We are not lemons by Chelsey Grasso

Selma June had come to town. In Lindburg, Kansas, that was as good as it was ever going to get. They held the lecture in the public library, where I had been shelving and reshelving books for sixteen years. And there, with a backdrop of typed decimals and laminated bindings, Selma June taught our women how to have a baby.

It’s all about the oxytocin she told them. Mood goes up, labor pains go down. She was dressed in wide-legged trousers and a fitted blazer that made her look like she was somebody that had the right to talk. She had gotten into midwifery because of her distaste for forceps. The claw, as she called it, had been used on her during her own delivery over forty years prior. She shuddered a little as she recounted the cool metal being shoved between her legs and emerging with what looked like a slimy cantaloupe. She spoke to a room full of mostly fertile women. They shuddered too. We, she told them, are the only species of mammal that can doubt our capacity to give birth. Our bodies are not lemons. We are not lemons. The women nodded ferociously.

Selma June drew a circle on the dusty chalkboard I had forgotten to clean that morning. The women drew circles in their notebooks and looked up expectantly. This, she said, is not a ring of fire. This, she said, is the circle of life. Some of the ladies gave sighs of revelation. I clenched my thighs.

What are some things you can do to calm your body when the baby is on its way, she asked. How can you learn to enjoy the crowning, not fear it? Anna, Bernie, and Clarice, members of my weekly book club, raised their hands. Selma June answered the question herself. Massages, up there and down there. Walking the halls. Dancing! Taking a bath. Did you know there is a region in Spain where all the expectant mothers travel to the coast to give birth in the Mediterranean Sea?

After the talk, Selma June signed a few dozen books, buttoned up her blazer, touched her palms together, and bowed. Then she was gone.

For weeks afterwards the women of Lindburg wouldn’t stop talking about Selma June. They told their husbands from across a casserole-covered dinner table. They monopolized the conversation on their lunch breaks around the water cooler. They gossiped about it from across stalls before thanking the pastor on their way out of church. They checked out all of Selma June’s books from the library.

When the waiting list became too unreasonable, I had to start moving names around depending on how pregnant the women on the waitlist were. It’s only logical, I told the women who were only just trying to conceive, not yet carrying anything in their uteruses. But no matter how fairly I tried to disperse our copies and organize the waitlist, the women still kept coming up to my desk asking, begging, for Selma June’s book. They got aggressive as the weeks passed on. They accused me of secretly hoarding the books. Look at my belly, I told them. Does it look like anything more than a belly to you? At this they merely huffed and disappeared into the stacks, probably to misplace a book or two.

After a second shipment came in, my book club finally got their hands on seven copies of her birthing guide, A Fearless Birth; and the reverence for the midwife was ignited in tenfold.

Selma June said not to eat during labor, Anna pointed out when Bernie said she was planning on sucking down a chocolate milkshake as soon as her water broke. Clarice rebutted that Selma June said they could eat, and more importantly, should eat. Daniella said it depended on where you were giving birth. Eloise was planning on a water birth. They all sighed as they remembered Selma June’s story of the Spanish women who traveled to the sea. They all longed. Flora said she would give anything to move to Madrid. Geraldine agreed. I was quiet during this entire conversation, mostly because these round, beautiful women overwhelmed me. What was it to grow a human inside your belly and not be worshipped? Oh, but they were worshipped. They had doors opened for them, seats given up on the bus. They got their feet massaged and jar after jar of bread and butters delivered to them in the middle of the night by their husbands.

My husband, before he left, had said he wanted five of them. Five is a big number, though they say it’s easier to get them out after the first one. After the first, they say, it’s a piece of cake. A slice of bologna. A single push.

In the book club I opened my mouth and then shut it.

The women kept reminiscing about Selma June, arguing over her wisdom. Athena and Aphrodite rolled into one fitted pantsuit.

I opened my mouth again.

You don’t need to live in Madrid to give birth in the ocean, I told the room of women. They looked at me funny.

Geraldine said that wasn’t her point. That it was about more than giving birth in an ocean. That it was about a lot more.

You can have a communal birthplace here too, I said. A water birth.

We’re not talking about the Frisbee Breton Birthing Center forty miles south in Salina, Clarice responded.

I don’t know what made me say it, but I did: You know, I was a midwife before I became a librarian.

Really? said Eloise. Really, I said. Not really, I didn’t say.

The women were silent. Bernie flipped to the middle of A Fearless Birth. So what are you supposed to do when the baby is in a breech position, she asked me.

You have the mother get up and walk around, I told her. Shimmy a little.

Bernie looked down at the book, then up at the other women. She told them I was right. What Bernie didn’t know was that I had snuck a copy of Selma June’s book to myself weeks earlier. That I had read the book thirteen times.

Wow — our very own Selma June, said Anna. Lindburg has our very own Selma June.

I stood up.

