The Stud Book (25 page)

G
eorgie flossed her teeth in the upstairs bathroom and when Bella started crying in the next room over, she paused, a white line of dental tape still laced around her fingers. It was almost midnight. She could see Humble in bed, reflected in the slice of bathroom mirror, framed by the open door. He was watching a cop show on TV.

He said, “Did you fill out the life insurance papers?”

Ah, crumb! Again. She didn’t want to think about ever dying, about leaving her daughter, leaving this world. Georgie stopped flossing long enough to say, “I’ll get to it in the morning.”

“Get to it? What do you do all day?”

The baby monitor was on her side of the bed, where it cranked up the volume of Bella’s crying and brought it out in stereo like they had unhappy twins, one in each room, one a little more electronic than the other. Humble didn’t let on that he even heard it. He had a beer on his side of the bed. Bella kept up the howl. The heartbeat of the white noise machine, with its steady
thump-thump
, seeped through the monitor, too. Georgie dropped her floss in the wastebasket.

This was the first night they’d moved Bella to her own room.
She was a tiny baby on a raft of cushions on a big, flat mattress in a lovely maple crib.

Georgie walked into the bedroom, ready to sink into bed, but couldn’t relax as long as Bella was crying.

With his eyes still on the TV, Humble leaned over and clicked the monitor off. The heartbeat and the baby’s cry were muffled but fought their way through the walls.

“Should we check on her?”

Humble said, “She’ll get herself to sleep.”

Georgie felt the baby’s cry crawl through her body in a steady low-voltage electricity that powered a nearly constant tension in her neck. The heartbeat matched her own. “If we let her cry, we’re teaching her that we don’t listen.”

Humble said, “That worked for my parents.”

“You think your mom listens to you, even now?” Humble’s mom was present only as an absence, a grandmother who made no promises.

Bella coughed, a choking little baby cough. It was a whole drama going on in the next room.

Georgie said, “We’re teaching her she can’t affect her environment. We’re teaching powerlessness.”

Humble reached for his beer and took a sip.

“If I bring her in here, we can turn the heartbeat off,” she negotiated. The baby would hear Georgie’s heartbeat through her chest. They’d sleep that close together.

Humble put his beer bottle down. He said, “I can’t sleep with her in the bed.”

With that bottle, and his bed, Georgie saw him then as a grown baby. This is how his mother raised him: a crib and a bottle.

He was a tired baby, his eyes ringed with exhaustion.

But to let Bella cry, alone like that, even though she was only one room over, was to Georgie like leaving her on the side of the road, lost in a vast world.

Georgie went to check on her.

Bella was a red-faced bundle of hot tears and clenched fists. She’d kicked her blanket off.

Newborn babies are freaky alien fish slipped from another dimension: big eyes, heavy heads, useless limbs—they swim in a
climate laden with gravity; the air doesn’t support their efforts so they cry. They need support.

Georgie put Bella on her back, in the middle of a baby blanket. Bella kicked and howled, wrinkled her face, opened her mouth. Georgie put a hand on her daughter’s chest and pulled the blanket snug around the tiny body. The first time she’d done this, it’d seemed so very wrong. She caught her daughter’s arms and legs, trapped them in the blanket, twisted the cloth and tucked one end in, making a package, a human present. Bella stopped crying. It was instantaneous: The blanket was tight, and her whole body relaxed. She closed her puffy eyes and slept.

The womb is a snug place. A tight swaddle is as close as a newborn gets to going back home.

Georgie picked up the package that was her newborn and carried it in one arm. She went downstairs for a glass of water. She patted Bella’s back and sang a song made up of sounds that weren’t words, and every sound was all about love. Halfway down the stairs in the dim light she took a step that didn’t work out, and she fell. That easily, her foot swished. Down she went two steps at a time. Georgie’s knee bent wrong and her body weight cut through the air until she hit the wooden floor in the downstairs hall. The baby was against her shoulder. Georgie hadn’t tumbled, she’d gone straight down. Her knee was jammed, and one hip hurt, but Bella was fine.

