Sometimes I imagined people all over America, in Kansas City and Buffalo and Sarasota, vacuuming their shedding dogs, or freezing their marshmallows and their hair simply because I’d told them to. No matter what La Rae said about the triviality of my column, it gave me a queer sense of power, and of communion with strangers. The stationery some of their letters were written on, embellished with flowers or smile faces, like Sara’s thank-you notes, and the handwriting that slanted forward earnestly or was modestly tiny, never failed to touch. me. I “knew” these people, in a way. Some of them wrote back to say the gum was gone from their hair, the dog had run away from home. And I began to imagine other aspects of their lives. I saw a vegetable garden near a kitchen door, tomato plants neatly tied with pantyhose, on my advice, and a woman going inside, where the soup simmered with a potato in it (to absorb the excess salt), and a man waited on the repaired rocking chair to pull her down onto his lap. I began putting these images into a poem called “Advice.” I told the woman in the poem to let the soup boil over and away, to let the tomatoes, nourished in babyhood by ashes mixed with the soil, grow until the house was hidden by the vines and she and the man were trapped inside forever.
When I showed the poem to Ruth, she said that I seemed to be moving more and more toward a prose style. She wanted to know if I had thought of names for the man and the woman. I admitted that I had—sometimes they were Joy and Robert, and other times they were Leslie and Paul. “What else do you know about them?” Ruth asked, and the beginnings of a story rolled out. They’d married too young, I said, and their backgrounds were too dissimilar, but their real tragedy was that they were unable to have a child. Joy, or Leslie, kept the garden as a kind of token of fertility, and it was also something she could nurture.
“And then what happens?” Ruth asked, the way Ann or Jason used to during a bedtime story.
“I don’t know,” I said, startled and pleased by the question. “Maybe a baby grows on the tomato vine, in a caul of pantyhose. Maybe Robert goes berserk and tramples the garden. Maybe they live happily ever after. I don’t know. I guess I’ll have to write it to find out.” And that was how I stopped trying to write poetry and started trying to write fiction. Ruth suggested I take a workshop with an old friend of hers the following semester, a short-story writer named Alec Breslow. Was he the “A.” she’d dedicated Wrong Turn to? Suddenly everything took on the remarkable mystery of an unwritten narrative.
Early the next Saturday, Sara and I met at her new apartment to hang some pictures and line the kitchen shelves with paper. Afterward, we went to a local luncheonette and ordered waffles and ice cream for breakfast. Sara told me that one of the couples in our childbirth class had had a baby girl the night before. “Debby and Ralph wanted a boy, though,” she said.
“How about you?” I asked. “Do you have a preference?”
“Not really,” Sara said. “Well, sometimes, maybe, I hope it’s a girl. Like a little friend of my own. Like Peggy.” She sighed and put her fork down beside her plate. She’d hardly eaten anything.
“Aren’t you hungry?” I asked. “Sara, honey, try not to be so sad.”
“I’m okay, Mrs. Flax,” she said. “It’s just that my back is bothering me,” and she squirmed in her seat.
“Since when?” I asked her.
She picked up her fork and poked at the ice cream melting in the waffle craters. “Just now. But there, it’s better, it went away.”
“Where did it hurt?” I asked, as casually as I could.
She was eating again, but she motioned behind her with her free hand. “All the way down,” she said, “but it’s gone now.”
“That’s good,” I said, and looked surreptitiously at my watch.
“Oh, it’s not that,” Sara said quickly.
“How do you know?” I asked her.
“I just do. And it’s too early, anyway.”
But she put her fork down again, for good this time, and just sipped some water and pleated and unpleated her paper napkin.
Ten minutes later, there was another twinge in her back, and this one traveled to her lower abdomen and her thighs.
I went to the phone near the rest rooms and called Carmen’s number. Her answering service told me she was out but would be checking in very soon for messages. I thought of Bernie, who was back from Chicago, and then I called Dr. Norman, the obstetrician who’d first confirmed Sara’s pregnancy. He said he’d meet us at his office right away. Sara was in his examining room only a few minutes when he came out and told me that she was in labor. I was oddly unprepared, as if I hadn’t already guessed this news, as if I hadn’t really believed until that moment that she was pregnant.
