“Oh girl, sound like you in labor.”
Mama lifted herself half off her sofa and swatted at Sweetie, who was still sound asleep on her foam. “Get up, girl. Go to the pay phone and call 911 before your sister has her baby on my damn floor.”
Sweetie groaned and turned over, but didn’t make a move to get up. So Mama kicked her, hard. “Get the fuck up and go make the call!”
I rolled over onto my side. The pain had only started, but it was already way worse than I’d imagined, and I was scared about what was coming next.
“Contractions will increase in intensity and duration, signaling the impending arrival of your baby,” a nurse at the Free Prenatal Clinic had tried to warn me, reading from a pamphlet called “The Exciting Days Ahead.” I just stared at her because I didn’t know what the hell she was talking about.
“Girl,” the nurse had said, leaning forward. “This means it’s gonna hurt like a son of a gun. When the pain starts coming, you find your way to the hospital.”
“Ohhhhhh . . .” I moaned.
“All right!” said Sweetie, jumping up and handing her sleeping baby to mama. “I’m going! Hold your horses, Rabbit. All you gotta do is squeeze your legs together so that baby don’t pop out your coochie while I’m gone.”
“You tryna be a smart-ass, now?” Mama said. “You need to get a move on and go make that call. No telling how long the ambulance gonna take to get here.”
It was a known fact that 911 took their sweet time showing up to Vine City. Just about everybody had a story about an uncle or brother or cousin who almost bled to death on the gotdamn sidewalk because the ambulance took their muthafuckin’ time.
Lucky for me, Sweetie had a special talent with 911. She discovered it by accident one day when Dre was twelve years old and had an asthma attack after he and Andre tried to get high huffing gasoline out of the gas tank of Mama’s Pink Panther.
Sweetie had run to the pay phone and screamed into the handset, “My brother can’t breathe. He dying!”
Minutes later, an ambulance showed up, sirens blaring. Sweetie and I piled into the back with Dre. When we got to Grady Hospital, they wheeled our brother into the ER and Sweetie and I followed him in. While we were waiting for a doctor, a little old lady hospital volunteer in a pink smock came by handing out free sandwiches wrapped in cellophane and little containers of apple juice. She didn’t even care that Sweetie and I took four sandwiches each. “We gonna hold these for our brother,” Sweetie had said, and the volunteer just smiled.
From then on, whenever food got real scarce Sweetie would call 911, Dre would have a fake asthma attack, and we would all get to eat. It wasn’t a regular thing. That would be abusing the system. But there are certain problems in life—like being really really really hungry, or going into labor—that can only be solved by calling 911. That’s when Sweetie’s God-given talent for sounding hysterical came in handy.
Sure enough, only minutes after my sister came back from the pay phone, two EMTs showed up at the door. That was quick, even for her.
“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?”