Little Earthquakes
Page 19
The woman looked up at Becky. “I heard your baby crying,” she said.
Becky looked at the woman. She had wide-set eyes, a full, pink mouth, high cheekbones, a heart-shaped face with a pointy chin that should have been too sharp for her face, but on screen . . .
“Hey,” she said. “Hey, I know you! You were in that movie about the cheerleaders.”
The woman shook her head. “Nope. Sorry. That was Kirsten Dunst.”
“But you were in something.”
The woman reached out with one fingertip and almost touched Ava’s bare foot. “She’s so beautiful,” she said. “You must be so happy.”
“Happy. Yeah, well, when she sleeps . . .” Becky’s voice trailed off. Lia Frederick. That was her name. Lia Frederick. And her married name was Lia Lane. Which Becky had no reason to know except that she was a devotee of Entertainment Weekly and People and the nightly tabloid TV shows on which Lia Frederick was a regular. Lia Frederick had played half a dozen small roles in big-budget shoot-’em-ups, and she’d played a nuclear scientist with a rare blood disease and a stalker ex-husband in a movie on Lifetime that Becky had seen twice in the past four weeks when she’d been stuck inside with her brand-new squalling baby.
Lia reached into the diaper bag and pulled out a burp cloth, a fancy one in a blue-and-white print that matched the bib Becky had found. “Here,” she said and tried to put it in Becky’s hand. “This is for you.”
So this was where the little baby gifts had been coming from, Becky thought. This was who’d slipped the spoon through her mail slot and who’d put the rattle in her bag and left a pacifier at Mas.
“Here,” said Lia, trying to put it in the pocket of Becky’s bathrobe. “Please, take it. I don’t need it anymore.”
Becky searched her memory. Hollywood tragedy, she thought again, and then she had it. Some normally bubbly anchorbabe, face arranged into an unfamiliar somber expression. Our condolences go out to Sam and Lia Lane, whose ten-week-old son Caleb died last week. “Oh my God.”
“Please,” said Lia, looking desperate and sad as she pushed the little burp cloth at Becky. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I scared you. I’m sorry I was in front of your house; I couldn’t sleep so I went for a walk, and I was just resting for a minute when I heard the baby start to cry. Please. Please just take it. Please.”
Becky put the cloth in her bathrobe pocket, and she took Lia by the hand. “Come with me,” she said.
∗ ∗ ∗
Ten minutes later, Lia was sitting at her table, still looking as if she might bolt, and Becky was sitting in the rocking chair she’d installed in the corner of the kitchen. Ava, it turned out, had been hungry after all, and she was nursing contentedly while whapping at the side of Becky’s breast with one tiny fist and looking like an angry old man who was now trying to get his change back from a broken vending machine. Twix bar! Twix bar! Goddamnit, I wanted a Twix bar! Becky smiled, burped the baby, and set her into her Moses basket on the kitchen table. “Scrambled eggs. I’m going to make scrambled eggs,” she said, before Lia could answer.
Becky cracked four eggs one-handed into a bowl and reached for her sea salt, her pepper mill, and her whisk. “Whenever my brother and I got sick, my mother used to make us scrambled eggs. I have no idea why, but, well . . .”
“I’m not sick, though,” Lia said with a tiny smile. She took a long breath and let it out slowly. “I used to live here, you know. I mean, not here, here—not downtown—but in Philadelphia. In the Great Northeast.”
Becky put a chunk of butter in the pan and flicked on the heat. “Tea?” she asked. When Lia nodded, she put the kettle on to boil. “So you came back home, after . . .” Her voice trailed off.
“After,” Lia said. She looked ruefully at her diaper bag. “I got on the plane with this bag. I wasn’t even thinking. I had all this stuff, this baby stuff, and then I saw you in April.”
“Did I look pregnant?” Becky blurted, then shook her head at herself. Here she was, with incontrovertible evidence of her condition, and she was still playing Pregnant or Just Fat?
“Yeah,” Lia said. “And I just thought . . . oh, I don’t know. I don’t know what I was thinking. I guess I kind of lost my mind.”
“I can understand that,” Becky said. She poured the eggs into the pan and turned down the heat. “I mean, I can imagine . . . well, I can’t imagine, really. It’s the worst thing I can think of.” She tilted the pan, stirred the eggs, and popped two crumpets into the toaster.
“I watched you for a while,” Lia said. “You and your two friends. But I don’t know their names.” She smiled. “I didn’t even know Ava’s name. You never call her Ava, you know? She’s the baby of a thousand names. Tiny Toes, Grumbelina, Princess Plumberbutt . . .”
“I think we were having diaper issues that day,” Becky said. “Anyhow, the blond woman is Kelly and her baby’s Oliver. She keeps flow charts, and her big recreational activity is returning things. She’s basically the Meg Ryan of Babies R Us, but she’s really nice. The black woman’s Ayinde and her baby’s Julian. Her husband’s on the Sixers, and she lives in this mansion in Gladwyne. I’m not sure I would have gotten to know either one of them, before.” She shrugged. “Babies make strange bedfellows.”
