Raising Cubby

by John Elder Robison

  I think the thing that frightened me the most about Little Bear’s illness was that it didn’t end. What did that mean? Having read a lot of history, I knew moms could die having babies, and being sick surely increased the odds of death. Not only would I lose my mate, I would be left to care for a kid and a new business all by myself. There was no way I could do that. The mere thought was terrifying.

  When I’d worked at Milton Bradley, one of the other engineers had developed a stomach ulcer. He learned he was sick when he threw up blood all over the bathroom at work and was rushed to the hospital. The guy almost died. I was terrified the same thing might happen to Little Bear and I wondered what that might portend for the baby.

  I tried to tell myself everything would be okay, but she didn’t get better. That meant I stayed anxious. Gradually, my fears evolved. Instead of worrying that she would die, I became afraid her sick, lethargic state would become her permanent way of being. That would be even worse, in a way. I was doing my best to be a good husband and a good pre-dad, but I didn’t know what to do. I’d never been involved with a pregnancy or a new baby before and couldn’t tell if her situation was exceptional. Nothing I read mentioned any association between pregnancy and ulcers, and the doctors were no help.

  “Sometimes these things happen,” they said, as if those words would reassure me. Sometimes moms die in childbirth, was all I could think in reply, so I just kept quiet. It was clear that they had no hard facts to share, just opinion and vague hope.

  Some guys might have asked their friends, but I didn’t have many friends, and I was too insecure to ask anyway. I wasn’t comfortable talking to my parents, and my little brother was barely full grown and living in Chicago, which was no help at all. In the end, I kept my fears to myself. The more my wife complained, the more worried I got. Every new problem made me more afraid the healthy baby I was hoping for would never arrive. If she was “broken,” as I thought of it, and the kid was growing inside her, I was afraid he would be broken too.

  Little Bear saw the situation very differently. She was convinced that her pregnancy was the hardest one a mother had ever endured, but she found it bearable because she believed it would result in the world’s most wonderful baby. She thought I was an ungrateful SOB for not believing and not being more considerate. Now I realize she just wanted me to be supportive and reassuring, but back then I was so terrified that there was nothing I could do for her.

  That put me in a terrible fix. Little Bear wanted me to acknowledge her sickness, but the more I conceded she was having a difficult time, the more scared I got for her and the baby.

  The most constructive thing I could do was work to ensure we had some financial security no matter what happened. Unfortunately, with every passing week, I was sliding closer to insolvency, borrowing from one credit card to pay another.

  Then, just when I thought I was finished, salvation appeared in the most unlikely form. I sold a blue Mercedes convertible to an old fellow with a foreign accent. We got to talking, and he made me a proposition.

  “This is a good business you have here. All you need is working capital. I can put up some money,” he said, “and you can expand your car buying. We’ll split what we make fifty-fifty. You do the work, and I’ll provide the cash. What do you think?”

  And if that wasn’t enough, he had more to offer.

  “I have an extra garage at my construction company in Springfield. You need room to expand. Why don’t you move out of your backyard and set up in the city? That’s where all the customers are.” What he said was true. I knew I could only go so far working from home.

  Feeling it might be too good to be true, but hopeful anyway, I moved my business to Springfield in the winter of 1989. The baby was due in April, so I had to work fast. I used the last of my money to buy a hydraulic lift so I could work under cars without lying on my back. I drove all over the area putting flyers on cars, advertising my new business. Anywhere I saw a Mercedes, BMW, or other high-end car, I left my little ad. After that, I crossed my fingers and prayed.

  Meanwhile, I kept driving to the big dealerships near Boston, looking for cars I could buy. That was getting harder and harder to do. When I had started out, it seemed like easy money. I’d buy a car for ten thousand dollars and sell it a few days later for ten five. The profits weren’t huge, but they were steady. If only that had lasted. When the economy tanked, every car in my inventory collapsed in value. I broke even on a few but lost thousands on most. Demand had dried up.

