Loving Katya

Loving Katya,

When I arrive, Katya is in labour, softly moaning to herself while rocking back and forth on the edge of the hospital bed. Hovering behind her, Mischa is smiling at me in welcome, thankful that someone else is here. His nervous hand gestures and silence tell me he isn't at all sure what he should be doing.

I give him a big smile and hello and then move towards the bed to give Katya a gentler hug and kiss and then smooth her forehead a little bit, whispering encouragement into her ear. Her white/blond hair is fanned across the pillow and starting to curl from perspiration. She clasps my forearm with more strength than I knew she had, but it's fine. We've both been working out since we turned fifty, and my arm is now as strong as her hold on it.

I stand by the bed feeling a little foolish about the things I've brought along. Little bags and baskets of pleasures that I thought might make things easier for her--hand lotion, a hot pack, some crystals from Crabtree and Evelyn that work as smelling salts, a bit of chocolate and a board game. A board game? What was I thinking? I can see it's too late for any of that, but I hold up these treasures and she smiles anyway, not wanting me to feel bad. Mischa says she's been in labour for hours and it isn't getting any easier. I wish she'd called me earlier, but she wouldn't have called at all unless I'd insisted. She is someone who could do this entirely alone if she had to and then remember it as easy.

I look around the room--what they now call a birthing room--and notice the pine furniture and soft cream and maroon wallpaper, a rocking chair, and a small sofa where I sit down and put the bags on the floor. Music is playing from an old ghetto blaster that they brought with them, softening the harshness of the light coming through the window. Still, the classical music creates an odd backdrop to primitive sounds that are getting louder now, making me want to lie down on the bed with her and hold her while she screams.

But I can't do any of that now. She is Mischa's wife, and this is going to be his baby and his responsibility. I can't take that away from him today of all days. At the best of times he seems so childish, so helpless, so dependent on Katya for everything in his life that I often overcompensate, doing things for her that make her feel as though she's loved and cared for, because I know he either can't or won't. And she does the same for me, bringing little gifts and making tea from time to time when things at home are off kilter and I've sobbed the details into the phone.

Watching Mischa now I worry that he won't be up to helping her through the labour or dealing with the baby once they get home, and I feel a lump forming in my throat. All I can do now is try to find a balance between what he is not doing and taking over completely while we wait for the baby who will be named after me--Julia.

Katya says Mischa was a prodigy as a child-a mathematical genius who was working on his Ph. D. at 15 or 16 with people who were 15 or 20 years older than he was. I've seen the photographs of him with his old schoolmates who all look like grandfathers now, while at 40 he is still young and vibrant. He himself doesn't see anything odd in this age difference, but Katya and I think it's sweet if not a little bit sad, too. This is her third marriage. I'm on my second.

My husband J. C. (Juan Carlos) came to this country as a political refugee fleeing from a dictatorship on the other side of the world and met me when I was teaching at the Centre for Victims of Torture, where he spent his time learning English among other exiles who spoke the same language but had other things in common, too. We got married while he was in the middle of his refugee claim, something I suggested myself even though he said he "didn't want to mix things."

I think our husbands loved us when we met them, but they were also ripe for us and our own motivations, for marrying them went beyond love. In some ways, they are our little coups in a world that is so focused on youth and beauty. They make us feel both young and victorious and come from cultures that revere older women. Our accomplished older daughters and our May/December marriages are something we have in common that we like to talk about. But in most other ways, Katya and I are totally different.

We first met when already fluent, but a perfectionist, she registered as a student in my English as a Second Language class after arriving here from Moscow. I liked her right away, but as I began to find out more about her, I was occasionally intimated by all of her successes which made mine feel so small. Not that she bragged about them because she didn't, but in everyday conversation it turned out that she was a former athlete (cross-country skiing--something she refuses to do now even for fun, remembering all those years as a special kind of torture) as well as an aerospace engineer who had designed the interiors of rockets as part of the Russian space program. None of my friends is a rocket scientist and despite my own advanced degrees, success as a journalist and now as a teacher, these accomplishments of hers made me feel like I hadn't done much in the same time period.

Sometimes we love to say we are 50 in that way that Mick Jagger is 60--much younger and cooler than that number would suggest--and our husbands go right along with it. But the truth is we worry about aging long before they do, keeping them interested, and whether or not our little jokes about our "trophy boys" are pathetic attempts to hang on to our fantasies about ourselves before they all blow up.

