The Omega's Dearest Baby

by Louise Bourgeois

  Half an hour later, Vincent drank the last of his cold coffee and folded the papers back up. He had just wiped the table clean of oatmeal and put the pan and bowls into a sink of water to stop the oatmeal from setting like cement on them when Emily reappeared.

  “Time for me to shower,” he said to her.

  There was a kiddies toilet seat in each of the bathrooms in the house, and Vincent set the one in the ensuite onto the toilet and pulled Emily’s jeans and knickers down and sat her on it.

  “OK?” he asked her, and she nodded, and he pushed his jeans down and dragged his oatmeally T-shirt off and slid open the shower.

  Another part of their routine. She sat on the toilet while he showered quickly. He reckoned he could get in, get clean, and be out again in about 90 seconds, which was just about Emily’s tolerance for sitting still.

  She didn’t last that long today, calling out, “Nothing’s happening, Da,” before he got the shampoo out of his hair.

  “Hang on just a moment,” he called out, his head under the water.

  Seconds later, he wrapped a towel around himself and lifted her off the toilet and washed her hands and, as an afterthought, wiped the oatmeal off her face.

  “Go and get your toothbrush and toothpaste from your bathroom,” he told her, reaching for his own toothbrush.

  Emily was very obliging about having her teeth brushed and Vincent pulled on boxers and clean jeans while she was finding her own brush, and tugged a clean T-shirt over his head.

  His knees complained again when he knelt on the bathroom tiles to clean Emily’s teeth and he was heartily glad that today was Friday and that Noah would be home and on parent duty for the weekend. His knees weren’t going to take much more of this.

  He removed the kiddie toilet seat and put the lid down and Emily clambered up onto the lid to watch him shave. He shaved the old fashioned way, with a brush and soap, and Emily leant forward to drag her fingers through the lather that dropped on the bathroom counter. “Don’t put your fingers in your mouth,” he reminded Emily as he picked up his safety razor.

  He was pulling the skin of his chin taut with one hand and shaving with the other when Emily asked, “What’s the day, Da?”

  “Friday. Today you go to kiddiegym with Morgan. And you and I have to go food shopping this morning too, later on.”

  Emily nodded and put her fingers in her mouth out of habit, making Vincent reach for a clean wash cloth and wet it, then carefully wiped the lather from her lips. She stuck out her tongue, saying, “Yuckyuck,” and Vincent wiped that too.

  “Don’t put your fingers in your mouth,” he reminded her again, trying not to laugh at the faces she was pulling.

  He finished shaving quickly and rinsed the lather off, then brushed his own teeth. His hair was in clumps when he checked his face in the mirror for leftover lather, so he dragged a comb through it and quickly tied it back off his face.

  “Ready for the day?” he asked Emily, who was still sucking on the wet face washer, taking it out of her mouth.

  “Check mail?” Emily asked him, pushing ahead of him through the bathroom door, getting under his feet.

  “Washing first,” he said, beginning to strip the bed he and Noah shared. “Then we can check your email.”

  He bundled up the sheets and quilt cover and dropped them at the top of the stairs, collected the diaper pail from the other bathroom, added some damp towels from the ensuite bathroom floor. Clothes from the bedroom and bathroom floor got added to the pile, then he dragged the whole bundle down the stairs, Emily trotting ahead of him.

  “Can you open the laundry door?” he asked her, mostly to get her out from under his feet on the stairs.

  Sheets and towels went into the washing machine, then he rinsed Emily’s night nappy out. However much they paid Morgan, it wasn’t enough to have to deal with that particular mess. Reliable nannies were precious things, and they had been incredibly lucky to find a good nanny right at the beginning. No way was he going to give Morgan any reason to decide she wasn’t happy with them.

  He washed his hands again. “OK, Em, email time now,” he called out as he walked back through the kitchen.

  She was ahead of him, banging impatiently on his study door with her fist, as he reached up for the safety latch at the top of the door. “Hang on, hang on,” he said, and she was through the door and clambering into his chair. He leant down and switched the pc on, then scooped Emily into his arms and sat down in his chair, Emily on his lap.

