Heads or Tails (8 page)

The temptation to ignore her, even to just walk away was visceral.

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” I whispered, unclear whether I was talking to myself or to her. In seconds, a sheen of sweat formed on my forehead.

Finally, I found a diaper and lugged the baby over to the couch. I put the new diaper under her, as I’d seen Jean do, before opening the old one. Fortunately, she was only wet. But as I slid the old diaper off her, she peed again. Because the new diaper wasn’t yet secured, urine dribbled sideways off the diaper and onto the couch. Our beloved, still-new couch.

“Shit.”

Then I realized that the pee had not only dripped onto the couch but across the sticky tape of the diaper that I’d just exposed after peeling off the paper protective layer. So its stickiness wore off and I had to ditch that diaper, pick the bare-bottomed baby up and go dig up another. My teeth grinding together was the soundtrack to my movements. I was unaccustomed to feeling so incompetent. The compounding of errors brought me back to tenth-grade chemistry.

“What’s all the commotion?” Jesse said from the doorway of the living room. The slit in his boxers was cockeyed and I could see his penis. The joke I’d normally make didn’t seem like it would be welcome in the middle of the night.

“She just needed a diaper change.” I measured my tone to downplay my own exasperation.

“It’s Sunday night — or Monday morning, whatever. We have to work in the morning.”

Work. I had so much to do back at Curtis Construction, including figuring out how to deal with newly discovered rust in steel columns at the Alamo Square project as well as calculating wall insulation for an upcoming bid. Fortunately, when I’d called Frank from New York to explain what was going on, he agreed to cover for another day or two.

“I know,” I said, clearing my throat with a short cough. “Can you hand me a damp paper towel?”

He brought one from the kitchen and widened his eyes when he saw that I was blotting urine from the couch, my hands moving in short jerks.

“You know I’m not a diaper-changing, baby kind of guy, Stevens. That’s one of the reasons you married me, remember?” His light brown hair stuck up in odd directions. He rubbed his cheeks and eyes with his palm.

I longed to touch him, to commiserate with him, just like we did whenever we had to suffer through a tedious, obligatory social event. Using one hand to clean the sofa and the other to steady the wriggling baby, I was also tempted to snap, even though I knew caring for a baby was as out of his element as it was mine. Instead I took a breath.

Over the years, I’d observed couples like us, those who’d vowed not to have children. In several cases, while one party continued to relish their childless status, the other — and it wasn’t always the woman — started to have doubts. In those cases, the marriage inevitably crumbled. While I was always sad for both parties, it was the staunch advocate for remaining childless for whom I had a particular sympathy. That spouse had stayed true to their original commitment, one that was not socially acceptable, one in which he or she used to have a devoted partner. To be then left by that other person struck me as particularly sad and isolating.

“I realize that, Jess. This wasn’t something I wanted to do. It wasn’t voluntary. This is an
emergency
,” I said, drawing out the last word. “You won’t have to do anything for the baby. I’m just trying to help someone out. Someone who’s sick.”

He nodded sleepily and turned towards the bedroom. His build was slight — he was only two inches taller than me — but our race training had carved his muscles, creating an emerging broadness that I loved. He paused and revolved slowly back toward me. “It’s just —. You didn’t ask me,” he muttered.

I kept my eyes glue downward as I changed the baby into a dry onesie. She used a tiny, walnut-sized fist to rub her eyes, striking me then as so pathetic, so very human. I gathered her up and followed Jesse into the bedroom. I tried to put her back in the car seat but she kicked her legs in objection and I worried she’d start to howl again. I held her to my chest as I searched for another place to lay her down, but within moments she was already asleep against my shoulder. Dizzy with exhaustion, I lowered myself backwards onto the bed and let her sleep on me the rest of the night.

“WTF,” I texted Sarah the next morning. “Do babies get jet-lag?”

Bleary-eyed and stiff from sleeping the whole night on my back, I’d been awakened by the sound of Jesse leaving the house. The baby continued to doze as I tip-toed into the living room and laid her on the couch near the pee spot she’d made a few hours before.

“Yes,” Sarah texted back. “They’re jet-lagged from their travel from the womb! It goes away after…never mind. U don’t want 2 know.”

