The Bright Side of Disaster

by Katherine Center

  18

  Dean did not call back that night, though I slept with my hand on the phone just in case. He did not call the next morning, either. Though it had been my plan to act like the call had meant no more to me than any chat with an old acquaintance, I called his cell phone three times the next day. No answer, any time.

  Maxie and I walked up and down the block for most of the morning, then took a nap together on my bed, then scrounged around for some lunch for me. I was still doing the handfuls-only diet—only eating things I could grab with one hand while I held her.

  I could not put her down. She was not fooled by the vibrating bouncy seat, or the swing, or the Mama Motion bassinet. All activities for me now were one-handed. My favorite meal of late was a handful of sunflower seeds, a piece of toast, a piece of string cheese, several strawberries or grapes, and any chocolate I could find. Though, to be fair, chocolate was not restricted to meals—if anything eaten standing at the kitchen counter could be called a “meal.”

  Since Maxie, my relationship with chocolate had intensified into something of an addiction. Now I needed it, wanted it, had to have it. If I ran out, I returned obsessively to the cabinets, Maxie over my shoulder, using one hand to look for old Halloween candy or stray packets of hot cocoa. This was how Dean must have felt that night I happened upon him fishing a mostly smoked Marlboro out of the kitchen trash.

  I read in a women’s magazine that chocolate had mild antidepressant qualities. But if I was depressed, I couldn’t feel it. I felt other things. An overwhelming, heartbreaking, euphoric love for Maxie. Gratitude toward my mother every time she let me have a shower. Numbness about Dean. And, every minute of every day, hollowed-to-the-bone exhaustion.

  Which is why, when the Giraffe from childbirth class called to invite me over, I almost said no.

  “We thought we’d all get together next week with our new babies,” she said.

  “Kind of a show-and-tell,” I said.

  “Exactly!” she said. “How did your birth go, by the way?”

  “Torture. How was yours?”

  “Wonderful. It was more spiritual and moving than I could have hoped for.”

  I paused.

  “You think you can make it?” she finally said. “We’re ordering a pizza.”

  She sounded so perky. She did not sound at all like a capsized person in a stormy sea of sleep deprivation and lactation hormones. I wasn’t sure I could stand to be in a whole roomful of women whose lives were going just exactly as they had planned. But I had nothing else to do, and wasn’t in a position to be picky about company. At least it would kill an afternoon.

  When the day finally came, I had nothing to wear. Every single thing I owned made me look frumpy. As I tried on my fourth T-shirt, I gave up and decided with an internal wince that the trouble probably wasn’t the clothes.

  It was supposed to be our entire childbirth class—all the moms, anyway. But the Talker had already gone back to work and the Oompa Loompas lived so far out in the country that the drive was too much.

  “Lee Ann really wanted to be here,” the Giraffe said as each of us walked in, “but little Kevin refuses to be in the car for more than ten minutes.”

  Sure, sure. We all understood that. Our new lives were circumscribed from every angle by things our babies would not tolerate. Everyone compared notes and I learned that Nipples’s son loved the car and rode most places without a fuss. The Giraffe’s daughter screamed her head off from ignition to parking brake. And Julia Child’s son, who had been born two weeks premature, only slept when he was in the car, so she and her husband, the Pirate, were taking turns sleeping in the driveway.

  The group of us arrived at the Giraffe’s house with enough gear for a camping expedition. Diaper bags, strollers, baby slings, car-seat baskets, changing pads, and nursing pillows littered the living room. We were all nursing, so each of us found a place on the oversize twin sofas or matching chairs, plugged babies up to boobs, and got to chatting. At this point, it was what most of us did most of the day, anyway: nursed and nursed and nursed.

  The Giraffe was really the leader of the group. Not only had she taken the initiative to organize this get-together, but she seemed to know everybody’s name, the name of each respective spouse, and the name of each baby. And she made sure folks felt included by bringing them into the conversation. I learned later that she’d been a corporate seminar facilitator before she went to law school and started raking in the big bucks. But at the time, when she looked at me during a pause and said, “So, Jenny, how does Dean like being a daddy?” I admit I hadn’t expected to be brought into the conversation so directly.

