Sucking Up Yellow Jackets

by Jeanne Denault

  Something was wrong. Seven-month-old babies didn’t fall out of cribs. The sides were too high. I must not have checked the side rail latch last night. My stomach felt as though it was trying to squeeze up to the back of my throat. Appalled at my carelessness, I didn’t even glance at the bed.

  Poor innocent baby; his misplaced faith in my ability to keep him safe started me sniveling. I held him close, rocked side to side, closed my eyes and crooned. “I’m so sorry. I won’t ever leave the side unlatched again.” Max started shivering. It was early May, still cold in Massachusetts and he was a small, skinny baby. I reached for a blanket in his crib and banged into a wooden slat. I really looked at the crib for the first time. The side was up. I grabbed the bar and shook it. It was locked.

  Who did this? He couldn’t climb out of a crib without help. With Max clutched against my chest, I tore through all three floors of the small house. There was no one except his still sleeping twenty-two-month-old sister in the crib on the other side of their small bedroom and his snoring father. I didn’t wake Pete. After four years of marriage, I knew not to wake him unless the house was on fire.

  I went into the living room and sat in the rocker handed down through Pete’s family for generations. Someone should have used it for kindling long ago. The runners were too short and the back so tall any person with short legs who made the mistake of sitting back and rocking ended up flat on their back with their feet up in the air. I’m short but careful. And it was the only chair in the living room.

  I leaned forward, rocked in a slow tick-tock and tried to accept the fact that my small baby had climbed out of his crib without help. I found it easier to think some infant-hating monster was lurking off-stage. A deranged person wanting to harm a baby was a threat I could solve by picking up the phone and asking for help. There was no help with small children who ignored normal growth stages.

  I had been on edge ever since his pediatrician came into my room three hours after Max was born, plunked himself into the visitor’s chair, shook his head and said, “This baby’s going to give you trouble. He’s been wide awake ever since he was born and looking around as though he’s trying to decide how to redesign the world.”

  I was a creative worrier but never expected he would start climbing out of his bed before he could stand up. I should have. Max was strong, he hated to be confined and already showed ruthless tenacity as strong as his father’s when he wanted something.

  He relaxed slowly. Still a mass of twanging nerves, I took rare comfort from his clinging body. He didn’t usually let me hold him for long unless he wanted something beyond his reach. Each time he put his arms in the air to be picked up, I felt a rush of tenderness. Maybe this time he just wanted to be hugged. Instant disappointment followed when he reared away from me and pointed at what he wanted. It was never me. He would have been happier with a robot he could control. Or his father. On the rare occasions when Pete hugged him, Max didn’t so much hug back as tolerate the hug and not immediately struggle to be put down. I was grateful for this. I should have been jealous but I wasn’t. Any sign of affection or even tolerance Pete showed for his small son warmed my heart.

  Linda was so much more rewarding as an infant. I was sure I represented food, transportation and comfort to her in equal measure but she seemed to grasp my reflexive need for pay-back. If I hugged her, she hugged back. She loved to have me snuggle her against my neck and croon silly songs and rhymes to her. She asked to be picked up in order to reach something on occasion, usually food, but she was much less needy and far more appreciative. If she did want me to be a convenient elevator, she would smile at me or give me a small hug of thanks.

  This never seemed to occur to Max. I couldn’t decide if this was because he was smart enough to figure out he didn’t have to beguile me to get food, transportation and dry diapers or if some part of his personality had been left out. He didn’t seem to mind if I hugged him as long as I put him right down so he could get on with something more important like dismantling one of his toys.

  No light showed from my friend Mary’s house across the street at this late hour. Steady drizzle darkened the moonless sky visible through the large picture window with its two flanking double-hung windows, an architectural feature that was an inevitable part of the front façades of houses built in the nineteen-fifties. The owl who lived in one of the enormous creek willows behind the house hooted three times. The repeated sound was a mixture of threat and melancholy. It matched my mood.

  The next day I sat in Mary’s kitchen watching her knead bread. I told her Max had climbed out of bed. Eyes half-closed against the curling thread of smoke from the cigarette clamped in the corner of her mouth, she considered this. Pausing in her kneading, she plucked the cigarette out of her mouth and rested it on the ashtray on the far end of the counter. “I’m not surprised. Look at him over there. God knows how many objects are in that basket. Fifteen? Twenty? Whatever. Each time he comes over, he takes out each one, gives the ones he had seen before a cursory glance then finds the new ones and checks them over as though he has to describe them for an inventory list. Once he’s satisfied that he knows them inside and out, they’re relegated to the known list and they get just a cursory glance the next time you bring him over.”

  I slumped against the counter. “Maybe he has a career in inventory control.”

  Mary snorted with laughter, picked up her cigarette, inhaled deeply then ground it out in the ashtray. Smoke oozed out of her mouth as she spoke. “I don’t even know how to place him on a normal infant behavior chart. Having the ability to remember large numbers of unrelated objects and immediately identify new ones aren’t milestones in any of my books.”

