The Same River Twice: A Memoir

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Summer for me has always been a time of hibernation, a hallucinatory season to be endured. This one is passing in a fury of photosynthesis and intimacy. Rita has kept her job for the insurance, while her belly grows. A small magazine has accepted a short story and sent me a check for fifty-four dollars. It’s my third publication, the first that paid. Rita is happy. The check validates her decision to have a child with me, proves that my days as a bum are gone. I take her to town for dinner. The bill is low since Rita is eating five small meals a day instead of three large ones.

The rest of the money buys fabric to make curtains for the baby’s room. After borrowing a sewing machine, I manage to produce two hemmed strips that will fit no window in the house. They hang at a slant. Sunlight borders the sides; the bottom is eight inches below the windowsill. I am prouder of them than of getting published.

Every morning I take coffee to the river and sit in the same chair where I ended the previous night with beer, I prop my feet on a sandbag left from the flood. Now, in late July, drought is killing the corn, and the river has dwindled to a creek. The morning stillness is broken only by the symphony of birds claiming turf, and my neighbor’s boat as he checks his catfish lines. To him the river is a tool. He’s trapped and fished it for two decades.

Twenty-five hundred years ago, a Greek named Heraclitus said, “You can’t step into the same river twice.” I climb down the bank and remove my shoes and socks. The river is warm on my skin, a continuous flow that is immediately gone, yet remains. The water surrounding one leg is not the same as around the other leg. Sediment drifts away and it occurs to me that you can’t even step on the same bank twice. Each footstep alters the earth.

Heraclitus is known as “the Obscure” because none of his writings survived. My neighbor has no use for his ideas. To him the river is always the same, moving past his house, providing food. He steps into it every day. He gauges the spots to set his poles by the texture of mud beneath his feet. I spread my legs as far as I can. One foot is Heraclitus, the other is my neighbor. I am floating somewhere in between. Wind in the high boughs makes the leaves ripple like water, producing a distant whisper. Fish eggs cling to rock along the shore.

Rita’s eggs are thirty-four years old. She wanted amnioscentesis to eliminate the worry of producing a baby less than perfect. Her uncles, aunts, cousins, and grandparents all died in World War II — some in combat, some in death camps. Rita can never be sure what genetic oddities run in the family. Her feet are flat and she has dyslexia. One of my eyes is farsighted, the other nearsighted. As a kid, I had big teeth bucked so badly that four molars were yanked to make room.

Standing in the river, I imagine DNA as something large and visible, extending from throat to navel, full of unruly tangles that produce cowlicks, walleyes, and pinheads. I was against the test, afraid that if our child turned out damaged, it would mean that I was too. Even worse, if the results showed a Down’s baby, I would want to keep it anyway. The test is for throwing it back.

Rita prevailed and two weeks ago, we went to the hospital. She was told to drink sixteen ounces of juice. Half an hour later a nurse strapped her to a table. Above Rita’s head sat a sonogram screen that would monitor the probing of her gut. The nurse lifted Rita’s shirt, pulled her pants down, and swabbed her belly with a clear gel. She nodded to the doctor, another woman, who pressed an ultrasound transducer to Rita’s stomach. The sonogram screen filled with a murky, mobile image that looked nothing like a child. The white areas were tissue, the black was fluid. The spine looked like a zipper. The doctor measured the skull and thigh. She checked the heart, which was working fine. Flowing along the top of the image were horizontal layers of uterine wall and placenta, bringing to mind a summer sunset, changing with the light of the heart.

The doctor manipulated the sonogram until two vertical images bisected the screen. She froze one, enlarged the other, and took photographs. “There’s a hand,” she said, indicating a pale blot. “We’re looking at the baby as if it was sitting in a chair and we’re underneath. It’s mooning us. The legs are crossed, so we can’t see the genitals. It’s shy.”

I watched the screen, trying to see as the doctor did, but found only a shifting landscape of black and white, a bubbling tar pit that caught light and held bones. “It looks good,” she said. “Fifteen-point-nine weeks along.”

She pressed several buttons and changed the image to a cone that represented a three-dimensional cross section inside Rita’s belly. As the doctor moved the transducer, the image in the cone changed. She was hunting for a large space, far from the fetus, close to the amniotic wall. “There’s one,” she said. “Perfect.”

