The Stud Book

There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.

Ba-da-boom!

W. Somerset Maugham famously said that, and he said it again now in Georgie’s ear, and he threw his head back and laughed.

His words were scrawled on a piece of paper tacked to her wall. She was at her computer, a desktop set up in the dining room. With a one-term leave from an adjunct teaching job at Portland Community College followed by Christmas break, this was the moment to dust off her dreams. It would be the longest consecutive stretch of time she’d had off from work since she was thirteen, since her mom transferred with Nike to Malaysia and her dad forgot how to buy groceries, since she got her first period and had to take the city bus to buy her own tampons. At thirteen she washed cars. She made blackberry pies from berries that grew in an alley and sold them by subscription to residents in a retirement home.

Twenty-five years later, this was her big break. Her plans for maternity leave? She’d write a book. Author a book, even. She’d been patching one together for ten years already, in bits and pieces—it was her PhD dissertation: Implied Narrative and Suppressed Symbol in the Paintings of Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun.

She could smell the best-seller possibilities!

With a shift in tone and scope she’d turn her dissertation into a commercial manuscript—play up the romance, the tragedy. Manufacture a lot of deeply felt emotion.

Pssst! They don’t tell you this in grad school, but here’s a tip: People go nuts for deeply felt emotion.

Vigée-Lebrun was a beautiful raven-haired portrait artist who flattered her patrons and worked her way into Marie-Antoinette’s life as a court painter. She lived at the Palace of Versailles with her infant daughter. When the French Revolution hit, when Marie-Antoinette lost her head, Vigée-Lebrun and her child escaped overnight, in a seriously competent mother moment.

This woman’s life was destined for the big screen! Georgie opened the file. Bella slept in her bassinet. The house was quiet. First thing Georgie did was revise the title of her work: The Secret Narratives of Vigée-Lebrun.

Readers love secrets.

Success inched closer. Somerset Maugham could have his laugh, but she’d win out and find her own rules. Her writing project had a nerve-racking sense of suppressed urgency.

Back when Georgie’s mom left town, Georgie dropped out of school. Social workers tracked her down. Her dad must’ve given them Sarah’s address. She was with Sarah’s family, eating their Pop-Tarts, bread, and tuna. She had Pop-Tarts hidden in her pockets. Heat pumped out of the vents in Sarah’s house, a minor miracle. She slept in Sarah’s extra bunk bed, on an extended sleepover, ready to leech love from a family that wasn’t hers.

She was a stray.

Now the bruised feeling around her C-section incision had started to lessen. Bella, mid–baby dream, scrunched up her face like Margaret Thatcher on a bad day—like Marie-Antoinette, when politics took a wrong turn—but still she slept.

What could go on in those new dreams? Freud suggested dreams were about working through repressed urges. What would be repressed in a newborn baby? Maybe Freud didn’t take care of enough babies.

Georgie readied her hands over the keyboard.

To spell and to cast a spell came from the same Middle English, the same source and sorcery, the same impulse and high hopes: to charm an audience.

The goal was to get the right letters in the right place, the right words in the right order, and seduce. She started to type, launching in earnest into her project, and at that very second, as though tied to the touch of Georgie’s fingers against the keyboard, Bella woke up and began to cry.

That angel. The girl’s face got so red! Was that natural? Did babies ever have aneurysms with all their screaming? And what were those blotches on her cheeks?

Georgie picked Bella up to croon in her ear. Then she saw marks, little crescents, etched in her daughter’s forehead. Claw tracks?

They weren’t deep. It was like a rat had prodded the child.

A rat?

If Georgie were to call the advice nurse again, what would she say? Hey, remember me, the one who gave my daughter drugs? I have one little question.…

No. Instead, she turned to the computer, held Bella in her arms, and typed, “baby + blotchy + cuts on forehead.” Thousands of answers and nonanswers came up, a world of parents trying to sort things out from home.

One search result read: cancer.

Georgie’s heart, her blood, her brain—everything stopped, instantly sick. She held her daughter closer. Cancer?

Oh my God! They’d spend every minute together. Life was short.

She tipped the baby back and looked at Bella’s face again. The splotches had subsided but the slim nicks in her forehead were still there. She pulled the sweet bundle closer, talking herself back off that ledge: not cancer, not cancer. Not everything is cancer.

There were other answers to choose, all more reasonable, more manageable. That was the beauty of Internet medical advice: options.

