That night, Maggie and Lyle lay with their arms around each other and talked about their son. “He’s all grown up,” said Lyle wistfully.
“Yes,” said Maggie. “He certainly is.”
“He’s a nice young man,” said Lyle. After a moment he added, “I think we’ve done a good job at being parents.”
This was not a new conversation, and always before, Maggie had gone to sleep feeling satisfied that she and Lyle had done their best. “He’s a fine-looking boy,” they would remark in the darkness of their bedroom, and occasionally one or the other of them would say, “He’s an old soul. It’s almost as if he’s been here before.”
But now Maggie sweated and tossed and thought about the world Will was entering, how filled it was with hidden dangers. She wondered what it would be like with Will gone off to college or wherever his own path led him — would she be able to escape the gravity of her role as wife and mother, or would she collapse into herself, becoming hard and dense and dying? She thought about the article on becoming, which stressed the need for agency, and about the letter from a person named Dolly, who had decided not to sit idly by, and about how any person could point to a handful of moments that changed everything: The first was when her father had slammed out the door for the last time. The second was the evening she had taken her sister’s turn at washing dishes so that she could wash them with Lyle, who up until then had been her brother’s friend. The third was the moment the footsteps paused, giving her an opportunity to take the document that now lay pulsing beneath the sweaters in her bottom drawer.
1.2 Dolly
Dolly Jackson worked as a midwife at a women’s health clinic, and because of the clinic’s location near a large VA hospital, it attracted a lot of veterans and veterans’ wives. She loved her job despite the fact that her family had tried to dissuade her from entering the field. “You’re doing a doctor’s job, but you’re getting paid worse than a nurse,” they said when Dolly went home for Easter or Christmas.
It was true, but Dolly didn’t care. More and more women were joining the armed services, and she liked to think of herself as soldiering bravely on the battlefield of women’s rights. She also liked to think she was helping her boyfriend, Danny Joiner, who had enlisted in the army when his college scholarship ran out and whom she hoped someday to marry. Her work allowed some of the women to have their babies at home, where Dolly lit candles and soothed them with soft music. “I’d like to see a man go through this,” she’d whisper to the women, and when the babies plunged mewling from their mothers’ wombs, their first glimpse of the world was softly lit and rose scented and the first thing they heard were the violins and cymbals of Appalachian Spring if they were white babies and the Oklahoma City Gospel Choir if they were black. “It’s a beautiful world!” Dolly told the babies. “Me oh my, it’s a beautiful world!”
She taught the husbands and boyfriends how to help the women breathe, and then she wrapped the babies up in soft cotton blankets and placed them in their mothers’ arms. But lately, Dolly’s work had taken a frightening twist. Three babies in the past year had been born with horrendous defects. One had been born without a face. The head was the size of a grapefruit; its only feature was an open mouth, and out of the mouth a tumor protruded, purple as a plum and big as an orange. She deserved to go to hell for wishing the baby would die. She wished it would die quickly, before the mother saw it. What else could she wish for?
Over the next few days, she tried excising the thoughts as neatly as the pediatric surgeon had excised the tumor, but ugly images kept penetrating her resolve. She saw ripe fruit everywhere, even in her sleep. She sat bolt upright in bed with the words of the attending obstetrician ringing unbidden in her head: “Why in the world did you let the mother see it?” As if it were somehow her fault for wanting everything to be perfect in a world where nothing was.
I wish that baby would die, she had thought then, and she thought it again whenever the horrendous image of a baby with a head like an orange and a grapefruit stuck together popped onto the screen of her inner vision. It had been the worst moment of her life when, in the soft winking light of the candles, with Copeland’s magnificent crescendo evoking the thrust of new life from the earth, she had said to the mother, “We need to call the doctor,” and the mother had taken the baby in her arms and screamed and fainted, and only Dolly’s quick thinking had prevented the baby from falling to the floor.
The grandmother, who had been waiting in the next room, rushed in when she heard her daughter scream. “What’s going on here?” she shouted as the father grabbed at the soft bundle, and Dolly had allowed him to take it from her.
She was glad when the baby’s tiny weight was no longer in her grasp. She had hurried out of the room to use the telephone — to call the doctor, of course, but also to evade the family’s dawn of understanding. When she returned, she announced, “The doctor will be here in twenty minutes.” During those long minutes, Dolly didn’t know what else to say. She pretended to be busy with her bag of instruments and then with the mother and the blood pressure cuff, but she could tell that the family blamed her for the baby’s condition — not because it was her fault, but because there was no one else to blame.
Dolly wished the doctor would hurry. She knew he had a new car with a powerful engine, and she wished he would use it as aggressively that night as he used it to get to his weekend trysts in Norman or Shawnee. She wanted a second set of shoulders for the burden of blame the father and grandmother had handed over the way she had handed over the baby, but she wondered if they would feel the same way about the doctor, who hadn’t been complicit in the actual birth — and also, the doctor was a man. Dolly knew people preferred to blame women if there was a choice. For one thing, women were smaller and presented a lesser physical threat, and for another, the women she knew, herself included, were more than eager to blame themselves.
That had been the worst night of her life until the sunstruck October evening less than two months later when a baby had been born covered with a cracked white coating, a coating like a potter’s glaze, a powdery white crust crazed by deep black gashes where there should have been skin. Dolly could hold her tongue no longer. “Don’t we need to tell someone?” she had asked as carefully as she could. Long ago, she had learned which things would encourage the doctor to speak and which would cause him to say, “So you can see that I’m a busy man, with no time for idle chatter.” She kept her voice low, which made it hard to get the tone right. “About the birth defects, I mean. That’s two now, just eight weeks apart.”
“I know what you’re thinking,” said the doctor, stroking the stethoscope that hung around his neck and giving the appearance of listening.