by Rachel Yoder
Sure, he seems happy, the husband whispered later that night, in bed, over the boy, who slept between them. He wouldn’t let the issue go, as was his custom.
He is happy, Nightbitch whispered back.
I just think the dog stuff needs to stop, the husband countered.
But he loves dogs, she insisted. There’s no harm.
The meat, her husband said. And there’s a dog kennel just to…play in? In the living room! It’s not natural. It’s too much, he concluded, as if this were the final word on it, as if he’d drawn a conclusion that they all must now accept.
She rolled her eyes in the dark.
It’s not like he even eats that much, she said. And it’s great to pretend. It’s all fine.
If he gets sick, it’s on you, the husband whispered sharply. If other kids think he’s weird, that’s you.
Of course it is, Nightbitch said. It’s all on me. Every part of it.
They lay there in silence. They’d had this fight a million times. She waited for him to say more, but there was only the sound of her son’s even breathing. She fell asleep imagining the taste of fresh blood.
* * *
—
ALL NIGHTBITCH WANTED WAS never to do night-nights again for the rest of her life. It was Monday, her husband had left that morning, and she and the boy had baked muffins and played with trains, played with Play-Doh, gone for a walk to the train track, taken out the hose and attached the sprinkler and had a go of that, played chase, played ball, played fetch inside and out. Their feet were dirty and their noses were dirty, and they ate peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches on the porch steps as the sun eased toward night. Their muscles were hot and tired and happy, and the boy stared with vacant exhaustion, mouth slathered with jelly.
Oh yes, Nightbitch had with great folly believed that night-nights would be easy on this night, a breeze! Just a smooch and snuggle, and then the boy would be gone. In fact, such a night-night had never once occurred in the boy’s entire life, though Nightbitch refused to acknowledge this and instead embraced that positive attitude and productive thinking.
Yes, it would be a wonderful Monday night-night, she told herself as she washed the boy and slipped on his little pajamas and then slipped the whole boy bundle between the cool blue sheets of her bed.
Yet, as soon as she lay beside him, she was horrified to see the folly of her hopeful thinking as the boy began to thrash under the sheet, ask for fresh cold water, ask for a cool washcloth, ask for a carrot, an apple, animal crackers.
No, she said, and then no again. It’s time to go to sleep, not time to eat. It’s time to let our bodies rest. Time to be a good doggy and keep your body still.
When attempts to engage his mother proved fruitless, the boy sat up in bed and attempted to play patty-cake with himself, clapping and slapping and then laughing hysterically, delirious with his weariness. She was so very, very tired, so incredibly exhausted, and wished she could sink down into the memory-foam bed or else have a night off from the tedium of bedtime, reading the same books over and over, telling a story, another one, then playing a song on the phone, lying there, waiting for the boy to go to sleep.
It was true that she had been responsible for putting the boy to bed nearly every night since he was born. Certainly she had been the only one able to get the boy to sleep when he was an infant and all he wanted was to nurse until he slipped into dreams of big fleshy pillows and oceans of warm, warm milk. So wasn’t she, in a sense, owed an innumerable amount of night-nights by her husband? Shouldn’t he, whenever he had the chance, undertake night-nights happily, gratefully, in honor of the many nights—the years—when she had been in charge of the task?
Yes, this would be the fair way, but, of course, it wasn’t how things went in their household. Even after her husband returned from his week of work, she performed night-nights on Friday, because he was tired—he was, indeed, always tired, and sometimes his tummy did not feel so well, because he had been chugging coffee and eating corn nuts on the way home, perplexed by the ensuing nausea…and he really just wanted to get back to his computer, his video games and browsing and folders, relax a little, you know, and Nightbitch did not want to throw a fit or cause a scene or really engage with any confrontation whatsoever, because she had nothing left. The lack of fairness surrounding night-nights was yet another source of rage for Nightbitch, lying there in bed as the fireflies blinked outside and the boy tossed beside her.
