Only Children

by Rafael Yglesias

  “Oh, Bear.” Nina sighed, hurt by his cynicism. “If she looks like you, she’ll be beautiful. Six feet tall, beautiful skin.”

  “Brown eyes?”

  “She’ll have my eyes,” Nina said firmly, her blue eyes widening with conviction.

  Eric laughed, pleased he had wrung this little admission of vanity. “Only a one-in-four-chance,” he warned, shaking his finger at her.

  “It’ll come through.”

  “Will you love this baby if it doesn’t?”

  “What do you mean?” she protested.

  “I don’t know. I just hope—for its sake—that it’s got blue eyes.”

  “That’s not funny,” she said, turning from him to look balefully at the television. Her thick brown hair shifted off her back, fell across her shoulder, and exposed the pale white freckled skin of her neck.

  “I was kidding, for chrissakes.”

  “I don’t feel like joking right now,” Nina answered in a faint voice. “Ugh,” she groaned, a hand reaching for her back.

  Wearily, Eric planted his fist there and pressed. Hard. Pushing, pushing, pushing. Hoping he could get the little bugger to come out already. To end the fantasy and begin the reality.

  “ELEVATE THE BLADDER,” she heard Stein say. Peter winced. He tried to mask his reaction, but a flicker of queasy disgust peeped through-Diane felt weird about their poking around her insides like shoppers at a sale counter, but only intellectually. She couldn’t picture—even to scare herself—what they were doing. And this abstracted relationship to the birth of her son was a relief. She had worried she wouldn’t be up to natural childbirth, that like some scared kid on the first day of battle, she’d panic and flee, only to be dragged, crying, back to the front—humiliation following cowardice.

  Instead, this seemed almost queenly. Her husband, the doctors, and the nurses attendant on her various parts, the heavy painful lower half of her body whisked away to a numbed dimension.

  “Here he is!” Stein said. She strained her neck and caught a glimpse (above the tented blue sheet rising from her chest) of a slimy bald head. “Clip. All right.”

  The baby cried. Not the bloodcurdling scream she expected, but a feeble squeak of protest, a kitten startled from sleep.

  Stein, his eyes warmer, bigger, and kinder than she had ever seen them, approached with her son. Stein’s hand, covered by a transparent rubber glove, encompassed the whole of baby’s skull; the fingertips spread beyond, petals open, cradling the blossom within.

  “Let’s say hello to Mama and then we’ll check you out,” Stein said to the creature—it was too much of a miniature, too strangely animate, too wet to be called anything else—and then laid it in between her swollen breasts. One of the nurses—also beaming with tranquil joy—raised Diane’s head so she could look at the face.

  “Hello,” said a voice at her side. She was surprised to find it belonged to Peter; she had almost forgotten he was there. Peter leaned in, his hand covering baby’s tiny, furiously clenched fist. By comparison, Peter’s hand looked gigantic and terrible.

  “Easy,” she said involuntarily.

  “I’m barely touching him,” Peter complained.

  She looked at the face. It was unreal—the skin translucent (hardly protecting the blue-green veins beneath), fine hairs everywhere, the lips full, brilliantly red against their pale surroundings. Baby’s legs and arms cringed and yearned, as if finding the open air harsh— a mute appeal for cushions and warmth.

  “Hello, Byron,” Peter said to the baby, using the name he had urged over her plaintive objections. Too pretentious, too odd (the potential nickname—By?—sounded like a description of sexual confusion), and besides, Diane had never read Byron. (Wasn’t he a sexist pig?) But Peter had, especially in adolescence, and he made no attempt to pretend it was simply a love for the name itself. “It’ll guarantee one thing,” Peter said. “He’ll be sure to read Byron at least once—so we won’t have a complete illiterate for a son.”

  Diane looked at her creation. That was no Byron. The brilliant whitish yellow umbilical cord, as thick as a trunk phone line into a busy office, extended from his red and swollen belly. The biggest thing about him were his testicles (maybe he was like Byron), but that was caused by birth or something—they had explained at the classes. The legs were retracted up almost to the stomach, a frog turned upside down, feet feeling desperately for a comforting surface.

