None of this moved her at all. We drew the curtains, hardly spoke, and watched daytime TV When the day came to leave there, I said what I had been saving to say, to have it on me, to feel that I had convinced her. It was easy. “Daddy’s on his way.”
Daddy held her arm, to guide her, to keep her on course for the door. Sister reached behind her back and fluttered out her hand and I–I think it must have surprised me: that she had thought to reach for me, and then that she had not. I took her hand. She drew me up from behind her to walk along up the walk with them, on Sister’s arm, Sister on our father’s arm, the new wife trailing behind us. I had not heard her. I had not likely listened. I was hearing, I think, the rest of them, the fathers, daughters, churchly men, the sisters hissing scripture, a vast unholy throng.
I saw her face then: I saw our mother’s. I saw her face in the face of another mother gone to her knees in the uncut grass with her baby hugged against her chest in the litter of all they had brought there.
They had labeled the months, the stations: Here is your baby at three months, here is your baby at four months, here is your baby at five.
They were reaching in under the rope strung up to keep them off my sister, to keep them away from me. They were snatching at the hem of our mother’s dress. I kicked at their arms, their faces.
“Mother—” she said it loudly, and let my hand go.
I thought she had meant it: Mother.
I heard Sister all along, I know, walking along: “Mother.” But I had not thought of it. This is how I came to think of it — it made it easy, easier for me: we were sending her baby to Mother. There were not enough babies among the dead for all the mothers to mother.
Sister turned from me; she fluttered her hand behind her back, teetering on her heels.
They bent their heads; they were kneeling, rocking on their knees. I thought maybe they meant to drink from the jars, maybe they meant to sing.
I thought, going on I knew better: I understood it, the news of it, the reason they had come-but then I thought they had come in need to her; they had come to her to be tended to — it was stupid — to be answered I knew I was being stupid to be dropped to their knees and saved.
I saw they had saved out a jar for her.
She began to throw them coins.
“One more.”
She touched a forehead. She tossed away a ring she liked. She kissed a boy they offered.
“One more baby more,” they said.
She tried to lie down. She thought to let them cut it out of her, the easy way. Who can say now, what I had brought her back over the country to do, what Sister thought she was meant to be doing?
I saw her knees give, she was turned from me. She was reaching for the new wife’s hand, calling the new wife: “Mother.”
And this surprised me. It was nothing, it was the way of things.
I fell behind some. If it had been me. She tried to lie down. I might have let her.
He got her moving. Daddy was gentle. I could see Daddy meant to be gentle. He had her by her hair. He hauled her up some. He had her by the braid his tidy wife had made of the mess of Sister’s hair to keep our Sister nice that day, to keep our Sister tidy.
You think it’s easy? The way she tries you. The way she — listen. You think it’s easy? You think she means to make it easy? Sister, mother, holy joe. To be our father? To keep her moving, swung to her feet and gone?
My guess is they gave her Pitocin, a drip, same as what they gave me. They give you your fishnet panties. Then they send you to wander the halls in your socks until the contractions begin.
There are other mothers out there: it’s insulting: that it is not only you. But it must have calmed my sister — to have somebody new to talk to, to lap the nurses’ station with.
In time, I talked too. Stood in the gaggle in the yellow glare, rubbing the drum of my belly. Not because I thought I had to (talk) — decorum, no, nicety, not then, not yet again. This was our blessed respite. Nothing decorous about it. Only lassitude, rapture, a flaunted animal pleasure. I’ll go on, I went on, I have never been quite so sweet on myself, and talky, in time, and shameless — avid, giddy, apart. I might have told anyone anything. I think talking made me hope to prolong it, stop it, hedge some way — I wasn’t afraid, much — the table, the curtain drawn, not even the room, the stirrups, the blank chill of the day outside, none of this really shook me — not the pain, quite, the prospect of pain: I thought, Come on, come on: what is the pleasure of what docs not cost you, hurt you? — no, the room, I think, thrilled me, the wide belts, the tools, the dim medieval look of it.
When he was in me — that was when he was easiest to love.
They let me blather on, the others. We all of us mothers did. We scrutinized, amazed ourselves, the hearts we grew, the milk, the bone, the ax to wield; the father, yes, come in, do, gently — there—helpless there, supremely: remote, absurd, refined. Our faces swelled, our eyes withdrew; we spoke our old lost tongues. This of course was later; this was the fabled room. We were lucid at our station, patient in the yellow glare, divulging in our measured tones the blanching gape of cervix, vying some, even then, predatory, preying, somebody’s sticky plug spit out, somebody’s bloody show.
Had your bloody show, dear?
Yes, yes — then nothing. Instructions. Nurses, nurses, somebody always grinning from the corner of my room.
I lost hours; they might be years. The grasses sang. The river-banks shrilled and buckled. I know I wandered. I saw a white horse burning. I saw my mother sleeping in the bend of a yellow road.
Pieces missing, syllables. The living thinned to shadow, droned, busy at my knees. At what?
But who could know?
Even now I worry George to recall to me the day’s events; I want orderliness, a story, the discrete before and after.
And after, before the room, the wide window over the Merrimack, dark then, the coming dawn, before they brought him to me — these are the questions that flare in me, petty, absurd-I had not seen him but to see him, plump and bawling, thrashing in the sick light and in whose scoured arms? And who is it who went off with him? What surly, immigrant nurse, mistaken for a mother, bathed him, while I in my decorum lay in the cool with the curtains drawn chatting with the postmaster’s wife?
What difference? And yet I think of it. Ought to think instead of Sister, yes, be a good big sister. Easter in the morning. Ought to bundle up in the morning, stash my boiled eggs. It being Easter. Since she is my sister.
Sit her down — she claps at me — show her how to hold him, show her what to do.
Her own, she could have held — a guess — in an open hand — small as that, if she wanted, if she was lucky, if the nurses were on their rounds.
Of course I think of it. I hardly think of it — except that she is here. I think of us in the blaze of heat and of the room where we waited, the chairs we took, side by side, the row of scaly bucket seats bolted to the wall. We tipped our heads back. People do — and there were years of people before us, drooping in those chairs. How lucky: a single salient detaiclass="underline" the plaster worn smooth behind us, stained: years of hair, the press of heads, oily, elongated patches. We were resting, had been, those of us who came to help, to fill out papers, if help was how you thought of it, who waited there, dozing, until we were certain the job was done.