Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (20 page)

Madelyn was asleep when we arrived, and Paul, my father, and I gathered around the crib to adore her in soft voices. One of them suggested that she resembled my mother, but to me she just looked like a baby, not the cute kind you see on diaper commercials but the raw, wrinkled kind that resemble bitter old men.

“It’ll be different when her hair comes in,” Paul said. “Some babies is born with it, but it’s less gnarlier for the mother when they’re bawl-headed.” He waved his hands before his daughter’s closed eyes. “It’s the mothers I think about. Can you imagine what that must be like, having something inside you that’s all fur-bearing and shit?”

“Well, fur and hair are different things,” my father said. “Having a raccoon inside you, all right, I see your point, but a few hairs never hurt anybody.”

Paul shuddered and I told him about a recent documentary, the story of a boy who’d been surgically separated from his secret interior twin. It lived inside of him for seven years, a little dummy with no heart or brain of its own. “That’s fine, or whatever,” I whispered, “but it had this really long hair.”

“Like, how long?” Paul asked.

In truth I hadn’t seen the documentary, just read about it. “Really long,” I said. “About three feet.”

“That’s like having a fucking Willie Nelson doll living inside you,” Paul said.

“It’s a bunch of baloney,” my father said.

“No, really. I saw it.”

“Like hell you did.”

The baby raised a fist to her mouth, and Paul lowered his head into the crib. “That’s just your uncle Faggot and your raggedy-assed granddaddy talking some of their old stupid bullshit,” he said. And it sounded so ... comforting.

When my father left, Paul heated up a serving of formula. The baby woke up, and Kathy settled her onto the sofa, where the four of us watched videos taken in the hospital. That my brother had not filmed the actual cesarean led me to believe that someone had expressly forbidden it, perhaps for legal or sanitary reasons. There was a blank spot between the arrival of the doctor and the purple-faced baby wailing like an urgent call at the end of her umbilical cord. As if to make up for the missing seven minutes, the recovery-room footage goes on forever. Kathy drinks from a plastic cup of water. A nurse wanders in to change the bandages. Often my sister-in-law is naked or topless, but if she was bothered by the sight of herself playing on a wide-screen TV, she did not show it. Sometimes she held the camera, and we saw Paul in his cutoff shorts and promotional T-shirt, a baseball cap turned backward on his head.

The two of them had watched this video dozens of times, but still they sat enraptured. “Here’s where that nurse’s aide comes in,” Kathy said. Paul turned off the volume and as the woman stuck her head through the door he lip-synched her voice.

“Look like evabody in here asleep.”

“Do it again,” Kathy said.

“Look like evabody in here asleep.”

“Again.”

“Look like evabody in here asleep.”

Further along there was footage of the baby’s first bowel movement. It looked like tar, and when the last of it had seeped out, Paul hit the reverse button and watched as the puddle contracted and crept back into his daughter’s body. “You see how dark that shit is?” he said. “I mean to tell you this little baby’s advanced.”

He held Madelyn up to the TV screen and she gave a little, two-syllable cry that sounded to Paul like “whoopee!” but I interpreted as something closer to “help meeeee.”

People who have nothing to prove offer practical baby gifts: sturdy cotton rompers made to withstand the cycle of vomit and regular washing. People who are competing for the titles of best-loved aunts and uncles — people like my sisters and me — send satin pants and delicate hand-crafted sweaters accompanied by notes reading “PS. The fur collar is detachable.” The baby is photographed in each new outfit, and I receive pictures almost daily. In them my brother and his wife look not like parents but like backwoods kidnappers, secretly guarding the heiress to a substantial cashmere fortune.

Between the still cameras and the video cameras, Madelyn’s every move is documented and presented as “Baby’s First . . .” Baby’s First Beach Trip doubled as Baby’s First Hurricane. Supported by her mother, she looks past the bent sea oats and out toward the blackening sky, her face creased in an expression of wisdom and concern never seen on either of her parents. The Fourth of July, Halloween, Thanksgiving: these are just days to her, but Paul and Kathy their logic paralyzed by love, insist that their daughter is cognizant and as excited as they are.

On Baby’s First Day of Winter Madelyn sat before a video of A Christmas Carol, then watched as, in imitation of a Victorian gentleman, my brother applied a pair of mutton-chop sideburns. This was accomplished not with a disguise kit, but simply, using two strips of raw bacon that ran along his jawline and remained in place for minutes at a time through the miracle of fat against human flesh. Then Paul got out the ladder and taped Christmas lights to the front of his house. They too were short-term, collapsing into the bushes moments after the picture was taken. The baby, of course, already knew what she would be getting. Gifts were presented the moment my brother returned from the store. Baby’s First Pop-Up Book. Baby’s First Talking Doll. One of her presents was a phonetics aid called the Alphabet Pal. Press D, for example, and the machine recites the letter. Press D, then A, then D again, and it connects the letters into a clumsily pronounced word. “Duh-Aah-Duh.” It sounds like someone with a mechanical voice box and is far too advanced for a child Madelyn’s age. She wanted nothing to do with it, so by Christmas morning it had become my brother’s toy. He is determined to make it curse, but the Alphabet Pal is crafty and decent and soon figured out what he was up to. M-o-t-h-e-r is fine, but try following it with f-u-c-k-e-r and by the second letter the machine will giggle and, in a natural, little-girl voice, give you a piece of its mind. “Ha ha ha ha. You’re silly!” “I can’t even get it to say dick,” he says, “and that’s a goddam name.”