There was this new clumsiness that came with motherhood: always one hip cocked out, a baby in her arms, her spine still recovering from the baby weight, her C-section scar along the front. All of it conspired to make her lose her footing.

When she looked over her shoulder, the light of their open bedroom door cut through the dark hallway.

“I fell down the stairs,” she called out.

There was the sound of TV voices.

“I wrenched my knee.”

Still no answer.

Georgie patted Bella’s back. “I don’t know if I can stand.”

“Did you try?” Humble’s voice was slow and gravelly.

Georgie pictured his tired eyes. She got up on wobbly legs. She leaned with one hand against the doorway and got to her feet with less grace but the same trepidation as Bambi. Her balance was off
with swaddled Bella in one arm. She hadn’t broken anything. A place on the side of her hip, maybe technically her ass, her lower ass, felt hot and as though a hand was pushing against her there. “My hip is wrecked,” she said. But she could walk. That invisible hand didn’t push her over.

“You’ll be fine,” Humble said.

She called back, “Really? That’s all you can do?”

There was an ambulance wail on TV. A voice said, “… hasn’t been dead long.” Humble’s bottle clinked against the nightstand.

S
o say you’re a female Asian elephant, shy, tall, and pretty. A good part of your evolutionary success is because you have the ability to grow the weight of a refrigerator in your gut, in your womb, as you carry it for nearly two years, then push it headfirst out the birth canal, the pocketbook, the elephant pussy, in a splashing river of blood and tissue.

That’s a requirement.

You’ll have blood down your legs, a baby on the ground. The amniotic sac should break, and if it doesn’t, that’s a problem. Make your baby breathe when it won’t. Kick it with your feet if you have to, let it slide in the blood one way then another until its eyes open, its mouth moves, air goes in.

If you’re that newborn, your job is to walk immediately. It’s crucial. Walk away from predators, and keep close at your mom’s side even as you blink eyelashes still gummed with afterbirth, dust, and blood.

Sarah stood outside the dry moat and wall of the outdoor enclosure watching three elephant cows and their massive offspring. How could something so big look so charmingly diminutive? Even the largest elephant moved with the dreamy grace of a parade float.

Their ears were freckled and looked as soft and ruffled as the edge of a silk skirt. Their backs were topographical maps. Even the babies had eyes like old men, like sea turtles.

She tapped her pencil against the metal railing. The rail was decorated with chipped paint, like old metal playground equipment.
They should test the paint for lead
, she thought, and she’d care about that more if she were still pregnant.

The cows raised their calves together in a happy co-op. The fathers, two bull elephants, were kept in separate enclosures.

Bulls could turn murderous.

In other countries elephants are work animals. Often enough, bulls kill their masters. Mostly they kill when they’re in what’s called “musth,” a state that comes on like really bad PMS, only in the males. It’s a physiological thing, a psychotic shift. It’s a problem. There’d be money in developing a Prozac-type drug to keep male elephants emotionally stable, if a company wanted to take that on.

Some trainers starve the bulls to keep them docile, but musth comes anyway.

In Asia, nobody blames a rampaging elephant. Trainers know the odds: Males go mad; it’s par for the course. In the United States, stomping a trainer’ll get a bull killed. “Put down” is the phrase, as though to kill an animal and a little insult, a put-down, are at all the same. As though bringing an animal to its knees—down, closer to the ground—is the whole of it.

It left a serious dent in breeding programs when zoos became scared of the liability involved in keeping a postadolescent, sexually active bull in the stable. The Oregon Zoo held the international Asian elephant studbook.

Sarah had stood in the same spot weekly for months, watching each baby elephant flop its short trunk and learn to use it. They had to develop those muscles! Supercute.

