Page 15 - WTP Vol.X#1

and every penitent, single mother. Sometimes, when I was early, I would wait near the window where men and women stood to search incubators as if shopping for reassurance while folklore and super- stition followed every doctor down the halls like spies. My sister, when I mentioned she’d chosen the best area of medicine, said, “Not always, and when it’s not, it’s the worst.”
Commandments
Years before, my mother had told the story about a friend who had one kidney, two babies, and a doctor who said, with the next one, she would murder her- self or lapse into dependency upon dialysis to drag her up from toxicity’s depth. And yet, my mother had said, that woman sat there pregnant again because her church had said you can’t slip anything between yourself and the next soul waiting in line to enter its earthly body.
That friend had heard the same marriage instruc- tions my wife and I had; she’d absorbed the com- mandments for married life from a designated priest. And maybe someone had stood and said, “Bless us, Father,” like the man next to me at our last session, minutes before we could leave and try to forget our four hours over hell. Everyone stood. We received a blessing that inferred a curse on me, starting with soiling myself and soiling others, including the wom- an beside me who was going to curse herself with coils and pills to keep some souls in limbo jostling for a while.
For nearly three months we stayed secretive with our news, adhering to our own superstitions about premature public exuberance. Already we had abandoned one doctor who decorated his office with posters of Bible passages with praying hands and promised to choose our child rather than my wife if an emergency arose. My sister, by now, had an ad- vanced degree in nursing. The teaching position she had taken was at a Catholic university.
Lesson Two: The History of Lactaria
Lactaria means places of milk, the Roman columns, once, where babies were brought by mothers, some- times for the milk of a wet nurse, though more often, perhaps, to be abandoned, the mothers trusting pity’s power to save their children, what was offered by a local church after a newborn, discovered in a park, had not, despite the sweet kitsch of infancy, survived one night’s exposure to a late March freeze.
What Charmed Us
In Turkey, mothers, right after giving birth, drink lohusa serbeti (“postpartum sherbet”) made with wa- ter, sugar, cloves, cinnamon and red food coloring.
In Latin America, new mothers observe la cuarentena (“quarantine”), forty days of recuperating by abstain- ing from sex, physical activity and spicy foods.
What We Disagreed On
Male names Female names
My Sister Explains her Research
Anencephalic, she said, during the last days before we announced, naming the subject of her study of ethics. I listened and said nothing and kept my expression set at neutral because she spoke as if reading from the report she’d submitted for government funding.
I could see her Roman Numerals and their subject headings within the cloud of her early April breath, but what I wanted to know was how an expectant mother felt, knowing the child she was carrying could not possibly survive, yet could be kept alive for hours or days in order to be harvested of its organs as long as that mother consented to carry it to term, a per- sonal charity for the otherwise doomed. How she could accept the smiles of strangers as she swelled, the congratulations of relatives and friends unless she chose to terminate or tell she was transporting a set of parts for the needy.
What We Disagreed On
Whether I researched too much like my sister, discov- ering ways that made normal seem unusual.
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