[At the reading, I left out a few paragraphs that I thought were too dense and too hard to hear. Maybe I just didn't want to alientate people....anyway, they're starred here.]
This first long excerpt is from Tahija Elison's in-progress autobiography, "My Life as I Know It"
It was a calm night. I felt as if I didn’t have a worry in the world. I was sitting on my bed reading a book when all of a sudden I began to get sharp pains in the middle of my stomach. I couldn’t imagine what was going on and why I had the pain. I waited for about twenty minutes but the pain was still there it was a constant pain and it made me begin to worry, being as I was five and a half months pregnant I began to not only worry I began to actually panic. I was thinking to myself, why was this happening. It was too early for this to be happening. Was there in fact something wrong. I quickly ran to the bathroom to see if there was any change in my body that I could see, but there was none. I then quickly called the hospital and they said for me to come into the emergency room right away. If I wasn’t afraid before I was surely afraid now not knowing what would happen next. The whole way to the hospital I was thinking, is it something wrong with me or is this a normal situation for someone in my shoes. You see I had never been in these shoes before. All of this was new to me so I was very confused and most of all scared.
The panic I was in when we got to the hospital. First they made me wait until the doctor could see me which seemed like forever, but was actually a few moments. I guess when you are afraid you lose track of time minutes begin to feel like hours and one hour seems like three. The thought of not knowing what was wrong with my babies began to make me feel sick with fear. All of the emotions that were coming over me were starting to overwhelm me. I had to know what was wrong and why.
--Tahija Ellison
Chapter 8
One night when Kaki and I were out for the evening Tahija began having pains. Lamarr was with her, and when the pain didn’t quit they phoned the emergency room and were told to come in. They took a taxi. It was false labor, but the ER doctor decided to admit her. Hospital bed-rest had begun.
When I found her room, Tahija said, not looking up from combing out her hair,
“Now what I’m supposed to do in this bed all day, Kathryn?”
“Complain, like you been doing,” I said, coming in. She had a single room with a big window looking out on another wing’s windows.
“And I can’t hardly move without those going off.”
She flicked her comb at three fetal heart monitors stacked like stereo equipment beside the bed. Sheets of continuous-feed paper zeet-zeeted out the backs and wires ran from the fronts to three belts around her belly. Each monitor beeped steadily, but no two beeped in sync, with the effect of a continuous stream of sound, like an oboe holding a high off-pitch note.
“I don’t know how you can sleep,” I said.
“I can’t, that’s just it. Something truly wrong with these people if they think I’m — “
“Hey, you named them.”
“They been had names,” she said.
On each monitor was a strip of masking tape with a name printed across it in black magic marker. Damear, Mahad, Lamarr. I tried pronouncing them.
“Not Duh,” she corrected me, “Dah” — a tired feet hitting hot water type ah.
“Damear.”
“No, Damear.”
“Okay, second syllable stressed. So the next is Mahad?”
“Close.”
She was sitting up on top of the covers, bunched pillows at her back. She had on her Stop the Violence t-shirt, the gray sweat pants, new striped socks. She scooped hair grease from a jar at her side. Her hair reached about six inches out from the top and sides of her head. Braiding it in front of me was either an unavoidable necessity or a show of trust. Of all her passingly Muslim girlfriends, Tahija was the most serious about covering — she occasionally wore even a nekob, or face veil. And here I’d come upon her with her hands up in her hair and she hadn’t missed a beat.
"So how do you decide who gets which name?”
“Okay whoever is born first, he’s Damear,” she said, head to the side, braiding fast along one strand, eyes half closed, “second, he’s Mahad, like that.”
“You going to call Lamarr Junior?”
“Better not call no son of mine Junior.”
If it wasn’t himself, walking in with a cheesesteak for two. Lamarr had schmoozed the staff into letting him sleep over in the room the night before, and appeared to be ready to hold vigil until the births, which was a good thing, given Tahija’s needle phobia. If any shots were going to happen, Lamarr had to be there.
He set his tape player on the top monitor (Damear) and sat in the one chair. I was glad to see him in a quilted shirt. I’d been wondering just how cold it had to get before a coat of some kind appeared, then I figured it out: the number concerned wasn’t in degrees, but dollars.
“How’s the telemarketing going?” I asked.
“Going great,” he said. “They walked a new client through today checking us out, like we were race horses or something. Credit card insurance. If he signs we’ll have full-time for like a month.”
I pictured the converted factory Lamarr had described: cafeteria-style tables crowded with back-to-back computers. Oddly, there were no phones. The computers dialed, moving through databases like mowers through a field. You heard a click in your headset, then a voice, often wary (they’d heard the click too), and in you jumped: icy water all day.
Reaching for her half of the cheesesteak, Tahija set off one of the monitors — a hard-edged eeeee that brought a nurse running. The nurse moved Damear’s sensor around Tahija’s belly until the mislaid heartbeat sounded again.
