Pregnant Brittany was sleeping and leaning against the covered radiator.
“Somebody—Cherise—will you please wake Brittany up? Give her a shake or something?”
“Aww, she’s tired.”
Kate walked over and snapped into the air by Brittany’s ear.
The pregnant ones, especially, often tried to sleep. The class was optional, Kate reminded them, and if they wanted to nap they should go upstairs and do that. Still they returned and leaned their heads against the wall or down on their arms on the desk, as if dreaming, precariously, that the information would seep into them regardless of attention paid, would infiltrate them like the polluted New England air, the exhaust and smoke and by-products of industry, and that all they needed to do was remain still and passively accept, let Kate do her thing the way their men had done theirs, leading to the girls’ and women’s current delicate conditions.
Brittany jerked awake. The women murmured. Kate tried to appear strict and schoolmarmish.
“Brittany, this hour isn’t going to help you if you sleep.”
“I know, Katie, I know.” The kid rubbed her eyes and nodded. She’d resided at the Rose Center for a couple of months last year. She’d moved out, but now, in the wake of another disastrous relationship, she was back.
“Have some coffee.”
“Coffee’s bad for the baby!”
“Oh, not so bad.”
“The book says!”
The shelter possessed a copy of What to Expect When You’re Expecting, a tome Kate had bought then discarded during her own first pregnancy, finding the book silly at best, misogynistic at worst.
“A cup or two is fine. A cup or two a day is fine. Hell, ten cups a day is probably fine.”
“I don’t like coffee,” Brittany said.
“Don’t listen to that stupid book. Listen to me. And get yourself some coffee.”
Brittany pursed her lips. Then, so challenged, she got up and fixed herself a cup of three parts cream and sugar, one part coffee.
After class Kate collected her books and notes and rubbed off the dry-erase board. She turned to see Eva at the snack table, biting into a roll. She had lovely teeth, Kate noted.
“You settling in okay?” Kate asked.
Eva started and coughed over her pastry.
A list of the stages these women allegedly experienced hung on the office bulletin board, right below a warning letter from Public Works:
Stage 1) Running Scared (She jumps at the doorbell or the phone.)
Stage 2) Depression (With no immediate crisis to filter emotions, she experiences loneliness and grief. She considers returning to her abuser.)
Stage 3) Moving On (She makes constructive decisions and gets on with her life.)
“Sorry,” Kate said. She touched her hand lightly to Eva’s shoulder. She wished she could wipe the ugly markings from the girl’s face.
“Yes, I like it,” Eva said. “Bed is comfortable. People nice.”
The girls and women slept and napped in several large rooms in an arrangement that recalled the Madeline series, the twelve little girls in two straight lines (on excursions, breaking bread, brushing teeth, going to bed). The kids shared beds or got their own next to their mothers. Cribs occupied the north wall. Kate had donated the girls’ old one and collected others from Brooke and Mave and the like. Books, as well as toys, abounded, and while the books were not partaken of quite as much as the common room television, sometimes, curled up in bed in their dormitory in the daytime, the women read to their kids. Sometimes a group would hang around the dorm together, the kids off playing—then domestic battles were described and raunchy stories were told.
Eva chewed and covered her mouth politely. “I am supposed to be on diet.”
“These aren’t so bad.”
She could say something about how Eva didn’t need to be on a diet, but if it helped the kid to worry about her weight, if it provided a distraction, so be it.
“Yes?” Tears jumped into Eva’s black eye and her good one. “It is so, so good.”
· · ·
AT TWO-THIRTY Kate picked up a coffee for herself and a bagel for the kids and got back on the highway. She found a Springsteen song on the radio—a song from The River, a song about driving—and turned it up. In his songs the men were always driving. The story concerned the man, the person behind the wheel, and the women just ran across porches or rode shotgun. But Kate felt included by the songs anyway. She drove to Robin’s preschool, then to Lila’s kindergarten classroom. Lila thrust toward Kate a ceramic dragonlike creature with an endearingly gloomy expression on its long, crooked, polka-dotted face. Kate took it, admiring, exclaiming, looked into its face, turned it this way and that. “I love it, baby girl. Does it have a name?”