Georgie had Googled health and baby answers every day of her daughter’s life so far. And as this thought crossed her mind, she reenvisioned her whole book proposal: new idea, new project. It was so clear! It wouldn’t be the book she had set out to write ten years earlier, but it was the book that mattered now, the one that’d save her sanity. She opened a blank document and typed:


Fifty Things You May Not Need to Worry About in Baby’s First Year (But Can If You Want To): A Hypochondriac’s Guide to Child Care


She started a list:

1. Crazy newborn waking-up faces

2. Crossed eyes

3. Acts deaf

4. Funky breathing

5. Poop styles

6. Crying jags

7. Staring

8. Red face

9. Bruises

She wasn’t a doctor. She was a mom who knew how to self-soothe, as they said in babyland.

She wrote:

10. Baby:

a. Sleeps all the time

b. Sleeps when held

c. Sleeps when swaddled

d. Never sleeps

e. Looks half-asleep when its awake

Her daughter wasn’t even a week old, and there she had it—ten ways to go insane. Another day or two, this book would write itself.

She’d never leave the house again. She’d stay home, write books—cast those written spells—and coo at her baby until the baby grew into a girl who could talk. The two of them would talk together. Everything that mattered was already there in those dark rooms.

She was still on the computer, rocking Bella on her lap and darting from one link to the next, when she came across a notice: “Lit Expedition: Ecotours of the mind.”

It was an upcoming conference, scheduled for Portland. It was a world of major literature in her own backyard, less than two months away. It was listed as “The First Annual …”

It couldn’t be annual if it hadn’t even happened once yet. She had an urge to grade that line like a freshman placement exam. But no, she’d let it go—that wasn’t the relationship she had with the material.

This time, she wanted in.

Johnny Depp was listed as keynote speaker. Johnny Depp?! Gilbert Grape. Captain Jack Sparrow. Edward Scissorhands. Donnie Brasco. The Johnny Depp who channeled Hunter S. Thompson, with his thin mustache and shaggy hair, the man whom she’d known since 21 Jump Street, who was entirely familiar yet unreachable and surreal. That man was coming to the Oregon Convention Center to wave at a crowd and talk about environmental literature?

Okay. So she’d leave the house after all.

Even Vigée-Lebrun, that rococo painter, knew when to exit the castle.

This—this!—was the balance Georgie sought as her book project swerved from the academic to the popular then into a list of neuroses and baby poop. The life of the mind. Bring it on. She e-mailed her name to the organizers. She typed, “Hello, I’d love to volunteer to introduce speakers for your upcoming conference.” Calm and polite.

She hit “send.”

And before that message disappeared, she saw her mistake: “Hell, I’d love to volunteer …”

Ah! One dropped letter and she’d turned her voice on the page from an English major with a PhD into an enthusiastic cowboy.

Hell yes. She’d love to volunteer!

She put on classical music. The music was for the baby but also for her. It was Brahms’s Academic Festival Overture, conducted by Leonard Bernstein. The music was thrilling! It was the dance of Georgie’s high hopes set to a score. The conference would be her way of stepping back into the stream of the academic conversation. She needed it.

Please, please, please.

The organizers got back to her mid-overture. They said they’d love her help—they were desperate for volunteers!—but also that they wouldn’t have exact assignments until the day of the conference.

Georgie wrote back, pecking at keys on the keyboard one letter at a time, one-handed, while she held Bella against her chest. She typed, “Thank you!” She couldn’t say it enough. Then she added, respectfully, “One detail. If I don’t know my assignment in advance, how will I have time to research and write the introductions? I’d love time to think about it.” She wanted to put her writing skills to use. Her mind hadn’t gone with motherhood; she was still part of the discourse, the academic dream. The blaring classical music, that Academic Overture, was the sound track to Georgie’s life.

And as soon as she hit “send” again, she saw her mistake: “I’d love time to think about tit.”

Tit.

Crap! This was the problem with typing with a baby in her arms, a nursing baby, a baby high on tit.

An e-mail came back: “Well write it. You get a copy the day of.”

That was confusing. Well write it? She was missing a crucial piece.

Georgie e-mailed, “Sounds good. I’ll write it, once I know who I’m introducing. Okay?” She tried to put a smile in her words without sinking to emoticons.

For a while, her in-box stayed quiet. There was an ad from Sears, and another from Doctor Sears. Much later another conference e-mail came back. “We’ll write it,” this one said, more clearly. “All you have to do is show up and read it onstage.” Signed with a smiley face.

Less exciting, but fine, and still a way to keep her hand in.

She wondered who she’d be assigned: a writer, an editor, a theorist, a filmmaker? Somebody smart. Johnny Depp?

Ha. She pictured introducing him in his Willy Wonka glasses, or his Jack Sparrow makeup. More likely he’d be in a good suit. Somebody at the top would snag that assignment. Al Gore was a keynote speaker, too. Michael Pollan would be there, and all the superstars would be far out of reach. Georgie would likely be assigned an obscure academic on a back stage.

