“Nice wrapping, Evan.”
“Don’t mention it,” he said. I unrolled a hand-sewn onesie, cut from an old T-shirt. There was a skull with a Mohawk on one side, on the other glittery letters spelled Metallica. This was a shirt he’d worn almost every day of high school, not because he particularly liked Metallica, but because he’d grasped, from an early age, that irony was the key to everything. It had been worn and washed and worn again so many times that the cotton was downy soft.
Evan looked down at the baby. “It’s so tiny,” he said, “and alive.”
“You really have the gift of summary, Evan,” I said.
“Dyl,” Evan said, “check out its minuscule fingernails.”
Dylan looked. “Cool.”
As the boys talked over her, the baby didn’t stir. Our discharge paperwork read, “Needs easily met,” and it was true. She was easily comforted by nursing or a song. She’d wake up for a few minutes and then drift back to sleep. In the back of my mind I knew the chance that we were done with hospital life was wafer thin, but I simply refused to think about it. And that worked well.
Together, away from the hospital, we were a closed, reciprocal system of delirium and euphoria.
Each forearm was a cushion of plush velvet I could rub or kiss for hours. The only thing that alarmed me was that her body now existed outside my own. Harm could come to her without passing through me first; amateur design flaw.
Daily, hourly, Gracie and I were entranced by the essential acts of infancy; the trope, the trifecta, of babyhood: poop, sleep, eat. Repeat.
Our third day home, Cassie arrived with ginger soup, an Anne Carson book, and her wind of good cheer. After lunch she baked brownies for us (that is, for her and me since the baby would only receive brownie by-products in the milk stream). Cass and I sat in my mom’s garden while Lulu ran up the hill pursuing a scent only she could smell, and the baby slept beside us. It was a gorgeous California day, light wind, puffy clouds at high altitude.
Cassie, in a red silk blouse and black jeans, was the most beautiful woman ever to sit in a California garden on an April afternoon. Not that she cared, not that she noticed. She was interested in ideas over surfaces; she always had been.
We met when we were ten, in an alternative classroom run by a daft but darling man named Bernie, a fuzzy-haired progressive educator who liked to inspire us with aphorisms (“The only way to take responsibility is to respond with ability!”). Cassie would roll her eyes at me; I’d roll my eyes back. She didn’t try to embarrass Bernie; she’d respond to his suggestions respectfully. But she could think circles around him. In my view, a fifth-grade classroom was way, way too small an arena for her. She was meant for bigger things; she should be riding into battle to save the French or performing lifesaving surgery or writing a poem. Most of all, always, writing a poem.
Often, when I looked over, she’d be staring out the window, eyes darting or peering searchingly up at the ceiling. She was the quiet girl at the back of the class, thinking clear, deep thoughts everyone wanted to know but only a lucky few, like me, got to hear.
After school we’d walk across the street to Cassie’s house, empty of parents, and pray to the Great Horse God, asking her to grant us Appaloosas, Palominos, Pintos, Mustangs, any creature with a shiny coat capable of a dead gallop. We wanted to have horses, ride horses, know horses, breathe horses, trade horses, sing horses, love horses, be horses.
Looking at Cassie twenty-five years later, I realized that she’d gotten our wish. She possessed the sprung, flexible energy of a lithe animal on the verge of taking flight. And such was her spirit of generosity that, beside her, you felt infused with the same set of live possibilities. Lumpen perinatal blob though you might be, next to Cassie you felt perkier, more artful. As if she might unscrew her long, articulate arms and offer them to you.
“Hey,” Cassie said, “are you in there?” She was holding the baby, smiling at her, but talking to me.
“I was just thinking,” I said, “that you’d probably lend me your arms if I asked.”
“Only,” she said, “if you promised to conduct a symphony with them.” She picked up a brownie, took a bite, and handed it to me. “I’ve always wanted to conduct a symphony.” I took a bite and handed it back. It was gooey at the center. We’d pass it back and forth until it was nothing but a crumb, and then one of us would bite the crumb in half and pass it back. This was what we did best, share. She took another bite, handed it back. A tiny piece fell off and landed on the baby’s forehead. It looked like a tika, the mark worn by Hindus to indicate the location of the third eye. Thusly blessed by brownie, the baby slept on.
“How is she?” Cassie said. She was looking at Gracie so intently I had the feeling she might spontaneously diagnose her. Mystery illness solved.
“She looks OK, is she OK?”
“I’m not sure,” I said.
“Well, she’s got a certain something,” Cassie said, “a definite certain something.”
A handsome, sexy god in our high school had once said this to Cassie, “You’ve got a certain something.” We’d been pretty sure he didn’t know her name, and he definitely didn’t have the vocabulary with which to describe her presence, falling, as it did, outside the high school box. But he knew she was unique, of note. Entirely original. At the time, we’d filed it under pathetic, backhanded compliment. Now, it was our highest form of praise.
“All babies have a certain something,” I said.
“Maybe,” Cass said, “but she’s the somethingest of them all.”
After Cassie left, the baby and I crawled up to the studio’s loft and fell asleep instantly. New motherhood strips you down to the studs. Almost everything I enjoyed doing in the evenings, pre-baby, like reading books or writing emails or watching CSI or walking to the park, was now an irrelevant luxury. All I needed in this refashioned life were brownies and baby and sleep.
Through those early days, my mom was a pillar of motherliness. She did laundry, cooked meals, took out the trash, held the baby while I showered, and wiped the glop I hadn’t noticed from my face and clothes. My friends Suzi and David (her college boyfriend, now husband) camped on our couch so that they could keep me company at 3 a.m. Suzi would lie beside me in the loft in the wee hours. “Fall back asleep, Heath. I’ll make sure she doesn’t roll off the bed.” Even Evan and Dylan were useful. Every time the baby cried, one of them would shout over from the main house, “Help her!” And if she didn’t stop crying instantly, they’d appear at my door, indignant on the baby’s behalf.