Mothers of Sparta

by Dawn Davies

  “I cannot seem to make this pie,” I said.

  “I’ll go buy a pie.” He picked up the baby, who yelled into his face.

  “No. We can’t. I said we would bring a home-baked pie. It’s not that hard to do. I’ve done it a dozen times. And besides, if I stay in this house one more minute, I’m going to lose it.” He rocked the baby back and forth and held his keys up on one finger.

  At the Star Market, I was hefting the fresh pumpkins in the produce aisle, my eyes burning with fatigue, when I had a new thought: Fuck this pie. I went to the baking aisle and bought Libby’s canned spiced pumpkin pie mix, and a ready-bake crust already in the pie plate, covered sweetly in a circle of wax paper to protect the tender, unbaked crust that looked every bit as good as the one I had spent forty-five minutes making two times over. My problem was solved, even if it was a hinky solution.

  That night we almost called the nuns over for an exorcism. We passed the baby back and forth while she screamed so hard she vomited. We waited for her head to spin around. She writhed in our arms and hollered until each of us wanted to fling her, at which point we would pass her off to the other person and go and stand outside on the back porch in the snow, thinking of pre-baby days where we could do the things we wanted, normal things, like reading the paper sitting down, or taking a shower, or baking a pie. At two, the baby finally fell asleep on my husband’s chest, and I put together the canned pie mix and baked it in the prepackaged crust. I sat in the kitchen and watched the clock, checking the pie every ten minutes while I drank several cups of coffee. It took fifty-five minutes from start to finish and I was pleased with myself. By this point, I had slept perhaps three hours out of the last sixty and I had never before felt so odd without having been ill. In the few moments before I finally fell asleep, I saw briefly, out of the corner of my eye, a small giraffe bending down to take a bite of the area rug in my bedroom.

  We awoke the next morning to the memory of the previous day’s storm, to rays of sun passing through the lace dining room curtains, to a peaceful, pink-cheeked baby, a dirty kitchen that still smelled like smoke, and one perfect, deceptively un-homemade pie in the fridge. I had slept four hours in a row, straight through to six A.M., for the first time since the baby was born.

  That afternoon we left Boston and drove to a nearby town with rolling hills and old colonials, a town I had never seen before, to break bread with the Bluebloods, the kind of proper New England family most people only read about. This was a family that went way back. A family that had a summer place in Maine or maybe on Cape Cod. A family that used different sets of silver for different occasions. A family that liked a completely homemade Thanksgiving. I held the pie on my lap like a Fabergé egg while the baby slept in the backseat like an angel. The snow that covered the Massachusetts hills turned the region into a series of postcards, and for a few minutes, I didn’t miss the South.

  You don’t have to talk much when you show up to a place with a new baby. They take your things quickly, unburden you of your coat and your diaper bag and your baby. They shove you down in a chair and begin drilling you with questions, while holding the baby improperly, in ways you know she doesn’t like. But you are so happy that you are not holding the baby for once that you let it happen, you ignore the thought of germs marching up their hands and arms and onto the baby’s face, and you sit back. They ask you questions about the baby that one might ask about a new pet: How much does she sleep? How much does she weigh? What does she eat? Does she do any tricks?

  These Bluebloods, eight in all, were gracious and proper and well educated. They read the classics and talked about them. They loved tradition and their vocabularies far exceeded mine. I felt like a hillbilly at the White House, and in situations like that, I knew to keep my mouth shut, so I sat quietly and smiled, and drank whatever aperitif they handed me in Great-Great-Great-Grandmother Blueblood’s sherry glass that had come over on the Mayflower. The baby slept sweetly. Before I knew it, I had downed two Lillets and a Dubonnet, nibbling on salted nuts while they talked about things I didn’t understand but grew increasingly interested in as the alcohol took effect. When the baby woke up and mewed politely, I asked to be excused and Mrs. Blueblood guided me into a room not too far off the living room. When I walked, I felt my body pitch, and realized I was buzzed for the first time in many months.