I gently closed the swinging door that separated the living room from the kitchen and, as quietly as I could, brewed myself a cup of coffee. Jesse had lifted our blinds, as was our morning custom. But it was too bright for me — like looking directly at a meadow of snow on a sunny day — and I yanked them closed. I pulled out a scrap of paper from the makeshift desk in the kitchen and began jotting down things I thought I might need for the next few days. Other than diapers and formula, I couldn’t think of what else to add, though I was sure I was missing some pretty major necessities.

“Did U get the goodies I left U?” Sarah texted.

“Huh?” I typed back.

“I can’t come over ’til tomorrow. School conferences, etc. So I left stuff inside UR side gate. Sorry. Thought Jess wld see it & bring it in.”

I went out the back kitchen door and walked around to the side of the house, which was accessible from the street only if you had the code to the side door, which Sarah did because she took our trash bins out for us whenever we were out of town on garbage day. I dragged two boxes inside. One was a plastic Container Store box filled with miscellaneous baby items and the other was a cardboard product box, taped closed with blue painters tape, for something called a Pack ’n Play.

“Just found it. Thx.”

“It’s basic stuff: diapers (may not B right size), toys, play mat. For anything else, U can make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear until I can come by 2 assess the situ.”

I plopped down on the kitchen floor began pulling items from the plastic box. When Sarah’s son Henry was a baby, she prided herself on dressing him the way she’d wished all her ex-boyfriends had dressed, all tailored and preppy. Very J. Crew. And then when Lily came along, she’d prided herself equally on dressing her baby girl in Henry’s hand-me-downs, deliberately blasting all gender stereotypes. Already, I’d pulled from the box a tiny pair of madras shorts and a light blue button down. I didn’t see many girl clothes. Still, I texted back, “Phew. Thx.”

“For now, 2 minimize nighttime wakings, stick strictly 2 this schedule: eat, activity, poop, sleep. Repeat.”

I wasn’t exactly sure what she meant but I was too tired to inquire further. So I simply wrote again, “Thx.”

“And the PnP is in lieu of a crib. Whatever U do,” her final text of the morning read, “do not let that baby sleep in UR bed.”

The next morning, Tuesday, I consulted my calendar for the first time since Sunday’s plane ride. I realized I’d missed my first Spanish class at the JCC the night before. Even if I’d remembered, there was no way I could have gone. Not only had taking care of the baby left me too tired even for a shower or to eat anything more for dinner than a few graham crackers (it turns out that eat, activity, poop, sleep takes a lot more energy than it sounds), but there was no way I was going to ask Jesse to watch her while I went to a class of all things. Already, he’d kept his distance from her — and hence from me — going to both the early and late training runs yesterday after work. He wore ear plugs to bed, though luckily the baby slept in the Pack ’n Play all the way until four-fifteen, which despite the ungodly hour, I considered a decisive win compared to the night before.

I hadn’t even left the house since returning home from New York late Sunday night. I had no stroller and I couldn’t figure out how to use the fabric front body carrier that Jean had sent home with me. I feared that I’d think I had it all securely attached and then once I stood up, the baby would drop to the floor. So I wasn’t risking it.

I hadn’t been in my car since Thursday. Normally I loved driving. I loved anticipating the ruts and grooves in the road with my body and adjusting the vehicle’s course just so. But without the cranky cab driver to install the car seat, it just wasn’t going to happen. Plus, I couldn’t imagine having the baby all the way in the back seat while I was up front driving. That seemed somehow dangerous to me. Plus, where, exactly, would I drive to?

Instead, we cocooned inside and I built a makeshift infant seat out of couch pillows so I could prop the baby up while I prepared a bottle or went to the bathroom. In two days with an infant, I’d amassed a shocking pile of laundry so I also propped her up when I had no choice but to start a large load of onesies and burp cloths. Jesse’s and my dirty clothes would have to wait. When the baby pooped through a clean onesie still warm from the dryer, I could hear Virginia lamenting to me in her Southern twang, “No sooner I clean this place up ‘fo you messin it all up again!” It had been awhile since I’d thought of that and despite my fatigue and frustration, it made me smile.