My sister-in-law’s condition calls for her to sleep through the night, so when Madelyn wakes at two and three and five A.M., it is Paul’s job to feed her or change her, or carry her around the house, begging her to lighten up. There’s no point in going to bed, so he kicks his pillow from room to room and collapses on the floor in front of her crib or the swinging chair that sits in the dining room. When the last of my sisters has hit the sack, he dials me up and holds the receiver to his daughter’s mouth. For months I listened to her cry long-distance, but then she got a little older and learned how to laugh and coo and sigh in that satisfied baby way that makes me understand how some could bring a child into this lousy world of ours.

“She’ll turn on him sooner or later,” my father says. “Just you wait. In a couple of years Madelyn won’t want anything to do with him.”

I look into the future and see my brother’s face, impossibly middle-aged. His daughter has rejected all of his values, and stands now on the dais of a major university, the valedictorian preparing to deliver her commencement speech. What will she think when her dad stands in the aisle, releasing a hog call and raising his T-shirt to reveal the jiggling message painted upon his bare stomach? Will she turn away, as my father predicts, or might she remember all the nights she awoke to discover him: this slob, this lump, this silly drooling toy asleep at her feet.

Nuit of the Living Dead

I WAS ON THE FRONT PORCH, drowning a mouse in a bucket when this van pulled up, which was strange. On an average day a total of fifteen cars might pass the house, but no one ever stops, not unless they live here. And this was late, three o’clock in the morning. The couple across the street are asleep by nine, and from what I can tell, the people next door turn in an hour or so later. There are no streetlamps in our village in Normandy, so when it’s dark, it’s really dark. And when it’s quiet, you can hear everything.

“Did I tell you about the burglar who got stuck in the chimney?” That was the big story last summer. One time it happened in the village at the bottom of the hill, the pretty one bisected by a river, and another time it took place fifteen miles in the opposite direction. I heard the story from four people, and each time it happened in a different place.

“So this burglar,” people said. “He tried the doors and windows and when those wouldn’t open, he climbed up onto the roof.”

It was always a summer house, a cottage owned by English people whose names no one seemed to remember. The couple left in early September and returned ten months later to find a shoe in their fireplace. “Is this yours?” the wife asked her husband.

The two of them had just arrived. There were beds to be made and closets to air out, so between one thing and another the shoe was forgotten. It was early June, chilly, and as night fell, the husband decided to light a fire.

At this point in the story the tellers were beside themselves, their eyes aglow, as if reflecting the light of a campfire. “Do you honestly expect me to believe this?” I’d say. “I mean, really.”

At the beginning of the summer the local paper devoted three columns to a Camembert-eating contest. Competitors were pictured, hands behind their backs, their faces buried in soft, sticky cheese. This on the front page. In an area so hard up for news, I think a death by starvation might command the headlines for, oh, about six years.

“But wait,” I’m told. “There’s more!”

As the room filled with smoke, the husband stuck a broom up the chimney. Something was blocking the flue, and he poked at it again and again, dislodging the now skeletal burglar, who fell feetfirst into the flames.

There was always a pause here, a break between the story and the practical questions that would ultimately destroy it. “So who was this burglar?” I’d ask. “Did they identify his body?”

He was a Gypsy, a drifter, and, on two occasions, an Arab. No one remembered exactly where he was from. “But it’s true,” they said. “You can ask anyone,” by which they meant the neighbor who had told them, or the person they themselves had told five minutes earlier.

I never believed that a burglar starved to death in a chimney. I don’t believe that his skeleton dropped onto the hearth. But I do believe in spooks, especially when Hugh is away and I’m left alone in the country. During the war our house was occupied by Nazis. The former owner died in the bedroom, as did the owner before her, but it’s not their ghosts that I worry about. It’s silly, I know, but what frightens me is the possibility of zombies, former townspeople wandering about in pus-covered nightgowns. There’s a church graveyard a quarter of a mile away, and were its residents to lurch out the gate and take a left, ours would be the third house they would stumble upon. Lying in bed with all the lights on, I draw up contingency plans on the off chance they might come a-callin’. The attic seems a wise hideout, but I’d have to secure the door, which would take time, time you do not have when zombies are steadily working their way through your windows.

I used to lie awake for hours, but now, if Hugh’s gone for the night, I’ll just stay up and keep myself busy: writing letters, cleaning the oven, replacing missing buttons. I won’t put in a load of laundry, because the machine is too loud and would drown out other, more significant noises — namely, the shuffling footsteps of the living dead.

On this particular night, the night the van pulled up, I was in what serves as the combination kitchen/living room, trying to piece together a complex model of the Visible Man. The body was clear plastic, a shell for the organs, which ranged in color from bright red to a dull, liverish purple. We’d bought it as a birthday gift for a thirteen-year-old boy, the son of a friend, who pronounced it null, meaning “worthless, unacceptable.” The summer before, he’d wanted to be a doctor, but over the next few months he seemed to have changed his mind, deciding instead that he might like to design shoes. I suggested that he at least keep the feet, but when he turned up his nose we gave him twenty euros and decided to keep the model for ourselves. I had just separated the digestive system when I heard a familiar noise coming from overhead, and dropped half the colon onto the floor.

There’s a walnut tree in the side yard, and every year Hugh collects the fruit and lays it on the attic floor to dry. Shortly thereafter, the mice come in. I don’t know how they climb the stairs, but they do, and the first thing on their list is to take Hugh’s walnuts. They’re much too big to be carried by mouth, so instead they, roll them across the floor, pushing them toward the nests they build in the tight spaces between the walls and the eaves. Once there, they discover that the walnuts won’t fit, and while I find this to be comic, Hugh thinks differently and sets the attic with traps I normally spring before the mice can get to them. Were they rats, it would be different, but a couple of mice? “Come on,” I say. “What could be cuter?”