“I don’t know if I can do this,” Clee said, pushing her doll aside.
“You can,” I reassured her. “It’s almost over.” But she stared at me, intent with some unspeakable, specific meaning. Motherhood. She didn’t know if she could do it. I looked away, pounding on my baby doll’s back, one, two, three times, then I put my ear to his mouth, listening for a breath.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
There were no machines at home. If Jack’s blood pressure or heart rate or oxygen intake went up or down there was no way to know. He ate every hour around the clock; Clee was almost never not pumping and I was always warming, washing, or holding a bottle. She moved back to the couch and Jack slept in the bed with me in the sleeper tray. Every few seconds I had to put my hand on him to calm him but I couldn’t fall asleep that way because the full weight of my palm would crush him. I lay with my hand hovering for hours. This led to an excruciating shoulder and neck problem that normally would have been my top concern. I ignored it. He was colicky — after each bottle he writhed and bucked in agony for hours at a time. “Do something do something,” screamed Clee. He stopped moving his bowels. I massaged his stomach and cycled his legs. Clearly, something was very wrong with him; a smile by the fourth of July seemed unlikely at best, since he was hardly more than a pile of guts. His face was covered in scratches, but neither of us felt confident enough to cut his nails. My shoulder worsened. After the first week I moved Jack’s tray to the floor and slept beside him there. I didn’t bathe him because I was too afraid he would slip out of my hands or his belly button would open. Then one night I woke at three A.M. certain he was rotting like a chicken carcass. Only as I lowered him into the sink did I realize this was a crazy time to wash a baby and I began to cry because he was so trusting — I could do anything and he would go along with it, the little fool.
Clee only pumped. Sometimes she slept while she pumped. Mostly she watched TV on mute. If I couldn’t find her, she was outside, sitting on the curb. When I complained that she wasn’t helping, she said, “Do you want him to drink formula?” As if she really wanted to help but couldn’t. She was the worst possible person to do this with — that was evident now, but what could I do? There was no time to get into it and Jack still hadn’t had a bowel movement. It had been twelve days. All the dishes were dirty and Clee tried to wash them all at once in the bathtub — she said she’d done it before. The drain clogged immediately, and the fat plumber came, the same one; Jack took one look at him and had a massive bowel movement that exploded his diaper; yellow cottage cheese was everywhere. I cried with relief, kissing him and wiping his skinny bottom. Clee said I’m sorry and I said No I am and that night I moved back to the bed, wondering why I had ever thought sleeping on the floor would help anything. Clee stayed on the couch. That was fine, we still had four weeks left until the consummation date set by Dr. Binwali.
Besides pooping and eating and sleeping, he hiccoughed and made sticky pterodactyl sounds, he yawned and experimentally pushed his clumsy tongue through the small O of his lips. Clee asked if he could see in the dark like a cat and I said yes. Later I caught my mistake but it was five A.M. and she was asleep. The next day I forgot. Each day I forgot to tell her he couldn’t see in the dark like a cat and each night I remembered, with increasing urgency. What if this continued for years and I never told her? My body was so tired that it often floated next to me or above me, and I had to reel it in like a kite. Finally one night I wrote “He can’t see in the dark” on a slip of paper and put it by her sleeping face.
“What’s this?” Clee asked the next day, holding the slip.
“Oh, thank God, yes. Jack can’t see in the dark like a cat.”
“I know.”
Suddenly I was unsure how this had begun. Maybe she had never asked. I dropped the subject with dark thoughts about my own mind. The following night I was overwhelmed with the suspicion that this baby wasn’t Kubelko Bondy at all, that I’d been duped. An hour later I decided Jack was Kubelko Bondy’s baby—he had given birth to the tiny thing and we were just babysitting until Kubelko Bondy was old enough to look after him.
But if you’re Kubelko Bondy’s baby, then where’s Kubelko Bondy?
I’m Kubelko Bondy.
Yes, you’re right. Good. That’s easier.
I curled my arm around his swaddled shape. Trying to cuddle him was like trying to cuddle a muffin, or a cup. There just wasn’t enough acreage. Very carefully I kissed each blotchy cheek. His vulnerability slayed me, but was love the right word for that? Or was it just a very feverish pity? His terrible cry tore through the air — it was time for another bottle.
The night feeds were at one A.M., three A.M., five A.M. and seven A.M. Three A.M. was the bad one. All the other hours retained some elements of civilization, but at three A.M. I was staring at the moon cradling someone else’s child who had stolen my one life. Every night my plan was to make it to dawn and then feel out the options. But that was just it — there were no options. There had been options, before the baby, but none of them had been pursued. I had not flown to Japan by myself to see what it was like there. I had not gone to nightclubs and said Tell me everything about yourself to strangers. I had not even gone to the movies by myself. I had been quiet when there was no reason to be quiet and consistent when consistency didn’t matter. For the last twenty years I had lived as if I was taking care of a newborn baby. I burped Jack against my palm, supporting his floppy neck in the crook of my thumb. Clee’s pump started up in the living room. Not the benign shoop-pa of the hospital pump; this new one was shriller, it sounded like hutz-pa, hutz-pa. A perpetually building condemnation — who did we think we were, taking this child? Such hutz-pa, hutz-pa, hutz-pa.
But as the sun rose I crested the mountain of my self-pity and remembered I was always going to die at the end of this life anyway. What did it really matter if I spent it like this — caring for this boy — as opposed to some other way? I would always be earthbound; he hadn’t robbed me of my ability to fly or to live forever. I appreciated nuns now, not the conscripted kind, but modern women who chose it. If you were wise enough to know that this life would consist mostly of letting go of things you wanted, then why not get good at the letting go, rather than the trying to have? These exotic revelations bubbled up involuntarily and I began to understand that the sleeplessness and vigilance and constant feedings were a form of brainwashing, a process by which my old self was being molded, slowly but with a steady force, into a new shape: a mother. It hurt. I tried to be conscious while it happened, like watching my own surgery. I hoped to retain a tiny corner of the old me, just enough to warn other women with. But I knew this was unlikely; when the process was complete I wouldn’t have anything left to complain with, it wouldn’t hurt anymore, I wouldn’t remember.
Clee never touched Jack unless I handed him to her, and then she held him away from her body, legs dangling. Little Dude is what she called him.
“Do Little Dude’s hands seem funny to you?”
“No. What do you mean?”
“He has no, like, control over them. I’ve seen people with that — adults, you know, in wheelchairs.”
I knew what she meant, I’d seen people like that too. We watched him flail erratically.