“Sometimes our calculations are a little off,” he said. “But don’t worry, she’s full-term—the baby is a good size. And the heartbeat is strong.”
“What happens next?” I asked.
He smiled. “Don’t you remember?” he said. “Nature happens next. She seems to have plenty of time. Primips—first-timers—usually do. Where did she say she’s going to deliver—Larchmont? You can start out with her now and I’ll get in touch with Mrs. Gomez.”
I tried to call Ann, but I got her machine. “The baby’s coming!” I said. “We’re on our way!” And I prayed that she, or somebody, would be home when we got there.
The car service Dr. Norman called sent a stretch limousine, although we’d requested a regular sedan. It had a fitted bar and a television set in the back. “All we got,” the Russian émigré driver explained when I inquired. He was looking critically at Sara, probably wondering if she was going to ruin the upholstery. Sara was delighted to be traveling in such high style. As soon as we swerved into traffic, she put her feet up on the facing seat and turned the television on. “Oh, rats, it’s Saturday,” she said, switching from cartoon to cartoon. Finally she settled on one of those civic-minded talk shows from New Jersey. “Thanks very much for joining us today,” the host was saying. “New Jersey’s highway development and maintenance is certainly a subject for everyone’s concern.” I took a pencil and some paper from my purse to write down the time and duration of Sara’s contractions. Whenever one began, she held onto my hand and squeezed it until the pain passed, but she never took her eyes off the tiny screen.
Our driver was skilled but reckless, and I rapped on the glass panel several times, signaling him to slow down. Mostly, he ignored me. “Here, one pieces,” he said with disdain as we pulled up to Ann’s house. After I’d paid him, Sara asked him his name. “Serge Polanovitch,” he said. “You like?”
“Not bad,” she told him, “but only if it’s a boy.”
Lily was off for the weekend, and Spence was on the golf course, but Ann ran out to greet us. She had just come from playing tennis and was still wearing her whites. She looked like a nurse in a blue movie as she bustled around the guest room in her tiny pleated skirt. It was the same room where Sara had been sleeping these past months; there were bottles and tubes of her makeup scattered on the dresser top, her socks and pajamas flung over the bedside chair. Ann closed the blinds, canceling out the brightness of the day. Now the baby wouldn’t emerge from that familiar darkness into blinding light, which Carmen said was probably more traumatic than anyone realized. I remembered staring up into the klieg lights of the delivery room, waiting for Jason to be born, stunned by my sudden, unwelcome celebrity.
I cleared the chair so Sara could sit down, and knelt to take off her red high-tops. The Velcro rasped in the dim and quiet room. Sara said, “Ahh! Thanks,” and wiggled her toes contentedly. Then she undressed completely and put on the short, frilly nightgown Ann had bought her for this occasion. She asked if I’d please bring her the box of cassette tapes on the night table, and she hummed cheerily as she rummaged through them. Her euphoria, I decided, had to be related to this early stage of labor. Hadn’t I been that way myself, at first, an absolute model of civility and heroism? And didn’t my mother, whose favorite stories were about her torturous delivery of me,
wash and wax her kitchen floor right before she left for the hospital?
Sara’s contractions were still manageable and still ten minutes apart, enough time, I knew, to make her think: This isn’t so bad—what’s all the fuss about? I’d had the same thought on my way to the hospital, certain that my mother, who had advised me to beg for gas, had blown things up out of proportion again. “It’s not bad at all,” I told Howard, which was exactly what he wanted to hear. “This is a cinch, so far,” I told the obstetrical nurse a few minutes later as she bent to the fetal heartbeat. She snorted loudly and sauntered out of the labor room. Much later, Howard was with me in that same room, which had become pink with morning. By then the pains were murderous, and clearly only going to get worse. When I was way beyond reason or consolation, I was shaved, purged, and tethered to a table under those blazing lights. This was a horrible mistake, I decided, an aberration—everyone couldn’t be born this way, or the human race would have died out long ago.
