Summer of '69(92)

Finally, Blair arrives at the baby section—toddler, infants, newborn layette. She has nothing for the twins, and no one has sent anything. Blair decides to choose four outfits for each gender, just to cover her bases. The clothes are precious, tiny and delicate like fine doll clothes. Blair gets four basic white onesies, two with white piping, two with blue, and four sailor suits, two male, two female. The sailor suits are impractical, she knows, but she can’t resist. She hands the outfits over to the salesgirl, who takes them to the register.

“You’ll need to wait to ring these up,” Blair says. “My sister is being fitted for a bra.”

Blair heads back to lingerie to see how Jessie is faring. She can hear Miss Timsy’s incessant patter: “You see, my dear, how this one provides lift? Shoulders back now, chin up…”

Suddenly, Blair feels a staggering pain; it’s like giant hands are squeezing her midsection. There’s a sound like the muted pop of a balloon, and water comes gushing out from between Blair’s legs.

She screams.

Miss Timsy pokes her head out from behind the dressing-room curtain, and the salesgirl rushes over to take Blair’s arm. “Are you okay, miss?” Then the salesgirl notices the puddle forming at Blair’s feet. Liquid is running down Blair’s bare legs, and Blair is mortified and confused, thinking she somehow lost control of her bladder and wet herself, but a split second later she realizes her water has broken right in the middle of Buttner’s next to a carousel of boys’ dungarees. A pain comes that is so rude and insistent that Blair knows this is it. Contractions. Labor.

“Jessie!” she says. “We need to go now!”

Jessie pops out of the dressing room in just her shorts and a white bra.

“Put your shirt on!” Blair says. “We have to go. I’m in labor. It’s time.”

Miss Timsy says, “Let us call an ambulance.”

“No, no,” Blair says. She isn’t about to make a scene; it’s bad enough she’s leaving them to clean up after her. “We have to go. My bag, my things—my mother will take me, it’s fine.”

Blinding pain. Blair grits her teeth, counts to ten. It passes.



She and Jessie walk up Main Street, Blair holding on to Jessie’s arm for dear life. Right outside of Mitchell’s Book Corner, Blair feels another contraction coming on; it’s like a truck is about to hit her.

“We have to stop for a minute,” Blair says. There’s a bench outside the store and Blair hears Jessie asking her if she wants to sit but Jessie’s voice is faint and far away. There is only room in Blair’s head for her own thoughts and this searing white-hot pain. She doesn’t think sitting will help; it may make things worse—if anything could be worse than being in labor on Main Street in the broiling-hot sun.

The contraction barrels down. Blair’s knees buckle but Jessie holds her steady.

“Should I run for Mom?” Jessie asks.

Blair can’t talk until the contraction is past. “And leave me here? No, let’s go.”

They make it to the corner of Main and Fair, but another contraction is coming. Blair says, “You go. I’ll be right here.”

Jessie races up the street. Blair braces herself against a tree. The Quaker Meeting House is across the street—quiet, calm, serene. Blair wills herself to think about the Quaker Meeting House, but the pain is overwhelming. It consumes her. She’s crying and sweating and cursing the day she ever met Angus. Angus, who is a thousand miles away in Houston. Blair tries to recall today’s date. She thinks it’s the fifteenth, so the moon launch is tomorrow. Right? It doesn’t matter. Angus is so unavailable, he might as well be on the moon.

A car pulls up and Blair casts her eyes down, willing it to move on. Her legs are sticky with fluid, the back of her dress is soaked, and she wants to disappear; what she fears most right now is a Good Samaritan.

“Blair!”

It’s her mother and Jessie in the Scout. Jessie hops out and walks Blair over to the passenger side, but how will she ever get up and in? She faces the car while Jessie pushes from under her buttocks and somehow boosts Blair up. Another contraction is coming.

“We can’t go down the cobblestones,” Blair says.

“What?” Kate says. “But darling, there’s no other way.”

“We! Cannot! Go! Down! The! Cobblestones!” Blair says in a voice that sounds nothing like her own. “Back up.”

“Back up?” Kate says. “Fair Street is one-way, darling.”

“Back up, Mom,” Jessie says. “No one is behind us. I’ll keep watch.”

Another contraction is coming. Blair howls.

Kate backs up.

“Keep going! Keep going!” Jessie says. “It’s clear all the way to Lucretia Mott.”

Thank you, God, Blair thinks. Lucretia Mott Lane to Pine Street, Pine Street to Lyons, Lyons to South Mill, which meets Prospect Street right across from the hospital. Kate screeches to a stop in the emergency room parking lot, and two orderlies appear with a stretcher.

“You’re not leaving me, are you?” Blair asks her mother.

“We’ll be right behind you, darling,” Kate says. “You won’t be alone.”

Blair closes her eyes. She won’t be alone. Kate and Jessie will be here. Someone is missing, Blair thinks. “Someone is missing,” Blair mumbles to the orderly.