Little Earthquakes

by Jennifer Weiner

  “All Through the Night” read chapter six. Julian opened his eyes and started to cry. Ayinde sighed, thinking she’d settle for her baby’s sleeping All Through Three Hours. She carried Julian to the glider and began nursing him, supporting his body with her right hand while she turned pages with her left.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  By the next morning, Ayinde had all of her tools in place—an electronic timer, so she could see exactly how long Julian was nursing, and the brands of slings and strollers and baby bathtubs and baby soap and baby shampoo that Priscilla Prewitt recommended. (Now I want y’all to know that I’m not getting one red cent from these manufacturers. These are simply the products that I’ve liked the best over the years.)

  Ten minutes into her Baby Success! program, she had her first problem. Brand-new babies should be nursing a maximum of thirty minutes per feeding, Priscilla Prewitt wrote. Longer than that, and they’re just usin’ you as a pacifier. But after thirty minutes, Julian was still going strong. Ayinde squinted at the book, looking for further instructions. If Dumpling is reluctant to let go of the booby, tell him nicely but firmly that mealtime’s over, and there will be more to come later. Then ease him off the breast, and offer him a pacifier—or, if you’re going all-natural, your finger to suck on.

  “Julian!” Ayinde said, in her best estimation of a tone that was nice but firm. “Mealtime is over!” He ignored her, eyes squeezed shut, jaw working. Ayinde let him nurse another minute, which slid into another two, which was almost five when she was accosted with a vision of her son running home from kindergarten and opening her blouse himself.

  “Okay!” she said in her firm-but-cheerful tone. She tried to pull him off gently. The baby’s head slid backward. Unfortunately, her nipple came with it.

  “Ow!” she hissed. Julian opened his eyes, startled, and began wailing. Just then, the telephone rang. Kelly, she thought, groping for the Talk button without so much as glancing at the caller ID. Maybe it was Kelly, or Becky, and she could tell her what to do . . .

  Alas, it was Lolo. “I hear that sweet boy!” she announced. Ayinde could imagine her mother standing in the white-on-white kitchen in which nothing other than tea was ever prepared, misting her orchids, dressed, as always, in couture—a pencil skirt or a wrap dress, high heels, and one of the dramatic hats that had become her signature look.

  “Hello, Mother.”

  “Hello, my love. How are you doing?”

  “Just fine,” Ayinde said, as Julian blatted.

  Lolo’s tone was dubious. “That doesn’t sound like a happy baby.”

  “He’s just a little cranky,” Ayinde said, as Julian wailed even more loudly. She set him down in his Priscilla Prewitt–approved bouncy seat, tucked the receiver under her chin, and tried to refasten her bra. “It’s his cranky time.”

  “Are you using that book I sent? It came very highly recommended. My masseuse swears by it!”

  “High praise,” Ayinde murmured.

  Lolo raised her voice until she was shouting over the baby’s cries. “Well, Ayinde, the point of the book is that once you get your baby into a routine, he won’t have a cranky time!”

  “I understand that,” Ayinde said, fumbling her breast pad back into place. “We’re working on it.”

  “You know,” Lolo said, “you never cried like that by the time you were Julian’s age.”

  “Are you sure?”

  She gave a brittle laugh. “I think I can remember what my own daughter was like.”

  With all the drugs it was rumored Lolo had taken in the 1970s, Ayinde wasn’t so sure. “I should go.”

  “Of course, love. Take good care of that darling baby!”

  Ayinde hung up the phone, rehooked her bra, and picked up Julian, whose wails had given way to little whimpers. “Hey, sweetheart,” she whispered. His eyes were beginning to close. Oh, dear. She picked up the book. DO NOT ALLOW DUMPLING TO SLEEP AFTER A FEEDING! Priscilla Prewitt admonished. Do you want to take a big ol’ nap after eating a heavy meal? “Yes,” Ayinde said. No! Priscilla Prewitt wrote. The ideal order for Baby’s development is meal, then activity, and then a little visit to Dreamland.

  “Julian. Dumpling.” She kissed his cheek and wiggled his toes. He opened his mouth and started to cry again. “Playtime!” She dangled the fuzzy butterfly in front of the baby’s face. Richard hated the fuzzy butterfly, along with the blue teddy bear and the crinkly-winged insects. “It’s sissy stuff,” he’d said.

