by Julia Fine
My panic had crested, and now it began to recede. Time to take stock. I was sleep-deprived. Hormonal. We hadn’t focused on the condo since Clara was born, but it was an it, a place and not a consciousness, could foster no resentment. The microwave was broken, I was tired and anxious; in my exhaustion I’d imagined Margaret. Somebody out there was playing some stupid, sick joke. I’d be fine if I took a step to the left, toward the glass, if I just turned the handle. Better than fine: I would be warm and indoors with my child. Glass was glass, and the internet was just a mess of radio waves and wires. My toes had turned to ice.
I braced myself and peeked beyond the brick. Clara asleep. One hand stretched above her head, as if she’d found her church and was testifying. She was two weeks old, and in between the times she’d be able to hurt me. My baby. My girl.
I put my hand on the door handle. It wouldn’t turn. The door was locked.
Impossible. I jiggled again, refusing to let it be true. It could not be true. It was four in the morning, and my phone was on the couch, and Ben was in Houston, and only Annie or the cops could let me in. Annie, who would tell me she’d told me so, or the cops, who would tell me I was an unfit mother. Once I froze to death, they’d come take my baby away—but how would they find her? How would they know to come look for her? Days would go by, and Ben would come up the stairs, and a smell would waft out when he unlocked the—
Stop it. Get a grip and call for help.
“Help!” I slammed my hands onto the balcony railing, branding them bloodless white. Nothing changed—the alley indifferent, the world as still as if I hadn’t said a thing. “Somebody help us!”
Was Clara moving? Was she stretching toward that electrical outlet? Could the system short-circuit, with that creep using our Wi-Fi, with her diaper wet, my laptop plugged in?
Could Margaret hear me from her upstairs room? Would she come down? I needed someone to call Annie.
“Help!” Why was my voice still so quiet? Why had I spent so much time training myself to be quiet? “Help me, please!”
I had no way and nowhere to climb—too high up, nothing to shimmy down or use for a foothold. At least Clara was asleep.
Had she wanted me gone? Had the condo wanted me gone? Clara was mad about the microwaved milk, which even as I was heating I had known was a mistake. Clara was mad about my apathy, mad at my resentment. She knew that I preferred Margaret’s fur-lined room—the silver tea set and the old-fashioned telephone, the green glass hurricane lamp with the dangling copper cord—to her own sterile nursery. She was trying to get back at me.
All rationality abandoned, I readied myself to wail, to pound the thick cement of the balcony, to sacrifice my next-born child to the spirit of the building in exchange for a way in. And then I heard the revving of an engine, and smelled the heady rot of garbage. A blinking orange beacon appeared out of the morning fog, the lighthouse coming slowly toward me.
“Hey,” I yelled down, leaning so far over the balcony that my feet lifted up off the concrete. “Hey, guy with the truck!”
He had on thick headphones, the band glimmering in the streetlights. If he just turned his head, he would see me. Three dumpsters sat spaced across the alley at about twenty-foot intervals; ours was the last. I watched him hook the first onto the back of his truck, the growl of the motor drowning out my cries for his attention. Inside, Clara was stirring. It would be hours before the neighbors woke up, and then who knew how long before they noticed me. In that time Clara might have learned how to roll and fallen out of the bouncer. Solly might have peed on the floor. I might have frostbite.
I was wearing ripped pajama bottoms and one of Ben’s old T-shirts. In just a minute, my only chance at rescue would be standing right under me, but I had nothing to get his attention. We’d meant to get planters, and hadn’t. A planter would be difficult to lift, but also difficult to miss. A planter would rain potting soil and seeds down onto the alley, would land with a resounding and declarative crash. But I didn’t have a planter, so I pulled off Ben’s shirt and dropped it down, where by the kindness of some fate it fell onto the garbage man’s shoulder. He looked up at me leaning out over the railing, one hand flailing madly and the other not quite hiding my nipples. He took off his headphones.
“You stuck up there?”
“I have a baby locked inside!” Saying it out loud made it truer. I started to cry.
