7
The delivery-room music was raucous in her thirty-second laboring hour. The baby was ten days late, and at the twentieth-fifth hour, she had still been ticking off appropriate words: troublesome, exasperating, perverse, contrary, recalcitrant, obstreperous, disobliging, and then the few u words she could recall: unaccommodating, unhelpful, uncooperative, unwanted. Wait, she’d thought, when unwanted spiked, an articulated word she hoped only she heard. And then: entirely true, entirely not true, this time, last time, true and not true. She was sidetracked, the dictionary in her brain slipping away when a nurse increased the sweet epidural drip, and the music changed nature entirely. There had been Beethoven, Bach, and Mozart sailing through the delivery room, she was not an expert in classical music, but they were easily recognizable; now electric guitars were wailing, drumbeats pounding away, licks and harsh syncopations, and Joan’s voice croaked when she yelled, “Please! Change the station.” Nothing changed and she couldn’t tell if the music and her yelling were only inside her own head. Please, she prayed then, though the years had not changed her position about God, or gods, and she had already run through the panoply of words she used to invoke, could remember.
Daniel’s birth had been rapid, like a rocket, he set a record, leaving Joan with most of her self-respect intact, but not this time, this one already determining the time line of life. Her sweat, rivers of it, started out sweet, had gone sour, then yeasty, and now there was a meaty scent she was inhaling. She felt like a sick and cowering dog.
The bright lights all at once dimmed—why hadn’t they been lowered from the start, hadn’t they asked for a calm, quiet, melodic delivery?—and then Martin was soothing her forehead, whispering into her ear, “It will be okay.”
A contraption rose over her belly, gloved hands draping reams of thick plastic over it, cutting off everything below from her view. She was in parts, leaving those on the other side to contend with what was beneath her curved flesh. Scrub caps darted around, white, pink, and yellow disks rising and falling, rapid voices chasing each others’ tight tails, words like maternal tachycardia, fetal distress, spinal block, catheter, IV lines, and Joan felt something sting her hand. Out of the cyclone came her doctor’s quiet voice, “Scalpel. Starting Pfannenstiel incision.”
How wonderful now that everything was silent, the pain and fear gone, just the slow, slow beating of her own heart, her mind in a white haze that transformed into bleedingly bright primary colors. She remembered the pictures of a C-section that she had seen in one of Martin’s medical books, the scalpel so sharp against the thin skin that the underlying yellow fat layer burst, revealing the shiny, tough, fibrous fascia, over the abdominal muscles. A scalpel nicking an opening in that tough lower layer, then pulled apart, revealing the filmy, flimsy layer, the peritoneum, the actual lining of the abdominal cavity; it, too, was opened, with sharp, thin scissors. Then a small cut through her retroperitoneal. She heard “Retractor,” and pictured her bladder pulled down toward her feet, away from the rest of the surgery, sparing it injury. A final incision across the lower portion of her womb, her uterus easily tilted up and laid on her belly, revealing the baby only to the doctor and nurses busy working. There were pictures of it all in Martin’s book and a sentence that read: Pulling gently on the head will allow the rest of the delivery. She heard “Clamping umbilical cord,” and then she heard no more.
*
She woke in a hospital room and wondered why she was there, wondered when someone would come to explain why she felt nothing below her waist, nothing at all. She knew she should be afraid, but something in her bloodstream was lifting her up, up, up, out of the bed, and she was floating just below the ceiling. Looking down, she was at the old dining-room table she used as a desk, the wood floor of her East Village apartment sloped under her feet, pages crawling with words flying through the air, stacking up next to the typewriter, there was a title on the tip of her tongue, that slid right off, and she, too, slid away.
*
She woke again, and knew she was in her hospital room, that there was, or had been, a baby. Martin was on the bed, carefully balanced, tenderly looking at her. She heard him say, “That was all unexpected,” then ask how she was feeling, but she couldn’t respond, couldn’t keep her eyes open, they were like windows slamming shut, and her last thought, It’s all unexpected, reverberated then faded away.
*
She woke again and Martin was in the armchair next to the bed, the baby hidden in a blue blanket. So the operation had been successful, the baby alive. “He emerged with bravado and his eyes clenched tight. He has all of his parts,” Martin said, and Joan wanted to say, “Turn down the painkillers, I can’t stay awake,” but she was gone before the words left her mouth.
*
She was awake and alone in her hospital room. She felt wrecked and sore and the clock hands were elongated snails inching around the black markings of the day, but perhaps it was night, and late, because she couldn’t hear the nurses laughing at their station, couldn’t hear the shush of their foam-soled shoes.
*
She woke and knew it was morning from the slant of the sun lighting up her hands, the veins standing out, needles inserted and taped down, and then the heavy door pushed open, and there was Martin, smiling and cradling the new baby, sitting down on the bed, transferring the infant into her arms. “Your first glimpse of your mommy,” Martin said, and Joan saw a cap of jet-black hair, skin white as alabaster, the combination giving him the look of a baby ghoul or a vampire, something medieval, potentially poisonous. But everything was where it belonged. “He’s beautiful, isn’t he,” Martin said, and Joan thought the pain meds were affecting her sight, for the baby looked so white, as if he were bloodless, when Daniel had been golden and rosy.
*
“You’ve been in and out,” Martin said as he untied her hospital gown, pushed it down past her breasts. She hadn’t said a word yet, her throat still clenched tight, but he understood she wanted the baby’s flesh on hers. She had been right, with Daniel, about the essentialness of that first connection, not wasting it on anyone else’s baby. She was overheating, but the infant was cool and dry, not damp and sticky as Daniel had been, and even though they were skin-to-skin, the way this one looked up at her, she thought she had to be wrong, that it wasn’t an arrogant stare, a smirk on his pale lips. He blinked, then turned his head away, already his own person.
*
She tried feeding him. He latched on. She felt the suction between his pursed mouth and her nipple, but suckling did not interest him, he was content to lie there, just like that, before tucking back into himself. Four times she tried, before Martin paged their ob-gyn.