Little Earthquakes (26 page)

“Why is that bad?” Becky asked. “It’s not a bad thing to like what you do.”

Kelly settled the baby onto her hip and started pacing the length of the kitchen. “Maybe it’s not that I like working. I like leaving. I like getting out of the house so I don’t have to be with Steve twenty-four seven, but then I have to leave the baby with him, and I feel guilty about that because I know they’re not doing anything educational, they’re not going for walks or reading books or watching
Baby Einstein,
they’re just lying on the couch watching
SportsCenter.
”

“Oh, Kelly,” Becky murmured.

“And Steve…” Kelly dropped her eyes, pulling Oliver’s face into her neck. “I don’t know what’s going on with him. I don’t think he’s even trying.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“All he’s been doing is seeing this career counselor. Some ass-hole,” Kelly spat. I winced and wondered whether I’d ever heard her curse before. “They meet three times a week and do personality quizzes.
Are you an introvert or an extrovert? What’s your emotional profile? What job would be your perfect fit?
” She shook her head. “I just wanted to shake him and say, ‘Who cares about the perfect fit! Just go do something!’ But he’s just been sitting around all day, like it’s been a weekend for months. No interviews. No nothing. And I’m working, and Steve’s doing nothing. Nothing,” she repeated, and she jumped to her feet. “I’ve got to go.”

“Kelly,” Becky said, stretching out her hand.

“No, no, I’ve got a bunch of phone calls to make,” she said, picking up her diaper bag. “Florist, caterer, lighting company, and I’ve got to go to the drugstore, and our toilet’s backed up, so I’ve got to track down the plumber. I’ll call you guys later.” And with that, she ran up the stairs.

Becky and Ayinde looked at the stairs, then down at their babies. “I’ll go,” I said, and hurried after her. “Kelly! Hey!”

She’d gotten Oliver into the stroller and was trying to pick up the whole thing and wrestle it out the door.

“Let me help.” I opened the door and helped her lift the stroller down to the sidewalk. “Do you want me to walk you home?”

“Nnnooo,” she said slowly. “No. I can’t ask you to do that.”

“Do you want me to stay with Oliver?”

I held my breath, half believing that she’d laugh at me or give me a cheerful brush-off, another version of
No, no, everything’s fine.
Instead, she stopped in her tracks. “Could you?” she asked. “Could you do that?”

“Sure I could. I’ve got to work at the restaurant tonight, but this afternoon I’m free.”

“Oh my God. You’d be saving my life. Steve could…” She rubbed her eyes with her fists, and I wondered how long it had been since she’d gotten a stretch of uninterrupted sleep. “I could tell him that he could take some time and get some work done, make some calls or something. We’d pay you, of course.”

“Don’t worry about it. Just let me go get my stuff.”

“Thank you,” she said. She grabbed my hand. Her eyes were gleaming. “Thank you so much.”

“Oh, no. No, no. No, no, no,” Becky said, shoving the yellow bandanna backward over her disheveled curls.

I looked up from the manchego cheese I was slivering to put on the salads. “What’s wrong?” It was eight o’clock at night. I’d spent my afternoon at Kelly’s, playing with Oliver while Steve closeted himself in the office, and I’d been working in the kitchen since six o’clock, with only a quick break to go back to my apartment to shower and exchange my Gloria Vanderbilts for a pair of high school Sassons. My apartment was no longer empty. The week before, Ayinde had asked whether I could use a few things. “I’m redecorating,” she told me. The next morning, a truck bearing what appeared to be the entire contents of her guest house had arrived. I called Ayinde and said there was no way I could accept all of her things, but she’d insisted. “You’ll be doing me a favor,” she said. So now I had oversize leather couches and armchairs, lamps and a coffee table, a projection-screen TV, and several of Richard’s framed MVP certificates, which I assumed I’d be returning at some point.

Becky retied her bandanna. “I have twenty-five hungry businessmen who are expecting Chilean sea bass with wild mushrooms and tamarind sauce, and…” She flung open the walk-in dramatically. “I have no wild mushrooms. I don’t even have domestic mushrooms with bad-ass tendencies. I have no mushrooms at all.”

I stole a glance toward the dining room, where the businessmen seemed quite happy with their sangria and seared tuna on tortilla chips, with Sarah shimmying around in high-heeled patent-leather boots, keeping their glasses full.

“Maybe you can give them extra arepas,” I suggested.

The phone in the kitchen rang. “Becky,” called Dash the dishwasher, waggling the receiver. “For you.”

She took the phone. “Yes. What? No. No, I can’t. No, I…” She shoved the bandanna backward again. “Oh, man.”

