Home Game

by Michael Lewis

  “One more just like that.”

  “One! Two! Three!”

  Next comes the sound of a hairless dog escaping from quicksand. Sluuuuuuuurrrrppp!

  “It’s a boy!”

  And with that, Walker Jack Lewis comes into the world.

  ONCE THEY WHEEL Tabitha from the delivery room to the recovery room, Stage 1 ends and Stage 2 begins. For the whole of Stage 1, a father performs no task more onerous than seeming busy when he isn’t. Nothing in Stage 1 prepares him for Stage 2, when he becomes, in a heartbeat, chauffeur, cook, nurse, gofer, personal shopper, Mr. Fixit, sole provider, and single parent. Stage 2 is life as a Mexican immigrant, with less free time. Entering Stage 2, I know from experience, I have between twenty-four and forty-eight hours before I’m overwhelmed by a tsunami of self-pity. I set out to make the most of them.

  The first assignment is to fetch our seven-and four-year-old daughters from home so that they can meet their new baby brother and see firsthand the joy of partial disinheritance. The birth is supposed to have put them into a delicate psychological state. As I enter the house, I see no trace of it, however, or, for that matter, of them. Just inside the front door lies the shrapnel from an exploded giant Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. In the kitchen is the residue of what seems to have been a pancake breakfast for twenty. Dishes long banished from use have migrated out of the backs of kitchen cabinets, toys untouched for years litter their bedroom floors. Exactly thirteen hours ago, at midnight, our kind and generous next-door neighbors left their own bed for ours, so that we might go to the hospital and have a baby. Briefly, I have the feeling that if I turned around and walked away, my children would very happily use these new grown-ups to create a new life for themselves and never think twice about it.

  At length, I find them, at play with their benign overlords in the courtyard. “Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!” they shriek.

  We embrace histrionically. They know where I’ve been, and they know their mother has given birth. But instead of asking the obvious question—to what?—they race off to find various works of art they’ve created in the past six hours. “You have a baby brother!” I shout at their vanishing backs. A baby brother, as it happens, is exactly what they both claimed to least want. “A baby brother!” they shriek.

  I’ve never been able to feel whatever it is I’m meant to feel on great occasions, so I shouldn’t expect them to, either. But of course I do. It’s not until they climb into the minivan that they finally get a grip. “Daddy?” asks Dixie, age four, from her seat in the third row. “How does the baby get out of Mama?”

  This minivan is new. I’ve never been in the same car with a person who still seemed so far away. In the rearview mirror, her little blond head is a speck.

  I holler back what little I know.

  “Daddy?” asks Quinn, age seven.

  “Yes, Quinn.”

  “How do cells get from your body into Mama’s body?”

  We wheel into the hospital parking lot.

  “Help me look for a parking spot.”

  That distracts her: They love to look for parking spots. In the Bay Area, looking for parking spots counts as a hobby. One day when they are grown, their therapists will ask them, “What did you and your father do together?” and they will say, “Look for parking spots.”

  We find a spot and instantly the race is on to the hospital elevators, followed by the usual battle-to-the-death to push the up/down button, followed by the usual cries from Dixie that because Quinn pushed the up/ down button she has first dibs on the floor button, followed by Quinn’s usual attempt to push the floor button, too. Since not long after Tabitha began to balloon, they’ve treated every resource as scarce; one of anything has become casus belli; no object is too trivial to squabble over. A Gummi Worm vitamin, for instance, or a ripped pair of stockings. Produce in their presence an actually desirable object—an elevator button in need of punching or, God forbid, a piece of candy—and you’ll have screams inside of a minute and tears inside of two. Oddly enough, they used to get along.

  When the elevator doors open onto the third floor—all smiles, you’d never know how narrowly they’d just averted bloodshed—they come face to knee with Shirley. Shirley is the large and intimidating security guard assigned to prevent the twelve thousand babies born each year in the Alta Bates hospital from being stolen. She must be a success at it, as she’s been guarding them even longer than we’ve been making them. This is the very same Shirley who, seven and a half years ago, prevented Quinn from being abducted at birth, and thus spared some poor kidnapper years of sleep deprivation.