If it had not been a false alarm and one of the three hearts had stopped, Tahija would have been rushed to the operating room for a dangerously early c-section.
“See, I can’t hardly move,” Tahija said. “And I sure can’t use . . . that thing.”
“The bed pan? Why not?”
“I just can’t.”
“Look, I’ll show you how,” I said, moving toward it.
Her laughing caused Mahad’s belt to slip, setting the middle monitor off. Lamarr did as the nurse had, then leaned in close to say,
“Mahad, get back where you supposed to be!” Sure enough, before the alarm reeled in any staff, it quit. “Better mind me,” the father-to-be said, pulling Tahija’s shirt back down.
“The only one not starting trouble is Junior,” Tahija said.
“Don’t call him Junior,” Lamarr said, eyebrows in a Mr. Spock V.
“I’ll call him what I want to call him, long as he not big-headed like you.”
Thus began the repartee that used to sound to me like bickering, but which I heard now as flirting. A good time for me to leave.
<<>><<>>
Hearts beating inside their mother, father’s voice a sonar through the amnion . . . as it should be. But other things were not as they should be. Tahija worried her children would be taken by the state as soon as they were born — stork morphed into hawk. For her and Lamarr, as for many poor families, the circling hawk was a fact of life. Because they were so young, fifteen and sixteen, and not in the care of their parents, and because three babies were due, the Department of Human Services had been alerted as soon as Tahija entered the hospital. Soon after, a relative of Lamarr’s reported her as a runaway. Inquiries were made. One of her doctors reported that he hadn’t seen any parents visiting and he suspected she was homeless. This same doctor maintained, to her and to DHS, that she was too young to handle triplets. (Tahija learned about his efforts through a nurse who had been a teen mother herself and believed, she told Tahija, that she could do it.)
The hawk was circling.
*At twelve, Tahija had become stand-in mother to her two younger sisters and baby twin brothers. From a much earlier age Lamarr had had to scramble to keep utilities on and food in the house as his parents and other family moved from crisis to crisis. Both Tahija and Lamarr had endured evictions, had been without a dollar in the house or an egg in the refrigerator. Both of them more than once had kept DHS from removing siblings as the family life raft took one wave after another. It didn’t matter if supplies were so low the survivors were at each other’s throats. The raft was better than the frigid deep. The raft was better than the auction block.
*The auction block. Had it started there? Was their fear that old, inherited like Tahija’s overcrowded bottom teeth and Lamarr’s tensile brow from men and women who rarely saw their children grown, who left for the fields before dawn knowing that when they returned after dark one more of their loved ones might have been sold away? Not that their being there could have stopped it, not that strong arms encircling or voices beseeching or hearts breaking could have stopped it.
Though I could look back on my childhood and identify families, some quite close to home, whose children should have been removed by the state, I had not grown up in the shadow of the hawk. My parents and my friends’ parents had been presumed competent, even if proven otherwise. Tahija and Lamarr were presumed incompetent, and feared they were not going to be given the chance to prove otherwise.
Chapter 11
It was the start of her twenty-eighth week. Tahija was an Olympic marathoner approaching the stadium, a pilgrim nearing Mecca, a mother carrying children to term, or as close to term as anyone can carry three.
The night before the morning she went into labor she told Lamarr she felt sick. As he had most every other night of her long confinement, he slept on folded blankets on the floor. In the morning she felt the same, and told him he should cancel his breakfast appointment with Kaki. He didn’t though, and minutes after he left the room her water broke. She told the nurses to run after him, but he was gone. And so she was alone when the hospital social worker came with her briefcase and informed her, after verifying that she was the one expecting triplets, that an anonymous caller had reported her a runaway. DHS was opening a case.
Soon after the social worker left, around noon, the contractions began, and this time the shot that had been stopping them or at least slowing them down didn’t do anything. She paged Lamarr, but he didn’t call back. He always called her back. Lamarr calling her back was the one thing she could count on. She punched in the code that meant emergency. Still no call, and no Lamarr all big and smiling in the doorway.
She called his friends and told them page him, go find him, tell him come straight to the hospital. Then she called her cousin Mia, who lived close by, and told her, “Get yourself over here quick because I’m about to have these babies.”
<<>><<>>
Temples throbbing, womb clutching and unclutching as it had been doing now for days, she lay with eyes closed remembering scenes, images from her life. . . . Lamarr in the hallway at school, his smile, Lamarr throwing her cigarettes into the street, the feeling he gave her . . . the ocean at Wildwood, how light she felt with him, the waves lifting and settling them, lifting and settling, the music of the boardwalk, close yet far, the double ferris wheel tipping . . . and then farther back in time, turning the corner of her street and seeing — what? — some pick-up truck angled like an accident across the sidewalk, three strange men changing the locks on her house. Not even asking them, not having to ask what they were doing, knowing every last thing in the house would be forfeited for back rent, and no mother arriving all loud to rescue her oldest girl’s school clothes, her pictures, her journal, her video collection, the stuffed animals arranged just so on her bed. Homeless since then, now again. Though herself a home for three.
