A Better Man

by Leah McLaren

  “Motherfucker!” She pushes her son’s sturdy shoulders away from her chest and watches as his head comes away last, the suction of mouth on nipple breaking with a pop, his head snapping back. On her areola there is black bead of blood; she wipes it off with her thumb and licks it, tasting the sweet, milky mixture of two vital fluids. Foster stares past her, lazy-lashed and drunk on oxytocin, oblivious to her pain. She mops up her breast before tucking it back into the nursing bra. There is no point in scolding him, she knows. Praise the good, ignore the bad. It’s her own fault for not being able to stop. Every week she promises herself that next week she’ll wean them for good, but then Monday rolls around and with it the moody morning vicissitudes, the restlessness of bedtime, and she reverts back to the old way. She can feel Nick’s silent disapproval mounting with each week the breastfeeding goes on. She knows what he thinks: that she’s doing it for her own selfish, needy reasons rather than for the twins’ well-being. The truth is, three years after their birth (a botched home birth turned emergency C-section overseen by a disapproving doula and a team of unflappable thirty-year-old female surgeons), she still finds it hard to pinpoint where she ends and her children begin. She knows people think it’s strange—possibly even disgusting—this business of nursing one’s children well past the infant stage. But what about the importance of unconditional love? What about the foundations of security such closeness can bring? What of the natural immunity? Maya wouldn’t tell a soul, but a deep-seated part of her believes that she is protecting her children with her breast milk. And that without this magic elixir, intimately administered in the ancient way—skin on skin, nipple to mouth—something awful might happen. Madness, illness, destruction, even death … And so she persists.

  Now that Foster’s finished, Isla, who’s been looking at a gender-neutral picture book about dinosaurs, swivels across the bed for her turn. Maya reflects for the zillionth time on how amazing it is that they never refuse it, no matter how much dairy and processed breakfast gluten (she’s trying to get them off oatmeal and onto quinoa porridge, to little avail) they clog themselves with first. No matter what, the primordial thirst wins out. Surely they will lose their taste for it eventually, but when will that be? Five? Ten? Fifteen years? Could mammals actually lactate that long without having more offspring? Maya knows such things don’t realistically bear thinking about, but she’s also secretly pleased with her ability to turn mothering into a kind of endurance sport. Where other mothers detach, she persists—the contours of her existence blurring into her children’s development so that all their previous selves, from infancy to kidhood, are imprinted on her skin, a burgeoning palimpsest in bodily fluids.

  Isla’s on her lap now, head nuzzling under Maya’s collarbone, on the spot where she once slept as a baby. (Can she remember this in some subconscious recess of her brain?) She draws her knees up to her chest and wriggles into the fleshy curve of her mother’s hips, snuggling down like a baby kangaroo in her pouch. Before Maya even has a chance to unhook, Isla’s hand has snuck inside her top. She looks up, face full of trust and wonder, and opens her lips to whisper something. Maya leans in to hear her daughter’s secret and decides that this—above all else—is the reason she persists. Yes, it must be.

  “Mommy?” says Isla.

  “Yes, honey?”

  “Motherfucker.” And she latches on for her morning drink.

  When in doubt, seek professional help. This is one of Maya’s core beliefs—one of the few she still seems to share with her husband. For every problem, there is a person whose job is to solve it. She believes this fervently, and yet there is the nagging fear that her mother—a bread-baking retired academic—might be right. That if she keeps on outsourcing more and more efficiently, eventually she will become a tiny bit player in her own life, with all the lead roles taken by talented, competent professionals.

  She would be lost without Velma, who comes ten hours a day, five days a week, forty-eight weeks of the year (the remainder a paid holiday). Officially Velma is the twins’ nanny, but in reality she’s also the family cleaner, cook, gardener, handywoman, finder of lost remotes and socks and keys, putter-together-of-Ikea-furniture, writer of thank-you notes, jump-starter of cars, spiritual counsellor, massage therapist, gadget IT support and, if Maya is honest with herself, the other human adult she talks to most.

