by Emily Gould
Laura sailed through the class undisturbed by Marie, who seemed uncharacteristically subdued. As the other babies clapped and flailed along to Laura’s original composition about an octopus who needs to buy—but cannot afford—eight new shoes (semiautobiographical in origin), Marie sat at the periphery of the circle, chewing listlessly on someone else’s expensive rubber giraffe. Laura imagined that Marie was attaining some new milestone of maturity and could now intuit when her mother needed her to be calm. They were going to work together as a team now, Laura thought, and her heart swelled. The true cause of Marie’s newfound mature attitude revealed itself, though, as class was ending, when she simultaneously puked and shat herself so profoundly that Laura had to rush off to the bathroom to change her clothes. The moms and nannies of the other students looked on in horror as Laura hustled a wailing, drippy Marie into the yoga studio’s pristine, lavender-scented bathroom. Three of those bitches had arrived late and had not yet paid. “We’ll get you next time, Laura!” one of them had the grace to shout through the door on her way out; the other two didn’t even mention it. Even though thirty dollars wasn’t the difference between what Laura had and what she owed her landlord—three hundred was more like it—it was still enough to make her feel a flush of rage as she stuffed Marie’s sodden, reeking onesie and leggings into a plastic bag, resisting the temptation to just throw them away. She finished wiping Marie down as best she could despite her vehement protests, then sat on the toilet to comfort her with a boob so that she would chill out enough to be put into the carrier. Marie’s fluffy head was damp with sweat. How had she become so sick so quickly? Laura bent down and kissed her poor little baby’s clammy brow while dialing the only phone number she knew by heart.
On the third try, Callie finally answered, and Laura hastily begged her to come to Brooklyn and take care of Marie while she taught the rest of her classes.
She heard Callie shifting around and making bleary thumping sounds. “Are you trying to figure out what time it is? It’s ten thirty a.m.,” said Laura. Laura always knew what time it was, now.
“Can you not be a bitch for a second? I’m just waking up. How long do you need me to take her for? We’ve got band practice later. I mean, I do.”
“I just need you until my last class of the day gets out; it’s near the apartment, so I should be home by four fifteen. You could be back in Manhattan by five, probably. The other thing is, the reason I need you to take her is that she’s sick, but you won’t need to do anything except keep an eye on her fever. She’ll probably just snooze for most of the day,” Laura said, hoping she was telling the truth. “Oh, and the apartment is a bit of a mess, I apologize in advance.”
Callie sighed. “So, wait, I’m going to be exposed to some super-toxic baby germs? I can’t get sick right now, dude. And you know I’m not a baby expert.”
This was true. Laura avoided asking Callie for help except in cases like this one, when she absolutely could not avoid it. Everyone else she knew in New York was either a late-night acquaintance, like Alexis, or a fellow new mom with her own shit to deal with. Callie was still her closest friend, and as underqualified as she was as a babysitter, she at least would show up, however late, and do it. She meant well, and didn’t hate kids by any means. It wasn’t her fault that she didn’t operate on a momlike frequency. She didn’t understand those little semi-intuitive things, like how to figure out that Marie needed to nap and put her down before she became punch-drunk, overtired, and inconsolable. Once, after Callie had been called in to emergency-babysit, Laura had discovered Marie’s onesie fastened underneath her diaper.
Laura sighed. “Callie, I am really sorry about this, but I wouldn’t ask if I wasn’t in a total bind. I can’t afford to miss my classes, and if I pay a sitter, it’ll cost just as much as missing them. Can you please try to get to my place before noon? I really think she’ll just sleep, and I will totally owe you one.”
“One what? Redeemable when?” Callie said, in a way that seemed like she mostly was kidding, but almost not.
Laura snapped. “If anyone owes anyone anything, Callie, it’s you! I could be waking up at noon and doing what you’re doing, if it wasn’t for …”
“Well, that was your choice!”
Laura thought she could hear tears in Callie’s voice. She always had been an easy cry. It was always how she’d won fights; it was impossible to yell at a crying person.
“What am I supposed to do, sit out everything good in life until you’re ready to rejoin me?”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be harsh, I’m just running on so little sleep here and I … look, you’ll come, right?”
“I don’t know.” Callie sniffed and paused, but Laura knew she would help. She would be late and resentful, and she would put in the bare minimum, but she would come.
