by Mary F. Pols
I went back into my room. Dolan was asleep in his bassinet, his arms above his head. He had resisted being swaddled from the very beginning, which seemed odd for a child who was content to stay in the womb for an extra eleven days. I still wasn’t sure who he looked like, beyond my mother’s chin dimple and blue eyes, but when he wasn’t red-faced and crying, he was a lovely baby. I gingerly got back into bed, turned out the light, and tried to nest. I could hear the TV in the other room. I can’t stand the sound of someone else’s TV shows. I slid sideways off the bed and went out to glare at them and tell them to turn it down. A half hour passed. No ginger ale. Another half hour passed. No soup. No ice pack. I gave them ten more minutes and then stormed out into the living room, smacking the palm of my left hand with the back of my right hand.
“I said I needed soup,” I said. “I said I needed an ice pack.” They both looked blank, dopey, and then a little afraid. “I am sick. I have a breast infection. I have a temperature of 103.”
There are few things more pathetic than feeling as though you have to remind people to feel sorry for you. But I felt validated the next day when the nurse practitioner opened up my paper gown and grimaced.
“This is bad,” she said. “Normally I’d try to push out the blockage or get you to pump it out, but this is all over one breast and in half the other. You need antibiotics.”
God, was breast-feeding worth all this trouble? Now I had to worry about the poor baby getting antibiotics in his milk. Sure, the doctors said it wouldn’t hurt him, but what else are they going to say? Alison had quit breast-feeding when she got mastitis, and look at Katy—she was fine. Except for being an insomniac stoner.
When we picked Matt up at the BART station that afternoon, I told him that I was planning to quit breast-feeding. He still didn’t have a car, or the money or inclination to get one anytime soon. It was a 1.3-mile walk from my place to the station, half of it pleasant, half of it ugly, industrial, and not very safe. From there he could be at work in twenty minutes or at his place in the Upper Haight in another twenty. I was contemplating making him walk back and forth to the station, but I hadn’t quite gotten there yet.
“Well, if that’s what you want, then go ahead and quit,” he said. “I know you wanted to do it for the whole first year, but I can see how hard it is.”
He was so reasonable.
“I’ll wait and see how I feel tomorrow,” I said. “Maybe after the antibiotics kick in I won’t want to quit.”
Two days later, I felt sufficiently better to take Katy on a driving tour of the Bay Area. She was leaving the next day, and I wanted her to see something of California before she left. This was her spring break, after all.
“I wonder,” she said as we neared the end of our loop of the Bay Area’s prime tourist spots, “whether there’s anywhere in Berkeley where we could just buy a little pot? Just a really small amount.”
I turned to look at her. I had a newborn sleeping in the back, a gash in my gut, and I was fighting a bacterial infection of the breast. Technically I was still supposed to be avoiding driving. Did my niece seriously want me to take her someplace to buy drugs on the street? She met my gaze, her green-gray eyes guileless. She looked fourteen. Like a fair version of Christina Ricci, pale and petite and curvy, with a sweet moon face.
I turned back to the crowded freeway. “No, Kate,” I said.
“Okay,” she said.
Someone said to me later that Katy and Matt seemed to be the perfect storm of incompetence. I had to laugh, because it was true. I wasn’t resentful, though. If she was the nor’easter and he was the hurricane blowing up from the Bahamas, I suppose I was realizing I had to be the lighthouse—the stability on the rocks. I had always been able to nurture in spurts; I could bring friends soup if they were sick and I could hold their crying babies. I’d be good in a mastitis crisis. But I’d always been able to go home after my fit of nursemaiding to lie around on my own couch and, like Katy and Matt, drink wine and watch television and forget about responsibility. It was fitting then, as I moved into this permanent role of nurturer, to have to fend for myself to a certain extent. That, as almost any mother would tell you, is part of the job. Those two weeks were a rite of passage, an introduction to what lay ahead.