“Whoa! Okay, lady. We’re gonna fix this, okay? I’m calling nine-one-one now.”
“No! Can you please just call my sister? I don’t want to make a scene.” Already I could sense the neighbors stirring. Why did I care? If not now, when would ever be the moment to demand everyone listen, to claim space for myself and my child? But I didn’t want Arthur to see me naked, or the girl across the way. I didn’t want them to see the soft flab of my stomach, or my greasy, unwashed hair.
“I’m calling nine-one-one, and I’ll stay with you till they get here, okay? They’re gonna send the fire squad. Your kid will be fine.”
“Please . . .” I whispered.
“What’s that?”
My teeth were chattering.
“Can I give you my sister’s number? Can you call her, too?”
“Don’t worry, lady. The fire squad’s on their way.”
“Six-three-zero-two-four-one-one-four-nine-seven.”
“What?”
“Six-three-zero . . .” The way he looked up at me, squinting; the way my mouth sharpened the words so much that I almost could taste them. I shook my head. “Never mind.” Inside I could see Solly standing guard over Clara. She blinked out at me, mournful and waiting. My breath fogged the glass and obscured them both from my view.
Sirens approached, the full-on fire brigade clanging down the silent street. Lights turned on in the condo across the way.
Of course Clara woke up when they hammered down the deadbolted front door, tracking mud onto our hardwoods. Of course Solly started barking. But the worst of it was how easily the men turned the lock to bring me inside from the patio, how calm and ordinary and even deferential they were as they walked me to the couch and wrapped me in a silver heat blanket. I was too cold to pick up Clara—I could feel the cold radiating off me, and even Solly sniffed me with uncharacteristic disdain.
“She can’t smile yet,” I said to the man bending down to wiggle his gloved fingers a few feet from the bouncer. I don’t know why I thought I needed an excuse. He hadn’t asked for any; he was trying to be kind. But I felt a frightening bitterness toward his heavily clothed body, his calm, easy way of wooing my daughter. The ease with which his body broadcast man. His partner took my blood pressure, and the band around my arm gave me something to push back against. There was comfort in being contained.
It took three calls to wake up Annie, and then several minutes of sleep-addled confusion before she understood my plight. The garbage-truck driver was gone, as was Ben’s T-shirt, and while I figured I’d see neither again, I was sure that the driver would see me when he looked up at our balcony each time he passed through on his run. He would remember my body, spilling.
Annie arrived in sweatpants, which made me feel a bit better. Our dead bolt needed replacing; the hallway was littered with debris. She used a rag to wipe the muddy footprints from the floor. She told me we would talk about this later, but for now to go lie down, and I did, and for the first time in what felt like several decades I was alone in my bedroom, with the door shut.
It was only as I drifted off to sleep that I remembered the message board: Don’t let her in.
It hurts.
The Major Impact of a Minor Publisher
While exceedingly simple, the new genre of the “tactile book” put into practice many of the prominent modernist literary theories of its day. Just as Stephen Dedalus gave adult readers a world of sensory impressions in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Dorothy Kunhardt’s Pat the Bunny offered a fully immersive sensory experience to her young devotees—children could fluff a rabbit, f
eel the itch of a man’s beard, and flip through a full miniature book within its pages.
Pat the Bunny was a runaway best seller for publisher Simon & Schuster, but it was not the first of its kind. Two years earlier, in 1938, the small independent publisher W. R. Scott put out Ethel McCullough’s Cottontails, a “feely” book that featured rabbits with real cotton-ball tails, and apple trees adorned with red glass buttons. The books were meant to be handled by children as young as eighteen months old, and were printed with nontoxic dyes on untreated cloth. Because of a lack of resources and shoddy production—editor Margaret Wise Brown and publisher Bill Scott sewed all the sensory details into each book themselves—the majority of Cottontails stock fell apart in the mail or at the warehouse.1 The idea, however, was groundbreaking.
