Telegraph Avenue

“What?” Luther Stallings said to Julie. “You want a hug, too?”

“Okay,” said Julie. Then he realized that Luther Stallings had only been joking, and even before the man turned and loped, without looking back, into the garage bay of Motor City Auto Body and Custom Jobs, he felt sharply bereft.

“Oh, look at that cute little boy,” Aviva said bitterly. Frog Park, lunchtime, babies and herders of babies pastured in the sunshine. The boy was as strawberry blond as Julie had been once. He lounged against his mother with his toddler overalls unsnapped and flapping, feeding her a garbanzo bean. “Could you die?”

The boy looked nothing like Julie had looked, apart from the hair. It was the angle of his slouch, the way he carelessly depended on his mother to hold him up, that killed her. Or maybe it was simply the avalanche of years. She looked away. She almost regretted having proposed to Nat that instead of eating at the store, they find someplace nice to sit and have an early lunch together. A bag of sandwiches from Genova Deli, some fried artichokes, a pair of Aranciatas. Her last meal, she had styled it, aiming for wry, hitting brittle. Taken aback when Nat only assented to her terminology, hunched over the counter of Brokeland, chin in hand, flying black sails from every mast like the ship in Greek mythology. Sailing as ever toward her, from yet another labyrinth, aboard the Moody Dude. No sign of Archy. Explanation of that absence, of what was wrong around or between the partners, awaited only a formal request from Aviva; but she had withheld it. For once, let Nat do the listening. Let him look for something to grab on to, someplace to hunker down and watch as she unstoppered a genie of panic and did whatever it was that you called the opposite of wishing.

“If I go to prison,” she said.

“Ho, boy,” Nat said, fishing Mobius strips of onion out of his sandwich with a feline prissiness, piling them on the white sandwich wrapper spread between them on the bench. “Here we go.”

“You’re going to have to make Julie come visit me.”

“Aviva.”

“He won’t want to come,” Aviva said. “He’ll be too angry.”

“You aren’t going to prison.”

“Oh, no?”

The boy reclined against his mother the way a god might recline in an Italian fresco, against a favorite cloud, in the heaven of his mother and her bare brown shoulder. Maybe around his eyes, too, there was a touch of Julie, a histamine puffiness in the cheeks.

“Aviva, it’s a hearing in a hospital. Not a courtroom trial. And it’s about something that Gwen did. You’re just along for the ride.”

“Gwen didn’t do anything, Nat.”

“No, of course, I’m just saying—”

“That’s the point. Gwen’s real mistake wasn’t mouthing off to a doc. I mean, it was a mistake. But she was tired. She was drained. It was a really long day. And the guy totally, totally provoked her.”

“Had to be,” Nat said. “Gwen Shanks losing her cool is kind of hard to imagine.”

“It was unreal. Impressive.” Delicious, sickening, like eating an entire birthday cake between them. Aviva had found herself reveling in Gwen’s outburst with all the horror of fifteen years spent putting up with the highhandedness and disdain of doctors, dusting it like dander from her shoulders. Fifteen years of valorous discretion, unspoken retorts, and trepverter. “But a mistake.”

“It’s always a mistake to lose control like that,” Nat said without apparent self-irony.

“Huh,” Aviva said.

“Shut up.”

“Anyway. This fucked-up hearing we have to endure today? It’s not happening because Gwen lost her shit in the ER. And Gwen’s blowup won’t be the reason when I have to go to prison.”

“Good to know.”

“Gwen thinks Lazar disrespected her because she’s black. And look, I mean you’re aware of my policy when it comes to that type of situation.”

“Your policy is ‘What do I know about being black?’”

“What do I know about being black? I’m sure that when she went after him, calling him names, pointing her finger at him? To Lazar, it was just another stereotype from the ER deck of cards, you know, the Angry Black Woman. But being a black woman wasn’t Gwen’s big mistake, either. Her big mistake was being a midwife. A nurse-midwife who does home births and hospital births.”

“They hate that.”

“They hate all midwives, but they especially hate the ones who do home births. They want to make us go away. They want to say to us, ‘Pick. You can do births here in the hospital, or you can do them at home with your patchouli, and your placenta-eating, and your mandala tramp stamps. But if you choose to keep doing those home births, ladies? Then you lose your privileges.’”

She became aware that some of the women around them, moms, babysitters, were looking to see who was ranting on this fine August afternoon at some poor old slumped guy in a pool-hall suit, picking at a sandwich. At least one of the moms was a patient of the Birth Partners, Dina or Deanna, looking half embarrassed and half entranced, the way you looked at your rabbi when you saw him mowing his lawn in a pair of Bermuda shorts.

“I mean,” Aviva said, lowering her voice, “we know this. This is a proven, established fact. Every other hospital in the East Bay has already done it. Chimes is the last one that still lets midwives do both home and hospital births. They’re just looking for an excuse to go the same direction. And, of course, they have all the power, right?”

“Right.”

“Meanwhile, if they have a birth that goes like Lydia’s? It’s ‘Oh, hey, shit happens. Mom’s fine, baby’s fine, let’s move on.’ I don’t know, maybe if Gwen didn’t lose her temper, maybe we would have been able to skate past. But Gwen did lose her temper, and when it came time to say she was sorry for losing her temper, God bless her, she didn’t want to do that. So now? Today, at this hearing?”

“What happens?”

“I figure we’ll get our privileges suspended. A month, two months. Six months. Just to give us something to think about. And then two or six months from now, they’ll make it a condition of our reinstatement that we stop doing home births. Then once they’ve got me, they’ll make all the other midwives stop, too. And here’s the thing, Nat.”

She put down her sandwich, wiped her fingers, took a long acrid swallow of orange soda. The little boy had wandered away from his mother, tacking across the grass toward the play structure. His mother watched him go, proud, tickled, unaware that every time they toddled away from you, they came back a little different, ten seconds older and nearer to the day when they left you for good. Pearl divers in training, staying under a few seconds longer every time.

“I’m not going to stop,” Aviva said. “I will tell them I’m stopping, and then I will continue to do home births in secret. I’ll do them in yurts and tree forts, in Section Eight housing, on top of Grizzly Peak in some million-dollar glass palace, you can see the Dumbarton Bridge. And then one day, sooner or later, something will go wrong. I’ll have to transfer to the hospital. And the secret will get out. My privileges will be terminated. I’ll be investigated, and brought up for review, and after dragging the process out until our family is broke and in debt for all kinds of legal fees, the state medical board will take away my license.”

She knew a strange sense of exhilaration and saw it reflected in her husband’s face, a question forming in his eyes, probably something along the lines of Is this what I’m like?

“And after they take away my license, Nat, I promise you: I will still do home births. I will do them for people who live off the grid. Marginals. Illegals. People, I don’t know, moms on the run from the law. Moms in cults, moms living in communes. Whatever insane, highly inadvisable scenario you want to imagine where somebody would hire a rogue midwife. Because babies should be born at home, and midwives should catch them. That is the sum total of my system of belief, all right? It may seem trivial or quaint or crazy to