by Ariella Papa
“I could stash some things at my dad’s. I could also stand to purge. And in case you haven’t noticed I haven’t been making much lately.”
I didn’t say anything. Of course I had noticed. I thought he was going through a dry spell. I kept waiting for him to talk to me about it, but he wasn’t.
“You know, I got to get to work,” he said. He kissed the top of my head and I smiled, out of habit.
I heard him stop in the kids’ room to kiss them on his way out. Usually, I found that endearing, but today was going to be one of those days where everything he did pissed me off. He was probably going to wake up the kids with his scraggly beard and then everyone would be in my bed.
Naomi was done nursing and let my nipple out of her mouth.
I rolled onto my side, making a little more space between us, but not completely letting go of her. I thought back to that first night with David in art school and how perfect he had seemed. I thought of how he made me laugh when I was nine centimeters dilated with Julissa and how calm and composed he had been when we had Sage at home. My family had learned to stop asking when we were going to make it official, but to us marriage didn’t matter. I knew he loved me and I loved him. And the way we defined love was something I didn’t think a lot of people experienced. I didn’t need to have a piece of paper. It was deeper with David.
In the beginning of our relationship we were together all the time, working on our art, scrimping by, dining by candlelight to save on electricity and occasionally exploring the cheap restaurants in all corners of the city. We lived in a giant illegal loft in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, before everyone decided it was cool. It was our space, our haven. All we did was talk and when we were silent it was because we were creating something. For him it was sculpture and for me it was photography and photo illustration. Whenever I was around him there was this crazy frenetic creativity that inspired me, that challenged me.
And then along came Jules and we loved her. She completed our little family. We kept doing all the things we were doing. We kept creating. We had a couple of shows that went well. We sold a few pieces. We talked about buying a barn upstate so David could have more room to use bigger materials for his sculpture. I don’t know why we didn’t do it. Eventually our building got condemned and we had to move to Boerum Hill in Brooklyn. Most of our friends moved out west or up north. David started occasionally working for his dad here and there. I hated being away from him. It was ridiculous how much I missed him when we weren’t together. The nights he came back from work, the three of us lay in bed together breathing in the scent of the bakery.
“I have to do this,” he said. “I hate it, but it’s worth it for the family.”
“It’s a sacrifice,” I agreed, “We are sacrificing our time together. But I appreciate it.”
“The most important thing to me is that we raise these kids.”
“We will.” I vowed. I believed we could keep it up, our creativity, our way of being without needing anyone but us. We were a family and we defined that.
And then Sage came along. He fit right in to our family too. We didn’t have the space we had in Williamsburg and it was a lot smaller with two kids, but we managed. David accepted a part-time position from his father. I still hated when he left the apartment, but with two I had less time to be sad about it.
David was sad, though. More than anything he wanted to be there. Throughout our whole history David and I had always been equals. Now one of us was the child rearer and one of us was literally the bread maker. So I had an idea, just for fun I went up to moms in Prospect Park and The Botanic Gardens and told them I would love to photograph their kids. I designed cards to make it seem legit and believe it or not, I got jobs. Women come to Brooklyn like salmon to spawn. And they need proof. They loved my work and passed the word along. I was popular with all the new moms. My photos were on birth announcements and first birthday invites. It was perfect.
David could work less and be a part of the kids’ lives. And to me, it seemed like easy money. I loved kids and photography and the job was a good one. I felt so lucky. I was contributing and sacrificing for the family.
And then I got pregnant again. We always said we wanted to fill up a van with kids, but we didn’t expect it all to happen so fast.
Now it was time to start again. I had taken time off with Naomi, but David was right, enough was enough. Seven months. But this time I dreaded the thought of working; going to other people’s houses and making their kids laugh. It was such easy money. It was much easier for me to do than it was for David to go and work for his dad. So why was I dreading it?
I wanted to believe that it was because I was selfish, that I wanted to spend time with my own children. And that was it, but only partly.
I first picked up a camera when I was twelve at a summer arts camp. I remember walking around the woods, stopping and snapping pictures. I took my time and then I brought the film back to the dark room to be developed. The moment, that first moment where the picture started to appear was magic. That’s where I returned every waking minute I wasn’t shooting pictures. I loved the smell of the dark room chemicals on my hands. It was sensory in a way that, maybe because of my bum ear, nothing ever had been. That year when I returned home I found old pictures of my grandmother and collaged them with new ones I took. I wrote snippets of her life story along the side. I spent weeks on that project until it was perfect. It was hanging up in our living room now. I loved photography, but right out of art school I shirked staff jobs I could have gotten for magazines or advertising. I would freelance when I needed to pay bills, but what I really wanted was to make art.
But when I had kids, I couldn’t afford to be as choosy. Taking pictures of other peoples’ kids wasn’t art. It was survival. I knew that I couldn’t have both, but I didn’t know how to let the dream go. David was apparently happy to let his dream go. It didn’t bother him that we might lose our creative space. And that comment about Sage’s gay thing? It was as if we were speaking two different languages.
“Looks like you got almost a full house,” I heard above me, pulling me out of my concerns and back to the park. I looked up to see Victoria, one my neighborhood clients. I smiled.
