PREPAREDNESS by Charlie Buck
Did all newborns look like hillbillies? The baby’s beady eyes and startling gums – it was like seeing a snake grin, or glimpsing the gills of a fish in the mouth of a human. So unsettling.
As was the fact that the baby never smiled at her: the most recent in a long line of people who hadn’t found her funny. The first had been her parents. It was still an echo in her head, how one or the other would say, Do you think that’s funny? in a way that made clear they did not.
The baby lay on a dishcloth on the kitchen table while the dad finished wiping its creases. Its skin was loose, as though it had gone on a radical diet while still in the womb.
“She was born with size large skin and a size small body,” the dad said with affection, but what the mother felt was closer to dismay. This little yellow baby, who even when naked still seemed to be wearing some old man’s pants.
“She’s such a nice baby. It’s too bad we’re going to have to return her,” she said, and her husband laughed, a short startled bark.
He found her funny. After only a few dates he had told her that even if he didn’t laugh at the time, that later, when alone, he often thought of things she said or did and laughed then. She hoped he was off laughing by himself a lot lately, since he sure wasn’t doing it much around her.
A headline on top of papers stacked beside the baby caught her eye. “‘Thirty-six Comedians Killed in War.’” She was aghast. “They’re sending comedians now?”
He looked at her neutrally. “Let me see that.”
She pointed out the story.
“Canadians.”
She was that kind of tired, the kind that bent words and emotions into unrecognizable forms. Her husband lay the baby on its cocktail napkin-sized diaper. He folded the tabs over, frowned, then pulled them open again and rotated the diaper under the baby. She was supposed to figure this out all by herself after he left?
His National Guard unit had recently been activated. When they got the news, he’d insisted they move from the city to this safe, distant, barely affordable suburb. It might as well be the moon: none of her friends would venture this far from the city to visit. And the one time she’d descended into the metro system with the baby, she’d become nauseous. It felt wrong to take a baby underground, no matter how well lit.
“Just remind me, what’s so great about being in the Guard? Because I’m having a hard time remembering.” In all fairness the father had signed up long before he’d met her, back when the Guard was more of a national janitorial service, cleaning up after disasters and floods and things like that. But they’d always worn uniforms and carried guns, and wasn’t that reason enough never to have volunteered?
“The cross section of people I’ve gotten to know. I’d never have met them in my day-to‑day life.”
“What do you think reality TV is for!” she cried, and the baby startled, wailing. Volunteering was one thing; what she couldn’t understand was why, now that there was a wife and a war and a baby, he hadn’t unvolunteered. Why wouldn’t he abandon his country when it was acting like a nutcase? Though that this trait was currently working in her favor had occurred to her.
“You’re going to sour your milk,” her husband said, his voice straddling the line between exasperated and amused.
“Don’t mention milk,” she cautioned, but it was too late: heat surged into her breasts. She looked down in disbelief as two circles of moisture expanded like time-lapse photos across the front of her cowboy shirt. She popped open the snaps and unhooked a soaked bra-cup. He handed her the baby and she turned it to her breast. Its tongue fluted around her nipple, forming a mollusk-like seal as it nursed.
He stood above her, his gaze lingering on her chest.
“You liked my breasts.”
“I didn’t like your breasts, I loved them. I loved your breasts.”
“This is too past-tense for me.”
“Just remember,” he said to the nursing baby, “I have a remainder interest.”
Her breasts were perfect, except that he couldn’t touch them. At night if she even heard his hand whisper toward her across the sheets, her nipples began to weep milk. The nursing bra didn’t help, even though essentially it was a peekaboo bra, with cups that peeled down. But instead of having the louche allure of crotchless panties, it looked more like bandages from the Eastern Bloc.
“They’ll be back,” she said, but neither of them believed it. “And in the meantime we’ve got . . . all this,” she said, awkwardly proffering the breast the baby wasn’t nursing on, a breast that very possibly outweighed the baby.
“Nice,” he said, in a way she found momentarily cheering, then demoralizing. Nice?
