Women's Work

by Megan K. Stack

  If he realized we’d been split from each other, he didn’t mind. Maybe he had been raised to expect it; maybe I had not. The memory of those bars would stay in my mind for years.

  The doctor came. The doctor frowned.

  “The baby has not dropped,” she said. “The head is not engaged. Your cervix is closed.”

  She tucked her clipboard under her arm and looked into my face.

  “This induction is not going to be easy for you,” she said. “I know you wanted a natural birth, but under these circumstances I recommend an optional C-section.”

  This was precisely what the midwife had warned us to expect—the doctor wanted to medicalize my birth!

  “I don’t want a C-section,” I snapped. “But you said it’s ‘optional,’ right? I have a choice?”

  “Ye-e-s,” she said slowly. “I can’t say it’s imperative. Not yet. So, of course, it is your choice.”

  “Then no,” I said firmly. “No C-section.”

  “Fine,” she said. “We’ll start by trying to soften your cervix and start contractions. Then we’ll see how it goes.”

  * * *

  ————

  The summer day pressed upon the hospital and the city, pressed upon my belly with an immobile and dull ache. We pestered and pressed the nurses for permission to go for a walk. Getting out of the maternity ward was like getting out of prison. Forms were signed; promises extracted; bracelets issued.

  The drab side streets of northern Beijing offered no cheerful place to stroll. The sidewalk came and went in unhelpful patches. We passed faded dusty storefronts and stalls hung with crutches and stale bandages and flimsy wheelchairs folded like dinosaur skeletons. A chain Italian restaurant, heaps of fruit, laundry. All was pavement and towers and walls, all was mineral hard surface.

  “Let’s go in here,” I said. “It looks like there’s some kind of playground or park—”

  “It’s a workers’ compound,” Tom said. “They built these all over China. All the people who live here will have worked for the same factory or ministry or whatever.”

  Through a rusting gate we entered a constellation of brick apartments. Old men played mah jong at picnic tables, shuffling their tiles, cupping their hands over cigarettes. A sweaty day, sky clotted with smog, air thick with coming rain. The young and the elderly had fled cramped quarters for the cracked pavement and weedy beds of the courtyard. Clusters of women bent their heads together, and children roamed wild. There was a miniature amusement park with a tiny merry-go-round, sun-faded plastic animals, a trampoline. An old man took coins for the rides. Only one small girl had pocket money; she spun alone and serious, as if she’d done this ride before and it was never what she’d hoped. The old man hawked and spat. Soon her turn would end.

  “We won’t be able to get out this way,” Tom warned.

  “There must be a second gate.”

  “These compounds usually have only one way in and one way out,” he said. “But we can try.”

  “Okay.” I kept walking.

  Our path was shrinking; the buildings closed around us. I led us down one alley, then another, but each one was a dead end.

  Tom was right.

  “You were right,” I told him.

  “It’s not about who’s right,” he said.

  Forward momentum hit the wall. We could only return, retreat, and go back to where we had started.

  * * *

  ————

  Back in the hospital room, painful contractions gripped and vanished in pointless rhythms. The hours dragged along, but the baby didn’t budge.

  A nurse tucked sheets over Tom’s sofa bed. I crawled in beside him, sluggish and sick, and twisted in contractions until sunrise.

  Morning brought breakfast trays and yellow light. Smog stood thick in the air. In the schoolyard behind the hospital, children sang their morning exhortations to rise up and build a new Great Wall and counted off their exercise drills. I had been in the hospital for twenty-four hours, and practically nothing had happened. Morning fell to afternoon and sunset clotted into black, but still the baby stuck high. Another night in wakeful limbo. Too much pain to sleep and yet I was desperate for more pain, enough pain to tear this baby, at last, from my body. In the morning the doctors urged me, again, to have a C-section, and again I refused. With grim, we-tried-to-warn-you faces, they hooked a sack of Pitocin to the IV and flooded my veins with birth hormones.

