Manhattan, When I Was Young by Mary Cantwell

Author:Mary Cantwell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

I awoke on March 17, waiting. “They never come when they’re supposed to,” I told B., and sent him off to work. All day long I waited, dusting the furniture, scrubbing the bathtub, longing for the moment when, like somebody in the movies, I would bend over, clutch my stomach with both hands, and say—to whom ? I was alone—“I think it’s time.” Meanwhile the baby was quiet, scarcely moving, hardly even stretching her legs. I know she could hear, but could she see? Do babies keep their eyes closed until they’re born? Or do they open them, look around, study the terrain?

After supper, we went to the movies. With no baby yet in view, of course we would go to the movies. We saw Our Man in Havana, in Times Square, where Irish and Irish-for-a-day drunks were roistering down Broadway.

The next morning, on the dot of 8:30, I felt a dull ache in my back, which was repeated about fifteen minutes later.

“The baby’s coming,” I said, as cool and know-it-all as I had been the day before. “But it’s going to take hours, so you just go off to work.” My husband, obedient to the superb creature I had become, did as he was told.

So much to do! I had to go to the A & P so that B. would have something to eat for the next few days. Then I had to pick up the slipcovers I had left at the cleaner’s so the living room would look nice. Waiting for the cleaner to find them, trying to distract myself from the contractions (“Don’t sink pain!” Mrs. Bing was hissing into my ear. “Sink contraction!”), I studied the little plastic bird on the counter. It kept dipping its head, up, down, up, down, toward a glass of water. I will never forget this bird, I said to myself. I will never forget this moment.

“I’m in labor, I’m in labor,” I wanted to shout to the people I passed on Seventh Avenue on the walk home. “Look at me, look at me, look at how it’s done!”

On my hands and knees, I crawled around the couch and loveseat, closing the snaps that held the slipcovers to the tapes sewn to their undersides. Finished! I washed every dish, did a last run with the vacuum cleaner. Finished! I ate my favorite lunch, egg salad on white. Finished! And at last I crawled onto the chaise longue with Rose Macaulay’s The Towers of Trebizond. I loved that book. Who wouldn’t love a book that began “‘Take my camel, dear,’ said my aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass”? But after a while I could no longer rise to Macaulay’s High Anglican empyrean and dialed B. “Come home,” I said, still calm, still grand.

Because we thought overnight cases tacky, bourgeois, my nightgowns and toothbrush were in a paper shopping bag, along with a handful of lollipops that were supposed to provide glucose when my energy flagged during labor.

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