by Mary Rickert
Never having been pregnant before, Sylvia had nothing to compare it to except TV shows, but she thought it was perfect. She felt wonderful the whole time. Holly, the midwife, said, “Sometimes it’s almost harder if you have an easy pregnancy. It makes the birth just that much more of a shock.”
Sylvia, who had been feeling very much like a madonna—not the rock star, but the perfectly peaceful mother type—just smiled.
* * *
The pain was monumental. Right from the start. Ed called the doctor and she said, “How far apart?” and Ed asked Lara, “How far apart?” and Lara screamed, “What?” So Ed repeated the question. “There’s no time between, you moron,” Lara hollered. Ed relayed this to the doctor (editing out the “moron,” of course), who said, “When did the contractions start?” and Ed said, “Five minutes ago.” That’s when the doctor said, “Bring her in now.” Ed said, “Right now?” and the doctor said, “Wait. You’re in Voorhisville, right?” and he said, “Yes,” and she said, “Call the ambulance,” and Ed said, “Is there a problem?” and Lara screamed and the doctor said, “Call them.” So Ed called the ambulance and they came right away. It was Brian Holandeigler and Francis Kennedy (no relation to any of the famous ones), who tried to make jokes to calm Ed and Lara down, but between screams of agony, Lara was vicious. “She’s not usually like this,” Ed said. “Fuck you!” Lara shouted. “You’re going to be all right,” Francis said. “Fuck you!” Lara screamed. “Try to breathe,” Ed said. “Remember the breathing?” “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Lara screamed.
Something was wrong. Something was terribly wrong. She knew it. And here she was, surrounded by these idiot men (“Idiots!” she shouted) who thought she was hysterical.
“I’m dying!” she screamed.
“You’re not dying,” Ed said.
It felt like she was being scraped raw inside by talons. It felt like her guts were being carved out. Or like teeth! It felt like small sharp teeth were chewing her up inside.
“Do something!” she shouted.
“Well, we really can’t do much,” Brian said.
“What?” Ed and Lara said.
“I could take a look,” Brian said.
“But we’re not supposed to transport women in labor,” Francis said. “We’re supposed to stay here. Unless there’s a problem.”
“There’s a fucking problem!” Lara shouted.
“Do you mind if I look?” Brian said as he slipped his hands around the waistband of Lara’s pants. Ed found the image disturbing, and turned away. Lara saw him turn away. She managed, through her pain, to form the words again: “Fuck you.” Brian sat up. “Hold your legs together,” he said. “What?” Lara said. “Is it coming?” Ed said. “Of course it’s—” Lara interrupted herself to scream. “Close your legs!” Brian shouted. “Are we taking her?” Francis said. “Yes. Yes. Oh God, yes,” Brian said. “Close your legs!” he yelled at Lara. “Oh, God; oh Jesus,” Brian said. Lara screamed. Ed leaned down and held her hand. “Please,” he said, “close your legs.” “I want it out!” Lara shouted. “Please,” Ed said, “do what they say.” “Excuse me,” Francis said, and shoved Ed away.
Brian and Francis set the stretcher on the floor beside the couch. “I’m dying!” Lara screamed. Brian and Ed lifted her to the stretcher. “Close your legs,” Brian said. Lara closed her legs. “Don’t drop her,” Ed said as he opened the door. “Can I come with you?” “Two steps,” Francis said to Brian, who was backing out. Ed shut the door. He looked at Sylvia’s dark house. Death could come to anyone, anywhere, he thought. “Are you coming?” Francis said. Ed jumped into the ambulance. The siren screamed, but it was nothing compared to Lara’s screams. “Let me see where you’re at,” Francis said. He spread a sheet over Lara’s lap and bent under to have a look. When his head came out of the sheet, his eyes were wide, his skin white. “Oh, Jesus,” Francis said. “Hold your legs together.”
Lara tried to hold her legs together, but it felt like she was being sliced by knives. “Ed,” she shouted. “Ed?”
“I’m here, baby, I’m right here.” He squeezed her hand.
She screamed. She screamed the whole ride from Voorhisville to the hospital in Becksworth. When they got there, the doctor was waiting for them.
