Only Children (15 page)

Miriam smiled at Nina. She shook her head and closed her eyes sadly. Then she brought a hand to her lips, kissed it, and put the hand on her husband’s cheek. “No excitement! We have our baby grandson in the car.”

They’re kooks, Nina thought, not for the first time, but without a shudder of revulsion. They were gutted fish on a dock; their innards quivered in public for all the world to see. She looked down at Luke, asleep, his face a mask: the bridge of his nose fiat, the beautiful lips sealed, lying in state like a sculpture on a bishop’s tomb, the occupant done in cool marble, making him perfect and timeless. But he was a Jew, this baby, this son, this person from her and yet not from her.

Nina had told Eric not to let his parents come upstairs, just as she had prevented her parents (or her mother at any rate) from being there. She didn’t know why she had felt that she and Eric being alone with Luke the first time was important—until now. She didn’t want Luke to know anything of the world but them, the two of them, so different, her interior hidden, his exploded; she wanted Luke to make himself out of their incompatible materials, to fashion himself new, created by none of the old forms.

“Will you raise the baby Jewish?” Nina’s mother had once asked.

“Do you even know what that means?” she had answered.

“You know what I mean.”

“He will be raised by us,” Nina had said.

Her mother had frowned and said, “These things have to be thought about. I don’t care what you decide. But confusion isn’t good for children.”

“You think being raised Jewish isn’t confusing?”

“Being nothing is more confusing,” her mother had said.

“My baby won’t be nothing,” she had answered, furious.

The car pulled up in front of their building. Ramon, the afternoon doorman, rushed out to open the door, the cheeks on his fat, round face puffing up with his broad smile. “
¡Hola!
” he shouted at Luke.

“He’s asleep!” Nina snapped.

“You don’t want us to park and come up?” Barry asked.

Nina froze in position, her legs out of the car, her torso inside, thinking: I swear, I’ll never forgive you, Eric, if you let them.

“We can be a big help,” Barry sold himself. “We raised a kid, you know.”

“Uh … ” came out of Eric.

“Let them be,” Miriam said. “They need to rest. We’ll visit tomorrow.”

While negotiating the lobby—Nina moved slowly, giving an impression of protective motherhood, although it was her sore wound that needed the care—Nina reflected that Eric was incapable of saying no to his father. That task always fell to Miriam. Father and son were overpowering men, not only physically and vocally, but in their vibrant, expressive faces. Refusing them was to hurt a bear: a huge, warm, gentle creature shocked by cruelty, his pain and fear made more pathetic by the size of the suffering. Eric feared disappointing his father’s expectations and love as much as Nina feared failing Eric.

She thought of this as a problem not in relation to herself. She didn’t mind. After all, she had no desire to let Eric down. He demanded only affection and attention; there was nothing brutal in his wants. She thought of it for Luke. Sons have to say no to their fathers, she argued to herself in the elevator, the tower of Eric beside her, Luke unconscious in her arms. The shadow of this man could forever block the sun from her child, obliterate from Luke’s sight much that was not in Eric’s vision but existed in hers. The world, for Eric, was composed of things: gadgets, money, luxuries, ways of doing. For her the planet had life: in its changing sky, in the aging of faces, in the dirt of buildings, in the brisk efficiency of winter and the languorous sex of summer.

Eric believed people and the things they did were important; sometimes Nina could contemplate the end of humanity not only with calm but with a kind of relief. She didn’t bleed at every horror on the news; she didn’t weep while passing the homeless, covered, like forgotten cars, with grime; she didn’t rage at all the bloodthirsty bigotry of the international world, black against white, Jew against Arab; she didn’t despair at the great listless heads of the starving. Instead, she felt hopelessness keenly in all the world’s activities.

Nina stood in the hallway while Eric fumbled with the keys. He was nervous; his body moved ahead of his intentions and left him uncoordinated. He had stumbled in the lobby when he simultaneously moved ahead to the elevator and then reversed direction to help her. He had raced to press the buttons inside, mistakenly holding the door open button until she pointed it out. Now, in his haste to get the right key in the lock, he had dropped the ring. There was silence throughout the building. Everything he did echoed in the stairwell near their door.