Laura managed to get most of the way home before Marie puked again, warm liquid squishing against her chest and immediately turning cold in the early-spring air. They entered the apartment building with Marie wailing, but in a subdued way that conveyed her extreme dissatisfaction with the state of affairs in the carrier as well as her weakened condition. As repulsed as part of Laura felt by her barf-covered baby and self, the other part of her—the animal that had not existed before Marie was born—wanted nothing more than to comfort Marie and hold her close, no matter what vile substances covered her. She ran up the four flights of stairs to minimize her neighbors’ exposure to the sound, shucked the guitar, carrier, and diaper bag as soon as she entered the apartment, then stripped both herself and Marie naked just inside the front door and walked straight into the shower. She would throw all their wet clothes into a plastic bag later, she told herself. Marie was not a fan of this experience, but by the time they were rinsed clean, her hoarse protest cries had begun to taper into resigned, sustained whining. As quickly as she could, Laura got the limp-limbed baby into a diaper and set her in her crib, where she ratcheted up to sob screams again for the twenty-five seconds it took Laura to put on underpants and the T-shirt she’d slept in. Finally she scooped up Marie and lay down with her in the unmade bed, where Marie lunged for a boob and fell asleep within seconds. Laura shifted around, getting as comfortable as possible in the odd side-lying position that Marie’s presence next to her necessitated, and made a mental note to wake up before Callie arrived and try to get the apartment looking baseline livable, then fell asleep and didn’t wake up again until she heard the buzzer. She looked at the clock. It was twelve thirty; her class was half an hour away at a toy store in Fort Greene.
Complaining about Callie’s lateness was probably not the best way to greet her, but Laura’s panic had to rest somewhere. Callie shrugged and waved her hand in front of her face to indicate that the apartment smelled bad. She was wearing a suede miniskirt, long dangly earrings, and hot-pink lipstick. Had she spent an extra half hour making herself cute?! It was an impulse that Laura could no longer relate to on any level. She handed Callie a seminude Marie, who at least was not crying, and hurriedly shoved the barf clothes pile into a trash bag.
“I’m sorry about the smell. I’ll open a window. I didn’t have time to make a bottle, but there are bags of pumped milk in the freezer—you know how to defrost them, right?—and she probably won’t be hungry anyway. Do you know how to take her temperature? It would be great if you can keep an eye on it. And there’s baby Tylenol around here somewhere that you can give her. Oh, and can you put clothes on her?”
Marie was, mercifully, not seeming all that sick at the moment; her nap had renewed her and she was happily bababaing and playing with Callie’s long earrings.
“Watch out,” Laura warned. “She’ll yank those right through your earlobe.”
Callie put Marie down on the floor so that she could remove her jewelry, and Marie immediately scuttled over to a puke-soaked sock that Laura had missed and began happily waving it around. Puke droplets spattered onto the grimy floorboards. Marie grinned up at Laura and Callie with total trust and joy.
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br /> “Oh my God, she’s so gross,” Callie said quietly.
Laura had an almost uncontrollable impulse to scoop Marie up into her arms and tell Callie never mind, that she would skip her classes and stay with her baby. But, she reminded herself, there was an outside chance, if attendance was good, that she would be able to make enough money today to at least give her landlord the impression that she was trying very, very hard and would be able to pay the remainder of her rent within the week. Callie might not be Mary Poppins, but she would keep Marie alive, and being able to keep living in their own apartment was worth one less-than-stellar afternoon of Marie’s life.
Laura ran to the bedroom part of the studio and threw on leggings, a bra and an oversize, not-too-stained cardigan in a bright color that the babies in her classes seemed to like, grabbed her guitar, and snuck out of the apartment as quickly as possible; long goodbyes only made Marie more unhappy. With a final apology to Callie, who was picking up the wet clothes on the floor with the very tips of her painted fingernails, Laura ran down the stairs, filled with the feeling of having forgotten something vital. She had her keys, wallet, phone, and guitar, though; the feeling that nagged at her was the absence of Marie’s soft weight against her chest. For the first block of her sprint northward she fought back a dumb lump of tears that threatened to emerge from her throat, but soon she began to feel light and even a little bit free. It was extremely rare for her to be without Marie, and even though it was strange and sad, she couldn’t help but also feel that it was nice, for a moment, to be out in the world alone.
