The World's Largest Man (17 page)

I waited for a moment of blinding enlightenment when I would feel like a father who had fathered something. At baby showers, I stared into the eyes of fathers when they were looking away. Were they different from me? Yes, but how? Pop came to a shower, and I looked at him, deep into the dark place behind his eyes, but found no comfort there, no lessons.

I
t's time,” my wife said.

She had begun to make noises, like something you might hear at the Dixie National Livestock Show.

“Are you okay?” I said, and she threw a trivet at me.

We went to bed. It didn't feel right, lying down next to a creature making those sorts of sounds, but I wanted to be there for her, although it felt safer to be outside for her, perhaps behind a blast wall.

Around 11 p.m., she began to thrash.

“It's time,” she said again.

“You said that already.”

“Get out.”

I went to the futon, or as I liked to call it, the Iron Taco. I lay down, said a prayer for my wife, and looked forward to having scoliosis in the morning. At 1 a.m., she woke me.

“I'm in labor.”

“Again?”

The plan had been to do all the laboring at home, so as to give my wife the greatest chance at bleeding to death in her own living room. But my wife needed sleep and was getting panicky, parts of baby protruding from her body at upsetting angles. At 2 p.m., twenty hours after my wife had first announced that her labor had begun, and both fifteen and fourteen hours after she'd also said it had begun, she said that, finally, at last it had begun.

She was trembling. I'd seen that look before, the last time she'd been forced to drive over the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway.

“I want to go to the hospital,” she said.

I reminded her about the medicines they would try to give her. I didn't really care. I was merely being argumentative, which I felt was my role.

Then she started moaning louder, louder, building, bracing herself on the frame of the door, the whole world contracting, ripe with fleshy bounty.

“What do I do?” I said.

“DON'T LET ME DIE,” she said.

My poor wife was about to give birth to our child on the front porch, like some kind of animal and several of my second cousins, and I still didn't feel like a father.

L
et's have this baby!” a nurse said, and then abandoned us.

“Where'd everybody go?”

That's another lie they tell you, that when you're ready to have a baby you go to a hospital. You don't. The place where you go is more like an expensive and very cold motel where strange people come in, make vaguely dark pronouncements about your wife's cervix, and then charge you five hundred dollars for a commemorative bedpan.

Natural childbirth, I noted, made my wife appear very unnatural. Like she was—what was the word?—ah, yes: dying. Somewhere in the epic of her suffering, she had taken on the noble aspect of a dying ruler, fading, fading, staring down ghosts, a flash of recognition, a pitiable sadness, a very real loneliness, locked as she was in the private chamber of a pain only she could understand, a pain other mothers knew, closed off forever to a world of men who were not competitive eaters.

Hospital staff came in and stared, whole gangs of nurses.

“Don't see much natural these days, seems like,” one said.

I found this hard to believe. This was Mississippi, where just two or three decades ago, everybody had been giving birth in cotton gins.

“I bet she'll cave,” another whispered, on her way out.

L
ate into the evening, I found Pop, sitting alone.

“Hey, boy,” he said.

We sat there for a while, quiet. I thought this might be a
good time for him to provide some counsel about how to be a father, or even to feel like one.

“Were you in the room when I was born?”

“Shit no.”

Pop came from an older generation of men who believed delivery rooms were dangerous places, full of cats and evil spirits. I felt a little sorry for him, and jealous, for I knew I would have to be in there and would have to see the spirits.

“What do you remember about the day I was born?”

“Lemme think,” he said. Here it comes, I thought. He was about to drop some serious wisdom. “I reckon we was about to go see a movie and your momma was frying some pork chops and she come to hollering and there you was.”

It was a touching story.

Mom came staggering up from a darkened corridor.

“You done had a cigarette,” Pop said. “I can smell it.”

“Kiss my butt,” she said.

“It'd be a lot to kiss,” Pop said.

These were my role models.

“I don't even know how to hold a baby,” I offered. I'd held only one or two babies in my life and found the experience upsetting.

“Your father knows how to hold a baby,” Mom said, patting him on the arm. He was a known Baby Whisperer.

“Shoot, babies like me,” Pop said.

