Though it was six years before our own sad parting, my husband and I were already surrounded by the carnage of other marriages. One by one, our friends found reasons to live apart—Fulbright years, sick mothers, sabbaticals, new jobs—until we were the only ones with rings on our fingers, the only ones wondering what to buy for the upcoming anniversary. I started looking at Barry as though he were a mole I’d found somewhere on my body. Where was the cancerous part of him, the part that would slowly kill me? His laziness seemed more like artistic selectivity in those days. We both believed a job would rob him of his time to write. Talent like Barry’s, well, you didn’t come across it every day, etc. I remember watching him sometimes, though, and thinking that if he were less good-looking, I’d never let him get away with it—the not working; the slovenliness; the one-sided relationships he had with people in which they’d give him things in exchange for being his friend, and aside from an hour or two of his lovely eyes blinking at them, he’d never give anything back in return.
Lou started suckling again, and I felt my milk let down. I studied the curve of her left foot. What if I never put her in the little white boot? What if I just let nature run its course? Would she be bowlegged on one side? Walk with a weird gait? A limp? Barry opened the door an inch and looked at me with a wide eye. He opened the door another inch. “Dinner,” he whispered. For some reason, he had his shirt off.
I squeezed my breast, trying to get the milk out faster. Lonnie had nursed her babies on a schedule from the minute they were born, once every four hours, no more, no less. One time I had tried to space out Lou’s feeds a little, and she cried so hard and so loud that I didn’t stop shaking for hours. The way I felt when Lou cried was worse than the pain of childbirth. What would have happened if Lonnie had known I was still nursing? Nothing. Maybe one comment. Two. But I couldn’t see that then. I was fighting with her in my head. I switched Lou to the other breast and whispered for her to hurry up until she was done.
I carried Lou into Lonnie’s dining room, put her in the high chair, and waited to see what Lonnie would serve her. I was nervous that Lou would start crying and Lonnie would call her “fussy,” a term that enraged me. I did not believe that babies just cried. I certainly had never cried for the hell of it. There it was: the anger rising in my chest. I had researched the “cry it out” technique after a few sleepless nights left me devastated with fatigue. You were supposed to let your baby cry for fifteen minutes at a time before you went to him. When he vomited, which he would eventually do from all the retching, you were supposed to clean it up swiftly and then continue to let him cry, lest he learn that vomiting was a surefire way to get you to hold him. If you did this for seven nights, your baby would stop crying out for you. I narrowed my eyes at Lonnie and imagined tossing the hot casserole dish of lasagna at her.
“Noodles,” Lonnie said to Lou, and put a scoop on her tray. “Mmm.” She had changed into her nurse’s uniform—purple scrubs and clogs, socks with little hearts on them. I couldn’t imagine being Lonnie. Working nights; threading IVs into veins; emptying bedpans. I felt oppressed if I had to make a phone call.
“Is she walking yet?” said Lonnie.
“A little,” Barry said.
“My babies were early walkers,” Lonnie said. “All three of them.”
Lou picked up a long ribbon of lasagna noodle and flung it behind her.
“Oh,” I said. “Lou.”
“Don’t worry about it,” said Lonnie. “That’s what they do. You should get a dog, Edie.”
Lonnie’s dining room was grandmotherly—floral wallpaper and dark wainscoting, black-and-white photographs of her and Barry’s grandparents in tiny metal frames, a curio cabinet full of ceramic dogs. She told us she’d just gotten around to taking down her Easter decorations. I gave Barry a look to see if he found this as funny as I did, but he was scooping lasagna into his mouth with a kind of fervor. He was still bare chested.
Lonnie cleared her throat for Barry to stop eating. I gripped Barry’s hand and reached for Lou’s chubby, noodle-covered fingers.
“Bless us, O Lord, and these thy gifts, which we are about to receive from thy bounty, through Christ our Lord,” Lonnie said. “Amen.”
“Amen,” said Barry.
“Almond,” I said.
