Rafael Yglesias - Only Children

Now he hung on to her hand because he needed to feel her presence, to know she lived. There was still warmth in the delicate fingers and narrow palm. Around him many people made noise, hustling about frantically, but a silence enveloped him. He felt the center of his head yawn queasily from fatigue. He was exhausted by the fight to get to this finish, a climax he had assumed would be triumphant, beautiful, ecstatic. Eric looked at her destroyed body and he knew he was looking at death.

“Okay, I’m cutting,” he heard Ephron say, and he winced.

The monitor’s numbers were unforgiving: 32, 40, 33, 31.

“Baby’s down. We won’t do a section. I’ll use forceps.”

A nurse approached with enormous metal hands; they stretched from her arms like the grotesque fingernails of a monster robot. He realized only a second before Ephron put their wide scoop-shaped ends into his wife that they were the forceps. Surely they would tear Nina to shreds and squash his infant’s head. Why were they killing them?

He closed his eyes, finally unable to look, beaten even in his passivity as an observer.

“Head’s out!” someone yelled.

He looked. Growing out of Nina like a melon was a huge, slimy skull. Around its neck, thick as a hangman’s noose, and just as tight, was the umbilical cord.

“Cord! Cord!” Ephron screamed as though it were a ghastly creature. “Clamp! Clamp!” Someone instantly put a metal clamp on the umbilical cord. “We’ll cut now!” Ephron was handed what looked like shears, and she angrily cut the umbilical cord right behind the baby’s neck, freeing it of the stranglehold.

“We’ll clear the shoulders.”

“Left,” said someone.

“Right,” said Ephron, and the baby was out. Two huge testicles, discolored and explosive, dominated Eric’s vision. It is a boy, he thought, utterly unexcited by the fact.

“Baby’s out!” someone said.

Others, who had been standing behind Ephron like spectators at an accident, grabbed his son and rushed over to a table at the rear. Ephron and the rest turned to watch. He couldn’t see, couldn’t imagine what so many people could even do to a tiny thing like that. It must be dead, he thought. Of course, it’s dead, he argued.

A fragile wail, a squeak of discomfort broke the suspense. He sighed, but Ephron and the others showed no relaxation; they continued to look over.

The cries got louder. He saw two of the people move away, tossing cloths into pails. A glimpse of his son: skin bluish, face distorted with pain, a huge, distended belly overwhelming tiny limbs.

There’s something wrong with him. He’s crippled. He’s brain-damaged. I have a broken son.

“Placenta,” a nurse said. Ephron returned her attention to forgotten Nina, her body dead, her mouth violated by the medical equipment.

“Baby’s good,” a man at the table said. “Six, ten.”

“Your baby’s fine,” a nurse repeated to Eric.

Eric nodded. Ephron looked at him. Her eyes peered into Eric’s. He tried to smile at Ephron, thinking she needed a sign of his gratitude, but then he realized his mask covered his mouth. Ephron continued to stare at him. She pulled her mask off. Her mouth opened. Then closed. Around him the others seemed embarrassed, lowering their eyes. “What are you doing here?” Ephron asked sharply.

The question baffled Eric with its existential possibilities. He didn’t know what he was doing there. He was holding Nina’s hand, clutching the narrow palm and long fingers, stuck to its weakness in the hope it could give him strength.

Ephron’s face changed from irritated surprise to her professional manner. “You’re not supposed to be here when the mother is under total anesthesia.” He didn’t answer. Ephron relaxed some more, coming close to her office manners. “Now that you can see mother and baby are all right, could you wait outside?”

He nodded stupidly, agreeing. But Ephron talked nonsense. His wife was ruined on the table. His son might be breathing, squalling, but he had come out blue, starving for sustenance. How could they know he was all right?

He let go of Nina’s hand to leave.

Nina’s arm dropped like a weighted pendulum to the floor.

“Strap her arm down, for God’s sakes!” Ephron shouted at a nurse. Nina’s fingers touched the floor: limp, killed. Eric walked out rapidly, through the metal doors into an empty hallway, the corridor narrowed by unused equipment pushed against the wall.

He closed his hot, swollen eyes, feeling weak. His stomach was so empty the middle of his body seemed ready to collapse under the weight of his ribs. He turned around and watched the operating-room doors. There were windows placed high on each of them, but at six-six he could easily see. They had put Nina’s arm on her belly, not strapped as ordered. They were fussing with her vagina, sewing up the episiotomy. His son was hidden from view, however, by the tall body of what he assumed was the pediatrician on call. A nurse came out and walked past him as if he didn’t exist.

And he felt invisible. Stripped of all his possessions, of all his faith in life and the future. He waited stupidly, blinking his sore eyes at the smudged metal of the doors, sure that bad news was going to issue forth.

AFTER DIANE farted once, she couldn’t stop. It was comical, walking back and forth in the dreary private room, from the sink to the foot of the bed, releasing gas like a vulgar practical-joke cushion.

Visitors were allowed now. They arrived, filling the room with flowers, little boxes with little clothes, blue balloons saying “Happy Birthday,” and always with big smiles, exclamations of praise and wonder. “He’s so cute!” “He’s gorgeous!” “He’s so tiny!” She got candies and fruit and kisses and encouragement and attention, endless attention to everything she had experienced or felt over the last few days.

There were flowers and messages of congratulations from Wilson, Pickering but no visitors—“I’m buried by the Hobhouse case,” her peer and work friend Didi said on the phone. Diane’s boss, the brilliant Brian Stoppard, included a note with a basket of fruit—“A trumpet of welcome to your new associate.” That, along with Didi’s call, reminded Diane of the risk she had taken in her goal of partnership. Diane reasoned that if she had her child while still an associate and proved that it didn’t affect her work, then instead of motherhood’s being a fault, it would be seen as a virtue, an event the partners would still have to fear with a childless associate, but not with her. Diane reasserted to herself the cleverness of the plan to soothe her nerves.

They were jangled again when she got her first view of the gap Byron’s existence would create with her female friends. Most were childless, although they all had plans or ambitions in that direction. She told them little or nothing of the painful agony following the operation and spoke of the necessity of the procedure itself (which had been a relief) as a disappointment. She didn’t know why she lied, except possibly out of altruism and feminist bravado. Most of them were squeamish about pain.

To her friend Betty Winters, her one close friend with a child (although they had seen little of each other since Betty’s delivery three years ago), Diane immediately told the truth. They had a long, happy, gossipy talk, of the kind they used to enjoy in college.

“Breast feeding is so boring!” Diane said to her.

“I know! You can’t do anything but watch television—”

“I can’t even concentrate on that—”

“I know—”

They rushed to finish each other’s sentences, in a hurry to establish their unity of feeling. Betty reassured her about the future. “You’ll see, it’s hard, but you’ll love it,” she answered to every query. She recommended one child-care book: “It’s my bible, I’ve worn out two copies.” Betty left, repeating as she backed out the door, “Call me anytime, day or night, if you need advice or a shoulder to cry on.”