Authors: Delia Sherman
"A specialist is just going to throw some numbers at us and repeat what the OB said,” he tells me. “We can't know anything until they're born."
I am going anyway.
"I am going anyway,” I tell him, but he is asleep.
My belly is a hollowed-out boulder filled with soft bone and heavy syrup, and during the course of my sleep it has slung itself hard right of center, dragging my resisting hips with it, skewing my spine.
Everything is heavy and dark, as if Pompeii has fallen on me. I wait in the dark, for some speck of light, for some rugged archeologist to brush the dust from my twisted form and lift my bones from my wrecked bed.
I will probably never sleep again, and so to amuse myself, I go over my list of anxieties. There are currently thirty articles, and I tell them like rosary beads, roll them like olives in my mouth, re-arrange them like twigs in a nest.
The babies haven't moved in two hours.
Money.
The sound of wind chimes when there isn't any wind.
Symptoms of senile dementia in my cat.
God is definitely this Guy, and he never wanted me to be a mother to begin with, and I have subverted nature, much like Dr. Frankenstein, and remember what happened to Mary Shelley, her husband ran screaming from her that time they were vacationing in Geneva because he swore he saw eyes where her nipples were supposed to be.
I need more folic acid in my diet.
My eighteen-month-old is on to me.
Someday she will meet someone who wants to fuck her.
I'm turning into Erma Bombeck.
Erma Bombeck is dead.
Satan.
Jesus.
Incontinence.
Now I'll never be a movie star.
That beer I shouldn't have had last weekend.
The public school system.
I'll never be sexy again.
I was never sexy to begin with.
I place too much importance on being sexy.
What is sexy, anyway?
My bathwater was too hot; I have inadvertently boiled my babies' brains.
Lead paint.
What is that? Is that a goiter?
I'm a fraud.
Soon everyone will realize I'm a fraud.
Down syndrome.
Global warming.
The pros and cons of circumcision.
My life is like the first twenty minutes of a disaster movie.
The babies haven't moved in two hours.
So when the dragon comes barreling down on me like a whistling, murderous Chinese New Year, I am not surprised. It arrives in a blast of red-black heat, rolling eyes, and charcoal-tinged farts. At the foot of my bed it pauses to sneeze, a stringy line of flaming snot escaping its nostrils and narrowly missing the cat, which sleeps on, like my husband, unperturbed.
It is red.
Not fire-engine red, but heart's blood. Aortal.
It sort of hangs there like an unexpected metaphor, filling the room with its lizard funk, its wings spread and riding an impossible updraft, or maybe just floating on its own heat. The air beneath it bends and ripples. The streetlight from outside our bedroom window filters in through the bamboo shade and picks out the black edging that scallops the scales of its wings.
It looks like my grandmother's spaghetti sauce tastesâpepper-tempered, oily, irresistible, with just a whiff of anchovy on its breath.
It is staring at me stupidly.
Stupid, stupid animal.
I know I should leap to my feet, grab a sword from somewhere, defend my family; I should go for its belly, as it would go for mine. But I haven't been able to leap to my feet for some time now, and the closest thing we have to a sword is a meat cleaver, and I would have to get out of the bed, past the dragon, and all the way to the kitchen to get it. Besides, it would disturb both husband and cat if I were to engage in battle with a creature from my girlhood at this absurd hour.
So I wait. I wait and see. I wait for the dragon to speak, to make dire predictions about the fate of my children, my husband, my cat. But it doesn't say a word. It just swivels its lizard head around and gazes momentarily at my husband.
At the bookshelves from Crate & Barrel.
At the desk from the Container Store.
At the Little Tikes plastic kitchen set that my daughter got for Christmas.
At the Pampers, the cell phones, the iPods, the printer/scanner/fax machine. Its gaze travels out to the red minivan in our detached garage, and then back inside where it sneers briefly at the cable TV. It causes the edges of last year's tax return to curl slightly with heat, and it notices the Christmas card we got from our mortgage associate, Dan Kozar (which, if you're looking for someone, he has been nothing but helpful to us).
