“Act confident. Be strong.”
“But what do I do? When they run out?”
“Walk them back.”
“That’s what I do!”
“Even if you have to do it one hundred times.”
“Really? That seems … I don’t know. Wrong.”
“It’s not easy. For a while I had to hold Taylor down in her bed.”
Taylor was Lila’s age. “Hold her down?”
“That’s right. In her bed.”
“Wow.”
“The rule is, they’re in bed. They don’t have to sleep so long as they stay in bed.”
“That’s a good rule.”
“Madison reads. He loves Harry Potter, of course. Taylor too. She reads. Now it’s fine. She stays in bed. Maybe you feel like it’s selfish, wanting them to go to bed, but it’s not. They need it. They need the sleep, and you and Colin need your time together. When we moved to this house, Madison ran out of his room again and again and again. So I set up camp outside his room. I had dinner in his bathroom for a week. When he tried to run out, I’d hold the door shut. For a week, dinner on the bathroom floor.”
“Jeez.”
Maybe if the kids slept, she would be able to pull herself together, lose the insidious sense of time constantly running out. Colin would make a killing and she would want him the way she once had, without inhibition and grudges. She knew one had nothing to do with the other, but a goal felt useful, generative. She could see it. She could! A happy future, children who slept through the night!
“So maybe,” said Kate, “maybe I should put a lock on the door. Or something.”
“A lock?”
“So they don’t run out. So, I don’t know, I don’t have to stand there, holding the door shut. In the middle of the night. And also, I can’t hold both doors closed at once.”
“Lock them in their rooms.” Brooke sipped her coffee and put it down. “No.”
“But—”
Brooke held up a hand. She gazed down at her coffee, as if receiving insight from its lovely chemistry of tastes. “You do not lock them in their rooms. Ever. If you do that, which again you shouldn’t ever do, they will think of their room as a bad place, somewhere they don’t want to be. The room is supposed to be a happy place.”
“But—you said you held Taylor down in her bed.”
“That’s different,” Brooke said, somehow knowing. “Don’t you see how it’s different?”
Kate didn’t. She crumbled a bit of tea cake between her thumb and index finger. It was only ten-thirty in the morning and already she had shot down her daughter’s special dream of world fame and contemplated jailing her children in their rooms. Confined to bed, confined to room, what was the difference? But if Brooke said it was different it must be so. Kate wanted to understand—she wanted to know without being told. She could follow directions and revise and correct but she wanted to know the formulas and to understand them, their application in various situations and which ones to use when.
“Have you guys seen a therapist?” Brooke asked. “You and Colin?”
“No—about the sleeping? The kids?”
“You might want to think about it. When parents are stressed out the kids pick up on it. Which is probably, ironically, making the whole sleeping thing worse.”
“Hmm.”
Of course, the bedtime struggles were beside the point.
“Do you two do date night?”
“We do fight night. Every Saturday. After the kids are finally in bed we order takeout and fight.”
“Trey and I go out to a movie or dinner or an art opening or something every Friday.”
“We used to see movies. We used to go into the city. Not since the kids.”
“You should. You should get a sitter and get out. You have to get away from the little ones once in a while, the two of you together.”
“Well, that’s what they say, but …”
“You might surprise yourself.”
“A surprise would be nice.”
“We went.”
“Where, to the city?”
“No, to therapy.”
“You and Trey?”
“Yup. After Taylor. I stopped wanting to sleep with him.”
“Well. That’s normal. Especially after a baby.” Was it? “I think the guys just really need to get over it.”
“So bad for the marriage, though. I mean, a man is entitled to have sex with his wife, right? And if you’re not enjoying it, well, he can tell. I know it can be hard to get in the mood. But you can’t just shut him out sexually.”
“No?”
“No.”
“You mean sex is part of the deal.”
“No, I mean, well … yes.”
“Did it help? The therapy?”
“It did. It helped me feel … that I had some control, I guess, so I didn’t have to control Trey by withholding sex.”