So as I was saying, I told the women. You don’t need to be in Spain to give birth together. In fact, Lindburg has just the place. Their eyes widened. Besides, what do you think the women in Central Spain do when they have to give birth? Daniella and Eloise raised their hands. I answered my own question. They can’t trek it to the Mediterranean. Oh no, there’s another way. Show up in your suits at the Lindburg community pool tomorrow morning ready to work.

Work on what? Geraldine asked.

On a fearless birth.

§

The first time we met it was just those seven women. Clarice and Flora weren’t even pregnant yet, but they wanted to be prepared. I had them get into the lukewarm pool and stand in the center holding hands. I stayed on the periphery, dry on the concrete. Each woman was made to tell their biggest fear.

That it will hurt.
That it will get stuck.
That it will be feet first.
The ring of fire.
That I won’t love it.
That I won’t have one.
That something will be wrong.

There, I said. Now you’ve said it, forget it. The women stared at me.

They weren’t buying it.

Listen, I told them. Listen, I said. Remember what Selma June told us. Giving birth is what the body is meant to do. And the secret? The secret is not to fear it. The secret is to embrace it. To celebrate it. To worship it, really.

With that I looked down at the women standing awkwardly in the pool and had them disband. Limber up, I told them, and they began awkwardly stretching their limbs beneath the water. Like a football team made up of all the last picks, they reached for their toes, twisted their torsos from side to side.

After a minute of shuffling, I blew my whistle. Taught them how to squat. How to do pelvic tilts. I even had them lift their knees, one at a time, up to their chests. Every thirty seconds, I had them change positions. I wanted them lithe. When at last they learned to trust me, which I could tell by the way they stopped hesitating to move their bodies in the ways that I told them, I directed them to squat and reach down between their legs. That is how you’re going to pull the baby out, I said. Practice it.

And they did. They reached beneath the water and raised up in their seven sets of arms seven non-existent babies. They cooed at the space between their hands and Flora even spun hers around above her head.

I blew my whistle and they all turned to look at me, their arms still lifted above the pool.

Good, I told them. You’re going to be great mothers, I said.

§

You’re going to be a great mother, he had said to me. I was still digesting the fact that it was five that he wanted. My body, a warehouse.

After three months, I tracked the calendar. After six, I changed my diet. After nine, I stopped running. After twelve, I saw the doctor. After fifteen, he was gone. Scarring is what the test results showed. As if there had been something living inside me at one point, scratching to get out, but there never was.

§

After only a few months, word got around town, and the pool became so popular that I had to limit participants to those seven months along or further. “Third Trimesters Only” it read on a paper sign outside the chain link fence that surrounded the pool so pumped with chlorine that it sparkled like a giant green peridot.

We met every Tuesday. When the women arrived they stripped down to their suits, now twenty-four of them, because that was how many would fit into the pool. The furthest along would take the most time, leaning on each other as they pushed their pants down to their ankles, grabbing an elbow for support while they kicked off each pant leg.. Some of them wore polka dots, some of them wore stripes. Many of them wore yellow. They were a circus of flashy balloons and gaudy beach balls.

The split between one-piece suits and bikinis was not evenly balanced. A majority of the soon-to-be-moms, expectedly, wore one-pieces, covering up their stretching stomachs with shimmering polyester that strained over their soon-to-be-babies. But there were a few, mostly the younger ones, that flaunted their bulge in two-piece suits. Some of the women commended them for being so bold. Some of them raised their eyebrows. Some of them gave dirty looks behind their bikini-stringed backs. But I? I thought they were all beautiful, even the ones that didn’t think so themselves.

With the women all suited up, I blew my whistle and rushed the herd into the water. No time for dawdling, I said. There’ll be no time for that when the baby’s coming. In, in, in you go. And the two dozen women would race into the water, sending waves splashing over the edges onto the grey cement. The pool didn’t have a deep-end. It was a steady four feet from one end to the other, which meant that the women could parade around all four edges without having to swim. This is how I directed them, eventually forming a long band that circled the inner perimeter of the pool like a conga line. After ten minutes of this I stopped them and told them to stand in place while they practiced their breathing exercises. Hee-hee-hoos filled the pool.

They needed me. I was their Selma June, and they were mine.

Next, I made them float on their backs. It was a spectacle. Mounds of lycra drifted on the surface of the water. Sometimes they bumped into each other. Sometimes they got stuck in a corner and had to be fished out with the pool net. A few of the women had trouble letting go. They would continually crane their necks and lift their heads from the water, jostling their weight and flipping themselves over again and again. Relax, I told them. If you can’t relax now, you’re not going to be able to relax when the baby’s on its way. And if you can’t relax when the baby’s on its way, then it might mean the claw for you. Saying this only made the women tip over more. Listen to me, I shouted at the most stubborn of them. I can get you through this, but you need to listen to me.

§

The waitlist grew, and more and more women starting showing up to the pool, encircling the gate’s edges, hoping for a no-show. The parking lot filled and street parking became difficult. I parked my car in the one reserved space at the pool. It wasn’t meant to be for me, but the women always left it open, and I never got a ticket or a tow.

