Fourteen years ago at dawn, Husband walks into a clinic. A nurse hands him a cup and points him to the jerk-off room. He doesn’t remember if he watched porn or flipped through magazines, but most likely he did not want to touch anything.
The results come back and they learn his sperm has a hard time getting through Wife’s cervical mucus to fertilize her eggs. Husband is relieved; he doesn’t want her to feel worse. He has no shame around this, but she does.
They will try for a year while everybody around them seems to be catching babies. Husband remembers this as a very dark time for her. He stresses the word dark.
As if to create some distance from a shrinking life, Wife starts to think of herself in the third person. Maybe it begins when they are trying to get pregnant, and certainly it lasts all the way through the pandemic. It will be over a decade until she finds her way back.
◆
Wife remembers dropping out of high school, moving into an apartment with two other teenagers, and inviting heavy-metal boyfriend to move in. It had all seemed like a fine idea, even if boyfriend requested that she—the girl—not look into men’s eyes when greeting them.
I don’t want them to get the wrong idea, he’d said.
There were other etiquette demands, but a condom was not one of them, and soon after, the girl would call Mother to rescue her.
It hurt badly, the nurse shamed her, but the girl knew her luck; abortion continues to be illegal in Brazil.
Heavy-metal boyfriend threatened to call the police on Mother, and so the girl left him. Maybe his penance was to forever carry her seventeen-year-old face on his arm, a tattoo he had offered as a birthday present.
Decades later he would find Wife online and share a picture of the daughter he eventually did have.
She reminds me of you, he wrote.
◆
An octopus mother will lay her eggs, cover them, defend them, never leave and never eat. By the time the eggs hatch, the mother has died. “Semelparity” is the name of this usually fatal and single reproductive event.
Husband and Wife do one round of IVF at the fertility clinic. Wife stresses one round of IVF because it feels a little less inadequate to her, than say, two, or three rounds.
She oscillates between gratitude—her health care covers this after all—and a shame knotted so tight it constricts her to silence.
This is greedy and unnatural, she thinks, a failure of a body that was made for this.
At some point, during this one round of IVF, Wife is told she has eleven eggs. Her ultra-charged fertility has her whole body signaling Now!—but intercourse is discouraged. It doesn’t matter, Husband and Wife have lost all interest in sex on demand. All she can do is simmer as science takes over.
At night, Wife whispers made-up prayers to her dead Grandmothers, to her dead Father, to the Saint Mary she is consecrated to—to anyone.
Please, I want this, she begs.
At the end of the eleven-egg cycle Wife is put to sleep, the eggs are removed, and combined with Husband’s sperm to be fertilized. The two healthiest embryos are transferred to her uterus.
An extra chance in case one doesn’t stick, the doctor tells them.
◆
I can’t have you here and be worried all the time, Mother told her. The girl was to be exiled to her Tia’s farm in rural Brazil, where the family would keep an eye out. First boyfriend would be twenty-one to her fifteen, and the girl would learn she was the prized girlfriend while he remained the gregarious philanderer as was his birthright.
Unknowingly, she’d stepped right into a family fable. Mother’s first boyfriend had also been the town’s bad-boy. Not much had changed.
First boyfriend was of Italian descent, and his mother cherished him and his brother with the undying devotion the girl had come to recognize as very Brazilian towards male offspring (and Italian, and Middle Eastern, and so on).
Two decades later, when Wife was pregnant with boys, her Tia would congratulate Husband for the “varões”—an expression for maleness like a cross between a boar and a knight.
The girl gave first boyfriend something of herself in his childhood bedroom; something was given and she doesn’t believe anything was given back. More than the sex, it was the doily under his bedside lamp that she remembered best.
A crocheted doily, cream colors perhaps, most likely with a religious message embroidered in the middle. Brazilian doilies go under ceramic water filters, or the fresh baked cake for your afternoon coffee. They might go under plants, the television, and always, under the Bible. Like punctuation.
◆
Perhaps it was a foregone conclusion Wife had not examined but somehow inherited. In the throes of what felt to her like a selfish, selfish impulse, the desire to have children, to simply make them, drowned out her logic, any logic.
Why populate a world barely able to provide? Less personal questions felt symbolic, theatrics of a mind turned sloppy in want. Wife felt captive to an impulse, annoyingly single-minded, and careless with their love.
She thought of the making alone, that first chrysalis of change. She did not ponder the years and years to perpetuate their errors, their dreadful anxieties.
Wife thought nothing of that. They would do it right after all.
