Abbott Awaits (15 page)

Monitored, amplified, the fetal heartbeat sounds to Abbott like the hoarse bark of a guard dog. “Or like a marching band far away,” his wife says. The nurses take her blood pressure and talk about their distant pregnancies. “Back then they just knocked you out,” says one. Then they roll Abbott's wife out of the room. She smiles weakly and waves as she disappears. Abbott puts on his scrubs and waits. He knows that eleven thousand babies are born in the United States every day. Nothing else so ordinary is ever called miraculous. He sits, stands, walks to the window. Three stories down, morning commuters drink coffee and talk on their phones. They do not even glance up at the Childbirth Center, this hub of life. They do not seem to notice or care. Abbott surmises that he has driven past dozens of births while opening CD cases or eating crackers. He sits, stands, picks up items and puts them down. Finally someone comes for him, leads him out. His wife is at the center of the operating room with a drape over her chest. Abbott can choose which side of the drape: belly or head. He chooses head, because it is crying and because he does not want to see—ever—his wife's abdominal wall. Her headache is caused by
a rapid drop in blood pressure, and the anesthesiologist is making things better. His voice is soothing and kind through his mask. “Is it still bad?” he says. Abbott's wife nods. “In just a second you're going to start feeling better,” he says. There are many people in the room. The nurses and doctors joke about speeding tickets, and Abbott wishes they would be quiet. Then they all grow quiet, and Abbott wishes they would start joking again. He does not know whether the procedure has begun. He is with his wife, though it is true that the doctors on the other side of the drape are with his wife, too. He strokes her hair through the thin fabric of her scrub cap, worried that it might not be the right thing. (Later she will tell him it was the right thing.) Her arms are out to her sides. The doctors use what sounds like a vacuum. Abbott, sitting by his wife's head, can see, over the drape, the eyes of the doctors above their masks. The birth feels secretive, covert. He can feel the hot air pooling in his own mask. The thing he'd like to tell all of them is
Please be careful with this woman and this baby
. It's always possible to be a little bit more careful. He leans down to whisper to his wife. He puts his covered lips lightly on her ear and says nothing. He makes a whispering noise but not words. The doctors tug hard at the hole they have made, and here now there's a human baby aloft over the drape, looking not at all ready for existence. Her skinny legs, for instance, are curved like parentheses. It has already happened and it is over and it has begun. The doctors begin to repair Abbott's wife's body. Her head is smiling, weeping. “Is she OK?” she asks. Someone says, “She looks great.” This time the camera has fresh batteries, but Abbott forgets to take a picture. Fortunately, the anesthesiologist is there to help. Here's the red-throated howl. Here are the curled toes. Here's the knit cap too big. Here's the yellow cord with bright drops of blood. Here's the pediatrician's forearm. Here's the scale. Here's the wife, so close and so far away. Here's the terror, the full and expanding heart. Here's what happened to Abbott.

