Dancing Girls and Other Stories

An old woman, a fat old woman dressed all in green, comes into the room and sits beside Jea

“When will I have it?” Jea

The old woman laughs. Surely that laugh, those tribal hands, have presided over a thousand beds, a thousand kitchen tables… “A long time yet,” she says. “Eight, ten hours.”

“But I’ve been doing this for twelve hours already,” Jea

“Not hard labour,” the woman says. “Not good, like this.”

Jea

But—and this is the part of Jea

She thinks momentarily about the other woman. Her motives, too, are unclear. Why doesn’t she want to have a baby? Has she been raped, does she have ten other children, is she starving? Why hasn’t she had an abortion? Jea

Jea

“Slow down,” A. says. She’s on her side now, he’s holding her hand. “Slow it right down.”

“I can’t, I can’t do it, I can’t do this.”

“Yes you can.”

“Will I sound like that?”

“Like what?” A. says. Perhaps he can’t hear it: it’s the other woman, in the room next door or the room next door to that. She’s screaming and crying, screaming and crying. While she cries she is saying, over and over, “It hurts. It hurts.”

“No, you won’t,” he says. So there is someone, after all.

A doctor comes in, not her own doctor. They want her to turn over on her back.

“I can’t,” she says. “I don’t like it that way.” Sounds have receded, she has trouble hearing them. She turns over and the doctor gropes with her rubber-gloved hand. Something wet and hot flows over her thighs.

“It was just ready to break,” the doctor says. “All I had to do was touch it. Four centimetres,” she says to A.

“Only four?” Jea

“You’re hyperventilating,” A. says. “Slow it down.” He is rubbing her back now, hard, and she takes his hand and shoves it viciously farther down, to the right place, which is not the right place as soon as his hand is there. She remembers a story she read once, about the Nazis tying the legs of Jewish women together during labour. She never really understood before how that could kill you.

A nurse appears with a needle. “I don’t want it,” Jea

“Don’t be hard on yourself,” the nurse says. “You don’t have to go through pain like that.” What pain? Jea

Jea

“It’s a mild analgesic,” the doctor says. “We wouldn’t allow anything that would hurt the baby.” Jea

Suddenly she sits bolt upright. She is wide awake and lucid. “You have to ring that bell right now,” she says. “This baby is being born.”

A. clearly doesn’t believe her. “I can feel it, I can feel the head,” she says. A. pushes the button for the call bell. A nurse appears and checks, and now everything is happening too soon, nobody is ready. They set off down the hall, the nurse wheeling. Jea

“Need me?” she asks.

“Oh no,” the nurse answers breezily. “Natural childbirth.”

Jea

“You must be crazy,” Jea

“Don’t push,” the nurse says.

“What do you mean?” Jea

“Breathe through your mouth,” the nurse says. “Pant,” and Jea

From somewhere her own doctor materializes, in her doctor suit already, looking even more like Mary Poppins than usual, and Jea