They hustled the civilians onto the plane. The GIs were tense. There were probably VC among the villagers, there might be a guy with a grenade buried in his armpit, and the bombers might arrive early and blow them up, too. My father was at the rear of the plane, helping the last few villagers embark as the plane began to pull away. He got them all on and he hopped on the tongue. The sound of the engines was loud and violent. An old lady holding a scrawny chicken under each arm, everything in the world that she now owned, lurched as though she wanted to run back for something else. A photo of a child or a husband? It didn’t matter; she couldn’t go back. My father grabbed her around the waist and held her tight as the plane picked up speed, bouncing over the landing strip he’d built the day before. She screamed an animal scream and dug her old lady elbows into my father’s ribs and her chickens made a racket and my father held tight as the plane gained altitude and the bombers began to drop their loads. My father and the woman watched as her village and her home were destroyed.
13
Oh Josephine
Christa and I wanted to bring our baby home to a stress-free environment. The stretch of Washington Avenue where we lived in Brooklyn did not qualify as such. I called it Little Kandahar. Most nights there were fistfights on the street; the occasional gunfight erupted nearby; once a car careened into the building; from the apartment window I’d witnessed a hit-and-run; and there were at least two men who patrolled the block in wheelchairs and aggressively panhandled and cursed and threatened physical violence against anyone who didn’t hand over money.
A block away one might eat at one of the better Italian restaurants in the city and pay twenty-five dollars for a plate of pasta. This neighborhood was wildly popular with art students and kids just out of college working their first shitty jobs before they had to depart the city for Montgomery or wherever they’d come from. Also there were a lot of white creative types in their thirties and forties who had for a number of years reportedly been civilizing the place with their wit and vigor and children. I saw no indication of this.
I admitted that my years in Chelsea had blinded me to the harsher realities of the outer boroughs and the inanities of the white creative class.
In early summer we moved full-time to Woodstock.
We spent the summer nesting. I painted the baby’s room Persian Violet and we acquired all of the matériel required for the first six months of her life. We hiked and hung out at swimming holes that only locals knew. We made fun of the hipsters who visited the Catskills on the weekends.
In early September Christa’s due date passed and we began to panic. She’d had a healthy pregnancy. Nothing indicated a problem birth, but her doctor talked about inducing her if she made it to a week past. Christa wanted a natural birth but she’d grown tired of pregnancy.
She said to her doctor, “Please get this baby out of me.”
The doctor said, “We’ll talk next week.”
We continued to nest: now we painted the large main room of the house. I went to the gym twice a day. I cleaned out the gutters on the house. I swept the chimney. We walked the three-mile route along Upper Byrdcliffe Road where we lived. The baby sat on Christa’s bladder like a queen on a throne, and our walks aggravated the situation. Christa learned how to squat at the side of the road and pretend to admire flowers when actually she was taking a pee.
We considered driving fifteen hundred miles to Tennessee so she’d be certain to have the baby naturally at The Farm, the birthplace of contemporary American midwifery. But we realized we’d have to drive home that same fifteen hundred miles with a newborn and that seemed cruel to everyone involved.
There had been talk of castor oil to induce a natural labor, an old trick of the midwives. All tricks have believers and naysayers: the believers said, Go for it, while the naysayers said, Enjoy sitting on your toilet for a day or two.
We’d heard of a restaurant in Georgia where they guaranteed that at your due date or beyond you’d go into labor within twenty-four hours of eating their eggplant Parmesan. Christa wanted a dozen servings delivered express.
One afternoon I stopped by the butcher and decided that for dinner we must eat a massive three-pound porterhouse.
At home I dropped it on the kitchen table and dubbed it the Labor Steak.
Christa said, “God, I’ll do anything to get this baby out of me.”
And I knew she meant it.
“The Labor Steak will do it, sweetheart. A steak must work better than eggplant Parmesan.”
In the early evening I returned again from the gym and found Christa reclining on the couch, a glass of syrupy pink liquid in front of her.
She said, “God, this tastes awful.”
“What is it?”
“Fruit juice and castor oil.”
“Where did you get castor oil?”
She laughed. “I bought it weeks ago.”
“How much did you take?”
“A teaspoon.”
“That’s child’s play. You need at least two tablespoons or it won’t work,” I said with the certainty borne of a Google search. I fixed Christa a higher dose.
It was the chilliest night since we’d moved to Woodstock, and we decided to have our first fireplace fire. Castor oil. Labor Steak. Romantic fire. We couldn’t go wrong.
Christa loved eating a steak so nearly raw you’d think it still had a pulse. Like a good husband I’d refused to allow her a rare steak throughout her pregnancy, but at nearly a week past her due date I decided she’d earned a steak at whatever temperature she desired. Outside on the deck I prepared the charcoal.
Inside, the fireplace spat out flames and Christa set the table. I stared at her through the window. She was my extremely beautiful and massively pregnant and petite wife and I knew that very soon, possibly within hours, our lives would change forever.
Like every other night we ate late. It was almost ten when I threw the meat on the grill. The woods that surrounded our home were dark and quiet.
