Elephants on Parade

Finalist
Terrain.org 15th Annual Fiction Contest
 

Jessy was afraid to touch the baby’s head.

The baby, just three weeks old, was asleep. The dog, an ill-tempered nine-year-old mutt named Mohawk, needed a walk. Urgently. Her husband, the official dog-walker, had headed back to work that morning after his brief paternity leave, jaunty and freshly-shaven, smiling up at their brownstone windows before disappearing into the day. 

In order to walk the dog, she needed to wake the baby.

The baby, swaddled in her bassinet, was so small, so helpless. So totally fucking immobile. Could Jessy just leave the baby in the apartment and take the dog for a quick walk?

She looked at the dog. The dog looked back. Dark eyes. Eager eyes.

Jessy had loved the dog slavishly, stupidly, until two weeks ago, when she and Scott brought the baby home. She’d sworn against being this woman, but there it was, irrefutable: she held the infant on her lap as Mohawk approached and all she saw was otherness of species: animal, instead of beloved. The sheer canine of her. Germs marching in steady invisible streams along the wet snout. Greying beard crusted with last night’s hamburger. Tongue sloppy and dangerous. Incisors stained and sharp.

Mohawk had come running toward Jessy after a week’s separation in a spasm of ecstasy, tail wagging so hard her entire body wiggled, squealing with deep-throated joy, before she caught sight of the baby and had herself the dog version of a heart attack. She shrieked in confusion, howled herself into a corner, ran back and forth, back and forth in a hysterical high-pitched fashion, wanting her mother, wanting her mother, wanting that freak baby-thing gone.

Jessy had feared a scene but this frenzied suffering was beyond comprehension. She worried the dog would explode, pieces of kidney and heart and bone flying in every direction. Jessy wanted to comfort her but found herself shrieking back instead. She clutched the baby closer. It wasn’t out of love—who was this baby, even?—but panic.

The dog howled. The baby began to wail. 

Pressure pulsed in Jessy’s mind like a dull, distant drum.

Please don’t kill the baby, Mohawk, she’d silently urged. Because then we’ll have to put you down, and that I would not survive.

Jessy did not love her baby.

“Not yet,” her mother chided. “That’s normal, honey.”

Jessy had been discharged from the maternity ward on day two, as promised. Healthy as an ox!, a high-pitched nurse called out as Jessy struggled to roll herself out of bed. But by day five the baby was still in the NICU. Jessy and her mother sat around the bassinet warmer, that smallest of glass coffins, waiting for the baby to decide to fully join them on earth, a place she seemed reluctant to be, not wanting to open her eyes, to breathe, or to eat. The words “failure to thrive” ticker-taped through Jessy’s mind as she ran a finger along the orange feeding tube that snaked deep into the infant’s tiny upturned nose, that nose the only feature that even slightly resembled her mother’s. All was wires and tubes and blood and waiting. Midnight waiting. 2 a.m. waiting, 4 a.m., 6:30, Jessy turning half-animal under fluorescent hospital lights, grey-skinned and swollen, sore from the breast pump she’d been hooked up to like a penned cow, still bleeding profusely, shocking amounts of blood really, her back aching while she lay in bed, the baby’s NICU crib an endless corridor away.

“I love Mohawk,” she said slowly. “Why do I love my dog more than my baby?”

 “These things take time,” her mother said, confident to the point of boredom, her hands picking at a purple-and-pink knit NICU donation blanket that rested atop the bassinet. “Give it time.”

The room beeped in every direction. They were surrounded by pale, withered babies and crusader NICU nurses stronger than Jessy would ever be. The nurses were the actual stars of the show here, ringmasters of a nightmare circus where, try as she might, Jessy couldn’t find the crack in the tent to get back to the cool nighttime air of the rest of her life.   

But then: Hello earth, thought the baby on day six, opening her ocean eyes to scope out the scene: her NICU crib with its ceiling of blanket, her blithering, ragged mother. Maybe I’ll stay a while? Have a snack or something? Cool, cool.

