David Sedaris: Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim

They named her Madelyn, which was shortened to Maddy by the time she reached the incubator. I was in a hotel in Portland, Oregon, at the time and received the news from my brother, who called from the recovery room. His voice was soft and melodic, not much more than a whisper. "Mama's got some tubes sticking out of her pussy, but it ain't no big thing," he said. "She's lying back, little Maddy's sucking on her titty just as happy as she can be." This was the new, gentler Paul: same vocabulary, but the tone was sweeter and seasoned with a sense of wonder. The cesarean had been unpleasant, but after bemoaning the months wasted in Lamaze class, he grew reflective. "Some is cut loose and others come out on their own self, but take heed, brother: having a baby is a fucking miracle."

"Did you just say, Take heed'?" I asked.

Kathy returned home later that week, but there were problems. Her legs were swollen. She couldn't breathe. An ambulance carried her to the emergency room, where they drained thirty pounds of fluid from her body: accumulated water and, to her great disappointment, her breast milk. "It'll still continue to come in," Paul said, "but because of all the medication she's on, we're going to have to pump and dump." This was a medical term he'd picked up from the doctor, who announced in the same breath that Kathy could not have any more children. "Her heart's too weak, but can you believe that shit?" His new voice temporarily disappeared. "Breaking bad on Mama D when she's on tap and already scared half to death? I said, 'Fucker, begone with your pump-dumping, Pakistan-community-college-attending ass. I'm getting me a specialist.' "

"It's interesting," I told him, "that in the nineteenth century they used puppies to drain a woman's breast milk."

Paul said nothing.

"I just thought it was a pleasant image," I said.

He agreed, but his mind was on other things: his sick wife, the baby he was caring for on his own, and the second, hoped-for child he knew now they could never have. "Puppies," he said. "I bet they could really drain your ass."

I flew to Raleigh two weeks after the baby was born, and my father, unshaven and looking all of his eighty years, arrived half an hour late to pick me up at the airport. "You'll have to excuse me if I'm a little out of it," he said. "I'm not feeling too hot, and it took me a while to find my medicine." It seemed he had a little infection and was fighting it by taking antibiotics originally prescribed for his Great Dane. "Pills are pills," he said. "Whether they're for a dog or a human, they're the same damned thing."

I thought it was funny and later told my sister Lisa, who did not get quite the kick out of it that I did. "I think that's horrible," she said. "I mean, how is Sophie supposed to get any better when Dad's taking all her medicine?"

Along with a stained T-shirt my father wore a pair of torn jeans and a baseball cap marked with the emblem of a heavy-metal band. I asked about it, and he shrugged, saying he'd found the hat in a parking lot.

"Do you thinkKathy 'sfather dresses like a roadie for Iron Maiden?" I asked.

"I don't give a damn what he wears," my father said.

"Do you think that whenhe gets sick, he just runs down to Petco and self-medicates?"

"Probably not, but what the hell difference does it make?"

"Just asking."

"And what," my father said, "you think you're going to win Best Uncle award by holing up in France, flipping pancakes with your little boyfriend?"

"Pancakes?"

"Well, whatever they call them," he said. "Crepes." He lurched from the curb, using his free hand to adjust the oversize glasses he'd bought in the seventies and had recently rediscovered in a drawer. On the way to Paul's house I told him a story I'd heard in one of the airports. A new mother had approached the security checkpoint carrying two servings of prepumped breast milk, and the goon in charge made her open both bottles and drink from them.

"Get out of here," my father said.

"No," I told him. "It's true. They want to make sure that whatever you're carrying isn't poison or some kind of an explosive. That's why sperm donors have taken to traveling Greyhound."

"It's a lousy world," he said.

Suggestions of how to improve this lousy world were displayed upon his rear bumper. My father and I do not agree politically, so when riding with him I tend to slump down in the seat, ashamed to be seen in what my sisters and I callthe Bushmobile. It's like being a child all over again. Dad at the wheel and my head so low, I'm unable to see out the window. "Are we there yet?" I ask. "Are we there?"

Madelyn was asleep when we arrived, and Paul, my father, and I gathered around the crib to adore her in soft voices. One of them suggested that she resembled my mother, but to me she just looked like a baby, not the cute kind you see on diaper commercials but the raw, wrinkled kind that resemble bitter old men.

"It'll be different when her hair comes in," Paul said. "Some babies is born with it, but it's less gnarlier for the mother when they're bawl-headed." He waved his hands before his daughter's closed eyes. "It's the mothers I think about. Can you imagine what that must be like, having something inside you that's all fur-bearing and shit?"

"Well, fur and hair are different things," my father said. "Having a raccoon inside you, all right, I see your point, but a few hairs never hurt anybody."

Paul shuddered and I told him about a recent documentary, the story of a boy who'd been surgically separated from his secret interior twin. It lived inside of him for seven years, a little dummy with no heart or brain of its own. "That's fine, or whatever," I whispered, "but it had this really long hair."

"Like, how long?" Paul asked.

In truth I hadn't seen the documentary, just read about it. "Really long," I said. "About three feet."

"That's like having a fucking Willie Nelson doll living inside you," Paul said.

"It's a bunch of baloney," my father said.

"No, really. I saw it."

"Like hell you did."

The baby raised a fist to her mouth, and Paul lowered his head into the crib. "That's just your uncle Faggot and your raggedy-assed granddaddy talking some of their old stupid bullshit," he said. And it sounded so… comforting.

When my father left, Paul heated up a serving of formula. The baby woke up, and Kathy settled her onto the sofa, where the four of us watched videos taken in the hospital. That my brother had not filmed the actual cesarean led me to believe that someone had expressly forbidden it, perhaps for legal or sanitary reasons. There was a blank spot between the arrival of the doctor and the purple-faced baby wailing like an urgent call at the end of her umbilical cord. As if to make up for the missing seven minutes, the recovery-room footage goes on forever. Kathy drinks from a plastic cup of water. A nurse wanders in to change the bandages. Often my sister-in-law is naked or topless, but if she was bothered by the sight of herself playing on a wide-screen TV, she did not show it. Sometimes she held the camera, and we saw Paul in his cutoff shorts and promotional T-shirt, a baseball cap turned backward on his head.

The two of them had watched this video dozens of times, but still they sat enraptured. "Here's where that nurse's aide comes in," Kathy said. Paul turned off the volume and as the woman stuck her head through the door he lip-synched her voice.

"Look like evabody in here asleep."

"Do it again," Kathy said.

"Look like evabody in here asleep."

"Again."

"Look like evabody in here asleep."

Further along there was footage of the baby's first bowel movement. It looked like tar, and when the last of it had seeped out, Paul hit the reverse button and watched as the puddle contracted and crept back into his daughter's body. "You see how dark that shit is?" he said. "I mean to tell you this little baby'sadvanced."