Happy and You Know It

by Laura Hankin

  “Oh, we’re . . . ,” Whitney began, but Christopher just smiled and thanked the man.

  As they turned away from the stall, Christopher whispered, “We can’t turn down free cookies!” So they brought those over to the same bench they’d sat on the week before and ate them slowly, talking until the last crumb was gone.

  Whitney pointed to a sign. “Next Saturday’s the last market of the season.”

  “That’s too bad,” Christopher said. “It’s been nice, having fresh produce.”

  The next week, Whitney woke to sleet and slush. She stared out the window at the unforgiving weather, an out-of-proportion disappointment blooming in her chest. She had just really wanted some cage-free eggs, she told herself.

  She’d almost believed it too, until Gwen’s Christmas party.

  Chapter 6

  Baby Reagan was a pretentious little show-off as far as Amara was concerned.

  “Look!” Gwen said to them all, taking Reagan’s sippy cup out of her pudgy hands and putting it on top of the low table in Whitney’s living room. All the women sitting together on the floor, filling out their vitamin forms, turned their heads to watch as Reagan squinted and grunted, then swung her arms up to the tabletop. Amara willed Reagan to give up and be a tiny, immobile slug a while longer—Lord, she was a monster, rooting for a baby to fail—but Reagan pushed and wobbled to her feet as most of the other mothers squealed, clapping their hands, while Vicki gave her slow, faraway nod of approval.

  And just like that, Charlie became the last child in playgroup who still hadn’t stood up on his own. The slowest of the babies.

  Enough already, she thought as Gwen beamed at her daughter. Reagan wasn’t the second coming of Christ. She wasn’t even that cute. Whitney’s hand crept over to Amara’s on the rug and gave it a quick, tight squeeze.

  Amara let her hand linger in the warmth of Whitney’s for a moment, then untangled herself. “We’ve got to head to Charlie’s pediatrician appointment,” she said, grateful for the excuse to leave. God, this was breastfeeding all over again.

  Sometimes, Amara wished she could lop off her tits and toss them in a dumpster. All her adult life, they’d been causing her trouble. She’d gotten a reduction a few years ago, because when she’d hurried through the hallways at work, the unwieldy buggers threatened to put someone’s eye out, and if she’d had one more conversation with a coworker in which she caught him staring, she would have punched him straight in the nose. At the time, her doctor had failed to mention that it could come back to bite her.

  Breastfeeding was supposed to be natural. A cow could get a calf to suckle at her teat, and yet Amara, who had a degree from a well-regarded university and had handled some of the most famous celebrities in the world, couldn’t get Charlie to latch onto her nipple. Fucking babies. The most narcissistic rock star on the planet was no match for the average six-month-old.

  It wasn’t like one of those articles on the mom-centric websites: “How My Battle to Breastfeed Taught Me Who I Really Am” or some similar nonsense. The women who wrote those stories would recall how they’d tried and tried until, after some magical words of wisdom from a kindly lactation consultant or a few deep, centering breaths, they’d navigated their babies to the perfect spot and their little angels latched on and stayed on, moonlight from the window draping across mother and child. Only then, in a blinding flash of insight, would the author realize the depth of strength and selflessness that had always existed inside of her. There was always a happy ending, a moment at which a woman knew she was a good mother.

  All of that was the exact opposite of Amara’s experience.

  She eventually attained a basic competence in breastfeeding her son, but it was never easy or mindless or satisfying. Meanwhile, her breasts were perpetually heavy and raw; she’d dealt with multiple rounds of mastitis; her nipples chafed at her shirts, and sometimes they leaked; and she pumped all the time, but never a consistent enough amount to provide real nourishment for Charlie. So her boy was a de facto formula baby, which apparently meant she didn’t love him enough because, as people were so fond of reminding her, breast was best! (But she did love him, despite it all, with a steady ache. She’d journeyed through the terrifying, alien wonders of pregnancy and discovered a new sun, even if sometimes she wished she could leave Charlie on a church doorstep and take off for South America.)

