White Oleander - Janet Fitch [165]
“I won’t.” I fed her some of the ice chips they let her have. They wouldn’t let her drink anything, in case she had to have anesthesia. They didn’t want her puking into the mask. She puked anyway. I held the small plastic kidney-shaped pan up under her chin. The fluorescent light accused us.
The nurse looked up at the monitor, stuck her fingers up Yvonne to check her dilation. She was still eight centimeters. Ten was full dilation, and they told us over and over again there wasn’t much they could do until then. Now was what they called transition, the worst time. Yvonne wore a white T-shirt and green kneesocks, face yellow and slick with sweat, her hair dirty and tangled. I wiped the stringy vomit from her lips.
“Sing me a song,” Yvonne said through her cracked lips.
“If ever I should leave you,” I sang into her spiraled ear, pierced all the way up. “It wouldn’t be in summer...”
Yvonne looked huge in the tiny bed. The fetal monitor was strapped to her belly, but I refused to look at the TV screen. I watched her face. She reminded me of a Francis Bacon painting, fading in and out of her resemblance to anything human, struggling to resist disappearing into an undifferentiated world of pain. I brushed her hair out of her face, made braids again.
Women’s bravery, I thought as I worked on her hair from bottom to top, untangling the black mass. I would never be able to go through this. The pain came in waves, in sheets, starting in her belly and extending outward, a flower of pain blooming through her body, a jagged steel lotus.
I couldn’t stop thinking about the body, what a hard fact it was. That philosopher who said we think, therefore we are, should have spent an hour in the maternity ward of Waite Memorial Hospital. He’d have had to change his whole philosophy.
The mind was so thin, barely a spiderweb, with all its fine thoughts, aspirations, and beliefs in its own importance. Watch how easily it unravels, evaporates under the first lick of pain. Gasping on the bed, Yvonne bordered on the unrecognizable, dis-integrating into a ripe collection of nerves, fibers, sacs, and waters and the ancient clock in the blood. Compared to this eternal body, the individual was a smoke, a cloud. The body was the only reality. I hurt, therefore I am.
The nurse came in, looked up at the monitor, checked Yvonne’s contractions, blood pressure, her movements crisp and authoritative. The last shift we’d had Connie Hwang, we’d trusted her, she smiled and touched Yvonne gently with her plump hands. But this one, Melinda Meek, snapped at Yvonne for whining. “You’ll be fine,” she said. “You’ve done this before.” She scared me with her efficiency, her bony fingers. I could tell she knew we were foster children, that Yvonne wouldn’t keep the baby. She’d already decided we were irresponsible and deserved every bit of our suffering. I could see her as a correctional officer. Now I wished my mother were here. She would know how to get rid of Melinda Meek. Even in transition she would spit in Melinda’s stingy face, threaten to strangle her in the cord of the fetal monitor.
“It hurts,” Yvonne said.
“Nobody said it was a picnic,” Melinda said. “You’ve got to breathe.”
Yvonne tried, gasped and blew, she wanted everyone to like her, even this sour-faced nurse.
“Can’t you just give her something?” I said.
“She’s doing fine,” Melinda said crisply, her triangular eyes a veiled threat.
“Cheap-ass motherfuckers,” the woman said on the other side of the white shower curtains. “Don’t give poor people no damn drugs.”
“Please,” Yvonne said, clutching at Melinda’s white jacket. “I beg of you.”
The nurse efficiently peeled back Yvonne ’s hand, patted it firmly onto her belly. “You’re already eight centimeters. It’s almost over.”
Yvonne sobbed softly, rhythmically, hopelessly, too tired to even cry. I rubbed her stomach.
Nobody ever talked about what a struggle this all was. I could see why women used to die in childbirth. They didn’t catch some kind of microbe, or even hemorrhage. They just gave up.