The piping on the red snowsuit was yellow, and on the green snowsuit it was blue: fire-engine red, sunflower yellow, summer-grass green, deep-ocean blue, the palette of preschool, the colors in a set of finger paints. I loved everything about those mail-order snowsuits—the snap-off hoods, the ribbed cuffs—but I especially loved the piping, which ran, as thick as a pipe cleaner, across the yoke of each jacket and down each leg of the pants, like the stripes of a military uniform. Just what I’d have done if I’d sewn them myself. It made the boys look like soldiers from different regiments. The red-and-yellow brigade of the two-year-olds, the green-and-blue brigade of the four-year-olds. I still dream about them—the snowsuits, the little boys.
I sewed my first son his first snowsuit when I was pregnant with him, in the middle of a hard and terrible winter, the ramp-up to Y2K, the much anticipated end of the world. He wasn’t due till the very beginning of April; it would be spring by then, thawed, even blooming. Still, wouldn’t he be cold? He was coming out of me: didn’t he need something to go into? I bought a yard of Kermit-green fleece and a matching zipper, and I stitched for him that sort of star-shaped sack Maggie Simpson wears. (Most of my ideas about parenting came from Marge, fretting beneath her blue beehive.) The zipper ran from the left foot to the right shoulder. I sewed on little flaps for his tiny hands to be tucked into, like letters into envelopes. I tried the snowsuit out on a stuffed bear the brown of the bark of a sugar maple. We named the bear Elly, for Eleanor Roosevelt, and I carried her around the house in her new fleece suit, practicing.
The doctors had to unzip the baby out of me. I couldn’t push. Maybe I didn’t want to, I don’t know, I don’t remember. When I was trying to deliver him, my best friend, Jane, was on her deathbed, more than a hundred miles away. We were historians, counters of years, markers of time, so this spring, twenty years since that day, day of birth, day of death, I opened her computer, to honor the anniversary. We’d bought our first laptops together when we were in graduate school. It had taken her forever to pick out hers. No one hated change more. She dreaded disappointment like a disease. She was also superstitious: she hated jinxing anything with her own expectations. She spent eight months deciding on what kind of a phone to buy when her old one broke—not a smartphone, not a cell phone, mind you; this was a mere landline telephone—and when she got sick we were working on the three-year-long decision of whether or not she should get a dog. Her own decisions paralyzed her, but she was immediate and fierce with her advice to me, which never varied: my chapter drafts were always good, my haircuts always horrible.
A Macintosh PowerBook 160: she’d left it to me in her will, along with her books, but it had sat, plastic and inert, a thwarted life of the mind, her mind, a mind that I crammed into a box and stored in the back of the cupboard where I keep my fabric, yards of cambric and calico and gingham. So this spring I yanked it out of the cupboard and hauled it out of the box. I plugged in a power cord attached to an adapter the size of a poundcake, but when I pried open the laptop sharp bits of steel-gray plastic broke off like chipped teeth, and the hinges cracked, and the screen fell away from the keyboard and dangled, like a mostly decapitated head, the Anne Boleyn of Apples. I propped the screen up against the wall and pressed the power button. It made that noise, the chime of Steve Jobs’s doorbell, but nothing happened, so I pressed a bunch of keys and fussed with some parts that seemed to move, and I cursed, until my fourteen-year-old figured out that I had set the brightness to black. He fixed that, and the screen blinked at me, as if blinded by its own light, and then a square Macintosh-computer face turned into a thick black arrow pointing at her hard drive, which, I discovered, she’d named Cooper, for my old dog, a lame yellow Lab, long since dead and buried.
