by Nancy Thayer
She laughed, and suddenly spread her legs out in a V from her body. She grabbed a ball and held it at her crotch, then rolled it toward Alexandra, who was now sitting that way. “Now, roll it to Daddy and Daddy will roll it to Daphne,” she said. “Watch out for your drink,” she told Jack as he arranged himself for the game.
Alexandra loved the game. Jack and Daphne talked—interrupting themselves constantly to pay attention to Lexi—and after a while Jack made them each another drink and they rolled the ball in the reverse direction. The living-room window gleamed, a wall of light. After a while Daphne said, “I love it when it’s just like this—not quite dark, but not daylight either. It makes the air seem so gentle.” They decided to go out for a little walk. Jack zipped a sweatshirt onto Lexi and stuck her fat feet into their sneakers. Then, Jack holding one of the child’s hands, Daphne the other, the three of them walked down the dirt road toward Daphne’s house. The tunnel of trees was black. They could hear Dickens barking.
“Let’s turn around and go back before he has a heart attack,” Daphne said, and they did. “Hear the birds, Lexi? They’re calling good-night to you.”
It seemed perfectly natural for Daphne to fix them another drink while Jack changed Lexi’s diaper and put her in her sleepers. They were talking about the English department now, and about Hudson, and about different writers. It was a pure relief to Jack to say some things to someone who understood—who knew what college departments were like, what kind of squabbling and rivalries and games went on.
“I’ll be right back,” he said, and went up the stairs and carefully lowered his sleeping daughter into her crib. He was surprised, when he came back down the stairs, to see that Daphne was crying. He couldn’t imagine what had happened. It always amazed him how much women cried, and how easily.
“I’m so sorry,” Daphne said. “Forgive me. I just … it was just seeing you like that with your daughter. The way you held her and looked down at her. You love her so much.”
To Jack’s dismay, Daphne bent over and crossed her arms on her lap and sobbed into them. He sat down on the sofa next to her, moving cautiously.
“I guess all fathers aren’t like that, huh?” he said. He didn’t want to probe, but he didn’t want to be aloof, either.
“Cynthia’s father wasn’t,” Daphne said. “Oh, Alexandra’s a lucky little girl!” She raised her head and wiped her eyes. “I’m getting maudlin. I’d better go.”
“No, no, finish your drink. Tell me about Cynthia’s father.” Jack sat at the other end of the sofa, looking at Daphne.
“Joe never wanted children,” Daphne said. “He was always so wrapped up in his work. While I … I hadn’t thought of having children, but all of a sudden this need grew right out of me. For a long time I tried to stifle it, thinking I could cajole Joe into having children. I had this very good friend, my best friend in those days, and she had the most beautiful little boy. While I was thinking about getting pregnant, Laura got pregnant for the second time. She was so thrilled, and I was so happy for her—but so jealous as I watched her growing bigger. And she loved being pregnant and loved talking about it.” Daphne stopped to sip her drink.
“That summer Laura and her husband went to their house on the Vineyard and Joe and I went down to spend a week with them. We had a wonderful time. We biked everywhere, swam—Laura and Otto swam naked when they could, they said they always went to nude beaches in Germany. That seemed so exciting and … oh, chic, to Joe and me, so deliciously wicked. The Krafts were fascinating. We all swam in the ocean and read books and ate enormous amounts of food.”
Daphne scrutinized Jack. “Why am I telling you all this?” she asked, and without waiting for his answer, went on: “Are you sure you want to hear all this? I don’t know why I’m thinking about it all now.”
“Go on,” Jack said.
