Rafael Yglesias - Only Children

“Hello, Byron,” Peter said to the baby, using the name he had urged over her plaintive objections. Too pretentious, too odd (the potential nickname — By? — sounded like a description of sexual confusion), and besides, Diane had never read Byron. (Wasn’t he a sexist pig?) But Peter had, especially in adolescence, and he made no attempt to pretend it was simply a love for the name itself. “It’ll guarantee one thing,” Peter said. “He’ll be sure to read Byron at least once — so we won’t have a complete illiterate for a son.”

Diane looked at her creation. That was no Byron. The brilliant whitish yellow umbilical cord, as thick as a trunk phone line into a busy office, extended from his red and swollen belly. The biggest thing about him were his testicles (maybe he was like Byron), but that was caused by birth or something — they had explained at the classes. The legs were retracted up almost to the stomach, a frog turned upside down, feet feeling desperately for a comforting surface.

“All right, let’s give him over to Dr. Kelso,” Stein said, and a young baby-faced pediatrician picked up Byron with a confidence that both impressed and irritated Diane.

“Welcome to the world,” Dr. Kelso said, and carried him off.

NINA HATED the furniture. The dark, dreary wood of the living-room shelves, the fat, rumpled couch, the dull red rug, the thick, oafish horizontal blinds (smudged by futile attempts to clean off New York’s air) — they all seemed responsible for the pain and mistake of this birth. Her back ached with bruising hurt, like nothing she had ever felt before. The base of her torso felt sore and dented, as though someone had been striking her with a mallet over and over and over — trying to halve her. Whenever Eric removed his fist, the pain intensified, stabbing so insistently her breakage seemed only moments away.

“Oh! Oh! Press! Press!” she cried. She reached back to the wound, almost fearful, however, that her hand would find nothing where once there had been her body — her strong, young, always reliable flesh.

“Okay, okay,” he said, and his strong fist shored her up, lifting her above the surging pain, just high enough for her to breathe and survive.

“Oh, God! Oh!”

“Breathe! Do your breathing!”

Nina huffed and puffed irregularly, skimming insecurely on the pain, buffeted out of her attempts to get a steady rhythm by the erratic stabs of hurt.

“Forty-five seconds,” Eric said. His voice was squeezed by the effort of maintaining pressure on her back. “Contraction is subsiding.”

“No, it’s not!” she protested. Eric laughed, but she wasn’t joking, she wanted to be accurate.

And then it was gone.

Vanished — not a tide ebbing — but whisked away by a magician’s wand. Stay off my spine! she yelled internally at the thing inside her. She pictured the midwife from the childbirth classes, holding the break-apart model of a pregnant woman high enough for everyone to see, while she manipulated the fetus doll to show various positions. The midwife illustrated back labor by pressing the plastic fetus’s head down on the model’s spine. “The pressure here gets worse as baby’s head is pushed lower by the contraction. Gravity is best for relieving the pressure. Get on all fours like a dog. Have your husband keep a ball or his fist or an ice pack pressing on the small of your back. Back labor is very difficult, but it can be handled.” Oh, yeah?

“It’s five minutes,” Eric said. “That was five minutes. We should go.”

He’s terrified, she thought, disgusted. She knew it was still too early — that if they went to the hospital now, they would be stuck in the labor room for hours. And because of her back labor, being there might mean the instigation of medical procedures such as putting on the fetal monitor, forcing her to lie down on her back— the worst possible position. But Eric’s smoldering hysteria at being away from medical supervision was dangerously close to ignition. “We’re supposed to wait until it’s consistently five minutes,” she argued, risking the conflagration.

Eric looked at his notebook, reciting: “Six, five and a half, six, five and a half, five. It’s getting there.”

Nina struggled to get to her feet. Eric took her hand and pulled. He groaned at the effort. “Jesus,” he commented.

“Now you know how I feel.” Nina walked to the phone and dialed Dr. Marge Ephron’s service.

“Who are you calling?”

“The doctor.”

“I thought you weren’t—”

The service answered. The operator immediately agreed to call Dr. Ephron. Nina hung up. “You’re right,” she said to Eric. “We should go to the hospital. I may need help with this pain.” Once she might have expected a protest from her husband. He had been keen on doing the natural childbirth. But the pale, nervous man, already nodding his agreement, was an unlikely objector.

The phone rang. Nina picked it up. “That was fast.” She put a foot forward and placed her right hand behind her on the small of her back. She arched her watermelon stomach forward. Put a babushka on her and she could be a peasant woman in the field pausing in between harvesting the potatoes to deliver her child. For Eric, the sight filled him with respect and guilt. “They’re almost five minutes apart. I’m having a lot of back pain, though. I may need help.” Nina pressed her thin lips together, breathing through her nose, while she listened to her doctor’s response. Eric knew that meant Dr. Ephron was being either critical or contradictory. “We are ,” Nina said. “I’ve; been on all fours for hours and Eric’s arm has practically fallen off from keeping his fist in my back.”

You’d think a woman doctor would be sympathetic, Eric thought. After all, Ephron has had two kids herself, the last quite recently.

“Right,” Nina now said, her mouth relaxing into a conciliatory pout. “Un-huh. Okay. We’ll wait. Thanks.” Nina hung up. “She says it’ll be harder on us at the hospital. We’re supposed to call when it’s consistently four minutes apart.”

“Great. American medicine’s great, isn’t it? Don’t go to the hospital when you’re in pain ’cause it’ll only be harder on you!”

“Okay, Eric. No speeches.”

Everything I do is wrong. He closed his eyes. I’m not gonna make it. He had had that conviction all along, despite the obvious fact that millions of other men had managed to survive this experience.

“Oh!” Nina began to pace. “It’s starting,” she hissed with a sharp, fearful intake of breath.

“What! It’s only been four minutes!”

Nina was walking, stiff-legged, across the living room. “My back, my back,” she shouted in between huffs and puffs. Eric followed her, comically hunched over, attempting to place his hand on her constantly retreating back.

“Stand still!” he pleaded.

“I can’t, I can’t!” she said, moving away just as he finally got his fist pressed against her.

“Get on the floor!”

“Goddammit! Goddammit! Goddammit!” she said, scurrying back and forth as though she could dodge the agony. She stopped abruptly, grabbed the thick mass of her brown hair behind her head, pulling it taut at the scalp, and screamed: “Fuck this!”

Eric seized her, one arm going about her shoulders so she couldn’t escape, and jammed his free fist into her back. “Breathe!” he screamed right into her ear.

She jerked her head away and defensively put a hand up to her ear. “Ow!”

“Sorry,” Eric said, twisting his hand into her mercilessly, amazed that such force could relieve pain rather than cause it.

Nina tried to keep to the exercise, but she would break off to exclaim at the pain and lose the rhythm. She kept thinking (whenever the mist of hurt lifted enough for her to regain the vista of consciousness): I hate being a woman.