Tales From the Crib

by Jennifer Coburn

  “No, but I’m going to that support group on Tuesday and maybe someone will be able to give me some tips,” I said. “I don’t know if I can make it another day like this.” Jack patted me on the back and assured me I could do anything I put my mind to. He went into our kitchen and offered to make a cup of hot chocolate with marshmallows. As I watched him wipe down the gold-speckled white counter, I dreamt of remodeling our kitchen. I saw a thinner version of myself bustling about a rich cherrywood, modern rustic kitchen with a stainless steel sink and a double-door sub-zero. I imagined the yellow Maytag being replaced by a brushed silver Bosch, and granite floors to replace our linoleum that curled at the corners. I shouldn’t have hot chocolate, I told myself. The day I had Adam, I stepped on the scale and was horrified to see that I’d only lost five and-three-quarters pounds upon delivery, which was even more disturbing considering the baby weighed six. Of course everyone had told me it would take a few months to get back to my pre-pregnancy weight, but I secretly thought that the momentum of delivery was going to help shed not only the pregnancy weight, but an extra ten with it. You know, kind of like my body would feel the removal of the baby and all my blubber would come along for the ride. I thought it would be one great flush toward the exit and I’d be left with the Pamela Anderson body I had in my fantasies. But birth was not the fat vacuum I’d hoped. My hips and belly were far from ready to sport the Baywatch red Speedo, but my breasts were a wonder to behold. I couldn’t believe how scrumptiously full and round they were. Prior to a feeding, I looked as though I had implants.

  “Thanks, Jack,” I said, looking at him filling the silver kettle Zoe bought for our wedding. He seemed to make the transition from spouse to friend seamlessly. Though I missed having him as my husband, I must confess, our relationship was far less tense this way. In fact, there was no tension between us at all. I wondered if there was hope for us. If our interactions were amicable as friends, why couldn’t they be this easy as lovers? On that note, the doorbell rang. Bernice and Rita made it in one piece.

  “Oy,” my father’s sisters said in unison. “Who made it so easy for any maniac to get a driver’s license?” Rita shot in her thick Long Island accent. “Maniacs, lunatics, and imbeciles, all of them,” she spat.

  Taking their coats, Jack answered, “In the forties, Congress made an economic decision that what was good for GM was good for America, and lowered the standards for driver’s licensing to encourage car ownership.”

  “Don’t you love him?” Bernice stamped his cheek with Estee Lauder lipstick. “Married to you all these years and still thinks your family wants answers to their questions,” Bernice laughed. “Let me see that gorgeous baby, Mista What’s-Good-for-GM-Is-Good-for-Lee-Iaccoca.” That was second only to my all-time favorite phrase-butchering of Bernice’s. “Try this new oleo,” she once offered. “It’s called, Would You Believe This Isn’t Buttah?” Bernice lifted Adam out of the baby sling and cooed something that sounded like dolphin talk.

  “What kind of contraption is that?” Rita asked, pointing to the sling.

  I saw Jack stop himself from answering, then offered them hot chocolate instead. “Bernice, bring that baby over here,” Rita demanded, parked in her chair. “Has it occurred to you that I’d like to see the child, too?” Our living room was decorated in early seventies, like the rest of our home. We purchased the house from the estate of a deceased widow whose decorating included seven La-Z-Boy chairs and nothing else. Three were lemon yellow, two were avocado, and the other two were brown and beige paisley. We had a few ugly plywood end tables and one ultra-pedestrian brass floor lamp, but no couch. The piece de resistance was the Rice-a-Roni brown shag carpet which, now that we had a child who would soon crawl, must go no matter what the price. Jack and I spent every last penny we had on the down payment for the home, so we gladly took the furniture as part of the purchase price. At the time, we were focused solely on the school district, and were quite sure we’d decorate very soon. Instead, very soon, we just stopped caring—about our marriage or our home.

  Rita and Bernice were twelve and fourteen years older than my father. They lived within four blocks of each other in Merrick, Long Island, the Promised Land for second generation Jewish immigrants, and now, their kids. The main street was lined with trendy clothing stores, and take-out restaurants with bravado names: the Bagel Boss, King of Siamese Food, and the Sushi King. There’s really very little humility among Merrick business owners.