  “All right, let’s give him over to Dr. Kelso,” Stein said, and a young baby-faced pediatrician picked up Byron with a confidence that both impressed and irritated Diane.

  “Welcome to the world,” Dr. Kelso said, and carried him off.

  NINA HATED the furniture. The dark, dreary wood of the living-room shelves, the fat, rumpled couch, the dull red rug, the thick, oafish horizontal blinds (smudged by futile attempts to clean off New York’s air)—they all seemed responsible for the pain and mistake of this birth. Her back ached with bruising hurt, like nothing she had ever felt before. The base of her torso felt sore and dented, as though someone had been striking her with a mallet over and over and over—trying to halve her. Whenever Eric removed his fist, the pain intensified, stabbing so insistently her breakage seemed only moments away.

  “Oh! Oh! Press! Press!” she cried. She reached back to the wound, almost fearful, however, that her hand would find nothing where once there had been her body—her strong, young, always reliable flesh.

  “Okay, okay,” he said, and his strong fist shored her up, lifting her above the surging pain, just high enough for her to breathe and survive.

  “Oh, God! Oh!”

  “Breathe! Do your breathing!”

  Nina huffed and puffed irregularly, skimming insecurely on the pain, buffeted out of her attempts to get a steady rhythm by the erratic stabs of hurt.

  “Forty-five seconds,” Eric said. His voice was squeezed by the effort of maintaining pressure on her back. “Contraction is subsiding.”

  “No, it’s not!” she protested. Eric laughed, but she wasn’t joking, she wanted to be accurate.

  And then it was gone.

  Vanished—not a tide ebbing—but whisked away by a magician’s wand. Stay off my spine! she yelled internally at the thing inside her. She pictured the midwife from the childbirth classes, holding the break-apart model of a pregnant woman high enough for everyone to see, while she manipulated the fetus doll to show various positions. The midwife illustrated back labor by pressing the plastic fetus’s head down on the model’s spine. “The pressure here gets worse as baby’s head is pushed lower by the contraction. Gravity is best for relieving the pressure. Get on all fours like a dog. Have your husband keep a ball or his fist or an ice pack pressing on the small of your back. Back labor is very difficult, but it can be handled.” Oh, yeah?

  “It’s five minutes,” Eric said. “That was five minutes. We should go.”

  He’s terrified, she thought, disgusted. She knew it was still too early—that if they went to the hospital now, they would be stuck in the labor room for hours. And because of her back labor, being there might mean the instigation of medical procedures such as putting on the fetal monitor, forcing her to lie down on her back— the worst possible position. But Eric’s smoldering hysteria at being away from medical supervision was dangerously close to ignition. “We’re supposed to wait until it’s consistently five minutes,” she argued, risking the conflagration.

  Eric looked at his notebook, reciting: “Six, five and a half, six, five and a half, five. It’s getting there.”

  Nina struggled to get to her feet. Eric took her hand and pulled. He groaned at the effort. “Jesus,” he commented.

  “Now you know how I feel.” Nina walked to the phone and dialed Dr. Marge Ephron’s service.

  “Who are you calling?”

  “The doctor.”

  “I thought you weren’t—”

  The service answered. The operator immediately agreed to call Dr. Ephron. Nina hung up. “You’re right,” she said
to Eric. “We should go to the hospital. I may need help with this pain.” Once she might have expected a protest from her husband. He had been keen on doing the natural childbirth. But the pale, nervous man, already nodding his agreement, was an unlikely objector.

  The phone rang. Nina picked it up. “That was fast.” She put a foot forward and placed her right hand behind her on the small of her back. She arched her watermelon stomach forward. Put a babushka on her and she could be a peasant woman in the field pausing in between harvesting the potatoes to deliver her child. For Eric, the sight filled him with respect and guilt. “They’re almost five minutes apart. I’m having a lot of back pain, though. I may need help.” Nina pressed her thin lips together, breathing through her nose, while she listened to her doctor’s response. Eric knew that meant Dr. Ephron was being either critical or contradictory. “We are,” Nina said. “I've; been on all fours for hours and Eric’s arm has practically fallen off from keeping his fist in my back.”

