Getting Stoned With Savages - J. Maarten Troost [89]
Lukas grew to be very comfortable on my shoulder. Indeed, he was at ease on anyone’s shoulder. He took it as his natural state. This is because in Fiji, a child’s feet never touch the ground. Babies are adored on the islands. We’d enter a restaurant, and the moment we arrived, a waitress would divest us of our son. “Where’s the baby?” my mother asked in a panic when she visited a couple of months later.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“I think the bartender took him,” Sylvia said.
My mother looked at us oddly. “You’re going to have a hard time when you return to the U.S. As a general rule, in the U.S. we don’t let strangers walk off with babies.”
“But we’re in Fiji,” I said.
“I know,” my mother said. “Couldn’t you at least wear something nice, though? What happened to the clothes I sent you?”
It was astonishing how warm Fijians were with children. No matter if we were in a village or at a resort, soon Lukas would find himself shepherded from shoulder to shoulder. Sweet songs would be sung in his ear. Rugby players would coo and play peekaboo. In response, he’d gurgle appreciatively.
At home, Anna taught us everything we needed to know. Bewildered at first by our son’s mysterious ways, we had simply listened attentively as she explained the nuances of burping and what, precisely, constituted a good poop. Whenever we had a question, she was there for us.
“I can’t figure out why he’s crying,” I said one day. I had ruled out food, a heavy diaper, and sleep.
“It is because someone is thinking bad thoughts about him,” Anna informed us. The three of us exchanged looks. “Not in here. Someone out there,” she said, gesturing beyond the house.
The bastard, I thought. Now why would someone do that?
The months passed, and they were happy months. Here and there, we had our worries. Lukas’s doctor was a Hare Krishna, and during the exams, the baby would take an inordinate interest in the poster of Lord Krishna. This will require close watching, I thought.
“You should massage the skull,” the doctor told us, “to make it nice and round.”
This we declined to do. Indians, apparently, prized round skulls, just as the Malekulans once favored elongated heads. As far as we could tell, Lukas’s head was perfect as it was. And if he grew up to have a Winnebago head like his father, I was sure he’d get used to it.
By the time Lukas had passed his sixth month, we had come to conclude that Anna had the strength of Atlas. It is one thing to spend your day traipsing about with a seven-pound baby. It is altogether different when he is twenty pounds. Indeed, I myself grew weary after an hour. Sensing that he was sound asleep on my aching shoulder, I’d gently lay him in his crib, and the moment he touched the sheet, he’d let me know in that voluble way babies have that he didn’t think this was a good idea. In a Fijian household, of course, there would be an endless supply of well-rested arms to take turns carrying a slumbering child. But we didn’t quite live in a Fijian household. Thoughtlessly, we had failed to bring a village of cousins and aunties of our own to the South Pacific.
Lukas soon adjusted to the two worlds he inhabited. Eventually, we had our way of doing things while Anna had hers. We’d try to teach him Western ways, to become independent, while Anna coddled him island-style. “Babies shouldn’t cry,” she said, swooping him into her arms. Meanwhile, stopwatch in hand, Sylvia and I would stand just outside his door and spend long, wrenching minutes listening to him cry until, finally, he learned that not only could he nap in his crib; he could even sleep soundly through the night. Anna, however, insisted that he snooze on her shoulder. When we fed him pureed mango, he sat in a high