by Rumaan Alam
“I’m going to have a baby. What am I going to do—with my brother?”
There would be others, besides Ian, to come tomorrow and be with Cheryl, friends, colleagues, peers, intimates Rebecca could not guess at, like the man who was the father of that small baby with hair like a lamb and skin like a hazelnut. Rebecca imagined them, a loving group, passing the baby like a baton. “Don’t worry about that now.” Rebecca hoped her charade of nonchalance would be reassuring instead of maddening.
Cheryl took her hand.
“But when?” She was so calm. “When should I worry about it?”
“It’ll be fine.” Some of life’s situations—what else was there to say? You had to believe the deus would emerge from the machina or you had nothing.
“I wish I had that sense that the world is going to work out fine in the end. I’ve never seen that happen.” Cheryl released Rebecca’s hand.
Rebecca chose to hear this as a comment on the scenario, not personal insult. But maybe that would have been right, too. Maybe Rebecca’s life was charmed, as Diana’s was charmed; maybe some lives contained nothing more to worry about than being wed and bred and having perfectly set hair while other lives brought you here, to the hospital. Maybe Rebecca had only platitude because Rebecca had never had a problem. “You’re going to have a baby. It’s a happiness that’ll make you feel like everything in the world is just as it should be.”
“This was not how it was supposed to be—” Cheryl was angry. “Fate is the laziest way to explain terrible things.”
“I’m sorry.” Why did Rebecca feel at fault and why did she think she could fix everything? “Why don’t I take him home?”
Cheryl laughed. “Why don’t you what?”
“I could.” It seemed, suddenly, quite clear, that Rebecca could be that deus. “He needs to be fed, and rocked, and looked after. He needs to be kissed, and sung to, and bathed. I know how to do all that.”
“He’s my brother. It’s my—responsibility.”
Speech and thought moved at different speeds. “Cheryl, it’s not that you can’t do it, it’s that—I’m right here. We have a crib. It’s not even an imposition.”
“So what, you’d just take him home?”
“Let us help.” She waited. “At least for now. We’ll talk about later—later.”
“I don’t want to be someone who needs help.” Cheryl frowned. “But maybe I am.”
Two days later, after some cajoling, Auntie Christine came to the house on Wisconsin Drive bearing a bucket of chicken, a rented videocassette, and cousin Michelle, whom Jacob always enjoyed seeing. Rebecca found the infant seat in the basement and buckled it into the car. She found Jacob’s old bassinet, Jacob’s old blankets, Jacob’s old onesies, and washed these, folded them neatly, piles of white cotton, smelling of nothing. The children watched The Muppet Movie and Rebecca drove to the hospital, “The Rainbow Connection” echoing in her head. She disliked the Muppets, all their earnest, homespun pathos. She brought the baby home. His hair was soft, his skin mottled. He rarely opened his eyes, and his mouth was a displeased frown. He was perfect. His name was Andrew.
Part Two
11
SHE PUT THE BASSINET IN THE SAME SPOT AS BEFORE. IT WAS ALL SO familiar and yet all so different, governed by the logic of a dream, the sort that seems like it might be recurring, but how can you tell because it’s a dream? Though she thought of Jacob as baby this was an actual baby. He fussed and she picked him up. It was all rote, required no thought; she lifted him to her, both hands, his little body slack as a cub’s in the mouth of a lioness.
Downstairs, she filled the bottle from the pitcher of filtered water. You had to do that first, so the volume was correct. She added the scoop of powder, which crunched like snow and smelled like metal. She shook it but let it sit, because you had to, or the baby got gas.
“‘What good is sitting alone in your room?’” She sang, because a baby liked to be sung to, she remembered that, even if it had been three years. “But you can’t sit, can you? Can you?” You had to talk to babies. They said that a child had to reach school age having heard a million words. This was part of the responsibility she’d taken on, part of the favor she was doing. “‘Come hear the music play!’”
Andrew yawned, then his tongue slipped from his mouth. She knew, somehow, that he was hungry, an intelligence she was surprised she still retained. Rebecca sat at the table and held the bottle, and Andrew drank.