  Each morning, when the twins are at preschool and Maya has returned from the gym, Velma makes a pot of tea and they convene in the kitchen for girl talk. They would never call it that, of course. Officially, they are employer and employee, mistress and servant, lady-of-the-house and lady-in-waiting. But their chit-chat allows them both to forget this arrangement and act like something less awkward and old-fashioned is going on. For Maya, these bonding sessions assuage her guilt at engaging someone else to hand-wash her delicates despite being unemployed herself. For Velma, a twice-divorced former Brazilian pageant contestant (runner-up, Miss Curitiba 1978) now in her late fifties, it’s just a welcome distraction while she gets on with the daily business of sterilizing the counter, reorganizing the fridge and cleaning the corners of the window ledge with a Q-tip. From the cuffs of her tight white jeans to the points of her gel-manicured fingertips, Velma is a superior human being in every way.

  Ever since Velma bustled into their lives three years ago, hoisting a bottle sterilizer and case of Diet Coke against her broad and perfumed bosom, Maya’s household has ceased to be within her own control. One tearful postpartum call to an upmarket child-care agency was all it took to produce this splendidly tanned and cheaply Botoxed Mary Poppins busting out of an emerald sateen blouse. After casting a spell over the writhing, colicky twins (Velma’s method included the ministration of ominous-looking herbal tinctures, some open-handed back-thwacking and swaddling that resembled a straitjacket), she set to work on sorting out the house and, finally, Maya herself. While Velma has succeeded in alphabetizing the spice rack, dry cleaning the curtains, washing the walls and ridding the pillows of dust mites, her campaign to get Maya to “do something with that hair” and put on a little weight “for the sake of your face” has not been nearly as successful.

  Despite this, their domestic companionship has taken on a comfortable rhythm, with Velma running the show while Maya watches gratefully from the sidelines, calling the occasional cue like a well-intentioned but unnecessary stage manager in a long-running Broadway musical. The unflinching competence with which Velma attacks the chaos of a post-breakfast kitchen or soothes a crying toddler is enough to make Maya despair at her own lack of firm domestic instinct. Like all great mistresses of the domestic arts, Velma manages to be bossy and loving by turns. “Watch! Like this!” Velma is always saying, while swabbing gravel from a scraped knee, suctioning water from a toddler’s ear or turning over a perfect tarte Tatin. “You see? Easy-peasy.” But for Maya, it never feels that way. For Maya, domestic perfection is a daily battle. For Velma, it’s a vocation.

  In between the cleaning and cooking and child care, they talk about stuff: Velma’s daughters (now twenty-seven and thirty—one a plastic surgeon in Rio and the other a fashion buyer for a major downtown department store), their respective childhoods, places they’ve lived, holidays they’ve taken, grooming secrets, cooking tips, celebrity gossip, high-profile murder trials, political sex scandals. But mostly they revert to their favourite subject, which is the twins.

  “You should have seen Foster at the playground yesterday,” says Velma while polishing the good crystal wine glasses using the espresso machine steamer—something Maya would never have thought of in a million years. “Strutting around like he owned the place. At one point he actually went over to the gate and started choosing which children can come in and which ones he doesn’t like the look of. Such a healthy little ego on that boy.”

  “Let’s hope he doesn’t have sociopathic tendencies,” says Maya. “You haven’t noticed him killing any stray cats have you?”

  Velma’s laugh is a pealing church bell. “Oh, honey, you d
on’t have to worry about that. He’s going to be wonderful. He’s very proud but also very sensitive and full of heart. Remember the time he knocked Isla off her trike and then tried to take off his Band-Aid to put over her bloody nose? That was so sweet. Come to think of it, he reminds me of my second ex-husband.”

  “What was he like?” Maya is intrigued. While Velma devotes plenty of airtime to her two daughters, she rarely mentions either of her ex-husbands, both of whom are back in Rio.

  “Oh, so handsome. A handsome devil—a salesman who could charm the pants off an Eskimo.”

  “How long were you with him?”

  “Only two years. He was a madman—no offence to Foster—but it was worth it because the crazy attraction I felt for him gave me the courage to leave my first marriage. You know that one lasted a long time. Over ten years. Much longer than it should have.”

  “Why?”

