The teenagers at the table watched them like they were on TV already. The human primate in the stroller sucked its pacifier while the man-ape flashed his best feature. Sarah bobbed her head to one side of the reporter’s hairdo then to the other, trying to do her job. It was important work! She was here for the zoo, for science, for the future of humanity! She’d definitely turn down their silly little media request, hoard her specialized information.
If her third baby had lived, it’d be six months old, in her arms. They wouldn’t crowd her this way if she were flanked by her children. She’d be a different person, hold a different place in the world. She’d have what Georgie—the old Georgie, Sarah’s child-free, academic drinking buddy, that denizen of the life of the mind—would have called, as though from a great intellectual distance, the “cultural legitimization conferred through motherhood.”
Was that ever such a bad thing?
But Georgie had changed. She had a baby, the legitimizing child.
The only infant in Sarah’s care was Lucy. She’d protect Lucy’s privacy.
The girl with the clipboard said, “Ma’am? Sorry. We need you out of the frame.”
Across the river Georgie wore the blood-marked abdominal smile of a fresh C-section and navigated the short hallway of her two-bedroom bungalow. She had a round of prescription pain meds and a baby, like a warm bundle of fresh laundry, wrapped in a blanket in her arms.
It was lovely to carry her own perfect girl-child. Out of nowhere—or really, specifically, out of Georgie’s body, out of her uterus, out of the slash cut in the middle of her gut—there was a baby! Right in their house. Once they’d let a stray cat in, and those were weird days. Suddenly she and her husband held cat energy in the house, an animal curling around their feet, asking for food and love. A baby was even more dreamy and surreal. She kept thinking about that cat now, how it had come and gone, leaving cat hair on an armchair, traces of itself. This baby was here to stay. Georgie reached for her drugs.
Oxycodone is a cute narcotic, delivered in small pills like toy medicine. You could feed those pills to a mouse, a rat, a teacup Chihuahua. She shook the pills in their plastic container and they put on a ragtime rattle of a show for her darling newborn daughter. With its fine rattle that bottle was practically a Waldorf learning tool, except instead of the requisite Waldorf wood it was made out of plastic and painkillers.
Georgie clambered across the broad expanse of their California king with the baby clutched tight to her chest and the pills in the other hand, her hand wrapped around the vial, her knuckles against the bed. C-section stitches tugged across her bikini line. “Oof!” She said it out loud, like a cartoon character, a plea for sympathy, even though she was alone.
She was alone except for her daughter, anyway. That was the whole thing about being a new mom—always alone and never alone. Always with the baby. Always with this new nonverbal companion.
Humble would come home soon.
The baby’s fingers lay outside her pink blanket like a little row of roots, white and thin. Until she held her own child, Georgie hadn’t known anything about mother-love. Now it crowded her body, clotted her heart, made her want to cry. Maybe it was the painkillers that made her want to cry. Either way, she was high and happy and sad and the whole thing closed like a hand around her throat.
She couldn’t hold that baby tight enough.
She had a blue triangle tattooed on her bicep—the “rhetorical triangle,” her favorite paradigm. She drew the triangle on the whiteboard each year, the first week of her freshman English classes, as an illustration of how all meaning is made.
The three points of the triangle? Author, audience, and text, as they say. An author puts a text in front of an audience, and meaning is conveyed. Change any one component—new audience, new author, new book—and the meaning changes, too. It could be a slight shift, or massive. In class it sounded clear. Across her other arm, in the rounded font of an old typewriter, a second tattoo asked ANY QUESTIONS?
The soft spot of her baby’s fontanel pulsed with each breath, making tufts of the girl’s dark hair dance up and down.
In the rhetoric of new life, Georgie was author and audience both. Bella was the text, that daughter she’d drawn