The Same River Twice: A Memoir

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The alarm clock buzzed at dawn. I fought exhaustion until the reason for such an early morning released enough adrenaline to melt dry ice. The outside air was dark as dusk. Rita’s preternatural eyes gleamed, anticipating relief. Maternity and paternity possessed the supremely differing points of view of a shaman and a televangelist, a proton and an electron, a quarterback and the football itself. Neither of us could eat breakfast. Mist from the river rose to blend with snow, the earth and sky mixing in air.

I held Rita’s arm as we walked to the car. The sun was beginning to rise, with the moon still hung in the west. I stood between the two companions of the planet, feeling the lure of each, the myth of both. Earth was the broker of life while the moon marked passage of time. I drove slowly, carefully. We didn’t speak. At the hospital an orderly whisked Rita away in a wheelchair, her belly leading the way. Fifteen minutes later a nurse pecked my shoulder.

“Are you the acting father for Mrs. Offutt’s child?”

“The husband.”

She frowned at her clipboard. “This way,” she said.

“What do you mean, acting father?”

“Birth coach.”

I followed her through an elaborate security system to the delivery room, where Rita lay connected to a coil of wires and cords. A blood pressure gauge wrapped her left arm. She wore a belt that monitored the fetus through electrodes fastened to her body. A machine charted contractions with a tiny stylus like a seismograph. The spindly IV dripped Pitocin, a hormone that would eventually trigger labor.

I asked the nurse about alternatives to Pitocin.

“Nipple stimulation sometimes helps but I’m afraid it’s two weeks too late.”

“You’re afraid?” I said.

From down the hall came an anguished howling. The nurse hurried away and I envisioned our neighbor having just seen the two-headed freak she’d emitted from her body. I pulled the deck of cards from our suitcase and offered Rita a cut. We played gin rummy and I won handily. Rita tried to doze. I left for a walk and discovered a herd of stark-eyed men biting lips, nails, and cuticles. One man twitched uncontrollably; another scratched his forearm with the methodic repetition of a lunatic. Conversation consisted of grunts and swallows. Eventually we were all driven away by a sweaty bastard who delivered a monologue on the three previous babies his wife had lost. If this one didn’t come, he was filing for divorce.

I visited the nursery, where eight babies were wrapped like mummies in transparent cribs. A tiny girl lay beneath heat lamps, and I recalled a psychology class field trip to a center for children abandoned to the state. Room after room contained naked idiots. At puberty they had to be taught to masturbate; otherwise they dry-humped furniture and smaller kids. The prize was a hydrocephalic nine-month-old with a head the size of a wheelbarrow, flattened by gravity from lying on its side. The four skull plates were clearly delineated as if floating beneath the surface.

I left quickly. Nurses were joking behind a low barricade that reminded me of a strip club’s protective bar. I wanted a drink. I settled beside Rita to read poetry but was unable to concentrate. While she slept, I took another tour of the labyrinth and peeked in the cesarean room, a regal chamber with the atmosphere of a scrubbed crypt. It was empty save for a shiny metal table beneath a giant bank of lights. In the waiting room I found a spy novel and moved through it with ease.

Four hours later Rita’s contractions increased and I was very hungry. The sandwiches we’d stored in the suitcase a month ago were moldy. While trying to aid her through latent labor, I felt more like a cheerleader than a coach. Mainly I wanted each thirty-second contraction to end so I’d have ten free minutes to read my thriller. A high-ranking official was suspected of being a mole and the protagonist had a gunshot wound in his upper thigh. Rita was moaning. Every half hour a nurse checked her cervical dilation and effacement.

Rita entered the second stage of active labor, and I couldn’t find my flashcards. She squirmed in pain. I was powerless and frustrated, capable only of holding her hand and counting to five as she thrust breath from her lungs in harsh increments. I called a friend and asked for food. An hour later a nurse brought in a duffel bag containing tuna on whole wheat and an airline bottle of whiskey. Between contractions, I ate the sandwich and promptly vomited into the bag, trying to conceal it from Rita. My sensitivity was wasted. She didn’t notice.

The second stage was running long and our doctor dropped by to increase the Pitocin from one drop per minute to two. She asked how I was doing, then patted me on the head. A nurse ran an electrode into Rita’s vagina and fastened it to the baby’s skull. Rita refused medication. She was determined to nurse her baby in a coherent manner immediately following birth. She breathed and grunted, expending more energy than a sumo wrestler. Her eyes stayed shut. I mopped sweat from her face and fed her slivers of ice dipped in juice. Time slid into an oblivion of one-minute cycles that reminded me of the hurricane — breath push rest, breath push rest. The computer graph peaked and troughed in a record of Rita’s work. The room faded into a bathysphere containing the two of us, connected at the palms. Later I learned she’d undergone hard labor for six hours.

Suddenly the room filled with medical personnel summoned by a machine at the nurses’ station. The monitor showed infant distress — each contraction was lowering the fetal heartbeat. A nurse shouldered me aside and dropped a hidden trapdoor in the bed between Rita’s legs. Someone placed a wide-mouthed bucket below. My mouth was dry. The cervix was dilated to the maximum of ten centimeters, fully effaced, soft as dough. A nurse brought a pair of giant gleaming salad tongs on a steel tray. The doctor inserted one, then the other, clipped them together at the handle, and began maneuvering them by feel and memory. Everyone’s brow was wet. I could do nothing but wipe Rita’s face and hold her hand.

