Megan Bergman: Birds of a Lesser Paradise: Stories

You don’t want it to be behavioral, Wood told me. Always harder to treat the mind than the body.

But he had found nothing. Her scan was clean.

No mineralization, no masses, Wood said, disappointed.

Cerulean sat on the concrete floor and leaned against the cinder-block wall. Her black fur shone in the fluorescent lights. Her ears were small. I could not bring myself to look at her eyes. She had mussed the towels into piles. Her feet made me want to cry, the pads of her three remaining paws plump and worn.

At three months I just looked fat. Like I had eaten four sandwiches instead of one, I told my mother. I could cup my belly in one hand, swing my forearm underneath the slight mound the book said should be the size of a grapefruit. I couldn’t bring myself to say the word womb .

Wood came home in his white coat, smelling of formaldehyde and anal glands. He asked “What’s for dinner” but did not listen for the answer. Instead, he stuck his head inside the refrigerator.

How was your appointment? he asked, peeling off his white coat, pulling off his left shoe with the heel of his right.

I made three-bean chili, I said, shooing the cat from the stove. I wiped buttered paw prints from the glass.

Wood cracked open a beer.

I was palpated today, I said. Like that thing you do to cows, when you feel for lumps in their abdomen.

I can tell when a woman is pregnant by finding the ridge of her uterus, my OB had bragged. I touch a thousand tummies a year, for God’s sake.

On the screen, the fetus had doubled over, then stretched, a sun salutation with no sun.

I couldn’t help thinking, I told Wood, that the nub of his or her vestigial tail looked a lot like the end of a cocker spaniel.

Incessant waggers, he said. Submissive urinators.

Loving, I said. Warm on your lap.

The following day, the picture of my fetus, taped to the kitchen cabinet, made my niece cry.

I’m scared, too, I said.

I meant it.

The black-and-white photograph showed the baby’s skull and vertebrae, eye sockets like moon craters.

Somehow, it wasn’t enough. It didn’t tell me what I wanted to know about my child, what I needed to know to sleep at night. No photograph could say: Everything will be perfect.

Later that evening, Wood rubbed my back, sutured the dress straps I had snapped with my swelling bosom. I could feel his breath on my scapula, his needle stitching cottonlike skin.

Friends came over for dinner that night bearing presents, pop-up books and sock monkeys. I put out a plate of crudités but noticed too late the dog hair wound into the broccoli florets.

Wood spoke of his upcoming conventions, the paper he’d coauthored on using ultrasound to monitor the morphology of female jaguar reproductive tracts. It was hard to trump frozen jaguar sperm.

In captivity, the jaguar mother is capable of devouring her own cubs, he said.

I blushed at Wood’s lack of faith in mothers. It was as if he saw, at the heart of all women, an animal. Primality.

Here, Wood, I said. Open this package from your aunt. It isn’t just my baby, you know.

Wood slipped his finger underneath the wrapping paper.

A breast pump is an awful lot like a vacuum milking cup, my husband said, untangling the gifted contraption. He held the suction cups to his chest.

Soon she will be the cow that milked herself, he said.

Our friends howled.

A week later, Cerulean came back to the clinic for observation.

She smells like pepperoni pizza, Wood said over the phone. I can’t explain it.

I hated the thought of her on the cold cement floor, the cage bars obscuring her view, the indignities of her mysterious condition.

Can I bring you lunch? I asked.

I drove to the clinic with sandwiches and a bag of soft dog toys.

What is this? Wood asked, holding a headless hedgehog.

Let me put one in, I said.

Wood placed a hand over his eyes and left me alone with Cerulean.

Hi, I said to her.

She looked at me from the corners of her eyes, shy and damaged. I sat on the floor and tucked my legs underneath my body. I wanted to massage lotion into her feet, stroke her back.

Here, I said, handing her the hedgehog through the bars of the cage, then the stuffed cat.

I want to mother the world, I thought. I have so much love. Then — I have no business being a mother. I am a selfish woman.

Then — I can do this. Millions of women have been mothers. Then — I feel very alone. I do not know what I’m capable of.

My fetus grew arms, carried a yolk sac like a balloon.

These, the OB had said, pointing to a white Cheerio on the screen, are the sex cells of your grandchildren.

Tell them I’m sorry about all the weed I smoked in high school, I said. And that time. well, there were a lot of times.

I wondered if I would fill the shoes of the mythical matriarch, if suddenly my pancakes would become legendary, my dresses tailored, my back rubs soothing.

When I first told Wood I was pregnant, he had taken off his sweatshirt and placed the cockatiel to which he was administering medication on the exam-room counter.

I think the bird pooped in my hood, he said.

Wood’s cheeks were flushed. I touched his shoulder. It was a Saturday morning and I was helping him with his early-morning rounds. I liked those mornings when the clinic was quiet and it was just the two of us feeding schnauzers and ferrets in between sips of coffee and exclamations about the morning paper.

I am excited, he clarified, minutes later. He wrapped his arms around me and kissed the crown of my head.

I wanted to be as interesting to Wood as a urinary bladder wall tumor, lab work. I wanted to be pored over, examined by his hands, researched, discussed, diagnosed. I wanted to keep him up late, bring him in early.

Cerulean likes the stuffed cat, Wood said on the way to our birthing class.

Then he reminded me that he had to leave class early. Gall bladder infection in a Chesapeake Bay retriever, he said.

The instructor wore fleece leggings and a purple spaghetti-strap top.

Some women, she said, hands cupped as if she were holding a beach ball, achieve orgasm during birth.

I may have to poke out her third eye, I said to Wood.

Wood did not understand my anxieties — miscarriage, autism, premature delivery.

I wish it would come out like a goat, I told him. Sturdy, hooved, walking.

Every spring we helped the veterinary school calve and foal. The meat goats bloated with twins, the petrified sheep with their petrified lambs, limp and gentle on the mud floor. We picked the weak ones up and held them to the mother’s teat, removed the small bodies from the piles of hay when they did not thrive, bottle-feeding them if there was any hope of life.

You’ll do fine, he said, patting my stomach. Rugged stock.

But I knew how I would do. I would take my maternity leave and he would come home for dinner at night, late. My milk would let down when the cat cried at the moon from the staircase window. I would wake up sticking to the sheets. I would love and complain with equal vigor.

I’m sorry I missed the asexual revolution, I said. Aphids, bees, captive hammerhead sharks — they know they’re on their own. They don’t expect understanding.

What the cape bee gains in martyrdom, she loses in genetic potential, Wood said.

Self-reliance, I began.

Take last week’s sifaka, Wood said. He was the last of his kind. He needed others.

I’d been thinking about nativity scenes. Camels leaning over the manger like my cat nesting in the crib. The way Joseph pretended his hands were tied, that he wasn’t responsible in the first place.

The birthing class instructor passed around a wooden bowl of mixed berries. Wood held up one hand in protest.