“Someone here call for an ambulance?” asked the ambulance man, looking around the room. He was short and round. His partner, walking in behind him, was tall and skinny. The two of them reminded me of Abbott and Costello, who I used to watch with Granddaddy on his little black-and-white TV, both of us laughing our heads off.
“That’s her right there,” Mama said, pointing at me. “You need to take her to Grady.”
I sat up on the sofa but the two EMTs just looked at me, confused. “Dispatch said they had a call about a birth in progress,” said the chubby one. “Right here at this address.”
“Yeah,” said Sweetie, pointing at me. “She’s got a birth in progress. You can’t see she good and pregnant?”
“Miss,” said the skinny one, turning to me, “when exactly did the pain start?”
“Dunno,” I shrugged. “Maybe half an hour?”
“So you’re not actually giving birth at the present moment?”
“No, sir.”
“Then why did we get a call about a birth in progress?”
“Because I told the 911 lady that the baby was coming out,” answered Sweetie, who was standing on her mattress with her hands on her hips. “I said I seen the top of the baby’s head. That’s what I told her.”
The skinny ambulance man looked at my sister like she’d just announced she stabbed an old lady in the eyeball: “Why would you do that?”
“So y’all muthafuckas would get here!” Sweetie practically yelled. Then she turned to me. “You WELCOME!”
The ambulance men didn’t want to take me. They said I had “plenty of time,” and the only reason they’d come so quick was because they were already in the neighborhood, on another call.
“We diverted from another patient because dispatch said ‘birth in progress,’” the chubby one said, holding up his fingers in air quotes. “As in ‘an emergency.’”
The skinny one said to Mama, “Ma’am, why don’t you call again when she’s further along and they’ll send another unit?” Without waiting for a response, the EMTs turned to leave.
“Oh hell, nah!” Mama yelled. “You gonna take her right now.”
The chubby one shot his partner a look and shook his head, like he couldn’t believe somebody was asking him to do his actual job. “All right,” he said, with a sigh. “I’ll get the stretcher.”
“I don’t need all that,” I said, standing up. “I can walk.”
The skinny guy pushed me back down, hard. “No ma’am,” he said. “It’s regulation.”
Soon after the chubby one came back with the stretcher, and the two of them started strapping me in. That’s when it really hit me: I was having a baby.
Suddenly my heart was pounding like it was coming out of my chest. This whole thing was a BIG MISTAKE, I wanted to yell. There’s no way I was gonna be able to fit this baby out my cooch. NO GOTDAMN WAY!
I looked over at Mama, who was leaning back, puffing on a Winston. I noticed she wasn’t wearing shoes.
“Aren’t you coming with me?” I asked, alarmed.
“Nah, girl,” she said through a cloud of smoke. “You heard the man. It’s not like you gonna have the baby tonight.”
“But Mama . . .” I said, panicking. “I need you. Please, can you come? Please?”
“What you need me for?”
“’Cause I’m scared.”
“C’mon now,” she said. “Girl, there ain’t nothin’ to be scared of. Your sister had a baby and she didn’t have no trouble at all. Ain’t that right, Sweetie?”
I looked over at my sister, but she just shrugged. She couldn’t tell me it was going to be fine because for weeks she’d been describing the miracle of her childbirth. It sounded like the worst X-rated horror movie ever made: “Rabbit, for real, it feels like your insides is being ripped out . . . like you got an alien in there and it’s tryna to kill you . . . when the doctor cuts you down there to let the baby head out you won’t even feel it cuz you already gonna be in so much pain . . . and you know you gonna shit yourself, right? Yep, you gonna doo-doo right on top of your little baby’s head. . . .”
“You ain’t got nothin’ to worry about,” Mama said again. “You don’t need me tonight.”
I turned away from her to face the wall, trying not to cry. I was so mad at myself for begging her to come with me. I should have known Mama would never say yes. If there is one lesson she’d taught me in life it was not to ask her for shit: not food, or clothes, or to comb my hair. But I had been fooled, because lately things had been different.
