Two Kisses for Maddy: A Memoir of Loss & Love (18 page)

I remembered that day. It was the day before Madeline had been born. I went to pick up dinner for us, and while Liz waited for me, she got a visit from one of the nurses, who told her that she had finally gained some weight—something she had been struggling to do through her entire pregnancy. It was a sign that the bed rest was working.

Looking at the e-mail reminded me of how fucking great we had felt on March 23. We’d had no idea that Madeline would make her appearance the next morning and that twenty-seven hours after that, Liz would be dead.

I saw one other e-mail that same day, and it sent me into a conference room for longer than I care to admit.

from: liz

to: matt

sent: fri 3/21/2008 1:13 PM

subject: I love u

   And I’m excited to have a baby that looks like u :)

Fuck.

And my response:

from: matt

to: liz

sent: fri 3/21/2008 1:22 PM

subject: re: I love u

   Let’s hope she looks more like you…

Double fuck.

When I finally stopped crying, I returned to my desk. The empty, gray walls of the cubicle were a stark reminder of just how empty my life had become. Everything that had been in my old cube, including the one framed photo of Liz that I had kept there, was still packed in the boxes under my desk, and I wasn’t ready to confront any of it yet.

I spent the next hour printing out enough photos of Madeline to completely cover the walls of my cubicle.

Chapter 21

as much as i never

expected to,

i love shopping

with madeline:

i try to buy

clothes that

liz

would choose,

but every once

in a while, i get

something that

she would have

rolled her eyes at,

just so madeline

gets both perspectives.

B
efore Madeline was born, Liz and I had many conversations about what our lives with her would—and should—be like. Of course, they never included the possibility of a future without me there, or without her there. We figured our biggest challenges would be whether or not our daughter needed braces, if we liked her boyfriends, or where she should go to school. But we firmly agreed that she would not absorb our entire selves.

“This baby is not going to change our lives,” Liz would say.

“This baby is not going to change our lives,” I would agree.

We knew our lives
would
change in a good way, but even with the middle-of-the-night feedings that our friends talked about and the sleepless nights we were primed for, it was our intention to maintain who we were and what we had become together. Liz would still decorate the house, worrying over curtains and votive candles, and she would continue hitting boutiques all over Los Angeles, spending a shitload of money on a purse or another pair of shoes; I wouldn’t stop going to concerts whenever a decent band came through town, and I would keep getting up early on Saturdays to wander the streets of Los Angeles, taking photos with Ben. Most importantly to both of us, we agreed, our regular date nights would continue. Liz knew that if we were happy, our kid would be happy, and neither of us wanted to be a slave to a baby.

She had always planned on working, and while I joked about giving up my job to be a househusband, it was never something I could really bring myself to do. Of course, I had been slightly mistaken—now I would have given up every hour at that office to spend more time at home with Madeline. But my daughter and I got used to the shift in our routine, obeying an actual schedule instead of moving through our day at a leisurely pace. We kind of had to find ourselves a new rhythm.

I would leave work early, which was easy since there was nothing much for me to do there, and even though I could have left Maddy at day care until six o’clock while I did my own thing for a little while, I would pick her up immediately. With the time we were spending apart, it became even more important to have her with me as much as I could. I wanted to do the things I knew I’d be doing if Liz were still alive, but I didn’t want more time away from my daughter. Bringing Madeline with me on my adventures was exactly what Liz and I had meant when we said we weren’t going to be changed by our child. We’d instead incorporate her into the activities we both loved so much, each of us influencing her in our own way. But now I had a much heftier responsibility than just keeping our baby happy—I had to preserve and cultivate both of our interests so that Madeline would have an equal amount of influence from both parents. I knew that Liz would have fucking loved that.

Even when Maddy was just a blurry picture on an ultrasound screen, Liz started fantasizing about taking our baby girl to the spa and dressing her up. I didn’t give a shit about that stuff—I just wanted to teach her to appreciate music. I could practically see her on my shoulders, a mini-Liz chirping excitedly, helping me pick out records as I walked through the aisles of Amoeba, my favorite record store.