But after miscarriage number four all this family shit had started to get under her skin. The zoo was a place for endangered animals to fuck in safety. Her job was to watch babies, hoping to see animals make more babies. She was a barren voyeur, a babysitter.

Everywhere she looked, small bodies orbited around larger bodies like Galilean moons.

Sarah was in her own musth.

She’d been robbed. She had been on her way, a baby! And now, nothing.

A studbook recorded who had babies but also highlighted who didn’t.

Around her, the zoo was packed with families, mostly women and children. Dads were rare, but not so rare as to be either exotic or endangered. One woman pushed a six-seater stroller. Six kids? Whose idea was that?

Baby hogs.

Hoarders.

Dulcet was right, they were all addicts.

Children climbed on fences and pressed themselves against the animals’ enclosures in a visual display, a reenactment, of humans encroaching on an already diminished terrain.

As compulsive and indulgent as alcoholics, some people couldn’t have one without going overboard. Even lab rats were kept with set limits on offspring, due to the Animal Care and Use Protocol in research. Too many rats in a cage? That’s a mess. They’ll eat one another alive. Too many humans in a house?

Sarah wanted one single child. She wasn’t greedy.

Down in the Africa exhibit, a sign attributed as a “Masai Elder Blessing” read, “May you be peaceful and prosperous with many cattle and children.”

Sarah passed that sign at least once a day, sometimes more. Now she was not peaceful. She didn’t have cattle. She didn’t have kids.

What was the Masai curse? That’s what she got.

Every baby she saw was an anxiogenic substance: Babies made her anxious.

To see them in plague proportions? That had grown into her personal panicogen, no chemicals needed—flat-out panic.

Her timer peeped. Her charge, a six-month-old male elephant, tapped its trunk against a stick, left and right. He was doing well. “Play behavior,” Sarah marked on her list.

An elephant cow named Rainy Day paced incessantly. It was a coping mechanism. Years before, Rainy had been traded to another zoo, swapped for a male who came to Oregon on a short-term breeding loan.

She was pregnant when they traded her off. Her baby was born at the new zoo, but neither Rainy nor her calf were accepted as part
of the elephant social circle there. The other elephants crowded her and pulled rank. Her infant fell off the edge of their artificial lot into a dry moat, hit his head, and died.

Rainy went nuts. They tranquilized her, but that’s when she started pacing, and she never stopped.

Elephant handlers sometimes use what’s called an elephant hook. It’s a long pole. The end is curved like a scythe only with a round ball at the tip, instead of a blade. The ball is supposed to offer a nudge, like a fist, to an elephant’s sensitive temple. After her baby died, when Rainy Day started pacing, when she was high on tranquilizers and frantic with grief, zookeepers at the new zoo tapped Rainy with an elephant hook. But she moved fast, and the ball at the end of the hook knocked her eye out.

That’s when they sent her home.

She was a sweet elephant, half-blind, forever walking off that dance to her lost son. Her new baby was the thinnest in the herd; he ran all day at his mother’s feet. It was hard to say if she seemed to be running away from her child or trying to lead him somewhere better. Either way, a nervous mother set the pace for his world.

A happy mother makes a happy family!

Rainy’s dead calf was in the studbook, alongside the success stories. Sarah’s miscarriages? They’d be in a book, too, if anyone were keeping track.

She heard Dale’s voice before she saw him. “You’ve got the easy job,” he said. She turned. He’d come out of the elephant enclosure through a back door, down a fake-clay tunnel, a place used by staff and camouflaged from zoo guests by a thicket of bamboo. He wore waist-high rubber waders, and he was soaked. “Jesus, I hate urine collection.”

Sarah asked, “They’ve got you doing that?”

“Short on handlers,” he said. The air was already ripe with the green scent of elephant poop, and now the acrid component of that stench was intensified and close; Dale reeked of piss. He said, “I’m glad you’re back at work. Sorry you’ve had a rough time of it.” He looked at her as though to say more, but what was there to say?