For nine months Wife had three hearts. Sick as a dog but loving the heft and sensuality of carrying. Twins didn’t faze her—she’d long intuited their coming.
A woman at a bus stop whistled at her, Girl, you the mothership!
Yes, Wife smiled, I am.
When her water breaks, Wife wants to labor in movement and push on all fours but they put her on her back in an operating room, all bright lights and narrow bed and doctors getting in the way of her midwife. She pushes and pushes and grinds her teeth and when the world is splitting at its seam the first one comes out. He is crying and needing them right away, as he always has. Back in the womb his twin will stretch out, slow moving as he will always be.
An hour later she is pushing and terrified again that her body simply can’t do this. And yet it does, like all mothers before her. They welcome two boys at the dawn of the Arab Spring, in the first American city that will legislate reparations, when night and day are of equal lengths, their equinox twins.
◆
Strolling through a Chicago botanical conservatory with her then three-year-old boys, Wife had not expected to see a heavily fruiting jabuticabeira. Like so many tropical plants doing unexpected things, jabuticabeiras also fruit from their trunks; a misbehaving tree.
Jabuticabeira is the tree, jabuticaba is the fruit, and perhaps no one knew to eat them, or maybe it being the U.S. and all there were rules, but the glistening fat berries were ready to be plucked.
Wife takes the twins to the immaculate lawn of the immaculate park—these parks are still a wonder to her—and empties her pockets of jabuticabas on the picnic blanket. The shiny black berries taste like a cross between lychee, cherry and grape. Wife reminds the twins, you’re actually supposed to share a bucket full, and tells them they’ve done this before.
She tries to weave in Brazil as much as she can. This was my favorite tree to climb, she tells them in Portuguese. The twins have been to Brazil twice by then, and they remember these berries. Portuguese will be their language until they start kindergarten. They will then switch to English and not return. She will bring them back to Brazil many times over the years, until the pandemic changes their rhythm. Or maybe it is adolescence that does that. Or her new life.
She imagines the memory of jabuticabas pulling them back in one day, as they start to wonder about this place that they’re half from.
◆
There is a backstory here, of course, to how they became Husband and Wife. She wants to walk backwards to where the road splits and find where it begins. She chooses to say this spell begins in summer, as so many do. With summer air forgetting a long Midwestern winter. With the sounds of a neighborhood festival drifting in a stuffy attic room.
The heat would press her out, or the pull of something as summer does. The streets smelled of fried food and laughter, the occasional pop of a firecracker.
The girl saw him across the street. Boy not boy in the face, backpack full of beers, jeans ripped at the ass from some late-night shenanigans. He spotted her, adjusted the weight of his beers, walked over like he knew.
During the first five minutes, with no prelude, no context, he threw his head back and howled. And she knew. (Oh, please, this knowing. This chewed-up worn-thin trope.)
She had come to the U.S. for her graduate studies, did not yet know that she would stay, could not have known this was Husband-to-be.
After cheating on boyfriend with Husband-to-be, she would nickname him Lobo, for Wolf in Portuguese.
Will you wait for me while I go take care of my life? she had asked.
Of course, he answered.
It would always be a wonder to her that he agreed.
◆
Wife had imagined this twin pregnancy long ago, just not like this. Her babies are petri-dish babies and she continues to tell no one. The story she will stick to for all these years is not about IVF, but also a true story: there are generations of twins in my family, and I had always thought it was a possibility for me.
With a rising incidence of twin births, fertility treatments are often assumed and she also has a response for this: women are having children later so the chance of fraternal twins is higher. This is also not a lie, it is a circle around the truth.
Having left something out for so long she has to make an effort to even remember. She starts to write it down. Doesn’t know why it took so long.
Oh, she thinks with a smile, maybe I was busy with twins.
◆
Husband and Wife decide to have separate bedrooms when the children are three. She will always miss warming her feet under the furnace of Husband’s flesh, but that particular service had come with a full night of snoring unrest.
Separate bedrooms will soften the long haul, and make visible other default behaviors of coupledom. The story they’d thought was true would evolve. It would be tested. They will learn that marriage is a story they build.
Perhaps, you might think, separate bedrooms were a gateway to opening the relationship?
Maybe there’s something of a parable here, but Wife does not want to parabolize—a separate bedroom can just be a separate bedroom. It means they have their own space to retreat to, their own messes to tend, two different beds for sex, and that she can sleep diagonally on a bed as she likes to.
◆
There’s a ballet to climbing a jabuticabeira and keeping the buds intact, and if you’ve been careful, the little white flowers on the trunk and branches will transform into miraculous berries.
