Clothed, Female Figure

by Kirstin Allio

  Reluctantly, Elena unstraps. Anita says, We’ll just walk up to the park.

  Anita says, You can’t let this take over your life. He’s his own guy. Really. Anita snorts. Elena has never heard Anita snort. The bright yellow forsythia is overflowing the wrought-iron fence, and the ground looks tender, like a new scar. The park is a box of sunlight. The baby tries to blink and squinches his eyes shut.

  You’re lucky you dropped the weight so quickly, says Anita.

  Anita leaves from the park. She admits she has to do something with her own kids—sports event? birthday party?—and Elena slowly gathers herself and makes her way back to her apartment.

  Later, she feels prurient gazing at the pinched bud of his face, picking the yellow beeswax scabs called, as in a fairy story, cradle cap. Even saying his name out loud seems intrusive.

  Around five months, newfound energy. She can hear her mother call her spunky. She compares her baby’s life to the life of a Third World orphan. Not that she has firsthand experience, but there’s a general consciousness, dispatches from courtrooms and orphanages in China, Ethiopia, in the women’s magazines at the OB where she’d been stationed weekly by the end to hear the prenatal heartbeat. Or, she wonders, how many babies out of a nursery crop (she thinks of the twenty or thirty infants swaddled in their shiny little basins, along with her baby, all of them lighter, wetter versions of their parents) would be abandoned to daycare from the get-go? Or witness the beating, maiming of an animal?

  Her baby bunches himself around his crib like an inchworm. Now he can push up on his little arms to take a look. His eyes are clear and kind. His hair is coming in, fine and dark and surprisingly stiff, so that it looks like he has a buzz cut.

  Oddly, it seems there is no time to follow the instructions to knit a “bonnet with chin strap.” It’s as if just to be a mother takes up all the time in the world.

  She looks out of the fourth-floor window past the State House, toward parts of the city she has never visited. Beyond the city are the purplish hills of—Massachusetts? That she doesn’t know what goes on in the square office buildings decorated each by a necklace of cars glinting and signaling in the sun seems to be an indulgence. It’s not because she worked in Boston. Where are the big gassy city buses going? Dirty seagulls fly over a yellowing park that was supposed to provide low-income kids with—an alternative.

  She thinks she’ll take her son there, to that defunct park, when he is one or two and toddling beside her. An ice cream cone will once again mean what it meant when she was a kid. At the pop-down window, hopping impatiently on one foot, she will buy ice creams from the singing truck for all the low-income children.

  When Alexis is six months, they go to an island for a long weekend.

  Look at that, says Tim, the bed and breakfast has port-a-cribs.

  It does seem amazing. That anyone would know what they needed.

  It’s difficult to pack. Tim hangs in the doorway watching.

  Diapers, diapers, and tiny undershirts.

  They park near the ferry dock in one of the dirt lots where a chowderhead kid in an oversized T-shirt and flip-flops waves them in as if he’s been waving cars in for eternity. Tim carries everything on board while Elena bears Alexis. Her heart is in her throat. He’s not going to drop, she tells herself.

  She watches Tim leaning over the railing out on the deck. What does he see? The diving gulls, three brothers with identical hollow eyes throwing potato chips, the deep fur of white water the ferry churns behind it.

  Or, with eyes on the back of his head, his wife and baby?

  It seems miraculous that Alexis goes down in the port-a-crib. Elena sits on the edge of the four-poster watching him. She is almost stunned, actually, that all this—the baby—still exists when they transplant it. She wears her damp nursing bra to bed, goodbye sexual dignity, her eyes are too dry since pregnancy to wear her contacts.

  When she closes her eyes she feels the subtle rollick of the ferry.

  She is a ferryboat leaving a white trail, flat as a cake, holding steady.

  In the morning she watches the sea from the porch of the bed and breakfast. The pitch of the ferry (another one making the crossing) is almost imperceptible from this distance. But the knowledge of capsize is in the body of the boat, thinks Elena.

  She has hardly allowed anyone to visit. Tim’s mother has been held off, Tell her I have postpartum.