“What?”

She shook her head, turning toward the deep fryer, where the arepas were bubbling away. “Day care’s closing at nine, and I’m never going to get out of here by then, and Andrew’s scrubbing in on an emergency pancreatic duodectomy—don’t ask me what that is; I don’t even want to know…” She groaned, flipped the arepas deftly out of the basket, and looked into the walk-in again, as if the mushrooms might have materialized during the phone call. “I’m going to have to call Mimi,” she said, raising her eyes toward the ceiling. “Why, God, why?”

“I could get the mushrooms,” I said.

“No, no, that’s okay. I’ll just send Sarah out with more booze. That doesn’t look like a crowd that’s going to get upset about missing their vegetables.”

“Or I could get Ava.”

Becky put her forefinger against her lips and pretended to think about it. “Hmm, the mushrooms or my daughter? I say, get the kid. I’ll call the day care, so they don’t think you’re stealing her. Hang on, let me give you a key.” She rummaged in her pocket. “You can take my car, the car seat’s in the back, one of us should be home by midnight. Here, wait, let me give you money…”

“For what?”

Becky looked at me, then scratched her head beneath the bandanna. “Incidentals?”

“I’m fine,” I said. “Where’d you park?”

“Twentieth and Sansom. You’re saving my life, you know that? I’ll be grateful to you forever. I’ll name my second born after you.” She handed me the keys and pointed toward the door. “Run like the wind!”

The hospital’s day-care center was on the third floor of the hospital, and Ava was the last baby there, curled up in a crib in a corner of the room where the lights were turned down low. “Her father came in to see her about an hour ago,” the day-care lady whispered after she’d perused my Los Angeles driver’s license and waved away my offer to call Becky and have her reconfirm that I was okay to take the baby. She handed me Ava’s bag with her bottle, a blanket, and a change of clothes. “She’s been down about forty-five minutes, and Dr. Rabinowitz says she sometimes sleeps the whole way home.”

“Hi, baby,” I whispered. Ava sighed in her sleep. I lifted her gently into my arms, set her into her stroller, and went out to the car.

“Bye and bye, bye and bye, the moon’s a slice of lemon pie,” I sang down on the street as I eased her into the car seat and pulled a fuzzy pink cap over her bald head. She opened her eyes and looked at me curiously.

“Hi, Ava. Remember me? I’m your mother’s friend. I’m going to take you home to sleep.”

Ava blinked as if this information made some kind of sense.

“We’re going to go to your house and have a nice bottle…well, actually, you’re going to have a nice bottle. And then I’m going to change your diaper, and tuck you into your crib.”

Ava yawned and closed her eyes. I looked all around us, down the street and then over my shoulder as I got behind the wheel, looking for homeless people, crazies, potentially noisy revelers. But Walnut Street was quiet. “You’re very cute, do you know that?” I whispered toward the backseat. At Becky’s house, I lifted the sleeping baby into my arms and tiptoed to the second floor. Ava’s room was tiny, with hardly enough room for a crib and a rocker and a mobile of a cow jumping over the moon. It smelled like diaper cream and Johnson’s Calming Body Wash, which I, personally, had found useless. “If there was really something that could calm your baby down,” Sam had said, “wouldn’t it cost a lot more than three ninety-nine?”

I fed the baby with the bottle labeled
BREAST MILK,
with a little skull and crossbones drawn beside it—for Mimi’s benefit, I assumed. Ava sucked down four ounces with her eyes closed, making pleased little gulps as she drank. I patted her back until she burped. I changed her diaper, kissed her feet, wrapped her in her blanket again, and cradled her close to my chest. I imagined I could feel my milk letting down, that bittersweet tingling sensation I’d get before Caleb was ready to nurse.
What would Caleb have been like at her age?
I wondered.
Would he be calm, with Ava’s wide, watchful eyes? Would he follow my fingers as I spider-walked them over his belly? Would he smile at me?
I sat in the rocker with Ava in my arms, breathing in her scent, the sound of her exhalations, feeling sad but somehow peaceful as I remembered my son.

“Ready for bed?” I finally asked. The baby’s body seemed to melt against mine, her little head tucked against the side of my face, her belly against my shoulder. I could feel her breath against my cheek as I settled her into her crib.

I went downstairs and could hear the house settling around me. My mind did the math automatically. If it was ten o’clock here, it was seven in Los Angeles. I slipped my cell phone out of my pocket. I could call him, but what would I say? That I’d held two different babies and nothing had gone wrong? That I missed him? That I thought about him every minute I wasn’t thinking about Caleb?

