“And the baby is Hugo’s?” I said, though I didn’t find that so hard to believe, especially after the other night. In fact, it explained a lot about Stella’s behavior, and his.
“She’s already said she doesn’t have sex with Barry,” Kelsey said. “Who else’s would it be?”
I was suddenly glad I had a solid reason for quitting the show so I didn’t have to watch this romance unfold for another minute.
“I guess you were right about him,” I said. “Would it be okay if I slipped away this morning? I’m not really doing anything essential.”
“You’re always doing something essential,” Kelsey said. “You’re keeping me sane.”
“Call and text me anytime you want,” I said. “But I know you’re going to be fine.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted Hugo heading in our direction. I did not want to get caught having to explain anything to him. Fool me once and all that.
Without even taking the time to say a proper goodbye to poor Kelsey, I hopped up, blew her a little kiss, and hurried away. I might have heard Hugo calling my name as I walked off the set, but I pretended I didn’t.
twenty-two
I bounce-walked, my wailing granddaughter strapped to my chest, the length of the kitchen. Then I turned around and bounce-walked back. I was singing “Rock-a-Bye Baby,” alternating with “Hound Dog.” They seemed to be the only songs I knew, but maybe that was because I was exhausted and my brain was on autopilot.
I’d been taking care of Eloise for three days now, and every time I thought I was establishing a modicum of the beginning of a routine, everything changed. She cried in the morning, she cried at night. She slept and then ate, or she ate and then slept. Or none of the above.
Finally, her cries downshifted to whimpers. I kept bounce-walking, switching from crooning Elvis to acting as a human white-noise machine. “Sssssssh,” I soothed. “Ssssssssssh.”
I felt my phone vibrate in my back pocket. I’d learned quickly to turn off the text chime: Eloise seemed able to detect the sound from a hundred feet away. I slipped the phone out now and read the text from Kelsey as I bounced and shushed: a photo of Hugo comforting a crying Stella, which Kelsey had captioned with an emoji of a cat with its head exploding.
Lol, I typed, and pressed send. I had to say, I was getting pretty good at working my phone while caring for the baby, essential given that it was my only connection to the world beyond diapers and bottles.
I felt Eloise soften and grow warmer against my chest as she dropped off to sleep, her breath rhythmic and audible. She smelled delicious. I kept bounce-walking, kept sssssssh-ing, climbing the stairs until we were upstairs in the nursery. Slowly, quietly, I unzipped the carrier. Gently, steadily, I lifted her out. I lowered her toward the crib, set her on the mattress, slid my hands out from beneath her.
She started screaming again.
I gave myself a moment to fall back flat on the floor, staring at the ceiling and building the will to cope. Then I lifted her back into the carrier, which I might as well have hot-glued to my shirt, bouncing harder this time, singing faster. When she finally fell asleep once again, twenty minutes later, I knew better than to attempt to put her in the crib. Instead, I lowered myself onto the couch, thinking that I could write by hand while she slept against me. If I could manage not to fall asleep myself.
My plan was to make some notes for The Matriarch. Maybe this was ideal, writing about some fantasy version of my post-fifty life while I was living the real version. I could jot some notes on characters and settings for The Matriarch around the edges of caring for Eloise. The matriarch herself, for instance, is extremely rich, having built a business in something practical, like construction or luxury car sales. The matriarch presides over a complement of children and children-in-law along with grandchildren, though she does so from a distance, and often in the arms of her exotic secret lover.
That was good. I should write that down. Except I didn’t have a pen. I struggled back to my feet, the slumbering baby warm and heavy against me, found a pen, sat back down, and opened the notebook.
Matriarch, I wrote at the top of the page. Then underlined it twice. I had a strong sense of déjà vu. I’d done exactly this, I remembered. Right before I left Maine, when I was thinking about what I wanted to do and to have before I turned fifty. None of which I’d done or had.
