“Anna, Anna,” we cried out, “Anna! Please, tell us, what can we do for you?”
But she just smiled in that quiet way of hers and squeezed out of the blue dress as she walked across the bedroom toward us, taking our breath away.
When we gave her a slender silver necklace, she thanked us profusely and wore it that evening but then we never saw it again. We could only speculate, during our brief time alone together each day, that she’d flushed it down the toilet or thrown it into a gutter. Of course far more likely was that it had somehow fallen off, that the clasp had broken and she, in her fathomless politeness, didn’t want to mention it to us. Yet we were suspicious.
We encouraged her to rest on the weekends, to take a nap or come to the park with us or go see the mermaid parade. But she would only nap if we were napping too, and if it was one of those naked late afternoon “naps.” We encouraged her to read books, we had lots of books plus we’d buy her any book she requested, we’d subscribe to any magazine, and we urged her to listen to music, to download the songs she liked, we could pay, we were happy to pay, and also she could be the boss of our Netflix queue. “Maybe a vegetarian cookbook would be nice,” she said softly (we were both vegetarians). She was too busy, she often said, to do anything except keep house, and though she obediently tended to the Netflix queue, she was attentive only to our viewing history and the recommendations generated on the basis of our past favorites.
“Anna … what’s your favorite movie, Anna?” we once asked her, desperately.
“Oh,” she said with that infinite smile, “I don’t have favorites.”
Anna didn’t make us feel guilty about the dishwasher we never had to unload or the toilet paper that never ran out. Yet that only increased our feeling of guilt. In the months before the divorce, we began to long for Anna to flare up, to scream at us that we were selfish and lazy and never lifted a finger, because it seemed inconceivable that we could receive all these blessings for free. We wanted to pay, pay, pay.
The Sniper Solution
There came a time in my life when I could not speak to another person without imagining that person’s skull getting shot by a bullet on the left-hand side of his/her head, as though there was a sniper in the upper corner of every room I was ever in, a sniper crouched atop each building I passed.
The person (my husband or whoever else) would just be talking to me, innocently, and there I’d be, watching the explosion of bone and blood and brain and hair spraying out across the room or the bus or the street, speckling the person’s clothing with red and other disturbing colors.
I would feel so tenderly toward the person just then, seeing the delicate inside revealed this way, the horrifying ketchup of it all, the imminent loss, and I would try to listen so closely, ever so closely, to what the person was saying, as though I was listening to his or her dying words.
“Oh my god,” I would agree, “yes, yes, I see what you mean.”
I could only hope this tic of mine had something to do with compassion, and with becoming a better person.
THE DOPPELGÄNGERS
The Queen always looked profound when she pooped. Her eyes solemn, as though regarding the void. That was why they had taken to calling her The Queen, even though she was only a month old. Also, the way she sat enthroned in her car seat in the over-packed car as they drove to the new town. And the regal purple stars on her blanket, beneath which her absurdly tiny legs jerked this way and that.
* * *
“It’ll be better here,” Sam assured Mimosa that night in the new house. She was standing in the new kitchen beside the new window looking out into the new backyard. She was holding The Queen close to her. She—Mimosa, not The Queen—was crying. The Queen was sleeping. The Queen’s head fit flawlessly beneath Mimosa’s chin. She wondered if all babies’ heads fit so flawlessly beneath their mothers’ chins, if it was a biological thing. Who were those women, those women who had cautioned her, “Don’t worry if you don’t love your baby right away; it takes a while”?
“It’ll be better here,” Sam said again, or maybe he didn’t. She was too tired to know. Everything was a blur—the red numbers on the digital clock, the black hole of The Queen’s mouth.
Sam came up behind Mimosa and did something, the bite on the back of her neck, his vampire move. It was a trick he’d discovered by accident, one night many years ago; they’d been rolling around in bed and somehow his teeth had found the skin there. He’d immediately let go and apologized. “No,” she’d said firmly, giddily, realizing that now she could love him. “I mean, please. Do it again.”
