Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim

  “This is it,” Michael said. From the other side of the door I heard the sound of a television. It was one of those Sunday-morning magazine programs, a weekly hour where all news is good news. Blind Jimmy Henderson coaches a volleyball team. An ailing groundhog is fitted for a back brace. That type of thing. The boy inserted his card key into the slot, and the door opened onto a bright, well-furnished room. It was twice the size of mine, with higher ceilings and a sitting area. One window framed a view of the lake, and the other a stand of scarlet maples.

  “Oh, you’re back,” a woman said. She was clearly the boy’s mother, as their profiles were identical, the foreheads easing almost imperceptively into blunt freckled noses. Both too had spiky blond hair, though for her I imagined the style was accidental, the result of the pillows piled behind her head. She was lying beneath the covers of a canopy bed, examining one of the many brochures scattered across the comforter. A man slept beside her, and when she spoke, he shifted slightly and covered his face with the crook of his arm. “What took you so long?” She looked toward the open door, and her eyes widened as they met mine. “What the . . .”

  There was a yellow robe at the foot of the bed, and the woman turned her back to me as she got up and stepped into it. Her son reached for the coffees, and I tightened my grip, unwilling to surrender what I’d come to think of as my props. They turned me from a stranger to a kindly stranger, and I’d seen myself holding them as his parents rounded on me, demanding to know what was going on.

  “Give them to me,” he said, and rather than making a scene, I relaxed my grip. The coffees were taken, and I felt my resolve starting to crumble. Empty-handed, I was just a creep, the spooky wet guy who’d crawled up from the basement. The woman crossed to the dresser, and as the door started to close she called out to me. “Hey,” she said. “Wait a minute.” I turned, ready to begin the fight of my life, and she stepped forward and pressed a dollar into my hand. “You people run a very nice hotel,” she told me. “I just wish we could stay longer.”

  The door closed and I stood alone in the empty corridor, examining my tip and thinking, Is that all?

  Who’s the Chef?

  My boss has a rubber hand,” I told our Parisian dinner guests following my one and only day of work. The French word for boss is our word for chef, so it sounded even better than I’d expected. A chef with a rubber hand. You’d think it would melt.

  The guests leaned closer to the table, not sure if I was using the right word. “Your chef? Since when did you start working?” They turned to Hugh for confirmation. “He has a job?”

  Thinking, I guess, that I wouldn’t notice, Hugh set down his fork and mouthed the words “It’s volunteer work.” What irritated me was the manner in which he said it—not outright, but barely whispered, the way you might if your three-year-old was going on about his big day at school. “It’s day care.”

  “Volunteer or not, I still had a chef,” I said. “And his hand was made of rubber.” I’d sat on this information for hours, had even rehearsed its delivery, double-checking all the important words in the dictionary. I don’t know what I’d expected—but it definitely wasn’t this.

  “I’m sure it wasn’t actual rubber,” Hugh said. “It was probably some kind of plastic.”

  The friends agreed, but they hadn’t seenmy chef, hadn’t watched as he thoughtlessly wedged a pencil between his man-made fingers. A plastic hand wouldn’t have given quite so easily. A plastic hand would have made a different sound against the tabletop. “I know what I saw,” I said. “It was rubber and it smelled like a pencil eraser.”

  If someone told me that his boss’s hand smelled like a pencil eraser, I’d shut up and go with it, but Hugh was in one of his moods. “What, this guy let you smell his hand?”

  “Well, no,” I said. “Not exactly.”

  “Okay, then, it was plastic.”

  “So, what,” I said, “is everything not held directly to your nose made out of plastic? Is that the rule now?” One of our joint New Year’s resolutions was to stop bickering in front of company, but he was making it really hard. “The hand was rubber,” I said. “Heavy rubber, like a tire.”

  “So it was inflatable?” The guests laughed at Hugh’s little joke, and I took a moment to think the worse of them. An inflatable hand is preposterous and not worth imagining. Couldn’t they see that?

