“No, it is.” Jess was silent for a moment. “Clara, this is a big deal. A huge thing. I’m worried you don’t really know what you’re asking.” She was warming to the idea. Clara knew she could persuade her.
“But I do know,” said Clara. “Will you consider it? Entertain the possibility?”
“I don’t think I’d be very useful,” Jess said.
Clara said, “I don’t even need you to be useful. I just need you to be you.”
THE WATER BIRTH
2015
“She did it,” Jess announced from Clara’s front porch. “She really did. I was there. I saw it.” She was on the phone to Adam just thirty-five minutes later. She had exited the scene along with the midwives, leaving Clara and Nick and the baby, the new family, alone. “I can’t believe it,” she kept saying to Adam, exhilarated by what she’d witnessed but also tired and stunned. She’d been convinced that having the baby at home was a terrible idea, that anything and everything would go wrong, especially given her friend’s track record. She couldn’t understand why Clara would be willing to risk everything, why she’d replace her high-risk OB-GYN with a midwife, playing fast and loose with life and death…but everything had gone according to plan.
Although there hadn’t actually been a plan—this had been the most exasperating point. “We’ll just take things as they come,” Clara had pronounced as Jess pressed her for details, wanting to know what she’d be expected to do. Clara said she didn’t want her to do anything, she just wanted her there, but this made Jess uneasy; when her kids were born,during the worst of it, she’d hated every person in sight for their powerlessness to take away her pain.
“And I had an epidural,” she underlined during their back-and-forths weeks before the birth, giving Clara another reason to reconsider her cockamamie idea. (According to the midwife, it wasn’t a plan but avision: “You have to be able to see something in your mind to make it so.”)
But Clara was undeterred by Jess’s doubts and protests. “You’ve got wisdom and experience,” she said. “I need you to share that with me.”
“Well, can I share it now?” Jess responded. “Because I remember what labour was like, when it felt like my pelvis was being shattered, and my vagina was on fire. Is that enough? Do you want more details?” But Clara shook her head, raising her hand to make her stop. Clara was doing hypno-birthing meditations. Everything else was just noise.
So Jess went along with it. She was squeamish about the details, but she was going to be there because Clara needed her.
Nick called her after dinner one night in the middle of May to say it was finally happening, could she come, so she kissed Adam and the kids goodbye and headed downtown, taking transit because she didn’t want to worry about parking, and who knew how long it was going to take? She felt she was setting off into the unknown, which was something she rarely felt these days. Adam had assured her that they’d do just fine without her, crossing his fingers that it wouldn’t take days and days.
Clara was standing in the kitchen stirring batter for a cake, wearing nothing but a T-shirt that wasn’t long enough, her thighs mottled with cellulite, the hair between her legs and down her thighs thick and impossible not to stare at, butClara wasn’t attentive to such details. She didn’t seem to care about anything except stirring the batter and taking deep breaths, most of the time with her eyes shut. She acknowledged Jess’s arrival with a nod and stopped stirring. Then she placed a hand on her belly and breathed deeply again. “Born Slippy” by Underworld was playing on the stereo. Nick and Clara still had CDs.
The kitchen opened onto the living room, where the pool was already set up and lined with garbage bags and being filled with a hose connected to the sink. Nick was watching TV with the sound off. He got up to greet Jess and whispered, “It’s happening.” He was nervous, she could see it. Normally he was a consummate host, in strong possession of himself and his home, but he didn’t know how to behave right now. “She’s doing okay,” he told her. “She wants her space.”
Clara was stirring again, swaying. The midwives were in the garden and Nick had turned the music down, Clara’s moaning loud against it, like the lowing of a cow. She was bent over the counter, her hands braced against the edge.
“Darlin’?” Nick called, but Clara waved him away. “She’s going to bake that cake,” he muttered to Jess. “I told her we didn’t need to have a cake, but she insists. She read about it in a book. And she’s never going to get it done because she keeps putting down the spoon and leaning over and moaning.”
“Shut up, Nick,” called Clara from the kitchen, through clenched teeth.
“Are you sure it’s all right that I’m here?” Jess asked him, now in even lower tones. They ducked into the hallway.
“If it wasn’t, you’d know it,” he reassured her. “Get ready though, she’s going to turn on the cooker. As if it wasn’t hot enough already.” The temperature outside already felt like summer.
The song ended in an explosion of drums and noise, and then immediately started playing again.
“She’s got it on repeat,” said Nick. “Don’t even mention it.”
“She’s doing okay?” Jess asked as they watched Clara, who was upright again and stirring the batter to the rhythm of the song, as though she were under a spell.
He said, shaking his head, “She’s amazing.”
—
Jess remembered her own early labour lasting two days, contractions coming on strong in the evening and fading away during the day. Eventually she went to the hospital to be induced. She’d been ready for a similar lack of progress with Clara, but everything was unfolding at an even rate, one thing leading to another. Jess’s main job was not to forget the cake in the oven; the baking smell was meant to fill the air while Clara laboured.
When the midwives declared Clara’s contractions sufficiently strong and close, they permitted her to finally get in the pool. Her relief was immediate. Her eyes were open again and she was smiling, riding her pain, going with it. It was incredible to witness the way she was present yet not present, the way she went so deep inside her brain that the pain of her contractions was a distant thing, something to roll with rather than fight.
Jess had even thought it might be boring, watching and waiting, but there was momentum even when it seemed like nothing was happening. Clara’s lumbering body was efficient, and Jess thought back to the advice she’d been given when she was in labour—Your body knows exactly what to do—words that hadn’t been even vaguely true. Watching Clara now, however, she could see how it worked. Jess understood the physiology—the contractions that open the cervixto let the baby pass through, and the stronger ones that get the baby moving—and now, before her eyes, it all was unfolding, fascinating, and oddly outside of time.
Eventually one of the midwives got in the pool with Clara, and then Nick too in his shorts, and they were all so focussed that Jess didn’t even feel weird at the sight of her friend’s husband’s baggy chest and the grey hair that covered his shoulders. Clara wanted people around her now, and so Nick sat behind her and held her, whispering encouragement in her ear, kissing her hair. And Jess sat just outside the tub, Clara squeezing her hand, the force of her grip the only thing revealing the intensity at the heart of her calm. She was here. This was happening. Jess had never felt so much a part of anything so far outside herself.
The cake was ready shortly before Clara started to push. Jess pried her fingers free and got up to remove it from the oven, surprised to see that she was dripping with sweat. She couldn’t find oven mitts, so she used a dish towel to pull the pan from the oven, burning her thumb in the process. “Ouch,” she said to herself, and put her thumb in her mouth. She picked up a knife from the dish rack to test the cake—the knife came out clean. Done. It smelled like cloves, apples, and molasses. She turned the oven off.
