David Sedaris: Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim

Dead or alive, I'd have no peace, and so I let it go, the way you have to when you're totally dependent on somebody. In the coming weeks I'd picture the hand waving good-bye or shooting into the air to hail a taxi — going about its little business as I went about mine. Hugh would ask why I was smiling and I'd say, "Oh, no reason," and leave it at that.

MY MOTHER AND I WERE on the beach, rubbing oil into each other's backs and guessing who in the family would be the first to have children. "I think it will be Lisa," I said. This was in the early 1970s. Lisa was maybe fourteen years old and while she wasn't necessarily maternal, she did do things according to their order. Getting married was what came after graduating from college, and having a baby was what came after getting married. "Mark my words," I said, "by the age of twenty-six Lisa will have" — a trio of ghost crabs approached an abandoned sandwich, and I took them as a sign — "Lisa will have three children."

It felt very prophetic, but my mother dismissed it. "No," she said. "Gretchen will be the first." She squinted toward her second daughter, who stood on the shore, pitching meat scraps to a flock of gulls. "It's written on her hips. It will be Gretchen, then Lisa, then Tiffany."

"What about Amy?" I asked.

My mother thought for a moment. "Amy won't have a child," she said. "Amy will have a monkey."

I did not include myself in the baby prophecy, as I couldn't imagine a time when homosexuals, either through adoption or the procurement of a rented womb, could create families of their own. I did not include my brother, because every time I saw him he was destroying something, not by accident but willfully, gleefully. He'd dismember his baby, with every intention of putting it back together, but then something would come up — a karate movie, the chance to eat two dozen tacos — and the reconstruction would be forgotten about.

Neither my mother nor I could have imagined that the boy smashing bottles on the path to our cottage would be the first and only one in the family to have a child. By the time it happened, she would be long gone and my sisters, my father, and I would have to bear the shock alone. "It happened so fast!" we would say to one another, speaking as if Paul was like us and preceded every action with ten years of discussion. But he's not like us, and to hear him tell it, the debate ended with a simple "Take them panties off." Kathy did, and shortly after getting married, he called me to announce that she was pregnant.

"Since when?" I asked.

Paul held the phone away from his mouth and yelled into the other room. "Mama, what time is it?"

"You're calling her 'Mama'?"

He yelled for her again, and I told him that if it was four o'clock in Paris, it was tenA.M. in Raleigh. "So how long has she been pregnant?"

He figured it had been about nine hours. They had used one of those home-testing kits. The previous evening the result had been negative. This morning it was positive, and Kathy had become Mama, which would eventually change to Big Mama, and later, for no particular reason, Mama D.

When my friend Andy and his wife discovered they were going to have a baby, they kept it a secret for eight weeks. This, I learned, is fairly common. The fetus was minute — a congregation of loitering cells — and as with anything that informal, there was a good chance that it might disperse. A miscarriage turned would-be parents into objects of pity, and you didn't want to set yourselves up too early.

"I don't mean to discourage you," I said to Paul, "but maybe you two should keep this to yourselves for a while."

He coughed, and I understood that he and Kathy had been on the phone for hours, that I was probably the last to be called.

What I considered a reasonable degree of caution he dismissed as "nay-sayery."

"I'll chain its ass down if I have to, but ain't no baby of mine going to forsake the womb."

After hanging up, he went to the store and bought a nursing chair, a changing table, and a bib readingI LOVE MY DADDY. I thought of those children you sometimes see at demonstrations.ANOTHER TODDLER FOR PEACE, their T-shirts read, or, my favorite,I 'M SO GLAD MY MOMMY DIDN'T ABORT ME.

"Shouldn't you wait until the baby can talk and say that kind of thing for itself?" I asked. "Or maybe at least hold out until it has a real neck. What are you doing buying bibs?"

The next time he called he was at the counter of a toy store charging a set ofBaby Einstein videos. "I don't care if it's a boy or a girl, but this little son of a bitch is going to have brains."

"Well, it's sure not going to get them from his parents," I said. "Kathy hasn't even gone to the doctor and already you've got videos?"

"A crib, too, and I'll tell you what, this shit's expensive as hell."

"Well, so is calling France on a cell phone at eleven o'clock on a Wednesday morning," I said, though again, I don't know who I thought I was talking to. My brother can't survive unless he's breathing into a telephone. If you're an enemy, he'll call only once a day, but if you're a family member and on relatively good speaking terms, you're guaranteed to hear from him once every eight hours or so. There's the money he spends calling us, and then there's the money my sisters and I spend calling one another to talk about how much our brother calls us.

When the pregnancy became official, he called even more. "Big day, Hoss. We're taking Mama in to get her Corky test." Corky was a character from an early-nineties TV program and was played by a young man with Down syndrome. My sister Lisa got the message as well and wasn't sure if the fetus was being tested for a triploid twenty-first chromosome or the possibility that it might grow up to become an actor. "I'm pretty sure they can determine the drama gene now," she said.

By the sixth month the only surprise left was the baby's sex. Paul and his wife speculated, but neither of them wanted to know for certain. It was, they said, bad luck, but how was it any unluckier than furnishing a nursery or preaddressing the birth-announcement cards? Like everyone else in the family, I kept a list of possible names and called every so often to offer them up: Dusty, Ginger, Kaneesha — all of them rejected. The contractors and carpenters my brother works with suggested names as well, most of them inspired by the pending war or the image of America as a tarnished but still shining beacon. Liberty was popular, as was Glory, the slightly Italian-sounding Vendetta, and Kick Saddam's Ass, which, as my father pointed out, didn't leave much room for a middle name. All of his suggestions were Greek and were offered with a complete disregard of the inevitable taunting they would inspire. "You can't enter the third grade with a name like Hercules," Lisa told him. "The same is true of Lesbos, I don't care how pretty it sounds."

Then there was the pressure of naming the child after one of its grandparents. Lou and Sharon were options, but there was also Kathy's family to consider. "Oh, right," my sister Amy said. "Them." The Wilsons were nice people, but we saw them as interlopers, potential threats standing between us and what we'd come to think of as the Sedaris baby. "Don't Kathy's parents alreadyhave a grandchild?" I asked, speaking as if a grandchild were like a Social Security number or a spinal column — something you needed only one of. We decided they were greedy and capable of anything, yet when the time came to compete, we completely dropped the ball. Their team was out in full force when the baby was born, while we were represented by only Lisa and our father. Kathy was in labor for fifteen hours before the doctors decided to perform a cesarean. The news was delivered to the waiting room, and when the time came my father looked at his watch, saying, "Well, I guess they should be carving her up right about now." Then he went home to feed his dog. By this point, naming the child Lou was on par with naming it Adolph or Beelzebub, but all three were disqualified when the baby turned out to be a girl.