“Where would you like me to put it?” asks Franckline, when Jim is gone. She’s got it in a baggie, is holding it up.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“I’ll put it in this pocket here.” Franckline unzips a little pouch at the side of Lore’s duffel.
“Excuse me,” Lore says. She gestures at the monitoring belt — can she remove it? — and Franckline comes to unfasten her.
Once the belt is removed, Lore walks into the bathroom, closes the door behind her, and drops herself onto the toilet. Tears spring up in her eyes, brim, then fall. All right, let them. She can still see the orderly’s hand, broad-wristed like Asa’s, and feel the painful pleasure of a man’s fingers holding her own. The final give of the metal. She will never fix this ring. She could not bear to see the ugly seam in the once uninterrupted curve. Everlasting love and life. Maybe not. She reaches for the toilet paper, blots her eyelids and her cheeks. Ridiculous. But let them fall.
There is the trapdoor tug again. It’s odd, how different this pain is from what has come before; perhaps the baby has moved down and is pressing more directly on the cervix. And then, so quickly that it tips her to one side of her seat, forcing her to put her palm against the wall to steady herself, Lore feels an urgent desire to push down, to push out the pain that is filling her up fast. Her belly goes liquid and she is nauseated; she is going to throw up. She calls out for Franckline, and instantly the nurse is there, kneeling on the floor in front of her, telling her, No, no, don’t get off the toilet, ride it out here, lean against my shoulders if you need to. Lore leans into Franckline as if she were the pillows at the foot of the bed, wraps her arms hard around Franckline’s frame. Franckline steadies herself with a hand on the toilet rim. “Let your voice out,” she reminds Lore. “Bring it from way down.” Their faces are inches apart and Lore can smell the subtle, spicy odor of Franckline’s skin and something of mint on her breath. It diffuses the nausea a bit. She swallows. She doesn’t want to shout or moan into Franckline’s face, but the nurse is encouraging her, urging her, and she complies. She is sobbing, without knowing when she started, or how. The pressure inside her is tremendous; the baby pushes against her back, as if it wants to come out that way, and Lore too pushes without wanting to, fiercely, needing to relieve the pressure; something is looking for an exit; get it out, get it out, get it out!
But all that happens is that the contraction passes, leaving her with a reduced but still noticeable sensation of pressure, and her face bathed in tears and sweat. Franckline wets a towel and hands it to her silently. Lore draws it over her face with quivering hands. “A minute fifteen seconds,” Franckline says. There is no smile or encouragement now; they’re beyond that. Now they are in earnest.
Lore gets up slowly, sees that she’s shat some small curls into the toilet. She is not embarrassed; she can’t afford to use up her energy on any feeling as inessential as that. She flushes the toilet and swats at the seat with some toilet paper. “I felt like I needed to push,” she says. “Is it okay to push?”
“I don’t know. You ought to be fully dilated first. You didn’t go through a clear transition.”
“I feel like I want to push.”
“It’s possible, of course. We can’t know unless you have another exam — or the baby comes out.”
Lore’s finger is throbbing, as the orderly has promised. The blood returns in thick, awkward pulses. At first she clutches it, to numb the hurt, but that proves worse. She has barely climbed back into bed, trying to avoid any pressure against the finger, when the next contraction arrives, and once again she has no time to do anything but lie back and draw up her legs and bear down with the frightful pressure. It is no baby pressing now but something else, alien and with damage on its mind. There is nothing proper to hold onto — not Franckline’s shoulder or back, not the pillows, which are at the end of the bed; she can only grip her own knees, infuriated, ignoring Franckline’s exhortations to draw in her breath and groan. Rebelliously, she screams, knowing that it will only waste her strength and rake her throat, knowing that screaming is for the weak and out of control, and that some other woman in another room will hear her and be frightened. When her breath comes back a bit she curses and bucks from side to side, protesting pain’s fingerprints on her body. Franckline leans over her, instructing quietly, “Try to stay still,” and Lore shouts, “I need it to come out I need to push,” and Franckline says, “Push then,” and Lore pushes, her feet trembling, her fingers (she no longer feels the damaged one) gouging into her knees. She strains with all her might until she genuinely expects to see a baby flop out on the sheet beneath her, until the pressure retreats enough to let her loosen her grip and lower her buttocks to the mattress.
Again Lore sponges herself with a towel Franckline brings from the sink. “Let’s get you ready for the next one,” Franckline says. She positions Lore over the pillows and phones the charge desk. “Patient in room 7 may be ready to push. Can someone call Dr. Elspeth-Chang?”
The next contraction comes quickly and lasts longer than a minute, but although the pain seizes Lore and shakes her, this time it does not panic her. The need to push has receded somewhat, and she praises Whomever or Whatever for this deliverance. No one told her that pushing might be so terrible, so rough-pawed and bestial, much worse than the cleaner, sharper pain of the contractions. The child is waiting a bit, has decided to stay with her a bit longer. In her birth plan, Lore gave orders that the baby should be laid on her chest as soon as it emerges and that she wishes to cut the umbilical cord herself. The idea of doing so in fact fills her with unease. The flesh, she imagines, will be tough and resistant under the scissors. She has a terrible image of not being strong enough to cut neatly, of having to twist and gouge to get the thing done. I am father and mother both to this child.
She turns her head, rests. Not long ago, Lore might have thought that any child of hers would have not one parent but three: her, Asa, and eccentric Aunt Julia. Julia, who didn’t understand children, was afraid of them, and only once, that Lore knows of, ever painted a picture of one. A birth scene, in fact: a squatting woman and the emerging torso of a child. Unusual in that it stood in Julia’s studio uncovered, unusual in that Julia did not speak of it bitterly, self-punishingly. She seemed willing to appear almost fond of it. The woman had a flattened appearance and the background was luridly floral with the same harsh greens and reds and purples that Julia and Lore had gazed at in the Expressionist gallery that long-ago evening. The child’s face was visible: a nightmare face, blurred and misshapen. Although Lore was afraid that any comment could spur Julia to throw a drop cloth over the easel and clam up, she could not resist saying that the child was awfully unattractive.
Julia shrugged.
“But I like it,” Lore added honestly, meaning the painting. It captured something for her, something about her own mother, maybe — not what her mother might have gone through in labor so much as what she had gone through raising her on her own. Her mother had cared for her, but there must have been times when she’d felt she was being split open by the burden, that she was struggling to expel an ugly, indistinct scream.
“Do you? I’ll give it to you.”
Julia had never offered her a painting before. Never again would she. Yes, yes, she would take it, said Lore, thrilled.
Asa protested. He didn’t like the painting, he confessed, and he returned to his argument about not having Julia’s things in the apartment. Lore badgered him to give it a chance for a week or two. They tried hanging it in the living room, the bathroom, finally the bedroom. Asa held it to the wall yet another time. His eyes met Lore’s, and then both of them broke out laughing, laughing so hard that Asa dropped the picture on the floor and Lore had to go get tissues for her eyes: there was no way that this painting could ever hang in their bedroom or for that matter anywhere else that belonged to them. It was simply too disturbing — too Julia. Without further discussion, Lore wrapped it in brown paper and stashed it in the hallway closet. When she moved out of the apartment, she spared it, left it resting neatly in its place against the closet wall. Even in her rage she could not damage one of Julia’s paintings. Julia’s soul resided in them; it would have been worse than a bodily murder.