“Is that how he felt? That you were trying to control him?”
“Well, I was.”
“Hmm.” Kate stood and transported her cup and plate to the sink. She opened the dishwasher.
“Oh, don’t do that. I’ll do that.”
“You sure?”
“Leave it.”
“Thanks so much, Brooke. I should probably get going.”
“I’ll give you the number. Just so you have it.” Brooke wrote on a pink Post-it.
“One more thing to do.” Kate took the Post-it anyway.
“Don’t feel obliged. You have the number if you want it.”
“I know. Thanks.” She looked at Brooke’s tidy handwriting. “I’ll probably leave this in my car and find it in a year.”
But she folded the Post-it into a rectangle and stuck it in her wallet. Driving home, she felt buoyed, connected. Brooke and Trey had been to therapy. Mave kept paintings in her basement. If Kate wanted, she could make ceramic plates with the girls’ handprints and hang them on her kitchen wall. Then all might be well.
On arrival home, however, disorder prevailed. There it was—the dried-out Play-Doh, the Lincoln Logs, the lipstick-smeared Ariel head, the Woodkins, the Webkinz, the puzzle pieces, the stuffed animals that surely screwed and reproduced in their baskets, the cottage-cheese cup overturned on the rug. Nothing had shifted since she’d left in the clean crisp light of early morning. She felt almost let down, as if she’d expected the rooms to clean and organize themselves in her absence. Last year Beatrice had moved away and now they employed Portia, who demanded less preparatory organization, but still, how could the poor woman work in such conditions?
That night, after putting the girls to bed, after Kate had eaten a sandwich standing at the kitchen counter and Colin had eaten a larger version of the same sandwich in front of the Patriots game, she began, listlessly, to pick up.
“What we should do here,” she said, “is no more birthday parties.”
“Birthday parties?”
“You know. Kids’ birthday parties. The Children’s Museum. Creative Arts, Gymboree.”
“It’s nice for kids to see their friends,” he said, somewhat piously.
But he got up off the couch and began to help her. He tossed Lincoln Logs into a basket. He tossed the Woodkins in after, ignoring the plastic organizing sheath. Then he paused in his efforts, picked the week-old New York Times sports section pages she’d used for crafts off the floor, and started to read an article.
“The presents,” she said. “The cake. The pizza. The party bags. The boring other parents. The inevitable, eventual barfing. They invite us and we invite them and the toys and the junk …”
“I think a kid should have a birthday party,” Colin said. He rustled the newspaper and folded it.
“Well. Why don’t you plan Robin’s?”
He tossed the paper askew onto the coffee table, just cleared of children’s toys.
“Yeah. Okay,” he said. He walked away, toward the kitchen.
“So—you’ll plan Robin’s party? Is that what you’r
e saying?” she called after his broad, indifferent back, his smooth-shaven neck, his thinning crown. She rounded the corner into the kitchen.
“Fine.” He opened a sleeve of chocolate-chip cookies and held it out to her. “No big deal.”
“Oh,” she said grimly, taking a cookie, “you’ll see. You’ll see it all. It’s not over when it’s over, you know. Then you still have the thank-you notes.”
“Book the museum, get a cake from Stop & Shop, call it a day. Forget the notes.”
“You can’t do that!”
“You want ’em, you write ’em.”
“But why is it always us!” she cried. “The women! Why do we have to do it!”
“Because chicks like that stuff. You included.”
“Do not.”
“Then what’s up with the Martha Stewart habit?”
She turned away and poured herself more wine. “I read Martha for the recipes.”
“Kate. I said I’d do it.”
“Yes, but—so, you’re doing me this big favor.”
“No favors. I don’t mind.”
“You’re not going to do it,” she said. “You’re going to wait till the last minute and then you’re not going to do it.”
He folded up the cookies and returned them to the cabinet and went back to the game. She followed him.
