Eleven Hours (6 page)

“Yeah,” says Lore dryly. “That will motivate me.”

Silence.

“You're not much of a talker,” says Carol. “I guess you can tell I'm a talker. I'm going to draw you out. Just watch.”

You've got to be kidding me
, Lore thinks. She turns her head away.

“So it's your first baby?” Carol asks as she wipes down the sink with a paper towel.

“No.”

Lore looks up to see Carol squinting skeptically.

“It's my first birth, but not my first baby.”

“Oh, but …”

“I had my first pregnancy when I was raped. I had to abort it.”

“Oh,” says Carol, “oh.” She flushes and abruptly seats herself in the chair below the television bolted into the wall. She points herself in Lore's direction, as if to announce that she is here, she is a ready receptacle, if Lore wants to unburden herself of any details.

Now why did I say that? Lore asks herself. That was vile, she thinks.

“It's all right,” she tells the nurse. “It was a long time ago.”

Good God, why had she said that? But the plump little woman's friendliness had been so false, so deaf; she'd wanted to say something to puncture it. Well,
that
had certainly done it. Where is Franckline, Lore wonders? Why did I say such a thing?

It was Julia who had been raped. It happened in the lobby of the Upper West Side building where Julia and her father lived. The man had cornered her in the entryway as she fished for her key. Asa blamed himself—he would never (he told Lore) be able to feel that it was not his fault. He and his older brother and their parents lived in a different building half a block away; the Foxes and the Lisks were old friends, in and out of each other's apartments all the time. Julia and Asa had walked around the city for hours that night as they often did. They were high school seniors; it was past eleven. Generally Asa walked Julia to her door, as Morningside Heights was still a dicey neighborhood at the time. But that evening Asa was angry at Julia over her friendship with another boy in their class. “It was stupid,” he told Lore. “It was nothing. But at the time I was feeling like Julia shouldn't ever pay attention to anyone but me.” As they'd walked about, Julia had listened sympathetically but refused to agree to put an end to the friendship. They got to Asa's door and, miffed, he said goodnight and went inside. The way Asa remembered it, Julia hesitated, as if she wanted to ask him to continue on with her. Then she left. Julia said she didn't remember the hesitation, or even the conversation, and commented that there were other nights she'd gone home by herself, it wasn't completely unusual. But then the blows to her head made her recollections of the evening fuzzy.

Her mother by then was living in Oakland. She didn't come to see Julia after the rape. Julia told Lore this a few weeks after they met and fell into a friendship that was as swift and buoyant as a love affair. “She didn't come back to be with me or see how I was. It was my father who took care of me.”

And Lore had been shocked then about Julia's mother, for she had a crush on this woman she had never met, this creator of enormous, disorienting canvases that you could see if you went to certain museums in Baltimore or Austin or Cincinnati. From far away they looked like quilts, but quilts with eerily realistic images—were there photographs pinned to the cotton batting? Closer in, you saw it was all paint. Paint had created the traditional triangles and floral patterns, as well as the grainy, spontaneous-seeming “photos” of contemporary black life and black struggle: police stopping young men in cars and confronting them on the porches of their homes, young women beaten by their boyfriends, but also family dinners and college graduations and people of all ages working at various jobs. Julia showed Lore the paintings in a large book, where the text said something or other about the artist challenging viewers' assumptions about both black folk culture and the hegemonic Western tradition of realism. Lore looked slowly through the pages. One included an enlargement of a “photo” of a woman at a console of knobs and outlets, leaning in to make an adjustment. She was seen mostly from the back, and she and the console filled nearly the whole frame. Where was she? She could equally likely have been juggling an old-fashioned telephone switchboard or managing a launch at
NASA
. There were no particular clues in her navy skirt suit, her neatly pulled-back hair, or her discreet pearl earrings. Lore liked that the woman was placeless and without category, and purposely avoided the text accompanying the reproduction, afraid it might explain something. The woman might be highly educated, a gender and race pioneer, or very ordinary, struggling through an everyday job. Either way, though, she was in control of something, a massive set of variables that she had mastered.

