Acts of Creation

“Immersion 2021” by M Patrick Riggin

Dr. Mann assures me restlessness is common. Besides, I’ve found ways to cope: essential oils, art classes, et cetera. In the mornings, I take cold baths. When the dawn breaks through the window above our tub, the bathwater shines like a prism. I slide in, let the cold snatch my breath, watch the blood escape my fingertips. I wring out like a dishrag.

Later, my husband pours water into the coffeemaker and explains why cold baths are a bad idea. He talks about oxygen deprivation, uses the word “hypoxemia,” though he is an accountant and not a doctor—which I point out. 

“Have you asked Dr. Mann what he thinks?” my husband says. He opens the refrigerator, pulls out turkey, cheese, mayonnaise. Assembles a sandwich. I tell him Dr. Mann suggested I avoid jacuzzies, not cold baths. My husband licks a glob of mayonnaise from his pinky finger and fills a thermos with coffee.

“Any extreme seems reckless, though, don’t you think?” he says. Coffee drips down the side of the thermos and forms a ring on the counter.

A lot is reckless for American babies that is considered perfectly unreckless elsewhere in the world: Coffee, for one. Cheese. Sushi. Saunas. Turkey sandwiches. Mayonnaise. Epidurals. Formula. In Paris, expecting mothers drink wine, enjoy cappuccinos, smoke cigarettes. I say all this to my husband as he gathers his things for work. He shrugs and kisses me on the nose.

“Whatever you think is best for our baby,” he says, sliding out the front door into the heat of the morning. “It’s your body. But do at least ask Dr. Mann.”

***

Once a week, I drive an hour and a half from Riverside to Venice Beach for ceramics class. There are ceramics classes in Riverside, but when one lives in the desert, one finds excuses to smell the ocean. I like the flow of traffic—all of us purpose-driven along the same cracked freeway toward the coast.

The studio is tucked inside a strip mall off Washington Boulevard, a half mile from the beach. From the parking lot, I cannot see the ocean, but I can smell the salt and sunscreen, can see hoards of people on their way to the beach, ice cream melting down their fingers, seagulls skulking close behind.  

My tablemate is painting her clay sculpture when I arrive.

“What do you think of tourists?” she asks.

I shrug, pour green paint into my plastic tray.

“It’s like, if you love L.A. so much, find a way to move here like the rest of us, you know?” She dips her brush in her tray of paint. “And if you don’t want to move here, like, can’t you find a way to be happy wherever you’re from?”

I suggest to her that maybe some tourists will move to L.A. Maybe they’re just trying the place on first to see if it fits, to see if they actually like it before they uproot their lives. My tablemate sighs heavily, sweeps paint onto her sculpture in hard, decisive strokes.

“Exactly,” she says, “fucking cowards.”

My tablemate is unbearably cool—black tattoos up her inner arms, unshaved armpits, a headscarf woven with gold thread. The rest of us are painting coil pots we made last week, all of which are wonky versions of the instructor’s example: narrow at the bottom and wide around the middle like beehives. But my tablemate’s sculpture is an infant-sized human kneeling in prayer, its long head is slightly cocked, its eyes gaping hollows. At once grotesque and elegant. She is painting it cerulean blue.

“I don’t think art should behave in expected ways,” she says when she catches me looking. “Otherwise, it’s like, how will it shake our perception of reality?”

The instructor makes his rounds. He is barefoot and wearing board shorts, his hair a heap of blond curls. He smiles at my coil pot, which I’m painting green to match the nursery. “Great color,” he says and winks. To my tablemate’s humanoid sculpture, he says, “Hella rad, girl.”

My tablemate scratches her eyebrow with her middle finger as the instructor passes our table. The thick, plastic smell of paint wafts in my direction, and I vomit into the trashcan beneath our table.

***

Dr. Mann assures me that nightmares, too, are common. I have dreamt of giving birth to a torrent of water which fills the room and drowns me, and to a two-inch long adult man, a Tom Thumb, who sits on my shoulder and demands that I bake him a hundred tiny pies and knit him a hundred tiny sweaters. I have dreamt of giving birth to a child with six mouths, all of which are insatiably hungry, and of one with beady eyes on the tips of each of its fingers, which watch me wherever I go. Tonight, I dream that I give birth to my tablemate’s cerulean statue. It cries blue paint, leaves blue handprints all over our upholstery. My husband is disappointed because he was so hoping for a boy. 

When I wake, sunlight pulses through the blinds, sending fiery lines across the bed. I draw myself a bath and slide into the water, letting the cold push the air from the pit of my lungs.