  “Look,” I said, “this wasn’t something I saw in a shop. I was right there, in the room with it.”

  “Fine,” Hugh said. “So what else?”

  “What do you mean, ‘what else’?”

  “Your volunteer job. So the boss had an artificial hand—what else?”

  Let me explain that it isn’t easy finding volunteer work in Paris. The government pays people to do just about everything, especially during an election year, and when I visited the benevolence center, the only thing available was a one-day job helping to guide the blind through one of the city’s Metro stations. The program was run by my chef, who’d set up a temporary office in a small windowless room beside the ticket booth. It wasn’t my fault that no blind people showed up. “Listen,” I said, “I just spent six hours in a storage closet being ignored by a man with a rubber hand. What do you mean, ‘What else?’ What more do I need?”

  The friends stared blankly, and I realized I’d been speaking in English.

  “In French,” Hugh said. “Say it in French.”

  It was one of those times when you really notice the difference between speaking and expressing yourself. I knew the words—blind people, election year, storage closet—but even when coupled with verbs and pronouns they didn’t add up the way I needed them to. In English my sentences could perform double duty, saying both that I’d reported for volunteer work and that Hugh would be punished for not listening to the single most interesting thing that had happened to me since moving to Paris.

  “Just forget it,” I said.

  “Suit yourself.”

  I left the table for a glass of water, and when I returned, Hugh was discussing Monsieur DiBiasio, the plumber hired to replace our bathroom sink.

  “He’s got one arm,” I told the guests.

  “No, he doesn’t,” Hugh said. “He’s got two.”

  “Yes, but one of them doesn’t work.”

  “Well, he’s still got it,” Hugh said. “It’s there. It fills a sleeve.”

  He’s always doing this, contradicting me in front of company. And so I did what I always do, which is ask a question and then deny him a chance to answer.

  “Define an arm,” I said. “If you’re talking about the long, hairy thing that hangs from your shoulder, okay, he’s got two, but if you’re talking about a long hairy thing that moves around and actually does shit then he’s got one, all right? I should know. I’m the one who carried the sink up three goddam flights of stairs. Me, not you.”

  The guests were getting uncomfortable, but I didn’t care. Technically, Hugh was right, the plumber had two arms, but we weren’t in a courtroom and there was no punishment for a little exaggeration. People like mental pictures; they give them something to do besides just listening. Hadn’t we been through this? Instead of backing me up, he’d made me out to be a liar, and, oh, I hated him for that.

  Once he’d destroyed my credibility with the one-armed plumber, it was pretty much over as far as the rubber hand was concerned. The guests weren’t even thinking plastic anymore, they were thinking actual working hand, made of flesh and bone and muscle. The mental picture had been erased and they’d never understand that a hand is defined by its movement rather than its shape. The chef’s had fingernails, creases—you probably could have read the palm—but it was pink and stiffish, like a false hand you might use when teaching a dangerous animal to shake. I don’t know how it attached or where, but I’m fairly certain he could take it off without too much trouble. While sitting there, just the two of us, waiting for blind people who never showed, I imagined how the hand might look positioned on a bedside table, if t
hat was where he kept it. There was probably no point in wearing it to bed, the thing wasn’t particularly helpful; the fingers didn’t open and close. It was just a deception, like a hairpiece or a false eyelash.

  The dinner conversation staggered on, but the evening was already shot. Anyone could see that. In another few minutes the guests would look at their watches and say something about their babysitter. Coats would be retrieved and we’d stand in the hallway saying good-bye again and again as the guests made their way down the stairs. I would clear the table and Hugh would do the dishes, neither of us speaking and both of us wondering if this just might be the one to do it. “I hear you guys broke up over a plastic hand,” people would say, and my rage would renew itself. The argument would continue until one of us died, and even then it would manage to wage on. If I went first, my tombstone would read IT WAS RUBBER. He’d likely take the adjacent plot and buy a larger tombstone reading NO, IT WAS PLASTIC.

