The Stud Book (2 page)

The young woman with the news crew traipsed in white Keds that miraculously stayed white even in the rain. She seemed to grow younger as she came closer, and smiled, baring friendly teeth. Sarah hated to turn her down, sensing a kindred spirit—they both had clipboards!—but it was zoo policy.

The girl, the woman, reached out a hand as though to shake, to touch skin in a behavioral display of goodwill, and Sarah put her hand out, too, only then, instead of shaking, the girl tucked her clipboard under her arm and rolled her hand, calling the reporter in like reeling in a fish. The correspondent stepped in close, then closer, bringing along a cloud of hair spray.

This is how elephant cows assert dominance: They sway closer and closer, until one cow gives up ground.

Sarah was that cow. She gave up ground. The reporter stepped a sharp heel on the mother-father hermaphrodite worm where it inched along the asphalt, right on the bellyband. Her foot skidded. Babies! She caught herself as if it’d never happened.

The reporter’s hair blocked Sarah’s view of the mandrills. When the timer beeped, Sarah said, “Excuse me—”

The teenagers at the table watched them like they were on TV already. The human primate in the stroller sucked its pacifier while the man-ape flashed his best feature. Sarah bobbed her head to one side of the reporter’s hairdo then to the other, trying to do her job. It was important work! She was here for the zoo, for science, for the future of humanity! She’d definitely turn down their silly little media request, hoard her specialized information.

If her third baby had lived, it’d be six months old, in her arms. They wouldn’t crowd her this way if she were flanked by her children. She’d be a different person, hold a different place in the world. She’d have what Georgie—the old Georgie, Sarah’s child-free, academic drinking buddy, that denizen of the life of the mind—would have called, as though from a great intellectual distance, the “cultural legitimization conferred through motherhood.”

Was that ever such a bad thing?

But Georgie had changed. She had a baby, the legitimizing child.

The only infant in Sarah’s care was Lucy. She’d protect Lucy’s privacy.

The girl with the clipboard said, “Ma’am? Sorry. We need you out of the frame.”

A
cross the river Georgie wore the blood-marked abdominal smile of a fresh C-section and navigated the short hallway of her two-bedroom bungalow. She had a round of prescription pain meds and a baby, like a warm bundle of fresh laundry, wrapped in a blanket in her arms.

It was lovely to carry her own perfect girl-child. Out of nowhere—or really, specifically, out of Georgie’s body, out of her uterus, out of the slash cut in the middle of her gut—there was a baby! Right in their house. Once they’d let a stray cat in, and those were weird days. Suddenly she and her husband held cat energy in the house, an animal curling around their feet, asking for food and love. A baby was even more dreamy and surreal. She kept thinking about that cat now, how it had come and gone, leaving cat hair on an armchair, traces of itself. This baby was here to stay. Georgie reached for her drugs.

Oxycodone is a cute narcotic, delivered in small pills like toy medicine. You could feed those pills to a mouse, a rat, a teacup Chihuahua. She shook the pills in their plastic container and they put on a ragtime rattle of a show for her darling newborn daughter. With
its fine rattle that bottle was practically a Waldorf learning tool, except instead of the requisite Waldorf wood it was made out of plastic and painkillers.

Georgie clambered across the broad expanse of their California king with the baby clutched tight to her chest and the pills in the other hand, her hand wrapped around the vial, her knuckles against the bed. C-section stitches tugged across her bikini line. “Oof!” She said it out loud, like a cartoon character, a plea for sympathy, even though she was alone.

She was alone except for her daughter, anyway. That was the whole thing about being a new mom—always alone and never alone. Always with the baby. Always with this new nonverbal companion.

Humble would come home soon.

The baby’s fingers lay outside her pink blanket like a little row of roots, white and thin. Until she held her own child, Georgie hadn’t known anything about mother-love. Now it crowded her body, clotted her heart, made her want to cry. Maybe it was the painkillers that made her want to cry. Either way, she was high and happy and sad and the whole thing closed like a hand around her throat.

