Crooked Branch (9781101615072)

by Cummins, Jeanine

  “The market closes at four on Thursdays,” I say to Emma, reaching into my pocket to check the time on my phone. “It’s already three thirty-two. Think we can make it?”

  Emma stares at me.

  “I can’t wait until you can talk. I’ll probably have to stop cursing before then.”

  Sometimes when you say this sort of thing out loud in front of other grown-ups, they tell you not to wish the precious babytime away, and then you have to restrain yourself from punching them in the throat. So it’s best just to whisper it to Emma when no one else is around. The phone in my hand rings, and I fumble it, almost drop it. Leo.

  “Hello?”

  “HONEY!”

  Oh my God, what is he so happy about?

  “Hi.”

  “How are my two girls?” he says.

  “Fine, we’re good. We’re out walking to the Amish market so I can make us a real meal tonight.” We’ve been ordering in, gigantic fried sandwiches with waffle fries, Chinese food, and even Tex-Mex “salads” in edible bowls. Extra ranch dressing, please. My inner foodie shudders.

  “Oooh, honey.” I can hear him making a sort of sucking-air-through-his-teeth sound that usually indicates news he’s reluctant to share.

  “What?” I say.

  “Yeah, it’s just that I’m not gonna be able to get out of work tonight. The restaurant is slammed.”

  I stop walking.

  “You what?” I ask.

  “We have a full house, and I just don’t think Mario is ready for a full dinner service without me.”

  “Oh.”

  Mario is Leo’s dinner sous-chef, and he’s been at the restaurant for almost two years, but according to Leo, he’ll never be ready to run the kitchen alone. Leo is so busy with the business side of the restaurant that he hardly even cooks anymore, but he just can’t let go of that kitchen. Real tears spring to my eyes, and my nose starts that wet, swelling feeling. It’s a horrible admission, but I actually count the hours that Leo is away from the house, and that’s not hyperbole. I literally count them: four hours to go. Three hours to go. Okay, just two hours to go now, I can do this. I’m lonely without Drew Carey for company, but when Leo’s home, it’s completely different. I watch him with Emma and I feel happy, like the decisions we made were the right ones. When he’s home I don’t even remember the deserted panic of these empty afternoons. It’s like I have revolving brains, each one amnesiac of the other.

  “I won’t be too late. I’ll get out of here as soon as the first wave is over, once Mario finds a good rhythm,” he says. “I’m just nervous about business here now that you’re not working. We’re relying on the restaurant income more than ever.”

  I feel sick to my stomach, like a tightrope walker watching the safety net collapse. I’m not prepared for this.

  “She’s only three weeks old,” I say. “You weren’t even supposed to go back to work until she was one month, that’s what we agreed. You have such a good team there now. You need to trust them more.”

  “But I have an even better team at home,” Leo says. “You guys are doing great!”

  Great? The sensitive, articulate, successful man I married . . . is he stupid? We’re doing great?

  “It’s only a few hours, honey. We just can’t take any risks with the restaurant now that you’re not working.”

  If he says the words “now that you’re not working” one more time, I swear I am going to walk into traffic.

  “Okay?” he says.

  I have to hang up the phone. I don’t want to become a woman who hangs up on her husband, but there are lots of things I didn’t want to become. I’ll just add this to the list. Because I can’t answer him. I literally can’t speak. I press end call. I will give myself a few minutes and then phone him back. I will tell him I lost the signal, or maybe even the truth, that I momentarily lost my voice. The phone rings immediately and I send the call to voice mail. I concentrate on deep breathing and walk to the end of the block. It’s a windy day, and in the graveyard across the street, the oak trees are scattering the season’s first leaves among the headstones. My neck is sweating. My armpits are sweating. Emma is making a face that means she might soon begin to cry.

  I bend into her stroller and tickle her cheek with my hair, because even a mama in crisis comforts her baby. That’s the minimum, automatic human response. Emma’s arms flail out and then she snuggles in. She is fuzzy and smells like pie, but she cries. A lot. And mostly, I still feel like that doctor just sliced me open yesterday, like I might physically split in half with one wrong twist or a significant hiccup.