Mother’s childhood home had two symmetrical jabuticabeiras in the yard. The eight siblings would all claim a spot, careful not to nudge fruit off the trunks.
Wife’s oldest cousin tells her, all the cousins had their own branches too. But you were often not in the country, so maybe you don’t remember.
But she does.
The word jabuticaba is derived from the Tupi word jabuti, meaning tortoise, and caba meaning place. With the fruit growing on the trunk it was perhaps easier for the tortoises to reach them. The Tupi people inhabited most of Brazil’s coast when the Portuguese first arrived. Very few are left today.
Jabuticaba é um símbolo de família, oldest cousin tells her, before passing the phone to her mother—Wife’s Godmother.
I remember the stomachaches, and the jams we’d make, Godmother tells Wife.
Godmother has been losing her memory and will soon be diagnosed with dementia. Pain and pleasure seem to resist the erosion of time.
Oldest cousin will ask Husband and Wife to come to Brazil more often, or that Wife speak more Portuguese with the twins, and that she not forget to tell them stories of their Brazilian family.
After having children of her own, Wife will feel a void where her family should be. It takes becoming a mother to know this.
Caba means place and so does a tree.
◆
Pregnant twice in her life, Wife had two children. The first time she was seventeen and had an abortion. The second time around she was semelparous, putting all her available resources into maximizing two future lives.
For a female octopus, laying eggs is the beginning of the end. She will now decompose and feed the ocean floor.
The human mother will give and care more than she thought she had the energy for giving and caring, but this won’t kill her like a true semelparous organism. She will die a petit mort, not to compare motherhood to an orgasm, but a little death as a rite of passage.
Surrender was the best mother advice Wife was ever given. It gave her permission to slow, to release control.
Wife pictures her naked body slowly tumbling down a rocky ravine.
◆
The girl had first seen Husband-to-be when he played his last show with Died In His Suit. The name he’d given the band because he felt he was watching his father do just that. He played shirtless, his drumming contained and a rage.
The girl had just finished what would be her last tour. She loved playing the loud drone of their music, a blissful flow sharpened by repetition, like a flock of starlings moving in unison. But the somatic release of the stage was bracketed by a lot of waiting, by bad food, and worse sleep.
Husband had not wanted to end any of his bands, cried when they ended, punched a hole in the wall when the last one fell apart.
You walked out on all your bands, he reminds her, I didn’t.
Soon after they met, they packed their instruments and headed west, innocent to the fact that their instruments would stay packed. They did aimless years, made art, made plans, made children, and got a home in the forest. As if to shield them from the inevitabilities of time, Wife had once glued the objects of their beginning on an altar-like diorama. A felted tiger for when Lobo nicknamed her Kitty, photo collages, the ticket to their first movie and their first show. A mapping of their emotional core, it was also a prayer.
Protect us, it said.
◆
They marry on the coast of Brazil, at a beach she loves. Wife had been here with Father when she was twelve, with her walkman and her silence. This is the last memory she has of Father at the beach, when he asked her to walk with him.
Not now, the girl had responded.
She had cassette tapes to listen to, her very important adolescent thoughts to retreat to. Father would try again, drawing her out, and they would eventually walk and talk from one end of the beach to the other.
Wife does this with the twins now. One by one she gets them walking, and then they start talking. She marvels at how young she was when she lost Father, the very age that the twins are now.
In her twenties Wife had once been very high on this beach, crouched in the river like an alligator, half her face submerged. Compelled to take a picture of a figure slowly approaching on the empty beach, the girl had crawled out of the water to grab her camera. As they came into focus, she thought the woman to be a mother, her two naked children play-walking alongside her. The girl knew this was yet to come for her—this exact configuration, a mother and two boys.
When you’re young and imagining a shape that ties up loose ends, there are shapes you believe will most definitely heal a heart.
Their wedding beach is small and curves like a horseshoe. At one end of the beach, the river comes in from the jungle; at the other, a circular rock formation creates an ocean pool you can jump into. The tallest point rises more than thirty feet—this had been her jumping spot.
A decade after the wedding, Wife brings the twins and is surprised to find she no longer wants to jump from the high point. The children tease her, but they won’t jump either. She stands at the edge, looking down at the turbulent water lapping the rocks, sea urchins safely tucked into holes carved by hard spines and scraping jaws. She had lost all interest in risk.
◆
On a crisp fall day, Wife wakes up in a dark forest knowing she needs to leave. She has, in fact, needed this for years. In winters she’s chased the sun, or taken some time alone and away—but this leaving, Wife knows, might be too much to come back from.