And the small company’s innovation didn’t stop there. Bill Scott, a letterpress printer with family money and a child enrolled at Bank Street School, had formed W. R. Scott in 1937, operating partially from his home, and partially from a school projection closet. His goal was to tap into the nursery school market, at the time largely untouched by major publishers. While the progressive early education movement had grown swiftly over the past decade, no one had solely dedicated their list to experimentally tested here-and-now children’s books.
Margaret Wise Brown proved an excellent choice to serve as W. R. Scott’s chief editor and spokesperson, soliciting manuscripts from her wide range of acquaintances and suggesting and supporting a variety of avant-garde styles of book. Under her supervision, W. R. Scott pioneered the board book (using cardboard and spiral bindings rather than traditional materials), the tactile book, and the first-person history genre.2 In allowing the children’s book to go beyond its traditional form, Brown paid homage to her literary idols, who were experimenting with form in their own work—
7
I finally called my mother, and when she arrived, I felt saner, mostly because it was hard not to feel like the most logical one in the room next to my mother, in her deep-V cashmere sweater, mascara tracked under her eyes. She had on a gold Magen David necklace, and the lowest point of the star pierced her right in the sun-freckled fold of her cleavage.
The first thing that she said: “You look a mess.”
“It’s harder than I thought, not having Ben here,” I said, and immediately she gave me the look I should have anticipated, the look of Try raising two girls without a father, try dating with two daughters at home, and by the way, has Dad been by to see the baby? I chose not to respond; Annie’s therapist had told her that the only way to stem my mother’s passive aggression was to force her to express herself overtly. We weren’t going to give her crumbs.
It was nice that Annie had a therapist. It was like having one of my own, only for free and without having to schedule appointments.
I watched my mother pull the headband she had bought for Clara out of a little pink gift bag, her French-tipped nails grating against the excess tissue paper. Why wrap something for a two-week-old? It seemed like such a waste.
My mother positioned the headband on Clara, who frowned at her. The little flower screaming girl girl girl and we wonder where we get the complex, the feeling that we’re supposed to fit into some schema. That we, the whole messy humanity of us, are supposed to fit neatly inside the elastic of a tiny pink headband.
“We should take her somewhere,” said my mother. “Where can we take her?
“We should take her to the beach,” said my mother. “We should take her to the zoo.”
The thought of either was unbearable. Sand gritting Clara’s diaper, a mouthy tiger watching me nurse. My mother had two daughters. She had done this twice, and she knew. But that was who she was, a woman in denial, a woman convinced that the truth of things was putty she could mold at will. This hadn’t served her well.
THE FIRST FEW months after my father left, my mother behaved as if he’d be back any second. She cooked enough for him to join us at dinner, waiting to set the table until well after the food had gotten cold, Let’s just see if Dad is walking through the door. There was no conversation, no explanation as to why Dad no longer lived with us. Annie and I placed bets on when Mom would sit us down and say “divorce,” how she would do it. Annie thought it would be solemn, the two of us squished onto the plaid basement couch, Mom on her knees on the carpet, a hand of ours in each of her own. I thought she’d just start feeding us at a more appropriate time, that she’d stop waiting to see if Dad would be home to give us baths or tuck us in. We still got baths, at that point. We still had bedtime. As the weeks went on, routine dissolved into a slow, fibrous stretching of time, a thinning scrim of what was acceptable. Because she was my mother, I didn’t think that this could hurt us. The whole point of your parents, to my childhood understanding, was to be pillars that would hold you up, bedrock you could return to if you crumbled. The family was an object, and subject to object permanence. When my mother got flickery, I had total confidence she’d come back into focus.
We found out Dad was back in town because one of Mom’s friends saw him at a grocery store. We came home from school one day to find Shelly Moretti sitting at the kitchen table with Mom, drinking a beer. My mother was pinch-faced and silent, and Shelly flurried us back into the yard, where we sat on the front stoop with our book bags, hungry and chewing our fingernails.
Thank god I had Annie. After Shelly, the stretched putty got progressively thinner, and then finally snapped through. Mom didn’t set her alarm, or set it for three in the morning, when she’d get up to clean the house top to bottom, including our bedroom.
