by Rumaan Alam
22
CHRISTINE, EVER DUTIFUL, KEPT CALLING. REBECCA RELENTED. There was a Halloween to-do on Christine and Tim’s block in Silver Spring. Rebecca dressed Jacob as a cowboy and put the baby in a onesie decorated to look like a tuxedo. Christine dressed Michelle as a princess and didn’t even bother with Michael. Of course, it hardly mattered, the two babies asleep in their strollers, the two toddlers looking mostly their usual selves in their warm jackets.
Conversation was almost impossible, the older children darting ahead and dangerously near the road, but fortunately they lost interest after ringing six doorbells and the entire company retreated. Tim had grilled hamburgers, even though it was then quite cold and unnervingly dark at only five thirty.
“Who wants salad?”
“Oh, give him some, Tim. Jacob, Uncle Tim has carrots and tomatoes.” Rebecca cradled Andrew, held a bottle steady, sipped her wine, ate her salad, all at the same time.
“Anyway, this team—they presented the most startling study. Trauma, and g-u-n-s.” Christine had taken to spelling even though Michelle was too young to pay attention to most of the adult conversation. “It’s chilling.”
“Is it?” Hearing her sister talk about work was a bit like hearing about a journey to a country she’d never even considered visiting, like Bhutan or Chad. But it was interesting, Christine’s work, because it was about the world. “What specifically?”
“They need to expand the study. That’s where we come in. The money. But essentially they’re looking at incidences of anxiety and depression and hypertension and SIDS—a whole range of disease—and correlating it to g-u-n v-i-o-l-e-n-c-e. It’s insane. People are d-y-i-n-g from being s-h-o-t but also from other things.”
“The inner city?” It was a phrase you heard. They lived in the city! It was perfectly lovely.
“The long and the short of it is that the threat of g-u-n-f-i-r-e can actually make people crazy, eventually. Michelle, no more juice. Take a bite of your hamburger, please.”
Rebecca watched her sister, a distorted reflection of herself, a cream-colored breast emerging from her sweater, an apricot-colored baby at her chest. “That’s terrible.”
Christine looked back, wide-eyed, intent, though anyone who studied epidemics for a living would be forgiven a tendency toward alarmism. “I just don’t know what the world is coming to.”
The world did not matter; there were two children and several pieces of candy. There were yells and spills and a general sense of mayhem. Even the babies seemed manic. Rebecca showed her sister the trick—that television was an opiate—and they left the elder cousins in its charge. Tim cleared the dishes and Christine spread a blanket on the dining room floor and let the baby flail about on his tummy while Andrew sat unsteady sentry, surrounded by plastic toys, the two companionable in their immobility.
“How are you doing?” Christine herself sprawled on her stomach with the two infants.
Her sister’s edge of panic made Rebecca more resolute. “I’m fine.” She said it like she didn’t understand the question.
Christine exhaled, like she was psyching herself up. “Rebecca. Did you ever think that you might, possibly, be depressed?”
Rebecca laughed. “Overwhelmed, maybe. Tired, sure. But depressed? Like you mean clinical?”
“Postpartum.”
“I thought it went without saying, Chris. Andrew’s mine but he’s not—mine.”
“You don’t have to have given birth.” Christine seemed to understand that she was the family’s Cassandra. To correct for this, she aimed for even greater dramatic flourish. It was an odd tactic. She pushed her fingers into her unruly red hair. “I’m just asking. I worry.”
“I’m not depressed.” Rebecca felt defensive. “This is what I’m like!”
“It’s been almost a year, Rebecca. You just don’t seem like . . . you.”
“This is who I am, now.” Being with her sister made Rebecca more dramatic, by osmosis. But perhaps it was true, that this was who she was, now.
“You’re a stay-at-home mother? Since when?”
“Since Priscilla died.”
“It’s more than that. You seem—you seem depleted, as well as enriched. And I don’t mean tired, I know what tired looks like. Look at me.”