I wanted to start creating the characters for The Matriarch, but I couldn’t stop thinking of Kelsey’s text. Why was Stella crying? What was up with her and Hugo? I knew Stella was a mad Instagrammer, so with my newly dexterous thumbs I found her Instagram profile. No mascara-streaked tears on that page, only Stella’s toe cleavage showing off her new red snakeskin pumps, a selfie of her wearing a full-body black leotard that seemed to reveal a baby bump, and a close-up of what I recognized as the side of Hugo’s face: rough beard and tender cheek.
Blech. I shut down the phone and tossed it to the other end of the couch. If I had any time at all, I needed to spend it writing. Or resting. Or fighting back the tide of diapers and bottles and tiny little clothes that needed washing.
Except I wasn’t going to do any of that, because the baby started fussing again. I stood up, taking the notebook and pen and, okay, the phone with me. Could I write as I walked? Not possible. Maybe if I stood at the kitchen counter, bouncing and swaying as I wrote, I could get something done.
But there was nowhere to put the notebook down on the kitchen counter, because every surface was covered with dirty bottles and empty containers that had contained Caitlin’s frozen breast milk, along with my mug full of now-cold coffee and everybody’s breakfast dishes, a pile of diapers, a spit-up-covered onesie, and cereal boxes and a box of wipes and newspapers from the last few days.
I couldn’t focus at all in this chaos, so I moved around quickly straightening up, the baby still strapped against me. The faster I moved, the quieter she grew, although the second I stopped moving, she began fussing again.
It was a beautiful day outside. Maybe since I couldn’t write now, I should take her for a walk. We could both get some air, which would undoubtedly be good for our health and our moods.
Homewood really was a beautiful town. I’d forgotten how beautiful, or maybe I’d just blocked it. It was painful being back in the place I loved but that had been lost to me, like being at a party with an ex you’d never gotten over. An ex who didn’t even notice you were there.
It did feel good to breathe fresh air, though, and to move beyond the four walls of that house. Eloise snuggled against me, I snapped a photo of her and posted it to Caitlin and Ravi’s photo sharing app. Within seconds, both had liked the photo and Caitlin had commented: Angel.
Walking down the street in Homewood, everything was oddly the same, but different. The same pink hydrangea bush was blooming in front of the dark green house, except the old hedges had been torn out. Some of the houses were painted different colors. There were new cars in the driveways, a tree had been cut down, or a different dog barked behind a freshly painted fence. And all the people were different. School had started for the year, and kids climbed off buses or walked home in pairs or gangs; so many children that I could almost imagine they were the neighbor kids and classmates of Caitlin’s I’d known: freckled Robin and rascal-y Miles and somber Elizabeth, who had once told me her mother slept all day and left her all alone.
“That’s not going to happen to you,” I said aloud to Eloise, cradling her rump. She was, of course, fast asleep.
Another text came in. Maggie this time, saying only How u?
OK, I typed back. U?
She sent a picture of a British Airways plane on the tarmac. Off to London! she wrote. C u soon. And then some hearts.
“I want to be you,” I said aloud, though I only texted back more hearts. I needed to stop looking at my phone. I had thought, before I went out, that I wouldn’t walk up our old street, but now I was in such a bad mood I figured it couldn’t make me feel any worse. I’d managed to avoid
that ever since we moved away, even when I came back to visit friends. It hurt too much to be an outsider looking at the house I’d cleaned and painted and renovated, the house where I’d brought my daughter home from the hospital and made love with my husband and took care of my parents before they died.
I felt like a ghost drawn inexorably to my old home. Walking slowly up the street, with one of the baby’s feet held lightly in each hand, I expected that any moment one of my former neighbors would come outside and recognize me. We’d talk and I’d tell them what I was doing and say yes, I was living here with Caitlin now, helping with the baby. Maybe we’d make plans to have coffee or they’d invite me over for dinner. Maybe I’d rediscover some wonderful element of my life I’d forgotten but that had been here waiting for me all this time.
