What We Have

by Amy Boesky

  “Your mom wanted to get the crib,” Jacques said apologetically. “I felt bad, having to put you off like that. But she wanted to surprise you.”

  I thought about how convinced I’d been that she didn’t care, that she didn’t want to be out here with us. And all the while, she’d been crib shopping long distance.

  Now I wanted to call her and tell her I’d changed my mind. Come back! Come and help us! Move in, stay forever!

  But we’d made a plan, they’d bought their tickets to come back over Christmas, and I tried my hardest to be brave when I called her later, raving about Sacha’s room. Thanking her for the crib.

  “Are you guys all right?” she asked. “You’re sure you don’t want me to come out sooner and help for a little while?”

  I was sure, I told her. I swallowed, hard. Hopefully the days between now and Christmas would fly by.

  HELP WAS ALL I THOUGHT about now. Time was suddenly carved in two: time with help, and time without.

  Julie came over and helped, but she had to get back to the Justice Department. She was working overtime, trying to save money before she and Jon moved. Lori was busy working on a story, our neighbors were busy, Annie was busy, the world was going on and people were living their lives, and we came home and it suddenly felt like every minute of every day had become a challenge.

  We needed help. We needed a baby nurse, I explained to Jacques, for so many reasons. Because I’d had a C-section, and because we were brand-new parents and didn’t know how to do anything, like making the bassinette comfortable, or cutting Sacha’s nails, or washing Sacha’s hair, or diagnosing or curing diaper rash, or figuring out how the baby monitor worked, or deciding whether the used-up chemical heating pads counted as toxic or could be thrown out with ordinary trash. Not to mention cooking dinner while holding Sacha, talking on the phone while holding Sacha, holding Sacha while she was crying, keeping Sacha from crying interminably every day from three o’clock until midnight, or figuring out how to sleep in two-hour increments. On our own, we couldn’t tell the difference between normal cries and cries that meant something was wrong.

  We tried to get Annette, the baby nurse who had helped Dave and Lori, but she was booked through the first week of May. But there was Clara, the agency told us. A friend of Annette’s. Every bit as experienced, if not more so. And she was available just a few days after we got home from the hospital.

  Available was a plus. “Good,” I said. “Clara sounds good.”

  She could come at the end of the week. In the meantime, Sacha needed everything.

  Twice a day the Bilirubin Lady came and monitored Sacha’s jaundice. For this to work, we both needed to hold her. I took one end, Jacques took the other. The Bilirubin Lady was actually a visiting nurse, and we were indebted to her, because if not for her and the bilirubin blanket, Sacha would still be in the hospital. Each time she came, she took a small lancet from her medical kit and stabbed Sacha’s heel with it until it welled with blood. One vermillion bead swelled bigger and bigger, dropped away into the Bilirubin Lady’s test tube, and got stoppered up and taken away. As the lancet plunged in, we all sucked in our breath—Jacques, me, Sacha—until Sacha trumpeted hers out in an ear-splitting, world-ending howl.

  Her cries shattered me. They were so primeval, and to hold her while she shuddered, to offer treacherous assurances—it’s over, all over, she’s finished, look, you’re fine, fine—these were the first lies I told her, because I knew she’d be back, the Bilirubin Lady. Twice a day, every day for a week. After the Bilirubin Lady was done with her ministrations, I scooped Sacha back into my arms, furious and spitting, a small knot of misery. Every part of her curled up with shrieking: her fingers, her tiny legs, and I tried to smooth her back into forgiving us.

  We set up triage units around the house: one downstairs, one up—little care stations, with stacks of products in various states of half-openedness: baby wipes, ointment, teetering piles of diapers so small they looked like sanitary napkins. We needed to be near electric outlets in order to plug in the bilirubin blanket, which encircled Sacha with turquoise light, healing her underdeveloped liver. This limited us in terms of mobility. We found if we bumped her heavy pram up and down over the threshold between the living room and the kitchen in time with Billie Holiday, Sacha’s wheezy, early-evening cries spluttered into silence, and she fell, if not asleep, at least into a trance that mimicked sleep. That, in a way, was help.