  Alone in the dim, well-appointed Queen Anne office, I sat in a wingback chair and nursed my daughter. All traces of yesterday’s demon baby were gone, and she pressed against my bare chest and placed her rosebud fingers on my swollen breast. I touched her tiny nails. I could feel her relax, and the relief from the pressure of my boob while she drained it was magnificent. My body had begun to reward me with the hormones it gives new mothers—warm, happy, satisfied hormones—and I sat back in the chair, reminded of a nursing sow lying flat out on her side in an oxytocin-induced stupor, drunk with pleasure. While she nursed, I cried silent, happy tears that leaked out of my eyes and rolled down my cheeks. About fifty percent of the time we did this I cried in this way and it, too, was not unpleasant.

  Another thing they don’t tell you about when you have a baby is the amount of leaking there will be, and not just from the baby. Any time the baby cried, my breasts leaked milk. If I heard a baby cry on television, my breasts leaked milk. Occasionally when I simply thought about the baby, my eyes leaked tears, though I was not unhappy. Once in a while, when caught unawares and I didn’t tighten up in time, I peed when I laughed. They make products for each of these things and, in fear of losing control of something, either myself or the baby, I bought them all.

  Breast pads are round, white pads made out of the same material as menstrual pads. They stick onto the inside of your bra and absorb the milk that leaks out of you every time you think about your baby. When the baby nurses from the left breast, the right breast leaks like a faucet, and you usually need to hold a breast pad up to it, or face squirting your lap, or the baby’s legs, or anyone else in the room with you. I bought these breast pads, along with pads for leaking pee when I laughed, and extra tissues, and baby wipes for all the leaking the baby’s back end did, and the rubber bulb for sucking up all the leaking the baby’s nose did, and the plastic pads to put the baby on when changing her diaper, and many, many diapers, and the bibs to catch all the leaking that came from her face, and the spit-up towels to throw over my shoulder to catch the prodigious, spontaneous, post-meal mouth leaking. I kept all these things in a giant soft-sided trunk they called a diaper bag, and carried it everywhere I went, in case of emergency.

  The baby was tiny enough to have no room in her digestive system for both new food and waste, so whenever she ate, she crapped, a full gastro-colic reflex, like a bird or a fish would do. I finished nursing her, then changed her diaper on top of the plastic baby-changing pad that came with the new diaper bag. In the dim light, I folded a tiny triangle out of the baby wipe, and I cleaned the poop out of the folds of her labia and her belly button. Baby poop moves forward, too, as well as back, and often leaks out of the top of the diaper, another thing they don’t tell you. I rolled the soiled wipes in the old diaper and put the rolled-up diaper in its special pocket in the diaper bag. Then I snapped up the baby’s little green velour footie suit, folded up the diaper-changing pad, and changed my breast pads. It was growing dark, and I fumbled with all of the equipment while joggling the baby, whom I wanted to keep happy. Outside the door I heard the stirrings of polite conversation, the kind you might hear through the door of a probate attorney’s office, and a clinking of glasses and appetizer plates.

  I adjusted my nursing bra, reswaddled the baby, stuffed everything into the diaper bag, and headed out with the baby over one shoulder and the diaper bag over the other. Eight Blueblood faces met mine with interest at first, and then I noticed my husband’s eyes grow wide. In fact, when I stepped toward him, I saw him glance down at my long, black skirt, and then back up at my face, frantically. I understood this to be some sort of message, but I couldn’t pro
cess it fast enough. David Blueblood, his hair perfect, his white shirt crisp, who had been walking from the kitchen into the living room, reached for my skirt, pressing his tie into his chest as he bent down, and said, “Hullo, what’s this?” Then he plucked a used breast pad, which I had missed, off the hem of my skirt. He held it up in front of the group, turned it in the light, and squinted.

  “It’s a breast pad, David. I’ll take it,” I said. My face felt purple, and I would like to have died right there, but probably not as much as David Blueblood, who blanched, and attempted to fling the pad out of his grasp, but was unable to because the sticky side was stuck fast onto his fingers.

  “Oh, God!” As soon as he said this, the baby flinched and urped up the contents of her stomach over my shoulder, down my black sweater, and onto the Bluebloods’ expensive Persian rug. I peeled the breast pad off David Blueblood’s fingers and stood there with it. The baby started to scream.

