Week 36

Rose Wong 

My eight-pound belly and I are crammed in a rigid and thinly-padded coffer, held captive by two fixed armrests and the seat before me. Airlines restrict travel for women after thirty-six weeks of pregnancy, earlier for international travel. In my last week of eligibility, I return to the blistering Minnesota winter for my mother’s funeral. Art is six-foot-four and likes the aisle seat where he can stretch his legs slightly, while I take the window seat. I arranged for us to sit in adjacent aisle seats today. Twenty minutes before takeoff, the window seat beside me is still empty. I watch each passenger straggling down the aisle, hoping that they either stop before or walk past me. Art sees my desperate stare down the cabin and reaches across the aisle to take my hand. I love you, he says. I shift my weight to my right and cradle his hand in both of mine. I love you, too. One of the last to board, a middle-aged man holding a pet carrier decelerates toward us and gestures to the seat next to me, breaking our knitted hands.

I have nearly endured it all. Morning sickness, insomnia, hemorrhoids, bleeding gums, diarrhea, constipation, headaches, leg cramps, yeast infection, interminable fatigue. The most agonizing, so I’ve been told, is still a month away, and then a plump and perfect little thing. Complete from the moment she enters the world.

Pushing against the armrests, I sidle out of my seat and toward the back of the plane. I lean against the empty seat outside the occupied bathrooms, pressing my fist against my lower back and pelvis where the pain swells. A white woman with blonde highlights and a large-beaded rope necklace smiles and queues next to me. She observes my engorged belly and peach fuzz head. I watch the lock on the bathroom doors and tap my fingertips on the headrest and pretend not to notice her long gaze, my physical desperation for a stall to open. You look pretty far along, she says.

Yeah, just several more weeks now.

Are you sure you’re supposed to be flying?

I can fly until thirty-seven weeks.

Well, it’s not a bad idea for you to wear a mask.

A door grates open. I step before the empty seat for the man to slide past and slip in the stall.

This was not the plan. Neither was cancer. Two days after our wedding, I visited my doctor for a painless lump that had grown to the size of a golf ball on my left thigh. Then a CT scan, oncology referral, biopsy. A honeymoon in Japan delayed and then cancelled. The oncologist listed plainly the symptoms and risks of chemotherapy at our first meeting, and my incontrovertible need for treatment. Art and I chose not to delay chemotherapy to freeze my eggs and defend against possible infertility, one of those briskly fated decisions where no choice is wrong but neither feels good. He wanted children if I did and I wasn’t sure if I did. He was certain he needed me alive. I figured if we were meant to become parents, I would just become pregnant. Chemotherapy stopped my periods and induced temporary menopause. Doctors said it could take up to a year after treatment ended for menstruation to resume, if ever. And that there was no definite consensus on how long it would take potent toxins in the various drugs to leave the body after treatment. The general guideline is to wait between two months and two years before giving birth. Eleven months after my last chemotherapy infusion, I was pregnant. By then, many of our friends had already welcomed their first child. I ached for everything I had missed.

After months of silence, I called my mother and told her the news. Her voice surged through the receiver like an old intruder.

What? It’s too soon. You not ready. You not ready to give birth and be a mom.

Mom, like I said, it just happened.

This is a terrible decision. You will not be good mother if you make decision like this.

Her Chinglish once reverberated ceaselessly through my mind. I was in school then, before I learned to run. I am thirty now and my honey legs travel far. Winds roar against my ears and gush between my limbs, sweeping her shrill to a low murmur in the mind’s corner, as long as I keep running. How can I know if I’m ready? Will I know?

When I returned from the bathroom, the man seated next to me had let his cat out of the carrier and onto my seat for an impromptu photoshoot. The cat is seated upright, almost seeming to cooperate with its owner’s phone photography, with grey and white marbled across a luxuriously soft and long coat that I find myself tempted to touch. The man notices my lumpy frame and moves the cat onto his lap, which I’m not sure is allowed on the plane, either. He brushes his fingers through the cat’s fur as the plane begins sliding forward on the runway.

What’s his or her name? I ask. The cat turns, startling me with strikingly blue eyes.

His name is Flame, he says, smiling, glad for the opportunity to talk about the cat. I’m amazed by Flame’s serene air in the oddly enclosed space, which produces a deep hum as it moves.

He’s a very good boy, I admit.