  “How very evolved of you,” she’d replied and explained that there were very few options available for newborns in the dump-truck-and-bulldozer category, even if she’d wanted to seek them out, which she didn’t. “What did you play with when you were a baby?” she asked.

  His face closed. Ayinde regretted the question immediately. Richard had grown up in Atlanta in half a dozen houses—his grandmother’s, an aunt here, a play-cousin there, places Ayinde had only seen on TV and in the profile Sports Illustrated had run a few years ago. No toys there. Worse, no mother. It was part of what drew them together. Even though Ayinde had been abandoned in a posh apartment and enrolled in boarding school as soon as she hit fourteen, and Richard had been dumped in apartments in the projects, it all came down to the same thing—parents who had better things to do. But Ayinde, at least, had had a consistent adult in her nanny, Serena, who’d cared for her from the time she was six weeks old until her eighth birthday. She’d had toys and clothes and grand birthday parties, a roof over her head, and the guarantee of three meals. Richard’s life hadn’t been like that.

  “You want to know what I played with?” he asked shortly. Then he’d smiled to soften the blow of his words. “Basketballs, baby.” Julian had basketballs, of course—a regulation-sized sphere that bore the autographs of all of the Sixers and a miniature one that Richard kept tucked in Julian’s crib.

  “Let’s shake a leg,” she told her son, who peered at her through slitted eyes as she wiped his face with a burp cloth, replaced his dirty T-shirt with a clean one, fastened a blue-and-white bib around his neck, and carried him into the sticky air outside.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  “Just be patient,” Becky was saying from her perch on a bench in Rittenhouse Square Park, where she and Kelly and their respective bellies were sitting side by side in short-sleeved shirts and sneakers, squabbling about the right way to give birth. Like it’s going to be up to them, Ayinde thought with a smile.

  “I am being patient,” Kelly replied. She lurched to her feet and stretched her arms over her head, then grabbed her left elbow with her right hand and pulled. “I’ve been patient. But it’s thirty-eight weeks, which is full term, so why can’t they just induce me already?” She blew out a frustrated breath and switched elbows, then moved on to hamstring stretches.

  Ayinde wheeled Julian over to the bench, thinking that Kelly, with her wisp of a blond ponytail and translucent skin, was looking considerably less chipper than she had in that first yoga class. Her lips were chapped, her blue eyes were sunken, and her body, in her black-and-white maternity workout ensemble, seemed to be all belly. Her arms and legs had moved past skinny toward scrawny, and she had dark circles under her eyes.

  “Babies know when they want to be born,” Becky said. “What’s the rush?” Becky’s appearance had also changed in the past weeks. She had the same full cheeks and tumble of curls, the same uniform of sneakers, leggings, and oversize T-shirts. The difference was, she’d finally started to show. Which was good news, Becky said, insofar as she finally looked pregnant, but bad news because people kept asking her whether she was having twins. Or triplets. And whether she’d taken fertility drugs to get them.

  “You need to relax,” Becky said, unscrewing the top of her water bottle and taking a gulp. Kelly made a noncommittal noise and started doing torso twists. The two of them were polar opposites when it came to their birth plans. Becky wanted an all-natural birth: no drugs, no medical interventions, laboring at home for as long as she could manage with her husband an
d her friend Sarah there to help. She’d taken classes in something called the Bradley Method and was fond of parroting expressions from her instructor such as “Babies know when they’re ready to be born” and “Women were having babies just fine long before doctors got involved” and “You have to let your labor unfold in its own time.”

  Kelly, on the other hand, had long ago announced her intention to get her epidural right away—in the hospital parking lot, if possible—and none of Becky’s facts and figures and offer to loan her a videotape of women in Belize giving birth without any medication while they squatted in rope hammocks they’d woven themselves had changed her mind. Kelly’s own mother, Kelly explained, had simply disappeared in the middle of the night five times and come back a day or two later with a deflated belly and a brand-new little bundle of joy. No muss, no fuss, no pain that Kelly had seen, and that was just what she wanted for herself.

