Women’s Hospital by Anne P. Beatty
From the outset of her nonfiction flash “Women’s Hospital,” Anne P. Beatty employs striking imagery to describe her “tiniest shivers of memory” of giving birth to her youngest two children in the Women’s Hospital, marking the seasons by the “flame-bright maples of November” and “June’s fat sweat.” The nearly dismantled hospital looks “as if a giant came stomping through, grabbing fistfuls of wall and room.” Sparing use of similes and oblique metaphors make her comparisons particularly effective. The narrator drives by the site where the hospital is being torn down for months. The building and its destruction become larger metaphors only slowly, over time.
Rigoberto González, in his craft essay “Memory Triggers and Tropes” from The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Nonfiction, observes: “As citizens of the world, we stumble upon images/objects/symbols at every turn and usually by happenstance. But as writers we latch onto the shiny little finds that unlock our memory banks, polish them, and place them at the center of a showcase.” “Women’s Hospital” succeeds as a demonstration of “latching onto” an image to “unlock…memory banks.” Beatty opens the essay in the present moment (“They are tearing down Women’s Hospital…”), and the demolition of the hospital acts as a trigger for her memories of giving birth there, evoked in a series of images: “Where are the hospital beds I raised and lowered, where are the plastic trays, a dull mauve…?” The “awful netted underwear” and “stacks of giant maxi pads”? Beatty explores these memories not to construct a narrative but to inspect the significance this condemned building has held for her and create a new space to acknowledge it. The building gradually becomes a metaphor for what a woman’s body undergoes to produce new life. “Never mind the ripping.”
“The lessons of this piece revealed themselves to me slowly,” Anne P. Beatty writes in her author’s note. She leads her readers to participate in what she calls her “meditation on time, loss, destruction, and memory” and reflect on where she’s arrived. —CRAFT
They are tearing down Women’s Hospital, where I gave birth to my youngest two, a girl against the flame-bright maples of November, a boy in June’s fat sweat. For years, the hospital stands silent, as we drive to the dentist, to the bookstore, to the carwash. I think nothing of it—well, maybe not nothing, but only the tiniest shivers of memory: the nurse saying, why don’t you take a walk, the nurse saying, it’s too late to get in the tub, the nurse saying admiringly, at least eight pounds. I careen past, hands at ten and two. I feel the hospital more than I see it.
Until the day I’m alone, no children in the car, and I notice it has turned into two football fields of rubble. Even the brick wall, that perimeter I circled in the black-and-white houndstooth coat that wouldn’t button over my belly—even that is gone. Dismantled. I can drive slowly enough to see the wire layered in the concrete to strengthen it, the hidden reinforcements laid bare. I can see pieces of brick, half-broken slabs, not quite stone, all piled up. It’s the haphazardness that startles me, the way the building’s interior has been ripped up and put on display. The site hasn’t been razed so much as destroyed, as if a giant came stomping through, grabbing fistfuls of wall and room.
Where are the hospital beds I raised and lowered, where are the plastic trays, a dull mauve, on which I was once served pudding, acetone orange juice, a sandwich I ordered then decided I couldn’t eat? The bathroom cupboards stocked with that awful netted underwear that looked, even new, like something that belonged in the trash? The stacks of giant maxi pads? The mirror where I saw my babyless belly for the first time, distended but empty, with ridges of dimpled useless skin that I could see but not recognize as my body, after the hurricane washed ashore?
In birth the only plan is life, and—you realize this in the moment, or at least I did—the life in charge is not yours. The building must come down. The baby must be born. Never mind the ripping. The world is distracted while we are razed. The world will pass us by, hands at ten and two. The world has children in the backseat, bickering.
For months, the lot sits. I keep thinking I’ll go one day when I have time to park, pick up those angular shards of brick, see it gone, up close. I never do. Then, on a March day, I notice the land is cleared. Laid with clean straw, tiny arrows of grass seed. Plastic pink flags ripple along the border, heralds of property or gas lines. They all read peligro. They warn us something new is coming, arriving on this spot. It might be marvelous, or awful, or strange, or beautiful, but one day it will be gone.
ANNE P. BEATTY’s essays have appeared in The American Scholar, The Common, Copper Nickel, Longreads, New England Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Greensboro, North Carolina. Find her on Facebook @anne.beatty.313.
Featured image by Suzi Kim, courtesy of Unsplash.