***

“My god, you’re glowing,” my friend sings when I arrive at her house for Ladies Night. She squeals and claps her hands together. My friend is forever overreacting. She and the other ladies are already drunk and laughing. They gather around my friend’s couch with glasses of wine, nibble at hunks of cheese from heaping platters. My friend’s essential oil products are set out on the coffee table, gleaming in the lamplight. A few of the women set down their glasses to lift bottles of oil to their noses or rub some into the backs of their hands. The air smells like coconut and sage. I take a seat on the couch next to a woman with dark hair and wine-red lips. She leans into me, her eyes glassy. She is holding a thumb-sized bottle of oil.

“I rubbed this on my belly every night when I was pregnant with mine,” she says, “and I swear-to-god not a single stretch mark.”

I nod and place my hands on my stomach. Without a drink, I’m not sure what else to do with my hands. When the woman asks what I do, I tell her I used to write poetry but now I’m experimenting with sculpture. I tell her I’m working on a piece designed to shake peoples’ perceptions of reality. The woman laughs.

“No, no,” she says, raising her voice, “I asked, when are you due?”

My friend clinks a spoon against her wine glass to call us to attention. She giggles at herself in the most charming way, thanks us all for coming, and explains how the products on the coffee table in front of us saved her life. The ladies smile in unison.

“I used to live my life by default,” says my friend, “but now I live my life by design.”

As she talks, I am struck by how the ladies watch her, each of them copies of the other, like we’re in a house of mirrors, and each woman is just another reflection of one woman, the real woman: My friend, who is standing at the center telling us how it feels to have found her purpose.

And when she is done, there is hardly anything left to say. The ladies drain their glasses and make jokes about their partners watching their children (“Better get back before someone dies!”). They gather their purses, place orders, hug my friend goodbye. I buy three bottles of the thumb-sized oil.

When I get home, my husband is snoring. I go into the bathroom and remove my shirt, turn to the side. The pamphlet from Dr. Mann’s office says that the baby is the size of a cucumber. An odd fruit to compare to a human fetus—long, green, warty. The nose of a fairytale hag. I pour oil into my hands and smear it over my stomach in swift circles.

***

My tablemate is absent the day the instructor removes our pots from the kiln. When he calls us forward to collect them, I take my tablemate’s sculpture, tuck it under my arm when the instructor isn’t looking. No one notices, so focused they are on their own glossed creations. The parking lot smells like dead fish and waffle cones. The air above the blacktop churns with heat. I think I might throw up, but I breathe deep and swallow it down. I set my tablemate’s sculpture in the passenger seat, watch its glazed flesh shimmer in the sun as I drive. Every once in a while, I talk to it—try to explain myself. Its head is slightly cocked in my direction as if listening.

When I get home, I cradle the sculpture like an infant from the car into the house and up the stairs—a sort of test. It’s warm from the sun and fits perfectly inside the crook of my arm. When I reach the landing at the top of the stairs, I imagine dropping the sculpture over the side, just to see what would happen: Would it shatter into a thousand pieces, or merely bounce and roll?

Instead, I carry it into the nursery, which I’ve painted Glacial Green. We do not know the baby’s gender. My husband wants to keep it a surprise: “There are so few surprises in life,” he says.

I have poured my soul into this room. Spent days testing out shades of green on every wall. Scoured a dozen antique shops for the exact right rocking chair. Bruised my thumb and forefinger hammering together the bookshelves. I move the sculpture all around the nursery. I set it on a windowsill and step back to see how it looks, move it to a shelf, and then to another windowsill. After a while, I place it back on the first windowsill where it looks best after all. Then I pull a volume of fairytales from the shelf and sit back in the rocking chair. There are many ways storytellers erase mothers: death by shipwreck, death by poison, death by plague, death by mysterious ailment, death by childbirth, death by fright, death by heartbreak, death by longing. Mother after mother buried in the ground beneath their children’s journeying feet.

***

“It’s really good, baby,” my husband says when I bring him up to the nursery and show him the sculpture. “Maybe you should give up poetry altogether and focus on sculpting.”  

I slip on lingerie and make my husband sit in the kitchen and watch me cook stir fry like I used to in the earliest days of our marriage. He loosens his tie, pulls me into his lap. We have sex on the couch in the living room. My husband’s hands are damp, and his breath still smells like his morning coffee. He kisses my neck, presses his cold nose to my cheek.

“Is the baby okay?” he whispers.

When it’s over, my husband kisses my belly, and then gets up to spoon the stir fry into bowls. I lie and look down at my bare stomach. The skin along the bottom stretched and creased under the baby’s weight. Spindly red lines crawl from my crotch to my belly button and along the tops of my thighs. My body is cracked desert earth, a roadmap with red-edged highways going nowhere.

The stir fry is room temperature now and congealed at the top. Too salty. Yet my husband scoops dripping forkfuls into his mouth.

