The house is quiet. I get up slowly and turn on the bedside lamp. Carefully, I unswaddle my son—his arms boing upward as if on springs, those little gates in a pinball game—and grab a clean diaper. As I’m reaching for the wipes, a spray of pee hits me in the face, and as soon as I clean myself off, it happens again. I get another wipe and hold it at the ready. He sighs and stops wriggling, closes his eyes. Finally I get him changed; then I rewrap him and place him in his crib. I marvel at the swift return of his sleep, the profound simplicity of his needs.
Downstairs, the light over the stove is the only one on. A plate wrapped in foil sits next to the sink. Mom and Dad are in the den watching the news, the light from the TV making them look superimposed, two-dimensional. They sit next to one another on the couch, their hands close but not touching.
“Are you hungry?” Dad calls out. “There’s a plate for you there. Chicken.”
“I saw. Thanks.”
I get a glass and fill it with ice, and then with water. I drain it in big freezing gulps and enjoy the ensuing cold headache. I fill up the glass again and drink it just as quickly. My thirst feels bottomless. I don’t know how to be in this house, this house that refuses to not be impossible. I was just starting to figure it out, to at least glimpse a future in which I could glimpse a day when I might have a firmer sense of things, a life, a life furnished with appropriate and not insurmountable feelings, a life of safety and peace for my child, a life with at least one important thing figured out. I did not know how but I believed in a how. Now that belief feels hollow, stillborn.
My mother has returned, and I am disappearing.
I eat the food because I am hungry. I eat standing at the counter, since sitting down seems too much like forgiveness. It is my mom’s cooking, and the taste of it fills me with a kind of fermented joy, a pleasure that’s gone acidic from too much shelf time. I keep thinking, Where was this food when I needed it the most?
I put the plate in the dishwasher and go upstairs. I wash my face and brush my teeth and put on Alicia’s nightgown. It stretches over my still-swollen belly and breasts and makes me feel indecent, doubly so for having stolen it from her. Oh well, I think. We can’t always do the right thing, or we don’t always want to. I put a robe on over it and go back downstairs. My mother, my father tells me, has gone to bed. He is watching the nature channel, a program about the African savanna. I have the odd sense that the African savanna is 75 percent of the nature channel’s programming, that we have all, all of us in the entire universe, seen it before.
Sitting on the edge of the couch, I ask quietly, “So what’s the deal?”
Dad glances at me. On the TV, a lion is taking down a zebra—that old scene. “With what? Your mother coming home? Isn’t it great?”
“But where has she been? And why has she been gone so long? And what made her come back? And how much have you known about all of this?” There are questions upon questions. Now that I’ve started asking, I’m not sure I will be able to stop. I want to peel everything back to the very beginning, to the beginning that predates me, to the beginning before the beginning. I have just had a baby, and I feel I deserve certain answers, certain answers about origins.
“Mostly she has been at Ingrid’s old place. She likes it there. She wants to keep up the place, and she’s good at that sort of thing,” Dad says matter-of-factly, as though what’s at issue is my mother’s prospects as a property manager.
“Why didn’t you just tell me? Why the secret?”
Dad looks at me. He looks tired. On the screen, an elephant munches grass sullenly, his tail whipping the flies around, as opposed to away. “Agnes, it’s complicated. I’m sure she’ll tell you in time. She didn’t want to bother you with it—she barely wanted to bother me with it. She just needed some time. Some time away from…everything.”
“But do you have any idea what I’ve been through? The worry? The wondering? Not to mention, I really kind of needed her this year!” I am crying now, which I thought I was too angry to do.
Dad shuts the TV off. We sit in near-darkness. I wipe my nose with my sleeve.
“I’m sorry, Agnes. I know it must have been difficult for you. It was difficult for me, too, believe me. But we have to also think what’s best for your mom. She’s been through a lot.”
“How has she been through more than we have?”
Dad is quiet.
“The important thing,” he says, after a minute of what seems like careful deliberating, “is that we’re all here together. I would think you’d be happier. Mom is so excited to help you with the baby. The baby is the whole reason she came back. Doesn’t that mean something to you?”