Ever since school let out for the summer, Mama and I had been together from dawn till dusk, sitting in that hot-ass efficiency watching all her shows: The Price Is Right, The Young and the Restless, and As the World Turns. One day she looked at me and said, “Girl, you big as a house! That’s just how I was when I was pregnant with you.” She even put her hand on my belly and felt the baby kick. It was the closest we’d ever been. If felt like we were bonded. Like she was gonna be there for me, for real.
Instead all she said was “No use in both of us going to the hospital,” as the ambulance men lifted up the stretcher and carried me out the door.
Outside, I felt the night air against my face. I closed my eyes and promised myself that I would never ever ever EVER ask Mama for shit again as long as I lived. I gripped my belly and squeezed my eyes shut to keep the tears from falling. When I opened them again, I was inside the back of the ambulance.
I looked around and was startled to see, on the bench against the wall, a balding, middle-aged man wearing dirty sneakers with no laces. He had a bandaged right shoulder and his faded T-shirt was ripped and covered in blood.
“Who the fuck are you?” I said. I tried to sit up, but I was strapped to the stretcher. “What the hell?”
“Miss,” said the chubby ambulance man. “I’m gonna need you to calm down.”
“But who is he?” I pointed at the man covered in blood.
“Well, miss, as I previously informed you, we were tending to this gentleman and his injuries when we got the call about a woman giving birth. Now if you just lay back down, we’re gonna take the two of you directly to the hospital.”
I turned to the bleeding man. “What happened to you?”
“Nigga cut me,” he answered, with a shrug of his good shoulder. I could smell the liquor coming off him like he’d been swimming in a vat of Granddaddy’s moonshine. He looked from my face to my belly. “You pregnant?” he asked. “Or is you just fat?”
“What it look like?” I said, suddenly irritated. “CAN’T YOU SEE I’M HAVING A GOTDAMN BABY?”
“Okay, okay, okay . . .” He put up his hand like he was stopping traffic. Then he leaned back and stared at me like he was trying to get his eyes to focus.
“Now, miss,” he said, pointing his finger in the air. “Let me tell you somethin’. Babies are a gotdamn blessing, ya heard me? I got four children of my own: Rodney, Samuel, Joseph Jr., and Joleen, my little baby girl. She ’bout three, maybe four months old. Can’t be no more than six months. Maybe a year, give or take. Hell, it don’t matter! That baby is the prettiest little baby you ever seen. I enjoy the shit outta them kids. So I just want to say congratulations to you, miss!” He swept up his arm like he was holding a Bumpy Face bottle and making a toast. “Congratulations!”
“I mean that,” he added. “It’s a gotdamn beautiful thing.”
Just then another contraction hit. I grabbed my belly and moaned, “Ohhhhhhh . . .”
“Now that shit gotta hurt,” said the drunk after it passed. “You ain’t got nobody ridin’ with you to the hospital?”
“No.”
“You want to hold my hand?”
“Nope.”
“All right then. Good luck.”
“Yeah, you too.”
Chapter 12
Baby Formula
My daughter was born at 1:07 p.m. on August 9, 1986, weighing eight pounds, fifteen ounces, with big brown eyes and a full head of hair. “You
so pretty,” I whispered when the nurse placed her in my arms. I named her Ashley, after the beautiful Ashley Abbott from The Young and the Restless, who was having an affair with an older, married man, just like me. Ashley Abbott and I had almost the exact same life problems. The only difference was her married man was Victor Newman, the billionaire owner of the worldwide cosmetic and real estate conglomerate Newman Enterprises, while mine worked the fryer at Fish Supreme.
Derrick didn’t have Victor Newman money. But that didn’t stop me from having big dreams about the life of luxury I wanted for our baby. Most of my fantasies involved white-lacquer furniture. The kind I’d see when I went with Mama to Carson’s, a buy-now-pay-later furniture store where Mama was paying off her nineteen-inch color TV.
Every month, rain or shine, as soon as she cashed her welfare check, Mama would get in the Pink Panther and drive over to Carson’s with her ten dollars in hand. Mama might fall behind on the rent, the electric, or the gas, but there was no way she was gonna miss a payment and let Carson’s repo her TV. While she argued with the cashier about how much she still owed, I’d wander over to the Baby Room to take a look at floor displays of the most beautiful furniture I’d ever seen.