  But even Shirley presents the girls with no more than a small speed bump in their endless race. Security badges gleefully grabbed, they resume their competition to see who will be the first to find Mama’s room, Number 3133. Advantage Quinn, again, as Dixie can’t read any number greater than ten. With Dixie behind her running as fast as her little legs will carry her and screeching, “Wait for me, Quinn!” Quinn flies to her mother’s hospital door. And there, amazingly, she stops in her tracks. The big, cold recovery room door is too much for even her to barrel through. She knocks nervously and announces her presence, giving Dixie just time enough to catch up.

  “Just let me put some clothes on!” I hear Tabitha shout.

  That’s not what she’s doing. She’s setting the stage.

  Much effort, none of it mine, has gone into preparing for this moment. She’s bought and read them countless books about sibling rivalry; taken them to endless sibling prep classes at the hospital; rented many sibling-themed videos narrated by respected authorities—Dora the Explorer for Dixie, Arthur for Quinn; watched with them, every Sunday night, their own old baby videos; and even bought presents to give to them from the baby when they visit him in the hospital. Before this propaganda blitz, our children may or may not have suspected that they were victims of a robbery, but afterward they were certain of it. Hardly a day has passed in months without melodramatic suffering. One afternoon I collected Dixie from her preschool—to take one of approximately six thousand examples—and learned that she’d moped around the playground until a teacher finally asked her what was troubling her. “When the baby comes, my parents won’t love me as much,” she’d said. Asked where she’d got that idea from, she said, “My big sister told me.”

  I’ve sometimes felt that we’re using the wrong manual to fix an appliance—that, say, we’re trying to repair a washing machine with the instructions for the lawn mower. But my wife presses on, determined to find room enough for three children’s happiness. The current wisdom holds that if you seem to be not all that interested in your new child the first time the older ones come to see him, you might lessen their suspicion that he’s come to pick their pockets. And so that’s what she’s doing in there: As her children wait at her hospital door, she’s moving Walker from her bed into a distant crib.

  “Okay, come in!”

  They push through the door and into the room.

  “Can I hold him, Mom?” asks Quinn.

  “No, I want to hold him!” shouts Dixie.

  And with that Walker’s identity is established: one of something that we need two of. In less time than it takes an Indy pit crew to change a tire, Quinn’s holding him and Dixie’s waiting her turn, swallowing an emotion she cannot articulate and wearing an expression barely distinguishable from motion sickness.

  THERE IS A warning sign before the trouble begins, but I miss it. The afternoon I bring Tabitha home from the hospital is also the day of our neighbor’s glamorous wedding, in which Quinn and Dixie are to be the flower girls. In walks Tabitha, and off flounce her little girls with other grown-ups to the Mark Hopkins Hotel, to have their hair and makeup done, and then lead a bride to her doom. Good, I think, the little monsters are gone for the day, and Tabitha will have one day of peace in the house, before the war resumes. But when I deliver Mother’s Milk Tea to her in bed, I find her sobbing. “I just wanted to be there when our little girls walked down the aisle
,” she says, as if they, not our neighbor, were getting married. This is unusual; her mind has a slight tendency to race to some tragic conclusion, but she usually stops it before it arrives. I hug her, pretend to sympathize, tell her that it’s no big deal to miss just one of approximately three thousand occasions on which her little girls will dress up like princesses and preen in public. And she appears to agree, and to feel better. Fixed that one, I think, and move on to the next. A family is like a stereo system: A stereo system is only as good as its weakest component, and a family is only as happy as its unhappiest member. Occasionally that is me; more often it is someone else; and so I must remain vigilant, lest the pleasure of my own life be dampened by their unhappiness.

