Authors: Monica Drake
S
arah’s cell phone sang in her pocket. Her hands were numb with cold. When she answered, Nyla said, her voice a susurrant whisper, “I don’t think Georgie’s doing too well.”
The zoo’s air was filled with the scent of cinnamon and grease—the “elephant ears” cart workers had started making their daily sweet fry bread—and Sarah felt that disconnect of being close and far away at the same time, a friend’s voice in her ear, the news crew blocking her view. She had the pacifier laced around her index finger. Absentmindedly, she tapped its rubber nipple against her cheek.
“You saw Georgie? I can’t get her to call me back.” Yes, it was a selfish hand that tightened down against her heart, but she, Sarah, was meant to be first in line to see the baby. She would know how Georgie was adjusting—her oldest friend, her friend from Lincoln High! Her friend who’d never moved away.
Portland had, for a while twenty years earlier, been low on young people. Portland, Oregon, you had to say, because somehow even the tiny spot of Portland, Maine, loomed larger.
When they were right out of high school there was a small crew of downtown club kids, so small it was easy to think you knew them
all. It was a tiny scene with a big, weird social pressure to say,
Yeah, I’m heading to LA soon
. Or you could say SF, or maybe San Fran. You might say,
A friend invited me down
. Maybe you’d really go. Sarah and Georgie didn’t even pretend.
Georgie’s own mom had left back then, moved out of town like some kind of runaway—a runaway mother nobody went looking for.
Those years mattered! Sarah and Georgie rode clunker Goodwill bikes on streets that emptied out after dark and drank in dive bars where nobody asked their age. They colonized the old-man bars, laid the foundation for generations of hipsters who’d come along since. They drank at Satyricon, and saw Poison Idea and even Nirvana before Cobain really made it.
Portland’s last bastion of the permissive West died when they closed Satyricon’s punk rock doors. The club reopened for a while, under the same name, but it was thin and watered-down. It was in the original version where Sarah and Georgie saw Courtney Love in the bathroom, where they dodged a flying bottle when someone—Courtney?—flung it. It was definitely Courtney’s hand in the mythology of their shared memory. Even when they went to college, they only went to Portland State University, a commuter school downtown.
Now the dollar theaters were six dollars and all parking was metered.
Nyla and Dulcet were native Portlanders, too, though from the east side of the river. Grant High School. Sarah had known them almost twenty years—a long time, yes, but still she knew Georgie first.
She pressed the phone to her ear. “In what way isn’t she adjusting?” Her words came out through a tight jaw.
Nyla whispered, “She’s in the bedroom.”
“Georgie invited you over?” Sarah’s voice caught as she said it. She spun the pacifier on her hand, as a way to keep from shaking. The TV crew started rolling up their cables.
Nyla said, “We dropped in.”
We?
“You and who else?” Her voice cracked and her throat was raw, as though an alchemy of grief, jealousy, and guilt flourished in the onset of a sudden virus.
“Dulcet,” Nyla said.
Of course.
“She gave Dulcet all her painkillers.”
Dulcet would love that
, Sarah thought. It wasn’t that Sarah wanted painkillers. She just wanted to be first in line for the offer, for any offer, from her friend.
She kept in check an urge to slide the pacifier into her own mouth.
Across the grounds Dale, the zoo vet, made a lazy S curve down the asphalt paths on his mountain bike. His jacket said zoo
VET
in white letters big enough to read across a stadium. He wore shorts all winter. He had an Oregon tan, which is to say no tan at all but the pink flush of bare skin working hard in a cold rain. His muscles shifted with the effort of an incline. He was a specialist in cardiovascular fitness and circulatory systems, and believed in constant motion. Sarah said, “Is she adorable?”
Nyla asked. “Georgie? She’s worn out.”
“I mean the baby. Of course the baby’s cute.” Cuteness in infant mammals is a survival skill. Sarah imagined a cross between Georgie, Humble, and little Lucy, the newborn man-ape.