  I had been stultified and swollen, but now my body began to shift around with excruciating speed. I distinctly felt my hipbones dragging themselves apart. The sensation reminded me of the rack, of hapless medieval lieutenants drawn and quartered, horses pounding in opposite directions to spill hot blood on stinking dust. Torture, execution, European history—God! I didn’t want any of that in my head. I had expected some tearing and stretching, but this sensation was deeper and deadlier and unspeakably painful. My skeleton was being dismantled. There was nothing in my brain but gruesome images and a single mantra: I am going to die.

  I was supposed to be thinking of other things. The midwife had trained us to meditate and “go to a place deep inside,” as one of the hippie moms had described birth. But it wasn’t happening. I had been awake for two days straight and my strength was blown, and that place inside of me, if indeed it existed, was not findable now.

  The hospital room had disintegrated into its own drabness. I rolled far out at sea, in the fogged dark of night. The waves pushed and tossed and I couldn’t keep my head above water. I’m here, I’m lost, let me go. Another life is buried within me. It is also my life. My own life must rip itself from my center and leave me dead. Let them take it. Let me go. His life, my life. Take it, do it. I can’t anymore.

  “Give me an epidural,” I gasped when I could speak again.

  The contractions were fast.

  The needle was huge.

  I couldn’t have cared less.

  “You have to stay still, even when the contractions are coming,” the doctor warned. “If the needle slips you can be paralyzed.”

  Cold steel slipping quick oh God that’s my spine. I was still at sea, but now it sloshed with the sweetness of nothing. I was too limp to talk. “I’ll take a shower,” Tom said uncertainly.

  “You should,” I agreed. He withdrew into the bathroom and I heard the slap of water on tiles. I luxuriated in nothingness.

  But something was happening. Monitors beeped, buzzers bellowed, nurses raced in from the hall. Suddenly the room was crammed with people rushing, chattering, flipping pages.

  “You’re going into surgery,” somebody shouted. “The baby’s heart is failing.”

  “One, two, THREE!” They heaved me onto a stretcher. Tom came dripping and bewildered from the bathroom, and then he was running beside me, somebody had given him a cap and a mask, somebody had given him scrubs. I was losing moments. I understood what was happening and I understood that it was happening to me. It had already happened a very long time ago. It was a memory in real time.

  The surgery was freezing cold and snappingly bright. Nausea rolled and curdled.

  “I’m going to throw up,” I whispered to Tom. “I don’t know how—”

  “We’ve already cut you open,” a nurse barked. “No moving. I’ll put a towel under your chin and you vomit there.”

  I did as I was told.

  I heard a baby crying.

  * * *

  ————

  He was a boy; we named him Max. Isn’t every woman shocked by her first baby? So many things I hadn’t anticipated. His wizened face already carved with ancient griefs and nameless rages. The love he provoked—fierce and searing; a natural disaster; a bloody sweet tornado that demolished all that had been before.

  “Feed him,” the nurse said sweetly. “He needs to eat.”

 
She arranged him on my chest, grabbed my breast, and scraped the nipple over his mouth. He chewed, sucked, smacked.

  “Good,” she said.

  “He’s eating?”

  “Yes.”

  “Something is coming out?”

  “Something will come.”

  I worshipped the nurses. I never wanted to leave them. Whenever I wanted to feed the baby I pushed the button by my bed and somebody appeared to smile and coo and arrange us into a nativity sculpture. I loved the button that summoned them. I loved their faces and their voices. Each nurse was sweeter and softer than the last. I wanted to stay in their care forever.

  * * *

  ————

  The baby’s face was fixed in my mind long before his birth. He was a boy, and so I was sure he’d look like Tom: dimples, long lashes, and dark, soft eyes. A mop of chocolate curls, eventually, then glasses.

  I was wrong.