“One afternoon we went out for a sail in Otto’s boat. Just the four adults; we left Hanno with a sitter. It was a nice big boat, with a cabin with a head and a galley and room to sleep six. It was the most beautiful summer afternoon—there was just enough wind to make us skip right along, yet it wasn’t too choppy. We’d been sailing for perhaps an hour. Suddenly Laura made this sort of grunting sound—so impolite, you know, I laughed with embarrassment for her, and she sat up all of a sudden and said something in German. Then she got up and went down below. I followed her. She went into the head. I stood by the door. ‘Tell Otto to head back to shore,’ she said. ‘Tell him he must hurry.’ ”
Daphne looked down into her drink. “She was losing the baby. She came out and lay on a bunk and I put pillows and towels under her bottom to elevate her, to stop the bleeding. But it didn’t help. By the time we got to shore, she was holding my hand and crying so terribly and writhing. She was in such pain. She thought she was going to die. I thought she was going to die. And she said … Laura said”—Daphne was crying a little now—“she kept saying, ‘Daphne, don’t let this scare you. You must have children. Even if I die this way, don’t be afraid. It’s a fluke. It won’t happen to you. You must have children. That is what life is all about.’
“She didn’t die. We got her to the hospital, and she didn’t die. Though of course the baby did.” Daphne looked up at Jack, her eyes blazing. “Have you ever sat with someone while they are dying?” she asked. “It’s an amazing thing. You feel so intense. You feel you are at the center of the universe. You feel so important—and yet you have no power. You think you will do anything, unimaginable things, to keep this person you love alive.
“I would have had children even if I hadn’t met Laura, of course,” Daphne said, her voice growing lighter. “But that was a crucial moment in my life. So—what I’m trying to get to—I went ahead and got pregnant without Joe’s consent. Without his knowledge, actually. It’s not unusual, you know. Since then I’ve met lots of women who have sort of sneaked their children into this world. But I assumed that Joe would love his child, once he saw her, held her.”
Daphne seemed very tired all at once. She looked into her empty glass. The living room was so dark that Jack, at the other end of the sofa, could hardly see her. “But he didn’t,” she said. “My husband didn’t love his daughter. He didn’t love her at all. That’s why I was crying when I saw you holding Alexandra that way, rocking her that way. It, um, made me long for something I never had. I’m sorry I got so emotional on you. It must have been all these drinks. I really do apologize.”
Jack moved down the sofa and put his arm around Daphne. “Don’t apologize,” he said. “Please don’t apologize. I’m glad you told me. I’m glad you could tell me.”
Then, to his surprise, he took Daphne’s face in his hand, and, meaning simply to get her to meet his eyes so that she could read his sincerity, he began to kiss her. “It’s all right,” he kept saying, kissing her cheeks and her forehead and her chin, and then her mouth. She was trembling—from her crying, he thought—and she sat with her hands docilely in her lap. So it at first was not a matter of desire, but a matter of consolation. But to his surprise, he kept kissing her—God, she was so soft, her limbs were soft, endlessly soft, and he kept saying, “It’s all right. It’s all right.”
When he kissed her for a very long time on her mouth, she put her hands up against his chest as if to push him away, but she did not push him away. Their kissing turned into something very different from consolation, something flew out of their depths, like a bird flushed from the underbrush, flashing up into the air, something like a bird, with a life of its own, and they could kill it or let it live, the decision was theirs, but at first they reacted with their instincts, and they let it live. It was life, as all love is life, like a bird fighting to survive, to fly and be beautiful and have its own way for a while. Jack’s hands were everywhere on Daphne’s body, all the places he had wanted them to be, against the warm plump freckled skin, the full breasts, the rounded limbs.
He pulled up her sweatshirt. He wanted to see her breasts.
Daphne twisted away
from him. She stood up and pulled her sweatshirt down. It was so dark they could not see each other except for their outlines, and the gleam of their wet mouths and eyes. Yet their breathing was so heavy they could almost see it; their panting was heavy and alive, like an animal roused in the darkness.
“We can’t do this,” Daphne said. “We can’t ever do this again. We must never do this again.”
Then, stumbling a bit against the furniture in the dark room, she went through the living room to the front door, opened it, and was gone.
Jack sat in the dark for a long time, thinking, wondering what on earth he’d been doing. He sank his head in his hands.
