I lit another match. Not one sip was missing from the wineglass, or evaporated, or whatever. So I drank it. I reached over, and without the nicety of a toast, or even a here’s-looking-at-you-kid, I slugged my father’s wine back in one gulp. I now know I should have passed it around, so we all could share.
Blood of Daddy. But fuck it, I was greedy.
Dee didn’t say anything, in that annoying way she had of saying nothing, just looking at you, so self-contained and well groomed, so well groomed you suddenly felt hairy and troll-like, and if you hadn’t thought of picking your nose, you suddenly did.
“What?” I said.
“Nothing,” she said, meaning everything. In the dark the lightning bugs were blinking their green and yellow lights, calling out to each other, here I am, over here, no, over here in the tall grass, come to me, come to me. My father loved lightning bugs. “I think lightning bugs are just about the greatest thing in the world,” he’d said the spring he died.
“No, tell me.”
“I can’t believe you just drank that wine like that. That wasn’t right, Evie. Granted, it’s just a symbol, but—”
“Fuck you, Dee, it’s not a symbol.”
Dee moved a strand of hair away from her face very deliberately, like I’d spit on her.
“Oh, that’s nice,” she said, and sat up straighter in her chair, crossing her legs. “I wish I could say I was surprised, but you always have to take it too far, don’t you?”
“Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you,” I said. “You don’t even know too far. You think you know too far?”
“All I am saying is that it was wrong for you to just take that. Please, just get a grip, why don’t you?”
My mother sighed, hunched up her shoulders, and started doing yoga breathing through her nose: sniff, sniff, the breath of fire. It was supposed to make your spine feel like a fiery serpent. This was supposed to be a good thing.
Dee started to laugh. I could sense Billy bracing himself in his chair. He knew the mistake she was making, he’d made it—you should never laugh at a crazy person. To prove that point, I leaned over and took a wild swing at her, punching her in the back.
“Owwwww!” she screamed. Then, for a long moment, there was no sound except the animal-like grunts of me trying to hurt her and her pushing me away, then the scuffling sound of the table moving and her chair falling backward as she jumped to her feet.
“God!” she shouted, and lunged at my chair, pushing it over. I landed with a thump, a shocking wonderful bone-rattling thump that shook me. I’d been waiting for somebody to knock me on my ass. Now I really wanted to kill her. I started slapping wildly, trying to smack her in the face, or pull her hair. We hadn’t fought like this since we were little kids.
“Evie!” Billy yelled. “Don’t!”
“Girls!” my mother yelled. I saw her hand down in front of my face for an instant. I recognized my father’s wedding band on her finger. “Stop it, stop it! Someone will get hurt. Stop it!”
But did Dee stop?
No, Dee fell on me and punched me in the nose, so hard the blood started to gush. Thank God, or I don’t doubt she’d have kept on swinging.
“Oh my God,” Dee said, sitting back on the deck and shaking herself like she was in a dream. “I’ve never done that before.” She stared at her hand; her knuckles were pink.
“Is it broken?” Billy asked. He looked confused, as if he wasn’t sure he saw what he thought he saw. Hell, he probably wanted to sock me too.
I held on to my nose. I was glad. On the first anniversary of my father’s death, my sister gave me a bloody nose, and I was grateful.
“Oh, girls,” my mother said. She scooped some ice out of her drink and bundled it into a napkin, then handed the little ice pack down to me. She sat back in her chair, closed her eyes, and started doing her yoga breathing exercise again.
As I lay there getting my breath, napkin dripping water all down my face, I said, “You know, I’m pregnant.”
Now that I’d said it, it was true. “Ha-ha,” Dee said, lying on the ground beside me. I wasn’t kidding. I wished I was. I wished to hell I was joking. I wished to hell my sister and I still lay together like this, the way we had as children, sharing the same bed, by choice and need.
“That’s really nice,” I said, trying to lift my head, then, deciding it wasn’t important, I just lay there. I didn’t want to get up. I was scared, and scared to tell them. “Do some Starsky and Hutch flip-over Dukes of Hazzard shit on a pregnant lady. Just you wait, Daisy Mae,” I said. “Your time will come. You and your fancy-pantsy boyfriend.”