  I took my baby to my breast, expecting my husband. But—Oh God, it’s my father, it’s my father dying of cancer again, the bones and the ears. I had chosen Tom for new life and new family, new genes, new house, new world. I had taken Tom’s name because mine clanked with the heaviness of a lonely childhood, of watching my father die with nothing resolved, nothing said, except finally I love you, because in the end there was nothing else possible to say.

  It wasn’t only that the baby resembled my father, which was undeniable. In those first wild days when Max emerged from starvation in the womb and the nearly fatal beating of uterine contractions, he looked exactly like my father on his deathbed. I cradled the baby in a maternity ward in China and hurtled back to a living room in Connecticut, my father in feverish madness, clawing for life and babbling in anger and sucking morphine from a sponge.

  That’s when I knew it was hopeless. I could give up my name and go all around the world, but I couldn’t escape myself. I had given birth to my father in his moment of fatal torture and to my own younger self who had been disobedient and rebellious and faithless. I’d tried to break new ground, but the soil was me and my genes were full of ghosts. I was sorry for myself and sorry for this tiny creature, my baby, with his snapping round maw and emaciated face.

  My baby was my father, and now it was my job to feed him and keep him alive. It could have been written by Freud. No, this was all wrong. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. I had to keep him alive. How could I keep him alive?

  Tom was at my elbow, face full of unshaven wonder and sleepless serenity. He went out walking and came back and said, “I could see his face so clearly. I never remembered anybody’s face like that.”

  Like a puppet I said: “Yes, he’s beautiful.” Inside I was screaming. I couldn’t eat or sleep. The nurses offered to take him to the nursery, but I couldn’t stand to be apart. I lifted him onto my chest and nodded off to dreams of Spain, dreams of my father who lived in Spain, and my baby was an egg balanced on a checkered tablecloth, and then the egg rolled off and cracked and the yolk seeped out. The horror of Humpty-Dumpty, I had let my baby fall! I jumped awake in terror, but he was still there on my chest, swollen pink face pushed close to my own.

  His bowels were a wreck; we changed his diaper dozens of times. We were sweating and panicked.

  “Is it supposed to be like this?”

  “How can I know?”

  Then he fell asleep, and that was even worse. I stared at him in white terror. I could detect no movement in his chest and eyelids. Was he dying here, in a hospital bassinet, while nurses gossiped in the corridor and I sat watching? I laid one finger on his bony chest and felt it rise and fall. I woke Tom up and whisper-sobbed my fears.

  “I don’t know,” he croaked. “He’s not supposed to sleep?”

  “He didn’t sleep last night.”

  “Well, what do you want to do?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “Should we call the nurse?”

  “Am I being crazy?”

  “Well, honey, I don’t know. I think we’re in the hospital, so if you think something’s wrong we should call the nurse.”

  “He’s sleeping!” I sniffled to the nurse when she came.

  “Good,” she said.

  “No, but I mean, he’s sleeping like nothing will wake him up. And he’s never slept like this before”—as if I were speaking from years of maternal experience—“and it’s scaring me. It seems like he’s hardly breathing. I just have a feeling something’s wrong.”

  “He’s tired,” the nurse said. “He need to sleep. Birth is very hard for babies. And your labor was very long. This make him tired.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “He’s okay! Don’t worry.” Her smile was sympathetic, and something more, as if I were being cute.

  “Don’t you want to do some tests?”

  “Better not bother him.”

  “But—”

  “Thank you. Thank you very much.” Tom flashed her a significant look, giving her permission to go.

  When we were alone he said, “Honey.” He said, “Everything’s all right.” He said, “Why are you crying? We have our baby and, look, he’s perfect.”

  He said, “You need to get some sleep.”

  And I said, “I know. Don’t you think I know?”

  I spent the night staring wildly into the bassinet. When the first thin light of dawn edged the curtain I called my mother.

