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Show Motherlunge a novel 120 for-getting through labor as a whole woman, a grownup, a real mother-and realized that there was no use. The nurse took a long time to come. Meanwhile there was just the bed and the sheets, and the IV tubing and bag on the metal pole. If the nurse ever came, she could take an inventory. She would find all of these objects-metal bed, white sheets, tubing, bag, pole-intact; and on the floor and on the trays and in the comers of room the nurse would also find a thigh, a hip, a throat. These would be the various pieces of Dorothy's body of course, gray, bloodless, drained by a solid, disassembling pain.... "This is labor!" the eventual nurse said. She laughed a little as she said this, in the way that people term not unkindly. She gave Dorothy some gas to breathe in through a mask, and then left again. And when she was gone, the labor continued, the same except now at a great, uncrossable distance, until it was the next day. And then Dorothy found herself in a different room, and a baby in a wheeled bin was parked next to her bed, its forehead dented by forceps and its small mouth moving like one raised disk of a tentacle. Meanwhile, in the hospital waiting room, Walter smoked and watched television. Along with another man and the man's mother and mother in-law, he watched a cooking show and two soap operas. "It's baby number one for us," the other man said, leaning forward on his seat and clapping his hands together like a quarterback waiting for the snap. He was about Walter's age, wearing a dress shirt and nice slacks, his brown hair oiled and raked across |