by Rumaan Alam
She found a bench and gave him his bottle. Then he finished and recovered his equanimity. Whether or not he could see the birds, could recognize them as something akin to but different from himself, Rebecca couldn’t know. His body shook, not that perpetual quiver of a child’s body, but uncertainty, incompleteness. He was still so unformed. She wrapped her hands around his torso and he wobbled happily. “Duck,” she said. “Duck.” Then: “Duck!” A warning, a joke, she found it hilarious and laughed.
A brunette grinning so hard she looked idiotic pushed a stroller past Rebecca, hesitated, then asked if she could sit. Rebecca was accustomed to the smiles (the smiles concealed stares) and the half attempts at conversation. This was part of parenting, collegiality, but it was different with Andrew than it had been with Jacob. The only black people living in their neighborhood were some Nigerian millionaires who sent their daughters to school in Switzerland. Most people seemed to smile at Andrew the way they did the ducks.
“Of course.” Rebecca pantomimed making room, though she took up little space.
The woman sat, went about her settling, lifting the baby from its stroller, coaxing the pacifier back into its mouth. “How old?”
The argot of mothers. Shorthand for Can we be friends? “He’s nine months.”
The woman lifted the arms of the baby on her lap, as though in triumph. “What a sweetheart. This is Michael. He’s five months.”
“Hi, Michael.” This was the way such things were done; the mothers mere regents, vessels, unimportant, even though they were the ones conducting the conversation. “This is Andrew. I’m Rebecca.” These casual chats never blossomed into friendship, so she rarely learned or retained the names of these women. Eventually everyone got back into their cars and went back to their lives.
“Caroline, hi.” The woman sounded relieved. She pushed her modish sunglasses up her nose and smiled at the emerald-headed fowl that were tantalized and scandalized by the one morsel of bread Rebecca had tossed their way. They were unafraid, these birds: dogs, cars, mothers, toddlers. “He’s yours?”
Rebecca had never mastered this kind of intramaternal talk, because it was a minefield: comparing milestones, spousal jobs, vacation destinations, zip codes, makes of automobile, postnatal weight. The mothers she met never had anything else to discuss; none of them seemed even to have jobs. Perhaps that was why she had no friends.
Rebecca had been happy to let Priscilla handle all this. Perhaps that’s why she and Priscilla talked so much, conspiring over lunch, lingering after the five o’clock hour; a desire for a conversation about something real. Rebecca was unworried about coming up short—Jacob had walked early, talked early; Christopher had a great job; they lived in a fancy zip code; she drove a Volvo; she weighed the same as she had at sixteen—but she had no desire to discuss the question of Andrew’s origin. Let strangers think her ovaries had failed her; she didn’t want the baby who would one day be a boy to hear his mother discussing him as she might new drapes, an exotic ingredient, fashionable sunglasses: as a thing so lovely that you had to wonder about its acquisition. His story could not be easily summarized, but Rebecca didn’t want to say even that.
“He’s mine.” This was what she always said, because it was what she wanted him to hear, and because it was true.
Caroline looked at her meaningfully, then turned her attention back to her baby, the pond. It seemed she understood the tone in Rebecca’s voice but was unable to help herself. “Good for you.” A pause. “My uncle was adopted.”
Rebecca knew that people were unable to stop themselves remarking on Andrew. He did not need strangers to ratify his existence yet there was this desire on the part of people who knew neither baby nor mother to do just that. This had happened at one of those parties Christopher had implored her to attend. A wife with whom Rebecca had nothing in common save that they were both wives had clucked appreciatively. “It’s so brave, what you’ve done.” Rebecca wanted congratulations for the things that she had done. That fat, formless poem had won the Yale Younger Poets Prize. Instant, institutional approbation. Rebecca was a poet, even if she’d spent the last several months thinking about bottles and diapers. That was a matter to celebrate. Motherhood, at least Rebecca’s instincts about it, was selfish. Becoming Andrew’s mother was neither the least nor the most she could do; it was, simply, what she had done. A kind of madness, a moment that snowballed into a life, just like all life, if you think about it, sperm meets egg and there you go.
