Cam leaned in to kiss Eleanor, as recommended inSpiritual Midwifery. An open-mouth kiss, meant to help Eleanor dilate those last two centimeters. Eleanor could smell steak on his breath.
On the third push, she was overcome by the most searing pain—like hot metal branding flesh, like her whole body ripping in two, a jagged tearing of her softest, most tender part.
Then the baby spiraled out of her, and everything else—steak, Celtics, swimsuit models, Fisher-Price animals, oranges—fell away.
They saw her face first—small and round, and wailing, with large black eyes and a full head of hair. Valerie ran a hand over the creamy white substance covering her skin and placed it on her own cheeks and around her eyes.
“Vernix,” she said. “The best moisturizer ever invented. How else did you think I got to be this age without any wrinkles?”
Laughter. More talk of basketball. Jeremy entering from the living room, where the game had ended by now.
“She looks like Bill Walton,” he said.
What was he doing here anyway? Eleanor wanted to be alone with Cam.
“Here’s your daughter,” Valerie said. Then Alison was in her arms, and nothing else mattered.
14.
Second Fiddle
Aweek after Alison was born—March now, snow melting, mud season—the insurance check for their wrecked Toyota showed up in the mailbox, and they purchased the 1965 Plymouth Valiant with Georgia plates. There was just enough money left over for a car seat and a Johnny Jump Up, recommended by Darla.
Eleanor’s milk came in, her breasts cartoonishly inflated. She wept at the sight of her body—her belly still protruding, everything soft. Nobody had prepared her for this part. Her husband could enter into fatherhood with his body unscathed, his stomach as flat as it ever was, those same abdominal muscles rippling over that perfect chest. But after delivery, Eleanor bore stretch marks and shredded skin in the most intimate place of her body, not to mention thirty extra pounds.
Three weeks after the birth, a woman who saw Eleanor in the grocery store asked, “When is your baby due?”
Afterward, out in the parking lot, she leaned against the steering wheel and wept.
There was one part that thrilled her, though: the power she possessed, within her own body, to nourish their daughter. When Alison cried, all she ever needed was Eleanor’s nipple, and the world was right again. Eleanor gloried in the wild, animal connection she had with this child. She had only to hear Alison’s voice—and sometimes, had only to walk into the room and see her lying there—for milk to come pouring out of her.
Cam loved Alison, too, of course. But it was different for him. At this point in Alison’s life the most important thing in her world was getting fed, and Cam couldn’t provide that. Eleanor considered, for a moment, how it must feel for a man at moments like these—holdinghis infant daughter, hearing her scream, and knowing there was nothing he could do for her but hand her to her mother. The powerlessness of that.
“I know he’s trying,” Eleanor said. “But at this point, Cam almost feels”—she felt guilty saying this out loud—“superfluous.”
“Tell me about it,” Darla said. “All Bobby wanted to do, after Kimmie was born, was hand out cigars and drink shots of tequila and ask if we could have sex yet.”
Eleanor did not share Darla’s bitterness. But the thought had occurred to her that once the impregnation part was over, there wasn’t a whole lot for a father to do besides folding and changing the diapers and standing around, trying to be supportive.
She thought about her parents, and how, for them, she had been a kind of interloper in their love affair. Her birth had been grudgingly accepted—her presence in their lives like the regrettable but necessary visit of a relative from out of town who overstays her welcome.
For Eleanor’s child—Eleanor and Cam’s—it would be different. Alison’s birth marked the beginning of a new kind of love affair—hers with their daughter. If there was an outsider in the story, it was Cam. “I didn’t know it was possible to love anybody so much,” she said to Walt and Edith, when they came by to see the baby.
Walt had patted Cam on the back with the air of a man welcoming a comrade into a new and unfamiliar club.
“From here on out, you play second fiddle, bud,” he said. “Might as well get used to it.”
15.
Ships in the Night
It was hard to understand how one very small infant who slept most of the time could have created so much upheaval in their lives, but Eleanor was exhausted all the time, inhabiting a state that somehow combined euphoria with sorrow.
They had created this precious, miraculous person. Whole hours passed in which all Eleanor wanted to do was hold Alison and study her face. But there was this other part: her body belonged to her child now. She could hardly remember who she had been before. Somehow, in the course of becoming a mother, she had lost a piece of herself.
The sadness came to her, in a rush, every time she placed Alison on her nipple to nurse. Some hormone must have released itself into her bloodstream, she figured, but knowing it was her own body chemistry playing tricks didn’t make any less real the feeling that she was plummeting down some bottomless well.
For Cam, none of the same hormones came into play, but he felt the effects of Eleanor’s. Her breasts, that had been, for Cam, a source of seemingly endless pleasure—never more so than during her pregnancy—were vessels of milk now, whose sole function was to feed their child. One night, in bed, not so long after the birth of their daughter, he had reached over to touch them, and she recoiled as swiftly as if she’d received an electric shock.