It seems as though he really wants an answer. I try to decide. “I don’t know,” I say honestly. “I don’t know anything. I feel like I’ve been…lied to, like you’ve been lying, this whole time. How often did you guys talk? Why didn’t she ever want to talk to me?”
Dad rubs his eyes. “She called me once a week or so, at work. She always asked about you first. She feels a lot of guilt, Agnes. But…she just…she needed to…get well first—before she could, you know, be here. Once you left for school, I think she allowed herself to fall apart in a way she couldn’t before.”
“But why is her falling apart more important than ours? We’ve all fallen apart! And she—and you—both of you, have made it even worse for me!”
Dad touches my hand, wet with tears. “Maybe one day you’ll understand. Life isn’t fair—you know that as well as anyone. Your mom took what she needed, Agnes. At some point, we all do.”
I imagine leaving my baby. I imagine my baby killing himself. I cry harder.
“You’ve been through a lot”—that phrase again—“in the last forty-eight hours. Why don’t you get some rest? Things will feel better in the morning.”
I feel like I could collapse under the featherweight of Dad’s sad attempts at consolation, the tired dictums, the futility of it all. I feel newly abandoned—abandoned by this unabandoning. I feel like a husk, and—catching a glimpse of Dad’s face as I leave the room—like a daughter of husks.
I get into bed in the nursery. Simon’s bed. I think about how two months ago, a month ago, I could not have conceived of it. Now it is a place to sleep where I can be near the baby. What must Simon think of any of this.
The baby stirs as I begin to doze off. In a flash I am beside him, lifting him from the crib. I sit in the glider and we glide. I nurse him on my left side and feel a thorny surge on my right. In a moment, my nightgown is soaked. After he falls asleep again, I lay him in his crib and tiptoe down to my room, where I peel off my nightgown. I find the stretchy bra I’d worn in the hospital and put it on, stuffing a maxi pad in each side. I didn’t realize that when my milk came in, my milk would come out. I put on different pajamas and go back to Simon’s bed.
The next time I wake up is not to a baby’s cry. I feel a disturbance of air, movement somewhere in the room. I feel electrically awake. Propping myself up on my elbows, I can make out the outline of my mother in the glider, the bundle of my baby cradled in her arms.
I stand up. My breasts are heavy and the front of my bra feels waterlogged. “What are you doing?” I whisper. A tingling moves through me, as in the moments of waking up from a bad dream. Here, now, I feel I am waking into one.
“He was crying,” my mother whispers back. “I thought you could use some sleep.”
“He was not crying. I would have heard him.”
“He did cry. Sort of a whimper, off and on for several minutes.”
“He didn’t whimper. He didn’t cry. Why are you in here?”
“I’m telling you, he was starting to get upset. It’s not good to let them work up to a big cry when they’re this young. I want you to be able to rest whenever you need to. That’s why I’m here.”
I stand in front of them. My mother continues to glide, just barely grazing my foot. “Go back to bed,” she says. “He’s fine now.”
“I need to
feed him.”
“He doesn’t need to eat. He’s asleep again. You should go back to sleep. He just needed to be held.”
“I need to feed him, for me. My boobs kill.”
My mother makes a sound in her nose, as though trying to decide if she believes me. I feel a cross between fury and fear. “Please give him to me.”
Bending forward, my mother kisses the baby’s face and whispers something to him I can’t make out. She looks at me and shrugs. “Here. Take him.”
I gather him from her and bring him to the bed, not wanting to sit in any spot made warm by her body. I place him on the bed and he wriggles his head like an earthworm.
My mother pauses at the door. “How about a hug?”
I put a pillow on either side of the baby, even though I know he can’t move. I don’t want to hug her. For over a year I have wanted nothing more than to hug her. From that place—that memory of wanting her, needing her—I move toward her and we embrace. She feels small, smaller than me, with my protruding flesh and leaking systems. I try to feel what I should be feeling but am more preoccupied with the sense that I am sullying her. “I know you’re mad,” she whispers near my ear. “Dad told me. I hope that one day you understand. I think you will.”