“How about an epidural?” she said. “You better take a look,” Brian said. She lifted the sheet and looked. “Take her to the OR,” the doctor said. “What’s happening?” Ed said. “You stay here,” a nurse said. “What’s happening?” Ed said to Brian and Francis. They both stared at him, then Francis said, “There might be some complications.” Ed sat down. Brian and Francis left. The hospital was so quiet Ed thought he could still hear Lara’s screams. But it couldn’t have been her, because Lara had gone to the right, and the screams were coming from the left.
* * *
Jan Morris lay screaming in her hospital bed, but no one was paying much attention. Someone had checked her when she came in, and pointed out that she wasn’t even dilated yet. Jan insisted they contact her doctor. “She wants to know,” she said. But Jan’s doctor was busy with some other emergency, so Dr. Fascular took the call instead. The nurse checked Jan again, decided that she was making a big fuss over nothing, and administered an epidural. The mother was in her forties, and they were often the biggest pains. They wanted everything a certain way. But Jan kept screaming until it finally occurred to someone that there might be a problem.
The nurse who looked at Jan later said, over coffee and eggs with her twelve-year-old son, that it was the most shocking thing she’d ever seen. The woman hadn’t even been dilated ten minutes ago—or, okay, it might have been closer to twenty minutes, but then suddenly there was … she thought there might be an arm, a leg, something like that. Anyway, after she saw the strange thing protruding from Jan Morris’s vagina, she ran to call Dr. Fascular again.
“What thing?” the nurse’s son asked.
“I don’t know how to describe it. It was just sticking out, and it was like a, like the tip of a triangle, and it was sharp.”
“You touched it?”
“Look,” she said, and showed him the small cut on her finger.
“What happened next?” the boy asked.
She remembered touching that bloody tip with her finger; she remembered the sear of pain and running to call the doctor. The next thing she knew, several hours had passed and she was punching her time card to go home. Even though she was tired and her feet were sore and she certainly wanted to be there when her son woke up, she went to the nursery where she found the baby, a sweet-as-they-all-are prune-shaped thing, wrapped tightly in a blanket, sleeping. She read the chart and saw that there was nothing unusual noted.
MADDY
Yeah, well, that nurse didn’t see nothing wrote down about it because they could hold them inside like the way you put your fingers in a fist, or maybe more like the way you close a eye. That’s what the babies did. They pulled them in real tight and it just looked like, I don’t know, kind of extra wrinkled and stuff. Who pays attention to a baby’s back, anyways? Not most people. Most people wanna look at a baby’s face or fingers and toes. There is a weird fascination with grownups looking at a baby’s fingers or toes. Also, baby’s shit. My mom could go on and on about JoJo’s shit. Was it greenish? Was it runny? She’d get mad at me when I rolled my eyes. “You can tell things about your baby’s health, Maddy,” she’d say.
My mom liked to behave all superior about babies with me ’cause she had two, and she figured that made her a expert. Also, I really think she liked the fact I was a teenage mother ’cause it proved her theory that I was a fuckup all along. Weird as it is, though, I sometimes wish I had my mom here with me like Elli has hers. But how fucked is that? Both of them doing it with the same guy? It makes me shiver every time I think about it.
JoJo was born at home, even though we didn’t plan it that way. Just ’cause we had a midwife renting Billy’s old room in the basement don’t mean we was going to use her. Holly was really busy. On
ce she came upstairs and asked me to turn the music down, but she asked like she knew it was a big pain for me to do, and so I turned it down. And one night we sat on the front steps and talked. I thought she was nice.
But it’s not like I got to choose much about JoJo. My mom liked to act like everything was up to me. “He’s your baby,” she’d say. “He’s your responsibility”—she said this about diaper changing and when he was crying. But other times she’d say, “Just ’cause you had a baby don’t mean you’re all grown up now.”
My mom said I had to go to a hospital. “It’s just ridiculous that in this day in age, with all the best modern medicine has to offer, a woman would choose to give birth at home like they was living in Afghanistan or something.” My mom loved to mention Afghanistan whenever she could. My brother Billy got killed there, and after that she blamed Afghanistan for anything wrong in the world.
