Safekeeping: Some True Stories From a Life

by Abigail Thomas

  What the Moment Can Hold

  The first time I hold my daughter’s daughter I feel so sad. I don’t remember feeling this when her sons were born. It is a strange feeling, the wrong emotion for this happy time, but I can’t help it. I’m remembering when the baby in my arms was my daughter, when it was all still to come. So many things did not go as I would have wished. There is so much I can’t undo. The baby is beautiful, as my daughter was, as all my children were and are. When I kiss my daughter she seems barely to feel it, seems almost to turn away. I wonder what she is thinking. “What a beautiful girl you have,” I say, but my voice doesn’t sound real. My daughter nods distractedly. I try to remember how it is when the baby is born and you are intent only on milk, milk, milk. But she feels distant to me, although I may be imagining it. This is not what I expected. I expected pure joy, and here are joy and sorrow mixing into the same moment.

  Back home the family makes its adjustments, some painful. I find myself interfering, making unnecessary and unwelcome suggestions. My daughter’s husband, the older boys’ stepfather, asks them to do some household chore. Twice, three times, he has to ask. His voice has an edge. Everyone is tired. The older boy mutters something under his breath. Voices are raised. “You’re being rude,” says my daughter to her eldest son, and I jump up. I can’t seem to stop myself. “He wasn’t!” I shout. “You weren’t listening. You’re being unfair!” I am trembling with emotion. “Mother,” my daughter finally has to say. “Please stop.” And heartsick I leave the room. But I am remembering another family, different days. I don’t know what to do with this mixture of emotions, this blurring of the present and the past, and I hate it. Instead I want one pure feeling, like water in a cup.

  But the baby is beautiful. Her eyes are big and round and blue. She reminds me of one of the creatures in the Hall of Darkness, the nocturnal animals whose forms you make out only by letting your own eyes adjust, and then there they are, in the branches or among the grasses, slowly taking shape, motionless, wise, looking out at you. Beings from another world. She sleeps and wakes and nurses. She doesn’t fuss. I like to carry her around the house, whispering to her, but I can’t call her by her name, my name. I am humbled by the honor and don’t deserve it. “What’s wrong,” my daughter asks from time to time. “Nothing,” I say, but my heart is heavy. I feel as if my daughter and I gaze at each other on opposite banks of some body of water. “This is a happy time, Mom,” she says, and I take it as a reproach.

  So I cook. It comforts me to be slicing onions and frying garlic. It comforts me to be chopping tomatoes and browning meat. “You don’t have to start so early, Mom,” says my daughter. “It’s only three o’clock, and we don’t eat until seven.” We laugh, but I keep on cooking. “She keeps trying to get me to eat,” I hear her telling a friend on the telephone, “at ten in the morning, ‘Have a chicken sandwich,’ she says to me.” My daughter laughs again. I look at her across the room. Her little boy is playing with trains and puzzles on the rug, occasionally climbing up next to her to look at the baby. The two older boys are in school, sixth and seventh grades. Later there will be a fire in the fireplace and a family eating supper together. I try not to think of the way she grew up, the upheavals. The ordinary things she didn’t get to do, the mistakes I made.

  “Do you want a pony?” I hear my daughter whisper to the baby in her arms.

  At night my daughter and her husband climb the carpeted stairs to the second floor. Upstairs is another domain. This is where the smaller children sleep, and the baby, where the voices are hushed and everybody walks on tiptoe. Upstairs is dark and quiet. Downstairs the older boys and I prepare for bed, brushing our teeth, getting drinks, turning off lights. “Good night,” we say to one another, and then we decide to sleep all in the same room. “It’s been a long day,” my oldest grandson sighs from his pile of pillows and covers on the floor. Next to me my younger grandson stretches out. I listen to them breathing until they fall asleep. Then I have a dream of a blue-black ocean where huge waves break heavy and dark. There are fangs of foam dripping from the breakers. The road home is already under swirling water, but the boys and I try to escape. It is a terrifying dream. We hang on to a rope? Each other? And I fear we will all be washed away, but then in the way of dreams suddenly the sea is calm, and the boys are with other boys, floating on their surfboards, waiting to catch a wave. The ocean is manageable again, back where it belongs. They are safe.

  I lie awake, wishing I had faith of some kind. I’ve caught glimpses of it now and then, I can even conjure it up for a second or two, but it fades. It’s a stillness, the polar opposite of worry. It isn’t hope; hope has too much energy, requires constant renewal; faith (if I had it) would just be there.

  The next night the baby’s plastic tub is on the kitchen counter. In it a new washcloth and an unopened cake of soap, a white towel. “Are you giving her a bath tonight?” I ask, and my daughter nods. “Her first. Will you help me?” “Of course,” I say, “I would love to.” My daughter starts to fill the little tub with water from the sink, then stops. She decides instead that she will get into her own bathtub and take the baby in with her. I remember doing this myself a long time ago. “I’ll feel more secure that way,” she says. And it will feel good, warm water and the naked child against her naked self. Will I get the baby ready and bring her in? “Of course,” I say. With pleasure. So I lay the baby down on my daughter’s bed, and her big eyes are wide. “You are a little darling,” I whisper, and bend my face to hers, but the other feeling is there too, uneasiness, something heavy in my heart. I undress her carefully, slipping one tiny arm out of its sleeve and then the other. “She’s lost her umbilical cord already,” I call in to my daughter. “I know, it came off early,” she answers, and then I hear the water rumbling into the tub. Naked, the baby’s arms and long legs flail against the bare air, and she wails. “Oh you,” I whisper, unable yet to call her by my name, “it’s all right.” I want my joy pure, I want to get rid of the echo in my head. This is my granddaughter, named for me. This beautiful child.

  I gather her up, nuzzling her soft face, and bring her into the bathroom, and my daughter, her breasts heavy with milk, reaches up her arms for the child. The moment she is lowered into the water the baby stops crying, her body goes limp, her eyelids drop—it all happens at once. Under her half-closed lids her irises are now moving left to right, over and over, rhythmically, as if to a beat. At first I am afraid, and put my hand in the water to make sure it’s not too hot, but it is fine, comfortable. We don’t speak, but my daughter touches my arm as we realize what we are looking at, what the two of us are being shown. This is the face of the unborn child.

  And I know now what a moment can hold.

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you again from the bottom of my heart to Chuck Verrill, Liz Darhansoff, Leigh Feldman, and Tal Gregory, who read this at the very beginning and encouraged me and without whom I’d have just gone back to bed. Thank you to Else Blangsted, my soulmate, my friend, whose love and intelligence and refusal to take no for an answer are crucial to me. Thanks to my sisters, Judy and Eliza, who have carried me over many a rough spot and who usually make me see things more clearly and always make me laugh: I love you both. Thanks to my husband, Rich, who puts up with me with unfailing good humor and steadiness of love: How did I get so lucky? Boundless gratitude and praise for my editor, Robin Desser, who saw what this might be and made it happen, asking all the difficult interesting questions. You made the process if not pure pleasure, certainly as exhilarating as doing something difficult can get. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

  As for my children, Sarah Waddell-Okin, Jennifer Waddell, Ralph Waddell, and Catherine Luttinger, what I know I’ve learned from all of you. I couldn’t have done this (or anything) without your affection and encouragement. Thanks as well to Sarah’s husband, Claude, and Ralph’s wife, Kirsten. Not to mention, of course, my perfect grandchildren: Joe, Sam, Ben, Dan, Abigail, and Quinnie. (And my granddog Daisy.) />
  And to you, Quin, my old friend, a cup of kindness yet. Wherever you are.