A Fortunate Age

by Joanna Rakoff

  Usually, though, Sadie was content on her own. The rhythms of motherhood—the regularity, the structure of it, the dinner at six and bath at seven and bed at eight—suited her. And then there was Jack himself, with his hooded Peregrine eyes and his fair Peregrine hair and Ed’s pale eyes and long legs and arms, who had emerged from her, fully formed, the sort of child whom Rose described as “easy”: a decent sleeper, an infrequent crier, an eater of brussels sprouts, in possession of a broad, ready smile that charmed the proprietors of the local bakery and dry cleaner and pizza shop. In the night, when he woke and clung to her, his hot face in her shoulder, she felt the individual muscles of her heart slowly ripping into their isolate strands. She loved him so. No one had warned her of this, this furious, frightening animal love that turned her into a strange, senseless being, who had given up a job she loved—though she supposed she was already loving it less well before Jack came along; she supposed she had been perhaps looking for a reason to give it up—because she couldn’t bear the thought of leaving her infant with an underpaid West Indian woman who had abandoned her own children to take care of Sadie’s. It had turned her—a fearless traveler—into an anxious, twittering freak who had yet, in the two years since Jack’s birth, to board a plane, for what if it were to explode on takeoff, or, more likely, fall prey to box cutter–wielding madmen, causing her life to end, and preventing her from ever again watching Jake’s prodigious cheeks burst into a smile or slacken into sleep. It had happened two weeks after Jack’s birth. It would happen again.

  And yet there were days. Sometimes, Jack’s very easiness—his warmth, his attachment to her—made him difficult. He still, at nearly two, often wanted to sleep on her lap for naps, rather than in his crib, so that the process of putting him down took hours and left her senseless with exhaustion. And though he was happy to sit for half an hour, loading and unloading blocks into the back of his plastic dump truck, he didn’t want her to read while he did so. “Mama, guck,” he cried, and snatched the paper from her hands. And then there were nights: when he woke, sobbing, frightened by some shadow in his room or corner of his developing psyche (or, as Ed said, simply thirsty), and refused to return to sleep, making her feel heartless for, in her exhaustion, desiring that he do so. Even when Ed was home, it was Sadie he wanted in those terrible hours, and Sadie he wanted before he went to sleep in the evening, and before his naps, and when he woke up in the morning. For he was, somehow, still nursing. This great big boy, who barely fit on her lap, with his head of wild curls. A year ago, she’d offered him milk, just as the doctor told her to, and he’d puckered his lips and said “No. Bad.” She’d tried everything: soy, goat, sheep, rice, which was supposed to most resemble breast milk. But he refused them all—just as he’d refused the bottle (filled, then, with breast milk, pumped, painfully, in dribs and drabs, at the kitchen table, after he went to sleep) at two months, then three, then four.

  “He’s not still nursing?” Rose asked each time they visited. On this one point Rose and Ed happily agreed. “You’ve got to wean him,” Ed had said the night before. “You’re wearing yourself out.”

  “How?” Sadie snapped. “I’m trying.” But the truth was: she wasn’t. Not because she didn’t want to—she did. In a way. Sometimes, while he nursed, he rested a fat, proprietary hand on her breast, occasionally giving it a hard squeeze. “No,” she said, prying his fingers off her, fighting a wave of irritation. But why? She had shared her body with him this long, hadn’t she? Was it fair to suddenly demand it back? No. And yet, she was tired. So tired. Too tired to be groped by a three-foot-tall toddler. And yet, too tired to figure out a way to get him into his crib that didn’t involve pawing her.

