White Oleander

"Sing me a song," Yvo

"If ever I should leave you," I sang into her spiraled ear, pierced all the way up. "It wouldn't be in summer . . ."

Yvo

Women's bravery, I thought as I worked on her hair from bottom to top, untangling the black mass. I would never be able to go through this. The pain came in waves, in sheets, starting in her belly and extending outward, a flower of pain blooming through her body, a jagged steel lotus.

I couldn't stop thinking about the body, what a hard fact it was. That philosopher who said we think, therefore we are, should have spent an hour in the maternity ward of Waite Memorial Hospital. He'd have had to change his whole philosophy.

The mind was so thin, barely a spiderweb, with all its fine thoughts, aspirations, and beliefs in its own importance. Watch how easily it unravels, evaporates under the first lick of pain. Gasping on the bed, Yvo

The nurse came in, looked up at the monitor, checked Yvo

"It hurts," Yvo

"Nobody said it was a picnic," Melinda said. "You've got to breathe."

Yvo

"Can't you just give her something?" I said.

"She's doing fine," Melinda said crisply, her triangular eyes a veiled threat.

"Cheap-ass motherfuckers," the woman said on the other side of the white shower curtains. "Don't give poor people no damn drugs."

"Please," Yvo

The nurse efficiently peeled back Yvo

Yvo

Nobody ever talked about what a struggle this all was. I could see why women used to die in childbirth. They didn't catch some kind of microbe, or even hemorrhage. They just gave up. They stopped caring whether or not the baby came. They knew if they didn't die, they'd be going through it again the next year, and the next. I could understand how a woman might just stop trying, like a tired swimmer, let her head go under, the water fill her lungs. I slowly massaged Yvo

"Mamacita, ay," Yvo

I didn't know why she would call for her mother. She hated her mother. She hadn't seen her in six years, since the day she locked Yvo

It wasn't just Yvo

I held on to Yvo

I thought of her mother, the one picture I had, the little I knew. Karin Thorvald, who may or may not have been a distant relation of King Olaf of Norway, classical actress and drunk, who could recite Shakespeare by heart while feeding the chickens and who drowned in the cow pond when my mother was thirteen. I couldn't imagine her calling out for anyone.

But then I realized, they didn't mean their own mothers. Not those weak women, those victims. Drug addicts, shopaholics, cookie bakers. They didn't mean the women who let them down, who failed to help them into womanhood, women who let their boyfriends run a train on them. Bingers and purgers, women smiling into mirrors, women in girdles, women on barstools. Not those women with their complaints and their magazines, controlling women, women who asked, what's in it for me? Not the women watching TV while they made di

They wanted the real mother, the blood mother, the great womb, mother of a fierce compassion, a woman large enough to hold all the pain, to carry it away. What we needed was someone who bled, someone deep and rich as a field, a wide-hipped mother, awesome, immense, women like huge soft couches, mothers coursing with blood, mothers big enough, wide enough, for us to hide in, to sink down to the bottom of, mothers who would breathe for us when we could not breathe anymore, who would fight for us, who would kill for us, die for us.

Yvo