10 Abbott’s Reminder
Abbott occasionally forgets that pregnancy culminates in childbirth. More precisely, Abbott only occasionally remembers that pregnancy culminates in childbirth. Abbott’s wife’s gradual expansion, though, is indeed caused by a very small and helpless creature with no reasoning skills. As that creature grows, it will eat sand and develop ear infections. From time to time Abbott remembers, always with a sense of euphoric apprehension. This afternoon Abbott, his wife, and their daughter are visiting the hospital, or, in the idiom of third-trimester checklists, touring the birthing facility. Touring a birthing facility is, Abbott discovers, a powerful mnemonic. He can see the weary parents and grandparents walking the halls. The women, the new mothers, move slowly and clutch IV stands, medical carts, bassinets, or nurses. They don’t clutch husbands. The husbands are useless. They are stranded in the old world, while the women clearly have visited a distant place on their own. And now they’re back and their bodies are wrecked and their eyes have that unfocused look that seems to be less about fatigue than transcendence — as if conventional sense perception is no longer interesting or even necessary. The husbands are goofy and exalted, happy and proud. They are incapable of walking at the appropriate pace. They walk too far ahead of the women, and then they come back and walk too far behind them, and then they begin walking too far ahead again. In the nursery the swaddled newborns lie peacefully beneath heat lamps, giving the false impression that they are good. One opens its eyes slowly. “Baby,” Abbott’s daughter says as Abbott holds her up to the window. They tour the recovery room, the kitchen. Abbott is pleased to learn that the chair becomes a bed, that the refrigerator is open to fathers. “Same as the last time,” Abbott’s wife tells Abbott, and he nods as if he remembers. Every nurse talks to Abbott’s daughter. “Look at you,” they say. “Aren’t you sweet.” They give her stickers that say I Was Brave and I’m a Big Sister. Abbott’s daughter peels the stickers and applies them to herself immediately. Roxanne, the nurse and tour guide, speaks only to Abbott’s wife, as if Abbott does not understand the language. “You’re cesarean, right?” Abbott’s wife nods, and Abbott nods too. “OK,” Roxanne says, “on the morning you come in, we’ll set you up in a birthing room. We’ll get you hooked to the monitor and get your vitals and prepare you for the section. We’ll need to get a catheter in. You know about that, Mom. We’ll put Dad in scrubs. Then we’ll take you to the O.R. and start the anesthesia. You’ll be awake the whole time, Mom. When that’s ready, we’ll come for Dad. After the delivery, we’ll clean up the baby right there in the room. If everything is OK, we’ll keep the little one in there with you. We don’t split up mothers and babies if we don’t have to. It’s not like the old days. When they finish stitching you up, Mom, we’ll take all of you to a different room for recovery. Do you have any questions?” Abbott’s mind is a vast windy plain at dusk, swept clean of word and thought. “No,” Abbott’s wife says. “Great,” says Roxanne. “We’ll see you in a few weeks.” Abbott tries to show his daughter the babies in the nursery once more, but this time the blinds are drawn. They leave the hospital then and go downtown for a large pizza.
11 Abbott’s Inadvertent Research on Prepositions
Abbott mows the lawn, secretly enjoying himself. His wife and daughter play with sticks in the driveway. He cannot hear them over the sound of the mower, nor does he want to. The mown lines are green and fragrant; the robins drop into his wake for worms. The lawn is filled with weeds, but even weeds look good after mowing. This old mower just runs and runs. The blade is new and scrupulous. Abbott installed it an hour ago, lying beneath the propped mower, tightening the bolt with two hands, a grunt. At the end of a long row, he turns the mower back toward the house and sees that his wife and daughter are no longer in the driveway. They’ve probably gone back inside. Now the evening is still good, but not quite as good as it was.
12 In Which a Gorilla Appears
Actually, it appears to be a minimum-wage employee in a gorilla costume, but Abbott feels neither scorn nor pity nor melancholy. He’s not speculating why it is that primates are comic, and he’s not reflecting pensively about Dian Fossey or evolutionary branching. This is because he’s with his daughter, and his daughter is, in the presence of the gorilla, enraptured. Just think about her afternoon. It begins with another rainy-day trip to the chain bookstore on Route 9, and suddenly it has a gorilla in it. And this gorilla appears to be improvising — it is bounding over children’s tables, knocking down display books, and pounding its chest loudly, at least for a bookstore. Abbott’s daughter stands with her fingers in her mouth, immobilized by ecstasy. She is a conductor. She conducts wonder. Wonder passes from the world to Abbott through his daughter. One could say that he is taking pleasure in the reckless bookstore gorilla, but he is not even looking at the reckless bookstore gorilla. He is looking at his daughter as she looks at the gorilla. Later — not now, thank goodness — Abbott will have to consider how it is possible that watching another person live so fully and directly can feel so powerfully like living fully and directly.
13 Abbott Makes a Move
Abbott and his wife walk toward each other in the cluttered family room, though they are not each other’s destination. There is only one narrow path through the clutter. As they meet, Abbott turns sideways to the left to allow his wife to pass, and as she does, he grabs her right breast. In fairness, he means to caress her right breast, but it is difficult to caress a moving body part. If pressed, Abbott would be forced to admit that there is not one erotic aspect of this tableau. Not one. It’s late morning, very hot. Abbott’s wife is deep in the third trimester of a rough pregnancy. Their daughter is with them in the room, squeezing old bath water out of a lobster. Abbott is wearing what he wore yesterday, and perhaps the day before that. Abbott’s wife laughs, but not in the right way. “What?” Abbott says, prepared to defend the indefensible. “I just don’t know what you were hoping to accomplish,” she says. Abbott does not know, either, so this conversation will have no brakes and no steering mechanism. “You just never know,” he says, “when a little spark can start a fire.” Despite the joke, he is not joking, which is to say his irony is ironic. “A fire?” she says. “Are you serious?” “Of course not,” Abbott says. “Then what—” his wife begins, but she stops and begins again. “I think it’s potentially sweet that you groped me,” she says. “But I’m sorry, you are just not going to start a fire.” She pulls her maternity blouse up over her stomach. There’s a watermelon. It’s her flesh, and it is exciting, but it is also looks at this point like a carnival exhibit. “This,” she says, holding her belly like a big potted plant, “this is inflammable.” “Right,” Abbott says. He is not so dumb as to think now is a good time to bring up the quirky lexical item that inflammable is in fact a synonym, not an antonym, for flammable. You can look it up. And thus his wife has just unwittingly suggested her sexual readiness, her combustibility. Abbott’s wife says, “She’s not drinking from that lobster, is she?” Abbott, typically so heedful, is unconcerned. There is a quirky lexical item he is determined to share.