“No, you don’t,” the midwife said.
“Just get this fucking thing out of me!”
Finally things picked up. During one of the pushes the midwife said, “I see a lot of dark hair!” She asked Kate if she wanted to look. She offered a mirror, which Kate refused. Colin looked, still holding Kate’s leg. The midwife threw a towel over the squat bar and told Kate to push and pull herself up with the towel. She told Kate that the baby was crowning, and Kate felt a burning sensation around her vestibule and the pressure of a wall crashing down sideways inside of her. The head came out. Colin shouted. The midwife said, “Looks like a girl, from the face!” Then Kate had to stop pushing while they did something or other, and then the baby came out with just a few more pushes, and everyone surrounding Kate’s nether regions was saying, “It’s here, it’s here,” and the midwife said, “Get ready to hold your daughter,” and put the baby on Kate’s chest. Kate put her hands around the baby’s backside. Its sudden appearance shocked her. She, the baby, lay on Kate’s bosom, naked and compact, moving and making noises. She looked around and she looked at Kate. Her eyes were bright and alert.
“Oh, my God.” Kate looked around the room for Colin and found him next to her. “It’s a real baby.”
He cut the cord and Kate pushed the placenta out and they gave her a shot of Pitocin to shrink her uterus and the midwife got down between her legs and stitched her up. “Look at your stomach!” the nurse said. Kate looked down—her belly was sunken and empty and soft. She fed the baby. The nurse cleaned the baby and put her under the heat lamp. Colin called Kate’s mother and put Kate on the phone. Her mother was beside herself, almost crying. She said, “I really wanted it to be a girl.”
The orderly took everybody to the recovery floor. Kate rode in the wheelchair and held the baby and Colin walked behind with Kate’s things. Everyone in the hallways and elevators offered congratulations, just as if they’d been out there waiting all night.
A sandwich and a soda were delivered to her room. She didn’t want the sandwich so Colin ate it. The nurse brought some graham crackers and peanut butter and Kate had those instead. The nurse gave Kate an ice pack and Motrin and Demerol and said she’d come in later to take her to the bathroom. Colin slept on the couch. The baby, now named Lila, went to the nursery. A different nurse brought her in to Kate in the middle of the night to be fed. At six Colin went home to sleep more comfortably. At eight they brought Lila in again and brought Kate breakfast and tea. Her mother called to say she was on her way. Kate took another shower and brushed her teeth and rinsed with mouthwash. She put on body and face lotion and brushed her hair. Naked, she felt her stomach, so amazingly pliable.
Her mother arrived and went straight over to Lila, who was lying in her clear plastic elevated bassinet. Edie wore her usual gray coat, which set off the gray in her hair—she appeared elderly, all of a sudden, standing there looking down at the fresh little infant, easily a grandmother.
Colin returned and plugged in the CD player. He put on the Goldberg Variations. A nurse poked her head in. “Y’all relaxing?”
“Yup,” Colin said.
“Busy day yesterday.”
The nurse vanished. “Busy for her,” Colin said, indicating Lila.
“Maybe the busiest day of her life,” Edie said.
“Well,” Kate said, “busier than today. So that would be a yes.”
“You know who just had a baby, Kate?” her mother said. “Rudy Anderson. Or, well, his wife did.”
Kate’s mother stayed until early evening; then she went to the Bridgeport apartment, where she would stay for the next ten days to do laundry and cook and help care for the baby until her daughter and son-in-law got the hang of it. Kate fed Lila and an orderly took her to the nursery for the night. Kate watched as Lila was wheeled out the door and down the hall in her clear plastic bassinet, until all she could see of her was the little pink hat. Then Kate turned on the television and ate the sandwich she’d saved from lunch. Now she was ravenous. She ate the sandwich and the little iceberg-lettuce hospital salad. She went to sleep. The nurse brought Lila to her in the middle of the night and left, leaving the door half-open. The sleepless white hallway dimly illuminated Kate’s room and Lila was beautiful and clear-eyed at Kate’s breast. The pink hat had come off and she looked up at Kate in the shallow light with her bright dark eyes and her dark mussed hair and her little blue T-shirt with the ends folded over her hands so she wouldn’t scratch herself, a strange, extraterrestrial little creature, cross between radiant wood nymph and wrinkled gnome. Kate sat her up and burped her. Her jowly face and her patient, hunched back were suggestive of a grumpy old man’s.
