How Fish Learned to Sing
A Nonfiction Excerpt
by Debra MarquartMy boy name. For years I pestered my mother: What was my boy name? My parents had picked two names and discarded the boy name after I was born. But who was the shadow that walked inside me? I felt him in my every step. My mother could never remember.
But in her forgetting, she remembered another story. How she took a cab after midnight the few blocks from our house on Avenue C to St. Alexius when the pains began and how Dad stayed behind with the other kids until Grandma could be fetched from the farm. How the labor intensified through the night and dragged into the next morning.
She remembered how my older cousin Phyllis—who was a nurse in the same hospital—came to sit with her between contractions to pass the time.
Everything moved slowly at first, my mother says, then it accelerated, through waves of pain. The nurses prepped her for twilight sleep, with the nightshade scopolamine, and paged the doctor. No response. He was down the hall, busy with another delivery.
Minutes passed. I was crowning. Phyllis circled my mother, along with the other nurses, worrying. They paged the obstetrician again.