  All the other mothers in playgroup were juicy and bountiful. Especially Vicki. Vicki’s boob was a goddamn fire hose. If Vicki whipped her boob out to breastfeed on a park bench, all the babies in the vicinity probably whooshed out of their strollers, desperate for a taste of that liquid gold. Vicki would never stop breastfeeding, and her son would grow up with a hearty Oedipus complex. Amara pictured little Jonah in the schoolyard telling the assorted boys, “If you love Mountain Dew, you’ve gotta try my mother’s milk!” At his wedding, he’d clink Vicki’s boob against his bride’s champagne glass before taking a suckle.

  The playgroup women had listened to Amara’s woes and suggested all sorts of tricks, like eating a lot of oatmeal or trying a different brand of breast pump. (“You ever notice,” Joanna had said as she and Amara took the elevator after one such playgroup, “how people can say they’re trying to help you while making you feel worse than before?”) Eventually Amara had just stopped talking about it and given up.

  But she couldn’t just give up on Charlie’s motor development.

  Sitting in Dr. Katz’s waiting room an hour later, in between rocking Charlie’s stroller back and forth with her foot and texting the office address to Daniel again (he was running late, some meeting at work had gone over), she pulled The Foolproof Guide to a Happy, Healthy Baby out of her bag. She read this book the way twelve-year-olds pored over Harry Potter novels, hunting for clues, rereading, and annotating late into the night. She hadn’t yet written erotic fan fiction about the two doctors who had coauthored the thing, but hey, given the direction in which her mental health was heading, maybe that was on the horizon. She flipped to the developmental checklist page, which was covered with her own notes. She’d checked woefully few of the boxes. She went over the list of things she wanted to ask Dr. Katz, and her heart raced at the thought of what his answers might be.

  * * *

  —

  “Well, Charlie’s still underweight!” Dr. Katz said to Amara and Daniel. This doctor was far too cheerful about everything. Amara’s parents had not emigrated from Nigeria to London and worked their asses off to give her every opportunity—even sending her to college in the US, for fuck’s sake!—just for Amara’s kid to go on a hunger strike.

  Daniel was bouncing Charlie on his lap, still out of breath from running the twenty blocks from midtown. His glasses had gone askew in the process, giving him a faintly ridiculous, lopsided look even as he nodded seriously at their pediatrician. “Okay, so what can we do to fix that?” he asked.

  Dr. Katz looked at their chart. “His intestinal and kidney tests have all been fine, so it’s probably a matter of giving him a higher-calorie diet throughout the day and keeping an eye on it.”

  “What about standing up?” Amara asked. “He can put weight on his legs when I hold him, but he doesn’t pull himself up.”

  “Uh-oh!” Dr. Katz said, smiling.

  “‘Uh-oh’?” Amara asked. “What does that mean?”

  “It’s probably nothing to worry about,” he said, patting Charlie’s head. “Some babies are just a little slower than others. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  “But what if it does?”

  “Well, then we’ll know in a few months!” he said, giving out a kindly chuckle like he was Santa Claus distributing toys. (Here, child, you get a toy train, and you get a Hatchimal, and YOU, little Charlie, get uncertainty about whether or not you’re developing normally! Ho ho ho!)

  “Wow. That’s very helpful,” she said. She had an urge to slap some gravitas into him, so, inst
ead, she concentrated on the wall behind Dr. Katz’s head, which was painted with a jungle scene. In the middle of it, a cartoon monkey clutched a vine, grinning. Rather creepy-looking, actually.

  “I think,” Daniel said, “we’re just feeling a little overwhelmed right now.”

  “Look,” Dr. Katz said, “it seems like your son is what we call, in fancy scientific jargon, a difficult baby. But that doesn’t necessarily last. How’s he sleeping?”

  Amara and Daniel looked at each other. “We’re having trouble getting him on a consistent schedule,” she said, “because someone goes into his room when he wakes up in the middle of the night to cuddle him, when he’s supposed to be crying it out.”

  “I wait!” Daniel said to her, then turned to Dr. Katz. “I only go in when it really seems like he’s not going to stop. And it works. He goes right back to sleep.”

