by Susan Choi
“I don’t need time. I certainly don’t need time to train John to a bottle. I’m not going to do it.”
“I think we’ve talked plenty about the things you’re not going to do. You’re not going to let Lewis see John. You’re not going to let John take a bottle. You’re not going to set foot in your old house so long as you live, which must mean that it’s me who will go get the rest of your things. You’re not going speak to your husband, so that I’m the one who gets to tell him about all the other things you won’t do. That’s wonderful, Aileen. It’s so decisive and mature. I’m sure there’s no reason to think about what you are going to do.”
“I only said,” Aileen said through her teeth, “that I’m not going to put John on a bottle. At least not by December eleventh.”
“Good!” Nora said. “Don’t! Don’t do anything, please!”
But in the week after Thanksgiving, John began to have colic—or at least that was what Nora called it for the first several days. He wept and screamed without pause, sometimes for three or four hours at a stretch, and though Aileen pushed her breast in his mouth, he wouldn’t take it and nurse. His red face poured sweat, and his gaunt little limbs madly flapped—he seemed frailer when he screamed, though the noise that he made was astounding. Soon everyone in the house, the three adults and three children, seemed to be constantly screaming and crying. Aileen walked John endlessly in the hallway, his furious body draped over her shoulder, and was so tired she wove, and once knocked his head into the wall. The real winter had finally come, and it was too cold to take him outside. At night Warren and Nora also shrieked at each other, no longer trying to keep down their voices, and once, as Aileen trudged the hall like a pilgrim, she heard Nora’s two children, clandestinely huddled in the older girl’s room and tearfully trying to comfort each other.
When the doctor came, he confirmed what Aileen had been secretly fearing, as she changed John with obsessive attention and yearned for that overfilled diaper that had so recently fouled her lap. John had not just stopped gaining but starting losing again. He was only a few ounces over his birth weight. “He won’t nurse,” she said, helplessly crying as the dispassionate doctor—the apparently wonderful man on whom Nora relied—turned and prodded and pulled John as if preparing a chicken to roast. “It’s his colic, he won’t nurse, I’ve tried—”
“I don’t like to blame colic,” the doctor said, cutting her off. “Colic is a vague term, and it gets blamed for more than its share. My guess is your milk supply’s down. He’s not getting enough. You need to start him on bottles of formula. That way there’s no guesswork. You know what he’s getting, and you can give him enough.”
“I do give him enough!”
“Well, apparently not,” said the doctor.
Because the kitchen was the place to sterilize bottles and mix formula, and because the kitchen was Nora’s realm, and most obviously because Nora had bottle-fed before, it was Nora who launched the new regimen, with brisk efficiency and even, Aileen thought, with some measure of poorly disguised cheerfulness. “You’re glad, aren’t you,” she said. She didn’t realize that her words were mumbled, almost slurred, as if she were drunk—she was aware only of the enormous effort to articulate her thoughts and to balance her head on her fist as she sat at the table. She wanted to lie on her bed, a damp cloth on her face. John had taken to the bottles with gusto, draining each dry in a fraction of the time he had needed to satisfy himself at the breast, and in the process ingesting so much air that he frequently vomited great arcs of white liquid that cleared whoever’s lap he was sitting on and smacked splashingly onto the floor—but these events, the first of which made Aileen shriek with fear, did not seem to disturb him at all. He would emit a sated afterbelch and fall serenely to sleep, or to draining another full bottle. His hysterical crying disappeared without leaving a trace, as Aileen senselessly felt it should: some diminishing wail, to be heard in the hall at around four A.M. by the mother, now pacing alone. No, the crying was gone, as if the little body she’d held to herself had been some other baby. This baby, who took his milk from Nora—or Warren, for that matter—was a changeling, an impostor, although only Aileen felt this way. For the others it was the opposite story. It was the old baby, the one bound to Aileen by implacable grief, that had been inauthentic. Now when John happily belched, Nora cooed, “There he is!” as if John had emerged from a fog. “He’s a strapping little man after all,” Warren said in agreement.