  Her own parents have made the drive from Queens only once, when Alexis was two weeks. She hasn’t encouraged them, and they’ve sort of settled back into the fact that they already have ten local grandkids. Her offering seems minute. Her mother cleaned and cooked for forty-eight hours and her father folded newspapers that Tim left butterflied on the kitchen table.

  Tim suggested having one of his grad students and the grad student’s lonely British wife over—just drinks, he promised. Elena scanned her kitchen through the eyes of a female stranger and saw ridges of black dust on her high cabinets, a tacky film on the range hood.

  Listen, Elena said. I am not a yogurt-eating housewife who whisks away dust instead of reading contemporary fiction or the—the op-ed pages. And I am not a career-chasing feminist who hires a Guatemalan housecleaner and then doesn’t even notice her own spanking clean range hood.

  Tim looks utterly defeated by the logic.

  She knows she’s privileged to be a housewife looking down (from above) on a housewife.

  When Alexis is nine months, Elena decides to send out announcements. Friends from college with whom she’s fallen out of touch, Tim’s department, a high school boyfriend she hasn’t seen since she was twenty-one but suddenly, inexplicably, misses.

  Well, yes; now that she thinks about it, that’s who she wants to tell: Ryan. She is a gummy-faced adolescent, her dark mane of hair unstyled like a peasant’s, her slender, grooved neck, and she and Ryan are eating her mother’s spinach pie and having a staring contest.

  She doesn’t think they had a lot to talk about, but there was unmistakable kinship.

  She chooses a snapshot in which Alexis bears a striking resemblance to her, to his Greek side, as Tim says: Telemachus.

  But Alexis is not exactly Homeric, or bronzy. If his skin has a color, it is chalk. Elena thinks of science class: is white a color? The color wheel, the periodic table, the Bunsen burner, the rainbow. Ryan sitting directly behind her so she felt she had extrasensory nodes budding out of her shoulder blades.

  In the picture Alexis has morello cherry lips, dark lashes. His eyes are big and tragic. What would Ryan think?

  Of course Elena Theodoro had a boy who looks like a girl. That’s what Ryan would make of it.

  And why of course? And why can she read Ryan’s mind, in memory?

  Actually, Tim thinks Alexis looks more Indian. A maharaja (she cringes, Tim with his complexion like strawberry shortcake), a princeling from Arabian Nights. Other babies are stuffed animals compared to elegant Alexis.

  She has intended to put a crayon in his right hand, from the start. She admits her bias: the lefties in grade school were bad spellers and when they wielded scissors it looked as though they were cutting backward, into themselves. She puts her dry, chalk-purple hand over Alexis’s underwater grip.

  He already knows the scope of the apartment. The table legs and chair legs and clatter of his own fork when he lets it go on purpose. He stops to watch Elena at work on his birth announcements.

  She has never done anything like this in front of Alexis. Never shaved her legs either, or mixed a drink: how can a set amount of alcohol make two people drunk? And yet she has not dared to drink a drop for fear it will spike her breast milk. She feels this project as a risk. She must be able to clean up fast, hide the evidence. If she is needed by Alexis.

  The Crayola colors are paler with paraffin than she remembers from her childhood. She had imagined a more primary rainbow. She’s going to glue the snapshot on card stock and draw a crayon frame around it. Now that she’s started she feels a tremendous rush. N
ot to finish, she wonders, but never to stop.

  In warning, Alexis starts to huff and puff on the floor below her. Why have I been deprived—for ten whole minutes—of body contact?

  Oh, says Elena. She feels her color rising. Her double life, these birth announcements. He keeps huffing. His mouth begins to collapse but he remains bravely upright.

  She never feels really free. In fact, not even as free as she used to feel on her lunch break. She has made an analysis of the verb phrase, “to put a child to bed,” and decided it is not an action, or a series of actions. It’s a presence. As in, the presence of the mother. Tonight, however, after Alexis is down for his first shift of sleep, she anticipates getting back to her little art project. She edges away from Tim, who is slightly flushed from wine and standing across the sink from her.

  She says, I’m making announcements. Tim clears his throat. She says, You know, Alexis John Gamble. Seven pounds five ounces.

  Alexis is twenty-eight months. This is absurd, says Tim. Do we count in months until he moves out of the house for college?

  The birth announcements have just come back from the printer. There were several false starts, so that in the end, Elena had them printed.

