The Mothers of Voorhisville (5 page)

My mom said I had to go to a hospital. “It's just ridiculous that in this day in age, with all the best modern medicine has to offer, a woman would choose to give birth at home like they was living in Afghanistan or something.” My mom loved to mention Afghanistan whenever she could. My brother Billy got killed there, and after that she blamed Afghanistan for anything wrong in the world.

After I talked to Holly that night on the porch, I wanted her to help when the baby came. It's not like she tried to convince me, or nothing like that. We barely talked about it. Mostly we talked about other stuff. But I liked her, and I didn't like Dr. Fascular. He has cold hands and is always grumpy and shit.

My mom was all like, “No way,” and said it had to be at the hospital. But there wasn't much she could do when it happened the way it did, all of a sudden, with me alone in the house. I didn't expect it to hurt like it did. It hurt a lot. I didn't scream, even though I really wanted to. I just went down to Billy's old room and laid down on Billy's old bed, which was now Holly's, and waited for her to get home. It hurt so bad I took the bedspread and rolled it up at the end and stuck it in my mouth. Every time I felt like screaming, which was pretty much all the time, I bit down.

I don't know how long it was before Holly came home. She said, “Maddy?”

I just screamed. I let the bedspread fall out of my mouth and I screamed loud enough to bring my mom and dad down the stairs, and then there was this whole part where they got mad at Holly, and even though I was screaming and shit, I had to explain to them that she didn't have nothing to do with it, and then my dad said he was going to get the car, and Holly was looking at my vagina and saying, “I don't think so.”

I heard it hurt a lot to have a baby, but nothing nobody said told me how much. I don't even want to think about it.

So Mom starts arguing with Holly, and then all of a sudden Holly says, “This baby is halfway here. If you want to take her all the way to Becksworth, you go ahead. But I sure hope you are prepared to deliver it.” Which, ha ha, got my mom to shut up.

Okay, so like it hurt more than anything I ever imagined. It hurt more than when Billy got killed, and I didn't think there would ever be nothing that hurt worse than that. Later, Holly told me it was not a usual birth. Still, I don't think I'll ever do it again. Like I could! Ha, stuck here with all these women.

I was exhausted. I just wanted to go to sleep. Holly said, “What are you going to name him?” And I said, “JoJo.” And my mom said, “I knew it. I knew it was Joey Marin.” My mom was obsessed with trying to figure out who JoJo's dad was. “It ain't Joey Marin,” I said, but she just looked all superior. Holly cleaned him up and she said he was beautiful. And that's coming from someone who delivered hundreds of babies, so that should tell you something. Then she gave him to me, wrapped up like a bratwurst in a bun. Everybody stood there, even my dad. Like I was going to breastfeed in front of him! I guess Holly figured that out, 'cause she said she had some things to talk to them about in private. When Mom and Dad were both out the door, I told Holly I was sorry I got her in trouble. “That's all right,” she said. “I thought this room could use a birth.” I saw what she meant. Except for Holly's clothes and a little glass jar on the dresser filled with some wildflowers, the room was just the way it was when Billy left to get killed in the war.

So I took off my T-shirt and put JoJo up by my boob, and he started sucking.

The next day, after I moved back upstairs and my mom cleaned all of Holly's sheets and even baked her a tube of chocolate chip cookies to thank her for everything she did, I was undressing JoJo, and the next thing I knew, my finger was bleeding and JoJo was crying and my mom was standing there going, “What are you doing to him?”

“I ain't doing nothing to him,” I said. “I pricked my finger.”

“This is no longer all about you,” she said, and, “You better make sure you keep one hand on him when he's on the changing table, or it won't be long before he'll just roll off.” About as soon as JoJo was born, my mom started imagining all the horrible ways he could die.

I looked at JoJo laying there with his face all scrunched up and all I could think was that I had a huge problem. I didn't love him, all right? For the first time in my entire life I wondered if this is what was wrong with me and my mom, that she just didn't love me and couldn't do nothing about it. I felt real bad, and angry too. I decided that wasn't going to happen with me and JoJo.

I picked him up and took him with me to the bed, and that's when I saw them sticking out. They were
tiny
, like his fingers and toes were tiny. They were tiny like that.

“Holy shit, JoJo,” I said. “You've got wings.”

 

T
AMARA

When Tamara met Raj and found out he was Hindu, she didn't think much about it. It wasn't until she was already falling in love that she discovered how much his faith mattered to him. She told him she wasn't sure she could convert, but he said she didn't need to. It might have been easier if she could fool herself into believing that her infidelity had been Raj's fault, but Tamara could not believe that. She had cheated on him for the worst reason of all: because she felt like it.

There was justice in her pregnancy.
It was a Catholic thought, she knew, but no matter how many years had passed since she'd gone to church, she could not escape the idea that God did things like this to Catholics. He punished them for being bad.

Tamara knew it was not uncommon for pregnant woman to have horrible dreams, but she was sure hers were the worst. Several times, Raj died. Once, she drowned the baby. (How could she even
dream
that?) She had many dreams that featured birth defects. When she woke up crying, Raj held her, soothed her, made her tea, told her jokes. He was the perfect husband, which just made everything worse.

Tamara thought of confessing. Being raised Catholic, how could she
not
think of that? But she couldn't decide. Was she confessing to help their marriage, or just to relieve her guilt? What was the
right
thing to do? She no longer trusted her judgment. How could she, after she'd displayed such a colossal lack of any? (After it all came out and everything fell apart the way it did, she would decide she must have been put under some sort of spell, though the other women say things like, “Sure, if that's what you wanna call it, honey.”)