I took my shoes off and crept back up the stairs. Ava was snoring, and she’d turned herself over, planting her head on her arms with her bottom in the air. I couldn’t keep from smiling as I padded past her into the bathroom. My face in the bathroom mirror looked different…or, rather, similar. I looked more like my own mother than I ever had in my whole life. It was in the eyes, I thought, and I lifted a lock of my hair. I’d dyed it brown for a part in a toothpaste commercial once, and Sam had looked at it, asking, “Is that your original color?”

“Who can remember?” I told him.

“I think it looks nice,” he’d said.

I wondered how I’d look as a brunette again. I figured I’d have to do something, as the two-toned look had gone out with 1985-era Madonna. Brown might look good, I thought, listening to the baby monitor in case Ava woke up and needed me. It would be like coming home.

At six
A.M.
, a week after she’d told her friends the truth about her husband, Kelly lay in bed, body stiff, hands balled into fists, listening to Oliver gurgle and coo and babble to himself, hoping, as she did every morning, that Steve would wake up before she did. She glanced sideways. He was sprawled on his back, snoring, mouth gaping open. “Let me take him,” he’d told her every morning for the first two weeks the baby was home. She hadn’t let him. What was the point? He couldn’t nurse the baby, and soon he’d be working again so he needed his rest.

Stupid,
she thought, as Steve snored. Because now it was almost five months later, and he still wasn’t working, and Oliver had gotten to the point where he wouldn’t accept anyone but her first thing in the morning.

Kelly eased herself out of the warm bed and went to get the baby, who stopped chewing on the edge of his blanket and just looked at her before breaking into a broad grin that displayed his dimples. “Good morning, angel,” she said, feeling her heart lift as she carried him to the changing table, nuzzling his brown hair that seemed to get thicker every day. Oliver hadn’t been the best-looking newborn—he’d inherited Steve’s nose which worked better on an adult than on a baby, and his face had looked like a puffy balloon over his scrawny limbs—but he’d turned into a gorgeous baby, pudgy and sweet-tempered, hardly ever crying. His thighs were Kelly’s favorites. They were deliciously plump, soft and squishy as twin loaves of fresh-baked bread, and she couldn’t keep herself from planting kisses up and down them before she pulled off his pajamas and wriggled him into a pair of overalls and a red-and-white-striped shirt.

Gorgeous but—she could admit it to herself only in these quiet morning hours—a little boring. She loved him, she would die for him, she couldn’t imagine her life without him, but the truth was, after fifteen minutes playing with him under his Gymini or reading him one of his Sandra Boynton board books, her fingers started itching for the keyboard, for the BlackBerry and Palm Pilot, for the cell phone, the relics of a life where she’d had places to go, important things to take care of, even the occasional forty-five minutes to curl up in bed and page through
Metropolitan Home.

Steve came up behind her, breathing his sour morning breath on the back of her neck, rubbing his stubble against her cheek until she moved away. He’d sometimes shaved twice a day when he was working; now he’d go two or three days without shaving at all. “Let me do it. You can go rest.”

“We’re fine,” she said without turning around.
There was something wrong with her,
she thought. She wanted Steve to help, and then when he showed up, she was just irritated that he hadn’t gotten there faster. She’d wanted a baby so desperately—the perfect baby to complete their perfect family—and now that she had one…She fastened Oliver’s overalls as Steve shrugged and went back to the bedroom. She did want her baby. No matter how bad things got, she’d always believe that.

Kelly sat cross-legged on the bed, opened her nightgown, and pulled the baby against her. This was the happiest time of her day, sitting in the warm half darkness with Oliver in her arms, and afterward, when he was done, she would set him on the bed and then lay down beside him, slipping between the sheets to drift into a dream of how her life would have turned out differently if she’d married anyone but Steve.

Brett,
she thought. Brett had flirted with her for a month during her junior year of college, and she’d thought he was sweet and funny but too odd looking for her taste—he was six and a half feet tall and beanpole skinny with a mullet and a weird
hyuk, hyuk, hyuk
of a laugh. She’d told him she just wanted to be friends, and he’d sighed and said, “That’s what they all say.” According to her alumni magazine, Brett had moved to Silicon Valley, started up a dot-com, and sold it for many millions of dollars before the crash. There’d been a half-page feature on him, complete with a head shot. He’d lost the bad haircut and acquired a wife and three children. The article didn’t mention his laugh.

