Another Marvelous Thing (12 page)

she found herself averting her eyes from the neat rows of babies in their little plastic bins, but once in a while she found herself hungry for the sight of them. Taped to each crib was a blue (
I
'
M A BOY
) or pink (
I
'
M A GIRL
) card telling mother's name, the time of birth, and birth weight.

At six in the morning the babies were taken to their mothers to be fed. Billy was impressed by the surprising range of noises they made: mewing, squawking, bleating, piping, and squealing. The fact that she was about to have one of these creatures herself filled her with a combination of bafflement, disbelief, and longing.

For the past two months her chief entertainment had been to lie in bed and observe her unborn child moving under her skin. It had knocked a paperback book off her stomach and caused the saucer of her coffee cup to jiggle and dance.

Billy's husband, Grey, was by temperament and inclination a naturalist. Having a baby was right up his street. Books on neonatology and infant development replaced the astronomy and bird books on his night table. He gave up reading mysteries for texts on childbirth. One of these books had informed him that babies can hear in the womb, so each night he sang “Roll Along Kentucky Moon” directly into Billy's stomach. Another suggested that the educational process could begin before birth. Grey thought he might try to teach the unborn to count.

“Why stop there?” Billy said. “Teach it fractions.”

Billy had a horror of the sentimental. In secret, for she would rather have died than showed it, the thought of her own baby brought her to tears. Her dreams were full of infants. Babies appeared everywhere. The buses abounded with pregnant women. The whole process seemed to her one half miraculous and the other half preposterous. She looked around her on a crowded street and said to herself: “Every single one of these people was
born
.”

Her oldest friend, Penny Stern, said to her: “We all hope that this pregnancy will force you to wear maternity clothes, because they will be so much nicer than what you usually wear.” Billy went shopping for maternity clothes but came home empty-handed.

She said, “I don't wear puffed sleeves and frilly bibs and ribbons around my neck when I'm not pregnant, so I don't see why I should have to just because I am pregnant.” In the end, she wore Grey's sweaters, and she bought two shapeless skirts with elastic waistbands. Penny forced her to buy one nice black dress, which she wore to teach her weekly class in economic history at the business school.

Grey set about renovating a small spare room that had been used for storage. He scraped and polished the floor, built shelves, and painted the walls pale apple green with the ceiling and moldings glossy white. They had once called this room the lumber room. Now they referred to it as the nursery. On the top of one of the shelves Grey put his collection of glass-encased bird's nests. He already had in mind a child who would go on nature hikes with him.

As for Billy, she grimly and without expression submitted herself to the number of advances science had come up with in the field of obstetrics.

It was possible to have amniotic fluid withdrawn and analyzed to find out the genetic health of the unborn and, if you wanted to know, its sex. It was possible to lie on a table and with the aid of an ultrasonic scanner see your unborn child in the womb. It was also possible to have a photograph of this view. As for Grey, he wished Billy could have a sonogram every week, and he watched avidly while Billy's doctor, a handsome, rather melancholy South African named Jordan Bell, identified a series of blobs and clouds as head, shoulders, and back.

Every month in Jordan Bell's office Billy heard the sound of her own child's heart through ultrasound and what she heard sounded like galloping horses in the distance.

Billy went about her business outwardly unflapped. She continued to teach and she worked on her dissertation. In between, when she was not napping, she made lists of baby things: crib sheets, a stroller, baby T-shirts, diapers, blankets. Two months before the baby was due, she and Penny went out and bought what was needed. She was glad she had not saved this until the last minute, because in her ninth month, after an uneventful pregnancy, she was put in the hospital, where she was allowed to walk down the hall once a day. The sense of isolation she had cherished—just herself, Grey, and their unborn child—was gone. She was in the hands of nurses she had never seen before, and she found herself desperate for their companionship because she was exhausted, uncertain, and lonely in her hospital room.

