What We Have (17 page)

Jacques didn’t mind. He liked the pressure. It made the whole thing a kind of race!

Except, he reminded me, that didn’t mean we should relax our standards. Jacques was still smarting from the hit we’d taken selling our house in DC, and he kept emphasizing this was a time for patience. For comparison shopping. In his mind, there was no rush. We were planning to settle here permanently, and Jacques wanted what he called the “Forever House”—a place we’d settle down in until the distant day someone came to roll us off to assisted living. Personally, I was hoping a house might show up a little closer to this end of our lives than that one. March gave way to April, and I could feel the months left for nesting and decorating dwindling at an alarming rate. I wanted time over the summer to plan my courses for the fall, time to line up a babysitter. I wanted to find the Forever House
now
.

I tried to throw myself into the hunt. A house would come on the market, we’d pack ourselves up, get Sacha ready, look over the listing sheet or replay the message from Sandi, our broker, and convince ourselves this one would be it. In the abstract, each house sounded perfect. But inevitably, there’d be a problem. The house would be on a main road, or in ruins, or the size of a shoebox, or way too expensive, or all of these things at once, and we’d come back, glum and irritable, and the green shag would be waiting for us, scratchy, ugly, not even ours to change.

Maybe it was moving back to Boston with so little warning, finding myself in a place both known and unfamiliar. All I know is that the House with the Green Shag saddened me. Each room felt lonely in a different way. The basement was the worst, with its old remnants of family fun: a box of dented Ping-Pong balls, a banner from someone else’s high school days.

I had no interest in playing in the playroom or dining in the dining room or living in the living room. I wasn’t myself. I didn’t feel like driving up to Maine to see Julie, or joining playgroups, or getting myself a new library card and taking Sacha to Story Time. One of my new colleagues called, wanting to meet for lunch, but I didn’t have a babysitter and didn’t feel like bringing Sacha, who’d been irritable and off-schedule since we moved, so I just declined. Instead, I called my mother from the phone in the kitchen, our borrowed table cluttered with baby cereal and real estate listings. I made fun of the house and when my mother laughed, I felt better.

I was annoyed with myself for missing DC. When I was in DC, hadn’t I sometimes wished we were back in Boston?

“The carpet,” my mother reminded me, “is always greener on the other side of the house.”

 

IS IT POSSIBLE TO GET
delayed postpartum depression? I missed everyone that spring. I missed Jacques, who—back to a regular schedule—had traded in his bicycle and telecommuting for regular hours, five days a week, except in his world,
regular
meant long, intense hours, six days a week. I missed our DC neighbors, and the zoo, and my colleagues at Georgetown. I missed Julie, who sounded manic and slightly out of focus when we talked, working extra hours to put money away before the baby came, interviewing pediatricians, making a million plans. She and Jon loved their rental house—it was a Victorian with a view of the bay, and she was fixing up the baby’s room on weekends, dying for us to come up, and instead of being helpful and sisterly, I felt exhausted and even (despicably enough) a little jealous. Why couldn’t
we
find an adorable cottage we both loved? Why were Jacques and I getting crankier and crankier with each other, erupting into predictable arguments about whose turn it was to bathe Sacha or walk Bacchus or who got to sleep ten minutes later or sneak off to run an errand?

This wasn’t us. It wasn’t the
us
I wanted, anyway.

I called Annie. I tried explaining all of this to her, but she didn’t really want to hear about it. She’d just renewed a lease on a walk-up in a bad part of West Philly, had fallen behind on her car payments, and didn’t particularly care what color our carpet was. “Remember what it was like before you married a captain of industry?” she asked me.

“He’s not a captain of industry,” I said, irritated. It was clear Annie wasn’t in the mood to lend a sympathetic ear. As far as she was concerned, I had a semester off and was squandering it. “What do you
do
all day?” she asked me once, sounding mystified.

