Parallel Play

by Thomas Rayfiel

  “Hi,” he said quietly, testing to see if I was up.

  “Did you eat?”

  “I ate.”

  He got into bed. Our legs bumped against each other, clumsy, clunking things.

  “Sorry about your glasses.”

  “It's all right. They're fixed. I never thought a pillow could—”

  “What happened at work?”

  “Nothing. I had to make sure someone was all right.”

  “Were they?”

  He reached across.

  He didn't like to talk about what happened at the hospital. It was technical, I assumed, or confidential, or maybe I was the antidote to it all, the sweetness and light he came home to, the one who made him forget his troubles. The wife.

  “How's Ann?”

  “Good.”

  His hands smelled of antibacterial soap. He'd been up to his elbows in misery all night, then scrubbed it away, taking off a layer of skin too. My stomach knotted up. It was as if he was still wearing rubber gloves. The problem was no longer physical, a fear of pain, it was more a lack of concentration. When did making love stop being new and become a reference to all that had happened before? My mind would get distracted, lose itself in long-ago moments. When did every touch become “remember this?” We never kissed on the lips anymore. It was one memory neither of us wanted to disturb. I tried responding, and that, of all things, made him stop. He froze, in the middle of a caress. He was somewhere else too. We both were.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Tell me about your day.”

  “Oh, please.”

  I rolled away. My back was to him, but at the same time I ached for him to take me. Take charge. Relieve me of all responsibility. My day was fine, I tried to say, but the words didn't come, just the dry click of my jaw opening and closing. His fingers traveled along my side and settled in the hollow of my hip.

  I knew he wanted me to make it happen. I had to start, for some reason. It was my job. But I couldn't.

  “What went on tonight?” I insisted.

  “Nothing special.”

  You keep expanding love to take in more things, hoping it will become this cure-all, this guarantee of happiness. But then it gets so diluted, so thinned, like a watered-down drink.

  “You smell nice,” he yawned.

  “It's your cologne.”

  “No. Something else.”

  “Meat,” I said. “Beef tenderloin.”

  “Mmm.”

  His body gave a last shake. He slept. He never got up, even in the beginning, when she woke every two hours. Now it was down to once a night, and even that was rare. I was the only one who didn't sleep. My dreams leaked into my days, and my daily concerns transformed themselves into nightmares. I waited another minute, then worked myself free. There was still enough room to be alone, even with him taking up three-quarters of the bed. I lay there and tried not to cry.

  • • •

  “I see we have some new people here, which is great. So I think we should go around and introduce ourselves. I'm Janice and this is Louise. Louise was ten pounds eleven ounces at birth.”

  “Wow,” we all said, a chorus.

  A few days later, I went to a meeting of the Parallel Play Group. It was at Osbourne's, a coffee shop on Seventh that had a wicker basket of toys kids could play with. There were only eight or nine of us, but with all our stuff we pretty much took over the place. I got a muffin and a cup of coffee and let Ann loose over the red tile floor.

  “I'm Alison and this is Dominic. Dominic is named after his father, aren't you, Dominic?”

  “Hi, Dominic!”

  I didn't know why I had come. For company, maybe. Despite all my bitching, I needed to be with people like me. I was lonely.

  But of course the rest of these mothers weren't like me at all. They had this confidence I completely lacked. I got the sense they had already lived their lives, the first part, at least. They'd had deeply meaningful love affairs and jobs, been to Europe and Asia, gone through all the happiness and sadness available to them as single people, and then, just when it was getting tired, when it looked like they might be repeating themselves, they had cashed out at the top of the market, traded in at just the right moment. Now they were entering this new phase. They were eager. That was the difference. Under all the fatigue and drudgery and polite complaining, they were excited.

  “Randall just arrived last week. From Guatemala.”

  “Oh my God!”

  “Look at him!”

  “He's adorable.”

  “Hi, Randall!”

  There was a pause. All eyes turned to me. I was next. I tried clearing my throat.

  “I'm Eve, and this is Ann. She's …”

  I couldn't think of any cute little fact to add. I felt this absurd need to compete with the kids who had come before. What was Ann? What made her special? What set her apart?

  “She's a mistake.” I tried to imitate their mock-confidential tone. “I mean, an accident.”

  I gave a nervous laugh. My whole body was turning scarlet. A hot flash. Menopause. Good. I was past childbearing. At last.

  “I mean, when I met her father, it was for an injury. I had no idea that—”

  “Don't I see you in the park?” Janice asked.

  “Yes,” I answered, as if it was an amazing coincidence.

  She was being nice, trying to rescue me, but still it was the kind of exchange I hated, a mindless acknowledgment, assuring each other of our mutual existence.

  “She's beautiful.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Hi, Ann!” everyone chanted.

  I looked down. She was oblivious, banging a plastic xylophone against the wall, her serious, intense face—a miniature version of my own, everyone said, although I couldn't see it— framed by dark hair. She never used a toy the way it was supposed to be played with, which I liked, that rebel quality, most of the time.

  “Ann,” I chirped, “they're saying hello.”