She couldn’t hold that baby tight enough.

She had a blue triangle tattooed on her bicep—the “rhetorical triangle,” her favorite paradigm. She drew the triangle on the whiteboard each year, the first week of her freshman English classes, as an illustration of how all meaning is made.

The three points of the triangle? Author, audience, and text, as they say. An author puts a text in front of an audience, and meaning is conveyed. Change any one component—new audience, new author, new book—and the meaning changes, too. It could be a slight shift, or massive. In class it sounded clear. Across her other arm, in the rounded font of an old typewriter, a second tattoo asked
ANY QUESTIONS?

The soft spot of her baby’s fontanel pulsed with each breath, making tufts of the girl’s dark hair dance up and down.

In the rhetoric of new life, Georgie was author and audience both. Bella was the text, that daughter she’d drawn into existence. The meaning of the world shifted from the life of the mind to the bloody, seeping, heartbeat center.

Parent/​Baby/​World: All meaning came from that juncture.
Any mind-body split was blasted out of the water once her own body was nurturing a new mind.

She had a third tattoo on the small of her back, a tribute to French feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. It read
THE SECOND SEX
, after one of Beauvoir’s seminal titles.

Seminal
—could you use that word with a woman’s writing?

Weird.

But yes, Georgie had a French feminist tramp stamp.

She’d dropped out of high school. Now she had a PhD, because every dropout has something to prove, and she proved she could handle school all the way through. She’d learned to speak the language of the academy. It spoke right back, too, which is to say
the legitimizing pedagogical institutions had granted investment in the (re)-formation and reification of her gendered body
.

Ha!

In other words, she was a woman, a mom, with a PhD.

Bella was three days old. Georgie’s underwear was a day newer than that. One of the first adjustments to motherhood was that she’d bought a six-pack of granny panties—the kind that came all the way up—because every pair of her bikini-cut version hit exactly where a row of fish line–style thread was stitched through her skin.

Doctors called it a “bikini-line incision.” Georgie never realized “bikini line” was a precise anatomical designation until she tried to put her own clothes on.

The el cheapo granny panties came in fuchsia, turquoise, and glaring white. Each color made her ass look larger than the pair before it, but they didn’t rub against the stitches. They wrapped over her skin like a comforting hand. She settled into her nest of blankets, books, and magazines, and reached for the remote, turned the TV on, but kept the sound down. How much TV is bad for a newborn? That’s what it means to be alone and never alone—to reconsider every urge.

What she really wanted was a full-bodied pinot noir, a gin and tonic, a pale pink raspberry martini. Doctors said alcohol would leach into her milk and dim her baby’s growing brain. They used to prescribe stout to bring the milk in, but she didn’t have those old-school doctors. So instead of a Guinness, Georgie had oxycodone and a big glass of water.

When she asked whether oxycodone in her bloodstream was okay for the baby, the nurse said, “You wouldn’t want your baby to have a mom in pain, would you?”

She didn’t want her baby to have a mama in granny panties, either, but there you go. Not everybody gets what they want.

She curled a hand over her daughter’s head, cradled and covered that constant pulse of the fontanel. “We’ll be okay.” She pushed the baby blanket away from Bella’s chin. The girl’s tiny red mouth was open, her eyes closed, long lashes resting over her pale skin. Her mouth was a little heart, with all the love in the world collected there.

Bella slept like her father. He could pass out anywhere. It was a way of trusting the universe. Georgie didn’t even trust herself.

She flipped channels until she saw the familiar curve of a pregnant belly. The warm enthusiasm of a trained woman newscaster came in as a voice-over. “The zoo will soon welcome a new resident!”

The flat color of local video scanned the pregnant monkey, hunched and fat. Georgie sat up straighter in bed to distinguish herself from that slope-shouldered simian. That was one difference between humans and other primates—we walk upright. Upright!