CHAPTER 10
A Gift Horse
DOLAN HAD BEEN the beneficiary of great generosity even before he was born. Liza and Hugh had practically emptied their garage into the trunk of my car: a bassinet, two kinds of strollers, and a white wicker crib. Kir had come by with two enormous boxes full of hand-me-downs in great condition—clothes, toys, even extra diapers. Then there were the gifts, which seemed to arrive every day in the last month of my pregnancy and came from people I barely knew or had never even met. Women at work kept turning up at my desk with offerings: outfits, stuffed animals, soft blankets. Adrian, my gruff big brother, sent me a check for $1,000. Matt’s cousins sent a Baltimore Orioles uniform for the baby. His grandmother, about to become a great-grandmother, sent one of those portable cribs, better known in twenty-first-century parental parlance as a pack-and-play.
It was overwhelmingly kind of everyone and I loved it. Until the second pack-and-play arrived.
Matt had mentioned a couple of weeks before Dolan was born that some “girl” (I had been trying to get Matt to say “woman” but hadn’t made much headway) who hung around Finnegan’s Wake and regularly came to the bar team’s softball games had expressed a desire to get Dolan a gift. She’d asked if I was registered anywhere.
“It’s weird,” he said. “I don’t know why she wants to get him something.”
“People are incredibly nice,” I said. I was holding paint chips up to the wall in the baby’s bedroom. “The receptionist at the paper gave me a blanket the other day. What do you think, is Bahamian Blue just too freaking bright?”
“It’s pretty bright,” he said. “It just seems strange.”
“How about this one? Cool Blue?” I said. “I think I like it more. Just say we’re not registered anywhere and there’s no need to get anything, but an outfit is always welcome.”
At the time, I was too busy nesting to dwell on the conversation. The girl probably had a crush on Matt, which seemed misplaced, given that he was about to have a baby, but whatever. Then one night, right after Katy had gone home, Matt called from San Francisco. I was sitting on the couch, Dolan asleep at my breast. He sounded excited.
“So she, this girl, just dropped off all of this stuff,” he said. “You wouldn’t believe this crap. Another pack-and-play—and it looks like a nice one—and this huge box of diapers, and all of these little clothes hangers and things to separate out his clothes by age. It’s like $200 worth of stuff.”
He was laughing. I was suddenly very alert. I was still puffy from the C-section, although my ankles were almost back to their normal size.
“Why is this girl buying you all of this expensive equipment?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I think she just has a lot of money.”
“Have you been flirting with her or something, Matt?”
“No,” he said vehemently. “I don’t even talk to her. She’s always asking if I want to go get a drink or something, but I barely know her.”
I’ve been with some liars, including two of epic proportions. From them I learned women may be irrational creatures, but they simply do not have irrational interests in men. If they are hanging around, if they are crank-calling your house, if they frequent the same places as the man you’re with, then something—or rather someone—has led them to believe that the pursuit is worth it. I was a solid decade past being deluded by any man, and Matt, a relative innocent in matters of the heart, was no match for me. I let my suspicions curdle for a few days. Then one night he came over to help with Dolan’s first bath, an event we were both dreading. All the books said babies don’t like to be naked. Naked and wet wasn’t going to be an improvement. But Dolan’s umbilical cord had fallen off and his circumcision was sufficiently healed,
so it was time.
“Okay, hand him to me,” I said. I was kneeling next to a big plastic baby tub, molded so that you could prop the baby up in it. Matt had Dolan in his arms, diaper-free, a pretty pink boy lying rather languidly on a blanket. He was blinking up at his father.
“I don’t think he’s going to like it,” Matt said. “That tub looks so hard.”
“I know,” I said. “But we’ve got to wash him. I’m supposed to take him in for a checkup tomorrow and I can’t bring him in dirty. My friend Susan told me that she was afraid to wash her son for the first month and her pediatrician scolded her for it. They showed her all the dirt on his neck.”
“Okay,” Matt said. “Here goes.”