The baby reeled away from her, staring at the ceiling in a glazed ecstatic state. The father slipped his hand under the little back and cupped the baby against his chest as she tucked and snapped herself back in.
“Do you love her?” she asked.
“Sometimes. I guess I feel more like a technician than a dad. Like I should be wearing a lab coat and latex gloves when I handle her.” He looked down at the baby. “But I do feel something right here,” he said, patting his lower stomach, “when I look at her.” He touched the baby’s hand, and three tiny fingers wrapped around one of his.
“Umph,” she said. She wasn’t feeling it.
She’d spent her adulthood thinking of love as something that required lingerie and elusiveness, not nursing bras and unvarying availability. Was this love? She leaned to blow warm air over the baby’s fuzzy head, and it shut its eyes.
“I can tell from the way she looks at me that she doesn’t like me,” she said.
“All you are to her now is milk, and she likes that plenty.”
“When she was inside me we were closer,” she said, remembering all the swirls and gurgles she’d interpreted as good humor.
“They should put a warning on all new babies: Your fear reflected here.”
“It should be woven into those blue stripes on the swaddling blankets at the hospital,” she agreed, her voice thickening.
“What a kindness that would be,” he murmured, rubbing the index finger of his free hand across her forehead, trying to smooth it.
Two friends finally came to visit, one with a crisp stripe of white down the middle of her buzz-cut, the other with blue Kool-Aid-dyed curls. They crept into the house as though it were a crime scene: was there blood? Body fluids of any sort? Poopie?
“Come in, come in!” she said, in a strange voice she had never used with these women, who had seen her through countless jobs and lovers and regrettably few ambitions. She ushered them into the tiny kitchen, where the baby swayed in its bouncy chair.
One fluffed her skunk stripe as she stared down at the baby, then tugged a large green fake-fur spider from her handbag and dangled it over her, reciting, “Little Miss Muffet sat on a tuffet – ”
The baby turned her head – she could turn her head! – and wailed. She scooped the baby up, and it buried its head into her shoulder. The wails continued, a softer complaint, and as she patted the baby, she realized that in her excitement at expecting visitors, she’d forgotten to check its diaper all morning.
Instead of leaving the room she deftly undid the side flaps, thinking her friends might want a glimpse of the inner workings of parenthood. But after lifting the baby’s sticky bottom from the diaper, she remembered why they might not. Oh well, nothing to do but proceed. She finished diapering the baby and turned to them. Her friends looked ashen.
“It’s like taking care of a tiny paraplegic,” one said, dropping the spider on the kitchen table, her maternal moment over. She rooted in her purse for her pack of cigarettes, shook one out and then stopped, looking sharply at the baby. Slowly she pushed the cigarette back into the pack. “Can you imagine having everything in life done for you? Everything?”
She hadn’t been able to think of what she and these friends might talk about, comment on, or connect over, now that their lives no longer resembled each other. To her own surprise, she cupped her hands over the baby’s ears and said, “I don’t love her and she knows it.”
“My mother felt that way about me,” the friend said. Her hand dove into her purse again, bringing up the soft pack of cigarettes, which she kneaded.
“Fake it,” said the other, her Kool-Aid hair underscoring her words.
“She’ll know,” said the first. “I did.”
It wasn’t consolation, but it was contact, and after they left for the metro, she felt better.
She hadn’t made friends with people with children. She’d tried, but their shortened attention spans were maddening, and hanging around forever waiting for a scrap of connection was demoralizing. Her friends hadn’t had children. Oh, a few had, back when the general population had done those things. Then they’d disappeared, as though sucked from the surface of life by an undertow.
The father came home late that afternoon to find her in bed, reading furiously, the baby asleep in its crib.
“Did you have a nice visit?” he asked, and she nodded, not lifting her eyes from the paper. Her friends remained a cipher to him, but she’d always gotten something from them, a comfort not evident to him from their strangely tweaked exteriors. She didn’t want him to know this was waning just as he needed it to wax.
Yet he knew. He pushed back the newspapers and sat on the edge of the bed. He lifted one of her feet and began massaging it. When he stopped, she looked up to find him contemplating the arch of her foot.
