Only Children

by Rafael Yglesias

  I’m thirty-six years old, she thought; in four years I’ll be forty. I am closer to death than I have come from birth. My life has hardened in the mold. I am riding an express to the glassy-eyed, hearing-impaired, bladder-weary terminus. I am thirty-six years old and my growing is over.

  “Diane?” Peter said, looking at his arm.

  Diane followed his glance: she had a desperate grip on his sleeve. All Diane could see, for the moment, was the tweed fabric bunched up in her fingers.

  “Are you all right?” Peter asked.

  “I feel a little faint,” she managed to answer. “I’d better—” She stumbled out of the noisy room, back to the foyer. Paula was still there with her children, surrounded by a half dozen new arrivals. Peter and Betty followed Diane, Peter taking her arm, Betty appearing in front, peering at her.

  “You look green,” Betty said.

  “Hey!” said Patty Lane, the celebrity author, tapping Betty on the shoulder. “No hello?”

  Betty glanced back at Patty. “Oh. Hi. My friend—have you met?—she’s not feeling well—”

  Diane looked at Patty’s beautiful body, displayed by tight black stretch pants and a loose pink blouse unbuttoned to reveal the tops of her black bra, and she thought: all these women are more famous and more beautiful than I am.

  Patty’s pleasant party smile evaporated, her big green eyes widening. “We’re fainting,” Patty announced, and pushed Peter away, taking Diane’s other arm. “There’s a bedroom this way,” Patty said.

  The two women half carried Diane to a huge sedate bedroom, all the fabric beige and the furniture made of light, glistening wood. Patty shut the door in Peter’s startled face, as if he were a molester.

  “That’s her husband,” Betty explained.

  “Who cares?” Patty answered.

  “Diane, this is Patty Lane—”

  “I know,” Diane said. Diane had read and enjoyed Lane’s two novels of distressed young womanhood in New York, pitying and envying the main characters’ woes.

  “This is your friend Diane!” Patty said with recognition. “Didn’t you just have a baby? Should you be out in a mob scene like this?”

  Betty laughed. “She had the baby six months ago.”

  “Oh,” said Patty. “So? I’d still be in bed.” There was a knock on the door. “If it’s your husband, do you want him?” Patty asked.

  Diane nodded, although she felt much better alone with the two women. Younger, at ease, free from the world’s intense demands.

  Patty opened the door. But it wasn’t Peter. Paula Kramer bustled in, asking questions, suggesting remedies, mentioning Stoppard’s concern that Diane rejoin the party to talk with the Gedhorn people. At the mention of the clients, Diane stiffened. Her anxiety at the chaos of the universe focused into tension at the demands of the present. Diane declined Patty’s and Betty’s suggestion that she rest for a while and instead returned to the party, ignoring Tony, Peter, and the group that she had embarrassed herself in front of, joining, instead, Stoppard and the Gedhorn people.

  Diane felt sure of herself the moment she was back in her element, making fun of the way opposing counsel had deposed the vice-presidents, bolstering Stoppard’s ego as he became expansive and predicted victory.

  Once they all went to the buffet, she was split from the Gedhorn people and found herself beside Delilah. The star winked at her and said, “You feeling better?”

  “Yeah,” Diane answered. “I’m not getting enough sleep.”

  “Does your husband help with the baby?” Delilah asked, but in a tone that implied she already knew the answer.

  “Of course not,” Diane answered, relieved the secret was out. Yes, I am a failure as a feminist.

  Betty, Patty, and Paula waved her over to a corner of the dining room and Diane ate ravenously while they talked. Paula continued to praise Hunter, perversely egged on by Betty, and in the cab ride home, the words of the mothers about getting their children into a good school stayed in Diane’s mind. Betty had said to Diane, “You don’t have to worry—Peter’s mom can get you into any of the good private schools.”

  The baby-sitter reported that Byron had been an angel, playing happily on the rug until nine, and falling asleep without any fuss the moment he was rocked. While Peter paid her, Diane went into Byron’s quiet room and stood over his crib.

