This Old Man Read online

  “I’m sorry,” Pammy said, as she motioned to Jo.

  Click. The stopwatch signaled something, either the beginning or the end of a contraction. Pammy seemed to be in another world. She was cross-eyed, gazing at the ceiling. I looked up to see what she found so fascinating up there. There was some irregular speckle of a gray spot. Was that it?

  “You’re coming down now,” Jo said in a very soothing tone. “Fifteen seconds, ten, five. You should be feeling it pass by now.” I wondered how she knew all this.

  “Hi, Greta,” Pammy said brightly. “Guess what’s happening.”

  “She can’t guess,” Jo said. She kept pulling at a piece of hair and winding it around her finger.

  “How far apart was that one?” Pammy asked.

  Jo replied, “Just under nine minutes.” She was taking Business Math at school. Was timing contractions part of it?

  Pammy wore a thin, pink flannel gown, which stretched tight over her belly. When I picked up the nerve to look at her closely, I could actually see the baby move, squirming around in there, or trying to elbow its way out.

  “This is holy, this is so spiritual. This is so much a part of nature,” Sylvia rhapsodized. She tiptoed forward to peek at the wrestling match that was going on inside Pammy. “I’m going to make us some popcorn. I won’t butter it or salt it, so it won’t be too bad.” She tiptoed off to the kitchen. We had hardwood floors, and they squeaked under her feet. Poor Sylvia, I thought. She was trying so hard to be quiet.

  “It sort of hurts,” Pammy said.

  Jo moaned, “Oh, Jesus, I’m not up to this.”

  I wasn’t much good either, but I thought about our exercises on this floor. “How about doing the pelvic rock?” I suggested. It sounded constructive.

  Pammy obediently rolled over like a hippo and got on her hands and knees. Her belly hung to the floor as she rocked back and forth. “Actually,” she said, a little out of breath, “my back doesn’t hurt.”

  “It doesn’t hurt now, because you’re doing the pelvic rock. But it might, later. This way you’ll be prepared.”

  Pammy sat up on her knees and signaled Jo. She clicked the stopwatch. Pammy had to bend her head way back to find her favorite speckle on the ceiling. This time I noticed she was taking small, shallow breaths that got faster after a while, then slowed down again. When Jo told her she was down to five seconds, she took two deep breaths, and everything sagged a little.

  “Jesus, it’s only been about seven minutes,” Jo announced. This must have been a hot news flash, because Pammy nodded soberly and Jo was all red and sweaty. She wiped her sleeve across her forehead. Sylvia and I stood there staring like idiots. I thought about our pioneer sisters who sprang into action when someone took to her childbed. Were we supposed to tear up sheets? Were we supposed to tell her to pull on the spokes of the headboard? What headboard? What bed? She was sprawled on the gold shag rug. What were we supposed to do? I flashed on Dan Ackroyd saying, “How many times has this happened to you? You come home after a hard day’s work and find a friend having a baby on your living room floor, and there’s not a midwife anywhere in sight.”

  “All right,” Jo said, “we’re going to call Kaiser Hospital to tell them we’re on our way.”

  “NO!!” It was a piercing shriek of a sound. I thought Pammy was having a violent contraction, the kind where you’d pull on the bedposts for dear life until your nails dug into the wood. Jo turned away and bit her nails and pulled at her cuticles. Pammy wasn’t yelling with pain, though. She was simply announcing to the world and those outside the known universe that she was not going to the hospital to have this baby.

  “This is too much,” Jo cried. “This is too much.” She grabbed a raincoat out of the front closet. “It’s not in my contract to deliver kids, you got it?” She flew out the front door.

  “Looks like it’s up to you,” Pammy said sweetly. She slid the stopwatch across the floor.

  Sylvia returned with a vat of popcorn and four satellite bowls. She pushed popcorn into her mouth by the handful. “Want some?” She offered a bowl to Pammy on the floor.

  “No, thanks. I’m just not hungry.”

  “Let me have some.” My mouth was full of popcorn, and I thought Pammy wouldn’t understand me. “We’d better get her to the hospital.”

  Pammy geared up for another howl. I put my hand on her stomach and gently pushed her down. “Don’t yell, don’t yell.”