“Where do moms meet other moms?” he mused. “At a mall? In the park? Or while home reading the paper?”
“I don’t loll in bed reading the paper,” she whimpered, because it was the thing she most missed. All the parts of the world that she was no longer aware of, compressed into tiny type, waiting to expand her.
“You would if you could,” he said, indicating the piles of newspapers growing in corners, under the changing table, beside the bed, papers she couldn’t throw away unread. “But since you can’t, you might as well go to the park.”
“Go to the park and make friends?” she said. “When was the last time you did that? When you were five?”
She threw back the sheets, newsprint sliding onto a floor covered with other papers. She slipped getting out of bed, righted herself by grabbing the bedpost, managed a dignified march into the kitchen. He followed.
She banged open a cabinet, looking for her vitamins.
“I’m not trying to pick a fight,” he said. “You just seem isolated.”
“Before I had her I felt so unique. Like a sword that sprang up in a cornfield.”
“You need to meet someone who’s going through the same – well, similar – things as you.”
“Now I feel like dirt, like compost, part of this big universal egoless thing. The goop that life springs from. Connected.” She wrenched the top off a pill bottle.
“So if you’re compost, you don’t need a friend?”
She sagged against the counter. How was it possible to be connected, yet feel so alone? It was like a koan. The moanin’ groanin’ koan.
“Oh my god,” she said. “I just took one of Big Mister’s pills.”
“Big Mister, your dead dog?” he asked, disbelieving.
She nodded.
“Heartworm or anti-inflammatory?”
“The one for arthritis.” What that must do to breast milk!
The look on his face made her think it behooved her to go to the park. As she slipped the sleeping baby into the sling, she could hear him on the phone with the lactation specialist. Were any of his fellow guardsmen training to become lactation specialists? That would make her feel better about the war.
In walking to the park she felt like she was using all of her energy to appear normal, as an injured animal would, so as not to be eaten. At least the neighborhood’s moms were at home, starting dinner, instead of standing on the corners waiting for older kids to get home from school, happily chatting with each other and not even making eye contact with her. Finally she reached the dormant yellow grass of the play area, and dropped onto a bench whose dark paint matched her clothing.
She looked down at the baby huddled against her. It had spit up and of course she didn’t have a rag, or blurb cloth, or whatever they were called. She fished her shirt cuffs from the sleeves of her jacket and wiped the baby’s chin. Even in sleep its brow was furrowed. She wished she could relieve its worries, but whatever they were, they were probably justified.
She heard singing and looked up. A woman was pushing a carriage down the path. She wore a summer dress over blue jeans, a heavy sweater pulled on top. She guided her stroller to their bench, and said, “It’s nice when the park’s not crowded, isn’t it?”
“I’ll say,” she said, a little too vehemently.
“The big kids trample the toddlers, and the moms are so busy talking, they barely notice.”
She didn’t respond. She was feeling an unfamiliar quiver of hope that she didn’t want to ruin by opening her mouth.
“Is this your first baby?”
She nodded.
The woman said, “Nothing really prepares you, does it?”
For childbirth? A baby? Purely functional breasts? Deployment?
“Nothing,” she agreed.
“It’s intense.”
“Intense? It’s like taking care of a tiny quadriplegic!”
The woman looked at her blankly or with shock, it was hard to discern these things anymore. Just as a corner of her mouth began to lift, the bundle in her carriage thrashed, then began to scream.
“Shit,” the woman said, burrowing in her diaper bag. “That’s her dirty diaper cry. She’s a nut about clean diapers, but do I ever have one? Fucking A. Sorry to run.” The woman wheeled her stroller back down the path at a trot, every bump increasing the volume of the howls.
From her dark bench she watched them disappear as Robinson Crusoe must have watched far-off ships vanish out to sea. Her own baby made some kitten noises, and she busied herself rearranging the sling, the sling around her little quadriplegic?
She slunk home. The father was in bed, asleep. He was exhausted lately, even though she was the one who got up to nurse the baby at night. She slipped the baby into bed beside him and went to the bathroom. When she came back he lay on his back, his little primate burrowed into his chest hair, his ears flushed pink with pleasure.