Lila left her pink hat that night, like a girl leaving a barrette at a boy’s house after a hookup. Kate’s mother appeared early the next morning. Lila had not yet come for her feeding. “Where is she?” Kate’s mother asked.
Kate said, “In the nursery still.” She pointed at the hat. “She left her hat,” Kate said, and her mother laughed.
8
HEY BOUGHT A HOUSE in Fairfield, one stop farther south on the New Haven line, a three-bedroom, two-bath carriage house with low ceilings and latches on the doors. They bought a second car, that year’s Subaru wagon. Darcy ended it with Jesse, lover of Indian food, and left New York for a job at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. The recession of Colin’s hair continued, as did the expansion of the bald spot at the back of his head. Kate cut her long hair to her shoulders. She lost weight and her breasts shrank a size from nursing.
They moved into the new house when Lila was an infant. The first few years as parents were happy ones. Again, it seemed as though everything was going to be all right, that something troubling had been put aside. Colin came home in time for Lila’s bath and rolled up his sleeves and rinsed her hair with the removable showerhead and together they watched her tilt her face upward and stick out her tongue to catch the water, creases appearing in the plump back of her neck. Kate learned the song Colin had sung to Liam, the one about the man who lived in the moon. They read Lila board books, then picture books; they rolled her around the house in her high chair; they danced her in the air; they fed her puréed food out of tiny jars, jars Kate agonized over in the Stop & Shop: Would Lila prefer Beef with Carrots or Chicken ’n’ Dumplings (and were they dumplings? how could they be?) or Spaghetti Bolognese or Turkey with Rice?
THEY EMPLOYED A SITTER, Vanessa, to care for Lila at home. What they paid Vanessa was not all that much less than what Kate made. It therefore cost them about what it gave them for Kate to work, if one figured in the additional costs of dry cleaning, transportation, and the like. However, she factored in the money she would make after Lila went to school and the benefit to Lila’s self-esteem to have a mother who worked. Vanessa did Lila’s laundry and made the occasional run to Stop & Shop or BJ’s. A woman named Beatrice came once a week to clean the house.
“We can afford it,” Colin said. “She needs the money, right? We don’t have to do it all ourselves.”
Beatrice called for a comprehensive set of cleaning supplies and a special brand of vacuum. She required that the house be organized upon her arrival. When it wasn’t she squirreled stray clothes and toys and objects away in unfathomable places. She accepted cash only as payment. Somehow Colin became separated from the details of this domestic activity and others, and a certain subtle fatigue developed and interfered with Kate’s new, Lila-specific happiness. The fatigue was like a small rodent working its way through her brain. It was like a rat chewing away at all the essential connections that mobilized the labyrinthine gray matter of her mind. Lila of course brought about much of the fatigue, but the rest of it came from somewhere else, from something she and Colin had started on together and, with Lila, effected completely.
At the development office one afternoon she made a startling discovery. She had paused at the watercooler, where two coworkers, Joyce and Marcus, were discussing their respective law school ventures—hers in the past, his
imminent.
“My household was in an uproar,” Joyce said. “My kids were little then. Total chaos.”
Both women looked at Marcus.
He shrugged. “I don’t have a household.”
Then Kate saw that she had one: a household. She had not known until that very moment. Like a rare glandular disorder, it had plagued her covertly. The groceries and the diapers. The lawn and the gutters. The furnace and the cleaning supplies and the recycling and the trash collection and the dishwasher and the running to the cash machine for Beatrice. Where the extra money went and where important things got lost, the cause of Kate’s exhaustion and general dismay. Things to be bought and sorted and put and thrown or given away, a constant cascade of things tumbling in and out. She saw the secreted presence of it in her life, finally showing its face, like a troll in the attic. She saw the lack of it in Marcus’s bland and aggressive chin, and she heard its damage in Joyce’s flat, querulous tones.
Still, she kept her job at Yale Development a month past Lila’s second birthday. Then three things happened.
