Knock Knock

by S. P. Miskowski

"That baby girl." She said. "Oh no, you're right. I hadn't noticed until you said that. It's the spitting image of her!"

  Beverly let loose a rough, snorting laugh and then clapped a hand to her mouth. She lowered her voice to say:

  "Well, that's a shame. Poor Ethel."

  Marietta nodded.

  "You know," said Beverly. "Rex looked exactly like his granddaddy when he was young. And I resemble my great aunt Ida, more than my mother, which is the only reason I ever get down on my knees and give thanks to God."

  Marietta shook her head.

  "It isn't the resemblance I'm talking about," she said. "I think that's a mask."

  "A mask?"

  "A familiar face. It hides more than it shows, that way."

  The waitress stopped by to pour another round of coffee. Beverly and Marietta were silent until she left.

  "I don't know what you're telling me, Marietta. Ethel's baby looks like Ethel's mother, but it's, what? A mask? You mean, like a disguise? What does that mean?"

  Marietta pursed her lips and shook her head.

  "Have you seen something?" Beverly asked. "Did you have a dream about the baby?"

  "No," said Marietta. "No. But every time I see her, I can feel something, it's strong and it's deep."

  Beverly looked out the window at intermittent traffic heading toward the new freeway entrance. The clink of silver and coffee cups filled the diner.

  "I'm sorry," she said. "But I think Ethel is too old to look after a baby. That's all there is to it. She's worn out because she made a mistake. It's one thing to believe life is precious and good. It's a different thing altogether to have a baby and raise it while your friends go through the change of life."

  "You might be right. Maybe that's all it is," Marietta said in the even tone she employed to reassure Henry and her friends, after she'd gone too far and spooked them. "You're probably right."

  "Well," Beverly said. "Time will tell. So I guess we'll have to wait and see how it all turns out."

  Ethel

  Things were all right while Burt was at home. Even when he wasn't in the same room with Ethel he kept up a steady stream of noise in the background: whistling, humming, playing the radio, or hammering away at this project or that in the garage. She knew he was there. And he was good with the baby, always happy to carry her around wherever he happened to be in the house.

  When Burt was at work or running an errand the stillness of the house crept in around her. At the sewing machine, she felt like she was being watched. Not by one person but by something that followed every move she made. It felt as if the house itself were alive and waiting for her to do the wrong thing. She caught herself tiptoeing in the hall and in the kitchen, even when the baby was awake. She realized she was avoiding turning on lights unless she had to. She began to whisper to herself, and couldn't make herself stop the habit.

  Connie Sara didn't sleep in short cycles as the parenting books warned. She fell asleep around ten o'clock and woke at seven every day. When Ethel confided this to the mothers she knew, they expressed envy and astonishment, but Ethel didn't feel lucky. She didn't sleep well. She had anticipated a more complicated sleep and feeding cycle. Her mind was ready for things that never occurred. She stayed up late to check on Connie Sara until she realized there was no reason to. The baby slept soundly. Ethel slept less and less. If the wind caused a branch to tremble outside, she woke up.

  She began to pay closer attention to the women she met who were nursing infants. Their babies fussed when they were hungry and nuzzled against them when they were held. Connie Sara didn't do these things, yet in all physical respects she was normal, the doctor said.

  "She sleeps all night and doesn't like breast milk," he said. "Count your blessings."

  After that Ethel felt ungrateful. Her child was perfect and beautiful. She ought to celebrate. She ought to brag. She ought to take a million photos, but she never took one. Burt recorded all the big moments in their daughter's life and placed the pictures in a photo album that Ethel never opened.

  She visited the doctor three times to complain about things most mothers would have loved. She had free time to watch TV, to sew, to have a glass of wine. Yet some nights she didn't sleep at all. She would sit at the kitchen table sipping chamomile tea from a bright green ceramic cup. She would stare out the screened window at the blue-black night sky. Everyone in Skillute was in bed. Her daughter slept. Her husband snored away in bed, alone. She knew she should feel free, this time was hers, but she never shook the sense that she wasn't alone.

