The house my pregnant wife and I recently bought has a set of open stairs. Totally unfit for a child learning how to walk, much less Mom and Dad carrying the child up and down the steps for the first couple of years. We need a banister. I will build the banister. I found a newel post at a salvage yard. I stripped it down, sanded it, stained it and set the thing up at the top of the stairs, using wood glue, screws, and a complicated bracing system I developed on the fly. As soon as I had it set – and it was set solidly – I realised I'd put it in the wrong place. It doesn't line up with the stairs.
I was born in Washington DC. The consultant my mother had when she had me was named Dr Payne. He was known as the "Gynaecologist to the Elite". Dr Payne delivered Ethel Kennedy's 11th child. My mom thought he was an insufferable ass, but because she was new to the area and someone at church had recommended him, she decided to have her third child guided into the world by Dr Payne. The hands that pulled Rory Kennedy by caesarean section out of Ethel were the same hands that first touched me. By the associative property, I'm a member of American Camelot.
I had a panic attack in Home Depot last weekend because I couldn't conceptualise building a banister using a shoe rail rather than attaching the balusters to the steps themselves. I'm terrifically bad at maths and the angles necessary in carpentry are usually arrived at through sheer accident. But in Home Depot last weekend, my inability to visualise the mitred angles promised that I could only fail this child. I sat on a set of display stairs and tried to catch my breath.
Out of all the births in my family, mine was the most photographed. I am screaming, covered in blood, the blue umbilical cord still attached.
My mom showed these pictures to my aunt Esther.
"What beautiful eyes," she said.
"But David's eyes are closed."
"I meant the doctor's."
My father had a string of business failures. When I was 12, my dad pulled me aside and told me that he realised that he was worth more dead than alive. He told me that if he died, I would get $100,000, which at the time was the going rate for a near-mint Action Comics #1, which has the first ever appearance of Superman. I waited a beat too long before telling my father that I'd rather have him than the money. In my defence, I was 12 and, unlike my father, Superman was guaranteed to appreciate in value.
When I was taken to be circumcised, my mother asked Dr Payne if it would hurt me. He responded, "Well, I can't remember mine."
My grandmother on my father's side lived until she was 99. I took her out for sushi on her 99th birthday. She was a tiny woman and had never lost a single brain cell. Less than 5ft tall and perhaps 80lb, as long as you weighed her with her jacket on. She ordered tempura and a glass of wine. I had a beer and spicy tuna rolls.
After a brief attempt at Florida widowhood, she moved into a retirement home in Columbus during the mid-1980s, so she could be close to her only son. Nana audited classes at Ohio State and expected to die in her 70s.
Nana and I spent her birthday dinner talking about the Madeleine Albright autobiography she was reading.
Seven months later, she'd be dead and I'd be helping my mom and dad clear out her apartment. "You should grab anything you want," my dad said.
Dr Payne went on to marry a famous news anchor by the name of Jessica Savitch. She was one of the first female national news anchors. She was young, famous, beautiful and addicted to cocaine. She'd been married before and had had many boyfriends. Dr Payne was the jealous type. He especially hated Jessica's dog, Chewy. It had been given to her by one of her former lovers. Trotting around their house, pooping in their backyard, sleeping between them in bed, it must have been like living with an objective correlative.
The problem with modern pregnancy is the toxic level of sincerity my wife and I have been exposed to. People are kind on the train; they smile and surrender their seats to my wife. All the books we read prattle on about the marvellous journey on which we're embarking. It's invasive, this sincerity, and I suspect it's seeking to disarm me.
I told my wife that I needed to sand and stain the new banister, balusters, and bottom newel post that I've bought. I didn't want her around the fumes so I sent her to her parents for a few days. I drank bourbon as I worked. Once I had everything stained, I was drunk and I realised the balusters I'd bought were each three inches too short and now unreturnable.
Sorting through Nana's books, I came across one titled Final Exit by Derek Humphries. It's a how-to book on suicide full of recipes for toxic cocktails. In the front page of the book is a Post-it note in Nana's handwriting with one of the recipes transcribed into a shopping list. I stuffed the book into my bag before my dad saw it. In the book is a newspaper clipping of a review of it. The clipping is dated November 1987. I would have been in eighth grade. The thought that Nana had been suicidal during my adolescence makes me sad. We had so much in common those years and we never talked about it.
