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Show Motherlunge a novel 122 list of courses had come in the mail, one day in the summer before college began, they had sat at the table together and looked at it. She had worn the black reading glasses that she called her owls. One by one, Walter had pointed out the classes he was thinking of taking. "That does sound interesting," his mother would say, and she would circle each description with a pen. She had sat next to him and she was as tall as he was, and her hands were long and her fingernails rimmed with dirt from the garden. She had smelled faintly of sun and Jergen's lotion. And she was going to die within two months and leave Walter behind, and if he had known this, everything he remembered there in the hospital waiting room would be refilled The Last Days of Her Life, a stupid soap opera, so it was good-it was good!-that he didn't. Pavia and I arrived at the hospital, and after Pavia signed in we were led to a delivery room. "She wants an epidural," I said to the nurse as I watched my sister changing into her hospital gown; it was touching how awkwardly my sister moved, lifting each foot out of her sweatpants with the sad, dutiful concentration of a circus elephant climbing down off the overturned barrels. Weeks before I had asked Pavia how she was imagining her baby's birth. She had eschewed the Prepared Childbirth classes advertised at her OB's (and recommended by me). But was she going to do some special breathing? Visualization? Was she going to have a natural birth? |
