Xhenet Aliu - Brass

I was an amateur. I giggled when the nurse moved the little bud of her stethoscope over my back.

“Sorry, it tickles,” I said.

“One more deep breath,” she answered.

I stared when she poked a needle into my arm, watching the cylinder turn crimson as it sucked up blood.

“You have good veins,” she said, and I felt proud, like all these years, when people said I was busy doing nothing worth talking about, what I was really doing was working on my veins, making them nice and plump for overworked phlebotomists.

“What’s it say?” I asked.

“What’s what say?”

“My blood.”

“I don’t know yet. We have to send it out for testing.”

“Oh,” I said.

“But it’s red like it should be,” she said, trying to help me feel not stupid. “I bet it’s got all of what it’s supposed to have and not too much of what it shouldn’t.”

Unlike the ladies in reception, the nurses were cheerful, kindergarten teacherish. They must have been used to dum-dums like me, baby incubators too young or too stupid or in need of twelve steps to be mothers. I didn’t trust their soothing voices, their Snoopy and Woodstock scrubs. They’d play peekaboo with us, and then, by the time we uncovered our hands from our eyes, DCF would be waiting with a net to scoop up our litters.

“The doctor will be right with you,” the nurse said.

The doctor wasn’t right with me. It took another twenty minutes for that, and in between another white-smocked woman came in, short and smiling, and I thought I recognized her from back at Crosby High School, someone who graduated a few years before me. I looked at her name tag and it was no help, because it just said Marisa or Maria or something, one of the names that was assigned to every third baby girl that went through the maternity ward at St. Mary’s Hospital between the years of 1974 and 1983. Marisa or Maria was doing all right for herself. She had the money for a spiral perm and acrylic nails and something put a smile on her face that wasn’t fake. It must’ve been a good field to get into, ultrasound tech, and I put it down on my mental to-do list as a career to look into once things were settled down.

Marisa/Maria smeared some cold jelly over my stomach.

“Cold, right?” she asked.

But I wasn’t shivering from the cold. This was the moment, just like that, when everyone would really get to see whether I had done this whole thing wrong. The Albanian ladies—the gruas, Bashkim called them—they would probably be happy to see tentacles on that screen instead of arms and legs. They’d remind me of those Marlboro Reds I’d taken drags from before I realized I was knocked up, those swigs of Mamie’s Carlo Rossi. This is what can happen, this is what you go to the doctor for, they’d say, the behind-the-scenes, the coming attraction, the sneak peek at the mess you’ll be cleaning for the rest of your life.

“Wait,” I said.

“What’s wrong?” Marisa/Maria asked, and my face must have answered for me. “Oh, don’t worry, this doesn’t hurt. The wand just goes on top of your belly,” she said and illustrated on her own stomach, which probably hosted nothing more than an Italian grinder from Nardelli’s, nothing that could turn monstrous.

“It’s just,” I said.

Marisa/Maria smiled her infinitely patient smile, and I had no good response to it.

“Never mind, I’m ready,” I said. I closed my eyes like I did for the last two clicks up the hill on the Cyclone roller coaster, the last moments of peace before the velocity of the fall would force my eyes open again.

She was right, it didn’t hurt. It almost felt good to have someone press into my belly like that, a little massage, a little feeling that the weight there wasn’t all mine alone.

“Do you want to open your eyes?” she asked.

“Oh,” I said. I’d forgotten that they were closed. Marisa/Maria pointed at a monitor, which was swirly and gray and came in like a premium cable channel the clinic hadn’t paid for.

“Do you see it?” she asked.

I shook my head, and she began pointing. “Arm, leg, head. See?”

It was as if we were looking at a cloud, and she was describing a shape that wasn’t really there until it was, and then it was so obviously there that I couldn’t not see it.

“Oh my god,” I said.

“See?”

“Oh my god,” I said again.

She kept moving the wand and let us sit in silence for a minute. There it was, the star of this show, up on a screen with an audience and everything. It wasn’t much of an audience, just me and an ultrasound tech, and I felt bad for the little thing, starring in a show that nobody had come out to see. And then I felt bad for me, that I was sitting alone out there, trying to muster enough applause with my two little dinky hands to reach the stage. And then I didn’t feel so bad anymore, because it was mesmerizing, that little graceful modern dance going on in front of me. There were tiny little movements you really had to focus on to see, but I did see them. My eyes trained to them pretty quick, and I felt like I suddenly understood why dancers dance, not to get a whole theater full of people to pay attention but to get just one person to really, truly see.

“It’s two arms, right?” I asked.

Marisa/Maria nodded.

“And two legs?”

“Yup, two and two and nothing extra.”

I was relieved but not that relieved. It surprised me, because I realized that if she’d said No, something’s missing or Oh god it’s got horns, I’d still have been fixed to the seat, mesmerized.

“Do you want to know the sex?” Marisa/Maria asked.

“I don’t…I mean, should I?”

“It’s up to you. Some people want to plan for it, some people want a surprise. No harm either way.”

That didn’t seem entirely true. It felt like Bashkim already had something to lose.

But Bashkim wasn’t there, so I guessed he didn’t get to say.

“Yeah, I want to know,” I said.

“Congratulations, you’ve got a baby girl!” said Marisa/Maria.

I choked up and I wasn’t sure why. I didn’t feel sad, and I didn’t feel disappointed. Maybe I was disappointed that I wasn’t disappointed, knowing I was letting Bashkim down and not giving a shit about it. Maybe I was happy that I wasn’t carrying a Dwayne-to-be, which meant I was one step further away from ever being Dwayne’s mother, that terrifying Donette-fueled entity out in the waiting room. Everybody said girls were harder, but maybe that just meant I was going to have to try more and, for once in my goddamned life, really mean it.

“I’ll get the doctor,” Marisa/Maria said, and I nodded. She pulled the wand away and the show on the screen was over, but really, it wasn’t. When I thought about it I realized what I saw wasn’t even the show, it was a dress rehearsal at best. Really the curtain hadn’t even gone up yet.

I was even further along than I thought, twenty-six weeks, which in real-life time meant six months, right on the cusp of the third trimester. I wasn’t ready to hear that number, and I got a little pukey when she said it, but other than that, the whole trip was fine. It was better than fine, even, it was beautiful. That’s what the doctor said: beautiful. It was a word I didn’t know could be used to describe a condition like mine. I thought the only words were pregnant or not, healthy or not . But she said beautiful, which up until then I thought was just a word someone called you when he wanted a blow job.

“You could stand to take in a little more iron, but otherwise everything looks beautiful,” she said. She was corn-fed and tall, had to be from somewhere like Indiana sent to do mission work in a place like this, with a helmeted blond hairdo that looked like it belonged on someone twenty years older than she was. But still I wanted to tell her: No, Doctor, you’re beautiful, you’re the one who makes everything you touch okay. I felt like a moron for having been afraid of this all this time. On the way out we passed a corkboard covered with thank-you notes and pictures of newborns, and I told myself that I’d have to send a card to the clinic. It would say: Thank you, ladies, for doing what nobody else in my whole world had even attempted, for making all of this okay. Thank you, Doctor and Marisa/Maria, for showing me how to do the part that comes next, and thank you, Donette Lady, for showing me what not to do.