  Paula’s prideful remarks—“They get into Hunter on merit”— Tony’s envious ones—“They all have IQs over one fifty”—Paula’s advice—“If you just read to your boy a lot, he’ll score high on the test”—and Peter’s infuriating “He’s not a genius” were replayed over and over in her mind.

  Diane was smart. She had gotten into Yale from a mediocre public school and from there gone to Harvard Law. Her brain was ferocious, alive, calculating. Her mind could concentrate absolutely on a subject, relentless to the finish, immaculate at arranging the details. More than anyone she knew, certainly more than Peter, she was here, in New York’s fast lane, on merit.

  Diane put her hand down on Byron’s back and stroked gently. Then she let her fingers stray on his warm skull.

  “He’s not a genius,” his father had said.

  Byron could make do with Peter’s connections and become one of those mediocre children of the successful, lazy intellectually and spoiled by physical comfort.

  Diane felt her mind pulse with energy. She imagined her tough, active brain could flow down through her arm, into her fingertips, and into Byron, into the soft, impressionable dough of Byron’s mind.

  Peter made a living because his mother knew the right people. He got into Harvard because two generations had gone before him.

  I made it because of my brain.

  Diane closed her eyes and released the force of her intellect into Byron’s baby brain. She felt her body glow with the transfer.

  Get there on merit like me, she ordered.

  WHEN ERIC exited off the Maine turnpike and got on the two-lane country highway, Nina rolled her window down all the way and tilted her head out, her face to the wind. The cool country air splashed her cheeks and filled her nostrils with the perfume of nature’s maturity. Her eyes rested, gazing at the soft greens, the still white houses, the glimpses of shimmering bays and lakes, the winding stretches of placid road. With every mile, there were fewer and fewer things and people—less and less of lifeless cement, more and more of the breathing earth.

  Nina glanced back at Luke. He had been peaceful in the car, soothed by the steady hum of the motor and the regular bumps of the highway’s seams. He slumped bonelessly in the hollow of the car seat, his veined eyelids were closed, and his long eyelashes rested, like discarded fans, on the white fabric of his face. His black hair was crazy from repeated perspirations and dryings, some locks curling up against gravity, others collapsed on his brow, stuck to his skin.

  Eric’s thick thighs, naked in his blue shorts, glowed in the late-afternoon sun. Nina put her hand on the muscled mass of Eric’s leg, ironing the curled hairs between her fingers, and tried to imagine Luke-the-tadpole growing up to become like his bear of a father. Eric’s arms were so long that even with his seat retracted to the maximum, they looked cramped by the short distance from his shoulders to the steering wheel. Eric had to angle his knee to one side when lifting off the accelerator or else he’d bang it. His head almost touched the roof. Some of his kinky hair actually did. Maybe Luke cried at the prospect of all that stretching in store for his body.

  They reached her parents’ summer cottage by eight. While Eric unloaded the car, Nina stood at the top of the bleached wooden stairs that declined from the lawn to the rocky shore. Luke was awake in her arms, his eyes wincing at the chilly sea breeze. The orange and pink light of the sunset glowed over the curved sky from the west, colors parachuting from the air to die in the water, tinting the cold blue of the bay red and gold. The dark approached them from the horizon, erasing the bright world. At the edges of the night, stars appeared.

  “That’s the most sleep
he’s ever gotten.” Eric’s voice boomed in the trafficless, unpeopled auditorium of the country, his sound abrasive amid the soothing noise of lapping tide, rustling leaves, and complaining gulls. “He’ll probably be up all night.”

  “I’ll stay up with him,” Nina said calmly.

  Eric cocked his head.

  “Really,” she said, self-assured. Nina held Luke up to the side of her face. “See the stars, baby,” she whispered to the little circle of Luke’s countenance. “I think that’s Venus,” she added.

