We Need to Talk About Kevin_ A Novel - Lionel Shriver [40]
I cannot for the life of me understand what we were trying to prove. For your part, maybe that I was the heroic larger-than-life that you wanted to have married. For my part, I may have got sucked into that little competition between women about childbirth. Even Brian’s demure wife Louise announced that she had managed a twenty-six-hour labor with Kiley while soothed only by “raspberry leaf tea,” a treasured family factoid that she repeated on three separate occasions. It was encounters of this variety that swelled the ranks of the natural childbirth course I took at the New School, though I wager that many of those students who talked this “I want to know what it feels like” game broke down and begged for an epidural at the first contraction.
Not me. I wasn’t brave, but I was stubborn and prideful. Sheer obstinacy is far more durable than courage, though it’s not as pretty.
So the first time my insides twisted as if rung like a wet sheet, my eyes bulged slightly, the lids widening in surprise; my lips compressed. I impressed you with my calm. I meant to. We were lunching at the Beach House again, and I decided against finishing my chili. In a show of returning equanimity, you dispatched a piece of cornbread before retreating to the rest room for a foot-high stack of freshly banded paper towels; my water had broken, gallons of it, or so it seemed, and I had drenched the bench. You paid the bill and even remembered to leave a tip before leading me by the hand back to our loft, checking your watch. We were not going to embarrass ourselves by turning up at Beth Israel hours before my cervix had begun to dilate.
Later that afternoon, as you drove me across Canal Street in your baby-blue pickup, you mumbled that everything would be all right, though you had no way of knowing. At admissions, I was struck by the commonplace character of my condition; the nurse yawned, fortifying my resolve that I would prove an exemplary patient. I would astound Dr. Rhinestein with my gruff practicality. I knew this was a natural process, and I was not going to make a fuss. So when another contraction doubled me as if I had just been caught unawares by a right hook, I merely exhaled a little hoof.
It was all a ridiculous and perfectly pointless act. There was no reason to try to amaze Dr. Rhinestein, whom I did not especially like. If I intended to do you proud, you were getting a son out of the bargain, sufficient payoff to put up with a little screaming and rudeness. It might even have done you good to recognize that the woman you married was an ordinary mortal who adored comfort and hated suffering and so would opt sanely for anesthetic. Instead I made feeble jokes on my stretcher in the corridor, and I held your hand. That was the hand that you told me afterward I very nearly broke.
Oh, Franklin, there is no use pretending now. It was awful. I may be capable of toughness in respect to certain kinds of pain, but if so, my fortitude dwells in my calves or forearms but not between my legs. This was not a part of my body that I had ever associated with endurance, with anything so odious as exercise. And as the hours dragged on, I began to suspect that I was just too old for this, that I was too inelastic approaching forty to stretch to this new life. Dr. Rhinestein said, primly, that I was small, as if to indicate an inadequacy, and after about fifteen hours, she despaired sternly, Eva! You really must make an effort. So much for earning her amazement.
There