The Interactive Class

The lecture is over and the room is quiet in the way a room goes quiet when a demonstration is about to start.

Your mother is standing at the front of the class with the chalk in her hand and the diagram on the board behind her a cross-section, a couple of labeled arrows, her handwriting in neat small capitals and she has just finished. She is in the white costume with the little gold brooch at the collar and the crossed straps on her bare back and the blue plate at her waist, and the striped sleeves on her forearms, and she has been at the front of this room for forty minutes answering questions with the same flat competent voice a biology teacher would use. She is sweating. She has been sweating since the second slide.

The teacher steps up behind her without a word. He is enormous a head taller than any student, broad through the shoulders, calm, dark-skinned, and he has not spoken since he introduced her at the top of the hour. He does not announce what he is going to do. He reaches down, hooks two fingers under the scrap of lace at her waist, and pulls the blue plate goes with it, and the lace tears, and he drops the whole thing on the floor beside the teacher's desk. Your mother's hands go flat on the desktop in front of her. She does not say a word. She does not look back at him. She looks out at the class, and she bends forward over the desk the way she has been bent forward for the last three slides, except now there is nothing under the white costume and everything on display, and her ass is enormous and slick and trembling in the light from the window.

The teacher steps into her and starts. He does not hurry. He holds her hips and moves at a steady pace and looks up at the room over her shoulder while he does it.

"This is sex," he says, to the class. His voice is flat and instructive. "Watch how the hips move. Watch how the back arches. This is what it looks like when it is done properly." The desk skids an inch on the floor. Your mother makes a sound and does not stop looking at the students. "And in a few minutes," the teacher says, "you will see what fertilization looks like."

In the row beside you, a girl with short black hair has her hand over her mouth. Behind her, a blonde has both hands pressed to her own cheeks and is whispering to the girl next to her. Across the aisle, a boy is taking notes. Half the room is leaning forward and the other half cannot look away.

Your mother lifts her head off the desk and looks out at the class, breathing hard, hair coming loose from the braid, and her eyes find you in the third row.

"Any questions so far?" she says.

One month later, and the classroom has been rearranged. The desks are pushed back against the walls in three rows, leaving an open floor in the middle where the chalkboard used to be. The chalkboard itself is still on the wall, and the diagram on it is new four outlines of a woman's body at four different stages, drawn in your mother's handwriting, with arrows pointing to the belly, the breasts, the hips and the pelvis, and small block capitals underneath each stage. The old lecture diagram has been wiped away.

In the middle of the open floor is a padded examination table with stirrups at the foot end and a steel tray beside it with a cloth tape measure, a small hand mirror, a jar of clear gel, and a speculum laid out on a cloth. The windows are closed and the room is warm and it smells of the gel and of her.

Your mother is on the table with her feet in the stirrups and her knees apart and the white costume on and open down the front. She has been pregnant for a month. It is not showing through clothes yet the belly is still small and low and hard, just a firm round swell above the pelvis that was not there four weeks ago but the class can see it from the second row because she is naked from the collarbone down, and they can see the change in her breasts even more clearly. They are bigger than they were. They are heavier and fuller and the veins under the pale skin are more prominent and the nipples are darker and larger and have already started to bead there are two dark wet patches on the white frills where her chest has been resting against them, and they are spreading.

The teacher stands at the head of the table with the tape measure. He is in a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and he has not changed his expression since the first day of class. He takes the tape measure and wraps it around the widest part of her belly, just above the navel, and holds it there while he reads the number out loud to the room. Then he does it again, an inch lower, and reads that number too. Then he moves the tape up to her chest and wraps it around her under the arms, across the fullest part of the breasts, and reads that number out loud, and then does it once more across the nipples themselves, and reads that one out loud too.

"Last month," he says "the belly was thirty-one centimetres. This month it is thirty-four. The chest was one hundred and four. This month it is one hundred and nine." He sets the tape measure down on the tray and picks up the hand mirror. "The rest of you will write those numbers down. You will write them down every month, and by the end of the term you will have a chart, and the chart will be the whole lesson."

He walks around to the foot of the table and stands between her stirrups. He does not announce what he is going to do. He picks up the jar of gel and the speculum from the tray and holds them up where the room can see them, one in each hand.

"This is a speculum," he says. "We will use it at every visit. The purpose is to look at the cervix and see how it changes as the pregnancy progresses. In month one it is closed and firm. By month nine it will be soft and shortened and it will have started to open. You will see the difference with your own eyes, month by month, and by the last visit you will be able to describe it without looking." He sets the jar down and opens the speculum with one hand, and the metal clicks. "Bring a notebook. Every visit."

He looks down at her over the stirrups.

"Tell them what it feels like," he says. "Month one. Everything."