“Love Monster.” Lila skipped ahead.
“Fabulous.”
“Can we get our costumes today?”
“Not today. Soon, though.”
“I’m going to be a witch. A witch with a green face.”
“I thought you were going to be a fairy.”
“I changed my mind.”
“What are you going to be, Rob? Still a dragon?”
“Nothing!”
When they reached the car, Robin refused to attach her seat belt. Kate reached in—leaning, straining—and, holding her child down in the booster, forced on the belt. Robin screamed, “Pinch you!” She pinched Kate’s arms, already riddled with tiny bruises.
“Time out for that,” Kate prescribed, wearily. “Time out the second we get home.”
The pediatrician had recommended 1-2-3 Magic, a popular book on disciplining children. Kate had read it cover to cover, then applied the method as prescribed. Colin had glanced through the book and also taken up the method, but he’d bastardized it, Kate felt—giving them “three” immediately, dropping the matter after “two” though the bad behavior persisted—until the system became compromised and was no longer effective. Since last spring, Robin’s behavior had taken a particularly dreadful turn and Kate had reinstalled time-outs, but the newer, compromised version. Now she too went straight to the time-out, skipping the warnings but applying the formula for punishment: a minute in exile for each year of the child’s age.
Over the summer the playroom door had stuck when closed, so Kate could essentially trap Robin in that room. Now, as the atmosphere cooled and dried, the wood shrank under its influence and Robin was able to open the door and come shrieking out, rendering Kate impotent and unable to administer punishment unless she stood there, holding the door closed, for the full agonizing four minutes. On one of her multitudinous lists were instructions to call a locksmith.
She held her daughter down and clicked the seat belt closed again. There was something demeaning about the ducking in and ducking out, the bending and the stooping. Maybe here lay the appeal of the SUV: The slight lift, the reaching up instead of down to buckle the child rid the act of some of its struggle, its tedium, and its degradation. Extracting herself from the backseat, she whacked her head on the metal doorframe. She cursed and held her head. “Are you okay, Mommy?” Lila leaned anxiously forward to investigate.
“Thanks, baby girl. I’m okay.”
She got into the driver’s seat.
Lila leaned back and buckled herself up, gazing warily at her naughty sister. Kate started the engine. Something clicked behind her.
“Mommy, Robin took her seat belt off again.”
“Goddamn it.”
“She has it off.”
“Put your belt back on, Robin.”
“No, I’m not going to do that any day.”
“Robin. Do you want two time-outs?”
“Hmpfh.”
Oh, she could slap the girl silly!
“Robin, you know Mommy will get arrested. Don’t you? The police will arrest Mommy and put her in jail.”
“What kind of jail?” Lila asked.
Kate turned to wink at her older daughter. Lila nodded, unsure.
“I want you to put it on,” Robin said.
“I just did. Twice. You put it back on yourself.”
“I’ll do it,” Lila said.
“No. I want Mommy to do it.”
“Fine. Fine fine fine fine fine.” Kate got out, slammed her door shut, opened Robin’s, reattached the seat belt. She got back in and slammed the door again. Another click. She began to breathe rapidly. Heat assaulted her face and neck. A vision surged up—of shaking Robin, of whacking her across the face—an urge toward something that felt, in this demented moment, like justice.
“Do not,” she said. “Do not tell me that was your seat belt.”
“She took it off, Mommy!” Lila cried. “She took it off again!”
Kate pulled out and drove.
“Mommy, Mommy! Her seat belt’s off!”
“Thank you, Lila, honey. You know what, though? That’s her problem now.”
“Oh, Mommy! She needs it; she needs it on!”
“Oh, Lila, you’re so sweet.” She pulled over. “Robin, do you know that if we get into a car accident you will be killed?”
Silence.
“You will be killed; you will die. Die!”