Rebecca looked. Her sister did look paler than was normal, except for the skin around her eyes, tinted with sleeplessness. This was the look of motherhood. But it was offset, or compensated for, by something else, a faint glow, a vague contentment. This was how Rebecca assumed she, too, looked. “Right. We’re tired. We have babies. It’s tiring.”
“It’s something else, Bec. It’s like—you’re punishing yourself.”
“Should I be going to the spa?”
“Maybe you should be going back to work?”
“Because you did?”
“I did! I love my work. It’s fucking horrible. Excuse me. F-u-c-k-i-n-g horrible. But it’s also great. I go to meetings and my breasts leak all over my clothes, but I get to think and talk and be—I don’t know. The person I was four years ago, the person I want to be ten years from now when our kids are teenagers slamming their doors in our faces.”
“I’m fine. I don’t need anything other than—this.”
“Look, I think you’ve done a great thing. An amazing thing. We’re all in awe. I know—I know they had some doubts, but I didn’t. I think you’ve just become a mother again, just like I did, and it’s great but you seem like you’re having trouble, recovering your balance.”
There it was again, that great thing that Rebecca had supposedly done. “You’re kind to worry.”
“What about hiring a nanny. Christ knows you can afford it. And you could go back to writing or just—live or catch up or feel like a human being again.”
“I’ve never felt more like a human being.” Rebecca wanted to lower her voice to its most serious timbre, lean toward her sister, and say, Christopher is in trouble. She did not. That was a matter for husbands and wives. “The money is not the point.”
Christine was direct. “He’ll know he’s your baby, Rebecca. You don’t have to change every diaper.”
Rebecca smiled down at the three of them, Andrew now scooting about, Michael simply collapsed like a helpless turtle, her sister, rosy and satisfied. “You don’t understand.”
“You can’t spend your life feeling guilty about your being white and his being black, about you being alive and her being dead.”
That was not it! “I don’t feel guilty. I feel responsible. I feel charged with . . . I don’t know. Being alive, for him. For both of them.”
Christine was no longer smiling. “You need to try something. Talk therapy. SSRIs. Meditation. This isn’t helping anyone, or it’s helping them but not you. You can’t disappear into motherhood. It’s not good for you. And I can see that’s what you’re doing. You’ve vanished.” Christine was a doctor, and like every doctor she was an evangelist.
“What if this is who I am? Who I am now. Who I have become.” Rebecca picked up her baby and changed the subject back to g-u-n-s. Then she packed up the children, their candy, the bags of stuff it was necessary to forever be packing up. But it lingered, what her sister had said, it infected her, and that night, though it was late, though she had things to do, Rebecca took out a pencil, a legal pad, and sat with them, just for a moment, not writing, just considering them, and wondering if it was true, what she had said to her sister, that she had never felt more like a human.
23
CHRISTMAS MUSIC WAS ODIOUS, CHRISTMAS WAS ODIOUS. Forced jollity and mawkish sentiment. Rebecca wanted real feeling, something transcendent, but was given only this. A role to play: divine what the children wanted, buy buy buy, wrap it and pretend. Christopher spoke of Father Christmas, which she thought hilarious.
She played a compact disc, which still felt futuristic: Streisand. Rebecca sang along without embarrassment. These were the songs of her own youth, she had her mother’s taste, as she had her mother’s face. It wa
s stirring and sentimental but having a child was freeing: you always had a tit out, and the niceties fell away.
Cheryl was coming over. Rebecca dressed in black but felt joy. Motherhood deformed your breast and then your vanity. As a girl, in her big sister’s hand-me-down duds, then a college student, perfectly preppy, then a young woman dating Christopher, then a young wife, Rebecca had dressed the part: T-shirts with inscrutable slogans and old jeans, knees patched with old bandannas; mohair sweaters and silk-lined wool skirts; printed dresses of demure length, paisley silk scarves, gold earrings, necklaces with turquoise and amber and other semiprecious oddities, leather bags, cashmere cardigans, aviator sunglasses. It all sat unused, unless she felt like it: Louis Vuitton for a jaunt to the grocery store. The ruby earrings from Elizabeth that didn’t look right on her, because she was a redhead, clipped to her ears (they were that big) and for no reason other than that she thought they’d make her feel beautiful for an afternoon. It was beauty for herself. Obviously, Andrew and Jacob cared little what she wore, and Christopher, too, often failed to comment.
