She missed New Years. Happy New Year! On New Year’s Eve, she fell asleep at 10 P.M. in a Motel 6 in Illinois. But now, in the gloom of February, now she heads back. Because the baby is coming. And, guilt or no guilt, she has no control over what she has to do now. It was a relief, actually, the lack of responsibility. She has no choice in the matter. She has to push this baby out.
WHEN SHE WALKS AROUND the malls that she haunts, she walks so slowly, like the baby’s head is right there, right above her vagina, like there is a bowling ball between her legs. She positively waddles. And it feels like a bowling ball is leaning on her crotch. It fucking hurts. How much does a bowling ball weigh? How much does this baby, the placenta, the extra pints and pints of blood and fluid weigh? The same as a bowling ball? Probably more. Sometimes, a sharp stabbing pain. Other times, just a dull throbbing that becomes like some horrible white noise; at first she ignores the pain and then it’s the only thing she can think of. So she sits down on a bench across from the indoor fountains at the mall — throb, throb, throb.
She’s due. And, like the other two times, she’s in denial. Because, who after all wants to deal with that pain? Who wants to welcome the horror that is birth? Who joyfully embraces the thought of their body cleaving in two? Vague, nightmarish memories of the other births startle her, flash at her, as she does her thing, the driving, the walking around malls, the walking from her car to a gas station and then back again, the lying around hotel rooms. Meanwhile, she pretends this isn’t her labor very slowly starting. But it is. At a mall in Michigan, after eating an enormous steak and a baked potato for dinner — she never eats the potato, why now? — she waddles out to her station wagon and gets in the car and heads toward New York. Not vaguely east. No, now she drives straight for New York City, straight for Brooklyn. She drives eighty miles an hour most of the time. She’s anxious. She wants to get there. She’s heading back to her boys. To her man. The father of this baby.
But she doesn’t quite make it. She’s not a confident driver to begin with. When her stomach hardens up, it becomes hard to focus on the road. She can still see the road. In fact, morning’s pushing through, hazy and dark, a dark February morning, and she knows she’s been sitting in this car for that long now — and she’s been in Pennsylvania for a long time. God, she’s close, but the hardening of her stomach, the contraction—the word actually presents itself to her — is telling her to pull over and ask where the nearest hospital is.
“Twenty minutes to downtown Philadelphia,” the man at the gas station tells her. Twenty minutes. She can do it. They are coming faster now, the contractions, regularly, too. Her first labor was eleven hours, not bad. Her second was eight hours long. How long would this one be? She has more than twenty minutes before the baby forces herself out, she must. She says to herself, “I’ve got at least a few hours. I’ve got time. Drive slow, breathe,” and she talks to herself like this until she enters Philly, a city she’s only been to once or twice with her family, long ago. Once, they stayed in a hotel and went swimming in the indoor pool and then walked around, sightseeing. What was the second time? She can’t remember now, the pain during her contractions distracting her memory for the most part. She does remember where the man told her to go and she makes the turns and there’s the hospital.
She is the only white person in the waiting area. After talking to the triage nurse, she’s sent out to give her insurance card to the person at the desk and then she’s ushered out of the emergency waiting room into another room right away. Ahead of all the dark-skinned people. She wishes this was because she’s about to have a baby, but she knows it’s because she has a good insurance card. Once, when Mike had a horrible ear infection, she took him to the emergency room in a downtown Brooklyn hospital and the look on their faces when she produced her insurance card! It was as if she were holding out a bar of gold for payment.
They have a room in their maternity ward. The nurse Beatrice comes in, a West Indian woman by her accent. She checks her pulse. She listens to the baby’s heartbeat with a long corded thing. She times her contractions. “They’re three minutes apart, but they’re not lasting very long. They don’t feel that powerful, do they?”
“No, not really.”
“The doctor will be here soon to see how dilated you are.”
A handsome, middle-aged white woman appears. She looks tired, but she smiles. She introduces herself as Dr. Lumiere and then says, “Let’s take a look at you then.”
She puts her hand deep inside of Sonia’s crotch. This hurts. She moves her hand around and Sonia can feel the hand twisting inside of her and she can see the doctor’s arm from the elbow up, moving this way and that. The doctor’s face held in concentration. Seeing with her fingers. “Where are you from?”
“Brooklyn.”
“Your husband’s not here?”
“He’s in Brooklyn.”
“You’ve had two other deliveries, I noticed from your chart.”
“I have two kids, yes.”
“And where are they?”
“They’re in Brooklyn. With their father.”
Suddenly, the hospital gown held loosely over her breasts and enormous stomach feels incredibly inadequate. Sonia feels ashamed. “I was heading back to Brooklyn from a business trip and didn’t quite make it.” She smiles. She’s a horrible liar. She fruitlessly tries to pull the crinkly gown over her body to hide her shame, but it doesn’t work.
“Have you called them? They could make it here on time.” The doctor finally pulls her hand out of Sonia.
“How dilated am I?”
“You’re only three centimeters dilated, but you’re completely effaced. This being your third birth, it shouldn’t be that long. I’ll get the anesthesiologist on call.”
“I don’t want an epidural. I didn’t get one with my other kids.”
The doctor looks at her critically.
“If the nurse can give me a shot of Demoral, I’ll be fine. Really. I prefer Demoral. I like drugs that mess with my head better than the ones that just numb you.”
“Would you get a tooth pulled without the numbing pain reliever?”
“No. But I’m not getting a tooth pulled. I’m having a baby.” And if I were getting my tooth pulled, thinks Sonia, I’d ask for the gas, too. It’s like doing whippets.
“But getting a tooth pulled isn’t nearly as painful as giving birth. And it doesn’t make sense that you’d get numbing pain reliever for pulling a tooth but not for having a baby. There’s no reason to feel all that pain.”
“I’m one of those weird people who kind of gets off on pain, OK?”
“You really should have someone here with you. A sister or your mother, if you’re not going to call your husband. We can’t really let you leave unless you have someone here to take you home.”
“Well, I just got here so let’s not think about me leaving yet. I just got here.”
Dr. Lumiere frowns at her. Sonia feels high. The endorphins, in reaction to the contractions, must have just kicked in. She gets a rush to her head. She says, “You’re beautiful when you frown.”
“Are you on any medication? Lithium? Prozac?”
“No,” she says.
“No high blood pressure, no diabetes …”
“Oh, no, nothing like that. I’m healthy.”
“When was your last prenatal checkup?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Were you having weekly checkups?”
“It was a while ago, my last checkup. It was a couple months ago.”
Dr. Lumiere frowns again. “Well, everything looks fine.”