Robert Butler - From Where You Dream - The Process of Writing Fiction

She pulled at one more weed and then stopped, but stayed hunched over, and then grabbed her stomach. She didn't say a word but went to her knees and looked up at me in a panic. I dropped the plastic poles at my feet and knelt beside her.

"Mama, what is it? What's wrong?" I reached for her arm.

"I think I'm having female problems," she said with an emphasis on the first syllable of female.

"Oh." I hesitated, "I mean, what?" I helped her to her feet and we walked toward the house. Bright red blood had soaked through the seat and part of the leg of her pants. I felt my face go cold and pale.

"My periods have gotten really bad lately," she explained almost out of breath as we reached the door and went inside. "I'm flooding like this all the time. I think I might have to have something done about it." She went into the bathroom and closed the door. "Get me a change of clothes, Becky."

I rummaged through her drawers and found a clean pair of panties and some pants. She cracked the door and I handed them to her. "Get my purse and bring me the cordless phone."

"Do you want me to call someone for you, Mama?" I asked standing outside the door already with the phone.

"No, I've got to call. Just get my purse."

When she came out of the bathroom she still couldn't stand up straight and tears were welling up in her eyes. "Are you sure, Doctor?" she said into the phone. "OK, I'll be there in a few minutes." She hung up and handed the phone back to me. "We've got to go to the hospital, Becky. I may have to have surgery."

"What? Surgery, why?"

"I've been considering having a hysterectomy for a while and with all the trouble I've been having, the doctor thinks we may have waited too long." I grabbed her arm and helped her to the car.

A nurse was hovering just inside the door when I got up to her room that night. "Shh! Be quiet now, she's still resting from the surgery." The nurse spoke in a stern whisper that probably would have woken my mother up before any noise that I would have made. I sat down without a reply and pulled at a piece of the plastic fern by the bed. The room was cold and the window small. Stiff gray curtains hung past the frame in an attempt to make it look larger. The TV was off, but the room vibrated with a dull hum. I wanted to leave. The cinder block walls reminded me of a padded cell. The only light on in the room was a reading light above my mother's head and I wondered how she could look so pale and sunken yet swollen at the same time.

My grandmother was reading a romance novel in the chair beside me. On the cover was a woman in a torn white cotton dress with ruffles that hung over one shoulder. Her hair was a stringy blond that flew back from her face with the imaginary wind. She clung to the chest of a large man, almost twice her size, with a furrowed brow and a hand on his hip like he had been playing king of the mountain and won.

"Did it go all right?" I asked in a whisper softer than the nurse's had been.

"They said she'll be fine, no difference between a regular hysterectomy and an emergency one." My grandmother went back to her book while I stared at my mother sleeping.

Weeks after her stitches were removed her scar remained red and it drew up the skin around it. She made a point to show me that they had shaved off all of her pubic hair. She looked bare, stripped. They had sliced vertically, directly down her stomach, and the scar was set deep into her skin with her belly swollen on either side.

"Look at that, from my belly button down to my impossibles," she told me. She was standing in her room holding her nightgown up and looking into the full-length mirror on the door. "Now I've been cut into twice." She turned away from the mirror and dropped her nightgown to tell me this.

This was news to me. I may have been told before but I didn't remember another scar.

"The first time was from when I had you and like to have died. Now I've had two emergency surgeries," she glared over the words like I ought to apologize.

"You almost died from having me? I thought you were so happy that I was a girl and that you didn't even believe them until they put my butt in your face?" This is the story I liked to remember.

She brushed through her hair, straight back, and then scrunched it with her fingers. The brush was still in her hand as she spoke. "I sure enough did make them put your butt in my face. I was so happy to finally have a little girl I couldn't see straight. But afterwards, I had my tubes tied and they didn't hold my stomach."

"Why would they need to do that?"

"I was coughing and they were supposed to hold my stomach so that I didn't rupture any of the stitches. Well they didn't and I came untied and hemorrhaged. They liked to have let me die. I kept telling them that I didn't feel right, that something was wrong. But they didn't listen."

I interrupted. "Why didn't they listen? Couldn't they tell?"

"Well, you'd think so, I was swole up like a toad frog. But they just kept telling me that it was normal to feel that way after having a baby or some such nonsense. I told 'em that I knew just exactly what it was like to have a baby; this was my third. But they still wouldn't listen. Finally when the nurse came in to check my blood pressure I was damn near dead and they had to do emergency surgery."

I crossed my legs under me and sat up higher in the desk chair.

She repeated herself, "I was bleeding to death. Those nurses weren't watchin' me like they were supposed to."

I grabbed my side of the completely assembled arch and lifted while my mother lifted the other side. She was finally able to get out and work in the yard again, but now everything was just about done blooming and it was almost time to get the yard ready for winter. "I want to get that arch in before it gets cold, Becky. That way next year the wisteria will just run up it," she told me. We angled the arch beside the holes, then lifted it in. It slid in with a clunk and one of us had to hold it while the other packed the dirt around the poles. I volunteered for the dirt.

"Get the water hose over here and wet that old clay. It'll harden like concrete around the poles," Mother said, pointing toward the hose cart at the side of the house.

After reattaching the hose to the faucet I wheeled the cart to the flower bed where the arch now stood with my mother's support. The water was cool. When it hit the hard, cracked ground it didn't soak in right away but splashed against my legs.

I shoveled the mud into the holes and knelt down to pack it with drier dirt at the top.

"Now, that's just right," she said and let go of the arch.

The project had been a success. In a year or so the white plastic arch would be dripping with cones of purple petals. But I still hadn't told her.

She was already smoking when I got around to sitting down with her on the porch.

"Mama, I'm sorry if…" I started to say, trying to fight back the tears as they inched into my eyes, but she seemed to have softened a bit. Her body was relaxed against the back of the chair, and she was rocking. "I know I'm not exactly what you expected in a daughter."

She stopped rocking and looked right at me. "Oh honey, yes you are. You're independent, full of life, everything I ever wanted." She leaned back in her chair again and looked out over the yard. "Never mind that silly husband of yours, and doctors can do so much these days; you may have children

someday if you want, just look at what all has happened to me. All the problems I'm still alive to tell it."

"No, you don't understand," I protested.

"I know you two aren't getting along. He hasn't called all weekend, not even to see if you got here safe. You don't need him anyway, and you should be grateful for that. It wasn't like that when I got married."