Those first days, when Aileen had been unprecedentedly happy, adrift in the dazzling void with her child in her arms, seemed to belong to a prehistory everyone had forgotten. “It’s not the end of the world,” Nora had said to her sharply when, streaming tears, she finally came to observe the sterilizing process for the bottles and nipples. “With Nancy, I ran out of milk at twelve weeks and switched over to formula, and with Michael, I used formula from the start, and you can see for yourself they’re both perfectly fine.” Aileen was too heartbroken and tired to imagine that Nora was also a passionate mother and that she might take Aileen’s attitude toward the bottles as a criticism of herself. Instead she saw Nora turning against her, like everyone else.
“You’re glad,” she repeated wildly.
“Glad of what?”
“Glad I ran out of milk, and so quickly. It proves everyone right. I’m an unfit mother. Now Lewis can take John for all twelve days of Christmas. He can take John for a whole year of Christmas.”
“For God’s sake, Aileen. There’s not a mother on earth who hasn’t gone through a rough time like this. You’re just tired. You’ve got to pull yourself together. You’ve got to sleep, for one thing.”
“As if I don’t want to sleep!”
“If you could stop, for one minute, believing that this is the world’s greatest drama and that you are the star—” Nora’s voice had not particularly altered, but a look of suppression came over her face, as if she’d been exposed to enormous temptation and had barely resisted. To slap me, Aileen thought.
“I can’t wait to get out of here,” she said, imitating Nora’s calm, cruel tone, because she couldn’t, she realized dizzily, find a tone of her own—because she couldn’t find emotion of her own. Was she chastened or angry? Dependent on Nora or sick of her? “I can’t wait to get away from your wonderful doctor, and your know-it-allness, and your wonderful competence. It makes you glad that I’ve turned out so awful! That I’m such a bad mother! It makes you glad, doesn’t it?”
“Oh, Aileen!” Nora seized her on either side of her head, as if she did mean to slap her, or box her ears, or shake her until her neck snapped, but instead she pulled Aileen to her chest and held her sobbing face as if it were a treasure to be fiercely guarded. “You’re a good mother,” Nora whispered. “His only! And you love him, you love him….”
“No I don’t! No I’m not!” Aileen sobbed.
When Nora’s doctor came back the next week to give John his checkup, he prescribed Valium for Aileen and suggested she see a psychiatrist. “It’s often the case,” he intoned, “that women postpartum experience some amount of depression. It’s very little talked of, which is too bad, because it’s really quite common. You shouldn’t feel embarrassed about it. At the same time, you have to take it seriously and treat it like any illness. Nip it in the bud before it goes any farther.” They were all sitting in the front room together, Nora, Aileen, and the doctor—John plumply asleep in his bassinet, having received the doctor’s grunt of approval—as if they were at a funeral home, Aileen thought, engaged in a fake conversation while averting their eyes from the coffin.
“I’m not depressed,” she said, hearing her voice tremble. “I’m very tired.” Her eyes filled with tears. She cried constantly now, usually without a clear understanding of what was making her cry, although it was often the overwhelming complexity of everyday tasks.
“The Valium should help you with sleeping. And the sleeping should help you with everything else.” Here he smiled encouragingly at her, and she
was struck by how kindly he seemed—was he really a wonderful doctor, as Nora insisted, who had only appeared hostile to her because she was crazy?
“I’m surprised it’s all right,” she murmured. “All right to take pills, with the baby.”
“It’s perfectly all right,” he assured her. “Now that you’re no longer nursing.”
She had forgotten; for more than six months, since learning she was pregnant, she had thought of her body so differently. Everything she’d ingested she’d first thoughtfully scrutinized, imagining what it would do to the cells that were building her child. She had even made Nora laugh at her. Nora, who of the two of them was so historically square, who nodded off after a half glass of wine, who’d turned purple and choked the one time she’d tried lighting a cigarette. Aileen all her life had been the careless sister, the one who acted with little regard for herself or the future. And then had come the day when she’d called Nora in terror because she’d drunk some weak tea—she had given up coffee—and had felt the baby flopping inside her. “I’ve made him have a heart attack, Nora!” she’d said frantically, and Nora—when she’d finally stopped laughing—had said, “You’ve only woken him up.”