  Exhaustion had become a defining principle for her, guiding every choice she made, leading her, increasingly, on a lazy and lonely track: emails and phone calls went unreturned for months; the dry cleaning lingered in the shop; her hair grew flat and fuzzed with dirt; the paper collected on the coffee table, crisp and unfingered, for she could not bear to read about the endless war, the latest foibles of the absurd regime that had launched it, the murders and fires in the Bronx and Queens and far-out Brooklyn. This exhaustion, she knew, was far from a new story, so far that she could barely bring herself to mention it when Beth or Emily, on the rare occasions she spoke with them, asked how she was. And yet she thought she did have it harder than, say, Vicky, whose husband was a social worker at a school in the East Village and arrived home promptly at four in the afternoon every day, as Vicky never failed to remind her. “You should do what Noah and I do,” she’d advised months back, when Sadie, in a weak moment, admitted that she was having trouble coping. “He has half an hour to settle in after work. Then at four thirty it’s my time.” She smiled meaningfully. “Ava goes to bed at six, you know, and then we have our time.” But Ed did not get home at four o’clock—ever. He was gone for days, sometimes weeks, in L.A. for meetings, or, lately, directing videos or commercials, because, though she told neither her parents nor her friends this, they needed money, badly.

  “Why don’t you go with him?” Vicky had asked a few days ago as they loaded laundry into their building’s industrial washers, Jack and Ava pushing around the heavy wire carts. It was a question she’d heard before: from Beth, from Dave, from Emily, from her mother, who thought it was Sadie’s duty to accompany Ed wherever business took him, or hey, who could blame him for finding “a little something on the side” (Rose had really used this phrase). They didn’t seem to understand that Ed wasn’t on vacation, lounging by the pool at Chateau Marmont. “He’s going to Bosnia,” she reminded them. “But it’s safe there now, isn’t it?” they asked. She supposed it was. But still, it just seemed a bit much. What would she do with Jack all day—Ed was often on set for twenty hours in a row—in a place where she didn’t speak the language, where she knew no one. “It’s actually kind of nice being alone,” she told everyone.

  There was truth to this. In the evenings, after she put Jack to bed, she felt almost giddy with freedom: She could take a bath! Eat cookies for dinner! Get into bed at eight o’clock and read, just as she’d done when she was single, in her little apartment on Baltic Street, but better, for then she’d always been consumed with work, with the endless piles of manuscripts to edit.

  But on this June morning, as she deposited Jack in a swing and gave him a push, the evening and its small luxuries seemed very far away. Ed would be gone for four months, an inconceivable amount of time. She’d slept badly, anxious about Ed’s travel, anxious about the months without him, months of picking up the milk and purchasing birthday gifts, and doing the laundry, the endless laundry, and generally managing everything alone, and as she lifted Jack into the swing and gave him a push, she found herself prey to self-pity, an increasingly common phenomenon. The older Jack got, the more she realized that the difficulties of being alone with him for such long stretches were larger than just the everyday hassles: each day, she faced a million tiny choices—choices that would affect who Jack would become and how he regarded the world—and each day the repercussions of those choices grew larger and larger, swelling inside her head like a sponge, absorbing the material around it. Would she let him watch television? Eat candy? Drink juice? Wear the obnoxiously boyish clothing—with plasticky renderings of basketballs and trucks—purchased for him by her mother? Take a bath with her, now that he was more a boy and less a baby? And the smaller, more subtle things, too: if she grew impatient with him, if she snapped at Ed on the phone, if she seemed sad or angry or depressed. All of these things could somehow damage her son’s psyche. Or had she absorbed too much of the rhetoric of the mommies’ group? She should, perhaps, have gone with Ed.

  “Down,” Jack said now, thrusting one sturdy arm out in front of him, like a little commandant. “Ga!” He’d barely been in the swing five minutes.

  “You want to come out?” she asked doubtfully.

  “Yes,” he said, tossing his arm out again. “Mama! Ga!” His eyes, she saw, were rimmed
with red. Like her, he’d slept badly the night before. Today, she’d put him down for his nap early, before noon. “Mama, ga!” he said a third time, as an enormous blue pram materialized in front of the gate that led into the baby swings. At the helm of this outsized device stood a short young woman, her eyes covered in trendily large sunglasses, her diminutive form dwarfed by the girth of her haul, which she was having trouble maneuvering through the narrow entryway.

  “Let me help you,” said Sadie, striding over and holding the door open.