  She had set aside time for the baby, let her clients know she wouldn't be available for a couple of months. Now she felt silly calling customers and inviting them back, saying no, her baby didn't need her after all. Beyond the basics, diaper changes and bottle-feeding and bathing, it was true: her child barely needed her.

  In the absence of larger concerns, she began to resent small things. Rinsing out the baby's cloth diapers in the toilet. Dunking them in the cold water. The movement, the predictability of it was nauseatingly familiar after the first hundred times. Abruptly she switched to disposable diapers and told Burt she was doing it for Connie Sara's health because disposables were less likely to cause a rash.

  She began to dread checking the water temperature before Connie Sara's bath. Filling the bottle with formula. Opening the shampoo, or the canister of baby powder. Folding the baby's clothes. Placing them neatly in the chest of drawers. Lining up the drawers evenly in their tracks when she closed them. The repetition grated on her nerves. Each necessary movement seemed to take longer each time she performed it.

  More than ever, when she was alone with the infant, who never slept during the day, she would feel a foreign presence in the room and turn to find Connie Sara watching her. At first she told herself this was natural. Why wouldn't a newborn look in the direction of its mother, its source of life and love and food?

  After a while this reasonable attitude wore away. No matter where the baby lay in relation to her, when Ethel turned to check, Connie Sara was staring directly at her. Not with obvious affection or mirth, not with satisfaction, she decided, but with a cold expression that said Ethel wasn't up to this job. She was playing mommy with none of the proper instincts. She wasn't even interested in it. She would fail. Sooner or later she would make a mess of things.

  Her pregnancy had been surprisingly easy. She had come to expect that the baby would lift her spirits for good. She had longed to feel joy. She couldn't recall the last time she had felt free, the last time she had seen her life as other than a burden.

  Now she realized that the child was a burden, too. Her few needs were mundane and boring. Her gaze made Ethel uncomfortable. She had changed Ethel's life, but not for the better.

  Ethel would put up with the tingling sensation, the feeling of being observed and judged, as long as possible. Then she would have to jump up and start tidying the room, washing clothes, sweeping the front porch, anything to have a real purpose and to escape having to look into her daughter's eyes.

  No matter how tiresome she found it to care for the baby, Ethel couldn't bring herself to hire a sitter. Marietta offered to sit for free. She was now living with her son Henry and his wife. Close enough to walk over in an emergency. Close enough to provide relief when it was needed. Yet Ethel couldn't ask for help. She searched her conscience to explain why. It didn't make sense. Marietta had raised a child of her own. She knew more about caring for a baby than Ethel did. Surely it wasn't that she didn't trust her friend. Why was she uneasy about leaving a friend alone with her child? From this a host of questions came to mind and overwhelmed Ethel.

  Why did Marietta move in with Henry and his well-to-do wife when she always said she was happy in her own little house, a house she now kept boarded up with a barbed wire fence running all the way around the yard? She never sold off that property. She claimed she was saving it for one of her distant relatives as a retirement gift, but no one had ever heard her mention such a relative befo
re. Now she lived close enough to Burt and Ethel to justify weekly or even daily visits, yet they hardly ever saw her. When they did she never failed to ask if they wanted a night off, saying she would be glad to watch the baby. The child. The baby.

  That was the thing. That was the thing nagging at Ethel all along. Marietta never called the baby by her name. Why not?

  Ethel felt a flush of shame, mulling over these questions. Beverly and Marietta were her best friends in the world, for all intents and purposes her only friends. She owed them so much. Yet she had this sinking sensation in her heart whenever Marietta brought over a loaf of her daughter-in-law's fresh baked bread or carrot cake, smiled gently, and said for the umpteenth time:

  "I'll be glad to sit with the baby any time you and Burt need a night off."

