The Book of Baby Names Read online

  The Book

  of

  Baby Names

  * * *

  by Norman Prentiss

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  The Book of Baby Names

  Norman Prentiss

  The Book of Baby Names — Foreword

  Sandra picked up the dull, saddle-stitched book. The child on the cover laughed, a mischievous gleam in her eyes. Water stains on the front cover blurred the outline of some of the child’s teeth, making a few look sharp, like an animal’s. But the girl laughed, so everything was okay.

  Denise, at work, said she hadn’t picked out a name yet.

  Sandra’s brother used to joke that he loved giving books as gifts. What he would do was pick out something he wanted, buy it a month in advance. He’d read it carefully, peering like a spy into each forbidden page. No right to read it, which made it fun. He was so careful, nobody’d ever know.

  It was true. The copy of Da Vinci Code she received from him one Christmas was flawless: spine uncreased and perfectly straight. A gleaming cover with raised foil letters. No fingerprints anywhere. Someday, she’d get around to reading it.

  But her brother’s behavior seemed wrong. Like giving a gift to yourself for everyone else’s birthday.

  She didn’t read The Book of Baby Names. Didn’t even open the cover.

  Besides, she wasn’t having a baby. The subject matter didn’t interest her.

  So she didn’t realize the book wasn’t one of those many pamphlets with A-Z listings, brief definitions to explain the meanings or derivations (“Norman” = from the north; “Diana” = truth), a list of possible nicknames (“Liz” or “Betsy” for “Elizabeth”), a warning against once-popular names, now out of fashion (“Gladys” or “Bernard,” for example). A helpful “Introduction” with a brief history of the importance of names: how the name is your first important decision regarding your child, and could shape his or her future in ways that might not now be apparent. Other helpful advice.

  She didn’t realize The Book of Baby Names was a work of fiction. And that the stories inside were horrifying.

  * * *

  The Baby Truck

  (a fable)

  Its motor had a distinctive rattle as it accelerated up the hill outside their home. The truck didn’t pass on a regular schedule (sometimes twice in one day, sometimes weeks or months without a visit), but Becca and her husband could always pinpoint its signature voice above the usual street noise.

  “The baby truck is coming for you.” Edward had started the joke a few years ago, quoted to her in a bad Karloff imitation—as if the truck were a modern incarnation of the stork, coming for Becca to deliver a newborn before either of them was ready.

  It was an “art car” by definition, a car redesigned into a conversation piece to startle people who pass on the road or pause to gawk in parking lots. Becca looked up the concept online, found countless pictures and even a philosophy. The owner of an art car rejects the idea of a professional paint job, and covers the vehicle’s flaws with spray-painted graffiti or bright tempura art designs, adding theme-based objects to complete the effect. The “hero car” has cartoon action figures posed and stuck in battles all along the chassis. The “diner car” has laminated menus glued to the doors; napkins, spoons and forks, and plates with plastic food decorate the hood as if it’s a Formica table top. On others, models of classic cars travel acrylic roads; spaceships hover above a painted starscape; a miniature roller coaster follows tracks along one roof edge and, after a perilous drop down the rear window, circles the trunk before a slow climb up the other side. The more outlandish the better.

  The baby truck was the most disturbing one they had ever seen. A mass of baby doll heads covered the front of the truck, their glass eyes facing forward as if watching the road for obstacles. Other heads turned in different directions, making it impossible to view the car from any angle without at least one tiny face staring back. Some of the heads were held up by small plastic arms. Other arms, snapped off and attached loosely to the truck, bounced and waved in the wind. Severed doll legs mimicked the final kicks from babies who fell, unmonitored, into backyard swimming pools.

  Wooden panels formed makeshift walls that enclosed the truck bed, open at the top. Doll clothes were pinned to the wood in a patchwork; around the top edge, small hands guarded the rim, fingers like a plastic version of barbed wire. Becca and Edward could sometimes see cardboard boxes or garbage bags over the top, and they assumed that the owner hauled junk for a living. But unlike other art cars that displayed a prominent web address or phone number, there was no advertisement on the baby truck.

  Perhaps it was just as well. What was visible of the owner didn’t invite further contact. From the side of the road, it was possible to see his head and bulky shoulders in the truck cab, his large hands tight on the steering wheel. A bristly crewcut and neatly trimmed beard added stiff lines to his round, expressionless face. It was hard to distinguish how old he was, his hair an odd mix of blond and gray. His glasses had yellow-orange lenses that masked his eyes. No matter what the season, he wore a dirty tan overcoat, buttoned to his neck.

  Children often wave excitedly at these flamboyant kinds of cars, and their owners typically smile and return the favor. The driver of the baby truck never waved back.

  It was a nightmare car. Funny, but unsettling—just like their joke about it.