Lonnie’s head was still bowed, and I saw that she was crying. I nudged Barry under the table, and he stood and held his sister’s shoulders. “Hey, hey, hey,” he whispered. Barry’s chest was slick with sweat. I thought I’d turn on the air once she left. I hated people who didn’t turn on their air.
“I’m okay,” she said. She took her glasses out of her pocket and checked her watch. “Let’s eat. I’ll be fine.”
Something about the lasagna—how it tasted so good, how it was so perfectly and painstakingly put together—made my heart thick with sorrow. I could see the black tidal wave of depression approaching through the dining room window, cresting at the front of Lonnie’s lawn, crashing over her begonias, and then rushing toward me, over the cobblestone path to the front door, over the welcome mat, the beige shag carpet, knocking over the suede sectional and its matching ottoman, and pooling at my feet. Ultimately it was not Barry’s laziness or good looks that ended our marriage, it was me. I waited until Lou started first grade and then I calmly told Barry that I didn’t want to be us anymore.
“Before you leave, Lonnie,” said Barry. “Show me where your ironing board is?”
“In the linen closet.” She cut her lasagna into bite-size pieces with her fork and then shook Parmesan cheese over each piece. I stared at Lou, who had transferred her dinner onto the floor.
“Whoops,” said Lonnie. She disappeared into the kitchen and returned with a wet washcloth. Lou grabbed her cup of milk and tossed it. Lonnie rubbed the cloth over Lou’s face and hands, and Lou protested against the straps of the high chair, threw her head back, and started to cry.
“Stop,” I said to Lonnie. “I’ll clean her up later.”
“Sometimes, Edie,” she said to me, “you have to let them cry a bit.” She turned back to Lou. “Now hold still.”
I pushed Lonnie aside and took Lou in my arms. She rubbed her lasagna-covered hands into her eyes and into her hair. She wiped her face on my blouse. She was doing her distress cry, and I felt my milk let down. I rummaged in my pocket for a pacifier and pushed it into her mouth, and she plunked her little head down on my shoulder.
“Oh,” said Lonnie. “She still takes a pacifier?”
I thought of all I had to do in the next twenty minutes: take Lou into the bathroom, run the bath, wash her, dry her, rediaper her, get her in her pajamas, nurse her—all that bending down, all that lifting her off the floor, all that rocking—and then the long, sleepless night ahead of us. I thought of all I had to do in the next two days: find a way to nurse Lou during the funeral, find a way not to shout at Lonnie about being too rough with Lou, get Lou down for her naps, get her down in the evening, pretend the next morning that she had slept through the night, drink Lonnie’s cheap supermarket coffee and artificial creamer, listen to her talk about nap-time schedules and pacifier use. And then, of course, there’d be the inevitable argument about how Barry Sr. had been a good man and a good father, how he had a “light” within him that only she could see. I thought of all I had to do, and I wanted to crawl under the table and cry.
“Gotta go,” Lonnie said. She kissed Barry’s forehead and waved to Lou and me. “I’ll be back around four,” she said, meaning four in the morning. “The funeral is at one tomorrow. I’ll try to be up by ten.”
“Sleep in,” I said. “We can look after ourselves.”
“I’ll be up,” she said. “I’ll make pancakes for Lou.”
The second she was out the door I blasted the air-conditioning. I let loose a monologue on Midwesterners’ reluctance to turn on their air. I was talking to no one but myself.
&nbs
p; “Can you just try?” Barry said. He had taken Lou from me, and she was crawling around the kitchen, leaving lasagna handprints on the linoleum while he did the dishes.
“I could, yes. I could try. I’m actually trying to try.”
“Fuck,” said Barry.
“I know,” I said. “I’m in the wrong.”
“She’s a really nice person,” Barry said. “I like my sister.”
I picked up Lou and held her on my hip. “Sometimes Mommy is a jerk,” I said in a squeaky voice. I wet a dish towel and moved it around the floor with my foot. “Mommy is sorry.”