She felt dread at this waiting. In the hospital her intimacy with Luke seemed apart from the world and its ghastliness. When they crossed the doorsill to their apartment, the struggle to raise Luke in the mad world would begin. She wanted Luke to know, really know, there was a place of beauty for him, not the decorated prettiness of an apartment, but the warm, messy love of home, as she had felt with her brothers and sisters in that rambling house in Brookline, Massachusetts. The noise of dinner, the soft fabric of nightclothes, the games of Christmas, the excitement of Saturday morning, the regret of Sunday night—all the joys of her childhood she wanted to be Luke’s. She suddenly felt this life for Luke, here, shelved horizontally in the storehouse of New York, reared by a huge father obsessed by possessions, was pregnant with disaster.

They entered.

The apartment was still. An open window in their bedroom lifted a white curtain, billowing like a sail on Blue Hill Bay. “We’re home, baby,” she said to Luke, and moved the hand she had supporting his bottom. The diaper felt softer than usual. She pressed it again. There was something slippery underneath. “I think he’s taken a crap,” she said to Eric.

“You’re kidding!” he said as though an astounding and disastrous turn of events had occurred.

“They do that, you know.”

“The changing table’s all set up,” Eric said, again in a rush to do things his body wasn’t ready for. He tried to put her bag down and motion her toward the baby’s room in one gesture and nearly toppled himself as a result. He had to put out one hand on the floor to prevent a complete spill.

She found herself laughing uncontrollably, her body quaking from it, shaking Luke. Luke moaned. “Shhh,” Nina said to Eric, but she meant it for herself. “Don’t make me laugh.”

“I’m not trying to!”

“Relax.”

“Okay. I’m fine. It’s in here. I’ve set everything up.” Eric pointed to Luke’s room. She moved to have a view of it. The crib was badly placed, against the far wall between the windows. The changing table, which was really an antique dresser inherited from her grandmother, was in the middle against a wall. All quite wrong: the arrangement lacked any sense of flow; the objects were merely plunked down. She regretted again that she hadn’t redone the whole apartment while pregnant. “We’ll have to move the changing table by the window and put the crib here.” She gestured to indicate the wall farthest from the windows, where he had put the inexpensive white shelves, intended for the toys Luke would inevitably acquire.

“Why?” Eric objected. “We can hear him better over there,” he said, meaning that the crib was next to the bathroom, which was also connected to their bedroom.

She shook her head no. Explaining was too complicated and she didn’t want the bother of reasoning Eric out of it. She knew anyway he argued merely as a point of pride, irritated he had displeased her. Now Luke added to the disharmony. He woke up, with immediate angry cries.

“What’s the matter?” Eric pleaded, his face bewildered.

“He needs to be changed.”

“He knows that?”

Nina walked to the dresser and put Luke on his back. Luke’s face turned red. His hollow mouth yawned with screeching objections. The sound quickened her heartbeat, made her feel she had to be fast: that Luke was a ticking bomb she had to defuse. “Where are the diapers?” she demanded.

“Diapers?” Eric said slowly. “Oh, my God.”

“The hospital package,” she said, nodding at the paper bag the nurse had given her with free baby supplies.

Luke’s cries raged on as she unsnapped his tiny outfit. A dark mass showed through the diaper material, and had spread across the bottom to ooze from the side onto his thighs. The gook looked like oatmeal. She heard tearing sounds from behind her, and a glance revealed Eric, frantic, unable to open the stapled bag, ripping it apart. The sample package of four diapers also frustrated him. He pulled its top off in one motion. She knew his actions were funny, but she felt only impatience.

When she took another look at Luke (his chest now heaving with frightened, angry bewilderment), she noticed the oatmeal had gotten onto his clothes, and was squashed up his back, messing the plastic of the mattress and staining the bottom of his undershirt. Luke would have to be totally stripped and lifted off the mattress, which would then need wiping before clean clothes could be laid down. She had done all this several times in the hospital, but then Luke had been quiet, his arms maneuvering in the air awkwardly, his unfocused eyes peering with studied wonder at lights and shadows. To take the time now, with his wailing, seemed impossible.

Eric brought a diaper over. “What’s the matter?” he said, not to her, but to Luke, as if he were sensible, capable of response.

“The wipes!” she said, pronouncing the words hard. She could barely keep from screaming.

