The Visit - from The American Voice
They drive up and park and get out of the car and start to unload, unused to the amount of stuff you have to take with you when you travel with a baby. They lift the back of the pickup truck and take from it a stroller, a diaper bag and a portacrib, all obviously the top of the line and way more expensive than necessary, but who can tell you that for the first? Then they remove a bag with extra bottles, baby food and a huge mound of toys (unnecessary in my childpacked home), then a full bag of disposable diapers, two suitcases, and a bouncy chair with a receiving blanket tucked into its corner. From the cab, they lift the baby, car seat and all, then grab as much stuff as they can handle from where they have piled it on the sidewalk, and, leaving the rest, make for the front door. I head them off, praise the baby for a moment, and then pick up what I can carry. We go inside.
My friends are visiting for the weekend.
Peggy unbuckles the straps from the car seat and lifts her fat handsome baby out; the little girl seems to smile with relief. Their first long distance car ride, accomplished.
"How'd it go?" I say. My five-year-old boy and three-year-old girl suddenly appear at my sides and cling to me like Elmer's.
"It went," says Peggy. "Clara cried the whole way."
"She slept an hour," says Brian, Peggy's husband.
"Oh, God, yes, an hour. But then, what is an hour in this new and bizarre scheme of things. But a mere minute, a second's silence in the din."
"Bad trip, huh?" I laugh. My kids had always been good in the car, at least so as I remember, but I had heard plenty of horror stories. "Well, how about a beer?"
Clara rolls back and forth on her blanket on the floor and my two, Tim and Sandy, get right up in her face. They lean into her as if they've never seen a baby before.
"Pretty little," says Tim.
"She's just like a doll!" says Sandy.
I say, "Don't get too close kids," but Peggy just smiles and says, "They're okay." I can tell she's nervous but trying to be cool. Clara was a difficult birth, a breech after a long labor. Peggy pushed for what she said seemed like years. It had been enough to scare her to death as it was, she says, and then Clara had had some problems after birth, a little weakness in one side. And she was a fussy baby, cried a lot, she still, even as six months wakes three or four times. She's had several colds, Peggy says: "Although I don't know from where, we've scarcely been out of the house."
"Kids," I say to my two. "Find something else to do and leave that baby be."
Peggy's twirling spaghetti on her fork and balancing Clara on her knee at the same time. The baby looks as if she'll fall, slide right off onto the linoleum. I want to say, "You can put her down, you know. Just because she's been a little fussy. . ." But instead what I say is, "Why don't I hold her while you eat and then you can hold her while I eat."
Peggy accepts, reluctantly, and gives her husband a glance. He sits up straight. "Don't look at me, babe," he says. "I was brought up to believe you could put babies down once in awhile."