I had my eye on a shiny white crib that came with a matching dresser. I’d run my hand along the rail and imagine my baby luxuriating in that crib, dressed in a pink Adidas tracksuit with a pink baby bow around her head and tiny British Knights tennis shoes that I’d clean with a toothbrush. To me, Carson’s Baby Room represented everything good in life: a clean home, nice things, a mama who cares. It reminded me of sitting at Granddaddy’s bar, my eyes glued to his black-and-white set, watching Leave It to Beaver, my favorite show. I noticed every little detail in that TV house, from the checkerboard curtains in the kitchen window to the way everybody was always smiling and nobody ever got mad.
I didn’t know how I was going to get a Leave It to Beaver life for my baby, but I knew it’s what I wanted. I could see it clear as day: Me, Derrick, and our little girl, smiling in our home full of gleaming white furniture. I imagined it so much it felt like it was real.
Mr. John brought Mama and Sweetie to visit me the afternoon Ashley was born. The next day Derrick showed up. I’d only seen him a handful of times since the morning he kicked me out of his car for saving his ass from jail. But this was the day I’d been dreaming of, when he’d come back and the three of us would be a family.
My heart pounded with excitement as I watched Derrick take our baby in his arms, grinning like a fool. He insisted Ashley looked just like him. “She got her daddy’s eyes!” he exclaimed. He stared at her for a good twenty minutes. Then he got bored and handed her back to me. “I gotta bounce,” he said.
“But you’ll come back tomorrow, right?”
“Yeah, I’ll be back.”
I took a breath and started pulling myself out of the hospital bed, careful of the stitches in my cooch.
“Where you going?” Derrick asked.
“To walk you to the elevator.”
“Nah, you don’t need to do all that,” he protested.
But I was already shuffling out the door.
I headed down the corridor dragging my IV pole behind me. My titties were leaking milk all over the front of my hospital gown and my hair was standing up like I’d just put my finger in an electric socket.
Derrick was two steps behind me when I turned the corner to the elevators, so I saw the girl standing in the hallway before he did. She was leaning up against the wall dressed in a matching denim skirt-and-jacket set decorated with pink and purple rhinestones. When Derrick came around the corner behind me, she gave him a little wave, smiling at him like I wasn’t even there.
Maybe it was the baby hormones messing with me, but seeing that girl looking so put together when I felt so busted was like a donkey kick to the stomach. I turned to face Derrick. “Who the hell is that?”
“Don’t start trippin’.”
“Who is she?”
He paused. “That’s Celeste.”
I looked from Derrick to Celeste. She looked at me and back at him.
“We just friends,” Derrick said. “That’s it.” By the expression on her face, this was news to Celeste. I didn’t believe him, either.
Suddenly I could feel hot tears flooding my eyeballs, but there was no way I was gonna let Derrick see me cry. “Fuck you,” I said. I grabbed my IV pole and headed back to my room. “You nothing but a dirty dog.”
I bawled like a baby that night. I couldn’t believe I’d been so stupid, caught up in a fantasy of all the nice things I wanted for my baby when really I didn’t have shit. In a few days I’d be taking Ashley home to Mama’s nasty efficiency with the dirty cast-off sofas, no hot water, and the foam mattress on the floor. I didn’t have diapers or formula, blankets or clothes. I didn’t have little girl dresses or pink bows for her hair. I didn’t have a single baby bottle or wipes or a clean washcloth. I didn’t even have Derrick.
That’s when it really hit me. I was gonna have to figure this shit out all by myself.
Early the next morning, before the sun came out, I got to work. I snuck out of my hospital bed and made my way down the hallway to the metal supply rack I’d noticed sitting beside the nurses’ station. When I was sure nobody was looking, I grabbed a stack of diapers and five baby T-shirts and shoved them under my gown. Back in my room, I hid them in my covers. Then I went back for more.