The doctor called for a specialist, a jolly fellow with massive forearms. He ran the forceps in and strained until his knuckles whitened, shifted his body slightly, and removed the slimy instruments. He nodded to our doctor and strode away. I imagined a baby with a head shaped like an hourglass. Everyone began talking at once. The doctor crouched in a three-point stance between Rita’s legs and shouted, “Push it out, push it out!” Liquid splatted into the metal bowl.

“Crowning,” a nurse said. “It’s crowning.”

“Heartbeat down,” said another.

“Fetal distress.”

“Episiotomy.”

“Cord around its neck. Cord around its neck.”

I glanced down and saw a dark red sphere emerging from Rita’s abdomen. She was shrieking, I turned my head.

“It’s gone, it’s gone.”

I looked back and what had been the baby’s head had indeed disappeared, sucked back inside. Everyone was yelling instructions. I leaned to Rita’s ear and murmured words that emerged as gibberish.

“Here it comes,” the doctor said. “Crowning, crowning.”

Again I saw the head appear like a turtle’s from a shell, then retreat.

“Danger of asphyxiation.”

“Prepare for cesarean.”

“It’s coming back.”

“Push! Push! Push!”

Through the terror and intensity of the moment, I felt an odd respect for the fetus. After being squeezed through a tight tunnel for a quick view, it had opted for return, prolonging the safety of darkness and food. It was certainly my kid.

“Episiotomy, quick.”

“It’s tearing, it’s tearing.”

“Push, push, push. Here it comes.”

“Good good good good good good.”

Its face emerged in profile between Rita’s legs. Circled around its neck was a pale fleshy cord like a snake. The doctor cut the umbilicus, which flipped onto Rita’s stomach as if sentient and alive, settling slowly into her deflating skin. From the vicinity of her pelvis came a strangled sound.

“There it is!”

“It’s out! It’s out!”

The doctor placed a wet mounded lump on Rita’s stomach, aimed at her breasts. The baby didn’t look like what the books had described. There was no cheesy substance, and the head wasn’t elongated. The thing was gray and wrinkled as old meat. It didn’t move. In that moment, I was sure that it was dead.

“My baby,” Rita said. “My baby, my baby.”

A tubular arm wiggled from beneath its head and stretched into the air, bending at the elbow, tiny fingers moving in a clutching motion. Just as quickly, the arm retracted. I leaned closer-no tail, a full head of dark, bloody hair. It looked like an Aleut after a vicious alley fight, with puffy eyes and scuff marks on its cheeks. The hands were fisted at the ready.

“Boy,” said a nurse. “It’s a boy.”

She scooted him forward and guided his mouth to Rita’s nipple.

“Sutures,” the doctor said. “Bring extra fast.”

A nurse gathered the baby and carried it to the far side of the room. She weighed him, measured his length like a fish, and ran her fingers in his mouth.

“Good palate,” she called. “All ten fingers and toes. Nine on the Apgar.” She turned to me. “Watch this.”

She held him beneath his armpits and slowly lowered his feet until they touched the surface of a sterile table. A leg lifted in an immediate step.

“Only humans do that at birth,” she said. “It’s my favorite part.”

She laid him on the table, rolled him in a blanket like a burrito, and offered him to me.

“He can’t be with the mother while she’s having surgery,” she said. “It wouldn’t be safe.”

I took him stiffly and we stared at each other. His eyes were deep blue, his hands gigantic. A cleft in his chin astounded me. I identified myself and welcomed him. He’d become pink but remained quite mute, his vision locked to mine. It occurred to me that he knew mysterious things. I could see an awareness that was at once exhilarating and frightening. I wanted him to speak, to tell me everything. What he’d just experienced was fresh in his mind, soon to be buried except for nightmares. We stared for many minutes, passing unknown information back and forth through the conduit of his initial sight. I cried and sang to him. Nine months of fear spiraled away. His birth was my rebirth. Paternal terror was simply ignorance. The baby knew everything there was to know.

I became aware of an eerie high-pitched moan, a battlefield keening. The doctor sat on a stool between Rita’s legs. Rita writhed on her back, head swinging side to side, her hair a constant dark motion. Two nurses held her arms. For an hour she moaned, receiving ninety-four stitches. At the last second of birth our baby had lowered his shoulder and forced his way into the strange world of light and space.

I carried him to his mother but Rita was in a private zone of pain and joy. The nurse motioned me away. I made the mistake of checking the doctor’s work. Her smock was bright red, the sewing finally complete. The doctor dipped her hands into the bucket and lifted what appeared to be a plastic dry-cleaning bag. She turned it inside out, gauging viscosity and content. I thought of augury, of pagan belief in the potency of the amnion. Satisfied, the doctor dropped it and red water splashed the floor. My knees felt weak and I was very scared of dropping the baby. I imagined my arms to be iron bars.

A nurse took the baby and presented it to Rita, She was cooing like an animal. I dug through the duffel bag and drained the tiny bottle of emergency whiskey. I sat in a chair, staring at the living symbol of life, Isis and Ra, woman and child.

The doctor reappeared in fresh clothes. A nurse sponged Rita and draped her in a clean gown. Everyone was smiling. Another nurse asked me his name. Over the sound of conversation came the baby’s cry. Rita’s nipple had slipped askew. She adjusted it and everyone listened to the baby’s quick breath, the suckling sound, the tiny mewing of life.