Stockholm. Something foreign. What about our kids?”
Then John explained carefully, squaring his shoulders and using both hands to shape his point in the air, that his father was a Lilly, his mother was a Lilly, and so on, and he wasn’t about to snub his parents or defect to another country or even talk about children just yet, and thus ended their first real tiff.
Two days later when they went to the courthouse to get the marriage license the last-name issue was all settled, and a smiling woman handed them their license and a congratulatory Newlywed Gift Pax—a drawstring plastic bag stuffed with one tube of Crest, a six-ounce bottle of Tide, some generic cologne, a sampler of Stayfree Minipads, two Tampax tampons, six caplets of Midol Maximum Strength, a packet of food and car coupons, and two Massengill disposable douches.
Lillian was responsible for taking care of the Gift Pax, as she was for ordering the flowers, choosing the wedding music, and filing for the name change. In a pensive mood a week before the wedding, she dumped the insides of the Gift Pax bag out onto her bed when her parents weren’t home and arranged everything into categories. The contents of the largest pile, she realized, had been chosen for a woman, aimed at some mythic deirrigation that was to be a natural part of her life to come. The messages stamped on the items were unescapable—“Open This End” and “Do Not Flush” and “It’s Easy”—the same cadences and commands she’d been marching to for ten years, since she’d first noticed her body emptying itself against her will, but now it was all somehow intimately connected with John. Tiptoeing barefoot like a naughty adolescent boy, she chose a tampon and one caplet of Midol from her pile, took them into the bathroom, and filled the sink with water. Dropped in the sink, the tampon burst out into a languid white butterfly-shrimp, while the Midol steamed up into mystic fragrant pebbles, eventually finding their way into the white fluff. This was what womanhood must be, she thought—floating around bloated with bits of debris clinging to you, until finally the weight made you sink. Or lying dormant, dissolving away into white space—silent while the world watched; suspicious that what really mattered was that a woman learn to properly stanch and flush her own blood, to embrace both the vitality and the ugliness of her flesh. Lillian paced around the upstairs rooms, swinging her arms—feeling herself a lonely teenage girl, emptied of all that was dreamy or glorious. She lingered in the bathroom and leaned her head against the cool window, breathing mouthwash mist onto the frosted glass. She thought about calling off the wedding, or asking John to somehow prove his love, or at least demanding that he learn to poke fun at his last name.
After she and John had been married for two years, Lillian developed a secret fondness for her new name, saying it aloud over and over with her hands sunk to the wrists in warm, sudsy dishwater, enjoying how the name jaunted and clicked between the teeth and the palate. She stared into the little lemony bubbles nestled into a teaspoon and delighted in watching her lips say the name upside down.
She got to the point where she could say the name, over and over, without noticeably moving her lips. For the first time, she wondered if she had the stuff to be a ventriloquist. She noticed that only the “Lill” part of the name required her to expel any air. When she was pregnant with Bub, something seemed cozy and instinctual and dogmatic about bobbing her head slightly as she repeated the name, and during her labor it all became her mantra, her cradle, her “Lillian Lilly Lillian Lilly Lillian” way of rocking herself through childbirth.
John greeted Bub’s birth with far less certitude.
“Why doesn’t he moan or something? He’s too quiet,” John said, scowling and nervous. He laid his son’s four-hour-old little body in the crook of Lillian’s arm and leaned over the hospital bed a bit nearer to her lips. The woman in the next bed coughed loudly.
“They said they’re going to put him on a respirator,” John whispered confidentially. “What’s wrong with him?”
Lillian tilted her head on the pillow and looked at his face, gingerly stretching out her lips a bit as he kissed her. The moustache was gone now and had been replaced by several tiny pinches in the upper lip. John’s one of those people, she thought, whose lips you just never really notice until the moustache is gone. The moustache had made him droopy-mouthed and serious, but its absence revealed new edges to his smile and a squirminess to his mouth that Lillian had never imagined. She learned how to grin as she kissed him.
“Piss,” said the woman in the bed next to Lillian’s, turning on her side to face the Lillys.
“Don’t worry hon,” Lillian said. “He’s just delicate. Like a flower. Like a wet new flower. He’ll be fine sweetie, he’ll be fine.”
“They said his lungs aren’t big enough yet,” John whispered. “He’s breathing through his nose, I think. Listen.”
“He’s okay.” Lillian stroked her husband’s forearm. Bub had already spent fifteen minutes clutching her pinky finger in his fist, crying and squirming in healthy little jerks, and she knew he would be all right.
“Pissss,” the woman insisted, sitting up in her bed. “I stink like shitty, shitty, pissss.”
John looked over just as she struggled her hospital gown off her front, revealing coin-sized purple blotches dotting her sides, her skin folding downward in a pattern that suggested her body was dripping away into a slow, patient puddle.
“Get these damn things off me,” she said, scratching up and down her sides, squinting directly at John. “Get them. Off.”
John looked away and stared down at his own son, who was as buoyant and fat as a puppy.
Bub was on the respirator for two days, and they had to listen to his breathing carefully at home for about a week.
“I think he’s groaning a little,” John said anxiously, sitting on the couch at home, holding Bub against his shoulder to burp him. “I heard him gurgle, sort of, but it wasn’t like a wet sound or anything, it’s like he has a little pebble stuck in there. A couple of pebbles. It was a groan, sort of.”
“He’s fine,” Lillian said, gazing at them both dreamily from across the room. This was her favorite part of motherhood—the watching. She had never seen John so childlike, so worrisome. If Bub sputtered a little of her breast milk out of his mouth, John wanted to call the ambulance. If Bub frowned hard John laid him on the carpet and stuck his ear to the small chest to make sure the heart was still beating. Inside Bub’s chest, he could hear a perfect, pumping cadence, with just a touch of congestion rolling around once in a while—“It’s like, like a tiny tumbleweed that blew off course,” John told Lillian excitedly, “but it sounds healthy too, just blowing around happy there, warm and safe. A good sound. An ocean.” Lillian had never known her husband to be quite so imaginative and childlike, and she loved to sit back and watch.
But sometimes his imagination failed him, and John felt at a complete loss with Bub.
“You burp him,” he would finally tell his wife, carrying Bub by the armpits across the room. “You do it better.”
“I hear him burp better than you do, that’s all.”
“What does it sounds like to you, anyway?”
“I do it like the dolphin,” Lillian said, patting Bub’s back. She had recently become vegetarian, and used animal metaphors generously. “I use my sonar to find the air bubble, and poke it right up out of him with my long nose.”
Bub eeped out a burp in confirmation.
“That kid is turning you weird,” John said, shaking his head and walking off.
Lillian had to admit it was true. Since she’d had Bub, she’d been getting weird. She had cravings now not for juices and popcorn and carob, but for words and facts and cleanliness. She’d spend hours at a time just on the letter “p”—musing over the definitions of words like “plaid” and “plutonium” and “pluvial”—fascinated that she and Bub were just along for the ride, while all the words were out there reverberating somewhere near the stratosphere whether anybody liked