White Oleander

BUT THAT NIGHT I dreamed the old dream again, of gray Paris streets and the maze of stone, the bricked blind windows. This time there were doors of glass with curved art nouveau handles, they were all locked. I knew I had to find my mother. It was getting dark, dark figures lurked in the cellar entrances. I rang all the buzzers to the apartments. Women came to the door, looking like her, smiling, some even called my name. But none of them was her.

 

I knew she was in there, I banged on the door, screamed for her to let me in. The door buzzed to admit me, but just as I pushed it in, I saw her leaving from the courtyard gate, a passenger in a small red car, wearing her curly Afghan coat and big sunglasses over her blind eyes, she was leaning back in the seat and laughing. I ran after her, crying, begging.

 

Yvonne shook me awake. She took my head in her lap, and her long brown hair draped over us like a shawl. Her belly was warm and firm as a bolster. Through the strands of her hair wove the colored strands of light I still saw, cast by a kid's carousel bedside lamp I'd scavenged on trash day. "We get all the bad dreams, ese," she said, stroking my wet cheek with the palm of her hand. "We got to leave some for somebody else."

 

30

 

THE MATERNITY WARD of Waite Memorial Hospital reminded me of all the schools I'd ever gone to. Sand-textured walls painted the color of old teeth, lockers in the hall, linoleum floors dark and light brown, acoustic tiles packed with string. Only the screaming up and down the halls was different. It scared me. I didn't belong here, I thought, as I followed Yvonne down the corridor. I should be going to third period, learning something distant and cerebral, safely tucked between book covers. In life, anything could happen.

 

I brought all the things we'd learned to use in baby class, the tennis balls, the rolled-up towels, the watch, but Yvonne didn't want to do it, puff and count, lie on the tennis balls. All she wanted was to suck on the white terry cloth and let me wipe her face with ice, sing to her in my tuneless voice. I sang songs from musicals I used to watch with Michael — Camelot, My Fair Lady. I sang to her, "Oh Shenandoah, I long to hear you," that Claire had once sung on the banks of the McKenzie. While all around us, through the curtains, women screamed in their narrow labor beds, cursing, groaning, and calling for their mothers in ten languages. It sounded like the laboratories of the Inquisition.

 

Rena didn't stay long. She drove us there, dropped us off, signed the papers. Whenever I started liking her, something like this happened.

 

"Mama," Yvonne whimpered, tears rolling down her face. She squeezed my arm as another contraction came. We'd been here for nine hours, through two shifts of nurses. My arm was bruised from hand to shoulder. "Don't leave me," she said.

 

"I won't." I fed her some of the ice chips they let her have. They wouldn't let her drink anything, in case she had to have anesthesia. They didn't want her puking into the mask. She puked anyway. I held the small plastic kidney-shaped pan up under her chin. The fluorescent light accused us.

 

The nurse looked up at the monitor, stuck her ringers up Yvonne to check her dilation. She was still eight centimeters. Ten was full dilation, and they told us over and over again there wasn't much they could do until then. Now was what they called transition, the worst time. Yvonne wore a white T-shirt and green kneesocks, face yellow and slick with sweat, her hair dirty and tangled. I wiped the stringy vomit from her lips.

 

"Sing me a song," Yvonne said through her cracked lips.

 

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

 

Yvonne looked huge in the tiny bed. The fetal monitor was strapped to her belly, but I refused to look at the TV screen. I watched her face. She reminded me of a Francis Bacon painting, fading in and out of her resemblance to anything human, struggling to resist disappearing into an undifferentiated world of pain. I brushed her hair out of her face, made braids again.

 

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.