The twenty minutes in the taxi home are spent in tears and recuperation. But by the time we arrive, we are able to smile and preserve the conceit that a father likes nothing better than to spend a morning with his child.
AT SOME POINT in the last few decades, the American male sat down at the negotiating table with the American female and—let us be frank—got fleeced. The agreement he signed foisted all sorts of new paternal responsibilities on him and gave him nothing of what he might have expected in return. Not the greater love of his wife, who now was encouraged to view him as an unreliable employee. Not the special love from his child, who, no matter how many times he fed and changed and wiped and walked her, would always prefer her mother in a pinch. Not even the admiration of the body politic, who pushed him into signing the deal. Women may smile at a man pushing a baby stroller, but it is with the gentle condescension of a high officer of an army toward a village that surrendered without a fight. Men just look away in shame. And so the American father now finds himself in roughly the same position as Gorbachev after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Having shocked the world by doing the decent thing and ceding power without bloodshed for the sake of principle, he is viewed mainly with disdain. The world looks at him schlepping and fetching and sagging and moaning beneath his new burdens and thinks: OH…YOU…POOR…BASTARD.
But I digress.
I came home one night, relieved the babysitter, and found that Quinn had three bright red spots on her forehead and, for the first time in her life, a fever. The domestic policy handbook clearly states that when anything goes seriously wrong with our child, I am to holler for her mother and then take my place at her elbow and await further instructions. As I say, the American father of a baby is really just a second-string mother. But the first string was nowhere to be found. For the first time our child badly needed help that, it appeared, only I could provide. On the heels of that realization followed another: After a year of watching Quinn claw toward her mother whenever she became upset, I now could prove my own qualifications for the job.
A single phone call to a miraculous service called SOS Médicins fetched up a nattily clad French doctor to our doorstep inside five minutes. He arrived in a little white truck with a cross on the side that looked a bit like an old World War I ambulance. He was easily the most reassuring doctor I have ever met; there was not a hint of self-doubt about the man. Treating a sick baby is more like treating a sick dog than a sick person, as the baby can’t tell you where it hurts. To our new French doctor this proved no obstacle at all. He marched into the house, spotted Quinn giggling on the couch, smiled knowingly, and said, “Varicelle.”
Chicken pox. Having diagnosed the disease from a distance of fifteen feet, he then examined the howling patient for another three minutes. On top of the chicken pox, he found ear and throat infections, plus the fever I already knew about, plus a couple of unrelated, smaller defects. He was so efficient at finding diseases that I thought he would find she had the plague or something, but his work was so quick and self-assured that it was impossible to question any of it. Afterward, he sat down at our kitchen table and wrote out two long pages of prescriptions, all of them illegible, and said that he was certain she’d feel better once she’d taken a few of them. From start to finish, his visit took about fifteen minutes and cost less than forty bucks. Vive la France!
I trundled the prescriptions together with Quinn across the street to the pharmacy—everything in Paris you might want to buy always seems to be just across the street—and came away with a huge plastic sack of cures. Then, with a truly fantastic display of heretofore unrevealed parental competence, I actually persuaded my child to swallow several of them.
All this was perfectly thrilling, and not simply because there is an obvious pleasure in curing one’s child. Power was in the air. It was a rare fatherhood Al Haig moment: I was in charge here.
Then Tabitha walked into the house.
“What’s going on?”
I told her everything that had happened, and as I did, tears welled in her eyes. Mistaking their meaning, I could not have been more pleased with myself. I assumed she was moved by my performance. At this difficult moment in our child’s life, when she would naturally look to her mother for comfort, her mother was away and unreachable. Plucked from the end of the bench and sent into the game with just seconds on the clock, I’d been told to take the final shot. I’d hit nothing but net.
I waited for what I was certain would be a curtain call. Instead, there was only silence. I could see from her face that she wasn’t merely upset; she was irritated. She walked over to the sink and banged around some dirty dishes. With whom was she irritated? I wondered, neglecting the important truth, corollary to the rule about the fool at the poker table, that if you don’t know who your wife is pissed off at, it’s you.
