Forrest Gander: As a Friend

And where is he, the biological father of the unborn child? States away. On a New Orleans tugboat in violent Gulf water. Nor will he make it so far up the river again, with five weeks’ pay and anaconda boots, looking for a lovely girl’s ear to nibble, and with half a notion, steadily declining, to betroth his charismatic loathsomeness to whatever sad someone might part her lips for him, take in his torrent of lies, and mistake him for whatever he surely is not.

The mother of the pregnant girl (some would say child) places her King James on the cane chair outside the second-floor door. Then she enters the room.

In the same glance by which she recognizes her daughter, in a cotton gown and long socks, flailing on the gurney, moaning Oh God Oh God, she sees the empty metal stirrups poking like weird levers from the gurney’s sides. She hears her daughter’s moans and fixes her eyes on the stirrups which seem, in their cold metallic gleaming, in her fatigue and anxiety, to authorize her daughter’s suffering.

Oh honey. Dry-mouthed, the widow stands just inside the door and her sympathetic address, lacking sufficient force of utterance, dissipates in the air. Her daughter, not noticing her entrance, rocks on her hands and knees now between the gleaming stirrups, she pants, facing the wall, wiping her face against the mattress. Gasping, she rolls to her side, worn out and huge, her protuberant navel poking like a rivet head through the thin gown. At the front of the gumey, an aide, no older than the girl in labor, wipes a strand of brown hair from her own cheek, her shoulders slumped.

Meanwhile, the pregnant girl groans and rolls onto her back and her fingers clench the mattress. There is a stool along the far wall, a second long-limbed teenage aide atop it, her legs uncurling and curling around the stool’s posts as she surveys the spectacle. Her nonchalance suggests that she has seen it all before. She casts a quick glance toward the widow frozen at the door. Their eyes meet. Then the aide stops chewing her gum and turns again to the incredible belly.

From the sink and basin in the room’s far corner strides the midwife, horse-black hair, a young woman though twice the age of her two aides. She is wringing out a white washcloth. Sitting on the gurney’s edge, she wipes spittle from the mouth of the girl in labor. Not acknowledging the presence of the widow with so much as a nod. After a minute, setting the washcloth aside, the midwife strokes the girl’s hand and speaks to her in an undertone.

She has no right to judge me, the widow hears herself thinking.

Below the washbasin, some old quilts lie folded on the floor. Still moored to the door, rocking unsteadily on her heels, the widow recognizes the Drunk-Love-in-a-Cabin pattern on top. During the summer and fall of her husband’s fatal sickness, she had taken up quilting on the porch, and slept there as well, wrapped in an unfinished pattern night after night, unable to endure the stench of infirmity within.

Now she has entered a room where her daughter’s belly eclipses every image of herself, and she is not sure how to proceed. She feels superfluous, incapable of reconciling herself to this setback. She raised the girl to know better. But her daughter seemed bent on incarnating every potential disappointment that could be imagined, arguing with her teachers, refusing to go to church, sneaking the car out at night with no license. Where had she learned to drive? In the last few months, eating, sulking, expanding, the girl had spoken less and less as though her energies, the remnants of her youth, were being sucked inward and consumed. As if the infant were drawing off whatever was left of a cordial relationship between the widow and her daughter. And sometimes, it seemed to the widow that her daughter had pent up her feelings as a punishment, as though she, her mother, were somehow to blame.

Her teeth are chattering and the widow glances again at the quilts on the floor. Somebody should get one. Then she sees — how could she have looked away — the tremendous belly transforming. She sees it mound dramatically, drawing the girl’s head and shoulders forward toward her rising hips. The legs spread and the gown rises to expose a strange macula of iodined flesh, anus and vagina, two dark heartshapes. Visible from the larger, a thin trickle of blood.

The aide on her stool stops chewing gum.

The other girl pauses at the sink with a wet compress. Slowly, the midwife lays her hand on the enormous belly. And just as her palm alights, a jet of water bursts from between the thighs with a pop.

In the next minutes, the widow feels her disinvolvement grow exaggerated. She watches the second aide leap from her stool, snatching up from the counter an armful of towels. Spreading them across the soaked mattress. The midwife takes the wet, swollen ankles and crosses them, crosses the daughter’s legs, repeating calmly, Breathe, don’t push; breathe, don’t push.

And now the daughter’s screaming begins, the high shrill stabs of a dog whistle, barely audible. Then contractions punch her breath away. Soon she pales and furiously curses not her momma, not the derelict father, but the girls who have taken positions on both sides of the gurney to turn her onto her side. The daughter howls a string of outrageous execrations involving the Lord’s name the likes of which the widow never has heard.

Oh, my god! Goddamn! It’s shitsure ripping me apart. Then in whispers, My insides are! Coming out! Oh god oh god.

She grunts and seizes.

Don’t do that, whines one of the girls scoldingly. You’ll hurt the baby’s head!

But she grunts and tightens again and pushes and the midwife declares, It’s alright.

They lift her legs into the stirrups and bind them with buckled belts twice on the foot and twice at the thigh.

Push into your bottom, the midwife instructs. That’s right, honey, go ahead and push. The mid-wife’s hand on her naked knee. Her steady voice instructing the girls to massage the daughter’s feet and calves.

But the contractions keep no rhythm, they are like a volcano inside her. An hour passes, seizures gripping the girl, overawing her. Her mother, fifteen feet away, remains motionless as the effigy of a spectator, transfixed by the quarter-sized opening between her daughter’s iodized thighs where a patch of cheesy hair now begins to press outward. The vagina round as a steel ring, its thin inner membrane shining.

The daughter pushes, exhausted, her body like an animal on top of her, devouring her. Not coming, she begs. Not coming out! Can’t breathe!

Her eyes widen and she doesn’t take a breath. Can’t breathe, she gasps. Going. To dying. And she strains for tiny sucks of air against some invisible clamp on her chest.

The widow wants to get closer, but she needs the solid door behind her against which she stands pressed.

She’s dilated, the midwife says. And she pauses, the tips of her fingers within the swollen vagina, cupping a lanuginous patch of head.

The room smells deep to the widow, but not of anything she can say. Of something wrong, perhaps. It is like her own body odor intensified.

Push, the midwife is urging.

The daughter gulps for air, gasps, My back. God Jesus!

And this time the widow unplies herself from the door and marches straight toward the bed and slides her hand under the soaking gown, under the small of back and she rubs upwards into the hot coals of her daughter’s arched spine. Her daughter whines, a short, breathless, abstract noise. And the woman banks her fingers against the long scarp, the swell of muscle on either side of the vertebrae, and draws her fingertips upward to the middle of the bowed back. Her child makes a sound as deaf people make, rolling against the widow’s fingers. She flinches, the older woman, but maneuvers her hand upward again. She traces the wing-like shoulder blade with her thumb and it separates slightly and she can feel its beveled underside. Then she closes her eyes, transferring strength through her hands in an act of prayer, a prayer by which she would divert the moment’s welter. Again, her fingertips smooth the long troughs between her daughter’s ribs, the wet delta above the kidneys, the widow’s knuckles wedged between the hot sheet and the flesh that heats it.