Fiction: Fat Healthy Baby

Driving to her mom’s house, Natalie pictured a redhead with lustrous locks splayed out on a white pillow, rather than her own dark curls. It seemed she was thinking of the one-legged woman in A Zed and Two Noughts, who wants to lose her other leg at the end of the film, for the sake of symmetry. Was she remembering that movie right? She’d seen it once in college, nearly 20 years ago. Was she really thinking of this transitional time as disfigurement?

Natalie’s mom, Rosa, believed a new mother must lie in bed all day resting, eating, nursing. Early in the pregnancy, Natalie resisted Rosa’s invitations to spend the “fourth trimester” with her mother. But when Natalie found it difficult to heave her pregnant body around her cramped apartment where she lived alone, she agreed to spend maternity leave in her mom’s airy cottage, an hour away. She knew Rosa would dote on new mom and new grandchild alike. It was a matter of how much doting she could take.

During labor her mother was a comfort. They squeezed hands and breathed and sweated and cried. Natalie didn’t go in for a fancy maternity suite or a water-birth or anything extra. She didn’t want to test her “pelvic strength” or “prove” to the “world” the awesome might of her animal body. She ended up having a C-section, probably to suit to the OB-GYN’s schedule. “Knock me out,” she instructed. “Pump me full of the good stuff.”

When they returned from the hospital, Rosa fluffed the pillows of the canopy bed, white sheets crisp, the cold April breeze billowing gauzy curtains. Spruce and pine scented the air. The house creaked in the wind. Rosa’s was an austere kind of femininity, beech furniture with simple lines, a judicious display of glass knickknacks. It was not the house Natalie grew up in, loaded with old scratchy plaid. Rosa downsized the year after Natalie’s dad died. Exhaustion is what it was, Rosa said. Heart attack was the official cause.

Natalie did her best to ignore pain and discomfort using all available remedies. She imagined she and Violet in her cream-colored bassinet on a sailboat, embarking on this new journey. A Zed and Two Noughts, she remembered now, seemed to be about documenting post-death decay; she would push against this impulse toward morbid things, she would focus on brightness, happiness, life.

It was paradise, at first. Rosa stuffed Natalie with unctuous foods. Baked eggs with gruyere and triangles of toast sopping with butter. Cold glasses of whole milk. Slices of a rich almond cake Rosa had never served before. Broiled liver and roasted Tuscan kale for dinner. Rice pudding, hold the cinnamon. Cinnamon was too exciting, Rosa said. Too exciting for what, Natalie didn’t bother to ask. Violet was born; spice wouldn’t make her pop out another baby. Where had Rosa gotten these ideas? Except for the toast, it wasn’t what Natalie ate growing up. But she didn’t have the heart to Google “post-partum diet.” She was sure there was a brochure somewhere full of guidance. She was too tired to look. The kale surely cancelled all the bad.

Rosa had retired a month before Natalie was due. While Natalie wrapped up loose ends at her job, Rosa did much of the prep work around Natalie’s place and hers. She built a crib and changing table in each home, selecting a brightly colored rug for each nursery—persimmon for the cottage, periwinkle for the apartment, which caused Natalie to suppress a suspicion her mother wanted Violet to feel just a little melancholy at home, happier at her grandma’s. Rosa bought tiny little outfits covered in suns, stars, and the like. She lined every sharp corner with ugly rubber bumpers that would leave skid marks after removal years later. No nieces or nephews, no other grandchildren. Violet was going to be a QUEEN.

Breast milk flowed, Violet suckled. As Natalie expected, a little depression hit on contact. Like the disinterest in diet Googling, she dared not type in “nipple” and “downer” and opted not to discuss it with Rosa, afraid it would reveal Rosa’s own dark post-partum thoughts. (Did you ever leave the newborn me on the bathroom floor to cry all night, Natalie wondered, thinking of the story of her grandmother when she was a new mother still recovering from war and the neighbors banged on the ceiling in sour complaint? What had that act done to Rosa’s psyche? Was she curious what that might do to Natalie, to Violet?) But milk came.