“So you’re not going to help me after all,” she said. She indicated the still-disheveled downstairs.
He shifted his pose and again fixed his eyes on the screen. “Let’s do it later.”
“When?”
“Tomorrow or something?”
“Okay. But will you remind me? I need you to initiate it, okay?” She moved in order to more completely block the game. “I can’t ask you again. I don’t want to be that person.”
“It’s the Patriots. Please.”
“What if you don’t? Remind me? Then what?”
“Then Beatrice will do it or something.”
Colin refused to remember the subtleties of the respective housekeepers’ names, as if he could not be expected to absorb a matter so trivial; and as if his insistence on his own ignorance, his failure to keep track, further and necessarily emphasized his superior status in the life of the household.
“There are just too many toys,” Kate said.
“So get rid of them. Tell the girls to choose ten things they really want—”
“Ten! Look at all this stuff!”
“—or fifteen or twenty and we’ll give the rest away.”
“We’ll give it away? Okay. Let’s see. So I put all the little bits and pieces together and clean the sticky off. But who wants it?”
“Take them to work with you,” Colin said reasonably. “Take them to the ladies at the center.”
This actually seemed like a good plan.
But she picked up the Ariel head. “The parties, the presents, all the plastic crap. Remember Santa Comes to Little House? Mr. Edwards? Swimming the creek with the presents on his head? One cake. One penny. One tin cup.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Never mind.” She stepped away from the football and returned to the living room and began to sort the toys into four piles: miscellaneous, throw out, give away, put away. She attempted to put companion objects together in their rightful manner. Into the garbage bag went toast crusts, stray Cheerios, a cracked sippy cup, doll parts, torn playing cards, a Tupperware container that had once held water for paint—she should recycle it she but couldn’t face it, not right now—she could not face one more task.
Colin appeared in the doorframe. “Okay,” he said. “Here I am. Jets thirty-eight, Patriots thirty-one.”
Warm air blew from a vent. On the coffee table, the newspaper crackled where he’d left it. She spotted it and seized it. “Oh, you’re more effing trouble than you’re worth!”
He turned around and shut off the television and headed upstairs.
“I’m sorry,” she called after him. “Colin, I’m sorry; I didn’t mean that.”
He disappeared into their bedroom.
She neatened the kitchen and prepped the coffee and assembled the girls’ lunches. Then she picked up a vase that had been sitting by the side of the pantry sink for a month, since a late-summer cookout—not a wedding vase, not valuable, just one that had been delivered, with flowers, perhaps when Lila was born. She had not yet found the energy to clean it and put it away. It waited, gourd-shaped, for handling. Residual fauna hung inside and soft green mold coated the bottom.
She lifted it and smashed it in the sink.
SHE SAT UP in the middle of the night.
“We should see somebody, Colin,” she said.
“Huh?”
“A counselor. We should see a marriage counselor. Brooke and Trey did it. Brooke gave me a number.”
“ ’S too late,” he said drowsily.
The Valeries woke and pushed against her slumbering organs, his words reaching them. They dug their nails into her liver.
“No, Colin. Please don’t say that. If you say it you’ll make it true.”
“Kate …”
“You make your own reality. Things don’t have to be like this.”
“Just let me sleep.”
She slept and dreamed of a whole other room in the house, a room that existed in a parallel universe only she could enter. The room sucked energy from the rest of the house and accumulated filth that contaminated the communal air. The vents needed cleaning, the windows excavating. Bracken and bird excrement and wasps’ nests filled that elusive spot between storm and pane. Dust rolled wraithlike along baseboards. Busy spiders hung from beams, and cracks extended where molding died into the plaster. There was something rotting in that room, something someone had partaken of and forgotten to put away. Someone had stored pad thai under the bed. Someone had left plates of pasta below sheaves of unpaid bills and unsorted bank statements—spaghetti and sauce growing green like houseplants. Everything Kate had ever lost was in that room: every sock, every earring, every beloved object—a bracelet given to her by her bridesmaids, Lila’s first clipped curl, an ironically signed copy of her father’s last book. There could be found the dark-eyed elf babies her children had once been. Her love for Colin was in that room as well. Here the Valeries loafed and lingered, depressed and muted by domesticity, bickering and gaining weight, grubby and grumpy in ill-fitting tunics, their hair gone to nests.
