Two Kisses for Maddy

by Matthew Logelin

  Liz had been adamant about returning to work after she had the baby. “I cannot be a stay-at-home mom” was a familiar refrain, which hadn’t surprised me—she had always worked her ass off, focused on and determined to do well at her job, to move up. I have no doubt that she would have been a VP by the time she was thirty-two while raising our child at the same time. So when I started thinking about what it would be like to leave Maddy at day care, it helped to know that Liz would have been all for it.

  But finding the place for our daughter without my wife’s input meant a lot of research and a lot of legwork. Luckily, one of Liz’s best friends, Elizabeth, stepped in to help me with the search. She had been one of Liz’s colleagues and supporters at her first job out of college, and later they had been reunited at Disney. When Liz died, Elizabeth generously incorporated us into her life, bringing her three little girls over so they could play with Maddy. Well, by playing, I mean looking and poking—she was just an infant.

  I had also posted on the blog about my search. One reader sent a note that said, “I just moved to Portland recently, and the thing I miss most about LA is this day care.” My first reaction was that this e-mail was incredibly weird. I mean, if I left LA, the list of things I’d miss would include the Tiki Ti and Amoeba Records, but probably not the place my kid hung out without me all day. But my second thought was that this was the most ringing endorsement I had ever heard for a day care.

  After we looked at somewhere between fifteen and twenty facilities, I actually ended up picking that one. My choice was based on a mixture of research, recommendation, and gut feelings. Usually, when Elizabeth and I went to check out a space, something would turn me off immediately, like the way the staff talked in baby voices to the infants, or the surplus of baby books about Jesus. But at this place, I was charmed. The school was in a house with a calm, friendly, earthy vibe that I immediately connected to, even though I’m the last person you would find in the parking lot at a Phish show. There were toys everywhere, the schedule seemed less rigidly structured than at some of the other places, and their philosophy included talking to children like adults. I was never a goo-goo ga-ga kind of dad—I’d rather just explain to my six-month-old that the Silver Jews were never a Pavement side project. As soon as I saw the garden out back where the older kids grew vegetables and flowers, I knew it would be a good place for Madeline.

  On the morning of Madeline’s first day, I spent twenty minutes thinking about how Liz would have dressed her, and none at all thinking about how her father would be presenting himself. She was in a brand-new, pink long-sleeved onesie with flowers, and I in my usual outfit: a plaid shirt with pearl snap buttons, jeans, and a pair of vintage Nikes. I was stylish in certain parts of Los Angeles, but next to the parents of the other children, I probably looked like a college student.

  When we arrived, I sat in the car for fifteen minutes, alternating between sobbing and thoughts of just taking Madeline back to the house. Shit. Could I kidnap my own kid? For the first time in a long time, the tears were not about Liz’s absence. They felt different. They felt more normal, more common—the kind of sadness natural to parents abandoning their young. Which was exactly what I felt like I was doing.

  When I handed Madeline over, she went to her teacher without a fight, which made leaving her there even more difficult. We had developed an incredible bond, and I was worried that by leaving my daughter with someone new, we would somehow lose that. I finally understood Liz’s fear that she wouldn’t be as close to Madeline because I’d been the one to change her diaper and feed her first. I tried to tell myself that I was being ridiculous and that this day care would be the best place for her while I was working—the only place for her—but leaving her that first day felt almost impossible. I walked out and closed the door behind me, crying like a motherfucker.

  Walking through the familiar doors of my office gave me anxiety, too. When I arrived there a little while later, my head started pounding and my heart was pumping so hard that a doctor would have been able to check my pulse in even the smallest artery in my body. I had imagined work as a place that wouldn’t—​couldn’t—​change in my absence; I was looking forward to a reintroduction into what I remembered as a bustling office with jokes between colleagues who acted casually but managed to complete their assignments somewhat professionally, balancing sneakers-and-jeans attire with a secretly impressive work ethic. My family life may have imploded, but in my mind, the desks at Yahoo! were still organized in the same configuration, the same friendly faces occupying the spaces above them. I thought I would walk in to a bunch of back slaps, a couple of hugs, maybe a few congenial nods. Three I’m sorrys, two Welcome backs, and one or two Hey, Matts.

  I could not have been more wrong. I realized almost immediately that things at Yahoo! had gone on without me—everything here was business as usual. It was like I had been transported to the days before Madeline was born and Liz died, when the only thing I should have been worried about was what to eat for lunch that day.

  Some facts about my job had stayed the same: my salary, which building I would be in, my phone number. But everything else had changed: my old responsibilities had been reassigned to somebody else, which I knew, since somebody had to manage the outsourcing while I was at home. There had been a slew of layoffs, turning what had been a social, busy space into a decimated department with rows of empty cubicles. My desk had been relegated to a desolate corner, where I sat alone.

  Every day after I handed my daughter over, I sat in the corner of the room at work waiting for someone to give me something to do. My coworkers had been amazing and understanding during my time off, but now that I was back here, some of my colleagues were less sure how to handle the potential awkwardness of my situation. They had sent me kind e-mails when I was away at home, and now it felt like they were ignoring me. They weren’t doing it to be cruel—for all I knew, it was the way they thought they could be the kindest.

