Into the Wilderness

By David Ebenbach

The award-winning collection Into the Wilderness, winner of the Fiction Award from the Washington Writers' Publishing House, explores the theme of parenthood from many angles: an eager-to-connect divorced father takes his kids to a Jewish-themed baseball game; a lesbian couple tries to decide whether their toddler son needs a ma

• Language: English
• Publisher: Washington Writers' Publishing House
• Release date: Jan 23, 2015
• ISBN: 9781941551042

Book preview

Into the Wilderness

JUDITH I: Into the Wilderness

My parents helped me get from the hospital to my apartment. We rode up in the elevator with all my stuff, and then at my front door I felt this strange wash of relief, and even more as I opened the door and saw my little living room, the little hall that pushed back past the bathroom to the bedroom. I saw the couch, the rug that defined the living room, that set it off from the makeshift dining room, the small round table I used for eating off to my left, the kitchen tucked in behind it through the doorway. And, all around me everywhere, the reproductions of my favorite paintings. Modigliani, Close, Matisse. All the portrait faces said, this is the place where your life happens. For sure, coming back offered this sensation that my previous life was sitting there available for me, that I could stroll in, grab the splayed-open book off the coffee table—novel, interrupted—and just get back to it.

Of course, right then, behind me the baby let out a little cry of reminder.

"I think someone’s hun-gry," my mother sang, brightly cheerful.

I sighed. Who isn’t?

And so I sat on my couch, my Ethan Allen couch that was my second bed, the reading and napping and foreplay place, and I breastfed the baby on a couch pillow on my lap. Meanwhile my father was opening the shades on the windows and my mother was in the kitchen, pulling some snack together and also throwing away things that needed throwing away. Looking down, I watched a drop of milk fall from the breast that was waiting to be used and land on the pillow. This was not the first time some bodily fluid had ended up somewhere on this piece of furniture, but I had this weird feeling that it was somehow, for me, the least innocent of the fluids.

Where will the baby go? my father said, when we were all sitting down with sandwiches. He scanned the space for appropriate nooks.

The bassinet can strap right up against the bed, I said. I had thought of some things in advance.

What about when she’s older?

This was just another version of his usual astonishment that I could live in such a small space, but amplified now that his granddaughter was here, the problem too serious for him to ignore. I looked around a little. This had been a good place to be a single person. Was this a bad environment for the baby?

That’s a good question, Dad, I said. I haven’t worked that out yet. I pictured my apartment in boxes, all packed up, felt the edge of panic.

You won’t be able to stay here.

I think it’s a romantic kind of existence, my mother said, dreamy. But it’s true—it won’t work when the baby’s older. The two were like tag-team wrestling partners. Or good cop, naggy cop.

Well, she’s not older now, I said. Goddammit. For now, she can sleep next to the bed in the co-sleeper.

Is that all set up? my father said, eyebrows up high. I shook my head and watched him clap his hands once with a renewed sense of purpose, and then disappear off into the bedroom.

I looked over at my mother, studied her aggressively-colored hair (brown with the dye but would have been salt and pepper without it), studied the hang of the skin under her face. Still—despite the signs of age, she looked more like the baby’s true parent than I did, and not only because the child had a width in her face that was definitely from my mother. It was also because she was somehow so good at the nurturing all of a sudden. The baby was asleep in her arms, and she said, Pass me that pillow, which she then tucked under the baby to rest her arms a little. She did all of this gracefully, easily. I had never thought of her as an expert mother, but here were these things that she did so naturally, as if they were a part of her DNA. With me, all these same things were clumsy, strange, fake.

Maybe I ought to take the next round of pills, I said to her. There was a low, warm pain starting to brew in me. Every once in a while it hit me—they had cut me. They had cut through skin and that little bit of fat that had turned into that whole lot of fat during pregnancy, and through muscle, and right into the uterus itself. My uterus. Something about that last part—to invade a person’s organs—seemed appalling. But it was hardly a private space at the time, I guess, with the baby already in there, growing, drawing life from my veins, out of my own food supply.

My mother, meanwhile, sighed and gingerly got up and just as carefully transferred the baby and the pillow to me, which all sort of pinned me to the couch, and she went off to find pills and water. The baby stirred a very little bit, but never opened her eyes. What was going on in there, I wondered?

Oh, child, I whispered. Why did I bring you here?