  Rita could find fault with a twenty-one-gun salute in her honor. “Too noisy,” she’d complain. “All that gun powdah makes me cough.” Bernice, on the other hand, was overjoyed when a salesman from the cremation place informed her that her ashes would weigh about six pounds. “Thin at last!” she shrieked.

  In fairness, Rita had a tougher road of it. She was diagnosed with polio when she was six weeks old and had too many operations to count. She always walked with a limp, which Bernice said looked like a sexy Mae West swagger. This annoyed Rita, but then again, most things did. As much as she complained, though, everyone loved Rita. It was partly fear, but she was also hilariously funny in her ongoing running commentary on the world. To add to Rita’s lot, she and Bernice were teens when the Holocaust was destroying European Jews by the millions. Their parents had a plan if Hitler’s Third Reich came to America. My father, a toddler at the time, was to be adopted by the German family in the apartment downstairs from theirs. Bernice would go to a convent that had enough space for nine Jewish girls. But Rita had polio so there was no hope for her survival, even if she were a blue-eyed blond German. That’s a heavy trip for an eighth grader.

  Rita coped by shopping pathologically. I don’t mean she bought lots of pretty things for herself and loved ones. She purchased things for people we didn’t even know. She anticipated parties, weddings, and showers years in advance. We once braked for a garage sale and she snapped at the seller, “I don’t even know what an edgah is!” Bewildered, he informed her that an edger is a gardening tool used to create edges on lawns. “Why would I need that when my gardnah takes care of all of that nonsense?!” Now mind you, Rita pulled over for this garage sale. The man wasn’t barking her in or trying to hard-sell the edger once she arrived. He never even suggested she look at it. He simply had it out with all of his other things. “Uch, twenty-five dollahs for a ridiculous edgah. Who needs it?!” She was outraged.

  “So don’t buy the edgah!” Bernice suggested.

  “Not for twenty-five dollahs, I won’t!” Rita said. “This crook would never get ovah twenty dollahs from me.”

  “I’d take twenty for it,” the guy said.

  Rita raised her eyebrows as if to show us both that she’d revealed his scam. She handed him a crisp twenty dollar bill, gestured for me to load the edger into her car, and walked off muttering that she knew that “piece of crap” wasn’t worth twenty-five.

  Rita’s husband died five years ago. Bernice’s passed away last summer. Bernice took to funeral crashing. No one really understood why, least of all her. “It’s always so lovely to see all the beautiful flowahs and hear the nice things people say about the deceased. Sure, there’s crying, but people also have so many stories about the person. I really feel like I get to learn a lot about people,” she explained.

  Rita rolled her eyes. “Bernicil, you’re getting to know someone who’s dead. What good does it do to know someone who’s dead?”

  “Rita,” Bernice said in her sweet, calming voice. “It’s always wonderful to meet someone new, even if they’re not around for it.” Bernice combed The New York Times obituary section and attended two to three services a week. She always read the prominently featured obituaries because the more attendants at a funeral, the less likely she’d be recognized as a crasher. And she never attended funerals of anyone under seventy.

  “My sistah says any death of a person youngah than seventy is too sad, like the eighty-year-old ones are a regular Mardi Gras,” Rita teased.

  As my aunts made themselves comfor
table in our living room, my mother emerged from the guest room. She wore a peach silk kimono with an embroidered green dragon on the back. “I thought I heard you two!” She rushed to kiss Rita, then Bernice. “Was the traffic abominable, darlings?”

  “Not really,” Bernice answered.

  “A horror!” Rita contradicted. “Every other car skidding all over the freeway, but you know my sistah, ‘lovely, lovely, everything is lovely.’” Rita laughed. “How are you, mamaleh? You look stunning.”

  “You know how it is with a new baby in the house,” Anjoli sighed. “No one gets any sleep, but they’re precious gifts from the universe that we cherish.”

  Jack shot me a glance. I wasn’t sure if he was commenting on Anjoli’s characterization of herself as the sleep-deprived grandmother, or her gifts from the universe mumbo jumbo. Or both.