One of her exes, a professor named Brian Watson, hit up all the lit conferences. He usually sat on a few panels, ran a seminar or two, and chaired a hiring committee. She’d seen him at more than one hotel lobby cocktail party. Brian Watson had been a tenured full-time professor since he finished grad school two decades back.

When Georgie went back to teaching in the spring her goal was to become full-time faculty. Her department chair, Dan, was on every committee. His vote would be key. Maybe she’d introduce him at the conference. That’d be okay. Not thrilling, but still an opportunity. Georgie hitched up her shirt and let her baby nurse again, turning over her body while she herself lived in her mind, the idea-driven world of plans.



That evening when Humble came home, Georgie and Bella rested in the indentation of their collapsing couch. Georgie said, “Guess what?”

Humble jumped. He said, “Jesus, it’s dark in here. Thought you’d gone to bed.”

The sun set early in the winter. Georgie, in her cave with her thoughts, hadn’t bothered to turn a light on. She and Bella were fine moving around in the soft glow of the computer.

Humble poured a drink from a bottle of bourbon they kept on a low shelf in the dining room. He dropped down onto the couch beside her and put his bourbon on a side table. His body was warm. He was a big man, with solid shoulders. He pulled the blanket down, away from the baby’s face. “How’s our girl?”

He smelled like a bar.

They used to go out for drinks together, sit in a bar midafternoon sometimes. Back then it felt like vacation. When she got pregnant, at first she’d still go along—have a soda and bitters and chew on a maraschino cherry to calm her stomach.

He put his finger in the girl’s palm. Bella closed her hand. He said, “You fill out the life insurance papers?” His words knocked into one another.

“Oh, jeez,” she said. He’d been asking Georgie to fill those out. If you died today.… It was a threat, there on the front of the glossy brochure. The threat that came with bringing a child into the world: abandonment. She said, “Did you drive home like that?”

“Like what?” he asked.

“Drunk,” she said.

The phone rang. Neither of them moved.

When the phone rang again, Humble made an obvious effort to not slur. “You wan’to answer?”

No, she didn’t want to answer. Sarah had already left a dozen messages about coming over. The house was a wreck and steeped in Georgie’s own unshowered, sliced-open, stitched-closed, nursing body odors. She turned to the window behind the couch and pulled back the curtain to look out.

“You could throw a little party.”

A party for the baby. Who was he kidding? She’d have to get dressed, for starters. Sarah would leave in tears. Dulcet would show up high. Nyla would fixate on “spiritual midwifery” and the home births of her own two children. Ugh.

Portland was packed with happy mamas who birthed babies at home. Each one chalked it up to her personal, unique, deep-seated womanly wisdom. They preached natural birth as the only valid birth experience.

Georgie had bought into that narrative, too, until Bella.

Georgie had cracked a tooth, gritting against the pain of labor, when Bella was ready to be born. In the hospital, the epidural was a soothing cocktail. Then everything had gone into emergency mode. There was an oxygen problem, the obstetrician said, reading a monitor. They’d wheeled Georgie into the operating room without time to talk and jacked up the drugs, so many painkillers through her spine she couldn’t lift her arms.

They hung a blue paper curtain between Georgie’s head and her body because what they were about to do was brutal. They cut a fast line, let the blood seep, lifted her baby girl out. Bella’s long legs unfolded like a little foal’s. Georgie felt like a floating head. The rest of her body wasn’t her own—it was numb, bloody, being stitched closed by strangers—but she saw her daughter, and they handed the baby to Humble, and she was beautiful. It wasn’t a natural birth. Whatever. It was the happiest, bloodiest day of Georgie’s life.

Bella was born alive and sans brain damage. So what if it wasn’t in a candlelit bath of balanced sea salts set in the middle of feng shui-ed master suite, right? So what if it wasn’t in the chicken coop of an urban homesteading commune.

Humble turned on a light that cast him in a warm yellow glow. He could star in an old French painting, flattered by Vigée-Lebrun, dressed in the rococo ruffles of royalty.

He poured himself another shot. Georgie saw him sway. “How many drinks have you had?”

“Enough to quit counting. You want a Breathalyzer?” He leaned over to give her a bourbon-soaked smooch.

“Don’t put me in the cop role.” That was the road to momism. Georgie felt herself walking a thin, nervous line: She had a family now, the very thing she’d lost as a kid. Her own mom would’ve been planning an escape.

He stumbled, and she thought for a moment he’d crush her and Bella both. She held a hand up, to protect Bella, but Humble found his way.

She said, “Listen. I volunteered to work on a conference, with Johnny Depp.”





Days later, Sarah folded herself into her husband’s car, into that cloud of leather polish and spent gasoline, with a wrapped present on her lap. A week had passed since the baby was born. Sarah was like an aunt to that child! She would be, anyway, given a chance. She was out to practice her “aunting behavior,” as the ethologists called it. She’d treat that child like family.