  “Mama!” Jack called.

  “Mama will be right back, sweetie.” Awkwardly, the small woman attempted to guide the stroller past Sadie.

  “Thanks,” she said irritably. “Could you hold my coffee?” She pulled off her sunglasses with a noisy clack—revealing the small, sharp face of Caitlin Green-Gold. Caitlin had changed. Her hair was blonde and her arms, which were bare, were sheathed in ropy muscles and tanned to fine cocoa. She wore a plain black dress, of matte jersey, in the wraparound style. On her left hand sat a disarmingly huge diamond embedded in the chunky platinum confines of a Tiffany Etoile band, much disparaged by Rose (“It’s masculine”), who had been known to while away an afternoon expounding on the hideousness of Tiffany’s recent inventions.

  “Caitlin,” said Sadie. “Do you live down here now? Wait, sorry”—she jogged a few steps back toward Jack, who was trying to fling himself out of the swing—“let me get this boy down.” Freed, Jack ran through the gate and off toward the slide, now abandoned by Ava, Sophia, and Maude. “Sorry,” she said to Caitlin. She was unsettled to find that she was glad to see her. “Do you mind chasing after him with me?”

  “No,” said Caitlin. “We can sit down over there.”

  “We can try.”

  “So, that’s Jack, right?” said Caitlin, once they were installed on the bench under the fig trees, Jack occupied—if only momentarily—with the captain’s wheel atop the play structure.

  “Yes,” said Sadie. “And this is . . .”

  “Oh,” rasped Caitlin distractedly, as if she’d forgotten the contents of her stroller. “Ismael.” By rote, she pushed back the canopy to reveal the infant’s sleeping face, which was a lovely pale brown color.

  “He’s beautiful,” said Sadie honestly. He had a long, attractive nose, rather than the usual infant gumdrop, and a head of wispy black ringlets. “How old is he?”

  “Eight weeks. And Jack’s two?” Sadie nodded. “I heard about it from Lil. She was so jealous.”

  “He’ll be two in August,” said Sadie, deciding that she would not be baited into talking about Lil.

  “Is he going to school in the fall?” asked Caitlin. Sadie sighed. She’d been getting this question a lot lately. The mothers in the neighborhood—like the mothers of middle-class New York, in general—were single-minded in their pursuit of the perfect preschool, and the process of getting their Zoes and Maxes into it. Ava and Maude and Sophia, of course, were all going to school in the fall, and Sadie had listened wearily as their mothers detailed the chosen institutions’ educational philosophies and the celebrities with kids on the rosters.

  “I don’t think so,” said Sadie. “I think we’re not going to send him until he’s four, when he can go to public pre-K. But we haven’t really talked about it much.” It was true. Somehow, they never had time.

  “Four,” rasped Caitlin.

  “Yeah, we just felt like he has the rest of his life to be in school. He can spend a few years at home with his parents.” There was also the fact that they couldn’t quite afford it.

  “Oh,” said Caitlin, in such a way that it was clear she felt this to be utter nonsense. “So you both work at home now?”

  Sadie sighed. Caitlin had not changed. She still traded on forced intimacies. As always, she’d proceeded right to the heart of the matter—that is, asked a leading question. For surely she knew, from Lil—who knew from Emily and Beth and Dave—that Ed was often away. “No, I stay at home with Jack. Ed’s a filmmaker, a producer.” She still felt odd, pretentious, saying this. It sounded so glamorous, so West Coast, though the reality was ludicrously far from it.

  “I know,” said Caitlin. “I saw Command Enter.” She did not say whether she liked it or not, which, Sadie thought, was either an indication that she hadn’t or a Caitlin-style calculation, meant to keep Sadie on her guard. “What’s he doing now?”

  “Actually, he just left this morning on a big shoot.”

  “Where?”

  “Bosnia. He’ll be gone for a few months.”

  This seemed, strangely, to impress Caitlin. “Wow, but that’s rough. I start losing my mind if I’m alone with Ish for more than a few hours. But I guess it gets more fun when they’re older.”