Since this was the first time he had done it since the birth of The Queen, Mimosa was particularly sensitive to it. The touch of his teeth traveled silken down her spine, like an epidural in the seconds before it begins to numb. She turned to him, opening her mouth. The Queen awoke with a howl.
* * *
While Sam was at work, Mimosa ran her fingers from the top of The Queen’s head all the way down her spine, again and again, an addiction. It was too much, this beauty, this responsibility. The Queen burped. The Queen stared wide-eyed at the corner of the room as though watching a ghost emerge from the wall. The Queen farted. Mimosa couldn’t bear the softness like a piece of overripe fruit where The Queen’s skull had yet to fuse. It seemed that The Queen could vanish or disintegrate in an instant, that it would take almost nothing to destroy her.
“Are you there?” Sam said, standing in the doorway. A heat wave had begun. The bedroom was hot and dark. The whole house was hot and dark. He couldn’t see who was crying and who was sleeping.
* * *
Over the weekend they did things. Nice things, together, as a family. Sam insisted. It felt strange to Mimosa to be out and about, strolling down the sidewalk, sitting on a bench, eating ice cream. She was so accustomed to being inside the house. She was so accustomed to sitting on the bed with The Queen on her knees. Her armpits were damp and her sundress smelled. Her breasts were leaking.
On the other bench, another couple ate ice cream and gazed into a stroller. The woman wore the same sandals as Mimosa.
“Let’s go,” Mimosa said, standing abruptly.
Sam looked up, surprised.
“Come on,” she said.
The labor had been so long. She hadn’t slept more than three hours at a stretch since then. He rose and gripped the handlebar of the stroller. She stormed down the sidewalk toward a quieter street. Small, sensible houses, not unlike their own. She allowed Sam and The Queen to catch up with her. At the end of the block, a woman was watering a row of sagging stargazer lilies with a long hose. Mimosa, who liked stargazers, very nearly smiled as they approached the yard.
But this woman, the woman with the hose; she was wearing the same sundress as Mimosa. And, arcing outward from the small house: the wail of a newborn.
* * *
In the middle of the middle of the night, The Queen was screaming for milk, and Mimosa’s breasts were dripping, but the screaming interfered with the latch. The Queen was sticky with milk. Mimosa was sticky with milk. Mimosa wrestled The Queen’s confused, damp body closer to her nipple. Milk plastered them together at their stomachs.
* * *
On Monday, the heat was worse than ever. Something was happening to The Queen: hundreds if not thousands of small bumps had arisen on her skin. Mimosa noticed the rash when The Queen woke her at 4:57 in the morning (Sam slept through the crying, could always sleep through, and this was troubling to Mimosa, and at times filled her with queasy hatred, as though she had married a Frisbee or a spoon rather than a man).
Mimosa stepped around the moving boxes and turned on the overhead light in The Queen’s room. She removed The Queen’s onesie and diaper. She stood at the changing table for far too long, staring at The Queen’s skin. The Queen kicked and twisted and reached, oblivious to her mother’s hard gaze. Only when The Queen’s flailing arm had a little heart-wrenching spasm (overexcitement? agitation?) did Mimosa finally pick her up.
She went back into the other room and watched Sam sleep. Then she shoved The Queen at his face.
“Look!” she commanded.
“Oh,” Sam cooed sleepily, taking the baby, pressing her into his chest hair. “I am looking! I am looking at this beautiful, perfect baby! Oh my!”
The Queen smiled at her father, or so it seemed.
Mimosa pulled The Queen away from him and held her close, as close as close could be, the baby’s head in its nook beneath Mimosa’s chin, but she wished there was some way to hold her even closer.
* * *
The house felt small, small and hot. Mimosa could smell herself more strongly by the minute. Her body odor had intensified since The Queen’s birth. Sam had read somewhere that newborns can recognize only one person in the entire world, and the way they recognize that person is by scent alone. She wondered when her stink would begin to offend The Queen, or if The Queen liked it more as it grew stronger.
