She wouldn’t respond. Wouldn’t even look at him. One of the Star Wars movies was on TV, great flat thundering planes of metal roaring across the screen, and she was just sitting there on the edge of the bed, her shoulders hunched and hair hanging limp. Someone slammed a car door — two doors in rapid succession — and a child’s voice shouted, “Me! Me first!”
“China,” he said. “Are you listening to me?”
“I can’t,” she murmured, and she was talking to her lap, to the bed, to the floor. “I’m scared. I’m so scared.” There were footsteps in the room next door, ponderous and heavy, then the quick tattoo of the child’s feet and a sudden thump against the wall. “I don’t want anyone to know,” she said.
He could have held her, could have squeezed in beside her and wrapped her in his arms, but something flared in him. He couldn’t understand it. He just couldn’t. “What are you thinking? Nobody’ll know. He’s a doctor, for Christ’s sake, sworn to secrecy, the doctor-patient compact and all that. What are you going to do, keep it? Huh? Just show up for English 101 with a baby on your lap and say, ‘Hi, I’m the Virgin Mary’?”
She was crying. He could see it in the way her shoulders suddenly crumpled and now he could hear it too, a soft nasal complaint that went right through him. She lifted her face to him and held out her arms and he was there beside her, rocking her back and forth in his arms. He could feel the heat of her face against the hard fiber of his chest, a wetness there, fluids, her fluids. “I don’t want a doctor,” she said.
And that colored everything, that simple negative: life in the dorms, roommates, bars, bullshit sessions, the smell of burning leaves and the way the light fell across campus in great wide smoking bands just before dinner, the unofficial skateboard club, films, lectures, pep rallies, football — none of it mattered. He couldn’t have a life. Couldn’t be a freshman. Couldn’t wake up in the morning and tumble into the slow steady current of the world. All he could think of was her. Or not simply her — her and him, and what had come between them. Because they argued now, they wrangled and fought and debated, and it was no pleasure to see her in that motel room with the queen-size bed and the big color TV and the soaps and shampoos they made off with as if they were treasure. She was pigheaded, stubborn, irrational. She was spoiled, he could see that now, spoiled by her parents and their standard of living and the socioeconomic expectations of her class — of his class — and the promise of life as you like it, an unscrolling vista of pleasure and acquisition. He loved her. He didn’t want to turn his back on her. He would be there for her no matter what, but why did she have to be so stupid?
—
Big sweats, huge sweats, sweats that drowned and engulfed her, that was her campus life, sweats and the dining hall. Her dormmates didn’t know her, and so what if she was putting on weight? Everybody did. How could you shovel down all those carbohydrates, all that sugar and grease and the puddings and nachos and all the rest, without putting on ten or fifteen pounds the first semester alone? Half the girls in the dorm were waddling around like the Doughboy, their faces bloated and blotched with acne, with crusting pimples and whiteheads fed on fat. So she was putting on weight. Big deal. “There’s more of me to love,” she told her roommate, “and Jeremy likes it that way. And, really, he’s the only one that matters.” She was careful to shower alone, in the early morning, long before the light had begun to bump up against the windows.
On the night her water broke — it was mid-December, almost nine months, as best as she could figure — it was raining. Raining hard. All week she’d been having tense rasping sotto voce debates with Jeremy on the phone — arguments, fights — and she told him that she would die, creep out into the woods like some animal and bleed to death, before she’d go to a hospital. “And what am I supposed to do?” he demanded in a high childish whine, as if he were the one who’d been knocked up, and she didn’t want to hear it, she didn’t.
“Do you love me?” she whispered. There was a long hesitation, a pause you could have poured all the affirmation of the world into.
“Yes,” he said finally, his voice so soft and reluctant it was like the last gasp of a dying old man.
“Then you’re going to have to rent the motel.”
“And then what?”
“Then — I don’t know.” The door was open, her roommate framed there in the hall, a burst of rock and roll coming at her like an assault. “I guess you’ll have to get a book or something.”
By eight, the rain had turned to ice and every branch of every tree was coated with it, the highway littered with glistening black sticks, no moon, no stars, the tires sliding out from under her, and she felt heavy, big as a sumo wrestler, heavy and loose at the same time. She’d taken a towel from the dorm and put it under her, on the seat, but it was a mess, everything was a mess. She was cramping. Fidgeting with her hair. She tried the radio, but it was no help, nothing but songs she hated, singers that were worse. Twenty-two miles to Danbury, and the first of the contractions came like a seizure, like a knife blade thrust into her spine. Her world narrowed to what the headlights would show her.
Jeremy was waiting for her at the door to the room, the light behind him a pale rinse of nothing, no smile on his face, no human expression at all. They didn’t kiss — they didn’t even touch — and then she was on the bed, on her back, her face clenched like a fist. She heard the rattle of the sleet at the window, the murmur of the TV: I can’t let you go like this, a man protested, and she could picture him, angular and tall, a man in a hat and overcoat in a black-and-white world that might have been another planet, I just can’t. “Are you—?” Jeremy’s voice drifted into the mix, and then stalled. “Are you ready? I mean, is it time? Is it coming now?”
She said one thing then, one thing only, her voice as pinched and hollow as the sound of the wind in the gutters: “Get it out of me.”
It took a moment, and then she could feel his hands fumbling with her sweats.
Later, hours later, when nothing had happened but pain, a parade of pain with drum majors and brass bands and penitents crawling on their hands and knees till the streets were stained with their blood, she cried out and cried out again. “It’s like Alien,” she gasped, “like that thing in Alien when it, it—”
“It’s okay,” he kept telling her, “it’s okay,” but his face betrayed him. He looked scared, looked as if he’d been drained of blood in some evil experiment in yet another movie, and a part of her wanted to be sorry for him, but another part, the part that was so commanding and fierce it overrode everything else, couldn’t begin to be.
He was useless, and he knew it. He’d never been so purely sick at heart and terrified in all his life, but he tried to be there for her, tried to do his best, and when the baby came out, the baby girl all slick with blood and mucus and the lumped white stuff that was like something spilled at the bottom of a garbage can, he was thinking of the ninth grade and how close he’d come to fainting while the teacher went around the room to prick their fingers one by one so they each could smear a drop of blood across a slide. He didn’t faint now. But he was close to it, so close he could feel the room dodging away under his feet. And then her voice, the first intelligible thing she’d said in an hour: “Get rid of it. Just get rid of it.”