GENIUS BABY by Lulu Dewey

The baby is in her chair, slapping one sticky hand and then the other at the cat. From the other room daddy calls to mother. “We could put in ninety-two dollars a month,” he says. “How much do we want to save?” 

Daddy is setting up a college savings account for baby. The sweet little thing in her yellow wool socks is going to be an astrophysicist, or a painter. Genius baby, they call her, as she opens her mouth for another spoonful of mush. Her eyebrows have gone red from exertion; she’s gripping the sides of her chair, her fingertips wet little moons against the plastic. 

Baby is pooping, mother notes. Now baby is slack-jawed in the chair, eyes locked on mother’s. She grunts softly. Genius baby, mother thinks again.

“How much would ninety-two dollars get us?” mother asks. “We want her to take on a few loans, I think. We want her to feel an ownership over her education.”

“That’s right,” daddy says. “That’s right.” 

The baby finishes her task, smiles tightly, begins to wave again at the cat. One of her yellow socks has nearly come untethered. It dangles from her chubby foot.

“Your sock!” mother squeals. “Your little sock.”

“Let’s try to save forty thousand,” daddy says. “But we better hope she goes somewhere with in-state tuition.”

Mother dreams of the Ivy League; of a tall brick building in the middle of a tree-lined campus. She can see baby there, strolling across the quad, her tiny milk teeth gleaming. As she dreams, baby begins a soft keening that daddy can’t abide. 

“Poor thing!” mother says, and scoops baby out of her chair. 

Standing over baby, flat on her changing table, cooing and giggling and slick with shit, daddy and mother deliberate.

“Ninety-two will get us twenty-thousand by the time she’s eighteen, but that’s without interest,” daddy says.

“If I pay off my loans by the time she’s six, that gives us over a decade to put in more.”

“But what about the car?” daddy says. “We’ve got a few more years for the car.”

“She’ll be seven, then.”

“A decade exactly.”

“And that’s enough time,” mother says. “That’s more than enough time.”

“More than enough time,” daddy says to baby. She reaches towards him. She’s clean now, and freshly diapered, and she wants to be carried around the house so she can look at things.

“There’s the stove,” daddy says, and points for baby. “There’s the window.”  

He pictures a new stove, a bigger window. He pictures a better car, maybe one of those new electric ones, and a garage to keep it in. He pictures a motorcycle, a home gym, a drone, a television that takes up the whole wall, a state-of-the-art juicer for the kitchen, spitting out reams of juice.

Baby laughs as she starts to fall. Mother shouts, lunges with her, catches baby as she topples from daddy’s arms. 

Now baby and mother are angry, screaming and red in the face, flailing their arms at daddy. 

“Careless!” mother snaps. 

Daddy looks at baby’s open mouth, the shape of a lowercase q, a dribble of saliva sliding from one corner as she cries. He’s still thinking of that juicer. There’d be celery juice in the mornings for him and for mother. They could make carrot juice for baby, too. And with all that juice perhaps mother would lose some of the baby weight, go back to her old self. He pictures mother’s abdomen, taut and warm, and his mouth waters.

He shakes his head, looks at his wife and his child, who have calmed down and gone to sit on the sofa. Baby puts a single palm against her mother’s cheek, and they’re beaming at each other, and for a moment daddy grows angry. 

Ninety-two dollars is more than enough! he thinks to himself. Surely college will be free by then. Or, with the way things are going, it won’t even exist, and we’ll have saved up all that money for nothing—

Baby emits a low growl. Then she belches and claps. Little tufts of fuzz and lint cling to her palms. 

“Genius baby,” mother sings. “My genius baby!”

Lulu Dewey’s essays and stories can be found in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Literary Hub, DIAGRAM, Speculative Nonfiction, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the University of Iowa and currently teaches at Moore College of Art & Design in Philadelphia.