The Stud Book (31 page)

T
he day of Lit Expedition, Georgie woke up before Humble and the baby—woke up like a kid on Christmas, ready for her first day back at the work she was born to do.

By the time Humble got up, when Bella started to cry, Georgie was already out of the shower and drinking coffee. So many days lately her head had been cloudy. From morning until noon could pass in a blurry haze, one diaper change after another. Nursing hormones make a woman’s brain less engaged in aspirations. Georgie had read that. And she was prone to barometric migraines. Under a constantly cloudy Oregon winter sky, she could feel the atmospheric pressure shift inside her head. Today her head was clear, with a chance of thinking. Beautiful.

“Big plans?” Hum asked. He scratched his stomach and reached for the coffeepot. He’d forgotten.

That was okay.

Georgie didn’t need Humble’s validation; her plans were important to her. It was a certain kind of peevish wife’s role to begrudge him his own forgetfulness, and she thought of Mrs. Joe Gargery, that belittling drudge, that cautionary tale of an unwilling wife and
surrogate mother in the gendered society of
Great Expectations. I may truly say I’ve never had this apron of mine off since born you were
.

“Lit Expedition,” Georgie said, calmly. She had Bella in one arm and was patting the girl’s back. “Arena’s coming to babysit.” She touched her iPod in its docking station. It was already cued to her sound track, and blasted Brahms’s Academic Festival Overture through the house.

“Jesus, that’s loud.” Humble was puffy-eyed. He moved like an older man, totally hungover.

“It’s good for Bella and good for us.”

Then she remembered: Nurse Ratched, in
Cuckoo’s Nest
, blasted music through the psych ward. Agh! But this wasn’t a ward. It was her house. Humble wasn’t a patient. He could go out if he wanted to.

Anyway, maybe it was time somebody rewrote that book from Nurse Ratched’s point of view.

Upstairs, with the overture still playing, she put Bella in a rocking swing, then squeezed into her best pre-pregnancy skirt. She let her shirt hang out to camouflage the snug waist. It was a gorgeous and generous indigo blue, spun hemp and silk. A lucky, luxury shirt.

Today would be Bella’s first experience with an actual sitter.

It would be Georgie’s day out on her own.

The rocking swing ticked like a metronome, counting down the seconds.

The thought of leaving her baby in anybody else’s care made Georgie half-sick. Really, it did. But she’d see it through. People did this all the time.

The doorbell rang. Humble was in the bathroom, his morning office, and Georgie gave Bella a second look—the girl was buckled in, half-asleep, safe—then ran to get the door. Arena was on time, thank God. She was wearing a tiny T-shirt that said
I
♥
OLD PEOPLE
. Her jeans were striped jeggings. The girl was tall and thin and made being human in a human body look easy; everything fit and hung and tucked and moved in all the right places.

Georgie felt suddenly short and fat and a little oily. A minute ago, in the mirror, she’d looked fine. Now, she was definitely
not sleek. She smiled, invited Arena in, and led her back upstairs. “You’ve changed a diaper before?”

Arena said, “Not really.”

Not really? What did that mean? The girl was still in trouble for selling crystal meth, but Nyla swore up and down that was all a mistake, that it was Crystal Light. Expelled over Crystal Light?

Highly unlikely.

“But you’ve given a baby a bottle? I pumped fresh milk. She’ll be hungry when she wakes up.”

Arena shook her head. Her hair slid down over one eye. “Couldn’t be too hard.”

Downstairs, the front door opened then closed. Humble had left for the day.

Georgie stared at Arena. She’d changed Arena’s diapers. She’d helped give this grown girl a bottle. How was that even possible? Arena ran a hand through her loose hair, but instead of moving it out of her face, she drew it to her lips and slid that forelock between her teeth. She was like a tall five-year-old.

An abandoning mother isn’t a mother. Leave your kid behind and words like this will forever sing in that child-animal’s mind. Leave, and you don’t get it back, you don’t get to erase the mistake, it doesn’t go away. Georgie sang the words back to her own absent mother. To leave for a conference when Bella was so small? That’d be a tiny bit of what Georgie experienced when her mother left for Malaysia.

She couldn’t do it. “You know what? Come with me.” Georgie bent and started packing a diaper bag. “Come to the conference, hold Bella, keep her calm, stay close. I’ll do what I’m there for.” She’d introduce speakers and network.

“Really?” Arena slouched even more, a fragile flower wilting.

But it would be good.

If the baby needed to nurse, Georgie would be there. If Arena bought or sold drugs, Georgie would be there, too. Right?

