by Julia Fine
EVENTUALLY THE MANDATED therapy turned into occasional sessions by choice. At Ben’s request we moved to the suburbs, a fifteen-minute drive from Seth and Linda, a four-bedroom house with a yard. In the winter I could open the door and let Solly do her business out back—we would find frozen feces in the snowmelt when spring came.
Ben wanted Clara’s room painted pink, which seemed too much to me, but in the long run didn’t matter. We put on overalls and paper masks and classic rock and painted the walls. We forgot to put painter’s tape down over the molding and dripped Misted Rose all over the rug, but Ben thought it was funny and put his hands into my pockets and we had sex for the first time in months on the nursery floor while Clara was downstairs with his mom. It wasn’t bad, but it did feel like a tax I was paying in order to keep living in my body.
The microwave in this new house closed tightly. The air vents were silent.
Clara was seven months old when I finally wrote to my dissertation advisor: “I’ve had a family emergency and won’t be able to complete the program.” He wrote back: “This is not unexpected.” Expect, from the Latin ex, meaning thoroughly; spectare, meaning to look.
For my birthday, Ben bought me a replacement for the ruined volume of my Oxford English Dictionary.
AND THEN IT was Clara’s birthday. She’d dispensed with the pacifier and instead sucked on her littlest left finger, the one that had healed to a smooth stub. She had thin dark hair, and her eyes were fully brown now. Her cheeks had filled out. She could take two or three steps on her own, and could say “Mama.”
We had the family over in a housewarming/birthday celebration, and Annie brought the garbageman, who she was now seeing seriously. I welcomed him in with a smile. I was still taking the lithium, and it dulled any judgment. It allowed me to live in the suburbs. It disguised most of the pain.
Of course Seth and Linda came to Clara’s party and stayed the whole time. Linda stood at the sink and cut grapes into quarters. Seth let Clara smudge his glasses with her fingers.
Kelsey and Jeanie came with presents, and stayed longer than I would’ve expected. My dad, they said, had to work, but he sent his regards. My mother showed up late with a Barbie dollhouse, a giant magenta choking hazard that said “Awesome” and “Totally rad” when you closed the oven or opened the closet. We put it in storage in the garage.
After the party, Ben and I bathed Clara together, and lotioned her all over, and brushed her hair. I dressed her carefully in her pajamas and turned on her sound machine and let her choose two books. All of her books made me cry now, because they reminded me that she would one day have to learn about the world, and the world wasn’t what I wanted it to be for her. There were floods and diseases, there were hurricanes and fires, but mostly there were cruel people, selfish people, people who didn’t care what kind of legacy they’d leave.
We said goodnight to her lamp, to her stuffed doggie, to her sleep sack and her mobile with the colorful felt fish. We said goodnight to Grampa and Nana, to Aunt Annie and to Daddy and to Solly, to the garbage trucks and the birds in the sky. We said goodnight to all her toes and her belly button, to her ears and her eyes and her one special finger.
I kissed her on each cheek, then on the forehead, and I laid her in her bed and I turned off the light.
Epilogue
When Clara was fifteen months old, she looked right at me and said “Mommy more doggies,” and we called it her first sentence. Ben was in Seattle, but I FaceTimed him three times in a row in the middle of the day.
“What’s wrong?” he said, breathless, when he finally picked up. I could see his worried client in the background, framed by a whiteboard full of mathematical formulas.
“Listen to our daughter,” I said. I held the phone up so Clara could see him, but she only wanted to look at herself in the corner of the screen. “Tell Daddy,” I said. Of course she didn’t.
I JOINED A local mom’s group, and hosted monthly playdates. We would sit with our coffees amid puzzle pieces and baby doll dresses and stickers and talk about how to schedule naps or how much we should be paying for preschools. It was all very surface-level, though occasionally someone would talk about how hard it was to still be waking up with her son in the night, how hard it was to discipline her daughter, how sometimes after a particularly difficult day she’d skip her nightly pinot grigio and just cry. Each time I felt the moment in which I might tell them land like a bird in hand, and each time I let it take flight without comment. I thought that I was likely to be lonely for a very long time.