  Eric stepped to her side. “Where?” Nina pointed to what she remembered her father had always told her was Venus. She showed Eric reluctantly, afraid that, with his literal mind, he might know otherwise and correct her.

  “Wow,” he said instead. Eric looked at Luke and put out his enormous hand, reaching for Luke’s miniature version. “Maybe when you’re grown,” Eric said to Luke, closing on the little fist, “you can fly there.”

  Luke frowned at his father’s big face, as though disgusted by the notion.

  “I doubt it,” Nina said, thinking that this worried, clutching child would hardly dare the unknown.

  “Yeah,” Eric said. “They don’t have money for the space program. Instead they’ll put up lasers to zap him.”

  “God, Eric,” Nina said, disgusted.

  “Just kidding,” he said.

  “I know,” she reassured him. Eric was bound to reality, she reminded herself, and no matter how far the leash stretched, he would always be yanked back. Nevertheless, the spell had been broken and she carried Luke toward the house.

  The four-bedroom cottage, set in a cleared circle at the edge of Blue Hill Bay, shielded from the road and neighbors by white birches and tall firs, was two hundred years old and had been in Nina’s family for a hundred and fifty years. Just inside the front door, on a hand-hewn beam, four generations of Nina’s family had marked the growth of their children. “Could you get a knife, Eric?” she asked.

  “A knife?”

  “I’m going to mark Luke’s height.”

  Eric paused for a moment, studying the beam, and then peering at Luke. Nina knew he was about to make some pragmatic objection, something like the fact that Luke couldn’t stand up, but Eric must have decided against it, because he went to the kitchen for the knife.

  The tradition was to make the first indentation for height at age five on Thanksgiving when all, or most of the family, was usually in attendance. Nina had always found the ritual boring. From age fourteen on, she had refused to participate, believing that it only intensified the endless competition among the siblings—her brother John had chortled over outgrowing dead relatives—and that, as a connection to previous generations, measurements of height were hardly a profound legacy. There were old American families who kept journals, or whose correspondence, when found in attics, spoke down the long hallway of time. And there were old American families who had at least left relics of their taste and interests and benevolence, who had begun institutions, endowed universities, founded museums, and had civic works named in their honor. But Nina’s family, the Winninghams, had merely left behind several turn-of-the-century Ivy League championship squash cups; a stuffy painting of Great-Grandpa, the banker; and a grant for Princeton, by a bachelor uncle, to give a graduating senior money to travel in Italy for a year. To what end no one knew.

  The family had endured and lived hearty lives—that was all Nina could deduce from the stories of them. They were good amateur athletes; they made money steadily, although never excessively; they were helpful, but not extraordinary, citizens; they gave decent amounts to charity, but never boldly. The blank markings on the wall were a perfect symbol of their mute past: they had grown; they had procreated. Nina had decided instantly on seeing the beam that no matter how dull this conversation with her ancestors might be, she wanted Luke to speak early. None of the Winninghams had ever stepped out of line, made a rude noise, or changed anything they encountered. Luke, at least, would begin his life with an alteration of their tradition even while obeying it.

  She had Eric hold Luke while she used the knife. Luke’s curved legs dangled like feelers. The gouge she made in the wood was, at best, a crude approximation, but she took great pleasure in writing the date and Luke’s name big, so big that no other infant’s data would ever have room to fit, unless its size was radically different. The braggadocio of her large writing was also against the diffident family tradition. “Leave room for the next one,” her mother would always say. Nina hadn’t been polite; there would be only one newborn Winningham on the beam.

  The caretaker and his wife had done a good job preparing the cottage. Wood was split and stacked in the two fireplaces, there were fresh-cut wild flowers in every room, and a crib had been set up in the smallest of the bedrooms. Nina took Luke on a tour. For the first seven weeks of his life, Nina hadn’t gone in for much talking to Luke. He was unhappy, tired; always awake and fussing. All her efforts had been to keep him calm and quiet. But now, walking through the rooms of her happy childhood summers, she held Luke up, showing him the things and explaining, “This is your room. When Mommy was a baby, she slept here. That’s Blue Hill Bay, which goes right into the Atlantic Ocean. See that? That’s the mast of Grandpa and Grandma’s sailboat. We’ll take you out tomorrow if it’s nice.”