  The screen lit up, and Emily squirmed impatiently, pointing at the photo of her he had taken a few weeks before as soon as the list of usernames appeared. “Me, me, me,” she said.

  Vincent moved the trackball out of Emily’s reach and clicked on her name, then opened Outlook for her.

  She jiggled excitedly on his lap as her mail downloaded. “Ben!” she said.

  Vincent clicked on the subject, which was ‘Hello Emily’.

  Ben wrote to Emily almost every day, and Sophie, and Vincent’s mom wrote often too. Even Ella sent messages to Emily. All for Vincent to read out, though he had a sneaking suspicion that Emily was well on her way to whole word recognition reading already.

  “Dear Emily,” Vincent read. “I’m looking forward to seeing you again tomorrow when I come home for the weekend.”

  “Ben coming?” Emily asked, looking up at Vincent.

  “Ben’s coming home for the weekend. Tomorrow,” Vincent explained.

  “What day ’morrow?”

  “Tomorrow’s Saturday.”

  “Ooohhhh,” Emily sighed, looking back at the screen. “Read, Da.”

  “Alison can’t come with me as she has work but she sends her love. See you soon, Ben.”

  “’Lison coming too?”

  “Not this time. I’m sure you’ll see Alison again soon.”

  Emily had taken instantly to Ben’s new girlfriend, Alison, and Vincent had to admit he liked her too. She was a pre-med student, and seemed to work far harder than Ben did at college, though Ben’s grades were solid and Vincent was more than happy with his attitude. He just wasn’t driven to excel the same way Alison was.

  Vincent closed the mail from Ben and opened the other message, from Sophie. “Hello Emily,” he read. “I bought you a present and have just posted it to you. I hope you like elephants. Here is a photo of Simon I took. Love Gran.”

  “Elephants,” Emily said. “Like elephants.”

  Vincent nodded. Emily was obsessed with elephants, amongst other things. They would have to take her to San Diego zoo, see a real one soon, before her fancy moved onto something else less accessible, like volcanoes or aliens. He clicked on the attachment and opened a jpg of Sophie’s cat, Simon, an overweight ginger monster, lolling on his back.

  “Oooohhh, kitty,” Emily said, reaching out to pat the screen, making Vincent grab her hand quickly.

  “Want me to print it?” Vincent asked, letting go of her hand and reaching across to turn the printer on.

  “Yes,” Emily said.

  “Say, ‘yes please’.”

  “Yes, please,” Emily corrected herself and the printer began to whir. Emily stood up on the chair, Vincent’s arm around her waist as she leant forward to watch the photo appear from the printer.

  When the page had printed, Vincent tore a piece of sticky tape off the roll and added it to the top of the picture of Simon, and lifted Emily down onto the ground. “Here you are,” he said, handing her the picture. “Go add it to the collection, love.”

  Vincent had long ago sacrificed the paintwork of his study, covering the walls completely with layer after layer of photos and sketches and letters. Emily was slowly claiming the bottom of the walls with her animal pictures,

  Emily stuck the picture crookedly onto the side of a cardboard carton that was on the floor, and Vincent closed her desktop and opened his own. Emily patted his knee. “Play, Da.”

  “OK,” he said, clicking on his email to start downloading it, then getting down onto
his hands and knees and opening Ben’s old lap top for Emily to use. It made its own distinctive grinding noise as it booted, and beeped twice with error messages before Vincent successfully opened Emily’s game of ‘Dennis and the Dragon.’ This was all the laptop was used for now, for Emily to play games and watch DVDs on when they traveled.

  Emily chuckled to herself and wriggled in front of Vincent to get at the keyboard of the laptop, and Vincent sat back at his own pc to wade through his email.

  Accompanied by the same inane piece of electronic music from the game, Vincent managed to read all of his mail, and to reply to some of it before Emily clambered back onto his lap. “’Nuff, Da,” she said. “Come play.”

  “OK,” he agreed. “Washing first, then sandbox?”

  Emily patted Vincent’s cheek carefully and said, “Good Da.”