  Dead or alive, I’d have no peace, and so I let it go, the way you have to when you’re totally dependent on somebody. In the coming weeks I’d picture the hand waving good-bye or shooting into the air to hail a taxi—going about its little business as I went about mine. Hugh would ask why I was smiling and I’d say, “Oh, no reason,” and leave it at that.

  Baby Einstein

  My mother and i were on the beach, rubbing oil into each other’s backs and guessing who in the family would be the first to have children. “I think it will be Lisa,” I said. This was in the early 1970s. Lisa was maybe fourteen years old and while she wasn’t necessarily maternal, she did do things according to their order. Getting married was what came after graduating from college, and having a baby was what came after getting married. “Mark my words,” I said, “by the age of twenty-six Lisa will have”—a trio of ghost crabs approached an abandoned sandwich, and I took them as a sign—“Lisa will have three children.”

  It felt very prophetic, but my mother dismissed it. “No,” she said. “Gretchen will be the first.” She squinted toward her second daughter, who stood on the shore, pitching meat scraps to a flock of gulls. “It’s written on her hips. It will be Gretchen, then Lisa, then Tiffany.”

  “What about Amy?” I asked.

  My mother thought for a moment. “Amy won’t have a child,” she said. “Amy will have a monkey.”

  I did not include myself in the baby prophecy, as I couldn’t imagine a time when homosexuals, either through adoption or the procurement of a rented womb, could create families of their own. I did not include my brother, because every time I saw him he was destroying something, not by accident but willfully, gleefully. He’d dismember his baby, with every intention of putting it back together, but then something would come up—a karate movie, the chance to eat two dozen tacos—and the reconstruction would be forgotten about.

  Neither my mother nor I could have imagined that the boy smashing bottles on the path to our cottage would be the first and only one in the family to have a child. By the time it happened, she would be long gone and my sisters, my father, and I would have to bear the shock alone. “It happened so fast!” we would say to one another, speaking as if Paul was like us and preceded every action with ten years of discussion. But he’s not like us, and to hear him tell it, the debate ended with a simple “Take them panties off.” Kathy did, and shortly after getting married, he called me to announce that she was pregnant.

  “Since when?” I asked.

  Paul held the phone away from his mouth and yelled into the other room. “Mama, what time is it?”

  “You’re calling her ‘Mama’?”

  He yelled for her again, and I told him that if it was four o’clock in Paris, it was ten A.M. in Raleigh. “So how long has she been pregnant?”

  He figured it had been about nine hours. They had used one of those home-testing kits. The previous evening the result had been negative. This morning it was positive, and Kathy had become Mama, which would eventually change to Big Mama, and later, for no particular reason, Mama D.

  When my friend Andy and his wife discovered they were going to have a baby, they kept it a secret for eight weeks. This, I learned, is fairly common. The fetus was minute—a congregation of loitering cells—and as with anything that informal, there was a good chance that it might disperse. A miscarriage turned would-be parents into objects of pity, and you didn’t want to set yourselves up too early.

  “I don’t mean to discourage you,” I said to Paul, “but maybe you two should keep this to yourselves for a while.”

  He coughed, and I understood that he and Kathy had been on the phone for hours, that I was probably the last to be called.

  What I considered a reasonable degree of caution he dismissed as “nay-sayery.”

  “I’ll chain its ass down if I have to, but ain’t no baby of mine going to forsake the womb.”

  After hanging up, he went to the store and bought a nursing chair, a changing table, and a bib reading I LOVE MY DADDY. I thought of those children you sometimes see at demonstrations. ANOTHER TODDLER FOR PEACE, their T-shirts read, or, my favorite, I’M SO GLAD MY MOMMY DIDN’T ABORT ME.

  “Shouldn’t you wait until the baby can talk and say that kind of thing for itself?” I asked. “Or maybe at least hold out until it has a real neck. What are you doing buying bibs?”

