Chapter Two Bailey #2
Augusta’s baby started fussing in her little tent and Bailey went to retrieve her.
She held the squirming body awkwardly, paying special attention to her neck.
Bailey wished she liked holding newborns, but she didn’t.
It wasn’t just that they were fragile, it was that they also reminded her of hairless cats.
There was just something too raw about their skin, too naked, and it made her wince slightly.
She handed the child over to nurse and watched Augusta out of the corner of her eye, her friend twisting her strawberry-blond hair into a bun and pulling down her swimsuit to let the baby latch, while simultaneously carrying on a full conversation and sipping her tumbler of wine.
Bailey still felt slightly shocked watching her uptight friend just casually breastfeeding.
The whole thing was just a bit earthy, the random flashes of veins, the slurping noises.
It wasn’t Augusta’s vibe. If you asked Bailey about it ten years ago, she would have said Augusta would be more likely to snort a line of cocaine on national television than pop out a nipple in public.
Augusta draped the baby over her freckled shoulder like a sack of flour and thumped her back to make her burp.
The other children straggled up, sandy and pink, their hair stiff from salt.
They feasted on crackers and strawberries like seagulls, crying and snatching and scattering crumbs to the wind.
“Is you having a baby?” asked London’s little brother, Hale.
“Yes, I am,” said Bailey, poking his belly and scrunching her nose.
“And you’re the mommy but Uncle Van can’t be the daddy because he likes Caroline better than you?” asked London.
“LONDON, that is NOT what anybody said.” Fran looked at Bailey, horrified, but Bailey laughed easily.
“Van is the daddy,” Bailey said. “But I’m the mommy and mommies rule the world, right guys?” She grinned at the three little boys.
“I love Mommy,” said Charlie seriously.
“I’m going to be a mommy when I grow up,” said Hale.
“But daddies have a penis,” said London.
“They do,” agreed Bailey solemnly. “They do.”
Wap
Bailey didn’t want to give the baby Van’s last name, she didn’t want Van with her at the obstetrician, but when she took infant CPR she figured he might as well come along.
Vanny was the sort of guy who genuinely enjoyed thinking about ways he might be useful to strangers, the kind of person who pulled over to help when he saw someone struggling to change a tire, or parallel park, or once even carry a pull-out sofa up a third-floor walk-up, so she knew he’d say yes.
He arrived ten minutes late to class, and Bailey wanted to ask if he’d stopped to help a road crew spread asphalt on the way, but the teacher was speaking, so instead she just rolled her eyes and pointed her chin at the empty plastic chair to her right.
The class was held in a conference room at the hospital, and while most of the other students were pregnant women and their partners, there were also a handful of other adults there, and before they got started, they went around and introduced themselves and shared either their due dates or their reasons for taking CPR.
There was a woman who was taking a job at a day care, a couple who was moving with their young child to a remote village in Mali, where the nearest hospital was two hours away, and a woman who had just given birth and couldn’t stop worrying about what might go wrong.
“I just want to know what to do if he chokes on a grape or a hot dog,” the woman explained, wiping her eyes fretfully.
“Okay, well, that’s a great starting point,” said the instructor, nodding. “We don’t ever want to give an infant a whole grape or a hot dog.”
Bailey looked over and saw Vanny had pulled out a notebook and was writing “NO GRAPES OR HOT DOGS.” Bailey snickered. What kind of idiot would give a toothless newborn a hot dog?
They reviewed the major choking hazards, and one of the men told a harrowing story about the time he had, as a child, almost died from a large piece of ice lodged in his throat.
“That was probably incredibly scary,” agreed the instructor. “But you do know the ice would have melted before you actually died.”
Bailey motioned for Vanny to hand her his pen and she wrote “ICE OK FOR BABIES” on the page and winked at him.
When they were ready to practice the back slaps and chest compressions, the instructor pointed to a large plastic bin full of dolls and asked each couple to select one.
Vanny retrieved the mangiest of them all, a dirty-looking doll with a missing leg.
Bailey didn’t say anything but gave him a searching look.