Tuesdays had always been the best day of the week—the day the new releases arrived at the record store. But since Liz died, Tuesdays had become the designated slot for me to torture myself again and again with thoughts of how many weeks she had been gone. And I was still living from Tuesday to Tuesday. I felt that by counting them, by anchoring the scurry of time into weeks, I somehow tethered Liz to me, keeping a line to the last time I saw her alive.

These weekly trips to Amoeba helped me escape the awfulness that came with waking up to another week gone by without Liz. I knew that no matter how shitty the day started, I’d at least be able to escape some of it with a bag full of new records. Like most other weeks, on what happened to be the thirty-third Tuesday since Liz had died, I left work early and picked Madeline up from day care. I parked in the lot behind the shop, where the walls are covered with years’ worth of caked-on graffiti, and walked into the store with my baby hanging off my arm in her car seat. You should have seen the looks the hipsters gave me as I squeezed through the vinyl aisles, digging for records by Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti and Swearing at Motorists. They believed what I had believed before Liz was pregnant: that all people become lame when they become parents. But lame is one thing I am not, and I dreamed of a confrontation that would end with my inviting some asshole to my house for a look at my record collection and a couple of beers. As we wandered the store, I explained my selections to Maddy carefully, even though I knew she wasn’t yet old enough to understand the difference between Bon Iver and Bon Jovi.

I rolled up to the counter to check out with the reissue of Pavement’s
Brighten the Corners
and Mark Kozelek’s
The Finally LP
, but before we left Amoeba, there was one stop for us to make—a photo I had been meaning to take. Near the shop’s entrance was an elevator that nobody ever used. There were fewer than twenty steps between the store and the parking lot, so I had never even looked inside it until I had to get a baby and stroller up the stairs. I felt as though I had discovered some secret art space. The elevator was just filled with graffiti. I mean, literally, floor to ceiling, covered in graffiti. I grew up in Minnesota. I didn’t go to record stores with my parents. We didn’t really go anywhere that had graffiti. It thrilled me to share my tastes with Madeline and to give her a different—though not necessarily better—childhood than I had. The elevator was so fucking cool-looking, and I thought it would make a great photo, just a little baby in this room full of the scrawls of thousands of unidentified people. I took her out of her stroller, placed her on the floor, and backed into the opposite corner to click the shutter a few times. The resulting photos were great. Madeline looked like she was completely alone in a place where a child shouldn’t be at all. I knew she was going to love to see it someday.

Instead of going straight home, I stopped in Los Feliz to take Madeline on the kind of shopping trip her mom would have taken her on—a venture I would have stayed completely out of if Liz had been around. I couldn’t help but worry that with me as her only parental influence, Madeline would be missing out on all the things her mom loved and planned to do with her, so I tried to keep it on my mind all the time. I didn’t think, How should I dress Madeline? I probably would have had a kid wearing hand-me-down flannel shirts fashioned into onesies. Instead, I thought, If Liz were here, how would she dress Madeline?

There was a great a little boutique there that had gorgeous clothes for girls. The prices were astronomical, but I didn’t really care. If Liz had ever bought an expensive dress for Madeline, I would have lost my shit. Kids grow fast and every move they make creates a mess, so to spend any more than five dollars on an outfit seemed outrageous to me. But doing so would have made Liz really happy—not so much because she was spending a lot of money on our child, but because she was doting on her.

I loved that I had discovered this place on my own, without a recommendation from a friend, a blog reader, or even from Liz. I likely wouldn’t have even noticed a kid store if Liz were alive, but now I shopped at this place all the time. On this particular day, I saw an absolutely beautiful dress in the store. It was khaki colored, with jewel-like buttons and an ornate circular pattern running up and down the seams and around the arm and neck holes. Absolutely gorgeous. I knew that Liz would have loved it, would have bought it, no matter what. So there I was, a bearded man who looked like he should have been on line to buy tickets for the National, standing in a fancy children’s clothing store shopping for dresses with a little blonde-haired, blue-eyed cherub.

“This is beautiful,” I told the woman behind the counter.

“It’s Chloe,” she said.

I almost said, “I’m Matt and this is Madeline,” but then I realized she was gesturing at the label.

