CAR SEAT LADY.(The Talk of the Town)(Alisa Baer)

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 ...