Those days looking at Dora Lisk's pictures! It was all part of the first flush of Lore's great romance—the romance of being chosen by Julia and Asa, whose friends were artists and entrepreneurs and do-gooders, people who went to galleries and political rallies and read magazines on politics and culture. Who knew people whose names appeared in the
Atlantic
and the
New York Times
—or the children of those people, at least. Lore had imagined New York City would be like this, and was surprised at how easily and quickly, after those first lonely weeks, it fulfilled her fantasy. Julia and Asa had taken her up and made her feel that she was no longer a small-town girl, a kid with a grade-C education who'd spent half of her teens and twenties at a sickbed. That she could be anyone now, could reinvent herself—although it turned out that the most exotic thing to be among these new friends was, precisely, herself. They were earnest and kindly and did not mind explaining when Lore asked—there was no point in faking it—who Jacques Lacan or Rem Koolhaas was. They asked her many questions about where she'd come from and what she'd done before moving to New York, and she answered patiently, but soon she was allowed to slip blissfully into their lives and concerns and forget about what once had been her own.

That Julia's mother had left the family and moved all the way across the country Lore could almost understand: artists were cruel, artists were selfish, otherwise they could not do their work. (What notions Lore had then! Or perhaps she had in fact understood something.) But Julia's mother had not come when her daughter was raped. Lore could not see Dora Lisk's work in the same way after that: the precise brushwork, the young men in cars, the family dinners.

“She said she couldn't leave the baby,” Julia told Lore. Her mother had had two children with another artist after moving west, and the little one, three months old, had lung problems. Lore tried to decide whether Julia wanted her to say that this was a convincing reason or an unconvincing one. She knew that Julia's mother had rarely been in contact with her even before the rape. Julia had to this day met her half brothers only once. “One day she just gave me up and never really thought about me again,” Julia said. “How does that happen?” And she touched her cheek with the tops of her fingers, a gesture she had that Lore interpreted as her way of checking her own reality, making sure that she was still there, that she was in fact the one speaking. Julia's beautiful light-brown skin, and her hair that was also a light brown from her father but coarse and kinked like her mother's. Checking to prove that the two of them had blended to make something of her, that she was not oil and water, or some other combination of elements that could not cohere.

And when the pregnancy results came back, Julia said, there was the shame associated with it being your father who brought you to the clinic, your father who had to come up close to all those bloody intimate women's concerns, who had to pick up the prescription for pain meds and watch you shuffle out of the recovery room with a big pad between your legs, and bring you your bag of clothes to change back into.

(But Lore wanted never to feel sympathy for Julia again. “There's someone I need you to meet,” Julia had said, the very first day they knew each other. “My friend Asa.”)

“Should I put on the TV?” asks Carol cautiously.

“No,” says Lore. Her hands contract with agitation. She pushes herself off the bed and walks to the window. A mistake, she realizes—she will not be able to get back on the bed without asking Carol for help, without having to be grasped and touched by her. The sun is high in the sky but hidden now behind thick banks of gray; the lights on in the buildings opposite glow as murkily as if it were evening. An ambulance whines nearby, and she realizes it's not the first one she's heard since arriving. It pulls up and a stretcher is brought out of the back. Set back from the street as she is, she cannot make out all the details, but the figure on the stretcher appears to be a skinny, pale, long-haired man, young, younger than she. A few people stand still on the street to watch, but most go on their way.

Carol comes up beside her, too close, and waits quietly, as if hoping to be of service. Miserably, Lore watches a few flecks of snow scatter down from the sky. More will come soon, she thinks, covering the streets and making things look pretty for a while. When I leave here, she reassures herself, I will be holding my baby in my arms.

The door opens, and Franckline reenters room 7, saying her thanks to Carol. (
Of course!
the other nurse replies;
Laura is doing great, terrific patient, just shout if you need me again
!
) She comes to stand by Lore. “They said snow by two,” she comments. “Here it is.”

Lore does not reply.
She left me
, she thinks.

“Any contractions?” Franckline asks.

Lore grunts in the negative.