The vial of oxycodone was still in her hand. She moved her legs and the blankets shifted, books tipped and adjusted. The news camera cut to a baby mandrill, clinging to its mother.

The new infant would be born in December, born on the cusp of the schizophrenic season. Georgie had read all the books, the articles. She knew the threats: more schizophrenics were born in winter months, with numbers peaking in February, even bleeding into early March. Bella was born in November, just as that curve on the graph of probability started to climb. If she’d planned things better, Georgie would have given birth in August.

Could primates even be schizophrenic?

Any questions? Her tattoo was so cocky! With a new baby, she was all questions.

She reached both hands around her daughter to press and turn, to coax the childproof lid off the pill vial. The camera cut away from the mother and baby. For a moment there was Sarah, on TV. Huddled near a garbage can, near a pack of teenagers.

Sarah?

Sarah was pale. Her hair needed attention. It was soaked, and maybe that’s just how hair looks when a person works at the Oregon Zoo in the rain. Except Sarah was wild-eyed, too, and that made it all worse. She looked a little nuts. Guilt tapped at Georgie’s chest, a reminder: Sarah’s phone calls, those kind offers to come hold the baby. Georgie wasn’t ready to see anybody, to put on pants, or even a skirt.

Besides, Sarah could be kind of a downer.

The thing was, Georgie felt guilty for having a baby when Sarah had only miscarriages. She’d bought Sarah a satin bathrobe after the first one. She gave her a stack of novels and a bottle of pear brandy after the second. With the third, she’d stayed around for days, made dinners, washed Sarah and Ben’s dishes. What else could she do? She didn’t promise not to have her own.

She cupped a hand and shook the vial to tap a pill into her palm.

Sarah started backing out of the frame, then bent and picked a pale pink flower off the macadam of the zoo path. No, it wasn’t a flower; it was a pacifier, clutched in Sarah’s pale, reddened fingers. Georgie squinted and leaned closer. As she moved, the mess of meds fell forward like too much salt from a shaker. They fell into her hand, bounced over her fingers, and scattered on the bed, on the blankets. On the baby. White pills rained down on the small, sweet, open cavern of baby Bella’s red heart-shaped mouth.

“Fuck!” Georgie moved fast but couldn’t think. Were there pills in Bella’s mouth? That trusting, trusting, open mouth. She wanted to shake the baby, shake pills out, but you can’t shake a baby—people go to prison for that. Shaking a baby can cause brain damage and death. She held Bella closer and tried to see into the dark space between those little lips and toothless gums. “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,” she chanted.

The fontanel’s pulse was an accusation.

Georgie lunged out of bed. Her foot caught in the sheet. Bella was in her arms. Stray pills bounced to the floor along with the flutter of magazines. Her stitches yanked against her gut as though to hold her back, like an invisible internal seat belt. She turned on the ceiling light and tipped the baby’s head toward it, to see better inside her tiny mouth. There it was, there it was! There was a glimpse of white, a pill on her baby’s tongue. She’d thrown a bull’s-eye, made
a half-court basket, sunk the eight ball, except this round she didn’t want to hit the mark.

Georgie’s finger had never seemed so thick as it did when she tried to fish inside Bella’s mouth. She was afraid she’d force the pill down. Bella screwed up her face and pulled her hands out of the swaddling blanket. Georgie moved her finger into Bella’s mouth again. Bella tried to suckle.

Ah! Don’t!
Georgie pulled her finger away and whispered the words, a prayer, “Don’t suck anything down.” She laid the baby on her side on the bed and tried again to press a finger over those sweet toothless gums. Bella screamed. Her face turned red. She was a good screamer. Her tongue was a bird’s tongue, narrow and strong. And there was the pill, stuck to the side of her tongue. Georgie reached in, tapped, flicked, touched the pill until she managed to knock it off the side of Bella’s tongue, out of Bella’s mouth. The tablet was soggy and eroded, but otherwise whole.