  My new partner was expecting the bankroll he put into cars to grow. It didn’t. It was shrinking at an alarming rate. Like a fellow with a gambling addiction, I doubled my bets by buying even more cars. I thought I’d bought them so cheap I couldn’t lose, but I was wrong. My partner’s money evaporated as quickly as my own. That’s when he turned nasty. Actually, nasty is too nice a word. He became downright dangerous.

  I mentioned my situation to someone at work, and he said, “Don’t you know? Your new landlord’s family is in the rackets. You don’t want to mess with them.” I asked what that meant and got a five-minute description of the Mafia in New England. They were not people to cross. I felt sick.

  The money he had invested in cars was not really an investment at all. It was a loan, one I had to pay back even though it was all lost. I had no choice but to find a way out of the mess. It was simple, I told myself. I just had to make a lot of money and pay my partner back. And I had to do it with the added complication of baby preparation, and soon, baby management. That hadn’t turned out too well so far, but tomorrow was a new day.

  While I was losing my shirt in the car business, Little Bear was working on the house. She had a million things to do to make room for a baby. There was a crib to acquire, furniture to set up, and diapers and blankets to stockpile. She did most of those things herself, but there was one important task we did together: thinking of a name for our soon-to-be baby.

  We didn’t know if we would have a boy or a girl, so we decided to be prepared with names for either. I was shocked and mildly amused to find that there was actually a thriving industry selling guides to baby naming. I did everything on my own, so the idea that we’d buy a baby name in a bookstore seemed vaguely ridiculous to me. Yet there the books sat, prominently displayed in the parenting section. I looked at a few of those published suggestions, but they weren’t for me. I sensed that the best names were not in books at all.

  For example, if we ended up with a girl, I favored naming her Thugwena, because I knew a girl named Thugwena would be tough and not hassled by bullies. Thugwena is a strong, forceful name. Germanic, even. Lillian or Anne had nothing on Thugwena. In fact, if they were to meet Thugwena in a dark alley one night far in the future, they would surely turn and run.

  Little Bear didn’t like that idea much at all. “That sounds like a truck driver’s name,” she said. I wondered what was wrong with truck drivers. She preferred a name from our family tree, like Mary, Alice, or Carolyn. I thought those choices were too common. But most of all, I thought we should have a boy, and to encourage that, I concentrated on male names. After all, I was a man, and I assumed my kid would be a little version of me. I never even considered that Little Bear might feel exactly the same way and expect a little girl. I decided to proceed with positive thinking and plan for the arrival of a son.

  As everyone knows, the male version of Thugwena is Thugwald, but Little Bear rejected that fine manly name out of hand just as quickly. She also rejected Butch, Spike, Godfrey, and Bertrand. Fine country monikers like Zeke or Juke were unacceptable to her too. I wanted a strong, self-reliant sort of name, like Zeus or Thor, but she didn’t like those either. It seemed like we couldn’t agree on anything.

  She even rejected my functional choices. He would outgrow Baby pretty fast, but Kid seemed perfectly suitable, and admirably descriptive, to me. She wouldn’t even consider it. “What about Boy?” I suggested. “You can’t name a kid Boy,” she said without ever telling me why.

&nbs
p; From my perspective, refined names like Ascot, Geoffrey, or Clive were nonstarters. Luckily, Little Bear didn’t have any more enthusiasm for those names than me. We thought about John or Ed, our own fathers’ names, but we both rejected them. Our rocky childhoods were a little too clear in memory for either of us to honor our fathers in that way. And neither of us liked Wyman, my maternal grandfather’s name.

  But there was one name we both liked: Jack, my dad’s father’s name. He had died a few years before and he’d meant a whole lot to me. He was always the one person who’d believed in me as a kid, and he’d taught me about many things, including fine clothes and cars. When I was learning to drive, my parents grudgingly let me drive their Chevy Vega. Jack let me drive his Cadillac. He taught me how to work a shotgun and how to operate farm machinery. While everyone else said I was a failure, he was proud of me and said I was special.

