• Danny
• Rose
• Tariq

 

The birth itself was a pageant of iconography. The Catholics had their stations of the cross, their mysteries, their creeds. Susan had Corey's birth: The Vigil. The Broken Waters. The Trip. Early Labor. Stalled Out. The Crown of Thorns. Delivery. Peace (Drugged). The Return. Each rubric had arrogated a visual and a few scripted lines to itself. She imagined they could be represented differently according to the different genii that might undertake them, in the way of the court painters of the Renaissance. She never imagined them translated into web banners or pieces for a string ensemble, but perhaps someday someone else would, maybe Corey himself.

The Vigil is a scene dominated by a deep pink, oh for a strong word, cerise swatch of cloud pressed to the horizon, above which appears a slate blue strip, above which is a powdery blue dappled with lighter shades of pink, and then arching up over the rest of the sky, a bulging, nearly solid deep-sea color of blue. She, pregnant, sat gazing out a window at this display, while behind her, in another room her husband, her sister, and her mother-in-law rearrange furniture.

In The Broken Waters, Susan is alone. She lays on a plastic chaise lounge in the middle of a grassy, shady expanse. Half a dozen cordless phones in a variety of colors make a kind of circle in the grass around the chair, the way Susan had once seen beer cans in a circle around a truck parked illegally off a county road. In the icon, she has thrown one of her arms back over her head, and its fingers nearly brush against a digital kitchen timer nestled into the grass there. The timer reads 0:06:37. She holds a bath towel between her legs.

In The Trip, the viewer is one with the body of the person driving the car--judging by the size of the person, this could be Gwen, it could be Cathie. It is probably not Robert, unless the representation is not intended to be realistic. Susan sits to the driver's right, and is visible only as a hugely pregnant person in an Indian print dress. Her belly, her hand, and part of her arm occupy the vast majority of the canvas, and are all that is visible against a backdrop of the car's door. If the driver is looking in the direction that the picture's perspective indicates, the car has only stayed on the road by magic.

In Early Labor, a smug Susan, wearing high heels and a long sleeved gown that looks like a cross between something from Star Trek and something from The Jetsons, smiles and strikes a physique show pose (the bicep curl). She is not in the delivery room, but in the hallway outside the delivery room. The portraits on the wall behind her are not head shots of Those With Admitting Privileges, no. There is Wonder Woman, there is Cassandra. There Anna Akhmatova, there The Woman in the Shoe.

Stalled Out shows adjacent hospital rooms, one with Gwen and Cathie seated with four other people, strangers, all with pieces of pizza in their hands. Open, half-empty pizza boxes lie untidily on scattered endtables. Robert is entering the room with a stack of even more pizza boxes balanced carefully on an outstretched palm the way you see professional waiters do in the restaurants in the movies. From the other hand, bristle a tangle of those plastic six-pack carriers carrying Coke and Sprite cans. In the other half of the diptych, we peer into Susan's room, where Susan lies gazing up at the ceiling. Cute pink elephants and other fantasia-like creatures dance across the ceiling, quarter notes rise up from a tiny music box on the bedside table. Susan has her two hands on either side of her face, palms out, as if she were playing peek-a-boo with the creatures on the ceiling.

The Crown of Thorns showed a seated, agonized Susan propped up on her arms, viewed from the perspective of someone standing between her legs, with the child's head, a lifesize 13 cm around, bursting from her pubis. Bloody scribbles mark the torn labia's tears. Lined up at the head of the bed, facing Susan and peering out at the viewer were Gwen (a handkerchief over her nose and mouth), Cathie (whose own tears flowed down to mix with Susan's torn labia) and Robert, who looks up, not at the viewer, but at the tail of a long thread dangling from a large needle he held up in the other hand.

Delivery is cloth canvas rendered almost entirely in golden, silver, bronze, pearl, ruby and emerald beads. In a wealthy country under auspicious conditions, Delivery could be rendered with real precious metals and gems. The child is perfectly formed and looks like a miniature Otto von Bismarck. He is still curled like an apostrophe, and not yet swaddled, he balances on his mother's chest as if by accident. Susan's eyes are locked into Cathie's. Cathie leans across the bed and has clearly been crying. From her empty outstretched arms, it seems obvious that she has transferred the child from between its mother's legs to the mother's chest. One of Susan's breasts has escaped the hospital gown and turgidly obtrudes. A web-thin thread of milk runs from it to a puddle on the floor.

Peace (Drugged) is more surreal than the other stations. The ruddy child, swaddled in brilliant white, floats in the upper left hand corner of the canvas unsupported by any furniture or person. Susan lies rolled up in the fetal position, her face to the viewer, in the bottom right corner. She looks serene, almost beatific. From the child, as if from the sun, long rays of blood and milk streak across the space to connect with a cocoon of yellow light that emanates from its mother. The background is a jarring, bright cornflower blue color, watermarked with tears and feathers that rain down vertically, intersecting the child's rays at an 45 degree angles. On the two exposed bedposts, marvelously etched, like filigree work on silver, or like long African ceremonial masks painted on to wood, are profiles of Susan in attitudes of pain, one facing the left end of the canvas, one facing the right end.

From a distance, The Return looked like a string of refugees that the U.N. High Commissioner was documenting for CNN. Zigzagging across the canvas from bottom to top, vanishing into the high perspective of the upper left corner, marched anthropomorphized Subarus, baby strollers, teething apparati, diapers, diaper bags, Sitz baths, Kotex, nursing bras, bra shields, small knitted sweaters, tiny booties, photograph albums, onesies, a washing machine, receiving blankets and all manner of baby paraphernalia. The creatures wound their way through a mountainous terrain that resembled what Susan thought of as Afghanistan or Tibet. Every once in a while, you could see that an appliance or a small article of clothing had fallen off the path, and it would be hurtling towards the unseen bottom of the ravine, its small, panicked loony-tune hands raised up in the air overhead.

Corey was going on eight now. Susan could barely look at the photographs of the whole birth, because they were so graphic--she wondered if anyone had birthing videos or photos that they could bear to look at--but she could muse over these stations ad libidum. Maybe someday she would paint them or Cathie would paint them.