           He is. All ragdolls are, but I’d like to think Flame is special.  

___

The closest I’ve been to being someone’s mother I had graduated from college and moved to D.C. for my first job. I worked for the local paper and lived with my best friend from my dorm. I stewed in the sultry summer till late August when I slid into a cramped room littered with feathery little things, eight weeks old and weaned from their mothers, licking and teasing and crawling over each other, desperate for the world and its warmth. I scooped my kitten up as quickly as my eyes landed. White, with black and brown streaked over her head and ears and tail and the sides of her body. A faint brown smudge besides her teeny pink nose. I held her butt as she leaned on my chest, warm and weightless. We looked at each other.

Dolci slept most hours of the day. She tucked herself in the crook of my shoulder, on my back under my knit cardigan, across my lap covered by the hem of my jean jacket as I wrote at my desk. It was hard to look away. The smiling slits of her eyes, pink beans curled under her chin. Round upturned belly, half pink and shaven. The waking hours were witching hours. She chewed notebooks and record sleeves, kicked rings and makeup brushes off counters and across the floor, hung from the limbs of our four-foot money tree till it withered to a potted trunk. I lifted and shook her slinky little torso in the air and threatened and then begged her to stop. I joked to Jenny, if this were a real Asian household, this kind of behavior would never stand, though I was unsure what I meant by it practically, even if we were a real Asian household. When I wasn’t home, Jenny played with Dolci, then deposited her in my room and shut the door. She bit my toes in bed until we had to sleep separately. She threw herself against doors I was on the other side of and dashed out of the apartment when I came home. We lived in an old house with five units, ours on the third floor. Fox News and electric guitar bellowed through the walls of the man living directly below us. Once George called our friend visiting from college a fucking cunt after she moved his clothes out of the single dryer in our basement onto a table. One night, Jenny and I smoked with friends by the window on the back stairwell and heard him shout SHUT UP BITCH! and then the sound of glass crashing to the ground. We put out the joint and went back inside. When I took out the trash the next day, I saw glass shards scattered in front of the garbage and recycling bins. Since then, we suspected that the Stella Artois bottles that often filled the building’s communal trash bin were his.

I chased Dolci down one flight of stairs and then another. She stopped and crouched on the ground and looked at me, bolting as I reached for her. Another flight of stairs, and then another. When we reached the first floor, she darted back up to the second and down and up again, resting briefly between flights, as I fretted after her. These hours grew longer. I realized I preferred her asleep. One day she reached the top of the kitchen cupboards. We looked at each other. Her features had sharpened, black and chartreuse eyes shifted apart and into focus. The brown smudge had spread and darkened across her left snout, like chocolate stained on a white shirt.

___

Ali Wong’s Dear Girls gapes on my lap. Am I ready now? I grip my stomach and look at Flame, who looks almost too regal to be benign, sweetly purring as his owner scratches his neck and watches some sort of war movie. The man notices a flight attendant approaching our aisle and pulls a blue muslin blanket from his backpack and drapes it over Flame, who seems entirely unbothered.

I’m surprised he didn’t react at all, I whisper, though the flight attendant was already out of earshot.

He’ll do anything to stay out of his carrier, the man says, unsheathing his cat.

I slide my book in the backseat pocket and lean forward, gripping my stomach tighter. How are you sweetheart? Art says and rubs my back. Cramps. I’m going to the bathroom. On my way I seize every aisle seat and avoid meeting the curious glances across my hunched and lumbering body. Fresh blood and mucous on my underwear. I have not bled since the first days of pregnancy. In ways, maternity feels like a continuation of chemotherapy. New routines and sensations, in response to therapy toxins or the body’s preparation toward ejecting another lifeform, intrude and roil through the mind and body, retreating only as new ones appear. Normal and harmless—unless otherwise. In the first two years of our marriage, Art shuffled me on a wheelchair between sterile white rooms, where I committed to memory: the constipation medicine that gave me cramps, the nausea medicine that gave me involuntary diarrhea. The first day I lifted my head from the pillow and a clump of hair starkly remained. My better arm for finding a vein. Life drained from my body till I was a sow to be tethered to a pole of drip bags, devoid of cancer and desire. I had not known how women realized they wanted to wreck their bodies and imprint their existence permanently on another human being. Then I became pregnant. I learned life could still spring from my body. I could create laughter and hunger and resistance, a beginning, part my flesh and that of the man whose gentle touch had refused my withering. I wanted to kiss and hold and cherish ours, to give her the best I had. A cause worth my body. I toss the scarlet-stained paper in the bowl and wash my hands. When I was young, I covered my ears after pushing the blue button to protect myself from the sweeping rumble of an airplane toilet flushing. I don’t remember when I stopped being afraid, when it wasn’t so loud anymore.