It turns out nurses are almost as easy to steal from as drunks. They get distracted by every little thing—some juicy gossip, a doctor bossing them around, a patient hemorrhaging down the hall—that’s when I’d make my move. I swiped stuff out of an unlocked supply closet, from the counter at the nurses’ station, and from the carts the nurses wheeled into my room When they discharged me from the hospital, I left with two trash bags stuffed with dozens of bottles of pre-made Enfamil, baby clothes, and diapers. I thought I’d be okay for a while. But Ashley was only three weeks old when the diapers ran out.
“What am I supposed to put the baby in?” I asked Mama, holding up my half-naked daughter. “The Pampers is all finished.”
“Girl, use your damn head,” Mama said. She took Ashley from my arms and showed me how to use an old T-shirt for a diaper, pinning it closed with a safety pin. “See? Granma’s baby is good as new.”
Mama got thirty-four dollars a month extra on her welfare for having a new baby in the house. She gave it to me to buy baby formula. But the money was never enough. When Ashley was hungry and wouldn’t stop crying, I went to the Vine City corner store and slipped two containers of Enfamil down the front of my shirt. When the Enfamil was finished, I gave Ashley watered-down Carnation Evaporated Milk. When I ran out of that, Mama said, “The baby’s old enough for table food.” So I took a bite of my ketchup sandwich, chewed it up, spit it into my hand and fed it to my baby like she was a little bird. She was three months old.
One day Ashley was crying her head off. Mama told me to go to the pay phone on the corner and call Derrick. “That piece of shit you had a baby by is supposed to be helping you,” she said. “Tell him to bring you some Pampers and milk.”
I dialed the number for Fish Supreme and could hear Derrick’s coworker telling him he had a call: “Brotha, it’s your baby mama on the phone. . . . C’mon, man, how the hell am I supposed to know ‘which one’?”
Derrick promised he’d come by with some money, but he never showed up. Instead, when I opened the front door later that afternoon, there was Celeste, holding two Kmart shopping bags filled with diapers and baby clothes.
“Derrick told me to bring these,” she said, handing me the bags. I couldn’t believe he’d sent her. I was even more pissed off that she had the nerve to show up at my door dressed in a cute purple skirt and vest set when I had on a stretched-out T-shirt decorated with baby puke.
“I don’t want this shit,” I said, grabbing the bags out of her hands and throwing them past her, into the air. Little baby dresses and diapers flew out
of the shopping bags, landing all over the dusty yard. Celeste just shook her head: “Girl, you better pick that stuff up. You know you need it.”
“You don’t know what I need!” I yelled. “What you need is to get the fuck outta here!” I slammed the door in her face and waited inside, my back pressed to the door, until I thought she was gone. Then I went to the yard and started gathering up the diapers, booties, socks, and little pink dresses. My eye caught on a pink bow fixed to a elastic headband. It looked just like the kind of baby bow I’d imagined Ashley wearing all those times I daydreamed at Carson’s. I bent down to pick it up. When I looked up I noticed Celeste sitting behind the wheel of her Camaro, watching me on my hands and knees picking baby clothes out of the dirt.
On a cool afternoon, when Ashley was almost six months old, Miss Munroe came by to check on me. We sat on Mama’s stoop and she took my hand in hers. “I’m concerned,” she said, her face serious. “How are you managing?”
“I’m good,” I replied.
She squeezed my hand. “Really, Patricia? Are you?”
Suddenly I was sobbing, with tears and snot rolling down my face. I told her Sweetie’s daughter LaDontay cried all night, and Ashley and I couldn’t get any sleep. I told her that Mama wasn’t helping me and Derrick wasn’t around. “I’m trying,” I cried. “But I keep running out of everything.”
Miss Munroe patted me on my back, and handed me a tissue from her purse. “I think there may be something we can do,” she said. Miss Munroe explained that I could get my own public assistance—two hundred and thirty-five dollars in welfare, plus food stamps—if I became an emancipated minor. “It means your mother would no longer be legally responsible for you,” she added. “The benefits would go directly to you.”
She helped me fill out the paperwork, and a few months later I packed up all my stuff in trash bags and dragged Mama’s dirty yellow sofa to my very own place, an efficiency across the yard from Mama’s. It wasn’t the luxury accommodations I dreamed of, but for the first time in years when I turned on the faucet the water was hot.
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