Chapter Twenty-Five
There is no Jewish law against baby showers.
There is Jewish superstition against baby showers.
And really, it’s not against baby showers.
There is Jewish superstition against doing anything other than anticipating the very worst in any given situation.
You don’t tell pregnant Jews “Mazel tov”—Congratulations; you tell them “B’sha’ah tovah”—May your baby come at the right time, may it come in a good hour. May your baby come.
But when I used this logic to try to dissuade Dot from throwing me a shower, she said, “You would deny a dying old woman her last request?” Guilt. Also very Jewish. So I relented.
She had to hold it in the multipurpose room because, to my surprise, nearly everyone RSVP’d yes. Moth came and Max and even Roger. Lola successfully lobbied for a plus-one, so Lucas came. The rest of the male species, however, was not invited.
But all the Vista View women we knew were.
Everyone needed extra time to get down to the multipurpose room because they were balancing presents and potluck dishes on their walker trays.
Residents with motorized scooters arrived like Santa Claus, their sleighs piled high with their neighbors’ gifts and treats.
Showers had changed a lot since the last time any of us had had one.
We knew this from attending our own daughters’ showers, but it was different because I was one of their own.
Annalisa, who at 101 was the oldest one there, had worn white gloves, silk hose, and a garter belt to her shower, seven and a half months pregnant on a July afternoon many years before air-conditioning came to her small Virginia town.
Three people passed out, though whether from the heat, the cigarettes, or the cocktails, Annalisa could no longer remember.
Bonnie hadn’t had a shower because her husband was in Vietnam at the time, and it had seemed like a jinx to be celebrating new life and eating cucumber sandwiches while he might be getting his head blown off.
“He’s upstairs right now snoring like a lawn mower,” Bonnie said, “so I guess it was the right call.” When all three of her children were born, Gita was still in India and couldn’t have a shower until after the seventh month, just in case, though showers celebrated the mother not the baby anyway, she explained.
“Damn straight,” said Maisie.
“I got flowers, scarves, jewelry, oils,” Gita said.
“Money! I got lots of money. All the women in the village came. There were two bowls of sweet rice. Everyone scooped a bite out of the bowl of their choice and fed it to me. At the end, I was supposed to know if I was having a boy or a girl based on which bowl was emptiest. And I was so full I thought I would erupt.”
“They didn’t throw rice at my granddaughter’s wedding for exactly that reason.” Mona nodded. “She said the birds eat it and they explode. So people threw money instead.”
“Sounds painful,” said Ivy.
“Sounds like a scam,” said Maisie. “Did it work?”
“They got a lot of money,” said Mona.
“No. The bowls of rice.”
Gita grinned. “Three for three.”
I let their words wash over me. I understood.
We had all been shushed at our own daughters’ and granddaughters’ and nieces’ showers.
“Everything’s different now, Mom.” “Everything’s changed.
” “Oh, Grandma, you’re so old-fashioned.
” As if knowledge moldered like old produce, as if experience and what got handed down weren’t better guides than something someone posted on your social media feed.
Here, everyone listened. Here, our stories were all valued for what they were: stories.
Old women knew a thing no one else did, which was that nothing changed on this front, not really.
Not for eons. Not since we left the oceans for the forests and shed our gills and grew two feet.
We knew, as our children and grandchildren had not at their own showers, what to do for a baby who wouldn’t sleep, for a baby who was teething, for a baby with gas or dry skin or diaper rash.
We knew when to switch from milk to rice cereal and from rice cereal to oatmeal and from oatmeal to tiny chopped-up pieces of banana.
We knew when it was important to organize one’s entire life around nap time and when to acknowledge that a little missed sleep did not portend the crack of doom and it was better to wheel the stroller into a café and have a drink with a girlfriend.
We knew that using a playpen wasn’t the end of the world and in fact sometimes forestalled it. Such was the wisdom of the elders.
“A stroller does everything a walker does,” they said, “but comes in better colors. And it has pockets!”
“Butt paste is the best wrinkle cream,” they said. “I order it by the case. We can share!”
Lola and Sari said they would be happy to babysit for ten dollars an hour, which was half the going rate.
Lucas said he would help. Darcy said over her dead body.
Alice said we could borrow B21. Max said what happened to B20 and was treated to a tale of babysitter woe I could barely follow.
The Vista Viewers said they would be happy to babysit for free.
If Moth and I ever wanted to go see a movie or needed a nap or had errands to run, we had only to say the word.
This seemed like a generous offer, and I was grateful, but the truth was they could think of no one they’d rather spend an afternoon with than a newborn.
Dot had planned games. She had us guess how many jelly beans were in a plastic baby bottle.
She had us use diaper pins to affix paper napkins to peaches which, we giggled, did look very much like downy baby bottoms. She had the old women take tiny tastes from baby-food jars and guess the flavors.
At least half of them made a joke about its being better than the food in the dining room.
(At least half of those would be too full from their tiny spoonfuls of baby food to eat anything at dinner anyway.) While Moth and I opened presents, Dot pasted the ribbons onto a paper plate to make a hat for the pupacorn’s first birthday.
She had everyone append “in bed” to my exclamations over the gifts, even though they were mostly things like “Oh how sweet … in bed” and “Oh my, what tiny, perfect stitches you knit, Birdie … in bed” and “Green stripes! My favorite! … in bed,” all of which was somehow funnier than it really was.