  Should she include a more recent picture of Alexis? He has long dark curls. She can tell that Tim feels conflicted about a haircut: the problem of baby and man in the same little body. The problem of mortality, already. She finishes up the dinner dishes. She takes the printer’s box—several hundred announcements—and places it carefully at the back of her closet.

  ARK

  Caryn and five children are snowed in. The kitchen windows are iglooed with translucent bricks of opal, aquamarine, and rose quartz. The house feels different. Bigger—because it is all there is—and smaller for the same reason.

  It’s Friday, the kids’ third day home from school, and Tori, the oldest, has strep throat. Caryn suspects it’s from kissing another seventeen-year-old, a boy with a silver stud in his chin like a hard, shiny blemish. The oldest’s story always gets told first, as if it were universal. Tori’s friend is named Leo and Caryn suspects it may be his name her daughter likes, more than his kisses.

  The kitchen is at the back of the house, with an abrupt face-off onto an imposing escarpment built recently, stone by stone, at great cost, by shy and seemingly peaceful crews of Azoreans. Caryn’s husband, Dom, pointed out that they don’t tell her their real names, and as if it were related, Caryn regularly complains that she can’t see anything out the kitchen windows.

  But now she can see snow, like light’s body. Striated, blue-bright, a cross-section of a cliff. Light’s body? The way all of her children have been entranced, at some point, with stamping on each other’s shadows. “You’re dead!” she can hear them yell, as they leap away from each other on the sidewalk.

  Dom is away on business. If they were a Venn diagram, the two circles representing her and the children would be almost perfectly stacked, while Dom’s would appear adjacent.

  “Snowed in?” Dom caroled when he checked in last night. Caryn pictured him pinching his square buttocks together, a tic of merriment, standing at the plate-glass window of a hotel room on a high floor, looking out over twinkling lights. The particulars first. The shovel lost in a drift: couldn’t she borrow from a neighbor? His ardent practicality came barrel-rolling through the darkness and he’d laughed, “Like Little House on the Prairie?”

  When he’s home he reads out loud (inviting himself inside their Venn circle), his trim gray head propped on his furry arm on a child’s pillow. Caryn can tell that he likes the sound of his own voice. Once, after wine, she’d said she found vanity in men endearing. He’d claimed to be baffled and wouldn’t let her apologize. He doesn’t necessarily get sucked into the story like she does, but he loves it that she cries at the prairie deaths, the disasters in the Big Woods, and he is, in his approval of her, relentless.

  Her younger children, Louisa, Anne, and Thomas, are occupied for the moment, quiet. There were births for each of them, thinks Caryn, but the individual strands of memory have been worried and felted. Like a blanket put through the wash cycle. Like the snow, its little lint hairs and fibers getting denser by the minute.

  The boy at the kitchen table clears his throat: Paul, her sister’s child. His hair is skull gray, and at five, he already has an Adam’s apple. A year ago Ellen called in tears with the news of a scoliosis, and before Caryn could say anything, Ellen accused her of having four—four—as if it were an inoculation against the spinal curve of the only child. As if Paul, thought Caryn, a specimen, had to be a Frankenstein’s monster of many disparate perfections.

  Caryn’s kids treat him with preternatural coolness, like an invalid. When Ellen drops him off, once a week, for an overnight, he perches on his hardbacked suitcase until Caryn escorts him up to Thomas’s room, where she pulls a cot out. Why does she persist in putting him in with Thomas? Her son is eight, with rain-colored eyes and straight blond hair in a bowl cut. She knows his teachers think he is a devil; he’s always being typecast by grownups who’ve loved or hated some other little hellion. He shines a flashlight in Paul’s eyes whenever Paul betrays sleepiness, he has been known to guide Paul’s sleeping hand into a bowl of warm water. In the mornings Paul waits for Caryn at the top of the staircase, his scoliotic, geriatric little form wrapped in a plaid bathrobe and corduroy slippers from Paris.

  Caryn and Ellen are petite and blond, prettily of Irish descent. Ellen has a delicate, even precarious neck that will always present as girlish: as if she’s at once carefree and in need of protection. They have analyzed their differences with no small amount of wonder. Growing up, they believe, they were meant to feel like the same person.