WE GOT A play set in the backyard, and I could stand washing dishes at the kitchen sink and keep an eye on Clara. The set had two parallel swings, and she spent hours on it, pumping her legs. Every few minutes she’d get down and give the other swing a push, then return to her own seat—her joy manifested like the inscrutable inner mechanics of an old clock, requiring that both swings be constantly moving.
WHEN SHE WAS five, I went alone to Clara’s first parent-teacher conference. Ben was in Siena, Italy, for work. The teacher said that Clara was observant—she waited until she understood precisely how to do things before jumping in and trying them. This fit pretty well with my own understanding of my daughter, so I nodded. “When she messes something up, she says ‘Nuts,’” said the teacher. “It’s so old-fashioned. Most of the other kids swear. It’s very sweet.”
IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE to believe that days had once seemed endless, that nights had seemed endless, that I had been able to sit and just look. Clara was easier than Ben’s brother’s kids, objectively, and easier than Annie’s kids. The rest of them bounced off the walls twenty-four seven, while Clara could sit still and color, or read books for hours on end. But she asked questions I would never be able to answer, questions like “Why are clouds so far away?” or “Who made the rocks?” Her pajama pants were quickly too short, her shoes too tight.
I GOT A part-time job when Clara was in second grade, which was also around the time when Ben and I officially decided that we wouldn’t have more children. It had been a tacit agreement, made easy to keep tacit by the fact that we barely had sex. He was still gone a lot for work. It was possible that he was cheating on me, but the thought of him with someone else didn’t burn the way it once had, didn’t even offend me—he was still paying our mortgage, he was caring for our child. My symptoms hadn’t recurred but the hormones could certainly rev them back up. I’d have to go off all my meds if I got pregnant. And then we were older.
My job was as a copy editor for an academic publisher, mostly social sciences but also some history. We got a manuscript in from a member of my former grad school cohort, but the publisher nixed it.
“Too obvious,” he said between large bites of croissant, “and he should have toned down the language.”
SOMETIMES CLARA WOULD tell me that she felt a tingling in her littlest left finger.
“It isn’t a big deal,” she would say, which made me feel like it was a big deal. Which made me wonder how many times she didn’t tell me.
AT TWELVE, CLARA takes the bus home from school and lets herself inside the house when I have to work late. She keeps track of her key, and she knows how to make herself a snack and will get started on her homework, which to my surprise she genuinely enjoys. Of course I won’t let her bring a friend home without some adult present, or do any actual cooking, or use the fireplace. Most of the time I’m home by five thirty to find her sitting on a stool at the kitchen island, working on her algebra.
Now it’s November, but still pushing sixty degrees. I dawdle at work, aware the clocks will change soon, aware that I am nearing the last of my early-evening light. Ben is in Omaha, and I stop to pick up dinner from the Thai place he doesn’t like. When I get home, the front door is unlocked, but I don’t think much of it. And then I notice that the downstairs windows are all open, each lifted just an inch. Clara’s geography textbook is spread out at the kitchen table, open to a map I don’t recognize. She’s put water on for tea, her mug is
waiting. Steam sings from the electric kettle, calling her back.
Solly whines at the bottom of the stairs. She is getting too old to climb them. Her warning feels familiar.
Again derives from the Old English ongean, which can mean “in exchange for.”
My daughter never apologizes when clomping through the house, not even when she slams the door so hard she’ll frighten Solly into peeing on the hardwoods. I’ve always been quiet. My mother’s generation has been quiet. Linda will say, “Can that racket really be Clara?”
The noise I hear now can be Clara; it is Clara. In stocking feet I climb the stairs and follow her, careful to avoid the creaky floorboards, stifling a cough.
Clara stands by the linen closet, her dark hair in a topknot, her school uniform wrinkled, her hands reaching toward the wall. A door is there—turquoise—where before there was not a door. Clara breathes in, and turns the handle. Behind it stands Margaret, on her ladder. The same tweed jacket with the chuffed elbows. The same red lipstick. The same serious, dreamy expression.