It was the loveliest afternoon any of us had had in some time.
Moth looked dazed and sometimes confused (in bed) but happy. Ebullient even.
Dot looked tired and pale but satisfied. Triumphant even. She stood by the door and hugged every resident on her way out, said how good it was to spend the afternoon together, thanked her for coming.
I don’t know how I looked, but how I felt was how memory always feels: at once now and long ago, here and nowhere.
I was too mired in it all to feel nostalgically charmed like my neighbors.
I was experienced enough to know that their offers to lend a hand and a grandchild’s outgrown crib weren’t going to lessen appreciably the burden of parenting.
Infinity minus anything is still infinity.
But if I was going to bring a child into the world, if I was still anxious about that child growing up among people who had finished doing so long ago, I was grateful to be part of such a kind and generous community.
And I was grateful for the wisdom of their collected years, the rough equivalent of several millennia. We were going to need it.
After everyone had shuffled off to rest up before dinner and the kids had done the bare minimum to claim they’d helped clean up and even Roger pronounced this the best baby shower he’d ever been to, I found myself alone again, finally, with Moth, Maisie, and Dot.
“That was a wonderful afternoon,” Dot said.
“It was,” I agreed, and not even grudgingly. “Thank you, Dot.”
“I’m ready now,” she said.
“For the dining room?” Maisie was incredulous. “I ate so much I was thinking we could skip it till the weekend at least.”
“To die,” Dot said.
“Just to get out of tidying up?” Moth kept his eyes on the hand-knit blankets he was folding. “I’ll hoover the confetti, toss the paper in the bin, and Bob’s your uncle, this place will look good as new.”
Dot smiled and shook her head. “I fêted the pupacorn. Wished it blessings on its journey. Fêted you. Fêted all of us.” She sounded exhausted.
I saw suddenly. Or maybe I had known all along. The celebration might have been for the pupacorn, but the party was Dot’s chance to say goodbye to everyone. The journey upon which blessings were needed was hers.
But Maisie wasn’t having it. “It doesn’t work that way. You don’t just get to decide, ‘Okay, I’m ready to die now.’”
“You do if you’re lucky,” Dot said.
“Instead of dying, why don’t we go down to supper?” Moth suggested. “Just coffee and dessert?”
She waved him off. “I have to pack.”
“Why?” I asked, panicked. I understood wanting to exercise control over the ending of what was, after all, her very own life, but I was worried that she seemed to think it would require luggage.
“I’m moving. To the nursing wing.”
“When?”
“Now. I made a deal with my body: Make it through the shower then I promise I’ll retire you. It did so I am.” She paused. “I thought there might be some dignity in walking over, actually.”
Because this is what else I might have said to the ABC girls in the parking lot if I’d thought arguing with them would do any good.
It is meaningless and irrelevant and impossible either to pinpoint or pin down where life starts or where life starts to end, life and death both being ouroborosly indifferent to rhetoric or bombast or what any of us want or want to believe.
It is so much bigger and stranger and less cooperative than that, and I say this from the far reaches of its trenches.
Life means something different at its edges, all along the borders really.
And besides, who’s to say you’re dying better than you?
The nursing wing—attached via skybridge from the sixth floor to the rest of Vista View—was one of the perks listed in the brochure.
When the time comes, they said, you won’t have to go far.
Your friends will be able to visit you. You’ll be able to come and go as necessary.
When you need us, we’re right here. When you’re better, you just cross back over the skybridge and home.
The brochure did not mention how often people crossed back home.
Dot packed books: three short-story collections, two photo albums, one pulpy-looking mystery (“It’s terrible, but I’m hoping to find out who did it before I die”).
She packed a skein of wool but no needles (“My hands aren’t steady enough to knit these days, but it’s nice to have the yarn”).
She packed some nightgowns and a cardigan. Then she zipped the suitcase shut.
“We’ll bring you more books.” Maisie focused on what she could focus on.
“And more pants,” said Moth. “You always run out of pants before anything else.”
“I won’t need pants,” said Dot. “I’ll be in bed.”
Moth blushed.
“ ‘Pants’ means underwear in British,” I translated.
“Panties,” Maisie offered.
“Don’t say ‘panties.’” Dot made a face. “What if that’s the last word you ever say to me?”
“You’ll be out of there in a couple weeks, I bet.” I found myself actually believing this. “They’ll fix you up, and you’ll be on your way.”
Only half of this last statement was true.
We walked her over all together, Dot, Maisie, Moth, and I, taking the glass elevator to the sixth floor then slowly making our way over to the nursing wing.
“How many patients walk in here on their own two feet?” Moth asked the nurse at reception.
“You might be the first.” She smiled encouragingly at Dot, but when she came around from behind the desk, she was pushing an empty wheelchair.
Dot looked panicky as she lowered herself into it. “What if that’s the last time my feet touch the floor?”
“Oh, don’t be ridiculous.” Maisie was trying hard not to cry.
“Stand up,” I whispered.
“What?”
“Go ahead. Stand up.”
The nurse stopped pushing and Dot did. Then she sat back down again.
“See?” I squeezed her hand. “No last times.”
That’s where it all started.