Or she could have ended up with Glen, her high school boyfriend, captain of the debate team. Mary had run into his mother in the beauty shop and learned that he was now a partner in a D.C. law firm. Glen hadn’t been the most passionate guy in the world—Kelly could still vividly remember how he’d refused to make out with her the night before the SATs, saying they should conserve their energy for the test—but he’d had ambition to spare. If she’d married him, she wouldn’t be the one running herself ragged.

At eight o’clock, Lemon started nosing at Kelly’s palm, and Oliver opened his eyes. Kelly changed his diaper, then put him back in his crib, wailing, while she threw on the clothes she’d left lying on the floor the night before and took ten seconds to brush her teeth and slap cold water on her face. Then she put Oliver into his stroller, hooked Lemon up to his leash, pulled her hair into a ponytail, and left Steve still sleeping. She walked to the elevator, trying to keep the dog’s leash from tangling in the stroller’s wheels.

Lemon whined as the elevator carried them down to the lobby. He’d been a reasonably well-behaved dog in the prebaby days, but ever since Oliver’s arrival, he’d been summarily demoted from his position of number-one most-loved nonverbal creature in the house. Pre-baby, Kelly had been able to take Lemon on long walks, to buy him fancy collars and matching leashes, to fuss over him, and scratch his belly. Post-baby, Lemon was lucky if he got fresh water and a pat on the head in passing. And he wasn’t enjoying his new status as a second-class citizen.

“Lemon, shhh!” she hissed, as he started whining, then barking, and the baby gave a startled full-body jerk and began to cry. She slipped a pacifier between Oliver’s lips, threw Lemon a dog treat, and made it onto the sidewalk, pushing the baby and pulling the dog.

They commenced the daily lurch-a-thon. She took five steps, then ten, then Lemon planted himself in the center of the sidewalk and refused to budge. “Lemon, come!” she said, as men in business suits and women in high heels gave her a wide berth. “Lemon, COME!” she said, tugging at his leash, hoping that nobody was watching her or speed-dialing the ASPCA and reporting her for dog abuse.

They made it around the block to the Promised Land, the neighborhood coffee shop. Kelly tied Lemon’s leash to a parking meter, pushed the stroller with one hand and opened the door with the other.

“Triple espresso,” the barista sang out as Kelly approached the counter.

“You know it,” she said. She didn’t think she was supposed to be drinking so much coffee while she was still nursing—poor Oliver would be a caffeine junkie before he hit nursery school—but she couldn’t get through the day without it. She dumped skim milk and fake sugar into her cup, took her first gulp, then headed outside to collect the dog. Oliver’s stroller had a cup holder, which bore the printed warning
NO HOT BEVERAGES! DANGER TO BABY!
In the past months, Kelly had gotten proficient at one-handed pushing, with Lemon’s leash wrapped around one hand and her cup balanced in the other. The system worked perfectly most of the time. That morning, Lemon lunged playfully toward a skateboarder, and Kelly jerked her hand back, hissing as scalding coffee splashed her wrist and hand.

Finally, back in the apartment, Kelly left Oliver dozing in the stroller, dumped food and fresh water into Lemon’s bowls, and powered up the laptop, drinking coffee and checking her e-mail as fast as she could. She’d gotten through half of her unread messages when the baby started to stir.

She looked toward the bedroom. The door was still shut. “Steve?”

The door popped open and Steve popped out, still in a T-shirt and underwear, with his flaccid pink penis wagging through the slit of his boxers. “Why didn’t you wake me up? I could have taken the dog out.”

“Just take the baby for a minute,” she said.

“No problem,” he said, scooping Oliver out of the stroller.

“He might need to burp!” Kelly called over her shoulder, knowing it was a lost cause. Steve would give the baby a few halfhearted whacks on the back, then determine that the baby didn’t need to burp. Well, it wasn’t that Oliver didn’t need to burp, it was that Steve gave up too early. That was turning into quite the pattern, she thought, putting the computer on standby, parking herself in the rocker, and unfastening her bra.

Please,
she whispered to herself, as she placed the plastic cups over her nipples and flicked the machine on.
Please let this end soon.
“Please,” she muttered, looking at the plastic bottles attached to the cups and at her nipples, once a pretty carnation pink, now turned beige, cracked and ugly as an elephant’s knees. There was maybe an eighth of an inch of milk in the right-hand bottle, only a few drops in the left. Pumping was tedious and uncomfortable, and it was impossible to do anything else while the machine was running. It took both hands and all of her coordination to keep the cups in place, and if she didn’t relax, no milk. “Please,” she said again and closed her eyes, rocking until the timer went off and fifteen minutes had elapsed. She unhooked herself gratefully and held the bottles to the light. Three ounces. Not enough for a full bottle. It’d be formula again.