The beastly three-pound porterhouse crawled off the grill and onto a serving platter after a few minutes of cooking.
We sat down for dinner, and the shadows from the fire licked our freshly painted walls and we ate our steak there in our charmingly rustic family home. All we were missing was that darn baby.
We’d each had a few bites of the steak. I wanted to ask about the castor oil but also I didn’t want to ask about the castor oil. I knew that during her pregnancy she’d spared me the details of a number of the bodily mortifications she’d suffered. I assumed that if the castor oil experiment failed she’d keep the results to herself. I didn’t mind this.
Christa looked at me and her large doe eyes grew wider and she said, “Oh. Jesus. I think I need to spend a lot of time alone on the toilet.” She looked bashfully at the floor and pushed her plate away.
I said, “I’m sorry. This isn’t going to be fun, is it?”
“I’m sorry to ruin our dinner,” she said.
“Don’t be silly.”
Her eyes grew wider and she said, “Wait. I think my water broke?”
“How do you know?” I stupidly asked.
She reached down between her legs and said, “I know.”
She grabbed her phone and called the hospital.
I used the fireplace tongs to throw the burning logs into a large copper cauldron and dragged the cauldron outside and onto the deck. If my wife hadn’t needed to rush to the hospital I would have paused to admire the awesome sight of flames shooting five feet high into the dark night. But I doused the logs with a hose, and by the time I made it back inside Christa was already out front waiting in the car. The birthing center in Rhinebeck was forty minutes away.
She said, “Speed, speed, speed. I’m going to have this baby in the car!”
I have never regularly obeyed speed limits and the slightest encouragement from a passenger will always cause me to slam down the gas pedal. But this night, with the most important life at risk, I refused to speed.
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“It will take longer if I get pulled over,” I said.
“You speed on this road every fucking day, like three times a fucking day. Are you kidding me?”
“I’m not kidding. Delivery is a long way off.”
I’d read the books for expectant fathers. They were all very clear that the father shouldn’t speed toward the hospital. They also advised that when your partner no longer thinks your jokes are funny she is definitely in labor. We drove by the bar in Woodstock where my old landlord from Mount Tremper played bluegrass every Thursday night.
I motioned toward the Wok ’n Roll and said, “Want to hear some live music?”
She did not laugh.
“Let me drive,” she said. “I’ll speed.”
I refused to relinquish the wheel. We arrived in Rhinebeck without birthing the baby in the car.
We settled in the room. Christa had hired the help of a doula, a woman named Mary. Mary had about her the old mountain wisdom and also, I’d thought, a whiff of the hippie grifter.
My main job was to play the Josephine Birth Mix from my laptop. Over the summer Mary had urged us to forgo the usual birthing classes, and when Christa asked about breathing techniques Mary said, “You are alive. You already know how to breathe. You were born for this. When the time comes just relax and have your baby. She’ll tell you when she’s ready.”
Which is what happened.
I won’t say that I did nothing. I’d like to think that I was a calm and supportive presence for my wife during one of the most intense physical and psychological moments of her life. This might be true. I played the Black Crowes’ song “Oh Josephine” on repeat for about an hour around three-thirty in the morning. At about five I played “Into the Mystic” on repeat. I held the oxygen to Christa’s mouth when Mary told me to.
I repeated, “You are an amazing woman and you are giving birth to our beautiful baby and we will both love you forever.”
But mostly I watched four women—Christa, Mary the doula, the nurse, and the midwife—take part in the craziest thing I’d ever seen in my life. I’d been shot at during war and I’d seen what American-made five-hundred-pound bombs do to the human body, but nothing I’d witnessed compared to the intensity and immensity of my wife giving birth.
I watched these women take part in the natural birth of Josephine and I realized men could never accomplish this: four men trying to bring life into the world? Two would be engaged in a fistfight, one would be doing whiskey shots in the corner, and the other would be on the floor in a fetal position, weeping.
Josephine did tell us when she was ready for the world, at exactly 5:22 a.m. I caught her, as they say. She was a small bundle of loose limbs and of vernix, crying a beautiful cry. Her head looked like a collapsed hothouse tomato. I wondered if it would ever regain human shape, but I didn’t betray my alarm to Christa.
I moved Josephine to her mother’s chest, and I said, “Oh, Josephine, welcome to the family. We’ve been waiting so long to meet you.”
She latched on to Christa’s breast and we both held her little body. We were a family.
At first Josephine looked like every other baby, and then she began to fill out. There were days when I glanced at her and she looked like a complete stranger. And other days she looked just like Jeff. She usually looked like Jeff in the mornings, for some reason. I could see him in her brow and eyes and dear sweet smile. Around this time one of my aunts happened to send me a package with dozens of photos, many of them from the years when my parents lived in Spain and Jeff was an infant. And these photos confirmed for me Josephine’s resemblance to her uncle Jeff.
