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being led around by his mouth, I stuck my finger in. He sucked on it.
    My mother was at our house when we got there and it looked like she’d been there for weeks. For one thing, it was spic-and-span, and for another, she’d moved the kitchen table from kitty-corner to flush against the wall. She was sitting at it with a tray of pastries and a pot of coffee in front of her. “You have more room this way,” she said. I sat down and said, “Ma, look.” I stuck my finger in.
    “Take that finger out of his mouth! Are you crazy?” she said.
    “Why? He likes it.”
    “You got germs on your hands. Everything that passes that baby’s lips has to be sterilized. Come on, Jason.” She held out her arms. I handed him over. “How you doin‘, little fella? What a big boy you are.” She pinched his cheeks. “How you doing? How you doing? How you doing?” she shouted at him, nodding her head every time, poking his chin with her finger. “Look at those fat cheeks. I could eat him up. Your mother’s tired, so your Mimi’s taking over, let her get her strength back. Isn’t that right?”
    “Your Mimi?”
    “It’s cute, don’t you think?”
    “I like it,” Ray said, taking off his jacket and sitting on the couch.
    “Raymond, hang it up,” my mother said. “Your wife just had a baby, she can’t be picking up after you.”
    “I think Mimi’s stupid.”
    “What’s the matter with it?”
    “It sounds like a dog.”
    “I like it. It’ll be easier to pronounce.”
    I figured either she wanted to be called Mimi because she was only forty-five and embarrassed to be a grandmother or because Mimi sounded more like Mommy than Grandma did.
    My mother came over for hours every single day. I hardly had to do anything, and when I did do something, she watched me like a hawk. “Watch out for his head, Beverly, don’t forget the soft spot. His neck isn’t strong yet, he could snap it…. Better put him on his stomach, he might spit up and suffocate if you lie him on his back.”
    By the time she started bringing my fat aunt Alma with her, I’d had it. They perked a pot of coffee, broke open an Entenmann’s coffee cake and gave detailed infant histories of every one of their children. “Jerry was colicky, kept me up six months straight, but Willie, God bless‘m, slept eight hours the first night.”
    “That’s like Beverly. You were the best baby. Never a peep. Loved to sleep. You’re lucky Jason’s like that. You don’t know. Your brother—up every night. I didn’t mind, though. You get attached. Wait. You’ll see.”
    One day, around the same time I first smelled winter in the air, I sat at the table with my mother and aunt and Jason, who was in his little seat on top of the table. I watched my aunt’s fat fingers roll a cake crumb on her plate and couldn’t take them another minute. I stood up and said, “I’m bringing Jason to the library.”
    “You can‘t,” my mother said. “You can’t take a baby in public until he’s had all his shots.”
    “You said I could after six weeks. I’m going crazy.”
    “Then you go. I’ll watch him.”
    “No.”
    “You can’t take him, and that’s the end of it.”
    “He’s my baby.”
    “It’s awfully breezy,” my aunt said. “Might be hard to catch his breath.” She shrugged and bit her lips.
    I ignored her, put a jacket and bonnet on Jason, then made a triangle out of a blanket and wrapped him up.
    At the library, I checked out David Copperfield, and when I returned, my mother had lost her stand as big chief the baby expert. I invited my girlfriends over every night. Virginia was commuting to college. The rest had jobs, except for Fay, who was pregnant and still living down in New London. I felt sorry for Fay, but I figured it was my duty not to deceive her and to tell her the truth about the horrors of childbirth when she visited. “It hurts like hell,” I said to Fay and Beatrice and Virginia as we drank coffee one night in the kitchen. “That