Page 17 of The Light Year (Stardust Beach #6)

jo

. . .

“Frankie!” Jo says, walking to the end of the driveway to greet her best friend for an evening walk in mid-November. “I say this with all the love in my heart, but honey, you’re as big as a house!”

Frankie laughs as she puts both hands on the sides of her enormous belly. The smile on her face and in her eyes makes it clear that there’s nothing she’d rather be at this moment than the size of a house.

“I’m ready to burst, Jojo,” she says with a laugh.

Even her cheeks have gotten fuller, and while Frankie has retained the lithe, muscular figure of the Rockette she once was, she is now undeniably softer, rounder, maternal.

She glows from within like a warm candle is burning inside of her, and Jo stops and stares, fondly remembering the feeling of harboring new life for just a moment.

“Well, you look gorgeous,” Jo says, blinking tears from her eyes as she reaches out to take Frankie’s hand. The sun is hovering on the horizon, and the air feels cooler now that Thanksgiving is approaching.

The women walk together, slower than usual, and after a block or so, Frankie loops her arm through Jo’s, forcing her to walk even slower as Frankie’s breathing becomes a bit more labored.

“I swear, this kid is taking over my entire body.” Frankie laughs. “It’s got to be a boy—he’s so demanding.”

Jo shakes her head, remembering all three of her own as babies.

“Girls can be just as demanding,” she assures her friend.

“I felt like Nancy never slept when she was in my stomach, and therefore, I didn’t either.

And when she was born, she was alert for about twenty hours a day—no joke.

Now, the best part was that she was an observer, always, and would be happy wherever I put her, just watching everything go on around her, but a baby who is awake needs attention, and I felt like I was constantly chasing Jimmy around and also keeping an eye on Nancy.

” She stops talking now, recalling this period of her life and just reliving the exhaustion that felt as though it lurked near the surface of her every conscious hour.

“You’re not making a second baby sound terribly appealing,” Frankie says, squeezing Jo’s arm with her own as they walk on, linked together.

“Oh, don’t even think about that until you’re healed from this one,” Jo says, nodding down at the enormity of Frankie’s midsection.

“When people tell you the pain of childbirth is forgotten the instant they hand over your newborn, they aren’t entirely joking, but there will be moments during recovery where you are reminded—acutely—of how painful the whole thing is. ”

Frankie blanches. “I feel like there are things I don’t know. Do they just keep us in the dark so that we don’t revolt and refuse to have babies?”

“There must be some secret plan along those lines.” Jo smiles at her best friend wryly, matching her steps to Frankie’s as they round the corner and walk in the direction of the neighborhood park.

“But the conspiracy must extend to other women as well, because I feel like my mom or one of my sisters could have done me the favor of letting me know some of the more shocking bits.”

Frankie slows to a stop and lets go of Jo’s arm. “I need to know,” she says, eyes wide. “What horrible things has no one told me yet?”

“Oh, Frankie…” Jo trails off, feeling as though she’s already said too much.

Of course it’s not true that women would actually revolt and stop having babies if they were all shown informational videos before ever getting pregnant, but Jo is pretty sure that letting them in on some of the more “delightful” aspects of the process would undoubtedly create some reticence on the part of young ladies to give their bodies over to the cause and to act so excited about it.

“Tell me, Joey-girl,” Frankie begs, folding her arms so that they rest on top of her shelf of a belly.

“I’m not walking until you do. In fact, I will sit down on this lawn here,” she says, turning and pointing at the house they’ve stopped in front of, “and I will stay here until I give birth if you don’t tell me what no one else will. ”

Jo bites on her lower lip, weighing her options. “Okay,” she says, relenting. “First of all, there’s a lot of pushing.”

Frankie rolls her eyes. “I got that much already.”

“Well, it’s just…” Jo looks away, scratching at the side of her neck nervously. “Sometimes when you’re pushing a lot, it can force other things to come out.” She lowers her chin and looks at Frankie, hoping she’ll get the message.

“Like, what? I’m going to push my small intestine out?”

Jo keeps staring at her. “Nope. Not that.”

Frankie lifts an eyebrow, looking a bit worried. “My gallbladder?”

Jo shakes her head and glances down.

“Wait, do you mean—“ Frankie’s face goes red. “Like when you push in the bathroom?” Jo nods slowly as the horror descends on Frankie. “No way. No. I’ve never heard of that. Not one person has told me that I could accidentally…”

Frankie looks around as if there might be some escape hatch from the situation she’s in, and for a moment, Jo thinks she might actually fall right down on their neighbor’s lawn, as she’s threatened to do. Jo reaches out and takes her friend’s hand.

“Hey, the doctors and nurses see everything,” she says soothingly.

“Nothing that happens will surprise them, and most likely, you won’t even know if that happens.

They just swoop in and take care of it, and when they go out to the waiting room and let Ed know the baby has arrived, they definitely don’t mention that. No one ever knows.”

“Why did no one tell me this?” Frankie wails, looking panicked. “What else, Jo? I know there’s more.”

Jo tugs on Frankie’s hand and they walk again, making their way to a bench on the edge of the park, where they sit as the sky turns purple and teeters on complete darkness.

“Frankie, baby,” Jo says, lacing her fingers through her best friend’s and holding on tightly. “Sometimes the baby is big. Huge.”

“Of course it is. But the body is designed to do this—giving birth is completely natural.”

“Uh huh.” Jo nods encouragingly. “It is. But occasionally a big baby can rip the mother if the doctor isn’t careful.”

Frankie frowns. “My stomach already feels like it’s going to rip! But it won’t, right?”