“What are you doing?” Clara asks her.
Margaret smiles, and the largeness of it makes her incandescent. “Why, I’m building a house,” she says. “For Michael.”
Author’s Note
Although this is a work of fiction, I’ve done my best to inform the characterizations of Margaret Wise Brown, Michael Strange, and their associates with extensive research. The seeds of this book began with a desire to see these women have their due in popular culture—each was a trailblazer in her own right, and my hope is that giving them this fictional space will encourage readers to seek out more about their real-life counterparts. Mine is by no means a definitive analysis of their relationship or their work; to fictionalize recent historical figures is to do a strange dance of conjecture and interpretation, relating actual events through the lens of this particular novel, and my own impressions and experiences. I have the utmost respect for both women, their estates, their friends, family, and colleagues—it’s been an honor to learn from them over the past several years.
This novel owes a massive debt to two particular Margaret Wise Brown biographies: Amy Gary’s In the Great Green Room, and Leonard Marcus’s Awakened by the Moon. Gary’s buoyant narrative account of Margaret’s life provided rich characterization, and her attention to Margaret’s emotional range was a huge inspiration to me. Marcus’s philosophical examination of Margaret’s work and the literary world in which it flourished—as well as his highly detailed analysis of her career—provided the theoretical backbone for Megan’s dissertation and strengthened the intellectual heart of this novel. Both biographies are excellent reading for anyone interested in further exploring Margaret and her legacy.
Michael’s writing—including the autobiography Megan references—is available to those who like a good scavenger hunt. Margaret’s books are readily available from your local bookseller. Please do dig in—The Little Fur Family, The Noisy Book, and The Little Island are particular favorites at our house.
I’m in awe of the work of the many doctors, journalists, scientists, and mothers on the front lines of postpartum psychosis. Many aspects of Megan’s experience are based on information gathered from women brave and generous enough to share their stories. Megan’s treatment, and the fictional mother-baby unit in which she begins her recovery, is based on best practices I discovered during my research. Many of these resources are still unavailable to the majority of women in the United States, but in taking liberties with my description of available postpartum care, I hope to highlight the need for expanded treatment and the opportunity for change. Although my own postpartum experience was vastly different from Megan’s, it was, in its own way, traumatic and isolating. I wrote this book to shed light on those first few weeks of parenthood, in the hopes of normalizing the intense, conflicting emotions women may feel in those early days. The more we actively discuss the multifaceted experiences of new mothers, the better we as a society can care for women and their babies during an incredibly vulnerable period of their lives. I’m excited and honored to use this novel to push that conversation forward.
Sources
Part I
“The Dark Wood of the Golden Birds.” Kirkus Reviews, June 1, 1950.
Eliot, T. S. “Ulysses, Order, and Myth.” Review of Ulysses, by James Joyce. The Dial, November 1923.
Gary, Amy. In the Great Green Room: The Brilliant and Bold Life of Margaret Wise Brown. New York: Flatiron, 2017.
Marcus, Leonard. Margaret Wise Brown: Awakened by the Moon. New York: William Morrow, 1999.
“Margaret Wise Brown.” US BookScan. Accessed June 15, 2019.
Mitchell, Lucy Sprague. Another Here and Now Story Book. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1937.
Murkhoff, Heidi and Sharon Mazel. What to Expect When You’re Expecting. New York: Workman Publishing Company, 2008.
Part II
Barrymore, Diana. Too Much Too Soon. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1957.
Correspondence from John G. McCullough to Gertrude Stein, 8 February 1939, Gertrude Stein Collection, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.
Gary, Amy. In the Great Green Room: The Brilliant and Bold Life of Margaret Wise Brown. New York: Flatiron, 2017.
Kahn, E. J. “Tallyho!” New Yorker, March 8, 1941.
Larkin, Philip. Collected Poems. New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1988.
Maiorana, Ronald. “Buckram Beagles Harass Hare, But Are Cheered By Its Escape.” New York Times, January 13, 1964.
