Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim

Baby Einstein

MY MOTHER AND I WERE on the beach, rubbing oil into each other's backs and guessing who in the family would be the first to have children. "I think it will be Lisa," I said. This was in the early 1970s. Lisa was maybe fourteen years old and while she wasn't necessarily maternal, she did do things according to their order. Getting married was what came after graduating from college, and having a baby was what came after getting married. "Mark my words," I said, "by the age of twenty-six Lisa will have" — a trio of ghost crabs approached an abandoned sandwich, and I took them as a sign — "Lisa will have three children."

It felt very prophetic, but my mother dismissed it. "No," she said. "Gretchen will be the first." She squinted toward her second daughter, who stood on the shore, pitching meat scraps to a flock of gulls. "It's written on her hips. It will be Gretchen, then Lisa, then Tiffany."

"What about Amy?" I asked.

My mother thought for a moment. "Amy won't have a child," she said. "Amy will have a monkey."

I did not include myself in the baby prophecy, as I couldn't imagine a time when homosexuals, either through adoption or the procurement of a rented womb, could create families of their own. I did not include my brother, because every time I saw him he was destroying something, not by accident but willfully, gleefully. He'd dismember his baby, with every intention of putting it back together, but then something would come up — a karate movie, the chance to eat two dozen tacos — and the reconstruction would be forgotten about.

Neither my mother nor I could have imagined that the boy smashing bottles on the path to our cottage would be the first and only one in the family to have a child. By the time it happened, she would be long gone and my sisters, my father, and I would have to bear the shock alone. "It happened so fast!" we would say to one another, speaking as if Paul was like us and preceded every action with ten years of discussion. But he's not like us, and to hear him tell it, the debate ended with a simple "Take them panties off." Kathy did, and shortly after getting married, he called me to announce that she was pregnant.

"Since when?" I asked.

Paul held the phone away from his mouth and yelled into the other room. "Mama, what time is it?"

"You're calling her 'Mama'?"

He yelled for her again, and I told him that if it was four o'clock in Paris, it was tenA.M. in Raleigh. "So how long has she been pregnant?"

He figured it had been about nine hours. They had used one of those home-testing kits. The previous evening the result had been negative. This morning it was positive, and Kathy had become Mama, which would eventually change to Big Mama, and later, for no particular reason, Mama D.

When my friend Andy and his wife discovered they were going to have a baby, they kept it a secret for eight weeks. This, I learned, is fairly common. The fetus was minute — a congregation of loitering cells — and as with anything that informal, there was a good chance that it might disperse. A miscarriage turned would-be parents into objects of pity, and you didn't want to set yourselves up too early.

"I don't mean to discourage you," I said to Paul, "but maybe you two should keep this to yourselves for a while."

He coughed, and I understood that he and Kathy had been on the phone for hours, that I was probably the last to be called.

What I considered a reasonable degree of caution he dismissed as "nay-sayery."

"I'll chain its ass down if I have to, but ain't no baby of mine going to forsake the womb."

After hanging up, he went to the store and bought a nursing chair, a changing table, and a bib readingI LOVE MY DADDY. I thought of those children you sometimes see at demonstrations.ANOTHER TODDLER FOR PEACE, their T-shirts read, or, my favorite,I 'M SO GLAD MY MOMMY DIDN'T ABORT ME.

"Shouldn't you wait until the baby can talk and say that kind of thing for itself?" I asked. "Or maybe at least hold out until it has a real neck. What are you doing buying bibs?"

The next time he called he was at the counter of a toy store charging a set ofBaby Einstein videos. "I don't care if it's a boy or a girl, but this little son of a bitch is going to have brains."

"Well, it's sure not going to get them from his parents," I said. "Kathy hasn't even gone to the doctor and already you've got videos?"

"A crib, too, and I'll tell you what, this shit's expensive as hell."

"Well, so is calling France on a cell phone at eleven o'clock on a Wednesday morning," I said, though again, I don't know who I thought I was talking to. My brother can't survive unless he's breathing into a telephone. If you're an enemy, he'll call only once a day, but if you're a family member and on relatively good speaking terms, you're guaranteed to hear from him once every eight hours or so. There's the money he spends calling us, and then there's the money my sisters and I spend calling one another to talk about how much our brother calls us.

