by Danzy Senna
We moved quickly: six months of getting-to-know-you before I got pregnant. I was relieved at how simple the roles were: Rodney was the breadwinner. I would make the babies. We watched the baby grow inside me with shared joy and awe. But sometimes I thought I saw a glint of sadness cross Rodney’s face when we walked out of yet another triumphant doctor’s appointment. I wondered if he was thinking about the other wife, the other baby boy.
Now I stared at him where he stood on the sidewalk outside Janice and Greg’s house, ours now, holding Oscar on his shoulders. They were watching the men trying to park the moving van in front of the house. This was the first home we would own together. It was big and beautiful and American, with more cabinet and closet space than I had ever dreamed of.
The street around them looked like a movie set for a film about the fifties. Just up the block was a large white house that Janice once told me was the actual place they filmed Happy Days. Our house too looked like that to me, a pre-everything house. Standing at the window, I felt for a moment my luck. I had the man, the child, the house. I said out loud, “I’m happy. I’m as happy as I’ve ever been.” In the cleared-out room, my voice was startling, and I looked around to see if anybody had heard me.
In bed that night, Rodney sat propped up against pillows beside me, scribbling notes about the trial he was working on. Another rich man was being accused of murder. I could see black-and-white photographs—a woman’s body splayed on the ground, her skirt hiked up.
I turned to my side, away from the image. We hadn’t had sex in weeks and I knew we wouldn’t tonight. We were both too tired. There was the move, of course, and then there was Oscar. He had been having night terrors for many weeks now, and it had killed any remaining desire we felt toward one another. One of us was in the room with him at least twice a night, trying to wake him out of his shrieking fits. He looked awake but he screamed as if he was being bludgeoned. He could not be woken from the dream. You just had to hold him until he slowly fell back to sleep.
I looked around the room. The last time I’d been in this room there had been a different bed in this spot—a tall, dramatic sleigh bed all dressed in white bedding. Janice kept a fresh bunch of roses on their dresser in a glass bowl. The book on their nightstand had been, I recalled, a bestseller, a pop sociology book whose title I could not remember anymore.
Janice had led me through this room to the backyard, where she’d smoked and told me for the first time about the problems she and Greg were having. It was all just beginning to unravel then. She said he’d been traveling a lot lately and that the previous Sunday morning she’d been up early in the living room, playing with Bryant, when she heard a blooping sound on his cell phone, a text message coming in.
“A red flag went up,” she said. “I mean, you don’t get text messages early on Sunday morning from work or from a friend.” She went to the phone and picked it up and saw the words on the screen. My body is screaming out for you. Call. The writer had signed it with an S, “like a snake slithering across the screen,” Janice said.
When she confronted Greg, he quickly admitted to the affair. He told her that the thrill was gone from their marriage, ever since she had gotten pregnant. He said he knew it was his fault. He didn’t find motherhood sexy. He didn’t touch Janice very often, and when he did, he felt like they were going through the motions. He averted his eyes from her when she got undressed in front of him. She had to suck him with her mouth to get him hard enough to enter her, she told me, otherwise he remained soft, like a newborn baby.
She said all of this to me with a weirdly encouraging smile, as if she was giving me permission to burst into laughter.
I didn’t laugh, though I think I might have smiled while she spoke, only because she was smiling and my face automatically returned the expression.
“But we’re going to work it out,” Janice had told me, sitting just feet from where I lay now, in my own bed. “We just need some time to nurture the relationship—to remember why we chose each other in the first place.”
I remember thinking it sounded like something she had read in a book.
I turned to Rodney now, to say something about Janice, about how sad it all was that things had ended the way they had. But he was asleep already, the work file lying on the nightstand beside him.
I didn’t sleep well beside Rodney in our new bedroom, surrounded by all those unpacked boxes. The room felt too cold and so I turned on the heat but then it felt too hot so I turned it off. When I was finally drifting off to sleep at three in the morning, I was awoken by screaming. Oscar. I clambered out of bed and stumbled through the maze of boxes to his room. I found him standing up in his crib. His eyes were open and he was screaming, “Mommy, Mommy,” but when I went and stood in front of him, he kept screaming. I picked him up and carried him, thrashing, to the rocking chair in the corner. I held him and rocked him, saying, “Mommy’s here, Mommy’s here,” over and over, but he kept shrieking and looking around the darkness wildly, as if he were searching for somebody else. The sound of his weeping was so sad that I began to cry myself. And then, abruptly, he dropped into a deep sleep on my lap, as if he’d never cried at all.
I was on my way back from my morning power walk a few days later, dressed in spandex and sneakers, when I saw a BMW parked in our driveway. It was a convertible sports model, with an Obama sticker on the fender. The election had come and gone, the blackish man was in charge, and the slogan on the bumper—Yes We Can—already had the feeling of some dusty, long-gone revolution.
I recognized it as Greg’s car. One of Janice’s many complaints about Greg was that after they’d had a child he insisted on making choices that suggested he was still single, like this tiny car. As I neared the house, I heard the sound of men’s laughter floating out the window. Through the glass, I could make out Greg seated next to Rodney on the couch. They were laughing about something but all I could make out were the words “the end of kissing.” I entered the house quietly and for a moment it was like they didn’t see me. I only caught the end of Greg’s sentence, “woodworking in a basement.”