  Little Bear knew all that, and she liked Jack too. We’d both been sad when he died. Finally, we had a name we could agree on. We would have a boy, and we would name him Jack. And that was what happened. But I could not leave well enough alone. Before the ink was even dry on the birth certificate, I had renamed our tyke.

  I knew Kid was unacceptable, and Child was no good either because he would outgrow it in short order. Luckily, I had one name in reserve, and it proved perfect: Bear Cub. I called his mom Little Bear in recognition of her shape, disposition, and pugnacity. She was used to that. How could she object when I called her offspring Bear Cub? So that’s what he became. The Bear Cub.

  I took him everywhere and held him up in people’s faces. “Look,” I would exclaim. “Bear Cub!” They would generally nod and smile without any prompting, but if they didn’t, I would repeat myself, louder, until they got the idea. By the time he was one year old, he was known far and wide—or at least in every good restaurant, bookstore, and auto parts wholesaler in western Massachusetts—as Bear Cub. Cubby for short.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself. Before I could take him places and show him off, he had to be born, and that’s what happened next.…

  Hatching time arrived just before midnight on April 11, 1990. When Little Bear told me it was time, I loaded her into our gray Jaguar sedan and headed for Cooley Dickinson Hospital, half an hour away in Northampton.

  Some people would have doubted the reliability of an old British car at a time like that, but I was confident. How could I be otherwise? I had staked everything on my ability to rebuild and resell vintage British and German motorcars. If I couldn’t trust my handiwork to deliver my own wife to the hospital, where would I be? Walking a newborn baby to the hospital and sending an ambulance to pick up his mom by the roadside, I guess. In any event, the car came through and my ability to deliver my own baby by the roadside was not tested. It was usually a thirty-minute drive, but I made it in twenty, traveling at a briskly illegal but not felonious rate of speed. It was the time of night when solid citizens are all in bed and the bars have not yet closed, filling the road with drunks, and the streets were virtually empty the whole way there.

  I had called the hospital before leaving home, and two nurses were waiting at the emergency-room door when we arrived. “Let’s get you into this chair and off to delivery,” they said. They had the door open and Little Bear in a wheelchair before she could blink. Then they turned and rolled her out of sight, jogging fast. They take this baby stuff seriously, I thought. I stayed behind a few minutes to park the car properly and sign the admission and insurance papers.

  Now that the financial future of the hospital had been secured, another nurse led me to the delivery room. It was past midnight by then. They made me wash up and put on a clean gown. I wondered what would happen. Would there be lots of blood? Would the baby emerge with three arms or two heads? Luckily, I did not have much time to ruminate and worry. Some baby deliveries drag on for hours, but this wasn’t one of them.

  Cubby was born less than twenty minutes later. Unlike me, he came out in the normal way, with no need for scalpels or pliers. When I was born the doctor had grabbed my head with forceps and squashed it hard as he pulled me out. According to my mother, I emerged looking like an early Conehead. Seeing my misshapen skull, she thought I must have brain damage. The doctor told her I’d be fine, but she always thought that was why I ended up kind of different. Nothing like that happened to Cubby. The doctor dangled him by the feet, and he made a little yell of protest. Everyone smiled except for Cubby, though he wasn’t called Cubby yet. He just frowned and made squally noises.

  One of the first things they did was put Cubby onto the scale. Six pounds, six-tenths of an ounce, or half the weight of Small Animal, our pet cat. I’d caught bigger bass when I was fourteen. He was a little bit shorter than my forearm, wet, and red. He was also bald, and roaring steadily. Everyone had smiled at the first howl, and his mom still looked happy, but after a few minutes of steady roar some of the hospital staff looked like they were starting to wonder where the off switch was located.

  They swaddled our newborn son in a blanket and handed him to Little Bear, who admired him for a moment and then passed him to me. Between us, he settled down. I wasn’t sure if the handoff was part of a ritual, but I thought not, because I knew Mom didn’t have any more baby experience than me. Ritual or not, I wanted to be sure the baby I brought home was the same one I was holding that very moment in the delivery room.