  From the squash and sour cream soup, through the turkey and stuffing, the gracious Bluebloods passed the angry baby around the table, from person to person like a hot potato. They joggled and rocked her, switched her positions when she fussed, ignored her matter-of-factly when she was good. They talked over her as if it was a matter of course, and perfectly natural to be sharing a holiday meal with a tiny, screaming troll. The alcohol I consumed had long since stopped me from being embarrassed, and by the time they were making coffee and setting out the dessert sherry, I was cockeyed with dinner wine, feeling no pain, and in love with the Blueblood family. I could become a New Englander, I thought. Things are so practically handled with a rolling of the shirtsleeves and an opening of the hands, with earnest emphasis on the homemade, the traditional, the family. They aren’t even bothered by this baby, who is ruining everything. They have a wisdom, I decided. I was looking forward to pumpkin pie, to my pumpkin pie, to sharing my pumpkin pie with these kind people, who had only given of themselves graciously and asked nothing in return.

  By now it was dark and the table was ornamented with small crystal glasses that caught the light of the chandelier, fine little spoons, round, feminine bits of silver coffee service, and thin, see-through porcelain plates. The women of the family began to bring out the dessert lineup: a dark chocolate cranberry tart, a pound cake that weighed over a pound, a light, puffy Marlborough pie, a bronze apple pie so perfect it looked like a photo, a chocolate pie, chocolate-dipped candied ginger sticks, and my desperate, criminal, fake-homemade pumpkin pie.

  “Almost every recipe on this table came from one of our great-grandmothers,” Mrs. Blueblood said. “It’s important to keep the tradition going.” Everyone agreed. They went for the pumpkin first. They held their plates out.

  “This looks good,” they said. “Who did this pie?”

  “I did.” I sipped my sherry.

  “Homemade and with a new baby, too? This is wonderful. You didn’t have to do that.”

  I smiled around the table. This was wonderful. They weren’t going to know a thing.

  “You are a marvelous young woman,” someone said. It echoed around the table. I felt warm and accepted. My husband looked at me, raised his eyebrows, and stirred his coffee. The baby sat facing outward at the table, leaning against David Blueblood’s chest, blinking calmly, her tiny fingers grasping his. They sliced my pie and passed it around. They dug in. Mrs. Blueblood took the first bite, chewed for a moment, then pulled something long and white and pulpy from her mouth. Everyone else chewed and pulled from their mouths something long and white and pulpy. I quickly cut into my pie with my fork and pulled it apart. Inside, between the crust and the filling, was the white circle of protective wax paper that had come in the store-bought pie crust packaging. I had been too tired to notice it when I was cooking, and had baked it into the pie. As they extracted the wax paper strings from their mouths, they looked at me, eight pairs of pale New England eyes, steeped in tradition. I was too tipsy to cry at this point, but the baby wasn’t, so she started right up again and did it enough for the both of us.

  FEAR OF FALLING

  Soon after the birth of my first daughter, I developed a fear of flying; more specifically, a fear of dying in an airplane crash. The airplane ride itself: fun. Fine. The crash, if it must happen … okay, I suppose. They say it’s fast and everybody has to go sometime. As long as your affairs are in order, it’s better than withering away in a hospital bed or being eaten by a pack of dogs. It was the idea of falling toward Earth before the crash that scared me, because I know what my imagination does to me. It is impressive and unchecked, wide open and resistance-free, like a superconductor, complete with sights and sounds and smells and goose bumps and decision-altering, conceptual baggage that rarely materializes. I had a baby now, a responsibility to raise a child up in the ways she should go, until she no longer needed me. The thought that I would have time to ponder, in those few minutes of free fall before we hit the ground, all the things I would leave behind undone, was too much.

  This fear developed out of the blue when my daughter was six weeks old, on a return flight home to Boston after visiting family down South. We were settling into our row, which was near the toilet, and I could hear the metallic flush of waste and smell the eau de colonic leftovers each time someone opened and closed the thin-paneled bathroom door. That door was so flimsy, I thought, as I watched a fat man close it shut behind him. It wobbled. It looked like it was made of fiberglass, like it would crumble with the slightest of challenges. I looked out the window. What was this plane made of anyway? It appeared to be metal, but what if it was fiberglass, or worse, the same kind of plastic they had started making car bumpers out of? What did they even make planes out of, and why hadn’t I taken the time to learn how two stupid engines could keep a seven-hundred-thousand-pound bullet in the sky for hours at a time? I understood no physics and my lack of knowledge felt extremely limiting all of a sudden. I began to sweat. My husband helped me to settle our daughter’s car seat into the middle seat between us, and when we clicked the seat buckle, I was stricken by the thinness of the belt, the impossibility of a scratched metal buckle to protect this baby in the event of a crash.