She tucked extra disposable diapers in her diaper bag. Yes, disposable diapers! She used them. Each diaper took five hundred years to degrade in a landfill, longer than Oregon had been a state, longer than the United States had existed so far. The grandchildren of her
grandchildren’s grandchildren would live with that waste, but so what? Today she needed the godsend of high-tech diapering.

Arena slunk along the wall, down a hallway to the dining room. She followed Georgie. “So, what exactly are you doing at this thing?” Her teeth were white and charming in their awkward alignment. Her lips were doll lips.

“Introducing a speaker. It’s part of a conference.” She’d been assigned at least one, and maybe only one as far as she could tell.

“Somebody famous?” Arena picked up a postcard on the table and turned it over as though there was a chance it would be addressed to her.

“Might be,” Georgie said. “They’re all pretty big in my world, anyway.” She packed picture books, a pacifier, extra blankets, a rattle, and a soft toy—anything to calm a screaming baby in a tight moment. Mostly, at six weeks, the answer was always nursing. Boobs, boobs, boobs.

The point of the day was to let Georgie feel like a person with a brain, not a milk dispenser. That’s all she wanted. She put a bottle of frozen breast milk in a side pocket of her diaper bag. Arena leaned on the arm of the couch and stared at the TV like the TV was on, but it was off. Arena said, slowly and quietly, “I like to read, too.”

The conference was in the Convention Center. The parking lot was so big they had to take a shuttle from their car to the entrance. They actually may have parked closer to Georgie’s house than to the place—they were that far away across a broad expanse of parking lots. The three of them sat crowded in two of the shuttle’s sideways-facing seats. The folded stroller jutted into the aisle. Georgie held Bella in her lap. The diaper bag was as big as another rear end, like a person crouched on the floor, a Seeing Eye dog.

Georgie smoothed the dark, silky swirl of her daughter’s hair, looked down, and saw a mark at the edge of her own lucky shirt. It was a milk stain, or a water mark. It was almost invisible but no, there it was. Had that been on the shirt when she put it on?

Then she saw another one, higher up. And a little splatter. Breast milk or toothpaste? Either way, the flickering shuttle bus
lights, with their hint of green, brought the stains out like subliminal patterns.

In the Convention Center, Georgie put Bella in the stroller then broke into a power walk to keep her from screaming. Movement usually did the trick. Arena loped along at her side. They found the volunteer coordinator in the lobby at a lone freestanding booth. The woman handed Georgie an envelope and a name badge. Inside the envelope was a form letter:

There was a map, a schedule, and a coupon for a cup of Starbucks.

Mr. Clifford? Georgie’s heart picked up. James Clifford was brilliant. He was a well-known anthropological theorist. But then again, there’d also been a woman named Anita Clifford doing widely recognized work, briefly. Maybe it was her.

Arena twisted back and forth, her legs wrapped around each other like a little noodle ballet, her fingers laced. She asked, “Get somebody cool?”

Bella yawned and blinked.

“I think so.” Georgie scanned the schedule until she found the name, Clifford, highlighted. She had less than an hour. She was already late. She hoisted the diaper bag back on her shoulder and gripped the stroller’s handles. “He’s an interesting man. You’ll meet him.”

But where was the Green Room? She turned again to the volunteer coordinator. “Excuse me—”

The woman was busy with somebody else.

Bella hated the stroller. She gave a mewling, fussy cry, trying it out.

Georgie waited her turn. Everywhere she looked, she saw people who looked like somebody she might know. She thought she saw
Al Gore, but it was instead a man who looked like Al Gore. Then another one, who looked like Al Gore crossed with Alec Baldwin.

They waited too long—Bella’s cry climbed, louder, then burst into full song. They were already late. Bella screamed and then threw up. Her tiny hands were covered in baby spit and shaking.

Arena wandered off and fed coins into a Coke machine ten steps away. Georgie picked Bella up. She found a wipe in a bag to clean those darling starfish hands, even as the hands grabbed Georgie’s clothes, her best effort at dressing up. “There there, sweets. You’re okay,” she whispered.

Finally, the volunteer coordinator was free. She started packing, ready to leave the booth. Georgie cut in, “Excuse me?” She bounced Bella. “Where is the Green Room?”

The woman hitched up her Dockers. She took a short breath and clicked the cap off a Sharpie. She marked a big X on a map over one tiny room, a square, and handed the map to Georgie.

“How will I recognize my guest?”

The woman took the form letter from Georgie’s hand. She read it, then handed it back. “You’ll see ’em,” she said. Job done, she waddled off.