She looked out at the ducks. No particular response seemed warranted.
“It can’t be easy.” Caroline had more to say. “I mean, it’s hard for me! And what you’re doing is a whole other thing. The complications are so scary, I know. Withdrawal, they call it? Well, he looks so perfect. So healthy. He’s so lucky!”
Rebecca lifted Andrew off her lap and to her chest, securing the buttons on the carrier. He weighed little on her lap but pulled at her back. The baby kicked his feet, either protest or instinct. Rebecca felt like she must say something but the words would not come now but would visit her later, the right riposte. That was her work, wasn’t it, the search for the tidy turn of phrase, the most apt anapest. She did mumble something, some improvised Have a good day and Enjoy and See you later and Take care. Something utterly meaningless. Where the world, or Caroline, saw a crack baby, Rebecca only saw Andrew. Once, fetching Jacob from Woodley Park Montessori, a woman Rebecca barely knew held her by the wrist and pronounced her a saint. At the woman’s touch she turned into something else, not stone, but dust; Rebecca dissolved. She wanted to be someone completely different from the person everyone seemed to think her. She drove to fetch Jacob, an hour too early, and the baby fell asleep in the car once more, which ruined the day’s carefully worked out structure, one more reason to hate Caroline.
20
THE CONTRACT HAD BEEN MCDOUGAL’S IDEA. NOTHING FORMAL, he said, as though formality weren’t the essential quality of a contract. They shared a desire to come to something concrete, Rebecca and Cheryl. They worked it out: a face-to-face, once-a-month meeting, at which both Ivy and Andrew would be present, plus a weekly phone call, Wednesday evenings, per Cheryl’s schedule at the hospital. This had been enshrined, it had entered the record, it was binding if unenforceable though Rebecca still dreamt, sometimes, of armed policemen entering the house on Wisconsin Drive and taking Andrew from her arms. Thus in September, they met by the elephant in the Natural History Museum. The babies were too babyish for it, content to be confined to their strollers, but it was nice for Jacob to have something to look at.
Rebecca arrived first, evincing her enthusiasm. Plus it put the onus on Cheryl. Would they kiss hello? They did not. Cheryl steered Ivy’s stroller across the marble floor, waving a little, smiling a little. She’d lost all the weight of the baby, and seemed older, more polished, very pretty in her merino sweater, her ballet flats.
“Hi there!” Cheryl leaned over Andrew in his stroller, kissing him. She took Rebecca’s hand and squeezed it. She placed a hand on Jacob’s head, as though blessing him.
“Hi, Cheryl. You look just lovely.”
“Hi, Cheryl.” Jacob was doing this, increasingly. It wasn’t parroting but mockery, Rebecca thought.
“Auntie Cheryl.” Rebecca knew there had to be some kind of noun in play, some way for the children to internalize what was going on, even if it would be years before they understood it. They wandered through the exhibitions, ceding control to Jacob, who was delighted to lead the expedition. He ran ahead and Rebecca called after him, but the sound of her voice only floated up to the high ceilings. “How is everything?” Even in those wide halls, sparsely populated, it was a challenge, keeping their strollers perfectly in line. Rebecca fell behind, then Cheryl did.
“It’s good. Work. Baby. You know what it’s like.” Cheryl laughed.
“That I do.”
“There’s a good day care, anyway. We’ve been looking for a while. But there’s one, not far, not too expensive. I don’
t mind telling you—the day-care thing was killing me.”
“I’m sure it was.” Rebecca knew what it had entailed: Ian taking a regular Sunday so that he could be with Ivy one day a week, Cheryl turning to her mother-in-law and a neighbor for the rest.
“The hospital went to this new system. The schedule resets every ten days instead of every fourteen. It’s supposed to make it easier to pay us, or something, I don’t know. I’m sort of used to it now but the past couple of months have been—a lot of times, I had no idea what day it was.”