  “Let’s get this over with,” Becky said, getting slowly to her feet. They started their laps around the park. Kelly pumped her arms vigorously and lifted her knees high. Becky tended to amble and to stop every few minutes to readjust her ponytail. Ayinde kept her eyes on Julian, sleeping in his stroller, and had almost fallen twice because of it.

  “I can’t stand this anymore,” Kelly groaned. “Do you know I’m so miserable I actually thought about having sex, just to see if it would get things going?”

  “Oh, no,” said Becky. “Not sex!”

  Kelly looked at her. “Are you having sex?”

  “Well, sometimes,” Becky said. “You know. When there’s nothing good on cable.”

  “I just don’t see why they can’t induce me. Or give me a C-section. That would be ideal,” said Kelly, pumping her arms even harder as they rounded the corner on Nineteenth Street, passing a trio of art students carrying portfolios. She waved away the cigarette smoke. “I hate waiting.”

  “You know, statistically, the average first pregnancy lasts anywhere from seven to ten days past the medical establishment’s arbitrary forty-week deadline,” Becky said. “I just turned forty-one weeks, but you don’t see me complaining. And a C-section’s major surgery. There are risks, you know.” She nodded, looking satisfied at having worked another natural-childbirth nugget into the conversation, and glared at a pair of joggers who’d brushed a little too close to her shoulder as they completed another lap. “Are we done yet?”

  Kelly shook her head. “Once more around the park,” she said. “How are things going with Julian?”

  “Wonderful,” Ayinde said reflexively. She rolled her shoulders, readjusting her grip on the stroller’s padded handlebar, and thought that “Wonderful” was the only answer anyone really wanted to hear from a new mother. The truth was, caring for a newborn was infinitely more demanding than she’d imagined. The baby needed her all the time, and whenever she started to do something—check her e-mail, take a shower, look at a magazine, take a nap—his cries would call her back, and he’d need his diaper changed or he’d need to nurse, which he did at a rate of what felt like once every thirty minutes.

  Richard had watched it all with increasing skepticism. “You don’t need to work so hard,” he told her the night before, when she’d left the table after three bites of dinner to nurse the baby on the living-room couch. “We can get that baby nurse to come back.”

  Ayinde had told him no. In her view, the only women who were entitled to pay someone else to care for their children were working women. She had no job except for the baby, and she’d been good at every job she ever had. It pained her to think of admitting that she couldn’t handle Julian by herself. “We’re fine,” she’d told Richard. “We’re fine,” she told her friends, as they completed another lap. She reached down to reattach Julian’s teddy bear wrist rattle. “Have either of you ever heard of a book called Baby Success!?”

  “Oh, absolutely!” Kelly said.

  “That’s the one that says you’re supposed to have your baby on a schedule, right?” Becky asked. She winced and stopped to twist from side to side. “Cramp,” she explained, as Kelly high-stepped in place.

  “That’s the one. My mother sent it,” Ayinde said.

  “I looked at it in the bookstore. It sounded kind of rigid,” Becky said. “I mean, I agree with the scheduling idea in principle, but I like the idea of a morning nap and an afternoon nap instead of a nap every day at 9:15 and 3:32. And, did you get to the chapter on working mothers?”

  Ayinde had. “Back to Work?” the chapter was entitled, with the question mark built right in. Priscilla Prewitt, unsurprisingly, was not a fan. Before you head back to the salt mines, think carefully of the consequences of your choice, she wrote. Babies are meant to love their mothers and to be cared for by their mothers—it’s basic biology, darlings, and neither feminism nor daddy’s good intentions can fight it. Work if you must, but don’t kid yourself. Remember that the woman you bring into your house to love your dumpling is going to get some of the hugs, some of the smiles, some of the sweet little giggles—in short, some of the love—that any baby would rather give to Mom.

  “She makes it sound like you’re a horrible person if you leave your baby with a sitter for the afternoon, and you’re about two steps away from a psycho killer if you hire a nanny. But some women have to work,” Becky said, as they started walking again. “Like me.”

  “Do you really have to?” asked Kelly.

  “Well, I don’t think we’d starve if I didn’t. But I love what I do. I don’t know how I’ll feel after the baby comes, but for now, working three days a week sounds like it’ll give me a nice balance.”