  We found two or three positions that let us hold Sacha and talk on the phone at the same time, and this was critical because the phone was a lifeline for us, marooned as we were in this world of swabbing and wiping. This, too, was help.

  But there were so many moments of confusion. Where would Sacha go if Jacques wasn’t there and I needed to go to the bathroom (something which, in and of itself, demanded help at this phase)? I had dreams I’d left Sacha somewhere: on the kitchen counter, in the back of the car. On the top step going down to the basement, like a half-finished book.

  Right from the start, I was nervous. I didn’t want to be—I wanted to be one of those nonchalant, all-knowing mothers you see from time to time and admire. Instead, I was frazzled and compulsive, sweating all the small things. This could be partly because I wasn’t sleeping. I slept in fitful twenty-minute bouts, afraid Sacha was with me or that she wasn’t. I had a recurring, half-waking nightmare that she was in bed with us, or that Bacchus was in bed with us, or that they were both in bed with us, and one night I grabbed on to something warm and alive and thought: my God! It’s true, Sacha’s in bed with us, if I roll over I’ll crush her, and I grabbed hold of her, terrified, but what I was hanging on to was only Jacques’s leg.

  We made calls, we took calls, and in between we waited for Clara.

  One of the calls, Monday afternoon at three o’clock, came from the search committee in Boston.

  I’d completely forgotten about the telephone interview until that morning. And even having looked over some notes for an hour, it was hard to get myself into decent interview form. I was so sleep deprived I could barely remember what day it was, let alone how people measured time in the seventeenth century. I had to look at my notes to remember things I used to know by heart.

  John Donne, I reminded myself, handing Sacha off to Jacques, who was poised and ready. George Herbert. Thomas Thompion. Tempo. The invention of the pendulum.

  The earliest watches date from the late fifteenth century, though they weren’t called “watches” then. Not until later. Horologia, or clocks. Some were ornamental. Some hung from ball gowns; one anecdote describes a timepiece dangling from a great lady’s ear.

  Things I knew broke off and ran through my head. Answers to things I hadn’t been asked.

  The interview committee consisted of four professors from the English department. They were on speakerphone, which they weren’t used to, and after some introductions and good-humored joking about the situation, everyone introduced themselves. Two of the professors were named Paul, which made the whole thing trickier.

  I drew a dial on the back of a piece of paper, writing in names at different points of the clock—one Paul at three o’clock, another at noon. Elizabeth at six, Mary at nine. They asked about my research. I was starting, I told them, with hourglasses, tracing what happened when timepieces became more mechanically advanced in the seventeenth century. I was especially interested in the ways in which time changed how people lived and worked. Wearing timepieces, for instance—called “watches” in this period for the first time—made people feel more compelled by time, more driven by it. I mentioned the ball gowns, the earrings. Bringing mechanical clocks inside the home later in the century did the same thing. Clocks on mantelpieces. Clocks in bedrooms. As we talked, I found myself relaxing, and soon the conversation felt natural enough that I could even start to tell the two Pauls apart.

  “How did it go?” Jacques asked when, just at three thirty, we’d said round-robin good-byes and I had hung up the phone.

  It worri
ed me that he looked so eager. I didn’t want to disappoint him. Did he really want this job to happen? I could barely make it from one room to the next at this point. The thought of taking a new job in another city—even a city I knew and loved—confounded me.

  “How did it go?” my parents echoed, when they called later to check on us. “OK,” I said. I could tell my mother was holding her breath, biting something back. Curiosity, maybe. Or advice.

  EVERYONE HAD ADVICE FOR US. New babies seem to attract advice like Bacchus hair on velvet. During our first few days at home from the hospital, waiting for Clara to arrive, we listened to all the advice, trying to sort it into branches, like a great tree of knowledge.

  My mother and I talked several times a day now, and she had advice about everything except jaundice. I had to admit I had questions for her. Sacha’s room had looked so perfect when she arranged it, but now the edges of things were beginning to curl up. My own attempts to re-create the crib’s perfect linens turned out frowsy and homemade. How did I reach the farthest corner? Every time I got one part smooth, the rest sprang loose. Everything new was losing its patina.

