by Kyra Wilder
Men walking past the park would catch their eyes on her. They would get caught up and tangled like that, for a second, for a half a second. Fathers meeting their children in the park after work would hesitate for one heartbeat maybe, at the edge of her blanket, as if they’d just then remembered dropping something.
She never looked up though, at the hesitating heart-stopped fathers. She wouldn’t have. I knew she wouldn’t have. I watched the way she held the ball she tossed to her baby, the way she pushed her boy in a swing, the way she took her son’s hand as they walked, so I felt I knew these things. I called her Nell, to myself, inside my head, when I thought about her. She smiled at me once, and I smiled back. She had the most delightful gap between two of her teeth, not her front ones. See? I could have said to her. See? Who we are? Who could reproach us? Who could think a single bad thought about us? We who are doing the most beautiful thing in the world.
When E was born, when we brought her home from the hospital, I was so overwhelmed with love that I wanted to speak to her in a different language. A language apart from the everyday chatter that carried on all around us, that I’d heard all my life. I wanted to speak to her in a language that existed only for the two us. I loved her like that, that much. Sometimes love is like that though, it can be blind and demanding, it can be such a beautiful trap.
At the park if E and B were happy for a moment I brought out my book, Easy French, and tried to make sense of the words. I read over the dialogues, mouthing out the words to simple questions. Trips to the pharmacy, the library, a movie theatre and the park. I tried to remember the answers characters gave to the questions they were constantly being asked. I tried to formulate answers to imaginary questions that someone might ask me. I tried to find it, the thread that would string the words together, the thread that could knit me into the afternoon.
How old is your baby? someone could ask me. Where do you live? Where is the supermarket? I am thirty-four years old, I could say. I have two children. A boy and a girl, I could say. My hair is brown. My hair is short. My eyes are blue and green and grey. Each word I could puzzle out was a victory, something plucked from the abyss, from the edge of the world. A marvel.
In my apartment I thought about Nell. I thought about her in her apartment, about the closet she must hang her long dresses in, about the places she settled her children down to sleep. How she must iron their pillowcases, hang their bath toys to dry so mould would never grow inside them. How mould would never ever grow anywhere inside her house. How she must have tucked the hours all around her boys, fluffing pillows, smoothing hair, making every minute seem secure. I pictured her living in a house perched high on a hill above the tram stop where everything was green and frothy with light, where the breeze always blew very gently through the yellow-draped windows. Aurelie with her flowers, Nell with her children, petals and soft cheeks, I could see them perfectly, in their perfect homes.
I didn’t have a job, not anymore. Afterwards, after E was born, after I quit, well, it was as if I had woken up on a very quiet island. An island where it was always afternoon and I was alone, alone with E. We could have made a raft, rowed somewhere. I could have, but where would we have gone?
Sometimes I yelled then, when she was a baby, just to make all the quiet disappear for a while. To push it back and away from us. All that quiet, all those hours, just her and me in our old house, looking out on our old street. Sometimes we’d just yell together and hold hands.
M was going to leave on a trip, he’d be gone for two weeks. There was a big conference and then some meetings. Some of the other wives were going to a mountain house, he told me, a real chalet-type thing. He wanted me to go. There was a sandy beach on a lake, he said. A boat for E to play in, other children, green meadows and flowers in window boxes, cows with cowbells. Real Swiss stuff, he said. You could get some help maybe, he said, with the kids. Two weeks is a long time to be on your own. It might be good to have some company, you all could help each other out.
But we were fine here, I told him. Besides, I told him, there wasn’t such a thing as holidays for mothers, or holidays from mothering for that matter. So why pretend we could go somewhere to get a break. I didn’t want to go and mother with the other mothers at the lake. We’d choke each other. We’d be like seals piling our ungainly motherbodies one on top of the other. No, thank you, I didn’t need any bit of that. Mothering is a hard job, it needs a lot of space to breathe. Really, I didn’t want to travel, I only wanted to sleep.