“Right here!” he said, shouting to be heard over Luke’s cries. He lifted a blue plastic container of moistened cloths beside Luke’s kicking feet. It had been right in front of her eyes.

She lifted Luke’s legs, gripping his toy feet so hard they went red. “You’re hurting him,” Eric said.

She pulled the diaper, a pot overflowing with the hot cereal, from under him, folded it—the stuff squeezed out the sides—and handed the mass to Eric. He took it manfully, but then stood there watching, while the slop in his hands threatened to drop on the floor. “Throw it out!” she yelled over Luke’s now-rending cries, broken by gasps for breath. She had Luke’s lower half in the air, his feet together in one hand, like a trussed chicken. She looked at the smeared mattress and realized she would need more than simply the wipes to clean it off.

“Where?” Eric asked.

“In the kitchen. And get some paper towels!”

Eric ran to the kitchen. She heard him banging the cabinet doors, opening and closing them violently.

A look at Luke: eyes gone, mouth a pulsing cavern of agony, fingers scratching for help. She put a hand on his bony, throbbing chest. “Shhhh! Shhhhh!” she hissed, intended as a comfort, but her voice sounded scared and angry.

Eric rushed in, sweating, carrying a huge roll of paper towels still in its plastic package. He couldn’t get it open; the wrapping clung to his fingers. In desperation, he knelt beside her, furious, and dug through it to the paper towels, but at the cost of many sheets, torn apart by his method. He handed her a wad of fragments.

The stuff, at first, only spread out more, sliding from under the towels. Some of it splattered on her dress. Some oozed through the holes Eric’s fingers had made and squeezed through onto her hand.

A wave of nausea hit her stomach. Luke’s gasps for breath seemed to go on longer. Could he be choking?

She began to tremble.

Eric appeared. He banged against her hip. There was a flurry of paper, flags of it waving over the changing table, covering everything. A section fluttered on top of Luke’s face. She heard herself scream. She pulled it off him.

“It’s fine, it’s fine!” Eric yelled. He was tossing gobs of soiled paper towels onto the floor. The mattress was clean. “How do I do the diaper?” he shouted, aiming it under Luke. Now Eric was holding Luke’s legs up.

She pushed the diaper into position. Eric dropped Luke’s legs. Together they pulled the fasteners out, sealing them across the front. Eric instantly picked the wailing frog to his massive chest and swung his body from side to side.

“Please baby please baby please baby, it’s all right, it’s all right, it’s all right.” Eric’s brow, covered by sweat, furrowed comically, his eyes wide, like a boy holding back tears.

She took a breath. There was a stabbing soreness at the bottom of her body, at some mysterious place around, beside, above, below her vagina and anus. She felt the floor undulate.

I won’t faint!

“Give him to me,” she said.

“He’s all right!” Eric shouted. Luke was quiet. Eric rocked his body from side to side so fast that she thought Luke’s brains must be rattled.

“I have to feed him,” she said softly.

Eric stopped his movements. He looked at her dubiously. What was wrong with him?

“Give him to me,” she repeated. “He has to be fed.”

She looked at the room, so beautifully in order only a minute before. There were papers everywhere, colored with the strange soupy muck of her son; there were slain boxes, their entrails scattered across the floor. Eric rose like a ruined tower amidst the chaos, his shirt out, darkened by nervous continents of perspiration, his mouth open stupidly, his huge arms crossed, impaling the little creature to his chest, fiercely gripping Luke to protect him from the barbarians.

“Are you okay now?” he asked.

“I’m fine!” she said. The question made her ache with irritation. What the hell was the matter with him?

“Are you sure?”

She looked at the mess. She began to laugh, from her belly. From her punched-out middle, laughter trembled.

“Look at the room,” she said.

“I’ll clean it,” he said humorlessly. “Are you all right?”

“Goddamm it! Yes! Stop it! Stop saying that!”

He made no answer. He looked down at Luke and kissed the strange confused head of hair. Eric’s lips puffed out to make the contact gentle. He kissed Luke over and over. The sight was mesmerizing. Eric looked like an ape grooming his baby. From Luke there came sounds: peeps, sighs, moans, and then a squawk.

“He’s hungry,” she said, exhausted, almost unable to speak. She eased herself into the rocking chair under the window.