Was it in my bones to do what he did, and to like it?

He stood up. He could only take so much emotion before he became gassy.

“You're not staying for the birth?” Mom said.

“Did you know I was a boy?” I said to him, desperate to learn anything.

You could see the fire in his eyes, this unquenchable desire to place firearms in the hands of small boys and watch them
maim things. He needed a grandson. He smiled. He left. We sat there, Mom and me, and my wife lay there, somewhere down the hall, and distant cannonade could be heard in this or that room, and the siege continued, forever, into the dark maw of the Mississippi night.

M
y wife was hyperventilating. I looked at the clock. It was midnight. She had been awake for forty-six hours. The doula was there, with her pillows and massage oils and a large yellow fitness orb in case my wife wanted to work on her abs. Hours passed. Devices beeped. Nursing shifts changed. Sanity departed.

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING I HATE THE BEEPING WHERE IS MY ICE?” she yelled.

She had turned against the doula, too, who at around 2 a.m. of the second night had attempted to nap behind a potted plant in the corner.

“ALL OF YOU PEOPLE ARE ASLEEP AND I AM DYING!” she said.

“I love you,” I said.

“I DON'T CARE I HATE YOU GET ME MY BALL.”

I picked up her Golden Orb of Suffering, and the doula and I lowered her onto this object, which, it was explained, would relieve pressure on her cervix. She ripped off whatever wires and tubes they'd put on her, various alarms rang out, and she squatted on the orb. I stood in front of her, holding and rubbing her arms, and she buried her face in my chest, in what I thought was a pathetically loving sort of way, and she seemed to be weeping.

This is love, I thought. This is family.

When she started biting my nipple, I wanted to scream out, but knew that this was my role now, to give my wife something
to latch on to like a fruit bat. Perhaps that's what being a father was?

The contraction passed, she unlatched, looked up at me, a suspension bridge of spittle connecting her mouth to my shirt.

“Don't let them give me anything,” she said.

There were medicines in every darkened nook of this facility, drugs that could induce hallucinations, deaden whole regions of the body, heal the nipple.

I got her back to the bed.

All through the dimness of the room she wrestled with the demons of her suffering, her past, the memory of her mother, who was never not present, rendered almost material by the wailing, the shelling of the city of her body by nature's best artillery, and just when it was darkest and bleakest, when the hours had grown too many to count, when all sanity and reason had been bled from the room, she sat up in bed, suffused with light.

“She's pushing!” the doula said.

“Put this on!”

Somebody threw me a freeze-dried parcel of blue napkins. What were these? Ah, the scrubs! It was happening! I was so excited to wear the scrubs, so energized by the sudden burst of activity that I removed all of my clothes, and I now wore nothing but the blue napkins, which did not seem to offer sufficient protection from the lights that had dropped from the ceiling, which were burning my skin, or protection from my wife, who clearly was trying to eat me, and I found myself at her right hand, in the Universal Place Where Fathers Stand When Babies Come Out of Their Wives, and there was screaming, and barking, and yelling, and pushing, and more screaming, and I found myself screaming, too, just like I'd done in that barn so long ago, and the lights burned and then.

And then.

And then.

Nothing.

Our doctor was looking down, something was wrong. And so I looked. And what I saw was a shock. The place where the penis was supposed to be was no penis.

Our son had been born without a penis.

They said nothing. They were waiting for me to say it. To declare it.

“It's a girl,” I said.

It had been three days. I looked down, expecting my beautiful wife to smile and cry and talk to the baby, but her eyes stayed closed. She had other business, deep inside. She was talking to her mother.

W
atch her neck,” my wife said from her wheelchair, the day we left the hospital, as I tried to put the baby, who looked more like an undercooked pastry, into her car seat, a seat that had seemed so small before but now seemed designed for an adolescent narwhal. Many people had come to see the baby in the hospital, including Bird and his wife, who lived just over the river, not far at all.

“You got to keep that baby clean,” Bird said. “You got to change its diapers.”

“We had planned on letting it stay dirty,” I said, “but maybe you're right.”