The morning M left I got up with him and walked him to the door. He wheeled his Samsonite between us, a garment bag slung over his arm with miles and miles of beautiful suits zipped up inside it. He checked his phone and told me the date he’d be back, I circled it on the little calendar the rental company had given us. Love Geneva in July, it said, and there was a big red heart drawn over a picture of the shining lake. Swans, mountains. M was going to be gone until the end of it, until the end of the month.
Kiss E and B for me, he said. Be good. I don’t know about the hours, he said, when I’ll be able to call, it’s going to be really busy. It’s OK, I said. Don’t worry about us. We’ll be fine. You’ll do great. But when I said that, You’ll do great, I suddenly felt a kind of confusion. Wrongfooted is the way I felt, as if I’d tripped, vastly. Because of course how was I to know anything about what he was doing and how he would do it. He fumbled with his wallet, his keys, leaned over to kiss me. Sometimes everything was the same and sometimes things were different. When he kissed me for example. Just leave the door open, he’d said, at the party that we’d thrown together, just leave it, when I’d cooked salmon that was pink inside like kisses and we’d opened so many bottles of wine.
He tried to reach around me, to pull me in closer, but business cards scattered out of his pocket like sudden snow. They were so beautiful, the cards. They really were. The printed letters were like vertebrae, each one delicate, embossed, polished to a high shine. I bent to pick them up but the taxi was already outside. I have cards too! I wanted to shout, joking-not-joking, I have cards too, my pockets are stuffed with them. They say unconditional love and they are ready upon demand. They are ready for anyone to ask to see them. The door was already closed behind him though, he was already gone. I stacked up his cards neatly and put them by the door. When he came back, he would find them there.
5
The days grew hotter and hotter. Soon it was too hot to eat anything but lemons. We squeezed the juice over sugar and ice. I stopped cooking. Even boiling water for pasta could not be done. Instead I bought bags and bags of lemons at the market. I walked up and down the stalls, between the laden tables, pulling E, pushing B. In the apartment we stacked the lemons in bowls, crowding the small kitchen table with gleaming yellow towers of fruit. B loved to play with them, their intoxicating shapes, he would bat at them if I put them on the floor and send them rolling. He had a tooth now and he loved to sink it right into their bright delightful rinds.
I liked to have a bowl of lemons in the guest room. The best bowl, the best lemons. I dragged one of the rental-company chairs into the little room and set the bowl on it. The chair was the wrong colour, but the lemons, the idea of them, was right. It was so hot though, in there, that the lemons turned to rot. Always, almost within hours, they broke out in a pulpy grey fuzz and I would have to take them out and throw them away.
The fruit seller, a large woman with sunburnt hands and a faded apron, began to know me. She began to nod at me when I arrived at her table in the afternoons. It felt like an achievement. It really did! Well, what more could one achieve really? I was careful to nod back at her, moving my head exactly as much as she did. I didn’t want to seem stand-offish but neither did I want to appear overeager.
One afternoon she gave E a paper carton of glistening red berries. Back at the apartment we tasted them together, dipping them one by one into a bowl of ice-cold cream while the baby slept. We licked our fingers. We popped the berries between our teeth. With children
the future is always unimaginable, it is so uncertain as to be nothing. Less than that. As a mother, I had had to learn that, that the only sweetness you’re ever guaranteed, the full extent, is right now, the moment right between your teeth.
The next day I steered E to a different table to buy the lemons. I was worried the woman would think we expected another gift. It was so hard, it was always so hard to know what was right. I nodded at the lady as we passed though and she nodded back at me.
I began to fall asleep sometimes. Sometimes when I didn’t mean to I mean. I would just wink out like a candle, like the shutter of a camera closing, and then, click the shutter would open and I would find E staring at me as if she’d asked a question and I hadn’t answered her. Or as if I had answered her and the answer hadn’t been right. Anyway, I began to be afraid that I might fall asleep and E might wander off, out of the apartment, without me. So I began to remind myself always to lock the apartment door when we were inside. B was beginning to crawl a bit so I also began to lock the windows. It was just a question of practicality, of having to outsmart myself because, well, I couldn’t quite trust myself. Not all the time. It made the apartment hotter, the locked windows, but it seemed the only way to keep us all safe, at least until M was back and I could sleep properly. At least until then.