“Sounds like motherhood to me.” Rebecca had known all this. Those weekly phone calls had filled in most of the details. There was Cheryl’s work and Ian’s work and there was Ivy. But what could she do? Rebecca tried to imagine it, Ivy dropped at Wisconsin Drive every Wednesday. Rebecca, outnumbered again, the two babies who were in fact uncle and niece. It wouldn’t kill her. She could have offered. She knew they’d looked at a day care in Bethesda, near Ian’s work, but decided it was out of reach, financially. Rebecca could have supplemented that, could have put it within reach, could have paid for the whole thing, written a check covering the year and been done with it. Rebecca didn’t know if Cheryl would refuse to allow it or graciously accept it. Ivy was Rebecca’s son’s niece. Cheryl was Rebecca’s son’s sister. That made her something to Rebecca, and what’s money for?
“And how are you? How’s Christopher?”
“He’s fine. Busy.” She had, in fact, no good sense of how Christopher was. That didn’t seem like something worth getting into with Cheryl. She wasn’t sure, indeed, how far she could go with Cheryl. Priscilla had been so inside of Rebecca’s life, but her death had revealed that it had been a thing lopsided, unequal. Those months, as Priscilla’s body grew resplendent with what would become Andrew, Rebecca hadn’t even brought herself to ask who had helped Priscilla create the boy. With Cheryl, something similar seemed to pertain. What they were to each other and whatever its protocol was unclear. “Ian’s doing well?”
“You should see him, Rebecca. He’s always been someone who likes planning. He goes to the Safeway after work because it’s on the way home. He packs me lunch, after I go to bed. I wake up and there’s a tuna sandwich in the fridge, all wrapped up. Carrot sticks. Milano cookies.” She laughed. “He’s taken over the laundry. He’s on it.”
This was not a surprise, that Ian would be thoughtful. He and Christopher were men of different generations, different mothers, different countries. In Christopher’s reckoning, the business of life was not his business; in Ian’s view, he was as equal a partner as possible. To be fair: the times Christopher did help, toting the laundry basket upstairs, or picking up something for dinner, inevitably something went wrong. Generally, things were easier when Rebecca handled them herself. She tried to limit her sighs, her frowns, sometimes caught herself playing the martyr then had to confess that she didn’t, in fact, mean it. “That’s good.”
They followed Jacob, propelled by a child’s boundless enthusiasm. They looked on behalf of the babies, who could look, but who knew what they saw? They pointed at octopi and penguins, stumbled over the Latinate syllables of the dinosaurs’ names, considered the depictions of early man, which required a leap of imagination to reckon with. And after forty minutes, Andrew was dozing, Ivy whimpering, and Jacob starving. They retreated to the cafeteria, almost empty, which gave the place an even more grim aspect than its institutional lighting already did.
“I don’t know what we were thinking. A museum with two infants. I’m exhausted.”
Cheryl’s was a muted smile, touched with irony. “I like to pretend. That I’m still my old self.”
“I got croissants, though I am skeptical about the quality of the croissants on offer at the cafeteria in the Natural History Museum.” Rebecca placed the plastic tray on the table.
“I’m hungry, I’m hungry.” Jacob bobbed in his seat, leaned across the table, those thick pneumatic sneakers knocking the chair, its metal legs sharp on the linoleum.
“Sit, sit.” Rebecca ripped a pastry, and Jacob snatched the larger piece from her hand. He fell back onto his plastic seat and began to gnaw on it. She tried to put some firmness in it, in this sit, but so much of the time the words just came out of her, with no particular conviction and a worrying lack of patience. He was a baby, of course, but sometimes she wished logic would rule.
“Thank you.” Cheryl had slipped an arm from her sweater and raised it over her shoulder, but rather than unkempt, she seemed glamorous. Ivy was at her breast, and Rebecca could see the subtle pulse of the child’s skull, testament to the fact that she lived. “I’m hungry. I know it’s early, but I am.”
Rebecca put the paper cups of coffee on the table and moved the tray away. “Eat, please. I know what it’s like, I remember, that feeling of—I would feel so depleted, sometimes, when I was feeding Jacob.” Rebecca tore one of the pastries into several smaller pieces, as though Cheryl, too, were a toddler. “I know you must miss her so much.”
“Yes.” Cheryl reached for one of the pieces, chewed it thoughtfully.