Remembering that, I felt doubly slighted now. What I really wanted to tell Annie was how lonely I felt, how baffling it was spending so much time alone with a baby. But I couldn’t seem to find the right words. It sounded like I was complaining, and I didn’t mean to complain. I loved being home with Sacha, it was just—

I tried telling her about our next-door neighbor, a pert woman with a knowing eye. She had three basketball-playing sons, and I thought I could make Annie laugh, complaining about the sound of heavy panting outside the window every evening.

I could tell she was tuning out.

When I took Sacha to Harvard Square in her Snugli, we walked past places where Annie and I used to hang out and I felt like I was on Mars. Same places, different people. In some instances, different places. They kept closing the old cafés and putting in banks and office supply stores.

“It’s like I’m dealing with ghosts,” I told Annie.

“I found a dead man on my front stoop this morning,” Annie told me. “At least your ghosts are only metaphors.”

 

“ MAYBE,”MY MOTHER SAID EXPERIMENTALLY,
one afternoon on the phone, “you need to get out a little more. Meet people.”

This, from a woman who only opened the door for the exterminator. My mother loved it when
we
showed up. Everyone else was an intrusion.

 

ACTUALLY, I’VE NEVER MINDED BEING
alone. Academics are bred for it: You work alone in the library, reading things written hundreds of years ago. You write alone. You grade papers alone. There are brief interludes of too-much-togetherness—department meetings; students bunched up outside of your office, waiting for help with papers or letters of recommendation. Sometimes when you’re teaching, you dream about the chance to be alone again.

But this was different.

For one thing, I wasn’t exactly alone. I was with Sacha, and Sacha made it hard to do any of the things I liked doing when I was alone. Reading in general was out, since Sacha saw paper, like most things, as something to be torn up or sucked on. Writing was also out: She was an inveterate grabber of pens, a smasher of keyboards. When it came to housework or organizing, especially folding laundry, Sacha was herself an unfolder, a puller-outer, a creator of domestic disruption. Not to mention that she generated laundry and waste by the bushel.

I usually waited to call my mother till the hardest part of the day, the hour after the nap, the hour when Sacha was at her crankiest, smelling of sour milk, her cheek creased from the wrinkle in the flannel crib sheet, smacking crossly at my ear.

I was coming to depend on these talks.

My mother was like the authors of
What to Expect
, upbeat, sure of herself, only ironic, and the advice was tailored just for me. She was funny, honest, optimistic. She remembered things I’d done when I was a baby and things she’d done wrong and offered subtle and unspoken encouragement that one day, Sacha would be grown, solvent, able to talk on the phone and hold a spoon without dropping it. She admitted to making mistakes and reminded me I’d survived them. Best of all, she admitted she’d been bored and lonely half the time when we were little.

“It’ll get better,” she promised. “You’ll see. You’ll meet some nice people with babies, and it will get better.”

Mostly, so far, the people we met were Realtors. We met them one of two ways: Either they’d come over to pick us up, Sacha and me, to look at a house that had just come on the market or had been on, languishing, and had just changed price; or we met them because they were coming to the Green Shag for a “showing.”

Here is something I learned: Even though we were the same people in both situations—the same slightly colicky four-and-a-half-month-old baby, silky light brown curls, thoughtful eyes, saloon-man’s belly laugh—the same new mother (me) in my stretchy black pants (still a ways to go before I tried anything that zipped)—even though! We were
not
the same people when the Realtors came to us as we were when we went to them. In the first instance, we were “the tenants.” That is how we were introduced, if we got introduced at all. When you’re a tenant, nobody adds colorful details about your profession (Renaissance English) or where you’re from (DC, actually) or fills in delightful details about your baby (just over four months, isn’t she precocious?). As tenants, your job is just to answer the door and evaporate, suggesting to prospective buyers nothing but the ease with which you can be erased from the scene they’re about to witness. So we had no names, no identities, and there was no particular interest in the nap schedule of “the baby,” whose room—just to the left upstairs, the one with that
lovely
blue carpet—
must
be seen, it gets
such
good light, waking poor Sacha if she’d managed to sleep through the doorbell or the thunder of Bacchus’s responsive bark.

