“Don’t his organs get smashed if he sits like that?”

“No, he’s all right in it.”

“Okay. Maybe I will take him.” She goes to the mirror, lets down her hair and starts brushing it.

I put my stethoscope back in my bag, think about the notes I’ll need to make. Mother’s involution complete. Confidence still lacking.

“How long did it take you to be a nurse?” Grace asks, suddenly.

“Four years.”

“Oh.”

“But you can go for two years, too. You’d get a different kind of degree, but you’d still be an R.N.”

“I don’t want to be a nurse,” she says. “I was just curious. Being a nurse is—I mean, I’m sorry, not to be rude—but it is gross. Somebody give me a bedpan …” She shudders.

“Nursing’s not for everyone, that’s true. What about you, what do you want to be?”

“Happy.”

“Well,” I say, putting my bag on my shoulder. “That’s a good thing to aspire to. That’s the best thing.” We smile at each other. When Grace smiles, you see her as one step away from a flat-chested little girl, reaching for her mother’s hand.

In my maternity textbook photos, the new mothers were always very attractive. They would be sitting up in their neatly made hospital beds with a wide ribbon in their hair, smiling down at the infant held close to their nonleaking breasts. Off to the side there would be evidence of The Father: half of a masculine torso, perhaps. A successful-looking masculine torso wearing a suit.

In practice, there were some mothers who resembled those photographs, if not in looks then in spirit. But most of the mothers I saw were different than that. Such as the bitter unmarried woman I once cared for, a sharp-boned thinness to her, her eyeliner perpetually smeared, the spike heels she wore in with her maternity jeans tossed into her clothes locker, a distance between her baby and her even when she held him close. There were also a fair number of older women who had other children at home—sometimes many children—who kept their cups from their meal trays and filled them all day long with coffee from the visitors’ lounge. Who turned their babies over to the nurses so they could go out and have a smoke, talk to other mothers about the goddamn laundry piling up at home that he wasn’t about to do. Whose nightgowns were old and stained and whose bouquets were those that someone else left behind.

None of those women thrilled to the sight of a heartbeat in their baby’s fontanel; none held tiny feet in their hands and felt moved to simultaneous laughter and tears. None bathed newborn bodies with a sense of great wonder and fear.