  Vincent smiled and kissed Emily’s curls. It had been a long long time since Ben was this little, and he kept rediscovering pleasures he had forgotten. There was a quiet happiness in caring for a toddler, especially when the nanny arrived at noon each day, and he was glad he could be home with Emily for this time. When Ben was small, they’d been broke and he’d worked whenever he could, sometimes menial work, and had missed out of some this age. Now, he could afford to stay home. Hell, Noah could more than afford not to work too. Nothing like the insane pace he had worked at before Emily had been conceived.

  Vincent rolled the cover off the sandbox for Emily, then went and lifted the wet towels and sheets out of the washer, reloading the machine with clothes.

  Washing hung out, he squatted down in the sand beside Emily, and she took the cup she was packing with sand protectively away from him. He scraped the sand smooth in front of himself and began to doodle squiggles in the damp yellow sand.

  He was absorbed in the process almost immediately, lost in the shapes he was forming when Emily pushed at his hand, smudging the outlines. “No, Da, draw cats.”

  He smoothed over the shapes he had drawn, knowing they would linger in his subconscious until he had a chance to capture them on paper, and quickly drew two cats for Emily. She gurgled happily, and erased them. “Cats, again,” she ordered, and he obliged.

  Emily still had damp yellow sand clinging to her when Vincent lifted her into her car seat and buckled her up, and he brushed at it ineffectually, then glanced down at his own jeans. He was covered in sand too.

  At the mall, he carried Emily across the car park, setting her down on the cool tiled floor inside the main doors, and she darted ahead of him down the arcade, making him run to catch up with her. “Slow down,” he said, scooping her into his arms again.

  “Sing, Da,” Emily said, and he obliged, moving his collection of calico reusable shopping bags to his other shoulder and settling her on his hip.

  “Slow down, you move too fast, you got to make the morning last…”

  Emily chuckled, in his arms, then pointed at the front of the children’s clothing shop they were passing. “Look, tiger,” she interrupted.

  “That’s a cheetah,” Vincent explained, stopping so Emily could admire the poster. “See, it’s more slender than a tiger, and it’s got no mane around its neck.”

  “No hair?” Emily asked Vincent.

  “That’s right, no shaggy hair around its neck, just fur all over it.”

  “Get it for me?” Emily asked and Vincent shook his head.

  “No, I’m not going to buy you a cheetah, or even a poster of a cheetah. Do you want a new T-shirt instead?” Vincent asked.

  Emily’s eyes widened. “A blue one?” she asked hopefully.

  “If there’s blue one in your size, you can have it,” Vincent agreed, and he put her back on the ground and she scampered into the shop.

  The woman behind the counter said, “Hello Emily,” and smiled at Vincent. They bought most of Emily’s clothes from this shop, and the staff knew them both. The woman squatted down. “What would you like today?” she asked Emily.

  “Da says I can have a blue shirt,” Emily said, and she stuck her fingers in her mouth.

  The woman nodded. “I’m sure we can find a blue shirt for you, come and have a look with me.”

  Vincent sat down in a convenient chair and stuck his legs out. Emily was admiring the prints on T-shirts, and Vincent let her go. They had plenty of time, it was only ten in the morning, even though it felt like he had been awake for hours. He had been awake for hours.

  A few minutes later, Emily trotted up to him, a T-shirt in her hands. “Want this one, Da.”

  Vincent nodded. “Are you sure? It’s green, not blue,” he pointed out.

  She nodded at him. “Look, a robot.”

  “I can see. Give it to the lady,” he said, and he stood up and leant against the counter, holding out a cotton bag to the shop assistant, then fishing a credit card out of his wallet.

  In the supermarket, he settled Emily in the kiddieseat of the cart and pulled the list out of his jeans pocket and handed it to her as he buckled the strap around her waist. She held it carefully, frowning at it. She pointed at it with a damp finger, smudging the ink Vincent had scrawled the list in. “Biccies?” she asked.

  “Yes, we can buy cookies for you. We’ve got to get lots of food today. Everyone is coming over for dinner tomorrow night.”

  “Who?” Emily asked, looking up at Vincent as he tossed dishwasher detergent into the cart.