  Except the shared joke of a married couple can lose its humor over time. The nightmare they thought they’d never want had recently become Becca’s strongest wish.

  She wanted a baby.

  * * *

  For the first years of their marriage, Becca and Edward ignored the pleas of their respective in-laws, scoffed at friends’ arguments that parenthood wrenched your priorities into a new, deeper, perspective. Life was full enough. They preferred other people’s children—ones you could hold and bounce and coo over, then give back.

  Becca’s job added another context to her ideas of parenthood. As an event planner and fundraising assistant for the Washington, D.C. branch of the Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation, she regularly saw neglected children who faced a difficult, severe life. Without adding to the population herself, she could view her work as a positive contribution—raising public awareness and getting funds and support to kids who needed them. That was her reward.

  Still, it was an office job: telephones, email, fax machines, filing, databases, scheduled meetings. As relief from repetitive tasks, her co-workers made a big deal, threw a big party, for any “life event.” Birthdays. A housewarming. An engagement, a marriage.

  And the baby showers…

  In the middle of an interior rant two years ago—how these parties rearranged everyone’s weekend schedule, discriminated against couples who chose not to have children, prompted awkward references to diaper-changing and biological clocks—Becca found herself strangely jealous of the fuss people made over the latest pregnant co-worker.

  Her best friend, Doreen, had brought her ten-month-old to the shower. And damne
d if the little thing wasn’t cute.

  The baby wrapped her whole hand around Becca’s forefinger and tugged at it. “I’m glad Edward’s not here,” Becca joked, pulling away. “He sees Katie, he’ll want one too!”

  Except, from that moment, she wondered how easy Edward would be to convince. The idea of her own baby, her own, began to consume her.

  She could find no elegant way to raise the subject. Not when they had a running joke about the nightmares of parenthood.

  “The baby truck is coming for you.”

  Well, maybe it was. And she needed to get Edward onboard.

  After his initial surprise, he responded with an “if you’re sure that’s what you want” agreement—lacking enthusiasm, but at least not throwing an objection her way (no mention of how his sales job, with frequent travel, could pose logistical difficulties for raising a child; how their two salaries were barely enough to help them rent a small row house off Dupont Circle).

  They dropped the awkward contraption of the diaphragm, his extra precaution of condoms. Their sex previously had the scent and aftertaste of sliding latex and spermicide; now natural fluids and tissues flowed together without thin layers of rubber dulling sensation, separating them at crucial points of connection. Sex was more passionate and meaningful.

  But not successful.

  They went to a specialist. Edward was fine. But Becca’s “environment” (the doctor’s awful word) was “not hospitable.” After fertility drugs and standard treatments produced no measurable results, they opted for several advanced procedures—expensive and, because experimental, not covered by either of their health plans.

  During one procedure, she fantasized about the pain of giving birth—her reward for suffering through the humiliating, invasive treatment.

  And the other fantasy, watching the home pregnancy test, willing it to change color, blurring her vision to make the cruel, flat line distort into a positive. How exciting it would be for this to happen, to tell Edward the wonderful news.

  After repeated failures, their specialist advised against further treatments.

  “You could adopt.” Edward repeated these words, spoken earlier by the doctor. (Why hadn’t he said, “We could adopt?”)

  Of course she had considered this option all along. At her job, she sometimes met with families women who chose to adopt an HIV-positive baby. Becca admired them, but she wasn’t that strong: she couldn’t bear the thought of raising a doomed child. At the same time, she was embittered about these children’s natural mothers, who often didn’t want a baby, didn’t deserve one, yet were able to conceive without effort. Becca grew angry; her job became less fulfilling.

  Adopt? Not even if she could get a perfect baby, one that was healthy and smart and looked like both of them. She had moved away from that possibility. Becca wanted a child to grow inside her, to be her own flesh and blood.

  “No, Edward. I don’t want to adopt.”

  She had a horrible thought that Edward’s consoling hug masked his relief. He didn’t dare say, “This is all for the best.” But she sensed that was what he thought.

  Was it true that a woman always wants a child more than the man? Perhaps she needed the child in a different way, one she could never fully explain.

  This need tainted everything. It separated her from the rest of the world.

  * * *

  She had to believe, still, that wishing could make something happen. But it shouldn’t be easy.

  It required more than she had attempted before: more sacrifice, more risk, more outlandish faith than she’d been able to summon. And the cooperation of a force that had become mythical—at least to her.

  The truck idled in front of their building. Becca stepped outside and her bare feet tensed against the cool cement. The porch light was off; clouds blocked any starlight. She doubted the driver could see her.

  The engine went silent.

  Becca eyes began to adjust to the dark. She could faintly distinguish the truck, its small plastic limbs and round heads outlined in shadow. She was thankful he had come tonight, as she had hoped. Edward was away from home at a three-day sales conference in New York.

