All the women in the room ran over to help their hysterical colleague staunch the flow of blood from the lacerated infant; somehow in the confusion Bobby ended up in Tommy’s crib wearing Tommy’s plastic panties and Tommy ended up in Bobby’s crib wearing Bobby’s panties.

When Mary and Marge arrived to pick them up, Mary was given Tommy and Marge was given Bobby. Tommy rode home behind his ex-wife while his son sat in Tommy’s seat behind Marge. Marge took Bobby out of the Suburban with the seat and took him inside. Mary said goodbye to Marge and drove away with Tommy still sitting in the back. Tommy fussed and motioned with his hands to get Mary’s attention and succeeded only in getting a pacifier put in his mouth. She drove him home and installed him in Bobby’s room. Thomas looked around at the nursery which he had helped decorate with a new eye. Even though he knew intellectually that the room was exactly the same as it had been two weeks before when his wife had divorced him and he had been forced to return to his mother’s house, his new perspective as an infant made the room appear strange to him. The ten-by-twelve foot room had suddenly changed from a smallish bedroom into an vast expanse of space. The powder-blue star-studded ceiling loomed as high as a medieval cathedral’s vaulting and the furniture seemed impossibly immense! It was hard to believe that he was the one who had used a mere stepstool to paste the self-adhesive foil stars on the nursery’s ceiling only six months before. Even Bobby’s crib seemed to have grown in his absence; before he had left, it had seemed barely big enough to safely contain Bobby. As he lay on the mattress, safety contained between the plastic-covered, bumper-padded sides with nursery prints of Sesame Street characters, he felt like he had been confined to a large open-topped, padded cell, compete with bars that were too high to even think about reaching, much less clambering over. “At least,” he thought as his eyes closed drowsily, “I’m not surrounded by teddy bears!”

He fell asleep in Bobby’s crib and was awakened later by Mary. She hoisted him onto her hip and carried him into the kitchen, then put him in Bobby’s high chair and belted him into the seat. The padding was much thicker on Bobby’s chair than on his old chair and the difference made him claustrophobic. Every hard surface had been padded; he could barely move. Even if he had wanted to hurt himself, the heavy padding would have prevented the slightest injury. He felt trapped within a web of his own design. He had personally insisted on purchasing that particular model of high chair for Bobby because of its high safety rating in Consumer’s Magazine even though Mary had thought it would reduce Bobby’s freedom to move while he was in the high chair. At the time, Thomas reflected in regret, it had seemed like such a good idea. Once he was the one secured to the chair with inch-wide straps of unbreakable, blue-nylon parachute-webbing like a blathering psychotic, the idea had lost its attractiveness. All of his careful planning for Bobby’s baby things had become a cosmic curse. He felt like a male Black Widow Spider who wove a web for his wife only to have his colossal spouse watch while he became entrapped on its sticky strands. The image of Mary as a female Black Widow was overpowering. Thomas had the ominous feeling that she was even now planning her next meal. When she was done, he feared, his life and personality would only be a memory of something that had once nourished the baby spider named Bobby.

A minute later, she put a bowl of yellow baby food in front of him and ladled out a spoonful. Tommy looked at the vegetable mixture in disgust. “Does she really expect me to eat this revolting mess?”, he thought to himself, “Why doesn’t she fix me something I enjoy like Mama does?”

He looked over at her and found she was staring at him intently. “Go on, Bobby. It’s your favorite vege. You love squash! Aren’t you hungry?”