She’d never known such sweetness in her life. Her body, to its last molecule, had been the possession of somebody else.
She did begin taking the Valium, and though her ability to do so was a consequence, not a cause, of physical separation, in her mind this was the severing act. Something fragile was sliced, and destroyed.
12.
LEE RECEIVED AILEEN’S LETTER SOMETIME DURING THE week of Thanksgiving, by design forming only the vaguest recollection of when it had come. Immediately upon seeing it, thick with meaning in its barely adequate envelope, by far the most conspicuous item of mail that day on the console in his landlady’s hall, his almost unconscious instinct was to treat it as though it were a bill, or a library notice, or a subscription renewal. Without examination he collected it into the papers and books in his arms, and upstairs in his room he left it, still interred in the pile, at the back of his desk. It wasn’t destined to languish indefinitely; in the past couple weeks, since his rededication to research, his desk had ceased to be the fossilized archive from which he’d spent months averting his eyes. Once again a patient observer—or, better, a time-lapse camera—would be able to discern a dynamic, if very slow, process of change. Heaps inexorably crept toward the ceiling, came down, seeded new heaps or were thrown in the trash. Library books shifted position, according to due date. Outposts of new growth had appeared on the couch and the bed—half-used notepads and half-read abstracts. Aileen’s letter would be gotten to, in its time.
Thanksgiving was the only American holiday that had ever captured Lee’s imagination, and in previous years he had always spent it as a guest in the home of one of his professors or classmates. His interest in the holiday’s historical underpinnings and his enormous enjoyment of the foods gratified all his hosts, and this along with the tradition of taking in strays had given him his choice of dinners for the past several years. But this year he’d been invited nowhere; he’d seen almost no one since the previous spring. And to his surprise, rather than feeling bereft, he fairly hummed with contentment. For the first time in recent memory, perhaps for the first time since meeting Aileen, he had purpose, and peace. He had always loved a university campus in summer, the mysterious abandonment of the medieval city, with just a skeleton crew of damned souls left to meet his few needs: a single heavy-eyed stamper of books, a single sleepwalking ladler of gruel in the one cafeteria. Now he found that the campus on a national holiday at the onset of winter was the purest distillation of that hush he’d first known in the summers. He drifted without constraint or anxiety through the math buildings, down the walkways of the quad beneath the ice-lacquered trees; he knew there was no chance he’d run into Gaither, the most pious of pilgrims, today. The library was not even on limited hours, but entirely closed, yet this setback failed to annoy him; it was another liberation. He walked downhill into town, the overdue book, which he had not finished reading, clasped to his chest, an unexpected reprieve. He would finish it now. He had gone out without a hat or gloves, and the lightless sky was bearing down with the weight of snow, but he didn’t feel assaulted by the cold. It entered him, an energizing column, so that his lungs seemed to fully inflate for the very first time. He imagined them gleaming. In town he ate a sodden “Thanksgiving dinner with full trimmings,” presumably surrounded by unloved solitary diners in the neighboring booths, but he didn’t notice. He was absorbed in his book. He’d struggled with it before; now its fine grains of meaning seemed to pour themselves into his mind, like filings toward a magnet. When he was walking home again in the early darkness, he was happy. He thought briefly of Aileen, understanding her to have entered an unknowable world of motherhood, as he had entered a world of scholarship. Their paths had diverged and would continue to do so, vectors obeying their laws. And he felt, as he had before on a very few, very precious occasions, an intelligence guiding his life. Not a God; he would never say this. But something blessedly Other than him, a calm orderliness, which had corrected and saved him.
