By Stephanie Knapp
Grand Prize Silver winner in the Nineteenth Annual Solas Awards
Life can take us to the ends of the Earth, and to the end of our rope.
1. The Sticks
“Age et date de naissance?” The nurse was asking my age and birthday again. She was the nicer one, with that easy elegance that women effuse even in community centers in Nowheresville, France. The Romanian doctor, or French doctor of Romanian origin (I hadn’t exactly understood this part of our conversation), had smiled at my baby, but had been less obliging in all other aspects. I’d gotten passed off to her after completing the softer, phase one questions by the intake nurse. To be honest I’d failed the first round of those.
“Identification?”
I handed over my pass-éducation: a laminated card with my name, photo, and post. It seemed official enough. She turned it over in her hands, as if she would find something more with each flip.
“Your phone number, please.”
“We don’t have a phone.”
The intake nurse’s shoulders rounded in consideration. “Can anyone here vouch for your identity?”
I scanned the room, a generous space that would’ve made a small-sized gymnasium or auditorium in America. Armchairs peppered the pale vinyl floor, and a pair of canvas-doored cubbies stood to the left of the intake table. Some murals on the south-facing wall depicted a cracked-out drummer and a Louis Armstrong–looking fella. Then there was the long and heavily laden snack table nearer the entrance.
The identity question mirrored a familiar experience. Back in from the sticks I was from, the Ozarks, I’d once forgotten my documents. It was my first time voting, and I didn’t have my registration. The woman on the other side of the folding table had looked at my license and my face and said, “It’s ok honey, I know your mamma.” And that was that.
This small town was reminiscent of my childhood. It showed up on Google maps as an opaque dot only after multiple zooms. But though the size was familiar, the reflection was warped. On this side of the mirror I was over 4,500 miles from where people knew my mother.
Part of the reason I had shown up to the community center that afternoon was to try and place a tendril in our newfound soil (although the snack table was a massive bonus). It was where I had landed. Me, and a baby, in Picardie, France. Here, we were alone. I could vouch for the baby. But there was no one to vouch for me.
2. Age and Birthday
Two months prior I’d been eating birthday cake in northern California. My younger sister Emily had written XXX on the birthday cake because she’s amazing and shares a parallel sense of humor. We’d gotten together for the evening—she and her new fiancé and some friends and my husband. We ate and got drunk and used my art-school easel to play Pictionary.
Twenty-nine was the superficial goodbye that night. I’d already been dismantling my life, saying goodbye in progressively larger ways to the places and things and people around me. I’d left my job in San Francisco, gathered up the birth certificates and vaccination records, then went to AAA to get an international drivers license.
The Bay Area was in the rear view on my birthday—as was the wedding three years before. In my sister’s duplex in Davis, California, there were only unpacked suitcases, an appointment to procure a work visa, and an imminently departing one-way ticket to Paris. I did not know what hellos lay in wait. I only knew that in desperation I had applied for a job in France and they had said “oui.” I couldn’t yet face the reasoning behind my flight, but I knew it had something to do with keeping myself alive. Everything else existed as prayer.
3. Conversions
After failing to prove my identity with my pass-éducation, we scurried back to the flat. We returned armed with passports. For the second time that evening a kind stranger appeared out of nowhere and wordlessly grabbed onto the stroller’s prow to help carry it up the stairs.
This time I swung straight to the snack table to fetch the baby a tear of baguette. He’d begun to fuss. I should’ve changed his diaper when I was grabbing the passports. Only three remained in the pack, and I’d been rationing for two days. From my understanding, payday was at least another week away. At least I was hoping that I’d understood this correctly.
The intake nurse had a hard time making sense of my passport dates, probably because the French transpose the day of the month and month. But soon she was satisfied that I was me, and after a few coos at the baby, she passed me on to a woman in a lab coat, who led us into the canvas-covered booths.
The booth was less like a voting booth and more like my imaginings of a confessional. I angled the stroller between the two opposing folding chairs, and the woman with the lab coat and hair that could only be described as “chic business” produced a clipboard. She spoke the questions with an accented French. First she grilled me about travel: which countries, when. Then she asked how long I’d been in the country. I fudged two days because she’d already let slip that I must be in France for a month to make a blood donation. She did the math and voilà, I met the requirements by one day exactly. Being satisfied with this, and that I probably had never been exposed to MadCow, she moved to sexual partners.
I didn’t understand whether she meant currently, or ever, but it didn’t matter. The answer was one. And while I used to vacillate between pride and shame on that, I didn’t have time to feel either, because the next question was already being asked.
