The baby—we didn’t yet think about him as someone with a name—was a week late, then more, then more, and when I went to the doctor’s office to lie down on her little cot with a view of the back garden and read decor magazines, the little monitor on my belly said, Nothing doing! So I went into the hospital and they put a little pill on my cervix and said, This is to soften your cervix. In the morning we’ll start the pitocin and then you’ll have a baby. I had gone into the hospital with a hilarious assortment of things, hoarded crossword puzzles and a mix-tape I had made years earlier to listen to while running, a book of Elizabeth Bishop poems for David to read to me, and bottles of water. Pillows, changes of clothes, a journal. One thing I didn’t have, though, was snacks, and as I lay there in the hospital and nothing really seemed to happen in the fifteen minutes after the pill was administered, David became hungry, so I said, Why not order a pizza?

He ran out and got his favorite pizza, which had breaded and fried eggplant on top. It smelled so good that I asked him if I could have a little bit. And it tasted so good that I had a little more. Then my contractions started.

Hmm. Maybe that eggplant pizza was an error.
Hmm. These crossword puzzles aren’t holding my interest like they used to.
Hmm. Could you please turn that fucking music off?

The pain was neither a hum nor a whine nor the beating of a drum, it was my whole body grinding into itself, breaking itself apart.

When they came to the door to see if I wanted an anesthesiologist, David said, as per our prelabor, earnest, hopeful discussions, that we were going to wait and see how things went, and I said, Get the nurse back and tell her I want the anesthesiologist right now. By the time the dapper male French anesthesiologist arrived, I was sitting in my old black camisole, pantsless, ready to do business. I leaned forward and he found the space between my vertebrae. We chitchatted a little. I lay down.

Then David and I entered the very nice period, during which we both dozed, on and off, and David read me some Bishop poems. He may have read “Little Exercise,” which starts:

Think of the storm roaming the sky uneasily
like a dog looking for a place to sleep in,
listen to it growling.

It’s not one of her saddest poems, not even close, but as David read, each word sounded like a bell whose tone grew deeper and sadder with each stroke. As I listened, I felt a kind of vertigo from the depth of sadness I was able to feel, as if I were standing at the edge of something, looking down, not seeing the bottom. At the end of the poem I said, It was beautiful, but it is too sad, and he put the book down.

The story continues. It can’t stop! The doctor came in, wearing a short red dress. More people came in, crowding the room. I left the room for another room. I remember even the hallway, I remember being wheeled through the hall. The blood, the pain, then, afterward, the bureaucratic calm—I remember it all, even though I’m not, for various reasons, going to tell you about it, now. This is the story that is closest to me, that is most part of me, even though you might think, reasonably enough, that this story belongs to someone else.