Over the last few years we've become very close, our husbands have become friends, and we spend a lot of time together. She and Mischa are like family to us now with their own families so far away and ours scattered across the country, only seeing them for Christmas, funerals, or weddings.
***

When I hear another louder scream and see Mischa's look of helplessness mixed with tiny beads of sweat forming on his upper lip, I approach the bed again and suggest he go out for a smoke, maybe pick up a coffee in the cafeteria on the way out, and take a break. Poor Katya is beyond noticing the change of guard, but she looks happy to see me as I rock and kiss her, something like a smile forming through all the pain and tiredness. She touches me lightly and fleetingly; but when I put a hand on her brow, pushing the damp hair away and whispering in the same way I do when I talk to babies and kittens, she waves it away as though it's a fly and I try not to take offense.

When the nurses come in they are perky and efficient, chattering on about this and that as though this is nothing unusual--giving birth at this age in a new country with a child/man by your side and a new best friend. For them it's routine, and if they looked any less cheerful we'd think something was wrong. At the same time, they are annoying, and I want them to leave. The doctor is nowhere to be seen on this Sunday afternoon, but will eventually be here to take a look, see how much she's dilated, whether things are going well or not, whatever it is they do in these situations. I remember my own labour as a private thing and really can't remember seeing the doctor until moments before my own daughter was born.

I am lulled into a trance by the music and the nurses' chatter, and now that they have taken over, I am not entirely sure what to do with myself. I'm part of this, but I'm not; I think she wants me here, but maybe she's thought better of it now and doesn't. Finally, Mischa returns and perhaps sensing how I feel asks me if I want to videotape the rest of the labour. This is something I'm comfortable with, video and photography being such a huge part of my life, so I am relieved to be doing something I feel confident about as I start playing with all the little buttons and dials. I'm not familiar with his equipment, the latest state-of-the-art as always (although everything else they have seems old and used). But that's fine because it gives us something to talk about as well as a new focus, and I begin to film the scene in front of me. Mischa timidly waving, nurses bustling about while turning to smile into the camera, all to a soundtrack of the classical music mixed in with the occasional ambulance coming or going outside, their sirens working into a crescendo and then falling away.


When the doctor finally arrives, I find him young and arrogant, comfortably making himself the star of this drama. A little harmless flirting with the nurses, a casual nod towards me, then speaking to my two friends as though they are kindergarten children in the way that people do with people whose first language is not theirs. Where they come from, being a doctor isn't any more important than being a clerk, so I try to imagine what they are making of his quasi-rock-star status here, watching the nurses quietly defer to everything he says and does, suddenly becoming quiet and respectful. Sitting on a stool between Katya's legs (his own splayed like a teenager's), we wait for some kind of news while he pokes and prods.

I watch the minutes tick by on the country kitchen clock on the wall, willing the hands to speed up and make something happen when the doctor announces that the labour is in earnest now and the baby will shortly be born. Trays of instruments appear on a little table which is then placed in-between Katya and the doctor who asks me if I want to get in there with the video camera because the baby is crowning. I'm surprised he's allowing this, maybe he's not the arrogant little prick I thought he was after all, and I watch him move out of the way to let me pass. I've never seen another woman's vagina up close before and as the little camera whirs in my hand, I find it's beautiful--my fingers responding to the nurses' voices by tripping the shutter in time to their cries of push, push, don't push. Push.

My reverie is broken by a long scream, after which I hear the doctor shout, "No, sounds. No sounds." Even in the middle of her agony, Katya catches my eye and we almost laugh out loud together. One of our private jokes is about having to stay muzzled most of the time to keep our relationships intact. This pretty much sums it up: our eyes are telling each other, and I don't know whether to laugh or cry. No sounds. I want to kick him off the stool, smash his head against the floor, and deliver the baby myself--sounds or no sounds. He is a prick after all, although he eventually follows these words up by telling Katya it will be harder to push if she's screaming. A woman of course would have said that first. And gently.

Julia arrives crying her tiny heart out, so much so that I worry there is something wrong; but everyone is smiling and laughing so I do, too. And when I finally see her miniature scrunched-up face, I fall in love with her. Her mother is so exhausted by now she seems to hardly notice the writhing little girl on her chest. But I can see her, and I want to pick her up and hold her to my own breast. Suckle her. Let her shriek. Suckle her. Let her shriek. Isn't that we all want?

