Nice Big American Baby. Judy Budnitz

her fingernails. She’s crawling through, nearly breaking the surface on the other side, when her son shifts, or perhaps instantaneously grows a fraction of an inch, and suddenly she’s stuck. Border guards come and drag her out by her heels. They don’t seem surprised, they seem as if they’ve been expecting her. They look bored, almost disappointed, as if they’d expected her to have a little more originality.

      “Why won’t you let me help you?” Hopper says.

      She doesn’t answer.

      “Free of charge.”

      “Why are you being so generous?”

      “I don’t know. Out of the goodness of my heart?”

      Today he’s wearing a bolo tie, a snakeskin vest. He is wearing rings on every finger, like a king, like a pirate. Like a pirate king.

      “Please,” he says. “I want to. I insist.”

      She realizes something she should have seen months ago. He’s been tipping off the border guards. He takes money from people for helping them cross; then he takes money from the guards for telling them when and where to expect visitors. She’s been making money for him with each of her trips.

      “You are a bad man,” she says.

      “Oh, come now,” he says. “You can’t blame me. It’s a game of chance.”

      “An evil man. When my son gets big he’ll come back and kill you.”

      “Your son’s already big,” he says. “And I don’t see him doing anything.”

      She is determined. She flings herself at the border again and again. She travels in cars, trucks, buses. She walks on blistered feet. She travels in a fishing boat, an inflatable raft. She wears disguises, buys false papers. Each time the border repulses her, spits her back.

      Big American baby, she tells herself. She sees his size as proof of his American-ness. Only American babies could be so big, so healthy. She has convinced herself that he has always been American, that she is merely a vehicle, a shell, a seed casing meant to protect him until he can be planted in his rightful home.

      She carries him for two years. She constructs a sort of sling for herself, with shoulder straps and a strip of webbing, to balance the weight. She uses a cane. She looks like a spider, round fat body, limbs like sticks.

      Her son is alive; she can feel the pulse of his heartbeat, feel the pressure as he strains to stretch a finger, an eyelid.

      She thinks she can see a dark shadow through the taut translucent skin of her belly. She can see his hair growing long and black.

      Her body is adaptable. Her skin stretches, her bones shift, her blood feeds him. When people see her they are amazed, but she is not; she has seen it before, the lengths the body will go to to preserve itself, to cling to life.

      Big American baby, she thinks. Nice big American baby. It is her mantra.

      She carries him for three years. Three and a half. She becomes a legend, then a joke, with the border guards. They wave to her as she creeps past, cheer her on, drag her back at the last minute.

      Don’t you think he wants to come out by now? people at home say to her.

      He’s safer living in my belly than in this wretched country, she says, though she has been so single-mindedly set on her mission that she has taken no notice of external events. War, famine, peace, prosperity: it is all the same to her. America is the only option, the only ray of hope.

      She carries him for four years.

      Big American baby. Nice big American baby.

      She has in her mind pictures of hot-air balloons attached to bicycles, fanciful flying machines. Some days she imagines she will simply lift off the ground and float over, suspended by the power of her will alone. Hers and her son’s. Or she imagines that she is invisible, intangible; she breezes across the border. The air, it seems, is the only thing that crosses freely.

      Her son is so big, she imagines he fills her completely, his arms fill her arms, his legs fill her legs. She is a mere skin covering him, like an insect’s carapace, soon to be flaked off and shucked away.

      She’s too tired to speak now, just pants and whistles through her teeth. The words rattle in her head.

      Nice big American baby, someone chants. Not her. Him. The voice of her son gurgling up from her belly. Muffled and airless but undeniable.

      My son’s first words, she thinks, smiling proudly at a shriveled bush. You hear that? No baby-talk preliminaries, no babbling or lisping. My son: so precocious, so American.

      One day, as she is panting out her mantra and picking her way across the sand, a border guard appears: suddenly, as if he sprang up out of the ground. He carries the usual gun, wears the usual impenetrable sunglasses, has the regulation sweat stains blooming from his armpits. He takes her arm. She obediently turns around and begins walking back. She does not want him to start pushing her, getting rough; the baby might come out.

      But to her surprise she finds him pulling her forward, forward across the magic invisible line. Forward, toward the magnificent city that hovers like a mirage in the distance.

      “Come on, little mama,” he says. “You’ve had enough.”

      When she closes her eyes she sees the hospital of her dreams, a white sparkling grand hotel. When she opens them she sees speckled ceiling tiles, masked alien faces. She can’t feel a thing; she’s a floating head. It’s finally happened, then: her stubborn impatient head has taken off and left the slow body behind somewhere to gestate, egg and nest all in one.

      “My son,” she says.

      “He’s coming,” they tell her. They have to operate. “There’s no way he’s fitting through the usual door,” they tell her.

      She sees a foot kicking. It’s as long as her hand. She hears a stupendous, deafening roar. The foot catches one of the masked doctors on the chin and sends him flying backward into the spattered arms of another masked figure.

      Her balloon head is bobbing near the ceiling now, borne on the baby’s howls, but she’d swear she can hear, interspersed with the empty cries, bellowed words. I want, the baby demands. Give me, I want, I need, I deserve, I have earned.…

      She sees rising up out of her tired body a sodden mop of long black hair. She sees grasping fists.

      She hears—and surely she must be dreaming now—she hears the scrape of a rubber-gloved hand rubbing a sore chin and a doctor’s voice saying, “Now that’s what I call a nice big American baby.”

      Empty, deflated, she sits alone in the back of the van. She hears weeping somewhere, mingled with the sounds of tires on asphalt. It must be the driver. It can’t be her. Can it? Impossible. There’s nothing inside her to come out, not a drop. She’s hollow, she’s still floating, they forgot to reattach her head to those rags and remnants that were her body.

      “But it’s what you wanted, isn’t it? Wasn’t that the whole plan, give birth and leave him here with a new set of folks?”

      “I never even got a chance to hold him.”

      “He’s too big for holding already. He could hold you.”

      “I had things to say. Stories to tell him.”

      “He heard them. He was listening, all those years when you talked to him. He’ll remember.”

      It’s the voice of the Hopper man; she’s not sure if he’s the man driving the van or if the voice is inside her head. It doesn’t matter.

      “I want to stay,” she whispers. “He’s mine.”

      “You can always have another.”

      3.