by Amy Gustine
In the morning she takes the boy aside and tells him about the men. “Be careful.”
The boy tells her not to worry, though of course she does. When he gets home hours later, she realizes she’s been preparing all day to surrender in exchange for his long nose, his too-big teeth. The puff of hair on the back of his head that bounces when he runs.
“Did you see them?”
The boy nods at the curtain, behind which his mother mutters instructions to the girl about how to keep the baby awake until her second breast is empty.
“They’re her brothers,” he whispers.
•
R’s mother has a little money left. She offers it to them. “The girl must go. I’ll take her.” R’s mother will pretend to be an aunt.
The boy manages to get an Egyptian passport for a twenty-year-old male, so they weave a tale of marriage across borders to tell Egyptian customs officials, and cut the girl’s hair short, find her a pair of brown pants and a dark shirt, boys’ sandals.
But her hands are a problem. “Too smooth,” the boy points out. “And too clean.” He shows her how to dig through the bag of scrap metal. “Like you were looking for treasure.”
When she is done, her nails, formerly half moons pumped red and shiny with a nursing mother’s swollen veins, are torn, and her knuckles abraded. The boy rubs dirt from the floor on them. “Perfect.”
The plan is to dress her as a girl leaving Gaza so she is less likely to be searched and found lactating, and where passports mean nothing anyway. In Egypt, where the passport becomes important, she will become a young man.
The morning they are supposed to leave, the boy goes out early to fish. Before he leaves, he sheepishly offers R’s mother a wad of shekels, the money she gave him that first day to buy information. “You will need it to get out.”
She takes a few bills, tallying how much it cost to get in, then presses the remainder on him.
R’s mother and the girl are to meet a man who will take them in a taxi to Rafah, from which someone else will get them to a tunnel. R’s mother keeps imagining the men between here and home to be the Christian pig farmer, his shiny pate and kind eyes, his gentle hands on her hips.
The girl insists on walking separately in case there is trouble. “You can get away.”
R’s mother agrees to go first, hoping she can recognize the brothers and distract them if need be.
A blue car with a white stripe is waiting for her as she reaches the corner. The man gives her the word—tilapia—they had agreed on, and she gets in, holding a finger up for him to wait. As the girl reaches them, a shifting lump under her thobe gives the baby away. R’s mother pauses, then nearly shouts, her throat pulling closed, “Let’s go. We’re ready.”
They drive out of the streets, anonymous in the early morning dark. As they reach the edge of town, the ululating voice swells and the taxi stops. The driver gets out first, then the girl. R’s mother slides across the seat and stations herself between them. Clumsily, she mimics their movements, rising and kneeling, rising and kneeling.
As she gets back into the car, still shielding the girl from the driver’s view, she glances down the street. Between two buildings the Mediterranean glimmers under an oblique sun. Dark heads dot the pale sand, their motion like birds alighting, then startling, then alighting again. She hopes her boy is among them, praying.
UNATTENDED
Joanne wakes with the worst earache she’s had in years. Ryan is already gone and the baby is crying, of course. His diaper has come loose—she put it on in the dark, at three a.m.—and he sits in a yellow halo clutching his favorite toy, a stuffed elephant now marinated in piss. When she plucks the elephant from his grip, the scream intensifies.
“Jesus,” she says, flicking the toy back at him. “Fine, take the fucking thing.”
It hits him in the forehead and he stares a moment, startled, then grabs it like a life preserver as Joanne takes up the tears, kissing his head again and again. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hit you with it. I’m sorry.”
Dumbo sloshing in the Whirlpool, she gives the baby a quick bath, which only makes him scream louder. By the time she has a bottle ready he’s too apoplectic to notice until she squirts a long line of milk straight down his throat.
Fine, take the fucking thing. While he drinks, Joanne repeats the words to herself as if they’re a line she’s trying to memorize instead of a confession she’s trying to bear. She imagines cutting out her larynx, making all her mistakes in sign language. But then she’d have to cut off her hands.