___

Our apartment lost power two days before Christmas. The cold stiffened my body and pounded on the side of my head. Dolci burrowed in a pile of blankets. Jenny checked the circuit breaker. I texted Daniel and Obie, our neighbors on the first floor, their apartments were fine. The landlord said they couldn’t send anyone out until after the holiday. Let’s go to a hotel, Jenny said.

Hotels don’t allow cats.

Should we try and sneak her in?

You know the imp doesn’t sit in a carrier for a minute without sounding like she’s dropped in a deep fryer.

Fuck. Yeah. Okay. Hear me out. The awful guy downstairs adores cats.

How do you know this?

He messaged me on Facebook a couple weeks ago asking if we had lost our cat and that he had seen a, quote, puckish little calico embracing life down the street. I was home so I knew it wasn’t Dolci. I stalked his Facebook and apparently he had a cat that died and never got over.

How did he know what Dolci looked like?

Maybe he saw you chasing after her.

I knocked on his door reluctantly. He peered through a crack of fluorescent light. I told him management wouldn’t send help. He opened his door wider. We need to go to a hotel, but we can’t take Dolci—I’ll take her, he interrupted. You’re sure? Absolutely.

On Christmas Eve, George sent me a video of Dolci chasing a ball across his apartment. This is the best Christmas present, he wrote. I was grateful Dolci seemed well taken care of, but his Facebook message made me wince. I did not want to fraternize with him. Thanks again, I replied. After we returned, he messaged, I’m sending her back up. He opened his door and let Dolci run up the stairs into our open apartment. I miss her already! She’s WELCOME again anytime, he messaged.

Dolci once brought me her plush dumpling filled with catnip. So sweet, a gift. When I reached to pet her, she grabbed and bit my finger. Leave me alone then! I yelped and hurled the toy out of the bedroom. She careened after it. I looked up from my book moments later and saw her back on my bed, soup dumpling between us. Jenny said her family dog didn’t even know how to play fetch. Dolci hardly tired, hurtling herself across the hardwood and sliding toward the target and sauntering back to me, prize clipped between her teeth nearly as big as her head. The rest of the time, she hung herself out of open windows and dragged her claws through my hair and walked on our food as we cooked. I forgot how I ever relaxed around her. There were instances when she would still fold herself on my lap and vibrate softly. I didn’t dare to move or touch her but studied into memory the formless design of brown and black bursts against soft white. Then one day she leaped on my media console and pushed my flatscreen TV to the ground and cracked the screen. She was two years old. I can’t believe you didn’t have straps on your TV, Jenny said. Well, I guess I don’t need them now.

How’s Miss Dolci? I miss her, George messaged in January. He suggested that she stay with him on the weekends. I stared at my cracked TV, then looked back at George’s message. Sure, I replied.

I relished moving through my home without disruption. I did not have to fend off Dolci’s intrusive paws while cooking or worry who would take care of her when Jenny and I took weekend trips to Annapolis and Shenandoah National Park. I evicted her from my mind when I was discharged from her care, repressing the relief I realized from her absence. Friends came over and asked where she was. She’s hanging out with our neighbor, I said and changed the subject.

George posted photos and videos of Dolci jumping after a bird on a teaser wand and lying in a patch of sun. On Sunday evenings, I messaged that I was on my way down and he sent Dolci up the stairs before I opened our door. He had his own litter box and cat tree and toys. After a month of the routine, he messaged that Dolci wasn’t eating enough, that she needed to gain weight. He sent a photo of dry cat food in a Ziploc bag on a scale and wrote that was the amount she should eat each meal. I’m going to pack for you the amount she needs to eat, he wrote. I didn’t respond but found a box with fourteen bags of kibble outside my door when I came home. Two weeks later, Jenny walked into my room with a bag of cat litter George left outside our apartment. He said clumping litter is bad for cats.