The locker room was a mess of towels and sandals and oversized dresses. The women came from every corner of Lindburg. They came from the surrounding towns. They filled the changing rooms and crowded into the water. We pushed out max to thirty. One Tuesday we had so many women in the pool that the water spilled out over the edge every time I had them dunk their full bodies beneath the surface. Float, I’d tell them. Float like your baby is floating right now. Some women would pull themselves into the fetal position, turning sideways in the water; others would splay out, letting their limbs drift around them, like octopi.

They knew how to breathe, how to reach, how to push. They knew that when the baby came, it would be in this pool that they would deliver it. They knew that I would be right here, on the concrete, guiding them through labor pains and breathing exercises and bringing a new life into Lindburg.

§

When Anna reached her due date, she asked me if something was wrong. I told her that the baby would decide when it was ready. That her body would do the talking. That the last thing she wanted flowing through her veins was Pitocen. She swelled at the seam of her stomach that disappeared into the top of her bikini bottom, and the baby’s handprints pushed against her thinned skin on the Tuesday it happened. It was while the women bounced up and down in the water that she let out a shriek I will never forget. The other women froze. Another scream came from Anna’s mouth. It’s happening, she whispered, her eyes looking at me and no one else.

I took off my clothes and jumped into the pool in my underwear. Next to the other women in their maternity suits, I looked out of place, my white cotton faded and flaccid. OK, Anna, I said. I am here, I said. And Anna looked so deeply into me that I wondered if she could see how empty I really was. But before I could think about it any longer, she screamed again, this one more horrific than the last. Something wasn’t right. Something was very wrong. In Selma June’s book it said that most women would only recognize their initial contractions as a subtle pressure on the body. Not enough to make a woman shriek. The stench of chlorine entered my sinuses, and I asked her where it hurt. Inside of me, she said. Deep, deep inside of me.

The other women in the pool surrounded us, their ballooned bodies locking us in to the center of the pool. Everywhere I looked, I saw stretched polyester ready to burst at the seams. Corralled together, they started knocking into one another, yelling things. They were trying to quote Selma June, and they were holding their own bellies like someone might take them away.

Anna let out another screech, like some kind of prehistoric tetradactyl, and the bodies surrounding us started to back up. Anna’s body fell deeper into the water as her knees buckled and the circle around us got tighter once more, the sparkle of the suits blinding me. Breathe through it, I told Anna. Hee-hee-hoo, I told her. But she could not. All she could do was scream. This frightened the women, and again they moved back.

Should we call an ambulance, Clarice at last asked me, her eyes wider than the day Selma June had described the steel cold of the claw. No, I said. Of course not. I’ll take care of her. I’ll deliver this baby.

I wanted Anna’s screeches to fade, but they only continued, powerful and without regularity. You need to calm down, I said to her. You need to breathe. We are here, like you wanted, together. We are in a pool. We are in an ocean.

It was when a red trail of water started snaking around her thighs that I at last shooed the other women away from us, pushing their globular forms with my free hand. This means the baby is coming, I told them. Give us space. Give us so much space. And they did. They moved to the edges of the pool and boosted each other out and onto the periphery of concrete.

OK, Anna, I need you to listen to me now. I need you to push. Just like we practiced. Squeeze your insides every time you feel the pain. Anna only stood there, shaking. Frail. She was not lithe. She was not limber. She whimpered so loudly that I was not sure she could even hear me. The blood continued to flow out of her. It made a cloud of red around us.

It’s not time to push yet, yelled one of the women from the borders. She only just started having contractions. I hated this woman, whichever one it was that had said this. I hated them all but Anna in this moment.

Anna, I whispered in her ear. You have to relax. You have to let your body relax. You are not a lemon, Anna. Anna’s eyes closed and her body fell into my arms. I felt her shake as the convulsions continued inside of her. I used my two hands to press down on her stomach every time I felt it contract. I would get this baby out.

But the more I pushed, the worse it all felt. Blood was now streaming from between her legs. I heard a siren. Geraldine and her large, round body waved over two men in white suits.

The paramedics yelled at me to carry Anna over to them. They did not jump into the water like I had. They remained standing on the concrete.

I pulled Anna’s weightless body over to the edge. She was taken from me.

As the sirens carried Anna away, I stood alone in the pool’s dense, red waters. The other women stood crying, gasping for breaths, and though I couldn’t make out much of what they said, the name Selma June could be heard again and again in shallow whispers amongst them.

I let my body sink into the water. I plunged my head below. I kept it under as long as I could, not wanting to face the women who waited above its tainted surface, their beautiful shapes blocking out the sun.

Chelsey Grasso’s fiction has been published or is forthcoming in The Rumpus, The Minnesota Review, Harvard Review Online, Carve Magazine, Hobart, and elsewhere. Her fiction was a finalist in the 2019 Fugue Prose Contest and placed 2nd in the 2018 Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing Contest.