Read After Birth for Free Online Page B

toothbrush cowboy named Charley. His chatter sounds like talk but is not quite talk. My father and stepmother Sheryl, our visitors, observe him closely.
    Lot of autism these days , Sheryl notes, forehead tensed where not in elective nerve paralysis. Shouldn’t he be [whatever the fuck all my friends’ grandchildren are doing] by now?
    Walker! my dad shouts, holding up a cheese stick or a toy, or talking into a banana as if it were a phone. Walker, come here! What is your name? Do you know your name? Walker just grabs the bribe, disregards the crazy old man, cruises away. In this I am assured he is perfectly bright.
    Sheryl calls us “artsy kids” because we live up here, wear functional shoes, are of reproductive age, ride bikes. She thinks I’m a real estate visionary because I moved into a shitty apartment in a shitty neighborhood in Brooklyn in 1999. She regularly directs my attention to media mention of Brooklyn. Look, a new restaurant in BROOKLYN! It’s very HIP now, apparently .
    They relish grandparenthood, or some projection of grandparenthood, like they relish a shortlist of life’s offerings: fundraisers of every stripe, anything to do with the Holocaust, whatever’s showing at the Jewish Museum, grossly overdressing for rousing High Holiday sermons in which they are beseeched to solve world Jewry’s problems, past and present, by sending money to Israel and voting Republican if it comes down to it.
    They have “forgiven” us for not having Walker circumcised, though Sheryl recoils from diaper changes as though in protest.
    Sheryl runs an organization that promotes Jewish books. Books about Jewish mothers, daughters, fathers, sons, reclaiming Yiddish, moving to Israel. Bread-and-butter books about the one and only genocide, my favorite of which is, I kid you not even a little, The Holocaust Survivors’ Cookbook . Books about children of Survivors and books wondering at the emotional well-being of children of children of Survivors. Books about Jews who marry non-Jews, Jews who abhor the marrying of non-Jews, Jews ambivalent about being Jewish, people or entities accused of not liking Jews and/or Israel. Humor books about Jews who undereat/overeat, Jews who date online. Swoony debut novels of mystical redress for gassed lovers. Literary doorstops in which unlikely entities—bowling, Zionism—are united in metaphor. Post-apocalyptic sagas in which there is Only! One! Jew! Left! In! The! World!
    It’s all a little up its own butthole. And the thing is, Sheryl hasn’t read a whole lot of like anything else. I mean, lady’s not so well acquainted with Malamud or Bellow. She doesn’t know who Gertrude Stein is. She’s never heard of Paul Celan. She often gets fiction and nonfiction confused. When Philip Roth won the Pulitzer, she shook her head vehemently: self-hater .
    My father is Ophthalmologist to the Stars. Immediately (and I do mean immediately) after my mother died he married a social-climbing German émigré ten years his junior with a thing for Jews (o-ho, they love us now, don’t you know), but that ended within a year when he realized he had married a social-climbing German émigré fourteen years his junior with a thing for Jews. And of course it turned out Astrid wanted to have children, whereas I guess old Norman felt he was done with the having of children. Astrid spoke of converting to Judaism but made no progress toward this end. She had the sharpest jawline I’ve ever seen. We didn’t have much in common, Astrid and I, though she was given to offering me stagy hugs when my father was around. My father, the blind ophthalmologist.
    She hates me , I once heard Astrid say, weeping, through the wall.
    Give it some time, darling.
    No, Norman. She hates me, Norman. She hates me.
    I was fifteen, glad my mother’s whole dying rigmarole was over with, ready to move on, ready for life to begin. I didn’t hate Astrid. Hate requires love. Also, hello, classic stepparent mistake: it’s not about