  “We’re here to help, Anjoli. Lucy and Jack, you just tell us what you need and we’ll take care of everything!” Bernice chimed.

  “What are we taking care of? We’ve been here five minutes,’’ Rita corrected.

  “That’s sweet of you,” I finally spoke. “I’m going to bring everyone a nice slice of pie and coffee. Or would you prefer hot chocolate?” From the kitchen, I shouted, “What I really need is some advice on breastfeeding. It’s hurting like hell.”

  “Breastfeeding?!” my aunts responded at once. “What makes you think we breastfed?” Rita finished, spitting to her side.

  “You didn’t nurse?”

  “Why would we do that when we had formular?” Rita asked. I saw Jack inhale as though he were going to answer. Then he deflated as my aunt continued. “Don’t be such a martyr, Lucy. It’s not like you’re living in the jungle and there are no supahmahkets to buy formula. I would never breastfeed. I listened to Doctah Spock.”

  Puzzled, Jack couldn’t contain the question. “When did Dr. Spock say women shouldn’t breastfeed?”

  “Not in so many words,” Rita replied. “He said to trust your instincts. My instincts said breastfeeding was disgusting.”

  Chapter 14

  Adam barely made a peep during my aunts’ four-hour visit. Bernice said he was very considerate. Rita feared he might be deaf. Jack took Adam to his room to read him Green Eggs and Ham for the fifteenth time in his two weeks. I thought it was cute that Jack was already concerned about our son’s education. Ridiculous, but sweet. Jack’s mother mailed us an article about a study where a group of infants was broken into three categories—babies who heard an average of 3,000 words per hour, 1,500 words, and 500 words. The sociologists followed up on the kids fifteen years later and found that the high-word kids were high achievers in school, bright, articulate, and well-mannered. The average-word kids were doing okay, nothing remarkable either way. And the low-word kids were flunking in school, getting into trouble, and on the wrong track in life. In the days after we received this news clip, Jack talked to Adam almost nonstop. I saw no harm. I just hoped that he didn’t expect our two-week-old son to retain the lecture on earth’s major bodies of water Jack gave during bath time.

  “How’s that lunatic of a friend of yours, Lucy?” Rita asked while Jack was undoubtedly following up his Seuss reading with a discussion of whether Green Eggs and Ham was primarily a story about trying new things or persistence. “The one doing the confession show? What’s her name, Zuzu?”

  “Zoe,” I corrected.

  Zuzu?

  “Whatever her name is,” Rita continued. “That girl’s out of her mind.” I also thought True Confessions was doomed for failure, but I didn’t like Rita’s characterization of my best friend as a lunatic.

  “I think it’s clevah!” Bernice defended. “I’d be very interested to hear what these Catholics are confessing about. You tell me when that television program has its premiere and I’ll tune in.”

  Rita switched gears to her favorite topic—sex. Her philosophy: What a mess, but so pleasurable. “Speaking of confessions, tell us, have you and Jack been intimate again?” I cringed. “When I had your cousins, the doctahs told us not to have relations with our husbands for six weeks!”

  “So we had to call our boyfriends!” Bernice quipped.

  “You stole my punch line!” Rita exploded.

  “I did no such thing. I thought of a clevah thing to say, so I said it.”

  “I was about to say the same thing!”

  Anjoli interrupted by telling them that they should seriously consider a two-woman show together.

  “Really?” Bernice bit.

  “Of course, not really, you maniac. She’s trying to distract me from the fact that you stole my punch line.” And with her accusation that my mother was trying to distract her, Rita scanned the room and noticed that Adam was no longer with us. “Where’s the baby?”

  “With Jack. He’s reading to him,” I said.

  “Reading to him? Tell that moron we didn’t drive from Merrick in the snow to have him disappeah with the baby. I want to look at the baby. That baby really should cry more. You need to have his hearing checked, Lucy. I’m telling you, the sooner you know, the faster you can learn sign language.” Bernice added, “Like in that beautiful movie, Mr. Holland’s Music Class.”