  Velma shrugs, then gives the crystal glass another blast of hot steam. “I dunno. Why does anything need to end? I suppose I got a bit”—she jiggles her shoulders this way and that, causing her mane of frosted tips to quiver around her face—”I guess you would call it restless. I had to run. To dance. To get a new life! Looking back I’ve never questioned it. If I hadn’t left him, I wouldn’t be standing here today.” She spreads her arms, still holding the tea towel with a generous smile.

  “But your first husband, you were with him so long. You must have met him very young. He is the father of your children, isn’t he?” Maya hears a note of urgency creep into her voice.

  Velma looks confused. “Yes? So? People change. Carlos was a good man, but in the end I was so terribly bored. I had to get out or die. And I did, and here I am.”

  A fizzing wave of anxiety washes over Maya. This is not about you, silly, she tells herself. She looks down, blinking and stretching her face at the marble chopping block, but it’s no use. The tears have been lurking just below the surface lately, welling up and seeping out whenever she’s reminded of the happy past—back when she and Nick could bear to look each other in the eye. Earlier today, after feeding the twins, she spent ten minutes sitting in a chair, attempting to channel the Law of Wanting—a fanciful notion she’d just read about in The Way. The idea is to concentrate on the thing you want most, and the universe will hear you and grant your wish. I want my husband to love me again, she’d thought over and over, like a mantra. But the wanting only served to remind her of the loss. It wasn’t that she wanted love so much as that she couldn’t figure out where it had gone.

  Velma registers the tears and rushes to put her arms around her. “What’s the matter? Oh, Lord, what stupid idiot thing did I say? Tell me and I’ll chew up my words!” She mimes plucking words from the air and shoving them into her mouth and swallowing.

  Maya laughs and wipes her nose with the cuff of her yoga jacket. “It’s nothing, really. It’s just … sometimes I think Nick feels about me the way you feel about Carlos. It’s like I’m just there. A fixture he’s getting increasingly sick of. Like, like”—she looks around the kitchen, searching for a metaphor—”like an old backsplash.”

  Velma raises an eyebrow. “A what?”

  “You know, a backsplash. The tiles that go on the wall over the counter. People always change them when they renovate. That was the first thing Nick changed when we bought this house. The old terracotta backsplash—unacceptably 1990s, he said. He wanted European subway tiles. The point is, an updated backsplash gives an old kitchen new life.” Her voice snags in her throat mid-sob. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’m sorry.”

  Velma hands her a hanky, and instead of wiping, Maya pats at her face the way her dermatologist taught her, then snuffles like a congested pug.

  “But why do you assume you’re the backsplash and not the kitchen?” asks Velma.

  “What do you mean?” Maya begins to wonder if this metaphor hasn’t run its course.

  “Well, you assume you’re the old backsplash, but maybe you’re the old kitchen and all you need is a new backsplash to update your look. Or maybe your marriage is the old kitchen and the two of you can get a new backsplash together and then everything will be fine.”

  Maya knows she needs to be careful. Apart from the odd eye-rolling joke, she hasn’t let Velma in on the hole in the centre of her marriage. In part this is because she doesn’t quite know how to articulate what’s wrong. She and Nick almost never fight, yet their mutual dissatisfaction is palpable in countless unspoken ways. Maya is suddenly overcome by the fatigue of long-term denial. She wants to tell someone—anyone, really, but Velma especially—how unhappy she is. But she knows she shouldn’t. This house—this family—is also Velma’s livelihood. She’s as protective of it as Maya is, maybe more so.

  “Oh, it’s fine, really. Things have just been a bit strained lately. Nick’s been working so much and I’ve been focused on the kids.”

  Velma uncrosses her arms and places a hand on each hip. “And your sex life?” she says.

  Maya cringes. She’s always resented the notion that sexual relations could constitute an entire parallel life outside of regular existence. No one asked you about your “eating life” or your “exercise life” or your “sleeping life” or your “job life,” so why should sex be any different?

  “What about it?”

  “Are you doing it? Regularly? Or have you fallen off the horse?”

  Maya can’t meet Velma’s eyes. Her tongue feels mossy from too much green tea.

  “I think it began to tail off around the time we started co-sleeping.”

  “You mean after you had the babies?”

  “More or less. I mean, yes.”

