Girl Walks Into a Bar (26 page)

“I MADE MY OWN BABY FOOD TODAY! MASHED POTATOES WITH RICOTTA AND ORGANIC CHIVES! IT WAS BETTER THAN WHAT I ATE MYSELF!”

“AVA SLEEPS TWELVE HOURS A NIGHT—
IN
THE CRIB,
NO
ROCKING,
NO
SLEEP SHEEP … BOO-YA!”

“MAXIMILLIAN’S HEAD CIRCUMFERENCE IS IN THE 90TH PERCENTILE!” “Is that good?” “I DON’T KNOW! BUT IT’S THE 90TH PERCENTILE!!”

Eli sleeps pretty
well as far as I can tell, but I haven’t been around other babies, so what the hell do I know? If I had to wake up and be alert enough to argue a case in court or do brain surgery or be a senator or, hell, make the fries at McDonald’s, then yeah, maybe I’d take drastic measures like Ferberizing too. For me, though I work here and there, for the most part I’m a cavewoman, a primitive example of motherhood. I stay home and take care of the baby. I have a man to hunt and gather for me if I need it (though I can often be spotted at Trader Joe’s). But for now, I’m enjoying my time as a cavewoman. And I think cavewomen went to their babies at night when they cried. Actually, I’m betting cavewomen were the original “co-sleepers” so the baby was right there anyway, not off in some “cave nursery” with little furniture and choo-choo trains on the walls. What I’m saying is, I don’t think cavewomen Ferberized. Of course, they also lived to age thirty and didn’t brush their teeth. But still.

Over Theeeere! Over Theeeere!

My father has absconded
with the baby again.

We are walking down the High Line in Chelsea. My dad loves manning the stroller. He is so into manning the stroller and gazing at his grandson that sometimes he breaks into a rapid pace, forgetting his surroundings and the surrounding party of people who are also there to bask in the light of the Glorious Manchild. These fugitive runs tend to coincide with cases of extreme temperature. Right now, it is nearing ninety with bright sun. The last time he went on the lam like this, we were in Vermont for Thanksgiving. Dad took Eli for a walk in the stroller in the dead of winter, and my mom had to chase him down in the car a mile away. This was John’s first big family experience with me, so he got to witness a lifetime of family dynamics enacted on a dirt road in Charlotte, Vermont. Having tracked her subject like Dog the Bounty Hunter, my
mother slows down the big, embarrassing red Caddy and rolls down the window in the winter air.

“PAUL! What are you doing?!”

My dad is keeping up the brisk pace, singing songs to Eli in the frigid weather. Eli is bundled up, but his hands aren’t under the blanket and they are cold. The ladies in my elevator would have had a field day.

“PAUL!”

“We’re on a walk!” he says cheerily.

“PAUL! Get in the car!”

The marching continues. “I’ll walk back! We’re having fun. He’s having a blast!”

“Paul, it’s freezing out! Get in the car now!!”

John looks over to my brother, who for some reason got roped into this hunt for the obsessed grandfather. To my brother, my mother telling my dad what to do and my dad off on an enthusiastic-bordering-on-madcap tear is old hat. John’s just seeing this now, as his son is rolled along through the New England winter, possibly, if left unchecked, past the Canadian border.

My brother looks at John and just shrugs, rolling his eyes as if to say, “What can ya do?”

My dad grudgingly hands Eli over. Eli’s hands get warmed up. They come back to the house—where I’ve been waiting—blustering in from the cold.

“Ahhhhh, I love this little guy! We had so much fun!” Eli got a good dose of the Icelandic Plan for Good Baby Health that day, courtesy of Paul Dratch.

Now, at the High Line, in the summer heat, we have to chase my dad down the path, but he’s way ahead of us. He disappeared from sight long ago. We catch up to him finally and he brightly reports, “We’re having a blast! Aw, look at him. He’s my little buddy!”

He’s oblivious to the fact that once again, he’s been hogging the baby.

My parents not only came around to the idea of the pregnancy and grandchild, they have been reborn. They come to New York at least once a month. Every time my father visits, at some point in the weekend, he will take me aside, look at me very seriously, lower his voice, and say, “You have given us such a blessing” or “He’s such a miracle.” Only with his Boston accent, it sounds like “He’s such a merracle.” He’ll bust into the apartment saying, “Where’s my little buddy?” and “Ohhh, I love this little guy so much!” My dad puts on a real show for Eli, always singing or marching him around or pointing out trees and flowers. My mom is the more quiet one, but Eli appreciates her as well in a very sweet way. She’ll just be sitting there on the couch and he’ll crawl over and look up and flash one of his smiles especially for her. She’ll look down and laugh. “Oh, hello!”