But the children who raced through the yards were not children I knew. All the kids who’d lived on the block when we’d lived there had grown up now and moved away, or maybe moved around the corner and were raising kids of their own. Every time a door opened or a car pulled in a driveway, I expected to see someone I knew, half dreading and half craving the connection. But it might as well have been a hundred years and not five since I’d lived here.
I stopped across the street from my old house, still swaying to keep the baby asleep, trying to catch a glimpse in a window or find some clue that would tell me something about the life that was unfolding there now. They’d painted the place, a boring gray I never would have chosen. There was a red tricycle on the front lawn.
I took a photo, feeling like a spy, and texted it to Caitlin. A second later the front door opened and a young woman walked out onto the porch, holding a toddler by the hand. She was blond, the child was a boy. I’d never met the people who’d bought the house from me. It was too painful to go to the closing, so the lawyer handled it, and I couldn’t remember their names. This might be her; she might remember who I was.
I imagined walking across the street, introducing myself, asking if I could have a look around inside, revisiting the house I’d loved so well. And then, what, say goodbye again? I wasn’t sure I could bear that.
The woman put the toddler on the tricycle and pushed him into the driveway, where he was able to pedal by himself. She looked over at me. I smiled and raised my hand in greeting. She raised her hand back but looked more puzzled than friendly. Then she turned her back on me and followed the toddler down the driveway toward the backyard.
“Bye,” I said softly.
My phone vibrated in my pocket with another text. I expected it to be Caitlin, responding to the image of the house. But instead it was Hugo.
Where are you? he wrote.
I thought of all the ways I might respond.
Then my phone started ringing. I jumped and hurried to turn it off. I wished I could throw it into the bushes. Eloise shifted in the carrier and whimpered, and, rubbing her little back, I took off again at a faster clip, back to my daughter’s home.
* * *
I kept trying to find ways to get some writing done around caring for the baby. After all, she slept many hours a day, if only in short spurts or in the carrier. I’d swear that the minute she dropped off, I was going to sit down and write no matter if there were dirty diapers on the floor or ten texts from Kelsey on my phone. Or write while I stood up and swayed. Or write while I danced. Or write in my head and put it on paper later, as if I had any hope of remembering anything once the baby finally dropped off to sleep, when all I wanted to do was pass out myself.
It wasn’t that a week was so very long to take care of a baby without writing. Eloise was so tiny, her system so undeveloped, that I knew she would fall into a more predictable routine in a few months. And I was new at this too, out of practice. I’d figure it out with a little time.
That’s what I’d told myself back when Caitlin was born too. Those days were flooding back over me as if the twenty-six intervening years had never happened. Eloise looked so much like baby Caitlin that gazing into her eyes sometimes made me feel as if I were time traveling, not only in terms of what I was doing but of who I was inside.
In those moments I felt exactly as I’d felt as a brand-new mother, a dizzying mix of infatuation, boredom, tenderness, frustration, terror, love. And a nightmarish sense of disappearing as my identity merged with the baby’s.
I’d chided myself all these years for not being that mythical writer mom who types away in the minivan while waiting for preschool to let out, for soccer practice to be over. If I’d wanted it badly enough, if I were more talented, if I was really meant to be a writer, I would have managed to make it work.
Now it took only a week at home with Eloise to understand that it was impossible. Virtually impossible. As impossible as me becoming a senator, say, or an Olympic athlete. Sure, everybody wanted to be that mom who rocks the cradle with one hand while writing bestsellers with the other, and yet so few made it. And why was that? Because it very nearly could not be done.
My mom friend Joanne used to say that staying home with kids was like giving yourself up to Jesus or I guess any kind of messiah. You couldn’t hold back, you couldn’t do it halfway. You had to devote your whole life to your god, aka the baby.
If you wanted to take care of your family and your home, then you had a full-time job. And if you also wanted to do something creative or go back to school or start a business, then you had another full-time job and needed someone else to take care of your kids.