She kicks out her arms and legs. Her movements won’t wake him, they haven’t shared a bedroom in years. Husband is heating water in the old tea kettle that no longer whistles. They don’t hug if she doesn’t initiate it, Wife has asked for this morning silence. Lately, their hugs communicate too much. With one elegant winding peel he hands her the orange she would have fumbled with, his daily devotions are a comfort to her.
The boys are thirteen and Husband doesn’t think she needs to make their breakfasts. Wife calls it love. Brazilian Mamas as they are, Mother agrees. It goes by so quickly, she tells Wife. Spoil them a little.
In their rooms, the twins cling to the last strands of sleep, their dens of boyness suddenly too small for elongated limbs. She stirs each in turn, nuzzling warm heads, breathing them in. On one child’s nightstand sits a hand-painted box with two long braids of his once long hair, cut off when his difference served him no more. Rocks, shells and amulets once dear to the other now gather dust on his window sill, relics of other days. Acorda amor, she whispers, time to get ready for school.
Quiet mornings, shared silence, small duties. The river rushing outside. Wife is ashamed to want outside of this, forces the peace of it into view when the edges fray, puts it in her treasure box for a rainy day.
The story goes like this: in a region shaped by volcanoes and catastrophic floods their Pacific Northwest home has a Midwestern Husband, a Brazilian Wife, and twin teenage boys. They live in a temperate rainforest, Wife had not known dark winters like these. Husband is blond, Wife went grey, and the boys have the dark brown hair she once had. Their twenty-year marriage has recently strained. They call this place Paw Paw Ridge for their two cats and their funny little hill, but just in case the big one hits, the foundation is bolted to the bedrock.
Douglas firs loom large overhead, their creaking in strong wind just another threat, like the hot dry summers when their home is kindling for a debt they’ve yet to pay. Monthly recycling trips to the local landfill make visible the sheer waste of one little nuclear family. Their mild excesses and mostly benign vices, the ways they have hurt and been hurt, the deep grooves of their day to day rippling out like shock waves, toppling the forest around them.
◆
As a woman who once aborted a fetus, and who later needed science to make them, Wife understands what lack of autonomy would have meant—a child arriving way before she was ready, instead of arriving into a steady home.
IVF is facing legal challenges in the U.S., particularly in states with “fetal personhood” laws which give fetuses the same right as people who have been born. Wife is adamantly against this law, but the extra frozen embryos from their IVF haunt her.
In her insomnia hell-mind she imagines her beautiful children somewhere in the world, wondering why they feel so alone. She calls the clinic but the embryology department is never there. Wife is secretly convinced they’re running a black market scheme, hawking the later-in-life accomplishments of countless unassuming couples in the underground market of parental despair. When she finally reaches an embryologist, a patient woman reminds her that Wife must have signed a consent for the remaining embryos to be discarded. Her knees go wobbly for the embryos tossed away as biohazard.
Wife knows well the voraciousness of caring for one’s DNA, and the psyche splitting work of motherhood. This is why the decision is hers, of when, and if, the time is right. You can’t legislate this knowing.
◆
With Lobo reeling from a tour that had fallen through, and the girl’s last band now behind her, they drove away from the crunch of salt-stained snow and moved to California—to a half-finished cabin with a compost toilet. They were to build a little cob house on that land, a magical cove made of clay, sand, straw, and water.
They worked hard, smoked weed, and frolicked in the woods. They cleared the land, measured, dug, and poured a foundation. But as they began to stack large river stones for the cob walls, they realized they had the wrong sand for the mortar. If they were to build on top of that foundation, the house would one day collapse. And so they stopped building the little house.
Two decades later, Wife will leave their forest home to go hide in a high desert bordered by fault lines. On her alleged month-long, solo writing trip, the book she set out to finish will become another animal, and that she’s bringing a man she just met is not a part of the plan that Husband knows.
Technically, she’s not doing anything wrong. Their recently opened marriage has a don’t ask, don’t tell, agreement—they won’t tell each other what they know will hurt. But Wife knows she has pushed against the edges of their arrangement to take the space she needs. Some impulses are acted on without deliberation, or not acted on at all. She’s been down this road before.
As she packs her bags the spectral presence of her Tias, with Mother front and center among them, sends her ominous predictions of her inevitable undoing. Tsk-tsking her from under their well-coiffed and overly dyed hair, and always dismayed that she won’t cover her grays, they quietly whisper at her back: Husband will certainly leave you this time.