All historians are coroners. I began my inquest. I hunted around this tiny-screen world of black and white, poking at the membrane of her brain. I clicked on a folder named “personal” and opened a file called “transitions notes.” Microsoft Word version 5.1a 1992 popped up, copyrighted to the kid in graduate school we’d pirated our software from; she’d never updated hers. “Transitions” turned out to be notes she’d taken on a book published in 1980 called “Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes,” by William Bridges, who’d started out as a professor of American literature, a scholar of transcendentalism. She was always falling for this stuff, stuff I hated. The endless therapy, the what-color-is-your-parachute quizzes, the courage-to-heal to-do lists, the lifelong self-examination, the bottomless well. Bridges ended up a management consultant, an adviser to C.E.O.s engaged in downsizing. Transitions? Joblessness. “Jane, that stuff is crap,” I’d say, and she’d smile, and shrug, and go back to her book, Oprah for intellectuals, Freud for feminists, mother yourself, the latest claptrap.
I blinked. “Endings are like little deaths,” she’d written in her notes on the Bridges book. “We forget that they can be entrances to the beginning of a new life.” The computer began to bleat, a rumble of distress. The screen flickered, blindingly white, and then faded to black, and so, it embarrasses me to say, did I.
The one time I lost a baby, I was alone, in a bathroom. I hadn’t even known I was pregnant. I remember the color of the linoleum on the floor where I fell, beige, and the pattern, veined, and then the blood, and the tissue, a swirl of red and white: red-wine red, egg-white white. I remember the pain and the cold, I was so cold, and the membrane, diaphanous and wet, and the first convulsion of grief, and the second. I don’t remember the rest.
I do remember that Jane took care of me afterward. When I got married, Jane stayed with us in a two-story cottage on an island. On the morning of the wedding, as everyone was getting dressed, a near-hurricane hit. The iron garden furniture flew away. Upstairs, one of the skylights blew open and the rain came pouring in, onto the wedding dress I’d sewn from a bargain bolt, brocade. Jane had just come out of the shower, but she reached up and pulled the skylight shut with one outstretched arm while, with the other, she held up her towel. “I’m the Statue of Liberty!” she screamed over the howl of the wind.
We met the first week of graduate school, when I gave her a ride home from a department picnic and she tested my knowledge of music, a test I failed. She was the sort of person who could draw anyone out, talk about anything, and forgive everything except pretension and pettiness. She was almost immoderately charming; she was irresistible. Go to a restaurant with her, and in five minutes she’d find out where the waitress had gone to high school. Go again, and she’d remember the name of that high school, and would pick up the conversation exactly where it had left off. Stop to get your dry cleaning with her only to discover that she knew the names of all the dry cleaner’s children and the titles of their favorite picture books, and that she’d brought along another book, as a gift. She was dauntingly brilliant and she knew when to speak up, and who for. She had as many bad girlfriends as I had bad boyfriends. She loved to eat out and hated to eat in, and if she had you over for dinner she made you pasta with tomatoes, basil, and feta. She had an opinion on any movie. She had a crush on John Cusack. She loved to run. She drank coffee at any hour. She adored Jane Smiley. She was terrible at tennis. She had thick, curly dark-brown hair and very silly eyebrows and beautiful brown eyes, and she wore glasses that she called Official D.C. Congressional Intern Eyewear—round, wire-framed—and she’d had them since the nineteen-eighties, when they were a thing, but she was too attached to them to give them up. She was possibly the funniest person I ever met.
Jane knew everyone; I really only knew Jane. She was older; I was hungrier. “I trust her with almost everything,” she’d typed about me into her computer, but there wasn’t much else about me there, which was a relief. For most of the time I knew her, in the nineteen-nineties of Bill Clinton and Catharine MacKinnon, liberalism gone wrong, feminism gone bonkers, we talked on the telephone maybe half a dozen times a day, like ladies in a nineteen-seventies sitcom, Mary and Rhoda, Maude and Vivian. We discussed lunch: tuna fish or egg salad? We talked about what we were reading: Martin Amis, Zora Neale Hurston. We compared the soundtracks of our days: Richard Thompson, Emmylou Harris. We analyzed people. “He’s a good egg,” she’d always say about someone she liked. We talked about politics, elections, the war, all wars (I was writing about war), my dog, her cat, aids, Anita Hill. There wasn’t much need to write to each other, although we once spent ages composing and revising a forty-word ad that she was determined to post in the back pages of a newspaper. It’s still lurking in her computer:
big-hearted cynic w/spiritual leanings & roving intellect
Seeking similar, for friendship.