Once the baby’s done eating, she begins her penance, walking him in circles through the house until the ache in her back and arms is almost as bad as the one in her ear. When she was a kid the doctors wanted to do surgery, but her father dismissed it as profit-mongering. As an adult, Joanne had the surgery and for a time things seemed better. Now though, her Eustachian tube feels like someone used a tire pump on it. She’d like to turn off the air conditioning—cold makes it worse—but then the baby’s thighs will sprout a rash and any chance of quiet will be destroyed. Not that there’s much chance anyway. At eight months old, he hasn’t had a single good day. The doctors claim he’s perfectly healthy, that the crying is only a symptom of infancy, and Joanne knows they think she exaggerates, that he doesn’t really wail twelve hours a day. Ryan probably thinks so too, but he can’t prove it. Between starting a landscaping business and going to school, he’s rarely home.
Minutes before the washer’s spin rumbles to silence, the baby falls asleep. He’ll definitely wake if she puts him down. Then again, he might also wake at the click of the dryer door closing. Regardless, she’ll need that goddamn elephant, so Joanne takes her chances with the door.
A shudder, then the wail commences. She stabs the dryer’s buttons and resumes walking.
The earaches began in early grade school and grew progressively worse until, one day in the summer of 1993, Joanne’s eardrums burst. She remembers the summer well because that May, just before school let out, her father left her mother for a woman named Pamela and by June he was talking about moving to Florida. When Joanne’s mother, Lou, wasn’t railing about this—“He can’t fucking commit to a state, let alone a marriage”—she worked at Redmond Financial during the day and went to school at night to become an accountant.
Joanne, twelve at the time, spent her days off school with her friend Tina, who lived down the block. Tina and her little sister Megan were alone all day too, their mother at her job as a checkout clerk, their father only a name they heard occasionally when their mother made a phone call late at night asking for money.
The girls’ day began at ten o’clock, usually with spoonfuls of peanut butter and a bag of potato chips, then TV, lunch, and more TV. Sometimes Tina, who was long-legged and fidgety like an acrobat, convinced Joanne to play tennis in the street, but more often they spent the open hours after their soap opera ended sitting on the hill, waiting for Caid to appear. The hill was two streets over from their block, a small rise on an empty lot from which they could see Caid’s driveway and the basketball hoop mounted above his garage door. Caid was older by three years and neither girl had a prayer of dating him. Knowing this, they were able to love him wholeheartedly, without a sense of competition. In fact, they each loved him more because they could share it.
But one day Joanne couldn’t sleep until ten because of the pain in her ear. At seven a.m. it forced her out of bed and she snuck four aspirin from the medicine cabinet, grinding them with the end of her toothbrush before carrying the white powder into the kitchen and slipping it into her cereal bowl. Lou sat at the kitchen table drinking coffee and staring into space. If she found out about the earache, she’d accuse Joanne of kissing boys or not washing her hands often enough. Lou had a thing about germs.
That morning, when Joanne swallowed the first spoonful of cereal, a spike of pain surprised her and she coughed, spewing aspirin-speckled cocoa puffs across her T-shirt. Lou snapped from he
r reverie, her loud voice suddenly dulled and echoed, and shook her head. Jesus, Joanne, you could fuck up a one-car funeral.
Thinking of this, Joanne realizes she hasn’t taken any medicine yet, so she fetches the elephant from the dryer, puts the baby in the swing and goes upstairs to get the ibuprofen off her nightstand. At the sight of her bed, she considers closing the door and putting a pillow over her ear, then pictures the swing, its shaky Chinese base, its white and red triangular sticker that reads, “Warning! Do Not Leave Child Unattended,” and goes back downstairs.
The swing has found its soothing rhythm, though the baby’s face is still red with rage and his cry has begun its raspy phase, which sometimes means he’ll take a break, sometimes not.
Huddled beneath a blanket with her ear pressed against the sofa’s blocky arm, Joanne feels the entire city reduced to the size of this room. She imagines the wail expressed in water, a tsunami of grief bearing down, down, down.