When the pregnancy became official, he called even more. "Big day, Hoss. We're taking Mama in to get her Corky test." Corky was a character from an early-nineties TV program and was played by a young man with Down syndrome. My sister Lisa got the message as well and wasn't sure if the fetus was being tested for a triploid twenty-first chromosome or the possibility that it might grow up to become an actor. "I'm pretty sure they can determine the drama gene now," she said.

By the sixth month the only surprise left was the baby's sex. Paul and his wife speculated, but neither of them wanted to know for certain. It was, they said, bad luck, but how was it any unluckier than furnishing a nursery or preaddressing the birth-announcement cards? Like everyone else in the family, I kept a list of possible names and called every so often to offer them up: Dusty, Ginger, Kaneesha — all of them rejected. The contractors and carpenters my brother works with suggested names as well, most of them inspired by the pending war or the image of America as a tarnished but still shining beacon. Liberty was popular, as was Glory, the slightly Italian-sounding Vendetta, and Kick Saddam's Ass, which, as my father pointed out, didn't leave much room for a middle name. All of his suggestions were Greek and were offered with a complete disregard of the inevitable taunting they would inspire. "You can't enter the third grade with a name like Hercules," Lisa told him. "The same is true of Lesbos, I don't care how pretty it sounds."

Then there was the pressure of naming the child after one of its grandparents. Lou and Sharon were options, but there was also Kathy's family to consider. "Oh, right," my sister Amy said. "Them." The Wilsons were nice people, but we saw them as interlopers, potential threats standing between us and what we'd come to think of as the Sedaris baby. "Don't Kathy's parents alreadyhave a grandchild?" I asked, speaking as if a grandchild were like a Social Security number or a spinal column — something you needed only one of. We decided they were greedy and capable of anything, yet when the time came to compete, we completely dropped the ball. Their team was out in full force when the baby was born, while we were represented by only Lisa and our father. Kathy was in labor for fifteen hours before the doctors decided to perform a cesarean. The news was delivered to the waiting room, and when the time came my father looked at his watch, saying, "Well, I guess they should be carving her up right about now." Then he went home to feed his dog. By this point, naming the child Lou was on par with naming it Adolph or Beelzebub, but all three were disqualified when the baby turned out to be a girl.

They named her Madelyn, which was shortened to Maddy by the time she reached the incubator. I was in a hotel in Portland, Oregon, at the time and received the news from my brother, who called from the recovery room. His voice was soft and melodic, not much more than a whisper. "Mama's got some tubes sticking out of her pussy, but it ain't no big thing," he said. "She's lying back, little Maddy's sucking on her titty just as happy as she can be." This was the new, gentler Paul: same vocabulary, but the tone was sweeter and seasoned with a sense of wonder. The cesarean had been unpleasant, but after bemoaning the months wasted in Lamaze class, he grew reflective. "Some is cut loose and others come out on their own self, but take heed, brother: having a baby is a fucking miracle."

"Did you just say, Take heed'?" I asked.

Kathy returned home later that week, but there were problems. Her legs were swollen. She couldn't breathe. An ambulance carried her to the emergency room, where they drained thirty pounds of fluid from her body: accumulated water and, to her great disappointment, her breast milk. "It'll still continue to come in," Paul said, "but because of all the medication she's on, we're going to have to pump and dump." This was a medical term he'd picked up from the doctor, who announced in the same breath that Kathy could not have any more children. "Her heart's too weak, but can you believe that shit?" His new voice temporarily disappeared. "Breaking bad on Mama D when she's on tap and already scared half to death? I said, 'Fucker, begone with your pump-dumping, Pakistan-community-college-attending ass. I'm getting me a specialist.' "

"It's interesting," I told him, "that in the nineteenth century they used puppies to drain a woman's breast milk."

Paul said nothing.

"I just thought it was a pleasant image," I said.

He agreed, but his mind was on other things: his sick wife, the baby he was caring for on his own, and the second, hoped-for child he knew now they could never have. "Puppies," he said. "I bet they could really drain your ass."

I flew to Raleigh two weeks after the baby was born, and my father, unshaven and looking all of his eighty years, arrived half an hour late to pick me up at the airport. "You'll have to excuse me if I'm a little out of it," he said. "I'm not feeling too hot, and it took me a while to find my medicine." It seemed he had a little infection and was fighting it by taking antibiotics originally prescribed for his Great Dane. "Pills are pills," he said. "Whether they're for a dog or a human, they're the same damned thing."