She had always imagined another baby, that’s why she’d saved those darling, monastic garments, so soft and white. Princess Diana had done it twice but she’d done it for the kingdom. Rebecca just wanted it for Jacob. Having a sibling gave you the temporary illusion that you weren’t alone in the world. “We’re not alone in the world,” she whispered, six more words on their way to that million. The sound of his drinking was surprisingly loud.
The marble counter was cluttered: the glass lids of pots, the ossified twist of a tea bag, a dirty bowl and spoon. Rebecca had always planned on a plan, not this—instant infant. It was like something from myth, like she’d crept up some sacred mountain and spirited him away, a baby touched by God but also cursed, so that the rest of her life dissolved into disorder. Well, he was very cute.
“You’re all done! Already!” The baby looked stunned, more often than not; perhaps as he should, the world was a stunning place. She lifted him to her shoulder and rubbed her hand in circles along his back. Her milk was gone, but Rebecca could sense the machinery of her breast at work, like dormant gas lines in the ceilings of turn-of-the-century homes; a sense of dampness, the itch in an amputated limb. He belched, quite loud, and she laughed. She lifted him from her shoulder and studied his face. His eyes could not focus, rolled about seeking a direction like the needle in a compass.
She heard feet falling, heard the television switch on. They’d decided a bit of Sesame Street was not so bad, that Jacob deserved a concession. Andrew was like a surprise party that none of them could leave; the day he’d arrived, Jacob, defiant, stood behind the living room curtains and shit his pants. Rebecca had put the baby down, stripped Jacob nude, thrown the soiled underpants into the garbage can. She’d started saying I love you more than usual, and there was a still implicit in it.
Christopher came into the room. He was tall, slightly stooped, and somehow avian, like a stork, graceful even though its legs bend backward. He was not frowning but she knew that he was not happy. “We’re awake.”
It was not so early; it was nearly six. “Yes. We’re awake.” Rebecca kissed Andrew’s prominent forehead, which was made the more so by his hesitant hairline, foreshadowing the middle-aged man he’d be.
Christopher began to peel a banana. “I’m letting him watch Sesame Street.”
“Fine.” Rebecca didn’t want to hear more about what she knew Christopher was getting at, that I.
He delivered the banana, returned, and switched on the electric kettle. “So.”
“It’s a mess in here, I know that’s what you’re thinking. I’m going to ask Marie to come Mondays and Thursdays. Don’t you think? And maybe she can help with the laundry.” The laundry was relentless. If one baby was a balancing act, two was a war.
“So. What’s the plan here, really?” Christopher filled his mug.
“The plan?” She hadn’t, technically, consulted him, before making her offer to Cheryl. This was a mistake, Rebecca knew, but sometimes you made a mistake and just had to forge ahead.
“I know this seemed the right thing to do.” He fiddled with his hand like he was physically looking for the right word. “But it’s an extraordinary situation.”
The day beyond the windows looked bright and clear, and she wished to throw them open, let in the frigid December air, let it cleanse the house, let it rouse her into true wakefulness. Rebecca stood and bounced, because babies like it when you bounce. She pulled Andrew close, proximity approximating what—pregnancy? She had to give him more than that million words; she had to gi
ve him love.
“Rebecca.” Christopher hesitated. He sat. “Sit.”
“I can’t sit.” She began to laugh. “Sit. Like a dog? Don’t tell me to sit.”
“I’m asking—”
“I can’t stand it. Get it? Stand. Sit.” She laughed joylessly, but then it began to seem truly funny and she laughed sincerely. From the next room, she could hear the jaunty music from Jacob’s show, and this seemed appropriate. “Should I call Cheryl and say, Oops never mind here’s your brother back?”
“No one is saying that.”
“She just had a baby, Christopher. This is the least I can do.” Rebecca had gone to see Cheryl and Ian and the baby they had named Ivy. Vague grief had blunted the sharp joy they should have been feeling. The celebration was muted. Rebecca had taken balloons. They seemed ridiculous instead of festive, a taunt.
“I was as fond of Priscilla as anyone.” The verb tense was disarming. “But this is—it’s too great. To ask.”