“So you were waiting for me,” Franckline says, smiling.

And perhaps something in Lore was in fact waiting, because as Franckline helps her back onto the bed, she feels a new cramp, moving toward her quickly, quite quickly; she will need to find her breath ahead of it. “Hands and knees …” she entreats Franckline, and Franckline gently guides her into position. The pain begins in her mid-back and pushes down and outward, murmuring, “Make way, make way,” to her pelvis and her ribs, which fret and cry, “Impossible! Impossible!” and the muscles in her lower back contract like a fist that says, “Not today!” The contraction reaches a peak, but instead of receding persists there before mounting further, pressing her harder. For a long moment Lore forgets to breathe and casts around mentally, panicked—How does one breathe? Where does breath come from? Oh, help me!—until her lungs gasp of their own accord, a quick, inefficient gasp that Lore grabs by the tail and expands, and then there is time for another breath, a long one now, and a long, deep moan. But the moan this time is not simply a moan of will and pain but a call into the emptiness:
Is anyone there?
There is a blackness spreading into her vision and she feels herself spinning in an unlit sky.
Empty, empty
, her moan cries. The moan goes on, spiraling deeper into space, and at the end of it Lore falls directly into sleep, with no sense of a transition, into a dream of gray waters, of swimming with weary arms and trying to spy the shore. When she wakes a moment later—for her wrists hurt so—she is startled by the light and color. She had been swimming somewhere—for so very long!—in which light and color did not exist. She shifts her weight carefully onto her heels and rubs each circle of bone. Her hands tremble. Quite reasonably the room reassembles itself: bed, bedsheets, television, couch, sink, computer. Solid things, a solid floor under her.

“You did that beautifully,” comments Franckline, who is at the couch now, removing its cushions and stacking them at the foot of the bed. “Try leaning over these next time. They'll take the weight off your wrists.” She buckles on the fetal monitor—it's past time, she says—and offers Lore a cup of ice chips. Lore fishes out the slivers to suck on, touches her forehead with her cold, wet fingers. The universe cannot be good. A good universe could not include the forcing of her child half inch by half inch down the birth canal, its soft head squeezed misshapen by the hugging walls; could not include her own grotesque and agonized prying-open. These last months Lore has often woken in the morning aware of some fearsome fact she cannot quite place. She has groped uneasily until finally, with a stab of fear, she remembers again: The baby will have to come out. It will have to come out
that
way. She has showered and put out the things for her breakfast—toast, jam, one scrambled egg—in an attempt to blur with the ordinary facts of the day the distinct, inconceivable truth.

Sucking now, numbing her mouth, she draws a drop from an ice shard, holds it like a cold jewel, then swallows. Suck, hold, swallow. Time slows to this rhythm, the pull of her tongue, the slow warming of the drop. Nothing can happen while she sucks and holds, holds and swallows. How clever of her—to slow time, to make it wait. She pokes at another chip and pops it into her mouth. Her limbs are already forgetting the pain. But Franckline says, arranging the cushions, “The baby is determined now.” Franckline seizes time by the scruff, shakes it out of its stupor, sets it going again. She seats herself on the bed. “It wants out.” The clock on the wall has moved forward only a minute, to Lore's alarm and outrage.
The baby froze her face coming out
.

What was that? Who said that? Lore smells leaves burning in old metal trash cans, sees opaque skies heavy and wet around a brick school building. Tricia. She has not thought of it in years. It was when she and Tricia were in fifth grade. Tricia was telling about her big sister. Her sister's mouth and eye were pulled down forever on the right side, because the sister's baby had crushed some nerves coming out. That was how Tricia explained it. That side of the mouth and the eye would never move with the other side again. Lore saw the sister once when she dropped in for a visit, and the face was worse than she had imagined: it looked as if the still side had been smashed in a door. But Tricia said her sister said it was all worth it to have gotten Ryan, who was now three years old and knew his whole alphabet. Tricia made up a game and insisted that Lore play it: What was a baby worth more than? Was it worth more than your leg? Your eyesight? All the money you could ever get?