Possessing the Secret of Joy - Alice Walker [15]
To go through all of this again in America doesn’t appeal to me.
The crime they say I committed would make no sense in America. It barely makes sense here.
EVELYN-TASHI
THE OBSTETRICIAN BROKE two instruments trying to make an opening large enough for Benny’s head. Then he used a scalpel. Then a pair of scissors used ordinarily to sever cartilage from bone. All this he told me when I woke up, a look of horror lingering on his face. A look he tried to camouflage by joking.
How did that big baby (Benny was nine pounds) even get up in there, Mrs. Johnson? That’s what I’d like to know. He grinned, as if he’d never heard of the aggressive mobility of sperm. I attempted a smile I was incapable of feeling, first in his direction and then down at the baby in my arms. His head was yellow and blue and badly misshapen. I had no idea how to shape it properly, but hoped that once the doctor left, instinct would teach me. Nor could I imagine asking him for any instructions at all.
Adam stood beside the bed, too embarrassed to speak. He coughed whenever he was embarrassed or nervous; now he cleared his throat repeatedly. With my free hand, I reached for him. He moved closer, but did not touch me; the sound in his throat causing my own to close. After a moment, I withdrew my hand.
TASHI-EVELYN
I FELT AS IF there was a loud noise of something shattering on the hard floor, there between me and Adam and our baby and the doctor. But there was only a ringing silence. Which seemed oddly, after a moment, like the screaming of monkeys.
TASHI-EVELYN
SO THIS IS HOW there could have been an immaculate conception, he’d said bitterly, when I told him I was pregnant; meaning it literally, Bible scholar that he was. After three months of trying, he had failed to penetrate me. Each time he touched me I bled. Each time he moved against me I winced. There was nothing he could do to me that did not hurt. Still, somehow, I became pregnant with Benny. Having experienced the pain of getting Benny “up in there,” we were terrorized waiting for his birth.
No matter how sick I became during the pregnancy, I attended myself. I could not bear the thought of the quick-stepping American nurses looking at me as if I were some creature from beyond their imaginings. In the end, though, I was that creature. For even as I gave birth, a crowd of nurses, curious hospital staff and medical students gathered around my bed. For days afterward doctors and nurses from around the city and for all I know around the state came by to peer over the shoulder of my doctor as he examined me. There was also the question of what to do with “the hole,” as I overheard him call it, making no attempt to be euphemistic for my sake.
At last Adam put a stop to the sideshow my body had become and for the last three days in the hospital I held Benny close, gently and surreptitiously stroking his head into more normal contours (work I instinctively felt should be done with my tongue); or, when the nurse had taken him away, I turned my face to the wall and slept. I slept so long and so hard it was always necessary for the nurse to shake me when it was time for a feeding.
My doctor sewed me up again, much as I’d been fastened originally, because otherwise there would have been a yawning unhealable wound. But it was done in such a way that there was now room for pee and menstrual blood more easily to pass. The doctor said that now, also, after giving birth, I could have intercourse with my husband.
Benny, my radiant brown baby, the image of Adam, was retarded. Some small but vital part of his brain crushed by our ordeal. But thankfully, during the period I spent in hospital, and even for years afterward, I did not recognize this.
ADAM
THEY HAD DUG out a little hole in the dirt beneath her, and that was her personal latrine.
She was on her moons when I arrived, there was only one old woman, M’Lissa, from Olinka, to help her, and there were flies, and a slight but unmistakable