and I had agreed not to tell her. Even my father thought that was wise. “It’s just going to remind her,” my father said, “of all she’s going to miss.”

I was lying next to my mother on her bed, knowing full well that tomorrow the hospital bed was coming and this was the last time we’d have the luxury of lying together. My mother was whispering since the cancer had paralyzed her vocal chords. After she was done, I shook my head.

“I hate that story,” I said, “I always have.”

“Why?”

“It’s so melodramatic.”

I didn’t know why I was saying this to her. I knew this was my last chance, that anything I wanted to say to her I needed to say now before it was too late. I didn’t want to focus on that story. I wanted to tell her how much I loved her. I wanted to ask her why she’d been so critical of me. I wanted to see if she thought I was going to have a good life.

“Life,” my mother said sternly, “is pretty damn melodramatic.”

“My life isn’t.”

My mother raised an eyebrow. She’d lost all the hair on her body but she still had me paint on a thin line of eyebrows every morning. “Just you wait.”

I put my hand on my stomach. It was my first pregnancy so I wasn’t showing at all. But I wished that I was. Then my mother would guess that I was pregnant. All my life she’d always been able to divine the truth. She somehow knew about the first time I visited Planned Parenthood (“I’d rather get you an appointment with a proper doctor”) or the first time I used a fake I.D. (“Should I refer to you as ‘Joanne Knista’ from now on?” she’d asked, peering down at the card I had no idea how she’d found, her bifocals perched low on her nose). This was the only time she didn’t know what was going on with me.

“Still,” I said, “of all the stories to tell.”

“It’s my favorite.”

“It’s so sad.”

“No, no it’s not. It’s glorious.”

I knew that if my mother were healthy, she’d delight in her grandchild. She’d insist that I didn’t know how to parent correctly, that I’d need to hand the baby over to her until I learned. I could hear her instructions: Cradle his head in the palm of your hand while you bathe him; always dress her in layers; make sure he wears socks; don’t start cereal too soon; potty-train before she turns two otherwise you’ll have a fight on your hands.

I yawned, hoping she’d notice. It’s something she would’ve pounced on before. “What’s wrong with you?” She’d demand. “It’s not normal to be so tired all the time.”

When my mother said nothing, staring out into the gloom of her bedroom, I started to cry. She misunderstood. She thought it was the story.

“Why cry? Look,” she whispered, “at what you did. At such a young age. You didn’t even know.”

She always did this. She defined me. To her, I was always the baby held up to the window, the marvelous sight that kept two young people together.

That’s when I did it. I wasn’t ready for what was going to happen. I still wanted her to know everything.

“I’m pregnant,” I said.

There was a moment, a second only, when she reacted. She knew how long she had. It was just a slight ripple of emotion—her lips quivered, her eyes fluttered. But that was all. She controlled herself before I could feel bad about what I’d done, before I could regret anything. She clapped her hands together, the most energy I’d seen her expend in weeks, and then she smiled.

Of course the next day she forgot about it. She was taking massive amounts of morphine to control the pain and she just couldn’t hold onto what I had told her. But that night we stayed up late. I whispered so that she wouldn’t realize how soft her own voice was. We talked about the baby. We dreamed up names. She said, “Kate.” I asked, “Why Kate?” She said, “Because you look like someone who’d have a Kate.”

Return to Volume 3.2

All files © 2005-2012 Blood Orange Review