  I could have lied. I could have made up an idyllic life for the listening pleasure of the other mommies, complete with a very helpful fictional mate who changed the diaper pail and brought me hot tea while I was nursing. It didn’t seem likely that I’d see these women again. The idea of telling the truth was not appealing. I hated the idea that, months from now, if Dean returned to me and Maxie, and if we pieced back together a life that looked pretty good, and if I was trying to forget that this awful time had ever happened, these women would know the truth and remember. I’d run into Nipples, say, in the grocery store, and try to convince her that everything was all put back together now. But she’d have the goods on me.

  I’m not sure what compelled me to be honest. It may just have been that it made for a good story. But I answered the Giraffe as plainly as I could: “He left me the day before I went into labor, and I haven’t seen him since.”

  Suffice it to say, there was outrage all around. You haven’t seen outrage until you’ve seen a pack of breast-feeding women hear about one of their own getting abandoned.

  “I don’t understand,” Julia Child said.

  “He left me,” I said.

  “You’re all alone?” Nipples asked.

  “I am all alone,” I answered. “Except for Maxie and my obese cat.”

  The Giraffe had gone to the kitchen to get me a chocolate-chip cookie immediately upon hearing the news. “How on earth are you surviving?” she asked, thrusting it so close to my mouth it grazed my lips.

  With most people, I tried to accentuate the positive. I’d point out that my mother was helping and that I’d been getting pretty good at things. But suddenly something about these women made me want to be accurate. Maybe it was the fact that we were strangers sitting in a room with our boobs hanging out. Maybe it was the fact that not one of us was getting more than four consecutive hours of sleep. Maybe it was all the hormones in the air. But it was a relief to just look around the room, nod, and then say, “It really sucks.”

  I learned a lot of things that day. Their real names, for one. But everybody had her share of heartbreak. Nipples, whose real name was April, had had four miscarriages before a pregnancy finally stuck. Julia Child, whose name was Paige, had moved to Texas from Maine in her seventh month, had no family anywhere, and her husband worked fifteen-hour days and Saturdays. And the Giraffe, whose name was Claudia, turned out to be a single mother like me. Though not exactly like me, because she had a full-time nanny and a three-day-a-week housekeeper. Her husband, Abe Lincoln, had not, in fact, been her husband. He was her brother, who had only reluctantly agreed to be her partner, and he had almost missed five out of six classes.

  “You’re not married?” I asked dumbly.

  “No,” she said. “I’m thirty-eight. I haven’t found the right guy. I have plenty of money, and I was ready.”

  “Did you go to a sperm bank?” Paige asked.

  “Actually, I was going to. But I wound up doing it with a guy from my office at the company picnic—”

  “At the picnic?” April asked.

  “It was actually a square dance. They were giving everybody lessons. We were do-si-do-ing and swinging around and out of breath. Who knew that square dancing could be so erotically charged?” We all nodded at her. Who knew, indeed? Claudia continued. “Before I knew it, I was out in an alleyway with this
guy who’d always been kind of flirty with me, next to a dumpster that smelled like rotten bananas.”

  “That sounds like bad sex,” somebody said.

  “We wound up on top of his jacket on the pavement,” Claudia said.

  “Better than up against the dumpster,” someone else added.

  “You’d been drinking?” I asked, and she nodded.

  “I had been planning to do the whole thing so carefully—find a donor, check his medical history, where he went to college, make sure he was height-weight proportionate.”

  We all watched her for a minute.

  “When I told this guy I was pregnant, he said, ‘You can’t have this baby. You will ruin my life.’ He started ignoring me at the office, and a few weeks later, he transferred to Cleveland.” She looked around at us.

  “So he doesn’t know about the baby?” April asked.

  “I think he chose to believe that I did what he wanted and had an abortion,” Claudia said.