“Of course,” I said, like I had known that already. In my head, the sarcasm was rampant. Who gives a fuck if this is a Chloe dress? Who the fuck is Chloe, anyway? I’m wearing a Sears shirt for which I paid six dollars eight years ago at a thrift store in Chicago.

But I knew that Liz would have cared. And to be honest, now I cared. I wanted to do for Madeline what her mother couldn’t do for her, but I also felt that if I could dress my daughter properly, if I could show the people around us that I could match her outfits, the bows and the shoes and the socks, they would know that I was spending time with her, focusing all my attention on her, and that she was going to be okay. So like a good daddy, I handed over my credit card—I figured it was good practice for when my daughter would be demanding designer clothes for her first day of junior high. And then I asked how much it was.

“Two hundred dollars,” she said.

I briefly considered fleeing, but I saw the bitchy look on the salesgirl’s face as I tried to comprehend a baby dress that cost more than my entire wardrobe, and its lace trim caught my eye. I looked at Maddy sleeping in her stroller, and I bought the dress.

For two hundred fucking dollars.

With my credit card still smarting from the purchase, I put her and our new cargo into the car. When it was me and Liz, I was thinking, I knew how things would go. I would have followed her lead at the beginning and, as I got more and more comfortable, played an increasingly bigger role in raising our daughter, even doing the little things like making sure her outfits matched. But I had to learn how to care about all the girly things I didn’t grow up with without Liz’s help. I had to close my eyes and imagine how she would have done things, because few things were more important to me than making sure I channeled her influence in Madeline’s life.

  * * *

Before Madeline was born, I had talked to Liz about buying a rug for our living room. It wasn’t that I was interested in helping redecorate our house or anything—that was her thing—but I was worried that the wood floors would hurt our baby’s little knees when she eventually learned to crawl.

“What? She’ll be fine on the wood floors.”

“Liz, she’s going to hurt her knees if she starts crawling on these floors.”

“She’ll be fine.”

I was adamant. “What’s going to happen when she collapses facefirst on the floor? She’s going to have a broken nose, and I’m pretty sure no doctor would perform a nose job on a baby.”

“Seriously, Matt. She’ll be fine.”

“Have you ever crawled across a wood floor when you were drunk? I have, and that shit hurts.”

Her head tilted, her beautiful long eyelashes waving at me as if to tell me to go away.

“Our daughter is going to be a late crawler if we don’t do this,” I said.

She laughed. “Okay, we’ll get a rug. But only if you shut your mouth.”

Now I watched as Madeline used her arms to lift up her tiny body—a definite sign that she would soon start crawling. I thought back to that conversation with Liz. I had to go get a rug. And soon.

That same afternoon I took photos of the living room and I went to the Pottery Barn in Beverly Hills. I walked in and, as usual, felt out of place. I waited patiently, watching as the salespeople went from yuppie couple to yuppie couple, ignoring the mountain man with the baby growing from his chest. I decided that I would probably be getting better service if I were cleanly shaven and had a white cable-knit sweater tied around my neck. And they’d certainly be paying more attention to me if there were a woman standing beside me.

I wasn’t going to shave for these fuckers, and the sweater was way out of the question. And my wife was dead. How would Liz have handled being ignored when all she wanted to do was give a store a bunch of her money? She definitely would not be standing quietly in the back of the place just waiting for someone to help her like I was. I decided to take matters into my own hands. I approached one of the saleswomen and the buttoned-up couple she was with and said I needed her help, telling her to come toward the sound of the babbling baby when she was finished with the folks she was talking to. I didn’t deliver the message with the sort of sternness Liz would have, but I did channel the annoyed smile she would have been wearing.

When the saleswoman finally came over to me, I pulled my camera from Madeline’s diaper bag and held the display in front of her face. “Okay,” I said. “What rug would match this living room?”

Within a few minutes the woman found the perfect rug. I knew it was perfect because she told me so. Frankly, I didn’t give a shit what the rug looked like. All I wanted was something soft for my daughter to crawl on. But Liz would have spent weeks shopping for the perfect rug, making sure it matched the rest of the room. I couldn’t go quite that far, but I knew that she would be proud—and relieved—that I’d thought to bring photos in so someone with better taste could help me.