Carmen was on her way—she’d left a message on Ann’s machine, too—and I kept going to the window to see if she’d arrived yet. Sara, queenly and calm, selected several tapes and handed them to Ann to feed into the tape deck. I glanced at the top one: the Talking Heads’ Little Creatures. Appropriate enough, I supposed, but shouldn’t Mozart, or maybe Sarah Vaughan, be welcoming my grandchild into the world?
Sara had a pile of books on childbirth that she flipped through, like a patient in a dentist’s waiting room looking at magazines. “How do you feel?” I asked her, and she said, “Great! I feel perfectly great!” a little too loud, as if she were deaf or stoned.
Then Ann inserted the first tape, and the vibrant sound of the Talking Heads filled the room: “And she was lying in the grass! And she could hear the highway breathing!”
I sat cross-legged on the floor next to Sara with a pencil and pad in my hands. “Don’t forget to do your breathing,” I reminded her.
“Oh, I’ve been breathing all along,” Sara assured me. Then she said, “Here comes another one!” leaning forward and arching her back.
I wrote down the time and announced, “Ten minutes again.”
A half hour later, we were still at ten-minute intervals, and Sara was still presiding from her chair. We heard Spence come in, and Ann went down to tell him the news. He rushed up the stairs, with Ann right behind him. “Uncle Spence coming in!” he shouted, and then he was in the room, hugging Sara, who was between pains and able to hug him back. How marvelous she was! Maybe it would be a cinch this time, all the way through. I’d heard stories of women who swore they’d simply “dropped” their babies, without any of the usual agony. Athletes were supposed to have an easier time of it—could the elaborate gyrations Sara went through when she sang put her into that category?
Spence and Ann arranged the bed for the delivery, spreading a shower curtain under the bottom sheet, and a layer of disposable pads over it. They propped a number of pillows against the headboard, and then Spence stretched out to see if it was comfortable. Ann carried a tray table to the side of the bed and laid out the scissors and nasal syringe she and Sara had bought, on Carmen’s instructions. They were minor instruments compared to the cart of surgical steel they’d wheeled to the delivery table before Jason was born, but I suffered a pang of anxiety when I saw them. I picked up one of Sara’s childbirth books, which was illustrated with photographs. The baby’s father was in almost all of them, smiling and being supportive and loving.
“The camera!” Ann said, clapping her forehead. “We forgot the camera!” She and Spence raced down together, and when they came up again with the video camera, Carmen was with them. As soon as she walked into the room, I felt safer and more relaxed. Carmen lowered the volume on the tape deck, and shooed us all out of the room while she examined Sara. When we came back in, she told us that Sara was dilated two and a half centimeters, and I dutifully wrote that down, too. Then I gave Sara a back rub between contractions, another part of my coaching duties. “Mmmm,” Sara said, purring happily under my hands.
Spence took video footage of the room, of Carmen taking things out of her bag, of me rubbing Sara’s back. Sara waved at the camera. “Say something, dummy,” Spence directed her. “These are talkies.” “Hi, everybody,” Sara said. “We’re at two and a half centimeters now.”
She paid no attention to the small cylinder of oxygen and the mask that Carmen had transferred from her magic bag to the dresser. I thought of the trepidation I always felt on a plane, when the use of similar equipment was demonstrated just before takeoff. “In the event of a loss of cabin pressure …” the stewardess would explain, matter-of-factly. And at the Natural Birth Center they’d told us that the mother might be given oxygen during delivery if the baby was in stress. I could never imagine an actual loss of cabin pressure, but what could be more stressful than being born?
The room gradually grew darker and Ann lit the bedside lamps, which had been fitted with low-wattage light bulbs, almost like candlelight. Sara fell asleep on the bed and the rest of us sat around her, trying to read in the weak light, or dozing off ourselves. We could have been part of a golden tableau in a nineteenth-century painting. Sara slept and was jarred awake by contractions. She and I did the deep breathing together. I rubbed her feet and lightly massaged her lower abdomen. I realized that the Talking Heads tape had played itself out a long time ago, and no one had replaced it.