A weird phenomenon is that when my parents are around Eli, they become about one hundred times more Jewish than they are in real life. My dad will start singing as if he just walked off the boat from the Old Country—great hits like “Yaidle deedle dai, yaidle deedle dee…” and its B side, “Deedle yaidle dai, deedle yaidle dai.” My dad grew up in an immigrant household, where his parents spoke Yiddish. My mom, on the
other hand, is second generation and did not grow up speaking Yiddish. You wouldn’t know this, though, when she is dealing with Eli. “Oh, look at that little punim!” “Come here, little butchkie.” “Hello, bubbele.” Once she said, “Ohhh, you little fresser,” a word I’d never even heard before, and I said, “Mom! Who are you?” Eli was making them tap into some primal ancestral lore or something mysterious. They both started channeling the songs and language that may have been sung and spoken to them when they were babies. When my dad would bust into some really Yiddish song, I’d start to get a bit self-conscious around John, imagining him thinking, “What the hell are they saying to my child?”

“Dad, could you change up the repertoire?” I’d say.

“Huh? OK. Too Jewish?” And he’d switch over to war songs. Again, I guess these were the songs he associated with being a kid. Of
course
a baby wants to hear war songs. It’s only natural.

So while other grandparents are softly crooning “Rock-a-bye Baby” or “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” my father is careening down the sidewalks of New York, pushing the stroller, not taking his eyes off the little “merracle.” He enthusiastically belts out another tune that in his world is perfect for a baby:
“FROM THE HALLS OF MONTEZUMA, TO THE SHORES OF TRIPOLIIIII! WE WILL FIGHT OUR COUNTRY’S BATTLES OVER LAND AND AIR AND SEA…”

The family is in hot pursuit.

The Great Pile of Unknowns

Back when I was pregnant
and John had gotten used to the idea of fatherhood, he started to think of all the fun things he could do with a son. He fantasized about taking his son to games, throwing the ball around, and going fishing—all the traditional father/son activities. He also mentioned a family heirloom of sorts that he was excited to pass down to Eli. When John was a kid, his mother had taken a ceramics class and had painted a little statuette for him. The statuette was of a baseball player, and John’s mom had even personalized it by inscribing
To John, 1975, Love, Mom
on the bottom of the player’s foot. John thought of how cool it would be to write
Eli
with the date on the other foot … a true sentimental father-to-son family heirloom.

John excitedly approached me when it arrived in the mail. “My mom sent the statue for Eli!” He unveiled it to me. There was a little fact he had left out in the telling: The statue was creepy as hell.

I blurted it out instantly. “That’s creepy.” The thing looked like Chucky.

“No! It’s cute!” said John.

To me, the young lad had evil clown elements—wide-set impish eyes and a too-broad smile that put me in mind of a maniacal ventriloquist’s doll. What kind of psychological damage could be done to my son by going to bed under the demonic eyes of this boyish baseball player who, I was betting, came to life at night and ran around the room in a crab walk?

John left it on the table in my living room. The eyes would follow my every move. I couldn’t live with this statue in my realm. I was afraid I might roll over in bed and the thing would be lying next to me, staring at me with his enormous grin and wide-set eyes. John took the statue back to his place and we put it on the list of “things we would deal with later.”

There were a lot of things on this list. Things we didn’t even talk about as things on the list. Where would Eli go if we simultaneously kicked the bucket? No idea. Hadn’t been discussed. How would we explain our uni-que situation to Eli? Who knew what we would even
be
by the time such a discussion came up? You may be thinking, “Well,
I
would have
discussed these things,” but we were focusing on how well we were doing for two people thrown into a big situation and how much worse things could be if either one of us had turned out to be difficult, uncompromising, or a stone-cold freak.

In dealing with the “now” of infant care, many what-about-down-the-roads got shelved for a time when we were actually down the road. Of course I would have loved to have everything in its place mentally and emotionally for Eli’s sake. But Eli’s appearance on the scene was unique and I didn’t question my good fortune in having him come into my life. He wasn’t by the book to start with, which was his magic, and I hoped we could focus on that magic and go with the flow. So heavy topics got pushed to another day. We hadn’t even discussed religion.

I would like to raise Eli Jewish or at least have him learn about Judaism, not because I’m superreligious but because I feel a cultural and historical obligation to pass down the traditions. You can’t really pick up what Judaism is all about without making some effort with religious school. John had no knowledge of Judaism at all. I’m not even sure he had met many Jewish people in his life. The only Judaism I exposed him to thus far was a seder for Passover thrown by a friend of mine here in New York City, when Eli was about seven months old. It was a very casual affair, each couple who was attending consisting of a Jew and a non-Jew. Looking around, I realized I was the most learned Jewish person in the room, which is not saying a lot. Woe to the people if I were the one entrusted to know enough about Judaism to be the expert. You realize how
little you know about your own religion when you are asked to explain it to a newbie.

John asked me, “So what is it we’re going to?”

“It’s a seder.”

“What is it? What do we do?”

“It celebrates when the Jews escaped from Egypt. It’s just like a dinner party, only there are little readings throughout.”

“Wait. Am I going to have to read something?”

“Yeah, but don’t worry about it. Everyone reads a little part. It’s not a big deal.”

“We have dinner, but people are reading during it? So … it’s like a murder mystery?”

Pause. “Yeah. It’s like a murder mystery.”

When pressed for details about everything and I heard myself explaining my religion, I realized I may as well have been describing the Swahili creation myth. That is how random this stuff sounded coming out of my mouth.