The first thing: Vanessa got engaged and informed Kate that she’d be moving to New Jersey. Vanessa had taken Lila to the beach with her own friends instead of to the playground, to the mall instead of museums, had fed Lila Happy Meals instead of the healthy lunches Kate assembled and left in Tupperware in the fridge, but Lila loved ’Nessa, as she called her, and ran to her in the mornings. Kate interviewed a divinity student who did not like for little girls to play with trucks, a sweet Jamaican woman who didn’t drive, and a charming former preschool teacher who wanted thirty dollars an hour.
The second thing: After the September 11 attacks, the Yale administration requested that the staff of the development office attend the Yale College graduation in the instance that an attack on the university and its freshly formed masters of the universe should occur, the idea being to surround the precious students with other, less valuable bodies. And as the development office was comprised mainly of women—young women in their twenties, pregnant women in their thirties, new mothers of babies and toddlers, forty-something mothers of teens—the strategy seemed, to Kate, decidedly ungallant of Yale. At the graduation, standing queasily in the hot sun with her arms crossed across tender breasts, she watched her father’s old colleagues. Jack Auerbach, the graduate student from the Q Club (now a tenured professor), spotted her and offered a brief, masculine wave. The older professors (ensconced in the academic nucleus she and the other female bodies ostensibly safeguarded) surreptitiously picked their hoary noses.
And the third thing: Robin.
At home that evening, while Colin put Lila to bed, Kate took a pregnancy test. Colin found her crying in front of a Seinfeld rerun.
“I’m exhausted,” she said. “And nauseous, all the damn time. And they threw us to the lions.”
“Ivy League a-holes,” Colin said. “Fuck ’em.”
So she gave notice, completed her responsibilities, packed up her desk, and, soon enough, found herself at home with two children.
· · ·
WITH ROBIN they became “a real family,” as one person, then another remarked. The addition of Robin disproportionately increased their value as a unit in society. Until then they’d seemed to Kate mobile and reassuringly marginal, like a couple of careless teenagers carting their child around to restaurants and dinners on Saturday nights, taking the days as they came. Kate sensed something depressingly conventional in the transition; and now, like her mother, she sat up late sewing on buttons and paying bills. Colin, in pursuit of professional advancement, spent longer hours at work. The first time around they’d done the baby thing together—as a team—the bedtime, the burping, the changing. But with Robin, Colin quickly established his distance, and therefore his masculinity—threatened now, in this house of females. Kate’s first night home from the hospital he said, “I don’t have to get up, do I?”
“No,” Kate said, startled. “I guess not.”
“I mean now that you’re not working. Right?”
So Kate woke alone to Robin’s cries and sleepily nursed her and grudgingly burped and changed her and got her back to sleep and felt lonely doing so but supposed (as she’d been told by her fellow mothers) that she was lucky to feel lonely at all. As if his participation in Lila’s infancy had been a favor to her—to Kate and, on some level, to Lila. And shamefully, she had felt it to be so, and even now, she felt anxiously and secretly that the responsibility and work of Lila belonged to her, even as she insisted on the logic of a shared effort.
She forgot relevant things at crucial times. She made a list of activities for a rainy day but forgot about it on rainy days, remembered it only on sunny ones. She forgot to apply sunscreen; she forgot to check her children for ticks. (She wrote a note in capital letters and taped it to a kitchen cabinet—CHECK FOR TICKS!!!) She forgot to pack Lila’s library book on library day. She bought snow pants on sale in April for the following winter, then forgot about them until she came across them while hanging up the new ones. Toast went half-buttered, milk turned on the counter, to-do lists came down only half-tackled—frantic multitudinous lists addressing sundry aspects of life. For example:
Laundry
Electrician
Rug pad
Barry: storms, chair, garage
Rx
Résumé?
Cancel subscription
Pap smear
100 items, groups of 10 (a homework assignment)
Clip nails
Permission slip
Schedule wax
Ask about dreams!
Suicide
“Suicide?” said Colin.
“It’s a group. I heard them on XMU.”
“Well, it looks like you have suicide on your to-do list.”
She considered going back to school, or to work, but put these thoughts away before even examining them thoroughly. They had enough money—not heaps, but enough—and therefore any professional effort on her part, with kids this small, felt nearly recreational.
