Page 20 - WTP Vol. IX #10

Nothing at All (continued from preceding page)
But what other explanation was there? Over and over she said it: “Something is coming out of me and you need to make it stop.” And all they did was chuckle
a little and continue unwrapping metal and plastic tools from their packages.
So she decided she’d scream, as loud as she could, and they only chuckled more.
The white-coated doctor opened the door every hour or two. He walked like a man who had places to
be, and he didn’t knock before entering. She was sprawled out facing the door with no underwear be- neath her paper gown, but it was the lack of knocking that really bothered her. He described his actions as he touched her. “So what I’m going to do now is,” he’d say, or, “What you’re about to feel is.”
“Jesus, this is the worst dirty talk I’ve ever heard,” she heard her friend say, and she let herself snort a little, then burst out laughing. None of it mattered. She was invisible.
She said it again: “Something is coming out of me and you need to make it stop.”
“Everybody feels this way, honey,” a nurse said without looking up from the computer screen. “It doesn’t feel like it now, but I promise you it’s gonna be alright.”
“You don’t know that.” She was tired from screaming, so she just growled a little and made herself smaller in the bed.
“Everyone says they can’t do it, but the babies always come, don’t they?”
She shot back up. “I didn’t say that. I didn’t say I can’t do it. I said I won’t do it.”
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Did what happened next really happen, or was it another thing she made up? Waiting for her hus- band to step out of the room before gathering her things in the giant bag they’d brought with them, only to give up halfway through, abandoning it on the bed when she tiptoed out into the hallway and along the long corridor, and finally out the slid-
ing doors to the parking garage? She remembered emerging into daylight, but it couldn’t have been daylight, for it was only a dark garage, and the only reason she’d gotten away with it was because it was night shift. The nurses had been fewer and far- ther between, and they hadn’t checked on her in an hour. She wasn’t progressing like she ought to, they
said, and they were all in for a long night.
“What’s our plan here, girlie?” Her friend looked amused.
“I haven’t the slightest idea,” she replied, only she was laughing when she said it, laughing so hard she had to stop and grab onto the damp garage wall for support, clutching the bulge and stifling her laughter to prevent it from falling out.
“Alright, but you know it doesn’t, just like, fall out, right?”
But she was still laughing as she made her way down four flights of stairs and out into the city, just her and the bulge walking block after block, having the time of their life, knowing they had no plan but that they’d got away with it.
She thought of the two of them, her and the bulge, growing larger and larger. It would grow and she would expand to make room for it, the two of them growing stronger all the while. A baby seemed such a breakable thing, but the bulge was hard when she pressed on it, like a balloon that would never, ever pop. It was better this way, she thought.
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The same nurse who’d pulled her away from the vending machine in the hall (had she really only made it that far when she escaped?) was the one now talking to her husband in the corner.
Everything the nurse explained to him, she already knew from her nights on the bathmat. How it hap- pened every day, how the procedure was incred- ibly safe, and three out of ten births went like this. And still, he looked at the nurse like he’d never for a moment considered that his wife would be one of the ones who needed slicing open and stitching back together in order to fulfill what she was born to do. It was the first, she was sure, of what would be many letdowns when it came to the kind of mother he’d hoped she would become.
Some women planned it this way, of course, made the appointment weeks in advance and didn’t think twice. She wondered if these women had it easier, in the end, for having harbored no illusions in the beginning about how things were supposed to be. For others, it was a heartbreaking necessity. These were the women with laminated birth plans and labor playlists, doulas on the way to the hospi- tal to meet them.
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