Deep Rivers: a novel

By Marshall

It's the beginning of the 21st century and Charles Rivers, a Black college professor and Vietnam vet who came of age during the freedom struggles of the 60s, is worn down by the routine of teaching and grading at his New York City university. A widower for many years, he is lonely and worried about his missing son. But on 9/11 his lif

• Language: English
• Publisher: ICAN Press
• Release date: Jan 30, 2024
• ISBN: 9798869034090

Book preview

Two

Rosetta Ocean, March 2000

  She knew she would never forget the acrid smell of the paper hospital gowns. They were bright blue, an unnatural shade like the aqueous uber-indigo of concentrated laundry detergent. The gowns reeked of chemicals, or maybe their odor was intensified by each woman’s scent of fear, as  naked under the thin gown tied with a skinny plastic sash, she slowly moved through a series of connected waiting rooms by taking the vacated seat of the woman ahead of her. There was no clock on the wall to measure the waiting time. There was no TV hanging from an awkward mounting arm in the corner of the room. Planned Parenthood was clearly under-funded; the most recent magazines were over a year old. To say that time stood still and that the expressions of the unwilling and unwittingly pregnant women, who seemed to range in age from 15 to 45, were grim, was the grossest of understatements. Grimmest of all was that of the mother of the youngest girl. Dressed in a cheap business suit and fake oversized pearls, she seemed concerned about taking the time off from work to accompany her daughter.  She glanced at her watch repeatedly, and craned her neck to check on the progress of the queue, her face rigid with a kind of granite discipline one imagined she hoped her daughter would learn one day. The girl cried quietly into her hands after a loud petulant outburst in the counseling room during which she had threatened to run away.

Rosetta could not stop smelling that odor; she couldn’t stop looking around her. And she couldn’t stop looking down at her wedding ring, noticing how the dull gold contrasted with the warm molasses color of her skin. How many of the other women were married? She looked surreptitiously to her left and right at the hands of the women closest to her. This was something you did when you were single. Or at least before you were ready to welcome a first child. She was already a mother. Twice. She adored her children. But they had been planned. They had arrived according to a schedule and exactly three years apart when Will was still doing well in his job as manager in the office supply company.

  Rosetta sat in the last row closest to the door. Will was in the main waiting room. What was going through his mind? He had not seen the enlarged image of the embryo on the ultrasound screen or heard the strong, steady amplified beating of its developing heart.

  She wondered if it was a girl. She would have named a girl Eleanor after her mother who died of an asthma attack when Rosetta was seven. Eleanor was not a popular name. But for Rosetta, Eleanor was all that was left of her mother. Eleanor was snuggling together to try to stay warm in the big lumpy bed with the skimpy covers in their draughty railroad apartment; Eleanor was the heavy scent of cooking grease that clung to her mother’s clothes from her work as a waitress; Eleanor was the way her mother pronounced her name with emphasis on the Rose—Rose Etta and how she placed a glop of green hair pomade on her left wrist to dip into and oil Rosetta’s scalp as she parted and tugged on her hair with a wide toothed comb. Eleanor was lukewarm baths together in the yellowed pitted claw-footed bathtub because hot water was scarce, and a scratchy washcloth rubbed across her back until her skin tingled. Eleanor was watery white hominy grits just the way Rosetta liked them, sprinkled with two teaspoons of sugar, a streaming, melting margarine sun in the center. Eleanor was standing on tippy toes to kiss her mother goodbye in the schoolyard because Eleanor was so tall. Eleanor was the day her mother didn’t pick her up from school. Eleanor was not talking or laughing or playing for almost a year. Eleanor was a book she read in 7th grade about the former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt and how she helped poor people and wrote a declaration of human rights. Eleanor was the way her mother Eleanor Ocean and Eleanor Roosevelt became one person in her mind, and the way that person had come to embody love and all the qualities Rosetta associated with motherhood and caring about the fates of others and being a humanitarian woman of justice.

  Eleanor. What was she doing? You did not name a child you were about to abort. And you especially didn’t name it after your dead mother. She had been afraid to say it, but now she said that word out loud in her mind. Abortion. It was an ugly word. Such an ugly, ugly word. Even uttered silently it was a sharp knife scraping the back of her throat. When she was struggling to decide what to do about the pregnancy, she forced herself to look up the definition—the way she urged her students to look up words they assumed they knew in order to discover new meanings that might help them in their writing. The Latin past participle aborri meant to make disappear, which made her think of the whispered euphemism she had heard while growing up—She got rid of it. And now in her mind she made the dangerous experiment of applying that phrase to herself, holding her breath to see if it would make her change her mind.  But the guilt and sadness it quickened were not enough to dissuade her now that she had made up her mind, or to question her or any other woman’s right to make that choice. If she wasn’t willing to go through with it, she wouldn’t have come this far. Now she would make the pregnancy disappear; she would get rid of it, and then she would go on as if it had never happened.     

  Excuse me, Rosetta looked up. A lanky white girl with a hapless expression and asymmetrically chopped blond hair was trying to get past her. She was boyish and unattractive, and Rosetta wondered unkindly who had knocked her up.

  Trying to get a magazine, she said. She had a flat mid-western accent and large crooked teeth vying for limited space in her mouth. The table with the magazines was near the door. Rosetta sat in the middle of the row. She pressed her thighs together and swiveled them to the side. The girl squeezed past hers and three other pairs of knees that were barely covered by their paper gowns. Rosetta needed something to occupy her mind, but she had not thought to bring a book and when she glanced at the magazine table as she entered the room, nothing had caught her eye.

  The girl’s teeth made her think about the dentist, and she remembered the magazine she used to read in the dentist’s office —Highlights for Children. The covers were all the same. Plain and nearly monochromatic, so dull you’d think the magazine had to be boring. But she became so enthralled by the puzzles and stories inside that she’d forget where she was, and she would be startled when it was her turn to enter the treatment room and climb into the dentist’s big chair. Did they still publish it? Maybe she could get a subscription for the boys. She thought about her old dentist. Dr. Brown. And his first name: Oral—like Oral Roberts, but a dentist! She and her cousins, whom she had gone to live with after her mother’s death, had found that hilarious and instead of Brown, they referred to him as Dr. Oral. She’d heard from friends at school that dentists could give you laughing gas, but Dr. Oral never offered it. She was a teenager before she was given anesthetics for dental procedures. She always had a high threshold for physical pain. Maybe that was one of the reasons she was so gung-ho about natural childbirth and why she had chosen local and not general anesthesia for what was happening