Kim Stanley Robinson - Forty Signs of Rain

‘So you’re drinking your wife’s breast milk out of a baby bottle?’

‘Yes I am.’

‘How is it?’

‘It’s good. Thin but sweet. A potent mix of protein, fat and sugar. No doubt the perfect food.’

‘I bet.’ Roy cackled. ‘Do you ever get it straight from the source?’

‘Well I try, sure, who doesn’t, but Anna doesn’t like it. She says it’s a mixed message and if I don’t watch out she’ll wean me when she weans Joe.’

‘Ah ha. So you have to take the long-term view.’

‘Yes. Although actually I tried it one time when Joe fell asleep nursing, so she couldn’t move without waking him. She was hissing at me and I was trying to get it to work but apparently you have to suck much harder than, you know, one usually would, there’s a trick to it, and I still hadn’t gotten any when Joe woke up and saw me. Anna and I froze, expecting him to freak out, but he just reached out and patted me on the head.’

‘He understood!’

‘Yeah. It was like he was saying I know how you feel, Dad, and I will share with you this amazing bounty. Didn’t you Joe?’ he said, handing him the warmed bottle. He watched with a smile as Joe took it one-handed and tilted it back, elbow thrown out like Popeye with a can of spinach. Because of all the pinpricks Charlie had made in the rubber nipples, Joe could choke down a bottle in a few minutes, and he seemed to take great satisfaction in doing so. No doubt a sugar rush.

‘Okay, well, you are a kinky guy my friend and obviously deep in the world of domestic bliss, but we’re still relying on you here and this may be the most important bill Phil introduces in this session.’

‘Come on, it’s a lot more than that, young man, it’s one of the few chances we have left to avoid complete global disaster, I mean –’

‘Preaching to the converted! Preaching to the converted!’

‘I certainly hope so.’

‘Sure sure. Okay, I’ll read this draft and get back to you a.s.a.p., I want to move on with this, and the committee discussion is now scheduled for Tuesday.’

‘That’s fine, I’ll have my phone with me all day.’

‘Sounds good, I’ll be in touch, but meanwhile be thinking about how to slip the IPCC thing in even deeper.’

‘Yeah okay but see what I did already.’

‘Sure bye.’

‘Bye.’

Charlie pulled off the headset and turned off the stove. Joe finished his bottle, inspected it, tossed it casually aside.

‘Man, you are fast,’ Charlie said as he always did. One of the mutual satisfactions of their days together was doing the same things over and over again, and saying the same things about them. Joe was not as insistent on pattern as Nick had been, in fact he liked a kind of structured variability, as Charlie thought of it, but the pleasure in repetition was still there.

There was no denying his boys were very different. When Nick had been Joe’s age, Charlie had still found it necessary to hold him cradled in his arm, head wedged in the nook of his elbow, to make him take the bottle, because Nick had had a curious moment of aversion, even when he was hungry. He would whine and refuse the nipple, perhaps because it was not the real thing, perhaps because it had taken Charlie months to learn to puncture the bottle nipples with lots of extra holes. In any case he would refuse and twist away, head whipping from side to side, and the hungrier he was the more he would do it, until with a rush like a fish to a lure he would strike, latching on and sucking desperately. It was a fairly frustrating routine, part of the larger Shock of Lost Adult Freedom that had hammered Charlie so hard that first time around, though now he could hardly remember why. A perfect image for all the compromised joys and irritations of Mr Momhood, those hundreds of sessions with reluctant Nick and his bottle.

With Joe life was in some ways much easier. Charlie was more used to it, for one thing, and Joe, though difficult in his own ways, would certainly never refuse a bottle.

Now he decided he would try again to climb the baby gate and dive down the cellar stairs, but Charlie moved quickly to detach him, then shooed him out into the dining room while cleaning up the counter, ignoring the loud cries of complaint.

‘Okay okay! Quiet! Hey, let’s go for a walk! Let’s go walk!’

‘No!’

‘Ah come on. Oh wait, it’s your day for Gymboree, and then we’ll go to the park and have lunch, and then go for a walk!’

‘NO!’

But that was just Joe’s way of saying yes.

Charlie wrestled him into the baby backpack, which was mostly a matter of controlling his legs, not an easy thing. Joe was strong, a compact animal with bulging thigh muscles, and though not as loud a screamer as Nick had been, a tough guy to overpower. ‘Gymboree, Joe! You love it! Then a walk , guy, a walk to the park! ’

Off they went.

First to Gymboree, located in a big building just off Wisconsin. Gymboree was a chance to get infants together when they did not have some other daycare to do it. It was an hour-long class, and always a bit depressing, Charlie felt, to be paying to get his kid into a play situation with other kids; but there it was; without Gymboree they all would have been on their own.

Joe disappeared into the tunnels of a big plastic jungle gym. It may have been a commercial replacement for real community, but Joe didn’t know that; all he saw was that it had lots of stuff to play with and climb on, and so he scampered around the colourful structures, crawling through tubes and climbing up things, ignoring the other kids to the point of treating them as movable parts of the apparatus, which could cause problems. ‘Oops, say you’re sorry, Joe. Sorry!’

Off he shot again, evading Charlie. He didn’t want to waste any time. Once again the contrast with Nick could not have been more acute. Nick had seldom moved at Gymboree. One time he had found a giant red ball and stood embracing the thing for the full hour of the class. All the moms had stared sympathetically (or not), and the instructor, Ally, had done her best to help Charlie get him interested in something else; but Nick would not budge from his mystical red ball.

Embarrassing. But Charlie was used to that. The problem was not just Nick’s immobility or Joe’s hyperactivity, but the fact that Charlie was always the only dad there. Without him it would have been a complete momspace, and comfortable as such. He knew that his presence wrecked that comfort. It happened in all kinds of infant-toddler contexts. As far as Charlie could tell, there was not a single other man inside the Beltway who ever spent the business hours of a weekday with preschool children. It just wasn’t done. That wasn’t why people moved to DC. It wasn’t why Charlie had moved there either, for that matter, but he and Anna had talked it over before Nick was born, and they had come to the realization that Charlie could do his job (on a part-time basis anyway) and their infant care at the same time, by using phone and e-mail to keep in contact with Senator Chase’s office. Phil Chase himself had perfected the method of working at a distance back when he had been the World’s Senator, always on the road; and being the good guy he was, he had thoroughly approved of Charlie’s plan. While on the other hand Anna’s job absolutely required her to be at work at least fifty hours a week, and often more. So Charlie had happily volunteered to be the stay-at-home parent. It would be an adventure.

And an adventure it had been, there was no denying that. But first time’s a charm; and now he had been doing it for over a year with kid number two, and what had been shocking and all-absorbing with kid number one was now simply routine. The repetitions were beginning to get to him. Joe was beginning to get to him.