Asia hasn’t been outside for weeks. The air is an arctic blast in the lungs. The ground is too icy—if she fell she would never get up again. She would lie there like a turtle on its shell. And yet, inside the house, she sweats at night, the baby burning in her belly. She takes off her clothes and stands before the bedroom mirror. She can make out the shape of a foot, kicking out against her stretched skin. A dark line extends up from her navel. Shiny streaks of skin fan over her hips. Her nausea has never completely gone away and the only thing she can eat with any pleasure is flavored ice.
The Philadelphia house is larger than the one on Exeter Street, but it’s also older and darker. Sleeper has promised Asia a better house after the baby comes, something out in the country where a child can run. In the meantime, Asia spends much of her time in the only room downstairs that gets full sunlight in the morning. She lowers herself onto the sofa. It doesn’t seem possible that her stomach could swell so much without bursting.
She’s there, with a book she isn’t reading in her hand, listening to the fire eat itself in the fireplace when, for no obvious reason, she thinks of Hattie and is overwhelmed with dread. She rises and hoists herself up the stairs to the nursery. The preparation of blankets and toys and tiny clothes is something Asia would have expected to enjoy, but she’s left it mostly to Mother. In truth, she’s hardly been in this room. She pauses in the doorway, because Rosalie is already there, sitting in the window where the light is best, doing the uninspired but necessary sewing that a great many diapers require.
Rosalie looks up at Asia. “We’ll be ready when the baby comes,” she says and then she looks at Asia again. “Are you feeling all right?”
Since Asia first learned she was pregnant, she’s had many moments of joy and anticipation. She’s always loved babies. Won’t it be wonderful to have one of her very own? She pictures herself kissing a round knee, singing a lullaby, sleeping in a chair with the baby breathing softly against her shoulder. But her dreams have turned strange—birds underwater and fish in the air—and she startles awake several times a night gasping for breath. Sometimes these bouts of panic spread into the daylight and then keep on spreading, like a shadow that eventually consumes the figure that cast it.
She looks now at Rosalie, whose crooked back probably means she could never carry a child and anyway she’s too old and anyway who on earth would the father be? Asia wishes she were Rosalie now, crooked back and sad future and all. She’s always had such a calling to the convent. Goddamn Edwin anyway for making her marry.
Asia drops into the rocking chair and starts to rock. The wooden floor creaks beneath her. Outside the sky is a pale, grim gray. “Are you all right?” Rosalie asks again and Asia stops rocking by putting her feet down hard.
“I’m afraid I’ll die,” she says and then, realizing that her voice was so soft, Rosalie can’t possibly have heard, she says it louder. “I’m afraid I’m going to die. Don’t tell Mother.”
Two months back, she’d made a study of the gravestones in Father’s cemetery. She’d been methodical, one section at a time. Of course, not every woman who dies in her twenties or thirties dies in childbirth. Her mind is full of angels with frozen wings.
“I don’t want to die,” she says. She’s weeping now, which she didn’t expect, and it makes her cross. She was right to think this shouldn’t be said aloud. Now it sits in the chair beside her, now it starts the chair rocking again, now it has her by the throat.
She certainly hadn’t planned on telling Rosalie, but, here, she’s done it and really whom else could she have told? Not the boys—it would be almost cruel how ill-equipped they’d be. Not Jean, because she still wants Jean to envy her married state and join her in it. She needs the company.
Not Mother, who is surely suffering these same fears, as any mother would. Mother made John promise not to go to war because she couldn’t bear to lose him. Why didn’t she make Asia promise not to marry? Why does the extraordinary courage of ordinary women go so unsung? Asia would go to war in a minute. She’d come home with medals.
Rosalie puts down her hemming. “You were too little to remember John’s birth. Or Joe’s. But I remember them. Mother had ten babies and no problems. You’ll be exactly the same,” Rosalie says. She bites the thread off, knots it. Her hands are the most graceful thing about her. “I was just now remembering how you used to go flying down the roads on Fanny. Sidesaddle and faster than all the boys. I used to worry you’d break your neck. But nothing scares you.”
The two women look at one another. Then Rosalie stands and crosses the room. She puts her arms around Asia. They don’t often touch and this embrace can’t exactly be accomplished—Asia with her big belly, Rosalie with her Richard III spine, and the chair rocking spasmodically beneath them. It’s a hug made up of sharp elbows and stumbling. And yet, it’s all the nicer for the awkward unfamiliarity of it. She can feel Rosalie loving her, which is not a thing she often feels. The solace of having an older sister.
Rosalie’s cheek is lying on her hair. Rosalie smells of something almost like gin. “You are Asia Sidney Booth Clarke,” Rosalie says. “And nothing scares you.”
* * *
—
By the time she goes into labor, Asia’s more than ready to trade in the tiresome little aches and exhaustion for the Big Agony. A false alarm brings the nurse to stay for two days and then go away again. The doctor begins to call daily. Then one morning in late March, she wakes to a stabbing pain in the back of one shoulder. The pain moves down into her lower back, where it feels like a great spiked ball, levering her spine apart. It hurts so much she doesn’t even notice when her water breaks.
Joe goes for the doctor. Mother and Rosalie help her out of her soaking nightgown into a soft old one, move her to Mother’s bed, where the blankets are dry. Sitting is impossible; it even hurts to lie down. She tries one side and then the other, curled in agony around a pillow.
She’d been told that her labor, while painful, would be sporadic—there would be moments to rest between the waves. She’s aghast to find this was a lie—the back pain never lets up. It begins to twist, wringing her spine out like a dishrag.
The nurse comes first, followed shortly by the doctor. Everything is going splendidly, they say. Everything is just as it should be. The nurse forces Asia to get up and walk about the room. Asia is a knot of burning fury.
She lies down again. The doctor puts her on her back, palpitates her stomach. She has a moment of screaming wonder—I’ve never actually been in pain before, she thinks—and then all thoughts leave her mind.
The nurse gives Asia a tincture of opium. It has a curious effect—Asia splits in two. One of the Asias lifts up out of her body to watch the whole debacle from the ceiling, her body spread out and pawed over like a carcass at an autopsy. The other Asia is left behind to feel everything just as before.
Hours pass in hellish torment. The doctor leaves—the room, the house, the city? Asia doesn’t know. The floating Asia goes with him and sends no message back.
Night falls and the baby is no closer to being born than it was twelve hours ago. The doctor must have come back, because he’s leaning over Asia, explaining things to her. There are bread crumbs in his beard.