  Panic swelled up in my throat and I had a quick, startlingly detailed image of the airplane at thirty thousand feet, sun glinting off the metal wing etched with thousands of tiny scratches, ripping in half and plunging out of the sky. My husband, because he is a tall man, was quickly decapitated by a sharp piece of debris that flew across the top of the seats, and the baby’s car seat was sucked out of the hole. I had no choice but to leap out after it, pointing and rocketing down toward it, then wrapping my arms around it, watching my howling daughter’s perfectly oval face while we fell at 120 miles per hour. This thought worked at the speed of a neuron, and before the flight attendants could sit down, I was up, tugging at the car seat, and headed for the closed-off door of the plane.

  “I can’t do this. I have to get off.” I announced this to no one in particular. Two flight attendants shot up the aisle after me, and my husband pushed past them. He wrenched the baby out of my hands, pinched me in the crook of the elbow, and said, “Everybody’s staring at us. Get back in your seat.”

  “This airplane’s going to go down,” I said. “I’m going to die before I get a chance to raise this baby.” I remember saying that out loud, which, I must say, was articulate of me. I could feel the stares while we walked back down the aisle, but I didn’t care. This was before 9/11 and heightened security, and I was simply a nutty young mom, not a security threat.

  “You’re embarrassing me,” my husband said through a fake smile.

  He put the baby in the window seat, buckled her up, sat in the middle between us, then buckled me, then himself. He put a hand on my forearm and gripped it so tightly that I couldn’t get up.

  “Let me off this plane,” I said. “It doesn’t feel right.” He gripped my arm tighter. At six weeks postpartum, hormones can be unstable, and lead women to believe things that may not be true. In my mind, I was ratio
nal.

  “Stop it. We’re going home. You’re flying.” The baby and I both started crying. He looked at the seat back in front of him and didn’t speak to me again. Of course we made it home with no trouble—planes don’t crash from anxious, accidental telekinesis—but there was a distance between us after that. I had shown a side of me that neither of us had known existed, an irrational side, a weakness, yet a strange, primal urge for survival that had nothing to do with my husband. It wasn’t attractive to him.

  After the trip, I felt unsettled and sad, though my baby was healthy and beautiful and perfect. Often, I would daydream while nursing her, seeing, instead of her losing her first tooth, or carving a pumpkin, or doing the long jump, or going on her first date, images of starving children with flies in their eyes, rotten meat, acres of garbage, beatings, immolations, bloated whale carcasses washed up on the shore. I would feel a spinning in the room that would cause me to hold tight to the baby, lest she be torn out of my hands. Because my husband had shown he was not interested in my irrational thoughts, I did not tell him how I felt. I was ashamed and afraid of what would happen if I did share them. Gradually, things got better, but it took until well after my daughter’s first birthday. I toughed it out because I didn’t know any better.

  When my daughter was seventeen months old, I got pregnant again. My hormones minded themselves this time and I felt wonderful throughout most of the pregnancy, but within a few weeks after the birth of my second daughter, I began having trouble thinking clearly and I felt worse than I ever had in my life. I developed intrusive thoughts that wouldn’t go away, largely based on a belief that something I accidentally did would kill the baby. Unlike flying, an event-based fear that I had solved by deciding to never fly again, these thoughts were with me every day.

  Around suppertime, I would put the baby in the wind-up swing in the kitchen, crank it up, and let her swing while I cooked. My older daughter would play with her toys nearby. Within a few days, I had to move the swing several feet out of the kitchen because I had recurring thoughts of the butcher’s knife, which I had used adroitly for years, somehow tumbling out of my grip and piercing the baby through her fontanel. I was afraid to walk her outside because we lived at the top of a large hill and I had thoughts of losing my grip on the stroller handle and sending her plummeting down into traffic at the bottom of the hill. I was also afraid to bathe her, because I was sure that, despite my good intentions, and despite my two years of baby-bathing experience, I would lose hold of her soapy body and she would slide down under the shallow water of the baby bath and drown, and if she didn’t die right away, the bathwater she inhaled would set off a pneumonia that would kill her.