The Stud Book (10 page)

D
ays later, Sarah folded herself into her husband’s car, into that cloud of leather polish and spent gasoline, with a wrapped present on her lap. A week had passed since the baby was born. Sarah was like an aunt to that child! She would be, anyway, given a chance. She was out to practice her “aunting behavior,” as the ethologists called it. She’d treat that child like family.

Ben got in on the driver’s side.

In the tight box of a car, Sarah bent over her knees, over the gift, and gagged. She wiped a hand to her mouth then hacked again, a cough mixed with throat clearing. The present crinkled under the pressure of her chest against it. “Oh, God, I spit up a little on the cute bows.” She picked at the curling ribbon.

Ben asked, “You okay?”

“Sure, I’m great. It’s a good sign, right?” She looked for anything made of wood to rap her knuckles on. The dash was plastic, the seats leather, the floors covered in carpet. Paper was like wood, or had been when it was still alive, before it was made festive, girlish, and metallic. She tapped her hands to the silver and pink wrapping paper, then she tapped her head. She tapped her breastbone, not for luck so much as to urge back the sense of vomit rising.

The pregnancy test was positive. They had a baby on the way! It’s good to be queasy in the early weeks of pregnancy—it shows a body tilting into new hormones, adapting as a host, though maybe what she felt was only prenatal vitamins resting heavy in her stomach, a minor flu, bad food.

“I shouldn’t have had that Saint André.” Bacteria in soft cheeses, that’s not good for unborn babies.

Ben said, “Brie won’t kill you.”

Saint André wasn’t exactly brie. It was a triple crème, richer and fattier and harder to resist. She said, “I’m not worried about me.”

If her pregnancies had worked out, their backseat would be crowded now. The floor of the car would be flecked with cheddar goldfish crackers and Pirate’s Booty.

He put his hand on hers, on top of the present. “We could see this kid another time.”

“Now is good.”

“Are you going to hold the baby?”

Sarah said, “Of course I’ll hold her.”

Ben shifted the car into reverse and backed down the driveway. “Are you going to cry?”

She’d fallen apart at the baby shower when a friend of Georgie’s from work brought a cake shaped like a woman’s body with a plastic baby floating in an amniotic fluid made out of pale Jell-O. It was awful. She’d played the toilet paper game, guessing Georgie’s size at eight months by tearing off a length of toilet paper, but she had to dry her eyes on her game piece. It kept getting shorter.

When she turned in her estimate, what she had left of that strip of toilet paper was damp, blackened with mascara, and tiny. She had to guess that Georgie was toddler-sized, maybe even what they called eighteen months in the infant section, and then she bawled again!

She sobbed over the itty-bitty booties that served as table decorations. She’d totally made Georgie’s baby shower about herself, her own big void, her drama. Jeez Louise.

She couldn’t help it—babies made her cry.

This time, it wasn’t a party, thank fucking God. It was a visit. And this round she was pregnant. Again. That was her secret strength. She said, “I feel really good. I’ll be fine.”

Georgie opened the door holding Bella bundled in a blanket. Sarah and Ben, on the porch, made all the right sounds—they exclaimed: They were glad to see her! The baby was beautiful! Georgie looked great!

Sarah couldn’t hear whatever Georgie said over the baby’s scream mixed with the grind and shudder of a jackhammer down the street, that familiar, loud language of a neighborhood intent on gentrification.

Georgie still looked half-pregnant, and, of course, nobody had expected her to put on makeup for their drop-in anyway. Maybe it was a leave-in hot-oil treatment that separated strands of her hair, showing a little scalp here and there? She had on some kind of Western-style shirt with pockets and big pearl buttons on the front like overstated nipples. The paisley swirl of the fabric was marked with dried milk patches.

“Come in,” Georgie said, or something close enough, and moved out of their way.

The house smelled sweet, tinged with sour milk. Right away Sarah heard Nyla, midsentence, saying, “You can still have a vaginal birth after a C-section. Women do it all the time!”

Dulcet and Nyla were in the living room eating small sandwiches. Sarah hadn’t known they were coming. Yet again, they’d gotten there first. Neither of them had a regular job. They could show up on short notice, a total advantage.