“Yeah, we’re picking Julissa up at preschool in a little while. Hi, Zachary,” I said to the toddler in the stroller.
“Zach, say hi,” his mother said. Zach didn’t respond. “You know he won’t always say hi.”
“That’s okay,” I said, lightly. “I don’t take it personally.”
“He can say hi,” she said, defensively. She looked disappointed. She sat down next to me. Here we go. “That’s so great that you can nurse out here. I could never do it in public.”
I got this a lot. In Park Slope women were rumored to walk around topless with children attached to their breast, but here, less than a mile away, my discreet nursing was sometimes met with confusion. I put the dumb smile back on. This was the smile that I liked to call the crunchy one; I pulled it out whenever any of the moms I’ve worked for said something that I found to be a secret dig. I preferred to have them think that I was just the flakey artsy type than actually listening. I was sure more comments would come when she noticed Sage’s bathing suit. Sure enough.
“Wow, Sage, that’s quite an outfit,” she said smiling.
“Thank you,” Sage said sincerely. I felt a pang in my chest. He ran off to the jungle gym.
I felt Victoria looking at me waiting for me to explain. Instead I made cooing faces at Naomi as I burped her. I was trying to decide whether or not I should engage Victoria and Zachary so that I could potentially get some more business and placate David.
“My nephew Jimmy went through this period where he loved Dora,” she said after a minute. “He kept saying that thing she says, you know in Spanish. What does she say?”
“I have no idea.” I really didn’t know. I never got pop culture references.
“Oh, you mean your older daughter never got into Dora’s show?”
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“Nope,” I said. On a different day, I might add that we didn’t use TV as a babysitter in our house, but that was something David said when he was gloating and people were a lot easier on things a dad says than a mom.
“That’s great, she’s so super popular. You wouldn’t believe it.”
“I know, I’ve seen the merchandise.”
“Anyhoo, my nephew wanted to have a Dora party for his third birthday, but his dad freaked out. He wound up doing Cars.”
“That’s too bad,” I said. I meant it, poor kid. I wanted to get off the topic of dads not supporting their sons. I wanted Victoria to stop talking to me and leave me alone to quietly play with my daughter. I wasn’t sure I was ready to network just yet.
“I think it’s great that you let Sage do his own thing.”
“Thanks,” I said. I wished someone would call my cell phone. Or even Sage could fall and skin his knee. No major injury just a little boo-boo, anything to get out of this silly small talk. I wanted to collect my thoughts quietly. I wanted to slow myself and my mind down.
“What’s Naomi up to these days?” Victoria asked. My daughter was seven months old. On a good day she shat her pants and didn’t spit up.
“Oh, you know, the usual baby stuff. Life is good.”
“Is she crawling yet?”
“Nope, we’re only sitting up.”
“Zachary was a late crawler too.” Too? “He did the backward thing for so long and then one day he finally decided to do it. Now we’re waiting for him to walk, fifteen months and he’s still hanging on.”
“I really don’t see the rush for any of it,” I said. “I can barely keep up with the two of them walking.”
“Oh, me neither, no rush” she says. “I’m just saying.”
We sat for a while. She complimented Naomi’s eyelashes and her chubby cheeks. I kept looking at Naomi, not at Victoria, not complimenting Zachary. This was a bad idea though. I knew I was being sensitive. I was in a rotten mood and it wasn’t her fault. The neighborhood moms talked, they emailed, and they posted anonymous reviews on websites. I had to be more gracious. I couldn’t pull this sullen-girl act the way I used to when I was in high school, but so many times simply talking to other moms made me feel as uncool as I had in high school.
At last I turned to Zachary. I felt cheap, but I had mouths to feed. Throughout time mothers have had to do worse.
“What’s going on, pal?” I asked Zachary at last. “What nice curly hair you have.”
“Oh, it’s from his dad’s side,” Victoria said immediately, smiling.
“Adorable,” I said.
“Thank you,” Victoria said. I needed to get going. Julissa would freak if I wasn’t there to pick her up from school. I had no idea what she was going to do when she realized Sage was wearing her bathing suit. I called Sage over and handed him a T-shirt.
“We’ve got to go get your sister.” I stood up and secured Naomi in the sling. “It was nice to see you, Victoria.”
“Oh, you too. I was thinking of maybe getting some more pictures of Zach. You know for the grandparents. Those others came out so well.”
Score!
“Anytime, I would love to. You still have my contact info, right?”
“Of course.”
“Cool, let me know. Bye-bye, Zach,” I said, waving. I took Sage’s hand and we left the playground.
It seemed I was back in business.
Chapter 2
Claudia, the Ant
It was at the top of my to-do list.
I was going to get my kids into the perfect nursery school, no matter what. This was a project. And I was an excellent project manager.
In order to get into your top choice preschool, it was crucial to start eighteen months out. It would give me time to prep the children and make sure the staff at the day care knew to expunge Emily’s biting incident last fall if they were ever questioned.
In reality I wish I had started sooner. I wish I had started when they were in utero. The first order of business was to bring in an expert.