  On this first night, even after the girls return, it is not. I can’t believe it: Five people in the room and there is nothing wrong with any of them. I’m like a man who has fallen from a ten-story building only to get up and walk away without a scratch. I’d count all my blessings, but I’d run out of fingers, so I stick with the big ones. For the first time in three attempts, my wife has given birth without needing doctors to save the child’s life or hers. She’s so physically robust that she declined a second free night in the hospital and came home early. Our baby is healthy and—a first in my experience of newborns—reasonable. He cries when he’s hungry and weeps before he farts and otherwise appears to be satisfied with the world as he finds it. Even his older sisters have gone into remission. Eight hours of the full princess treatment distracts them for a few more from their suspicion that a new baby brother means less of everything for them. We spend an hour in front of the fire like a fairy-tale family, listening to them relive their first wedding. “When we walked down the aisle, they played Taco Bell’s Canyon,” Quinn says knowingly. (Named for its German composer, Johann TacoBell.)

  When they’re done, they yawn and go off to bed, sweetly, like fairy-tale children, and leave us with fairy-tale leisure—which we use to decode this year’s Christmas cards, stacked up and waiting for weeks. There’s the drummer in the rock band who sends us a card each year but each year has got himself an entirely new family. Not merely a new wife but, seemingly, new cousins, aunts, and uncles. Who are they? There’s a couple we’ve never seen, apart from in the picture they’ve helpfully included, but who say how nice it was to get together with us not once but twice in 2006. Who are they?

  Two happy little girls sleep in their bunks, and a new baby boy sleeps in the contraption Tabitha has rigged up beside our bed—having given away the expensive co-sleeper she swore we’d never again need because she was done having babies. In time she joins him, and so I curl up with Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population, a new edition for which, oddly enough, I owe an introduction. “I think I may fairly make two postulates,” writes Malthus, before advancing the most famously wrong prediction about humanity ever made. “First, That food is necessary to the existence of man. Secondly, That the passion between the sexes is necessary and will remain nearly in its present state.” And off he sets, with the cool hysteria of the Unabomber’s manifesto, to argue that my biggest problem circa 2007 should be a shortage of corn. On the other side of the Bay, fireworks explode. It’s New Year’s Eve.

  Just before two in the morning, I’m prodded awake. It’s Tabitha, with a look on her face I’ve never seen there before. “I’m sorry,” she says.

  “Okay,” I say. “What’s the matter?” But I already know it’s serious. She’s fighting very hard to hold it together. Her eyes dart around, and she fidgets as if she itches in fifty places at once.

  “I don’t know,” she says, “I’m really, really scared.”

  She’s like an addict in need of a fix that does not exist. She’s terrified. Worse, she doesn’t know what she’s terrified of. All she knows is that she can’t be alone, can’t even close her eyes in my presence without shuddering with fear. “I think I might need to go to the emergency room,” she says reluctantly, and she might. But it’s two in the morning, we have three small children in the house, the neighbors are all gone, and the nearest blood relation is two thousand miles away.

  “Tell me exactly what you feel.”

  “As if something really bad’s going to happen.”

  Tears fill her eyes.

  “I feel like I don’t have any control of anything. I feel like I might be going insane.”

  Five minutes later I’m leaving messages on doctors’ voice mails with one hand and Googling with the other:

  Childbirth. Panic.

  At the top pops alternative translations of Psalm 48:6 (Panic seized them there, / Anguish, as of a woman in childbirth). Skipping down, I find what appears to be a relevant entry: Post-traumatic Stress Disorders After Childbirth.

  “Have you ever heard of this?” I ask her.

  “No,” she says. But then a lot of unpleasant things can happen to a woman after childbirth, and you don’t hear about most of them until they happen to your wife in the middle of the night.

  “Don’t leave me alone,” she says, trembling beside me.

  I don’t think I’ve ever seen her scared of anything, and she is now more frightened than I’ve ever seen another human being outside of the movies. She’s the little kid in The Sixth Sense. She sees dead people. Still, born with the ability to remain calm in the face of other people’s misery, I feel more curious than alarmed. People who actually are going insane don’t know they are going insane. Googling on, I finally come to a plausible-sounding Web page written by a psychiatrist named Christine Hibbert. “Three common fears experienced by women with a Postpartum Panic Disorder are: 1) fear of dying, 2) fear of losing control, and/or 3) fear that one is going crazy.”

