Joan Makes History Read Online Free PDF Page A

when she could no longer make her buttons meet because I was lengthening within her, she and the balding man doubted no longer.
    Would his creature be a female, the balding man speculated: a dazzling beauty with teasing copper curls and a smile that would make rocks crumble where they stood? His heart clenchedwith the foreshadowed pain of seeing his untouchable exquisite daughter become a woman, of seeing her eyes grow red, languishing after some unworthy oaf, of sitting up late at night, waiting for her to be returned to him from some night of dancing, or worse, and of seeing in her swollen lips that she was no longer his pure girl, but was a woman, defiled by the lust of some man. That was pain: that she would no longer belong to her father, but to the world, to strangers who would not care as he did, for he would lay down his life a thousand times for her: strangers who would make her bored, make her weep, perhaps even raise a cad’s hand against her and bruise her white skin. Were there worse pains? Yes, that of having not a peach-skinned copper-curled girl, but an angular hairy-faced lank dolt of a girl with no more sparkle or loveliness than a cold sausage.
    If it was a boy! The bald man’s mind leapt to two images: one of the limp body of his son, killed in a duel at dawn, a ridiculous fear but his picture of dread: the other of his son in a dark suit, unrecognisable to his father because of the grave look on his face, accepting the keys or crown of government, and himself bursting into tears from sheer fullness of proud heart.
    Well, all this I guessed, and some I heard, as the bald man mused aloud to the thin woman, who smiled and nodded as she counted the stitches on the tiny garment she was knitting. I heard secrets, too, from my tight red hiding place. I heard that guttural man, who loved his wife like an addiction, groaning over her body and laughing at the way she swelled with me. He laid his hand over the curves of her belly, warming me inside, feeling my life stirring there: I could feel his hand reverent on the thin woman’s skin, and tremulous with the possibilities he felt within. I felt him lowering his large head towards me, ear first, and sensedhow he became congested, holding his breath, trying to listen to the quick flicker of my heartbeat. My darling, he whispered, you are most precious, even when grotesque. I felt the thin woman—not so thin now—shake with laughter and I laughed too, as she was doing, fondly, at this man who watched her with eyes soft with adoration.
    I swelled and caused the thin woman to swell, I laughed and cavorted in my warm room, for my job was simple: to wait and to grow. When I began to kick and jab at the thin woman with my elbow, they remembered that I was waiting to join them, and made ready. As well as the tiny knitted garments, and the others laboriously stitched and smocked, the thin woman obtained a cradle, and they both crowed and exclaimed over it, and planned how I would look, lying in it perfect and peach-like.
    In the end I was impatient at the limitations of my space: my legs kicked out, longing to stretch, and I arched and thrashed against the muscle and bone that held me. Yet when they began to release me, I fought against the tide that was forcing me down and out. Self! I cried. Thin woman! How can you turn against me like this? Oh, I wept in my wetness, and struggled, and clawed at the slippery walls of my nest, but there was no resisting those muscles squeezing against me, no turning back from destiny now. I reminded myself that I was born to make history, so it was necessary for me to be born.
    It was the greatest moment of my history, without which there would be no further moments, although to the hard-handed doctor and the Sister in her starch, I was nothing more great than yet another baby, wrinkled like a prune and as anonymous as a ham. Even the mother, lying back triumphant at last, and the bald father tremulous later with his