“Did you see her birthmark?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
He reached over to the lap of his wife and grabbed the infant, clasping her tiny leg in his arm like a man does a turkey drumstick at the state fair. Nate, the man in question, pointed to a tiny tan dot on his three-hour-old daughter, Madeline’s, knee. “See it now?” he asked. “It’s the shape of Texas. Almost the size, too.” He laughed. A snort escaped. He reminded me of Babe the Gallant Pig yet not as gallant.
“No, not really. I had one when I was born, too,” I said. “But it went away when I got older. That will probably happen with Madeline, too.”
I looked to that poor baby as Nate began to spout about how she looked like Dan Aykroyd from The Coneheads. I wanted to say that that was a vast improvement from looking like her father, but I didn’t. Instead, I focused my energy on Lindsey, who had now taken Madeline back into her arms.
Lindsey was my manager at work (a local grocery), and over the years we had grown fairly close. I felt comfortable complaining to her about old people who paid in dirty and exact change, obnoxious soccer moms who let their snot-nosed children run around like banshees, and especially about George, the head manager, who went into conniption fits if there weren’t enough homemade crouton samples out for our largely dentured clientele. In exchange for these effusive emotional dumps, Lindsey would often inform me of her love life, or for a while, her lack thereof. I never really understood why she married Nate in the first place, let alone dated him. And unfortunately it seemed like she didn’t either. I asked her once why they even got married and after much thought, the best answer she could give was that she thought it was just “a natural step.” Yet after a myriad of affairs and shouting matches between them that preceded this natural “progression,” I wondered if she thought the next step would lead her here, swollen-footed and with a baby planted on her lap like an anvil on Wiley Coyote.
I remember one particular morning she came to me and asked if I could talk. Immediately I worried if my till was short or if the beak-nosed woman called and complained when I said I wouldn’t give her a discount on an apple with a non-existent bruise. “Uh, sure,” I said.
Her subsequent words rolled off her tongue as heavy and awkward as a fat child canon-balling off the diving board, and I was the oblivious sunbather about to get drenched. “I’m pregnant.”
As a sometimes-supporter of government enforced sterilization, it was hard for me to convey the properly elated response to the glowing mother-to-be, however I felt that had there actually been some semblance of happiness on her face as she uttered those few choice words, I may have been more receptive. Unsure of how to respond, I muttered a simple and ambiguous, “Wow, were you expecting this?”
She looked down to her hands and began picking at her cuticles.
“Lindsey?” I asked.
“…no.”
Another pause.
“It’s Nate’s.”
Even worse.
“I thought you were going to leave him?”
She continued to pick at her cuticles. Her mouth began to form a pale pink asterisk and as she squinted her eyes I could see small wrinkles forming at the sides. And then she winced and stuck her irritated finger in her mouth like a child. “Goddamn it.”
“So you’re staying with him?”
She took her finger out of her mouth and began shaking it like you would a dirty rug. “I have to, now.” She sucked her finger once more. “I’m having a baby. Oh god, I’m having a baby.”
I have never had a single good experience with a baby. When I was a child and there were babies around, I thought of them as nasty, attention seeking toys whose batteries never died. And when I was older, the first baby I held was my cousin, Hope. She was overdue and resembled an Inuit. I found her to be quite peculiar and loathsome, as it seemed that she was allergic to the sound of others breathing. Subsequently, she was almost always crying. I put Benadryl in her formula once when I was babysitting to quiet her. It worked, and her parents never found out. I got an extra tip, too, so maybe that counts as a good experience. Regardless, I still didn’t care for her much. Babies, either.
“And you’re not going to…”
“No, I could never.”
“Right. Have you told him yet?”
“No, I’m afraid to.”
“Well, he is your husband.”
“I know. That’s why.”
Perhaps this is another dynamic of marriage that I will never understand, but it’s always seemed to me that lots of people get married so that when they do become pregnant, it’s not taboo. All of that juvenile grit is removed from the act, it’s all filed and polished and then voila, you’re no longer having unsafe sex but rather “family planning,” even though all of the sweat and grunts are the same. It’s one of those natural steps, as Lindsey put it.
When I was about four or five and my parents hadn’t split up yet, I remember spending a nonspecific Sunday afternoon in their bedroom. My mother lay on the bed and I was trying on her heels and pouting my lips in the full-length mirror, talking to her about what all Mobin, my imaginary friend, and I had done that day. “Honey,” I remember her saying, “what do you think about having a little brother or sister?”
I froze. Relaxed my lips. I didn’t want one. “I don’t want one at all, Mom.”
I looked back at the mirror as she slowly rolled to the other side. I could see the mattress move up and down erratically for a moment until she stood suddenly and left the room. There was a dark spot on the pillow the looked like a water lily. I heard the click of the bathroom door a few feet away and then the footsteps of my father toward it. A few months later they sat me down to tell me they were not having a baby but rather a divorce. Maybe that’s one of those natural steps, too. If, then.
Years later, I was looking for a few pieces of paper for my book report on Laura Ingalls Wilder and stumbled across what I thought was an empty notebook. It turned out to be an old diary of my mother’s. I’d always had a hard time reading her writing, but my eyes immediately honed in on the word ‘abortion.’ Quickly, I flung the notebook out of my hands and ran into the bathroom, scrubbing them until the skin was raw. I felt guilty, as if I had killed something. Not something that was, per se, but something that could have been. And that seemed even worse. To this day, I can recall the exact slant of the line she drew to cross her ‘t.’ I’ve never brought it up to her. She’s never told me, either.
“You should tell him as soon as possible, Lindsey. Tonight, even.”
She shook her head. “I know,” she said. “It’s just hard.”
“Well, it’s not going to get any easier.”
“Would it anyway?”
I blinked and saw the lined paper and black ink. The mirror and the pillow stain. The heavy pressure of the mattress on both sides as my parents put their hands on my shoulders and said that they Loved Each Other Very Much But Not The Same As They Used To. Would You Like To Spend Weekends With Mommy Or Daddy. Shivered.
“Maybe not.”
In my peripheral vision, I saw shades of orange and red. A woman with a chiseled chin was placing bell peppers and carrots onto the counter.
Lindsey cleared her throat and sighed. “You’ve got a customer.”
“Guess so.”
She wasn’t going to tell Nate that night.
That was the last time she mentioned the baby to me. Eight months later and still unhappy, Lindsey went into labor. Both sides of the family packed into the tiled room to witness the arrival of the fleshy union of two unique genetic codes. There were flowers and balloons and cameras and white smiles. And I wondered if the firmness of baby Madeline, despite her malleable skull, was any indication of the firmness of feelings between her parents. I hoped so, though I would never be able to tell. And maybe they wouldn’t either, even though a baby is a natural step.
Their family photos turned out nicely, although Nate paid extra to get Madeline’s birthmark removed from the prints he sent to his side of the family. He was looking at the camera; she was looking at the baby, grinning and in love. Maybe she could leave him after all.
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