“Love uncomplicated by milk,” she said, and he grunted happily.
She awoke that night, her torso throbbing, phantom gums closing around her nipples. She stood, a forearm supporting her heavy breasts, and carefully made her way to the crib, lit with a nightlight.
The baby was asleep, faint circles under its eyes, worn out from living. Sort of dead-looking, really. It had been exactly three hours since the last feeding, and as the dull edge of a guillotine smote her nipples, boom, the baby’s eyes flew open. Lacula! The unerring little bite, an exact emulsion of pain and deliverance.
“I don’t love you and you know it,” she said to the fuzzy crown of the nursing baby. She was sorry to feel this way, and extremely sorry to speak of it; it was something parents didn’t do.
She slipped the sleeping baby off her breast and back into the crib. She stood beside their bed, too downcast to climb in. The nightlight gave the father’s features an eerie greenish glow, as though she were looking at him through night vision goggles. He opened his eyes.
“What do we do if you don’t come back?”
“You’ll know what to do,” he mumbled. “I trust you.”
“I think a lot of men would say, ‘Don’t worry, I’m coming back.’”
He sighed, then struggled to sit up. “You know I can’t make that sort of promise.”
She was silent. She wanted to have a fight with him, to achieve some closeness. Instead she said, “Men shouldn’t go to war. They aren’t the least bit reassuring.”
“We should only send mothers. You’re savages.”
Well, that was something. She would kill to protect this baby, could that be love? In a time of war was it safe to love a child? Maybe it was better to remain neutral. To provide technical support until the baby reached an age where, if its parents fell over dead and were unable to protect it, the baby could grab its sippy cup and crawl down the street to safety.
He reached up and cupped her tight shoulders, guiding her down to sit beside him. “I wish I could make you feel better.”
“How about some laughter,” she said shakily. “That would make me feel better.”
“I’m supposed to laugh?” He looked at his watch. “At four a.m.?”
“I haven’t been getting the big laughs lately.”
“Is that what this is about? You know, you don’t have to be funny for me to love you.”
“Are you saying I’m not funny?”
“No! No. You are funny. But I love you even when you’re not.”
She crawled into the bed, and her husband fit himself to her, to her desolation and uncertainty, his breathing even and deep.
A friend was having an End-of‑the-World party. Her husband gamely cut a bib for the baby out of Tyvek, and she inked on the pie-wheel symbol for radioactivity. They wore big, loose decontamination jumpsuits that only snugged up around the wrists and ankles, just the ticket for a postpartum figure. Unwilling to chance someone glimpsing her worn nursing bra as she fed the baby, she ditched it and went commando. Besides, after two months of insurrection her breasts had become manageable, producing just enough milk at predictable intervals. As she walked up the sidewalk to the party she caught her reflection in the storm door, and couldn’t help but arch her back just a bit.
“I’m not sure you have the strength of character to support those breasts,” her husband said, opening the door. They walked into the loud, thumping roil of the front room. He handed her the baby carrier, courageously setting off to mingle, giving her a chance to show off the baby and be with her friends. She was pointed to the kitchen, which their host had thoughtfully designated non-smoking so the baby could attend. How could he have known the baby would be a little blinking beacon for drunken smokers?
She put the carrier down on the butcher block next to a cheese tray, as partygoers gathered round. The baby handled the attention by falling asleep, its eyelids translucent.
“That’s not a real baby, is it?” a man asked.
“No,” she said. “It’s wax.”
She said hello to people she hadn’t seen in months, friends she hadn’t called and who hadn’t called her, relationships, she realized, entirely made up of exchanges at openings and parties. Desperate to feel something, she looked for a drink: maybe alcohol could convert her exhaustion into camaraderie. But even friends who cultivated the pallor of addicts had a ridiculous bloom to their complexions from all their careless sleep. It was hard to think of any experience they might ever again share.
A huge silhouette narrowed the hall, and her host floated toward her, carrying a tray of shots.
“You look like shit,” he said approvingly. “Is that a body bag you’re wearing? You guys should’ve gotten married in those.”