I thought it was funny and later told my sister Lisa, who did not get quite the kick out of it that I did. "I think that's horrible," she said. "I mean, how is Sophie supposed to get any better when Dad's taking all her medicine?"

Along with a stained T-shirt my father wore a pair of torn jeans and a baseball cap marked with the emblem of a heavy-metal band. I asked about it, and he shrugged, saying he'd found the hat in a parking lot.

"Do you thinkKathy 'sfather dresses like a roadie for Iron Maiden?" I asked.

"I don't give a damn what he wears," my father said.

"Do you think that whenhe gets sick, he just runs down to Petco and self-medicates?"

"Probably not, but what the hell difference does it make?"

"Just asking."

"And what," my father said, "you think you're going to win Best Uncle award by holing up in France, flipping pancakes with your little boyfriend?"

"Pancakes?"

"Well, whatever they call them," he said. "Crepes." He lurched from the curb, using his free hand to adjust the oversize glasses he'd bought in the seventies and had recently rediscovered in a drawer. On the way to Paul's house I told him a story I'd heard in one of the airports. A new mother had approached the security checkpoint carrying two servings of prepumped breast milk, and the goon in charge made her open both bottles and drink from them.

"Get out of here," my father said.

"No," I told him. "It's true. They want to make sure that whatever you're carrying isn't poison or some kind of an explosive. That's why sperm donors have taken to traveling Greyhound."

"It's a lousy world," he said.

Suggestions of how to improve this lousy world were displayed upon his rear bumper. My father and I do not agree politically, so when riding with him I tend to slump down in the seat, ashamed to be seen in what my sisters and I callthe Bushmobile. It's like being a child all over again. Dad at the wheel and my head so low, I'm unable to see out the window. "Are we there yet?" I ask. "Are we there?"

Madelyn was asleep when we arrived, and Paul, my father, and I gathered around the crib to adore her in soft voices. One of them suggested that she resembled my mother, but to me she just looked like a baby, not the cute kind you see on diaper commercials but the raw, wrinkled kind that resemble bitter old men.

"It'll be different when her hair comes in," Paul said. "Some babies is born with it, but it's less gnarlier for the mother when they're bawl-headed." He waved his hands before his daughter's closed eyes. "It's the mothers I think about. Can you imagine what that must be like, having something inside you that's all fur-bearing and shit?"

"Well, fur and hair are different things," my father said. "Having a raccoon inside you, all right, I see your point, but a few hairs never hurt anybody."

Paul shuddered and I told him about a recent documentary, the story of a boy who'd been surgically separated from his secret interior twin. It lived inside of him for seven years, a little dummy with no heart or brain of its own. "That's fine, or whatever," I whispered, "but it had this really long hair."

"Like, how long?" Paul asked.

In truth I hadn't seen the documentary, just read about it. "Really long," I said. "About three feet."

"That's like having a fucking Willie Nelson doll living inside you," Paul said.

"It's a bunch of baloney," my father said.

"No, really. I saw it."

"Like hell you did."

The baby raised a fist to her mouth, and Paul lowered his head into the crib. "That's just your uncle Faggot and your raggedy-assed granddaddy talking some of their old stupid bullshit," he said. And it sounded so… comforting.

When my father left, Paul heated up a serving of formula. The baby woke up, and Kathy settled her onto the sofa, where the four of us watched videos taken in the hospital. That my brother had not filmed the actual cesarean led me to believe that someone had expressly forbidden it, perhaps for legal or sanitary reasons. There was a blank spot between the arrival of the doctor and the purple-faced baby wailing like an urgent call at the end of her umbilical cord. As if to make up for the missing seven minutes, the recovery-room footage goes on forever. Kathy drinks from a plastic cup of water. A nurse wanders in to change the bandages. Often my sister-in-law is naked or topless, but if she was bothered by the sight of herself playing on a wide-screen TV, she did not show it. Sometimes she held the camera, and we saw Paul in his cutoff shorts and promotional T-shirt, a baseball cap turned backward on his head.