  For the next two weeks Max rattled the bars of his crib with obvious frustration but didn’t climb out. I gradually relaxed and stopped leaping out of bed each time a squirrel jumped on the roof. I took him to the pediatrician. Maybe he would tell me the whole incident was a fluke. I should have known better. The doctor had a reputation for brutal honesty.

  He shook his head and said, “I’ve only run across a few boys like your son. He’s physically hyperactive and will be obsessive about some things but won’t fit the classic obsessive/ compulsive diagnosis. If it’s any consolation, boys like Max are usually a great deal brighter than average. But they can be wearing to live with. They seem to operate by a different set of rules. I wish I knew why, but I don’t. The one thing I do know is he won’t stop trying to get out of his crib if that’s what he really wants to do.” The frank pity in his eyes was like a hard punch under my rib cage. Sometimes honesty sucks.

  Instinctively protective, I clutched a resisting Max against my chest. Acknowledging my gesture, the doctor looked sad. “You can’t save him from himself. All you can do is pad the floor next to the crib, put a gate across the doorway and take everything but the cribs out of the room. Don’t even leave a dresser there. He can use that to climb on. That should work for a while.”

  Driving home I had a hard time concentrating on the erratic traffic on Route 128. Linda and Max were blessedly quiet for the moment. I was grateful. I was too tired to deal with all this garbage that was being dumped on me. I wanted to pound the wheel and yell obscenities but I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to stop if I gave way to my frustration. I had a temper and a fear of losing control and doing something I would regret. Like many of my characteristics, this sense that I was inherently faulty had been fostered by my mother. She could turn as cold and damaging as dry ice but she rarely lost her temper.

  A large car cut across my lane. The man driving aggressively didn’t even glance at me. I braked hard and fought the impulse to crash into his car and scream, “Take that you asshole.”

  I knew I was pushing my luck. I was pretty good at squelching what I was really feeling if it was socially unacceptable by my standards but I was afraid Route 128 would push me beyond my limits so I took the Lexington exit instead of Route 2 even though doing this would add another twenty minutes to the
ride.

  Concord, Massachusetts was a beautiful old town. Most of the stores, houses and the sprawling Concord Academy were painted white with black shutters. Our house was new: what was locally called a Cape Cod. I was never sure why. I could picture builders in other parts of the country using that name but the Cape was less than an hour’s drive from Concord and the structure didn’t look like any of the old houses I had seen there. It was small, solid, well-built and looked like a tidy box painted gray. Except for the color, it was exactly like the eleven other houses in the first small housing development in Concord. Not that the locals admitted we were part of the town. They referred to us as those tacky new houses out in the old potato field.

  The numbing fatigue that had become a constant in my world still fogged my thinking but the peaceful old road with its ancient homes and weathered barns at the end of dusty lanes had a calming effect. I managed to stay reasonable when Linda screamed as I drove right past the ice cream store without stopping. By the time we finally got to the center of Concord, Max was howling along with her. I liked to think this was a show of empathy but suspected it was probably his discomfort at the decibel level his sister reached. Max was sensitive to loud noise and Linda had a piercing shriek that made my eardrums ache.

  Our car wasn’t air conditioned and it was a warm day so the front windows were open. We sailed around the staid town square broadcasting a racket that must have sounded like a caged pack of out-of-control hyenas. Heads turned. No one smiled. I pretended I was invisible. I was good at that. I’d had a lot of practice.

  Chapter 6

  The night after our visit to the pediatrician, Max climbed out of his bed again. I assumed the padding encouraged him to think I agreed with his escape attempt and wanted to save him the pain of landing on the unforgiving oak floor. When I heard the thump, I struggled out of bed stupefied with fatigue. The accordion gate pinched his feet and slowed him down. This gave me an extra few seconds to gather my wits together. It must have been daunting for this tiny boy to make the decision to drop to the floor. His heart was still beating a staccato tempo when I lifted him off the gate and put him back in his crib.

  A part of me was touched by the hopelessness he must have felt but a larger part had to fight down the desperate need to shriek with frustration. His enormous blue eyes looked sad but he didn’t protest. This made me feel even worse.

  I wished I didn’t worry so much about the way other people felt. This empathy got in my way when I had to discipline Linda or Max. I told him I was sorry and asked him to please stay in his crib until it was time to get up. I explained about morning and what daylight looked like. I tried to stay calm but I could hear the rising tension and frustration in my voice. I was sure Max heard it too. He watched me and looked remote as I babbled on. I was certain he understood what I said but I had the uncomfortable feeling he was humoring me. He was just waiting until I left so he could take a brief nap and make another try for freedom. Which he did, night after night.

  I hadn’t gone through all the normal stages of sleep since Max was born. Some indomitable maternal instinct kicked in just before I was about to sink into the hard to rouse but mind and spirit renewing deep sleep that allowed the sleeper to awake refreshed and ready to face a new day. I never wanted to face the new day. I was only twenty-four years old. I should have been full of energy but I felt half-dead.

  Linda had just turned two. She should have been throwing her weight around and having tantrums but she rarely did. I got the impression she was as overwhelmed by Max’s attention-demanding, anti-social behavior as I was and decided much too young to be the good kid. When I tried to give her the time I knew she needed, Max took advantage of my brief lack of vigilance and did something that required my instant attention.