One hour, two, of the boy talking, laughing, clapping, tossing, crying, asking for big cuddles, rejecting big cuddles because they were too hot, asking for fresh cold water again, crying because she wouldn’t bring it to him, then tossing some more. All this was enough to make Nightbitch desperately want to die.
I am spending my life lying in a dark room, she thought to herself. I am spending my most productive years in unproductive, supine waiting.
Please go to sleep, she pleaded, and then cried quietly in bed because she was so tired, wanted just an hour without the child at her side, an hour of television, an hour of sitting on the couch and staring at the wall, just an hour. Anything. Instead, she lay there and lay there and lay there, and then it was ten o’clock.
She had been putting off weaning the boy from the binky, for why would she want to make bedtime even more difficult, her life even more tedious. The binky was, in fact, a constant source of battles these days and, once carelessly dropped on the ground, inspired a fount of screaming from the boy when he saw the bits of dirt and pine needles and bark adhered to the plastic nipple and could not immediately put it back in his mouth.
And, of course, there was the matter of waking in the night, the constant and endless waking when the binky fell from the boy’s mouth, the searching in the darkness, the panic, then the consolation. If she could just get one entire night of sleep…She fantasized about this, about how her body might feel that next morning, of the dreams she might have. Who would she be with a full night of sleep? Someone else entirely.
Plus, the boy was too big for the binky. Other kids at the library his age didn’t have a binky. She pointed this out when they were there. See? Only babies. But the boy shook his head and held tight to the binky, sucking stubbornly.
I baby, he would insist. I baby.
So this Monday night, when she was doing night-nights yet again, when she was hot and tired, annoyed at her husband—this night, she decided after two hours in bed with him that there would be no binky.
Normally, she would have made up some elaborate scenario involving fairies, would have gone through a ceremony of wrapping the binky in a scarf and picking the perfect lilac bough outside on which to hang it as an offering to the fairies. But on this night, the blood of Nightbitch flowed through her veins, and she told the boy they would play a doggy game, and the only way to keep playing was to remain a doggy.
Doggy rules, she said sternly, and the boy nodded.
First of all, she said, doggies don’t have binkies, do they? They boy looked at her seriously in the glow of the nightlight and handed over the yellow binky without so much as a small protestation. Jesus. She should have done this months ago.
Okay, she continued. And where do doggies sleep? The boy’s brow wrinkled, and he held up his pudgy little hands in a puzzled gesture. Hold on, she said, groaning out of bed and down the steps to drag the oversized kennel from the living room, up the narrow stairs, and into her bedroom, where it fit perfectly in the corner. The boy watched in stunned amazement as his mother stuffed a down comforter into the enclosure, finally turned to the boy and gestured at the kennel with a Ta-da!
He pointed to the toddler-sized kennel and said, Eh?
Very good! Nightbitch said. What does doggy need to make his kennel cozy?
Without even a word, the boy collected his things—the soft blue blankie, the tattered teddy that had once been hers, his choo-choo pillow. She could tell h
e was excited about this new adventure, the novelty of it, the adventure, the game of being a doggy now at night. His mother was playing with him!? After denying him even fresh cold water!? She could tell the boy thought he had won that evening in their battle of wits, and this was what she wanted him to believe.
She helped him arrange his soft things in the kennel, and he curled inside without a sound, a perfect fit.
Door open or closed? she asked.
Open ickle bit, he said, and she closed it halfway, then reached in and patted his head.
She sat cross-legged on the floor and counted backward from one hundred to one, as she often did, swaying slightly in the darkness, and when she got to one she rose carefully and walked to the bedroom door, expecting to hear his little voice, his cry, but instead there was nothing.
She exhaled quietly, then began to laugh, just a chuckle that turned into an uncontrollable fit she had to continue out in the hallway, where she slid down to the floor to sit and cry and laugh, so tired and also so relieved, and she just wanted to go to sleep now, too, there on the floor. A sweet victory, but it was already ten o’clock, too late to watch something, so she washed her face and then spread out in her deliciously empty bed while her son dreamt in the kennel.
* * *
—
THE WORKING MOTHER WHO still worked, who had gone to grad school with her and then eased into marriage and motherhood and a successful work-life balance, wanted to get lunch.