More silence, then scuffling sounds. Kate turned off the engine.
“She’s trying to put it on,” Lila said.
“Can you help her, sweetie? Can you?”
“Yes, I can. I will.” More sounds. “There.” Lila whispered tenderly to her sister, “There you go, just like that.”
They sat for a moment by the side of the road, all three troubled and spent. Then, “Okay,” Kate said. She turned the key in the ignition.
Finding Black Rock Avenue congested, she detoured through the arts district. They drove down Linden Street. A sculpture had been installed outside the music school: a zigzag steel construction topped by a glowing, metallic red ball.
The girls noticed it and clamored for it. “Can we stop, Mommy?” Lila asked.
“Not today.”
“When?”
“Some other day.”
“You always say that about stuff.”
“I want to touch it!” Robin pounded on the back of Kate’s seat.
Kate experienced an illogical fury at the perpetrators of the installation. “There’s no parking right now. It’s just not a good place to pull over.”
“But—”
“Shut up!” Kate shrieked.
At home, she ushered and coaxed them out of the car. She unloaded two backpacks, two drippy lunch bags, several days’ worth of art projects, school notices, her purse, tossed-off jackets, a fork, her stainless-steel coffee cup, and Love Monster, which she handed to Lila. “Carry this, please.” Then, “Come on,” she said to Robin. She talked them up the back steps and into the house. “Move your bodies, up the steps.”
How much longer could she continue, could she stand it: the serving and directing, the resulting, absurd sense of abuse, the constant tiny negotiations of space? On the landing, as Kate dropped the stuff and bent over to collect her keys from her purse, Robin kicked her in the behind.
“Time-out,” she said. As she said it, she remembered the earlier sentence. “Time-out for you.”
She punted it all inside—the backpacks, the lunch packs, the notices, the jackets, the art—and carried Robin, screaming and struggling, to the playroom. She slammed the door and ran away in the hopes it might hold this time. But she heard Robin’s feet on the stairs, her voice. “You stinky girl! Mommy, you’re a stinky girl!”
Kate took Lila’s hand and led her elder daughter to the master bathroom. She locked the door and they sat against it, their knees up.
“Why are we hiding?”
“If she won’t take a time-out, we’ll take one from her.”
Lila nodded. A seriousness and calm set over her face, that of a difficult justice implemented.
“I’m mean, aren’t I?”
“No, Mommy.” Lila leaned her head on Kate’s shoulder. “You’re the best mommy.”
Robin sniffed them out. She banged on the door, pulled and twisted at the knob. “Be nice to me!” she cried. “Mommy, be nice to me!”
Kate took her own arm skin between her fingers and pinched it. The Valeries scraped at her heart. Be nice to her, they said. Four times Kate counted to sixty. Lila counted also. When Kate opened the door, onto Robin, onto the light, Robin held a board book: Owl Babies. Her mouth turned down in a cry; her nose receded and became small. She stretched out her arms. Kate picked her up. Robin’s short muscular legs arched in preparation and seized Kate’s waist.
Kate found a place for Love Monster on the pantry shelf alongside the sock puppets, the wooden ships, the papier-mâché cat and the cardboard-towel-tube dog. She brought the satellite radio into the bedroom and for the remainder of the afternoon, in relative peace, they listened to the Disney station and read books and played cards on the bed. At six Kate, Lila, and Robin sat at the kitchen table while the girls ate their dinner (fish fingers, mashed potatoes, and canned peas). Kate opened and sampled a bottle of South African merlot.
“Plates to the sink, guys!” she cried.
Then upstairs for a bath. Naked and smooth as seals, their wet dark hair clinging to their biggish heads, the girls appeared younger, babyish—their bodies plumper, their eyes and cheeks rounder, their skin brand-spanking-new. Kate shampooed their hair and washed behind their ears. She loved it, loved touching them, washing them, sliding soapy hands over their slick skin; she experienced an almost erotic pleasure in this handling of someone smaller and softer than she. She admired their bald little vaginas, so frank and adorable, so much personality in those neat cleft triangles! Robin’s squat and short, Lila’s longer and somehow thoughtful-looking.
