Everyone chipped in, everyone doted. But at the end of the day, I was on my own. I didn’t have to work, and I had enough of every necessity. And yet life with the baby seemed impossibly complex.
Just getting up to bed had become a comical ordeal. The studio had a sleep loft, reachable only by a built-in wooden ladder, angled at a sharp rake. Ascending the ladder, using one hand to clutch the baby to my chest and the other to grab for incrementally higher rungs, was a physical joke. At night, once I’d gotten up to the loft, I was loath to come down again. Did I bring the baby with me, fumbling in the dark? Leave her in the loft alone? She couldn’t possibly wiggle off the bed and over the edge of the loft, right? It was impossible! It couldn’t be done! And then the infant who had not yet learned to burp strikes a match and burns the house down.
Parenting, I discovered, invokes questions you never thought to ask: Are you willing to leave the baby to her peril, even imaginary peril, if you have to pee? What if you have to pee really badly? Will you pee in a cup, in a loft, in the dark? What do you do with said cup? How self-sacrificing are you willing to be? Define peril. Define imaginary.
Bit by bit, these questions hammer at your sense of self.
Finally, my mom said, “Just put the baby’s bassinet up in the loft,” and it seemed reasonable to assume that, unless the baby could defy the laws of physics, she would be safe in her bassinet while I went down to the bathroom. But the dilemma of conflicting needs had only just begun. If the phone was ringing, and the stir-fry was burning, and Lulu was barking to be let out, and my pants were sliding off, and the baby was crying—where to start? The baby, of course the baby, but that leaves one hand for all other competing priorities. I dubbed this dance—baby in the left hand, everything else with the right—the one-handed life.
One-handed as I was, I didn’t miss Brian. I didn’t rage at Brian. For the most part, I didn’t feel he owed me anything in particular, now that the baby was born, except child support. It was as if, at the moment of her birth, my shock, my fury at being left while pregnant became a relic from another era. The hurt that had passed between us was beside the point. The point was her. I hadn’t forgiven him; I just didn’t feel intensely much of anything toward him anymore. I felt intensely for the baby, and the rest of life was white noise. My one-handed life was by design. I chose this girl, squeaky girl, sleepy girl.
Still, he was psychically hovering, more than I’d expected. He would call around eight each night, and I’d give him the update. She ate! She slept! She pooped! And he was as bowled over by these achievements as I was.
We never said, “Now we’ll talk every day.” We never said, “I forgive you” or even “I don’t forgive you.” We simply fell into a pattern of contact that reassured us both and, in my imagination at least, helped to form a protective seal around Amelia-Grace. Though we didn’t discuss it, I imagined Brian was living inside a titanic clash of inner tides: know the baby, love the baby, and let all hell break loose; or stay three thousand miles away. I didn’t envy him. She was an irresistible force.
I told him how her hair had begun to fall out in random patches. “She’s nearly bald, with this weird, Hitchcockian hairline,” I said.
I described the way she loved to sleep on her back with one arm thrown over her head, her chin stuck out at a contentious angle, daring the world to dish it out. Or how she’d fall asleep while nursing, leaving one eye open, a drunk too far gone to get comfortable. He wanted to hear everything, anything.
One night, after we’d chatted for a few minutes, Brian said, “Can I talk to her?” I held the phone to the baby’s ear. What was he saying? Was he whispering or just listening to the light whistle of her breath? It seemed like a private conversation. Did he apologize for missing her birth? Missing her blood transfusion? Did he recount the events of his day? I couldn’t know. I didn’t know. She fluttered awake, seemed to listen for a beat or two, and closed her eyes. Back to sleep.
“Why do you sleep so much?” I said.
“What?” Brian said.
“Just talking to the baby.”
We paused, a semi-comfortable silence.
“She’s a decent-looking baby,” I said.
I knew Brian would appreciate the understatement. That was his style. When we’d been together, if we shared a mind-blowing night, the next morning he’d say something like, “I had an OK time with you.”
“What’s so great about her?” he said.
“Well, Cassie says she has a certain something.”
“Cassie is obliged to say that. But tell me, specifically, what is so great about this so-called baby?”
“For one thing, she has fantastic breath. I could sell tickets. In fact her whole body is really outstandingly fresh; it’s as if each cell has been aired out at the top of the Sierras.”
“That is impressive.” Long beat. “I wish I could smell her.”
Get on a plane, you’ve heard of planes?
I stayed quiet. Because you do not run out scolding the deer that peeks from behind the bushes. You hold still. You wait. Even when the deer is acting idiotic. If I opened up my anger and impatience, this would be about me. And, more than Brian was my ex, he was Gracie’s dad. My job was to make room for him, at whatever glacial pace, to know his daughter.
6
My mom and I thought that twenty-one days of life on earth sounded auspicious, and so we were sitting in the sun, at an outdoor café, celebrating the baby’s three-week birthday when the full foolishness of my pretend-the-baby-is-fine-and-eat-Salade-Ni?oise plan dawned on us. Or rather, it dawned on my mom; I wasn’t even thinking about the baby. I was watching a pair of toddler twins, a boy and girl, play at the edge of a nearby fountain, both of them emanating good health like gamma rays. They had the sun-burnished skin and brown-gold hair of kids who spend their days collecting seashells. Looking at them, I ached. It was nearly impossible to imagine my fragile, pasty baby transforming into this kind of bursting, cell-dividing, condensed sunlight child.
I didn’t say any of this to my mom. Instead, I held up People magazine and pointed at a picture of Halle Berry wearing ripped jeans, flip-flops, and a white men’s shirt as she pumped gas not as a mere mortal but as a demigod whose body inspired an unwavering allegiance from any object it touched. On her, the button-down shirt was impossibly sexy.
“Look how buoyant she is,” I said. “Her body practically floats. How is that possible?”
“Untold hours of yoga,” my mom said. “Or, an all-raw, mostly nothing diet combined with salt scrubs and Finnish saunas. Whatever it is, regular people don’t have time to be buoyant. Anyway, not everything is the way it appears; I’m sure there are unseen things weighing her down.”