“What is it?” Phoebe asked, lifting her head, reaching down with one hand to touch her baby.
“A girl,” Rhea replied. “It’s a girl, a female child.” Then she lifted the baby, holding it in one big hand. “Get me a clean, wet cloth,” she said. Diana turned to the bureau, did something, then turned back again, handing Rhea a small, wet cloth. Rhea took it and wiped the baby’s tiny face with it. She cried then, a good, strong wail and Rhea reached out, dropped the cloth and pressed the baby against her bosom, murmuring to it. Then Selena gave her a baby’s blanket that lay folded on the chair by Phoebe’s bed and helped Rhea wrap the child in it, and then they set the baby in the crook of Phoebe’s arm.
“I have to push again,” Phoebe said, alarm in her voice.
“It’s only the afterbirth,” Rhea said matter-of-factly, and bent over Phoebe again. Diana had picked up the child and was holding it, touching its little face with her fingertips, smiling at it, while Rhea muttered at the end of the bed. “Go ahead, there, nothing to it.” The afterbirth came, Phoebe groaned, this time with relief that came close to pleasure.
Rhea gathered the sheets they had placed under her and, with Selena’s help, thrust them into a garbage bag Diana must have brought upstairs. This surprised Selena. She had never thought of Diana as competent, able to look after things, and this revelation pleased her immensely.
“What a team we are!” she said, laughing, and Diana laughed, too.
“It’s twelve, no five after,” she said. “She must have been born at midnight.”
“We should bathe her,” Selena suggested.
“Time enough for that,” Rhea grunted, fussing around between Phoebe’s knees. “Hand me that basin and another cloth.” Selena hurried around the bed and gathered the things Rhea had asked for, brought them to the foot of the bed and set them down.
Rhea began to wash Phoebe, and Selena protested, “I’ll do it.” Rhea moved back then, and let Selena wash her daughter while she and Diana returned the pillows to the bed, propping Phoebe up a little so she could see her baby better. Then Rhea sat down in the chair in the corner, folded her hands on her lap, and closed her eyes.
Diana was searching through Phoebe’s drawers, looking for a clean nightgown for her. When she found one, she set it on the bed, took another cloth, and helped Selena sponge Phoebe all over. Then, together, they put the fresh gown on her and covered her, tucking the blankets in around the baby.
Finished, Selena stood back.
“Oh, good,” Phoebe said. “I feel really good,” and she smiled. “I think she’s asleep,” she said, looking down at her child. “Isn’t she?”
“What are you going to call her?” Diana asked.
Without taking her eyes from the child, Phoebe said, “I didn’t think of names.” Diana opened her mouth as if to offer a suggestion, but Phoebe went on. “But I kept thinking, just now, I mean, that I could smell flowers—roses, I think.” She laughed, looking up at her mother. “I know it’s silly, but I thought I could. So maybe her name should be Rose. No, Primrose, like those little yellow evening primroses that grow out there …”
“Or the big, pink, gumbo primroses,” Selena offered. Those ones that spring up in the most awful places, where the soil is terrible and absolutely nothing else will grow.”
“Yeah,” Phoebe said. “Primrose. I like that. Her name is Primrose.”
“She’s so beautiful,” Selena said, and began to cry.
“Poor Mom,” Phoebe said, “it must have been awful for you.” Selena was amazed to hear so little regret, so little sympathy in Phoebe’s voice. She stopped crying and looked at her daughter, but Phoebe had eyes only for her child. She has no idea what it was like, Selena realized, and blinked, floundering in her effort to get a grip on this. She saw now that she had been expecting the baby’s birth to change things. But why should it? she asked herself. Growing up, understanding other people, takes a lifetime. One labour won’t do it. Sympathy for Phoebe, for all that lay ahead of her, flooded Selena.
The women rose, straightened the bedcovers, picked up the wet towels, the basin full of water, the cloths and the garbage bag and the scissors, and left the room. Behind them, Phoebe drowsed, her baby nestled against her.
In the kitchen Selena put the kettle on to boil. Rhea and Diana sat down at opposite ends of the table, and Selena sat between them.
“I’m exhausted,” she said.
“I feel great,” Diana said.
“I am very tired,” Rhea said. “I never thought I’d help deliver another baby. I thought I’d seen my last. I didn’t know this was what I was waiting for.” Diana and Selena looked at her quizzically, but she said nothing more.
“I was surprised at Phoebe,” Selena said. “I never thought she’d make a fuss like that.”
“Well,” Diana said, “you can’t blame her for at least lodging a protest with the gods for what was happening to her. It’s a bit much, after all.”
“That’s true,” Selena said, “but still. In this country we don’t carry on like that. We just do it. There’s no use making a fuss about it.”
“Maybe we should,” Diana said. “In Europe women yell and scream and everybody expects them to. It makes sense to me.”
“Never,” Selena said. “I’d never do that.”
“There’ve been a lot of changes since I had my children,” Rhea said, “in the way we think about having babies, I mean. What with birth control pills, and overpopulation, and all.”
“Honestly,” Diana said. “I don’t know which is worse: the old ‘having a baby is suffering and torment and pain,’ or the new ‘having a baby is fun, something the whole family can do together.’” They laughed at that.
