I chatted with the dancers and drank ginger ale. We got on really well, the dancers and I. They often gave me free lap dances and I tipped well. They gave me advice on losing the baby weight and drying up my milk quickly, told me I should come work with them because I have a gorgeous face and had a nice figure even while pregnant. I said I was a private dancer and cocked my head toward my husband who, the last time we visited the club together, lay sprawled across the booth, giggling as a buxom black girl with an elaborate weave named Sweetie shook her boobs in his face. They understood. He still goes to strip clubs. I can smell the glitter on him. I don’t care but I want to.
Each night while I was pregnant, I would take my picture, naked, in the bathroom mirror. I studied how my body changed. I loved the new curves, how full I felt, how filled I felt. My sister-in-law was nervous because she thinks I’m cold. She worried my coldness would affect the baby’s temperament. I said, “I don’t think it works like that.” I was very good at being pregnant. I loved holding my belly, so soft and firm at the same time. I read lots of books and did everything I could to make sure the baby would be healthy, perfect. I honor my commitments as best I can. I spoke to Elsa constantly, told her everything so she might know whom she came from. I didn’t keep anything from her; it didn’t seem right to lie to a baby. I got to name her so I gave her my mother’s name. My sister-in-law paid me $25,000 but the money was really from my husband. She and her brother enjoy solving problems with money or buying what they cannot otherwise have. I put the money in an account but haven’t spent it. That didn’t seem right either.
The hospital room was crowded when I was in labor. My sister-in-law and her partner and my mother-in-law and my sister-in-law’s mother-in-law and my sister-in-law’s sister-in-law and my husband all offered platitudes and conflicting advice, none of which I needed. The doctor and nurses were confused by the ways we were all connected, the ways of modern family. It was a long labor. After six hours of being stared at by people I barely knew, I was on the verge of tears. I wasn’t in much pain yet save for a headache. One of the nurses took kindly to me and shooed everyone out of the room for a while, told them to get some fresh air or some food or anything away from the delivery suite. When we were alone, the kind nurse fed me ice chips, said, “This is a hell of a thing you’re doing.” She asked me why and I told her the story of where I come from. I said this was as close as I was going to get to something of my own. She excused herself. When she came back, her eyes were red.
I held my stomach during those precious moments alone, tried to memorize the rise of that child, my child, inside me. No one could take the memory in my hands from me. Elsa was born at 3:33 in the morning. She was slick and purple and misshapen. The doctor set the baby on my chest and before I could stop myself, I held her and kissed the top of her head and I touched every inch of her before someone took her from me, more memory for my hands. She was so ugly and beautiful and wrinkled and skinny. She did not cry but stared at me through the tiny black slits of her eyes. I whispered into her ear. I gave her a name. I said, “I don’t mind how you just ripped me open.” I told her other important things I hoped she might remember. I told her she was mine. Later, my sister-in-law would tell me I was unrecognizable in the hospital, so soft and open. As the nurse took the baby from me and handed her to my sister-in-law and her partner, I thought all the people who believed me to be cold knew nothing about me at all. I like it that way. They have no business knowing how deep my love runs.
I couldn’t watch my sister-in-law with Elsa right after the child was born. The sight of that woman, awkwardly holding the baby, trying to make sense of how to love my child when I already did, it made my eyes burn. I told the nurse I was tired, so tired, and once again she shooed everyone out. The room became very empty. I stared at the ceiling and thought of my mother, a woman who lived a life far harder than was right and far lesser than she deserved. She loved me through and through, died from a gunshot to the head. I found her on the kitchen floor next to my father who also had a gunshot in his head though his was self-inflicted. I was 9. When I told my husband how my parents died, how they were found, he was kind, said how horrifying it must have been. A bloody mess was the only way the two of them were ever going to end.
This is a fabulous story. I think there’s more to it—more possible. Perhaps it could be a novel. Very compelling, beautifully done.
Wanted to print out your Weekend Fiction, but there is NO easy way to do that – like a simple Pdf. Can you arrange that in the future?