The Love of a Good Woman

fall. I’m here instead.”
    So she had been here before.
    “She’s rough,” she said.
    Her voice was matter-of-fact, almost a growl, not so nervous as I would have expected from the agitation of her body. “I hope I’m not that rough,” I said.
    She didn’t answer. My father had picked up a thin rod like a knitting needle.
    “Now. This is the hard part,” he said. He spoke in a conversational tone, milder I think than any I have ever heard from him. “And the more you tighten up the harder it will be. So just—easy. There. Easy. Good girl. Good girl.”
    I was trying to think of something to say that would ease her or distract her. I could see now what my father was doing. Laid out on a white cloth on the table beside him, he had a series of rods, all of the same length but of a graduated thickness. These were what he would use, one after the other, to open and stretch the cervix. From my station behind the sheeted barrier beyond the girl’s knees, I could not see the actual, intimate progress of these instruments. But I could feel it, from the arriving waves of pain in her body that beat down the spasms of apprehension and actually made her quieter.
    Where are you from? Where did you go to school? Do you have a job? (I had noticed a wedding ring, but quite possibly they all wore wedding rings.) Do you like your job? Do you have any brothers or sisters?
    Why should she want to answer any of that, even if she wasn’t in pain?
    She sucked her breath back through her teeth and widened her eyes at the ceiling.
    “I know,” I said. “I know.”
    “Getting there,” my father said. “You’re a good girl. Good quiet girl. Won’t be long now.”
    I said, “I was going to paint this room, but I never got around to it. If you were going to paint it, what color would you choose?”
    “Hoh,” said Madeleine. “Hoh.” A sudden startled expulsion of breath. “Hoh. Hoh.”
    “Yellow,” I said. “I thought a light yellow. Or a light green?”
    By the time we got to the thickest rod Madeleine had thrust her head back into the flat cushion, stretching out her long neck and stretching her mouth too, lips wide and tight over her teeth.
    “Think of your favorite movie. What is your favorite movie?”
    A nurse said that to me, just as I reached the unbelievable interminable plateau of pain and was convinced that relief would not come, not this time. How could movies exist anymore in the world? Now I’d said the same thing to Madeleine, and Madeleine’s eyes flicked over me with the coldly distracted expression of someone who sees that a human being can be about as much use as a stopped clock.
    I risked taking one hand off her knee and touched her hand. I was surprised at how quickly and fiercely she grabbed it and mashed the fingers together. Some use after all.
    “Say some—” she hissed through her teeth. “Reese. Right.”
    “Now then,” my father said. “Now we’re someplace.”
    Recite.
    What was I supposed to recite? Hickory dickery dock?
    What came into my head was what you used to say, “The Song of Wandering Aengus.”
    “‘I went into a hazel wood, / Because a fire was in my head—’”
    I didn’t remember how it went on from there. I couldn’t think. Then what should come into my head but the whole last verse.
    “Though I am old from wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where you have gone,
And kiss your face and take your hands—”
    Imagine me saying a poem in front of my father.
    What she thought of it I didn’t know. She had closed her eyes.
    I thought I was going to be afraid of dying because of my mother’s dying that way, in childbirth. But once I got onto that plateau I found that dying and living were both irrelevant notions, like favorite movies. I was stretched to the limit and convinced that I couldn’t do a thing to move what felt like a giant egg or a flaming planet not like a baby at all. It was stuck and I was stuck, in a space and time that could just go on forever—there was no reason why I should ever get out, and all my protests had already been annihilated.
    “Now I need you,” my father said. “I need you round here. Get the basin.”
    I held in place the same basin that I had seen Mrs. Barrie holding. I held it while he scraped out the girl’s womb with a clever sort of kitchen instrument. (I don’t mean that it was a kitchen instrument but that it had a slightly homely look to me.)
    The lower parts of even a thin young