In the car on the way to the park she felt victorious (having packed the diaper bag, located the car keys) and rolled down all the windows. She wanted to sit on a bench by the pond and hold The Queen in her lap and gaze at the swans. This was something she had imagined doing when she was pregnant.
But today even the birds terrified her. The swans and the pigeons were preparing for a face-off. They surrounded the most desirable bench, the pigeons viciously iridescent, the swans viciously white, ready for some kind of reckoning.
She spun the stroller around, away from the battlefield. The Queen began to fuss. Only a witch would dare stroll her infant in such indecent heat.
“You’re my best friend,” she said to soothe The Queen, but it just sounded plaintive.
* * *
Mimosa drove home slowly. She wished The Queen could be up front in the passenger seat beside her. She narrated the sights they passed: that’s a church, that’s a school, that’s a gas station. Soon the backseat was swathed in the hush of The Queen’s sleep. They said it was good to talk to your baby, but sometimes it was hard to know what to say, even when your baby was The Queen.
If Mimosa had been alone, truly alone, as she had so often been as of five weeks ago, she would have turned on the radio. But now the hush enveloped the car as Mimosa pulled up to a stop sign.
There were four cars at the four-way stop, three in addition to Mimosa’s.
First the car to Mimosa’s left passed through the intersection, driven by a woman with a dark bob, a tired face, a car seat in the back. Next the car to Mimosa’s right passed through the intersection, driven by a woman with a dark bob, a tired face, a car seat in the back. Then the car across from Mimosa passed through the intersection, driven by a woman with a dark bob, a tired face, a car seat in the back. Now it was Mimosa’s turn. She was horrified, paralyzed.
Yet it was her turn, and so she drove.
* * *
Early evening, and Sam was driving. A deep blue summer night, birdsong paired with silence. Stopped at a red light, they watched a woman push a stroller across the gleaming crosswalk.
“This town,” Mimosa said bitterly as the light turned green.
“What?” Sam said.
There was a row of dark trees, the kind of trees that ought to be Christmas trees. They looked strange here, in the heart of the summer, standing upright against the heat.
“Filled with doppelgängers of me,” Mimosa said. As she said it, she could see them—furrowing their brows the same way over the list of ingredients on a jar of tomato sauce, struggling the same way to wipe the shit out of the rolls of fat on their babies’ thighs.
Sam gave half a laugh. Mimosa glanced back to check on The Queen. The backseat was dim, but she sensed that the baby was awake.
“Yeah,” Sam said in that flat way of his. “That’s why I love you. ’Cause you’re just like everyone else.”
She craned her neck further, caught a glimpse of her accomplice’s dark alert eye.
Mimosa had been very organized, before all this. She’d had plans to start a small business. Somewhere on her computer there were spreadsheets.
“Just because they, what, have the same stroller we have?” Sam said as he pulled into their driveway.
He got out and opened the door to the backseat and unlatched The Queen. The Queen spat up on him, just as so many babies all over town were spitting up on their fathers.
* * *
It was eerie, more than eerie, it was nauseating, to see them standing at the gas station, their hair wilting in the heat just like hers, their bodies at the same stage of post-birth flab.
* * *
There was a doppelgänger in the produce section. Perched in the woman’s shopping cart, a sleeping infant in a handy detachable car seat identical to the handy detachable car seat of The Queen. Mimosa hid behind the bananas and watched. The woman held a real lemon in one hand and a lemon-shaped container of lemon juice in the other. She dropped the lemon into her cart, put the container back on the shelf, and began to walk away. Then she turned around to swap the lemon for the container. Then, she changed her mind again, put the container on the shelf once more, and returned the lemon to her cart.
Mimosa recognized the indecision born of exhaustion, that familiar fuzziness. This sizzle of recognition propelled her toward the woman.
“I did that just last week,” Mimosa found herself saying.
The doppelgänger, now studying the nutrition information on the container of lemon juice, didn’t react. Boldly, Mimosa raised her voice a second time.