  “Mom,” I said, “he’s sleeping, and he won’t wake up, and I think it’s bad. Nobody else thinks it’s bad. The nurse says he’s fine, but I just don’t think he should be sleeping like this. I mean newborn babies don’t sleep all night, right? I mean, look, I really do know that I’m being crazy, but at the same time I can’t stop myself. I’m just so scared he’s going to die.” I was sobbing, choking on tears, and I wanted to be small again, to bury my face in her lap.

  “Sweetie,” she said. “Babies sleep. They do that. He’s probably very tired. And when they’re so small it’s hard to see them breathing. But you’re in the hospital and I am sure that if something were wrong they’d tell you.”

  “Really?” I sniffled. “You think he’s okay?”

  Even from across the planet, she was the only person in the world who seemed reliable.

  “Really,” she said. “I think he’s just fine.”

  And he was. He was fine.

  “I’ve been awake four nights in a row now,” I told Tom when he woke up. “I didn’t even think that was possible.”

  * * *

  ————

  I hated the hospital room. I hated the dreary light that fell through limp curtains and the anonymous walls which were stained with my own drastic emotions. I hated remembering the parade of doctors who’d urged me to have a C-section, and my own mulish refusal. I felt stupid and reckless and as if I had already failed at motherhood, having lacked both the physical ability to deliver the baby naturally and the common sense to change the plan. The room was full of self-loathing, and I was desperate to leave.

  On the other hand, I was terrified to go home. How could they let us take the baby home? It was crazy; it should have been illegal.

  “When do we have to bring him back?” I asked the nurses.

  “Two weeks.”

  This was criminal, indeed. Didn’t they know our ignorance and incompetence could kill him a thousand times in two weeks?

  “Is there a number we can call if we have questions?” I glanced longingly at my bedside call button. “There are so many things we don’t know.”

  They took pity on me and copied the direct line to the nurses’ station onto a scrap of paper. All the way home my fingers kept burrowing into my pocket to make sure it was still there.

  It rained in Beijing that day. Shrieking, crashing rain; monsoon rain in a city hot as an oven. Water pooled at the floor of the city, forced
people from flooded homes and swamped the subway tracks. The city was drowning that day, but I hardly noticed. No hurricane, no plague, could have turned the streets more hostile than they already looked to me. Even the light was stabbing at us, everything moved and cawed and flashed, and how could I protect this baby? I hadn’t slept in a week and I was out of my mind.

  I sat in the hospital lobby holding Max in my arms while Tom hunted outside for a taxi. The doors were propped open, and the room sang softly with summer downpour. Industrial lights blazed and sweated. I couldn’t believe there was still a world beyond the hospital walls.

  On the opposite sofa perched a trio of blasé British club kids, students probably, two boys and a girl. I stared at them, and they looked back at me absentmindedly. We might have been watching one another on TV.

  They looked at Max, and one of the boys said to the girl, “Actually I quite like babies.”

  “Do you want kids then?” She picked with exquisite fingers at her lower lip.

  “Yeah?”

  I sat regarding them as they muttered and moved. Beautiful twining creatures who spoke softly and smelled of tobacco and skin creams, they were emissaries from a world devoid of everything the baby and I had just undergone. People, real people, to whom babies were nothing but a passing whim. For a minute they distracted me from the terror that I would drop the baby, he would stop breathing, the rain would never cease, it would carry his father away.

  Tom was back, flustered and sweating. “Let’s go.”

  The baby was light and disorganized as chicken bones in my hands. He thrashed in his car seat and howled with fresh indignation when the wet air touched his face. Tires shushed and neon gleamed through the storm’s unnatural dark in the month of light. The smell of rain seeped in through the cracks of the taxi; cold air huffed from vents. The baby was hysterical, and I had my face in his, whispering nonsense. This is rain, this is weather, this is China, this is the world. It was the first of countless times I would speak to my children and feel Tom listening, trying not to wonder, not to care, how I sounded to this man I had married. We are all together in the world, and this is how it will be, and have you ever seen anything so good as rain? It goes on the fields and makes food grow.