My mother came back with pills and water. Here you go, she said, but I had trouble getting a hand free, so she put the pills in my mouth and tipped the water glass so I could drink them down.

Where have you been all my life? I said.

How’s that baby? she said, looking down at her.

Asleep, I guess.

My mother sat on the edge of the couch, put her hand on my knee. Her face was curious, even solemn. It’s not going to be easy, she said. And to do it on your own…

I knew they were going to bring up the single mother thing at some point today. Mom, I— I started to say, but then I cut myself off with some very unexpected tears.

My mother froze at first, and then patted my knee with a few efficient pats, her bracelets piled close on her hand. Okay, she said. All right.

I heard my father’s footsteps come into the room behind me and then pause and retreat again. Something about that made me want to stop crying. Could you wipe my face? I said—my hands were full—and my mother found a tissue on herself somewhere and wiped me down briskly. Thanks, I said. "I don’t know what that was."

Really?

Normally I would have answered with some snappy comment, but the birth had slowed me down in a way, and the comment didn’t make it out. I don’t know what I’m doing, I said.

My mother smiled, dreamy again. Daddy and I used to sit out in the living room drinking booze and tearing our hair out while you were in the next room crying, and we didn’t know what to do.

This, I have to tell my therapist.

My mother looked at me with a little sudden contempt on her face. Those people. They expect miracles from parents. They’re like little idealistic children. Santa Clausers.

"I was kidding, Mom—don’t worry; I’m the only unanalyzed Jew in New York. They did an article on me for Time Out." Well, I hadn’t totally slowed down.

All the better for you, she said. You and your brother can think up enough nasty thoughts about me without some self-important social worker’s help. At that, she stood up to tackle the next thing. Now, what am I doing? she said. Oh—right, and she went to my refrigerator to see what wasn’t in it, and to make a list.

At one point that afternoon, I remembered the voicemail and listened to all the messages.

Mara (from college, calling from Delaware): I have this feeling you had your baby. Am I right? If I don’t hear from you I’ll know I’m right—so if you’re still just pregnant, call me, girl! Wow—maybe you’re having your baby right now. Call me!

Secretary: This is Dr. Reed’s office in Dental Associates, calling to remind Judith Berger that it’s time to make another appointment…

Josh (from work): Hey, there, Judith—how’s pregnancy leave treating you? When’s that baby coming? This place is a shambles without you—get back here ASAP!

Cousin Shoshannah (after visiting at the hospital): I just met your baby. She is so beautiful, I’m dying. I’m dying from it.

And on and on they went—mostly people who didn’t know if the birth had happened yet or not, and a few who knew and were excited. Cousin Janet, my born-again Christian cousin Janet, left a quote: But now faith, hope, love—abide these three; but the greatest of these is love. The baby woke up while I was abiding that little chestnut, and I fed her and paid half-attention to the sort of stridently happy tones of the voices on the machine. I realized that half-attention was about as much as I could muster anymore, and that it would be like that for a long time.

Dad found a huge dish of baked ziti that my friend Ellen had left in my freezer for exactly such an occasion, and he heated it up for us in the microwave. Marathoners eat pasta before marathons, he said ominously.

The baby slept on a play mat while we ate. She seemed to sleep a lot, at least during the day; in the hospital the nurses had started to wake me up for night feedings, to get that milk supply going, and at those times it seemed more like the baby was awake a lot. On some level, it just seemed that she tended to do what people did not do; she slept through conversations, took drugged-seeming, expressionless surveys of rooms and faces, moved her limbs without purpose, ate from my breasts, woke in the night. I couldn’t help thinking that she was like a different kind of creature, a different species altogether. An alien advance guard doing reconnaissance, aiming to disarm us through strangeness, cuteness, apparent helplessness. And me the first step in the plan to conquer Earth.

So, I said, and I had nothing else after that.

My parents looked up from their food, and I saw that they were tired, too. There wasn’t anywhere near enough room in the apartment to comfortably put even one of my parents up for the night; though each had offered to stick around and sleep on the couch, I had turned them both down, knowing that my mother had enough insomnia, and my father enough back problems, that it just wouldn’t be nice of me to lay either of them out on the couch—and, with my fresh scar leering across my belly, I wasn’t going to give up the bed myself. So they were staying with cousins out on Long Island while they were in from Indiana—here for the birth and, sooner or later, for the naming ceremony—and I could tell they were wanting to go back there and get some sleep. Still, my father looked around, as though searching for a few more tasks, or as though trying to locate some hidden other person, someone who could help me out when he was gone, and he said, Is there anything you need us to do before we go, to get the apartment ready?