They both looked up at me, still smirking, their eyes afire with some private male joke.
“It’s the lady of the house!” Greg said. Everything he said sounded like it had an exclamation point attached to it. “I hear you like the new digs!”
“The house is beautiful. We love it.”
His teeth gleamed, white and straight, like a German army in his mouth. His eyes flickered up and down my body with what looked like amusement.
“Jogging?”
“Power walking,” I said, self-conscious now, wishing I’d worn a longer shirt.
Just then, a woman’s soft voice spoke, as if from the ether. “You must be Tracy.”
I turned around. She stood—delicate, exquisite—in our hallway, drying her hands on a paper towel. “I didn’t mean to frighten you,” she said. For a moment I was confused enough to think maybe it was Janice standing before me. It didn’t really look like her, but there were some similarities—the black ringlet hair, the light brown skin, and the prominent teeth.
“I’m Soleil,” she said, moving toward me, a hand outstretched, a slight, tentative smile on her face.
I couldn’t tell from looking at her where she came from. Her features were a confusion of races, a new world order on her face. She was dressed like a rich Buddhist, pure California in a fringed white scarf, loose flowing clothes, rows of brown and orange prayer beads on her wrist.
I felt huge and lumbering beside her. I shook her hand, which was still moist from washing, then watched as she floated over to the couch and sat next to Greg.
“She’s tiny,” Janice had told me about the other woman. “Greg likes thin women with no asses.” She’d also said, “She’s black, or mixed, or something. He only dates women with color.” At the time, I remember noticing this phrasing—“women with color”—and wondering if she’d really meant “women of color”—because I knew from college, a
ll the protest and identity hysteria, that these were not the same thing. You could be a woman with color who wasn’t of color. Or vice versa. Anyway, Janice said it all in the same droll voice, wearing the same bemused smile.
“Greg came to pick up his mail,” Rodney said from the couch. “And to introduce us to Soleil. They just got a place together in Venice. They said we should come visit one of these days.”
I looked from Rodney to Greg to Soleil, three smiling faces, wondering how I should respond to this.
“The air is great there for children,” Greg said. “And we’re near the beach.”
“Where is your little one?” Soleil asked.
“At school,” I said, but then remembered it was Saturday. He wasn’t at school. Fear rinsed over me. Where was he? Where had I left him?
“He’s not at school,” Rodney said, with a laugh. “Remember? Betty came and took him to a playdate this morning.”
Betty was the sitter who sometimes worked for us on weekends. I forced a laugh. “Oh, right,” I said.
They were all staring at me, now not smiling.
“Excuse me,” I said, and went to the kitchen to get a glass of water. I could hear them in the other room, discussing the new house Greg and Soleil had moved into. They were renting it from an actress who had been somewhat famous in the eighties. She had been the lead in several thrillers. I remembered her face. She had pale skin and dark hair and sad eyes. I hadn’t thought about her in a while, and stood listening from the kitchen as they talked about her.
“She never really came to anything,” Greg was saying. “I’m not sure why she fizzled.”
“I heard she became a Scientologist,” Soleil said.
“Before or after she stopped getting roles?”
“After.”
“Trying to E-meter her way back to the big time, huh?” Rodney said. “That never works. I’ve tried it.”
“You were a Scientologist?” Soleil asked.
Greg laughed. “Rodney, I’d like to introduce you to the most gullible woman you’ll ever meet. He was kidding, babe.”
“No, I was being serious,” Rodney said. “I was a member of the church when I was younger.”
“Yeah, right.”
Rodney said, “It’s true!”
I couldn’t tell if Rodney was being serious, and waited, not breathing, to hear what else he’d say. Maybe he had been a Scientologist. It seemed possible. But everything was quiet in the other room, and when I peeked in I saw that Soleil was on Greg’s lap, fingering his hair. Rodney was leaning back on the sofa with his arm slung over the back, watching them, a faint smile on his lips.
I knew I should go and join them, it was only polite, but I wanted to be alone instead. I went down the hall to the bedroom.
I sat at the edge of the bed, unlacing my sneakers. Then I lay back against the comforter and stared at the ceiling fan, where it spun in slow circles, letting off a faint breeze. I could hear the voices of the men down the hall, low and inscrutable.
I thought about Oscar. I missed him with a terrible hunger. The first time they handed him to me in the hospital bed, I looked at his face and thought to myself, And then they lived happily ever after, as if the story were about somebody else. Oscar was to me the perfect model upon which all other babies were based. And yet, even then, it seemed precarious.
I heard somebody breathing in the room with me and turned my head to the side.
It was Soleil. She stood in the entryway to the bedroom. “Sorry to interrupt. The men sent me to find you.”
I sat up. “Oh, sorry. I was tired.”
She stepped inside, her arms crossed. “I hope this isn’t uncomfortable for you.”
“No, no.”
“I understand you were close to Janice. Greg tells me you were her best friend while she was here. You were the one thing she regretted about leaving this town. Having made a friend like you.”