  You’d think a woman doctor would be sympathetic, Eric thought. After all, Ephron has had two kids herself, the last quite recently.

  “Right,” Nina now said, her mouth relaxing into a conciliatory pout. “Un-huh. Okay. We’ll wait. Thanks.” Nina hung up. “She says it’ll be harder on us at the hospital. We’re supposed to call when it’s consistently four minutes apart.”

  “Great. American medicine’s great, isn’t it? Don’t go to the hospital when you’re in pain ’cause it’ll only be harder on you!”

  “Okay, Eric. No speeches.”

  Everything I do is wrong. He closed his eyes. I’m not gonna make it. He had had that conviction all along, despite the obvious fact that millions of other men had managed to survive this experience.

  “Oh!” Nina began to pace. “It’s starting,” she hissed with a sharp, fearful intake of breath.

  “What! It’s only been four minutes!”

  Nina was walking, stiff-legged, across the living room. “My back, my back,” she shouted in between huffs and puffs. Eric followed her, comically hunched over, attempting to place his hand on her constantly retreating back.

  “Stand still!” he pleaded.

  “I can’t, I can’t!” she said, moving away just as he finally got his fist pressed against her.

  “Get on the floor!”

  “Goddammit! Goddammit! Goddammit!” she said, scurrying back and forth as though she could dodge the agony. She stopped abruptly, grabbed the thick mass of her brown hair behind her head, pulling it taut at the scalp, and screamed: “Fuck this!”

  Eric seized her, one arm going about her shoulders so she couldn’t escape, and jammed his free fist into her back. “Breathe!” he screamed right into her ear.

  She jerked her head away and defensively put a hand up to her ear. “Ow!”

  “Sorry,” Eric said, twisting his hand into her mercilessly, amazed that such force could relieve pain rather than cause it.

  Nina tried to keep to the exercise, but she would break off to exclaim at the pain and lose the rhythm. She kept thinking (whenever the mist of hurt lifted enough for her to regain the vista of consciousness): I hate being a woman.

  PETER LOOKED down at the few uncovered inches of Byron’s body. After Kelso’s examination—“Ten, ten,” the cheerful fellow announced. “He’s passed his first test”—some more disgusting things were done about the umbilical cord, and then they left Byron to lie nude under an intense heating lamp while dawdling over taking his foot-and fingerprints—“He’s already got a record,” a nurse wisecracked—before swaddling him in two cloth blankets, leaving only the barest minimum of his face exposed. By then Byron had cried himself into a state of unconsciousness. A blissful sleep, it seemed to Peter, who had been handed the package of his child while he sat awkwardly on the stool (the lack of armrests made holding Byron wearisome) next to Diane’s head. Her lower half was presumably being replaced and sewn up; Peter certainly wasn’t going to look and verify that. When he occasionally glanced at the floor beneath the operating table, he saw a bucket into which they had dumped the sponges and Lord knows what else. The items inside were soaked red, and Peter was sickened by the notion that Diane had lost a pailful of blood. Rationally, he assumed that wasn’t possible, but the sight argued otherwise.

  “He’s beautiful,” Diane kept saying in a hoarse, tired voice. Every few minutes, punctuating her awed stare, she’d repeat, “He’s beautiful”—each time with a tone of discovery.

  Peter looked down at the uncovered oval of Byron’s face. To him it seemed nothing more than a mush of uncooked flesh. The only distinguishable things (nose and mouth) were too small to be taken seriously; his closed eyes seemed to blend seamlessly into his forehead. Why, that little stub of a nose looked as though a strong dose of sunlight could melt it. And he was so light—too insubstantial to have caused the enormous fuss around them.

  “He’s beautiful,” she said again, amazed. And then: “Isn’t he?”

  He’s mush, Peter thought. Unmolded clay. A transparency on which she could project any fantasy.

  “Don’t you think he’s beautiful?” Diane asked.

  But what is he? Peter wondered. That’s really a human being? From this blob a tall version of himself would grow and one day stand, dressed in a black suit, and mouth Peter’s death? Peter imagined old versions of his friends passing in front of a dark, smooth young man: Byron grown. “Your father was a good man. I’ll miss him.” And what would Byron be feeling? Relief. Now the trust funds would dissolve and the money come directly under his control. Now he would stand at the head of the ship, no longer second-in-command, no longer peering over the old man’s shoulder at the bright blue horizon.