And the curtain went up on the rest of Jessy’s life.

The list of ways to kill a baby was endless.

Jessy stared at the sleeping infant in the apartment. Those tiny hands, those wizened old-man eyes. Mohawk still tap-dancing around Jessy’s feet, begging, needing.

She took an inventory of her feelings to stall for time.

She felt tenderness toward the baby. Boatloads of wonder. An animalistic, innate protectiveness. But not the self-obliterating love she’d been promised by every woman offering unsolicited advice at the sight of her swollen belly. Perhaps she was too tired for love, like a wife pushing aside a husband in bed: not tonight, dear.

Jessy remembered love, in beds. She remembered not bleeding, not having to sit aslant in chairs while the stitches healed. Another woman entirely. One who shaved her legs, brushed her hair, applied makeup. Not this swollen ghost loitering in her mirrors. 

How could husbands stand the rejection? In five years of marriage she had been rejected exactly once.

The scene: A random Saturday. A lazy summer afternoon.

Her: traipsing out of the bedroom naked and smiling, one eyebrow lifted, strolling toward him with the dead certainty of a woman about to get laid.

Him: reading The New York Times at the kitchen table, a cup of coffee to his right, growing cold. He looked up from the pages, startled, put a hand on her bare hip, and said, with genuine surprise, “Honey, you know, I’m just… not up for it right now.”

He looked more shocked than she did. She forced a laugh. 

“Well, I guess I owe you one,” she said, playing it off.

“Or a thousand,” he said, joking, so many hilarious fucking jokes, and she returned to the bedroom naked and humiliated and here she was, years later, still thinking about the rawness of exposing oneself and being turned away. She turned him away at least once a week and he took it on the nose, undaunted, came back gamely every time. It seemed to work for them, this push and shove of pursuit and denial, but she had no idea how the world didn’t collapse around his ears in shame. She herself had an overdeveloped sense of shame, an intensely tuned sense of fear, a dramatic, dark imagination spinning out of control now that she needed to be her most focused. Now that someone needed her, truly needed her.

Her thoughts kept spiraling away like drunken birds in a strong breeze. She watched from a safe distance as the infant slept noisily. Occasional sneeze fits. Sometimes a strange squeaky sound from the back of the throat, like a dog toy, that made her leap from her chair.

New lungs just trying to work out the kinks, said the doctors.

You’re sending me home with kinked lungs? Jesus Christ.

The dog barked in her face.

Okay. Okay. To walk the dog, she needed to strap the baby to her chest in an infant carrier. The kind she’d seen women and sometimes men wearing in her neighborhood for years, walking to the bodega to casually pick up the milk and strawberries, grab the paper, hit the ATM. She would put the baby into the carrier, strap it around her waist and neck, tighten the straps appropriately (not too much!), then bend down, somehow not spilling the baby back out in a head-first puddle of bones on the floor, to clip the leash to the dog’s collar. (This was new—referring to her as “the dog” instead of as Mohawk, or Mo, or Mosey-Pie.) Then she’d walk out the apartment door, down a steep, dark interior staircase with both creatures in delicate balance, focusing like a tightrope walker, one hand on the dog’s leash, the other propping the baby’s horrifyingly unsteady head.

At the bottom of that staircase were two more narrow wooden doorways to negotiate, two more sets of old-fashioned locks, then one final set of outdoor stairs, these the dangerous ones, the grand finale, cement and steep. The kind that could easily send a woman to her death, the kind that, in another life, when she came tripping down in irresponsible leather boots in the depths of icy winter she knew beckoned tragedy. Even then she’d been dour, picturing herself slipping on the ice and falling spectacularly, like a trapeze artist with no ropes, her head splitting open on cement below, blood and brain sliding into the sidewalk cracks for the squirrels to feed on.