The two of them had watched this video dozens of times, but still they sat enraptured. "Here's where that nurse's aide comes in," Kathy said. Paul turned off the volume and as the woman stuck her head through the door he lip-synched her voice.

"Look like evabody in here asleep."

"Do it again," Kathy said.

"Look like evabody in here asleep."

"Again."

"Look like evabody in here asleep."

Further along there was footage of the baby's first bowel movement. It looked like tar, and when the last of it had seeped out, Paul hit the reverse button and watched as the puddle contracted and crept back into his daughter's body. "You see how dark that shit is?" he said. "I mean to tell you this little baby'sadvanced."

He held Madelyn up to the TV screen and she gave a little, two-syllable cry that sounded to Paul like "whoopee!" but I interpreted as something closer to "help meeeee."

People who have nothing to prove offer practical baby gifts: sturdy cotton rompers made to withstand the cycle of vomit and regular washing. People who are competing for the titles of best-loved aunts and uncles — people like my sisters and me — send satin pants and delicate hand-crafted sweaters accompanied by notes reading "PS. The fur collar is detachable." The baby is photographed in each new outfit, and I receive pictures almost daily. In them my brother and his wife look not like parents but like backwoods kidnappers, secretly guarding the heiress to a substantial cashmere fortune.

Between the still cameras and the video cameras, Madelyn's every move is documented and presented as "Baby's First. ." Baby's First Beach Trip doubled as Baby's First Hurricane. Supported by her mother, she looks past the bent sea oats and out toward the blackening sky, her face creased in an expression of wisdom and concern never seen on either of her parents. The Fourth of July, Halloween, Thanksgiving: these are just days to her, but Paul and Kathy their logic paralyzed by love, insist that their daughter is cognizant and as excited as they are.

On Baby's First Day of Winter Madelyn sat before a video ofA Christmas Carol, then watched as, in imitation of a Victorian gentleman, my brother applied a pair of mutton-chop sideburns. This was accomplished not with a disguise kit, but simply, using two strips of raw bacon that ran along his jawline and remained in place for minutes at a time through the miracle of fat against human flesh. Then Paul got out the ladder and taped Christmas lights to the front of his house. They too were short-term, collapsing into the bushes moments after the picture was taken. The baby, of course, already knew what she would be getting. Gifts were presented the moment my brother returned from the store. Baby's First Pop-Up Book. Baby's First Talking Doll. One of her presents was a phonetics aid called the Alphabet Pal. PressD, for example, and the machine recites the letter. PressD, thenA, thenD again, and it connects the letters into a clumsily pronounced word. "Duh-Aah-Duh." It sounds like someone with a mechanical voice box and is far too advanced for a child Madelyn's age. She wanted nothing to do with it, so by Christmas morning it had become my brother's toy. He is determined to make it curse, but the Alphabet Pal is crafty and decent and soon figured out what he was up to.M-o-t-h-e-r is fine, but try following it withf — u-c-k-e-rand by the second letter the machine will giggle and, in a natural, little-girl voice, give you a piece of its mind. "Ha ha haha. You're silly!" "I can't even get it to saydick," he says, "and that's a goddamname."

My sister-in-law's condition calls for her to sleep through the night, so when Madelyn wakes at two and three and fiveA.M., it is Paul's job to feed her or change her, or carry her around the house, begging her to lighten up. There's no point in going to bed, so he kicks his pillow from room to room and collapses on the floor in front of her crib or the swinging chair that sits in the dining room. When the last of my sisters has hit the sack, he dials me up and holds the receiver to his daughter's mouth. For months I listened to her cry long-distance, but then she got a little older and learned how to laugh and coo and sigh in that satisfied baby way that makes me understand how some could bring a child into this lousy world of ours.

"She'll turn on him sooner or later," my father says. "Just you wait. In a couple of years Madelyn won't want anything to do with him."

I look into the future and see my brother's face, impossibly middle-aged. His daughter has rejected all of his values, and stands now on the dais of a major university, the valedictorian preparing to deliver her commencement speech. What will she think when her dad stands in the aisle, releasing a hog call and raising his T-shirt to reveal the jiggling message painted upon his bare stomach? Will she turn away, as my father predicts, or might she remember all the nights she awoke to discover him: this slob, this lump, this silly drooling toy asleep at her feet.