“Ow!” says Mrs. Gottwald. “It hurts! It hurts worse than before!”
“I know, but we’ve got to do this. We’ve got to get this latch-on on.”
The baby is doing beaver gnaws. Mrs. Gottwald clutches her chest.
“I can’t,” she says now. “It hurts too much!”
“Come on!” I say. “Don’t quit!”
“No!”
“Come on, honey!”
“No, no. It hurts. I can’t. Stop!”
“No stopping!” I shout at Mrs. Gottwald. “No stopping!”
“Get some!” I shout at the baby.
Tears stream down Mrs. Gottwald’s cheeks. A thread of milky blood runs down her chest. The baby is screaming. Little Ezekiel is screaming, waving his Manchego. Mrs. Gottwald is screaming. Mr. Gottwald is speaking in low, lawyerly tones, something about something being actionable, but I ignore him.
“Get some!” I shout again, and then, I’ll be damned, Baby Gottwald latches on. Soon he’s slurping away in peace. Mrs. Gottwald sinks back against the headboard. I stroke her damp hair with the cool, curved edge of the remote control.
“That’s it, sweetie, you did good. Look at Baby Gottwald.”
“He has a name.”
“Don’t worry about it, honey. Just be proud. You’re doing a really good thing.”
And I start to tell her why this is such a good thing, how the antibodies in the breast milk are crucial for the development of a top-tier baby, and besides, I continue, think of the alternative, think of somebody like me, kept days after birth in a cold, antiseptic hospital designed for maximum alienation of mother from child. There were no doulas then, no midwives, no lactation consultants, at least not in our neck of the woods, which weren’t woods, but so what? My mother, I tell Mrs. Gottwald, she did the best she could, which consisted of being a drugged-up cow and nodding listlessly at anything her cruel and capricious godlike doctor told her, including the completely unfounded notion that she couldn’t produce milk, not to mention the sage advice that she not visit with me, a light-shocked babe desperate to bond, until she’d fully recuperated from the so-called ordeal of labor, which I don’t think she ever truly accomplished, or else maybe she wouldn’t have left my father for an insurance executive slash cowboy poet named Vance and moved to Montana. I don’t blame my mother, I tell Mrs. Gottwald. I blame the patriarchy that indoctrinated women into the idea that they were second-class citizens, foolish, feckless whore slash Madonna complexes, only good for being barefoot and so forth. But we know better now, I tell her, the steady progress of Progress is truly fucking stupendous, whereupon I feel Mr. Gottwald’s hand on the collar of my shirt as he tugs me away from his wife and into the kitchen. Ezekiel follows with a wheel of Camembert, some kind of polymer.
“Listen,” says Mr. Gottwald, plucks his earpiece out of his ear, “I just want to say—”
“Don’t thank me,” I tell him. “Your wife is the brave one here.”
“No, listen,” he says, a little sterner, and I can now see how he commands so many minions with such a dinky device. “I think maybe I misjudged. It would be good if you left now. We can handle the rest on our own. How much do we owe you?”
“You owe me the dignity of doing my job,” I say. “This may take weeks, and I’m not going anywhere. I admit I have failed to establish the nurturing environment this family needs to thrive during the oh-so-delicate newborn phase. But I’m going to turn shit around.”
I take out my cell phone. The oligarchs cut service a few weeks ago, but I start dialing anyway.
“What’s your basic take on anchovies?” I say.
“Excuse me?”
“What about filberts?” says Ezekiel.
“You can’t put filberts on a pizza,” I say.
“Filberts are nuts,” says Mr. Gottwald. “You can’t have nuts, period, young man. Okay, I need to make a phone call.”
“Crazy, all this, right?” I say to Ezekiel after his father goes.
“I hate pizza.”
“You hate pizza? Wow, they really must have done a number on you.”
“Which number?”
“Listen, Z-Man,” I tell him. “You need to be strong for your baby brother. No more whining. Look alive. When you were a child, you acted as a child. You played with toy cheese. But now is the time to put the toy cheese in the box marked totally fucking childish. Capisce?”
Ezekial regards his Camembert, lays it on the kitchen floor, which is made of hard, bright material similar to the cheese.
“Good boy,” I say. “Now go get some pizza money from your dad.”
I still need to order the pie. There’s a phone here on the wall next to the Sub-Zero refrigerator. I’m not paranoid, but I do prefer a landline when ordering pizza. Choice of topping is too much of a tell. When I’m done, I check my messages at home.
There’s one from Tina. She’s flown to Montana. Something is wrong with our mother. Tina leaves some numbers, which I dutifully erase. There’s one from somebody in what sounds like a very large room full of people calling other people. “Hello? Hello?” he says, hangs up. These people call often. They seem confused about me. They say I’m a valued customer but also threaten to add more late fees.
“Make up your minds,” I tell them. “Stand up for yourselves.”
The newest message is from Monica Bolonik at the Doula Foundation. She says it’s urgent. She’s not my boss, but she’s got power over my continuing certification. It’s no secret I’ve been jousting a bit with the regional leadership. Seems there have been complaints. Seems without Fanny Hitchens in your corner, being a pioneer in the doula community isn’t so appreciated. Monica is what, in a more primitive stage of my emotional development, I would have called a ballbuster. But I’m not like that now. I’m not perfect, but I’m not the guy who once wrote “Vice Principal Avery Has Cunt Bunions — Tell a Friend” on the senior lockers, either.
I call Monica back.
“Mitchell,” says Monica.
“I’m on the job,” I say.
“I know. A certain Mr. Gottwald informed me.”
“It’s going really well here.”
“That’s not how he put it, Mitchell.”
“It’s Mitch,” I say. “My mother calls me Mitchell.”
“You don’t like your mother, do you, Mitchell.”
“Was there anything else?”
“We’re reviewing your certification. You are tainting the good name of our organization.”
“I’m a damn good doulo,” I say.
“It’s hard enough to gain acceptance in society without your insanity. And there’s no such thing as a doulo.”
“Yet strangely,” I say, “you are talking to one right now.”
Ezekiel wanders back into the kitchen, nibbles on a neon-green brioche.
“Tell her how well things are going,” I say to him.
Ezekiel leans into the mouthpiece.
“They did a number on me,” he says.
* * *
I’ve had a lot of jobs. Substitute gym teacher, line cook at a rib joint, mail boy at my late father’s accounting firm. I was even in the movie business for a while, spent a few years as the guy with the walkie-talkie who lurks around the trailers, tells you to cross to the other side of the street.
But I’m long past reinvention. I’m practically middle-aged, deep into cell degeneration or, worse, relocation. I remember my uncle Don had these weird patches of hair right under his shoulder blades. They made me want to puke. Guess who’s got them now? Guess who pops his lats in the mirror and wants to puke?
Point is, it’s going to take a hell of a lot more than Monica Bolonik to de-doulo me. We’re talking acres of paperwork.
* * *
I’m teaching Mr. Gottwald how to change his baby’s diapers.
“Wipe front to back,” I say.