A friend who was trying to adopt and fortifying herself against arguments that breast milk is best and that unregulated breast milk banks were worth the risk had said that formula-fed babies slept better at night. But she warned Natalie that if she chose that route, she must watch out for lactavists.

“Lactavists?”

“People who will harangue you for not breast feeding if they see you bottle-feeding in public.”

Maybe it was all the possible judgments of a mom, a single one no less, that helped push Natalie to agree to her mother’s plan to spend “the fourth trimester” in supposed maternal paradise.

Rosa gifted Natalie expensive shearling slippers to wear around the house, should she deign to leave bed. She was terrified Natalie would slip and fall, terrified that cold feet would bring unpredictable health problems. The slippers made Natalie’s feet sweaty.

Two days mostly in bed was nice but by day three she was creeping out to help around, do anything at all, at least a little bit.

“Please, Natalie, rest,” Rosa implored. “Gather your strength. Soon you’ll be chasing Violet and wish you’d rested.” Rosa was panting as she said this. Natalie couldn’t help but protest. Yet she lay back on the pile of pillows and kicked off the slippers, grateful for the breeze filtered through the skinny pines surrounding Rosa’s cottage, carrying away the stink of her overheated feet. Violet snuffled in her sleep.

Natalie wasn’t 100% sure she’d have her job when maternity leave ended. It had happened to a friend of hers, hoodwinked out of a job. She wasn’t sure how it happened to her friend and she was afraid to press for details, lest she hurt her friend, lest knowledge of those machinations would somehow contaminate her future with foreboding. Don’t worry, Rosa insisted. Worry is not for you, you’ll end up dead at your desk like your poor father. Natalie didn’t know if he’d slumped to the side in his chair or if his head hit the walnut veneer, a detail she of course would never ask her mother, who’d found him. Imagining a little thunk deepened the pit of sadness in her stomach.

“You write poetry selling jewelry, you’ll find something good if push comes to shove,” Rosa said.

Copy writing about gems—clean, hard, precise. Natalie’s brain in her mother’s house felt as if it were going to mush. Breast-feeding at dawn was a beautiful thing, in theory. She was glad to rest but itching to go, to firm up her brain, maybe read for pleasure for a minute. Books of art and film history crammed her apartment, plus meditations on the ungraspable meanings of stones, silly but amusing. Her crystals would move to higher shelves as Violet grew.

The farmer’s market opened for the season on Mother’s Day. The cottage filled with tulips, anemones. Rosa had Violet’s astrological chart done by a random lady at a table by the cream pies Rosa bought three of.

“She’ll be secretive,” Rosa said of Violet as she shoved a log of goat cheese into the over-full fridge. “Watch out!” Rosa’s secrets were another matter. Natalie was always under the impression that Rosa was harboring big secrets. Now that Natalie was a mother she imagined all the things she will never tell Violet and felt more certain Rosa’s secrets were many.

Natalie set the chart aside without reading it. Her face had broken out from too much dairy, was breaking out just looking at the cream pie sweating in its metal tin. Barefoot in a kitchen was not what she envisioned when she’d decided that she would pick “Mr. Right” anonymously from a sperm bank. She’d went alone to the clinic, told herself to listen to the twinges in her gut as she flipped through a binder of profiles. The chosen donor was college educated, Jewish without the genetic mutations prone to those of Ashkenazi descent, artistic. Natalie being a single mom was only a brief concern for Rosa; she dove right into assistance, ready to coo at a newborn.

While waiting for Rosa to return from the farmer’s market, and while Violet slept, Natalie had found her mother’s recipe for almond cake propped up on the cookbook holder on the kitchen counter. An italicized note said it was written in Terezin. Good health cakes, they were called. Cakes for mothers of newborns. The woman who wrote the recipe died in 1944.