  The next time he called he was at the counter of a toy store charging a set of Baby Einstein videos. “I don’t care if it’s a boy or a girl, but this little son of a bitch is going to have brains.”

  “Well, it’s sure not going to get them from his parents,” I said. “Kathy hasn’t even gone to the doctor and already you’ve got videos?”

  “A crib, too, and I’ll tell you what, this shit’s expensive as hell.”

  “Well, so is calling France on a cell phone at eleven o’clock on a Wednesday morning,” I said, though again, I don’t know who I thought I was talking to. My brother can’t survive unless he’s breathing into a telephone. If you’re an enemy, he’ll call only once a day, but if you’re a family member and on relatively good speaking terms, you’re guaranteed to hear from him once every eight hours or so. There’s the money he spends calling us, and then there’s the money my sisters and I spend calling one another to talk about how much our brother calls us.

  When the pregnancy became official, he called even more. “Big day, Hoss. We’re taking Mama in to get her Corky test.” Corky was a character from an early-nineties TV program and was played by a young man with Down syndrome. My sister Lisa got the message as well and wasn’t sure if the fetus was being tested for a triploid twenty-first chromosome or the possibility that it might grow up to become an actor. “I’m pretty sure they can determine the drama gene now,” she said.

  By the sixth month the only surprise left was the baby’s sex. Paul and his wife speculated, but neither of them wanted to know for certain. It was, they said, bad luck, but how was it any unluckier than furnishing a nursery or preaddressing the birth-announcement cards? Like everyone else in the family, I kept a list of possible names and called every so often to offer them up: Dusty, Ginger, Kaneesha—all of them rejected. The contractors and carpenters my brother works with suggested names as well, most of them inspired by the pending war or the image of America as a tarnished but still shining beacon. Liberty was popular, as was Glory, the slightly Italian-sounding Vendetta, and Kick Saddam’s Ass, which, as my father pointed out, didn’t leave much room for a middle name. All of his suggestions were Greek and were offered with a complete disregard of the inevitable taunting they would inspire. “You can’t enter the third grade with a name like Hercules,” Lisa told him. “The same is true of Lesbos, I don’t care how pretty it sounds.”

  Then there was the pressure of naming the child after one of its grandparents. Lou and Sharon were options, but there was also Kathy’s family to consider. “Oh, right,” my sister Amy said. “Them.” The Wilsons were nice people, but we saw them as interlopers, potential threats standing between us and what we’d co
me to think of as the Sedaris baby. “Don’t Kathy’s parents already have a grandchild?” I asked, speaking as if a grandchild were like a Social Security number or a spinal column—something you needed only one of. We decided they were greedy and capable of anything, yet when the time came to compete, we completely dropped the ball. Their team was out in full force when the baby was born, while we were represented by only Lisa and our father. Kathy was in labor for fifteen hours before the doctors decided to perform a cesarean. The news was delivered to the waiting room, and when the time came my father looked at his watch, saying, “Well, I guess they should be carving her up right about now.” Then he went home to feed his dog. By this point, naming the child Lou was on par with naming it Adolph or Beelzebub, but all three were disqualified when the baby turned out to be a girl.

  They named her Madelyn, which was shortened to Maddy by the time she reached the incubator. I was in a hotel in Portland, Oregon, at the time and received the news from my brother, who called from the recovery room. His voice was soft and melodic, not much more than a whisper. “Mama’s got some tubes sticking out of her pussy, but it ain’t no big thing,” he said. “She’s lying back, little Maddy’s sucking on her titty just as happy as she can be.” This was the new, gentler Paul: same vocabulary, but the tone was sweeter and seasoned with a sense of wonder. The cesarean had been unpleasant, but after bemoaning the months wasted in Lamaze class, he grew reflective. “Some is cut loose and others come out on their own self, but take heed, brother: having a baby is a fucking miracle.”