And unloved objects also filled the room: every misplaced toy, every last whatsit and whosit, every puzzle piece. Every manual to every confounding appliance and electronic device. These items magnetized and merged to create hybrid creatures that claimed her as their manufacturer, her neglect having given them life. They chattered horribly among themselves of her daily doings and at night slunk into her bedroom and sat on her face.
She woke suddenly in the hopeful light of morning.
“Not a sound from them,” Colin said. He stared at the ceiling, his arms crossed behind his neck.
“They were exhausted.”
“Aren’t we all. Can’t sleep in, though.”
“Me neither.”
She got up and went down to the kitchen and poured two mugs of coffee. She carried the mugs upstairs and put one on Colin’s bedside table.
She said, “If it’s too late now, well, when wasn’t it?”
“What?”
“You don’t remember?”
“Yeah, okay.”
“Okay what?”
He leaned up against one of the big pillows and sipped the coffee. “The idea bothers me. But we could. See someone.”
“Really?” She shifted to her side, facing him, and rested her head on her hand. “That’s good. I think it might be good. Maybe we just need a little help.”
“But what’s wrong? What do we need help with? I’m not sure I understand.”
“I don’t either. But something is, right? Something feels wrong. Something we might be able to figure out.” She reached over and slipped a hand under
his shirt and rubbed his abdomen. “I don’t know, maybe—”
He rolled on top of her. She parted her knees. Aroused for once.
“Do it quick,” she said. “The girls. It’s almost seven.”
She grabbed a pillow and maneuvered it under her behind. Sweat dripped from his shoulders onto hers. His breath, coffee-scented, covered her face.
She clutched his biceps. “Oh, Colin. That feels good.”
He finished fast. As directed. She heard the soft bump of the girls’ bedroom door and two sets of running feet. She watched the knob of her own closed door begin to twist frantically. The small hands pushed and grabbed and the knob expressed their struggle. Outside a straggling bird twittered in the spare branches of a copper beech. The door opened and the girls fell over each other into the room. They ran to Kate’s side of the bed. She caught Robin under her armpits and hauled her up: a small fish. Then Lila, a bigger fish. She kissed their faces all over—their little noses, their soft full cheeks, their pliable mouths. She pulled them lecherously close to her. Colin got up and headed for the bathroom. Kate heard his urine hitting the water.
Robin pushed at Kate’s shoulder. “Get up. You smelly bed sleeper.”
“Ouch, baby. Don’t push Mommy.”
Robin pushed her again, harder.
“Robin. It’s not nice.” She slid her hand down the girl’s back. Water rushed through walls as Colin started the shower.
Lila grabbed The Marvelous Land of Oz from Kate’s night-stand and curled up on the sex pillow and began to read. Robin crawled under the bed and surfaced with a dusty coconut shell. Once the shell had contained coconut sorbet, served to Robin at their favorite local restaurant, and the girls had insisted on taking the shell home and rinsing it and keeping it. Now it held rotten petals gathered from the park. Robin picked the petals one by one from the shell and inserted them into Kate’s underpants (reclaimed and faintly damp). Colin returned from the bathroom in a towel and watched, curiously.
“You’re letting her do that?” he said.
“I guess I am.”
“Huh.” He bent from his waist to touch his toes. His joints cracked. His bald spot glared balefully at her, a dull stubborn eye. Robin sang at her task. “Downstairs, kids,” he said. He gathered them up, one under each arm, and carried them away. Kate visited the bathroom. When she sat, petals fell from her crotch.
Games to Play After Dark Page 11
