Her head almost as big as the rest of her body.
Lopsided as a winter squash.
Andi and you design an announcement on your computer that highlights the color pink, cartoonish flowers and balloons, and the photo of Andi served up like a fish at some European market in the birthing room.
You send nearly forty copies to your friends back east.
Some parents save the placenta as a keepsake, Andi says.
Some parents save the placenta as a keepsake and some parents bury it and plant fruit trees over it or smoosh it on paper to make bio-print art.
You practice baby talk for hours on end.
In 1851 there were fifty-two photographers in Britain.
In 1861, more than twenty-five hundred.
Assuming, of course, the book Andi read is accurate.
Assuming there could be some way to know.
Each time you phone, Grannam asks you to put Genia on the line.
Andi holds the mouthpiece in your direction and you perform.
Some people store blood from the umbilical cord to yield stem cells for future medical procedures.
Others put a dried hank of it in a pouch to wear around their necks.
To wear around their necks or to wear around their wrists.
The mysteries of the tribe.
Grannam calls to let you know she received your cute announcement and that Genia is a dead ringer for Andi as an infant.
Is she a sleeper or a crier? Grannam asks.
A sleeper, answers Andi. She does nothing but eat, sleep, and wet on no particular schedule.
That’s you exactly, sweetheart. Your mother didn’t know what to do.
You pick up the other phone.
We’ve counted, you say. For every twenty-four hours, she sleeps nineteen. Nineteen or twenty. When she’s really perky, she wakes for maybe half an hour, then it’s lights out again.
Sometimes we think about waking her just so we can play with her, Andi says.
She thought you were sick, says Grannam.
My mother? asks Andi.
I don’t do my exercises, Grannam says. Isn’t that terrible?
You should, Andi replies, effortlessly adjusting to the conversation’s realignment. They’ll make you feel better.
You refused to do number two. I told her you were just too much of a lady. Has the cord dropped?
Saturday, you say.
The water jets in the jacuzzi are too hard. I think my skin’s going to fall off. This is what they call medicine.
Did you make a note and hang it on your refrigerator?
What?
That’s what I do sometimes to remind myself of things.
What?
A note. Did you hang. A note. On your fridge?
When are you coming to visit me?
Soon, you say. Andi’s still recuperating.
When you were young, we didn’t think twice about putting you in the backseat of the car and just taking off. Now everything’s special baby seats and Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.
We promise we’ll visit as soon as we can, Andi says.
You pull away from the phone and make a few whimpers and nasal blats.
Who thought of such things when you were young? Grannam asks.
You bring the phone up to your mouth and say:
We’ll talk to you Sunday.
I love you, dears, says Grannam.
We love you, too, Andi says.
Come visit me, says Grannam, replacing her phone in its cradle before you can think of a response.
The photograph being all about the peripateia, you see.
All about the pregnant moment.
Your sexual relationship does not suffer because you are suddenly preoccupied with your new child.
Instead, you discover a mail-order business in South Carolina that deals in exotic adult videos and captivating mechanical equipment.
You do not turn into sole financial provider.
Instead, you feel your money running down.
Like gas in your Honda’s engine.
Like air from a punctured tire.
Andi does not gradually develop negative attitudes about marriage.
You do not miss bonding on a regular basis with your male buddies over cheap beer and sports talk.
Sports talk, fishing talk, gun-show talk.
Andi does not come to resent you as a means of sublimating her own inability to bond on a regular basis with her female chums over wine and shared secrets.
Instead, more very large checks arrive.
Corpulent stuffed animals.
Rattles, plastic bibs, poufy sweatshirts, books manic with things that pop up and pop down and whistle and clack.
You stop monitoring your email every day.
Instead, Kysha and Thom start a college fund on Gen’s behalf.
You thank them, designate them godparents, then commence manufacturing more photographs of your daughter.
You stop surfing the Web every day.
You deposit the checks into the special bank account, untouched, and feel like you are doing something shady.
You have your wireless internet connection disconnected, Andi sells her cellular, you clear out the closet in your guest bedroom and use it to store the presents, then twice a month drive what you have accumulated to the Salvation Army, hand it over, and put it out of your mind.
Try to put it out of your mind.
Everything arriving on your film and your retina upside down.
Andi hand-coloring her photographs.
Scribbling on them with a black magic marker, running them through a copying machine in town, tinting them sepia.
She scans them into the computer and stretches them, solarizes them, inverts them, blurs them, transforms them into pointillist fantasia, surrealist melts.
She learns that Alfred Stieglitz waited three hours in a New York blizzard on February 22, 1893, to capture the right moment with his camera.
That Phyllis Diller once said: My photographs do me an injustice. They look just like me.
That, forty minutes after birth, babies can begin to imitate the facial expressions of people around them.
How?
You remember this.
For some reason you remember this.
I can’t find my voice, Andi announces. I try this. I try that. But all I hear are other people talking in my head.
You are digging up weeds when she says this, pruning back huckleberry bushes, righting thin weathered gravestones in the cemetery.
You wear your blue bandana, Andi a wide-brimmed straw hat she bought for fifty cents at GoodWill that makes her look like a peasant in a nineteenth-century French painting.
Maybe your subconscious is working things out behind your back, you suggest.
That’s not how it feels. It feels like everyone is talking except me.
Maybe this is what people mean when they say: These things take time. What do they call it? Letting go. Maybe you need to learn to let go.
No, Andi says, clipping around the base of a recently straightened stone. No. Only people without children believe life is about incontinence. People with children know it’s really about discovering how to maintain control without looking like you’re maintaining control.
You stop and look over at her.
Do they?
Letting go is the child abductor opening his car door near a playground and holding out a bag of butterscotch candies.
You return to weeding.
You’ve been reading up on this, you say.
The rate of death as a result of firearms among American children fifteen years and younger is twelve times higher than it is in twenty-five other developed countries. Or twenty-five times higher than in twelve. I forget which. But.
You look up again. Andi continues clipping.
Is that true?
Ten times as many children die at the hands of their parents as die at school.
You’re making this up.
On the contrary, she says, maintaining the same posture she might if she had just commented about the first magpies of the year returning, roosting in the trees, screeching like angry osteoporotic scholars across the yard.