The baby—we didn’t yet think about him as someone with a name—was a week late, then more, then more, and when I went to the doctor’s office to lie down on her little cot with a view of the back garden and read decor magazines, the little monitor on my belly said, Nothing doing! So I went into the hospital and they put a little pill on my cervix and said, This is to soften your cervix. In the morning we’ll start the pitocin and then you’ll have a baby. I had gone into the hospital with a hilarious assortment of things, hoarded crossword puzzles and a mix-tape I had made years earlier to listen to while running, a book of Elizabeth Bishop poems for David to read to me, and bottles of water. Pillows, changes of clothes, a journal. One thing I didn’t have, though, was snacks, and as I lay there in the hospital and nothing really seemed to happen in the fifteen minutes after the pill was administered, David became hungry, so I said, Why not order a pizza?

He ran out and got his favorite pizza, which had breaded and fried eggplant on top. It smelled so good that I asked him if I could have a little bit. And it tasted so good that I had a little more. Then my contractions started.

Hmm. Maybe that eggplant pizza was an error.
Hmm. These crossword puzzles aren’t holding my interest like they used to.
Hmm. Could you please turn that fucking music off?

The pain was neither a hum nor a whine nor the beating of a drum, it was my whole body grinding into itself, breaking itself apart.

When they came to the door to see if I wanted an anesthesiologist, David said, as per our prelabor, earnest, hopeful discussions, that we were going to wait and see how things went, and I said, Get the nurse back and tell her I want the anesthesiologist right now. By the time the dapper male French anesthesiologist arrived, I was sitting in my old black camisole, pantsless, ready to do business. I leaned forward and he found the space between my vertebrae. We chitchatted a little. I lay down.

Then David and I entered the very nice period, during which we both dozed, on and off, and David read me some Bishop poems. He may have read “Little Exercise,” which starts:

Think of the storm roaming the sky uneasily
like a dog looking for a place to sleep in,
listen to it growling.

It’s not one of her saddest poems, not even close, but as David read, each word sounded like a bell whose tone grew deeper and sadder with each stroke. As I listened, I felt a kind of vertigo from the depth of sadness I was able to feel, as if I were standing at the edge of something, looking down, not seeing the bottom. At the end of the poem I said, It was beautiful, but it is too sad, and he put the book down.

The story continues. It can’t stop! The doctor came in, wearing a short red dress. More people came in, crowding the room. I left the room for another room. I remember even the hallway, I remember being wheeled through the hall. The blood, the pain, then, afterward, the bureaucratic calm—I remember it all, even though I’m not, for various reasons, going to tell you about it, now. This is the story that is closest to me, that is most part of me, even though you might think, reasonably enough, that this story belongs to someone else.

When Henry was born the nurse said, Drink lots of water so the milk will come in and I did, I drank liters and liters of water. I drank beer, too—we were in Belgium and everyone believed that beer was good for milk, and I drank Champagne—friends brought some to the hospital room, since everyone knows that Champagne brings your milk—and after all of this my breasts filled like balloons and felt as if, like balloons, they might burst.

Henry was, for his part, a very hungry baby: He ate frequently, seriously, until my nipples bled and I cried while he ate and cried thinking about him eating. Even after this period was over, when I could feed him comfortably and my breasts were merely enormous, they were enough to inspire a man passing me, as I carried Henry in his Baby Bjorn down the Chaussée de Waterloo, to shout after us, Il a la chance! I shouted back, in French, What? He repeated himself, and I understood that he meant that my baby was lucky to be lying there, resting on my breasts. Then I knew that the things happening within my body were not there for me, or even for my son, but for the interest and education of the world.

dog Pronunciation: \dȯg, däg, (regional) dawg\ Function: noun Etymology: Middle English, from Old English docalakadoo Date: before 12th century. Definition: Mythical beast well-loved by everyone, useful, bringer of pipe, slippers, Freudian in concept, embodiment of the id that draws forth the superego; also can be seen as an abyss of neediness filled with shit, covered with hair. Adorable. Loves chewing on things. Four legs, tail.

What we know about the dog:
She is hairy
She wants love
She eats snow
She shits all the time, or three times a day, depending on your perspective
Nothing is ever enough for her
She will jump on you
She will follow you home
She will eat your dinner
She will lick your toes or your socks or anything salty, so watch out
If something drops on the floor and you don’t want to pick it up and it is edible, she has her uses
She can be killed by a chicken bone
She pisses on her own bed, then slinks off to avoid punishment
Some children are frightened of her
She submits
She is not a person
She doesn’t understand
She will never read a book, even a simple book
She is dumber than a chimpanzee
I don’t believe she is capable of the creative act
She is my responsibility
I can lock her in a cage
She likes her cage
She doesn’t hold grudges
She snores

What we don’t know about the dog:
What her purpose is
The meaning of her
Whether or not she is preposterous
Why she pissed on her bed the other day and what will stop her from doing this
How much we would spend on her medical care

