The Blue Cotton Gown by Patricia Harman Page B

something coming out of the earth, and the head moves a quarter inch into my hands.
    “What’s in the bag besides gloves, Tom? Shoe strings, scissors?” Tom isn’t a paramedic or a doc. He hasn’t even thought of being one yet. He’s a bearded hippie beekeeper with the shoulders and arms of a carpenter and the soul of a string bass player.

    “Scissors in a plastic baggie with shoelaces. Some gauze and a blue infant suction thing. There are some worry beads, a baby blanket, and a laminated picture of Krishna.” He drops the beads in the drawer and hands Lou the picture of Krishna. The medical supplies he lays out on a pink flannel baby blanket, and then he puts on gloves himself.
    “I don’t suppose you could roll over?” I ask Laura between her contractions. She’s still rocking back and forth on her knees. “Lay on your back?”
    “Oh, shit,” she says, and she’s right. As the baby slides down the birth canal, some BM moves through the rectum and out of the way. Tom takes some gauze and wipes it up. Everything is moving fast now, but the baby’s head doesn’t flex. I know from the drawings in the emergency-childbirth manual that you should keep the head flexed, but this baby’s upside down with its chin tucked under the pubic bone, and I haven’t a clue what to do so I just hold on and put my hands around the head like a crown.
    “Breathe it out now,” I say with authority. “Breathe it out slowly.” Laura breathes. “Now pant!” A baby’s face is emerging from between Laura’s legs, scrunched and blue, looking up at the ceiling. Tom reaches over and suctions the mouth like he’s done this be-fore. “It’s trying to suck on the bulb,” he says, laughing. “Good sign.”
    Then the whole wet mass swivels and shoots out onto the bed. I scoop it up. The infant’s still dangling from the umbilical cord.
    “A baby!” the father yells, then slumps into the fetal position. The newborn screams.
    Laura laughs. “That wasn’t so bad!” Women always say that when it’s all over. I look between the infant’s wet legs.
    “It’s a girl.”
    “I told you!” says Lou, raising his head.
    After we tie off the cord and dry the infant, I hand the baby to her mother. The placenta slips out easily a minute later. Lou pulls himself together, and the three of them squirm to the head of the bed,

    where it’s still dry. I throw a blanket across them, and the candlelight shines on their faces.
    Behind Star, in the doorway, stands the rest of the commune. Three men and two women in various states of dress or undress, two sleepy toddlers, and one baby, who’s being held by his mother and sucking on a breast. Mica sleeps through it all.
    No one says anything, not even the kids, not a word. Pachelbel still plays on the stereo, music of holiness . . . Tom and I just kneel on the bed in the wet amniotic fluid.
    Baptized.

    shiana

    “I think I might have herpes,” the young coffee-skinned woman bursts out and then begins to sob. She doesn’t just leak tears. She floods. There’s no way to ask what’s going on, or why she thinks she has an infection. “ The son of a bitch, I’ll never forgive him.”
    When a woman says she has herpes, it’s usually fifty-fifty; half the time it’s herpes, half the time it’s something else. Sometimes it’s a painful yeast infection, a boil, or an abrasion after sex. Sometimes it’s a bump in the mucosa that’s been there all along but the patient has just noticed it . . . and sometimes it’s herpes.
    We deal with alphabet soup nowadays. HSV (herpes simplex virus), HPV (human papillomavirus), HIV (human immunodefi-ciency virus). They’re all sexually transmitted. Only one of them can directly kill you. The rest are just uncomfortable and with you for life.
    I sit and wait for Shiana’s tears to stop so I can ask her why she thinks she has herpes.
    She’s wearing the regulation thin cotton gown, sitting on the end of the exam table, with her dark hair pulled back