  “It undermines the whole thing,” Amara said.

  “Well,” Daniel said, throwing his hands up in the air, “I’m sorry that I want to comfort our son.”

  Dr. Katz chuckled again. “Sounds like this is an issue you two should discuss with a different kind of doctor.”

  Later, in the hallway, navigating Charlie’s unwieldy stroller through the door that Daniel was holding open, Amara said, “I want to change pediatricians.”

  “What?” Daniel asked.

  “He’s too flippant,” she said as they headed toward the elevator. “I don’t know if he’s even taking any of our concerns seriously. And I hate his smug face.”

  Daniel sighed. “He’s taking us seriously, Mari. I think he’s just seen it all before, so he knows getting worked up over things isn’t helpful.”

  “So now you think I’m getting too worked up?” she snapped. He gave her a look, and she deflated. She leaned against him, her voice catching. “I’m sorry. I just feel like I’m trying everything, and I’m failing at it all.”

  “Hey,” he said, wrapping his arms around her right there in that sterile hallway, Charlie cooing to himself in the stroller beside them. “You’re not failing.”

  “What if there’s something seriously wrong with him?”

  “Then we’ll give him away,” he said, his face gentle and somber. She smiled in spite of herself and pushed him. “No,” he said. “Then we’ll have a different kind of life than we planned. But we’ll love him with everything we’ve got and rely on each other, and we’ll make it work.”

  “You’re right,” she said, looking at him straight on. When had he gotten such deep bags under his eyes, and all that gray hair at his temples? “I love you. Let’s just go home, order something totally unhealthy, and put an idiotic show on.” She tugged on his tie. “Maybe we’ll even be able to get him to sleep so we can have a little time to ourselves.” She straightened back up and pressed the elevator button.

  He grimaced. “I have to go back to the office.”

  “What? Now? But it’s already after five.”

  “It was the only way I could get out for this appointment.”

  “Dammit,” she said, pressing her fingers to her temple. “It would be really nice if just this once, you could tell them to go screw themselves.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “Looks like it’s me and Charlie, alone again. Cool.”

  “It’s not like I wanted to be the only breadwinner,” Daniel snapped, right as the elevator doors dinged open.

  The car was packed with people, with just enough space at the front for the two of them. But Charlie’s stroller would never fit. “You go,” she said to Daniel. “You have to get back to the office.”

  “Mari . . .”

  “Go.”

  So he went.

  She had to let two more carfuls of people go by before she was able to shove herself and Charlie in there. Having a baby in New York City was an insane thing to do, much like skydiving or cutting off one’s ear. But she’d gone ahead and done it anyway.

  * * *

  —

  Amara was this close to getting promoted to showrunner when Daniel went and put a fucking bun in her oven. To be fair, it wasn’t entirely his fault. They only used condoms, even after five years together, because Amara didn’t like putting extra hormones in her body—she was perfectly balanced the way she was, thank you very much, and didn’t need to go back to the girl she’d been when she went on the pill her senior year of secondary school, crying on the tube every morning for no reason she could name—and when she’d tried an IUD her first year in New York, she’d suffered through a month of bleeding and cramps and then it had slipped without her realizing, meaning she’d had to take a very unpleasant trip to Planned Parenthood. She wasn’t going to suffer through more horrible side effects just so her boyfriend (turned fiancé turned husband) could feel extra mind-blowingly amazing, when he already got to feel pretty damn good. Luckily Daniel wasn’t one of those guys who whined about that sort of thing. She couldn’t have married a guy who did.

