So for a boy I proposed Frank. For a girl, I deliberately rejected Karru or Sophia from my mother’s vanquished clan and reached for the vanquished in yours.
The death of your Aunt Celia, your mother’s childless younger sister, had hit you hard when you were twelve. A frequent visitor, zany Aunt Celia had a playful taste for the occult; she gave you a magic eight ball that told fortunes and led you and your sister in darkened séances, the more delicious for your parents’ disapproval. I’d seen her picture, and she’d been heartbreakingly not-quite-pretty, with a wide mouth and thin lips but piercing, clairvoyant eyes, at once brave and a little frightened. Like me, she was adventurous, and she died young and unmarried after climbing Mt. Washington with a dashing young climber for whom she had high hopes, succumbing to hypothermia after their party was hit by a freak snowstorm. But you shrugged off the tribute with irritation, as if I were seeking to ensnare you by your Aunt Celia’s own supernatural means.
My second confinement felt vastly less restrictive than the first, and with Kevin in second grade, I could involve myself more fully in AWAP. Yet with child I also felt less lonely, and when I spoke aloud with you scouting and Kevin in school, I did not feel that I was talking to myself.
Of course, the second time around is always easier. I knew enough to opt for anesthesia, though when the time came, Celia would prove so tiny that I probably could have managed without. I also knew better than to expect a blinding Vulcan mind-meld at her birth. A baby is a baby, each miraculous in its way, but to demand transformation on the instant of delivery was to place too great a burden on a small confused bundle and an exhausted middle-aged mother both. All the same, when she begged to arrive two weeks early on June 14, I couldn’t resist inferring an eagerness on her part, as I had once inferred a corresponding reluctance from Kevin’s foot-dragging fortnight’s delay.
Do babies have feelings, even at zero hour? From my modest study of two, I believe they do. They don’t have names for feelings yet, and without separating labels probably experience emotion in a goulash that easily accommodates opposites; I am likely to pin myself to feeling anxious, while an infant might have no trouble feeling simultaneously apprehensive and relaxed. Still, on the birth of both my children, I could immediately discern a dominant emotional tone, like the top note of a chord or the foreground color of a canvas. In Kevin, the note was the shrill high pitch of a rape whistle, the color was a pulsing, aortal red, and the feeling was fury. The shriek and pump of all that rage was unsustainable, so as he grew older the note would descend to the uninflected blare of a leaned-on car horn; the paint in his foreground would gradually thicken, its hue coagulating to the sluggish black-purple of liver, and his prevailing emotion would subside from fitful wrath to steady, unabating resentment.
Yet when Celia slid to hand, she may have been visually beet-faced and bloody, but her aural color was light blue. I was overcome by the same clearskied azure that had visited me when we made love. She didn’t cry when she was born, and if she emitted a figurative sound it was the quiet, meandering tune of a rambler far from home who is enjoying the walk and doesn’t think anyone is listening. As for the ascendant emotion that exuded from this blind creature—her hands not grasping at the air but wandering, wondering at it, her mouth, once led to the nipple, suckling right away—it was gratitude.
I’m not sure if you could tell the difference instantly, though once Celia was fed, tied off, swabbed, and handed over to her father, you did return her rather quickly. Maybe you were still irked at my presumption, and maybe your new daughter’s perfection dismayed you further, as living evidence that my deception had been righteous. In any case, the years ahead would later confirm my initial intuition: that you could tell the difference, and that the difference made you angry. I imagine you bristling with a similar resistance if, after living for years in our fatally middlebrow Dream Home, you walked into the Victorian one with the porch swing, dumbwaiter, and mahogany balustrade and learned it was for sale. You’d wish you’d never seen it, and something in you would hate it a bit. On tramping back into our hackneyed cathedral of teak, the scales would fall from your eyes, and you’d see only a slag heap of pretensions, your brave capacity for rounding up crippled for life.
That’s my only explanation for your coolness, since you seemed so leery of picking her up and anxious to avoid looking at her with those long soulful gazes during which Brian claimed that a parent falls in love. I think she frightened you. I think you regarded your attraction to your daughter as a betrayal.
The birth went so smoothly that I only spent the one night, and you brought Kevin with you to retrieve us from Nyack Hospital. I was nervous, having every appreciation for how infuriating it must be for a firstborn child to contemplate the invasion of his patch by a speechless weakling. But when Kevin trailed into the hospital room behind you, he hardly leaped onto the bed to smother my suckling daughter with a pillow. Wearing an “I’m the Big Brother” T-shirt with a smiley face in the O—its fresh squared creases and price tag in the neck betokening your purchase of a last-minute prop from the lobby’s gift shop—he slouched around the foot, sauntered to the other side, dragged a zinnia from your bedside bouquet, and set about denuding the flower of petals. Perhaps the safest outcome was that Celia should simply bore him.
“Kevin,” I said. “Would you like to meet your sister?”
“Why should I meet it,” he said wearily. “It’s coming home with us, isn’t it. That means I’ll meet it every day.”
“So you should at least know her name, shouldn’t you?” I gently pulled the baby away from the breast in which Kevin himself had once shown such resolute disinterest, though she’d just started feeding. In that event, most infants would squall, but from the start Celia took deprivation as her due, receiving whatever trifle she was offered with wide-eyed abashment. I tugged up the sheet and held out the baby for inspection.
“This is Celia, Kevin. I know she’s not a lot of fun yet, but when she gets a little bigger I bet she’ll be your best friend.” I wondered if he knew what one was. He’d yet to bring a classmate home from school.
“You mean she’ll tag along after me and stuff. I’ve seen it. It’s a pain.”
You clapped your hands on Kevin’s shoulders from behind and rocked him in a pally motion. Kevin’s face twitched. “Yeah, well that’s all part of being a big brother!” you said. “I should know, because I had a little sister, too. They never leave you alone! You want to play with trucks, and they’re always pestering you to play with doll babies!”
“I played with trucks,” I objected, shooting you a look; we would have to talk about this retrograde sex-role crap when we got home. It was a shame that, born back-to-back, you and your sister Valerie—a prissy girl grown officious woman, consumed by the cut of her drapes, and on our brief visits to Philadelphia determined to organize “outings” to historical homes—were never very close. “There’s no telling what Celia will like to do, any more than you can tell if Kevin may like to play with dolls.”
“In a pig’s eye!” you cried fraternally.
“Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? Spiderman? Action figures are dolls.”
“Great, Eva,” you muttered. “Give the little guy a complex.”
Meantime, Kevin had sidled closer to the bed and dipped his hand into the glass of water on the bedside table. Eyeing the baby askance, he held his wet hand over her face and let drops of water drip, drip onto her face. Celia twisted, disconcerted, but the baptism didn’t seem to be upsetting her, though I would later learn to regard the fact that my daughter hadn’t complained or cried out as meaningless. His face stirring with a rare if clinical curiosity, Kevin wet his hand again and spattered his sister’s nose and mouth. I wasn’t sure what to do. Kevin’s christening reminded me of fairy tales in which an aggrieved relative arrives to curse the princess in her crib. Yet he wasn’t really hurting her, and I didn’t want to taint this introduction with a reprimand. So when he dipped his hand a third time, I resettled myself on the pillow and, dabbing her face with the sheet, discreetly withdrew the baby out of his reach.