She tried Zoloft. She tried yoga. She kept the rain off me but it always fell on her. All I could do was write; writing was what she could not do. The year I finished my dissertation, she left graduate school and spent a year at an ashram. “It’s as if I am looking at my work through the wrong end of binoculars,” she wrote to me, after we started e-mailing. I found on Cooper the hard drive a file called “future visions,” from 1995, a picture of what she imagined for herself in two years’ time: “Clearly arrived somewhere, or at the very least, well on the path to getting there.” She wanted to finish her dissertation. She wanted to become a writer. She wanted to have children.
How do you do it? people sometimes ask me, people often ask me, people always ask me. And why: Why the books? Why the babies? Why the essays? Why so many, why so fast? What’s the rush? Where’s the fire? Jane is the how, the why, the rush, and the fire. She never got to do any of the things we both wanted. Only I did.
I found a file of commonplaces, her favorite thoughts typed out in one long poem. Virginia Woolf: “Wander no more, I say; this is the end.” T. S. Eliot: “I said to my soul, be still.” By 1997, when she hoped to have arrived somewhere or, at the very least, to be on the path to getting there, she hadn’t. She’d fallen into another depression. “I can’t imagine spending my life fighting this,” she e-mailed me. And, as it turned out, she didn’t have to.
A folder labelled “cancer stuff” contained a file called “treatment options,” with this list: cord-blood transplantation; mixed chimeric/mini-transplant—Cytoxan up front, ATG, radiation to the thymus; chemotherapy—azacitidine; full mismatched related transplant—full-body radiation, course of idarubicin/Ara-C preparatory to infusion of donor cells; haplo-identical transplant, T-cell depleted, full course of chemo and radiation. Those were her very rotten choices.
She’d found out she had leukemia right about when I started trying to get pregnant. Her cells divided. My cells divided. Our selves divided. I’d taken her to the E.R., that very first night, when she felt woozy, really woozy, scary woozy, but, even as she lay in a bed beneath a blanket made of paper, shrinking, she’d ended up engaging the doctor on call in a midnight analysis of the comparative narrative strategies of Quentin Tarantino and Spike Lee, and wondered whether they knew some of the same people in Tenafly, New Jersey; did he have cousins there? I was with her through terrifying treatments, each new unavailing misery. And she was with me through ultrasounds and feeling the baby’s first kicks, each new impossible joy. She wrote to her doctors in August of 1998, when I was in my first trimester, and she was considering an experimental bone-marrow transplant, “How is ‘success’ defined? Is it simply living through the procedure?”
She lived through it. But living through it was not the definition of success. When she was sure she could not survive, when her doctors had given up, she decided to refuse to die until my baby came; she would wait to meet him, and only then would she let go. She wanted to wave to him on some kind of existential highway, driving in opposite lanes. It was like a game of chicken. Due date, death date—it gave a whole new meaning to the word “deadline.” She tacked to her corkboard a passage from Edith Wharton’s “Backward Glance”: “In spite of illness, in spite even of the arch-enemy sorrow, one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways.” But that, Jane, that is crap.
This resolution brought her unbearable pain, and it broke me. If I’m honest, the resolution wasn’t entirely hers. I think I must have asked her not to die before the baby came. I probably begged her. I don’t know, I don’t remember. The whole year is a near-blackout, except that I remember how each day carried my baby closer to life and her closer to death. I put her through this, I put her through this. I sank to my knees under the weight. But she’s the one who suffered for it, was flattened by it, flayed and tormented by it. After a bone-marrow transplant from her sister failed, she left the hospital and went to live at our friend Denise’s house, or, not to live there but to die there. On April 1, 1999, at a Passover Seder, Jane ate a bite of the matzo and the maror, the bitter herbs, the bread of life and the bitterness of affliction. The next day, she could no longer speak in sentences. “She tried and was frantic at first and what came out were words that almost made sense,” Denise told me. My contractions had started. I went to the hospital. And I tried as hard as I could to push, but it felt as though I were pulling Jane to her death. Mainly, I screamed. They unzipped him out of me and sewed me up. Friends took a picture of the baby the minute he came out, a Polaroid, it slipped out of the camera like a tongue from a mouth, and then they ran down the hall and out into the parking garage and drove that hundred miles, childbed to deathbed. They showed Jane the photograph—she couldn’t really see by that point, but Denise says she knew, she knew, she saw, she knew, she heard, she smiled—and then she died. She knew, she heard, she knew. Did she know? I don’t know.