  The two children had to share a room. Cape Cod houses had two bedrooms and a bath on the first floor with stairs and space for two more rooms and a second bath on the top floor. The upper story was still unfinished except for roughed-in wiring and plumbing. The floor was raw plywood. We insulated the entire space and put in radiators so we could use it as an art studio but we hadn’t done any further finishing.

  Linda hated being closed in. She had a rare tantrum when I told her I would have to close her bedroom door from now on. She shrieked, “No — no — no. My room. Want my door open.” She pitched toys at the wall. I felt like joining her. Smashing a few objects with satisfying crunches would have felt good.

  Doctor Spock was the reigning guru of child rearing at that time; I wasn’t sure what he would have suggested under the circumstances. I worked hard at behaving the way I thought a reasonable adult should and tried to explain. I let her pitch toys until she was calm then crouched and stood her in front of me so our faces were level. “I’m sorry, Linda. I have no choice. I can’t put Max up on the second floor even if I put a gate at the top of the stairs. All the wiring is still exposed. I can’t put you up there. The shiny insulation scares you even in the daytime. With Max climbing out of his crib all night long, I’ll end up batty from fatigue if I don’t close the door.”

  She yanked her shoulders out of my hands, glared at me and turned to Max with a venomous expression. If she were in a cartoon, arrows would have been shooting out of her eyes and stabbing him in the heart.

  I felt guilty but not guilty enough to leave the door open. Linda could have climbed out of her crib if she had wanted to; she could open doors easily. I didn’t know why she stayed in her bed and sulked instead. I worried that Max was making her feel as impotent as I felt dealing with a child who was catered to because he ignored all the rules. He continued to climb out of his crib but he was still too short to reach the door knob so he spent a lot of nights curled up on the floor. I was tempted to stop giving him vitamins.

  Chapter 7

  I daydreamed to get through the exhausting boredom of my days. This made it possible to iron a lot of shirts. In my daydreams I was often a widow. This idea sometimes brought me to tears but continued to slide into my mind with the persistence of a New York City cockroach. As a widow, I was saddened by my loss but not responsible for fate. I hadn’t given up on my commitment to love, honor and obey. Chance had taken away the object of my undying love. I was just superstitious enough to think I might be pushing my luck so I was careful to keep the life insurance payments up to date.

  Magical Thinking persists longer than we would like to acknowledge.

  Divorce would have been a more logical daydream but, although I had witnessed many unhappy marriages, my own parents’ being a prime example, I had never personally known anyone who was divorced. I wasn’t sure what the emotional consequences of such a split would be to me but was certain it would be devastating to my children. They weren’t old enough to understand the difference between a chosen relationship and a genetic one. To a small child, rejection was an absolute and would become a terrifying possibility for them. No matter how difficult my marriage was, my children were going to be part of a strong, cohesive family whatever the cost to me. This was more important than my marriage vows.

  In the fifties, magazines portrayed all women as happy housewives who wanted nothing more than to try the new salad advertised in full-page, four-color magazine ads on smooth chrome-coat stock. The ads assumed all husbands came home with nothing on their minds but the excellent meal waiting for them. Any woman who didn’t think this was a rich, fulfilling life was told her thought processes were at fault.

  One of the more popular women’s magazines had a feature asking, “Can this marriage be saved?” Each month I bought the magazine and flipped straight to the article, hoping the expert would finally say, “No way.” But no matter how bizarre the couple’s problems were, the end result was usually, “Yes, if…” And the “if” always seemed to be something the wife could do.

  When I see reprints of ads from that era, they look so ridiculous; it’s hard to imagine anyone paying attention to them. But we did, because there was nothing else. It was assumed women would spe
nd their days taking care of their husbands, their children and their houses, in that order. The only recreation for women in most suburbs was the coffee klatch. A second car was rare. Unless the husband was in a car pool so he didn’t need the car every day, the only people available for any sort of daytime get-together were neighbors.

  I was lucky to be in Concord. I had never pictured living in a country town. We ended up there almost by chance. Driving home from a visit to a friend’s house in Littleton, we decided to take a side trip through Lexington and saw a builder’s sign shortly after we turned off Route 2. We drove around the small complex and liked what we saw. The following week we went back and looked at the house that was nearly ready for sale. It’s almost embarrassing but I fell in love with the possibility of having my own washer and dryer. I had been hand-washing all of Linda’s clothes and hanging them on one of those wheeled clotheslines that stretched between one of the tall windows in our living room and a second wheel attached to one of our bedroom window frames. Pete’s and my clothes were dragged to a dirty, crowded laundry out near Boston University or washed and hung to dry at my mother-in-law’s house. This had been tiring but possible with one child. I wasn’t looking forward to doing it with two babies. So we bought the house. It had a good train into Boston and wonderful neighbors.

  Linda was an asset when we went visiting. She could walk into any home and within minutes she could grasp the dynamics of the household and figure out how to fit in. She was the one who made a game fun by adding another dimension. If we visited a place where there were girls, she suggested outrageous dress-ups, or played store with real money, or suggested they bake cupcakes and enlisted the aide of an older sibling who was allowed to turn on the oven.