She rinsed their hair. Both tilted their heads back; both stuck their tongues out, catching the water.
Later, the girls in bed and asleep, Kate stretched out on the sofa and put her feet in Colin’s lap.
“Cherry’s taking my class,” she told him.
“The dyke?”
“Oh, Colin. Yes.”
“ ‘Dyke’ is okay these days.”
“She thinks that the girlfriend freaked out because her father died. That Louise—Louise?—is transferring her father’s violence onto Cherry.”
“Right. Maybe it’s not because of her father, though, per se. Or maybe yes, but genetic rather than behavioral—I mean, nature over nurture. So she’s violent all on her own, not because of the father.”
“Doubt it.”
“For once, just once, can we not blame men for all the problems of the world? What about that other guy, with the tire iron?”
“You have to admit that usually—”
“Yeah, but in this case, let’s say it is nurture over nature then. What about the abusive men who were beaten up by their fathers? Why can’t we let them off the hook? I mean, not that anyone should be let off the hook, but … when we hear about a man beating up a woman we say, ‘What a bastard,’ not, ‘Well, he must have had an abusive father.’ ”
“Well, I’m sure he did. I’m sure they all did!”
“But when a woman does it you rush to trace the behavior back to a man and stop when you get there.”
“Well … okay. Look. I see what I see, that’s all.”
He squeezed her feet and forwarded through the commercials to the next segment of ER.
“Amazing this show is still going,” she said. “It’s, like, prehistoric.”
He paused the screen. “So what happened today?”
A report, was that what he wanted? She curled her toes away from his fingers. How she hated the part of her job that involved the dutiful relaying of the day, the girls’ moods and activities and doings.
But then she wanted, of course, to tell him, to tell him everything, or at least everything good, to share with him the girls in their bath and the adorableness of Love Monster!
“Robin had a tantrum. We played cards. Lila brought home an art project. You should ch
eck it out. In the pantry.”
“Uh-huh. What else?”
Was that not enough? What did he want from her?
“Well, that’s it.”
He nodded and pressed play. A gory operation ensued.
“Rub my feet, will you?”
He dug his thumbs into the tender spot above her heel.
“Oh … that feels nice.”
“Maybe all this is normal,” he said.
“You mean maybe all married couples are secretly miserable?”
“Are you miserable?”
“Maybe. Possibly. Not sure.”
He massaged vigorously. “Me neither.”
“Everyone pretends to be so happy. Maybe they are happy.”
“Who knows.”
“You know what I was thinking about before? That J. D. Salinger story, ‘Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut.’ I think just because of Brooke, you know, two women talking. In Connecticut. I mean, Brooke and I of course were having coffee, not martinis or whatever. I don’t think she even drinks.”
“She’s constantly pregnant.”
“Like Brooke and I would ever have that conversation anyway. The dead lover-soldier. The boss, the affair. The little girl, the imaginary friend.”
“The brass ring.”
“No. That’s The Catcher in the Rye. Anyway, that Uncle Wiggily story always appealed to me so much, when I was younger, I mean. Why? They’re so unhappy, those two. But I love how they sit around having drinks all day, and the storm, and the way the girl replaces the dead imaginary boyfriend with a new imaginary boyfriend, just the way her mom replaced the man she loved with the girl’s father. What’s his name? Begins with an L. I’m not unhappy like that but I wish I were. It’s like, I want to be. Is that weird?”
“Yes.” He held the remote in one hand expectantly. With the other he rubbed her right ankle.
“Go ahead.”
He pressed play.
They finished ER. Kate made lunches for the next day and Colin shut out the lights and they went upstairs. He checked in on the girls before Kate did, as always.
“What are they doing?” she asked him.
She would ask and he would make something up. This had been their ritual since Lila’s infancy.
Games to Play After Dark Page 14