Billy was admitted wearing the nice black dress Penny had made her buy and taken to a private room that overlooked the park. At the bottom of her bed were two towels and a hospital gown that tied up the back. Getting undressed to go to bed in the afternoon made her feel like a child forced to take a nap. She did not put on the hospital gown. Instead, she put on the plaid flannel nightshirt of Grey's that she had packed in her bag weeks ago in case she went into labor in the middle of the night.

“I hate it here already,” Billy said.

“It's an awfully nice view,” Grey said. “If it were a little further along in the season I could bring my field glasses and see what's nesting.”

“I'll never get out of here,” Billy said.

“Not only will you get out of here,” said Grey, “you will be released a totally transformed woman. You heard Jordan—all babies get born one way or another.”

If Grey was frightened, he never showed it. Billy knew that his way of dealing with anxiety was to fix his concentration, and it was now fixed on her and on being cheerful. He had never seen Billy so upset before. He held her hand.

“Don't worry,” he said. “Jordan said this isn't serious. It's just a complication. The baby will be fine and you'll be fine. Besides, it won't know how to be a baby and we won't know how to be parents.”

Grey had taken off his jacket and he felt a wet place where Billy had laid her cheek. He did not know how to comfort her.

“A mutual learning experience,” Billy said into his arm. “I thought nature was supposed to take over and do all this for us.”

“It will,” Grey said.

Seven o'clock began visiting hours. Even with the door closed Billy could hear shrieks and coos and laughter. With her door open she could hear champagne corks being popped.

Grey closed the door. “You didn't eat much dinner,” he said. “Why don't I go downstairs to the delicatessen and get you something?”

“I'm not hungry,” Billy said. She did not know what was in front of her, or how long she would be in this room, or how and when the baby would be born.

“I'll call Penny and have her bring something,” Grey said.

“I already talked to her,” Billy said. “She and David are taking you out to dinner.” David was Penny's husband, David Hooks.

“You're trying to get rid of me,” Grey said.

“I'm not,” Billy said. “You've been here all day, practically. I just want the comfort of knowing that you're being fed and looked after. I think you should go soon.”

“It's too early,” said Grey. “Fathers don't have to leave when visiting hours are over.”

“You're not a father yet,” Billy said. “Go.”

After he left she waited by the window to watch him cross the street and wait for the bus. It was dark and cold and it had begun to sleet. When she saw him she felt pierced with desolation. He was wearing his old camel's hair coat and the wind blew through his wavy hair. He stood back on his heels as he had as a boy. He turned around and scanned the building for her window. When he saw her, he waved and smiled. Billy waved back. A taxi, thinking it was being hailed, stopped. Grey got in and was driven off.

Every three hours a nurse appeared to take her temperature, blood pressure, and pulse. After Grey had gone, the night nurse appeared. She was a tall, middle-aged black woman named Mrs. Perch. In her hand she carried what looked like a suitcase full of dials and wires.

“Don't be alarmed,” Mrs. Perch said. She had a soft West Indian accent. “It is only a portable fetal heart monitor. You get to say good morning and good evening to your baby.”

She squirted a blob of cold blue jelly on Billy's stomach and pushed a transducer around in it, listening for the beat. At once Billy heard the sound of galloping hooves. Mrs. Perch timed the beats against her watch.

“Nice and healthy,” Mrs. Perch said.

“Which part of this baby is where?” Billy said.

“Well, his head is back here, and his back is there and here is the rump and his feet are near your ribs. Or hers, of course.”

“I wondered if that was a foot kicking,” Billy said.

“My second boy got his foot under my rib and kicked with all his might,” Mrs. Perch said.

Billy sat up in bed. She grabbed Mrs. Perch's hand. “Is this baby going to be all right?” she said.

“Oh my, yes,” Mrs. Perch said. “You're not a very interesting case. Many others much more complicated than you have done very well and you will, too.”

At four in the morning, another nurse appeared, a florid Englishwoman. Billy had spent a restless night, her heart pounding, her throat dry.

