“It’s red!” I shouted in the delivery room, startling everyone in the place.
Dr. Goldstein, looking down and then up at me, surprised, then glancing over to my wife Manya, who mumbled curses at us in her delirium, joked lamely about a milkman.
We both looked down again at the round wet dome between her legs. Sure enough, the sticky matted hair was red. Red like Irish; carrots; or a nice red pepper coulis. I looked at my wife suspiciously; but this was no time to bring it up. She was pushing so hard, she had surpassed red and went on to this dark beet color that presaged the black scowl I was going to get when this was all over.
The culinary metaphors were apt, as Leonard (Dr. Goldstein) and I were discussing the osso bucco I had prepared that evening before coming over to the hospital, while Manya was struggling with the breathing techniques that I was supposed to help her with, but hadn’t mastered properly.
“The secret to the dish is the gremolata, you know, the chopped lemon zest and parsley that you put on just before serving.” Manya moaned again, and puffed her cheeks, blowing out air rhythmically, desperately. “Atta girl, that’s it!” I said encouragingly, and turned back to the doctor. “But the finale was the best, man, the Grand Marnier soufflé.” Leonard looked at me with an exquisitely pained, but knowing, expression, “Oh, yeah. Delish!” Manya shrieked at this point, “Get this fucking baby out.” She choked and coughed; Beth, the nurse, the only competent person in the room, took over and stuck her face directly in front of Manya’s, shouted “Breathe!”, and followed that with yet another version of rhythmic breathing, very uptempo now. Manya pushed some more.
Earlier that evening, Manya’s water had broken just as I was about to serve the soufflé, but she’s such a trouper she was willing to wait until we had finished. Jane and Michael Stern, the restaurant critics for the Hartford Courant, were over and we couldn’t disappoint them. After all, I had worked on this meal for days. They, of course, were terrified at the sight of what was happening around my dinner table; they only had a dog. And the baby was two weeks overdue. But we made it through to the coffee, and Manya said sweetly that maybe it was time for us to go to the hospital. We said our goodbyes to the Sterns, and I bundled Manya into our Pinto, the Ford Motor Company’s “Death Car of the Year.” It had started to snow heavily, and I was having doubts about how the evening was going to end.
I need not have worried. With a squirt, he slipped out of his mother at last, a boy, vigorously voicing his own gargled protest. The nurses bundled him off, grimly indicating that I was to follow, while Leonard worked on Manya. They proceeded to suction something out of his mouth. He had swallowed his own feces, a not uncommon occurrence, but it had to be dealt with promptly. It gave new meaning to one of the juvenile swears from my adolescence, “Eat shit!” As I waited and watched, the debts, obligations, expectations, commitments, the baggage of my life, all vanished in that brief instant, as he struggled for air and I rooted for the little guy to come through. Everything fell into place, [from the cats found in the backyard of a Philadelphia tenement, to an elderly, childless aunt telling me I should have children instead when one of those cats was run over, to my narcissistic mother telling me that our pregnancy made her sad], as though some sort of pre-ordained equilibrium had overtaken me, handing me the key to the rest of my life. Not ecstasy, no, just a place in the sun.
We never saw the Sterns again after that. Or Leonard. But the baby son grew and learned to make pretty good soufflés of his own.
