by Kyra Wilder
It was getting late. I tried to hold dinner so we could all eat together but the pasta was going hard on the top and grey at the bottom while we waited and the sauce was bubbling away to nothing on the back of the stove. In the end it did, bubble away to nothing, and the tomatoes burned and stuck to the bottom of the pot. I gave E a slimy plate of cold pasta and hoped that M wouldn’t come home before everything could be cleaned up, the pot scrubbed, dinner cleared away.
At least we could still make the cookies. It was my mother’s recipe, the cookie dough, which she had gotten from her mother, so there were always comparisons, glances, the taking of tiny bites, the saying of nice things. Only I was the only one here now making it. I pulled the dough out of the refrigerator and E jumped up, greedy for it, grabbing at me at the bowl all at once and this was of course really such a wonderful thing, that she was happy, jumping. I jumped too a little bit to show that I thought this was all wonderful. We rolled the dough out into little balls and I let her press them into any shape that she wanted to.
E was flattening them in ways that would never bake correctly, too thick on one side, too thin in the middle, but I didn’t mention this. I only tried to fix them up a little once she put them down on the tray, saying all the time of course how nice they looked. How perfect. How much Daddy would love them. I was sweating a little bit, just at my hairline.
B began to cry in the other room. It was maybe ten o’clock and the cookies weren’t finished and I was still alone in the apartment with the children. Children who should have been in bed. Children who would in the morning be so tired, who would not sleep well at all. Who would not sleep perhaps all night because of this, because of me letting them stay up so late.
My heart began to get out from under me. E was pressing on me, standing on my foot, her elbow digging into all the places I was still fat from having B, all the places that would never be the same.
I can’t breathe! Suddenly I was shouting this, I can’t breathe! Well, I really couldn’t. I tried to make it a game, grabbing at my neck and making my eyes big but E had snapped back into herself and was watching me like she sometimes does, when she turns her eyes into ponds, liquid murky things, filled with frogs. Sometimes everything was like this and I couldn’t be calm.
I left the cookies on the counter and took E to bed. Telling her all the time what a good girl she was, how much I loved her. Wishing I could calm my face down a bit, relax my jaw. I could feel my teeth almost turning to powder in my mouth I was biting down that hard. E held my hand delicately as I led her into her room and tucked her into bed. She was so far away from me, her eyes like tiny pinpricks of light. Christmas lights on a fishing boat when I was already deep underwater. I kissed her forehead and told her I loved her but I had to wipe the spot where my cheek had touched hers because I was sweating so much that it left a mark.
B was screaming now but I couldn’t make myself go to him even though we were all supposed to be so quiet. I jumped in the shower with my clothes still on. Sometimes that sort of thing helped, like jumping as high as you could five times when no one was looking or pinching the inside of your legs or screaming into a pillow. The water was good. It was cold and it brought me back to myself. I could be calm.
I peeled my clothes off and left them in the bottom of the shower, wrapped a towel around my puckered-up supermarket chicken skin and went to pull on another pair of sweatpants, an old T-shirt. B was quiet now and this made me, of course, feel much worse and I ran to him and picked him up and told him I loved him I loved him I loved him even though he was almost now asleep and I was only bothering him. I slipped my nipple into his mouth and he obliged me by sucking a bit before falling back asleep and leaving me.
I wiped down the kitchen counters, threw away the unbaked cookies, cleaned the tray. I checked the floor and cabinets for bits of glass. At some point the voice would start talking to me behind the door and I didn’t want to hear it. If I kept working perhaps I would be too busy to hear it. I sharpened the knives again against the stone, scritch scritch scritch, filing the metal to such a fine point. Eating up the minutes that way along with the edge of the blade.
I finished the knives, polished the cabinet handles, wiped down the awful red rental-company refrigerator, climbed up onto the table to wipe the greasy stick off the tops of the lights. My grandmother said a man once ran his fingers over the tops of the doors in her house before he tried to kiss her, wanting first to check, he told her, how she kept her house. Of course this was terrible but I wanted the tops of the lights clean regardless. I got tired anyway though and went over to the sofa, curled myself up behind a mountain of pillows and closed my eyes.