Sarah had met Humble before Georgie did, years ago. They’d gone on what might be called one date. Back then, Humble drove a worn old Mercedes, and he coddled it. Sarah had her dog with her, Shadow, a cuddly new puppy that smelled like summer sun. They’d met up for a beer in the park. Late at night, after dark, he offered her a ride home, but it had pained him to allow her pup in his car. He couldn’t hide it.
That was the dividing line: How could she date a guy who begrudged her dear dog-baby?
Ben moved in with Sarah. He loved Shadow from the start! Now the dog was their aged and pampered thing, almost fifteen years later.
Georgie met Humble at a party in Sarah’s one-room apartment. Georgie didn’t have a dog. That baby? If things had gone differently, it could’ve been Sarah’s.
Then it would’ve been supercute. Ha!
Almost as cute as the baby she’d have with Ben, anyway.
All babies are adorable. They’re built that way, with big eyes,
big heads, and button noses. Then that strategic, stumbling, and vulnerable walk kicks in.
The Cuteness Factor.
Grown mammals nurture and protect baby-faced creatures. Reptiles lay eggs and crawl away, and that’s a good survival strategy because otherwise they’d eat their own offspring. A lucky anaconda turns out a litter of maybe sixty at once, some alive, some dead, others as unfertilized eggs. It’s the original combo meal, a built-in food reward for procreating.
The offspring who survive are the ones who slither off fast. Let that be a metaphor to get your ass out of your parents’ house, right?
Nyla said, “It was weird. Georgie let the police in to look around. They left. Now she’s sleeping.”
Sarah asked, “Police? Why the police?” So even the Portland police had seen the baby before Sarah? She was totally last in line!
“I don’t know. Apparently they’d gotten a call?” Nyla said.
Dale charged his bike through a murder of crows; glossy black bird wings filled the air. Sarah’s timer beeped. Baby Lucy was in motion, motoring.
The news crew marched toward their van. Dale’s nylon shorts flashed in the gray light as he pedaled from one animal enclosure to the next.
“I should be there.” She tapped the pacifier against her thigh.
Nyla said, “It’s all right. We’re on our way out. But, hey, I hear you’re due for a new baby, too.” Her voice was a happy singsong.
Sarah’s heart stopped; her face flushed. Nyla’d heard? They’d been trying, she and Ben. Maybe she was pregnant. She hadn’t taken the test yet. It was too soon—too soon to let herself down if the answer came up negative.
“At the zoo,” Nyla said. “The monkey. It was in the paper this morning.”
Ah! That pregnancy. Apparently this round—like an early labor, an early birth—PR had issued a premature birth announcement. Admin was either confident or strapped for funds, desperate to bring in visitors and sway voters to approve the next levy. Not all pregnancies made it to delivery. Sarah knew that truth in the memory of her body.
“It’s exciting?” Nyla asked.
“Sure.” The mandrill family kept up their Brady Bunch routine in the zoo equivalent of a split-level, ranch-style house: a split-level, semiterrestrial enclosure. Baby Lucy looked out through a wrinkled old man’s face. Her ears were huge and pink, cute by design.
The thing was, that mother-to-be mandrill had already been declared genetically redundant and was given a birth control implant. She’d conceived against the odds.
“Can you put Georgie on the phone?” Sarah felt far away from her old friend. She heard the phone rattle. Nyla’s voice moved to the background, calling Georgie’s name. There was shuffling, and a wait.
Nyla came back on the line. “She’s sleeping.”
You can’t wake a new mother from that famously hard-won maternal sleep. Those sacred baby naps! Conversation over.
Dale, that biological illustration of muscle and circulation, dismounted his bike on a forested hill. Sarah watched him with the scientifically engaged eye of an ethologist.
Dale had all the markers of a virile male animal in his prime: from his hair to his coloration, his flat abs, and the ready way he entered a room. He wasn’t exactly good-looking, but so very healthy.