  Velma nods, hands on hips. “I know what you need. I read about this in one of those silly magazines, but in this case it’s actually a very good idea. It’s called the ‘date night.’ You put on a nice dress, drink a few cocktails, talk about something other than the kids. In my day we did that every weekend. Then again, when my girls were the twins’ age I was in my twenties and living with my husband’s entire family.”

  Maya grimaces. “It’s true we never go out together anymore. I mean, there’s his annual awards gala, the whatever-they’re-calleds, but I didn’t go this year.”

  “Why not?”

  “Isla had a cold. Remember that awful hacking cough she had last winter?”

  “And what? You had to watch her while she sniffled in her sleep? I couldn’t do that for you?”

  “No! She was just being, you know, a bit weepy and clingy, and I felt she needed to know that I was there, otherwise her foundation of trust might be eroded or … oh, I don’t know. Okay, the truth is I just didn’t feel like going.”

  “And why didn’t you feel like going?” Velma lifts up the elements and scrubs some grease off the stovetop. She stares hard at Maya, indicating she will tolerate nothing less than the truth. Maya feels herself shrink in deference.

  “I guess I haven’t had much use for parties—or date nights, for that matter—since the twins were born. It all just seems so superficial when there are two small lives I’m now responsible for. Well, we are.” She smiles sheepishly at Velma.

  Velma rolls her eyes with dramatic disapproval. “You’re kidding me, honey. Seriously?”

  Maya blinks, then blows a wisp of hair from her face. She knows what Velma is going to say without her needing to say it—that the twins are three years old and well taken care of, so why would it be risking their lives to go out and have some fun once in a while? And even more to the point, that it’s not in anyone’s best interests to sacrifice her relationship with Nick to assuage some deep-seated reptilian fear that if she leaves her children for more than a couple of hours at a time, they will end up corrupted, maimed or buried in an avalanche of refined sugar. She knows all this, and yet she finds it hard to override the anxious primal urges that brought her to this juncture in the first place.

  “Have you tried talking to Nick?”

  “About what?”

  “Ab
out this feeling you have—that he doesn’t love you the same way anymore?”

  Velma says this matter-of-factly, but it still manages to take Maya’s breath away.

  She shakes her head. “We never talk about our feelings,” she says weakly. “But at least we don’t really fight. There’s got to be some good in that.”

  Velma looks unconvinced. “See, that’s just where you’re wrong. A little fighting is good for a marriage. Back home everybody says, ‘When you fight, you fuck.’ Is true, no?”

  Maya looks down at her hands. She has heard this theory before.

  “Maybe that’s what you’re missing—the howyoucallit?” Velma plucks an elastic band off the counter and extends it back, letting it snap against her fingers.

  “Tension?”

  “Yes, the tension! Exactly. This is what holds couples together. Like the sun and the moon.”

  “You think?” Maya wouldn’t begin to know how to pick a fight with her husband, even if she wanted to—or this is what she tells herself, conveniently ignoring the adversarial side of her brain, the side she set adrift when she left the law. The fact is, while she and Nick have almost no conflict to speak of, the resentment between them is constant and palpable—it just doesn’t lead anywhere. Not to a fight and not to sex. Their marriage, these days, feels like a state of dull discomfort. A pain so familiar that it wears on her like a chronic injury—too unpleasant to ignore, too boring to mention.

  For a moment Maya wonders if it’s her fault for not demanding more of her husband. For not calling him at work and ordering him to get home early or bickering over laundry and blown light bulbs. She read a self-help book once about how men prefer bitchy women because their selfish behaviour is a subconscious indicator of self-worth, which men in turn interpret as objective value in a mate. For a while after that, she tried to be difficult just for the sake of being difficult. But her heart wasn’t in it. She liked to think of herself as bloody-minded and tough, but in truth, she was in her own life acquiescent and deferential to the point of absurdity. Why else had she failed to wean her babies after three years? Because they kept asking for “mommy milk.” Why else had she potty-trained them by eighteen months? Because a book told her that’s what good mothers do and she was determined to do things by the book. Another ludicrous case in point: here she was taking marital advice from Velma, a two-time divorcee and avowed singleton (she often said she’d be damned if she ever “washed anyone else’s socks again without being paid for it,” which Maya thought was eminently sensible).