A moment later or maybe hours, M was there in the room with me, home, he looked tired and smelled a little bit of sweat. He reached into my stack of pillows and brought his face down and kissed me behind the ear. I love you, he said. I definitely heard him say it.
We had been so young together once, I hadn’t forgotten a second of it. The being young. The way he had looked at me when we were in that golden country and had good hair and teeth and were supple just by nature and not by trying. When every day was a market and all the shelves were stocked. We could have anything we wanted! It was all true and had happened, though it was hard to believe any of it now with our life always piled up all around us in heaps and mounds, slumping and shifting, old laundry and recycling. But it was all fine now that he was home, the walls pushed back a little around me, around us both maybe and I slept.
12
We all dressed carefully the next morning. M was a little nervous, he put on the clothes he wore to the office. A shirt from Milan. He looked like himself now, in the collared shirt, which was strange because I could remember the first time he put on a suit and it looked too big and loose on him and I thought he could have walked by me on the street looking like that and I wouldn’t have recognized him. If he saw the bruise, he didn’t mention it. I was grateful for his consideration, but also it made me feel a little slippery inside, like maybe what was real didn’t stay true and fixed from one day, from one minute, to the next. Or maybe it was that what was true and real for me wasn’t true and real for both of us together. Or of course maybe it was just that I had done my make up well. How many things could be equally true all at once?
E wore a white dress with little eyelets strewn across the fabric like flower petals. They were meant to look careless, you paid extra for that kind of thing, for their perfect off-handedness. I brushed her hair and oiled it a little and braided it carefully. She always cried when I braided her hair, pulling this way and that, undoing the work that had been done, forcing us to start again, but I thought, I really thought that she would one day like to remember my fingers in her hair. I thought that she would remember this love, my love, here, even though she cried now and said it hurt. Isn’t love sometimes like this? We’re always setting ourselves up to remember it.
M dressed B, pulling his little kicking legs through a pair of pants, sliding them up over the fat diaper. The boys I would probably one day call them, and I would laugh and be a woman in her forties and I would roll my eyes a bit and cross my arms in front of myself and tap my foot. We would be a family with pet names for each other, we would be that happy.
I couldn’t find anything to wear. I tried on shirt after shirt but none of them fit. The sleeves were too long, it was almost as if they might drag on the floor. The buttons were too tight. It was suddenly as if I were a grape being squashed down beside the rental-company bed by a monstrous thumb. I was bulging out, grinding down into the cheap carpet. I threw on a dress and ran out of the room, tripping, fast so the mirror couldn’t catch me. I rubbed more foundation over the bruise on my face, dusted it with more powder. I was the last one to the door, the last one to leave the apartment but I was ready now. We all walked out into the hallway and M locked the door behind us. Immediately I wanted to be back inside. To spend the whole day curled up but M was there waiting and B would start to cry soon, woul
d be hungry. So we left the building and walked to the tram stop. I was sorry it was too hot to wear my long coat.
M bought the tram tickets and slipped them into his pocket. When the tram came we all climbed on and rode it down the hill, past the train station and across the bridge over the lake. It was a beautiful day, we could have been in Paris in three hours. We got off the tram and walked past a flower shop where a young woman in a chequered apron was wrangling huge sunflowers with stalks as thick as her own wrists into an enormous bouquet. A bouquet that when lifted, made her, the tiny girl, look lost inside it. She was roping them together like cattle. M bought E a pink flower and she loved it, kissed it, crushed it and left it in the street all in the space of two minutes. Love was like that too of course. Blossoming and beautiful and bursting and delicate and gone. Why pretend otherwise?
