Doxology. Nell Zink
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morning and I’ll never let you stop
On the kitchen table, squirming on her back
I said baby’s on the kitchen table, squirming on her back
I’m going to take her little pants off and show her where it’s at
Daniel turned over in bed and said, “Your song is deeply disturbing.”
“The last line needs work,” Joe said. “In blues songs ‘back’ always rhymes with ‘heart attack.’ Maybe ‘wipe her dirty crack.’”
“I think with regard to our professional relationship there should be an ironclad rule,” Daniel said. “No songs about my daughter.”
THEIR ONE CONCESSION TO JOE’S ECCENTRICITIES WAS THE PURCHASE OF A BABY carrier. Pam called strollers “traffic testers,” because of the way caregivers in New York shoved them into the street to stop the cars. They had been transporting Flora in a ten-foot-long carrying cloth that circled the torso multiple times, with an X in back and another X in front, finishing with a knot you had to tie behind your own back. Joe’s attempt to put it on might have worked as a vaudeville routine. For him they invested in a BabyBjörn. They didn’t say it aloud, but they were both ever so slightly concerned that he might forget Flora somewhere if she weren’t firmly attached to his body.
Daniel quit his night job, transitioned to Pam’s health insurance, and signed on with a temp agency in the financial district. The hours would be unpredictable, but the pay was higher than for full-time work—eighteen dollars an hour. Within a week, he had an assignment that would last a year, sitting in for an administrative assistant on maternity leave at an employee benefits consulting firm way downtown, in windy maritime Manhattan, close to Battery Park.
His new colleagues expected almost nothing from him. They seemed thrilled that he knew how to alphabetize. They came to him for help printing spreadsheets.
After work he usually took the handoff, since Pam worked later. In the morning, he headed downtown while she waited for Joe.
The familial stress level declined to near zero. Flora continued to set new benchmarks for infant cuteness. By the time she was six months old, Pam, Daniel, and Joe were in agreement that for her to get any cuter would violate natural law. Her hair had come in wavy and almost black. Her eyes were dark blue. Her face was chubby as a peach.
LIKE DANIEL, JOE TOOK HER ON LONG WALKS STRAPPED TO HIS CHEST. HE HIT ALL THE record stores at least once a week. His former coworkers at the coffee shop fawned like grandparents.
One afternoon he came home and put her on the changing table just as his beeper went off in the pocket of his coat. He left her to go to the coatrack. He was feeling around for the pager’s hard surface in a tangle of candy wrappers when he heard a thump. She was lying on the floor on her side, making a high-pitched groaning noise.
He ran downstairs to call Pam, who had called his beeper. He said, “While I was getting the beeper, Flora fell on the floor! I think she hurt herself!”
“Where are you?”
“Downstairs.”
“Go back up and get her. Hail a cab to the emergency room at New York Downtown right away. I’ll meet you there. Okay?”
“Her arm looked weird.”
“Push her sideways into a box so you don’t have to change her position. Pad it with blankets. I’ll see you at Downtown Hospital. Okay?”
She didn’t call Daniel because she had a bad feeling about what he might say. He confirmed her fears that evening when he arrived home to see Flora’s elbow wrapped in blue bandaging. It was sprained. Joe had thought it was broken because he didn’t really do shapes. Daniel said they couldn’t go on letting a retard care for their child. He stopped himself and added, “He’s not retarded. Of course not. I just mean—”
“What did he do differently from anybody else?” Pam demanded to know. “Do you really think there’s any babysitter in the world that wouldn’t have happened to? She rolled over. There’s a first time for everything. And he was flawless. He charmed his way into pediatric orthopedic surgery before I could even get down there. She was fixed before I even caught up with them. She’s fine!”
“She has a monster bandage,” Daniel said. “What if she’d been bleeding?”
“What do we have to do, hire a registered nurse? I know Joe couldn’t splint a broken arm to save his life, and the box he put her in was way too big. But he knew something was wrong, and he got her to the hospital. That’s one of the reasons to live in Manhattan. It’s never far to the best medical care in the world.”
“He put her in a box?”
“I told him to. I don’t know. When an animal’s hurt, the most important thing is to get them to the vet without moving their spine, so you slide them onto something stiff like cardboard.”
“Oh, my God,” Daniel said. “She could have had a spinal injury, and you told him to pick her up and put her in a box!”
“Well, he couldn’t just leave her there and call an ambulance. That would take forever.”
“She might have been—I can’t even say it—”
“What?” Pam protested. She knew what he was getting at. Her throat seized up. “I didn’t think of that,” she said. “I can’t even think about it if I try.” It was true. No amount of effort could make her imagine Flora with a broken neck or back. It seemed like a sin, and tempting a lifetime’s bad luck, to think about it, much less say it.
“We’re getting rid of that table,” Daniel said. “We don’t need her airborne. There are no changing tables in nature.” She whimpered in her crib, and he picked her up. “Baby Flora, the floor baby. Born to be in contact with the earth.”
HE RESERVED THE HOBOKEN STUDIO AGAIN, THIS TIME FOR A FULL DAY, INCLUDING grudging supervision from a grouchy engineer, and recorded two Joe Harris tracks: an original entitled “Hold the Key” and a cover of “American Woman” by the Guess Who.
“Hold the Key” was taken straight from life. “Hold the key, kill the light, lock the door, lock it twice, and go down …” It had originated as a mnemonic device for leaving his own apartment, but in Daniel’s opinion it could become a stoner anthem. He imagined crowds at festivals singing it, swaying, holding hands.
Joe said “American Woman” was easy to play and fun to sing, and he wasn’t wrong. No one, hearing that recording, could have denied that he could warble like Mariah Carey and wail like Bono. Only the oddness of his ambitions marked him as an indie eccentric rather than a mainstream poseur.
Daniel didn’t waste money on a printed sleeve for the seven-inch, knowing it was the glued-on label that mattered. He used xeroxed clip art and a free vector graphics program (CorelDraw) to make the Lion’s Den logo. It showed a stylized lioness holding a large flower, something like a zinnia, in its crossed forelegs, with “Lion’s Den” in sixties-style art nouveau script. He put the preponderance of his investment into sound quality, paying double for heavy vinyl mastered at forty-five revolutions per minute to be shipped from England. He ordered one thousand of the singles, an insanely optimistic number, but Joe had committed to playing as many shows as it took to unload them, even if it took him the rest of his life. Daniel estimated twenty years.
JOE WAS IN THE LOFT ON CHRYSTIE STREET WITH FLORA WHEN THE UPS MAN ARRIVED with the fourteen stunningly heavy boxes. Victor helped him carry them up the stairs. Joe put one on the stereo, cranked it, and danced. It was immediately clear to him what he needed to do. He fed and changed Flora, strapped her to his chest, tucked twenty-five singles into his messenger bag, and marched off to the Abyssinian Coffee Shop.
He bestowed singles on all those who currently had shifts and stacked five more by the register for the remaining employees to pick up. With one exception, a pothead prep cook whose shift was ending, the staff added their gifts to the stack, from which two customers removed