  Ethel longed to leave the house with her husband for a few hours, but what would a sitter (even a best friend) make of Connie Sara's peculiarities? What would happen while she was away? Maybe nothing would happen, and this would prove Ethel was simply unfit to be a mother. Unfit, maybe even crazy.

  Why was Marietta so keen to be alone with the baby, while Beverly showed no special interest after the initial gift offerings? Ethel couldn't bear to find out, so she went on caring for the infant without help.

  When she couldn't stand it any longer, any time she thought one more hour trapped in the cocoon of her home would drive her to violence and insanity, Burt was there. He had no qualms about Connie Sara. He was happy to feed her, change her, or hold her in his arms while watching a ball game with Mudflap. Sometimes he would simply stand next to her crib talking to her, not baby talk but long, serious, one-sided conversations about life, about Skillute, about how work was going.

  With Burt the baby seemed different. Not only more cheerful, more animated, more natural in her movements and expressions but also genuinely contented and secure. For Burt the baby laughed. She would roll over onto her stomach and then pull herself up holding onto the bars of her crib, and laugh triumphantly when he praised her. She giggled at his attempts at peek-a-boo and an old half-remembered lullaby. Burt was the one who noticed when she started teething, and he spent hours trying to elicit her first word.

  With her father the baby was happy and normal. Rather than reassure Ethel, this made things seem worse. How could she explain to Burt how she felt when she was alone with his beloved daughter?

  In less time than Ethel thought possible, Connie Sara learned to crawl and to climb. Now she would climb out of her playpen and drag herself around the house, following Ethel from room to room while she worked. Wherever Ethel settled for a moment's peace, at her sewing machine or at the kitchen table, she would hear a sort of shushing noise, and grunts of physical effort, and soon the baby was a few feet away, on the floor, staring at her. The moment Ethel was visible the child would stop and rest there watching her. If she moved to another room, it would start all over again.

  She told herself: to a baby this must be an innocent game. She follows because she can crawl, and because she likes to see her mother.

  Nothing helped. Her most reasonable explanation was crippled by panic, by a feeling that she was being pursued. She couldn't run away. She couldn't hide. She knew, because she had tried.

  One morning while Burt was miles away helping Mudflap paint the fence around his house, Ethel reached what she thought was the breaking point. Her impulse, to reach out and kick Connie Sara away, frightened her so badly that she left the baby on the floor in the kitchen and walked briskly down the hall. There she opened the linen closet as quietly as she could and climbed inside, gently pulling the door shut.

  She stood in the pitch dark, barely breathing, with the scent of clean sheets all around her. Outside there seemed to be a lull, a heavy pause, as though the baby were genuinely unaware that she had gone. Maybe she didn't care. Maybe this would be the way to break her of the habit of following.

  A thin noise came from the kitchen, halfway between a sigh and a voice calling. Connie Sara couldn't talk at this age, didn't know a single word yet. Was Ethel losing her hearing, or her grip on reality? She could have sworn she heard the words "find you." No. She was listening too hard, imagining actual words when all that she could hear was this sound that was more like an absence of sound. Then she did hear it, coming after her.

  At the gentle tread of stubby knees and chubby hands navigating the hallway, Ethel felt her stomach tighten. It was coming. Why did she think "it?" Her child, her adventurous child was coming to find her. That was all. Yet the closer the thudding of knees and hands, the closer Ethel came to screaming out loud.

  What was she afraid of? What could possibly happen to her? She was a grown woman safe in her own home with a harmless baby that loved her. Wasn't she? Didn't the baby love her? She couldn't tell. Connie Sara didn't reach for her, or cling, or cry when she left the room. She simply came after her.

  Thinking this, Ethel realized that there was silence outside the door. The crawling sound had stopped, she didn't notice when. She couldn't make herself open the door. It was ridiculous! She had to open the door. She had to make sure nothing was wrong. Anything could happen once a child was mobile; she could climb on furniture and fall, or discover a pin or a tack on the floor, and put it in her mouth. With a shudder of self-loathing Ethel realized that for a split second she had experienced relief thinking these things. She also realized that she couldn't stay in the linen closet until Burt came home.