Arena slunk in from the kitchen, tall and sullen and gorgeous, with a handful of olives. That was pretty much everybody. Sarah was last.

“Come meet the latest enfant terrible to join our tribe,” Dulcet called out.

Sarah wanted a visit alone. Georgie owed her that much.

Ben hung up his old jacket and surveyed the room in an open, neutral way, offering a smile for whoever stepped in front of him.

She’d worked hard to get that visit. She’d called and called back and didn’t give up. Now she concentrated on keeping her smile easy—everything was fine!—and didn’t look down when she reached to hang her coat on the hook near the door, where she caught her foot in a trap and almost fell. A bouncy chair bit her ankle like a bad dog.
The bouncy chair was little, pink, and lined with dangling toys. It burst into a slow, sad, and creepy version of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” Raggedy Bitchy Bitch leapt off the couch and came bounding to bark at the chair. Sarah still had the present in one hand and her coat in the other. She tried to kick the contraption off her foot but it held on, plinking out its little song.

Dulcet grabbed Bitchy by the collar, swinging and spilling what looked like a mimosa from a martini glass in her other hand. Champagne and orange juice doused the baby’s chair.

Dulcet said, “Settle, Bitch. Jesus. Do you have a towel? Sorry about that.” She didn’t sound sorry so much as vaguely entertained.

Georgie joined the chorus of apologies. She clutched the baby, bent, and jiggled the chair off Sarah’s foot.

“Good thing there’s not a kid in there,” Dulcet said, and swigged what was left of her sloshing drink. Sarah finally got her coat on the hook. A bassinet crowded the living room.

“I saw you on TV,” Georgie said. “With the pregnant mandrill. That’s fantastic. Is everyone at work thrilled?”

“They’re hoping it’ll help the levy pass,” Sarah said, in a controlled voice that came out a little flat, verging on hostile. That wasn’t how she meant it, not at all, but it was true—babies born to a zoo are about gaining funding, cultivating recognition, and maintaining a diverse population. Sentimental enthusiasm was for the press.

Nyla said, “I heard they’re throwing a baby shower.”

“Really?” Sarah choked. A pregnant mandrill cake? She pictured the amniotic fluid in Jell-O, a mandrill figurine inside. PR handled public celebrations. She was in the research wing, an entirely separate field. The Oregon Zoo was a research institution, and one of the best, dedicated to preserving endangered species. She was proud to be affiliated. “They wouldn’t. It’d be anthropomorphizing.” Sarah couldn’t handle another baby shower.

The next baby shower she went to would be her own.

“They throw a party for Ellie every year,” Dulcet said, and shrugged. “That’s anthropomorphizing.”

Ellie was the zoo’s firstborn baby elephant, now a fifty-year-old matriarch. She’d given birth to six babies. Four of them had died, though nobody tried to think about that. At her birthday everybody
wore giant paper elephant ears. They sang “Happy Birthday” while she demolished a three-layer wheat cake with bananas planted on top.

“She’s alive. It’s a PR risk to let the public invest emotions in an unborn animal,” Sarah said, and her voice warbled.

“It’s a risk to invest love in a living animal,” Dulcet said.

Sarah ran a nervous hand over the terry cloth sides of the new bassinet. There was a gift certificate on the table: Good for one “gyno-steam treatment” at the Opening to Life Spa.

“I’m going to steam my opening to life,” Georgie said, and gave a sort of awkward plié, the baby still in her arms.

“We went in on it,” Nyla said. She and Dulcet were good at hanging out together because they could both make a dollar go a long way. “It’s an herbal postpartum vaginal steam bath. Drink?” Nyla tipped a green bottle over an empty glass.

Ben said, “I’d love one.”

Sarah knew that about Ben—he really did love a good mimosa. He loved mixed drinks and fizzy drinks and things with umbrellas.

He wasn’t afraid to ask a stranger for directions, either, going against gender statistics. Sometimes he even sat down to pee, which was fine!

Sarah said, “Virgin screwdriver for me.”