  “It does,” said Sadie, though she’d found those early months enjoyable, too, in a very different way. “Sorry, hold on—” She ran over to the play structure, where Jack stood at the edge of a too-high drop. “Jack, come to Mama,” she said, positioning herself by the toddler slide, which he promptly shot himself down, landing at her feet.

  “Do you miss your job?” asked Caitlin. And though this question followed the line of their conversation, Sadie still felt somewhat startled by it. None of her friends had asked her this, not directly, nor had they questioned her when she’d decided that she couldn’t go back—or, rather, that she couldn’t stay. For she had gone back, when Jack was four months old, and stayed for three days, weeping into the phone, as the nanny—pretty, devout, with the lilting tones of the Caribbean—complained that Jack wouldn’t take the bottle (“I’ll just give him the formula, okay? Maybe he like that better”; “No!”) and Jack himself screamed. “Do you think you’ll go back?”

  “I don’t know,” said Sadie, though the truth was, she did know. She was done. Done with the whole corporate thing. Done with ushering through other people’s books. The debacle with Tuck’s book—Val had canceled his contract after Sadie left, without so much as a glance at his rewrites—had been the final nail in the coffin. She needed to stop wasting time, to write her own. And she had started, however hesitantly, in the dark hours before Jack woke, while she drank dark coffee with sugar, the only time of the day when she felt keenly focused, able to think. But she would not discuss this with Caitlin. Or with anyone, really, but Ed, who thought she should think about screenplays. “A publishing satire,” he suggested. “Or a Whit Stillman kind of thing.” Maybe, she told him.

  “Have you been to the mommies’ group?” Caitlin asked, jerking her head toward Vicky and her cohorts, who stood huddled by the sprinkler, which was shaped like a rainbow.

  “Yes,” said Sadie. “Horrible.”

  “Oh. My. God,” agreed Caitlin. “So horrible. They, like, think that they’re liberal because they feed their kids organic baby food, but they’re like Betty Friedan’s worst nightmare.”

  For the first time that day, Sadie smiled. “It’s true,” she said.

  “Mama,” Jack cried suddenly, grabbing her finger and pulling her toward the bench. “Baby. Baby.” As they approached the bench—Caitlin trailing desultorily behind Sadie and Jack—a faint cooing noise began emanating from the big pram.

  “He’s awake,” said Caitlin flatly. And he was. Kicking his thin arms and legs against his soft white blanket and gazing, alarmed, at Sadie and Jack, who arrived at his side first. A moment later, when Caitlin stepped into his line of vision, he let out a frantic wail. “Okay, okay,” said Caitlin, her face turning a bright scarlet. “Hold on a second.” She began rooting in the bottom of the pram. Pick him up, thought Sadie, her blood pressure rising perceptibly. Across the park, Vicky whispered urgently in the ear of her skinny friend, while the fat one shook her head from side to side, setting her jowls aquiver.

  “Baby,” said Jack nervously. “Baby.”

  “Would you like me to pick him up?” asked Sadie.

  “That would be great,” said Caitlin, through gritted teeth.

  In her arms, Ismael felt impossibly light and sprin
gy—had Jack ever been this small?—his hot tears soaking the shoulder of her dress. “It’s okay, little sweetie,” she said, kissing his head, soft black curls flattening under her lips. His smell was different than Jack’s—muskier, more herbal. A different soap, that was all it was, and yet it was enough to make him seem almost a different species. “It’s okay,” she said. But he was already calming, breathing in great, huge, shuddering gulps.

  “Baby,” said Jack, staring solemnly up at her, his blue eyes darkening with confusion. “Baby.” This was what he called himself. “Baby!” he shouted when he found photos of himself floating around the apartment. “Jack baby do it,” he said when he wanted to climb onto a chair or eat applesauce unassisted. But he was really a boy now, hitting his Spaldeen against the wall and racing his Little People airplane across the floor and demanding to be read Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel ten times in a row.