The After Birth

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I worked in healthcare for a while, when I thought I wanted to be a nurse. First I wanted to be a nurse for the very, very old and then, when that became too depressing, I wanted to be a nurse for the very, very young and then, when that became too tragic, I quit. I worked a few jobs in between, all in the name of administration and healthcare, all in which I saw very little health and only trace amounts of care. Doctors, nurses, and hospital administrators populated my life, were my whole world, for almost a decade. They were just people at the end of the day, though I never could really figure them out.

Just a month before I quit to become an actress, or at least participate in acting workshops in the effort to become one, I attended my final dinner party hosted by and for a group of nurses from obstetrics. I had been invited but I wasn’t really among them. Nursing was a huge mistake to begin with, a decision made on account of the simple fact that I’d grown up with an eerie, Pacific Northwestern notion of Christian charity and a quantitative, methodical mind, and everyone knew I was a phony. At the dinner party, these nurses had gotten so drunk they all became indecent, their clothes falling off of them and them falling off of their chairs. At one point, it was somehow decided that we would all shout facts until someone’s fact was the most interesting.

“Cheetahs have brown eyes and leopards have green,” said one. She wore earrings that looked like palm trees.

“The capital of Pennsylvania is Harrisburg,” said another.

These were terrible facts; terrible facts that no one cared about.

“When you’re about to have a stroke, you start smelling smoke and fire.”

“Adolphe Quetelet invented the Body Mass Index in 1850!”

“In the fifteenth century, midwifery was considered a dangerous branch of witchcraft.”

“Witch, witch, witch!” the group began to chant. They all clapped and shouted at the woman who had recited this last fact; she was also incidentally the party host and was now standing on the table with one ridiculous Rainbow sandal in her hand, the other on her foot.

“Witch, witch, witch!” they shouted.

“And what was the book that made it official?” she cried.

“Malleus Maleficarum!” they all answered in unison.

“And when was it published?” she asked.

“1486!”

I was more or less repulsed and also a bit amazed. I had never met a bunch of nurses so excited about their field. I wondered if I had walked into something strange—a sex cult, maybe; a secret society of birth historians; an indoctrination. It was Los Angeles, after all, and it was a hospital, and it was obstetrics to boot. You could imagine anything.

But I, too, was from obstetrics and I, too, was capable of giving a little bit of wow. One of the first historians and, as he alleged, birthing experts was Pliny the Elder. A Roman philosopher, he wrote an early kind of encyclopedia—Historia Naturalis. I think of this from time to time: what was in it and all that’s changed. He suspected that an expecting mother with a predilection for salt would give birth to spawn without fingernails, and that a menstruating woman could turn seeds to virtual dust. Around AD 77, he advocated for laboring women to grind pig feces up into a powder and drink it during labor, to soothe the pain and expedite delivery. I won the game with this fact, shouted it out just as the hostess was about to step down from her perch and shotgun a beer, because it is a fact even though it isn’t true.

By then, I had already met my boyfriend Dale, who was in the process of convincing me to give up on health and pursue my dreams. It is easy to fall madly in love with a person who says that. I moved in just two months after we met. On our first date at a wine bar in Santa Monica, I had asked Dale to tell me something that no one knew about him. He thought seriously; he leaned forward in his chair and looked at his watch—a Rolex, a gift from a grateful client who had saved millions of dollars in income tax because of Dale’s financial acumen and agile brain—and finally said: “I love angel food cake.” It is easy to fall madly in love with a person who says that.

Since my falling in love, moving in with Dale, and leaving the nursing field, Dale and I had spent most of our waking hours in the apartment, satisfying our basic human desires and then resting, reading poetry, learning how to make angel food cake. And then sleeping, the backs of my thighs curled against the front of his. Dale spent his weekdays in an office in Culver City where he went to help wealthy people evade the IRS. He paid my rent, and I used my savings on acting workshops in North