B was tired too. He hated the heat. He cried in his bassinet and pulled at the sweaty baby curls behind his ears. E had lines of salt criss-crossing the back of her shirt like the shadows of prehistoric sea creatures, ammonites I told her.
Mostly I squeezed lemons and spooned sugar into cups. It was OK when we ran out of ice. It’s OK, I told E, it’s better. In the desert they would never think of drinking cold drinks. They really wouldn’t! Look at us, here in this heat, drinking warm lemonade. Look at us!
Once, E reached for her cup too soon, while I was still squeezing and measuring and pouring, lemon and sugar and water, and the sticky sweet juice spilled on the counter, on the floor. That’s OK! I said. That’s OK! Look, we can clean it up, and I was smiling. All we have to do is get this towel wet, and kneel down on the floor and find every little drop. We can do that, I said. We can be so clean and tidy and good. There was so much smiling to do. So much teaching and smiling and not minding. Wiping and drying, sorting, smiling and not mindingabit.
One afternoon I took B over to the sofa to feed him. I let him settle into the crook of my arm and I suppose I fell asleep. Anyway I woke with a start. I woke with B’s sleeping body sliding off my chest, towards the dangerous cushions. My heart leapt. It was as if I was dangling his small body over the edge of a ravine. It really was like that.
I had been told terrible stories of mothers who allowed themselves to fall asleep in this way, with their babies drifting helplessly towards the cushions. If we slept, we mothers, we slept cheek to cheek with disaster. That close, with terror touching us and singing to us in our dreams.
I couldn’t catch my breath. There wasn’t enough air. My face felt tight. I put B down in his crib next to the sofa and ran to the bathroom. My face was a riot of colours, blues streaked down my cheek from the corner of my eye down to my collarbone. Thick red paste was caked around my lips in circles that had been drawn and redrawn again and again. My eyelids were silver, bulging out of my face, like the hard backs of beetles.
E was behind me, smiling. Pretty she said. When I looked down at the sink I saw that my make-up bag was open. Lipstick, brushes, sponges, powders, paints. Expensive liquids of all different colours dripped from the mouths of tiny vials. The sink was stained, the towels were stained, the rental company’s perfect walls.
I smiled back at E out of my cakey mouth. There was lipstick sticking to my tongue and teeth. Pretty, I said. Yes, it’s pretty! Spelled, P-r-e-t-t-y. I spelled the letters with my fingers in the air. We played all afternoon with the shutters drawn. I kept my eyes on B, trying to breathe, trying to see him breathe, feeling the ceiling right on top of us all the time.
That night, after B and E had fallen asleep, I scrubbed my face, and cleaned up the wreckage in the bathroom, all the ruined tubes, the lipsticks, the tiny blush boxes. I picked up too, the whole apartment. Starting in one room and moving through all the others slowly. Our games had taken over the place a bit. Crept up on us, encroached. I hadn’t noticed. Or I had noticed and had let myself loose, had tried to, as if I were glossy green leaves floating in water and could be beautiful and delicate and wavering and touched just here and here, just dappled maybe in the right light. But now, cleaning, I saw it. The mess, the games, the importance of not wavering.
There was the egg carton on the counter, split open with the shells all jumbled up inside it, the cups and dishes from the tea party we’d had on the floor. There were the bits and bobs we’d brought in from the park and stowed in E’s bed. The sticks and apple cores. The secrets. The treasures. The wooden music box we’d found by the bins, that E had loved and that we’d brought back with us, dancing into the apartment, and that I now saw was speckled at the joints with mould. The doll we’d found in the sandbox with the broken neck. I filled bag after bag with the remnants of our marvellous games. The lemons in the guest room had rotted spectacularly, they turned almost to dust in my hands. I took the bags out of the apartment two by two, to the bins, making many trips until the apartment was clean again and ready for us all to love each other better, ready for us all to love each other so much.
