Miranda July: The First Bad Man

“Don’t worry, there’s not just me. You have other people.”

Who ? he said. No he didn’t. He just waited for whatever was going to happen next.

SUZANNE SALUTED AS SHE TOOKoff her shoes, I guess meaning it was fascist of me to insist on this.

“Do you do other Japanese customs or just this one?” asked Carl.

“Just this one.”

“We looked high and low for a baby present and then at the last moment we discovered a really incredible hat store,” said Carl, ambling around the living room. “I mean these hats were like something from a museum — a jester museum. They could have easily charged hundreds of dollars but most of them were twenty dollars or under.”

“But they didn’t have them in sizes for babies,” Suzanne said.

“They were one size fits all. We thought maybe if he had a very large head… an adult-sized head…”

Jack smiled shyly as his grandparents looked at him for the first time, appraising his cranium.

“It’s too big,” Suzanne said, pulling a jingling jangling jester hat out of her purse. Jack lunged for it.

“Bells,” I enunciated. “Jingle bells. You’ve never seen bells, have you? He loves it, thank you.” Jack gave up on the bells and tried to put his whole hand in my mouth. He’d been doing this ever since I’d started talking out loud to him. He’d also been grabbing the pages of books, shaking anything that rattled, stacking cups, rolling across the floor, chewing the legs of a toy giraffe, and sweetly reaching for me with whimpering excitement every time we were parted for more than a few seconds. Or maybe none of these things were new. Maybe I was just noticing them more acutely since the veil of my internal dialogue had lifted. He seemed less and less like Kubelko Bondy and more like a baby named Jack.

Suzanne smiled, putting the jester hat on her own head. “Do you want to tell her, hon?”

“We’re adding twenty dollars to your next paycheck,” Carl announced. “We ask that you cash it and put in an envelope—”

“It’s a fund,” Suzanne interrupted, jingling. “So one day, when his head is big enough, this money will be waiting for him.”

“We thought it was more special this way,” Carl said. “Look at her — isn’t she like a beautiful little sprite?”

We all stared at Suzanne with the hat on. If anyone looked like a little sprite wouldn’t it be the baby among us? But she batted her eyelashes daffily and fluttered her veiny hands like wings.

I gave them a tour of the house. In the nursery Carl whispered something to Suzanne and Suzanne asked if this had been Clee’s room.

“This was my ironing room. Clee slept on the couch at first and later we shared my room.”

They looked at each other sideways. Carl coughed and picked up a stuffed lamb.

“Lamb,” I said to Jack. “Grandpa is holding your lamb.”

They both frowned uncomfortably. Suzanne gave Carl a little poke with her elbow.

“We’re glad you brought that up,” he said.

Suzanne nodded vigorously with her eyes shut; Carl cleared his throat.

“Jack seems like an interesting person and we hope we get the chance to know him. But we’d like that to be on his own terms.”

Suzanne jumped in. “Do we share common interests and values? Is he curious about us and the kinds of things we care about?”

“I think he might be,” I ventured. “When he’s a little older.”

“Exactly. Until then it’s a forced relationship.” Suzanne’s vehemence was ringing the bells on her hat. Jack shrieked; he thought this was the most fun thing that had ever happened. “We’re supposed to play the part of the ‘grandparents’ [ jingle jingle ] and he’s supposed to enact the ‘grandson’ [ jingle jingle ]. That just feels empty and arbitrary to us, like something Hallmark came up with.”

Carl chuckled at the Hallmark line and rubbed Suzanne’s neck as she continued.

“Interesting young people come into our lives every day and we adore them, they’re engaging, they ask questions. Maybe down the road Jack will be one of these kids.”

“We might not even know it’s him,” Carl murmured.

“We won’t know it’s him and he won’t know it’s us — we’ll just be people who genuinely like each other.”

Suzanne folded the jester hat [ jingle jingle ] and put it back in her purse. She seemed relieved to have the speech out of the way.

“Do you want to hold him?” I said.

Her hands fit around Jack very easily. He looked up at her, wondering if the bells were coming back.

One Friday at ten o’clock there was a knock at the door and I thought, Well, what do you know, maybe she hasn’t completely forgotten us . I wiped Jack’s nose and tucked my hair behind my ears. My heart raced as I neared the door. Rachel had broken up with her. She had nowhere else to turn. I ran my fingers across my lips to make sure there was no gunk on them. She was probably a full-blown lesbian by now. If she tried to kiss me I would stop her and say Let’s consider this choice, what does it mean? What are we saying about who we are and who we want to be? Maybe she was more verbal now; Rachel might have brought that out in her. I couldn’t wait to talk to another adult, out loud.

It was a skinny, redheaded young man with a Ralphs name tag: DARREN. The bagger boy.

“Is Clee here?”

Jack tried to pull off the name tag.

“She’s not. She doesn’t live here anymore.”

“Really?” He looked past me into the house. I stepped aside so he could see she wasn’t in there.

“Just us.”

He regarded Jack and me, brushing his fingers along the white tops of the many tiny pimples that bearded his chin and pink cheeks. Fourth of July. He was the one who made Jack smile.

“Okay,” he said. “Bye, Jack, bye, Jack’s mom.” He darted off the porch, bounding past the TV on the curb. I watched him run down the street. Jack’s mom. No one had ever called me that before. But from Jack’s point of view no other person was more his mother. I looked at his small hand so confidently wrapped around my upper arm. It was a very ordinary thing to be but I felt suddenly breathless, like I had just made it to the top of something tall. Motherhood. He fussed; I went inside and gave him a plastic spatula. He slapped it on the counter, smack, smack, smack. I stood, holding his warm body, watching his concentrating face. It was too pink, he needed more sunblock. Smack, smack. And more reading — I read to him, but not every night. And we had only spent a few hours a day in the NICU with him. That wasn’t enough. It was enough for us at the time, but now it haunted me. Twenty hours a day he’d lain there alone. There would be other unpardonable crimes, I could feel them coming — things that in retrospect would become my greatest regrets. I’d always be catching up with my love. How terrible. Jack flung the spatula onto the ground and wailed. I picked it up, smack, smack. He laughed, I laughed. Terrible. I kissed him and he kissed me back with a wide-open drooly mouth. Terrible.

“Ah, my boy,” I said. “My boy, my boy. I love you so. This can only end in heartbreak and I’ll never recover.”

“Ba-ba-ba-ba,” he said.

“Yes. Ba-ba-ba-ba.”

TWO DAYS LATER DARREN BOUNCEDon the top step of my porch like a runner stretching out his calf muscles.

“I thought I’d leave my number, for the next time you talk to her.”

I asked him to come in while I finished feeding Jack in his high chair.

“Have you tried calling her?”

“It’s okay,” he said too quickly. He had called her many times. I wondered if I should tell him about Rachel.