“Oh, well, yeah,” I said, but I wasn’t sure it was true. Had we been that close? We saw a lot of each other for a while, then we didn’t see each other.
I rose to my feet.
Soleil stood in the middle of the room, looking around, her expression half somber, half excited. I tried to imagine what she was seeing: This was where Janice and Greg had made a baby. This was also where their marriage had gone bad, where Soleil’s future had become a possibility.
Janice had told me many times the story of how Soleil entered their lives. She would tell it to me each time as if it were the first and I’d nod and act indignantly shocked each time. At first Soleil had just been a casual acquaintance of both Janice and Greg, somebody they met through mutual friends and saw at parties now and then. Soleil had been single, childless, mid to late thirties, desperate for a grown-up life of her own. You could sniff it on her—the way you could on some women—the hunger for a man, a baby, the intention to have it all by any means necessary. A woman who has clung to her freedom too long and grown tired of it, but who might be stuck with this freedom for the rest of her life if she doesn’t play her cards right. “I felt sorry for her,” Janice told me. “Can you believe that? I thought she seemed lonely and felt bad for her.”
Now, standing before me in the bedroom, Soleil spoke quickly, in a half whisper. “I’m sure she told you I stole him, but the thing is, the marriage was already broken. I mean, Greg was dying in there. I wish things had gone differently, but I love Greg. And I know she’s your friend, but I know for a fact he never loved her. And she didn’t love him either.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I just said, “Well, it’s hard to say what goes on between two people. From the outside.”
Up close, I could see that Soleil had probably not been so pretty at some point. She’d figured out a way to disguise what was slightly ferretlike about her features—to make them work for her.
Her hair was working for her. I’d always wanted curly hair, like Jennifer Beals or Chaka Khan. When I was in high school I used to get my hair permed every six weeks so that nobody knew I didn’t really have curly hair. I was prettier with curly hair, my features more interesting, but I’d stopped perming it in college because it was getting brittle. I’d accepted what nature gave me, but looking at Soleil, I felt that old hunger again to look exotic and unclassifiable.
“Please don’t hate me,” Soleil said.
“I don’t even know you.”
I had intended it to sound cold, a rejection, but she took it as the opposite, an invitation.
“Thank you,” she said, smiling. “For not judging me. Greg said you were a kind person, a compassionate person. He said you would give me a chance.”
I could hear the men’s voices moving toward us down the hall. “Ladies, ladies,” Greg was calling. “Are you two up to no good?”
After Soleil and Greg were gone, I stared out the window, waiting for Oscar and Betty to come back.
Behind me, Rodney said, “She’s interesting. I like her.”
“She looks like Janice,” I said. “For a second I thought it was her.”
Rodney chuckled. “You’re joking, right?”
I turned around, shook my head.
“She doesn’t look a thing like Janice,” he said. “I can’t imagine two women who look less alike.”
I was about to ask him what he meant, but I heard Oscar’s voice on the street outside and turned to see him, chunky and golden, running up the walkway toward the house, Betty behind him with the stroller. I went out to greet him. He leaped into my arms and I held him, inhaling the smells from the park, the car exhaust and the pollen mixed together in his hair.
That night in bed I woke to the sound of screaming. It was once again three in the morning. Rodney whispered into the darkness, “Leave him. Let him work it out.” I lay there watching the clock, but the numbers weren’t moving fast enough. Oscar sounded different this time too, like something was really the matter. “Momma, Momma,” he wept. My throat went dry and my palms got wet. Finally, ten minutes into it, I said, “I
’m sorry, I can’t stand it.”
Rodney sighed as I slid out of bed, and said, “This is why you’re tired all the time. This is why you’re only half here.”
When I picked Oscar up, he was soaking with sweat. His body was stiff and did not relax into my embrace. He kicked and shrieked and tried to push himself out of my arms. “Momma, Momma,” he wailed, searching the room wildly for somebody else. I finally put him back in the crib, where he continued to shriek and flail around. I backed out of the room. I didn’t return to bed but sat in the hallway on the floor hugging my knees, listening as Oscar continued to call, “Momma.” After what seemed ages, he went quiet. I got up and went back to bed, where I lay stiffly beside Rodney, not falling back to sleep until the first light of morning.
The next night when Oscar woke again, screaming, Rodney grabbed my arm before I could go to him. “Stop.”
“But listen,” I said, my feet already on the floor.
“Momma, Momma!” came Oscar’s voice, between guttural sobs.
“Give him fifteen minutes,” Rodney said.
“I can’t. I just can’t.”
“You realize you’re training him to wake up screaming. If you go in there, he’ll do it again tomorrow night, and the next, and he’ll never learn to sleep through the night. He’ll be tired all the time too.”
“Momma! Momma!”
I turned and looked at Rodney through the darkness. “But he’s just a baby.”
“He’s two. He’s got to learn.”
“How long has it been?”
“One minute.”
I’d seen a movie once, many years earlier, about a wealthy couple who ignore their young daughter’s cries while they make love. Down the hall, she is being kidnapped. But this time I waited it out.