The next morning, I feel a fuzzy sense of wanting to start again somehow, to set things to rights. In the shower, where my breasts respond to the hot water by leaking milk down my body, I resolve to call Alicia, to ask how she’s doing, to tell her about my son. Maybe I’ll even tell her about the nightgown, and we can laugh about it. I’ll try to be happier, less paralyzed, around Mom and Dad. I’m the one who got pregnant and had a baby, I tell myself. It’s not as though there’s a codified way for everyone to act. We’re all in it together, figuring out our new lives in light of this new life.
When I go to check on the baby, I discover my mother in there, bent over his crib. When she straightens up, she is smiling. “I can’t believe how much he looks like Simon. They have the same jaw and nose. The eyes are debatable. Have you given any more thought to his name?” All of my goodwill from the shower dissipates. “No. And I’m definitely not going to name him Simon.”
“Simon is an excellent name for a boy.”
I feel that there is nowhere in the house for me to be. I want to run but my sore body won’t let me, and what would I do with the baby even if I could? I realize I do not have a stroller, the discovery hitting me like a rebuke—what kind of ill-prepared inadequate mother doesn’t have a stroller? I feel stuck in my body, stuck in the house, stuck in a swarm of silence. I reach for the baby to feel calm. Late in the morning I dress him in the warmest clothes I bought for him, double swaddle him in two blankets, and secure a tiny cap on his head. My father is at work and my mother is in the attic. I put on sneakers and my coat and take my baby outside. Holding him close to me, I walk.
The air is crisp and feels like a balm—I wish for it to enter me at every hole. My son opens his eyes and for a moment, the clear blue sky is reflected in them. On doorsteps are pumpkins; strewn across bushes are fake cobwebs. It is the season of ghosts and candy—my favorite. I dressed as a gypsy for four Halloweens in a row and wore the same bohemian skirt and flowing top borrowed from my mother, pinned clumsily at the hems, each year. The most exciting part of the costume were the fingernails—Lee Press-on Nails, long and with the slightest curl, that I painted blood red.
I turn down a street I haven’t been on in years and remember a childhood classmate whose mother was rumored to be a gypsy. The rumor, I think, was started by her daughter. She would invite us over to look at her mother’s crystal ball, which was kept in a box on the living room mantel and looked, now that I think about it, a lot like a snow globe. I wasn’t as impressed with the idea of telling fortunes as I was with the idea of living nowhere, of wandering.
I walk until I feel calm. I touch the baby’s cheek and it is chilly. I press him closer to me and we make our way back home. When I open the front door, I am greeted by large boxes in the hallway and piles of clothes on the floor.
“I was getting so worried,” my mother says, stepping over and around stuff as she comes toward us. “It’s too cold for him to be outside. Let me warm him up.”
I don’t give her the baby. I try changing the subject. “What is all this stuff?”
“Baby stuff! Clothes and toys, stuffed animals, some books. Simon’s mostly. I tried to find yours, too, but it must be somewhere else.”
I don’t ask where else it could be. There’s nowhere else in this house it could be.
* * *
A few days later, there is a moment where this returned mother becomes my mother, returned. I am in my room, attempting to exercise, using two dumbbells I found in the garage. I have been occasionally seized by the fear that my body will never resemble its former shape. I don’t really know how to exercise. I’m lifting one dumbbell to my shoulder and then back down, counting to ten, when I hear a low knock. I shove the dumbbells under my bed.
“Come in.”
My mother comes in and shyly puts two objects on my desk. “I just remembered a couple of things that really helped me after I had your brother and you,” she says. She holds up a maxi pad, unwrapped. “I soaked this in witch hazel and put it in the freezer for a bit. Put it in your underwear. I know it sounds strange but it really helps.”
“Oh. Okay. I’ll try it.” The other fear I have occasionally been seized by is that my ass and vagina, which seem now curiously fused into one throbbing muddle, will never stop hurting.