Shaw, Charles Green. “Through the Magnifying Glass.” New Yorker, December 3, 1927.
Stein, Gertrude. “Poetry and Grammar.” In Lectures in America. Boston: Beacon Press, 1935.
———. The World Is Round. New York: Harper Design, 2013.
Strange, Michael. Who Tells Me True. New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1940.
Part III
Brown, Margaret Wise. Goodnight Moon. New York: HarperFestival, 2007.
———. Goodnight Moon manuscript notebook, The Kerlan Collection, Elmer L. Andersen Library, Minneapolis, Minnesota.
———. The Little Fur Family. New York: HarperFestival, 2005.
———. The Noisy Book. New York: HarperFestival, 2017.
———. The Runaway Bunny. New York: HarperFestival, 2017.
———. “Stories to Be Sung and Songs to Be Told.” The Book of Knowledge 1952 Annual, ed. E.V. McLoughlin. New York and Toronto: The Grolier Society, 1952.
Gary, Amy. In the Great Green Room: The Brilliant and Bold Life of Margaret Wise Brown. New York: Flatiron, 2017.
Marcus, Leonard. Margaret Wise Brown: Awakened by the Moon. New York: William Morrow, 1999.
The Margaret Wise Brown Papers. 1910–1952, Special Collections. Wyndham Robertson Library, Hollins University, Roanoke, Virginia.
Strange, Michael. Who Tells Me True. New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1940.
Part IV
Action on Postpartum Psychosis. “Personal Experiences.” https://www.app-network.org/what-is-pp/personal-experiences.
Carver, Catherine. “Postpartum Psychosis: I’m afraid of how you’ll judge me, as a mother and as a person.” Mosaic Science, July 3, 2017.
Hill, Rebecca, Daphne Law, Chris Yellend, and Anne Sved Williams. “Treatment of Postpartum Psychosis in a Mother-Baby Unit: Do Both Mother and Baby Benefit?” Australas Psychiatry 27.2 (April 2019): 121–24.
“A Mother’s Mind.” Earshot, BBC Radio 4, November 3, 2018. Audio.
Twomey, Teresa M. Understanding Postpartum Psychosis: A Temporary Madness. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2009.
Acknowledgments
Thank you, always, to Stephanie Delman, who regularly makes my dreams come true. Thank you to Erin Wicks—your eye is impeccable, and your compassion is endless. Working with you two, yet again, has exceeded all possible expectations.
Thank you to the team at Sanford J. Greenburger Associates
—Stefanie Diaz, Heide Lange, Sami Isman, Abigail Frank, and more—for your continued support. At Harper: Jonathan Burnham, Doug Jones, Christina Polizoto, Elina Cohen, and so many more. I appreciate how you’ve all gone to bat for me, and I’m so lucky to be in your hands. My immense thanks to Miranda Ottewell, copyeditor extraordinaire, for all your help with yet another structural puzzle.
Thank you to everyone who expressed enthusiasm when, three months postpartum, I decided that I had to write a ghost story about Margaret Wise Brown. Sophie Brochu and Brian Zimmerman, your early reads once again got me on track and asked the questions I needed to hear. Adam Morgan, please never stop hounding me about when the next book is coming—I promise always to do the same for you.
My “mom friends” who very quickly became good friends: Sam Dawson, Cara Turner, Mara Winston Grigg, McKenzie Roman, Kristen Seward, Katie Harte, Kailee Kremer, Rosemary Pritchard—you’ve saved me so many times, and in so many ways. I’m proud to be raising our next generation alongside you.
Thank you to Hannah Lee, for talking candidly, for reading carefully, and for being a wonderful role model. To Allison Somogyi, for teaching me about history PhD programs and reading my “dissertation.”
Thank you to my parents, who are nothing like Megan’s parents, and my in-laws, who are nothing like Megan’s in-laws. I love you all, and you’ve helped me grow into the parent and person I am today.
Thank you to Elliott, who napped so nicely while I worked on this book, who brings me such joy, and is so (relatively) patient. And thank you to Margot, who has turned our lives upside down yet again in the most beautiful way.