Twenty years ago this spring, I put my baby in his Kermit fleece and carried him out of the hospital. No one knows how these things will strike you, before they come to you, and I’d never taken care of a baby before, but I loved everything about it, everything about him. “When can we have another one?” is the first question I asked my doctor. I’d won a prize for my first book, a book about war. I didn’t go to the award ceremony. I could not leave my baby. People were very mad at me: why wasn’t I more grateful? I went to Jane’s memorial service instead, and delivered the eulogy, with my little frog.
The feminism of writers who are mothers is a fetish, but the motherhood of scholars is forbidden. When my son was four months old, I tried going to a conference. I missed him too much. I made a rule: no more conferences. People were very mad at me: didn’t I take my professional responsibilities seriously? I got an e-mail from a fellow-scholar who accused me of being an intellectual manqué. Didn’t I want to get out there, hobnob, curry favor, court support, mix it up, do battle, become a gladiator? I did not. I got pregnant again and I dragged myself through the writing of a second book, figuring that either I’d get tenure or I’d quit. Jane would understand. I wrote in my acknowledgments about my oldest son, ridiculously, and regretted it when a reviewer mocked me. I adopted two new rules: never again read a review, and never show your colleagues your soft belly, ever.
I got tenure. Jane used to slouch around in a big black parka in the winter, with mittens I’d knitted for her, going on about her unfinished dissertation. She’d walk like Groucho Marx and slap her mittens together, with mock resolve. “I’m going to write a chapter this week!” she’d announce, never meaning it. She loved nothing more than a baby. I missed her like crazy.
I stitched quilts for my boys, Bear’s Paw, North Wind. I bought them those piped snowsuits, the red-and-yellow one and the green-and-blue one, and knit them matching hats and mittens. I pushed them all over the city in their double stroller, their snow boots kicking out from under crocheted baby blankets, and I’d tell them stories about Jane. I pictured her scooping them into her arms. “She’d have eaten you up like English muffins,” I told them.
When it was too cold and blustery to walk them to their day-care center in the stroller, even with the snowsuits and the blankets, we had to drive the car. I’d pack their snow pants in a canvas bag, bring that to the driveway, and then carry the boys out, one in each arm, and buckle them into their seats, and we’d pretend they were astronauts. Once, after I backed out and started driving down the street, the car staggered, and I thought it was stuck on ice and snow. Then the rear of the car started smoking. I pulled to the side of the road. I’d run over the canvas bag; it was trapped in a tire well and was burning. I tugged it out and smothered it with snow. And then I collapsed sobbing on the sidewalk, staring at the red and the yellow and the green and the blue, turned black, as if the children themselves had been in a terrible accident, the piping broken open and white as bone.
I went to California to find out about a job in a place with no snow. I was writing a book about slavery. A professor whose work Jane and I had read together in a graduate seminar arranged for me to meet him at his apartment, because he wanted to show me his collection of rare books. “He’s a bad egg,” Jane had said, long ago, but I’d forgotten why. He showed me his inscribed first edition of “My Bondage and My Freedom” and told me he knew all about the size of Frederick Douglass’s penis and the smallness of the vaginas of the white women with whom he had affairs. “Picture it,” he said, stroking the spine of the book as he moved closer, pressing himself against me. I later learned that he’d been banned from campus. I felt sorry for him, in his sad, lonely apartment with his beautiful books and his grubby wretch of a self, or else I would’ve decked him. I decided against California.