She had two shots of tequila and the bleakness around her thawed sufficiently to allow other visitors. The friends who hadn’t had babies, who would probably never have babies, who had barely acknowledged the baby, all wanted to know what had befallen her body.
“Varicose veins? Hemorrhoids? Saggy boobs?”
She felt a playful buzz. “They’ve come down in the world.”
“Let’s see!”
Their faces shone with anticipation, but when she unzipped her contamination suit the hardcore perfection of her breasts seemed to diminish the women, and have the opposite effect on the men. She tugged her zipper a few inches lower.
“Oh my god, that belly button!”
“It’s right out of National Geographic.”
“No, the National Enquirer: Kenny Rogers after the liposuction!”
“It’s like a Superfund site.”
What had she done to deserve these friends? It felt so good to laugh. She and her husband were so careful with each other that they weren’t taking the risks that produced sparks, flames, laughter. She downed another shot of tequila. It was great to laugh!
Then she saw her husband’s wounded face in the next room, as he caught sight of her, drinking and unzipped to the waist, the baby surrounded by a room full of smoking drunks. He came straight to her and wordlessly took the carrier. He opened the back door and walked out into the cold air. It couldn’t be too reassuring to be shipping out and leaving your baby with someone with friends like these. She really didn’t know why she’d married him.
A man charged at her, one arm clamping bags of chips to his side, his fingers laced into two six-packs of beer. He plunged his thumb into the fluorescent cheese ball on the plate in front of her, hoisting it into mid-air. As she stared at him, dumbfounded, he winked at her and screamed, “I want to live!” He ducked his head through the long strap of the diaper bag and galloped to the bathroom, slamming the door behind him.
“Wait,” she said, in a tiny voice. Around her the party was shifting gear, people starting to compete for limited resources. She found herself pounding the bathroom door roaring, “Hoarder!” When he opened the door she tackled him, yanking back the diaper bag. She stuffed the cheese ball and a fistful of his pharmaceutical cache in it for good measure.
“Not my Cipro,” he wailed as she staggered off with her haul, to go find her husband and baby.
Her glow faded as they drove home, the digital clock insistent on an inconceivable hour. The baby slept peacefully as they navigated a ruined quadrant of the city, a red light halting them beside a couch burning on the sidewalk. But still she felt annealed from the party, from a night of not guarding her words, from a night of feeling instead of caring how others felt.
Her husband didn’t seem to be speaking to her, but she was determined not to let it affect her. She muttered, “There won’t even be a bad mother to take care of you where you’re going.”
Silence.
He kept his attention on the burning couch outside her door, on the man threatening to smash the windshield of the car in front of them unless he was paid to wash it, on the souped‑up Hummer grinding toward their tidbit of a Toyota.
“I’m afraid you won’t come back,” she said, her voice thickening as tears began to drip from her chin. “Please come back.” She didn’t know if she meant stop being angry or come back from the war, but either must be significant for he took her hand.
“Don’t leave us,” she sobbed, but he cut the steering wheel sharply to the left, avoiding a suitcase that had exploded clothing all over the road, and answered, “Right now we need to pay attention.”
When they got out of the neighborhood, a neighborhood whose blight would never be eased by a military budget, he pulled over and held her and kissed her briny face.
They gave up on sleep that night. They would surrender later, if they got a chance. For now her hands stroked his body, her fingers tracing lines she half-imagined were scars. Let them be scars he would survive with, scars she would again touch this gently.
“This morning one of the kids in my unit said that he’d rather be killed than be embarrassed.”
“What a moron,” she said.
“It’s just the way an eighteen-year-old thinks: if you’re killed it’s over in an instant, but embarrassment is something you have to live with forever.”
“I want you to live as long and embarrassing a life as possible! Unzipped-fly embarrassing, shit-your-pants embarrassing, drooling-old-coot-who’s-an-embarrassment-to‑the-family embarrassing – ”
“Got it,” he said. They tightened their grip on each other.
“Is my belly button ugly?” she asked.
“God, no,” he said, rolling over to kiss it. “It looks like a half-smile.”