When Rebecca had imagined their second child, she’d imagined Priscilla. It was only now, truly without Priscilla, that Rebecca understood. The crumby plate on the side table and the Legos on the floor, the misplaced dish sponge and the expired lightbulb in the foyer, the wooden train and the balled-up tissue and the unfolded blankets and the need for butter and the discarded rubber band from the weekend’s newspaper on the kitchen floor, yes, all of that, plus Jacob and everything he needed, plus Rebecca’s work, to whatever extent that mattered. Priscilla stood between chaos and the rest of them. A little mess didn’t matter, but Priscilla was order. You couldn’t get through life if there was no logic to it, and there was no logic in any of this. “No one asked. I offered. Think of what she did for us.”
“You meant well. You meant a kindness.” He was gentle.
“I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t know what else to do.” Rebecca had never felt more honest.
“But, Rebecca. What’s the . . . ?”
“God laughs, remember? Plans make God laugh hysterically.” She had sketched a plan, though, she and Cheryl. A few weeks, they’d said. Babies changed a great deal within a matter of a few weeks. Priscilla herself had made those first few weeks so much easier for Rebecca, now it was her chance to do the same for Cheryl.
“Perhaps I should talk to Ian. Man to man. Find an arrangement.”
“Man to man!” Rebecca chuckled. “We’re not making a deal, Christopher. It’s a baby, not a—” She faltered, not knowing any nouns relevant to his work. “He’s a person.”
“I just meant that perhaps he and I could speak frankly. Put aside some of the emotion.”
“I am too tired to laugh as hard as I should be laughing right now.”
Her husband liked a tidy room. He liked a tidy life. “It’s a terrible situation, but it’s not our terrible situation.” Christopher was doing his best; his best was reasonable. “We can help, certainly. It would be a bit like having twins, I expect? Twice as much work, and expense, but people survive that.”
“You want to—give them a check?”
“I’m just thinking out loud.”
“Jesus Christ.” She squeezed the baby closer. He was too young to protest this.
“We could send them her wages. Priscilla’s. On a weekly basis, for some period—”
“This is a horrible idea and an unbelievable insult.”
“It’s testament to how highly we think of them, of Priscilla. But life has to go on, Rebecca, and I don’t think it can go on like this.”
“You’re missing what you had. The ordered life. The happy wife. Don’t you see—we had that because of Priscilla?” This was a debt owed.
“So, how does this end?”
The anger or irritation or whatever it was she was most feeling dissipated as the baby dozed in her arms. The day was filled with these moments of respite and you had to seize them, because they were brief. She understood what Christopher was asking, and understood that it was reasonable to ask, and that it was unreasonable that she had no answer save the one she offered. “I don’t know.”
They were silent and then, like an actor late on his cue, Jacob called out. “Mommy! Mommy! Daddy! Mommy!”
Rebecca left the baby in her husband’s hands, even though he had to be at work, and went to see what it was Jacob needed of her.
12
THIS HAD ONCE BEEN HER FAVORITE PLACE. THE SOUND WAS AS transporting as one of the popular songs of one’s youth: the chorus of human noise over the steady canned music with the flourish of the fountain’s plash echoing back from the soaring ceilings. The smell was cinnamon from something baking and the bouquet of all those cosmetics and that odd chemical newness of merchandise. The wide marble hallways were meant to conjure great urban boulevards and were lined with glass façades displaying the artful or the alluring. Those first few months with Christopher, Rebecca discovered that the diplomat’s consort required certain things that the nursery school teacher’s assistant did not possess. Silk dresses, shoes with a heel, smart handbags, that Paloma Picasso perfume in a bottle the shape of an eye, the occasional, modest piece of real jewelry. So she’d gone to the mall. She’d spent a small fortune, which was all she had, but Rebecca, at twenty-nine, had lived at home, and her parents did not ask for rent.