  Sure, I was never a “big man on campus” type, but I’d never been a social pariah, either. It was like my identity had been reassigned. Instead of The Guy Who Loves Music, or The Guy Who Worked in India for All Those Months, I was somebody else—somebody weird and unfamiliar. I hadn’t even had a chance to be The Guy with the Baby; I was just The Guy with the Dead Wife. I felt as though some of my coworkers were treating me like death was somehow contagious. And I couldn’t blame them, really—I probably would have reacted the exact same way.

  Even the phone’s silence drove me crazy. I watched the light at the top stay dark all day. Liz had been the only one to call me on that line—as an Internet company, we almost exclusively used online messaging and e-mail to communicate. I would come back from lunch and see that red rectangle lit up, excited to have a voice mail from Liz, however mundane her message would be. Now I dreaded I would never see that light again—or worse, I would, but the message wouldn’t be from her.

  I spent my first few days back sorting through e-mails. I moved all of the messages that had come during my leave to a folder called Before. But first, I sorted everything by sender and moved all the e-mails from my wife to a separate folder called Liz. I had thousands of them from her, but I simply wasn’t ready to look through them yet. I wanted to preserve them, though, so that if I ever felt ready to revisit her words, I’d be able to.

  I did read two of them, but not on purpose. The e-mails were sorted by date received, the most recent e-mail at the top. There it was: the last e-mail she ever sent to me.

  from: liz

  to: matt

  sent: sun 3/23/2008 5:48 PM

  subject: I gained weight.

  Probably from cookies and crap but when I stand up I feel bigger…can’t wait to show u!

  I remembered that day. It was the day before Madeline had been born. I went to pick up dinner for us, and while Liz waited for me, she got a visit from one of the nurses, who told her that she had finally gained some weight—something she had been struggling to do through her entire preg
nancy. It was a sign that the bed rest was working.

  Looking at the e-mail reminded me of how fucking great we had felt on March 23. We’d had no idea that Madeline would make her appearance the next morning and that twenty-seven hours after that, Liz would be dead.

  I saw one other e-mail that same day, and it sent me into a conference room for longer than I care to admit.

  from: liz

  to: matt

  sent: fri 3/21/2008 1:13 PM

  subject: I love u

  And I’m excited to have a baby that looks like u :)

  Fuck.

  And my response:

  from: matt

  to: liz

  sent: fri 3/21/2008 1:22 PM

  subject: re: I love u

  Let’s hope she looks more like you…

  Double fuck.

  When I finally stopped crying, I returned to my desk. The empty, gray walls of the cubicle were a stark reminder of just how empty my life had become. Everything that had been in my old cube, including the one framed photo of Liz that I had kept there, was still packed in the boxes under my desk, and I wasn’t ready to confront any of it yet.

  I spent the next hour printing out enough photos of Madeline to completely cover the walls of my cubicle.

  Chapter 21

  as much as i never

  expected to,

  i love shopping

  with madeline:

  i try to buy

  clothes that

  liz

  would choose,

  but every once

  in a while, i get

  something that

  she would have

  rolled her eyes at,

  just so madeline

  gets both perspectives.

  Before Madeline was born, Liz and I had many conversations about what our lives with her would—and should—be like. Of course, they never included the possibility of a future without me there, or without her there. We figured our biggest challenges would be whether or not our daughter needed braces, if we liked her boyfriends, or where she should go to school. But we firmly agreed that she would not absorb our entire selves.

  “This baby is not going to change our lives,” Liz would say.

  “This baby is not going to change our lives,” I would agree.

  We knew our lives would change in a good way, but even with the middle-of-the-night feedings that our friends talked about and the sleepless nights we were primed for, it was our intention to maintain who we were and what we had become together. Liz would still decorate the house, worrying over curtains and votive candles, and she would continue hitting boutiques all over Los Angeles, spending a shitload of money on a purse or another pair of shoes; I wouldn’t stop going to concerts whenever a decent band came through town, and I would keep getting up early on Saturdays to wander the streets of Los Angeles, taking photos with Ben. Most importantly to both of us, we agreed, our regular date nights would continue. Liz knew that if we were happy, our kid would be happy, and neither of us wanted to be a slave to a baby.

  She had always planned on working, and while I joked about giving up my job to be a househusband, it was never something I could really bring myself to do. Of course, I had been slightly mistaken—now I would have given up every hour at that office to spend more time at home with Madeline. But my daughter and I got used to the shift in our routine, obeying an actual schedule instead of moving through our day at a leisurely pace. We kind of had to find ourselves a new rhythm.

  I would leave work early, which was easy since there was nothing much for me to do there, and even though I could have left Maddy at day care until six o’clock while I did my own thing for a little while, I would pick her up immediately. With the time we were spending apart, it became even more important to have her with me as much as I could. I wanted to do the things I knew I’d be doing if Liz were still alive, but I didn’t want more time away from my daughter. Bringing Madeline with me on my adventures was exactly what Liz and I had meant when we said we weren’t going to be changed by our child. We’d instead incorporate her into the activities we both loved so much, each of us influencing her in our own way. But now I had a much heftier responsibility than just keeping our baby happy—I had to preserve and cultivate both of our interests so that Madeline would have an equal amount of influence from both parents. I knew that Liz would have fucking loved that.