It was like a novelty baby, a joke baby. We took her out to the car, and I got the straps around what I guessed were its arms and legs, although it was possible she was upside down.

Why had so many people lied about how hard it would be, making it, growing it, pushing it out into the atmosphere?

“The birth of a child is a beautiful thing,” they say, as though it's a rainbow, or a sunset, and I guess that's true, especially if
you are looking at a rainbow, during a sunset, while someone sprays you with amniotic fluid.

I wanted other young idiot fathers to know that these things happen, that it's a Greek drama, that the place where the baby comes out might actually tear, as it did on my wife. It tore.
Tore
. We had to pay a man to sew it back. He went to school to learn how to do it.
School
. What did you study in school? I studied paragraphs.

The doula, nurses, doctors, I bow to them, low and full. They work at the gates of hell. They work until the walls of the city fall.

That first night alone, I tried holding the baby, not ceremonially, but actually, the way Pop had done with me, rocking, while my wife slept long and hard. I tried talking to this new person, which felt strange, but became easier, the more wine I drank.

It cried, and I tried to stop it, but could not. I was no Baby Whisperer. Not yet.

Fatherhood had not fallen on me like a Damascus light. It would be long and slow in coming, with furious bursts, like labor, but it would happen.

“Hush, little baby,” I said, and she did not hush.

There can be only one baby of the family, and I'd just handed the torch to this one, and she'd pass it to others, too, in time. There was still much I didn't know, such as how many holes were actually on the female body. Too many, it seemed. They're a mystery, these women, and their numbers in my house had just doubled, and so had the mystery, and the light.

S
o, we had a baby.

In many ways, it felt like having malaria. Meaning, you don't think much about either babies or malaria until they happen to you. I knew that having a family was, prima facie, good, like peace treaties between warring tribes on distant continents were good or innovations in trash-bag durability were good.

My spouse was different. She had a gift. Her knowledge of babies and how they work was vast and frightening, even before she made one of her own. She preferred babies to college. Babies were her college, she their professor. Women with broken babies would bring them to her to fix, asking her questions about how to make them sleep or eat or generally behave in a way as to not be filled with devils or vomit locusts, and she answered these questions with alacrity and compassion.

“Are your nipples cracked yet?” she'd say, on the phone. And then she'd say, “Oh, you're just engorged,” as if being engorged, which sounded like an adjective that happens to you maybe right before your brain explodes, was no big deal. “It's probably just mastitis in your milk ducts.”

“How do you know all this?” I asked, while she rolled
her eyes and walked away. She was an expert, and I could not fathom the abyss of her baby knowledge. For my thoughts were not her thoughts, neither were her ways my ways.

W
hen we got a child of our own, I was excited that my wife could finally experiment on her own baby. I was proud, how she powered through an epic birth like some kind of Icelandic sea monster in the World's Strongest Pregnant Sea Monster competition. She had earned the right to do whatever she wanted with our baby. Which was how I wanted it. In that first year, I mostly just shadowed my wife, following her lead, doing whatever she did after I watched her do it, which was a great way to make sure she did everything.

I had some role in this drama, I knew, though it was unclear what. I would have to learn. And one thing I learned is, when you have babies, people will ask you about them.

“How's the baby?” they would say, during that first year.

“Fine,” I would say, lying.

I had become one of the lying liars of the world.

Because sometimes, it's not fine. Sometimes, it's like riding a Greyhound bus across the country with tiny people from the state hospital who have the same last name as you and are very likable but also want to bite you and pee on your suitcase. And you can't get off the bus until it stops, eighteen to twenty years from now. But you can't say that. You have to keep lying. Because you have to keep making babies, so society's adults can have something to take pictures of besides the ocean.

Sometimes, my childless friends would want to know.

“I mean, what's it like, anyway?” they'd ask, with a cadaverous smile, the way you ask somebody what it's like to date a girl with no ears. It was a sick question, designed to make
themselves feel better about their life choices. “Do you
like
it?” they asked. “Is it
fun
?”

Ours may be one of the first generations in the history of human breeding to ask such a silly question. I could think of a hundred good reasons to make a baby, but
liking
it was not one. I didn't like having children any more than I liked having cartilage. A blessing? Sure. But so is cartilage. One helps me ride my bicycle, the other one poops on my floor. Is that what they wanted to hear?