Meanwhile, I felt like I was tiptoeing around a land mine in my own home, afraid to set off the explosion of a disoriented baby or an understandably aggravated husband. But the cloistering at home would soon come to an end. I had to re-enter my real life — my work, my marriage, our tri training. Fortunately, Sarah texted that morning with the life-changing news that she’d devised a short-term child care solution for me and would explain when she came over.

As if on cue, while scanning my calendar, I heard a light tap at my kitchen door. Sarah had let herself into the side alley. With my free arm — the other was holding the baby — I waved her in.

“Wow, this is something I thought I’d never see!”

She grabbed the baby from me with the expert confidence of a mother of two. With uneven tufts of half-curly, half-frizzy blond hair, thin lips and too-small teeth that were oddly spaced, Sarah was the prettiest funny-looking person I’d ever known. She had — no, she radiated — a warmth and vivaciousness that made people want to be around her. I was not alone in this assessment. She had more friends and the handsomest husband of anyone I knew. I always felt lucky that amidst all of the choices, she considered me her closest friend.

Clutching an oversized plastic Lego figure I’d pulled from Sarah’s hand-me-down box the day before, the baby smiled a gummy grin at her. Without the weight of her in my arms, I felt buoyant. It was such a relief for someone else to be holding her. I’d thought that I was in shape from all our race training, but Gretchen was a hefty load and my arms ached from carrying her so much since Sunday. Sarah made the baby smile bigger than I’d ever seen simply by twirling her around and pretending to drop her without ever really letting go.

“What great hair!” Sarah said, smoothing the baby’s thick swath of shiny black hair with her fingers. “What’s her name again?”

“Gretchen.”

Sarah made a sour lemon face. She was obsessed with kids’ names, insisting that you could tell a lot about people by what they chose to name their children and she took exquisite care in naming her own.

“I know,” I agreed. When pregnant Margot had told me that she’d planned to name her daughter Gretchen, I was glad that we were speaking by phone so she wouldn’t see my own similar reaction.

“Old-fashioned names are, of course, good,” Sarah said. “Henry, Lily. But they have to be nice-sounding names — not rhyme with unpleasant words like ‘wretched.’” Harriet, I knew, was what Sarah would name her next daughter, if she ever had one.

“She will not let go of that Lego thing!” I jutted my chin at the toy in the baby’s hands.

“That’s so funny. When Henry first got that big Lego set, Matthew and I used to joke about that very figure. It looks like Gavin Newsom, don’t you think?”

For the first time, I regarded closely the toy in Gretchen’s grasp. Sure enough, with the slicked-back brown plastic hair, it did bear a striking resemblance to the former San Francisco mayor, the young guy with the good looks and even better family connections that took him all the way to Lieutenant Governor of California.

“So I’ve arranged for Mercedes to come help you. She’s the daughter of my cleaning lady. She’s got two kids of her own. They’re in school during the day so she can come help you. She can use the money.”

I hadn’t even thought about money, but I assumed that once Margot got better, she’d pay me back for the baby’s expenses. For now, I could spot her. I wondered if Mercedes would stay late some days this week so I could train with Jesse, but I decided not to ask just yet.

“Thanks so much.” We walked into the living room and sat on the sofa. She kept the baby facing her so she could make wide-mouthed faces at her.

“She’ll be here Thursday at nine after she drops her own kids off at school. Just show her where the formula and diapers are and you’ll be on your way. She can stay until four-fifteen.”

Four-fifteen
? How was I going to get a full day’s work done — let alone catch up on the days I missed — in far fewer hours than I normally worked?

“Okay.” I had no other options.

It was disconcerting making such an important choice — the choice of a caregiver — for someone else. Sarah, I knew, ran background checks on all of her babysitters and required proof of immunizations. I was just about to ask Sarah about Mercedes’s status but then remembered that I myself hadn’t had a flu shot, let alone a whooping cough or hepatitis vaccination. I decided not to bring it up.

“How’s Jesse handling all this?” Sarah had always been a fan of Jesse, referring to him as “a real salt-of-the-earth kind of guy.” She often told me how lucky I was that he was so “multi-dimensional” — not a workaholic or obsessive about one thing, like, say, golf. Jesse and Sarah had even formed their own friendship independent of me. Sometimes she texted him with computer questions because her own husband was clueless with technology. For the last couple of years, they’d colluded on planning my birthday gifts.