He held Dolan out to me gingerly and I took him, just as gingerly. As soon as I lowered the baby into the tub, he started crying. I scooped lukewarm water around him, and that just made him cry harder. He kicked his legs violently, and I remembered the strength of all those kicks I’d felt before he was born. It was sometimes hard to believe that this beautiful boy was the same one who had been living inside me, just a couple of weeks ago. Now that I knew this face, it was almost unfathomable to imagine it, fully formed, hidden from me in the dark.
“Ouch,” Matt said.
“This is awful,” I said.
“We’ve got to do it, though,” he said. “Maybe faster, though.”
“I’m going as fast as I can,” I said.
“I know, I know,” he said.
“Okay,” I said, giving a final splash to Dolan’s nether regions. “Get that towel ready.”
Dolan was still mad when we took him out. He stayed mad until he was in his sleep sack, wrapped in a blanket and lying in my arms, nursing. Matt sat next to us.
“Whew,” he said. “That was rough. I hate seeing him so miserable.”
“I know,” I said. “Horrible.”
We sat for a few more minutes. I could have let it go, but it was hard to pretend we were a happy team when I was harboring these suspicions.
“Did something happen with that girl?” I said.
“No,” he said. “I told you.”
I turned my eyes on him. I knew they were narrow slits by now. Menacing. I kept them on him until he had to meet my gaze. I was like Medusa. I was going to turn him to stone. But first I was going to yank the truth out of him.
“I don’t believe you,” I said. “No girl hangs around like this unless she thinks she’s getting something for her troubles.”
“Okay,” he said, running his hands through his close-cropped hair frantically. “We hooked up.”
Dolan seemed so small in my arms. I felt a deadly calm, the one that comes before a massive meltdown.
“When?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “A few weeks ago, or a month or something.”
“Right before I had the baby?”
“I don’t remember,” he said miserably. “It was just one night.”
I drilled away at him until I had enough facts to nauseate me. She’d called him late one night after seeing him at the bar. It was the middle of the night. He’d told her she could come over. He’d resisted anything with her since. Yes, it had been while he and I were sleeping together. No, he couldn’t remember if it was before or after the baby shower my work colleagues had thrown for me, when his mother had flown in from Baltimore for the weekend and we had been so content together. No, he hadn’t used a condom.
“I was so intimate with you,” I said. “I let you see me at my most vulnerable. I gave myself to you. The whole time I was pregnant, and even now, I couldn’t imagine sleeping with anyone but you. And this is what you do to me?”
The baby was still asleep in my arms. I felt insulted on his behalf too. We were as one when this happened. Now he was only two weeks old and I hated his stupid, inconsiderate dunderhead of a father. I would have to be tested for STDs. I would have to deal with this girl who was threatening to turn into a stalker. I knew Matt didn’t love me, but this meant these last few months of being together, of lying on the couch with his arms around me, of making dinner for him, of screwing him every chance I got, were an absolute lie. That yawn I’d seen, that was the truth.
“Do you hate me that much?” I whispered. “You must hate me to have done this to me.”
“I don’t hate you at all,” he said. He seemed anguished. “I just wanted to do something for myself, something that was just for me.”
I stood up and walked away from the couch. He was still sitting in exactly the same position, as if he were frozen there.
“You wanted me to trust you?” I said.
He didn’t even look up.
“You are going to have to go,” I told him. “I can’t stand to have you here. You are such an idiot; you have completely blown it. The time when you should be bonding with your son, you make it so that I am not going to be able to stand the sight of you. The time when I need you, when I need your help, you do something so awful that I have no choice but to throw you out.”
I went into my room and closed the door. I put the baby down on the bed, curled myself around him, and cried myself to sleep.
In the morning, Matt had packed all his possessions and was ready to go. Except that he needed a ride to the BART station. He was standing nervously next to his blue duffle bag.
“I fed the cats,” he said.
