Joy Williams - State of Grace

And then Doreen becomes visible in her scant outfit of fake tatters, her long hair swimming to her thighs, and there is still no sound from the crowd. She is bony and beautiful and a little foolish. Her face in the cast from the torches changes from being pretty to not being at all pretty to being clownish. It changes so rapidly. She starts to walk, very pale and absorbed and ephemeral, and the effect is winsome and lustful and lost on us. The crowd, me. The housemother says,

“I don’t believe anyone’s at their best when they’re nine-tenth’s naked.”

Doreen walks, her face, out of the light, aged and predisposed. The leopard beside her has its muzzle almost on the ground. The motion is fluid with a hasty hesitancy. Doreen walks. She looks gorgeous and sulky. Her legs rise up pure white and impossible to her manufactured little loin rag. She turns. She starts back to Corinthian. The sisters bleat,

“Doreen’s the Queen

Who’ll make you scream

With wantin’ to get to know her.”

The cramp begins again and I shift myself on the swing. The housemother gives me a sharp look. The cramp moves up and encircles each breast, like a lover might, like Grady might with his warm hands. Think of mind teasers, they’ll tell you. Think of the ingenuities of language and rhyme. Cords has made everything rhyme. Her song is a fortune cookie, a penny horoscope. Think of a rhyme, they’ll tell you, for step or mouth or silver or window. Think of things that are diversive or exceptions to the rule.

The cramp is gone and I feel nothing. I see Father. It is summer. He brings a baby down to the sea. He sprinkles water across its sleeping eyes. The sea is opalescent with its fathomless order and law. They watch it, the baby, blind and cautious and still, and Father. Little flowers grow between the higher rocks. The littlest flowers I’ve ever seen.

Doreen has almost reached Corinthian. A small spot comes on again and floods her prematurely. She is handing the rope to Corinthian. We all observe the deus ex machina . The error is corrected. The light goes out. Doreen is in shadow and suggestive once more. The crowd’s breathing becomes obvious. They are aroused on all the levels of their loneliness. And now the leopard rises, moves leisurely in a tall and searing spiral and attaches himself to Doreen’s shoulder. It is as though the animal is whispering some absolute secret in her ear and the beautiful girl is receptive to it. It is as though the beautiful girl bends a little to hear it, sagging against that singular coat.

Doreen screams. It seems frivolous. She screams and screams. The leopard leaps away into the darkness. The chaos is fixed and rigid. Ruttkin unholsters his gun but there is nothing to shoot at. Everyone is moving and shouting now. Doreen’s thin scream is the current beneath it all. I sit on the swing and raise my hand to my throat. I don’t feel anything. The night offered nothing to my eyes. It took nothing from me.

They put me in a white room in a white bed with high sides on it so that I cannot climb out. Nonetheless, when the nurse leaves, I climb out. There is a curtain in the room and a toilet behind it and I sit on that. I think that if only I can go to the bathroom that will be the end of the terrible seizure in my bowels and then I can get on with having the baby. I cannot do anything. Nevertheless, I feel much better. I climb back into the bed.

An adult female consumes seven hundred pounds of dry food in one year . No one ever tells you that there comes a moment when you have to pass it all.

I am in a seersucker nightshirt with little blue flowers on it. A prerogative of the ward. I have another contraction. Another moment gone. Something I could reflect upon now if I cared to. I think about it in a way. I think that they do not put nightshirts with blue flowers on patients who are critically ill. Once she cut her lip while shaving her legs. Once she fell while getting out of her underwear. Now how can a girl like Doreen be all cut up and better off dead?

The nurse comes back into the room. She has white hair and a white uniform and she puts her white face very close to my own as she puts her fingers up my vagina. She steps back, wiping her hand on a tissue. “Cervix has dilated this far,” she says, holding up three fingers.

“How wide does it have to be?” I ask, though having her dawdle there is the last thing I want. I want only for her to leave quickly so that I can sit on the toilet again.

“Seven wide,” she says. “One hour.”

It was said that one of my cousins was born in a chamber pot. It didn’t seem to matter. It was one of the few stories that Father ever told me and therefore I cannot comment on its meaning. I would say, however, that it was just a story that didn’t matter much.

I am a funambulist, the act, at last, proceeding without interval. They’ve placed an enormous clock on the wall for encouragement of a sort, the only kind there is. Time passes . And they have nothing else to offer, no matter what they claim.

“I can see the head now,” the nurse says. “Half an hour.”

My eyes are open and I am thinking of Little Red Riding Hood. Or rather not of her , that postiche pudendum, but of the wolf. They snipped his stomach open to get her out and then they filled him with stones and sewed him back up again. And when he got up, he died. Now that is very Freudian and shows the limitations and protractions of life.

“That was a good pain,” the nurse tells me.

“I only want the bad ones,” I say.

There are a great many lights in the delivery room but they are not doing much to dispel the darkness. Everyone here is masked against it, protected and shielded in beautiful popsicle green. I am left to see nothing but am urged to breathe freely. The smells here are unsuitable but quite obvious — erasures, mimeograph ink, chalk shavings. There is loss, there is banishment. The world in this room is skewered with a crumbling stick. The world in this room holds no promise or danger and the only hope of my own is for expungement. At last I may be punished.…

The nurse bends over me, smelling like a pressing board and pushes away the spots that rise and fall before my eyes.

“No, I still can’t play tennis,” the doctor says. “I haven’t been able to play for about two months. I have spurs on both heels and it’s just about wrecked our marriage. Air conditioning and concrete floors is what does it. Murder on your feet.”

A few minutes later, the nurse says, “Isn’t it wonderful to work with Teflon? I mean for those arterial repairs? I just love it.”

The doctor says, “They served cold duck with dinner. Would you imagine that, please? Cold duck?”

A few minutes later, the doctor puts the baby on my belly while he cuts the cord. The child has navy-blue eyes like a foal but does not look at us, having no interest in anyone here.

The doctor’s mask does not move. I cannot see his mouth making the words but I can hear the words,

“It’s a girl,” he says.

She is a success.

I want to tell you something. It’s not much. The fight for consummation isn’t much.

The girl in the bed beside me says, “I lost my baby.”

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“I think this is a heck of a place to put me, seeing that I lost my baby. In the maternity ward. I would say that was one heck of a place.”

“There was probably a mistake,” I say. I am sorry but I do not want to hear about it. Nevertheless, I continue to look in her direction, a gesture that connotes interest. I do not exist. I have had a child. It is the seal set on my own nullity.