“Yeah, not your stomach.” Jo rubs Frankie’s hand and then pats it soothingly. “Down there. You can tear, so the doctor watches carefully, and rather than letting you rip, they…” Jo swallows hard and winces. “Cut you.”

“Oh, god!” Frankie wails, putting a hand to her chest. “No!”

Jo nods again. “And then they stitch you back up. Sometimes tighter than they need to.” She frowns at the memory of her own painful recoveries. “I complained to my mom about it one time—I told her it felt uncomfortably tight—and she said it was called ‘the husband stitch.’”

Frankie looks mad; she actually looks angry as she shifts her body around and tries to stand, putting one hand on her lower back. Jo tugs at the hem of her shirt and forces her to stay seated.

“Jo,” Frankie whispers, looking around the empty park. “Are you telling me they cut you on your—you know?” She waves her hand in a circular motion.

“Yes, in order to keep it from ripping, which is arguably worse,” Jo says, trying to make it all sound reasonable.

“And that when they sew you back up, they sometimes make it tighter for your husband ? As if he’s done anything at all except get you into that situation?” Her face is flaming with the indignity of knowing that there is no way out at this point but to go through it. All of it.

“Yes,” Jo says, feeling as remorseful as if she herself had invented such a barbaric notion. “See, I told you there were things that no one really passes on beforehand, and it seems wrong to me that we all just sit on the information and don’t share it with one another.”

“I have to say, Josephine,” Frankie says, wild-eyed.

“You could have told me all of this a little sooner.” She points both index fingers at the unmistakable swell of the nearly full-term baby under her shirt.

“Now I have to dread going into labor because of the pain, which is something we all know about, but also all of this ?”

Jo lifts a shoulder sympathetically. “You did say you wanted to know,” she reminds Frankie. “And honestly, I think women have a right to. We’re not children. I knew none of that when I went into labor with Jimmy. And I kind of wish I had.”

“What would you have done differently?”

Jo lifts her eyebrows, feeling tired. “I mean, I couldn’t stop whatever happened with the pushing, but I would have been adamant about not getting stitched up like a teddy bear in danger of losing its stuffing. There’s no call for that.”

Frankie’s cheeks are getting less red as she listens and begins to calm down. “Okay, so you think I should say something to my doctor?”

“That’s up to you,” Jo says earnestly. “Your experience is yours, and it’s personal.

But I do believe we should all be telling one another every bit of information that we can.

It’s insane to me that this cloak of silence is in place, and that women are treated like infants or like barnyard animals just there for the breeding.

I do not like that, and I’ve learned a lot just from the things I’ve seen and heard at the hospital. ”

Now it’s Frankie’s turn to lift her eyebrows. “But we go into it willingly, Jojo—we aren’t horses or cows.”

“We do,” Jo agrees, “but without all the information. Generally speaking, we’re raised up with very little information about life or our bodies.

If we’re lucky, our mothers whisper something to us about our monthlies, or hand us some supplies, but other than that, what girl did you ever know who fully understood where babies came from when her body started to develop?

I didn’t even completely understand what would happen on my wedding night until it did. ”

They’d covered this terrain before, and Jo knew that, by the time she married Ed, Frankie had been more experienced than Jo had, but she was still willing to bet that no one had sat Frankie down and given her the nuts and bolts and the finer points of sex.

“You’re right,” Frankie says, tugging on a strand of hair thoughtfully. “They keep a lot from us.”

“And once we get married, most of us have babies quite young, and instead of telling us about the process, they distract us with things like baby showers, with decorating nurseries, and picking out names for the babies. Which, for the most part, kind of works.”

Frankie looks mad all over again. “Are you doing things differently with your own daughters?”

A flicker of discomfort passes over Jo’s face, but then she takes a deep breath.

“I am. Absolutely. I’ve already explained to them both about their monthlies, why they have them, and how to manage their own bodies.

It was hard, because my mother wouldn’t even look me in the eye when I got my first period, but I want there to be no shame in their lives when it comes to these things. ”

“Good for you,” Frankie says, still looking miffed by this entire discussion. “If I have a daughter, I’m doing the same thing. I’ll tell her everything.”

“There’s a lot more work to do,” Jo says.

“Once they start dating, I need them to understand the things that boys will want to do with them, and the ways they need to protect themselves, or to make their own decisions. I expect that to be a much tougher conversation, although when I explained her menstrual cycle, Kate was already pretty traumatized.” She laughs lightly at the memory.

“So while I will tell them what I know before they settle down and get married and have kids, I’ll do it slowly.

It’s too much information for a young girl to handle all at once. ”

“It’s like looking right at the sun,” Frankie says, taking Jo’s hand in hers again.

“God, what an awful way to run this show,” she says, looking down at her belly sadly.

“And the crazy thing is that I would still have gladly gone through it all for the joy of having a baby, I just think someone should have handed us pamphlets about all of this when we were teenagers. Given us a heads-up, right?”

“I couldn’t agree more, Francesca,” Jo says, standing up and holding out both hands so that she can pull Frankie to a standing position. “It’s wrong to keep us in the dark about our bodies.”

They start to walk together again, through the November night. The houses they pass are filled with light and warmth, and the sliver of a moon hangs in the middle of a blanket of glittering stars over all of Stardust Beach.

“Life is so complicated, Jojo,” Frankie sighs as they walk down her street and pause at the end of her driveway so that Jo can drop her off at home first. She rests her head against Jo’s shoulder as they stand there, side-by-side, looking up at the sky over the rooftops.

“It is,” Jo agrees mildly, putting her cheek against the top of Frankie’s head. “And this, my friend, this is just the tip of the iceberg.”