Smile: A Memoir

CHAPTER 1

Twins

Ten years ago, my smile walked off my face, and wandered out in the world. This is the story of my asking it to come back. This is a story of how I learned to make my way when my body stopped obeying my heart.

But this story begins with hope—the very particular hope of a birth to come. I was lying down in a dressing gown, cold gel on my belly, waiting as the lab technician looked for a heartbeat. I already had a three-year-old girl, and was expecting my second child. I was also expecting to have a play I’d written to be performed on Broadway in five months, and was slightly nervous about the potential collision of two kinds of abundance.

Suddenly the lab technician pointed to the screen and said, Do you know what that is?

No, I said.

I flashed on the ultrasound I’d had before miscarrying my second pregnancy, when the obstetrician had said the fetus looked not quite right and probably wouldn’t last. Don’t, like, go out and get drunk, though, she had said in a tone not quite teasing, just in case it’s viable.

Uh, not to worry, I had said, wondering what gave her the impression that I would go out and get wasted that weekend.

So this time, I feared the worst as I lay there, nervous, while the lab technician squinted at a screen I could not see. Look! she said, pointing. There was movement, a heart beating, it seemed to me. A heartbeat, that’s good, I thought, but what was wrong? Why was her brow furrowed? Was she alarmed, or, wait, was she pleased? Did you use fertility treatments? she asked.

No, I said.

Well, she said, you have twins!

Oh! I said.

Do twins run in your family?

No, I said. My mind raced to keep up with my body.

You can go to the waiting room, she said. I’ll give you a list of new providers. We can no longer be your ob-gyn because your pregnancy is now considered high-risk.

This was a great deal to absorb—that I had two babies inside me and was also now considered high-risk, so much so that they wanted to get me out of their SoHo office as soon as possible before I got preeclampsia and sued them.

I got dressed. I happened to be alone for this appointment; I had planned to meet my husband afterwards for lunch, where we would celebrate if there was a heartbeat, or commiserate if there was not. Now I was sorry I’d come alone. I wanted to tell my husband, Tony, the news immediately, but it also seemed strange to reveal such big tidings over the phone.

So I texted him: Meet me at Gramercy Tavern instead of at Rice.

Twins? he texted back.

Gramercy Tavern was closed for lunch. Tony and I went to Rice, as planned. We were both in shock; Tony, on top of the shock, evinced buoyancy, elation. Coming from a family of three siblings, he’d always wanted three. Being from a family of two, I’d settled on two. I’d even, at one point, settled on one, when I read in an Alice Walker essay that women writers should only have one child if they hoped to remain writers. With one child you can move, wrote Walker. With more than one you’re a sitting duck.

At lunch, Tony and I talked about how my miscarried child had wandered back, not to be excluded from this birth. We talked about how we would manage with three. I told Tony my fears: that my body could not contain this much abundance and that I’d never write again. He said he had faith in my body and mind.

At the end of the meal, I got a fortune cookie. I cracked it open. It read: Deliver what is inside you, and it will save your life.

Everyone seemed jubilant about the news, but I was overwhelmed. I found myself feeling vaguely sick when thumbing through books about multiples in the pregnancy section of the bookstore. There were pictures of breastfeeding triplets, and I didn’t want to know about all that. It struck me as grotesque, as though I had once been a woman but was now hurtling towards becoming full mammal, all breasts and logistics. I worried that I wouldn’t be able to give enough attention to my three-year-old, Anna. I feared that my body wouldn’t tolerate two babies; I feared that my writing wouldn’t survive three children.

I called my mother with the news. I gave off a scent of How can this have happened?

My mother paused, then said, Well, your great-aunt Laura had twins.

Why didn’t I know?

They were stillborn, she said.

Twins run on the mother’s side, skipping a generation. Poor great-aunt Laura, whose heartbreak I never knew. Somewhere in Iowa in the 1950s she buried two babies on the prairie and never spoke of it. I imagined their graves on some grassy plain. I wondered whether Laura gave them names; Laura was dead so I couldn’t ask her. The ghosts of my great-aunt Laura’s babies would haunt me for the rest of the pregnancy.

When I told friends I was having twins, I was as apt to cry as to laugh. My dear friend Kathleen, a playwright, from a large Irish Catholic family, comforted me, saying, I love big families. Small families are so boring in comparison. Kathleen had already raised two daughters, and had shown me all the ropes, talking me through potty training and tantrums. Her most comforting phrase was, I’m sure it’s just a stage. At this seismic news she said quite simply, I’ll help you. And I knew she would.

Three months pregnant and terrified, I visited my former playwriting teacher Paula Vogel and her wife, Anne Fausto Sterling, an eminent feminist biologist, on Cape Cod. They said, come, we’ll grill fish, we’ll take care of you. Paula is the reason I write plays. She has the ferocity of a general in battle, the joy and humor of a street performer, and the tenderness of a mother. That week, she entertained Anna with tissues she made into a puppet. Anna laughed with joy. I was quiet. Paula observed me. What’s wrong? she asked. She gave me her conjuring, summoning look.