  We all chewed our cookies for a little bit.

  “So anyway,” Claudia said. “I’m single. If you know anybody looking for a girlfriend with a baby.”

  For a moment, I felt so sorry for her. I thought, How’s she ever going to meet someone now? Her body’s all messed up. She’s lactating like crazy and riddled with stretch marks. Her old underwear doesn’t fit. She’s exhausted. She’ll have to get a sitter if she wants to go out. And men barely even like their own kids. I’d gotten just about that far before I realized that she was me.

  “You’ll find somebody,” I said.

  “I knew for sure I wanted a baby,” she said, and we all nodded.

  Conversations sprang up and fell back, crisscrossed and converged. We talked on and on.

  There on the sofa, as I nursed Maxie and her eyes slid closed, I said to the girls, “I think nursing is where kisses come from.” I had been thinking about it. Nursing had to be the place where nurturing and sweet milk and soft skin and mouths and warmth all came together and started to mean something about love.

  I had always assumed kissing was a learned thing, like waving bye-bye or speaking a language. But since Maxie, I’d decided that it was innate, the adult version of something we know to do from the moment we’re born. All of it tied together in the cycle of life.

  The other moms liked this idea. They said I should write a book about it.

  We’d arrived for lunch at eleven o’clock. At five-twenty-five, we were still there. Somebody noticed the time, and then everybody jumped up, snapping up nursing bras and buckling the babies into their carriers. I, myself, could have stayed the night. We had told our birth stories and had talked about sleeping, eating, nipples, pumping, spit-up, unexplained crying, and the varied meanings of poop. It was addictive to be around other people who were in the same time-warp baby world that I was. Their life circumstances may have been different, but we were all on baby time now, and I had to force myself out to the car when it was all over.

  Driving home with Maxie wailing in the backseat, I found myself thinking about Meredith. I hadn’t seen her in weeks. I’d left three messages on her cell that she had yet to return. These days, I was as lonely as I’d ever been, and she was MIA. Being in love was no excuse. I really needed her. Where was she? Where was this present she kept promising me? I was glad I’d found some new friends. Maybe now I wouldn’t need her. If she was going to leave me, I would just leave her, too. I resolved to start a weekly get-together with the other mommies. Starting the next week. And, as soon as next week was, I wondered how I would ever wait that long.

  19

  That night, Maxie fell asleep late, and had her wake-up even later, and by the time I got myself into bed, it was almost midnight.

  But I was feeling pretty good. Being around the other moms had given me a little perspective, and I was feeling like maybe I was getting a handle on this parenting thing. I thought to myself, Maybe I can do this. Maybe I’m going to turn out to be good at this.

  And then the power went out.

  It was pitch black. I heard the air-conditioning fan cut out. The hum of the dishwasher stopped. Even the quiet buzzing noises that the lightbulbs and ceiling fans made all fell silent.

  I had a flashlight in the kitchen, so I felt my way in there, moving very slowly while my eyes adjusted, sliding my feet across the floor, feeling ahead of myself with my toes, praying I wouldn’t kick Dr. Blandon or knock over a floor lamp and wake Maxie. At the junk drawer, I felt around for the flashlight, but it wasn’t there. Would Dean have taken it? My eyes were adjusting and I looked out the window. All the houses on the street were dark. It was a strange feeling, as if they weren’t alive anymore, somehow. Of course, there were people inside them, hunting for flashlights like I was, but it felt like I was all alone in the world.

  Flashlight, flashlight. Who stops to take a flashlight when leaving his pregnant girlfriend? And then I remembered: I’d taken it into the bathroom a few weeks back to look in Maxie’s ear to see if she had an infection. (She didn’t, but here’s a tip: You can’t tell that by holding a flashlight to a baby’s ear.) I shuffled my way back to the bathroom and kicked the little plastic tub that I’d forgotten to hang up after the bath. There was a loud honking noise as it moved, and then water splashed out onto the floor, onto my pajama legs. I held still, waiting for a cry from Maxie. Nothing. I probably stood there for ten minutes, afraid to move, before I finally reached over to the sink to get the flashlight. I flicked it on. Light! I aimed it toward the doorway and followed it out into the living room.

