“Do you ever talk to him?”
“Of course I talk to him.”
“Good, babies need that.”
They left lemonade and promised to return next Thursday with a quiche. I locked the door. Do I talk to him? I did nothing but talk to him! I laid Jack on the changing table.
All day long! I’d been talking to him for decades.
There we go, that’s nice, isn’t it? It feels good to be all clean and dry.
Okay, sure, I didn’t holler at him like a train conductor. But my internal voice was much louder than most people’s. And incessant.
Now let’s snap your pants.
I suppose it was possible that to someone on the outside it might seem as if I were moving around in perfect silence.
Snap, snap, snap, there we go. All done.
I patted his tummy and watched his wide-open face. It was a crushing thought, little Jack innocently living in a mute world. And all those words, all the terms of endearment—had he heard none of them?
I cleared my throat. “I love you.”
His head shook with surprise. My voice was low and formal; I sounded like a wooden father from the 1800s. I continued. “You are a sweet potato.” This sounded literal, as if I was letting him know he was a root vegetable, a tuber. “You’re a baby,” I added, just in case there was any confusion on that last point. He craned his neck, trying to see who was here. Of course he had heard me talk, but always to another person or on the phone. I put him down on the bed and kissed his fat cheeks again and again. He shut his eyes, gracefully enduring.
“Don’t worry, there’s not just me. You have other people.”
Who? he said. No he didn’t. He just waited for whatever was going to happen next.
SUZANNE SALUTED AS SHE TOOK off her shoes, I guess meaning it was fascist of me to insist on this.
“Do you do other Japanese customs or just this one?” asked Carl.
“Just this one.”
“We looked high and low for a baby present and then at the last moment we discovered a really incredible hat store,” said Carl, ambling around the living room. “I mean these hats were like something from a museum—a jester museum. They could have easily charged hundreds of dollars but most of them were twenty dollars or under.”
“But they didn’t have them in sizes for babies,” Suzanne said.
“They were one size fits all. We thought maybe if he had a very large head . . . an adult-sized head . . .”
Jack smiled shyly as his grandparents looked at him for the first time, appraising his cranium.
“It’s too big,” Suzanne said, pulling a jingling jangling jester hat out of her purse. Jack lunged for it.
“Bells,” I enunciated. “Jingle bells. You’ve never seen bells, have you? He loves it, thank you.” Jack gave up on the bells and tried to put his whole hand in my mouth. He’d been doing this ever since I’d started talking out loud to him. He’d also been grabbing the pages of books, shaking anything that rattled, stacking cups, rolling across the floor, chewing the legs of a toy giraffe, and sweetly reaching for me with whimpering excitement every time we were parted for more than a few seconds. Or maybe none of these things were new. Maybe I was just noticing them more acutely since the veil of my internal dialogue had lifted. He seemed less and less like Kubelko Bondy and more like a baby named Jack.
Suzanne smiled, putting the jester hat on her own head. “Do you want to tell her, hon?”
“We’re adding twenty dollars to your next paycheck,” Carl announced. “We ask that you cash it and put in an envelope—”
“It’s a fund,” Suzanne interrupted, jingling. “So one day, when his head is big enough, this money will be waiting for him.”
“We thought it was more special this way,” Carl said. “Look at her—isn’t she like a beautiful little sprite?”
We all stared at Suzanne with the hat on. If anyone looked like a little sprite wouldn’t it be the baby among us? But she batted her eyelashes daffily and fluttered her veiny hands like wings.
I gave them a tour of the house. In the nursery Carl whispered something to Suzanne and Suzanne asked if this had been Clee’s room.
“This was my ironing room. Clee slept on the couch at first and later we shared my room.”
They looked at each other sideways. Carl coughed and picked up a stuffed lamb.
“Lamb,” I said to Jack. “Grandpa is holding your lamb.”
They both frowned uncomfortably. Suzanne gave Carl a little poke with her elbow.
“We’re glad you brought that up,” he said.
Suzanne nodded vigorously with her eyes shut; Carl cleared his throat.
“Jack seems like an interesting person and we hope we get the chance to know him. But we’d like that to be on his own terms.”
Suzanne jumped in. “Do we share common interests and values? Is he curious about us and the kinds of things we care about?”
“I think he might be,” I ventured. “When he’s a little older.”
“Exactly. Until then it’s a forced relationship.” Suzanne’s vehemence was ringing the bells on her hat. Jack shrieked; he thought this was the most fun thing that had ever happened. “We’re supposed to play the part of the ‘grandparents’ [jingle jingle] and he’s supposed to enact the ‘grandson’ [jingle jingle]. That just feels empty and arbitrary to us, like something Hallmark came up with.”
Carl chuckled at the Hallmark line and rubbed Suzanne’s neck as she continued.
“Interesting young people come into our lives every day and we adore them, they’re engaging, they ask questions. Maybe down the road Jack will be one of these kids.”
“We might not even know it’s him,” Carl murmured.
“We won’t know it’s him and he won’t know it’s us—we’ll just be people who genuinely like each other.”
Suzanne folded the jester hat [jingle jingle] and put it back in her purse. She seemed relieved to have the speech out of the way.
“Do you want to hold him?” I said.
Her hands fit around Jack very easily. He looked up at her, wondering if the bells were coming back.