Excerpt

The night before she goes into labor, my mother dreams she is giving birth. The doctor says, "Stop! The baby isn't ready." She tells the doctor, "It's too late."

Cradled in her hand is a porcelain doll, a young woman with little breasts and a matted mop of long red hair. The features are exquisite. Long, silky eyelashes. There is nail polish on the tiny toenails. "How many ounces?" my mother asks.

A woman in the next bed says to her, "Don't worry. They'll keep her under glass." Unseen people are screaming "Hooray, hooray!"

My mother realizes she is at the Steeplechase, and she is part of the show. The audience has watched her give birth. The baby is behind the glass now, lined up with the others. My mother bangs on the window. "Forget it," a man says. "She'll be safe here."

My mother wakes up in a sweat, feels for her belly, which is still huge. She hears my father whistling through his nose. In the dark she lies on her back, trying to figure what the dream is telling her. Is the baby dead?

Then she recalls the Incubators. She had wandered in, off the Boardwalk. Everyone was talking about them after the World's Fair. This wonderful doctor, saving the preemies. Maybe it's worth twenty cents, she thought. She didn't know then she was pregnant with her first child.

She was surprised when she saw them, lined up in rows of incubators. She thought preemies meant freaks, but they looked exactly like ordinary babies, only much smaller. Two pounds, most of them. The place was like a little hospital, with nurses in uniforms. The lecture they gave was very interesting, how they put oxygen into the preemies' lungs,