Their collective judgment worn thin by now, Wife packs her car without so much as glancing their way.
Leaving the fluorescent lichen of her forest for the dusty browns of the Mojave—and secretly spending one month with a man she’s only known for three—is not something she has given much thought to. But the writing will catch it, as writing does.
You have nowhere to hide, it tells her.
But she no longer minds.
◆
At the tail end of the pandemic, and before the desert act, Wife and twins go to the Northeast coast of Brazil to a place she’d loved long ago. They spend a month in a little house by a deserted beach in an Atlantic coastal forest. In the mornings the twins unenthusiastically manage remote school while little monkeys come to their windows looking for pieces of fruit.
It had been over two years since they’ve been back and the twins’ Portuguese has slipped because she let it. English was quicker. With pandemic homeschooling and working full time, there was little that didn’t slip.
Their rented house is at the end of an unlit and impossibly pocked dirt road where lakes form after flash summer rains. Half-finished construction projects surround them. Broken tiles, pieces of brick, and piles of sand sink into the dirt and become the road itself.
Wife diligently locks the windows and doors at night. She even locks the bedroom door. She knows the car could break down somewhere, that the ocean has strong rip currents, how in the dark of night people walk on the side of the road and stray dogs dash out. As a mother, she’s become afraid of driving in Brazil.
An oil spill somewhere in the Atlantic lines the beach with shell-embellished tar balls. They’re cute, and fill her with sadness. At night they use cooking oil to clean the tar from their feet.
Mother visits for a few days, and when they take her to the airport, rain suddenly falls like a heavy theater curtain dropping on their heads, visibility and light swallowed in its wake. Without proper street drainage the water is almost up to the car door handle and Wife fears they’ll get washed out to sea. She tries to keep the mood light so the children won’t dread this half of who they are. Isn’t this just wild? she asks them, forcing a laugh.
In Brazil, it was common to consecrate children to a patron saint. Mother placed her under the protection of Our Lady of Graces when she was born, and when she left for the U.S. Mother gave her a little statue of Mary standing barefoot on a snake. Wife kept the statue, forgot the church, but still crossed herself out of a lingering superstition. Our Lady of Graces was often depicted holding broken arrows as a symbol of her protection against God’s wrath. Wife liked to think of her Mary standing in the eye of the storm, helping her break the silence she once aimed at herself.
The next day the sun is strong and the high tide swallows the jungle river that flows to their beach. Sweet brown forest water pushes against ocean waves to form a river-lake that cuts the beach in two. They play in the sun and her boys look beautiful in their twelve years of age. Puberty is starting, and when they return to Paw Paw Ridge they will enter their rooms never to emerge again.
By then Wife will have her own transitions going on, and one foot out the door. This is when she’ll stop referring to herself in the third person. She is tired of being anyone but herself.
My body is not a wrong thing.
Our marriage is good, we loved, we continue to love.
◆
Trucks send blinding jets of water on my windshield as I drive back home. The highway follows a river, the canyons bold and unsettling. High up on a ridge a waterfall turns wispy, the flow of water dispersing in the wind until it reconvenes. It is not a waterfall until it is again, further down the rocky facade. There is a woman hiding underneath the mother. She dissipates and reconvenes again.
At Paw Paw Ridge our family dines together, I ask the twins to have some manners. I am the keeper of such things.
Please use a knife, don’t cut with your fork.
We’re not in Brazil, Mama.
It’s just basic manners, I tell the boys.
It makes no sense, they tell me.
Fragments of conversation, little pieces of their days, and one boy who likes to go stretch in the middle of meals. Afterwards we clean up, I nudge them to help, to stay with us and not disappear. We sink into the post-dinner torpor that a family dinner cedes to. We have sat around the table, we have done our parts, it is a happiness.
This is not our every night. I am gone a few nights a week, or Lobo is gone, but there is always one of us at the table with them, sometimes both, sometimes with our new partners. Lobo and I hug, it means a lot, we feel on the other side. Of something.
The family was a shape I’d been tasked with keeping, and now will be blamed for cleaving. Our mothers resist this new shape, circle around it, offering us the weight of their silence—a divorce would have cleaved the family to a seemingly more acceptable shape. But I know what it took to make this, and that although we’ve added more shapes, we now make a stronger, more resilient whole.
I hold the children close, our IVF twins.
Surrender, I say to myself, as I picture my body in a slow-motion free fall, floating down, down, down, to the ocean floor. Down where sea urchins nest, where mothering means dissolving, I move through the inky dark, heart full, unafraid.