The doorbell rang as she was pulling her shirt into place. Kelly gathered the bottles and ran to the foyer like she was hoping to see Santa Claus or Ed McMahon with an oversized check. She knew it would be Lia on the other side. And as far as she was concerned, Lia, who’d agreed to babysit three days a week, was better than Santa and Ed combined.

“Hi!” Lia said, sweeping into the apartment, her hair (newly dyed a shiny chestnut) gathered into a glossy ponytail, her white shirt (clean, unspotted) tucked into her khakis (ironed, this season’s). Kelly could feel herself relaxing as Lia bent and plucked Oliver out of the exersaucer where Steve had deposited him. It was so nice to have a living human being in the house who’d actually help.

Kelly caught a flash of Steve’s underpants and heard the bedroom door slam as Lia touched her nose to Oliver’s. “Hi, Ollie-by-golly!” Kelly watched Lia hold her baby. The two of them—Oliver so smiley, Lia so beautiful—looked like one of the ads she’d seen in her parenting magazines, when she still had time to read them. Whereas she looked like the “before” photographs in any of the makeover stories.
I should have married Lia,
she thought. Lia never had to be asked twice to burp a baby. Lia knew instinctively, or from her own experience, that a wet diaper could still feel dry and would never pull one of Steve’s favorite tricks, which was to hook his thumb underneath the legband, take a quick feel, and say, “Nope, he’s dry,” when the diaper in question was visibly soaked and you could practically see ammonia-scented stink lines coming off of it. Lia would never plop in front of the TV set with the baby in her arms and watch
SportsCenter
or surf the Net with the baby tucked haphazardly into the crook of her arm. She and Kelly could cook low-fat meals and take Oliver to the park, the zoo, the Please Touch museum. There would be no sex, of course. Kelly didn’t think she’d miss it much.

She gave Lia the rundown—what time Oliver had gotten up, where they’d walked, what he’d eaten—as she packed up her laptop, cell phone, keys, Palm Pilot, and wallet. Steve ambled back to the table, dressed—more or less—in an ancient, threadbare T-shirt, bare feet, and jeans. “I’m going to be working at home today,” he said, half defiantly, half apologetically. The little speech was for Lia’s benefit, not Kelly’s, because where else would he be quote-unquote working?

“Fine,” Kelly said, trying to sound cheerful for the baby’s benefit. She gathered her gear and returned to the coffee shop.

“Back so soon?” the barista called.

“Me again,” said Kelly. She ordered another triple espresso, plugged in her laptop, and wondered what the staff at the coffee shop made of her, sitting there for five hours a day, five days a week, sucking down espresso and typing away. She wondered if they hated her for taking up the space, a prime table by the window. Maybe they thought she was a graduate student or a struggling poet, something grand and romantic or at least interesting.

She hit the Power button and slugged down scalding espresso in short little sips, tapping her toes until the sluggish, temperamental old laptop fired up. Her cell phone trilled. “Kelly Day!” she chirped and then closed her eyes, resting her head on her palm as she took notes on the Margolies wedding and the Drexel holiday party and the Pfizer Diversity Day celebration, for which she’d been tasked with procuring a jelly-bean rendering of Dr. Martin Luther King. She typed and took notes and asked the right questions, trying to time her calls to when nobody was ordering a frappuccino, so that her clients wouldn’t hear the blender whirring in the background.

It was a joke. A sham. She felt like the Wizard of Oz, a fraud behind the coffee shop’s green awning, working her ass off while her husband stayed home watching soap operas—he’d denied it hotly when she’d confronted him, but the TiVo to-do list still included recording the daily episodes of
As the World Turns.
She’d work, making calls, making notes, checking her watch, thinking about Oliver, wondering if he was napping; thinking about Steve, wondering if he was napping, too.

At five o’clock she speed-walked home. Lia was playing with Oliver on the living room floor, rattling stuffed animals in front of his face. Steve was nowhere to be found.
Probably visiting the career counselor again
she thought, hurrying to the bedroom and holding her breath as she inched the shaper brief and control-top pantyhose over her hips, and zipped up her long black velvet skirt as best she could.

“Oh, look how pretty!” Lia said to Oliver, as Kelly sat, legs splayed, on the ghetto couch and struggled into her high-heeled party shoes. “You really do look nice.”

“Yeah, well…” She paused for five seconds in front of the mirror in the hallway, swiping lipstick over her lips, trying to smooth her flyaway hair. “I just hope this goes well. And thank you. Thank you so much.”