So she ate stir-fried vegetables and brown rice, and sitting on the toilet she clenched and unclenched her pelvic muscles to prevent episiotomy. One of the cunning stores on Madison carried a book called The Birth Plan, which Lore bought. She read it and took pages of notes. She had thought already about the epidural and rooming in, but it seemed there were many other things to consider — should one allow the Vitamin K injection? The erythromycin drops? Whenever she thought of her Soleil emerging from the warmth of her body into cold air and brisk professional hands and the terror of being moved swiftly through open space, a pang seized her throat, and she shut her eyes against the pictures. In accepting the hospital she had accepted these insults to Soleil — the air, the hands, the flailing — but she would spare Soleil what pain she could. She spent long hours after school reading in The Birth Plan about typical hospital procedures — what was necessary and what might be less so — and she composed her instructions. It was satisfying to draft and redraft, to hone her desires. Detail did not bore her. Detail was power. Child care for Soleil would cost $1,200 a month, once she went back to work. Diapers and other supplies were budgeted for the first year at $750, formula and food at $800, clothing at almost none, since a colleague at P.S. 30 planned to deed Lore her toddler’s old sleepers and unisex overalls and Ts.
She dozes. A great umbrella opens, its spines blooming outward, but one spine is broken and the black fabric flaps up and down … Now Franckline is speaking to her. With an effort Lore concentrates, wakes. Dr. Elspeth-Chang would like to try to finish seeing her scheduled afternoon patients. “There’s not much for her to do until you’re fully dilated,” says Franckline. “But you’re moving along. Do you want the resident to check you again?”
Lore declines drowsily. Keep that doctor’s dirty fingers out of me, she thinks. She holds her hand before her eyes and looks at the flesh pinched deeply by the silver ring. I suppose I could do without one finger, she decides.
Franckline rises and, murmuring something Lore doesn’t catch, ducks into the bathroom at the front of the labor room. The door shuts with a click. Gone again! cries Lore silently. But it is only the bathroom, she reminds herself, and people must close the door when using the bathroom. Still, why should all these people come and go, come and go, nurses and doctors and men with snow in their hair, but she must lie on the bed, beached and passive? She too will go, she thinks. She will get up and walk out the door. This is not a prison or a reformatory, she has the right. She pushes herself upright and does her best to arrange the awkward gown, grips her hospital slippers with firm toes. One thing she learned very young was that if you carried yourself as if you had business, as if your presence somewhere was legitimate, people didn’t notice if you were in the wrong place or doing the wrong thing. At Our Lady of Sorrows she wore socks that were too short, or in non-approved colors, and if she pretended to herself that she was dressed according to code, none of the nuns seemed able to see. So now she walks the hallway without her nurse. She takes the opposite direction this time, and feels an outsize excitement at the thought of learning what might lie beyond the maternity ward in this direction, not Pulmonary but something else, some other troubled part of the body, and rooms filled with people suffering in an entirely different way. Old and young, poor and rich, sick and sicker. Young and rich did not keep you from being cut down, not always. Her mother (not rich, but not old either) had died at forty-five. She lay in the hospital bed in the house in Hobbes Corners, her mouth drawn into an oblong, and an odor to her breath that Lore would know forever after as the odor Death sent when it knew it had won its fight to take you.
At the funeral, which Lore had arranged — smalclass="underline" her mother’s family, awkward and treating Lore like a stranger; a smattering of work colleagues and neighbors — and paid for with money left for this purpose, she looked down at her mother’s face, relaxed of some of its characteristic lines, and thought that here lay the only person who would ever truly understand her, the only person she would ever care to be close to.
“We’re the same like that,” Julia told her, the day they’d met. “Both of our mothers are dead.” Julia told lies that had a certain poetic truth to them, and that she believed were true when she said them. Another time she claimed that as a child she’d gone blind for three months from hysteria, not wanting to see her parents fighting. (Asa, when asked, smiled and disputed the tale.) Julia and Lore were in the cafeteria at MoMA. It was a Friday evening in February, and Lore had been in New York City for six weeks. She was twenty-six years old and her mother had died in a final relapse in late November. It had been difficult to jump into her job midyear, to pick up the caseload that Mrs. Butler, injured in a car accident, had left behind. P.S. 30 was overheated, and by day’s end Lore was desperate to walk in the open air, even though the weather was bitter. She bypassed her subway stop and kept moving uptown, until she could feel her face stinging and her right hand — she had lost one of her gloves that morning — become numb. She stopped at a street vendor and paid four dollars for new gloves. Cutting west in the Fifties, she saw a line snaking out of the Museum of Modern Art and, when she asked what people were waiting to see, was told that it was a free-admission Friday. She got in line, joining the other shivering, jiggling bodies, grateful to have a reason not to go back yet to her apartment in the West 100s (also overheated, and shared with two impossibly messy recent college graduates, one of whom had two cats). The line moved slowly, and by the time she had gained entry to the museum she felt hungry. A look at the prices in the crowded cafeteria convinced her to stick to a cup of coffee. She asked a young woman with long, tightly curled hair if the empty chair next to her was taken. Julia shook her head and gestured that Lore should sit down. Her eyes, which blinked rapidly, were green. She was like a sea creature, sylph-like, somehow rippling and glittering. She was reading an expensive fashion magazine, which she put companionably aside.
“A speech teacher,” Julia breathed, upon asking what Lore did for a living, as if it were the most fabulous occupation she had ever heard of. “You help people, all day long.”