W
e started potty training our first daughter when she was still a year old. I cannot explain why we started so young; my wife led me to believe that our child's learning to use a toilet before age two would be something along the lines of memorizing the periodic table or the Chinese alphabet. It would be a real accomplishment, she said, and she wanted to try. She was an ambitious young mother.

“But she seems so young,” I said.

“She's very advanced,” my wife said, remarking on the child's other talents, which were largely focused on distinguishing between the sounds of ducks and nonducks.

“What does the duck say?” I'd ask.

“Quack-quack!” she'd say.

“What does the sheep say?” I'd ask.

“Quack-quack!” she'd say.

“She's so smart,” people would say, as a courtesy.

Some friends said go for it. Force the toilet issue. Incentivize it. These friends came from the school of parenting who strongly inveigh against the commodification of youth and believe that any capitulation to the needs of the young will end Western civilization and reduce our nation to something resembling an early Charlton Heston film. Others told us to let the child decide when she wants to use the toilet.

“Just let it happen,” they said, which seemed the very opposite of what you want to do with feces.

The most normal friends suggested we buy a small, colorful, cartoonish children's potty. “The ones with the pictures of princesses on them,” they said.

“Ariel!” our daughter said, when we brought the pink bedpan home.

“Yes!” I said. “Now you can poop on her!”

I laughed about this, but not my wife. No. She would not laugh for many years. Because she knew that potty training was going to be an endless campaign against the inevitability of the rectum and the deep Freudian fears of the young, a war fought with love, and prayer, and sullied brown hands, and Skittles, which my wife poured into a mason jar.

“What are those for?” I said.

“One Skittle for teetee and two for a stinky,” she said.

I explained to my wife that I would join PETA before allowing the word
stinky
to occupy my brain's language centers.

“Stinky!” our daughter said, holding her nose. At twenty months, she was roughly the size of garden gnome, with a Magellanic Cloud of curly brown hair spiraling out from her head in every available direction, which made her look not unlike a walking toilet brush.

“Stinky! That's right!” my wife said, handing her a Skittle.

The training started on a Monday and consisted of these ten simple steps:

            
1.
    
Remove diaper from child.

            
2.
    
Walk child to toilet.

            
3.
    
Point to toilet. Smile.

            
4.
    
Point to child. Smile.

            
5.
    
Point to floor. Frown.

            
6.
    
Point to the places on child where the urine and the feces come from.

            
7.
    
Say, “Woo woo.”

            
8.
    
Make the child repeat, “Woo woo.”

            
9.
    
Point to toilet again. Smile. Show teeth. Seem crazy.

          
10.
    
Wait.

I received calls and updates throughout day one. The first came in at 11 a.m., when my wife reported that the child had urinated in every room of the house and was now hiding underneath one of the beds. She'd been wearing, for the first time ever, what are called “big-girl panties,” which is, I believe, the technical term for “underwear soaked in urine.”

By the end of day two, most of the house was covered in sheets, towels, and other textiles in various yellows and browns. But it worked. I came home and—wonder of wonders!—heard the sound of tinkling. It was the child, on the adult toilet, in the act of voluntary micturition. Day two! It was such a glorious moment, everybody had a Skittle.

That night, I dreamt that every poop that had ever been pooped in the world was represented by its very own Skittle, and the jar reached up to heaven. It was big and wide and pretty, a jar of joy. My wife had done it. No wonder all those moms had called her, and still did. She was some kind of baby wizard.

“What about number two?” I asked the next morning.

“Oh, that'll happen soon,” she said.

And she said it with such confidence, such hope.

O
ver the next few months, what happened was, the child pooped in all the closets. She pooped in her room, our room,
the guest room, the living room, but not the bathroom. She did all her urinating during the day, in the toilet, Curious George panties pushed carelessly around her dangling ankles; but her poo, like the nine-banded armadillo and certain species of wombat, was nocturnal. Only when her rectum was cocooned in the palliative barrier of absorbent garments would her gastrointestinal tract release its malodorous bounty.