Now, she knew.
Billy dropped his wineglass on the table, a nice dramatic touch. But it didn’t break. It should have broken.
“You’re joking?” he said. “Us?” He was grinning like crazy.
“I’m sorry,” I said, apologizing, I guess, for springing it on him this way. For springing it on Mom and Dee with no warning.
“Oh God,” Dee said. “I’m sorry, oh God. I’m so sorry. A baby,” she said, turning toward me to rest her hands on my stomach.
My mother had stopped doing the dragon sniff. I thought she might have stopped breathing altogether.
“So,” I said, lying still. I knew it hurt her. Nobody did anything for a minute. We were not happy, not unhappy, just thinking how impossible it was that this kid was going to be born without my father knowing it. How impossible it seemed.
I wondered if Dean was waiting for me at the bar. I wondered what he drank, something boyish like a black diamond, or a madras.
“Are you sure?” Billy said, plopping himself down on the other side of me. He kissed my hands.
“Yep.” I propped myself up on one shoulder. It felt like I was talking about a leaky pipe that was going to cause trouble, not a baby. “Two months at least,” I said. I’d just assumed the tiredness, moodiness, nausea, and headaches were all part of an anniversary reaction to my father’s dying. That was what I wanted. Even the missed periods—that was grief. I wanted to feel that kind of connection, not this, not now.
“But the pills. Oh God.” He grinned, hands over his mouth for an instant, like he wanted so bad to smirk. He was so proud. I messed up my pills—who could remember?—and so Billy had performed the penile equivalent of shooting an arrow into an apple on the head of a whirling dervish.
I said, “You realize, of course, I hate you.”
My mother smiled, looking out at the yard. “Well, that’s wonderful, kids,” she said. “No, really,” she said, her eyes dry.
“A toast,” my mother said. I couldn’t recall her ever making a toast before.
She raised her glass, and said nothing. Then she said, “To you both,” her voice not at all wobbly. “I am so happy,” she said, where once she’d have said We.
“It’s almost midnight,” Dee said, a little anticipatory smile on her lips. “It’s almost over.”
On the first anniversary of my father’s death, we were supposed to move on.
I didn’t want to go forward.
“You know what? I’m going for a walk,” I said, standing up shakily. Feeling, for the first time in three months, really pregnant. I didn’t want to walk. I just wanted out of there.
“I’ll come with you,” Billy said, taking my arm. I loved Billy.
“No.” I squeezed his hand. “I want to be alone for a little while. I think, if it’s okay with all of you, I’m going to take a little drive.”
“Baby,” Billy said, “it’s late.”
“Your nose,” my mother said. “You’re pregnant. You need sleep.”
“You’re joking,” Dee said. I waited for her to say something about how I’d crashed into the garage yesterday, but she just looked sad and worried.
I couldn’t stand it.
“I’m just going to take a little drive around the neighborhood, that’s all,” I said. “Once or twice around the galaxy, to remember Daddy.”
No one would argue with this. I got into t
he car and rolled down the windows. Drive, my father said. Just drive. I flipped on the radio. On the first anniversary of my father’s death, we were supposed to move on. I was moving on.
I didn’t want to. It was as though I was a refugee being chased from my true home, prodded into the future with the stick of forgetfulness. Turning my head, trying to catch a glimpse of something I could never see again, the lights of a place I’d never wanted to leave, a place I’d never return to, a place that in memory would become more beautiful, more irreplaceable the longer it was out of my sight.
HERE IS COMFORT, TAKE IT
How many other women are you going to wake up with?
This is what I wonder when I roll over and see Charlie dozing at my side, a wet halo ebbing out on the sheet behind him, his arms flung out, claiming the center of our bed as his own. When I start to wonder this, I can’t just let him lie there and sleep, no, I have to kiss his cheeks, the sweaty back of his neck, his pale stomach where the skin is so silky it feels almost unseemly to touch it. Almost. I nibble and suck his earlobe until he rolls toward me, burrowing into my side, his fingers working the buttons of my nightgown, his head nuzzling my breasts, and then he sucks. While he nurses, I close my eyes and stroke his head, fingering his blond curls, enjoying the pleasurable throb I’ve become a stranger to even with my husband, especially with my husband. “I won’t ever let you go,” I whisper in my son’s ear. “Never, ever.”