Tamara had passed the bar exam, so she was technically a lawyer, but hardly anyone knew that. She never practiced. She hated law school, but didn't dare quit after her parents had put so much money into it. She hadn't really mentioned, in any of her phone calls or e-mails to her parents, that she wasn't doing anything with her degree, but instead was working part-time at the Voorhisville library while writing another novel. She'd never told them about the four previous novels she'd written (but not published) so it was difficult to tell them about the fifth. They wouldn't approve. Her father used to make fun of her art major friends. He called them “the future poor of America.”

She and Raj moved to Voorhisville because they had fantasies about small town life. Raj, who worked as a litigation attorney in Becksworth, and therefore wasn't really in Voorhisville much, still believed it was a quaint community, a perfect place for children. Tamara wasn't so sure. She'd
seen
things: the way Michael Baile (whose cousin was on the school board) got all the contracts for the school maintenance jobs, even though there were consistent complaints about the quality of his work. The way almost everyone talked about Maddy Malvern's spiral into sexual promiscuity, but did nothing about it. The way Roddy Tyler flopped around in those duct-taped shoes even in the winter, despite the fact that he worked for the richest people in town. Tamara did not think Voorhisville was quaint, though it did have the annual Halloween parade with all the children dressed in costumes walking down Main Street.
That
was quaint. And Fourth of July in Fletcher's Park, with Girl Scouts selling baked goods, Boy Scouts selling popcorn, and Mr. Muller twisting balloons into animal shapes while the senior citizen band played God knows what … well,
that
was quaint too. But Tamara saw the looks Raj, with his dark skin, got. “Doesn't it bother you?” she asked, but he just laughed. That's just the way Raj was. He didn't care. It had been harder for Tamara. She wasn't used to being a victim of prejudice.

“It would be like this in almost any small town in America,” Raj said. “You can't let it upset you.”

But it did. It upset Tamara very much. It confused her, too. She could never be sure. Had the man at the post office been rude because he knew she was married to someone with dark skin, or had he just been a rude man? What about the checkout girl at the supermarket, and the lady who cut her off at the corner of Henry Street and Wildwood?

The novel Tamara was working on was called
Underskin
, about a nomadic tribe of tree dwellers and the consumers who ate them. It was a love story, a dark fantasy, a brutal indictment of prejudice, and her best work. But after her strange encounter with the blue-eyed man, it was contaminated. Also, Tamara would later note, wryly, she had to resist the urge to put in a band of avenging angels. They weren't part of her plan for the book, and yet they kept appearing. She kept crossing them out.

Essentially, the work that had been going so well before she cheated on her husband started going very badly. This, Tamara knew, was God's way of getting her. This and her pregnancy; that's how she thought of it. She thought God had made her pregnant just to prove a point—which, she reasoned, was unnecessary, because she already
knew
she shouldn't have cheated, so why'd God have to make her pregnant as well?

After Tamara took two home pregnancy tests, she called Planned Parenthood and made an appointment she never kept. Much later, when the bad things happened and she was stuck with all the other women chronicling their stories, she wondered if this decision had been a matter of enchantment.

When she told Raj they were expecting, he kissed her all over. (Raj, thankfully, mistook her tears for joy.) They talked about names and the dreams they had for the child. “I just want her to be happy,” Tamara said, and Raj laughed and said, “That's a big dream.”

Over the next several months, Tamara found herself praying. She prayed to God, and she prayed to Krishna too. She prayed to everyone she could think of, like the Virgin Mary, and her Great-Uncle Cal (who would probably be embarrassed by all this, but was the only dead person Tamara had been close to.)
Hi, Uncle Cal
, she'd think.
This is Tamara. I'm married now. And I made a mistake. Please, please make sure that this baby is Raj's and not, well … I'm sorry. I shouldn't have done it. I know that. Thank you, Uncle Cal.
She prayed to Kali, with her four arms and that mysterious smile of hers. She even prayed to that elephant—she could never remember his name, but Raj had a small statue of him in the living room, and she prayed to him because he looked nonjudgmental
.
For eight months, Tamara suffered in fear and anguish while her body blossomed, effortlessly. “I don't know why women complain about being pregnant,” she told Holly.

“Sometimes it's more difficult to have an easy pregnancy,” Holly said, “because then you're not really prepared for the birth.”

At this, Tamara smiled.

But when the pain arrived it was the worst feeling Tamara could ever imagine. One second she was sitting at her desk crossing out angels, and the next she was on the floor, screaming. She was in so much pain she couldn't even
move.
It hurt to
breathe.
It was torture to get up or slide across the floor, which is how she tried to reach the phone, because Raj had gone into work even though her due date was approaching. (“I'll just call if anything happens,” she said. “We'll have plenty of time. All the books say so.”) Tamara screamed and writhed on the floor for hours before Raj found her there. During those hours, Tamara accepted that she was being punished. She also accepted that she was going to die. She even reached the point where she
wanted
to die.

“I'll call Holly,” Raj said.

“I'm dying,” she said.

“You're not dying,” he said. Then she opened her mouth and screamed, and his eyes got round, and he called Holly.

Later, Holly said it was not an ordinary birth. “I think something's happening here,” she said, mysteriously. Tamara was studying her baby, trying to decide who the father was. After several minutes of intense scrutiny, she asked, “Who do you think he looks like?”

Holly looked down at the baby, then at Tamara.

She knows
, Tamara thought.
How could she?