“I can hear the baby’s heartbeat.” There came a pause before Miss Cynthia asked, “Do you know how much weight you’ve gained?”
Shaking her head, Justine opened her eyes and saw the woman making notations in a small pad. “No. The last time I was weighed in gym class, I was one hundred twelve pounds.”
“There’s no doubt you weigh more than that now. How’s your appetite?”
“It’s good. I’m eating more now than I was before becoming pregnant.”
“What about nausea?”
“I threw up a few times a couple of weeks after I’d missed my period, but nothing now.”
“That’s good,” the midwife said. She removed a tape measure from the bag and slipped it around Justine’s waist. “Even though you’re not showing, I would like for you to eat five small meals each day instead of three big ones. That will help to keep you from feeling faint and lightheaded. Stay away from spicy foods that tend to give impending mothers heartburn. And I’m talking about putting hot sauce on your greens, fried chicken, or fish.”
Justine wanted to tell the woman she didn’t like hot sauce but decided not to let her know that. Since moving into the apartment, she hadn’t fried fish, chicken, or pork chops, but had put them in the oven, because she didn’t want the apartment to smell like fried foods. Maybe when the weather waswarmer, she would be able to open windows to get rid of the smell, and then she would resort to frying her favorite meats. She’d learned one thing from throwing up. It was that smells triggered her nausea.
“It’s not going to be long before you feel the baby move, so that’s when you’ll realize there is something alive inside of you.”
“Will it be moving a lot?” Justine asked.
“It all depends,” Miss Cynthia said. “Some babies are very active. You probably will notice movement more when you’re resting. I’m going to come back again the last Saturday in March to check your progress. Hopefully by then, you will have put on more weight. You don’t want to deliver an underweight baby where it would have to stay in the hospital until it gains enough weight before it can be discharged.”
Justine wanted to laugh in the woman’s face. It wouldn’t matter how much the baby weighed, because it wasn’t coming home with her. Once she delivered the little boy or girl, the charade would end, while she’d consciously not thought of the child growing inside her as her baby. She wanted no attachment to it, and that meant refusing to look at it once it was born.
Miss Cynthia reached into her bag and removed an envelope, leaving it on the bedside table. “Are you drinking milk?”
Justine nodded. “Yes. The milkman delivers several bottles every week.”
The midwife smiled for the first time. “Good, because you need the added calcium.”
Justine wondered if the woman knew Mrs. Crawford had taken her to her husband’s dental office to have her teeth checked once her pregnancy was confirmed. It was as if Lillian wanted the host carrying her grandchild to be as healthy as possible.
Miss Cynthia returned everything to her bag, walked out of the bedroom, and out of the apartment before Justine was able to put on her clothes. She picked up the envelope andopened it. Tucked inside it was five ten-dollar bills. Justine didn’t know if she would receive fifty dollars each month. If she did, then it would be an additional two hundred and fifty dollars on top of the seventy-five she’d been given before. She would be given a total of three-hundred twenty-five dollars in cash before giving birth, and once the baby was born, the monthly payments would stop. However, she would continue to live rent-free in the apartment until the end of June 1953.
Precious and her mother sought to offset their treachery by bribing her, but Justine knew there would come a time when both women would pay for their wickedness.
Winter had loosened its grip on the Northeast, as spring came early with warmer temperatures and longer days of bright sunshine. Justine felt more alive than she had in a while and was looking forward to delivering the baby so she could get on with her life.
She’d learned to type more than sixty words a minute, take dictation, and then transcribe it all perfectly. Once Justine had finished all of her coursework with high marks, the director of the school told her she could recommend placement for her at a number of companies looking for a competent secretary, but Justine knew she had disappointed the woman once she revealed she was pregnant and wouldn’t be able to accept any position until the end of the summer. She thanked her and said she had her business card and would contact her once she had the baby and was ready to join the workforce. She’d completed the six weeks of coursework at the secretarial school, confident that she would be able to secure a position in an office that needed a typist and stenographer.
Justine had made two purchases that she thought essential: a secondhand sewing machine and typewriter. She would need the typewriter to type her papers once she enrolled in college, and the sewing machine had proven more than useful once she’d learned to follow a pattern to make blouses and smocks to camouflage her expanding middle. There were times whenit was almost impossible to detect that she was carrying a baby. Justine also saved money by not buying lunch when attending classes, because she heated leftovers and filled a thermos with what she would eat during her break.
Miss Cynthia came like clockwork every last Saturday of the month to check on her. She was pleased that her belly was getting bigger and appeared almost gleeful when Justine told her that she’d felt the baby moving. Movement was more apparent whenever she was in bed at night. It was as if the baby were doing somersaults, wanting to come out sooner than its expected due date.
It was obvious the baby knew more than Justine, the midwife, or a doctor, because she began experiencing labor pains in late May. They began intermittently one morning, subsided, then started up again in the afternoon. It was early the following morning when she’d gone into the bathroom to relieve herself because of the intense pressure on her bladder that water gushed into the toilet bowl, and Justine realized it just wasn’t urine but that her water had broken.
Reaching for a towel, she shoved it in between her legs as she made it back to the bedroom and called the midwife, telling her that she was in labor. A pain ripped through her body seconds after she hung up. Biting down, she tasted blood where her teeth had cut her lip.
It seemed like hours, but it was only thirty minutes later when the midwife stood over her. She’d asked Justine for a key to the apartment so that she could make a duplicate in case she needed access to the apartment if there was an emergency, and going into labor a month early was definitely an emergency.
The pains were coming faster, harder, and Justine prayed for the baby to be born so they would stop. She felt Miss Cynthia roll her over on the bed, cover it with a rubber sheet, and roll her back before removing her underwear and inserting a hand into her vagina.
“You’re fully dilated. It’s too late to get you to the hospital, so I’m going to have to deliver the baby here.”
Justine lost track of how long she’d been in labor as the pains came and went. The midwife sat next to the bed, monitoring her progress. Seconds ticked into minutes before Miss Cynthia got up.
Standing at the foot of the bed, Miss Cynthia rested a hand on Justine’s swollen belly. “I want you to listen to me carefully. When I tell you to push, then you push as if you’re having a bowel movement.”
Justine nodded; she was in too much pain to speak, and she was unable to stop the tears streaming down her face. There came another shooting pain that felt as if she were being ripped in two. Then she began to pray, asking for forgiveness for cursing the baby inside her. It was because of what she’d said about carrying the devil’s spawn that she was going to die during childbirth. The pains were coming faster and faster, overlapping one after another until Justine felt herself slipping away, and she heard the command telling her to push. She pushed again, and that’s when she heard a baby crying. Miss Cynthia had slapped its behind before suctioning mucus from its nose.