  With more resignation than courage, she gripped the doorknob and turned it. She forced herself to open the door and look down. There was Connie Sara, and the child met her gaze without smiling and without a sound.

  Brusquely Ethel seized the baby, scooped her up and carried her to her crib. She lay her down on her back then yanked up the crib's barred side panel, locking it into place.

  "Stay there," she said, noting that her voice had descended to a husky whisper.

  "Stay."

  She looked at Connie Sara's face. No expression, none of the delight she had seen in other people's babies when they first began to speak.

  "What did you say?" Ethel asked.

  Now the child was silent. She would not speak again, if she had spoken. Ethel went to the kitchen to prepare chamomile tea to calm her nerves.

  What would people think of a mother who hid from her baby? How could she describe the dark and hateful glee in her daughter's eyes, or her stubbornly blank face? It sounded crazy to say her daughter was after her. Didn't it?

  "After me," Ethel said, and blushed.

  Mother and Daughter

  Burt blamed the pre-school for the first accident. Wasn't it their fault, for allowing young children to play on dangerous equipment? He called a consumer agency to get the manufacturer's rating and found out the makers of the carousel were being sued by a family in the Midwest. The news confirmed his suspicion. He told Ethel they should consider filing a complaint or a lawsuit, he wasn't sure which. He was sure that what happened was not their daughter's fault. He took the information about the carousel to the head of the pre-school and argued on behalf of his child, and won. That first time, she was allowed to stay in school.

  Ethel had to promise to have a serious talk with Connie Sara about safety and supervision. Since none of the other children had seen what happened, it was officially recorded as an accident.

  The smaller girl, Jane, had a dislocated shoulder, but she wouldn't say whether or not Connie Sara had pulled her off the carousel. There were other children everywhere but they said they didn't notice the two girls until Jane started screaming and fell from the carousel onto the sand. Then they all stood around and gawked at the shrieking girl until the teacher and the school nurse came running.

  Ethel was uncertain what to do. Burt insisted that they give their daughter the benefit of the doubt. He still thought the child was a small miracle. So what else could Ethel do? She had to tell herself and her friends that Connie Sara was going through a phase, although she knew this wasn't the whole story.
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  She suspected the problem was inherited, a streak of something harsh and aggressive running through her family. That was the answer. It had to be, because no one in Burt's family had ever been mean. His father liked to hunt but he had always cleaned, cooked, and eaten what he killed. He had put food on the table. He didn't hunt for the hell of it. He didn't hunt to prove anything. He certainly didn't hunt in order to harm animals.

  Ethel's mother Shirley had been too rough with her. Now she had to struggle constantly not to be rough with Connie Sara, not to yank her by the arm when she refused to budge in the checkout line at the grocery store, not to push her when she didn't want to get out of the car, not to slap her face when she said smart things.

  There was a strain of pure spite in the women of Ethel's family. That was what she came to believe while she was raising her daughter. This angry drive, this energy might be used properly to achieve many things, but more often it was misused. It all depended on how it was directed.

  Ethel held on to this belief while she had her talk with Connie Sara. She convinced herself that she could set aside the troubles between them and help the child onto a better path.

  "It's good to watch out for the other children. They're not strong like you," Ethel began over breakfast a couple of days after the accident.

  They were alone. Burt had gone to Longview on a work assignment, stopping on his way out the door to kiss Connie Sara on the forehead and tell her to listen to what her mother had to say. The girl munched away, working steadily on her second bowl of cereal.

  Ethel told her to remember that her strength didn't make her grown up. There were times when only a grownup could figure out the right thing to do. She reminded Connie Sara that she might hurt someone without meaning to, and then she would be sad, wouldn't she? The whole family would be sad. The county might even decide Burt and Ethel were bad parents, and take her away from them. At this, the girl looked up but said nothing.