A montage of Holocaust films sprang to Natalie’s mind, gaunt women smearing drops of blood on their cheeks to appear healthy enough for slave labor, soldiers holding babies unnaturally before tossing them in the air to murder them.

Her chest tingled discomfitingly.

The recipe was important to preserve, she’d thought, as the tingling refused to fade, but way too sad to eat.

“You made me eat a lot of this cake,” Natalie said after Rosa shut the fridge door, “and it’s not sitting so well with me, it’s making me feel kind of strange.”

Rosa waved dismissively. “Have some ginger ale.”

“That’s not what I mean.” Rosa liked to bake, it wasn’t out of left field that she’d baked so much, but Natalie didn’t recall being given food so—loaded. Not outside the context of say, a Passover seder. A bite of parsley sounded pretty good right now, Natalie thought. Cleansing.

Violet started crying. Natalie patted her tiny back which was not incredibly tiny anymore.

“It’s history, Natalie.”

Violet belched and stopped crying. Natalie sniffed Violet. She smelled like rancid cheese. “I’m going to give her a bath.”

“Let me,” Rosa said, holding her hands out.

“I got it,” Natalie said, firmly.

Violet had grown to a meaty cloud of baby blubber. Where rivulets of milk surreptitiously traveled, cheese formed. No one had told Natalie about milk neck. No one had told her about neck cheese. Too many other things to learn, she supposed. She wiped away her daughter’s homemade cheese wondering if she had “already” “ruined” her daughter.

Rosa invited Natalie stay longer than three months but Natalie was ready to jet.

“Are you sure?” Rosa asked as Natalie packed her car.

“Are you lonely?” Natalie asked, feeling thoughtful, her car half-packed, the guilt building, Violet sleeping snugly against her chest in the baby carrier.

“It’s not that, honey. Motherhood is difficult. I want to help.”

“You wish you’d had more help.”

“Certainly!”

“Did you ever feel like you were doing a bad job?”

Rosa’s eyes saucered. “Are you saying I did a bad job?”

“No! I am trying to relate to you, mom. Like you said. Motherhood is hard.”

“Do you think you are doing a bad job?”

“Not the worst job.”

“Once when you were a newborn crying for a long long time I did put you on the floor and close the door and walk away.” The tingling Natalie had felt after discovering the Terezin recipe returned, folding over itself, like a slumbering creature in her aorta was turning over, a little ghost.

“Like grandma.”

“Not for a whole night, no, it wasn’t like that, but—”

“But you were frustrated.” The little being she imagined in her aorta sighed.

“And darkly curious.”

“Darkly—curious?”

“I mean, I wasn’t attempting Spartan infanticide!”

“You thought about killing me?”

“No, honey.”

Impulsively they hugged, Violet in her baby carrier gently smushed between them.

Violet sat in the backwards-facing car seat with a mirror set up so Natalie could see her. She insisted Rosa not come, but, once home, unpacking the car with Violet strapped to her front quickly became fatiguing. Neighbors jumped in to help and offered to deliver a pot of tomato soup, a tray of lasagne.

My village is forming, thought Natalie, relieved.

Later that summer, at four months old, Violet’s first food was a single macerated cherry. Four months old was young, just barely advisable, but Natalie was eager to escape the fourth trimester with a great leap forward. Violet let the crushed fruit slide around on her tongue and grunted with pleasure. A single cherry was enough to satisfy her. “A single macerated cherry for the baby,” she imagined herself saying at a cocktail bar though she wouldn’t want to draw criticism to herself by bringing a little one to such a place. But all-consuming babyland was getting tiresome.

Natalie wondered what her father would have wanted Violet’s first food to be. Through the fog of early parenthood, she grieved his absence, his inability to dandle Violet on his knee and laugh with her softly the way a grandpa should. Would he have followed Rosa’s example and retired? Probably not. In his darkest moods sometimes he muttered work makes you free. Rosa never acknowledged such mutterings. When Natalie read ahead in her babycare book to the toddler years, there was a boxed sidebar about The Extinction Method of strategically ignoring undesirable but not unsafe behavior; was Rosa kind of doing that?