This morning Billy isn’t hanging on the edge of our bed, clinging like some kind of flightless cliff-dwelling bird that can adapt to even the harshest conditions, such as the ubiquitous wet spot, though at one time, long ago, he’d gallantly offer to sleep on it. That was when it was his, of course. This morning Billy is crashed out on our four-year-old daughter Annabelle’s floor swaddled in a Little Mermaid sleeping bag, his head stuffed in a beanbag chair. For a second I feel like shit.
The first few times Billy had fled I’d felt guilty, as though Charlie and I had chased him away. Later, I didn’t mind, actually I preferred it. I’d stretch out and luxuriate in the room his being gone gave me and Charlie. But since Billy and I are trying to salvage our marriage I feel sort of rotten. Still I cling to Charlie.
How many women will you kiss? How many hearts will you break? Will they pick up your socks for you? Will they feed you?
I never think about Charlie loving them. Why would I?
When Charlie tears himself away from my breast—it’s always tearing himself away—a rivulet of milk runs out of his mouth and down his neck like he’s a milk-drunk Bacchus. I smell my milk on his breath. I taste it on his lips when I kiss him. It’s sweet like almonds and vanilla. It’s wrong, I know that, kissing him like that on his lips, but he likes it. I like it. I kiss him again, and hope Billy doesn’t walk in. There’s this frisson between Charlie and me, we both know it. It’s like we’re having an affair, we have to steal our moments, but when they come they are delicious. They make you want to keep on living.
Weaning is hell.
Sometimes, at La Leche meetings, I just sit there and sob.
“I can’t do it,” I say, tearing a Kleenex into snow. “I’m not ready.”
They all support me, of course. They say, “You’ve got to do what’s right for you, sweetheart, for you. The rest of the world shouldn’t matter.”
But Billy and I have agreed it’s time.
“It’s hard on Annabelle,” Billy says. “She needs more of your attention, and she’s not getting it.”
“I’m here,” I say.
“Charlie will be three this fall,” Billy reminds me. “He can’t go to nursery school and have you loitering around the schoolyard waiting to stick your tit through the fence. He can’t. It’s not fair to him.”
“Fair?” I say. I resent the implication that my son and I are some kind of freak show. Not that I don’t know what people say, the way they look at us, then look away. The whispers: “This is not a third-world country.” And “You have to wonder what’s up with the mother.”
Even my friends, even my oldest friend, Mary Beth, rolls her eyes. Mary Beth, who listened to me wail after my father died, who has been the one constant in my life. I’m beginning to wonder if maybe she hasn’t been avoiding seeing me because of the nursing, if maybe it makes her too uncomfortable. After all, she’d nursed her own daughter, Ondine, for only two weeks and then quit.
“Darling,” she explained, “my body is a shrine, not a breakfast bar.”
Mary Beth has never suggested I should stop. I know it’s an act of great friendship for her to keep her mouth shut. I’m sure it’s just killing her, but she wouldn’t dare say a thing. Still, I know how she feels. How everybody else outside of the La Leche bubble feels, including my mother and sister. No one can make me stop nursing my boy. I won’t be bullied.
It’s like when my father died, every helpful Hannah who had ever read Elisabeth Kübler-Ross or any of those Grieving for Dummies handbooks said, It takes a year for the hurt to get better. Meanwhile, members of the Daughters with Dead Dads Club said, It takes two years, and the second year is worse because nobody remembers or gives a shit about your pain.
We don’t all go crazy the same way.
I imagine this year, year three (we’re off the grieving time line altogether), I’ll probably forget it’s the day and I’ll be out ballroom dancing, or shopping for suede hot pants, or eating malossol caviar on toast points when suddenly it will hit me: he’s never coming back.
I pull Charlie closer, belly to belly, it’s delicious. His round little-boy stomach, it’s like a cupcake you can’t resist eating.