  After my aunts left, Anjoli asked Jack to give her a lift to the movie theatre. I settled into my glider chair, took a deep breath, and endured the pain of another nursing. I grabbed a copy of The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding, but wound up cursing at the pictures of the serene looking women pictured on the pages. They smiled contentedly, almost smugly saying I’m nursing just fine, why can’t you?! “Liars, frauds, and lunatics!” I accused, not surprisingly, in a Long Island accent.

  I picked up the phone to call Mary, the La Leche League leader who urged me to call her “any time.” Nine at night didn’t seem too outrageous. By the grace of God, she answered and actually sounded happy to hear from me. “What if I used formula just for tonight and tomorrow, then come to the meeting on Tuesday morning?”

  “I’ll be there in ten minutes, honey,” she said.

  Over the past few days, everyone had gotten sucked into my nursing drama. The word “you” became synonymous with “your nipples,” as in “How are your nipples this fine morning?...Can your nipples have lunch next week?...Hey, have your nipples been able to make any headway with the novel ?” I even bought plastic protective shields so my bra wouldn’t touch my nipples. These hubcaps made me look like Xena’s older, fatter sister, Lactatia, the Nipple Warrior whose secret weapon was a milk spray of four feet.

  Jack was great, reading a list of benefits of nursing, urging me to “hang in there, kiddo.” Still, I needed more practical advice than what Jack could offer.

  Mary arrived at my house minutes later in a boob-shaped car with a nipple siren on top. Okay, maybe it was really an early model VW bug, but it looked like a breast to me at the time. With her, Mary carried a yellow page-sized book of questions about breastfeeding. After I explained my problem, she asked if she could look at my nipples. Before her question was punctuated, the snaps of my blouse crackled open so fast they sounded like fire works exploding.

  “I can’t diagnose anything, you understand, honey, but this looks a whole heck of a lot like thrush to me,” Mary said.

  “That’s what you said when we talked on the phone,” I said.

  “And now that I can see your nipples, I’m even more convinced.”

  “So how does she get rid of it?” Jack asked.

  “You’ve already tried every natural remedy, so why don’t you call your doctor tomorrow morning and see about getting a prescription for Diflucan.”

  We thanked Mary, who told me I wasn’t off the hook in coming to her La Leche League meeting on Tuesday. “Don’t forget, Lucy! You’re going to love meeting other nursing mothers. Unitarian Church at ten. See you there.”

  I did not want to go to this La Leche League meeting, but felt indebted to Mary. What did we need to meet about? How long could we talk about breastfeeding? But my Jewish guilt would not allow me to simp
ly take Mary’s free advice and ditch her meeting. La Leche League it was. I could survive one meeting. But first, I needed to survive the next feeding.

  “Jack, I think I’m going to bottle-feed tonight. Just till I can get my doctor to fill the prescription.”

  “That’s not an option, kiddo,” he said. He informed me that Mary swept through the kitchen and made Jack hand over all of the baby bottles. “She seemed very serious about it, Lucy. She kept telling me I’d thank her for this someday.”

  That day was not today. Jack explained that my milk supply would diminish if I took even one day off. How Jack suddenly became a lactation expert was beyond me. Between Jack and his mother’s mailings of articles on infant care, he was becoming more of an expert on mothering than I was.

  For the next hour, Jack and I tried unsuccessfully to convince the doctor on call to phone in a prescription to the all-night pharmacy. “No can do, amigo,” he kept saying in a surly Texas accent that suggested he did not consider us amigos at all. A red sports car pulled into our driveway and its headlights shone into our living room. We heard music turn off and voices chatter. Dr. Comstock was sitting in the driver’s seat and Anjoli was his passenger. I’d never been so conflicted in my life. On one hand, I abhorred my mother for making me an accomplice in her adulterous affair with my infant son’s pediatrician. On the other hand, Dr. Comstock could have me on my way to the pharmacy in minutes. “Dr. Comstock!” I burst onto my front steps. Saying his name created a cold fog from my breath. Were life equipped with a rewind button, I would’ve done the second take with slippers on my feet and a sweater tossed over my t-shirt. The pain from the snow on the soles of my feet was minimal compared to the crushed glass beneath my bra.