“Why are you so upset?” I asked. “The worst is over—it’s all taken care of.”
“I just wish I had been…here.”
“But why?”
“If I was here I could have asked the questions.”
All of a sudden, my questions weren’t good enough. How would she know? She banged the dishes around a bit more, and then said, “Did you ask the doctor why he was sure all these medicines were the right ones?”
“Uh, no.” Of course I hadn’t. He was the doctor.
“Did you ask him why, if it is chicken pox, she’s had these red spots before?”
“She has?”
“Did you ask why they are only on her face?”
Upon review of the videotape, my three-point shot was nullified, the team went down in defeat, and I was sent back to the end of the bench. I was unable to answer even one of the questions that a genuinely caring parent would have thought to ask. “The doctor said that the spots would spread to the rest of her body by tomorrow,” I said, answering one that hadn’t been asked.
“I think we ought to call another doctor,” she said, then swept her child up in her arms and took her away to whatever place mothers take their children when they don’t want their husbands to follow. Once they’d left, I quickly, and for the first time, read the instructions on the medicine. The first two bottles I selected said, chillingly, “NOT FOR CHILDREN UNDER 6 YEARS OF AGE.” The bottle I believed to contain a chicken pox ointment proved, on close inspection, to be a sore-throat spray. The gunk I’d been told to apply to the pox itself was not a spray, as the forty-dollar home-delivery French doctor had told me it would be, but a strangely dry powder that was impossible to apply to anything, unless you happened to have Krazy Glue. Left alone with her father, our child stood no chance of survival.
The next day came, and the red spots refused to spread, and the fever subsided. The day after that, the fever had gone altogether, and the spots had faded to nothing. To me this was a very good sign: Quinn was cured. No, I had cured Quinn. The doctor had said that there were rare light cases of chicken pox in which the spots didn’t spread: Here was one. To my wife it was a sign that the doctor had queered the diagnosis and that our child must be ailing from some other, heretofore undiagnosed disease. “I want to take her to the hospital,” she said.
The language of parenthood is encoded. When a mother says to a father, “I want to take her to the hospital,” she is really saying “WE are ALL going to the hospital, and if you whisper even a word of complaint, you will have proved yourself for all time a man incapable of love.” Maternal concern is one of those forces of nature not worth fighting.
Off we went to find a taxi, and then to find a hospital. Once we did so, we were seated in a small waiting room jammed with toys in which Quinn showed little interest, clinging, as she was, to her mother. Twenty minutes later, we were greeted by another nattily clad doctor, who was, if anything, even more self-assured than the first. He took one look at Quinn, laughed loudly, and said, “Not chicken pox.”
Tabitha looked pleased. “Then what are these?” I asked, pointing to the faded spots on Quinn’s forehead.
“Insect
bites,” he said.
I handed him the spray and asked why the doctor had instructed me to apply it to chicken pox.
“I don’t know. This is sore-throat spray. Who told you your daughter had chicken pox?”
I gave him the whole story and handed him the two pages of prescriptions, which, as it happened, had the name of the doctor who had written them on top. This provoked only more laughter. “Dr. D___,” he said, “he doesn’t know anything about children’s medicine.”
“You know him?”
“He’s my golfing partner.” He was still laughing; this was the best joke he’d heard all day.
“Is he a good golfer?”
“Very! He spends very little time working as a doctor.”
On the way home in the car, the family spirits could not have been higher. Quinn was cured—or as good as cured—and well, nestling up against her mother. I was back on the end of the bench. And there, with my incompetence in dealing with matters critical to my child’s survival fully exposed, I was once again well loved. Some sort of natural order had been restored.