  “Ben, and Ella, and Cedric. Ennis and Dawson, and Billy. You remember Cedric? He came over last weekend too. He played ‘Dennis and the Dragon’ with you.”

  “I ’member,” Emily said.

  Vincent nodded. Emily still hadn’t clearly grasped the passage of time. Everything that had happened before was ‘yesterday’. Everything to come was ‘’morrow.’ She was just beginning to grasp days of the week though.

  “Last Sunday. He lives in England, the same country that Gran lives in. He does visit Ella though,” Vincent explained.

  “He smells pretty,” Emily said, and Vincent hid his smile as he bent forward to drop coffee and drinking chocolate into the cart.

  “He does. And so does Dada sometimes.”

  Emily nodded agreement, and Vincent stopped the cart in front of the cookies. “Want to choose?” he asked, knowing they would wind up eating cookies shaped like teddy bears or something.

  Emily studied the shelves in front of her for a while, and Vincent leant his weight on the shopping cart handle and waited.

  She pointed at the shelves. “Pink ones,” she said. “They taste pink.”

  Vincent dropped two packets into the cart and added a packet of mint chocolate cookies, just in case any of the grownups thought it was beneath their dignity to eat pink rabbit cookies.

  “Now?” Emily asked, leaning back into the cart towards the cookies.

  “Ok, hon,” Vincent agreed, and he leant forward and retrieved one of the packets.

  Emily was quiet for the rest of the trip round the supermarket, happily chomping on her pink rabbit cookies, and Vincent ate a couple himself, just to keep her company, while he stacked shopping into the cart.

  In the car park, when Vincent lifted her out of the cart, she said, “Have to wee, Da.”

  Moments like this had been so much easier to deal with when Ben was little. Boys just peed on car tires. Girls were trickier, and Vincent set Emily down on the ground and carefully pulled off her jeans and knickers, leaving her wearing only her T-shirt.

  “OK,” he said, squatting her down. “Pee now, and try and keep your feet out of it.”

  He moved his own feet in a hurry to miss the stream. She had been bursting.

  “Good girl to hold on so long,” he said as she finished, and he looked up to find an elderly woman frowning at him, and he glared back at her.

  He set Emily back on her feet away from the puddle. “Good girl,” he said again as he reached for Emily’s knickers and jeans.

  Once she was safely in her car seat, he began to pack the bags of shopping into the back of the car,
remembering to hand Emily her new T-shirt for her to hold on the trip home.

  He managed to get most of the groceries away before Emily came charging into the kitchen, a book in her hands.

  “Read to me, Da,” she demanded.

  “’K,” he said, sitting down on the kitchen tiles.

  He always read to Emily when she asked, every time, just because it was one of his proudest achievements to have been part of raising a literate child in Ben. Emily would be literate too, if there was anything he could do to increase her love of books and the written word.

  She sat down on his crossed legs and handed him up the book. “Read Owl, Da.”

  Vincent took the book and opened it, not that he needed to see the words, he could recite all of her books now, but because if he didn’t time the words with the appropriate pictures, she would be upset.

  “The owl and the pussycat went to sea in a beautiful pea green boat.”

  “Boat, Da,” Emily said, pointing at the picture, following her own ritual for this book.

  “They took some honey and plenty of money, wrapped up in a five pound note.”

  “Like Gran uses,” Emily said, pointing at the money.

  “That’s right, and Aunty Tami too. The owl looked up to the stars above and sang to a small guitar, o lovely pussy, my love, what a lovely pussy you are, you are, what a lovely pussy you are. Pussy said to the owl, ‘You elegant fowl, how charmingly sweet you sing. Too long we have tarried, let us be married, but what shall we do for a ring?’”

  “Are you owl?” Emily asked, making Vincent pause as he turned over the page.

  “Do you think I’m an owl, hon?” Vincent asked curiously.

  “Yes, ’cause Dada doesn’t have a guitar, so he’s not an owl.”

  Vincent filed this snippet of insight into Emily’s world away to tell Noah about later and said, “They sailed away for a year and a day to the land where the bong tree grows. And there in a wood a piggywig stood with a ring at the end of its nose, its nose, with a ring at the end of its nose.”