We walked to M’s boss’s apartment building. It was one of the old-looking ones along the lake. It had a wrought-iron elevator in the lobby like a bird cage you closed yourself into. We rode it all the way to the top and stepped out in front of a tall white door with so much inlay and moulding that it looked like a maze, only it was perfectly made and so, of course, there was no way out. As we wrestled with the stroller, fighting with E who wanted to run ahead, M’s boss’s wife opened the door.
She was wearing a white dress that fell down her body like a waterfall, like a miracle, touching her just here and here. There was a panel cut out of one side, where a pocket would have been but which instead made a paneless window to a tan hip, the bone running just so. The perfect accessory, more unattainable than the latest this or that. A place for her, or for someone else to rest a hand. Oh this old thing, she could have said when she walked and showed it, how perfect it was, the dress, the hip. It was impossible to believe that she’d just had a baby, wearing white, wearing that dress.
M leaned in to kiss her cheeks, three times. It wasn’t really kissing, more touching. They smiled at each other like people who have eaten dinner together. I could see this. As he leaned in to kiss her he touched her shoulder like a man who knew whether she liked a cocktail first, or wine. But of course they had all eaten together, many times after work. I knew this, that M’s boss’s wife often came along at night when they went to restaurants, meeting them after she left her office.
M’s boss came out behind her, the baby on his shoulder, holding a hand out for M to shake. We were welcomed inside, walked through double doors, asked to sit. M took B out of the stroller and M and M’s boss looked at each other and laughed. Tailored shirts, wool pants, leather shoes, men with things to do. Men who could at that moment have called any number of people, who had at that moment many things to do, and there they were holding babies. That was a cue for the women, meaning me and M’s boss’s wife, to smile at each other, to pass on some sort of congratulations to each other, here we were, two lucky women, something like that. We did smile, we took our cue just fine.
Just inside the door, E asked where the tea was, stamping her little patent-leathered foot, and so we were all given another opportunity, the adults I mean, to look at each other knowingly and laugh. There was often, almost always, only one way for these sorts of afternoons to proceed. The smiling, the laughing, the knowing looks, the hand held out just so, come in please!
We were taken through to the living room where M and M’s boss sat down on the perfect French-blue sofa with the babies. They leaned back into the cushions and M’s boss’s wife and I, arranged in high-backed chairs around the occasional table, got down to the business of searching for something to talk about.
The gift we left on the side table in the entryway. It did look good there. The sunlight lay draped about the room like a member of the family, resplendent in a familiar way, at home and cuddled up in all the best places. The curtains hung down from the tall ceilings, light and airy, like the breath of beautiful women.
Of course I couldn’t say any of this to M’s boss’s wife, the script was laid out for us and did not permit whimsical deviations. She would say something nice about E and I would thank her. I would laugh once or twice and compliment the rug. I would try to keep from tugging on my dress. I would ask her where she got something or other and say I was looking for something like it. Something else would be hard to find, some bottle of cleaning spray, or decent coffee or bread, and we would note that and tut. I would take her advice and thank her. Of course I would ooh over the baby. I would say something about them growing up so fast and about how much I loved them, babies, all kinds.
She had an accent when she spoke but not a French one. She offered tea and so I had to ask how I could help. Then this, she had to refuse, No, no, no, she had to say. Please, stay just where you are.
We made out fairly well this way, keeping ourselves on well-oiled tracks. M and M’s boss were talking, patting the backs of the babies while they slept. Soon one of us, M’s boss’s wife or me, would have to look at the husbands and say something. I would need to prepare a compliment, something about how my M liked his boss, or the work. I would have to say my M, affectionately, like that.
She left and came back with a teapot, poured tea into cups that were already set out. M and M’s boss waved away the cups when they were offered and so we returned to the table and had to drink them even though it was too hot outside for tea. E had run off somewhere. I should go look for her I said, and M’s boss’s wife said, Stay, let her play and smiled as if we two knew all about the secret ways of children.
The table was set with a tray of macaroons in pastel colours. She offered me one and I took it and bit into it. I tried to pass the plate to her but she waved them away and said no she couldn’t and the whole thing felt like a trick. I looked for E, I wanted to give the rest to her but I couldn’t find her. I couldn’t get up then though so I swallowed the second half and went back to the tea.