  “This is Jeremy,” another woman began, uncertain, not sure if our contribution to the morning's entertainment was over. “He's almost six months.”

  After the initial introductions, none of us mentioned our husbands. We were past the whole concept. Husbands had served their purpose. None of us talked about work, either. Nobody said, “What do you do?” We barely even referred to the weather except for it how it affected taking care of babies. True, there was only so much conversation you could squeeze from which kind of wipes came out of the box better, although, to my horror, I found I had strong opinions on the subject.

  “Oh, nothing's worse than scraping your fingers over the top of that block and not finding the folded strip you're supposed to grab for getting a single wipe. You know what I mean? Because meanwhile you're holding down this struggling creature, like a rodeo rider trying to hog-tie a calf, so you end up gouging a hole deep into the ‘Lanolin-Treated Wipeaze,’ and then you have to live with shreds of stinky wet paper for the next five or six changes. Now, of course there is that hi-tech alternative of the little whale-shaped plastic cylinder that has a blow hole on top where wipes pop up individually. You've seen that, right? But have you ever read the label? It only holds half as many! So it's much more expensive.”

  I looked around.

  “Much more expensive per wipe.”

  There was a silence.

  “Does anyone want more coffee?” someone asked.

  “Think I've had enough,” I mumbled, resolving not to say another word.

  I tried not to think about having met Mark in the playground, which meant I thought exclusively about it, getting madder and madder at the way he had looked at me, at the things he had said. Because his whole attitude, the time we'd been together, was one of exaggerated indifference. Come if you want, he seemed to be saying, whenever I used to call, as if it was a favor, allowing me over to his place. But when I did come, he was completely available to me in a way no other man had ever been. What we had was private and all-consuming.
But only when he was right in front of me. Each time I left the loft, panic was waiting at the foot of the stairs. I had such good times with him and such bad times without him. And the bad times seemed necessary, part of the experience. There was nothing stable or nourishing about it. He meshed with my life on such a deep level. I needed more of him. More than I could ever have. He knew that. He had to know that. And now for him to show up this way and act as if—

  “I really like your shirt,” one of them, I think it was Alison, said.

  “Thanks.”

  “Where'd you get it?”

  “Third Street.”

  She had a big bruiser of a boy who was already making little fists and punching her leg.

  “Now, Dominic,” she said. “Third Street?”

  “Oh, it's not a store. I get stuff.”

  She nodded, the nod that means, You just tried to make sense but failed completely.

  “I find things. See, I made this vow, when I had her.”

  Ann kept reaching for another kid's faucet-of-snot nose, outraged, like it was a toy of hers he had stolen. He began to cry. I broke them up, trying not to notice the green-yellow glue pouring out of each nostril and collecting on his upper lip.

  “A vow?”

  She was still there. Alison. I had forgotten all about her.

  “About clothes.” I had Ann in my lap now. “I swore I wouldn't buy anything for myself, after she was born. People leave so much out, in this neighborhood. They just drape it over their fence or fold it up on the top step of their stoop.”

  “So you—?”

  “I guess it's like dumpster diving. Not that I go through garbage cans. Not yet, at least. All I buy for myself are socks and underwear.”

  “You must save a lot of money that way.”

  “It's not about money. It's about getting past the illusion of free will. You think you're dressing yourself when you buy clothes, that you're making a choice, saying, This is me. But really you're not, because all your so-called choices have been chosen for you.” My voice was too loud. I could feel it forcing its way through me, stumbling on a thought I truly believed. I tried not to shout. “So I figured if I just wore what was out there, other people's rejected or used-up fantasies—about who they were, what they wanted to come across as—and took those on, well, maybe that would give me a kind of reverse freedom.”

  She shot a quick glance off to the side, maybe to see if anyone else had heard and was calling for an ambulance.

  “Anyway,” I finished, “I thought I would just wear what I found. And I ended up with a lot of good stuff that way. Although now that it's winter, I guess I won't be getting any more things for a while.”

  I laughed, as if that was the punch line to a really funny joke.

  It's parallel play for us, I realized. We're the ones who are alone, oblivious, unable to recognize a fellow creature sitting six inches away. It was hopeless. I couldn't hit that note of quiet, boring conversation. I didn't fit in. What did I expect, that motherhood would give me a free pass into the normal world? I was still a freak, just a freak with a child, now. That was the only difference.

  “Well, it's a nice shirt,” she said, bringing the conversation back to where it had begun.

  “Thanks.”

  It ended badly, with Ann taking a dump that blasted through all three layers of her outfit. After changing her, I didn't sit back down, didn't say goodbye, just continued on out. We had to be going anyway. She was due for her checkup.

  • • •

  I thought one of the advantages of marrying Harvey would be free medical care, but he refused to even look at her. They had been warned about that. Either you saw what you wanted to see or were so paranoid you saw what you were afraid of seeing. Instead, he made me go to his friend Mindy, who'd hooked on with a really fancy pediatric practice in Brooklyn Heights. She was this tightly wound woman who wore real outfits, all planned, down to matching shoes and jewelry. Even stockings. I could see them, under her white coat. She always gave me the same look, perpetual surprise at whom Harvey had ended up with.