“The vacuum waits for no man!” she would say, crashing the machine against our bed frames. Once she sucked up Annie’s spelling worksheet, had to paw through the clog port to get it back.
One night, after we were asleep, she set the china out for two and made spaghetti and molten chocolate cakes. She put out the tablecloth, cloth napkins, week-old flowers in a vase, long phallic candles. She lit the candles and passed out on the couch, and then woke up at two a.m. to suffocating smoke after a candle tipped over and the flame caught a napkin. She was calm when she came to wake us, which made me calm, despite the smoke wafting in when she opened our door. I rescued my math textbook. We slipped out of the house through the back and stood waiting in our bare feet for the fire trucks, Annie still wearing her headgear. She pulled it out when the neighbors came nosing, but had nowhere to put it, and I remember shying away from her hand, fearful of orthodontic slime.
Mom had been looking at her wedding album, and it, too, burned that night—the kind of metaphor you’d scoff at if you saw it at the movies. When we came back to the house in the morning, Annie and I pierced the chocolate cakes, and instead of spilling out, the liquid centers sat gelatinous and trembling. Annie said it was a shame Mom had never gotten good at cooking; maybe we should get her a recipe book for her birthday.
My mother went away for a bit, after that. We stayed with Dad, first in the apartment he was sharing with Claudia, his twenty-year-old girlfriend, and then the three of us moved back into the house once it was cleaned. We went to school, we came home, we ate boxed macaroni and cheese. I had a class field trip to the planetarium, and when I brought Dad my permission slip, he seemed very proud to sign it, almost possessive, though he wouldn’t volunteer to be a chaperone. Some days he’d offer to play catch in the front yard. Some mornings we’d be pouring our cereal, and he’d slip in the front door with a wink and a Styrofoam coffee.
“Don’t tell anyone,” he’d say, and we’d know that he had spent the night with Claudia. He spent the night with Claudia more and more often.
The doctors let Mom come home once the life that she wanted came closer to the life that she had, the Venn diagram no longer two completely separate circles.
Mom didn’t get electroshocks to kick-start this new era. She didn’t get cold-water baths. They gave her CBT and pills, they talked her down from the delusions. Like my father, Mom was back three months later, standing ther
e at throwing distance, hugging us, holding our hands. But also, like my father, she was never really back.
“LET’S TAKE CLARA to the zoo,” said my mother.
It was the next day, not yet twenty-four hours after I’d explained how futile the journey would be—how hard it always was to find parking, how Clara couldn’t see anything, how she’d have to be breastfed, how she’d mostly be asleep. “I’ll pay to put the car in the lot.”
I’d always liked the zoo. As a kid Annie had a vendetta against it, talked about the brutality of keeping animals in cages, how they should all be roaming free. Typical bleeding-heart teenager stuff. But the animals had indoor space, and outdoor. They had ready food and an audience and a purpose. My only issue with the zoo was the smell of the primate house.
“Okay,” I said, because I knew that as long as Mom was with me, she’d keep pushing it, because I knew that otherwise I might never get out of the neighborhood. Go out into society, said Mrs. What-to-Expect’s SouthernMamma613. Lately I was obsessed with the What-to-Expects. I checked the message board religiously, emotionally invested in both OHbaby243’s failing marriage and SierraXGrace5’s pregnancy scare. There was a perversity to my attraction, a quiet shame; each time I typed out a response, I’d get embarrassed and immediately delete it. I couldn’t find Clara’s message. The moderators had probably deleted the thread; they probably didn’t want any other October Moms feeling threatened. But the message board was obviously a conduit to Clara, and I liked the idea of her as more than just a thing I had to tend to, the idea of her having a mind. I couldn’t figure out how she connected, but I thought if I just kept refreshing the feed, I’d come across some sort of clue. Meanwhile, I scrolled through, collecting wisdom. Don’t dress your boy in yellow clothes unless you want him to have sexual performance issues later. Buy a wipe warmer. Go out into society. I wouldn’t mind seeing some tourists for one afternoon. I said, “Let me walk Solly while you get Clara ready.”