  “I won’t, Greta. But you know how I feel about hospitals. I’m not having this baby in any hospital.”

  “I wish Elizabeth were here.” Were social workers trained midwives? I was clearly out of my league. I wasn’t even sure how to work a stopwatch.

  For want of something better to do, we ate a lot of popcorn. Sylvia went back to the kitchen for melted butter and salt. This was a national emergency, and Sylvia dutifully brought Red Cross reinforcements. We moved on to Hershey’s Kisses and potato chips. By the time we’d worked our way into the Fiddle Faddle from Sylvia’s care package, Pammy’s contractions were getting closer together and lasting longer. Some of them were ninety seconds long. We both panted with her, sometimes blowing crumbs out of our mouths, and we waited anxiously for her benevolent announcement that we were done with still another contraction. We breathed with her, we sighed in relief. We all wiped the sweat from our necks.

  I said, “Shouldn’t you have some kind of pain pill or a shot or something?”

  “No drugs,” Pammy said breathlessly, “and that’s final. I’m having natural childbirth. I won’t need anything.”

  Yes, we all agreed. We’re having natural childbirth.

  “It’s so natural, so … earthy. I mean, like you’d see on a farm or a ranch, or out in the fields.” Sylvia crunched the leftover unpopped kernels in her mouth as she spoke. “I’m gonna remember this all my life.”

  Pammy gasped. We weren’t ready. This one had crept up on us and didn’t seem to be following the predictable wave.

  I felt my face go white. “When did it start? You didn’t tell me when it started. For God’s sake, I can’t time it if you don’t tell me.”

  Pammy raised her hand feebly to silence me, but otherwise seemed to be in communication with the spot on the ceiling. Finally she folded her hands across her stomach serenely. I shook the stopwatch, but nothing fell out. Sylvia slid the bowl of unpopped kernels across the floor to us, then thought better of it. She poured them out and rolled them around in her hand. It reminded me of some Greek worry beads my mother used to play with in front of the TV.

  Also, Sylvia kept looking at her watch, as if she had a plane to catch. Or maybe she was watching for the next contraction. Neither of us wanted to be caught by surprise again. She said, “I don’t really belong here. I’m never getting married and having a baby.”

  “Whatever happened to ‘isn’t nature beautiful’?”

  “Yeah, beautiful, sure, but see, I’ve got a squeamish stomach, and I swear if she bleeds or anything, I mean, I will puke popcorn all over this rug.”

  “Pull yourself together,” I warned. I was torn apart myself.

  “I don’t know what everybody’s so excited about,” Pammy said. “Trust my body. It knows exactly what to do.”

  “Right, Mother Nature’s taken over the whole thing,” Sylvia said. “It’s totally out of our hands. Oh, God.” She rolled the worry corn frantically. Beads of it fell from her hand, and she stamped them into the shag carpet.

  With the greatest of consideration, Pammy told us, “Get ready, now!”

  I punched the stopwatch, but it still wasn’t right. “What good is this? You didn’t tell me how long the last contraction was, so I don’t have any idea how to steer you through this one.”

  “Maybe you should have gone to Lamaze class with her,” Sylvia suggested.

  “I’m not the father!”

  Pammy started panting. “Huh. Huh. Huh. Huh. Huh, huh, huh, huh, huh. Huh. Huh.”

  My throat was dry. “I guess we should call
Randy?”

  Pammy took her two deep breaths. “Randy?” she asked.

  “You remember him, Randall Stemmons, the real father?” I reminded her. I felt terrible, being so sarcastic to poor Pammy. But she was so blasted calm, while Sylvia and I were climbing the walls.

  “Yes, I suppose you should call him,” sighed Pammy.

  What a relief to get out of the room, even just to the hall to use the phone. The tension in there was as thick as bay fog. Sylvia followed right behind me. “Stay with her!” I whispered.

  “I can’t, I just can’t. Anyway, I’m getting towels and scissors. That’s what they do on TV. They usually use the kitchen table on TV. Do you think we can lift her?”

  I just stared at Sylvia. They actually meant to deliver this baby right on our living-room floor. I ran my finger down the telephone number list three times before I even recognized Stemmons.