In seventh grade, I went to a sleepover at Audi Thompson's house. It was a mixed-gender type of affair, which means that either our parents were open-minded or oblivious. We played spin the bottle and truth or dare. I groped Katie Rogers in a closet while she leaned down and pushed kisses into my neck.
I was an exceedingly small kid. I had two older sisters who bullied me constantly. They had a chant that they'd do. They'd chug their arms and hands like they were doing the Locomotion and sing "Whiner. Forty-niner" over and over until I broke down crying and tried to punch them quiet.
The short kid who could be reduced to rage and tears within minutes, I was a kind of party favour. When I went to the bathroom, Shawn Breece and Jeremy Burt closed the door on me and leaned against it. I pushed and pushed but I couldn't get it open. They found some slats of wood and started thrusting them through the slit between the door and the floor. The wood jammed against my feet and sent me sprawling. I went wild. I tore the place apart. I was scream-crying when Mrs Thompson opened the door. I was hyperventilating while waiting for my mom to pick me up.
My wife and I attended birthing classes in a doula's basement in the Albany Park neighborhood. The doula was in her 30s and had been on a roller derby team. She'd skated under the name AfterBertha. We watched a video of cartoon elks going through birth at an elk hospital. There were all of these new things to worry about. Cascading interventions, Vitamin K shots, erythromycin, caesarians, circumcisions. It seemed that everything in the world could cause autism.
During break, while all the other couples went to McDonald's to scarf fries my wife walked the streets surrounding AfterBertha's house calming me down from another panic attack.
When we got home, I started splicing the balusters together. We have a baby coming, we can't afford all new parts. Using dowel screws and wood glue I make the balusters the correct height.
When I started therapy after the sleepover, I lied in all the ink-blot tests. The red and black blotch was a neat red sportscar peeling rubber and decidedly not a bear gorging on a camper and shitting out his blood. I was going to show him that I was a person who didn't need him.
The therapist was skilled enough to recognise that I wasn't being honest. He told me that I could be open with him, that I could trust him, that he was one of the good guys, that he had been the guy who had helped my dad when he had been suicidal.
So much of pregnancy has been a migration of abstractions. At first, the pregnancy was abstract. My wife and I stared at her belly for months wondering if we were seeing any kind of bump. Then the pregnancy became real and the baby became abstract. Then the baby became very real for my wife, keeping her up at night by sitting on her bladder making her go to the bathroom every 15 minutes, but it's remained abstract for me.
I return to the banister and figure that with an l-joint I can fix the newel-post problem. I want to get everything measured and cut and set, so I can rent a pneumatic nail gun and knock the project out in a day.
Jessica Savitch came home one day from her anchor job. She couldn't find her husband. He wasn't upstairs. After a quick phone call, she found out that he wasn't at work. She went downstairs and found that Dr Payne had hanged himself in the basement with Chewy's leash. The same hands that brought me into the world would later knot a dog's leash around a two by four strut in the basement and then around his own neck. For Christmas this year, my mom got me Golden Girl: The Story of Jessica Savitch. There are pictures from the Savitch/Payne wedding, Dr Payne's smile as wide as his jacket lapels.
My parents don't know about the book of suicide recipes I took from Nana's apartment. But with the baby coming, people talk about genes and Nana's longevity. And I know exactly how amazing it is that she lived until she was 99. It was active longevity. The recipe was there on a Post-it note in the front of the book and the book stayed in her apartment. Every other book she had was from the library. This one she kept handy. She was suicidal for nearly 30 years. That is some kind of achievement.
In weeks, we will have in this house a completely powerless creature. I'm terrified of who I have been, the history surrounding me and how it will translate to what kind of father I will be. My father wrapped up in failure wanted to end it all. Nana wanted her life over for decades. The very first person who touched me killed himself.
I start setting the pieces of the banister at night when I can't sleep. I apply the glue, wipe off any residue, and nail the jerry-rigged balusters in with a little red tack hammer we found when we moved into the house. I never rented the nail gun. The banister is done before I realise what I'm doing. It's a patchwork mess of all the mistakes I made while making it.
It looks nothing like I imagined it would. But it's sturdy, sturdier than it has any right to be.