Afterwards, outside on the steps where we've gone to let Mischa have another smoke, J.C. arrives and we tell him a little about our adventure, but also that Julia is a beauty and he just has to see her. I know he's glad he missed the labour and the birth as hospitals make him nervous after his Mom died in one when he was barely a teenager, but he's happy to troop back in with us to see the baby for himself.

While we wait in front of the nursery window for a nurse to hold her up and show her off I think about how happy I am to be standing here with two men that I care for so much. But then J.C. asks Mischa what he's doing the next day, and I'm agitated. How about a game of squash? he says. Squash? Mischa nods assent, but I interrupt them to say I think Katya's going to need Mischa here tomorrow. She'll be going home with the baby. Chagrined, they both seem to realize the foolishness of this idea, but I know they'd like to go. Boy/men. They are so young and beautiful, but sometimes I want to weep at the sight of them.
***

Lying on Katya and Mischa's bed with her and Julia, I feel perfectly content. She's breastfeeding the baby and likes to talk to me while Julia suckles and we have some quiet time together without the baby crying or the demands of looking after Mischa and J.C. Their demands are not about cooking and cleaning, but rather giving them the attention that they both crave, neither really having other friends or family that they are close to. They are out somewhere together now so it's just "us girls" as we like to say, and now there are three of us. Here on this bed with my closest friend, I feel most at home in my skin. It's where I am, I think, really myself. At home things are good but not like this. I have to watch what I say between the language barrier and the fact that J.C.'s Latin background and a stint in a South American prison have given him a hair-trigger temper that doesn't take much to set off. Mischa's temper is more in check, but he's another perfectionist who spends a lot of time nitpicking about things that don't matter and Katya also has to hold her tongue or they'd be fighting even more than they already do. But she and I together create a kind of peace for ourselves that doesn't exist anywhere else.


On afternoons like this we talk about everything and nothing--the small things and the big things. We have a little fantasy that we call the Big House. In this house we live together with Julia and other women friends of ours, some of whom have children and some who are on their own. We imagine ourselves like those women who lived and worked together during the wars when all the men were away, learning things they never thought they could learn like how to unplug a sink permanently or work on a car.

It's not that we don't like men--we love them, but it's never all the time the way we love each other and now the way we love Julia. We'd like men to be a part of our lives in the Big House, but only sometimes--those times when they can bring their better selves with them. We imagine huge dinners we will cook on weekends when the men come to visit, after which we might go out somewhere with them in couples or groups, and if we want to sleep with them, they can spend the night. And then they leave. Sometimes we wish we were lesbians, even though the few we know seem to be locking horns half the time, too. Maybe sexual love just isn't meant to be 'round the clock.

Some days Katya cries in my arms telling me how little attention Mischa pays to Julia, how he can't stand her crying or waking him up in the night, refusing to help with even the smallest tasks so she can sleep. I know she had this baby for him who had claimed a little family would make him happier than anything else in the world, but now that his baby is here he just wants her to be quiet and not interfere with his work on the computer or his plans for ice fishing or squash dates. Katya looks exhausted and so much older than she did just a few months ago when her beautiful face was lit up like Christmas with news of the pregnancy and she carried herself like a Russian czarina. Now her eyes are hollowed and dark and her hair is a mess, stringy and unwashed. She's not taking care of herself anymore and insists on breastfeeding when if she would stop at least I could take the baby for a while as she catches up on her rest. But no, this is her way. Everyone else before herself, and there's not much I can do to change things.


She has begun to refer to Mischa as a monster and can barely stand the sight of him now. Applications for Julia's passport are flying through the mail to various embassies here and there. She wants to go home. Home is love--home is mother, children, friends, and language. She weeps into my hair telling me how sorry she is--how she will hate to leave me here without her, but that she has to do something, can't take anymore of anything, just needs to be suckled by her own.
***

We write, we email, and sometimes talk on the phone as we try to keep our friendship strong, but it's different now. Sometimes Mischa comes for dinner, looking lost and a little bit older. He doesn't know why she left or how to get her back. J.C. doesn't understand it either, but I think is quietly thankful that he wasn't put to the test, himself. And so am I. He's what I have now, and I'm trying to make the best of it.

While I'm loving Katya.