  Only in movies does it happen that the person who absolutely, crucially must be reached—because otherwise the patient will go to her death unconfessed, or unidentified, or unforgiven—has just walked out the door for the airport. The phone rings inside the house, but the Crucial Party is stepping into the taxi with his luggage, and doesn’t hear the wailing telephone.

  But that’s what happened at Randy’s house, though we found out later, after his son was born, that Randy was on his way to the shopping mall to play video games. Anyway, there was no answer, so I did the only reasonable thing to do. My finger raced up to the first name on the phone list. I dialed Kaiser Hospital and ordered an ambulance.

  13

  The news was all over school—Pammy Wilkins had had her baby. Even the teachers were buzzing about it. I was the official spokesperson at impromptu news conferences. “Yes, it was a boy. No, Pammy didn’t have any anesthetic. Weight? Six pounds, seven ounces. Brown eyes. Almost no hair, dark though. Of course he was going to be circumcised. No, he really wasn’t cute. Yes, Pammy had to have stitches, four or five of them. Name? Well, that’s up to Randy, her boyfriend. On the little wrist, in the meantime, there’s a plastic bracelet that says Baby Boy Wilkins.”

  The girls couldn’t believe that Pammy had actually seen Baby Boy Wilkins and was still giving him up to Randy’s family.

  “Why don’t they just get married?” one girl asked.

  Another suggested, “Maybe they can’t stand each other, you know what I mean? Like, they just did it once, and then hated each other after that.”

  “That is the most stupid thing I ever heard.”

  “I’d marry him, if I had his baby,” one said.

  “Have you ever even seen the guy?”

  This brought up a whole slew of other questions. The girls wanted to know all about Randy. I was really in my glory.

  “He’s sixteen. He’s a junior at Lowell High.”

  “Is he cute?”

  He was an absolute mess; anyone would say so. But it seemed disloyal to Pammy to admit this. “He’s going to look really nice when he gets his acne under control.”

  “Oh, gross!”

  “Really, he’s a sweet guy. Quiet. Polite. His mother is going to be raising the baby,” I announced.

  “I’ll bet she’s telling everyone it’s hers. Like she got pregnant and had it all in one night.”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted.

  “You mean Pammy’s never going to see her own darling son? I could never do that.”

  “Pammy doesn’t really know yet, I think.” Suddenly I knew how the President’s press secretary feels having to speak for another person without putting words in his mouth. “She’s not making any big decisions right now, I guess, at least until her stitches heal.” I’d been having a wonderful time with all this attention, but now I wanted the press conferences to come to an end. “I really don’t know any more.”

  “Where’s she going after she gets out of the hospital?” one more zealous member of the media asked.

  “Home. Where else?” I replied. Where was she going? Somehow we’d never resolved that question during the hours of our labor. Randy’s family wanted her to come home to their house until she was stronger. The County was ready to send her back to her foster parents, now that she’d been emptied. And we all wanted her to come home to our house. We’d just have to see who could pull the hardest. I was putting my money on Elizabeth.

  Mrs. Wong asked me to stay after English.

  “Congratulations on the baby,” she said, with her eyes flashing. Besides being an English teacher, she was also one of the drama coaches, and she knew how to make every motion of her body work for her. There were kids like Jo who took drama because it was easier than taking civics. Jo told me that when they were asked to impersonate a tree, Mrs. Wong demonstrated first and she looked like a tree. Next they were supposed to be loaves of day-old bread, and Mrs. Wong looked like bread rejected on the shelves of Safeway. Though she had a short neck and fairly short legs, she did something or other with her shoulders and the way she carried her chin to give an excellent impersonation of a willowy model. Now those versatile eyes were engaging me, woman to woman, to discuss the womanly subject of having babies.

  “Really, I didn’t do anything,” I protested. In all honesty, I felt I’d done quite a lot. I’d panted and huffed through four hours of contractions; I’d timed them. I was responsible for getting Pammy to the hospital before it was too late. I was the first one to see Baby Boy Wilkins when he was wheeled into the nursery wrapped as tight as a bolt of flannel. My heart had come up into my mouth at the sight of him, with his wrinkled blue finger wound around his nose. Something deep inside my body rumbled like a wave coming onto shore, not unpleasantly. But Mrs. Wong couldn’t know any of this.