After my last trip, on my way back to the apartment, I saw the woman with the pinned white hair sitting outside the cafe drinking coffee. She wore the same long coat, even in the heat, the buttons done up, right up to her neck. Her polished change lay already counted, arranged on the tabletop next to her saucer. Her feet were crossed, as before, at the ankles, tucked underneath her chair as if making space for someone else to come and sit across from her.
She was dipping the corner of her napkin into the tea-light on the table, letting the flame catch and tapping it out again with her fingers. Reflexively almost, over and over, lighting it, snuffing it out. There was only a moment, each time in between lighting and snuffing, for the tiny flame to live, for it to be alive.
I took two steps towards her, I really did. Thinking maybe in my tiredness that she had arranged all this somehow, for me. Thinking that she was signalling me. Hi, I would say, Bonsoir. We would have interesting things to say to each other. She would tell me about some wild thing she’d done when she was young. Some train that she’d ridden on in Russia, where the air was so cold outside that all the beautiful people inside the ice-covered carriages had to spend the whole night kissing and touching each other to stay warm. Something like that.
She let the napkin drop, stuck a cigarette between her lips and lit it. I could hear the crackling of the paper burning. She looked up then, with the cigarette stuck between her lips, and her face, facing me was different, not mysterious, just tired, lonely maybe and I saw immediately the foolishness of what I was doing. Standing in the street in my scrubbed face, waiting to be asked to sit down.
Back inside the apartment, I ran my hands over the kitchen counter and checked three times that the refrigerator was shut tight and not open at all. I sat at the table, then lay down on the kitchen floor. I closed my eyes, hoping that the hum of the refrigerator would put me to sleep. M had been gone a week and I pressed my face into the warm kitchen floor as if I were pressing it into his back. I wondered if he came home right then, if he opened the door, what he would have said, finding me there like that.
Morning came, like it does, and I was on the kitchen floor and I had been there all night and I peeled myself up off it and got on with things. My hands shook a little when I held B. I couldn’t dress him anymore, he seemed to change every minute. Sometimes he was too big for his clothes, sometimes he looked lost in them, swimming in loose fabric that could twist around his neck the moment I looked away. Every minute was capable of bringing such terrible things. I left him in his pyjamas.
E dressed herself. We got to the park early in t
he morning. We had the water pump all to ourselves. I had forgotten to pack the tools so E made do with her hands. Scooping the water onto the sand tiny handfuls at a time. She mounded the wet sand up around the giraffes, coaxing it into small hills, from which the giraffes, buried up to their long necks, cried for her help.
Sometimes she would rescue them right away, sometimes she would ignore them, piling the sand higher and higher, building houses, whole towns, out of sticks on top of them, and bringing smaller sticks, people, to live inside. All the sticks knew to ignore the sounds coming from underneath their feet. It hardly mattered, the water from the pump would always, eventually, wash it all away and the giraffes would be cleaned and welcomed back and tended to. Here, she would whisper to them, telling secrets in their little brown-painted plastic ears, here I am.
We played the days away and I marked them off on the calendar, all businesslike. At night I swept up all our things and cleaned as if we were expecting guests, or as if we were guests in someone else’s house, it didn’t matter. It took a lot of energy though, I feel I should mention, the playing and the cleaning up after. Staying on top of things. Sometimes my heart would start to beat very quickly and if E noticed or if E said, You’re sweating, I was quick to make a game of it.
I kept forgetting to call my mother and when I remembered she didn’t answer, or if she did the connection was bad and she would only stare at me from far away, her face frozen in its ring of light. I would stare then at the pixels and try to make out what colour eyeshadow she was wearing or what she was having for lunch. At night I would take her into the guest room and lie on the floor and talk to her. B’s great, I would say. He’s getting big. He’s doing this or that, any baby thing. And I would wait for her lips that weren’t moving to ask me, where’s M. And with my lips that weren’t moving I would ask her if it was possible to tell between what a man, what a husband, had to do and what he chose to do, and if had to, and chose to, changed for a husband who became an important man. With my lips that weren’t moving I wanted to tell her that M’s jackets, before I took them to the dry cleaners, sometimes smelled like perfume.