The squirrels were rabid, of course. One in particular. He showed up every morning to sit in the abandoned flower pot on the living room windowsill, the one the husband used to grow tomatoes in but this season, what with the baby coming, he’d been too busy to think about buying the seeds and tending to it every day like the nurturing person he was. He’d spent these past years toiling away over tomato plants because she, rotten woman who lived on the other side of the apartment, had been too ambivalent about motherhood to give him a baby. She with her aging womb. She with her non-motherhood career agenda. She with her narrow waist of which she was vain, vain, vain.

He was the one who’d wanted this baby, that fucking guy, all bustling and happy, singing Sinatra on Saturday mornings, waltzing her around the kitchen in slippers while the bacon sizzled, reading The New Yorker, being all smart and kind and shit. But she was the one who’d had to contort her body into shapes of the grotesque to create it, had to push it out over the course of 42 fucking hours (“That’s longer than a work week!” he’d quipped afterwards, and she almost slapped him), she the one who had to have her vagina sliced open with a surgical knife to let a foreign creature out, who had to sit in mechanical desexualized humiliation at the hospital-grade breast pump waiting for her milk to come in while her baby tried to refuse to stay alive, she who gained 40 pounds, whose hair grew lush, then mostly fell out, whose skin grew dull from lack of sleep, whose pants would obviously never zip again.

Yet he, the Average American Man, a mere three weeks later got to go back to work, showered and shaved and jaunty, leaving her (of all people!) alone with a helpless infant, a dog who needed to shit, and an outside world packed with rabid squirrels and cement staircases. But this time instead of cracking open her own skull, it was the baby who would crash headlong into the oak tree at the bottom of the stairs, the one with shattered glass around the base from the neighborhood kids’ stoop-drinking parties. (Obviously, the children were another issue—they would steal her baby or, at the very least, run into her on their bicycles. Oblivious with their bright youth, their arrogant, animal energy.)

The list of ways to kill a baby was endless.

In Dumbo, the mother dies. In Bambi, the mother dies. In all the fairy tale narratives, baby is where mother ends.

She forced herself down the stairs and into the sunshine with all souls intact. They sat on the stoop to recover, smelling the world, panting.

Jessy sniffed the baby’s head. People talked rhapsodically about new baby smell but wasn’t it just Johnson’s Shampoo? She was missing pieces, she decided. Pieces of woman that were supposed to be tucked inside her like shards of a stained-glass window were missing, gone, and what remained were open passages where the wind whipped through.

The baby’s head, when she was born, had been covered in a shocking amount of reddish blond hair, matted with blood and shit. The baby had been two weeks overdue—not one doctor had warned Jessy that that was dangerous—had swallowed meconium and was born in wrongful silence. More doctors and nurses than seemed reasonable burst into the room in those last frenzied minutes, before they sliced Jessy open with a surgical knife to save the baby.  

“Quick kiss hello from mama,” the nurse had said with false brightness before she whisked the baby, doll-like and silent, off to the NICU. An unearthly pale beauty, spot-lit, then gone.  

Let them take her, Jessy thought, drifting out of awareness, a half-dead slab of meat lying on a table drenched in blood. At least they know what they’re doing.

The baby’s head really was something though, when Jessy slowed down enough to consider it in the fresh air, in the sunlight. It tipped to the right, then the left, when she wasn’t holding it. The baby was a girl. The girl’s name was Sarah. She already had a soul. Jessy could feel it, the soul, playing there under her fingers. Already, she lifted her small chin to the light. Her eyes, when they opened, were blue, so blue. The wind danced in her fine, bloodless hair.

Sighing, Jessy drew herself to her feet. She held the head with her right hand; the dog by the leash in her left. One turn around the block was all that was required. One block: a bare minimum dog walk. But if the dog pulled too hard wouldn’t Jessy’s fingers instinctively bear down, clutching for purchase? Wouldn’t her fingernails dig toward brain and blood below, puncturing that sweet baby brain, killing her by accident?