“Hey, did you decide to bring that down?” he says between bites. He gestures to something behind me. When I turn, there is the cerulean statue on the counter, its head cocked in our direction, eyes gaping. The statue is no longer positioned as if kneeling in prayer—instead, it is frozen in mid-stride, as if in a dead run to the edge of the countertop.

After dinner, I carry the sculpture back up to the nursery and place it in the proper windowsill.

***

The desert sun burns white-hot the day my first batch of product arrives. I wonder if it will ever rain again, or if all of California will shrivel to kindling and burn away. The product arrives in a white, glossy box and comes with a selling manual full of pictures of smiling women who all in one way or another resemble my friend.

“Who will you invite to your first Ladies Night?” my friend asks over the phone. I name a few mutual friends from college. “Those girls are already my clients,” she says. “You’ll need to branch out.”

I picture myself as a tree—legs fused and immobile, roots reaching deep in search of water, my arms stretching toward the heavens, thickening, hardening. I tell my friend I’ll work on it.

In the end, I invite a neighbor from across the street, an aunt, a cousin, and my mother-in-law. My friend comes, too, for “moral support.”  While my friend helps me arrange the product out on the kitchen table, my mother-in-law pours herself glass after glass of rosé and makes jokes about how she cannot wait for me to have the baby so that she can finally get revenge on my husband for all the sleep he deprived her of in her twenties.

“See these lines,” she says, pointing to her forehead, “Your husband did this to me. I could have been an actress, you know, if it wasn’t for the lines.” The other women listen to my mother-in-law, laugh in all the right places. “Just imagine three years without sleep,” she goes on, “It got so bad I started hallucinating piano concertos. I heard them everywhere—in my closet, in the shower, in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator.”

I tell her she should have written down the music, tried to sell it for film scores or something.

“I never said the concertos were any good,” she says, and the girls erupt.

My aunt chimes in, pointing to my cousin, “This one was so bad…”

From the corner of my eye, I see a flicker of movement outside the living room window. While the others talk, I slip out the sliding glass door and into the backyard. Moonlight pools across our heat-stricken lawn. A shadow paces back and forth against the back fence.

When I step closer, I can see that the pacing shadow is the cerulean sculpture. It takes a few steps, tiny feet crunching on dead grass, then raises a clay hand to the fence, feeling for something. As it moves, its glazed flesh glistens in the moonlight. It takes a few more steps, reaches the other clay hand to the fence. Like it’s plotting an escape.

I hear the pop of the sliding glass door behind me and turn to find my friend.

“You should come back in and talk about the oil,” she says.

I don’t know what to tell the girls about the oil, so instead I pass it around, let them test it on the backs of their hands, soak into their knuckles. My friend talks about the ingredients. She rubs the oil all over a saltine cracker and submerges the cracker in water.

“Watch how the cracker swells,” she says, “The product lets moisture in but not out. Now imagine the cracker is your skin.”

“Will it take care of the forehead lines?” my mother-in-law laughs. After a while, she buys a bottle and then wanders off to find my husband, who is hiding in his office. My aunt and cousin give me hugs, pat my stomach. My neighbor thanks me for the wine, says we should have done this sooner.

When they leave, I find the sculpture outside and carry it back into the nursery. I place it back in the proper windowsill, tell it to stay put.

***

In the exam room where I see Dr. Mann, a small print of the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus hangs. They wear flowing white garments, are suspended in a blue background that looks like a warped version of the night sky. The stable where Mary presumably gave birth is far in the background, warm and glowy. The scene is utterly peaceful. Shockingly clean.

I ask Dr. Mann if he’s ever lost a patient before. He squirts gel on my stomach and presses in the fetal heart monitor. The sound of static fills the room.

“I may be losing my mind, but I make it a point to never lose patience,” he says.

I don’t know if I’m supposed to laugh.

“A little nervousness is common,” he adds, pushing the monitor around in search of a heartbeat, and then: “The little one is hiding from us.”

Dr. Mann makes this joke every time it takes more than a few seconds to find the heartbeat. I wonder how often he makes this joke to women in a single day. A month. A year.

“Ah, here we are,” says Dr. Mann. The baby’s heartbeat always frightens me with its loudness, like hurricane-force winds into the mouth of a microphone.

Dr. Mann says the baby is now the size of a jicama, so I pick a jicama up from the grocery store on my way home. I feel the shape of it in my hands, test the weight in my arms.

When I get home, my sculpture is missing from the nursery. I find it again in the backyard. It is kneeling in the dirt and digging a hole near the back fence with surprising efficiency. It scoops up mounds of dirt in its clay hands, tosses them over its glazed shoulder. Doesn’t it know there is no way out? Beyond our yard is just another fenced-in yard. And then another. And another.