Two days later his cab came.
They stood at the curb. She put her arms around him and they leaned together, the baby shrieking in the sudden darkness between them. He released them and got in the cab.
The cab turned the corner and he was gone.
An ache in her bones, she didn’t know if it was grief or exhaustion or depression or leukemia.
Maybe it was caused by reading the paper. She no longer cooked or cleaned: she fed the baby, ate energy bars and read the paper.
She read old newspapers and new ones compulsively, without pleasure or recall. She kept reading as the baby nursed, till they both dropped off. She didn’t want to read about war but it was strewn across the sheets. Today, when they woke up, it was even transferred to the baby’s sweaty skin.
She put the baby in the sink and washed her, the grey-tinged water gurgling down the drain.
Better go to the park. Her husband was in Afghanistan. She could brave the park.
“Park?” she asked, and a shine immediately seemed to hit the baby. It turned to where the Snuggli hung on the back of the door, and said, “Bah!”
“Yeah,” she said. “Humbug. But we’ll try it.”
As they walked down the hill to the park, she pointed out various sights: stop sign, school bus, squirrel, McMansions. It was only as she caught sight of the playground, and forced a wave at the clot of moms who seemed truly not to see her, that her spirits plunged. Was it a reflection of the times, these tightened ranks of mothers? Did a new mom pose a security risk?
She sat alone at one picnic table while the chattering moms clustered at the other one. The baby writhed in the carrier and she unfastened one side and slid her onto the edge of the table. The baby’s impatient, intelligent eyes raked the trees, the dogs, the play structures, before settling on the children. “Baht!!!”
She pulled the baby to her, but with a cry it twisted back to the children.
“Oh, baht,” she said. She picked the baby up and carried her over to the sandbox, where two skinny blondes in dirty frocks glanced up at them. The baby kicked her fat legs and squealed.
Both girls had the kind of fine white-blonde hair that seemed to float rather than hang. The taller one said, “Do you remember when I was three and my hair was still curly and I was yelling for Mom to let me in and she said no?”
“I wasn’t born yet,” said the smaller one.
“Well, I don’t think she heard me,” said the taller girl. Then both girls looked back up at her expectantly, as if she were going to provide some kind of magic.
“Why are you staring at us?” the younger one asked.
“You have such interesting socks,” she said, tilting the baby to look down at them. The smaller girl’s socks were different colors and heights.
“When my socks turn out like this I pretend the tall one is the big sister and the short one is the little sister,” the girl said, tugging up the little sister.
“Oh, that’s great,” she said. She stood watching them, but then thought she might be making them uncomfortable. As she turned to leave, the big sister said, “Do you want to play Pocahontas with us?”
Warmth prickled up her arms and over her scalp. She glanced over at the moms. They were oblivious to her, and suddenly that seemed like a good thing. She felt she was probably committing some sort of generational faux pas, but she squatted on her heels anyway, the baby cooing up at the blondes.
“How do you play?”
“Well, I’m Pocahontas, and my sister is Captain John Smith. You could be the bad guy.”
It was so nice to be included! She felt the thrill of potential friends, even though they were maybe six and four.
“Can my baby play?”
The older girl studied the baby dubiously, but the smaller one said, “He can be the bad guy’s fat little dog.”
“Okay,” she said, delighted, and the girls flashed quick smiles. “What do we do?”
“You just act like the person you are,” the big sister said, “like this.” Turning to her sister she trilled, “Captain John Smith, I just love your new tie-dyed dress!”
Captain John Smith grabbed the hem of her dappled skirt and sashayed along the edge of the sandbox.
Her fat little dog squirmed in her lap, and she felt a wrench inside her chest: just act like the person you are.
Pocahontas bent over the baby, her wisps of hair tickling the baby’s fuzzy head, and the mother made little growls and yaps as she leaned her baby forward. A corresponding squeal pealed from the baby, and she craned her neck to look back at her mom, a gleaming bolt of eye contact, a fat chuckle. Like this.
Charlie Buck’s stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Laurel Review, Santa Monica Review, and The Journal.