The screen showed a dark gap surrounded by gray and white like an astronomical photograph. The nurse handed her a syringe. The needle was very long, a beak. She used both hands to insert it into a guiding tube that was pressed tight to Rita’s belly. Rita closed her eyes. The doctor watched the monitor, moving her hands by rote, pushing the needle into darkness.

“Tenting,” she said, and the nurse repeated the word. I asked what it meant.

The nurse explained that the amnion was tough enough to resist the needle; it was like pressing a stick against the wall of a tent. After several tries, the doctor breached the amnion. The syringe sucked pale liquid into its chamber, and I had a sudden impulse to drink it. My knees felt trembly. A gray fog crowded my vision. The nurse took my arm and led me to a chair, advising me to place my head between my legs. She cleaned Rita’s stomach. The final image on the monitor showed a section of Rita’s interior in the shape of a cornucopia, the horn of life.

We drove home and Rita went to bed. For two hours I watched her sleep. The baby was missing an ounce of life already, a shot glass of amniotic fluid, and I was afraid that it might notice. We had taken its water away, like drought. I sat on the bed and apologized to Rita’s belly for our invasion.

The two-week wait went slowly. Today’s mail should contain the results of our amnio. I leave the river and climb the bank to my chair. Maples crowd the opposite bank, their leaves tinted yellow by lack of rain. The yard is brown and I think of lush summers in the hills at home. The grass is always greener where people die young. Our child is an underground spring straining at the confluence of Rita and me. The amnio will tell us if it’s polluted.

The river is sinking like a lost continent, a misplacement for which we all suffer. Yesterday I took the boat out, but a light breeze halted me in a holding pattern between current and wind. I had to wade home, pulling the boat with a rope, wondering how much further the river can shallow itself. Maps show it as a thin blue line the color of a vein until oxygen turns it the hue of mud. Should drought drink all the water, the other side of the river would still be this side. Herons would lose their safety, and bridges would have no meaning. If the waterways lay empty to the sea, the ocean would run backwards into the vacant riverbeds, rubbing salt against the open wounds of earth. Drought and flood, that slow sabotage of the soul, would never matter again. The dam that holds nothing back becomes a tombstone for the river.

At two in the afternoon I ill a canteen with water and walk the half mile to my mailbox on the blacktop. The dirt road bisects a cornfield that is, as the farmers say, “standing dead.” Each step raises a plume of dust beneath my foot. I stop three times to sip water in the oppressive heat of prairie summer. The handle of the mailbox burns my hand. Inside are two bills, a newspaper from Kentucky, and a rejected story. The amnio results are in a plain brown envelope, which I carry carefully, holding it away from my body like a snake. The mail is damp from sweat by the time I reach the house.

When Rita comes home from work, she makes me open the envelope. There is a four-by-four-inch photograph of the baby’s chromosomes separated into pairs like matching flatworms. An accompanying letter says that the test has shown them to be structurally sound. The kid has a solid foundation. If it turns out to be a terrorist, the fault will be environmental, not genetic. Rita and I hug each other for what seems like hours. Her eyes are damp. I sense that I want to cry, but something deep inside forbids it, like a safety on a rifle, or a childproof cap. I cannot muster the courage of release.

I go to the room we’ve prepared for the baby. In the center stands a white bassinet, a lidless picnic basket on legs, the same one I slept in as a newborn. My mother insisted on shipping it from the mountains to the prairie. She’d kept it, she said, against this very time. The bassinet is curved into an oval the shape of an egg. The light is dim. Everything has been placed with care. The whole room has an ethereal, expectant quality, like that of a cathedral in which miracles are rumored to occur.

I was my parents’ first child and it occurs to me that my father must have regarded this same bassinet with similar trepidation. I suddenly realize that I’ve been misreading the myth of Oedipus all my life. Drinking mother’s milk does not beget a thirst for father’s blood. The tragedy belongs to Laius, the father. Oedipus didn’t fulfill his own destiny, he lived up to his father’s terror.

I step outside to sit by the river in the streaming red light of summer dusk. Mosquitoes are working hard. I’ve hung old gourds on a frame to attract swifts because they feed on mosquitoes, but the birds care little for such accommodation. A great horned owl delivers a bellow that hushes the floodplain woods. A light rain blows downriver, a few sprinkles that pass rapidly as blown confetti.

The pregnancy is four months along, five to go. Rita dozes on the couch. The embryo has already set cells aside for its own offspring, like a farmer saving seed corn for next year’s crop. Female mosquitoes land on my skin, needing fresh blood for their young.