About nine-thirty he got up and turned on some lights. He washed up the glasses and put away some of Lexi’s toys. He thought, as he worked, how the toys were false—gave a false view of the world. For there was the wooden puzzle, and all the pieces fitted together to make a completed picture of a rabbit with a blue bow around its neck and a little wicker basket full of colored eggs in its paw. There was the wooden box with shapes cut into the lid—a three-dimensional X, a square, a circle, an oval, a triangle. Each piece perfectly fitting through its own hole, and absolutely not fitting through any other. The rock-a-stack, where colored plastic rings like inner tubes for dolls fit onto a yellow plastic pole, the largest at the bottom, the smallest at the top. There was no ambiguity in these toys, no duality, no confusion. Was it right to teach a child that the world was structured so clearly, that each thing had its place and only one place, that two contradictory things couldn’t exist simultaneously?
Carey Ann came in the door like a teenager in love for the first time. She was glowing. She took Jack by the hands and pulled him over to the sofa and made him sit down and listen to her. She had had a wonderful time. She had made friends, she had stayed after everyone else left and had a long serious talk with Shelby Currier—Shelby used to be a model and they had so much in common, so much to talk about. Jack listened to his wife, smiling at her eager happiness. He had looked in the mirror about eighty times before she came home, checking to see if anything showed, if there would be any way for Carey Ann to tell that he had been kissing someone else. As far as he could tell, his face looked just the same. At any rate, Carey Ann was so fired up about her new friends, she probably wouldn’t have noticed if a giant purple wart had grown on the end of his nose during the evening. She was going to try the play group again. And tomorrow she and Shelby were going to spend the afternoon at the park; Shelby had such good, sensible ideas about disciplining kids.
“Shelby says we’ve got to stop letting Lexi sleep with us. We’ve got to make her spend the whole night in her own bed, in her own room. She said we should be really firm about it. We can explain it to Lexi very calmly, and every time she crawls in bed with us, we just firmly put her back in her own bed and tell her we’ll see her in the morning. And she says that if she keeps crawling into our bed and doesn’t stay in hers, we should lock the door from the outside, so she can’t come into our room or leave her room. And she says that Lexi will cry and cry and cry enough to break our hearts, but that we can’t give in. She’s got to learn to sleep all night through in her own bed. That way we’ll all get a full night’s sleep and I won’t be so wiped out all the time. She was telling me how hard it is with strong-willed babies, how with Aaron, when he was two, she couldn’t get him to stop grabbing things off the shelves in the grocery store. She spanked his hands—that didn’t work. She tried reasoning with him—that didn’t work. Sometimes when she took things from him to put back on the shelves, he screamed with anger and people looked at her funny. So she did what she read in an early-childhood-behavior book—she told him that if he did it again, she’d put him in the car and leave him there while she shopped. So he grabbed something, and she left her cart right there in the aisle and carried this screaming little boy out to the car and put him in his car seat and locked all the doors, but left the window down for air—it was fall, it wasn’t too hot or too cold—and then she went back into the grocery store. She said you could hear Aaron screaming all over the parking lot. She said when she walked away from that car, other people in the lot looked at her like she was the devil incarnate. She heard people talking about it in the grocery store, how some mother had left a poor little baby alone in a car. She said she was shaking so hard she was nearly in tears, and of course she couldn’t really think about her groceries. She was afraid that someone would kidnap Aaron, or that he’d hurt himself in the car somehow, or that he’d choke to death crying, or any of those things. But she got her groceries, and when she got out to the car, Aaron was still crying like his heart was breaking—he was frightened, he’d gone all red and white. Some ladies were carrying their groceries to a car and one fat old bat said to Shelby, ‘You should be ashamed of yourself. What kind of mother are you?’ She felt like a monster. Aaron was so mad at her he screamed all the way home. Shelby was so mad at him she was afraid she’d hurt him. She wanted to shake him. So she took him in and put him in his crib, then brought in the groceries. By the time she had unpacked them, he had fallen asleep with his skin all blotchy and his breath coming in little whimpers and he was sucking his thumb and stroking his blanket for comfort, and she lay down on the floor next to the crib and felt like the worst mother in the universe. And Aaron wasn’t perfect after that in the store, but he was a lot better. If she threatened to take him out to the car, he straightened right up, just because of that one time. Oh, God, Jack, it feels so good to talk to someone about all this!”