I scoop the sculpture up in my arms. Its clay flesh is hot to the touch and dusty from digging. It writhes. Pushes against me. I carry it upstairs, rinse it in the tub, and towel it off. I place it behind a locked glass cabinet in the dining room.

For dinner, I slice the jicama into strips and throw it in the stir fry.

“It’s different,” my husband says, which, of course, is a polite way of saying he hates it.

When I fall asleep, I dream of a time when I was different. A time when I quoted the greats and sat on the beach at sunrise scrawling lines of verse into the sand. A time when I was a winged creature on the edge of a cliff. In the morning, I cup cold bathwater in my hands and drink. The baby kicks and kicks. I watch its little foot press into the pink lines on my stomach. We are always touching. I reach for a bottle of oil, read over the list of ingredients. I notice a note in small print: not recommended if you are pregnant or breastfeeding. Mother fucker.

***

“He stole my sculpture,” my tablemate whispers, nodding her head toward our instructor. “He denies it, of course.” She is working and working her clay, rolling it out flat and then balling it back up, again and again. We are supposed to be making candlesticks. When I ask her how she knows the instructor stole her sculpture, she shrugs. “A feeling,” she says.

Outside the studio window, the marine layer hangs low and grey. A breeze carries a burger wrapper into a palm tree. I am more uncomfortable on my stool than I ever remember being. My ever-swelling stomach bumps up against the table, pain radiates down my lower back and thighs.

“I have this theory about misogyny,” my tablemate says. “All of it, like all of it—the exclusion, the discrimination, the violence, the objectification—all of it stems from artistic envy.” As my tablemate talks, she leans hard into her glob of clay, pressing and rolling, pressing and rolling. “God, it’s not speaking to me today,” she says, shaking her head.

My half-finished candlestick has begun to lean, so I smash it against the table, work it back into a ball.

“Anyway,” my tablemate goes on, “I used to get, like, super bummed because all we ever hear about is men doing this and that—men writing all the books, making all the poetry, the art, the governments. And I’d always be like, but what have women made? And then it dawned on me. Women made all of humankind. We literally make people.”

After class, I cannot bring myself to get back in my car. I walk up Washington Boulevard toward the ocean. The air is damp and cool. Cars rush by, press on their breaks, honk their horns. A rusty chain link fence to my left blocks the sidewalk from the wetlands, which smell of sour decay. My hips ache, but it feels good to walk. When I reach the ocean, it’s as grey as the sky above. I sit down in the sand, feel around for seashells. I find a charming blue rock, as blue as my cerulean sculpture. But when I look closely, it’s just a piece of dried-out chewing gum.

***

I give birth to a baby girl. For twelve hours, she rips through me. My husband goes pale, vomits in a trashcan at the edge of my bed. Dr. Mann pats him on the shoulder. Assures him that such a reaction is common.

The nurses set the baby on my chest—naked, wet, and writhing.

I whisper to her: I made you. I made you. I made you.

They pack my underwear with layers of cotton, ice, and pads soaked in witch hazel, and they send us home. Outside our front door is another glossy package of product, along with my first commission check for sixty-six cents.

My husband takes our baby in his arms and starts the shower.

“I made it cold for you,” he says.

I strip off my clothes, slide the bloodied underwear down over my knees and ankles. Blood drips from between my legs and blooms across our bathroom rug. I do not want to shower; I am afraid to get wet. I throw on my bathrobe and walk downstairs.

The door to the locked glass cabinet in the dining room is open, and the sculpture is gone. I push open the sliding glass door and step into the backyard. The backyard is empty, but there in the corner is the hole the sculpture dug—wide and deep. I walk over to it. Blood trickles down my thigh and calf and into the dry, golden grass. I kneel down in front of the hole, which I realize now is a tunnel.

I climb inside.

The deeper I crawl, the cooler and softer the earth beneath my knees becomes. I dig my fingers into the soil, inch forward. Ahead, I see a light—an opening at the other end. A gentle, sweet breeze blows in through the opening, and I hear waves lapping against a shore. I see outlines of thick plants heavy with fruit. I am close now, can taste the salt of the sea.

And then, far behind me, I hear the tinny wail of my daughter. She is weeping, her body rattling, lungs sputtering. My breasts swell with milk.

I turn back toward the sound and begin the long climb out.

About the author

Jo Saleska Lange lives and writes in St. Louis, Missouri. She received her MA in literature with an emphasis in rhetoric and composition from the University of Missouri-Columbia and works as an academic writing coach and freelance dissertation editor. She is currently pursuing an MFA in fiction from the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

about the artist

M Patrick Riggin is a Pittsburgh-born writer, artist and musician. While attending college for history and journalism, M Patrick worked as a musician and freelance artist. Restoration, leathercraft and gardening are hobbies that contribute to his art. To follow his artistic journey, he can be reached at mpatrickriggin.com.