PART 2
DIXIE
MY MAIN AMBITION when my wife went into labor was to be sober. When our first child was born, I’d been rushing to finish a book. I’d suspected, rightly, that it would be impossible to reconcile book production with new fatherhood. To finish the manuscript before the baby arrived I’d taken to drinking several cups of coffee after dinner and working right through the night. I’d quit around four in the morning, then knock myself out with cheap wine. When Tabitha’s water broke I’d just thrown back a third glass of unsentimental Chardonnay. I’d wound up driving her to the hospital at five miles per hour and then, somewhat dramatically, passing out on her delivery room bed. I’d woken up just in time to witness the birth of my first child (Quinn Tallulah Lewis) but had made, I fear, a poor impression. For the past two years and eleven months I have been on the wrong end of a story called “How My Husband Was Loaded When My Baby Was Born.” I promised myself I’d do better this time. It was my last chance.
I remember that it was a Monday evening, just before cocktail hour, when Tabitha said she felt funny. An hour later we were in triage; an hour after that we were walking up and down the hospital halls to accelerate her labor to the point where it generated the respect of the women who doled out delivery rooms. I knew this hospital, from hazy experience. I recalled dimly the secret kitchen stocked with grape juice and the crushed ice and the strawberry Popsicles. I remembered vaguely how to finagle a private recovery room. I was the college graduate who had partied his way through school and was now returning on alumni day, hoping his classmates had forgotten what he’d been like. The one thing I knew for sure was that when they asked you if you wanted to get back in your car and endure labor in the intimacy of your own home, or take the hospital room now, you took the hospital room now. Having done this, I settled into the chair beside Tabitha’s bed and watched nurses string nine separate tubes and wires from her body to various machines: narcotics drip, penicillin drip, thermometers, blood pressure gauges, gas masks to deliver pure oxygen, heart monitors for baby and mother, and God knows what else.
And then…nothing. For the next ten hours we sat around with expectant looks, like extras in a World War II movie battle scene waiting for the Japanese finally to come charging through the jungle. From the point of view of the woman, “labor” is well named; from the point of view of the man, it really should be called “waiting.” Your wife goes into labor; you go into waiting.
A woman in labor needs to believe, however much evidence she has to the contrary, that the man in waiting beside her bed is directing every ounce of his concern toward her. This is of course impossible; and so the trick for the man in waiting is to disguise his private interests. He learns to camouflage trips to the john as grape-juice-fetching missions. When he is hungry he waits until his wife dozes off, then nips furtively down to the hospital vending machine for his supper of Ring Dings and Nacho Cheese Doritos. At some point in his private ordeal one of the hospital staff will turn to him and ask sweetly, “And how is Dad doing?” He must understand that no one actually cares how Dad is doing. His fatigue, his worries, his tedium, his disappointment at the contents of hospital vending machines—these are better unmentioned. Above all, he must know that if his mask of perfect selflessness slips for even a moment he will be nabbed.
“Would a little food taste good to you right now?”
“I don’t think so.” (Muffled, through oxygen mask.)
“Because they have these Ring Dings in the vending machine. The kind with the vanilla icing.”
The fixed accusing stare. “You’re incredible.” Pause. A weary tone. “If you want something to eat, just go get something to eat.”
At great and tedious length, fourteen hours after labor began, the baby made its dash for the exit. Then it stopped. The doctor on call poked and prodded a bit, then took off her gloves and stared.
Then another doctor appeared, Tabitha’s doctor, conveniently just back from vacation. Tabitha’s doctor is maybe the least likely obstetrician in Berkeley, California. He doesn’t believe, for example, in the sanctity of his patients’ whims. He has no time for superstition; he is unapologetic about his belief in the power of modern science; he believes that the best way to endure childbirth is not out in the woods surrounded by hooting midwives but in a hospital bed, numb from the waist down. He is, in short, my kind of guy. Maybe my favorite thing about him is the way he dismisses ignorant fears with such contempt that they simply vanish. When he is around, Tabitha feels, rightly, that she is in more capable hands than her own. This, for her, counts as an unusual experience.