  I will become the whimsical god of his life—idol and tormentor— someone to imitate, someone to destroy.

  “Yes, he’s beautiful,” he finally answered.

  “Hold his head up,” a nurse instructed, lifting the elbow that was cradling Byron’s head. “They have no neck muscles. You have to support his head.”

  “That’s not all I have to support,” Peter answered.

  The anesthesiologist snorted in agreement.

  Peter’s awareness of these attendants had been unspecific up until now—other than Dr. Stein, faceless. To think of them otherwise, for them to be real, to accept the fact that these strangers had been staring into his wife’s body like commuters stuck in a line peering into the Holland Tunnel was untenable. It seemed absurd to have to share this moment, this unique and intimate experience, with a bunch of people to whom he hadn’t even been introduced. He wanted to get out of this sordid tiled place, away from his new burden and back to his comfortable home, to the dignity of seclusion. After all, these next few days, while Diane and Byron were at the hospital, might be his last chance at peace for many a year.

  “I’m going to go,” he said.

  “What?” Diane said.

  “I’ll take the baby.” The nurse who had been hovering over him interrupted. She practically snatched Byron away. Not that Peter resisted.

  “I have to tell people,” Peter remonstrated, although Diane hadn’t sounded argumentative. “They’re all waiting.”

  “When will I see you?”

  “This evening.”

  “When are visiting hours?” Peter asked Dr. Stein, glancing in his direction and catching sight of a bloody sponge as it was tossed into the pail.

  “Husbands can come anytime,” the nurse answered with a hint of reproach. At what? Peter wondered.

  “If the wife wants them,” Stein mumbled.

  “I want him,” Diane said.

  “All right, I won’t go.” Peter folded his arms and stared ahead. He felt stupid having this personal conversation in front of the hospital people.

  “No. Go. You have to call people.”

  Peter got up quickly before she could change her mind again, kissing her perfunctorily. “Wait,” she called out, her hand pleading for his return.

  Peter bent over again. She urged him down
and opened her pale, dry lips. He met them reluctantly. She was lying nude, her lower half not only exposed but still sliced open. This romantic embrace seemed silly under the circumstances.

  “I love you,” she said with the happy, spent openness of a satisfied inamorata. It was absurd, as if they had moved their bed to the Forty-second Street IRT station and were doing their lovemaking amidst the stone-faced commuters.

  “Me too,” he said quickly. “I’ll call from the hall and come back to visit you in recovery before going home.” Peter began his stride to the enormous swinging stainless-steel doors built wide and high for the gurneys and equipment. Already he felt lighter; the heavy constriction of controlling his behavior in front of those people loosened its grip. “Bye, Byron,” he called to the tiny bundle, and pushed his way out. He walked faster and faster through the hall of birthing rooms, feeling more himself with each step away from them. I’m a father, he thought with growing pride. He was eager to tell everyone the news. He felt more interesting. More real.

  My son is born, he thought, studying the faces of waiting fathers, arriving mothers, bored nurses, and abstracted doctors. And Byron will be a better person than every one of these people.

  Actually, the whole business had gone quite well, as well as he had hoped. He dared to think, as he dialed his mother’s number on the wall phone in the outer hallway, that now things would go smoothly. And it was sweet to think, no matter how embarrassing the expression of it, that Diane loved him and enjoyed becoming a mother. It would be good for his boy.

  “Hello?” his mother’s voice asked.

  “Hello, Grandma,” he said to the phone, and got the expected satisfaction of hearing her gasp with awe and pleasure.

  ERIC HAD LOST any trace of excitement about having a baby. He had felt some trepidation in the previous few months, but this surpassed his worst fears. With every minute, Nina’s pain seemed to intensify; the prospect of hours more appalled him. Surely, once they got to the hospital and Dr. Ephron examined Nina, she would give her an epidural or a Caesarean or at least some heavy painkillers. Nothing this horrible could be natural.