Because I could not stop for death he kindly stopped for me
Charlie Asher walked the earth like an ant walks on the surface of water,
as if the slightest misstep might send him plummeting through the surface
to be sucked to the depths below. Blessed with the Beta Male imagination,
he spent much of his life squinting into the future so he might spot ways
in which the world was conspiring to kill him – him; his wife, Rachel;
and now, newborn Sophie. But despite his attention, his paranoia, his
ceaseless fretting from the moment Rachel peed a blue stripe on the
pregnancy stick to the time they wheeled her into recovery at St. Francis
Memorial, Death slipped in.
“She’s not breathing,” Charlie said.
“She’s breathing fine,” Rachel said, patting the baby’s back. “Do you want
to hold her?”
Charlie had held baby Sophie for a few seconds earlier in the day, and had
handed her quickly to a nurse insisting that someone more qualified than
he do some finger and toe counting. He’d done it twice and kept coming up
with twenty-one.
“They act like that’s all there is to it. Like if the kid has the minimum
ten fingers and ten toes it’s all going to be fine. What if there are
extras? Huh? Extra-credit fingers? What if the kid has a tail?” (Charlie
was sure he’d spotted a tail in the six-month sonogram. Umbilical indeed!
He’d kept a hard copy.)
“She doesn’t have a tail, Mr. Asher,” the nurse explained. “And it’s ten
and ten, we’ve all checked. Perhaps you should go home and get some rest.”
“I’ll still love her, even with her extra finger.”
“She’s perfectly normal.”
“Or toe.”
“We really do know what we’re doing, Mr. Asher. She’s a beautiful, healthy
baby girl.”
“Or a tail.”
The nurse sighed. She was short, wide, and had a tattoo of a snake up her
right calf that showed through her white nurse stockings. She spent four
hours of every workday massaging preemie babies, her hands threaded
through ports in a Lucite incubator, like she was handling a radioactive
spark in there. She talked to them, coaxed them, told them how special
they were, and felt their hearts fluttering in chests no bigger than a
balled-up pair of sweat socks. She cried over every one, and believed that
her tears and touch poured a bit of her own life into the tiny bodies,
which was just fine with her. She could spare it. She had been a neonatal
nurse for twenty years and had never so much as raised her voice to a new
father.
“There’s no goddamn tail, you doofus! Look!” She pulled down the blanket
and aimed baby Sophie’s bottom at him like she might unleash a fusillade
of weapons-grade poopage such as the guileless Beta Male had never seen.
Charlie jumped back – a lean and nimble thirty, he was – then, once he
realized that the baby wasn’t loaded, he straightened the lapels on his
tweed jacket in a gesture of righteous indignation. “You could have
removed her tail in the delivery room and we’d never know.” He didn’t
know. He’d been asked to leave the delivery room, first by the ob-gyn and
finally by Rachel. (“Him or me,” Rachel said. “One of us has to go.”)
In Rachel’s room, Charlie said: “If they removed her tail, I want it.
She’ll want it when she gets older.”
“Sophie, your Papa isn’t really insane. He just hasn’t slept for a couple
of days.”
“She’s looking at me,” Charlie said. “She’s looking at me like I blew her
college money at the track and now she’s going to have to turn tricks to
get her MBA.”
Rachel took his hand. “Honey, I don’t think her eyes can even focus this
early, and besides, she’s a little young to start worrying about her
turning tricks to get her MFA.”
“MBA,” Charlie corrected. “They start very young these days. By the time I
figure out how to get to the track, she could be old enough. God, your
parents are going to hate me.”
“And that would be different how?”
“New reasons, that’s how. Now I’ve made their granddaughter a shiksa.”
“She’s not a shiksa, Charlie. We’ve been through this. She’s my daughter,
so she’s as Jewish as I am.”
Charlie went down on one knee next to the bed and took one of Sophie’s
tiny hands between his fingers. “Daddy’s sorry he made you a shiksa.” He
put his head down, buried his face in the crook where the baby met
Rachel’s side. Rachel traced his hairline with her fingernail, describing
a tight U-turn around his narrow forehead.
“You need to go home and get some sleep.”
Charlie mumbled something into the covers. When he looked up there were
tears in his eyes. “She feels warm.”
“She is warm. She’s supposed to be. It’s a mammal thing. Goes with the
breast-feeding. Why are you crying?”
“You guys are so beautiful.” He began arranging Rachel’s dark hair across
the pillow, brought a long lock down over Sophie’s head, and started
styling it into a baby hairpiece.
“It will be okay if she can’t grow hair. There was that angry Irish singer
who didn’t have any hair and she was attractive. If we had her tail we
could transplant plugs from that.”
“Charlie! Go home!”
“Your parents will blame me. Their bald shiksa granddaughter turning
tricks and getting a business degree – it will be all my fault.”
Rachel grabbed the buzzer from the blanket and held it up like it was
wired to a bomb. “Charlie, if you don’t go home and get some sleep right
now, I swear I’ll buzz the nurse and have her throw you out.”
She sounded stern, but she was smiling. Charlie liked looking at her
smile, always had; it felt like approval and permission at the same time.
Permission to be Charlie Asher.
“Okay, I’ll go.” He reached to feel her forehead. “Do you have a fever?
You look tired.”
(Continues…)
Excerpted from A Dirty Job
by Christopher Moore Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
William Morrow
ISBN: 0-06-059027-0
