“Where’s that old woman?” she said.
I said, “She’s at home. She had a fall. I’m here instead.”
So she had been here before.
“She’s rough,” she said.
Her voice was matter-of-fact, almost a growl, not so nervous as I would have expected from the agitation of her body. “I hope I’m not that rough,” I said.
She didn’t answer. My father had picked up a thin rod like a knitting needle.
“Now. This is the hard part,” he said. He spoke in a conversational tone, milder I think than any I have ever heard from him. “And the more you tighten up the harder it will be. So just-easy. There. Easy. Good girl. Good girl.”
I was trying to think of something to say that would ease her or distract her. I could see now what my father was doing. Laid out on a white cloth on the table beside him, he had a series of rods, all of the same length but of a graduated thickness. These were what he would use, one after the other, to open and stretch the cervix. From my station behind the sheeted barrier beyond the girl’s knees, I could not see the actual, intimate progress of these instruments. But I could feel it, from the arriving waves of pain in her body that beat down the spasms of apprehension and actually made her quieter.
Where are you from? Where did you go to school? Do you have a job? (I had noticed a wedding ring, but quite possibly they all wore wedding rings.) Do you like your job? Do you have any brothers or sisters?
Why should she want to answer any of that, even if she wasn’t in pain?
She sucked her breath back through her teeth and widened her eyes at the ceiling.
“I know,” I said. “I know.”
“Getting there,” my father said. “You’re a good girl. Good quiet girl. Won’t be long now.”
I said, “I was going to paint this room, but I never got around to it. If you were going to paint it, what color would you choose?”
“Hoh,” said Madeleine. “Hoh.” A sudden startled expulsion of breath. “Hoh. Hoh.”
“Yellow,” I said. “I thought a light yellow. Or a light green?”
By the time we got to the thickest rod Madeleine had thrust her head back into the flat cushion, stretching out her long neck and stretching her mouth too, lips wide and tight over her teeth.
“Think of your favorite movie. What is your favorite movie?”
A nurse said that to me, just as I reached the unbelievable interminable plateau of pain and was convinced that relief would not come, not this time. How could movies exist anymore in the world? Now I’d said the same thing to Madeleine, and Madeleine’s eyes flicked over me with the coldly distracted expression of someone who sees that a human being can be about as much use as a stopped clock.
I risked taking one hand off her knee and touched her hand. I was surprised at how quickly and fiercely she grabbed it and mashed the fingers together. Some use after all.
“Say some-” she hissed through her teeth. “Reese. Right.”
“Now then,” my father said. “Now we’re someplace.”
Recite.
What was I supposed to recite? Hickory dickery dock?
What came into my head was what you used to say, “The Song of Wandering Aengus.”
“ ‘I went into a hazel wood, Because a fire was in my head-’ ”
I didn’t remember how it went on from there. I couldn’t think. Then what should come into my head but the whole last verse.
“Though I am old from wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where you have gone,
And kiss your face and take your hands-”
Imagine me saying a poem in front of my father.
What she thought of it I didn’t know. She had closed her eyes.
I thought I was going to be afraid of dying because of my mother’s dying that way, in childbirth. But once I got onto that plateau I found that dying and living were both irrelevant notions, like favorite movies. I was stretched to the limit and convinced that I couldn’t do a thing to move what felt like a giant egg or a flaming planet not like a baby at all. It was stuck and I was stuck, in a space and time that could just go on forever-there was no reason why I should ever get out, and all my protests had already been annihilated.
“Now I need you,” my father said. “I need you round here. Get the basin.”
I held in place the same basin that I had seen Mrs. Barrie holding. I held it while he scraped out the girl’s womb with a clever sort of kitchen instrument. (I don’t mean that it was a kitchen instrument but that it had a slightly homely look to me.)
The lower parts of even a thin young girl can look large and meaty in this raw state. In the days after labor, in the maternity ward, women lay carelessly, even defiantly, with their fiery cuts or tears exposed, their black-stitch wounds and sorry flaps and big helpless haunches. It was a sight to see.
Out of the womb now came plops of wine jelly, and blood, and somewhere in there the fetus. Like the bauble in the cereal box or the prize in the popcorn. A tiny plastic doll as negligible as a fingernail. I didn’t look for it. I held my head up, away from the smell of warm blood.
“Bathroom,” my father said. “There’s a cover.” He meant the folded cloth that lay beside the soiled rods. I did not like to say, “Down the toilet?” and took it for granted that that was what he meant. I carried the basin along the hall to the downstairs toilet, dumped the contents, flushed twice, rinsed the basin, and brought it back. My father by this time was bandaging the girl and giving her some instructions. He’s good at this-he does it well. But his face looked heavy, weary enough to drop off the bones. It occurred to me that he had wanted me here, all through the procedure, in case he should collapse. Mrs. B., at least in the old days, apparently waited in the kitchen until the last moments. Maybe she stays with him all the way through now.
If he had collapsed I don’t know what I’d have done.
He patted Madeleine’s legs and told her she should lie flat.
“Don’t try to get up for a few minutes,” he said. “Have you got your ride arranged for? “
“He’s supposed to’ve been out there all the time,” she said, in a weak but spiteful voice. “He wasn’t supposed to’ve gone anyplace.”
My father took off his smock and walked to the window of the waiting room.
“You bet,” he said. “Right there.” He let out a complicated groan, said, “Where’s the laundry basket?” remembered that it was back in the bright room where he’d been working, came back and deposited the smock and said to me, “I’d be very obliged if you could tidy this up.” Tidy up meaning doing the sterilizing and mopping up in general. I said I would.
“Good,” he said. “I’ll say good night now. My daughter will see you out when you’re ready to go.” I was somewhat surprised to hear him say “my daughter” instead of my name. Of course I’d heard him say that before. If he had to introduce me, for instance. Still, I was surprised.
Madeleine swung her legs off the table the minute he was out of the room. Then she staggered and I went to help her. She said, “Okay, okay, just got off of the table too quick. Where’d I put my skirt? I don’t want to stand around looking like this.”
I got her the skirt and panties off the back of the door and she put them on without help but very shakily.
I said, “You could rest a minute. Your husband will wait.”
“My husband’s working in the bush up near Kenora,” she said. “I’m going up there next week. He’s got a place I can stay.
“Now. I laid my coat down somewheres,” she said.
My favorite movie-as you ought to know and if I could have thought of it when the nurse asked me-is Wild Strawberries. I remember the moldy little theater where we used to see all those Swedish and Japanese and Indian and Italian movies and I remember that it had recently switched over from showing Carry On movies, and Martin and Lewis, but the name of it I can’t remember. Since you were teaching philosophy to future ministers, your favorite movie should have been The Seventh Seal, but was it? I think it was Japanese and I forget what it was about. Anyway we used to walk home from the theater, it was a couple of miles, and we used to have fervent conversations about human love and selfishness and God and faith and desperation. When we got to my rooming house we had to shut up. We had to go so softly up the stairs to my room.