“Your pressure's up, dear,” said the nurse, whose tag read “M. Whitely.” “Dr. Bell has written orders that if your pressure goes up you're to have a shot of hydralazine. It doesn't hurt baby—did he explain that to you?”

“Yes,” said Billy groggily.

“It may give you a little headache.”

“What else?”

“That's all,” Miss Whitely said.

Billy fell asleep and woke with a pounding headache. When she rang the bell, the nurse who had admitted her appeared. Her name was Bonnie Near and she was Billy's day nurse. She gave Billy a pill and then taped a tongue depressor wrapped in gauze over her bed.

“What's that for?” Billy said.

“Don't ask,” said Bonnie Near.

“I want to know.”

Bonnie Near sat down at the end of the bed. She was a few years older than Billy, trim and wiry with short hair and tiny diamond earrings.

“It's hospital policy,” she said. “The hydralazine gives you a headache, right? You ring to get something to make it go away and because you have high blood pressure everyone assumes that the blood pressure caused it, not the drug. So this thing gets taped above your bed in the one chance in about fifty-five million that you have a convulsion.”

Billy turned her face away and stared out the window.

“Hey, hey,” said Bonnie Near. “None of this. I noticed yesterday that you're quite a worrier. Are you like this when you're not in the hospital? Listen. I'm a straight shooter and I would tell you if I was worried about you. I'm not. You're just the common garden variety.”

Every morning Grey appeared with two cups of coffee and the morning paper. He sat in a chair and he and Billy read the paper together as they did at home.

“Is the house still standing?” Billy asked after several days. “Are the banks open? Did you bring the mail? I feel I've been here ten months instead of a week.”

“The mail was very boring,” Grey said. “Except for this booklet from the Wisconsin Loon Society. You'll be happy to know that you can order a record called ‘Loon Music.' Would you like a copy?”

“If I moved over,” Billy said, “would you take off your jacket and lie down next to me?”

Grey took off his jacket and shoes, and curled up next to Billy. He pressed his nose into her face and looked as if he could drift off to sleep in a second.

“Childworld called about the crib,” he said into her neck. “They want to know if we want white paint or natural pine. I said natural.”

“That's what I think I ordered,” Billy said. “They let the husbands stay over in this place. They call them ‘dads.'”

“I'm not a dad yet, as you pointed out,” Grey said. “Maybe they'll just let me take naps here.”

There was a knock on the door. Grey sprang to his feet and Jordan Bell appeared.

“Don't look so nervous, Billy,” he said. “I have good news. I think we want to get this baby born if your pressure isn't going to go down. I think we ought to induce you.”

Billy and Grey were silent.

“The way it works is that we put you on a drip of pitocin, which is a synthetic of the chemical your brain produces when you go into labor.”

“We know,” Billy said. “Katherine went over it in childbirth class.” Katherine Walden was Jordan Bell's nurse. “When do you want to do this?”

“Tomorrow,” Jordan Bell said. “Katherine will come over and give you your last Lamaze class right here.”

“And if it doesn't work?”

“It usually does,” said Jordan Bell. “And if it doesn't, we do a second-day induction.”

“And if that doesn't work?”

“It generally does. If it doesn't, we do a cesarean, but you'll be awake and Grey can hold your hand.”

“Oh what fun,” said Billy.

When Jordan Bell left, Billy burst into tears.

“Why isn't anything normal?” she said. “Why do I have to lie here day after day listening to other people's babies crying? Why is my body betraying me like this?”

Grey kissed her and then took her hands. “There is no such thing as normal,” he said. “Everyone we've talked to has some story or other—huge babies that won't budge, thirty-hour labors. A cesarean is a perfectly respectable way of being born.”

“What about me? What about me getting all stuck up with tubes and cut up into little pieces?” Billy said, and she was instantly ashamed. “I hate being like this. I feel I've lost myself and some whimpering, whining person has taken me over.”

“Think about how in two months we'll have a two-month-old baby to take to the park.”

“Do you really think everything is going to be all right?” Billy said.