Fear of Dying. Erica Jong

      4

       Heartbeat

      If I got rid of my demons, I’d lose my angels.

      —Tennessee Williams

      There are some women you meet and you know immediately you can trust them with your life. Isadora was my soul mate, protector, godmother to my tall, beautiful, redheaded daughter.

      “You’ll never regret having a daughter,” she said—and she was right. I even blessed my crazy ex-husband for my daughter. She was the silver lining in the storm of my life, my daughter whom I love more than any human being on Earth, my daughter who can make me angrier than any human being on Earth, my darling actress daughter who can make me laugh until I cry, my daughter who is both thorn and balm for my heart. Now she is five months pregnant. When she calls, I jump.

      “Mom, meet me at the doctor?”

      “What time?”

      “Twelve noon, sharp.”

      I get there at eleven-thirty (to avoid a daughterly tongue-lashing) and wait for my super-prompt daughter, who swans in at ten of twelve. “Why did you get here so early?” she demands.

      “So I wouldn’t be late and piss you off.”

      “You never piss me off,” she laughs.

      “Glinda?” the nurse announces.

      “Can my mom come in with me?” Glinda asks.

      “Of course.”

      Is this the place to tell you about Glinda’s father? He was a poet and a playwright whom I adored when Glinda was born—before his jealousy of my love for the baby led him to abandon us both. I know he didn’t want to abandon us and I often find myself hoping that this shared grandchild will somehow bring us to be friends again. He is an important witness to my life and Glinda’s. Because of Glinda, I’ll never regret him. His name was Ralph, but he had changed it to Rumi, somehow hoping to suggest he was a Persian poet and a dervish. Smitten with Sufism, he believed that all the world needed was peace. He frequently quoted Rumi’s verses—particularly the one that goes something like this:

      We may think we know ourselves.We may be born Muslims, Jews, or Christians.But until our hearts are healedwe see only differences.

      He was such an idealist. He believed he could make the world a better place through poetry. In many ways, Glinda is like him.

      Glinda and I go into the exam room, where the nurse fits my daughter’s belly with a fetal monitor and suddenly the whole room resounds with the rapid heartbeat of my grandson. This little creature who is destined to outlive us both fills the room with his thundering will to live.

      “Does it sound normal?” Glinda asks Dr. Wilder, a pretty blond ob-gyn in her forties.

      “Perfectly normal. Here, let me feel how you are.” She reaches inside my daughter. “No problem.”

      “Damn,” says Glinda, who has had a perfectly horrible pregnancy. Morning sickness day and night for five months, rashes, swollen hands and feet, not to mention genetic terrors in the first trimester. Both Glinda and her husband are Ashkenazic and had to wait until all the genetic tests were run. Glinda has been a heroine through all of this, but now she wants it over. She is praying for some condition that will make her doctors induce an early delivery. No such luck. The baby is already five pounds or more but not ready to hatch. In my family, we all have huge babies.

      “Don’t tell me what a great pregnancy you had with me!” Glinda says. Then to her doctor: “My mother always says she adored pregnancy. It infuriates me.”

      “All pregnancies are different, darling.”

      “Your mother is right,” says the doctor.

      Glinda glares at me as if she can’t believe I’d ever be right about anything. “How can she be right when she named me after a witch?”

      “It was either that or Ozma,” I said. “I wanted you to live happily in the land of Oz.”

      “A good witch,” says the doctor. “The Good Witch of the West.”

      Glinda rolls her green eyes.

      “Dr. Wilder, I want an epidural the minute I go into labor.”

      “We don’t torture women anymore,” the doctor says.

      “Good.” I cannot bear the thought of Glinda being in pain. But I know how unpredictable labor is. I expect Glinda’s baby to pop right out even though I myself had a C-section after nine hours of labor. I don’t say this. There’s nothing I can say and I know it. Half of motherhood is shutting up—as I said before. All I can say is I wish I’d known this earlier. Sometimes I think we should give every new mother an embroidered pillow that says what Kafka supposedly had over his desk: Warten (wait).

      After the exam, Glinda and I go to lunch.

      “I’m never having another baby,” Glinda says. “I told Sam and he agrees.”

      “You don’t have to ever have another one. One baby is fine. Nothing wrong with only children. Look at you.” I know Glinda will change her mind a dozen times about this and everything else.

      “I don’t know how the human race ever survived,” she says.

      “It’s astonishing, isn’t it?”

      I remember saying the same thing right after she was born. I was sitting in my hospital room watching a right-wing politician and a Catholic priest going on about the evils of abortion, and I threw the apple from my lunch tray right at the TV screen. Nothing broke. Nothing changed either.

      I looked at the beautiful little creature in the plexiglass cradle and marveled at her perfection. Jaundiced, yes. Wrapped in a flannel blanket of pink and blue, wearing a unisex knitted cap like a yarmulke on her reddish curls—but perfect from toes to top of soft skull. She was both beautiful and terrifying. I wanted nothing but the land over the rainbow for her. I wanted her to inhabit the land that I dreamed of once in a lullaby.

      “If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament,” the feminists of my generation used to say. What had happened to all those feisty women? Where are they now when we need them most? Dead? How did the word “feminist” get to be an insult? All we wanted was to make an unfair world more fair.

      Glinda didn’t have to be convinced of any of this. She seemed to have inhaled feminism with my milk. At sixteen she quit school to star in a Brat Pack movie. At seventeen she won a Tony as a singing Juliet on Broadway. At eighteen she soared above the West End as Peter Pan. At nineteen she played the young Elizabeth the First of England in a wonderful film. But shortly thereafter she was at Hazelden detoxing from an addiction