Despertar

baby

I'm on a bus to New York. Fifty-something seats, fewer than twenty passengers, most of whom are Asian and asleep. The others are sort of scruffy-looking teenagers playing their music too loud.

There are enough empty seats for everyone to have his or her own row, pretty much, but the young mother wearing the sling full of infant chose the seat next to mine. "I hope you don't mind if I sit here," she panted, rhetorically, when she struggled onto the bus at the Baltimore stop. "I don't like to take my chances on who might sit next to me, so I always try to attach to someone who looks nice."

I said it was fine and shifted my thousand pounds of stuff to the tiny space beneath my seat. I was automatically annoyed with her, because there aren't any other pickup stops after Baltimore, and she was putting me in the awkward position of having to choose whether to tell her that--thereby running the risk of looking like a snotty bitch who didn't want to share her seat--and who that's truly concerned about the contagions that lurk in vessels of public transportation brings her baby on the Chinatown bus, anyway?

She is forgiven, though, because in these troubling economic times not everyone has the luxury of flying first-class, and because she is wearing, tied to her torso, a universal get-out-of-jail-free card. She has a baby, she's welcome to invade the tidy little neighborhood I had staked out for myself on this disgusting bus.

Her baby's name is Juliana Jane, which, ignoring the etymological redundancy and its generally pornish sound, is fine with me. It scores at least a six by my (strict) rubric. If she ever has a baby brother, says my seatmate, he will be Jeremy Jack, in keeping with the "system." It's a tenuous if. Little Julie is just eleven weeks old and only newly delivered of her trials with jaundice and colic. Her Apgar score was at the bottom edge of the "fair" range, and her skin was the color and consistency of a particularly waxy slice of Swiss Lorraine. Her parents waited weeks for her little body to flood with any human color. The entire first month, not a day went by that my seatmate didn't call the pediatrician or will herself not to.

(Julie is fussing in her sleep. Seatmate stops talking long enough to adjust her, then asks what I'm writing. Trip itinerary, I invent, the first thing that comes to me.)

She isn't wearing an engagement ring. During pregnancy, her fingers swelled up so much she was afraid it would warp, so she took it off. No matter how uncomfortable it got, though, she forced herself to keep wearing the wedding band; she was sensitive about the assumptions people might make when they saw her giant belly. The engagement ring is back in its original velvet box, and she carries it with her wherever she goes. She's waiting for him to notice its absence, which, considering he hasn't in over six months, maybe he never will. He doesn't pay any attention to her lately; it's her punishment for having a girl. She can count on two hands the number of times he's initiated sex since the beginning of November, which was approximately when they found out. He openly wanted a boy and she openly wanted a girl, and by his twisted logic, her will won out. For himself and his daughter he imagines the future will hold mutual indifference. What good are a male and a female to each other if there's no sexual undercurrent?

(She poses that question in air quotes, but when she shows me his picture on her cell phone, I don't believe he really said it.)

She has never felt so fat, and maybe it's just paranoia, but she's pretty sure she's going to lose her job if she doesn't shed the weight soon. Even her mother, who till recently was her number one fan, has said she's sick of seeing her in el cheapo maxi dresses. She wants to know how I stay so skinny. I tell her the three prongs of my strategy, none of which are useful to her while she's breastfeeding. She's going to wean Julie at six months, until which she'll just be a cow, she guesses.

Our conversation ends here, not surprisingly. I've never met a woman who could talk about her weight problems without then lapsing into a painful, personal silence. She isn't fat, she just looks like she had a baby recently, but who am I to judge someone for her body dysmorphia?

Her hands are sitting stiffly at her sides, her fingers drumming against the seats. She isn't supporting the weight of the sling, so Juliana Jane is pulling her shoulders forward into an unattractive slope. When she sneezes, the whole setup shifts, and I can see into the sling, see Julie's tiny ankles folded together inches from her face. My seatmate peeks into the sling without smiling.

Juliana Jane has passive blue eyes, but my someday-baby will not. No matter who co-writes that story, any baby of mine is unlikely to have anything but eyes so dark you can't see the pupils. Skin as soft as the softest thing you've ever touched, indescribably soft, that starts and stays the color of a Werther's caramel. Her eyes will be gentle and alert, tracking every movement of my face. I will talk to her constantly, showing her my jewelry, the people walking past the window, her own opening closing fingers. I will talk to her so much she will be rapt when I talk to anyone else, because she won't yet be able to imagine a world in which I say things to anyone but her.

I won't take her on the Chinatown bus, but if I do, sling or no sling, I will keep my arms tightly around her, because I can't imagine not. The same way I can't even hold a football in the crook of my arm without getting that warm, circular feeling, that instinct to curl my whole self around it.