  I needed to find the phone book and call the power company. I headed to the kitchen, but before I got there, the beam of light started to fade. “Fuck!” I said out loud, and then, almost that fast, the light was gone. Batteries.

  I didn’t have any spares, so I stood in the dark for a minute, watching the shadows. And then I remembered that Dean and I had received sterling-silver candelabras as wedding gifts from a patient of my dad’s. My mother had brought over all the gifts that had come in before the wedding was “postponed,” and told me that I’d have to return them and then write thank-you notes anyway. “That’s just insult to injury,” I’d said. I still hadn’t written the notes, and I was toying with keeping the gifts as consolation prizes. Those candelabras were something to see.

  I lit some emergency candles and set them in the candelabras on the dinette table. This could so easily have been me in a different life, a newlywed me, whimsically breaking in my wedding candelabras with a romantic dinner at the dinette table. I watched the candles drip wax in spots on the table. Now, in the light, I saw Dr. Blandon watching me from a perch on the kitchen counter. Crouched in that position, his belly fat completely enveloped his paws.

  Then there was a knock at the door. All I could think was Please don’t wake the baby! and I went running to answer it before it happened again. I kicked my toe on a chair leg on the way and muffled my yelp of pain with my hand over my mouth.

  I tried to look through the peephole, but with no porch light, it wasn’t much use. Against all single-woman-alone-in-a-house advice, I cracked the door open to peer out. It was my garage-sale neighbor. He was in his pajamas. Again.

  “The baby’s sleeping,” I whispered, to underscore the point.

  “Okay,” he whispered back.

  I gestured toward his pajamas. “You must wear those things a lot,” I whispered.

  “Mostly at night,” he whispered back.

  “Did you lose your power?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why are you here?” I asked.

  “I thought you might need some help.”

  I didn’t need help, but I did want company. I had never paused to reflect on how comforting the auxiliary components of my life were until they were gone: no lights, no clocks, no phone, nothing. None of those lively electronic friends that populate the house. Just walls, furniture, a baby, and me.

  Inside, he insisted we stop whispering. I led him back to the kitchen, and we sat at the di
nette in the light of the candles. “That’s one badass cat,” he said, eyeing Dr. Blandon. Dr. Blandon started to purr.

  We both looked around at my messy kitchen, and then, after a while, my neighbor said, “Nice candles.”

  “My flashlight died,” I said.

  Then he told me the whole neighborhood was out, and wait times just to report the outage were over thirty minutes. “So probably a big one,” he said.

  “Probably so,” I said.

  “I thought I might stay with you until the power came back on.”

  I thought about faking it and telling him I was fine. But then I said, “Okay.”

  I offered him a can of warm grapefruit juice from the pantry, and he whipped out a deck of cards.

  “You think of everything,” I said, and he started to shuffle.

  “I’m good in emergencies,” he said. Then he looked up at me and said, “I’m good in other situations, too.”

  “I don’t doubt it,” I said.

  As he started to deal, I said, “The baby might wake up, and if she does, I’ll have to go nurse her back to sleep, and that could take some time.”

  “And I’ll still be here when you get back,” he said. Then he glanced up. “If that’s what you were asking.”

  I nodded.

  And then we played gin rummy. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d played cards. It reminded me of being a kid.

  My neighbor lost every hand, but he talked trash the whole time and made me laugh. He was a funny kind of pseudo-competitive.

  After a bit, we started building a house of cards. He told me that he renovated houses. He found bargains, fixed them up, and sold them at a profit. He did three houses a year. He lived in them while he worked, and then went up to stay with his parents in Dallas while the houses were on the market. He left his furniture, to make the houses feel homey, but nothing else—no stacks of junk mail, no tangle of computer cords, no dirty socks in the hamper.

  “You sell them the house they wish they had!” I said.