Summary

The narrator, Heather, remembers her daughter’s birth, contrasting her appearance with the unreal image of the dolls she owned as a child. She remembers being heartbroken that her daughter’s father, Brian, was absent during the pregnancy as well as how the nurses came in to run additional tests on her child.

She flashes back to her first date with the baby’s father in Greenwich Village and her own happy life that did not, at that time, include “being the mother of a child who required extensive neonatal medical care. Or spending a pregnancy alone, heartbroken” (8). On their second date, she remembers that he took notes on his diner placemat, showing that “he wanted to know, understand, remember who people were. How they were. And the best, the truest way he knew to burrow toward the truth was to write things...