The consultant said she was going to call me back in five minutes, ten minutes ago. Not to mention it was 10:57 and every day at 10:59, I shut down my computer and walked downstairs to the café for an iced cappuccino. Now this consultant’s tardiness had the potential to put my whole day back.
Plus there was a typo in her email. She wrote “their” instead of “they’re.” As in, “I’m sure their going to have no hiccups getting into the school you want them to get into.” This was a woman to whom I was considering giving money so she could “ease the twins’ path into the right school.” One would think that Marcy, the consultant, would have typed that sentence countless times. Maybe she didn’t usually deal with twins. And maybe she was relying on her spell check to catch her typos as people so often did. If you ask me, people take far too many liberties on email. They just don’t respect the person to whom they are sending the email. Or maybe she wrote her email quickly because she was so busy with all her other clients.
I don’t know why I was trying to figure out Marcy’s motivation for her misspelling. I don’t know why I bothered. I was always doing that, trying to figure out what made everyone else so incompetent. Most of the time, it was because people didn’t care.
But I cared. And I was excited. I remember the charge I got when I opened each of my college acceptance letters. I had gotten into every school to which I applied. Except Harvard. I was wait-listed at Harvard. But I believe it was an extremely competitive year. If I had tried to transfer there in my junior year, I am more than sure I would have gotten in.
And I am more than sure I would have initially gotten in if I had the advantages that a lot of other kids had. I’m sure they had experts helping them along. A little money goes a long way. My mother was so certain I could get in on merit alone. That’s not the way the world works, I soon learned, but no matter. She was crushed when I was wait-listed. I think that maybe I didn’t transfer to spite her. And now when I still lay in bed at night wondering if I should have transferred, what really gnaws at me is that once again my mother was right. More doors open for Harvard grads.
My children would go to Harvard. The right preschool was the first step. If only Marcy would call back. It was 11:14. I was beginning to suspect that Marcy was not who I wanted taking such a pivotal role of my children’s future. I would find someone who was punctual and, more importantly, someone who could spell.
Maybe Marcy was a grasshopper.
“The Grasshopper and the Ant” was a story in my favorite childhood fairy tale collection. In every aspect of my life I felt I was the hardworking ant to everyone else’s lazy grasshopper.
I hoped this story would resonate with one of my children, but Emily was only interested in The Backyardigans and one of the few words Jacob said clearly was truck. I worried this might signify their future personality defects. And if it did, I was more than sure it could be corrected by the right preschool.
Or maybe they would be somehow stigmatized if they started one of these designer preschools with so many issues. Perhaps their reputations would carry through to high school and somehow word would get back to the Harvard admissions committee. Perhaps they needed a chance to excel that they weren’t getting at their day care. Perhaps they needed a preschool prep school.
I had been doing research on preschools. I stayed up late at night trolling urbanbaby.com, reading different reviews and finding out everything I could online about the best schools.
I recently read about the Brooklyn Center for Early Childhood Education (BROCECE pronounced Brookese, for people in the know). It was relatively new on the preschool scene, but even though it was in Brooklyn, not Manhattan, it was recently highly rated in an article in New York magazine. It was an up-and-coming feeder school, meaning it could lead the twins to a good elementary school and that would make all the difference. It certainly wasn’t a top preschool, it was in Brooklyn after all, but maybe if we did a year there, the
kids would be ready. I imagined them on a preschool interview in Manhattan. At this point, it would be a disaster. They needed time. Perhaps they could start at Brookese and then transfer somewhere even better the way I should have done with Harvard.
Very well, then. Who needed Marcy, the incompetent consultant? Often it caused delays when one delegated. I would be the master of their fate. It was preferable. Getting the twins into Brookese was going to be my new focus. I could pour all my energy into Brookese instead of spreading the twins too thin with several schools. They would be big fish in a little pond. It was perfect.
The phone rang. I looked down expecting it to be Marcy. I was prepared to dismiss the tardy grasshopper. For the fee she had intended to charge me, I might relish it a little. She was unprofessional, and I don’t give people second chances. But it wasn’t Marcy. I recognized my mother’s number on the caller id. I knew why she was calling, but I didn’t want to talk to her. I was more than sure she would find a way to make me feel as though I was doing something wrong.
I let the call go to voice mail. But at the moment I was about to head down to the cafe, my computer calendar reminder dinged. I was supposed to be in a budget meeting. I was going to have to forgo my daily dose of caffeine. I was more exhausted than usual. Today of all days.
It was my birthday.
This morning I opened my eyes as usual a few precious seconds after I heard Jacob start screaming and right before Emily started kicking her crib, I realized that I was thirty-nine; technically I would be thirty-nine at 2 PM, but still.
Peter’s face was still buried in the pillow. It might have been nice if he leaped out of bed as a special birthday treat or maybe brought me breakfast in bed or something. But no, nothing.
I lay there for a minute, glaring at his bald spot.
I took a deep breath, knowing that as soon as my feet touched the ground it would begin. But somewhere I still hoped things would be different today of all days. I had a strict schedule. And it would have been nice if for once, someone else adhered to it.