  Caryn’s hips are slightly flared, but they could still trade slacks, if Caryn wore anything but jeans and Dom’s running sweatshirts. Motherhood is economical, the way it forces out all adult drama—for instance, a serious conversation with her sister. And it prevents her, when Ellen drops Paul off, from picking the fight she knows Ellen is waiting for.

  She holds up an accidentally purchased box of lemon cookies. Maybe Louisa is right, and the fussy biscuits and the fussy cousin go together. Louisa’s deft logic: “French people like lemon stuff.”

  It’s Paul’s dad who’s French. Da-veed, croons Louisa. Once, last summer, Caryn took Paul into the yard to inspect an ant colony: the kind of patient, hands-on parenting she wishes she’d done more of with her own children. The kind of thing, Dom says, that would ensure their children ran for office on a save-the-insects platform. She peeled away the lawn, a lacy, desiccated layer of turf, to expose the precise sand kingdom. Paul said in his trill voice, “If I had one for a pet, it would die of grief, Aunt Caryn.”

  She’d tried to tell Ellen, but Ellen wasn’t captivated. Maybe Ellen was simply distracted, rushing to work, but Caryn had been hurt, and sorry for herself, also, for the effort and tedium of confronting the mystery of the ants’ existence compared to her own and her children’s. She’s gone to great psychic lengths to cultivate a token memory of each of her children. Token diminishes it; it’s more like a cue. An unerring prompt from the unconscious, so that if her house burned and she lost every archived finger painting, hooked-rug potholder, autumn leaf like an unreadable old map between sheets of waxed paper...

  There was a single mother with a boy in Tori’s class in kindergarten who lived in an incongruous California-style apartment complex near the old Sunbeam Bread in East Providence. It was rumored that the boy took Ritalin and dressed up after school like a princess. So that the image of a plastic rhinestone tiara is luridly linked in Caryn’s mind with a sort of pre-criminal, Child Services hyperactivity. The single mother—Caryn remembers her as too tall, full of shoulders—lost every single princess photo in the apartment building fire.

  Caryn thinks she heard the boy made varsity as a freshman.

  She can leave Paul for a moment. The front of the house faces north and the north wind doesn’t allow drifts to
accumulate. It looks like neighbors have decided shoveling is useless. Early this morning Mr. D’Amata got out in his pickup; now it’s three o’clock. His parking spot is a shallow white basin.

  The plow hasn’t even made one pass on their street. Caryn catches herself listening for its rumble, the clank of its metal udders as little jet sprays of salt and gravel hit the messy roadbed. There is no wind now, and the quiet snow tumbles straight down to earth. Time accumulates with no pretense. Each hour feels like an hour, each minute feels like a minute. The snow is the sand in an hourglass.

  There’s a cascading crash from Thomas’s room upstairs and suddenly she sees Thomas at fifteen months, his Dumbo ears, hot, red cheeks, quick fists, bullfighter’s tight little rump. “I’m paying my dues with this one,” Caryn used to repeat, not exactly plangent, but needing an incantation, on the playground, in the checkout line at the supermarket.

  Caryn and Dom joke that their family keeps the pediatrician in business. The practice takes over a rambling, Victorian house in the cramped and shaggy university neighborhood. Caryn found herself there weekly in those early years—Louisa, Anne, and Thomas are all less than two years apart—and she used to chat up the bank of receptionists, women of a certain age, tugboat-bottomed, presiding over Brach’s butterscotch candies, for whom, despite her conspiratorial chitchat, Caryn reserves a subversive, daughterly hostility. The Arletta pack, she bantered, should endow an extra couch in the waiting room.

  She remembers breezing in for Thomas’s fifteen-month immunizations, calling out to the receptionist panel, ever ready with trench humor, and being ushered into the empty office of a doctor new to the practice. She set Thomas, in a diaper, up on the white-papered table, and Thomas immediately—obviously—slid off it. He was so much like Curious George Caryn wondered if she could have been inseminated by a children’s book. Dom used to roar at that. Even the short legs and long torso. Thomas made a beeline for the trash bin bristling with live germs and ta-da, thought Caryn, we’ll get a month of green snot, disease of hoof and mouth, the tongue infested with yogurty white blotches.