  Their condom broke the night before a gigantic presentation at work. She was one of the producers at Staying Up with Nick Tannenbaum, and she’d been developing a new segment for the show in which Nick would have a rap-battle debate about current events with the celebrity guest. She was always pushing for more substance, especially with the state of the world as it was. Nick, an affable Canadian, got nervous about handling controversial issues, but he loved goofing around and freestyle rapping with the crew backstage, so she thought he just might go for it. She’d written up a script about abolishing the electoral college (when she’d come over from England for university, she’d been dumbfounded by the institution—how was this the “great American democracy” she’d heard so much about?—but she tried to be evenhanded in the writing), and convinced the show’s bandleader, Kenny, to do one side while she incessantly practiced the other. She knew Nick would get a kick out of that too, if she managed to do it well. He always tried to get her to join in on the freestyling backstage when she was running around making sure a million other things were going the way they were supposed to. “Amara could probably kick all of our asses,” he’d say. (She wasn’t sure if he was saying that because she was black or if it was a joke because she was so no-nonsense or if he actually meant it.) “I’d destroy you. You’d go home crying to your mummies,” she’d always say while double-checking that the space cadet of an intern had put the cue cards in the proper order.

  After the condom broke, Daniel had offered to run out to the pharmacy for Plan B, but she wouldn’t have been able to do the presentation the way she wanted to with that hormone circus going on inside her body.

  The next afternoon, with the staff gathered around in Nick’s office, she’d ducked out, telling everyone she had to use the bathroom, and reentered in a Missy Elliott–style tracksuit as one of the band members began to beat box. “This is a rap battle, bitches,” she yelled. Nick made a face like a kid entering a candy store. “The issue? The motherfucking electoral college!” She paused. “Obviously we can’t say ‘motherfucking’ on air.” Then she’d launched into it.

  After the presentation went so well (she’d nailed it; she was a queen; Nick was totally on board), she had to go out for celebratory drinks with the guys, and by the time she woke up hungover the next morning and popped the little pill into her mouth, lo and behold, Charlie had already laid claim to her uterus.

  She couldn’t be a woman who’d had two abortions. She was thirty-two and married, for Christ’s sake, to a wonderful guy who’d been aching to be a father since, probably, the moment he’d popped out of his own mother. (He even told dad jokes and wore flannel pajama pants and developed strange, passionate interests in hobbies like watercolors and woodworking that flamed out after six months or so. Prime dad material.) Besides, when she let herself think about it, she liked the idea of a mini Amara-Daniel hybrid waiting for her at the door, hurtling into her when she came home from work, before s
he’d even had time to set down her purse. Of the three of them snuggling in bed on Sunday mornings, bleary and content, the little nugget watching idiotic cartoons while Amara and Daniel passed the New York Times back and forth. She was going to lean the fuck in and master that mythical beast known as Having It All.

  She told Nick when she was four months along, and he pounded his desk in congratulations, offering her some of the Scotch he kept in his desk for “special occasions” (which seemed to happen every day; Amara was worried he was a bit of an alcoholic) before remembering that she wasn’t supposed to drink. By this point, “Rapping the Issues” clips had gone viral a couple of times, most notably the debate on universal health care in which the celebrity guest, a dainty, young Oscar-nominated actress, threw down like none other.

  Nick arranged for Amara to stop coming into the office two weeks before her due date and then to take a full month off when the baby was born before she dove right back in. It was not the ideal time to go away. Their showrunner would be leaving soon to move to LA, and Nick was going to try to take on the position himself. He had no idea the amount of work that went on behind the scenes while he goofed around, so the experiment would probably end in a matter of weeks, and he’d promote one of the producers. Her coworkers were all dividing up her work while she was gone, with Robby taking on her primary duties. Robby was a pompous skid mark of a man, with a beard that badly needed a trim and a beer belly that he carried around like a policeman’s badge—proof that he was Chief of the Fun Times Bureau. He never turned down a swig of Nick’s Scotch.

  So she’d simply have to work her ass off. She came back after her brief maternity leave, her reservoirs of patience near empty, exhausted but ready to go. Nick oohed and aahhhed over the pictures of wrinkled-up Charlie and told her she should feel free to duck out early if she needed to. At one point, when she tried to talk to Robby about a scheduling issue with a guest, he laughed and said, “Hey, relax! Put your feet up, Mama. You just did the hardest work anyone can do.” But she couldn’t relax. She was a woman, she was black, and now she was a mother. She had to be twice as good—no, three times as good—as everyone else.