Twenty minutes and no break. Joanne transfers all hope to an egg, scrambled hurriedly. The baby throws it on the floor the same way he has orange sections, steamed carrots, and every other solid she’s tried. Apparently chewing offends him. The pediatrician scolded her: “It’s the mother’s job to get children on table food.”
“I’m trying,” she argued, “but he hates everything. Everything.”
Before the baby, Joanne worked in a lab, her beakers always clean, her experiments always consistent. In college, she made straight A’s and never missed a class. In those days she believed that, unlike her parents, she’d look back on her choices and see a straight line rising steadily to the right at a forty-five-degree angle. As if life were like a smorgasbord: all you had to do was pick the vegetables.
Joanne takes the baby outside, to the relief of warm air, and holds him above her head, gently shaking—“What? What is so damned horrible?”—until the flap of a neighbor’s upstairs blind sends her back into the air conditioning, where she roots through her CDs for a soothing voice, something like what she listened to that summer she was twelve, when she had Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” on tape. She and Tina liked to sing along, using a banana or a hairbrush as a microphone and watching themselves in the big mirror that hung above the sofa in Joanne’s living room. One time the windows were open and Caid rode by on his bike and the girls threw themselves to the floor, mortified and thrilled that they might have been seen, that he might have guessed they were singing about him.
The morning her eardrum burst, after Lou had left for work, Joanne put Whitney in their ancient walnut console with the lattice-covered speakers and turned the volume up to ten. Alone, she didn’t sing, only listened, revolving slowly, arms spread wide, marveling at the absence of pain. As she turned, the music changed, swelling and receding. It never occurred to Joanne she’d gone temporarily deaf on the left, that the price to be paid for relief was silence.
Of course she doesn’t have any Whitney, the tape long gone to who knows where. Maybe Norah Jones will do.
No to Norah. No to John Mellencamp, James Taylor, Bruce Springsteen, Janis Ian, Alison Krauss, Mickey Mouse, and Barney too. Joanne turns off the music and calls her doctor. With the baby on his activity mat, she listens to the recorded voice instruct her on the health benefits of daily exercise. Her son rolls over mid-scream, then rises on one fat knee. Joanne knows she ought to be delighted—it’s the first time he’s managed to get so far—but feels only impatience as she watches him inch forward, right knee leading. Unable to bring the left up, he collapses, head wedged in the crook where the gym’s arch meets the mat. Reluctantly, she lays the phone down to free him, then rushes back, catching the nurse just before she hangs up.
“Please, I need to see someone today,” Joanne begs when the icy voice says they have no appointments. “I’m desperate.”
They’ll squeeze her in at twelve fifteen. Joanne calls Ryan, but he won’t come home. They’re behind on a job.
“This is so typical of you.”
“What?”
“Is a little help when I’m sick too much to ask?”
“I’ve been telling you to find a babysitter.”
“Yeah, someone’s gonna watch this baby. They’d kill him.”
“Call your mother. She has nothing better to do.”
“Yes, because Lou’s the soul of patience.”
“Well, Jo, you’ll just have to take him with you, then. I don’t see why it’s such a big deal.”
“Thanks a fucking lot,” she says and slams down the phone.
After she changes out of her pajamas, Joanne installs the baby in the stroller, bribing him with a sugarcoated pacifier. Every three houses she swaps the one he’s sucked clean for the one in the bag of sugar. At the end of the block a lawn mower rumbles to life, its motor ebbing, then ramping. Of course she’s tried white noise—fans, the dryer, vacuum cleaners, burbling brooks. One time Ryan brought home fucking whale calls, like a saxophone in a child’s hands.
As she nears the corner, Joanne sees it is a teenage girl pushing the mower. She has long legs like Tina and hair held back with a bandana the way Tina wore it that summer, the summer of the burst eardrums, of Caid and Pamela, of the fight on the hill. That summer mowing the grass was one of the last clues about Tina. The first clue was Megan, Tina’s little sister. Four years younger, she had not been allowed to play with them since they’d started talking about boys and looking up dirty words in the dictionary. But sometime after school let out—who could say so many years later exactly when? Maybe in June, maybe the beginning of July—Megan began to follow Tina everywhere, and Tina refused to stop her. The morning Joanne’s eardrum burst, the girls showed up and attacked Joanne’s fridge as if they’d been on war rations. It wasn’t the first time and Lou had noticed the amount of food disappearing. “Those girls better eat at their own damn house,” she warned Joanne. “Your father’s not paying child support for three.”