The first of the afternoon’s classes passed without incident and with a decent number of babies enrolled, and Laura decided to treat herself by going to the diner across the street to get a cup of soup to go. She even had a small break to eat it, about ten minutes. She thought about calling Callie to check in but decided that fewer distractions were probably better.
But as she opened the lid of the paper container full of soup and the warm, brothy smell rose to her nostrils, Laura was assailed by a wave of nausea. “Fuuuuuck,” she murmured aloud, and the toy store clerk, seated at the register a few feet away from the bench where Laura was crouching, gave her a schoolmarmish “There are children present” look, even though currently there were none. Laura sat very still, willing the feeling to subside, but there was no getting around it: she had been puked on, and she would not escape unscathed.
“I have to cancel the rest of the day’s classes,” she told the officious toy store lady. “I’m feeling sick, and I shouldn’t be around the babies.”
“I understand, Laura, but we really need someone reliable teaching these classes,” said the lady, who was quickly becoming Laura’s mortal enemy. “If you can’t teach, you know that it’s your responsibility to find a sub.”
“Of course. I’ll give it a shot. I’m just going to use the restroom first,” said Laura, hustling the words out as quickly as possible with the certain, doomy foreknowledge that there was vomit hot on their heels.
In the brief, illusory period of feeling shaky but okay that followed immediately after she’d emptied her stomach into the receptacle labeled “Tiddle-Tidy the big-kid potty,” Laura called Johannes, the only other children’s musician whose number was in her phone. Once she’d managed to ascertain that her afternoon classes would be covered, she pressed her hot forehead to the cool rim of Tiddle-Tidy for a moment before gathering her strength and wobbling back out into the store.
“Johannes is coming,” she said as she walked past the desk. “Thanks for understanding; see you on Tuesday.”
“You’ll definitely make it?”
Laura was too sick and enervated to even expend the emotional energy being annoyed. “Of course,” she said, and hurried to leave before she had to throw up again.
* * *
When she got back to the apartment, Marie was practicing pulling herself up on the coffee table and banging on it with a wooden spoon, and Callie was lying on the couch, looking as exhausted as Laura felt even though it had been only an hour and a half since she’d left.
“Looks like someone’s feeling better!”
“Oh my God, Laura, she’s relentless! If she isn’t trying to crawl into the bathroom to play in the toilet, she’s yelling nonsense at the top of her lungs and insisting that I try a bite of her toys. I have no idea how you manage to handle this twenty-four/seven. Hey, aren’t you home early?”
Laura sank to her knees next to Marie and felt her forehead, then kept sinking till she was lying on the ground. Marie crawled on top of her, pulled herself up, and started biting her shoulder, grunting with excitement. “Yeah, I had to bail. I think I’m coming down with Marie’s stomach flu. I really hope you don’t get it.”
“No worries. I made sure not to touch her.”
“You what?”
“I just shooed her away from places she shouldn’t be with my foot.”
Laura paused for a moment, willing herself not to be annoyed at Callie. “She probably needs a diaper change …” She paused and sniffed Marie’s butt. “Wow. Yeah, she definitely—ugh, fuck.”
Disengaging herself from Marie’s clutching hands as quickly as possible, Laura lurched into the bathroom, just managing to shut the door so that Marie wouldn’t follow her. As she heaved, she heard Callie through the door.
“I’m gonna go, but just call me if you need anything, okay? Oh, and also your landlord came by—did you know your rent is overdue? He said he’d be back again later to pick it up.”
Laura rested, dizzy, then vomited again. “I don’t have it,” she said, not sure if she was talking loudly enough for Callie to hear.
When she emerged, she was surprised to see that Callie was still there, and that her vintage pink plastic purse was open on the coffee table. “How much are you short?”
“A lot. You really don’t have to … I wasn’t asking.”
“Is two hundred fifty enough? That’s all the cash I have on me.”
“That’s amazing. I’ll get you back next week.” Laura smiled weakly, too sick to feel humiliated, just relieved. “You’re a lifesaver, Callie, seriously. Thank you so much for this.”
“You’re welcome, and next time, just ask me, okay? Do not hug me. I’ll check in with you guys later. Bye, little monster,” she said, giving Marie a parting nudge with her heel.