  At first, Leo was enormously supportive. Our second night home from the hospital, I needed his help in the shower. I felt helpless, mortified. But he opened the shower curtain brandishing a razor, and asked, “What do you need me to shave?” And the two of us laughed so hard I thought my stitches would spring loose and I would bleed out in the tub. But now his patience is beginning to run short, and yesterday, when I told him my incision was throbbing, he asked when it would stop being an incision and start being a scar.

  “When I can throw sharp, heavy objects at your head without wincing,” I answered.

  The phone rings again, and I retrieve it from the stroller’s cup holder.

  “Sorry,” I say evenly. “Bad signal.”

  “Do you need me to come home?” Leo asks.

  “No, no, we’ll be fine. It’s just a couple of hours, right?”

  “Yeah, hey,” he says. “You know, I really love you, Jelly. You’re doing great.” Like if he repeats it often enough, he can make it be true. I’m doing great. I look down at Emma staring up at me, sucking on her fist. I bounce the handle of the stroller lightly—this is what I’ve learned from three weeks of motherhood. Constant motion is paramount.

  “I know,” I say. “We love you, too.”

  • • •

  The market feels almost familiar. My panic ebbs. I am like a regular human, walking the aisles with my human baby, browsing and purchasing foods to cook and eat. Normal. In my previous life, I was a food writer—that’s how Leo and I met. I went to his restaurant one day, and he seduced me with wild mushroom risotto. Food was the foundation of our universe. Before we had the baby, we could spend a whole day together—roasting, sautéing, chopping, boiling, reducing. There was something incredibly sexy about that, like tantric cooking. Now we eat ramen, and if Leo thinks to throw a piece of ham up in there for me, I weep with gratitude.

  Emma has drifted off in her car seat, so I’m able to take my time at the butcher counter, selecting the veal chops. I’m going to cook anyway, just for something to do. I squeeze plenty of produce before adding two lemons to my basket. When I finish shopping, I take two more laps around the shop just to fill up some extra minutes with people and food and comforting public noises. The thought of returning to the empty, aching house terrifies me. Emma begins to stir and stretch. She will be hungry. She is always hungry. I pay for the food and stuff the ingredients into the storage basket under the stroller.

  “Oh, what an angel,” the cashier says to me, leaning across her register to get a better look at Emma.

  “Yeah,” I say, rearranging her blanket.

  “How old is she?”

  “Three weeks.”

  “Oh, she’s brand-new! God bless you!”

  “Thanks.” I smile. “Do you want to come over for dinner?”

  The startled cashier looks up at me and leans away from us, back into her comfortable little work space.

  “I’m kidding,” I say. “I kid!”

  The cashier tries to chuckle.

  “NEXT ON LINE,” she says.

  The whole way home I mutter to myself about what an idiot I am. I hadn’t really meant to invite the cashier over for dinner. I meant to say it, but I also meant to laugh afterward, to indicate that I wasn’t serious. My v
oice is getting into an awful habit of doing things I haven’t sanctioned.

  “She thought I was a total freak,” I say to Emma, whose eyes are now open and blinky. “Mommy’s not a freak, baby.” I can’t tell if she believes me.

  It’s late afternoon now and as we walk down Seventy-eighth Avenue, two kids skateboard around us single file. Most of the street is shaded by trees, but in the sunny patches, the skateboarders cast fast-rolling shadows along the uneven pavement beneath. They shriek and call out loudly to one another. They make kissy-face noises at a young couple who are smooching against the railings of P.S. 119. At the corner ahead of us, the boys kick up their skateboards and carry them over the crosswalk and into the deli. I round the corner and unstrap the car seat to lug Emma up the steps to the front door. Across the street, my hot neighbor, Brian, is pulling his slick, black non-dadlike car into his driveway. My parents loved him, when they lived here. My mom called him “an old soul,” which is the highest praise she can bestow on anyone under the age of sixty.