White Flint Mall for a White Christmas. There was desultory snow, dry and halfhearted, but Jacob was old enough to understand Santa and the notion that it was better to give than to receive. Christopher took the boy to I. Magnin and Rebecca sat in the food hall, Andrew nuzzled against her chest, hot and sleepy. She had a cup of tea and a copy of the Indiana Review that she’d been waiting for even if rereading her poems was like prodding a cut to marvel at the pain. It was nice to see her name in print but she wanted to make art with meaning and just kept coming up with this? Still, she flipped to the little paragraph at the back and relished the biographical notice: Rebecca Stone is the winner of the 1988 Yale Younger Poets Prize. She was thirty-three but in Yale’s estimation that was young enough.
She remembered well the day she’d received the fat envelope from New Haven. She’d stopped work early, retreated to the kitchen, singing along to Liza Minnelli, marveling at that voice. Was that genetic inheritance? Did it matter who your mother was? Her happiness contained no embarrassment.
“You’re in a good mood!” Priscilla had laughed; even Jacob had laughed.
Rebecca explained why, then took down the bottle they’d opened with the previous night’s dinner. Priscilla sat and Rebecca poured and the boy played at their feet and by some magic (in vino veritas!) they pushed past small talk and into something else and Priscilla told Rebecca the story of her own mother.
“It was a long time ago.” Priscilla had tried to explain it but not to excuse it. “Cheryl’s twenty-five. It was twenty-five years ago. I was seventeen, was all. My mother wanted something different for me.”
Since the woman’s death Rebecca had been waiting for epiphany. She had only this: that without Priscilla, she didn’t have a person in whom to confide her sadness about Priscilla’s death. That was quite stupid, or something like a koan. Rebecca reached for her tea, careful not to spook the sleeping baby. Was spook racist when a verb as it was when a noun?
That day, Priscilla had told Rebecca about the girl she’d once been. “I worked so hard at it. My mother, what she was saying, is that I was supposed to be better. So I made myself better. It’s hard enough when you’re a woman. When you’re a black woman, the world says you’re not good, be better. And my mother believed it. She should have protected me.”
Rebecca at seventeen had been patchwork jeans and Judith’s hand-me-down Bell Jar, chemistry class and a strong feeling about Duane Allman. Priscilla at seventeen had been alone with a baby. Priscilla at forty-two or forty-three had had another baby and what remained unknown was what Rebecca at forty-two or forty-three would be. Rebecca gently tipped the child’s head to the side, but his eyes remained closed, his breathing steady.
She had never t
hought that she’d win the prize. She only sent in the manuscript because James Merrill was the judge. She thought he might understand her work, and she’d been right. But now that work belonged to the before. This was now and Rebecca should get up, throw away her tea, walk down the hall toward the department store, but the days had been quite awful and just to sit felt like an achievement. Jacob’s voice had a new, jarring note of complaint in it. Winter was so indifferent, cold at midday and dark shortly thereafter, and Rebecca was supposed to decorate a tree and buy presents and devise activities and make bottles and wipe bottoms and cook dinners. Christopher, worn down at last by her jokes (death by a thousand Cuts), was trying to swear off the Silk Cuts.
“My mother, she took the moral view. It was immoral, you see?” Priscilla had said. So what was moral, and how would you know it? Maybe Merrill was right and Rebecca should push the plastic lid of the teacup across the laminated table, near enough a Ouija. Failing that: Should she ask the woman walking past with her shopping bags, the man playing “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” on the white lacquered piano, her mother, her sisters, her husband, her son, James Merrill himself, Diana, Princess of Wales, Yale University Press? The baby strapped to Rebecca’s chest had been left alone and this felt like a test.
There was no sense, there inside the huge building, of the world outside. It was all simulacrum, an arcade as Arcadia, far removed from the dry snow, the white sky, the winter’s insistence. She put the Indiana Review back into her bag and threw away her unfinished tea. At the end of the corridor, she could pick out Christopher and Jacob, hand in hand, then not, as the boy rushed toward her. Had she really spent so much time there once? Had her principal preoccupation been dressing for a garden party at the embassy?
“Mommy, Mommy, we bought you a present.”
That high girlish voice broke your heart. Rebecca regretted having found Jacob unpleasant the past couple of weeks. Wasn’t it to be expected? “Did you? I’m so excited.” She kept one hand against the baby’s head, and with the other, stroked the boy’s soft hair. Her body had beaten her mind to the realization that she could do this, be mother to them both, at the same time.
