It's a day that everyone says they will never forget, but Mother remembers it better than anyone. She remembers the clatter of metal tools on a harsh tile floor. She remembers her feet, white with cold and far away, like a dead person's feet. She remembers a pulsing effervescent wildness in her head. She remembers a frenetic, sexually charged shaking of many tambourines by her right ear. The Doctor-she thinks she can remember his eyes, blue, above the mask-shouts She's awake! and just as quickly comes the swift plunge toward sleep, a wild, tangled place full of muck and current, as if a mountain stream has taken her by the heels and pulled her under. Mother gives up. She loses her grip. The thing she loves most is borne away. Hours later, she rises from her anesthetic stupor to find the Nurse weeping by the bed while trying to check her pulse. There is no baby. Their eyes lock and a ribbon of grief shoots between them.

“My baby is dead,” Mother says.

The Nurse bites one knuckle.

"Oh, no, dear, no. Your baby is fine."

The Nurse walks away without a word and comes back with the baby and places it, with reverence, in Mother's arms.

The baby moves.

But the Nurse is crying. 

Mother thinks: Why is the Nurse crying? Is my baby deformed?

"I have terrible news," the Nurse says. "There has been a terrible attack on New York City and thousands of people are dead. Our President has just been killed in Dallas by a Communist with a rifle. And the Japanese have bombed Hawaii. It's on the radio. We are at war."

It's the day that everyone says they will never forget. But what Mother will never forget is her first, true feeling, which was relief. She looks at her baby for the first time. And like the Nurse she then begins to cry, but from the joy of it, until her baby wakes and beats on her with tiny fists.