In the spirit of honesty and reconciliation that Billy and I are tacitly pursuing with each other, I should have told him last night that I was going to a nurse-in today. A rally to boycott Mama Robino’s Italian restaurant. Seems Mama asked a nursing mother to nurse either in the ladies’ room or outside. So today we’re all going with our children to sit outside and nurse with our placards reading MAMA ROBINO IS A BAD MOMMY. And NO NURSING NO PEACE.
People don’t understand. I can’t just make my son stop wanting me. You don’t own your children, they own you.
So Billy and I have decided: no more snacking on the breast, no incidental sucks, just night-night nursing and booboos—comfort sucking. That’s it. We both agree, the gradual approach is only humane.
But what about me? I feel like asking Billy. What the hell about me? But I don’t. Things between Billy and me are better than they’ve been in a long time. I’ve been selfish. Incredibly mind-numbingly selfish. What makes it worse is that after my father died Billy was incredible, a real pillar of strength and goodness, truly, his halo was goddamn blinding. He took care of the children, and the apartment and the bills, and life while I fell apart. Drinking Dewar’s in the tub—reminding myself that it was possible to drown in a bowl of chicken soup—and slouching around the apartment in the same black clothes day after day, justifying it as a European artist thing (even though I hadn’t been making work), thinking, God knows the French aren’t obsessed with washing their clothes after one wearing, those Frenchwomen bought a few nice pieces and wore them into the ground—difference was, my clothes were black stretch pants and a turtleneck.
Sometimes when Billy left the house with Annabelle in the stroller and Charlie strapped to his back I felt like he was wearing a neon sign advertising: SENSITIVE CARING IMPREGNATOR. GREAT SECOND HUSBAND MATERIAL.
Billy got tired. Any man would get tired. Especially a man whose wife looked like a fat melancholy beatnik.
One night sitting at the kitchen table paying bills, smelling of baby shampoo and roasted chicken, he said, “I’m burned out,” knuckling his bloodshot eyes for effect.
“Burn, baby, burn, disco inferno,” I said. I know he wouldn’t appreciate this, seeing as how I hadn’t so much as folded a tea towel in days.
“I’m serious,” he said, in his new and unsettling grownup voice. “What about me? What about us?” Us meaning sex.
I didn’t say anything. He’d been patient, it wasn’t until Charlie was six months old that he snapped.
“I’m tired of it. Sometimes I feel like I am comforting you on the death of your husband. It isn’t right, Ev. It isn’t right.”
I couldn’t say anything, but for a moment I was proud. Wasn’t I some daughter? Then I was ashamed. How my father would hate the way I have carried on. He wouldn’t understand how I could just stop working, how I could estrange myself from anyone who wasn’t family, or one of my La Leche sisters, or one of the few friends or acquaintances who had actually known my father. I didn’t understand completely. I did know that the idea of sex, of surrendering my body, was out of the question.
Right after Charlie was born, Billy started playing piano in a bar downtown. A self-consciously chichi little French Moroccan club with low velvet sofas, brocade pillows on the floor, and red lanterns.
Because it wasn’t the old blue Stratocaster that he wanted to drag out, and hang out with a bunch of guys in a smoky club, the wood floors swollen with spilled beer, I was neither threatened nor turned on. I’d fallen in love with Guitar Billy, no-underwear, torn-jeans, three-earrings-in-his-left-ear Billy. Not Piano Billy in boxers and black cords, the piercings now invisible, you could only just feel the scar tissue. That idiotic line If this don’t turn you on, you ain’t got no switch surfaced in my mind over and over again. Forget a switch, I’d blown my fuse box.
I kept thinking about how turned on I used to get as a girl thinking about Pete Townshend smashing his guitar, because, as he said, he could never get the guitar to make the sound he wanted. I’d always wanted Billy to do that, but he wasn’t the type, it was too obvious, too emotional.
“Maybe if I had one of those Mexican-made cheapy Fenders guys buy just so they can smash them,” he said. “That’d be fun.”
“You’re joking,” I said. It was like finding out the woman of your dreams has a silicone core.
“I need this,” Billy had said, like he thought I’d deny him this one thing. “Shit, sometimes I look at myself and I don’t even know who I am anymore, what with the new job, the suit, the kids, and the—”
Use Me Page 24