  We were glad when Clara came because she diverted us from the advice. But once she showed up, we needed as much advice about Clara as we did about Sacha.

  Clara was a large woman carrying a large, hard-sided suitcase, more Old Golly than Mary Poppins. She pronounced her words carefully when she spoke, as if she came both from another country and another century, though in fact she was merely from Virginia. Clara was nothing like Annette. Instead of sprightly grace, she exhibited a certain fixed stodginess, and a lazy eye that rolled opportunistically toward the TV. She asked Jacques to carry her bag up to her room, looking critically at our narrow staircase. Jacques grappled with the suitcase, his face turning red. The suitcase was going up to the guest room on the third floor, conveniently next to Sacha’s little nursery. Our idea was that Clara would wake when Sacha cried, change her, and bring her down to our bedroom; with a gentle tap she’d wake me—me, and not Jacques, who was planning, now that Clara was here, to hightail it back to the office first thing in the morning, and therefore needed sleep.

  Needed sleep! Who-needs-sleep-more had become the competition du jour, replacing whose-week-is-harder or wait-and-see versus let’s-go. Who-needs-sleep-more could get mean. We negotiated, then upped the stakes. We debated. We argued. We alternated between low-pitched, reasonable voices and mounting hurt and anger. Which is harder to do on little or no sleep: ride a bicycle to Foggy Bottom and write computer code, or guide a jaundiced infant and sulky Labrador through another day? When we tied, it was grim. Clara, we were convinced, would solve this problem. We both needed sleep! Jacques had his data to analyze, I had my blue books to grade, we both had the house to take care of, the increasingly sullen dog, and of course Sacha, who woke so effervescent and alert in her bilirubin blanket. Clara was a baby nurse, Clara would help.

  Clara was not a city person, she told us, and because she was slightly deaf in one ear, she’d been advised by her doctor to wear noise-canceling headphones when she wasn’t, as she put it with a delicate cough into an old-fashioned handkerchief, “on duty.” Upstairs, she unpacked a neoprene eyeshade the size of a black sports bra. Jacques and I exchanged glances. What were the off-duty hours for a baby nurse? The agency hadn’t mentioned this detail.

  Clara was happy to offer advice. What we needed, she told us, was a system. Her eye fell with displeasure on the battery-powered baby swing Annie had sent while I was still in the hospital. Up to one thousand hours! the swing proclaimed whimsically on its uppermost bar. The idea was that the baby went in the swing, you pushed the ON button, the baby whirred rhythmically back and forth, and presto! Hands free for dinner.

  According to What to Expect the Baby’s First Year, it isn’t good to become dependent on the swing. Thirty minutes is the maximum time period advised, the authors advised in cheerful, slightly accusing italics. It’s best to interact with Baby while she swings. Swooping in and cuddling are encouraged. Be wary, was the underlying message. Do not love the swing.

  We couldn’t help it—we loved the swing. When Sacha was in the swing I felt almost like my old self again—upright, conscious, both hands free.

  Clara remarked with a faint cough that she was not inclined to believe the swing was altogether good for the baby—

  I thought Clara might want to swoop in and cuddle. Or try one of those clapping games.

  “She’s useless,” Jacques whispered, low voiced, in the kitchen. “Does she expect us to wait on her?”

  “Remember,” I said, “we mostly got her for the nights.”

  Nights were enemy territory. Nights began around three in the afternoon when Jacques and I started arguing about whether or not to wake Sacha from her nap and when to feed her next. We were both believers in strategy, Jacques and I. The question was, which strategy would work? I thought if Sacha got nice and tired, she’d sleep better at night. Jacques thought if she got overtired she wouldn’t sleep at all. We took turns peering down at Sacha during this last nap of the afternoon. Sacha was a crystal orb in which our future lay. Our future was eight hours long. What would make her restful?

  It turns out it is pretty much impossible to wake a sleeping baby. All day Sacha slept, sodden, curled on her side in her oversized terrycloth onesie, fingers mitted in their cotton rolls. She breathed the long deep breaths of unshakeable slumber. I woke her to nurse and she sucked, eyes fluttering behind closed, translucent lids. She was in another world, dreaming of shadow, of membrane and capillary, swimming in sleep like a minnow, amphibious and untouchable, crisscrossing from one form of life to another.