It was almost midnight before Carey Ann had cooled down enough to go to bed. Jack came out of the bathroom and had a nice surprise—she was under the sheets without a nightgown on. He couldn’t remember the last time she had come to bed that way, signaling that she wanted him. Seeing Carey Ann waiting in bed for him naked that way was like seeing the sun coming up after a night lost in a swamp. He could find his way again. He got in bed with his wife and began to kiss her and stroke her and touch her. He was nearly nuts with desire for her, and for the first time in months she was just as nuts with desire for him. “Oh Jack oh Jack oh Jack,” she kept saying, and she nuzzled and whimpered and pressed against him and kissed him a million times.
“Daddy?”
He was just about to enter Carey Ann when he heard his daughter’s voice right at his elbow. He jerked his head around so fast his neck cracked.
“Mommy?” Alexandra said, crawling up on the bed toward her mother.
Jack leaned over and switched on the light, carefully holding the sheet against him so he wouldn’t give his daughter some kind of trauma. He grinned at Carey Ann. “I’m not exactly in shape to get out of bed at this moment,” he said.
Carey Ann stood up. She took Alexandra in her arms. “Lexi sleep in Lexi’s bed,” she said, heading for the baby’s room.
“No!” Alexandra yelled. “Lexi sleep with Mommy!”
Jack heard Carey Ann speaking in a reasonable tone of voice. “From now on, Lexi sleeps all night in her own bed. Mommy and Daddy sleep all night in their bed. We have to get a good sleep or we get too tired. Here, Lexi has her bunny to cuddle.”
Jack could hear Lexi trying to scramble out of her crib. She was screaming at the top of her lungs. “Lexi sleep with Mommy!” After a while she changed: “Daddy! Lexi want Daddy!”
Carey Ann was shuffling around out in the hall. When she came back into the bedroom, she was breathing fast, but for a different reason. “I’ve shut her in her room,” she said. “I tied one of my scarves to the doorknob and then to the stair banister—Lexi won’t be able to pull it open. And the other door locks in the bathroom.”
She sat down on the bed next to Jack. For a while they both just sat there listening to Alexandra scream. “Do you think we’re doing the right thing?” Carey Ann asked Jack.
“I do,” Jack told her. “I really do. I think it’s probably about time we did this.”
“I don’t think she can hurt herself in there, do you?” Carey Ann asked
.
“I’m sure she can’t.”
Jack and Carey Ann sat side by side, naked, on the bed, listening to their daughter scream. It was amazing how loud she could be, and how persistent. Fire departments and burglar-alarm companies ought to tape-record babies screaming, Jack thought; it would be much more effective than any artificial sound. Jack’s hair was practically standing on end. An anger was billowing in him, a desire to hit something. Carey Ann was turning white and shriveling down into the bedclothes. She looked sick to her stomach.
“Isn’t she ever going to stop?” she asked Jack.
The room seemed to be filling with the color red. Alexandra was stopping now and then to gulp more breath—then she screamed some more. Jack’s penis had crawled nearly up inside his body to get away from the noise. He felt like a monster.
He felt even worse, a few minutes later, when Alexandra’s crying changed from angry screaming to pitiful whimpering. “Dad-dy,” she was saying to herself. “Mom-my.” They could envision her lying in her bed, lonely, bereft, betrayed, unloved, confused—traumatized? Were they ruining their little girl for life?
Then: silence. But it was not soothing. It was terrifying.
“Maybe she’s dying,” Carey Ann said. “Maybe she’s stopped breathing. Maybe she’s choked to death.”
“Maybe she fell asleep,” Jack said.
“Don’t be cruel,” Carey Ann said. “This is the first time we’ve ever made her stay in her room.”
“And it worked,” Jack said. “You were strong, Carey Ann.”
“I’ve got to go check her,” Carey Ann said. “I’ve got to be sure she’s okay.”
“Something tells me this is not a good idea,” Jack said. But Carey Ann was up and gone—through the bathroom into the baby’s room. As soon as she opened the door, Lexi, who had been lying in her crib sucking her thumb, jumped up. “Mommy!” she screamed.