  The driver’s door clicked opened, two heavy footfalls, then the door thumped shut. Then nothing happened. He waited outside the truck.

  Becca had called to him without her voice. Now, she could hear him inside her head. “Are you sure this is what you want?” The voice was slow and deep, scratchy like that of a life-long smoker. Between words, a faint trailing squeak: a rusty wheel, a child’s cry.

  * * *

  In the bedroom, Becca had placed white candles on the end tables and dressers. She lit each one in a quiet, improvised ceremony. She shook out the final match and the driver moved closer to her, his shoulders wide, his body large beneath the overcoat. Small flames reflected in the yellow-orange lenses of his glasses. The candles threw moving shadows across his overcoat, as if wind rustled the musty fabric.

  As much as she wanted to turn away, Becca looked directly at his face. She has summoned him—it wouldn’t be right to glance away, to register any kind of disgust. It was proper to welcome him with open arms.

  Becca stepped out of her nightgown.

  He unbuttoned his coat. Beneath, the driver’s bare torso was decorated like his truck. Parts of plastic toys were fastened to his chest, as if the arms, heads, and legs had suction cups. The pieces seemed too close to his skin, like they had been grafted there.

  He moved Becca next to the bed and embraced her. His coat flapped around her on both sides, blocking her view of the plastic limbs. He held one rough hand on her shoulder for balance, used the other to unbuckle then lower his trousers.

  She felt something like a third hand, smaller, pinching at her waist on the left.

  He took her to the bed. Plastic pieces shifted and rolled with his thrusting body. Tiny fingers seemed to grasp at her neck and little mouths suckled at her breasts; small toes curled and scraped their nails against her belly.

  She felt him open into her, like a flower, as if the head of his penis split into two. Next were more sensations, like tentacles. Or four tiny fingers and a thumb, searching.

  And she found pleasure in this horror. Sensations similar to a pain she had longed for and imagined, but in reverse.

  As the baby, some early form of a baby, crawled into her.

  * * *

  Of course she was pregnant. The over-the-counter test was merely a prop to convince Edward to believe her.

  He didn’t. First he gave her a head-tilted, confused look. Then, with guarded skepticism: “I don’t want you to get your hopes up.”

  “The test is right,” she insisted. “You’ll see.”

  Edward went with her to their regular physician, ready to play the role of the rational one, ready to comfort her when the doctor, inevitably, sided with the specialist against Becca’s hopes. Instead, the doctor informed them that store-bought tests were fairly accurate—sometimes a false negative, but rarely a false positive.

  Becca got official lab results the next day. She put the phone down at work and smiled—not at the news, which she already felt in her heart, but at the thought of telling her husband that evening. She asked the receptionist to fax the lab printout, then she waited by the machine for her irrefutable proof to roll face down into the tray.

  At home, Edward held the page and squinted at the slightly distorted letters. He shrugged, looked at her, looked at the page again, then started to laugh. It struck Becca as the kind of laugh someone would make to prove he was a good sport after a practical joke. But he hugged her and said he was happy.

  She went regularly to an obstetrician after that (someone Doreen recommended). Edward came with her the day of the first ultrasound. It was a girl. Everything was normal.

  Except her fear that the pregnancy was too good to be true.

  * * *

  Each minute without crisis was a gift.

  Be
fore she had gotten pregnant, Becca frequently imagined the act of giving birth. Now she spent time imagining a miscarriage. If she had been wrong to want this baby so badly, wrong to summon its conception at any cost, it was all too easy to imagine horrible consequences. She knew the child would look like her, prayed there would be enough vague resemblance to Edward. But shadows on an ultrasound might hide an extra, tiny limb or some other deformity—a gruesome reminder of the baby’s surrogate father. Morning nausea signaled to her a deeper sickness, gut-wrenching spasms that could distort the baby’s shape in her womb. Any twitch within her stomach brought images of premature labor, an unstoppable stillborn delivery.

  The truck drove past their home some nights. Thankfully, during Becca’s months of infertility Edward had trained himself out of making their standard joke. Now they would pause, wait for the engine’s rattle to fade into the distance, then resume their conversation.

  But there was too much they didn’t talk about. Becca kept her fears to herself, smiled outwardly at the attention that came as the baby began to show: presents from co-workers; both of their parents fawning over her; a husband opening doors for her, carrying packages, lifting her legs onto an ottoman each evening and massaging her weary feet. Each gift was another step toward completing their nursery: clothes, dolls, stuffed animals, books. Every doctor’s visit was a happy milestone, bringing her closer to her dream.

  * * *

  For six months Becca kept the dreadful secret, until it knotted in her stomach. One evening after dinner, she clutched her stomach and cried out in pain.

  Edward drove her to the hospital, steering with one hand. The other held her left hand tightly and squeezed it in support. She was grateful for him, then.