  Even when Maddy was just a blurry picture on an ultrasound screen, Liz started fantasizing about taking our baby girl to the spa and dressing her up. I didn’t give a shit about that stuff—I just wanted to teach her to appreciate music. I could practically see her on my shoulders, a mini-Liz chirping excitedly, helping me pick out records as I walked through the aisles of Amoeba, my favorite record store.

  Tuesdays had always been the best day of the week—the day the new releases arrived at the record store. But since Liz died, Tuesdays had become the designated slot for me to torture myself again and again with thoughts of how many weeks she had been gone. And I was still living from Tuesday to Tuesday. I felt that by counting them, by anchoring the scurry of time into weeks, I somehow tethered Liz to me, keeping a line to the last time I saw her alive.

  These weekly trips to Amoeba helped me escape the awfulness that came with waking up to another week gone by without Liz. I knew that no matter how shitty the day started, I’d at least be able to escape some of it with a bag full of new records. Like most other weeks, on what happened to be the thirty-third Tuesday since Liz had died, I left work early and picked Madeline up from day care. I parked in the lot behind the shop, where the walls are covered with years’ worth of caked-on graffiti, and walked into the store with my baby hanging off my arm in her car seat. You should have seen the looks the hipsters gave me as I squeezed through the vinyl aisles, digging for records by Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti and Swearing at Motorists. They believed what I had believed before Liz was pregnant: that all people become lame when they become parents. But lame is one thing I am not, and I dreamed of a confrontation that would end with my inviting some asshole to my house for a look at my record collection and a couple of beers. As we wandered the store, I explained my selections to Maddy carefully, even though I knew she wasn’t yet old enough to understand the difference between Bon Iver and Bon Jovi.

  I rolled up to the counter to check out with the reissue of Pavement’s Brighten the Corners and Mark Kozelek’s The Finally LP, but before we left Amoeba, there was one stop for us to make—a photo I had been meaning to take. Near the shop’s entrance was an elevator that nobody ever used. There were fewer than twenty steps between the store and the parking lot, so I had never even looked inside it until I had to get a baby and stroller up the stairs. I felt as though I had discovered some secret art space. The elevator was just filled with graffiti. I mean, literally, floor to ceiling, covered in graffiti. I grew up in Minnesota. I didn’t go to record stores with my parents. We didn’t really go anywhere that had graffiti. It thrilled me to share my tastes with Madeline and to give her a different—though not necessarily better—childhood than I had. The elevator was so fucking cool-looking, and I thought it would make a great photo, just a little baby in this room full of the scrawls of thousands of unidentified people. I took her out of her stroller, placed her on the floor, and backed into the opposite corner to click the shutter a few times. The resulting photos were great. Madeline looked like she was completely alone in a place where a child shouldn’t be at all. I knew she was going to love to see it someday.

  Instead of going straight home, I stopped in Los Feliz to take Madeline on the kind of shopping trip her mom would have taken her on—a venture I would have stayed completely out of if Liz had been around. I couldn’t help but worry that with me as her only parental influence, Madeline would be missing out on all the things her mom loved and planned to do with her, so I tried to keep it on my mind all the time. I didn’t think, How should I dress Madeline? I probably would have had a kid wearing hand-me-down flannel s
hirts fashioned into onesies. Instead, I thought, If Liz were here, how would she dress Madeline?

  There was a great a little boutique there that had gorgeous clothes for girls. The prices were astronomical, but I didn’t really care. If Liz had ever bought an expensive dress for Madeline, I would have lost my shit. Kids grow fast and every move they make creates a mess, so to spend any more than five dollars on an outfit seemed outrageous to me. But doing so would have made Liz really happy—not so much because she was spending a lot of money on our child, but because she was doting on her.

  I loved that I had discovered this place on my own, without a recommendation from a friend, a blog reader, or even from Liz. I likely wouldn’t have even noticed a kid store if Liz were alive, but now I shopped at this place all the time. On this particular day, I saw an absolutely beautiful dress in the store. It was khaki colored, with jewel-like buttons and an ornate circular pattern running up and down the seams and around the arm and neck holes. Absolutely gorgeous. I knew that Liz would have loved it, would have bought it, no matter what. So there I was, a bearded man who looked like he should have been on line to buy tickets for the National, standing in a fancy children’s clothing store shopping for dresses with a little blonde-haired, blue-eyed cherub.

  “This is beautiful,” I told the woman behind the counter.

  “It’s Chloe,” she said.

  I almost said, “I’m Matt and this is Madeline,” but then I realized she was gesturing at the label.

  “Of course,” I said, like I had known that already. In my head, the sarcasm was rampant. Who gives a fuck if this is a Chloe dress? Who the fuck is Chloe, anyway? I’m wearing a Sears shirt for which I paid six dollars eight years ago at a thrift store in Chicago.