Will I ever write again? I asked her.

Yes, you will, she promised. I looked out at the ocean. This was the same view Paula had shown me years ago, when she’d invited her graduate students out to her Cape Cod home, entreated us to look out the window, and say to ourselves a mantra—This is what playwriting can buy.

My first Broadway play was supposed to go into rehearsal that fall; I was not only pregnant, I was extra pregnant. What luck, what abundance. All this bounty, why am I not happy? I thought.

And my mind went back to the fortune cookie: Deliver what is inside you, and it will save your life.

Did it mean that my life was imperiled, and if I didn’t deliver the babies speedily, the pregnancy itself would kill me?

Or did it mean something more metaphysical?

All through the pregnancy I thought, How could my children possibly save my life?

It would take me a decade to find out.

CHAPTER 2

Opening Night

Me, pregnant.

That fall, I sat at rehearsals for my play In the Next Room, or the vibrator play at Lincoln Center with my widening belly under the table, watching the actors, and frequently snacking on crackers. I fantasized about the Actors’ Equity breaks that come in two-hour intervals, so that I could pee or buy more food. I was the amount of showing where you just look sort of ambiguously fat, not unambiguously pregnant. I wondered if I would even be sitting at a rehearsal table once I had three children under the age of four.

Wearing a strange, green, roomy sweater, I put my arm around a luminous, slender actress for a photograph; she was so small it was as though my arm looped around her waist twice. And I smiled for the cameras.

Nerves are tricky for a playwright the week before any opening, but for Broadway openings, they are nearly impossible. Add being pregnant with twins and feeling like your belly is about to fall through your vagina onto the floor, because your second trimester actually feels like your third trimester, and your third trimester feels like some imagined fourth trimester that can’t possibly exist, and what you have is a kind of temporary psychosis.

The week before opening, I was busy doing press interviews. Reporters kept asking me about the nakedness onstage. The play—ostensibly about the history of vibrators—is really about marriage and intimacy. In the play, a woman who has just had a baby is married to a nineteenth-century doctor who treats women with hysteria using the newly minted vibrator, at the dawn of electricity. She begs her husband to treat her, though she herself is not hysterical. At the end of the play, the doctor is naked, in the snow. After the whole play, in which he has barely seen his own wife, he finally sees her, and is seen by her.

I was surprised that the reporters kept asking about the slight bit of male nudity onstage, when the rest of the play treated erotic matters like the orgasm (though under bloomers and sheets). Why the fixation on nudity? I wondered. The journalists told me the nudity felt in your face and endless. I was bewildered. I found the nudity subtle and of short duration. And this is New York City, I thought. Why are journalists shocked by male nudity? Would they have been as shocked by female nudity? Would they even have noticed it? Female nudity onstage often seems like a directorial grace note, whereas male nudity is shocking. We are not used to looking at the male body onstage, and we are definitely not used to looking at male nudity through the eyes of a woman.

In the last week of previews, for the sake of variety, I sat in the audience on house right for the first time rather than in my usual spot on house left. From this new vantage point, I finally processed the fact that the actor playing Dr. Givings was full-frontally exposed for an impressive five minutes during the leading lady’s last soliloquy. Having sat on house left all this time, I’d seen barely the shadow of a male member. But here he was house right in all his glory, distracting the audience during the last moments of the play.

When the leading lady called me to complain that no one was listening to her last monologue because they were mesmerized by the leading man’s penis, I thought I had better fix the situation.

The director was recovering from a migraine, so I took it upon myself to raise the issue of the leading man’s penis and the sight lines.

I called my beloved leading man, Michael Cerveris, and told him that the leading lady felt upstaged by his penis, and he said, Unfortunately, my penis is on the same side of my body as my face.

I raced into rehearsal the next day, still intent on helping to adjust penis sight lines, and the stage manager gave me a stern talking-to. He told me to go home and rest. I was incredulous. The ending of my play was at stake, and I should rest up until opening night? Yes, he said, rest up.

That week, I waited, napped, and worried.

On opening night, I put on a tentlike navy blue maternity dress with sparkles on the collar. My mother, my mother-in-law, Tony, and I arrived at the Lyceum Theatre, Broadway lights aglow. I squeezed into my seat. The penis sight lines were unchanged, but the leading man was beautiful and honest and unafraid. I got through opening night without drinking a single glass of champagne. Here are Tony and me that night:

At the after-party, we learned that the reviews were good, more than good, really; and the actors were ebullient. We all rejoiced.

The day after opening night, I realized that I was bleeding. From the place you aren’t supposed to bleed when you are pregnant. I remembered the couplet I’d written when I’d had a miscarriage earlier in the year, and the melody started to go through my head, a worried mantra:

Every month, women practice for this, casual loss as a regular thing—

women bleed in private like animals; men bleed in public like kings.