Your mother turns her head on the table and looks out at the class thirty adults, three rows of desks pushed back against the walls, every one of them watching her and her hand comes up off the table and rests flat on her own belly, low, where the swell is. She starts talking in that same flat steady voice she used for the lecture, and she does not stop for a long time. She tells them about the heaviness that started two weeks ago. She tells them about the tenderness in her chest that began before the belly changed at all, and about how the wet patches on the frills started four days ago and are now constant, and how much they leak when she leans forward. She tells them about the tiredness, and the nausea in the mornings, and the pressure low in her pelvis like a hand pressing from the inside. She tells them she can feel the change in her own cervix with her fingers, and she demonstrates it, and the whole room watches her do it.

In the front row, the girl with the short black hair has her hand over her mouth again and has not taken it down since she walked in. The boy with the notebook is writing as fast as he can. Somewhere in the second row a student has started crying and nobody has turned around to look at her.

"Any questions," your mother says, still talking, still flat, "before he opens me up?"

Nine months. The class is no longer in the classroom.

They have been walked down the corridor and through two sets of double doors into the medical wing, and the room they are in now is a delivery suite tiered seating on three sides rising up against the walls, a single padded table in the middle of the open floor with stirrups at the foot end and a drain set into the floor beneath it, a steel cart beside the table with a stack of clean white towels on the top shelf and a basin on the middle shelf and a bag of instruments and a kidney dish on the bottom shelf. There are more students here than there are seats and some of them are standing at the back of the room with their notebooks open and their pens in their hands. Every seat in the tiered rows is taken. The room smells of antiseptic and sweat and something else underneath, and the air is warm and wet.

The chalkboard at the front has been replaced by a whiteboard, and on it, in the teacher's block capitals, three words with a line drawn under each: BEFORE. DURING. AFTER.

Your mother is on the table. She has been in early labour since this morning and she has been on this table since noon and she is in the last hour now. Her gown has been opened from the neck down and pushed back on both sides and it is wet through with sweat and with the fluid that has been running out of her for hours. Her belly is enormous low and tight and hanging forward off her spine, the skin stretched shiny and thin, the navel pushed out flat, and under the skin there are shapes moving, slow and heavy, the baby turning or shifting or simply being. Her breasts are so large that they have spilled sideways off her chest and are resting on the table on either side of her, and the nipples are dark and swollen and leaking steadily thick, pale, beaded milk running down the sides of each breast and soaking into the folded towels that somebody has pushed under them. Her hair has come completely out of the braid and is loose and soaked and stuck to her neck and her forehead and her cheeks, and there is dried drool at the corner of her mouth, and her eyes are half closed and her hands are wrapped around the sides of the table.

The teacher stands at the foot of the table between her stirrups with his arms folded. He has been narrating since the doors opened and he has not stopped.

"Before," he says, to the tiered rows. "You have all seen her before. Nine months of it. Look at what has changed since the first month." He gestures at her belly with one hand, and the whole room looks at it. "The belly has come down and dropped since last month. The pelvis has opened. She has been leaking from the chest since month six and you can see it now, running off both sides. The navel has flattened out. The skin is thin enough to see the baby move through it. Notice the position head down, back to the left, chin tucked. This is called engagement. The head is in the pelvis and it is not coming back up." He steps forward and puts two gloved fingers between her legs and holds them there for a second and then takes them out and holds them up so the room can see the slick on them. "She is fully dilated. Ten centimetres. Her waters broke at eleven this morning and she has been in active labour since two." He wipes his hand on a towel and looks down at her. "Tell them where you are."

Your mother turns her head on the table and looks out at the room at the three tiers of students, at the notebook-holders, at the ones standing at the back, at you in the third row and she starts talking in the same flat steady voice she used for the lecture nine months ago, and she does not stop.

"I can feel the head," she says. "It is right here." She puts her hand flat on the lowest part of her belly and presses. "It is pushing down. Every contraction it pushes and it comes back up a little less. It feels like like something heavy that is trying to fall out of me and I can't stop it. It feels like the whole bottom of me is opening."

Her back arches off the table. Her hands grip the sides. Her breath goes through her teeth in a long tearing sound and her belly tightens and stands up under the skin and the whole room can see it happen. The teacher does not stop talking.

"This is a contraction," he says, to the room. "Watch her face. Watch her hands. Watch the belly it goes hard from the top down. This is what the body does. They come every two minutes at this stage and they last about a minute and they will get closer together. When the head crowns you will see the tissue stretch she will tear, most likely, and there will be blood, and there will be fluid, and all of it is normal and all of it is part of the lesson." He looks at the students. "Write down what you are seeing. Not what you think it means. What you are seeing."

The contraction passes. Your mother's back comes down onto the table and she breathes out and her hand goes back to her belly. In the tiered rows, the girl with the short black hair has both hands pressed flat over her mouth and her eyes are wet. The boy with the notebook is writing so fast the pen is shaking. Two rows behind him a student has gone pale and is looking at the floor. Somewhere in the back of the room a woman has started crying quietly and has not stopped and nobody has turned around to look at her.

Your mother turns her head on the table and finds you in the third row and holds on you for a second.

"...Second one's coming," she says. "Do you want to see it from the front?"