  “What will you do with the baby?” Kelly asked.

  “Day care,” said Becky. “Andrew’s hospital has on-site day care. I’ll be with her in the morning, drop her off at noon, and Andrew will take her home if he’s done before I am—ha, ha, like that ever happens. What’ll probably happen is I’ll pick her up when I’m done working. But he’ll be nearby. I feel good about that.” She looked at Ayinde and Kelly. “You guys are staying home, right?”

  Ayinde nodded. Kelly didn’t. “I was going to,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well.” She looked down at her sneakers, the bows perfectly tied, as they rounded the corner again. “Steve’s decided to make a career transition. He’ll take paternity leave once the baby comes, and probably I’ll go back to work until he finds something. But I’m sure it won’t take long,” Kelly said. She flipped her ponytail and wiped a trickle of sweat off her cheek.

  “Are you okay?” Becky asked.

  “Oh, sure! I’m fine!” Kelly said.

  Ayinde took a deep breath. She didn’t want to discourage them or tell them what it was really like at home with a new baby, but she couldn’t keep from remembering something Lolo had told her about her own infancy, an anecdote her mother liked to break out at cocktail parties. “That baby cried and cried so much her first week home, I swear, if someone had shown up at my front door—some normal-looking person, mind you—and promised me they’d give her a good home, I would have handed her over in a minute!” The guests would laugh, as if Lolo was kidding. Ayinde wasn’t so sure. After almost three months with Julian, her lovely little boy who seemed constitutionally incapable of sleeping for more than two hours or not crying for longer than one, she was starting to understand what her mother had meant and why Lolo had been able to hand her daughter over to Serena at six weeks. Serena was the one who’d sung Ayinde lullabyes, who’d cut the crusts off her sandwich, given her baths, and comforted her the day the mean girls had pushed her into the boys’ room. That was the kind of mother she wanted to be (except for the part about taking the train back to Queens every night, to be with her own children, the way Serena had). “You’re both going to be wonderful mothers.”

  “I hope so,” Kelly muttered, rubbing her hands on her belly. “Come out, come out, wherever you are!” She looked at her watch again, then over at Becky, who wiped her forehead and said that it was time for gel
ato.

  BECKY

  Becky peered over her belly at Dr. Mendlow as he examined her the next morning. “Anything doing?” She was forty-one weeks and four days pregnant, and even though she’d been telling everyone that her baby would come when she was ready and that patience was a virtue, the truth was she was getting a little desperate. There had to be something doing by now, she thought. People didn’t just stay pregnant forever.

  Dr. Mendlow pulled off his gloves and shook his head. “I’m sorry, Becky, but the head’s still up; you’re still not dilated or effaced at all.”

  She squeezed her eyes shut, willing herself not to start crying before she’d taken her feet out of the stirrups.

  “That’s the bad news,” the doctor said. “The good news is, you had a nonstress test this morning, and the heart rate’s still perfect, and the amniotic fluid looks fine.”

  “So can’t I just wait?”

  He pulled up a wheeled stool and sat down on it as she sat up, holding the gown closed over her chest. “I’m sure from all the reading you’ve done you know that the risks of having something go wrong with the birth, or the baby, increase after forty-two weeks.”

  She nodded. Even her holistic, all-natural, have-your-baby-at-home-or-in-a-nearby-field books had acknowledged that that much was true. She hadn’t paid much attention at the time, though. She’d just assumed that she wouldn’t have that problem, that as a result of her good intentions and strenuous preparation, her baby would be born not only on time but in a manner that was just what she’d planned for and dreamed of. “So what do we do now?”

  Dr. Mendlow flipped a few pages in her chart. “Given that we’re this far along, and given what the last ultrasound told us about the size of the baby’s head, my recommendation would be a C-section.”

  Becky buried her face in her hands. Dr. Mendlow touched her shoulder gently.

  “I know this isn’t what you wanted,” he said. He’d been listening to Becky talk about natural childbirth almost from the day she’d first come to see him, and he was completely supportive. “But pregnancy’s a balance between the wishes of the parents—the mother, really—and what’s going to be safest for the baby.” He wheeled the stool over to the wall and consulted a small calendar taped to it. “How does tomorrow sound for a birthday?”