After I talked to Holly that night on the porch, I wanted her to help when the baby came. It’s not like she tried to convince me, or nothing like that. We barely talked about it. Mostly we talked about other stuff. But I liked her, and I didn’t like Dr. Fascular. He has cold hands and is always grumpy and shit.
My mom was all like, “No way,” and said it had to be at the hospital. But there wasn’t much she could do when it happened the way it did, all of a sudden, with me alone in the house. I didn’t expect it to hurt like it did. It hurt a lot. I didn’t scream, even though I really wanted to. I just went down to Billy’s old room and laid down on Billy’s old bed, which was now Holly’s, and waited for her to get home. It hurt so bad I took the bedspread and rolled it up at the end and stuck it in my mouth. Every time I felt like screaming, which was pretty much all the time, I bit down.
I don’t know how long it was before Holly came home. She said, “Maddy?”
I just screamed. I let the bedspread fall out of my mouth and I screamed loud enough to bring my mom and dad down the stairs, and then there was this whole part where they got mad at Holly, and even though I was screaming and shit, I had to explain to them that she didn’t have nothing to do with it, and then my dad said he was going to get the car, and Holly was looking at my vagina and saying, “I don’t think so.”
I heard it hurt a lot to have a baby, but nothing nobody said told me how much. I don’t even want to think about it.
So Mom starts arguing with Holly, and then all of a sudden Holly says, “This baby is halfway here. If you want to take her all the way to Becksworth, you go ahead. But I sure hope you are prepared to deliver it.” Which, ha ha, got my mom to shut up.
Okay, so like it hurt more than anything I ever imagined. It hurt more than when Billy got killed, and I didn’t think there would ever be nothing that hurt worse than that. Later, Holly told me it was not a usual birth. Still, I don’t think I’ll ever do it again. Like I could! Ha, stuck here with all these women.
I was exhausted. I just wanted to go to sleep. Holly said, “What are you going to name him?” And I said, “JoJo.” And my mom said, “I knew it. I knew it was Joey Marin.” My mom was obsessed with trying to figure out who JoJo’s dad was. “It ain’t Joey Marin,” I said, but she just looked all superior. Holly cleaned him up and she said he was beautiful. And that’s coming from someone who delivered hundreds of babies, so that should tell you something. Then she gave him to me, wrapped up like a bratwurst in a bun. Everybody stood there, even my dad. Like I was going to breastfeed in front of him! I guess Holly figured that out, ’cause she said she had some things to talk to them about in private. When Mom and Dad were both out the door, I told Holly I was sorry I got her in trouble. “That’s all right,” she said. “I thought this room could use a birth.” I saw what she meant. Except for Holly’s clothes and a little glass jar on the dresser filled with some wildflowers, the room was just the way it was when Billy left to get killed in the war.
So I took off my T-shirt and put JoJo up by my boob, and he started sucking.
The next day, after I moved back upstairs and my mom cleaned all of Holly’s sheets and even baked her a tube of chocolate chip cookies to thank her for everything she did, I was undressing JoJo, and the next thing I knew, my finger was bleeding and JoJo was crying and my mom was standing there going, “What are you doing to him?”
“I ain’t doing nothing to him,” I said. “I pricked my finger.”
“This is no longer all about you,” she said, and, “You better make sure you keep one hand on him when he’s on the changing table, or it won’t be long before he’ll just roll off.” About as soon as JoJo was born, my mom started imagining all the horrible ways he could die.
I looked at JoJo laying there with his face all scrunched up and all I could think was that I had a huge problem. I didn’t love him, all right? For the first time in my entire life I wondered if this is what was wrong with me and my mom, that she just didn’t love me and couldn’t do nothing about it. I felt real bad, and angry too. I decided that wasn’t going to happen with me and JoJo.
I picked him up and took him with me to the bed, and that’s when I saw them sticking out. They were tiny, like his fingers and toes were tiny. They were tiny like that.
“Holy shit, JoJo,” I said. “You’ve got wings.”