“Marital status?”
“Yes,” I started. Before I could submerge the panic in my eyes, or stumble through words I couldn’t articulate in any language about all the wrong that I was running from, I saw my dodge.
“You’re married,” I said, pointing at her wedding band.
“Yes but my husband lives in Romania.”
“Mine too! I mean, yes, I’m married, and he’s not here. In France.” It was the perfect and reasonable truth, and a serviceable answer for why I was hauling a baby around to a blood drive. I kept going to refocus the conversation. “It must be hard to be so far away.”
“We Skype. And use Messenger.”
It kept on like this. She also had a son, although he was much older than mine. As we were developing this rapport, I congratulated myself on sustaining five minutes of conversation in the target language. But then we swung to the numbers.
“How many centimeters and kilos are you?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s ridiculous,” she quipped. “How could you not know this?”
“Because I only know inches and pounds. And even then…” I looked down at my body, wondering what the numbers might be.
“You must be joking.”
I went with her suggestion. “We don’t really use the metric system. What do you think I weigh?”
“What?” she chuckled.
“Go on, guess. Or, ok fine. Just use the baby’s stats. He’s 8.4 kilos and 73 cm. Ten months old.”
“Right, the baby.” Her smile blew away as she returned to her notes. “He nurses?”
“Yes.”
“How many times per day?”
“Four.”
She set down her clipboard in triumph.
“Well, that does it. There is no way you have an iron over twelve. That’s the cut-off. And besides, you must be too tired.”
I didn’t bother asking 12 what. That was irrelevant—she had given me a number to beat. Not only had I already consumed snacks (and now felt under obligation to give), but more than that I would not let this doctor tell me what my body could handle. She had no idea what I’d already been through.
I assured her that I was not tired at all.
4. Distance
I hadn’t lied when I said I wasn’t tired. An admittance would have been antithetical to the way I moved through the world. I was a coach’s daughter. Childhood was Roger Bannister and Prefontaine and Billy Mills (apparently it would’ve been too progressive in the ‘80s to use Tamakoce Te’Hila’s non-whitened name). Childhood was also my own races. Naturally I revered the greats, but was also horribly intimidated by them. I spent summers dreading the annual 5k race in downtown St. Louis, knowing I would never be good enough. We loaded into the van in the dark, Dad secreting a pistol into the car door or his sock because we were going into The City. I didn’t know what scared me more: the thousands of participants and spectators, the idea that the pistol would be used, or the fear of walking and/or disappointing my dad. It was so obvious I was bad at Athletics in those years. Slower than my older sister, could barely clear the pit in the high jump, unable to do anything but push hurdles down. It was a near certainty that I would be the family disgrace. But in middle school I somehow started being the first or second one back from our half mile warm up loops in PE. Maybe they don’t want to win, I thought, but I do. It was especially sweet to beat the boys, because I knew as soon as their bodies outmuscled mine, our biologies would ensure every future placement. In those years distinguishing myself with speed wasn’t about winning trinkets—the tidbits of approval I garnered from a bronze at the Show-Me State Games or a ribbon from an AAU meet were of much greater value than the hardware. I collected them all the same, and any PE or field day accomplishments, but held any higher aspirations close to my chest. I only really became a runner when I set the eighth grade mile record. Earning a place on the board felt like earning a place in the family. The only thing remaining was the relentless work to maintain it.
I carried this dogged distance-runner mentality forward, applying it to every physical or mental challenge. By adulthood, ignoring pain and dismissing exhaustion were baked into my marrow. It was a never-ending cycle, proving that my body (and by extension my entire being) mattered because it could power over obstacles. Yet even I could admit that the tired of the last year had been different. Not only had the process of birth been humbling in an entirely new way, but shortly afterwards I developed a series of infections that resulted in an emergency surgery. This was in part because I had received inadequate medical care, but like so much else, my own doing: a failure not only to recognize what my body was capable of surmounting on its own, but of advocating for it. Why speak of physical discomfort or pain? It would be useless in a workout. It went unrecognized in my relationship. Just in the last year, when I told my husband I felt sick, he closed the bedroom door in my face, saying he was tired too. In other words, weakness was no excuse for leaving my four-week-old job unattended. I lay on the carpet of our Oakland apartment for hours, glancing at the baby and holding tightly to the idea that my body must be able to handle whatever infection was raging through my breast. That with the baby, I wasn’t alone.