Sarah had her own fertility markers: full breasts, strong hips, good skin. Ben, her husband, was tall, which was a genetic plus in the brute world of animals, but he was a paper pusher. He spent his days at a desk in an office, making decisions on home loans. His slack shoulders had started to show the strain of sedentary work. He still had all his hair, though, that bloom of youth.
Thoughtful and kind, Ben was Mr. Steady, the most patient man she’d ever met. Being slow and gentle was one of his strengths.
Until it turned into a weakness.
He’d grown up in eastern Oregon, near the Washington border, near the Umatilla Chemical Depot, a chemical munitions storage facility. It was possible he had what the doctor called slow-moving sperm, or “low motility.”
Patient sperm?
And he was slow to get his sperm checked. His logic was that heavy pot smokers have slow swimmers, and they make babies all the time, so it’d happen!
Sarah made him drink three shots of espresso an hour before sex. Caffeine sends the soldiers flying.
She’d meet him after work, with a steaming cup of coffee.
By now it was conditioning: Coffee was foreplay, and a hard-on was hope.
When she went home she’d pee on a stick then watch to see: baby or no baby?
The teenagers had disappeared and left her holding their DNAladen, baby-spit-coated made-in-China pacifier. The zoo paths were dotted with families led by men in sagging jeans.
So why does a patriarch mandrill have that beckoning ass? Why does testosterone manifest as ornamentation? It’s about mate choice availability: His ass draws the ladies and holds the family together. One theory is that a bright butt helps a male lead his colony through the dense plants of the rain forest.
In the distance, Dale, in deep purple shorts, straddled his mountain bike and pumped up the side of a hill into the thick green manicured shrubbery of the Oregon rain forest where it had been groomed to make way for Employees Only paths.
L
ate that night, when Humble still hadn’t come home, Georgie called him, but there was no answer. She’d seen the conflicted way he moved around their house since Bella was born. He’d pick their daughter up, hold her close, one big hand spread across her tiny back, a perfect father. They had the same soft waves to their hair. His eyes might be narrow with sleep, and hers, too. Then half the time he’d put her down again, grab his coat, and head out without looking back. He’d say, “I have to work.”
Maybe he really did.
A permanent clutch of love and panic had moved into their home—they’d brought a baby into the world! They had the most perfect child! They’d screw up.
Paternity leave is built on vague terms for the self-employed. A lot of people had Humble’s phone number. When computers crashed, with small businesses on the line, they’d call him and he’d go and make things right. He worked whatever hours it took.
Maybe he was working now. That was possible.
And if he’d stopped somewhere for a drink? It wasn’t a crime. If it kept him from feeling like he’d lost all autonomy, Georgie could hold down the home front.
This was the truth about having a baby and a PhD: She knew the prescribed cultural mother roles, from domineering Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine to domineering Peggy on
Married with Children
.
She’d read psychologist Erik Erikson’s theories of “momism”—every frustrated, repressed, suicidal, alcoholic, promiscuous, flatulent, or dandruff-ridden man was driven to his weaknesses by a controlling mom or an infantilizing wife. Erickson postulated that mothers ran the family the way a boss runs a business, only with more castration.
Momism
.
If men stood for individualism, women were enforced conformity. Men were active and women beyond passive, a symbol of the sedentary. Christ almighty.
She’d read
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
and all those academic essays about Nurse Ratched: The woman’s role is to run a tight ward, robbing weak men of their masculinity. Wah!
She wouldn’t let motherhood put her in that emasculating spot of perpetrator and victim in one ovary-packing, mammary gland–wielding package, chasing her man home from bars, setting a curfew like he was a derelict teen.
No. If Humble missed dinner, that was his problem.
Georgie wrapped herself in a wool sweater, pajamas underneath. She held Bella in one arm and ventured out to drag their garbage can back from the curb. A cop car passed at the end of the block. Were those the same officers who had come to see about the baby? She stayed on her porch until they eased on by.