Jessy looked at the baby. The baby blinked. She sniffed the head again, cradled it against her palm. Baby of mine, she thought. In Dumbo, the mother dies. In Bambi, the mother dies. In all the fairy tale narratives, baby is where mother ends.

Baby of mine, she hummed on tuneless repeat, forgetting the rest of the song.

She made it halfway down Mercer, then paused. The elegant black iron lines of a fire escape ran above her head. They were supposed to indicate safety but she had a feeling that if she ever needed to escape her own apartment, her own life, they would shimmer to dust under her feet, sending her plunging to her death below.

Escape. She tasted the word like a cherry cough drop on her tongue, medicinal and sweet. She pictured a black pick-up truck. Hitting the road. Driving south, then west. Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana. Definitely Texas. Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. She’d stand beneath the Welcome to Truth and Consequences sign with a beer in one hand, sunglasses on, looking long and wild. She’d find a roadside bar, order a beer, and wait for a cowboy to pick her up, take her to a motel and rough her up a little. She’d been invited there to visit an old college friend once but didn’t have enough vacation time. She and the husband had been fighting (about whether or not to have a baby, about her empty womb). Later, she decided to try for a baby after all. They sold both their old cars to buy one shiny new one. One car for two people.

“I thought,” he said, “if you’d be okay with us being a one-car family, maybe you’d stop trying to run away.”

She wept on the sidewalk. “But I don’t want to run away,” she said.

He held her, the husband. He knew when she was lying.

 

The head really was beautiful though, cupped under her hand. There on the corner in the warming breeze Jessy forced herself to marvel at her daughter’s smallness. At the tiny bend of shoulder under white fleece pajamas with elephants parading down the arms. At the delicate intricacies of that little ear, pink, lined with blood vessels like the passages of a map, like directions, like roads from here to anywhere, from here to somewhere new. Where are we going, baby?

The first three blocks were quiet—the inside streets of her neighborhood, row after row of brownstones, the bricks warm and red in the afternoon sun. But rounding the bend to the final stretch was the tricky part. Montgomery Avenue was a major thoroughfare with four lanes of traffic, leading from the New Jersey Turnpike and dead-ending at the Hudson River, where the ferries at the terminal rolled gently in the blinking, sunlit water. In another life she’d liked the bustle, that she could peer out the kitchen window onto such a major route, that every summer Saturday there was a different local parade marching down the thoroughfare, honoring some Latin or African or a Pakistani holiday she’d never heard of. A spectacle of other lands, other lives.

They rounded the bend to Montgomery with Mohawk on alert, distrustful of noise and crowds. Jessy gripped the leash tighter. About three-quarters of the way down the block, her building finally in sight, she passed Xtreem Clean, the laundromat, the door propped open to a blast of air-conditioned air laced with fabric softener and steam dryer heat. 

“Mrs. Scott! Oh, it’s Mrs. Scott!”

Jessy paused, disoriented, while Hilda the shop owner cried out her husband’s name, arms raised ecstatically. Jessy staggered back as Hilda rushed forward, reaching to touch the baby’s hair, to tickle her pajama-covered feet.

“Yes, yes, hi,” Jessy said, forcing a smile.

“Oh, precious baby,” Hilda said. “You must be happy, so happy, and Mr. Scott, I know he is so happy too.”

“Oh he’s delighted,” Jessy said, “And my name is Jessy, by the way,”

“Of course,” Hilda said, not looking at her. “You come visit anytime. We will hold your baby so you can rest. It is warm inside, and clean, you have nothing to worry about here.”

Oh, to sit inside the laundromat, to let other women, the steady and motherly kind, she thought they were maybe Ukrainian, hold her daughter while she sat in a stupor watching the washer spin. A despair fell over her, so thick and black that she lost her breath. What would happen, honestly, if she walked into the parade the next time it went by instead? She could hand the baby to Hilda and fall in line, somewhere after the young girls with their flashing batons but before the grandmotherly women, revered in the back of red, open-topped convertibles. She could walk slowly, wave with queenly poise while people cheered from the fire escapes above. She could follow the street to its end at the glittering river, where she could step aboard a boat and simply go. It could be so easy to be a run away.

