Men, of course, do not give birth, but they have their own shadow form of labor: installing the baby’s car seat. This seemingly simple job has ruined plenty of golfing Saturdays, even for guys who solved Rubik’s Cube when they were younger. Thankfully, in Manhattan there’s an expert for everything, and if you’re expecting a son and have no idea how to get him home from the hospital, you can call Alisa Baer, the Car Seat Lady.
Baer, a twenty-five-year-old medical student with curly black hair and a nonsense-free manner, doesn’t have any kids herself, but she can tell you which car seats will and will not fit in your Volvo V40. She comes from something of a safety-obsessed family. Her grandfather was a stickler for fire prevention, and her mother, who began installing car seats in Baltimore in 1984, was the original C.S.L. When Baer was a kid, she and her mother would drive around town, looking for motorists who weren’t buckled up. Upon spotting one, Baer would hold a sign up to the window: “Please Fasten Your Seat Belt.” If the driver complied, she would flip the sign over: “Thank You.” She has only recently stopped being embarrassed about this.
When Baer first came to New York City, she found it difficult to walk down the street. Every time she glanced into a car, it seemed, she saw a potentially dangerous car seat. She started to leave her phone number on people’s windshields, informing them, in polite notes, that their car seat was improperly installed and that she would be happy to help out. Over the years, she’s seen some crazy jerry-rigs: bungee cords, AstroTurf, plastic piping. A number of fathers have tried to use all three seat belts as a harness. Baer knows that these men are just trying to think creatively. Still, she says, “When I hear that someone is an engineer, that scares me.”
On a recent morning, Baer was advising an expecting couple outside her East Village apartment. (She used to make free house calls, but now she asks that people bring their seats to her. She’s also begun charging forty-five dollars per seat, because New Yorkers told her they didn’t trust something they didn’t have to pay for.) “Feed the slack,” she told the father. “Simulate the torsional pull.”
Most people, Baer pointed out, do not install their car seat tightly enough (a good sideways tug should move the seat less than an inch). Watching her work with a car seat is a bit like watching a violinist tune her instrument: she handles each device with a professional briskness, and knows its quirks and personality. First, to insure that the baby’s breathing won’t be restricted, she wedges some rolled-up bath towels under the rear-facing car-seat base so that it’s aligned at the proper forty-five degrees. (Her tool kit also includes a carpenter’s level, a locking clip, and a baby doll.) Then she does a move in which she stands on top of the base and pushes her back against the roof, to provide leverage, while the expectant dad struggles to fasten the taut belt. (The expectant mom takes notes.) Now the moment of truth: the dad tries the maneuver himself. Leaning forward, he uses a swivelling motion to force the car seat into position. It’s similar to a leg press.
Baer estimates that she has installed five thousand seats in her career. She tests all the latest models herself and even purchases the most spectacular ones for further study. She hasn’t been stumped yet, although the fifteen-passenger vans of some Orthodox families—filled with, say, seven to ten kids of varying ages and sizes—have posed challenges. One of her proudest achievements is placing car seats for triplets in a particularly narrow S.U.V.
Most New Yorkers, however, have a more elementary problem: they take cabs. Baer is even willing to hail taxis with pregnant women and their husbands for practice installations. The first step is usually to calm down the taxi-driver. When a cabby sees a pregnant woman, he often begins to shout, “Emergency! Hospital! Not in back seat!” Baer explains that the woman is not in labor, and that all they ask is that he not drive anywhere for ten minutes. Her advice: give the driver a dollar right away, and leave the door open.