Ben got in on the driver’s side.

In the tight box of a car, Sarah bent over her knees, over the gift, and gagged. She wiped a hand to her mouth then hacked again, a cough mixed with throat clearing. The present crinkled under the pressure of her chest against it. “Oh, God, I spit up a little on the cute bows.” She picked at the curling ribbon.

Ben asked, “You okay?”

“Sure, I’m great. It’s a good sign, right?” She looked for anything made of wood to rap her knuckles on. The dash was plastic, the seats leather, the floors covered in carpet. Paper was like wood, or had been when it was still alive, before it was made festive, girlish, and metallic. She tapped her hands to the silver and pink wrapping paper, then she tapped her head. She tapped her breastbone, not for luck so much as to urge back the sense of vomit rising.

The pregnancy test was positive. They had a baby on the way! It’s good to be queasy in the early weeks of pregnancy—it shows a body tilting into new hormones, adapting as a host, though maybe what she felt was only prenatal vitamins resting heavy in her stomach, a minor flu, bad food.

“I shouldn’t have had that Saint André.” Bacteria in soft cheeses, that’s not good for unborn babies.

Ben said, “Brie won’t kill you.”

Saint André wasn’t exactly brie. It was a triple crème, richer and fattier and harder to resist. She said, “I’m not worried about me.”

If her pregnancies had worked out, their backseat would be crowded now. The floor of the car would be flecked with cheddar goldfish crackers and Pirate’s Booty.

He put his hand on hers, on top of the present. “We could see this kid another time.”

“Now is good.”

“Are you going to hold the baby?”

Sarah said, “Of course I’ll hold her.”

Ben shifted the car into reverse and backed down the driveway. “Are you going to cry?”

She’d fallen apart at the baby shower when a friend of Georgie’s from work brought a cake shaped like a woman’s body with a plastic baby floating in an amniotic fluid made out of pale Jell-O. It was awful. She’d played the toilet paper game, guessing Georgie’s size at eight months by tearing off a length of toilet paper, but she had to dry her eyes on her game piece. It kept getting shorter.

When she turned in her estimate, what she had left of that strip of toilet paper was damp, blackened with mascara, and tiny. She had to guess that Georgie was toddler-sized, maybe even what they called eighteen months in the infant section, and then she bawled again!

She sobbed over the itty-bitty booties that served as table decorations. She’d totally made Georgie’s baby shower about herself, her own big void, her drama. Jeez Louise.

She couldn’t help it—babies made her cry.

This time, it wasn’t a party, thank f*cking God. It was a visit. And this round she was pregnant. Again. That was her secret strength. She said, “I feel really good. I’ll be fine.”



Georgie opened the door holding Bella bundled in a blanket. Sarah and Ben, on the porch, made all the right sounds—they exclaimed: They were glad to see her! The baby was beautiful! Georgie looked great!

Sarah couldn’t hear whatever Georgie said over the baby’s scream mixed with the grind and shudder of a jackhammer down the street, that familiar, loud language of a neighborhood intent on gentrification.

Georgie still looked half-pregnant, and, of course, nobody had expected her to put on makeup for their drop-in anyway. Maybe it was a leave-in hot-oil treatment that separated strands of her hair, showing a little scalp here and there? She had on some kind of Western-style shirt with pockets and big pearl buttons on the front like overstated nipples. The paisley swirl of the fabric was marked with dried milk patches.

“Come in,” Georgie said, or something close enough, and moved out of their way.

The house smelled sweet, tinged with sour milk. Right away Sarah heard Nyla, midsentence, saying, “You can still have a vaginal birth after a C-section. Women do it all the time!”

Dulcet and Nyla were in the living room eating small sandwiches. Sarah hadn’t known they were coming. Yet again, they’d gotten there first. Neither of them had a regular job. They could show up on short notice, a total advantage.

Arena slunk in from the kitchen, tall and sullen and gorgeous, with a handful of olives. That was pretty much everybody. Sarah was last.

“Come meet the latest enfant terrible to join our tribe,” Dulcet called out.

Sarah wanted a visit alone. Georgie owed her that much.

Ben hung up his old jacket and surveyed the room in an open, neutral way, offering a smile for whoever stepped in front of him.

She’d worked hard to get that visit. She’d called and called back and didn’t give up. Now she concentrated on keeping her smile easy—everything was fine!—and didn’t look down when she reached to hang her coat on the hook near the door, where she caught her foot in a trap and almost fell. A bouncy chair bit her ankle like a bad dog. The bouncy chair was little, pink, and lined with dangling toys. It burst into a slow, sad, and creepy version of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” Raggedy Bitchy Bitch leapt off the couch and came bounding to bark at the chair. Sarah still had the present in one hand and her coat in the other. She tried to kick the contraption off her foot but it held on, plinking out its little song.