I see the pale underside of the dragon's throat as it raises its head to observe the ceiling fan; with its eyes it tries to follow the fan's circling blades for one confused moment, and then it abandons it. The dragon glares at me, shuddering, wings arching inquisitively.
I shrivel, not with its heat, but with its disapproval.
"I have to pee,” I tell it, finally.
It flees out the back way, through the kitchen door, knocking over a pile of fastidiously stacked recyclables. I hear paper and plastic scatter and bounce off the kitchen floor.
In the silence that follows, the cat yawns, in that sudden way cats do.
Once I am certain that the dragon is gone, I pry myself from sweat-soaked sheets. The floorboards creak under my weight.
In the bathroom, after I pee, I check for blood in the bowl and on the toilet paper. The toilet paper is white, and the bowl is blamelessâI am peeing so often, my urine is nearly colorless. No blood floats in the water there. But I'll keep checking as I have done, nearly compulsively, for the last four months.
I pause in the kitchen and clumsily squat to gather the bundles of newspaper scattered around in the dragon's wake. The tile in this kitchen is a delightful Italian slate, cold as hell, even in August, and receptive to stains. My daughter has come to grief on it more than once, I've broken a number of wine glasses on it, and now the dragon has tracked what looks like smoke damage across it. I will try to scrub it out in the morning. I close the kitchen door, wondering why we left it open in the first place.
In the dark hallway, I pause at my daughter's door listening to the wet, uneven breathing typical of toddler sleep.
She is some kind of sea creature, a baby squid, hard where you expect her to be soft and vice versa. Not a sweet, cooing, ornamental baby, but an inquisitive force of nature, and a humorous one. She will need all of her humor in the weeks to come.
Back in my own bed, arranging my pillows just so under my big, white belly, I consider weeping, but I can't spare the salt.
My husband snores like an oblivious summer storm.
In the morning, over orange juice and a prenatal vitamin, I will tell him about the dragon. I will show him the smoke damage on the cold slate tile. I will tell him that, while house hunting, we cannot consider anything red. No red barn board, no red kitchens, no red trim around colonial blue shingles.
I'll never see the color red again without my heart breaking for that vision of it that flew in on smoke-streaked wings and paused to sneeze all over our lifestyle.
The babies stir. I sleep.
This is not at all like the first time.
The first time goes like this.
It is a very warm day, but in the time it takes us to walk from the car to the emergency room (I insist on walking, because I'm a Trooper), the wind has changed and it is downright chilly in my flowing summer maternity dress.
(I wonder what portents lie behind this sudden ominous change in weather.)
Pretty Evanston hospital.
Pert RN.
Pretty labor and delivery room complete with glider rocker and medical equipment hidden behind flowered panels in the walls. I speak to my mother on the phone while a no-nonsense intern decides to insert what looks like a long crochet hook up me to break my water. The sound is like a rubbery balloon resisting attack. The fluid leaves me and hits the tile floor with a resounding splat, and I say “No, Ma, look, I've got to go now, things are happening here,” while the contractions come and go with great regularity; but I do not twist and moan like in the movies or even on TV, I just feel the need to inform everyone when the contractions are coming and when they are peaking and when they are going away, and I think this isn't so hard, it's not like taking a math test, for instance, I can't fail it, for instance, people stupider than I have given birth, lord knows, and, yes, I'll take the drugs, any drugs, all drugs, and that's much better except I feel sick so I throw up into a bedpan and I push and the drugs wear off and I push and there's conversation about how hospitals used to give the placenta to cosmetic companies to put in shampoos and things but that was before AIDS, now they just throw it away, and it's bright and cheerful in the room like a sporting event and I don't even get to yell at my husband like they do on TV, I don't feel the need, just once he's talking a little too rapidly and I say “shhhh” (and he does!) and I feel sick again, I've been pushing two hours, so I throw up into the bedpan again, and that does it.
That is how my daughter arrives. With a rush of vomit and me too busy clearing my mouth to notice.