“You’re being so aggressive,” Barry said. He took Lou from me, and I saw that he hadn’t been doing the dishes: he’d been turning the sink into a little bathtub. He wiggled Lou out of her clothes, then held her by her underarms while I took off her diaper. He placed her gently in the sink, and I put my hand in the water to test it. The water was too cold, but I didn’t say anything.
“She’s had a tough time, Edie,” he said. “She really misses Jerry and the kids.”
“She should be with them then.” I didn’t want to talk about Lonnie’s “tough time.” Her husband, Jerry, had gotten a job in Toronto, and she had refused to go with him. Her kids had had so much fun visiting Jerry over spring break that once school let out they asked to spend the summer with him. They were all talking about applying for citizenship.
“She has a job here,” said Barry. “All her friends. She’s lived here her whole life. It’s not easy to just uproot like that. Jerry didn’t even ask her—he just took the job. Imagine that, me taking a job without talking to you. I respect that she stood her ground.”
“Okay, sweetie,” I said. I put my hand over his mouth so that he would stop talking. “Shh,” I said.
“I don’t know why you dislike her so much,” Barry said.
“We really need to start putting Lou in that boot,” I said.
“When we get home.”
“We’ll start then.”
I found a beer in the fridge and watched my husband wash Lou. He filled a glass and tipped it over her head. He had found the bottle of baby shampoo I’d packed with our toiletries and was soaping her with it. He shaped her hair into a tiny mohawk. I wanted to tell him to protect her from the hard faucet by wrapping a dishcloth around it. I wanted to tell him that she was getting cold. He tipped too much water over her head, and she began to cry. I pretended that my feet were glued to the floor and that I couldn’t rescue her from my husband’s rough grasp. She looked at me with her sweet, helpless face, and I watched her little tongue quiver while she cried. Barry told her it was all right. He told her he was almost done. He lifted her out of the sink and looked around desperately for a towel. He was holding her directly under the air vent and she was shivering, and I couldn’t help it, I snatched her out of his arms and ran with her into the bathroom, where I swaddled her in one of Lonnie’s aquamarine bath towels and held her until she stopped crying.
“You make me feel like a horrible father,” Barry yelled from behind the closed bathroom door, “when you do things like that.”
* * *
—
Lou slept on my chest in the dark of the bedroom while I watched the news on Lonnie’s shitty black-and-white TV. Her chin dug into my collarbone. Barry was in the living room doing angry push-ups. It was a little after two. I’d just fed Lou. I knew I should sleep. I could get maybe two hours before she woke again to nurse. I heard Barry setting up the fold-out couch. I thought about what I would tell Lonnie when she got home. He snores? I wanted to watch TV? The truth, which was that he was starting to sense I didn’t want him around?
At that hour, every news story was about child abuse or murder. Some woman had decapitated her newborn in the neighborhood adjacent to Lonnie’s. Men were murdering people all over the state.
Who would raise Lou if Barry and I died? Barry and I argued a lot about this and we had argued about it that night. He insisted that Lonnie was the only option. The thought made me dizzy with rage. I did not want Lou to grow up in suburban Cincinnati with a woman who did not question the world. I did not want Lou shopping at big-box stores, saying grace before meals, going to church on Sundays. I did not want her to hear a bunch of lies about how Barry Sr. had been a good father, when the truth was that he was nothing but a philandering alcoholic.
Barry and I thought of ourselves as intellectuals, as artists. We thought of ourselves as sensitive people, enlightened people. We wanted Lou to grow up going to readings and gallery openings; we wanted to reframe what she learned in school from a feminist perspective, to talk to her about the civil rights movement, gay rights, the whole bit. I didn’t want someone like Lonnie raising my baby. I did not want my baby left to cry alone.
But there were no other options. I had lost touch with my own family ages ago. Like Barry’s mother, I had decided to cease to exist.