M’s boss’s wife had her phone on the table next to her and it kept buzzing. She flicked away a few calls with her manicured fingers, always turning back to me and smiling and apologizing, rolling her eyes a little. They’re supposed to leave me alone! she said. She said something like that.
My eyes moved back and forth between her and her new baby. How could both be real? Her baby was so much younger than mine and yet she had those painted fingers, those people calling her on her phone, had that hip in that dress. Perhaps it all came down to the half-bottle of champagne mothers were given here in the clinics, after they give birth, the Descamps linens that lined the airy privately insured beds, perhaps these things that seemed so fine and frivolous were actually like graceful toeholds on the side of a cliff. Perhaps your baby was the ocean you would otherwise fall into, perhaps your baby’s mouth was like the mouth of those birds where all the teeth point backwards, preventing escape, like those birds whose backwards pointing teeth continue all the way down their throats.
There was some art hung on the wall, hammered metal of some kind. The light reflected off it and lit her perfectly from behind, so she looked softened, like she had a glow about her. I thought about a piece of advice that I’d heard somewhere or other, that for a woman to look her best, she should pin a diamond into the lapel of her jacket. This was so that light, when it caught the diamond, would shine on her face softly, without other people realizing the trick. M’s boss’s wife was like that now, lit from behind, the light almost holding her up like Venus on her seashell. Well, she was beautiful like that. I wondered if she always sat in that chair, in that spot, in that light.
Text bubbles popped up on the screen of her phone and she glanced down a few times, pulled up her calendar, moved her thumb down the screen. They want me to fly to a meeting in Dubai, can you imagine? The answer was of course, No, I couldn’t. But I said it anyway, No, I can’t! Like that, and arranged my face to show I was surprised and impressed. To show I really couldn’t imagine it. Sometimes of course the faces that we make are true.
She typed away into her phone and called over to M’s boss eventually, saying something like, but
think of her voice here, her accent, the way she almost touched her manicured finger to the corner of her painted lip when she spoke, Darling, I’ve got to go to Dubai! Yes, at the end of the month! What will the nanny do!
Then she turned to me and said smiling, Well, I suppose she’ll get along. Then she said, Really I don’t know how you manage with two. I could never do it, I’d be crawling up the walls! You must be so busy!
I nodded and smiled and said something about children. Running after them. Busy, yes, I was so busy. She said something else or nodded.
I really had to go look for E. I have to go look for E, I said, and M’s boss’s wife nodded, managing to look only very slightly relieved. I got up and pulled at the bottom of my dress, trying to unstick it from my back.
I walked down the hall. My feet were quiet on the gleaming parquet floor, the floor that was clean enough to eat caviar off, that was slick enough for dancing, that was made of hundreds of tiny pieces laid down one by one by someone else. I stuck my finger in my mouth and then touched a wall leaving a wet print. E, I called but not too loudly. There were so many doors. The bathroom is just down the hall, to the right, M’s boss’s wife called out from the living room.
I opened the first door in the hallway and found a bedroom. A guest room it must have been. More white walls. A bed with a plush dove-grey headboard and an opera sofa tucked under the window. The sofa had a curved back, soft, like the neck of a fallen giraffe. Like the neck of a giraffe that was lying down, shot on the Serengeti or some other place that wasn’t here. There was a door inside the room and I stepped inside to open it saying, E? But not really meaning it. On the other side of the door was a bathroom with a freestanding tub deep enough, almost, to drown in standing up, but no E.
A line of unused soaps cut to look like amber were arranged on a shelf. The faucet rose up from the sink like a taxidermied bird, frozen in flight. I felt suddenly trapped in a flashing clean menagerie of fixtures and fittings. I stumbled back toward the door and managed to get out into the hall. The next door I tried was the kitchen, presided over by a green La Cornue stove with brass trim. Then, a closet with a maid’s uniform hanging on a hook behind a door.