Read Online Riding In Cars With Boys by Beverly Donofrio - Free Book Online

not to push,” she said as she wheeled my cot into the delivery room. I felt betrayed by every living mother. Why hadn’t they warned me?
    “This is horrible.” I started crying. “Where’s the gas? Give me the gas,” I yelled. “Don’t I get gas?” The nurse strapped my knees into stirrups, then positioned a round mirror above to distract me. “Look, Mrs. Bouchard, look. You can see the head.” It was slimy green and protruding. I covered my eyes and yelled, “Take it away, I can’t stand it, I don’t want to!” Finally, an Oriental intern walked in. They clamped a gas mask on my face and it was over.
    When I awoke, the nurse held a wrinkled, ugly red baby in a white cloth out to me. “Congratulations, Mrs. Bouchard, you have a healthy eight-and-a-half-pound baby boy.”
    “Boy!” I screamed. His head was huge and shaped like a football. “What’s the matter with his head? He has blond hair!” The nurse blanched. I covered my face with my hands and sobbed. It was as though my daughter had died. The baby girl with the pretty round head who’d been hiccupping, rolling over, and kicking inside me—the daughter who’d been my best friend for months—had been a boy all along. What would I do with him? I didn’t even like boys anymore. He’d have army men and squirt guns and baseball cards and a penis. What would we talk about?
    My mother brought me a strawberry milkshake and kissed me on the cheek, then sat down and settled her pocketbook on her lap. “So, how does it feel to be a mother?” she asked.
    I shrugged.
    “Hurt, huh?”
    I bit my lips to keep from crying.
    Later, I took a walk to the nursery and saw him, a little lump under a white blanket. I thought if it weren’t for his name on the bassinet, I wouldn’t even know he was mine.
    My mother came back at the next visiting hour and brought my father and my sisters, Rose and Phyllis, with her. Ray’s mother came too, and so did three of my girlfriends. Everybody sat on my bed or the win dowsills. Rose sat on my father’s lap. When Ray came by after work, there was no place for him. He seemed like an outsider, and I felt sorry. He handed me a bunny with an ivy plant in its back, and the first opening he got, he rocked forward and back and said, “Hey, Bev, you know something? The song’s ‘Hey Jude,’ not ‘June.’”
    Since the Beatles had been singing about a boy all along, maybe having a boy wouldn’t be too bad. Besides, if the fortune-teller had been wrong about the sex of my baby, then she was probably wrong about the other two kids and the split-level house, too. “Do you think we should name him Jude instead of Jason?” I asked Ray.
    “I guess.”
    “Jude?” my mother said. “What kind of a name’s that?”
    I’d never heard of St. Jude or Jude the Obscure, and the name reminded me of Judas, Jesus’ traitor. I changed my mind. “Let’s call him Jason,” I said.
    “Cool.” Ray dragged on his cigarette.
    The next day, when Jason came to my room, he was soft and warm and smelled sweet like baby, but he moved his head like a dinosaur in a Japanese movie. I was scared of him. Then he got the hiccups after half an ounce of milk and started crying.
    He was still crying when I gave him back to the nurse. “Only half an ounce?” she said.
    “He got the hiccups,” I explained.
    She shook her head as if to say, Stupid teenage mother.
    The next time he came to my room, I made myself be braver. I shut the door, then took off his undershirt and memorized exactly how his diaper was pinned so I could duplicate it, then took it off too. I’d never seen an uncircumsised penis before. It looked like an elephant’s trunk. I kissed it. I nuzzled his stomach, his armpit, his neck. I put his whole foot in my mouth.
    The day we left the hospital, I dressed Jason in a blue suit with a plastic Tweety Bird glued on the chest. Ray carried him to the car like he was a tank of nitroglycerin. At a traffic light, when I noticed his head