* * *
—
“You fixate on something, and you let it ruin your day,” whispered Barry. “You can nurse Lou in the bathroom.” He pointed down a stone hallway past the church’s coat-check room. I wore a black V-neck dress that I could easily pull aside for Lou and control-top tights that were giving me gas. The church was refreshingly cool. Lou didn’t have any black clothing so we dressed her in a little chambray dress and white sandals. I waited for Lonnie to comment on her outfit but she said nothing. She had her hair in a tight bun and wore a black pantsuit, a gold cross peeking out beneath the blazer. She had on black running shoes, which she kept apologizing for. Barry held my purse while Lou and I went into the bathroom, under the guise of me having to change her diaper. I sat on the toilet, her little sandaled foot kicking the roll of toilet paper. She was too distracted to nurse, her eyes flitting wildly around the bathroom stall. My arms shook with her weight, and I felt the sweat forming on my forehead. I had slept maybe three hours. I gathered my breasts back into the dress and fussed with myself in the mirror while I held Lou with one arm. I kissed her forehead, then found Barry and Lonnie waiting for us in the vestibule. They were holding each other like children. Lonnie had her head on Barry’s shoulder. I was not there for either one of them.
We sat in the cold of the church, in the front pews, Barry Sr.’s casket in front of the altar. The priest said a few words, and then it was over. I waited for Lonnie to stand up, reach into her blazer, and pull out a long speech about her father, but she sat there, unmoving. At the cemetery, we watched Barry Sr. be lowered into the ground. Barry leaned against me. I felt his legs buckle and I thrust Lou into Lonnie’s arms so I could hold Barry as he stared into the grass, on all fours. “Stop the planet,” I whispered to Barry. I was trying to be funny. I was trying to lighten the mood.
“Not now, Edie,” he said.
I could hear lawn mowers and the high whine of cicadas and Barry’s breathing. The cemetery was the oldest in the city, inspired by the Père Lachaise in Paris, and was also an arboretum. I thought that maybe I wanted to be buried there, next to Barry. I still think I might, even though we live apart now. I have these horrible moments of regret that leave me catatonic, but Barry is with someone else, and, truthfully, I am more at peace now that I live on my own. Lou is grown, of course. She is a sculptor in New York City. Last year, she made $12,000 on one sculpture alone. I visit her two or three times a year. One time, she had too many glasses of wine and told me she can never get married because it would be too hard for her to have me and Barry in the same room. She said the thought of it fills her with anxiety, that she stays up all night trying to figure out how to organize the ceremony so that we feel that she loves us equally. I had to laugh. I told her when the day came we would behave. I told her she had to think of her own happiness.
When Barry and I stood again, Lou was asleep on Lonnie’s shoulder. Lonnie was stroking the back of her head and whispering to her that she was the most beautiful girl in the world
. It was stiflingly hot—already late afternoon—and Lonnie must have been dying in that black pantsuit. I saw how capable Lonnie was in that moment, how selfless. I brushed a mosquito away from her hand. I asked if she wanted me to take Lou but she shook her head. There were thunderheads on the horizon, and I wished desperately for a summer storm, something to blow the heat out of the city. I wanted crazy lightning. I wanted to count the seconds between the thunder and explain it to Lou.
Barry Sr. was buried, and we were headed toward the car, but no one seemed to be in any rush to get there. “You know something, Lonnie,” Barry said. He had taken off his blazer and was rolling up his sleeves. He shielded his eyes from the sun. “I thought Mom might’ve showed up today.”
Lonnie repositioned Lou onto her other shoulder. Lou’s body was entirely slack, her mouth open. She made a little sighing sound, and I felt my milk let down. I think I was afraid to put her in the special boot because I was afraid it would make her cry. I felt so frightened when Lou cried.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Lonnie said.
“I’d like to see her again,” Barry said. “Even if she doesn’t want to see me.”
“I can think of a few things I’d say to her,” said Lonnie, and I smiled, liking her in the moment.
“So,” Barry said. He was leaning up against Lonnie’s car now, fiddling with a button on his shirt. “Hey, so, did Dad leave a will?”
“Oh,” Lonnie said. “Let’s not do this now.” She looked at me and then at the front of my dress, which was soaked through. “You’re leaking, Edie.” She dug in her pocket for a Kleenex and passed it to me. “Takes a while to dry up, as I recall.”
The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018 Page 8