Who will keep you safe? Is it really supposed to be me?

When she was 19 she saw the Ringling Brothers Circus elephants march up Fifth Avenue in the middle of the night. She’d been loitering with Scott and some friends at the Newark Diner, eating chicken fingers and disco fries. They were driving home around 2 a.m. when the Pirate Radio DJ on 94.9 The Wolf announced the elephants were coming.

“Elephants!” cried Scott, slamming on the brakes. “We’re going.”

Jessy stared mildly out the window, squashed in the backseat, listening to the cool sounds of Dave Matthews Band on a CD as they drove into the city. She didn’t much care for horns but everyone was obsessed with Dave so sometimes she could dig it, by habit rather than sincerity.

The night had been cold, the lights bright. They parked on the corner of 8th and 39th, then walked downtown, hunched and shivering, toward the waiting crowds. The circus trucks parked on the Queens side, where the animals unloaded and marched through the Midtown Tunnel toward Madison Square Garden. The elephants, ludicrous under bright streetlights, wore stage makeup: purple eyeshadow and painted-on black eyelashes above liquid-dark eyes. Waving atop them like beauty pageant girls were small-boned women in glittering leotards with blood-red lips and waists so tiny they’d never seen a hot dog. Tightrope walkers and jugglers and circus masters with tall hats strolled alongside, infinitesimal at the elephant’s feet. Their breath came out in steam, just like Jessy’s in her wool coat buttoned to her throat. She squinted at the spectacle, hating the excitement it raised against her will, worried for the elephants but astounded by their grace. There was magic in the crowds and the bright lights, the oddity of wild beasts wandering out of the tunnel and into the dazes of the avenues. She longed to be a part of it, and she wanted to run from it, and if we live in a world where elephants can walk under the East River and through Herald Square in the middle of a winter’s night, little girl, she whispered to her baby at a crowded traffic light 15 years later, then what kind of world is this? Is there anywhere we can be safe?

The elephants strolled past the Macy’s display windows holding each other trunk to tail, like mothers and daughters, like sisters, like friends. She imagined them cleaved from one life and thrust into another, stolen from their own mothers on bright African plains and made to stand in hot dark tents. Many years later, Jessy learned about an elephant sanctuary in Tennessee. Thousands of acres of wild farmland set aside for aged and tortured circus elephants. Once the chains came off they had scars, sure, but they acclimated and learned, in time, to relax and to trust. They made mothers and daughters and friends once again, doing the best they could with what they still had.

Oh baby, oh my baby, she thought outside of the laundromat, busses screeching by in the hot August dust. Your elephant shoulders and your seashell ear, your still-forming heart beating under my hand. Who will keep you safe? Is it really supposed to be me?

Back at their stoop, Mohawk sat obediently at her feet. The baby curled against Jessy’s chest, her pacifier rising and falling in slow rhythm. Jessy lowered herself down next to Mohawk. The sun was warm on their shoulders. Jessy felt dirty, greasy, tired down to somewhere past bones, past blood, to somewhere more eternal than that, someplace primal, normally inaccessible. The baby sighed in her sleep and nestled in closer. Jessy pressed her face against Mohawk’s greying nuzzle, then turned to offer the baby’s head. With queenly bearing, Mohawk leaned over and once, twice, sniffed the baby. She looked at Jessy with serious eyes, then rested her snout on Jessy’s knee.

Jessy rocked back and forth slightly, humming baby of mine over and over, thinking of elephants bearing chains and of elephants set free, of glittering Sixth Avenue women astride earthly beasts, and she held her own earthly beasts closer; like it or not, she was ringmaster now. She took a breath, rose regally, and drummed up the energy to climb her own stairs.