The Needle with Both Hands

Always fatal, Tay-Sachs disease affects only Eastern European children. For R.N.B. Over the waves of his chest, you watch the sun go up, again. How accidentally the birds cross it! How seemingly accidental. What random choices led you to him—your darling from the same steppes as Zhivago's, and your own. Then he's dressed, and you're almost. Leaning over, he pulls your slip up to put his hand over that fat part of you, where swims the swimmer. Enter Tay and Sachs, two men good at identifying a certain kind of certain death due to a certain mix of genes of children with certain parents. Today you go to determine your chances, rather, its chances, all euphemism unable to cover the chance red spot on the growing retina. After your doctor has his way, you can see on the screen the little swimmer trying to escape, holding the needle with both hands, just reflex. The verdict takes time to swell and ripen. The doctor offers his only balm, a curse: knowledge without antidote. All you know is that the immortals throw no bones, that you inherit nothing but genes and bravery, both faltering. You trot back to work and your new belly swirls with the fetal pig you took the eyes from, grade ten. To market, to market. You pull your goddamn shrinking coat around you. Nothing like the stir of life that has no chance. You shrug. It’s only the size of your finger, you don’t care— But knowing at the end of ten hours’ pitched screaming, your insides reversing, you get nothing— What goes where with death? You know all about life. You majored in biology, pirouetted through the wedding night. Does it make sounds yet? Choose happiness but accept the truth: the child might die, you tell your husband. Suffer and die. In the three-week wait you type and each hammer moves the days along. Waiting, every word from everyone hurts, every Good day, careless or concerned, every word. The only sympathy you want is the same cruelty shared, all else grates. Inside, it spins—in fear? What you must swallow is the sugar cube of your continuing, the inescapable desire to pee that stirs you mornings, hours before dawn. But if, at the end of these weeks of waiting, the white-masked priests come back bearing no news, which is their best, you will have brushed off death, rimed him bright and acceptable and seen it slant. Either way. That is, what happens doesn’t matter. You eat. You lie down. The sun shrinks. The daily din you’re thankful for rescinds its paper currency that nothing backs up. Your husband puts on a pot to boil, and another. He can’t feel it inside, though he’s eaten the same sour apple, bearing half the genes, those underclothes, the bra, the brief of the body. You are dumb before his helplessness. The cord to belly to cord will not be broken, ripped untimely as it may be. Mama has happened and the rocking horse of your heart heaves on.