Christmas was for family and family was now Cheryl. We’re a family now, Ian had said to her, that day, over pancakes. They had good intentions, she and Cheryl. They had a vision, or Rebecca did: Andrew and Ivy costumed, Superman and Wonder Woman, cadging candy from the neighbors; Cheryl and Ian and Ivy, at the Thanksgiving table; birthday parties, Easter lunches, picnics at Rock Creek. There’s vision, though, and reality. Cheryl a new mother, Rebecca a new mother, the complex dance of four adults, three kids. Only weeks ago, Cheryl and Ivy had come to the boys’ joint birthday party. Cheryl held her brother while the assembled company sang and the candles wavered. This was approximate to seeing Priscilla hold Andrew, something that had, horribly, never happened. Ian had to work, because the weekends were the best days for the selling of cars. Rebecca missed him. She thought it hilarious that he was Andrew’s brother-in-law. Whoever heard of a baby with a brother-in-law?
The doorbell sounded and Christopher called upstairs. “They’re here.”
That’s what the doorbell was for, Rebecca thought. To tell me that.
“Hello!” Rebecca tried to sound enthusiastic but nonchalant—a sisterly visit an occasion at once special and ordinary. Words didn’t capture such distinctly opposing feelings.
Cheryl leaned into the hug Rebecca offered. Hugs were better than kisses; kisses were insubstantial, showy. Hugs demonstrated connection, as they demanded connection. Hugs were a corrective, too, to Christopher’s public school propriety. Hugs were American, boisterous, honest even when forced, which this one was, not that the affection between her and Cheryl was feigned. It was something else. A brokered peace.
“Hi, Rebecca.” Cheryl had an unnerving way of using Rebecca’s name, as though she were willing herself to memorize it, or as though she were using it ironically, the way teenagers might call parents by their Christian names to demonstrate independence.
Ian was in the car with Ivy, asleep in her car seat. The boys were napping, too, or Andrew was. Jacob was observing what they’d termed “quiet time,” reading a comic book in his parents’ bed. The house had a preternatural hush that was only eerie because Rebecca knew it would not last. Cheryl slipped out of her shoes and followed Rebecca into the kitchen. That they did not enter the sitting room—its armchairs with their Napoleonic bees, its blue-and-white drapery—was a measure of intimacy. A chicken was roasting, a lemon nestled inside. The room smelled as a home ought to.
“How are the boys?” Cheryl always asked about the both of them. Andrew and Jacob, in her estimation, were separate people but a single entity. Blood did not make this a family, everyone had to agree.
“So good.” Rebecca broke the ends off the asparagus stalks and flung them into the sink. Could someone look at this mess, like the leaves at the bottom of a teacup, and divine the future? “Andrew is just intent on keeping up with his brother.”
“We brought pies. They’re in the trunk, Ian will bring them in when Ivy’s up. Pecan, which was my mother’s favorite.” She looked at the clock on the oven. “She’ll be awake soon, probably.”
“I can’t wait. Even though I’ve done nothing but eat for weeks. Thanksgiving. Birthday cupcakes. Christmas cookies. I get to this point every year, I just want to stop. One year, we should go away somewhere. All of us. Mexico. Just get away from the madness and go somewhere sunny.”
“A resort. With a day-care drop-off. And a casino. And an open bar. Could I have some water, Rebecca?”
“Of course. How rude of me.” Rebecca dried her hands on the tea towel. Her feeling toward Cheryl was maternal, though they were nearly the same age. She pressed a glass against the dispenser in the refrigerator door. Rebecca waited—always—for their conversation to transcend the quotidian, but this was so great an expectation. “It’s so dry, the winter air. Murder on the skin. Poor Andrew’s, especially.”