  The truth was, I had a fear of baby swapping. Like most people, I had read news stories of baby exchanges (usually, but not always, accidental) with some sense of amusement. But now that I faced the possibility of a personal swap experience I did not find it funny at all. Prior to hatching time, I had studied the layout and operation of the standard baby spaces in hospitals. Armed with that knowledge, I’d made a plan.

  The first and most important step was to get a positive ID on him. A nurse had slipped a name bracelet around his arm, but I knew that could be pulled off and swapped as fast as she’d put it on. I wanted something more personal and I was ready. When the doctor handed me our new hatchling, I quickly but discreetly wiped off his foot and tagged him with a Sharpie permanent marker. He was now the only baby anywhere with a little black triangle on his foot: a delta, the Greek symbol that signifies uncertainty and change. Whatever else he did, he would certainly bring us that.

  With his ID assured, I smiled and handed him to his mom. We were safe. Even if other people carried him away for testing or evaluation, we could be sure of getting the same baby back.

  The doctors and nurses looked at me a bit funny, but I didn’t care. I had not inspected the baby-holding facility at Cooley Dickinson Hospital before that night; for all I knew it was just a big open pen, like the Sunderland fish hatchery. There was no way you’d tell one fish from another without a slime-proof marker. I had looked at the other kids in the ward, and none of them were solidly tagged. Did baby swaps happen often? For all I knew, depraved nurses shuffled babies for entertainment. That was something I might do if I was a bored maternity nurse late at night. Once when I was a teenager, a group of us did that with cars, swapping identical-looking red Toyotas and watching the confusion as their owners tried to figure out how their cars had mutated overnight. (We took advantage of the fact that the key to Doug’s dad’s Toyota fit a number of other vehicles.)

  I have never trusted authority. To me, the idea the hospital would keep track of him was just ridiculous.

  I was surprised to discover that few people shared my point of view. Some of them actually questioned my actions. “You wrote on your baby?” Their tone of voice suggested they could not believe I would mark my kid, but why not? At work I marked my tools to keep them from getting stolen. All I could figure was, those people had never looked at a sea of babies basking under baby warmers and tried to pick out the one that was theirs. Also, the nurses had given Little Bear some awfully powerful painkillers, and if Cubby was taken away and mixed in with other newborns, I doubted that she could recognize him either. The fact is, identifying a baby can
be a lot more difficult than identifying someone older. I knew that intuitively. Babies don’t have many distinguishing marks; they are too young for scars and tattoos. Furthermore, they change fast. You can look at two newborns, one bald and the other speckled, and their hair might grow in to look exactly the same a week later. Given all that, marking a brand-new kid seemed like a no-brainer.

  It is possible that I have a particular difficulty in recognizing people I have just met. Neurologist Oliver Sacks has that problem; he’s written about it in The Mind’s Eye and other books. My poor recognition capacity might have made me unusually fearful about identifying my own kid. Then again, maybe I am just wiser and more cautious than most. After all, the onus of baby recognition was entirely on me. There was no way the baby would know me from Adam, and even if he did, he couldn’t say so.

  As it turned out, the markings were not really needed, because no one tried to take Cubby away from us. Mom held him tight as they rolled her to a room where they could rest. After that, she retained possession of him until they were both released the following day. I had him in my sight all the way home, and within a week, when my mark wore off, I had gotten sufficiently familiar with him that I felt confident that I could recognize him anywhere. Thanks to my Sharpie, I have no regrets, and a strong sense of confidence in Cubby’s origins.

  After our baby was born, I followed Little Bear to her room and sat with them as long as I could. Finally I had to go to sleep. I wished there was a place I could lie down too, but there wasn’t. I headed home to bed, excited and scared at the same time. I was thrilled at the thought of a new baby, but worried about my ability to be a good dad and the possibility that Cubby might be damaged or nonfunctional, or even that he wouldn’t survive.