  “I just thought since you and Pammy are good friends, this would be a nice time for you, too, experientially.”

  “I guess it is.”

  “Experience. Enjoy. Sense, Greta, feel,” Mrs. Wong said, as she opened the sacrosanct Locked Drawer of her desk, where the teachers kept their purses and wallets and where the shop teacher, Mr. McKnight, was known to keep his gin. “I have something for you.”

  For one crazy moment I thought it was something for the baby, like a pair of yellow booties.

  Mrs. Wong took out a file folder and opened it carefully. Inside was the most beautiful piece of artwork I had ever seen. It was a piece of thick, creamy parchment, with my poem done in magnificent, ornate Chinese calligraphy.

  “Oh, Mrs. Wong, it’s breathtaking.”

  “I’m pleased with it myself.”

  “Are you sure everything’s right?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes.”

  “But I mean it has to be absolutely, one hundred percent, perfectly right.”

  She laughed until I could hardly see her eyes. Even her laugh seemed like something on the stage. “I don’t require that your English papers be absolutely one hundred percent, perfectly right. This is, though. My father-in-law helped me with every word.”

  “I don’t know how to thank you, Mrs. Wong.”

  “Very simply. Just watch the old gentleman’s face when he reads the poem, and tell me everything you see in his face.”

  I stared at my toes, searching for some way to explain this: “I won’t be there when he reads it,” I said quietly.

  She started to say something, then changed her mind, for which I was grateful. “Then how about this for a thank you? How about turning in your English term paper on time, for a refreshing change?”

  “Early. A week, two weeks, whatever you say.”

  “It’s not due until June eighth. June eighth would be early enough,” she said merrily. “Good luck with our poem. I really hope the old gentleman adores it. Oh, and Greta, you must consider taking drama next semester. I think your face has character and pathos.”

  I could hardly wait for school to be out, so I could meet Wing. In fact, I was in Chinatown too early. I stopped at a pizza stand. About twenty Chinese kids were standing around the few lucky enough to be perched on the high stool
s. They were devouring pizza-by-the-slice, like I used to get at the big Woolworth on Market Street, when my mother and Hackey and I would go downtown.

  I heard words like pepperoni and anchovy mixed in with the Chinese words in the restaurant. I also heard some choice four letter words of distinct Anglo-Saxon origin. A bad jukebox blasted the old tune, “Rock Around the Clock”—in Chinese. Never had I felt so conspicuously white, so I left.

  I passed an import shop with strange things in the window. There was a kind of white fungus that looked like lacy bones; in a bottle there was pickled ginseng root with alien-like tendrils dangling. A sign read GINSENG—SPIRIT OF YOUTH. Also in the window were meat cleavers.

  For a moment what I saw reflected in the window didn’t totally register, so I turned around to get a closer look. An old woman stood there with tears rolling down her face, pointing feebly at a young Chinese walking jauntily down the street.

  “He took my bag!” she wailed. “My Social Security, my keys, my Medicare card, my grandchildren. Everything.” People walked around her, paying no attention.

  I ran to catch up to the boy and tapped him on the shoulder. He spun around defiantly, and it was Chen. I should not have been surprised. “Give me the purse,” I ordered. I could see it bulging beneath his jacket. I pointed to it, but he kept walking as though he didn’t understand me. I grabbed his arm—I must have been crazy—while I clutched the poem folder in my teeth. The purse strap fell out of his jacket. I yanked it until I had the purse in my hands. Chen only smiled arrogantly, as if to say, “You win some, you lose some.”

  I scolded him furiously, not even thinking about how foolish I must have looked on that busy street. “How can you do this to a poor old woman? She could be your own grandmother. Old Man would be so ashamed of you!”

  Chen spread his hands in a gesture that said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He knew, of course.

  I returned the purse to the little woman and took her into the pizza place for a cup of tea. One of the boys slid off of his stool and helped the woman up onto it. I poked around for change in my pockets. The young man who worked behind the counter smiled kindly and said he wouldn’t charge the woman. She was too frightened even to say thank you. Warmed by the tea, she finally stopped shaking, so I left her there, no longer feeling so white in that place.