<<>><<>>
Lamarr was eating a ham and egg sandwich. Unaccountably, his faithful pager wasn’t working. Kaki sat across from him asking questions that she hoped would lead him toward more clarity about his future. Because it was his future, gosh darn it, and when was he going to wake up and smell the roses?
“Roses?”
“Appreciate life.”
“I appreciate it.”
“Do you appreciate the fact that you are about to become the father of three?”
“Yes.”
“Well what are your plans for the future?”
Lamarr’s future was a favored topic of Kaki’s. Her own father’s work ethic waited like bunched bulbs to be separated and shared. He had been a successful advertising executive. He’d raised two boys and two girls who’d gone to college and become successful in their own right — an engineer, a head nurse, a high-profile missionary, and Kaki, former middle-management executive with a 401k and some very nice suit sets to show for it. Kaki wanted Lamarr to be able to provide for his family, and long serious talks over food were somehow part of that. They talked about community college, about trade schools and training programs, about The Streets, as in — was he still running them, gambling with his life now that he was about to be a father?
Lamarr reminded her about his best friend Dimitri. Dimitri had been shot at close range, in the head. He spent most of a very long night dying.
“I sat with him,” Lamarr said.
“I know you did.”
“Sat with his mom after. I’m not about putting my mom through that.”
“I’m glad to hear it.”
<<>><<>>
She couldn’t hold them off any longer. As a nurse swabbed her belly purple she paged Lamarr one last time. Then they lifted her onto a gurney and the room that had grown smaller and smaller over the last weeks was suddenly behind her forever.
Down the corridor, past the room where the moaning woman had been, past the nurse’s station — “Good luck sweetie. You go girl. At last!” — then through another contraction to surgery and down a long, long hall, fast toward the No Admittance doors and through, into the bright lights of the operating theatre.
Mia appeared, out of breath, and received her instructions.
“Don’t look away, not once. You hear me?”
Mia nodded as a nurse fit a surgical gown over her arms.
“And make sure they’re taking pictures. Is somebody taking pictures?”
Somebody was.
“I want pictures of all this because if something goes wrong . . . Mia, you make sure they don’t leave nothing in me, like they did my mom. All right? Mia, you listening?”
Mia looked like she was going to faint. And there hadn’t even been any cutting yet.
<<>><<>>
As they were getting into her car, Kaki noticed that the month of cheesesteaks and cheesefries from the Deli across from the hospital had put some weight on Lamarr. Was he still working out? she asked. He wasn’t, he said, hadn’t had time. She suggested he start again soon. He said he thought he might.
<<>><<>>
Three female obstetricians prepped for surgery. One was from Turkey, one from China, one from New Jersey. Behind and beside the three female obstetricians stood three assisting nurses, and behind the three assisting nurses one three-person emergency post-natal team for each baby. That made fifteen doctors, nurses and technicians — all women, as Tahija had requested.
Only the anesthesiologist was a man. And he was useless anyway.
Scrubbed and prepped and ready to enter was the male doctor who had been saying for six weeks that she was too young to handle three. Well she was about to handle three, and he was about to miss his big chance to witness triplets being born — the first ever at Temple University Hospital — because she refused him admittance.
Mr. Useless gave her an epidural, which did not work. Might as well have been aspirin. She felt everything. Just like at the dentist, and did the dentist listen to her? No, he did not listen to her, either. Nobody paid her any mind, not even Lamarr. She should page him one more time because he always . . . and now . . . but. . . .
<<>><<>>
Lamarr Stevens strolled down the maternity ward hallway and turned into the room he’d been all but living in for six weeks. Then he bounced out like a handball and tore off down the hall.
“Straight down and left!” a nurse called after him. “She’s — “
<<>><<>>
She heard a doctor say, “I have the first one.”
At 1:55 PM, with Lamarr in full sprint, the name that had been on the top heart monitor settled like a butterfly onto the forehead of a healthy three-pound-eight-ounce boy. Damear, the oldest, though little Lamarr had made it nearly all the way down the birth canal and was crowning.
A nurse placed Damear beneath a heating lamp. Gloved hands reached in and lifted out Mahad, the smallest at three-pounds four-ounces. Meanwhile Lamarr, about to become big Lamarr, let them put a surgical gown on him and pushed through the crowd in time to see his namesake being pulled back from the birth canal and lifted out through a doorway he hadn’t even known was there. Little Lamarr, the big guy at three-pounds nine-ounces.
Of the births, Tahija wrote, “The happiest memory I have of being a mother is the first time I heard them cry, because the doctor told me that they might not cry because they were real premature and their lungs might not be developed enough. The second was when I held them in my arms at the same time. I knew they loved me just as much as I loved them from the little smirk they had on their face, like Joy I finally see who I was kicking all that time.”
I think this is my favorite scene to read, or a close tie with Mahddy defeating the mossy rock (0:
copyright E.K. Gordon 2009