ON THE LAST weekend of October we’re warned to prepare for the biggest and earliest snow in New York State in decades. In a matter of hours the mountain we live on in Woodstock has turned from leaf-peeping ideal to deep winter landscape. The tourists who booked up the hotels months ago for the last look at red and yellow leaves descending from oak and poplar must change their plans. The leaves and trails are now frozen, which means no rigorous hikes up Overlook Mountain this weekend. Perhaps they might drive down to Kingston and purchase a sled at a sporting goods store and sled-race down the hills, or buy bourbon at a liquor store and submit to the baser instincts during a storm: get drunk and stay warm.
The tourists will be smart to learn from the twenty-two-year-old hiker Ryan Owens, who managed to get lost hiking near Moon Haw Road in the Slide Mountain Wilderness on Friday afternoon. He and his friend’s dog Maggie spent the evening in a cave, and in the morning, as the big snow began to drop, they covered seven miles through rugged mountain terrain before finding civilization. Ryan had with him only Maggie and a bottle of water and he wore a long-sleeved thermal T-shirt.
Just over a year ago, had I been this Mr. Owens, I would have welcomed the snow and the fury of this freak early storm, and I might have stayed in the cave to die.
Tonight Josephine has been fussy, something new for us. My mother is visiting from California but she offers no baby-calming advice, and we appreciate this. After all, I am the last infant she took care of, forty-one years ago. The techniques have changed and this she must be aware of. And if my mother offers advice, I can counter with the knowledge that she smoked while pregnant with me and continued to smoke in my presence until the day I left home for the Marines. I often joke with her and claim that her in utero and secondhand smoke caused both my bad eyesight and my slow times in the forty-yard dash, and that if not for her smoking I might have been a fighter pilot or a football star or both.
Some truth and rage course through the nuances of my joke. I still blame my mother for some of the hurt and fear I suffered throughout my childhood: Why did you not protect me from your secondhand carcinogenic smoke, and why did you not protect me from my father? You must have known that both were toxic.
The snow falls steadily and Christa worries that we will lose power. We lost power for a week during Hurricane Irene and were lucky to retreat to a friend’s vacation cottage in Maine during that time. A lengthy power outage with the baby in the house might be enough to scare us off the mountain and back to New York City.
Christa says, “If we lose power again, I’ll tell Byrdcliffe we just can’t take these risks with the baby. I’ll kick the renters out of the Washington Avenue apartment and we’ll be home in Brooklyn for Christmas.”
Here in Woodstock we rent an idyllic converted barn from the Byrdcliffe Artists Colony. It is a wonderful place to have brought the baby home but we are ready for a return to city living. The mountains are too slow. The power outage flirts with our city dreams, and the lights flutter off and on throughout the evening, but the power remains on. We both want the power to fail and to have to head to the Thruway and get a few rooms at the Holiday Inn and use this as the ammo for breaking our lease. Dragging your baby to a Holiday Inn so she doesn’t freeze to death is reason enough to break a lease, right?
This evening my mother cooked dinner. She made the enchiladas I grew up eating. I’ve been talking up these enchiladas to Christa since our first date. I remember from my boyhood only a few good feelings as constant and certain as the news that my mother planned enchiladas for dinner.
Tonight the enchiladas disappoint with a surprising blandness, and my mother knows it and I know it and Christa knows it, but we tell my mother that the enchiladas are great and we both take seconds because this is what you tell your sixty-eight-year-old mother. Growing up I loved my mother’s cooking, but now I am a rather accomplished self-taught home cook, and I can cook smoke rings around my mother, but no one needs to say it. And it doesn’t matter.
Yesterday I took my mother to the grocery store and she bought the same canned enchilada sauce she has used for decades. I wanted to tell her that she could make her own sauce from scratch, that it would be very easy in fact to make from scratch a flavorful and robust red enchilada sauce, and that in our pantry we had everything she would need for this tasty sauce, but I bit my tongue. Sometimes food is not about the flavo
r but the gesture. My mother made dinner for me and my wife and my newborn baby daughter. That is more important than the flavor of the meal, isn’t it? Someday when my mother has passed I will remember the night in Woodstock when I left my foodie pretensions in the canned food aisle of the supermarket and my mother cooked the enchiladas of my childhood for my wife and daughter. I will not remember that the enchiladas tasted bland. I will cherish the fact that as a winter storm streaked the Catskills with flashes of freezing snow, my mother labored in my kitchen and after the meal we were all full and we were happy. And by that time I will even forget that as a boy my mother failed to protect me from my bully father and that she smoked Pall Malls and ruined my speed in the forty-yard dash. Won’t I? Mothers are immensely forgivable creatures.
For the fussy baby, Christa and I have tried all the tricks we know as new parents: slings and swings and lullabies and Van Morrison and college football. Neither of us says so, but we are both thinking the same thing: Some ingredient from the canned enchilada sauce has entered into Christa’s breast milk and turned our baby into a monster! I watch a close football game and bounce the baby on my knee while Christa scans a number of child-rearing books trying to locate the exact cause of our daughter’s sleeplessness and distress. We count the diapers Josephine soiled today, we count the feedings, and we count her farts. We add the values and divide by our anxiety squared. Baby sleep is a science and we are both humanists, total failures at science.
I say to my mother, feeling guilty about something, “JoJo never does this. It’s midnight. She’s usually asleep by nine.”
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