Wordless, I buckled Dolan into the car seat and took him out to the car, Matt following sheepishly behind me. I felt overrun with humiliation. The superficial humiliation was driving him to the train, as if I were the mother of the most rotten sort of teenager. But the deeper humiliation was something I don’t think I’ll ever get over. I had felt beautiful in those last weeks, gloriously with child, fervently sexual. I thought I was someone filled with the unique power of reproduction and therefore invincible, safe from the petty crises of my pre-pregnancy romantic life. In my mind, Matt ought not to have been able to look away from me. But apparently it had been all too easy for him to cheat on me. If that was even the right word for it because how, after all, could you cheat on a woman you said you didn’t love and weren’t even dating?
AS SOON AS I GOT HOME, I called Kir to recount Matt’s sins. I had to bitch about them. I was hurt, but there was something in me that wanted to be told I was right and he was wrong. But she seemed unimpressed, as if this were such a predictable drama that she’d long ago pegged the outcome.
“He just wants you to know that this is not a relationship,” she said.
“Just telling me would have sufficed,” I said.
“Yeah, but this is easier in a way,” she said. “It’s so definitive. It makes everything so clear, doesn’t it? And you know what? Pretty soon you’re not going to care at all. What he does isn’t going to matter.”
“Really?”
“That baby is going to take over everything.” She laughed. “It’s kind of bad when you’ve got a husband because husbands end up feeling neglected, but the more you fall in love with that baby, the less you’ll care about what Matt is up to.”
I’d walked into the bedroom and was looking down at Dolan. I’d just put him down, and he was already sleeping peacefully.
“How is Dolan?”
“He seems pretty good,” I said. “He had his first tubby last night. Which he hated. I felt so cruel, getting him wet.”
“Oh, give him a few weeks and he’ll love it,” she said. “The first couple of times are hard, though. Don’t feel like you’ve got to do it a lot either; you can just sponge him down instead of putting him into the tub. And really, try not to think about this whole thing with Matt and the girl. You’ve got the baby; that is what matters.”
“I know,” I said. “I just feel so stupid. This is so not what I expected from my first few weeks of motherhood. I keep thinking it’s wrong. Unnatural somehow.”
“HONESTLY, IT HAPPENS ALL THE TIME,” my doctor said. She was taking a vaginal swab. “The studies on how many men sleep around when the woman they are wit
h is pregnant would blow your mind.”
“Really?” I said, propping myself up on my elbows. “Why is that?”
She shrugged. “Fear, I suppose. A lot of them might be afraid that they’ll no longer be the center of attention. Resentment of the baby.”
I was flummoxed. At least I wasn’t alone. I’d been mortified, making the appointment, having to confess to the presence of such sleaziness in my life. Even if I wasn’t the one who had slept around, I felt sullied by all that it implied. But now at least I could imagine sharing the pain with women everywhere. Sisterhood. It counted for something.
“Actually, you’re lucky,” she continued. “Some men really turn on their wives or girlfriends. I had a patient who was just beaten to death by her boyfriend. She was five months’ pregnant.”
Oh my Lord, I thought, looking at the ceiling.
“You’ll get a call from us if there’s anything funky in these results,” she continued, stripping off her gloves. “Otherwise, you’re all good. But you should get tested again in another six months.” On the way out of the room, she paused to look at Dolan. He was sitting in the car seat, next to the examining table, and he was watching her. “Wow, he’s so alert,” she said. “You got a good one there.”
In the elevator, I felt less angry than I had going in. Matt was an asshole, but this wasn’t the end of the world. A lot of women were worse off than I. For Dolan’s sake, we were going to have to find a way to get through this and move beyond. Couples’ counseling, I thought grimly. He won’t like it, but as we used to say in Maine, growing up, he can just suffah.
OUR COUPLES’ COUNSELING SESSION was in the same building where I’d gone to discuss the thumb-sucker. I would have liked to see the sniffling therapist again, but she had moved on, so we’d been assigned to someone new. Matilda was in her fifties or early sixties, and she had the look of a cheerful, youthful grandmother. She cooed over the baby, once again being hauled into a doctor’s office in his car seat. I made Matt carry him. We hadn’t talked much, beyond my telling him he had to come to therapy and his agreeing, in his usual passive manner.
