In the afternoon we went to see a baby born.
68 lines✦
irst we found a linen closet in the hospital corridor where Buddytook out a white mask for me to wear and some gauze. A tall fat medical student, big as Sidney Greenstreet, loungednearby, watching Buddy wind the gauze round and round my headuntil my hair was completely covered and only my eyes peered outover the white mask. The medical student gave an unpleasant little snicker. “At leastyour mother loves you,” he said. I was so busy thinking how very fat he was and how unfortunateit must be for a man and especially a young man to be fat, becausewhat woman could stand leaning over that big stomach to kiss him,that I didn’t immediately realize what this student had said to mewas an insult. By the time I figured he must consider himself quitea fine fellow and had thought up a cutting remark about how only amother loves a fat man, he was gone. Buddy was examining a queer wooden plaque on the wall with arow of holes in it, starting from a hole about the size of a silver dollarand ending with one the size of a dinner-plate. “Fine, fine? he said to me. “There’s somebody about to have a babythis minute?” At the door of the delivery room stood a thin, stoop-shoulderedmedical student Buddy knew. “Hello, Will,” Buddy said. “Who's on the job?” “I am,’ Will said gloomily, and I noticed little drops of sweatbeading his high pale forehead. “I am, and it’s my first” Buddy told me Will was a third-year man and had to deliver eightbabies before he could graduate. Then we noticed a bustle at the far end of the hall and some menin lime-green coats and skull-caps and a few nurses came movingtowards us in a ragged procession wheeling a trolley with a bigwhite lump on it. “You oughtn't to see this,” Will muttered in my ear. “You'll never 62 | The Bell Jar want to have a baby if you do. They oughtn’t to let women watch. It'llbe the end of the human race.” Buddy and I laughed, and then Buddy shook Will’s hand and we allwent into the room. I was so struck by the sight of the table where they were liftingthe woman I didn’t say a word. It looked like some awful torturetable, with these metal stirrups sticking up in mid-air at one endand all sorts of instruments and wires and tubes | couldn’t make outproperly at the other. Buddy and I stood together by the window, a few feet away fromthe woman, where we had a perfect view. The woman’s stomach stuck up so high I couldn't see her faceor the upper part of her body at all. She seemed to have nothingbut an enormous spider-fat stomach and two little ugly spindly legspropped in the high stirrups, and all the time the baby was beingborn she never stopped making this unhuman whooing noise. Later Buddy told me the woman was on a drug that would makeher forget she’d had any pain and that when she swore and groanedshe really didn’t know what she was doing because she was in a kindof twilight sleep. I thought it sounded just like the sort of drug a man would invent.Here was a woman in terrible pain, obviously feeling every bit of itor she wouldn't groan like that, and she would go straight home andstart another baby, because the drug would make her forget howbad the pain had been, when all the time, in some secret part ofher, that long, blind, doorless and windowless corridor of pain waswaiting to open up and shut her in again. The head doctor, who was supervising Will, kept saying to thewoman, “Push down, Mrs Tomolillo, push down, that’s a good girl,push down,’ and finally through the split, shaven place between herlegs, lurid with disinfectant, I saw a dark fuzzy thing appear. “The baby’s head,” Buddy whispered under cover of the woman'sgroans. But the baby’s head stuck for some reason, and the doctor toldWill he’d have to make a cut. I heard the scissors close on the
✦