Violet was in daycare and Natalie was back at work and everything was fine, fine. Breastfeeding was over and she was gulping coffee, three cups a day, and her brain has turned back on. Cold turkey breast-weaning and cry-it-out sleep training felt cruel yet she was getting some blessed sleep again. There’s only a subtle resentment running through the maternal line, Rosa-Natalie-Violet.

Violet’s secrets included surprise diaper drops once ambulatory. They went like this: Hide behind furniture. One velcro strap off, then the other, and the diaper, heavy with urine, shushs to the floor. Then full speed to the closet, to poop inside Natalie’s favorite blue pumps.

Is this punishment for weaning, for sleep training, for daycare, Natalie wondered?

Violet laughed when Natalie poured herself a glass of wine. Should I be drinking alone in front of the baby?

Worries piled up.

Is it bad to for the baby to see me cry?

Tantrums came. Violet kicked, screamed, pulled Natalie’s hair when Natalie tried to get her to do anything. She clambered onto a windowsills, pulled off her diaper and peed, thrilled at the golden stream. Natalie hesitated to ask for Rosa’s help. I have to deal with it my way, she thought. But guilt buoyed in the gut, palpable as acid reflux.

Rosa came, once a week. Violet’s uneaten food scraps were impossible for them to throw out. Natalie ate it, usually, until she caught a stomach bug from Violet, and she lay in bed immobilized for 24 hours, her body turning inside out. Only a month later she was back to eating Violet’s leftovers because she couldn’t bear to trash all that barely-eaten food. Rosa’s mother starved in the Holocaust. It was never okay to waste food in her house or in Rosa’s, but the abundance of food at Rosa’s was too much. What do I do with all this food I made, Rosa would ask in despair when Natalie said she just can’t take it anymore she just wanted the spinach salad from the sad little salad bar near her office. How could that be what she wanted? Is that really what she wanted?

She wondered this alone at the kitchen counter one evening as Violet reached for the cutting board and pulled, chopped broccoli tumbling down. Natalie swiped the knife into the sink before it could fall on Violet. Violet grabbed two trees of broccoli, held them aloft in her fists. The poop-full diaper fell. Violet crouched, yelling triumphantly, “Nooooo!” as more poop poured out from her onto the white linoleum. River of Fundament came to mind, that six-hour film about fathers and sons and Egyptian gods and Ernest Hemingway’s suicide and muscle-car-stand-ins for dicks, and yes, vast subterranean rivers of shit, a movie Natalie watched several years ago.

Was this the picture of motherhood Natalie was after? It wasn’t laying in bed all day like a convalescing princess but it was real, it was hers, and one day, she told Violet, one day maybe you’ll change my diaper. Violet laughed and ran to her room, tush disappearing down the narrow hall crowded with toys, all going off with lights and off-tune songs—“Potatoes! Are good to eat!” She returned with a fresh package of wipes.

Her second word (her first, a plaintive “Mama” while reaching for Natalie) rang out like a bell: “Ready!”

No, of course Violet’s readiness is not the end of the story. The questions are larger, the pain deeper, the poop will return as surely as we eat, hopefully in not too many rivers. Violet will want to know about her father who she’ll be allowed to contact after the age of 18 if he, through the sperm bank, checked the right boxes. And if he didn’t, maybe she’ll find him anyway, and if he did, maybe she’ll have trouble finding him or maybe he won’t be like anything she could have fathomed. There will be layers and layers, lineages known and unknown. Why do we only know about Rosa’s mom, who are the other ancestors, Violet might want to know. And she’ll find what she can find, if it occurs to her to ask, if it occurs to her to search, if it isn’t too painful to articulate, and the rest will be part of the vast unresolved which folds cosmically into future kin’s flesh.

Anca L. Szilágyi is the author of the novels Daughters of the Air and Dreams Under Glass.