Jenny and I decided we would move to a three-bedroom apartment with another friend. George messaged he didn’t want us to move. I didn’t respond. Two hours later, he wrote that he wanted to keep Dolci if we had to move. I tied the kitchen trash and opened the door. Dolci bolted down the stairs toward George’s apartment, clawing his door.

I wasn’t ready.

Okay, I replied to George.

Three weeks before our move, Jenny called me to meet her outside the house. She pulled a box in the shape of a forty-inch flatscreen TV from the backseat of her car. It’s from George, Jenny said. I stared at her. He asked me to pick it up from Best Buy. Help me carry it up.

My face fanned open in thrill and bewilderment.

What are you saying?

George messaged me saying that you agreed to let him keep Dolci. He said a lot of things, that it’s not goodbye forever, that he wants us to come back and visit Dolci. He said he might move to Hawaii, but we could visit Dolci there and stay at his place and he could get a hotel room. Then he called Dolci his “perfect little devil” and I told him how she broke your TV. She said, giggling.

That’s so weird. Like, all of it.

I laughed, too.

I watched Lady Bird on the new TV while playing fetch with my own surly teenager. On moving day, I carried her to George’s apartment. This was my first time standing inside the pristine home. I wrapped my arms around myself. I preferred communicating virtually, letting Dolci commute between us on her own. His apartment was larger and less cluttered than ours, the living room primarily open space excepting a brown couch, a desk with two monitors, a rolling desk chair, a wood dining table, four wood chairs, and an electric guitar leaning against a stand. In a corner, a cat tree, an orange mesh cat tunnel, a nylon basket of small cat toys. I handed him a card. In it, I thanked him for the TV and for giving Dolci the home she deserves. This is not goodbye. You are welcome to visit anytime. And I can send photos, he said. I widened my eyes to keep tears from rolling. I didn’t want to give her up, but that was not a good enough reason to keep her, when someone else knew how to love her better. I picked Dolci up again. She leaped instantly out of my arms and dashed into her tunnel, where she remained until I left.

George messaged me a month later. Wow! Not one word from you regarding Dolci. Not surprised considering Asian attitudes toward animal welfare. I do not blame you, I noticed your mother when she was visiting and she had that typical CUNT face and you have zero chance to be a decent human. Feel bad for your father.

Btw: Dolci is happy and fed and enjoying the life she deserves.

___

Three hours is ceaseless inside a restless body. Every cramp makes me curl inside myself. I can feel the stale air and low hum of the plane smothering each orifice and pore on my body. I push back against my seat and lean forward and back again, desperate for space to let my agitation sprawl. The man doesn’t notice my predicament as he struggles to coax Flame back into his carrier. Daddy will be right back. He just needs to go to the bathroom. Real bad, he chimes nervously to his cat, whose yowls are increasingly long and high-pitched. Flame’s protests and the man’s failed attempts at gently shoving him into the carrier exacerbate my anguish, and I cast him a sidelong scowl. What cruel God would put the crazy cat man and agitated pregnant lady together on a flight? No, I should be grateful for the space I have! I am not large for a pregnant woman in her third trimester, or an average person who travels by plane. My obstetrician said women who were underweight or had a body mass index below 18.5 prior to their pregnancy should gain between twenty-eight and forty pounds. I tried to gain weight, eating three full meals, dessert sometimes, replacing long runs with light jogs. Art cooks or drives us to every craving. Ribeye. Congee with pork floss. Wonton soup noodles at Kenny’s Noodle House. His rich chocolate molten lava cake, vanilla ice cream. But I could not shake my mother’s squawk accompanying each bite, every glance and survey in the mirror. Gaining is far easier than losing will be. Art has loved me bald and bloated and that’s plenty.

Pain escalates in my stomach in crashing waves. I blink back tears and finally look at my watch, the thin hand’s frantic spin, the long hand’s ominous tick: my lower stomach and pelvis spasm every seven minutes, a minute each. I turn to Art. In vertical slumber, his mouth hangs slightly agape. I have to go. Can I get out please? The man asks me frantically, still holding his cat. I heave myself out of the seat to let him through, but first he pushes Flame onto my chest. I trust you, you’re a mother, he says, and dashes up the aisle toward the bathroom. A heavy cramp radiates down my stomach and lower back. I thud back into my seat, clutching Flame, who writhes in my grip. My chest drops and then races — I don’t know, I don’t know.