TAMARA
When Tamara met Raj and found out he was Hindu, she didn’t think much about it. It wasn’t until she was already falling in love that she discovered how much his faith mattered to him. She told him she wasn’t sure she could convert, but he said she didn’t need to. It might have been easier if she could fool herself into believing that her infidelity had been Raj’s fault, but Tamara could not believe that. She had cheated on him for the worst reason of all: because she felt like it.
There was justice in her pregnancy. It was a Catholic thought, she knew, but no matter how many years had passed since she’d gone to church, she could not escape the idea that God did things like this to Catholics. He punished them for being bad.
Tamara knew it was not uncommon for pregnant woman to have horrible dreams, but she was sure hers were the worst. Several times, Raj died. Once, she drowned the baby. (How could she even dream that?) She had many dreams that featured birth defects. When she woke up crying, Raj held her, soothed her, made her tea, told her jokes. He was the perfect husband, which just made everything worse.
Tamara thought of confessing. Being raised Catholic, how could she not think of that? But she couldn’t decide. Was she confessing to help their marriage, or just to relieve her guilt? What was the right thing to do? She no longer trusted her judgment. How could she, after she’d displayed such a colossal lack of any? (After it all came out and everything fell apart the way it did, she would decide she must have been put under some sort of spell, though the other women say things like, “Sure, if that’s what you wanna call it, honey.”)
Tamara had passed the bar exam, so she was technically a lawyer, but hardly anyone knew that. She never practiced. She hated law school, but didn’t dare quit after her parents had put so much money into it. She hadn’t really mentioned, in any of her phone calls or e-mails to her parents, that she wasn’t doing anything with her degree, but instead was working part-time at the Voorhisville library while writing another novel. She’d never told them about the four previous novels she’d written (but not published) so it was difficult to tell them about the fifth. They wouldn’t approve. Her father used to make fun of her art major friends. He called them “the future poor of America.”
She and Raj moved to Voorhisville because they had fantasies about small town life. Raj, who worked as a litigation attorney in Becksworth, and therefore wasn’t really in Voorhisville much, still believed it was a quaint community, a perfect place for children. Tamara wasn’t so sure. She’d seen things: the way Michael Baile (whose cousin was on the school board) got all the contracts for the school maintenance jobs, even though there were consistent complaints about the quality of his work. The way almost everyone talked about Maddy Malvern’s spiral into sexual promiscuity, bu
t did nothing about it. The way Roddy Tyler flopped around in those duct-taped shoes even in the winter, despite the fact that he worked for the richest people in town. Tamara did not think Voorhisville was quaint, though it did have the annual Halloween parade with all the children dressed in costumes walking down Main Street. That was quaint. And Fourth of July in Fletcher’s Park, with Girl Scouts selling baked goods, Boy Scouts selling popcorn, and Mr. Muller twisting balloons into animal shapes while the senior citizen band played God knows what … well, that was quaint too. But Tamara saw the looks Raj, with his dark skin, got. “Doesn’t it bother you?” she asked, but he just laughed. That’s just the way Raj was. He didn’t care. It had been harder for Tamara. She wasn’t used to being a victim of prejudice.
“It would be like this in almost any small town in America,” Raj said. “You can’t let it upset you.”
But it did. It upset Tamara very much. It confused her, too. She could never be sure. Had the man at the post office been rude because he knew she was married to someone with dark skin, or had he just been a rude man? What about the checkout girl at the supermarket, and the lady who cut her off at the corner of Henry Street and Wildwood?
The novel Tamara was working on was called Underskin, about a nomadic tribe of tree dwellers and the consumers who ate them. It was a love story, a dark fantasy, a brutal indictment of prejudice, and her best work. But after her strange encounter with the blue-eyed man, it was contaminated. Also, Tamara would later note, wryly, she had to resist the urge to put in a band of avenging angels. They weren’t part of her plan for the book, and yet they kept appearing. She kept crossing them out.
Essentially, the work that had been going so well before she cheated on her husband started going very badly. This, Tamara knew, was God’s way of getting her. This and her pregnancy; that’s how she thought of it. She thought God had made her pregnant just to prove a point—which, she reasoned, was unnecessary, because she already knew she shouldn’t have cheated, so why’d God have to make her pregnant as well?