  Then it was evening, and cell by cell she came to life, a flutter, a wince, a grimace, a small batlike shriek, she rattled into crying like something inside her had broken. Cry cry cry, inconsolable and shuddering, spasmodic, mouth clenched in agony, all cramp, unable to suck, to be soothed, a caricature of crying, and we began our long choreography: Sacha over Jacques’s shoulder, Sacha swinging on her belly on my arms, Sacha on my lap while I rubbed her back, she was not a baby but a cry, she was a radio station we couldn’t change, a shore that forbade landing or retreat. It was eight and then nine and then ten o’clock. There was the changing and rechanging of diapers, the unpeeling of hot, wet terrycloth, the stringent ointment on abraded skin, Bacchus cringing and accusing in the corner, the long slow crawl toward night.

  We tried to induce rest. We played Vivaldi’s Four Seasons (classical music soothes the brain cells!). No tea for the breastfeeding mother. The breastfeeding mother lay on the sofa with a chemical heating pad on one breast and a blue book on the other. Analyses of self-construction dulled and stupefied the breastfeeding mother, causing her to nod off. This kind of nodding off was not allowed, we had a careful schedule of naps, assigned and unassigned, the breastfeeding mother was pilfering unapproved sleep units, but so much for that, Sacha was squirming, awake, clenching and unclenching her mitted fists, it was nighttime, Sacha was determined to be up. The mind is its own place, as Milton wrote; in Sacha’s case, the mind made its own time. Or as Milton said elsewhere: What hath night to do with sleep?

  At eight we were stoic, at nine we were apprehensive, at ten we were anxious, at eleven we were wiped out and no longer speaking to each other. I’d hoist myself up the stairs, crawl into bed, and fall asleep within seconds. I barely knew when Jacques came to bed, but there we were, sleeping together! This was utter joy, this was ecstasy, but the next thing we knew it was the middle of the night—two? Three? And we heard crying, a thin, high-pitched wail that cut into our consciousness like a knife. Sacha was crying, but where was Clara?

  Clara, it turned out, was a sound sleeper. Who knew what she had tamped into the labyrinths of her large, city-phobic ears.

  We lay awake, rigid, waiting for our system to kick in.

  Nothing—no Clara. Only cry cry cry from our desperate daughter.

  “Fuck,” Jacques said to the ceiling. He
lumbered out of bed, hauling himself off to the nursery, thwacking the door of the guest room on his way up and his way down. Not a peep from Clara. In the morning we were foulmouthed and foul-tempered. There was a thin film on everything, the newspaper lay unread in its plastic skin, Bacchus glowered from the corner, only Sacha, her aquamarine bilirubin blanket aglow, was cheerful, snuggled, sweetly dreaming on her tiny back.

  BY THE SECOND NIGHT, WE had a new system. The idea, we explained patiently to Clara, was for her to take over one feeding in the middle of the night. A “relief feeding,” my mother called it when we discussed this at length on the phone, designed so Jacques and I could get some rest. Thankfully, Sacha was happy to take a bottle, and we had one all set up, the formula ready. All Clara had to do was wake when Sacha woke, give her the bottle, and let us sleep.

  The trick was how to wake Clara. We used a broom—handle end, not the straw—to tap with four sharp raps on our ceiling, which happened to be the subfloor of the guest room. Jacques sang out sharp little oaths with each tap. TAP (fuck). TAP (fuck). Sacha howled miserably, I couldn’t bear it. Help, I whispered miserably into the pillow. We—need—help—

  By the third night, while Clara slept, Jacques inched his way up along the banister, anger glinting in his eyes. He came back down with Sacha and lay next to me, waiting rigidly, eyes fixed on the ceiling while I nursed.

  By the fourth morning, dour and unyielding, Clara was packed and ready to leave, unfazed by our short list of “reasons for dismissal” required by the agency.

  Sacha was almost three weeks old, and we were officially on our own.