Elisa Albert - After Birth

Jack told me not to have feelings about my feelings, advised me to write her a letter and bring it to her gravesite in Queens, tell her all the things I wished I could say.

Sorry you’re dead, Mom, I love you the best I could come up with, and a lie.

We decide not to “do” Thanksgiving this year. A relief.

Last year we drove down to the city with Walker in the brand-new offgassing car seat. My incision was still giving me trouble. I was still moving like a ninety-five-year-old. We arrived to find Sheryl and my father and cousin Erica and whoever else doting on the turkey, bobbing and weaving around it like it was made of eternal fucking light, barely able to pull themselves away long enough to greet us. The turkey, the turkey, look at the turkey! Sue me: I’d imagined them making a little fuss over the baby . They’re real into their juiced-up carcasses, my father and Sheryl. It gets them incredibly excited, ministering to a dead animal.

There are no pictures of me or my mother in that apartment, by the way. Not a one. There’s Sheryl’s mother’s mother in a late nineteenth-century Russian portrait, Sheryl’s mother as kid, Sheryl’s parents’ wedding, Sheryl as sorority president. There are the sons as grade-schoolers, sons and wives on respective wedding days, grandchildren in studio portraits. There’s Norman and Sheryl on a group tour, Norman and Sheryl on another group tour, Norman and Sheryl on yet another group tour.

They had made us a salad and a bowl of overcooked greens ( for the vegetarians! ) as though it were a proud meal to offer a post-op nursing mother. Of course they added turkey juice to the stuffing, so I ate the bread and salad and over-sautéed greens and this awful pie one of Sheryl’s sons brought from FoodLand. You would not believe the crap Sheryl’s greasy sons and their wives call food. The waxy, genetically engineered fruits, the processed shit, the corn syrup dextrose canola preservative crap they call food. That they’re not all dead is testimony to general good genes, I guess.

I mostly sat on the couch and nursed, as one nurses and nurses and nurses a newborn. Paul brought me a plate, kept asking if I was okay. At one point Sheryl tried to drape a blanket over me.

Later one of Sheryl’s grandkids came over and stood right next to me. She was about six, watching with great interest.

What’s he doing? she whispered, peering intently at the baby’s tiny working mouth.

He’s drinking milk , I whispered back. There was still time for her. She stood stock-still for another moment, then ran over to her mother.

THAT BABY’S DRINKING MILK FROM HER BOOBIE , she stage-whispered, eyes wide. The room burst into laughter.

Yeah , her mother whined in that hellish fake voice people use to bullshit to their kids, you didn’t do that, did you, Hayden?

Hayden said she guessed not.

My next visitor over on the couch was Erica. Walker had fallen asleep and released my swollen, still-wet nipple, which I hadn’t yet bothered to put away. The face Erica made, you’d think she was looking at a steaming fresh defecation. I pulled the cloth diaper out from under my shirt, where it had been stemming the leak from my other boob, and hooked the nursing bra all up again without waking the sleeping kid, proud of myself for having recently mastered this kick-ass series of moves. As proud as I’ve ever been of anything, come right down to it.

Erica sat there with that face like she was about to puke, or masturbate, or both. She was blind to the baby — the endlessly fascinating curve of his forehead, his astonishingly perfect nostrils and fingernails and eyelashes. Holding him in your arms reframed all things. How painfully obvious it was that men, with their secret societies and weapons stockpiles, could know little of life. Elsewhere in the room were heated discussions about football and politics and a new sci-fi movie whose effects were, according to one of Sheryl’s sons, off the hook .

So , Erica said. Listen. I wanted to talk to you about the wedding?

Uh-huh , I said. Cipriani, February. Winter Wonderland. She’d been starving herself for the better part of a year. I was supposed to be a bridesmaid, wear a lavender gown. I intended to drink some moderate amount of alcohol for the first time in a long while. This moderate amount was going to get me Super Fucked Up. I was looking forward to it.

Yeah, so, Steve and I really feel that it’s our day, you know?

Sure.

I mean, what I actually mean is that it’s my day, really. It’s my day.

Christ. How estranged from yourself, how juvenile and spastic do you have to be to cling to that kind of idea? Like a kid with a behavioral disorder.

And here’s the thing . She had rehearsed this. “The Thing.” Up it came from the entitlement swamp, covered in reeds, wearing a muddy veil and clutching an enormous bouquet. So many of our friends have kids. And even though we love kids and love our friends’ kids and wish we could include everyone, we’ve decided we can’t have everyone’s kids, and it’s not fair to make any exceptions, so I just wanted to let you know that we’re not going to be having kids at the wedding . She had definitely rehearsed it; she recited it without pause. And I just feel that having kids there would just, like, take the focus off me. So! She took a closing breath, exhaled it noisily.

Erica. I’m nursing. He’s a newborn.

She set her jaw, ready to rumble.

We declined to stay the night. On the drive home the baby bawled in the back while I bawled in the front.

I’m really not sure who I should try and comfort first , Paul said.

Fuck you , I said, because he was the only person available.

We pulled in to a rest stop in Ulster County, devoured the most disgusting/amazing heat-lamped pizza ever.

Something’s crossed over in me, and I can’t go back. (That was Thelma in Thelma and Louise .)

Hey, uh… sorry to bother you? I’m a friend of Mina Morris’s. We’re at uh… Crisp and Jerry’s? The water cut out this morning. The hot water. There’s no hot water. And the heat might be on the fritz. We can hear this banging? Can you call us? Thanks a lot.

Male voice. I listen to it three more times. It’s pretty amazing that these houses are still standing at all, when you think about it.

Will’s happy to see me, I could swear he is. It smells of Nag Champa in there. He gets his coat. We walk. Sunny, freezing.

She’s having a baby. Any minute. Like, she might be having it right now.

Cool. You can show her the ropes.

How deep in shit she’d have to be!

The guy who opens Crisp and Jer’s door is upper forties, short, wool socks, handsome, glasses, flannel. Self-conscious, you can see it immediately in the clothes, which are just slightly too too. Hates his father, wants to impress his father. Not quite enough self-loathing to cancel out the narcissism. Deeply admires people less materialistic than he, can’t quite give up on impressing people more materialistic than he. You grow up among the rich, you become a veritable Jungian psychic where material self-representation is at hand.

Hey , the guy says.

He steps aside to usher us in. Teeth-grindingly cold. A space heater is doing very little to help matters. Mina is bundled so thoroughly in blankets on the couch that at first I don’t see she’s holding her newborn.

We stare.

They look like hairless rats when they’re this new, like soft mechanical dolls. The most riveting, shocking hairless doll rats you ever saw. So intense, what happens when there’s a newborn in the room. This negative energy charge, this weird, blessed pall. Difficult not to whisper, tiptoe, nice and easy, forget what you were going to say.