Eleven Hours Read Online Free

minute. Franckline is still beside her as before, and she can just remember the thought, or rather the image, right before she dropped. She was dialing a phone in a taxi, trying to push swollen fingers at the small keys. Then she dropped. And in that short minute she went somewhere else, into an apartment she has never been in, where a woman with snow-white hair was serving her beautiful small cakes on a platter. The platter, silver, gleamed brightly. Lore dithered over which cake to take first—they were all so appealing—and then, before she could put her fingers around one, someone shrieked loudly, as if to shoo her away.
    She hears it again now—the shriek. It was the noise that woke her. It is a woman somewhere down the hall, and Lore blames her for taking away the platter of cakes. It was wonderful to have been there, in that severely well-appointed room, attempting to choose something sweet. Although now that she is awake she does not like the thought of food at all. The apartment had something in it of Asa’s parents’ apartment, of Helen Fox’s impeccably ordered library. The woman shrieks again. In childbirth class Lore and her classmates saw movies of women who did not scream and did not panic, but bore their pain with athletic grimaces. She had been in a temper every Wednesday at six thirty in the evening, in the big room above a city gym, tired from the day spent coaxing second and third graders to pick up M&Ms by sucking on a straw. As she walked from the subway, her hips twinged at each step. Sometimes, through one hip, there shot a bolt of pain so strong that she had to stop while other people bumped her and cursed. It felt as if the hip was coming unhinged from the leg, as if it was going to snap out at some strange angle like a puppet’s. These twinges, these bolts, had come on around the seventh month. All sorts of things had happened at the seventh month. Eating anything spicy made her ill for days. She could not tolerate milk. She had gas and hiccups.
    She knew that there were other women in the childbirth group who came straight from work, without even a break for dinner, in their maternity blazers and heels that pinched their swollen feet, but even so, even though she had time to go home from P.S. 30 and drink a little tea and have a little meal, she was in a temper every Wednesday and could not bring herself to like the class. The plumpish instructor, her own children grown and gone, was a nice woman, well-meaning, yet Lore was irritated by every word she spoke. Why? Why should she dislike Betsy, the instructor, or Melissa and John from 74th Street or Catherine and Peter from Summit, New Jersey? Was it because, as her mother would have put it, they looked like money? Why did Jane and Cecily’s plans to have Cecily birth the baby in their feng-shui’d bathroom cause Lore to smile with condescension? For a short time (Diana’s influence), she herself had flirted with using the bathtub. Perhaps that was what it was—these other women, these couples , still believed in what they could imagine, still enjoyed building up in their minds their perfect homes, their perfect births. Whereas she, the one partnerless woman, the one who always had to team up with the instructor for the exercises, stood precisely for the fact that things did not turn out as you had planned. Betsy massaged Lore’s back, showing the muscle groups that John and Peter and Jane should press on during the labor, to release tension. She held Lore’s hand, to demonstrate the importance of loving touch.
    When she got home from class, there would be another message from Asa on her answering machine. Lore thinks it must have been Marjorie who got in touch with him. A couple of times Marjorie had asked her nervously whether she’d spoken to Asa, and didn’t she think he had the right to know about the baby? No matter what had happened? And mightn’t being in touch help, you know,