Free A Ticket to the Circus by Norris Church Mailer Page A

art history with Mrs. Marshall, and one night I felt strange. This I announced to the class: “I feel strange.”
    “Go HOME!” they all yelled at me, in unison, but even though I was two weeks past my due date, I just didn’t think it was labor. I didn’t have any pains. So I stayed until class was over, everyone watching me out of the corners of their eyes, and soon after I got home my water broke and my mother said I had to go to the hospital. I still wasn’t sure I was in labor, and when we walked through the door, I said to the nurse that I was sorry, I thought I might be in labor but wasn’t sure since I wasn’t in pain. I was afraid she would scold me and send me back home. She slapped me down on the table, laughed, assured me Iwould have some pains, and then stuck me with a big needle full of painkillers. That’s what they did to ignorant twenty-two-year-old girls in 1971. They didn’t even ask me if I wanted to do a natural birth. Why would anybody want to do that? That’s why God invented morphine.
    The labor went on for eight hours. I was groggy the whole time and don’t remember much. I had brought my art history book thinking I would study for a test. Can you believe it? I do seem to remember floating penises in the pictures of the ruins at Angkor Wat—which frankly I wasn’t interested in at that point—and a lot of Buddhas, but not much else.
    At one point they gave me an enema, and just as I sat down on the pot beside the bed, the entire ladies’ auxiliary of the church trooped in with their flowered dresses and big smiles to give me their support. I screamed at them,
“Get out of here!”
and threw toilet paper rolls at them, poor things. They scurried away, and I felt bad, but really—this Christian business of visiting the sick is just too much. The sick just want to be left alone to fart at will, or to get up in a backless johnny with their butts exposed and go to the bathroom without having to entertain somebody who is underfoot praying over them.
    I had a spinal for the last big pain, and they whisked my baby boy away before I had a glimpse of him, because he had mucus in his lungs that had to be suctioned (he was probably zonked out on the painkillers, too, poor baby), and then I passed out. So I don’t remember seeing him until later, when I went to the incubator, and there he was, the spitting image of Larry. At least people could stop counting on their fingers the months Larry had been away. He was so beautiful—lots of dark hair, an adorable little monkey face, and he was huge! Nine pounds, with rosy cheeks hanging like ripe peaches. My friends Matthew and Larry from creative writing class bounced in to congratulate me, totally stoned, and were like, “Cool! Awesome, man! Look at his little toesies!” when they saw him. The nurses’ eyes were the size of dessert plates. Obviously, I hadn’t had a husband there with me, so I’m sure they were whispering, “I wonder which one the daddy is. I wonder if she knows.” I named him Matthew Davis, but not because of my friend. Larry and I had already picked out the name before I’d even met Matthew in class, but it was a nice coincidence, the Matthew and Larry thing.
    By October 1971, Nixon had started to withdraw some of the troops early, and Larry got to come home two months ahead of schedule. I met him at the airport, and I truly don’t think he recognized me. The look on his face still haunts me, as if he were looking at a not particularly attractive girl and then realized it was me. Matthew was six weeks old at this point, and I was still carrying around a lot of the baby weight and had cut my boob-length auburn hair into a Jane Fonda shag because it was so hot and miserable. We were happy to see each other, it goes without saying, but a little like strangers for a while, as if we were acquaintances who had bumped into each other at the airport and started a romance. Matthew was the biggest thing in my world, and Larry had