I’d always said I loved being a full-time mom, but now I couldn’t help wondering, had I really loved all those endless years made up of endless days devoted to one small person with extremely persistent needs? Or had I been bored and trapped and just ashamed to say so? Or bored and trapped but afraid there was nothing better out there for me. Or maybe I’d chosen to spend those years with my child, however stultifying, because I realized the only alternative was not having enough time with her at all.
* * *
It seemed to be a miracle that Eloise was asleep, in her actual crib, when Mrs. Whitney’s assistant, Betty, called. It was the end of the first week, on Friday afternoon, and I was attempting to cycle through a load of wash. They liked to do things the old-fashioned way at Empirical Press, preferring a visit to a call, a call to an email, an email to a—well, that was as informal as they got.
“Hello, dear,” Betty said. Betty always acted like not quite a mother, more like the college resident advisor responsible for your welfare. “How is everything going with you?”
I told Betty I’d been taking care of my granddaughter and so hadn’t been working on the show or doing any writing. I figured that she was calling to tell me she had a tax form I had to sign or as a prelude to a conversation with Mrs. Whitney. I was managing expectations, all expectations.
“Mrs. Whitney asked me to call you, dear, to let you know that she’s in the hospital and to ask a favor of you.”
“Oh no,” I said. “What’s going on?”
“Everything’s fine,” Betty assured me. “She’s just in for some tests. But there are some papers she needs you to bring her.”
“She needs me to bring her?” I said.
“Yes, dear. She didn’t give me any details other than to get in touch with you and ask if you could pick up an envelope at the office and deliver it to her by hand.”
“Where is she?” I asked.
Because of course I was going to bring Mrs. Whitney the documents, whatever they were and no matter why she needed them. Maybe an addendum to the book contract we both needed to sign, or sales figures she wanted to go over with me? And what kind of tests demanded that Mrs. Whitney stay at the hospital anyway?
All Betty would tell me was the name of the hospital, and she said she’d leave the envelope with the lobby attendant at Empirical’s building. I promised her I’d get the envelope and go to see Mrs. Whitney before the weekend was over.
When Caitlin got home from work that night, I wanted to talk to her right away about arranging my visit to Mrs. W
hitney. The more I thought about it, the more worried I was, and the more urgent it seemed that I get there as soon as possible. Although Eloise was fussing when Caitlin got home, I said there was something I needed to discuss. But Caitlin held up her hand to stop me.
“Just let me wash my hands and get these clothes off,” she said. She disappeared upstairs.
Caitlin was exhausted. She was waking up in the middle of the night to nurse, then working a long day learning a new job. She did not want to leave early or ask her supervisor for any concessions, afraid she’d lose the job she’d worked so hard to get. And the commute to and from the city was adding an extra hour and a half to her day that she had not bargained for when she decided to go after the job. The situation was difficult, for all of us.
Eloise was fussing, as she usually was in the evening. I circled the living room, rocking her until her mother came down fifteen minutes later in leggings and a big shirt.
“Is there any dinner?” Caitlin asked.
I knew that if I were a really good caregiver and housekeeper, I would have dinner on the table. But I could barely manage to call for takeout.
“There’s pasta,” I said. “Or frozen Indian.”
Caitlin sighed heavily.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I know you’ve had a long day.”
“It was the commute from hell,” she said. “And I’m starving.”
“I can pull some dinner together,” I said, “if you take over with Eloise.”
She eyed the baby warily. Her crying had grown louder.
“I’m so tired,” she said.
“Go sit down,” I suggested. “I’ll call Mr. Dino’s and order a pie.”
Our emergency dinner supplier for more than twenty-five years.
I could tell Caitlin was too exhausted and distracted to listen if I brought up my trip into the city to see Mrs. Whitney, so we turned on an Office rerun and took turns holding the baby and eating pizza. When Eloise fell asleep, we both collapsed.
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