Laura sank back down to the floor. It wasn’t even three yet, but all she wanted was for the rest of the day to be canceled, stricken from the calendar. Her immediate problem was solved, but a new one had presented itself: How was she supposed to take care of Marie while the only activity that she could really see herself doing for the next twenty-four hours was lying in bed shivering, occasionally getting up to vomit?
She wanted someone to bring her saltines and ginger ale, change the sheets, press a cold washcloth to her forehead. There was no one in her life like that, though. She was the person who brought saltines.
She picked Marie up off the floor and went to change her diaper. The poop was slightly more solid than it had been the last time she’d done so, but it still wasn’t a great sign that it was happening so often. Marie was, mercifully, much less fazed by being sick than Laura was. She smiled up at her mother as she changed her diaper and laughed uproariously as Laura bent forward to blow kisses on her warm little belly. Marie was so beautiful, Laura thought helplessly. They happened, these perfect moments, glittering brilliantly between the horrors. The afternoon stretched ahead of them, and Laura had no idea how she’d fill the four hours before bedtime. She was too sick to leave the apartment, and just the thought of the maneuvers necessary to get Marie back into outdoor clothes and strapped into the carrier made Laura feel like sandbags were pressing down on all her limbs. She put Marie down in the kitchen while she washed her hands at the sink, and when she turned around Marie was holding a butter knife she’d found somewhere, thoughtfully sawing it back and forth between her toothless gums. She just needed to stay occupied long enough that Laura could do so
me dishes, so that she wouldn’t be completely ashamed for their landlord to see the state of the apartment.
She shoved a threadbare VHS tape into the combination TV/VCR she’d found on a nearby curb and set Marie, who was still clutching the butter knife, down in front of it. To Laura’s chagrin, Marie was still too young to really care about TV but would usually get sucked in after a few minutes of the Sesame Street compilation’s brightly colored singing and talking. Laura pulled out her wallet in order to add what was in it to the cash that Callie had given—lent? Ugh, let’s hope given—her, hoping that her mental math was off and that she’d be at or possibly even over $750, the magic number.
“BA!” Marie shouted at the TV, gesturing with the knife, then turned her back on it to crawl over to where Laura was sitting. She pulled herself up on the edge of the coffee table and grabbed for the stack of twenty- and ten-dollar bills.
“Baby, Mommy is counting. Can you just watch TV, please? Look, Grover!” Laura’s head was pounding.
Marie, undeterred, stayed at the table’s edge, bouncing her big diapered butt happily up and down.
“Okay, you can help me count. Twenty, forty, sixty, eighty, one hundred!” She put the bills into neat piles. Marie watched, mesmerized. Laura tried to keep the disappointment out of her voice as she announced, “Seven hundred and ten!” at the end of the last sheaf of bills. She hurriedly shoved them back into her purse before Marie could grab them.
As if on cue, there was a knock at the door. Laura shivered with a combination of feverishness and dread. Even when she hadn’t done anything wrong, she still hated interacting with Sean, her landlord, who had the mien of a feudal lord visiting his serf’s hovel. The smell of his mentholated cologne would linger for hours, even if she didn’t let him sit down and get it on any of her furniture. This building, like most of the ones on her block, belonged to his family; this one was “his” to manage and maintain. He was blond with no eyebrows and always wore a Yankees cap, even in winter. Even though he couldn’t have been that much older than Laura, he oozed smug superiority, the contempt that city people feel for tourists. She wished that she’d had time to look harder for a place when she was pregnant, but it had become clear to her a little bit late in the game that having a baby and continuing to live in Callie’s East Village living room was a terrible idea, and she’d taken the first livable, theoretically affordable Brooklyn apartment that she’d seen. She’d been thinking of space for Marie and proximity to other people who had babies, even if she didn’t know them yet. She hadn’t thought about having to deal with someone like Sean. On Third Street, she and Callie had paid their rent by mailing checks to a PO box, which was only stressful because they had to remember to do it on time or else risk a sternly worded form letter and a fifteen-dollar fine. She had never paid Sean late or been short on the rent before, but he’d always counted it in front of her while leering at her milk-swollen boobs in a way that dared her to say something. In the context of Bar Lafitte, she would have laughed off a skinny, obviously powerless goon. In the context of the interior of her own apartment, it was less easy to do so.