  It’s like finding the picture of the red-throated diver in the bird-watching manual right after you’ve glimpsed one for the first time. Postpartum Panic Disorder: So now the thing has a name. Roughly one woman in ten experiences it after childbirth. How, then, could we never have heard of it?

  At length a doctor calls back: Stay with her, she says, and do what you can to calm her down. But she may become completely hysterical, in which case she’ll need to go to the hospital.

  The next six hours offer a new experience. She can’t sleep; she can’t close her eyes for fear of her mind thinking some terrible thought. But I know—or think I know, which amounts to the same thing—that she’s suffering from some chemical glitch that would repair itself in time and that a pill would fix instantly. What she feels has nothing to do with who she is. It’s a state of mind triggered by an event that she will never again endure. She might just as well have turned bright green for a day. But she doesn’t know this. She’s sure as Malthus that this terror is going to be with her forever—and yet she’s as brave as she can be about it. Amazingly, the only thing that makes her feel better is me. I fix her tea, rub her back, and try to enjoy being the sane one for as long as it lasts.

  ONE AFTERNOON I find my wife standing in the kitchen preparing, once again, to cry. The pills they gave her instantly silenced the brain screams. She’s gone from being terrified that she’s losing her mind and that everyone she loves is going to soon die to being, occasionally, sad. I’ll come across her getting dressed or sterilizing baby bottles, standing as still as a lady in a Vermeer painting, with tears in her eyes. There’s no point in asking what’s the matter—you might as well ask a flat tire why it doesn’t have air. She’s enduring this strange hormonal postpartum deflation that has nothing, really, to do with her. She’s gone from needing to be rescued to wanting to be comforted. Which is, in theory, where I come in.

  On the afternoon in question, the girls snack on tubes of yogurt, which they will now eat only if they come frozen just so—even though they aren’t meant to be frozen. I walk in, note them squabbling madly about who gets the grape yogurt and who the strawberry, see the pools growing in Tabitha’s eyes, take her in my arms, and ask, “Do you two have any idea how lucky you are to have a mom who takes such good care of you?”

  Dixie
, preoccupied with the Battle for the Grape One, does not hear me, but Quinn looks up for a moment, stares at us, and says, “There’s lots of good moms.”

  It’s her new trick, to render cold and dispassionate judgments about her parents at their moments of greatest vulnerability. Two days earlier she and Dixie were both home sick, and I went off to my office, consumed with anxiety, to figure out (a) how expensive it was going to be to build another bedroom for the baby (very), and (b) how I was ever going to work again when I didn’t sleep. At the first opportunity Quinn snuck into the TV room, clicked around the TiVo, found a biography of Bill Gates, and called Dixie in to watch it with her. An hour later I returned to find them both waiting for me: Quinn with hands on hips, Dixie forlorn and grasping a handful of berries.

  “Daddy,” said Dixie seriously. “I got some berries from the Gulf Stream waters.”

  “Why did you do that?”

  “So we can eat them. Because we are poor.”

  Which seemed like a sweet reaction to the Bill Gates documentary, until Quinn fixed me with her I’m-hereto-speak-the-truth-to-power stare and said, “We’re poor, Daddy. And you didn’t tell us. You lied to us.”

  As always, it’s hard to say whether it’s developmental or just mental. Must the seven-year-old mind discover for itself every possible way to offend other people before it can settle on a more sociable approach? Is this just the bug that comes with the software upgrade? I don’t know. At any rate, as I stand there with her mother crying in my arms searching for the words that will encourage her to be sweet, I come up empty. “Your mother takes really good care of you and me and Dixie and Walker, and I’m really proud of her,” I finally say.

  “You’re just saying that to make her feel better,” says Quinn.

  Just four weeks after the birth of my son, both of my daughters are living, in effect, outside the law. They act as if they have nothing to lose, and, materially speaking, they don’t. They’ve behaved so badly, for so long, that everything that might be taken away from them has been taken away: TV, candy, desserts, playdates, special dinners, special breakfasts, special outings with parents. They are like a pair of convicts in a Soviet gulag with nothing more than they need to survive—and still they continue to subvert the authorities. Oddly, their teachers all say that at school they remain little angels.