In a couple of hours, the contractions were stronger and closer: only eight minutes apart. Carmen encouraged Sara to take sips of water and herbal tea, to walk around, to empty her bladder. She took Sara’s blood pressure and listened frequently with the fetal stethoscope, saying, “Good, very good. Ah, that’s lovely.” After the next examination, she said, “Four centimeters now.”
“Ooh, it hurts,” Sara said, coming awake again later. She turned onto her side, her legs drawn up in pain. Spence and Ann went downstairs, and I lay next to Sara on the bed, stroking her back and shoulders, talking softly to her. “There,” I said. “There. Does that feel better?”
“Oh, no,” Sara moaned, moving restlessly. “What’s happening here? This is awful.” She hoisted herself from the bed and paced the room, still moaning. I paced behind her, mute Harpo chasing after Groucho. Was this how Howard had felt at the ringside of Jason’s birth—eager to help and helpless?
“Maybe a bath would be soothing,” Carmen said.
“I thought you weren’t supposed—” I began.
“She’ll be fine,” Carmen promised. “Some women even deliver in the bath.”
So Sara took off the drooping, wrinkled nightgown, and went into the tub for a while. Lying there did seem to soothe her, even if it didn’t lessen the severity of the contractions. I sat on the closed toilet seat and continued timing them. I noticed that Sara’s eyes had changed. That peaceful dreaminess was gone, and in its place was a deeper look of understanding that there was no turning back from this.
In the middle of everything, the phone rang. “Mom, it’s Nana,” Ann yelled up the stairs.
“Oh, God, what does she want?” I yelled back, and then I went into the guest room and picked up the extension. “What is it, Ma?” I said impatiently.
“Annie told me about Sara,” my mother said, “and I’m opening all my closets and drawers.”
“What for?” I asked.
“So she’ll have an easy time.” I could hear Sara groaning loudly in the bathtub.
“Thanks a lot, Ma,” I said, “but we’re not superstitious.”
“Is Howard there?” she wanted to know.
“Howard!” I said. “What would Howard be doing here?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “He has a right to be there, doesn’t he? I thought maybe you called him.”
“I’m not making any calls right now, Ma,” I told her. “I’m trying to help Sara. I have to go now,” I said, and hung up.
Carmen had gotten Sara out of the bathtub and back to bed, where she was sucking on frozen chips of orange juice, an
d eyeing the cylinder of oxygen with suspicion and fear. Now she was wearing one of Spence’s plain white T-shirts and a pair of fuzzy knee socks. “Five centimeters,” Carmen reported a few minutes later. “We’re halfway there.” Ten centimeters was the goal; then Sara would be able to start pushing.
“See, you’re making great progress,” I told her, but she acted as if she didn’t hear me. Ann and Spence came into the room with the camera and went quickly out again.
“Mom,” Sara murmured.
“What, dear?” I asked, before I realized she hadn’t meant me. “You’ll see,” my mother had warned, when I was pregnant with Jason, “you’ll curse your husband and scream for your mother.” Had I really done that? Howard had stayed with me, even when I knew he wanted to flee, to be anywhere else, maybe in another life.
Sara, released from a long contraction, said, “Sometimes I think how crazy love is, you know? What is it, anyway? It makes me laugh even to think about it.” But she wasn’t laughing; she looked distraught and exhausted.
By eight o’clock, she was talking rapidly between pains, even though Carmen urged her to use that brief time to rest. She talked about Jason in a feverish babble. Did I know he had a patch of lighter skin on his thigh that looked just like a lion? He used to tap out songs on her back in bed and she had to guess what they were. And once, he’d made supper when she had a cold, modeling hamburger into misshapen hearts. But she’d never forgive him for this, never! She talked about her childhood, and how she and Peggy had had studio portraits taken every year on their birthdays. “What’s today?” she said. “It’s my baby’s birthday, isn’t it? Paulie, I really don’t think I can deal with this.”
I felt feverish myself by then, and as if I hadn’t slept in years. Carmen suggested I take some time out while I could—she would stay with Sara. I went slowly downstairs to the kitchen, where Ann was making sandwiches. The fluorescent light was glaring and I had to cover my eyes. “I think I’m going to call Dad,” I said.
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