I called my doctor and told him I was bleeding. Stay home, the doctor said.

Stay home? I asked, incredulous. Yes, stay home, he told me. In bed. For the next four months.

CHAPTER 3

Bed Rest

This is a chapter about boredom and entropy. And being forced to stay inside. A chapter in which I plan to finally learn Greek and read all of Marcel Proust in bed but instead I start reading the Twilight series on my iPhone. This is the chapter in which time passes.

I asked my friends to visit and bring books. They cheerfully submitted, bringing bales, boxes, bags of books. All of the books appeared to feature dead twins. Little Dorrit: dead twin. I threw it out. A book by Ian McEwan: mention of a dead twin. I threw it out. I wondered about the literary obsession with dead twins and dead mothers.

Sometimes I thought gloomy thoughts about the miscarriage I’d had the year before. I had been at a playdate with Anna, and thought I smelled strange. We had left the playdate and passed several foreheads covered with ash. Ash Wednesday. I remembered how I got home, unloaded groceries, felt a strange pulling sensation, yelled, Oh! and went to the bathroom where I saw blood and understood what was happening. Then there was more blood.

Full of grief, I proceeded to watch 30 Rock as much as possible in order to laugh, and to eat as many Tibetan beef dumplings as possible in order to get my iron levels back up. Eventually, I tried to get pregnant again. I told very few people about the miscarriage. When I did, I found that a large number of women friends had also lost babies. Why didn’t we tell each other? I thought. Why did we protect one another from our own grief? Was it superstition? Privacy? Shame?

Now, on bed rest, I knit a crappy little blanket that would never cover even the tiniest baby, let alone two. My daughter’s never-failingly normal and cheerful preschool needed a volunteer to cut out hearts for a Valentine’s Day project. I was grateful for the task. They sent Anna home with a little packet with scissors and construction paper for me. I cut hearts in bed all day. Pink, purple, magenta—I took out a small scissors and followed the heart-shaped pencil lines the preschool teacher gave me. I was proud of my work.

I felt guilty for not valuing more deeply the free time spent in bed (Don’t most busy people fantasize about some time spent in bed?) but the whole concept of time was losing all meaning and value the more I did nothing. Value or time, I thought. If you live in New York City, you might find yourself at the subway ticket machines, in a hurry or in a stupor or both, staring at the words Add Value or Add Time. Before being on bed rest, I had often swiped my MetroCard that read insufficient funds and then stood stock-still, staring at those alternatives: Add Value or Add Time.

I have always been confused by these two options, which never fail to glimmer with existential meaning: Do I prefer Value or Time? But isn’t time value? Could I not have them both? A subway car often came by while I contemplated this question: value or time, value or time, time or value…

And then, invariably, I’d choose value over time because I often lose things and I’m afraid if I buy a month pass (time) I will lose my card. In the end, I am afraid of losing time, so I choose value.

Oh, what naps I had in those days. The best pregnant nap (which can also be applied to nonpregnant naps) is metaphorically toasting yourself on both sides: I napped on one side for an hour, then flipped, toasting myself on the other side until I was fully slept.

By napping, I cleaved the undifferentiated day into two. Like a ripe avocado cut into two sections, the nap divided the day into what was done and what was still to be done; and with nothing much to be done, it divided the day into the time that passed and the time that would pass. The pit—entropy—was discarded.

The contours of my sleep bled into the contours of the day—far from all the people outside who had business to attend to. Some Americans call a short nap a power nap because they think the nap itself must achieve something powerful. These are the same Americans who call a walk a power walk. What silly terms. Naps and walks may be powerful but their true power is in submission to the moment.

I would have loved to have Rip Van Winkled my way through the entire period of bed rest. I could sleep, grow a beard, wake up, and find myself surrounded by babies. But there were still about ninety days to get through. Time seemed not to move; it seemed to lose all value; but it did, in fact, pass.

That December, I hadn’t bled for a while but continued to worry about whether the babies would make it to full term. And whether I would make it with my body and mind intact. If it felt in my second trimester like my belly was about to fall through my vagina, in my third trimester, it felt as though my vagina was about to fall off. That makes no sense, you say. How can emptiness fall out of emptiness? Exactly.

Anna crawled into bed with me and played jumping games. I read the letters of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. No dead twins. I loved Bishop’s restraint up against Lowell’s expansiveness. I adored the borders of their solitude, and how they reached across to find each other. I thought it might make a good play. I read Twilight. I tried to bat away loneliness. There was a gulf between what was and what will be that I had all the time in the world to contemplate. A not knowing what I will be. What we will be when we are three…

The first snow came. Anna went out with Tony and made snow angels. I watched from the window. They collected snow in a purple bucket and dumped it in a hot bath. They