“I bet nobody picks this one,” Vanny said with a shrug.
While everyone knew that you were supposed to time the chest compressions to the beat of “Stayin’ Alive” by the Bee Gees, the important thing was that you hit 100 to 120 beats per minute.
According to the instructor this meant that there were actually a number of songs that you could use, like “I Will Survive” or “Cecilia.” Vanny wrote down “Stayin’ Alive” and even included the apostrophe.
“Use whatever song works for you—I want you to just hit that rhythm,” the instructor said, and all the couples got down on their hands and knees to practice compressions on the floor.
Van chose “Sweet Home Alabama” and sang quietly to himself as he pumped the doll’s chest, two centimeters down and up.
All around the room couples hummed and sang to themselves, “Baby Shark” and “Hips Don’t Lie,” little plastic babies jumping like beans on the carpeting.
When it was Bailey’s turn, she pulled the dirty baby over and started quietly singing Cardi B’s “WAP” while she did compressions. “Yeah, you fucking with some wet ass pussy. Bring a bucket and a mop for this wet ass pussy.” The rhythm was basically perfect.
Vanny nodded approvingly and took out his pen, writing down the word “WAP” in his notebook.
After they finished with compressions, the instructor moved on to risks of drowning, heart abnormalities, and ingestion of medicine or poison.
Vanny took notes about using powdered dishwashing detergent rather than bright pods and vinegar instead of bleach while Bailey listened quietly, holding the plastic doll in her lap.
She pictured the basket under her sink, the bottles of bright-blue window spray and wire scrubbers predoused in cleansing agents.
They talked about keeping loose blankets away from the crib, about suffocation from letting babies sleep on their stomachs or fall asleep in your bed.
The whole nighttime ritual took on an air of menace, and Bailey shuddered.
The instructor handed out a packet and encouraged them to reread it once every few weeks, just to keep everything fresh.
Bailey put the pages in her bag and added it to the list of things she needed to do before she gave birth: Make her parents get all their shots, purchase short-term disability insurance, arrange maternity leave with her marketing clients, cover all the electrical outlets, learn how to install the fancy new car seat with clips into her car.
It was all so intimidating, so high stakes, and nobody ever talked about it.
She felt like she had been tricked. This whole time everyone had focused on the nursery and the stroller and the clothing and all the great stuff you could buy when you had a baby, but not the practical things you had to learn and do to actually keep your child healthy and safe.
She had to decide if she wanted to bank the cord blood to save the stem cells from the umbilical cord and the placenta.
It cost thousands of dollars to store it in a medical facility and it seemed incredibly unlikely that they would ever use it, but Bailey worried that on the one in ten thousand chance the baby needed it, and she didn’t have it, she would never forgive herself.
She worried she would buy the bouncer that the manufacturer ended up having to recall for safety.
She worried about the toxic chemicals a new mattress could release, about tainted formula, about nonorganic cotton, about BPA in plastic bottles.
It was too much for anyone to think about without going completely insane, and as the instructor thanked everyone for coming, Bailey felt tears spring to her eyes.
There was no way she was qualified to do this.
She wanted to ask the teacher to come home and live with her and just be there in case anything went wrong.
Sure, she could push down on a doll, but what about real life, what about her own baby?
She felt a hand on the back of her neck, and it was Vanny, gently rubbing the tense muscles. “You good?”
Bailey quickly swiped at her eyes. She had Vanny. He would help her. He would install the car seat and do all the light switches. She gave him a small smile. “I’m just feeling really sad about leaving this doll here.”
“See? I told you I picked a good one.” Vanny took Bailey’s bag and wrapped an arm around her shoulders, walking her out to the parking lot.
Budweiser Manor
Bailey had dreaded telling her parents she was pregnant, but they were bizarrely sanguine about the whole thing.
They had watched Bailey’s sister Kylie marry a complete dirtbag, they had watched her other sister Madison spend tens of thousands of dollars on fertility treatments, so, Bailey supposed, there were worse things than watching Bailey have a free pregnancy in her thirties with a decent guy.