5.

––––––––

“... Breathe, honey, that’s it. You’re doing great. In one, out one. Pfff, pfff.”

All at once, an older father-to-be beside me, Bill, started coughing. He was a tall man in his early fifties, his wife in her early thirties. What had started out as coughing became strident hacking; on from there, thundering, nerve-wracking horfing sounds. Everyone stopped and watched Bill; expectant fathers sat back on their haunches and wives lying down on black mats watched in full shock at the Bill Show. His face was turning the colour of a juicy red tomato. The veins on his temples bulged. His jerking motions tipped a pack of Export A filter-less smokes out of his breast pocket.

“Are you okay, Bill?” I asked. “Can I get you some water?”

Allison nudged me—she heard the trace of hilarity in my voice; she knew me all too well.

Bill’s wife was as red in the face as her husband. She wasn’t sure where to look. She vainly smacked him on the back.

Everyone kept staring. The birthing class facilitator, a petite woman in her forties with blonde hair pulled back in a pony tail, had retrieved some Kleenex and was handing it over to Bill. She was a nurse, and she was doing her best to remain calm, despite Bill’s outlandish coughing fit. Some of the women in the room looked nauseated by the phlegmy sounds coming from the poor guy.

After a while I couldn’t help myself and started to snort. The entire episode struck me as ludicrous. I tried to hide it behind the back of my hand, as if I were trying to wipe off a crumb of food from the corner of my mouth, but Bill was getting worse with each passing second. If this kept up, he was going to have an aneurism, and someone would have to plant their lips on him and give him mouth-to-mouth.

Allison sat up on her mat. She fixed her eyes on me in warning and muttered angrily, “You made us late, dammit. You’re always late. Why can’t you take anything seriously, Donny? Just grow up.”

I glanced nervously at the others, to see if they had overheard her. Thankfully, they were too taken up with Bill’s drama.

I thought: how can you take a man with a huge head hacking his lungs out seriously? Especially at a birthing class. It was funny. I mean, this was supposed to be a serious class, and I was trying to do the right thing and be supportive, but not with Bill hacking his liver out of his maw. I couldn’t just pretend not to find things like that funny. I suppose the proper thing to do would have been to laugh about it afterwards in the car with Allison. Anyway, at that point, I knew that the best thing to do was to shut my mouth.

With slow, stiff movements, his wife heaved onto her feet. She was at least eight months pregnant, about the same amount as Allison. She helped Bill to his feet. His face was turning purple.

“I think it was the spices in the chicken wings,” she said apologetically over her shoulder, as she took the tissue box that the facilitator gave her. “We ate suicide wings just before we came here.”

We all nodded to show our support, because that’s what you’re supposed to do when you’re attending a birthing class: show empathy. Or, in my case, try to discover it. I mean, you couldn’t be expecting a baby and not be empathetic, right? So, obviously I needed to get on board with the empathy deal. But I’d laughed at Bill: unforgivable. I made a pathetic attempt to redeem myself by leaping to my feet and holding the door open for him.

Bill’s wife smiled at me gratefully. I felt I could really get good at the empathy thing. Then I felt Allison’s piercing gaze. She wasn’t fooled.

There was an awkward silence.

“Okay,” our facilitator said, all chirpy again. “Everyone back to their positions. Breeeath. In and out. C’mon now, that’s it ...”

Pfff, pfff.