Dulcet grabbed Bitchy by the collar, swinging and spilling what looked like a mimosa from a martini glass in her other hand. Champagne and orange juice doused the baby’s chair.

Dulcet said, “Settle, Bitch. Jesus. Do you have a towel? Sorry about that.” She didn’t sound sorry so much as vaguely entertained.

Georgie joined the chorus of apologies. She clutched the baby, bent, and jiggled the chair off Sarah’s foot.

“Good thing there’s not a kid in there,” Dulcet said, and swigged what was left of her sloshing drink. Sarah finally got her coat on the hook. A bassinet crowded the living room.

“I saw you on TV,” Georgie said. “With the pregnant mandrill. That’s fantastic. Is everyone at work thrilled?”

“They’re hoping it’ll help the levy pass,” Sarah said, in a controlled voice that came out a little flat, verging on hostile. That wasn’t how she meant it, not at all, but it was true—babies born to a zoo are about gaining funding, cultivating recognition, and maintaining a diverse population. Sentimental enthusiasm was for the press.

Nyla said, “I heard they’re throwing a baby shower.”

“Really?” Sarah choked. A pregnant mandrill cake? She pictured the amniotic fluid in Jell-O, a mandrill figurine inside. PR handled public celebrations. She was in the research wing, an entirely separate field. The Oregon Zoo was a research institution, and one of the best, dedicated to preserving endangered species. She was proud to be affiliated. “They wouldn’t. It’d be anthropomorphizing.” Sarah couldn’t handle another baby shower.

The next baby shower she went to would be her own.

“They throw a party for Ellie every year,” Dulcet said, and shrugged. “That’s anthropomorphizing.”

Ellie was the zoo’s firstborn baby elephant, now a fifty-year-old matriarch. She’d given birth to six babies. Four of them had died, though nobody tried to think about that. At her birthday everybody wore giant paper elephant ears. They sang “Happy Birthday” while she demolished a three-layer wheat cake with bananas planted on top.

“She’s alive. It’s a PR risk to let the public invest emotions in an unborn animal,” Sarah said, and her voice warbled.

“It’s a risk to invest love in a living animal,” Dulcet said.

Sarah ran a nervous hand over the terry cloth sides of the new bassinet. There was a gift certificate on the table: Good for one “gyno-steam treatment” at the Opening to Life Spa.

“I’m going to steam my opening to life,” Georgie said, and gave a sort of awkward plié, the baby still in her arms.

“We went in on it,” Nyla said. She and Dulcet were good at hanging out together because they could both make a dollar go a long way. “It’s an herbal postpartum vaginal steam bath. Drink?” Nyla tipped a green bottle over an empty glass.

Ben said, “I’d love one.”

Sarah knew that about Ben—he really did love a good mimosa. He loved mixed drinks and fizzy drinks and things with umbrellas.

He wasn’t afraid to ask a stranger for directions, either, going against gender statistics. Sometimes he even sat down to pee, which was fine!

Sarah said, “Virgin screwdriver for me.”

Nyla poured while she narrated, “Regional, organic sparkling wine, raised on an eco-vineyard in Yamhill, with no sulfites added.” Yamhill was a sleepy town in the low, folding hills of Willamette Valley.

Nyla was in the process of starting up a tiny eco-friendly store called LifeCycles, devoted to simple and transitory pleasures. When she found extra money she spent it on food and wine, the Portland way: Even when the economy tanked, when nobody bought what the news referred to as “durable goods” and the regional Goodwill stores had the highest sales rate in the nation, when renters made up the biggest demographic and everybody rode bikes because their old cars broke down, even then Portlanders blew through cash on microbrews. They’d pay for wine, grass-fed cattle, and Pacific coast sushi. They spent big on tattoos—that most durable of durable goods.

The baby screamed.

This is where Ben, if it were still the 1950s, would’ve said, “Great set of lungs on that kid!” clapped the new father on the back, and shared a cigar. Instead he sipped his mimosa. He asked, “Where’s Humble?”

Georgie fluttered a hand in a half circle then above her head. “Organizing the attic.” The baby kept up its wail.

“One way to use paternity leave,” Dulcet said, and picked at the tray of tiny deli sandwiches. They were baby-sized sandwiches, scaled in a cute size to honor the infant.

As though newborns even noticed lunch meat.

And as though those small pink slices of soft meat inside the bread weren’t eerily akin to the soft vulnerability of baby flesh. Sarah, nervous and half-queasy, saw the sandwiches as foreign, a strange behavioral ritual of a deli-worshipping tribe.