  He scrunches on the parking brake with virility, I swear. I try to wave a casual hello, but with my shopping bags hanging from one elbow, and Emma’s car seat from the other, I may actually appear to be signaling for help. He waits on a passing car and then skips across the street. Here is a man so inherently masculine that he can skip without fear of ridicule. He can cross his legs elegantly, at the knee. He can drink a cocktail of a pinkish hue without irony. He is that manly. He takes the eight stairs in two strides, and lifts all of the shopping out of my hands.

  “I won’t touch the baby until I receive instruction!” he laughs. I want to kiss him.

  “Thanks,” I say. “I wasn’t flagging you down or anything, just saying hello.”

  “Hello!” he says back. “No, you just looked like you could use an extra set of hands.” Emma is starting to whimper loudly in her seat. She has a big voice for a tiny newborn.

  “I could use an extra set of boobs, too,” I say, immediately regretting the breast-feeding humor that is funny to no one on earth except me. But he laughs. He laughs!

  “Aw, she’s hungry, Majella. You’re hungry, aren’t you, beautiful?” he says, peering over the edge of Emma’s car seat while I fiddle with the keys in the lock. “She’s gorgeous. Looks just like you.”

  I blush. Which is totally stupid. Because he is only being kind, saying the sort of automatic thing that people say about squished-up, squalling newborn babies and their haggard-looking mommies.

  “Thanks,” I say.

  The door swings in and bangs the wall inside while I lumber through the doorway, gracelessly dragging Emma behind me. Brian follows us down the long hallway into the kitchen, sets the shopping bags down on the counter, and goes back out for the stroller. Emma begins to wail, and I begin to sweat. I need to pee. My incision throbs from carrying the car seat up the steps. But Emma’s hunger trumps all my would-be biological urgencies.

  I always wanted to be one of those effortless, French-style women who can breast-feed discreetly anywhere, but I’m not. For me, breast-feeding requires a Boppy, a footstool, a glass of water, and substantial nudity. I look around wildly, wondering if I can put Emma off eating until Brian leaves, but she is hollering the house down, and my skin is crawling. I can actually feel my blood pressure climbing as she cries. My boobs begin to leak. Brian is coming back down the hallway with the stroller now. There’s no way around it. I hike up my shirt, unsnap my nursing bra, and collapse onto the couch with Emma. It’s a minimalist couch, and it feels judgmental in this living room, like it’s afraid to touch anything else for fear of contamination. Leo and I ripped up the linoleum tile in here and replaced the subfloor before we moved in, but we haven’t installed the shiny new hardwoods yet, so the sofa is sitting on some plywood in front of a spackled and unpainted wall. The floorboards sit a few feet away, still in their boxes.

  Emma latches on like a champ, and I’m so grateful for this small, ordinary miracle. Breast-feeding is like a gift after the C-section, like evidence that my body isn’t biologically opposed to motherhood, even if my brain seems to be.

  “At least I can do this right,” I whisper to the top of her soft little head.

  Brian leans the stroller up against the counter.

  “Wow, thanks,” I say.

  He’s even managed to fold it up, which took me days to figure out. Brian is an engineer. I look down to make sure that my shirt is draped over as much of my boob as possible.

  “Yeah, no problem.” He looks over at us on the couch, and then snaps his head away, as if I’ve slapped him across the face.

  Brian is one of those progressive, gentlemanly types who believes in breast-feeding, but only theoretically. In practice, he is completely undone by it. He doesn’t know where to look, so he studies my kitchen ceiling. I glance down at my engorged boob. It’s bigger than Emma’s head. Disgusting. I feel a hot blush creeping up my neck.

  “The kitchen looks fantastic,” Brian says, staring at the light fixture. “The place is really coming along.”

  “Thanks,” I say, stretching my shirt halfway across Emma’s face while she tries to eat. “It’s not like yours—I wish we had the patience to restore all those great historic details. It was a mess when we moved in, needed so much work. My parents just didn’t have the energy to keep it up when they lived here.”

  “Well, it was homey,” he says kindly. “But it sure looks a lot different already.” I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to say that he’s fondling my poured-concrete countertops.

  “Well, much as I enjoyed the linoleum paradise of my childhood, those yellow appliances were ready to retire,” I say. “They limped to their deaths.”