How about lunch at the park? she texted. You bring your son and I’ll come over on my break and we’ll just chat and catch up. Sure, Nightbitch had thought. Of course. It had been so long since she’d seen the working mother—not since they had met up for coffee when the mother still directed the gallery, in fact—and of course it would be nice to reconnect. She would show her friend the working mom how she was really settling into her stay-at-home-momming, how she was happy and fulfilled, how she didn’t even need art or a career at this point, no way, just some good, pure mothering time to devote herself purely to her son. And, honestly, it wasn’t entirely an act now, for she had indeed, at least in some small way, convinced herself of this, of her happiness, and had bent her mind toward herbal remedies, toward Jen and that mommy scene, because what was the alternative? Grow so miserable and mad that the energy of these emotions generated a cellular change such that she became a she-wolf? Just run around the town as a dog and accept this as her lot in life!? This was not, could not be, the solution.
And so they had made plans and the working mother as well as the mother who did not work (but actually did, very much) showed up on the appointed day, at the appointed hour.
The working mother who was acknowledged for her work, since it fell outside the bounds of the home and thus was considered valuable and paid a salary, still taught art and made art and had all the things that modern women were supposed to effortlessly have, also had a perfectly packed lunch, housed in an eco-friendly insulated bag, her sandwich wrapped in eco-friendly beeswax paper that was washable and reusable, her compostable spork made from vegetable starch, and who could fault her for that? Certainly not the stay-at-home mother, with her individually packaged squeezies and bag of goldfish crackers and plastic baggies of off-brand cookies.
The women picked a nice bench in the shade of a tree right next to the playground.
You really have the life, the working mother said, watching the boy play.
I do, Nightbitch said proudly, for she did have the life, that stay-at-home life. And here, on this fine summer day, she for the first time felt true gratitude and sensed some sort of minuscule yet profound shifting of her deepest fears and dreams, these heavy rocks of need and yearning heaving around in her guts.
Ahhhh, she said, pertinent to nothing, and the working mother laughed.
Her friend went on, taking neat bites from her sandwich and launching into talk about her own artistic practice, her struggle to keep it up, her own children, but Nightbitch stopped listening nearly as soon as her friend started talking, instead rapt by a movement at the edge of the woods that bordered the park.
She froze with animal alertness. There, so close, so very tame, so very, very stupid, a bushy-tailed squirrel nibbled on a bit of trash.
Everything okay? the working mother asked, wrinkling her brow into a knotted little question.
Shhh! Nightbitch hissed, unmoving, then, in a whisper, Excuse me. Just one minute…
She inched from the bench, eyes locked on the squirrel, but it sensed in Nightbitch something threatening, and in an instant was off toward the tree line.
Squirrel! she yelled to her son over on the playground as she ran and pointed.
Squirrel! Squirrel! she yelled again, now to no one in particular. She barked the word out of sheer delight and sprinted after the little animal. Her son, not wanting to miss the fun, whooshed down a slide and ran, too.
The squirrel paused in the underbrush at the edge of the woods, and Nightbitch and son stopped together, yards away.
Get him, the boy murmured.
She had trained him well. He was a very good boy who knew not to move, not to scare it away. Instead, he waited for his mother’s instruction.
You have to wait, she said quietly. Wait for just the right moment before you…and with the word pounce, that’s what she did. She surged forward—launched herself, really—arms stretched forward, mouth open in a ferocious snarl, her son behind her saying Raaaaar raaaaar raaaaaaaaaaaar.
The squirrel focused into a pair of close-up terror-filled eyes, a twitchy little nose, those small little hands, and Nightbitch was upon the animal—she would have it! it would be hers!—and she felt its fur in her very hands, but then the thing was gone with the swish of its tail, slipping from between her inept human fingers.
Arrrrrreeeeeeeee! Nightbitch hollered, now lying in the weeds, arms extended, flip-flops yards behind her.
Arrroooooooo! the boy howled, throwing himself down beside her and laughing.