Nyla poured while she narrated, “Regional, organic sparkling wine, raised on an eco-vineyard in Yamhill, with no sulfites added.” Yamhill was a sleepy town in the low, folding hills of Willamette Valley.

Nyla was in the process of starting up a tiny eco-friendly store called LifeCycles, devoted to simple and transitory pleasures. When she found extra money she spent it on food and wine, the Portland way: Even when the economy tanked, when nobody bought what the news referred to as “durable goods” and the regional Goodwill stores had the highest sales rate in the nation, when renters made up the biggest demographic and everybody rode bikes because their old cars broke down, even then Portlanders blew through cash on microbrews. They’d pay for wine, grass-fed cattle, and Pacific coast sushi. They spent big on tattoos—that most durable of durable goods.

The baby screamed.

This is where Ben, if it were still the 1950s, would’ve said, “Great set of lungs on that kid!” clapped the new father on the back, and shared a cigar. Instead he sipped his mimosa. He asked, “Where’s Humble?”

Georgie fluttered a hand in a half circle then above her head. “Organizing the attic.” The baby kept up its wail.

“One way to use paternity leave,” Dulcet said, and picked at the tray of tiny deli sandwiches. They were baby-sized sandwiches, scaled in a cute size to honor the infant.

As though newborns even noticed lunch meat.

And as though those small pink slices of soft meat inside the bread weren’t eerily akin to the soft vulnerability of baby flesh. Sarah, nervous and half-queasy, saw the sandwiches as foreign, a strange behavioral ritual of a deli-worshipping tribe.

But they also looked kind of good.

Arena sat on a window seat and pulled her knees to her chest, shrinking away from the baby’s screams.

Nyla said, “The beauty of bringing a baby into the world these days is, in part, that it automatically turns the new parents into environmentalists. You can’t have a baby and not care about the planet, right? It’s that awareness of future generations.”

Dulcet ate maraschino cherries out of an open jar on the table. She flicked juice off her long fingers. “Then who shops at Walmart?”

Nyla ignored her. “Giving birth to a child gives birth to the parents. They’re new people. It’s like crossing an invisible border.”

Sarah’s stomach hurt, she wanted so badly across that border. She was an illegal immigrant peering into the land of maternity, deported three times already.

Dulcet said, “And the rest of us?”

Nyla said, “You don’t appreciate everything your mom does until you have a child of your own. Then you know.”

“What if she didn’t do much?” Georgie asked. “Just checked out early.”

Nyla reached to adjust one of Georgie’s tiny flower earrings, turning it right-side up. She said, “I could lend you my postpartum kickboxing cardio DVD if you want,
Blast the Flab
. I use it all the time.”

Georgie winced.

Sarah spoke up. “That’s postpartum. It’s normal.”

“Normal fat,” Georgie said, and patted her stomach. The baby in her arms was making a quieter howl now, more like a song off-key.

Sarah moved in close and reached her arms out. She said, “You look fantas—”

Georgie unsnapped one of the pearl buttons on her Western shirt. There was a flash of brown nipple. It was a nursing shirt. The pocket was a trapdoor.

Sarah’s words broke at a splash across her cheek.

Georgie said, “Oh, jeez.”

Dulcet gave a wheeze that passed for a laugh, palmed one of her own flat breasts, and said, “Fucking God. It’d be almost worth being preggers just for the boob juice act.”

Over Bella’s wail, Georgie half-shouted, “I don’t have any diseases. They tested for all that.” Breast milk is a blood product. Georgie hoisted her now-exposed boob.

Arena’s pale cheeks turned red, a blush climbing. Yes, it was breast milk that hit Sarah’s face, shot from Georgie’s boob like a water pistol. The baby latched on, and the room was newly quiet, the screaming replaced by only a sucking sound. Even the jackhammer was a distant rattle. There was a scrape against the floor upstairs. Humble moving furniture.

Georgie came at Sarah with a napkin and dabbed at Sarah’s face, with her boob still out and the baby in her arms, all those suckling sounds and the cloud of milk smell. It was too much, too close—the smell clotted Sarah’s throat and tugged at the side of her mouth, forcing a grimace.