The irony was, we were looking at more or less identically priced houses in Cambridge, and when we were the buyers, the Realtors—friends or partners of the very people we’d seen that morning—were totally different: all curiosity and attention, eager to learn our likes and dislikes, our slightest prejudices about curbside parking and downstairs bathrooms. When we were the buyers, they were so caring! Jacques’s piano became a fascinating challenge to puzzle out in each of the pint-size living rooms we navigated (“parlors,” they called them). “Could the piano go
here
?” one agent wondered, flattening herself against a coat closet in a tiny foyer.

Sacha saw each house with us. Her eyes widened as we climbed narrow staircases flocked in Victorian paper, or ducked our heads under the low ceilings of euphemistically named “third floors.” She nodded off in her Snugli as we opened and closed ancient medicine cabinets, where antibiotics from the Cold War crumbled in dead vials, peered into dim nooks advertised as kitchens, or sidled down rotting staircases into basements glowing with stalactites of mold.

In the afternoons, my mother called and I described each house for her in faithful detail. She nicknamed them for me. The house with the leaky roof and the neon-bright kitchen on Anawan Road got recast as “An Nah Want It.” The house with the fault line in the foundation became the “Crack House.” The house where I tripped on the basement steps was dubbed the “Mouse House,” after I admitted that under a garment rack stuffed with musty, 1950s dresses we’d seen the sad, sideways curl of a long-dead tail.

My mother loved anatomizing houses. She was good, too—good enough to eliminate or promote a place long distance, armed with penetrating questions (no first floor closet? What do you mean, no sink?). Sight unseen, she could suggest a corner of a front hall could become that much-needed bathroom. Her ingenuity astonished me. Couldn’t you put a bedroom addition over the garage? Couldn’t you knock down the wall and make that room big enough for the piano?
Couldn’t
in her lexicon meant
could
, and her sense of what was possible was unceasingly capacious. For Jacques and me, a house was
wysiwyg
: “what you see is what you get.” No bathrooms, no closets, no room for the piano, forget it. My mother felt differently. Things could be “opened up” or renovated or repositioned, and eventually I began to realize we were talking about more here than mere stucco and glass.

She must have known, more than I did, that I was a little depressed that spring, moving back to Boston; that with Julie gone, missing Annie, between jobs, waiting, not knowing exactly what I was waiting for, I felt lost. Here I was, a mother myself now, my diplomas framed and propped up in the makeshift study Jacques and I shared. I had everything I’d ever wanted, and I still needed my mother to reassure me it would all work out. That
couldn’t
could still mean
could.

For a long time, when I was little, she was my mother, and I needed her. Then I grew up and she was still my mother and I loved her, but I didn’t need her anymore—or at least, I didn’t
want
to need her. Then I was busy and working, and I missed her sometimes and other times, didn’t. And now, almost thirty-three, I was discovering her again, and needing her again, and actually
wanting
to need her. It was as if having a baby and becoming a mother somehow made the lights snap on and I was figuring it all out. Or at least this piece of it. So this is what it’s all about, this mother-daughter thing! Somebody to complain to who actually laughed about the next-door neighbor, and didn’t try to get off the phone.

 

WHILE SHE RENOVATED FOR US
long distance, my mother was packing for her trip out to see Sara and the girls. It was April break, and she and my father were taking them up to Vancouver Island and Lake Louise. They’d be gone ten days.

Ten whole days without talking to her. Oh, she could try to call us from the road, but she’d be with Sara and the girls, and it would be different. I could imagine the breathless, I-can’t-really-talk-now sound in her voice. “Don’t worry,” my mother said, as if reading my mind. “I’m coming out to see you in May. I’m spending Mother’s Day with you, remember?” My mother was convinced if she didn’t see Sacha every few months, Sacha would forget who she was. Babies have short memories, and my mother was determined to update her imprint on a regular basis.

I couldn’t wait for her to come. Probably yet another sign I was losing it.

My mother, for her part, loved being needed. “See, Mellie,” she teased. “You become a mother, and guess what? All of a sudden, your own mother comes in handy.”

Later, walking Sacha to the park past the empty swings, I thought about that remark.