Internal and external silencing made a sarcophagus around me. What did the true intentions of my flight matter? I’d already become a ghost. The quantitative evidence of this still haunts me : a year of blank journal pages, months of nearly no emails (the survivors are pragmatic and/or opaque). The places where my voice, where my distinctly altered and freshly scarred body could inhabit, had been marched to a ledge. I was running an unknown course, on God-knows what mile. My toughness an invisible medal clanking across my sternum.
5. Take and Give
Several minutes and a vial of blood later, I clocked in at 12.5 whatevers. I could donate. My French-Romanian doctor reluctantly led me to another nurse, who pointed me towards the recliners. I walked over with a smug expression, as if squeaking above the minimum requirements was something I’d been training for weeks to accomplish.
“Age et date de naissance?”
And there we were again.
I answered, pausing as she slid the needle into the crook of my arm. For a moment I wondered why I knew it was larger than a regular needle, why I even had that comparison. Then I remembered the biweekly blood draws throughout the pregnancy, the strangeness of the data during that time. The doctor’s office had called one day out of the blue, asked me if I felt well, and then told me that my white blood cell count was astronomically high. Worried that I had leukemia, they tested my blood every two weeks. Although my cousin had died of leukemia when we were children, I never believed the doctors. I submitted to their blood tests anyways, moving forward without processing any feeling inside my body.
There was, however, no denying that my blood chemistry was changing upon that recliner. About a minute in, a pleasant sinking sensation settled atop me. This was followed by a flare of panic, but the nurse returned, distracting me. She leaned my chair back and instructed me to concentrate on the fluorescent lights and to not close my eyes. Comfort seeped across my body. Silence. Then, a fussing sound. I followed the red snake flowing from my left arm across my body, down the chair, then to my baby, strapped into the stroller. The stroller. A compact, three-wheeled Mountain Buggy with inflatable tires. You could run with it, go over any terrain, lay it down flat for diaper changing or sleeping. It was one of the only things I hadn’t shed in my flight across the ocean.
“Sshhhh,” I tried. The bag at the end of my left arm’s tether rocked back and forth. I wished I could hold the baby, rock him just as the blood was being rocked. Instead I handed him a bright green folder as an amusement, the only thing my right arm could reach. My slide into lethargy continued, opening another memory. The baby at six weeks, on the floor. Me, on the operating table. The surgeon above us. The fearful glint of a metal under fluorescents.
For all he knows, I could be getting a haircut, I rationalized, entombing the surgery memory into safety. I craned my neck to check on the other donors. There were one or two newcomers, and several empty recliners. Meanwhile, in the stroller, the baby had begun gnawing on the folder. Merde. I used my right hand to pick the flecks of green paper out of his mouth and toss the thing on the floor.
The nurse came over again to ask me how I was doing. “Ça va,” I shrugged weakly. Fine.
“Oh but the baby was eating the folder,” I continued. “Don’t worry. I got all the pieces.” The nurse shook her head in confusion. Had I spoken in English?
My blood pressure bent down in a deep yawn, and a relaxed peace soaked into my body. How long had I been in the chair? Long enough for the baby to gnaw a corner off the folder and the mural characters to begin staring at me. Long enough to bag on the rocker go from clear sack to burgundy balloon. Only one person remained in a recliner, and I began to wonder if somehow they’d all failed their iron tests. If the baby and I were the only ones left, if that somehow meant that we were doing things right, or wrong. Across the gymnasium, a school-aged boy was using the folder like a surfboard to skate across the floor. Didn’t the baby just have that folder? Or me? I envisioned a boat, made completely of green folders, striking out across the sea. Sailing off the edge of a flattened world, never seen again.
The nurse who had previously been satisfied with my answers of “fine” was chatting somewhere in the periphery. Then French-Romanian doctor appeared, and I heard the nurse say something about “nearly done.”
“No,” the doctor scolded. “She is done now!”
None of it seemed to matter anymore. In fact, it all seemed distantly entertaining. Even the baby had caught the vibe. We could stay parked in the community center forever, staring at the lights in peace. But then the doctor began blocking my view. She was holding something to my lips. A cup. A cup filled with something shockingly sweet. Orange juice.
“Doucement,” she was telling me, slowly, and I thought I would laugh out loud, because all I could think of was the scene from True Lies with Jamie Lee Curtis doing a striptease. But I don’t think I laughed. I’m not sure I even sat up for a bit. The nurse pulled the metal from my vein, and the doctor kept putting the orange juice to my lips in slow, Benedictine gestures.
