into existence. The meaning of the world shifted from the life of the mind to the bloody, seeping, heartbeat center.
Parent/Baby/World: All meaning came from that juncture. Any mind-body split was blasted out of the water once her own body was nurturing a new mind.
She had a third tattoo on the small of her back, a tribute to French feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. It read THE SECOND SEX, after one of Beauvoir’s seminal titles.
Seminal—could you use that word with a woman’s writing?
Weird.
But yes, Georgie had a French feminist tramp stamp.
She’d dropped out of high school. Now she had a PhD, because every dropout has something to prove, and she proved she could handle school all the way through. She’d learned to speak the language of the academy. It spoke right back, too, which is to say the legitimizing pedagogical institutions had granted investment in the (re)-formation and reification of her gendered body.
Ha!
In other words, she was a woman, a mom, with a PhD.
Bella was three days old. Georgie’s underwear was a day newer than that. One of the first adjustments to motherhood was that she’d bought a six-pack of granny panties—the kind that came all the way up—because every pair of her bikini-cut version hit exactly where a row of fish line–style thread was stitched through her skin.
Doctors called it a “bikini-line incision.” Georgie never realized “bikini line” was a precise anatomical designation until she tried to put her own clothes on.
The el cheapo granny panties came in fuchsia, turquoise, and glaring white. Each color made her ass look larger than the pair before it, but they didn’t rub against the stitches. They wrapped over her skin like a comforting hand. She settled into her nest of blankets, books, and magazines, and reached for the remote, turned the TV on, but kept the sound down. How much TV is bad for a newborn? That’s what it means to be alone and never alone—to reconsider every urge.
What she really wanted was a full-bodied pinot noir, a gin and tonic, a pale pink raspberry martini. Doctors said alcohol would leach into her milk and dim her baby’s growing brain. They used to prescribe stout to bring the milk in, but she didn’t have those old-school doctors. So instead of a Guinness, Georgie had oxycodone and a big glass of water.
When she asked whether oxycodone in her bloodstream was okay for the baby, the nurse said, “You wouldn’t want your baby to have a mom in pain, would you?”
She didn’t want her baby to have a mama in granny panties, either, but there you go. Not everybody gets what they want.
She curled a hand over her daughter’s head, cradled and covered that constant pulse of the fontanel. “We’ll be okay.” She pushed the baby blanket away from Bella’s chin. The girl’s tiny red mouth was open, her eyes closed, long lashes resting over her pale skin. Her mouth was a little heart, with all the love in the world collected there.
Bella slept like her father. He could pass out anywhere. It was a way of trusting the universe. Georgie didn’t even trust herself.
She flipped channels until she saw the familiar curve of a pregnant belly. The warm enthusiasm of a trained woman newscaster came in as a voice-over. “The zoo will soon welcome a new resident!”
The flat color of local video scanned the pregnant monkey, hunched and fat. Georgie sat up straighter in bed to distinguish herself from that slope-shouldered simian. That was one difference between humans and other primates—we walk upright. Upright!
The vial of oxycodone was still in her hand. She moved her legs and the blankets shifted, books tipped and adjusted. The news camera cut to a baby mandrill, clinging to its mother.
The new infant would be born in December, born on the cusp of the schizophrenic season. Georgie had read all the books, the articles. She knew the threats: more schizophrenics were born in winter months, with numbers peaking in February, even bleeding into early March. Bella was born in November, just as that curve on the graph of probability started to climb. If she’d planned things better, Georgie would have given birth in August.
Could primates even be schizophrenic?
Any questions? Her tattoo was so cocky! With a new baby, she was all questions.
She reached both hands around her daughter to press and turn, to coax the childproof lid off the pill vial. The camera cut away from the mother and baby. For a moment there was Sarah, on TV. Huddled