“I’m sorry if I shouldn’t bring it up.” Rebecca waited. “But I think it’s better, not to pretend?”
Cheryl looked down at the baby in her arms. “It’s a funny feeling. I don’t go around feeling sad all the time, or anything. I am happy. You know, because of Ivy. Because of Andrew.”
Rebecca looked at the baby, asleep in his stroller, head flung to the side. He had a loud, nasal wheeze, Andrew; you could hear him even if you weren’t attuned to him, as she was, as a mother would be. “But there’s this whole other thing, too.” Rebecca understood. “This happiness all wrapped up with sadness.”
“I just wanted her to see Ivy. To know her. And Mom was so good with babies, you know?” Cheryl paused. “When I was still in school, we did this rotation, at Children’s. There were these ladies, from the church, they’d come in every other day or so. We called them the Grandmas. Maybe they called themselves the Grandmas. I can’t remember. We called them Grandma, individually, but also, the Grandmas, collectively. Like, Oh, ask one of the Grandmas or Grandma, can you take her? They volunteered. There were a lot of kids there, kids who were abandoned, or in foster care, or just—kids no one came to visit. And you know, it’s good, for the kids to be held, talked to, visited, even though they’re babies, or sick, or asleep, or don’t speak English.”
“The human connection.”
“But I think it’s more than that, I have to say. I think there’s something—an older person and a very young person. There’s a kind of magic there. They’re both right at the fringes of life. There’s some sort of understanding. A common language, or like—they just know something about each other. And I mean really young. Like babies, maybe until they’re two. And old people, like true grandmas, like a lady in her seventies. Some of them were. I think one of them might have been eighty, she must have been, she was so tiny and bent over, couldn’t even stand upright. But she’d come and they’d sing or pray or whatever. And I think it did something. It didn’t make a difference. If the baby had withdrawal symptoms, then praying wasn’t going to stop its tremors. But there was something. Like a quiet, in the room. When these old ladies would be around. The whole big, noisy machine of the hospital felt a little more quiet.”
“That’s amazing.” Rebecca sipped the coffee, which tasted quite awful.
“That’s what I miss, sometimes. When I think of Ivy. And my mom. They didn’t get the chance to do that. Have that kind of conversation or whatever it is, that connection that has nothing to do with me. That’s just between them. And you know, she’s a good baby, but that doesn’t mean I couldn’t use the help.”
“Your mother did know how to handle a baby.”
“I didn’t know my grandma, you know. Grandma Shelly. Mom would talk about her only sometimes, and when she did, she always called her Grandma Shelly, which seems weird to me now, because I never saw the woman, as far as I can remember. Grandma Shelly seems like—
such a specific name for a person who might as well have been imaginary. She didn’t matter, in my life, at all. Then I saw these grandmas at the hospital, and it was like . . . A grandma can do magic. I get the point of a grandma. And I wish we had one. That’s all.”
Rebecca nodded. She knew enough to say nothing. She tore off more of the pastry for Jacob, who was busy with the dinosaur stickers he’d conned her into buying. Buying was always easier than not buying. It made him quiet, anyway.
“Excuse me.” A man loomed over them. Rebecca hadn’t noticed his approach, though the place was still mostly deserted. “I’m sorry. You can’t. Do that here.”
Cheryl looked up at the man and drew the muslin blanket down off her shoulder and over her breast, though it was already covered. “I’m sorry.”
“What do you mean?” Rebecca looked at the man. He was in his fifties, which seemed to confer upon him the authority his polyester uniform did not.
“Ma’am, the ladies’ room is just over there. Beyond that wall, down that hallway. We ask that you—do that, in there.”
“I’m sorry.” Cheryl slipped the baby from beneath the blanket. Ivy looked dazed, but did not protest.
“No. Don’t apologize, Cheryl. Finish.”
“She’s finished. I think.” Cheryl put the girl on her shoulder and rubbed her back. She pulled the blanket still closer around her, though she was quite hidden beneath it.
“Sir. Maybe a little privacy, please?” Rebecca stood and leaned over the table and reached for the baby. “Let me take her.”