  “How long has she had this?”

  “Had what?”

  “This.”

  She pointed to one of Ann's tiny fingers.

  “What? It's a knuckle.”

  “That's the knuckle. Above it.”

  It was just a bump.

  “I don't know.”

  Here I was, the mother, and this woman who'd examined her for all of fifteen minutes had already seen something I missed. She sighed and shook her head as if it was my fault, then frowned at the finger under a light. Even Harvey admitted Mindy could be rude, sometimes. “But she's an excellent doctor,” he said. “Well, she'd have to be,” I'd answered.

  “You know, she sucks that finger a lot. Maybe it's just a teething bump.”

  “A teething bump?”

  “Yes.”

  Everyone else seemed to know these fake medical childhood-development terms, so why shouldn't I make one up? Of course using it on a real doctor probably wasn't too brilliant.

  “So what is it?” I asked.

  “A cyst.”

  “Is that serious?”

  She ignored me, just opened the folder that had Ann's charts in it and made a little note there.

  “Let's talk about you, Eve.”

  Let's not, I thought, starting to get Ann dressed, which was hard enough without an audience. The way she waggled her foot made it impossible to get it through a pant leg. Meanwhile Mindy just sat, watching.

  “How's it going?”

  “Great.”

  “Getting any sleep yet?”

  “Some.”

  “Harvey says she pretty much sleeps through the night now.”

  “Yeah, well I have things on my mind.”

  “You look good.”

  “Thanks.”

  I couldn't figure out if this was her clumsy attempt at socializing or part of the checkup, making sure I wasn't going to lose it and harm my child the minute we hit the street. Ann's toes were stuck in five different directions. I tried burrowing my hand in from the other side. I could feel Mindy judging me.

  “What kind of things do you have on your mind that keep you from sleeping?”

  “Oh, nothing in particular,” I went on in a chatty tone, pretending to be absorbed in what I was doing, which I was, actually, gathering the toes, making sure they didn't bend back and snap off, guiding the little foot through.

  “Like what?”

  “There!” I stood back, very pleased; the shirt would be easier. “I told you: nothing, really. Why? What did Harvey say?”

  “He didn't tell me anything specific. It's more what he implied.”

  “Which is …?”

  “Just that you're stressed out. Have you thought about seeing anyone?”

  “You mean like a doctor?”

  She nodded.

  “I'm seeing you now. And when I get home tonight I'll see Harvey. I don't know, maybe you could say I'm seeing too many doctors. Maybe that's my problem.”

  I didn't like Mindy, but I admired her. I would have liked to be her, in another life. But since I wasn't, she made me say things, bad things. She brought out the worst in me.

  “There are therapists,” she began, “who specialize in postpartum—”

  “There's nothing wrong with me. I'm doing fine.”

  “You might be depressed.”

  “If I am depressed, I'm depressed for a reason, which makes it OK.”

  “There are also medications you can take—”

  “That would make me happy even though I don't have a reason to be happy? See, that, to me, would be crazy”

  “You have plenty of reasons to be happy, don't you, Eve?”

  I sighed. Mindy had a job, a career; she had taken control of her life in exactly the way I hadn't. I had just let things happen. And yet I sensed she was just as frustrated as I was, that she even envied me while I was busy envying her. Maybe we did have something to talk abou
t, I didn't know, but I wasn't going to break down and have a heart-to-heart cryfest with her. That would violate some core privacy I had to defend.

  I got Ann into her socks and shoes.

  “Look, I'm just a pediatrician.”

  A childless pediatrician, I corrected silently. At least I thought it was silently. I frowned, listening for an echo.

  “But you've got to understand that this is not an uncommon occurrence in new mothers.”

  “I appreciate your concern.”

  “Without treatment, it can lead to a very serious mental condition. Studies show that—”

  “When did you talk to Harvey, anyway?”

  “We ran into each other.”

  I concentrated very hard on the laces.

  Someone knocked at the door. It was such a small room she had to brush past me, stepping out to consult with another doctor, one of her bosses. I got Ann's jacket on. I was afraid she was getting reprimanded for taking too long with us. She's just trying to help, I thought. Why do I always want to bite her head off?

  When she came back in, our little moment was over.

  “So I've been wondering.” I acted as if the last part of the conversation hadn't happened, in case I'd been rude. “Should I be doing something?”

  “For what?”

  “The holidays.”

  “You mean Hanukkah?”

  “I guess. I mean, Harvey hasn't brought it up or anything, but …”

  “Maybe he doesn't want to make you uncomfortable.”

  “Why would doing something for Hanukkah make me uncomfortable?”

  She started leading us down the hall.

  “You have some kind of background in that area, don't you?”

  “I was raised in a religious community.”

  “Right.”

  “But I don't believe anymore.”

  “Neither do I, I guess.”

  She made one last note on a form and handed it to the nurse behind the desk.

  “But you're still doing something, aren't you?”

  Her hair was pulled back. It made her face smooth, birdlike. She brushed an imaginary strand away from her eyes.

  “Yes, as a matter of fact I am, but I doubt Harvey expects to. I don't remember him being particularly observant.”