But they also looked kind of good.

Arena sat on a window seat and pulled her knees to her chest, shrinking away from the baby’s screams.

Nyla said, “The beauty of bringing a baby into the world these days is, in part, that it automatically turns the new parents into environmentalists. You can’t have a baby and not care about the planet, right? It’s that awareness of future generations.”

Dulcet ate maraschino cherries out of an open jar on the table. She flicked juice off her long fingers. “Then who shops at Walmart?”

Nyla ignored her. “Giving birth to a child gives birth to the parents. They’re new people. It’s like crossing an invisible border.”

Sarah’s stomach hurt, she wanted so badly across that border. She was an illegal immigrant peering into the land of maternity, deported three times already.

Dulcet said, “And the rest of us?”

Nyla said, “You don’t appreciate everything your mom does until you have a child of your own. Then you know.”

“What if she didn’t do much?” Georgie asked. “Just checked out early.”

Nyla reached to adjust one of Georgie’s tiny flower earrings, turning it right-side up. She said, “I could lend you my postpartum kickboxing cardio DVD if you want, Blast the Flab. I use it all the time.”

Georgie winced.

Sarah spoke up. “That’s postpartum. It’s normal.”

“Normal fat,” Georgie said, and patted her stomach. The baby in her arms was making a quieter howl now, more like a song off-key.

Sarah moved in close and reached her arms out. She said, “You look fantas—”

Georgie unsnapped one of the pearl buttons on her Western shirt. There was a flash of brown nipple. It was a nursing shirt. The pocket was a trapdoor.

Sarah’s words broke at a splash across her cheek.

Georgie said, “Oh, jeez.”

Dulcet gave a wheeze that passed for a laugh, palmed one of her own flat breasts, and said, “F*cking God. It’d be almost worth being preggers just for the boob juice act.”

Over Bella’s wail, Georgie half-shouted, “I don’t have any diseases. They tested for all that.” Breast milk is a blood product. Georgie hoisted her now-exposed boob.

Arena’s pale cheeks turned red, a blush climbing. Yes, it was breast milk that hit Sarah’s face, shot from Georgie’s boob like a water pistol. The baby latched on, and the room was newly quiet, the screaming replaced by only a sucking sound. Even the jackhammer was a distant rattle. There was a scrape against the floor upstairs. Humble moving furniture.

Georgie came at Sarah with a napkin and dabbed at Sarah’s face, with her boob still out and the baby in her arms, all those suckling sounds and the cloud of milk smell. It was too much, too close—the smell clotted Sarah’s throat and tugged at the side of her mouth, forcing a grimace.

It was worse than the baby booty table decorations, worse than the amnio cake.

Georgie said, “Have some food.” This is what mothers do: nurse babies, feed a crowd.

Sarah would, in a little over eight months, magically transform into that competent mother hostess queen. She swore she would. For now she turned away and adjusted pillows on the couch.

Georgie cradled the baby’s head in her palm and whispered, “Sleep, sleep, sleep.”

Sarah watched uneasily, with a mix of greed and nerves. She watched like it was porn.

She watched like she was a failure.

Her hands trembled. Small-brained animals, hamsters and rats, sometimes eat their offspring in a kind of twisted overprotection. Polar bears do it, too. Sarah understood the impulse: insatiability.

Nyla and Dulcet seemed immune to the urge, as they picked through tiny foods and refilled their glasses. Ben was calm, looking at art on the walls.

When baby Bella drifted off to sleep Georgie eased her off her breast, snapped her shirt again, and rested the sleeping bundle against her own shoulder.

“She’s a delicate little bonbon,” Sarah whispered. The baby was a secret that’d take a lifetime to unfold. She had a distinct blue vein that ran along the side of her face, like a river drawn on a map. It was life.

“Want to hold her?” Georgie asked.

There it was: the question that came with only one answer.

“Sure!” Sarah squeaked, in a single note so high and quick that perhaps only Bitchy Bitch’s ears could pick it up. She held out her arms and tried to stay steady. They swapped Bella from one shoulder to the next, one patting hand to another, and Sarah thought, Okay, I’m doing it. She looked to Ben to show him what she could do: hold a baby and not cry.

She concentrated on the baby against her chest, the tiny weight, radiating heat. Her lower lip trembled. The baby seemed to grow more fragile in her arms. She could squeeze that child, right up against—right into—her own body. She was a stand-in for the infant’s whole soft world. Nothing about Sarah’s hold on the baby felt natural; she worked to make it look simple.

Advanced maternal age. A doctor wrote that on a chart at the hospital under Sarah’s name. “Aged primipara,” they wrote, which was nothing like an aged prima donna. Later, they changed “aged” to straight-up “elderly.”