  The kitchen was the first room we renovated after we bought this house from my parents—the only room we’ve finished, with a cork floor and a Sub-Zero, over-and-under, built-in fridge with a glass door. That fridge is so beautiful that sometimes I actually embrace it, and then I have to spritz off the leaky breast milk stains from the glass door afterward, with Windex.

  Brian opens one of those glass doors now, and deposits both of my shopping bags inside the fridge without unpacking them. He’s wearing dusty jeans and Timberland boots, and somehow he looks elegant in my immaculate new kitchen. We are a before-and-after picture: I am before, all sweaty, disheveled, and bloated in the unfinished living room, and Brian is after, standing in my flawless kitchen like some sexified, twenty-first-century version of a Norman Rockwell painting.

  “I really miss the grape-motif wallpaper,” Brian jokes from the kitchen. “But I guess your aesthetic has a certain appeal, too.”

  Conversation! Complete with sarcasm and humor! Hallelujah! Emma sucks noisily at my boob, and thwacks my chest with her free-flailing arm.

  “Don’t tell my mom,” I say, laughing. “She’d be heartbroken if she heard you weren’t a fan of the grape wallpaper.”

  Brian takes a break from his breast-feeding-eye-contact boycott to flash me a grin.

  “How are they settling in, in Florida?” he asks.

  “Good, they love it. I just talked to my mom this morning.”

  “They coming up for a visit soon, to meet Miss Emma?”

  And suddenly my eyes are filling up again, and I am mortified. I will not ruin this. I will not frighten my hot and kindly neighbor with my bizarre, uncomfortable tears. I will swallow them. I shake my head, glad I didn’t switch on the lamp before I sat down. It’s still light outside, but the sun has dropped behind Brian’s roof across the street.

  “No, I don’t know,” I say, and I’m encouraged by my voice, which sounds unaccountably solid. “They’re still getting used to everything. They’ll probably come in the spring, after the bad weather.”

  They moved to Florida just six months ago. At the same dinner where I told them I was expecting their first grandbaby, they made their own announcement: “We’re moving to Tamp
a!” Which felt, at first, infuriating, and then fortuitous. On the subway home that night, I asked Leo if we could buy their house.

  “In Queens?” he said, like I’d just suggested we should move to Libya.

  “Yes, in Queens. Where I grew up. Where lots of nice, normal, nonelitist people grew up,” I said, in my most elitist voice.

  “No, I know—Glendale is great,” Leo said.

  “There’s so much green space in Queens,” I said. “I miss that, living in Manhattan. All the trees and grass and sky.”

  “But there are dead people under that grass,” he said. It’s true that Queens has a lot of graveyards. That’s always sort of creeped Leo out. “And isn’t it kind of far?”

  “From what?”

  “You know, from Manhattan, from work. From stuff.”

  But Leo was already defeated. I was barely nine weeks pregnant then, but I’d already acquired the habit of placing my hand suggestively across my belly in an argument, to illustrate the righteousness of my position. And my position was this: I wanted out of Manhattan. I hadn’t even known until that very moment, but it was true. I wanted out of our tiny, sterile, teacup apartment. I was tired of paying $3,500 a month for eight hundred (beautiful) square feet in a glass box that we didn’t even own. We’d been talking about buying a place anyway, and now I wanted a house that had windows you could open in the springtime, with screens that would collect buckets of pollen and dead insects. I wanted neighbors who could annoy me horizontally instead of vertically. I wanted a weed-whacker and a garden hose.

  “I want an education for our kid that’s somewhere in between Gossip Girl and Gangland,” I told Leo, while our train rumbled north through Midtown. To his credit, he didn’t roll his eyes at me, but he did say, “I think you’re being slightly dramatic.”

  I didn’t care. Pregnant people are entitled to be dramatic. The suburban city was singing to my new-sprung maternal ferocity, and in the end, Leo couldn’t escape. We bought the house—my childhood house—from my parents, and now here we are, in Glendale. Or here I am, at least. And here’s Brian, standing gracefully in my new kitchen.