  Luke moaned and whined at first. His legs made spasmodic movements in the air, objecting to the lack of support, but Nina kept talking, turning him, her voice soft, like her own mother’s, explaining everything.

  “That’s a spider web. Is the spider home? No … Did you hear that? An owl.”

  She saw that Eric followed them about with a puzzled expression on his face. “Something wrong?” she asked faintly.

  “Don’t you think you’re worrying him?” Eric said.

  Luke wasn’t crying; he had even stopped peeping with complaints. “He’s fine,” she answered. “He’s listening to me.”

  “Okay,” Eric said, agreeably. “He is quiet. But his eyes look worried.”

  Nina turned Luke, put him face-to-face with her. The blue marbles glowed at her, radiating their wonder. “We’re having a conversation,” Nina said. Luke seemed to be studying Nina, filling his eyes; they widened more and more, as if he could expand his vision limitlessly. Luke seemed to want to absorb more than merely the sight of her; he wanted to take in the idea, the function of her. He squawked at Nina.

  “I’m Mommy,” she said to him. She knew that was his question. “That’s your daddy. I’m Mommy. This is Grandma and Grandpa’s summer cottage. We’re going to stay here.”

  Luke winced. His legs pulled up and then thrust down. He cried.

  “Oh, God,” Eric mumbled.

  But Nina didn’t feel the sinking despair this time. She sat down on the bentwood rocker, its arms worn to silver nudity by four generations of use. She told Eric to turn out the light. She bared her breast and fed Luke.

  From time to time Luke pulled off to scream at the spasms in his stomach. He shouted up at her; he pushed with his legs, trying to swim away from the hurt. Nina shushed him, held his hot melon head, and kissed the almost liquid softness of his brow.

  The moon lit up the bay and the water reflected a shiny blue light on the beams, the crib, Luke’s body, Nina’s arms. The rhythms dulled her thoughts; amidst the steady lonely sound of the runners treading wood and Luke’s smacks of pleasure, Nina abandoned her self—her selfish core that had fought this duty.

  She could feel them in the room—the mothers of her family. Silent and benign, Nina felt them enter, dissolve together, and inhabit her.

  The women before her were here, their ghosts rocking infants too, their ceaseless care now hers.

  Her labor was over. She was born a mother.

  BYRON’S MOUTH came at Peter. Byron was in his walker, a little seat with a tray in front and wheels on the bottom. He raced in his walker, powering himself with his feet. He raced madly along the length of the hall, eyes bright, charging his father with a
joyous wide-open mouth.

  Peter had come home in despair at the tedium of another evening with his wife and son. The nine months of Byron’s life, the nine months of diminished socializing, sleeping Diane, and early-morning rising, seemed to stretch back endlessly, covering all of Peter’s past. He could no longer remember the days of last-minute dinner dates and leisurely gossiping in bed with Diane. He had long since given up on making love with his wife; a five-minute conversation that wasn’t about Byron’s motor development was the closest they came to intimate contact. Besides, Peter didn’t want to sleep with Diane anymore. The few times they had, she seemed, even when physically pleased, put upon by the request, and dismissive afterward.

  “Da, Da! Da, Da! Da, Da!” Byron telegraphed his only word with staccato insistence.

  The walker smashed painfully into Peter’s shin. Byron was bounced back by the impact. Byron stood up on his legs, sat down in the seat, then got up again. Abruptly he went in reverse, backing away.

  “Da, Da! Da, Da!” he claimed Peter.

  “Yes, fella,” Peter said. He bent over to rub his leg.

  Thus encouraged, Byron charged again. His mouth was open, revealing two tiny teeth on his bottom gum. Peter went to his knees and put out his hands to stop the walker.