It was like being diagnosed as an old hag. Waiting for death.

And here she was, that old hag, with a baby in her arms! Despite what they said, she was happily, victoriously, secretly pregnant. She turned in a slow waltz while Georgie pulled the ribbons from the present they’d brought, then let the paper fall open. “Goodnight Moon,” she said. “How sweet! We love it.”

Sarah stopped mid–box step. “Do you already have a copy?”

Georgie gave Sarah a reassuring smooch on the forehead, and again brought her into the maternal nimbus of sweat and milk. Sarah felt a rush of heat behind her eyes. She held back her nausea.

Nyla picked up the wrapping paper and ran a finger over the metallic polka dots. “Is this recyclable?”

Arena, that lanky child, bit a nail, looked at her mom, and cringed. Humble came through a swinging galley door. His thick hair had a cobweb in it. He gave everyone a nod, a handshake, a hello, and checked the bottles on the table. He said, “Let’s get these guys some good stuff.”

“That is good,” Georgie said.

Nyla chirped, “One percent of each sale supports urban gardens for terminally ill homeless refugee children.”

Humble was already in the kitchen. He came out with two beers, one for himself and one for Ben. “Enough with the girls’ drinks.”

Ben traded his nearly depleted cocktail for the brewski. But he really did love a mimosa. Sarah thought, Who was he to pretend?

Humble brought his bottle forward fast and clinked it against Ben’s bottle. Beer sloshed.

With that clink, Bella woke and squirmed in Sarah’s arms.

An awake newborn was more complicated than a slumbering one. Sarah felt Bella writhe and brought her forward. The baby was making such cute faces! “Is that a smile?”

They leaned in close. Georgie said, “Her first smile.”

Nyla said, “She likes you.”

“You smell like mama’s milk,” Dulcet said. Sarah had milk in her hair. Dulcet smelled like yesterday’s booze.

The baby huffed, red in the cheeks.

Nyla said, “It might be gas.”

Arena, living, breathing evidence of Nyla’s expertise in raising babies, stretched one long arm, yawned, and turned away, exuding a teenager’s discomfort in her own skin.

Sarah said, “She’s warm.”

“Go ahead, take the blanket off,” Georgie offered. And they unwrapped the baby, that prettiest of presents. The women cooed and laughed and touched Bella’s soft legs. The men nursed their beers. Sarah relaxed. Babies liked her! This one did.

She reached for a sandwich.

She could hold a baby and eat a sandwich, and that had to count as maternal competence.

Humble said, “That’s an honor, you know. Georgie never puts her down.”

Georgie waved the comment off, but said, “I don’t want to put her down, actually.” She started to reach for the baby back, then she checked herself. “An abandoning mother is not a mother,” she said. It came out with the rhythm of a jump rope jingle, as practiced as the voice in her head.

“It’s not abandoning to put her down,” Humble added. His voice was kind.

Georgie looked, as though from a great distance, to where Bella rested in Sarah’s arms. She said, “I heard about a literary festival coming up and volunteered to introduce a few speakers.”

Behind her, Humble said, “You’re really going through with that?”

Georgie said, “Bella can stay with you. It’s one afternoon.”

“What if she needs—” Humble held a hand to his own chest, cupping a porn-sized ghost boob.

“I’ll pump. It’s an international event. Johnny Depp’ll be there. It’s called Lit Expedition. Ecotours of the mind,” and she laughed at the tagline.

Dulcet asked, “Johnny Depp writes?”

Nyla said, “Maybe he’ll talk about what it’s like to have a private island in the Bahamas. With global warming, that estate will be under water.”

Humble turned to Arena, his voice booming, “You good with babies? Want to babysit?”

It was sudden, the way he shifted his energy. Arena flinched. “I think so.” She looked at the floorboards.

“Think so?” He bumped his hip into Arena’s shoulder. She gazed out the window, in a clear effort to ignore him.

“Of course she is.” Nyla nudged her daughter, too, more gently, and the girl was jostled between them.

Sarah rocked the happy baby, moved her from one arm to the other, and took a bite of the sandwich.

Humble said, “Or we could call Aunt Sarah when we need a night out.”

Aunt Sarah. He’d read her mind! Her dream was to be that child’s aunt, though with a baby of her own. Aunting behavior was the helpful but strained, desperate social role of the old maid animal. It was a subordinate, childless female making herself valuable.

Sarah would have her own child in eight months. Then her aunting behavior would transform into cooperative parenting. She said, “Anytime.”

She felt a drip on her arm, near her wrist. She looked. It was the dark yellow of deli mustard leaked from her sandwich. This was the kind of thing mothers put up with: compromises. She shifted Bella and licked the mustard off her skin. Her skin was warm. The mustard was warm, too. It was grainy with a taste like sour milk and compost. It didn’t taste like mustard.