We almost got him! Nightbitch said conspiratorially to the boy, turning on her side to look at him. Grass prickled their cheeks, and the boy reached out to touch his mother’s hair.
Is okay, Mama, he said. Squirrel!
We’ll get him next time, she said, and he hugged her, and she stood with him in her arms and headed back to the playground, where the working mother waited.
Just a little game, Nightbitch said self-consciously, approaching the bench where the working mother waited.
That was…, the working mother said, searching for the word,…astonishing.
Just doing my job, Nightbitch answered as she rolled her eyes and smiled thinly, eager to change the subject.
Well! the working mother exclaimed. Motherhood really seems to suit you.
Sure! Nightbitch said, watching her son as he climbed up the slide. I guess it does. But I’m not working working, she said. Not like you. You know: money, art. Stuff like that.
Oh, come on, the working mother said, brushing nonexistent crumbs from her lap. You’re doing the hardest job.
I really hate it when people say that, Nightbitch said, even though it’s true.
You should come to dinner this weekend, the working mother said, as though she’d had the most original thought in the universe. A videographer—someone they’d also gone to grad school with—was returning to guest-lecture that fall, at the program they had all attended, and for a moment, Nightbitch flared with envy, after which she promptly plummeted into a familiar self-loathing. What did she expect, after all? She spent her days chasing after squirrels with her son. She hadn’t been working, not like them. Where was her newest project? Where was absolutely anything to show for the last three years?
Okay. Yes. She would go. But just for fun! It would be so great to hear about their work and be dazzled by all they had done. She would be a sister, a supporter, a feminist. She
would relate her own triumphs as a full-time mom and celebrate their career successes while also providing heartfelt and active listening to the worries they no doubt had about their own mothering, their own children, whom they abandoned each day. Yes, all perspectives, all choices could be represented around the dinner table where they would break bread and work toward building a supportive community of women. So positive was Nightbitch, so thoroughly upbeat and might we say delusional, she could not even see how truly wrong-minded she was being, for how could she decide to excise one of her most foundational urges: to create art? Yet, still, she thought, she hoped, she had decided she could.
* * *
—
THAT WEEKEND, WHEN HER husband was home, she wanted it from behind. She wanted him to bite the back of her neck. She wanted to fight and bite, and then she wanted to fuck him hard. She wanted it rough, and then, afterward, she wanted to be patted on the head, to have her hair stroked and straightened, her underneck rubbed, and then her belly rubbed, too.
The kind, good husband acquiesced, and as he did, she told him he was a good boy, and he liked that. He liked all of it.
Afterward, he said, I don’t know what’s gotten into you, but please don’t change.
If you say so, she replied, and lovingly bit his arm.
And it was after one of their many and uncharacteristic interludes on Saturday, as she lolled in their afternoon bed of rumpled, sullied sheets while their son napped miraculously in his doggy crate, which they’d moved into his bedroom, that a quiet feeling whispered in the clear, open space her marital harmony had created. This feeling was so quiet she might have missed it had she not had a moment to herself, still naked and in bed, listening to her husband while he roused their son from his nap. As she basked in this refreshing and rare postcoital child-free calm, she noticed, tickling the back of her throat, an insidious fear, which had been hovering in her periphery since that magical animal night. Had she let herself focus on this sensation, she knew she would quickly be overwhelmed and consumed by it. After all, what did it mean that she had turned into an animal not two weeks earlier? And who or what had been the source of such a transformation? What force had brought Nightbitch into being? She did not allow herself to consider fully these questions, to dwell on what darkness had called forth a monster, a beast, a creature from the deepest and bleakest crannies of her humanness. She did not let herself dwell on the tight ball of fear inside her, because this sort of indulgence was one she could not afford. She must rise from bed, tend to her child, her house, her own well-being. She must pull it together, to put it quite simply, for the sake of her family, because, otherwise, what? This entire thing they had going—this house and family and life—it would all fall to pieces if she fell to pieces, and so she simply could not. There must be a reasonable explanation, she reminded herself, and became determined to find just that: reason. Have someone explain things to her. And who other than Wanda White could do such a thing?