Tabitha’s doctor collected information from the doctor on call, in the way doctors do. They spoke for maybe two minutes, in English as intelligible as their handwriting. At some point I remembered that it was my job to know what was going on.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“The baby wants to come out face first,” said the doctor on call.
“And that’s not good?”
“It won’t fit,” said Tabitha’s doctor. He let that unpleasant thought hang in the air.
“We can’t get a grip on it to turn it around,” said the doctor on call.
Without ever uttering the phrase “C-section,” the two doctors conveyed the idea of it well enough. As Tabitha’s doctor leaned in to see what he could do, I leaned over Tabitha and, drawing upon my years of selling bonds for Salomon Brothers, tried to persuade her of all the advantages to having her stomach cut open. She pretended to nod and agree, but tears welled in her eyes. The doctors, to their credit, noticed her distress; and, to their even greater credit, they responded to it. Before I knew how it happened, Tabitha’s doctor brandished a large pair of suction cups, one over each hand.
“I’m going to try to pull this baby out,” he said, in a different tone. He was no longer a doctor. He was a deep sea fisherman. One of those guys who sat on the back of big motorboats hauling in schools of giant tuna with one hand while drinking beer with the other.
Tabitha’s head popped off the pillow. “If it puts the baby at any risk I’d rather have the C-section,” she said.
“Tabitha, no shit.” The doctor shook his head and pretended to say to me what he wanted to say to himself. “I love the way her mind works. Just what I want to do, put the baby at risk.”
Ten minutes later, by some miracle I still do not understand, he was hauling a baby girl into the world. I knew from experience that the little involuntary sob of joy I made as my eyes met Tabitha’s was a fleeting sensation. I also knew that other, less understandable emotions would soon follow.
THE LAST PLACE to recover from what they do to you in a hospital is a hospital. When Tabitha staggered down the hall from her delivery room to her recovery room, she left a place where people had cared for her so well that it brought tears to my eyes, and entered a place where she was a nuisance. You might think that people who work in hospi
tal maternity wards have some special feeling for new mothers. You’d be wrong. Some of them enter the spirit of the occasion, and a few do it with obvious pleasure. But an astonishing number seem to resent any woman who has had the nerve to reproduce. To ensure that she thinks twice before she does it again, they bang bedpans against her door every twenty minutes, holler down the halls all hours of the night, ignore all her gentle requests, and, in general, exude the warmth and charm of an old Soviet border guard. “Oh, great, another fucking baby,” I half expected a few of them to say as they breathed their heavy sighs over my wife’s pale, spent body. For all I know, this is sound hospital strategy. Certainly, the atmosphere in the recovery ward discourages anyone from staying longer than necessary. The patient remains on the premises just long enough for the hospital to collect the data it needs to prove to the courts that it didn’t kill her.
Anyway, the last time around there was no question about what I would do after our child was born: I’d curl up in a little ball in the chair beside my wife’s hospital bed, protect her from the hospital staff, and pop down to the nursery every half hour or so to make sure that Quinn hadn’t been sold on the black market. This time is different. This time I’m free to go; indeed, it is my duty to go. By default, I’m now in charge of family harmony. Which is to say, I’m supposed to fetch Quinn from home, bring her to the hospital, and prove to her that her life, as promised, is now better than ever.
The past few months Tabitha ginned up what we both imagined to be a ruthlessly effective propaganda campaign to brainwash our two-and-a-half-year-old into thinking that the arrival of Dixie, and the subsequent collapse in her share of parental attention, was actually in her interest. Out went Dr. Seuss and in came I’m a Big Sister! and Hush, Don’t Wake the Baby. Each night, Quinn laid her head on her mother’s swelling belly and engaged her imaginary sibling in loving conversation. A few weeks back, I even drove her over to the hospital, walked her through a play-by-play of the birth, and, to encourage her to think of this as a win-win situation, bought her a chocolate doughnut from the hospital vending machine.
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