Doucement. Doucement.
Minutes passed. Children began to come and visit the baby. After the nurse finished bandaging my arm, I attempted to bend it and get up, but everyone started shouting and I did not understand why. So I lay back down, arm long on the table, and watched the children play, adrift in my euphoria.
6. Oblivion
Words slowly bloomed across the snack table. A woman with an oval face talked to me about babies, about the coming weather. Others guided duck pâté, Nutella, and beer to their lips. Swap the French for English, the baguette for cereal bars, and it was a little like the bus rides home from races, our exhausted muscles flattened against the hard benches. We had all given a part of ourselves to the same cause.
Outside it was full dark. As in every previous trip up and down the community center stairs, someone magically materialized to help carry the stroller. How were the French so helpful? We were almost back to the flat when I remembered the diapers and how we might not make it to the morning.
“Fuck,” I whispered, pointing the stroller towards the discount grocery.
“Hey! English!” someone called out from the road. He was possibly one of the over-18 students, a group pursuing technical training called the BTS. Was I his English teacher?
“Aye-like-beeeer! It’s tor-ture!” he announced. I nodded and smiled, not only to disguise that I was in danger of fainting but to appreciate his valiant pass at our hard consonants. Inside I focused on steadying the 5kg diaper box across the stroller’s handlebar.
Back at the flat I ripped open the package and changed the baby, then face-planted onto the bed. I did not care how long until the next diaper purchase. I did not care about how many euros remained, or even how much blood was left. I supposed I was around a pint down, which should have just been subtraction, but that would assume a size I was not.
Other things I did not think about:
The surgery.
My husband.
My suicide attempt in the spring.
My brain spun on stand-by mode, occasionally whirring up when the baby began his puppyish play of placing random objects near my face. His night nursing—what I thought of as the evening’s finish line—loomed.
As I pulled the baby up onto the school-issued twin bed, I thought that maybe we could just fall asleep together. My stomach was still full of pâté and bread, so I also reasoned that the eventual absorption of calories-to-bloodstream would return my body to me.
I drew the baby to my breast and closed my eyes.
In the minutes that followed I slid into a well of fatigue I didn’t know existed.
She was right, I thought, unable to envision the French-Romanian doctor but hearing her warnings.
And everything was ok, and everything was wrong. The oblivion that I couldn’t yet admit that I was courting settled onto the bed with us. It spoke in many tongues, encouraging my erasure by telling me how negligent, how utterly reckless I had been. How it had been a catastrophic idea to take my baby and move to a tiny town I’d never heard of in the backwoods of France—no car or phone or friends or family. The baby began to snore softly, and I felt a wave of pity for him. He’d done nothing to deserve being carted across the ocean. To be plunked into a sparsely furnished, linoleum-lined room with nothing besides a handful of toys and a mother who was so frantically trying to find her own way.
~ ~ ~
In those paralyzed hours I thought I might be dying. That my body’s cells were closer to giving up than they had ever been before. The concentrate of blood pulsing through my innermost core was so feeble that I knew no adrenaline boost waited in the wings. The weak rise and fall of my rib cage was all that remained. After the tiny energy infusion from the snacks entered my muscles I relocated the baby to the camping crib. At lease he wouldn’t roll off the bed. And then it was spent. Thirst begged me to drink, and even though our room boasted the odd feature of a wall-mounted sink, it was over three feet away. I couldn’t manage it. I had some phone numbers pencilled in a notebook, but even if I could move, there was no phone to move to.
I hallucinated in the dark. I remembered that outside, stars were spilling into the infinite blackness. On our trip home it’d looked like someone had thrown salt into the late October sky. A gorgeous night. The same firmament held me, my baby, my mother, these strangers in Northern France, together. Our experiences weren’t separated by miles at all, only the twirling of the Earth and the millimeters of our skin. As blood and stars and death swirled about the room, everything was so simultaneously close and distant that it all hung in the balance. It was, finally, all beautiful.
~ ~ ~
Stephanie Knapp is a writer living in New Orleans. She was born and raised in the Missouri Ozarks, and has always loved stories. Her films have been screened in Missouri, New York, and California, and her photos exhibited in Missouri and California. Recently, she has been a resident at Hambidge and a finalist in the Wisdom-Faulkner and Patty Friedmann writing competitions. Her work has been featured in Paper Dragon, Infection House, and the American Writer’s Review. When not teaching in the French schools or writing, she makes desserts, runs, and will lose entire days in the darkroom if unattended.