How to
Act

Victoria Mack

It hit me in Whole Foods. It knocked me to my knees, my hands gripping the cart. I have no words for it, still, or at least not the right ones. 

January 2015, I’m in Denver doing a show—a new play by Tamara Jaskell, who is a fancy playwright and friend. Whenever Tamara writes a certain kind of role—a cold, nasty, city bitch who steals your money and your man—she casts me. At the time I’m skinny with blonde hair and cheekbones, and an imperious quality I developed as a teenager as protection from my father’s sneering contempt. I hate this quality in myself, but in the way of most survival tactics, it sticks, and the harder I try to be warm the colder I seem.

During the first week of rehearsal I find out I’m pregnant. There is joy, and bewilderment, and already there is dread, a sense that if my happiness depends on my body—always a site of frailty and chaos—tragedy is around the corner.  

Jack, my then-boyfriend, flies out from Brooklyn. I’m eight weeks along when we head to the first doctor’s appointment. I lie on the table in the bright yellow room, my stirruped feet in pink socks. My doctor is young and sweet-faced, and the three of us watch the ultrasound screen. There is a white flutter, like a hummingbird beating its wings against a window; like something you shouldn’t try to catch, something fast and fragile that’s meant to be free. 

Everything looks great, she tells us. Do we want the ultrasound printed to take with us? Of course we do, and Jack says, I guess it’s really happening, his voice trembling, and we grip each other’s hands and in that moment I feel it: I become a Mother. A new person, like I’m the one being born. My big dreams, my plans, my important thoughts, fall off like a skin I no longer need. I am body, now. Me = Body = Mother. My destiny.

I look at the doctor in time to see her eyelids flicker. Her mouth tightens, but she smiles, says “Excuse me,” and disappears. Jack lets go of my hand and we wait, silent. She comes back with an older woman, slick and stilettoed, with black hair in a tight low bun. The new doctor looks like a character I would play. This woman, brisk, all business, walks to the ultrasound machine and glares at the screen. 

The heartbeat is too faint, she says. And the fetus is too small. We’ll have to come back in a week and see. She walks to the door, turns and says, You’d better not take the ultrasound picture. I understand, then, what she means. 

I dress and we leave. We’d planned to get groceries after the appointment, so we head to Whole Foods. We pass Bye Bye Baby on the road and I grimace, then smirk. Bye bye baby. The universe is funny. Cruel, though.

The Denver Whole Foods is gigantic, a beast that could swallow our Brooklyn Associated as an hors d’oeuvres. We split up to shop more quickly. I am alone in the bread aisle when suddenly I am short of breath and have to lean onto the grocery cart. There is some kind of fog filling my eyes and I stare at the contents of the cart—whole milk, dark chocolate with hazelnuts, creamy peanut butter—trying to bring my mind back from wherever it has gone. I stop walking, panting, and from behind me I hear Ugh! Jesus. A brunette woman in long linen pants hurries around me and down the aisle, put out by how slowly I’m moving. I feel no anger. I feel only shock that there are other people in the world and that they are not in pain.  

I meet Jack and we find an empty register. I put a half gallon of milk on the conveyor belt and that’s when my legs give out. I grip the sides of the cart. Then I’m on the floor, panting, shaking. I cannot stand. Jack pays, places the groceries in our totes, jokes with the boy behind the register. He is giving me time, but when the bags are in the cart I know I have to get up. I have to walk to the car, drive home, go to bed, get up, go to rehearsal. I have to gather the thoughts and plans that fell off me like an old skin, and slap them onto this new me and pretend they’re attached. I have to perform. It’s a part I don’t want, badly-written, fake. The script goes something like, I’m fine. And, No, I don’t have children. I’m focused on my career right now. And, I am part of the world. I am not a Mother, I am a Person. I am more than a shell. 

I grip the top of the cart and pull myself up. She’d be six now. My hummingbird.