What we sometimes imagine about the dog:
That she sits in judgment upon us

Henry had a piano recital this Saturday. It was his first, and for it he wore a shirt that wouldn’t stay tucked in and a visage that said, Please don’t talk to me I am very close to vomiting. I should mention that on Thursday morning I slipped on the ice of my driveway, banging my head hard against the ground. I got up. I went inside. I felt all right. But then, in the kitchen, putting the dishes away, I started noticing little fragments of thought, little pieces of memory, little familiar ideas, or dreams, and couldn’t figure out where they had come from. I wanted to follow them up, follow them to where they had started. The light was gray in the kitchen, cold and dim, and I suddenly realized I was standing there, frozen, trying to make my way through my own brain. At the hospital they took a film of my brain and the neurologist, the next day, said I had suffered a minor brain trauma. I was better within a day.

Still, or so, there was a crystalline quality to Henry’s recital that I have rarely felt anywhere. The room was vivid, the colors intense, the light golden and warm, in contrast to the darkness outside. The children who were performing sat in a section by themselves, away from us, and so I could only see Henry from a distance, and I felt him strongly there, away from me. David and John and I sat with Henry’s babysitter and her husband, and my parents, and my youngest sister and her boyfriend. My childhood friend and her family were there, also, to hear her older son play.

Most of the children were unknown to me, but as they took the stage and played their pieces it seemed that they were saying something important about themselves. My friend's son, one of the youngest, played simply and well. Henry played seriously, making a line out of the music, as his teacher had told him to do. One little boy, dressed neatly, sat down and played some crazy Romantic rhapsody badly, but with such enthusiasm that you knew something within him had been waiting for this music. A little girl had so many problems with her Clementi that I felt my father, sitting behind me, grow worried, and sad. The last girl to play, the oldest player there, played two pieces flawlessly, so beautifully that it pierced through the lights, the colors, the darkness outside, through the skin of the evening, and into its heart.

When I was younger I gave little thought to maintaining myself, keeping track of myself, keeping myself together, because I had no idea that I was dissolving, and that I would find, thirty, twenty, fifteen years later, that this younger self was an apparition, familiar to me because we shared memories, but otherwise increasingly, unknown. I should have written everything down, is one thing I think today, is one thing, in fact, I write down, but maybe seeing my younger self on paper would have increased my distance from her. Maybe it would have embarrassed me, and made me turn away. In any case, part of younger self’s charm, don’t you think, is that she hadn’t yet thought of these things? That she was so dreamy? That she imagined life as something that would happen to her, and that she imagined she would drift through this happening and find herself essentially unchanged on the other side?

My grandmother didn’t die suddenly, but I was far away, and very pregnant. I found it hard to let go. When my son was born I believed, privately, and without any system of belief, that she had been reincarnated in his form.

My son had curly hair and a head that, at least early on, drooped forward on its slender stalk.

In my dreams I changed my grandmother’s soiled pants.

They both loved me.

I’m not suggesting these things are evidence. There was no evidence for the belief, nothing that couldn’t be explained easily, gently, plausibly by my own psychological needs. Once, crossing the Chaussée de Waterloo after my grandmother’s death, but before my son’s birth, I passed a woman I was convinced was her spirit. She didn’t even look at me. It didn’t matter.

Now we’ve moved to a very old house. It was a farmhouse, and then a school, and then a private house again. It is porous, open to pests, and sometimes because of this and sometimes for other reasons, it creaks and rattles. The doors are blown by empty breezes. We moved here when our younger son, who is not my grandmother’s reincarnated soul, was less than one year old. He started talking soon after we moved in, which surprised us. One thing he liked to say when he and I were in his bedroom was that he saw people, sometimes behind me, always when there was no one there. At first I was, against my will, alarmed by this. It was nonsense, I told myself. I would not allow myself to imagine anything. But later, after I understood to what extent our house was infested with animals, I welcomed ghosts. I wanted to believe in them. I prefer ghosts to things, and to nothingness.

I am a dog I am a dog I am a dog I am a dog. I am an old dog, so old I died three weeks ago. They didn’t want me to die, they didn’t want me to go, so they took me to the veterinarian. The veterinarian couldn’t say, "Put him to sleep," or they couldn’t hear him, so they gave me steroids, and steroids are amazing things. They couldn’t bring me to life but I do walk around now, lifelike. Skeletal. My fur is soft.

This is from before my time—there is no reason I should know this—but when the hamster died they didn’t bring him back to life, they laid him in a box, they took the box outside, and they tried to dig a hole to bury him. The ground was frozen and they couldn't. Then they became distracted by something and they put him on a fence post and went inside. He sat in his box on a fence post until spring. I will die before spring, and they will burn me up. Salt sticks in my paws. I am gone, or almost gone.