Abbott's syllabus is six pages, single-spaced. It is thorough and exact, and in its very form suggests the comforting notion that the world can be known. Additionally, the detailed schedule of readings and assignments should serve to ward off catastrophe until mid-December, at least. The teetering planet cannot collapse on October 14; there is an essay due that day. The white sheets of the syllabi are still faintly warm from the copy machine, and Abbott always feels, as he distributes them, that he is giving students something nourishing, something prepared, some baked good. He imagines a professor's apron and mitts. Abbott plans to speak for just ten minutes or so about the class, but he speaks for thirty-five minutes. He plans to be stern and intimidating, but he isn't. He plans not to allow any students to add the course, but he admits four students without even asking for their hard-luck stories. He erases the blackboard and walks to his office. Colleagues in the hallway shake his hand and congratulate him, and Abbott makes jokes about sleep. In his office he stands in front of his bookshelves. Often he has the feeling, looking at his books, that they somehow represent his own achievement. He wipes the dust
from his desk with a tissue and then sits down, his back to the doorway. Through his window he can see students playing Frisbee in the bright grass. Abbott knows about the empty pie tins of the Frisbie Pie Company (1871–1958), and so he has no need to research the origins of the pastime. He is free just to watch, and he does. One must of course be cautious in making any broad assertion about human nature, but it seems to Abbott that humans like throwing and catching things in the sun. He turns on the lamp that he found beside a dumpster. Occasionally a student comes by, knocks timidly on the open door. The students are nervous and sincere. Over the summer they read the books that Abbott recommended, and they loved them. They have busy semesters, jobs. Their parents don't want them to change majors again. Abbott remembers their names. They all speak in a rush, stop abruptly, and ask if Abbott had a good summer. Yes, thanks, Abbott says, very good. He walks across campus, and the day is so beautiful that he notices it. On his skin he feels sun and breeze, the counterpoise of seasons. He is not thinking much of anything. In the parking lot he walks up and down the rows, up and down, searching for his car. Eventually he finds it. He drives, engaging the clutch, depressing the brake, tapping the turn-signal wand. At a crosswalk he looks for his sunglasses and can't find them. The car takes him right to his driveway. Inside the house he changes clothes and takes his elder daughter outside to walk around the block. The girl walks twenty-five feet past the driveway and stops at the grate. Abbott picks up a small rock, puts it in his palm, and extends his palm toward his daughter. His daughter pinches the rock between her thumb and forefinger, then holds it over the grate for a moment before dropping it in. Abbott and his daughter listen for the sound of the rock hitting water—a faint, high-pitched
bloop
that reverberates in the dark tunnel. The girl laughs when she hears it. A spry, gray-haired woman walks up. She asks about the baby. She says many years ago her children used to sit right here and drop rocks down this same grate. “What a blessing,” she says, and then she walks off. Abbott and his daughter drop a few more rocks, enjoying the sound of the rocks hitting the water. Then they walk around the block. Precisely halfway, the girl asks to be picked up, so Abbott picks her up and carries her back to the house. “You're getting so big,” he says over and over. The baby is
asleep, and Abbott's wife tells Abbott to take a nap if he wants. Abbott sleeps for twenty minutes and wakes up disoriented. In the bathroom he does not look in the mirror. The baby is up now, and he holds her in the family room while his other daughter plays with a blue tractor and his wife makes dinner. With one hand he helps his daughter make a ramp out of a large book, and they roll the tractor down the ramp. He helps her make a wall of blocks, and they roll the tractor down the ramp and into the wall of blocks. She puts four necklaces on Abbott and tries to put one on the baby. “Let's not do that,” Abbott says. Then the girl pinches her finger in the jewelry box and cries. “Ouch,” Abbott says. “Let's take a look at that.” At dinner, the baby lies quietly in the bassinet while mowers drone outside. “This is not a good dinner,” the girl says, but she eats quite a bit. “These are the last of the great tomatoes,” Abbott's wife says. After dinner, the girl jumps on her new trampoline and then takes a bath. Abbott sits on the floor of the bathroom beside the tub. The tub has a shower door that slides on a track, so he can't sit on the edge. He examines the frame of the sliding door, wondering how difficult it would be to remove. He can only imagine what has grown beneath the metal. He could remove the frame, clean the tub beneath, install a hanging rod and shower curtain. It would be a nice surprise for his wife, who hates this shower door. The girl drinks bathwater out of colored plastic cups. There are at least twenty-five plastic animals in the water, representing numerous epochs and ecological zones. All of them sink except, inexplicably, Big Zebra. Abbott is not worried, at present, about lead paint on the animals leaching into the water, in effect creating a toxic lead bath. He dries the girl off and then puts on her diaper and pajamas. Abbott's wife puts the girl to bed. The baby is happy in her bassinet, so Abbott cleans up the bathroom and then the kitchen. The dishwasher is old and ineffective, so he has to scrub the plates and glasses thoroughly in the sink before loading them. The falling sun slants through the window above the sink and illuminates the plastic oral syringes on the sill. When he's finished with the dishes, he wipes down the counters. He needs a haircut. His wife walks gingerly through the kitchen and pats Abbott on the hip. “How do you feel?” he says. “Not bad,” she says. She turns on the girl's monitor and then, grimacing, lifts the baby out of the bassinet. “You should let me do
that,” Abbott says. He sniffs the sponge and props it against the Cold knob in the sink. Abbott's wife nurses the baby while Abbott feeds the dog and the cat, then cleans up the family room. He puts the jewelry in the box, the buttons in the coffee can, the stuffed animals in the crate. On the monitor he can hear his daughter singing an English folk song about the bubonic plague. He lies on the carpet, listening. The sun goes down and the room grows dark. Abbott gets off the floor and turns on a lamp. Then he sits on the couch next to his wife and helps her stare into the baby's face. It's a second conception—together they bring her into the world.

For their material, editorial, and/or moral support, I would like to thank: my family, near and far; the persistent Lisa Bankoff; the handy Bob Bourke; the meticulous Susan Murray; the heroes at LSU Press, particularly John Easterly, Lee Sioles, and MaryKatherine Callaway; and the editors of the
Cincinnati Review, Subtropics, StorySouth
, and
Best of the Web 2010
, where versions of some chapters were originally published. I owe special mention to Michael Griffith, who made every page better. Always and especially I am grateful to Jenn Habel, the center and the reason.