Short story in Parenting and Family

"So I Gave Him the Bean-Shaped Organ"

By: Patricia Brieschke

Four decades ago, when I was young and stupid and didn’t know a baby from a wormy kapusta, according to my Polish mother, I gave birth to a tiny damaged boy on my kitchen table. Just out of high school, I was working in a fertilizer factory and writing earnestly to reshape myself in the image and likeness of George Eliot.

I registered at the Chicago Maternity Center for prenatal care: two rooms above a store facing the Maxwell Street Market. A volunteer palpated my belly to the crooning of Muddy Waters. I prepared my supplies: a two-foot-high stack of newspapers, a large plastic sheet, a dime for calling the Maternity Center, a strong electric light, and a kettle for boiling water.

My son wasn’t exactly what I had expected. Legs twisting around themselves like Gumby, he looked more poultry than baby, but the most exquisite chicken I’d ever seen.

The doctor said Sean’s hips were dislocated and he needed an operation. My mother cautioned, “When Pa took me for my first streetcar ride, I woke up in Cook County Hospital without my tonsils.” Her sister was supposed to get the operation, but she ran away. They believed they’d be kicked off relief if someone didn’t show up.

The orthopedist attached a six-pound weight to my eight-pound baby. His body slid across the crib. Strapping him to a board for traction tore his skin. “Let’s get serious, mother,” the doctor said. He drove a metal pin through Sean’s femur, drilling through bone without anesthesia. His baby curves stiffened. I pounded the window. His fists opened and closed like fish gills sucking air, and I lunged for the door. He screamed, I answered. An aria of mother and child wailing. With pin in place, the doctor wiped sweat from his brow and said, "What’s all the fuss, mother? Babies don’t feel pain."

Then I learned about ureterostomies. They said Sean wouldn’t live to be a year old. Only partial function of one kidney. Dr. Belman cut Sean’s ureter and created an opening in his right side to take stress off his baby plumbing, buying time.

Wrapped in plaster from ankles to underarms, Sean came home. Legs splayed in the full spica cast, he was unable to move. It was spring, and I opened the windows so he could hear the Spanish dance music. He watched the origami animals on the ceiling that his father folded at night while he drank. I tried to hold Sean, but he arched his neck and turned his head, clutching his own bottle, as if he needed no one. He cried all the time. I put gin in his milk. If it silenced my husband, it might soothe my baby. I sang, “You Are My Sunshine,” ashamed of not loving him enough.

I put Kotex over the hole in his body to soak up the pee, but urine leaked into the layers of plaster, burning sores in his back. Flies buzzed around his head and toes. One day, I poked my finger into the doughy cast and noticed tiny, wriggling larvae in the crevices that were soggy with urine. I put my head out the window and screamed. I put a pillow over Sean’s head and wished he would die. He was mine to protect, and I couldn’t keep the maggots away.

My parents offered a Mass for Sean’s soul. I had damned him by not baptizing him. “The kidney is punishment,” my father said, “for his heathen mother.” My husband’s parents sent a telegram: THIS WOULDN’T HAVE HAPPENED IF YOU HADN’T MARRIED THAT POLISH GIRL.

Everything changed when Sean learned to whistle, snap his fingers, and blow bubble gum. He lived, but his name remained on the executioner’s door. Over the years, I lugged countless jugs of urine to the clinic, watching Sean’s creatinine level climb toward the double digits. There were computers now, and my boy was on the Web all the time. The Nephron Information Center. Renal World. Brazilian Kidney Transplant Registry. Guidance on surgeons, dialysis, and drugs. He scoured online auction sites and classified ads. Bidding for one kidney rose to almost six million dollars before revealed as a hoax. The federal government made it a crime to sell vital organs. Bones were okay. Creatinine climbed another point.

Surely we could get a kidney in Brazil. I’d raise money by selling other body parts. I checked the possibilities. Blood? My husband used to get 15 dollars for a pint of plasma before his blood turned to alcohol. Hair? No time to grow. Eggs? Too old. Breast milk? Even if I figured out a way to get it pumping, still only 25 cents an ounce. Not much added up.

So I gave him the little bean-shaped organ, the size of my fist, hovering in my back. Like a small fetus, reddish brown head bowed on its body.

In preparation for the day of surgery, I cleaned the insides of cabinets, vacuumed the rugs, changed the sheets on the bed. I began to eat, as if storing for a long trip. Then I put down my fork and felt a seiche of emotion that had been building for almost 40 years, as if someone had removed the mute from a tuba.

On the operating table, my empty womb remembered carrying Sean.

“Relax, honey, you’re not going to die,” the nurse said. And I didn’t. But my kidney did. I’m left with my life, slipshod and struggling, and the knowledge that I loved so imperfectly.

THE END

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