I took a different job and moved into a house closer to preschool, so we could always walk, and never have to take the car again. I finished the book. I had another baby. Book, baby, book, baby, book, baby—another rule. I stitched another quilt. I started writing essays. I wrote about everything I thought Jane might ever have wanted to, but never did, never could, never would. I read books at Little League games. I wrote at the kitchen table, among piles of homework. I once went over a piece with a fact checker, wearing headphones and hollering above the sound of street traffic, while riding to soccer practice on a tandem bicycle with a ten-year-old boy behind me who punched me in the back after the fact checker asked me about the shape of an anatomical paperweight on a desk in a Planned Parenthood clinic and I shouted, “No, it wasn’t a vulva. It was a uterus. What? No. It was a uterus! ”
I suffered only for being so blessed, and for my cowardice. I dodged fights, I held my tongue, I minded my rules. Do the work. Deliver on deadline. Don’t sweat the nonsense; you’re not dead. I kept Jane’s picture on my desk. Once, when I was walking home with a new baby strapped to my chest, my oldest son holding my hand and their brother squirming in a stroller whose underbelly was crammed with lunchboxes and library books, I ran into a colleague I adored. “Hey, how are you?” I asked. “So busy,” he said, shaking his head importantly. “So much to juggle.” He rushed past. I waved goodbye.
That baby never took a bottle. When he was a newborn, he nursed every forty-five minutes. Once, even though I was on maternity leave, I agreed to go to a meeting with a university president, because he’d asked for my opinion about something important. “Please let him know that I have to leave after forty minutes,” I told his secretary. “Or else I will leak,” I whispered. He arrived twenty minutes late and started talking, holding forth, and when he didn’t stop I finally interrupted him, reminded him that I had to leave, and offered my dissent.
“Professor Lepore, few people have the audacity to interrupt me,” he said, “and fewer still have the temerity to do so in order to disagree with me.”
I decided to stop hiding my soft belly. Fuck it.
Ten years after Jane’s death, the beginning of the age of Obama, we had a big birthday party. Ten candles, cowboy hats and popguns. The next day, I went to the library where I’d deposited her papers. I opened up the archival box, expecting to find her. She wasn’t in there. I flew to Michigan to interview a man who freezes the dead. He couldn’t let go of people, either. For a long time, I wore her old, too-big shoes. I’d borrowed her gumption. It got as thin as a slipper. It’s got thinner since.
Another ten years passed. Twenty years: a generation. The boys don’t wear mittens anymore. Their feet are much bigger than mine, even bigger than Jane’s. But I still miss their baby feet, and their patter, and the piffle of childhood. I reel at a baby’s cry. I swoon at strollers. I don’t understand why all the love songs aren’t about babies. I wrote a very long book, a debt paid. I am tired of writing books. The books had always been for Jane. She heard, she knew. Did she know?
When my mother was the age I am now, and her children had grown up, she decided to clean the house, purging it of everything no longer needed: the cots in the attic, the board games in the basement. Somehow, she managed to cart to the dump an old coat box filled with the baby books she’d painstakingly kept, each book jacketed in a different shade of pastel, each page a clutter of annotations and photographs and locks of hair finer than thread. She’d thrown away the record of our childhood. She never forgave herself. But I’m not so sure it was an accident. My mother had been ambivalent about motherhood in a way that I never have been. It had confined her. It had saved me.
My friend Jane, bighearted cynic with spiritual leanings and roving intellect, loved ideas and books, and she loved babies, but she had a particular weakness for teen-agers. Her mother died when she was sixteen, and she loved to watch people grow up and get past that age, and become stronger and better and wiser and glow bright and soar, like an Apollo rocket, to the moon and stars. Me, I have never understood what can possibly come next, here on earth. Why aren’t all the sad songs about children leaving home? I keep a box of my sons’ little knitted sweaters, cable, Argyle, zippered and buttoned, sunflower yellow, fire-engine red, in the closet where I’ve decided to stow Jane’s computer, black and white and gray and mute and dead. It will not power on in the year 2029. Wander no more, I say; this is the end. ♦
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