And so it was with unease that he read Aileen’s letter, some handful of days after getting it. His unease didn’t arise from anything explicit; the letter hardly seemed to speak to him, and it never spoke of him. Apart from the very first line, the letter more closely resembled a diary, and after reading the first several pages Lee even flipped back—Dear Lee—to confirm that it was a letter, and a letter for him. He was disturbed, he realized, not by anything overt the letter stated but by everything it seemed to assume—by its implicit designation of Lee as the person not just entitled to but desirous of such disclosures. These were sentiments Lee wasn’t convinced a wife would share with her husband; why would Aileen want to share them with him? And such outsize, almost lunatic fervor for her child by Gaither; had Lee not decided to give up Aileen, had he failed to arrive at his benignant position, he might have been spurred to a frenzy of rage by this stuff.
But Aileen didn’t know she had been given up. Lee thought about this as he folded the letter; toward the end he’d been skimming, and he had no desire to read it again. The letter implied a remarkable intimacy—but the question remained, of what remarkable thing the intimacy implied in its turn. Nowhere was there mention of the future: Aileen’s, Gaither’s, Lee’s, or the child’s. Had Aileen articulated some clear expectation of him, Lee would have known to inform her of his decision to withdraw from her life. Instead there was this uncensored transcript of her most private thoughts, and now he wondered if this was her sign that she had withdrawn from him. Consuming ardor for her child by Gaither, no reference to a rearranged future. She didn’t know she had been given up, but it no longer mattered, because she had released him.
And yet the letter was so unrestrained, so avidly confiding, as if describing one passion as a means of encoding another—but could she so love Gaither’s child and also love Lee? Lee grew aware of a strain in his logic; to avoid thinking more about it, he forced the letter back into its envelope, and put it inside a textbook he almost never referred to, and put the book into one of the very deep drawers of his desk.
As November gave way to December, his existence achieved a complete transformation, as if the solitary peace of Thanksgiving had been the mere start of a growing alignment and amplification. Only musical terms seemed to capture this pleasant sensation. Everything from his morning oatmeal to the nib of his pen was caught up in symphonic concord, under the stirring control of a brilliant conductor. If it had ever crossed Lee’s mind before now to describe his relation to his life circumstances, he might have attempted metaphors of storm-tossed vessels or mismatched wrestlers or frost-nipped blossoms as unoriginal and ineffectual and disjointed as the conditions themselves. Now both his life and his image of it were harmonically pure. He fell asleep at strange hours and woke up completely refreshed; he ate whatever he had in his cupboard and found it de
licious. He made singing progress in his work. He read the way he ate, wrote the way he slept, never seemed to misplace so much as a thumbtack in an apartment that had given over all its limited floor space to squared stacks of paper. It helped that the term had ended the second week of December, so that the other habitués of his house—rarely seen, always heard—were now gone. No longer did he find the second-floor bathroom door closed when he went to take a long-deferred piss after hours of inspired mathematics and tea or beer drinking. No more cattlelike feet on the stairs, heedless voices through walls, doors slammed as if intended to shatter his thoughts. He generically hated all his fellow tenants for how oversize and unself-conscious they were, but now the house was abandoned, as if the earth had been cleared by a plague. He only sometimes heard his landlady’s radio, as thin and querulous-sounding as she was, but her manifestations were so few and predictable he benignly absorbed them into his harmonized days.
The fact of Christmas came to his attention when his landlady surprised him with a knock at his door. Admitting her, after stuffing the tails of his shirt into his pants, he saw her swiftly assessing the state of the room: a fire hazard, but nothing she didn’t expect, even probably hope for, from her student tenants. There was no woman and no dissipation; she was satisfied. “Mr. Lee,” she announced, “I’m going to my sister’s for Christmas. I’ll be gone this whole week. I trust you to abide by house rules even while I’m not here.” It was only now that Lee realized she was wearing a coat and a hat, and he belatedly identified a noise he’d been remotely aware of as an idling car. She must have been on the point of leaving before she’d remembered him.
“Of course, Mrs. Winnick. I hope you have a nice time.”
“Do you celebrate Christmas, Mr. Lee?”
He knew better than to say that he didn’t. As he spoke, he offered up a wry prayer that today wasn’t Christmas already. “Yes I do, Mrs. Winnick. I’ll be visiting friends.”