She would find a dark place somewhere in the house. We would hear her talking through walls and could often smell her pooping through them.

“Who's she talking to?” my wife said.

“The dark lord she serves,” I said.

She would poo and then just keep talking, possibly to the poo, because she loved it and was not ready to say goodbye. Sometimes, she loved it so much that she wanted to keep it inside her, compelling my wife to feed the child various accelerants designed to loosen the bowels. Every morning and night, the woman stood in the kitchen and mixed liquids and powders like a medieval apothecary, shaking and stirring and going mad. She poured these tonics into our child, whose bottom opened like the Grand Coulee Dam. Around suppertime, the baby would begin to hold herself in unusual ways, grasping the front of her crotch with one hand and the back of it with the other, apparently trying to lift her entire body off the ground and throw herself out the window.

“LET'S GO POTTY!” my harried wife would say a bit too loudly, smiling a bit too brightly, the way crazy people do.

“No,” the child would say. “No! No! No! NOOO!”

It was not an angry kind of
NO
. It was the kind of
NO
you hear when you ask someone if they want to throw themselves from the top of El Capitan. My wife fetched her tools, most notably an enema the size of a large handgun, while I chased the child, picked her up, carried her to the toilet.

“NOOO!” the baby said.

“Listen, we don't want to
throw
you in the toilet,” I said. “Unless it will help you poop.”

“Stop scaring her!” my wife said.

Please note that I was not the one holding a turkey baster full of nitroglycerin.

M
y parents had taught me so many things. My mother taught me to read and write and paint, and to love the act of learning, and my father taught me to skin a buck deer and even nonbuck deer and even nondeer deer, and also how to run a trotline, as well as how to run dogs and bases and people off your property with axes and mauls. Those had been relatively complicated things to learn, involving much nuance and tenacity, and yet I had learned them. How could we not teach our child this most basic task?

I wanted to help, or at least sufficiently get in my wife's way in a way that angered her. But she wouldn't let me, her logic being that the woman who'd pushed the baby out could teach the baby to push other things out, and so she held the child over the toilet and the child wailed and looked down into the hole for baby alligators.

“Go away,” my wife would say, through the closed door.

Then the door would fly open and the incontinent child would escape and run around the house frantically, looking under things, as though she had lost a precious jewel or her mind. It seems so natural: you eat, you form waste, your body and gravity have a meeting, come up with a simple plan: a location, perhaps some light reading material, and a candle for illumination and mood. Nature runs the meeting. You are merely attending, participating. After all, your attendance is required. You could call in sick, and the meeting would be rescheduled. You cannot get out of the meeting.

“We really need to have this meeting,” Nature says.

“I'll be here all day,” Gravity says.

“She can't keep putting this off,” Nature says.

And that was the problem. The child became so distressed at the sight of the toilet bowl that she lost the ability to go
anywhere
: the toilet, her Pull-Up, the closet. She kept rescheduling the meeting, until it was no longer going to just be a meeting. Human resources would have to be there. Security would be called.

To prepare for this explosive day, my wife became an ethnographer of the body's lower functions, studying the child, making field notes.

“She's got to go,” she would say, marking the calendar.

“How can you tell?”

The child would be walking very slowly and sort of leaning back, the way some people approach limbo poles or hurricanes. “It's been five days since she went.”

“The toilet will not eat you,” my wife said to the child.

“But if you don't give it your stinky,” I said, “it will come into your room at night and take it from your bottom with a fork.”

The child cried, ran away.

I didn't understand. She was three now, could read chapter books and run effectively from cats and recite creeds dating to the late Roman era.

Sometimes, if we were lucky, nature blindsided the child with a surprise emergency meeting that she could not postpone. We'd be in the front yard playing, and she would grow quiet and sidle under one of the tall camellias by the front porch and squat down and do it right there like a war vet.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“A stinky,” she said. “In the garden.”

The neighbors stared from their porch, concerned.

“She's very advanced!” I yelled, a bit too loudly.

H
ow did you potty train me?” I asked my parents on the speakerphone, while my wife and child wrestled just beyond earshot.