I watch his eyes, the movement of them as he scans the story. Moving left to right. Dropping down to read the next line. But his eyes are lowered, gazing down on the newspaper and so I can’t see much, none other than the lashes and the lids. He bites a lip. He bites hard so that the pain of the lip overrides whatever it is he’s feeling on the inside. I do that too.
He reaches for a cup of coffee set on the marble edge of the raised bed. I read the corrugated sleeve on the cup. A coffee bar on Dearborn. I’ve never been there before, but I know the place. I’ve seen it before.
And then he gets up to go, and I ready myself to make a move for his seat. He slips an orange baseball cap over the brown hair, though as he goes, he leaves his newspaper behind. Because he’s sad. Because he’s distracted.
He walks away and I notice a shoe is untied, the cuff of a pant leg stuck in the shoe’s tongue. He leaves it there. For a second or two I watch him go.
But then, standing and making my way to the raised bed, I call to him, “Sir,” while grabbing the newspaper so that the wind doesn’t have a chance to scatter it around the garden. “Sir,” I call again, “your newspaper.”
But he’s walking away and before I can run to him, something leaps off the page at me. It grabs me by the throat so that I can’t speak and I can’t move. I’m frozen in place, a bronze statue like the lions who stand before the Art Institute, guarding its entrance.
There on the top of the newspaper is Mom’s beautiful face. Her beautiful brown eyes and brown hair, both watered down by the black-and-white newsprint.
Her obituary. The one I put in the paper because I needed the world to know she was dead. To solidify it. To make it real. Because only then, when it was written in print for all of the world to see, would I believe it.
This man. The sad man sitting in Mom’s and my spot in the garden. He was reading her obituary.
He had the newspaper folded so that Mom’s face was on top, and it was these words his eyes spanned as he bit his lip so that he wouldn’t cry.
Mom’s obituary is what made this man sad.
I read over the words. Mom’s death notice, which was brief because there wasn’t a whole lot of information to provide. No memorial service. No one to send flowers to.
The final line reads “Eden Sloane is survived by her daughter, Jessica.”
My legs lose feeling. I go slack jawed. Because there’s one word on the newsprint that the man has circled and it’s my name. Jessica.
eden
July 12, 2003
Chicago
The park is named after some poet, I’ve come to learn. Though no one pays attention to things like that because, to most people, it’s just a park where kids romp around on the playground and, on the other side of a chain-link fence, boys play basketball, the repeatedthump,thump,thumpof the ball on concrete a steady refrain. They’re older boys mostly, teenagers, and they spout from their mouths a flurry of curse words at regular intervals, and I feel grateful Jessie is still too young to know what any of it means, though she pauses from time to time to watch them. To just stand on the playground and stare.
There are baseball fields off in the distance, and on the other side of a bridge, a path that snakes along the river where she and I sometimes walk, but not today. Today she played on the playground, and for the first time ever, found a friend. Not the kind of friend we’d keep in touch with after today or invite over for a playdate. No, Jessie and I don’t have those types of friends.
Rather she’s the kind of friend who, for fifteen or twenty minutes at best, is a bosom body. A soul mate.
I watched as Jessie and the little girl chased each other in dizzying circles, up the stairs and down the slide. Again and again and again. As far as I knew, they never exchanged names. Because that’s the way it is with kids. Uncomplicated. Straightforward. Easy.
There was no one else on the playground but the two of them, and the only ones sitting on the periphery of it were the little girl’s mother, pushing a newborn in an old-fashioned buggy, and me. It took some time, a few awkward glances my way, before she rose from her own park bench and came to mine, standing before me, offering a hello. I too said hello, staring down into the buggy at the infant sound asleep beneath a yellow blanket.
“How sweet,” I said.
The baby, Piper, she told me, was twelve days old, born on the first of July. The woman moved guardedly, as if in pain, and I didn’t ask before she told me, “Piper was breech,” telling me how her baby was fully intent on entering the world feetfirst. “The doctors did everything they could to change that. But no such luck,” she explained, sitting softly beside me on the park bench and describing in too much detail what a C-section is like. The incision. The surgical staples. The scar she’d no doubt have. She lifted the hem of her shirt then so that I could see it myself, and I blushed at the sight of her still-pregnant belly, at the bloated butterfly tattoo that sat just inches from the healing incision, at the canvas of fair skin. She was oversharing and I blamed the newness of childbirth for it, the fact that to her it was still fresh. The only thing these days that occupied her mind.
“With Amelia it was different,” she admitted, and I made the easy assumption that Amelia was the older of the two, the little girl, maybe five years old, who Jessie made a train with at the top of the slide—wrapping her skinny legs around the midsection of a girl she hardly knew—and together they catapulted down to the wood chips below, landing on their rear ends, laughing. “Twenty-some hours of labor, three hours of pushing,” she said, going on far too long about the gush of water when her membranes ruptured, like the pop of a water balloon. Her, worried only that she might poop on the bed, as one of her girlfriends had done. The broken blood vessels left behind on her face from hours of pushing, thin, red veins that snaked this way and that across her skin. Some doctor she didn’t know delivering her baby. Her breasts engorged, her unable to produce milk following childbirth. Having to relent to formula, which her mommy’s groups abhorred.
I felt uncomfortable, if I was being honest, about this sudden revelation of information from a woman I didn’t know. But it dawned on me then that this is the type of thing women do, this is the type of thingmothersdo: share their experiences, swap stories, foster camaraderie.
She looked at me expectantly, as if it was my turn to share. She was quiet, watching me, and when I didn’t respond, she prompted, “And your girl?” and I knew then that I must tell her something, that I must offer up some version of the truth. I pictured those wide hospital halls, the glaring lights. “She was a vaginal birth?” she asked, that word alone—vaginal—making me turn redder than I was before. Because these were the kinds of conversations I didn’t have. Intimate. Friendly.
Most of my conversations ended at hello.
I felt my head nod without my permission, and I knew I must say more, that a nod of the head alone wouldn’t suffice.
And so I told her about the hospital room. I told her about the huddle of people who gathered around me, the nurses clinging to either of my legs, encouraging me to push. Incanting it in my ear—push, push—as I gathered handfuls of bedding in my hands and bore down with all of my might. The epidural had worn off by then, or maybe it was never there to begin with. All I felt was pain, a pain so intense it was as if my insides were on fire, about to rupture. I was certain I would soon explode. A hand stroked the sweaty hair from my face, whispering words of encouragement into an ear as I screamed, this crude, ugly scream, but I didn’t care how crude or ugly it was. The nurses wrenched on either of my legs, stretching me apart, making me wide.Push, they said again and again, and I did, I pushed for dear life, watching as that flash of black spilled from inside of me and into the doctor’s gentle hands.