She learned from NPR that a dream deficit existed—that because families no longer gathered at the breakfast table and discussed their dreams, the dreams went unrecalled, creating a psychological void. So, dutifully, in the car on the way to school, Kate would ask her girls, “What did you dream?”
Sometimes they remembered—sometimes they didn’t.
To get them going, she would relate her own dreams. Occasionally she remembered. Usually she made something up.
She moved from the house to school to the store as if through a series of tunnels, sometimes running into someone or other, sometimes an acquaintance busy with his or her own tunneling—but generally it seemed a clandestine business, this underground traveling, a myopic, itinerant concentration of self. Somewhere, in the center, a party was going on—Kate could hear it, smell it, and she turned corner after corner hoping to come across it but she never did. And, terrified by reports of cancer and girls getting their period at age eight, Kate drove from store to store in her tunnel collecting the correct defenses. The natural food co-op carried organic vegetables but no meat. The Stop & Shop carried the household essentials and organic produce, dried, jarred, and canned goods, but no organic juice boxes and organic or free-range chicken and meat only sometimes. The gourmet Italian market carried free-range chicken and meat but no organic vegetables and none of the household essentials.
However, regularly and amazingly, upon investigation of the fridge, there seemed to be nothing to eat.
The days ran sloppily together. An unwashed hamper of days.
There were occasions and distractions and routine. The girls were inevitable and wonderful but deeply problematic. They did adorable things like dance in diapers and underwear to Journey. Like hold earnest, private conversations with each other. Like offer their small faces in the dark for a kiss. They disrupted the night and consumed the day. Kate did what she could, taking demands and commands as they cropped up—in the car, in the bath
, at mealtimes—she considered a limited future in the evenings after she cooked dinner and cleared up and gave the girls a bath and put them to bed and went around the downstairs picking up, removing, if diligent and successful, all trace of them.
And things had changed after Lila, after the regulation six weeks and then some, after the first vaguely painful postbaby round. It will take a while, the books had told her. But stay positive! Do your Kegels! Certainly, the area had taken a beating. Pain and swelling ebbed to divulge dulled nerves and laxity. But one night in May, feeling somewhat like herself again, Kate rubbed Colin’s crotch through his boxer shorts, wriggled out of her underwear, and got onto her hands and knees. He got behind her and guided himself into her. He stroked her back. She flinched at his gentleness.
“Do that other thing,” she said.
“What thing?”
“You know.”
“Oh. That. Really?”
“You don’t want to?”
“No, sure I do.”
He hit her on the rear. He grabbed her hair. Then let go.
“This feels weird,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
He ran a hand over her hair and smoothed it over her shoulders. “We have a baby now. A baby girl.”
9
OBIN BEGAN PRESCHOOL, Lila kindergarten. Kate extended her hours at the Rose Center: the women’s and children’s shelter where she’d volunteered since leaving Yale Development. Monday and Wednesday mornings she got the girls ready for school and dropped them off on her way to Bridgeport. On Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays, she got the girls ready and Colin dropped them. Then the empty house affected the silence of a freshly abandoned crime scene, so while Kate drank coffee and ate toast she listened to Martha Stewart on the satellite radio. Tuesday was “Everyday Food” with Sandy Gluck. Thursday was “Cat Chat” with Tracie Hotchner. Kate didn’t own a cat and didn’t particularly like cats, but she listened anyway because she found the shows, the station, and the whole idea of Martha deeply reassuring. Divorce! Insider trading! Public disgrace! Jail! And yet on and on she went, dispensing ideas and advice, chuckling over Sandy’s segment on gorgeous gourds, validating domestic concerns both crucial and superfluous, developing an industry she’d practically invented. Kate now knew more about cats—their habits and temperament and physiology—than she’d ever imagined she might. There were amazing stories of cats’ heroism. One little girl’s cat stood outside her bedroom door and meowed as her stepfather sexually abused her. Another cat fetched a neighbor when its owner went into anaphylactic shock. Tracie spoke scathingly of people who abused and tortured their cats, of couples who became pregnant and threw their cats out onto the street. (And Kate recalled Moira and Alice, the Great Dane.) The people who ran the animal shelters were like wardens, a guest once said, in that they grew fond of their charges and then sometimes had to kill them—once again, a clear case of the privileged asking the less so to do their dirty work.
Games to Play After Dark Page 9