“Thank you.” Cheryl sipped the water. “You’ve tried shea butter? It’s what we use. It’s what Mom used.”
“I’ve been using coconut oil.” After Andrew’s bath, she dipped her fingers in the glass jar, the wax going to nothing as she worked it over the baby’s skin. After, he glowed beautifully and smelled like cake. “I’ll have to try that.”
“Sometimes . . .” Cheryl paused. “Black skin, it can require extra care. Especially in the winter.”
“Skin is skin.” Rebecca tried to sound reassuring.
“I’ll bring you some,” Cheryl said. “I probably have some, in the bag. I’ll leave it.”
What conversation ever achieved something beyond the exchange of updates, the confirmation of facts already in evidence? Conversation was time passing, syllables destined to be forgotten, intelligence with no purpose, divorced from the long game of life, an inconsequential thing. Conversations that actually were important almost never seemed so as they were unfolding; it came later, the understanding that a certain moment had been significant. “Cheryl.”
“Yes?”
Anyway: What did Rebecca want? “You can get your own water. In my house. In this house. You should know that.” Rebecca snapped an asparagus too near the top. There was only the tip left, but she threw it into the roasting pan.
“I’m sorry.” Cheryl’s eyes were, as everyone’s, inscrutable.
“I need you to know that.” Christine had not understood. Rebecca’s disinterest was not depression. It was clarity. The trauma had been epiphany: so little mattered. She could not go back to being the same person that Christine and everyone else expected her to be. It wasn’t so dramatic as to say that person had died with Priscilla—better to say that Rebecca learned something, from Priscilla’s death, from Andrew’s life, and she changed. But life lesson: people don’t want one another to change.
“I know that.” Cheryl was still smiling, faintly. There was something so stubborn about her. “I need you to know something, too.”
Rebecca stopped. “What is it?”
“Skin is not skin.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m telling you about black skin. I’m telling you about shea butter. You could—you could listen to me.”
Rebecca felt, absurdly, like crying. “I’m sorry. I just meant—you know, we’re all human. We’re all in this . . .”
“I know what you meant.”
“I just thought . . . We’re not pretending at something. We’re doing it. Ian said, that day at the courthouse. He said, We’re a family now.”
Cheryl laughed. “Fine, we’re family. He’s my brother. He’s black. I’m black. I don’t need you to tell me skin is skin, I need you to just listen for once.” Then, more seriously. “It’s not like it’s some bad thing that we can’t admit. He’s black. It’s a fact.”
Rebecca looked down at the counter before her. “You think I don’t listen?”
Cheryl smiled. “Sometimes you don’t. You knew that.”
“I didn’t.” Rebecca sniffled a little, wanted not to cry. “You’r
e my son’s sister. You come and go in this house as you like. You get your own water. You belong here.”
“I’m your son’s sister. I’m in your house and I’m telling you something.”
“Sorry.” Rebecca felt hot/silly/out of control, not a way anyone enjoyed feeling. She looked at the kitchen, at her wooden spoons, stained from use, at attention in the porcelain crock. Cheryl was a specter, an echo of her mother. How unhelpful, to wish one person was a different person. Priscilla was dead, and Rebecca was left with the woman’s son and the woman’s daughter and that was that. “You’re right.”
They were both quiet for a minute, two, three, five.
“The boys are going to be dying to open their presents. Are dying.” Rebecca tried to sound cheerful. “Well, not Andrew, of course, but Jacob. He keeps picking them up and shaking them.”
“What’s the point in Christmas without presents? Not Christ, but don’t tell Ian I said so. We went to church with his mom. She makes me call her Mama.”
Rebecca knew how the Johnson women felt about God. She always rolled her eyes when people spoke of God’s plan—as, weirdly, happened often. A white mom with a black kid made people think of a God, busily planning. Many want to believe in order. A well-enough-intentioned foolishness. “How do you get along? You and . . . Her name? Nancy? Why can’t I remember?”