Later, she and I stared at each other from our respective beds. I was afraid to pick her up. I didn't know if it was allowed.
I'm not afraid of giving birth. That's the least of my worries. I'm afraid of what comes after.
Some things they don't tell you about.
Hemorrhoids: Wherein the tortured veins around your anus rise to the surface in swollen masses of tissue and cry revolt. Not every woman gets them, but many do. They come from straining during the birth, and they will cause your fully dressed husband to wince when he is standing there like a great big hairy cheerleader between your shaking legs. If you're lucky, he will later remark that they put him in mind of that time he was at the zoo and was mooned by a female baboon in estrus. Your mother will warn you, with typical grim glee, to forever after be wary of sitting on hot concrete, or a radiator, as the heat will “bring them out again.” This may prove to be untrue. But something does bring them out again. From time to time. For the rest of your life.
Episiotomies: Wherein the doctor makes a small incision to the perineum (that's the area between the anus and the vagina, for you amateurs) in order to facilitate the birth. Midwives hate them and swear they're not needed. Doctors swear by them and say it keeps the woman from getting torn up. The woman in labor doesn't give a shit. The trauma surrounding her cunt is, by that point, so transcendentally mind-blowing that a quick snip with some silver surgical scissors is more or less an unremarkable event. Though the stitches may itch, later.
The Fluid: Wherein you empty out. There's a lot of it, and it pours out of you, and it gets all over. It is amniotic fluid and blood and in some cases shit, but don't worry, the orderlies mop it up. Don't worry about the orderlies. Don't wonder what would've happened to you if you'd grown up in the sort of dire circumstances that makes orderlies out of people. You are not an orderly. You do not have to mop up the juice bucketing out of a helpless privileged white woman with her legs up and her eyes up and her belly heaving like that of an albino mare. You are not an orderly. You are not responsible for someone else's goo. Yet.
The Dragons: Wherein they perch on your very chest, like in a painting by Hieronymus Bosch. They may just be metaphors. Ignore them as best you can.
This is not like the first time.
For one thing, the last time had been in a different hospital, a nicer hospital. In this hospital there is no gliding rocker and the equipment is not hidden like wolves in the walls, it's right out there in the open.
Last time, there had been no dragons.
This is no tasteful birthing suite, but a small, hard room with monitors and no windows and the ubiquitous TV screwed high on one wall, because we know what's important. I can understand why the dragon crouches there. It's a good roosting spot, the highest spot in the room.
As the student nurse stands next to my bed and attempts to find a likely spot on the inside of my elbow, she brushes aside leathery wings, irritated, mostly, by the color of them. “The color of these things,” she complains, the dragon wings flapping lazily around her. She is a tiny woman, herself caramel colored, with an accent I think might be Philippine. The lilt of her voice is tropical, but she is trying for a brisk bedside manner and her hands are not confident. Her needle drags across my nerves before finding its way into my vein. I hiss, which is what I do when I'm in pain. I breathe in. I have been told, in birthing classes, that you're supposed to breathe out. But a person can't breathe out all the time.
I hiss, and the dragons answer; they hiss and flutter, drawing the student nurse's eye.
"I can't get over the color of them,” she marvels, but not over their actual presence. “The color of what is it now? That trendy poison all the French artists drank?"
I am surprised out of my middle-class, liberal-arts complacency. What does a Philippine student nurse know about symbolist poets?
"Absinthe?” I venture.
It's true. My student nurse has got it right. The dragons glow like something distilled from nature but mixed by mankind, potentially lethal, a gleaming riot of green under dull fluorescent light.
"That's right!” The student nurse unsnaps the rubber tourniquet from around my arm with a flourish. “You teach art or something?” she asks.
I am not so far gone yet that I will admit to being a poet, even under torture. But I am disturbed by the assumption that I am a “teacher” and not a “doer.” It takes my mind off the Pitocin drip that is about to be directed into my bloodstream, and the stink of hot linoleum.
"Hey, can we do something about the animals in here?” my husband asks, sparing me the difficulty of answering the poet question. He has come up from the cafeteria with a milkshake for me.