That day Tina downed two bowls of Cap’n Crunch before fishing a folded yellow postcard out of her pocket.
“Somebody stuck this on our door.” It was a notice from the health department about their grass. “Do you know how to start a mower?”
He’s finally asleep. Joanne parks the stroller beneath the sycamore and gets the book out of her car. Breaking the Cycle: A Guide for Mothers.
Lou had a hollow plastic tube, maybe three feet long and half an inch in diameter. She called it “the whip,” used it on Joanne’s legs when Joanne lied about going somewhere after school, came home late, or left the kitchen a mess. The whip left red welts shaped like boomerangs. Where did it come from? And where was it now? It seems impossible to throw such a thing in the trash.
Joanne flips through the book from back to front, reading the headings, unwilling to begin at the beginning. When it’s time to go to the doctor, she lifts the baby carefully, but he wakes while she’s buckling him into the car seat and begins to cry. She backs out of the driveway, teeth clenched, checking her mirrors obsessively, as if the baby will appear in one by magic, directly in the path of her wheels.
Forty-five minutes of people staring in the waiting room—one old woman scowls when Joanne uses the sugar pacifier—then five minutes with the doctor.
“Probably a viral infection. Use a double dose of ibuprofen, call if it still hurts in three days.”
“Three days?”
After a lecture about the overuse of antibiotics, the doctor escapes, allowing a sympathetic smile toward the crying baby.
Back home he refuses his bottle, spits out mashed banana, throws a popsicle at her white curtains. Trying to scrub out the stain, Joanne eyes the inflatable pool on the patio. The water will be warm by now, not like yesterday, when she spent an hour with the air pump and the hose only to snatch him out as soon as his toes touched the frigid surface, setting off another rage. He would like it now. He would float, right? And if he didn’t float, he would be quiet.
Joanne calls her mother.
While she waits fo
r Lou to arrive, she puts the baby back in the swing and goes outside to have a cigarette. Several times she’s left him alone in the crib, which the pediatrician calls “the safe zone,” and stuffed cotton in her ears, but today the cotton would be intolerable, so she dons the ridiculous pink fur-covered earmuffs her mother gave her for Christmas. What was she thinking? How can Lou help? Lou always makes everything worse.
Joanne realizes the old man behind her—out trimming his shrubs—is scowling over their shared fence. Assuming it’s the earmuffs that have drawn his attention, she takes them off. The baby is howling as if he’s just been sentenced to death. Joanne checks her watch. Lou lives ten minutes away. What the fuck is taking so long?
The old man goes in and Joanne tries to concentrate on pleasant things—sprinklers hiss-putting in circles, bees buzzing in the lavender, children called in to lunch. That day, at noon, when Joanne had tried to get Tina and Megan to go home for lunch, Megan began to cry and Joanne asked what was going on.
“Nothing.”
“Then what’s the big deal if you eat at your house?”
“No big deal. It’s just.” Tina paused. “My mom has a new boyfriend.”
“Is he an asshole?”
“I don’t know. We don’t see him much.”
“That’s good, isn’t it?”
Tina shrugged.
So Joanne made them all macaroni and cheese and they ate while playing Monopoly at the kitchen table, then they watched their soap opera. With only one eardrum, the dialogue came at Joanne as if from a cave, the pitch deeper and every vowel laden with echoes. Still, she remained unconcerned, attributing the strange effect to a problem with the TV station. Her other ear had begun to hurt by then, so she took more aspirin, crushing it this time in a cup of leftover frosting.
After the program, they fixed each other’s hair. Joanne worked on Megan’s, which was unusually dirty and knotted. She combed it smooth, then repositioned a homemade barrette of yarn and ribbon.