“There should be some middle way,” Selena said. “It’s a natural function, it happens a million times or more every year, and yet, there’s no denying it, each time it’s not natural at all, it’s a little miracle. It’s hard to figure out the right way to deal with that.” They were silent then, each lost in her own thoughts.
“Still,” Diana said, “this is a great way to have your baby. At home, surrounded by the people who care about you, instead of strangers. And sort of, not such a mystery, if you know what I mean.”
“I think,” Selena said slowly, “the worst thing that ever happened to me was when I had Phoebe. I had to go to the hospital in the city because she was early and old Dr. Sanderwell was away. When I was in the labour room they put my feet up in those horrible stirrups …”
“God, I hate them,” Diana said, suddenly furious.
“… and they had these handholds for my hands. When I tried to move my hand to scratch my nose, I realized that they had put straps around my wrists, and done them up, so that I couldn’t …” she gasped, then got control of herself, “… and my ankles were strapped, too.”
“They did that?” Diana said, not in disbelief, but in horror.
Behind her, the kettle had begun to hiss, but Selena ignored it.
“I remember I got panicky when I realized what they had done to me—I thought,” she swallowed hard. “I thought, if I don’t struggle, I won’t know … I’m a prisoner.”
Nobody spoke. Selena became aware of the clock that had been their parents’ and their grandparents’ ticking steadily above the table. She listened to it. Rhea sat at the end of the table, remote from them, her eyes closed. Diana sighed.
Upstairs Phoebe and her child slept on, dreaming who knew what, their dreams forever interwoven. The wind had died down, and they could hear faintly, in the distance, the roar of a snowmobile racing over the fresh-fallen snow, coming toward them.
Dear Selena,
Here in the Yucatan peninsula, I have been travelling through the villages. My Spanish is getting quite good and I can manage pretty well. You wouldn’t believe it if you could hear me dickering for food and a place to sleep. I’m riding around on a motor scooter, staying out of the way of the tourists and the tourist centres.
The Indians have a hard l
ife. They are such a small people, I tower over them. They are very poor, and most of them still live in the old ways, growing a little corn and so on, and living in palapas, which are thatch-roofed houses with no doors or windows, only openings and with no furniture inside. At night they just string hammocks and sleep in them. During the day they roll them up. They cut wood for their cooking fires and carry water, which is in short supply here, and grind their own corn as they need it each day. They work extremely hard for the most minimal existence.
But they too, like us at home, live among their ancestors. New little clusters of huts sometimes grow up around stone ruins that their ancestors built six or eight hundred years ago. I think of our women at home in Mallard and Chinook, cooking meals for their families, washing their clothes, nursing their babies and singing them to sleep. Just like their grandmothers did. So-called civilization is drawing closer though. There will soon be fast food stands outside Chichen Itza. And I shudder to think what will happen to the people then.
The women here are very dark-skinned, with black hair drawn tightly back from their faces. They don’t smile much and they seem to do the hardest work. Their costume is a short, white cotton dress. It has about four inches of embroidery around the hem—always a flower pattern in very bright colours—and there are no proper sleeves in it, just a square yoke which extends over the upper arms. The yoke is also covered in brightly coloured embroidered flowers. And the material the dress is made out of isn’t thick and heavy. It’s light and almost sheer. For all I know it might be a polyester blend. They wear a slip under it, I guess because below the hem for another three or four inches, there is a white eyelet frill with a scalloped edge showing. It is a beautiful costume.
The amazing thing to me is that these women all wear this dress, and they wear it all the time. I have seen a woman less than five feet tall, standing in her white dress while her husband loads onto her back a big bundle of sticks (cut neatly in equal lengths) for firewood, so heavy that she bends over with it. And women carrying buckets of water so heavy they stagger, and big ceramic basins on their heads full of grain or corn to be ground, all of them wearing that white dress with the flowers embroidered around the hem and across the chest.
The first time I saw it, I couldn’t believe it, couldn’t imagine the spirit that would make them produce some beauty that they could live with every day, even in that hard, unbeautiful killing life that they lead. It told me something about women. In fact, it made me think about that argument we had about the community college—about all those classes in embroidery and sewing and different kinds of crafts, and I was so contemptuous of them and of the other women, too. And none of you knew quite how to defend them, or yourselves. I see now what they were for, what they mean. And my respect for the women I grew up with has grown. I may not have been entirely wrong, but I wasn’t entirely right, either.
I think of the North Amerian native women doing all that beadwork with quills and sinew, and our own grandmothers turning the quilts, which they needed to survive the winter, into works of art. As if they didn’t have enough to do.
Even when you turn women into packhorses and slaves, it seems their craving for beauty, which has given light and strength and meaning to humankind, can’t be extinguished.
I am going further south from here, into the camps for the refugees from Guatemala, and after that I will move on south again. I am going further and further into the jungle.
Diana
Copyright
LUNA. Copyright © 1988 by Sharon Butala.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.
EPub Edition © NOVEMBER 2010 ISBN: 978-1-443-40215-6
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First published in by Fifth House: 1988
First HarperPerennial edition: 1994
This edition: 2005
* * *
Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data
Butala, Sharon, 1940-
Luna
“1st HarperPerennial ed.”
ISBN 0 00-648540-5
I. Title.
PS8553. U6967L85 1994 C813’.54 C94-931585-0
PR9199.3.B87I.85 1994
* * *
HC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3
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