Take my place, I thought. Stay and do this for me. I’ll be out having crème brulée a few blocks down. But I couldn’t think of anything I could actually ask for. Just be sure to leave the instruction manual when you go, I said.

Don’t believe what any of the books tell you to do, my mother said, as usual missing that I was kidding, pointing at me with a fork. They all disagree with each other, anyway. Sleep her on her back, don’t sleep her on her back, let the baby cry, God forbid you let the baby cry.

So some of them must be right, then, right? I said. If they all disagree. If they all say the opposite thing.

They’re all wrong. You can’t find right in a book, my mother said.

Okay, ma—no books, I said, making something like a Boy Scout salute with my hand.

There was another long pause, and then my mother put her fork down. Okay, she said. "We can’t stand it anymore. What’s her name?"

Caught off-guard, I stuttered for a moment, and then said, Mom, you know I’m saving that for the ceremony. My story had been that I was keeping the name secret until her naming ceremony, in a firm nod to Jewish tradition, even though traditions around girls were entirely flexible as far as I could tell. Of course, the real secret was that I didn’t have any name in mind for the child at all.

Our daughter’s gone Orthodox on us, my mother said to my father, while I considered that I hadn’t dodged a bullet so much as delayed it.

Eventually, dinner was over, and when my father had quietly and not all that carefully washed the dishes, it was time for them to go. They were seeing me in the morning, but they kissed me like I was going off into the wilderness to find the meaning of life, likely never to return. My mother even held my face in her hands a minute and shook her head at me, her eyes full of wonder.

And then they left.

This was the real moment—in some ways, the strangest moment. There was the birth, of course, but I had been dizzy with exhaustion then, and so didn’t catch the full strangeness of it at the time. Plus the idea of birth was pretty well tied to the idea of pregnancy for me. But this moment, alone in the apartment, the door closed after my parents, and then this sound, this thin, testing cry from behind me—I turned to the play mat that was next to the couch, and saw the baby, and although most of me knew intellectually that this was the deal, this baby, at the same time there was this other voice, a minority voice but a forceful one, astonished, that said to the baby, You’re still here? I almost fell back against the door from the force of it.

I mean, shouldn’t the hospital stay have been the duration of it? Isn’t that what happens at hospitals? You go in because you have something, and you go home when you don’t have the thing anymore. They don’t send you home with jars of neutralized viruses or surgically-removed appendixes for you to take care of, after all. They just remove them. Or, if not that, shouldn’t my parents have taken the baby with them when they left, as though they had been a party of three guests? All the other people who’d ever been in my apartment had been guests. All of them.

But in that moment of turning from the front door toward the cry, I think I began to understand it.

You’re here, I said aloud. Named or not, the baby was a baby, not just an idea of a baby, a vague expectation. You’re not going anywhere, I said.

The baby, eyes open but only dully open, looked into some middle distance while I tried to stay upright. For her part, she didn’t seem at all freaked out by the arrangement, probably wasn’t even aware of it. I had the idea that the world, including me, was mostly invisible to her. I walked over to the mat, feeling some pain in my incision or maybe in my head, and sat down on the couch. She continued to blink and look out at nothing in particular, but I studied her. I studied the black, thick hair that had been so surprising when I first saw her, the wide forehead, the small eyes that had so much iris and so little white, those eyelids that slid open and shut like a relaxed pulse, her skinny arms and the sleeves hanging loose off them, arms that moved like separate and blind animals, her skinny legs that moved the same way, the feet that still seemed strangely angled, the whole bowlegged structure of her lower body. And I lifted her shirt, looked at the black stump that was what was left of her umbilical cord, looking more like the end of a slender tree branch than part of a human body. Just that day they had taken the clamp off, the clamp that had been irritating the skin on her belly a little, and now the branch was there by itself, waiting to fall off. I remembered what it had looked like before they cut it, when they held her over the sheet for me to see—ta da!—and my eyes, my baffled eyes, went to the cord, the strangest aspect of this strange creature—it was so bright, so colorful, like the rainbow wires in phone cords, in some kind of cloudy but translucent sausage casing. I hadn’t expected all the color, and then I hadn’t expected the shift to tree bark. Somehow I hadn’t expected any of it.

I pulled the baby’s shirt down