“And this is…well, basically it’s a corset. But it’s elastic.” She holds up a wide beige band with Velcro running down one side. “You wrap it around yourself and wear it under your clothes. It’s supposed to sort of push everything back into place. Come here,” she says. “I’ll help you.”
Maybe it’s because I’ve wanted to hear those words—I’ll help you—for so long, that I walk over to her and allow her to push my shirt up and my sweatpants down. She wraps me up tightly. “Is that too tight?” she asks.
It is too tight, but it feels right, the tightness. It feels like I feel, pleasantly suffocated, tenderly crushed, by something purported to restore me.
Days pass. I keep a cold witch hazel maxipad in my underwear and the relief is immense. When I throw one out, another appears in the freezer. It is a kindness I don’t know how to repay and so I do not try. My mother moves like a shadow but her presence is like a glare that my eyes and my senses cannot adjust to. I alternate between hiding in the nursery and taking my son for furtive walks. His umbilicus heals, and shortly after, his penis. He opens his eyes for longer stretches. Flakes of skin cover his scalp and forehead, and I wipe them away with some baby oil on a cotton ball. In the evenings, I bathe him in the sink of the Pink Bathroom, trying to ignore my mother, whose breath and movements I can hear outside the door. Caring for him feels meditative and intuitive, an experience wholly divorced from my mind. My mother’s hovering is constant. She offers commentary and advice whenever I’m within earshot.
“Keep his head covered.”
“That—that cry—it is identical to Simon’s.”
“He should learn to take a bottle.”
“I bought some pacifiers—sometimes he just wants to suck but not eat.”
“Make sure to dry his bottom before putting on a fresh diaper.”
“I think he’s cold. You are underdressing him.”
Before leaving the room, I brace myself. I imagine a cloak that I can put over myself and my son to make us invisible, impenetrable. When we walk, I bundle him up and zip him into my big winter coat. It’s like having him inside me again, but I can see him, his nose that might one day be described as regal, his surprising eyelashes. He sleeps, every once in a while pursing his lips and sucking—as though figuring, Why not? Maybe I’ll get lucky—every once in a while opening his eyes and tilting his head back, as if to look at my face.
Every day I plan to call Alicia, and every day I do not call. She
leaves two messages, one on the machine and one with my mother, who tells her I am busy with the baby and cannot come to the phone. Curiously, I feel no guilt.
Nighttimes are my favorite. I wake up multiple times and feel more alert than exhausted. It is easy to pretend we are alone in the house. My milk flows easily now, predictably, and the two of us find one another with a kind of rapture. One night, around two in the morning, I place him back in his crib and tiptoe to the door to refill my water glass in the bathroom. When I open the door, my mother is standing there.
“I thought I heard something,” she says.
My heart beats wildly. In the stark silence, we both can almost hear it. I feel that I cannot continue in this house. But there is nowhere else.
Dad exhibits increasingly odd behavior. He rents a power washer and power washes the driveway, something he has never done before. He buys canisters of air freshener for every room and uses them liberally upon entering or leaving. One night he comes home with two large pizzas and two bags filled with Chinese takeout.
“Something for everyone!” he says. It is as if he counts the injuries in this house as mouths to be fed.
One day I see them from the window where I sometimes stand holding the baby. They appear to be arguing, Mom’s hands making erratic circles in the air while Dad leans squinting and motionless against the car. After a while, he steps toward her and forcefully grasps her shoulders. It stuns me a little, this break in character, unless the real break in character is how he acts around me—halting, unsure. I can’t see his face. A moment later, they embrace, his arms around her like he’s afraid of what will happen if he lets go.
Some nights from the nursery I hear them talking in their room. I become afraid, to hear something I shouldn’t, and yet my whole body tenses to listen. One time I hear her say, “You never said it but you always blamed me,” and then Dad’s voice, cracking with rage, “You have no right, no right.” Another night I overhear him ask her if she wants to move, to live in another house. The baby wakes with a sputtering whimper and I pick him up quickly and try to hear her answer. Maybe she says it too quietly, or maybe she’s fallen asleep, I think, but then—a long, low sob.
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