“I have a hard time choosing between them,” she said. Her voice seemed an intrusion in the cool, tranquil supermarket.
The doppelgänger turned to her with a radiant smile, and Mimosa reacted with a radiant smile of her own.
“I know!” the doppelgänger said, as though they were in the middle of a conversation. “It’s like, convenience versus authenticity. I can’t believe that squeezing a lemon sounds like too much of a hassle, but that’s just where I am in my life right now, you know?”
So much did Mimosa know that she had to blink back a pair of tears.
“How old?” the doppelgänger asked, turning her smile on The Queen.
“Six weeks,” Mimosa said.
“Mine too!” the doppelgänger exclaimed. “Well, six and a half. Just started smiling for non-gas reasons last week. Look, you’ve got to join my moms’ group for babies born in June.”
“Oh,” Mimosa said, revolted and fascinated.
“Mary Rogers,” the doppelgänger said, sticking out her hand.
“Mimosa Smith,” Mimosa said.
“Mimosa!” Mary Rogers said. “That’s quite a name.”
“My mom’s favorite drink,” Mimosa explained, as usual. Mary Rogers didn’t yet know that, aside from her name, Mimosa was just like any other plain Jane.
* * *
It was there, damp with sweat, in the pocket of her sundress. She reached down and squeezed it during dinner. She’d made pasta and now she didn’t know why she’d made something that required water to boil. The night was already devastatingly hot.
“Want me to hold her?” Sam said across the small breakfast table. They had a dining room with a dining table, but they had yet to use it. Mimosa held The Queen with one arm and with the opposite hand clenched the piece of paper torn magnanimously from Mary Rogers’s shopping list. On one side, Mary Rogers had scrawled the name of the café where the moms’ group was meeting this week; on the other side, brown rice, prune juice, paper towels, oli-. It felt so intimate to have this scrap from another woman’s list, her items jotted just as messily as Mimosa’s always were.
Mimosa insisted on holding The Queen, even though the baby’s warmth was increasing her own temperature by a degree or two.
“You need to eat your food,” Sam said.
The Queen is my food.
“It was stupid to make pasta in this heat,” she said.
Sam shrugged, pressed a forkful into his mouth. She could tell he agreed.
<
br /> “Let me take the baby,” Sam said, “so you can eat.”
She pitied him, and willed herself to pass the baby. The Queen kept it together for twenty seconds before starting to shriek. He stood up, bounced her, didn’t do it quite right. Mimosa refrained from critiquing his technique. They couldn’t be put into words, anyhow, The Queen’s particular needs. After a few minutes he was forced to return the baby to her mother. The Queen quieted instantly, offensively. Sam carried the plates to the sink and put them down hard.
* * *
The women threatened to overwhelm the café, these women with their strollers and sandals and sundresses, staked out at two large tables and encroaching upon a third. Mimosa struggled through the doorway with her stroller. She was stuck halfway in, halfway out, when it occurred to her that she could still escape. It could still be just her and The Queen, alone together.
“Hi! Welcome!” one of the doppelgängers cried out—Mary Rogers, she assumed, though it was impossible to know. “Come on over!”
And they all turned their heads, their tired faces reflecting her tired face. They were gesturing to her, they were scooting aside to make room.
For the first time in a long time, Mimosa knew exactly what was required of her. She glided across the café and took her place among them. She was given a seat and an iced tea. She pulled The Queen out of the stroller and began to nurse her, idly, as the others were. So this was all she had to do: sit here, nurse her baby, blend in.
But then the questions began. How many weeks? Where’d you deliver? Pounds, ounces? How’d you pick the name? When do you go back to work? Have you figured out child care? What’s the nap schedule? Sleeping much at night yet? So flustered did she become that she said the wrong birth date, the tenth instead of the twelfth, but was too embarrassed to correct the mistake, because one of the doppelgängers had already gone into raptures about the fact that her baby had been born on the same day.
Some Possible Solutions Page 3