Dijonnaise, perhaps?

It didn’t taste like mustard at all.

Georgie froze, her face still, eyes wide, then she poured a fast glass of wine. “Swish,” she said.

Sarah wasn’t drinking. “No, thanks.”

Nyla said, “There’s not much in baby poop in the first weeks anyway. Just breast milk, right?”

Baby poop?

Humble said, “Get that kid changed.”

Bella’s cotton diaper rested loose around her pink baby thighs. There was no mustard on those little sandwiches.

No Dijonnaise.

And Sarah thought again, Poop, the word an echo of the bitter taste, and she nodded yes, she would take the wine. She lifted the glass, swished, and spit back into the glass.

Poop coated Sarah’s tongue like oil. Grit caught in her teeth. Her eyes were hot, and she couldn’t quite see. She’d already been queasy, and now she gagged, nearly vomited. She made a yakking squawk, the sound of a dying bird. Bella started to wail.

Sarah couldn’t pass her over fast enough.

Humble took the baby so gently; he was a handsome, sensitive, fatherly man. It was about as much as Sarah could stand.

If soft cheeses bred deadly bacteria, what more did she have to worry about with poop in her teeth? That could kill a fetus, for all she knew. Her baby would never be any safer than it was right now, hidden deep inside her body, and that wasn’t safe at all.

Her vision clouded as she tried not to cry. She tripped again on the bouncy chair, stumbled, made her way to the bathroom with the thing chiming “Twinkle, Twinkle” still half on her foot, kicked it off, and closed the bathroom door behind her.

She spit in the sink, rinsed her mouth. She looked through the cabinet for Listerine. There was nail polish. Comet. Clinique Take the Day Off makeup remover. She hung her head, willed her throat to relax, and tried not to cry. Mascara had migrated into the creases below her eyes. Who had sold her that clumped and flaking paint? Sarah looked like an aging Ace Frehley.

Advanced maternal age. The diagnosis was drawn on her skin.

Next to the tub she saw not one but two more copies of Goodnight Moon. Two copies! What did she, Sarah, know about babies? Only the most obvious things. What everybody knew. She should’ve bought a damn gyno-steam treatment, an “opening to life” herbal refresher.

Old hag.

Her throat choked up and she gagged, hacked, and then spit again.

Through the hollow door and down the hall, she heard Nyla ask, “How far along is she?”

Sarah froze. They were talking about her. They knew.

She thought of the zoo, her body a cage: It isn’t good to let the public emotionally invest in an unborn animal.

Then the conversation was a radio off the station, a static of voices. Sarah wiped mascara from her face and drank tap water from the palm of her hand. She wiped her hands on her skirt and over her hips, adjusting her clothes, her body, herself.

As she walked back into the living room she looked steadily from Ben to Georgie, to Nyla and Dulcet. Arena sat curled up on the window seat and tapped on her iPhone. Maybe she was texting somebody: Just saw Mom’s friend eat baby poop! LOL.

Whatever. Sarah smiled and tried to act like she meant it.

At first, nobody said anything. Georgie raised a glass of soda water. She burst out, “Congratulations!”

They were all so happy! They drank and beamed her way. Humble, with the baby in one manly arm, gave Ben the uneasy glance of a guy ducking from his own unstable emotions of raw papa love.

Sarah said, “You told them?”

“They guessed.” Ben shrugged. Of course they did; it wasn’t hard to guess. They’d seen her through three miscarriages and knew they’d been trying. Ben was happy, too. Dulcet refilled her own glass, because booze and a toast was what passed for emotion in Dulcet’s world. Bitchy scrambled to find a crumb on the floor. Georgie said, “Let me get you something.”

She disappeared upstairs and came back wrestling a pillow twice as big as she was and as wide as Humble’s shoulders, only with a hole in the center. “It’s a pregnancy pillow. You can wrap your legs around it, or use it to take the weight off your stomach. The fabric wicks water away from your body when you sweat.”

So it was a pillow full of Georgie’s dried pregnancy sweat? A pillow she’d tucked between her legs, under her own sweating, baby-filled stomach. She pressed it on Sarah. When Sarah took it, it was like carrying a giant doll. “Sure you’re done with it?”

Georgie was certain. “I don’t need it anymore. Now I snuggle my baby.”

Right. Sarah leaned the pillow against the wall by the door. Her voice was soft and disappeared into the noise of the party as she said to Ben, “I wasn’t ready to tell anyone.”

Humble tapped Ben on the arm and said, “Let’s have a drink, buddy. Later this week?”

Ben hesitated, then said, “Yeah, sure.”