Ava stirred in her basket, raising one clenched fist above her head. “The baby power salute,” Becky said.
“Caleb used to do that,” Lia said. “That was my baby’s name. Caleb.” She seemed about to say more, then she closed her mouth and stared down at Ava.
“Where’s your husband?” Becky asked, struggling to come up with his name. “Sam, right?”
Lia shook her head. “Back in Los Angeles. I kind of just left. I wanted to tell him . . . it wasn’t his fault, but . . .” She shook her head again. “I just couldn’t stay,” she said softly.
Becky turned off the flame and reached for plates and napkins. Ava started flailing her arms. “Can you hold her?” Becky asked.
“Oh,” Lia said. “I, I don’t think . . .”
“She doesn’t bite,” Becky said from the stove. “And even if she did, it would probably be okay, as she is still in the situation of having no teeth.”
Lia smiled. She shrugged off her coat, bent down, and lifted Ava into her arms. She settled the baby against her a little awkwardly and rocked her back and forth as she rocked across the kitchen, singing in a voice that was high and sweet and silvery.
“Bye and bye, bye and bye,
the moon is half a lemon pie.
The mice who stole the other half
have scattered star-crumbs in the sky.
Bye and bye,
bye and bye,
my darling baby, don’t you cry.
The moon is still above the hill.
The soft clouds gather in the sky.”
Becky held her breath. Ava reached up with one wandering hand and tangled her fingers in Lia’s hair.
KELLY
“How was your doctor’s appointment?” Steve asked, with his right hand on her knee.
Kelly took a deep breath and tried to wake up. She had known this question would be coming, and she knew that in spite of how it sounded it had nothing to do with Steve’s concern for her health. How was your doctor’s appointment, loosely translated, meant Can we have sex?
“It was fine,” she said slowly, knowing what would come next. Knowing and not wanting it one bit.
The truth was, she was cleared for takeoff. “You’re fine,” Dr. Mendlow had said, still buried practically wrist-deep in what she amusingly used to think of as her private parts. That was before she gave birth in a teaching hospital and wound up pushing in full view of a parade of residents, interns, medical students, and, she could have sworn, a junior high school field trip, although Steve insisted that she’d hallucinated that part. “Whenever you’re ready, you can start having intercourse.” Kelly would have laughed longer than thirty seconds, but she knew the doctor was busy, and she had to get back home as fast as she could because Oli
ver would need to nurse again. That, and she couldn’t think of a polite way to say that she’d never wanted to have sex less in her entire life and that the spectacle of her shorts-clad, couch-bound husband, who kept telling her that he was taking a much-needed mental health break before starting his job search in earnest, wasn’t doing much for her libido.
There was also the matter of the couch. She’d come back from walking Lemon and Oliver one afternoon to find a giant orange-and-brown-plaid three-seater squatting in the middle of her formerly vacant living room. She’d closed her eyes, certain that when she opened them again the ugliest couch in the history of furniture would have vanished. But no. The couch was still there.
“Steve?”
Her husband, still wearing the boxer shorts he’d slept in, wandered into the room.
“What is this?”
“Oh,” he said, looking at the couch as if he, too, was seeing it for the first time. “The Conovans were throwing it out, and I told them we’d take it.”
“But . . .” She struggled to find the right words. “But it’s hideous!”
“It’s a couch,” he said. “It’s something to sit on.” He flopped down defiantly. Kelly winced at the sour smell of mildew and eau de old people that wafted out of the cushions. The thing smelled as if someone had died on top of it. And then stayed awhile. And it looked . . . God, she thought and swallowed hard. It looked close enough to the couch she’d had in her house growing up to be its evil twin.
“Steve. Please. It’s awful.”
“I like it,” he said. And that was that. The couch had stayed.
Dr. Mendlow looked at Kelly as she wiped her eyes with the hem of the pink paper-towel gown. “Why don’t you step into my office?” he said. He looked as boyish as ever in his customary blue scrubs and white coat, but she saw a tie peeking out from underneath his collar. She wondered where he was going and whether he’d be bringing his wife.
“No,” she said, still snorting a little, “no, really, I’m fine. Just a little exhausted.” Which was such an understatement that it set her off on another gale of laughter. She’d fed Oliver at 11:00 at night, at 1:30 in the morning, at 3 A.M., at 5 A.M., and literally had been forced to drag her nipple out of his mouth so that she could make her 8:30 appointment.
“My office,” he said, washing his hands. Kelly wiped herself off, pulled on her panties, her sweatpants, and her T-shirt (stained with spit-up on both shoulders, she noticed, but what could she do?), and arranged herself in one of Dr. Mendlow’s leather chairs.
“Listen,” he said, sitting behind his desk five minutes later, jolting Kelly out of the light doze she’d fallen into, “whatever you want to tell your husband, I’ll back you up.”
Her jaw must have dropped. “You want to tell him I said nothing but holding hands until six months, you go right ahead.”
“I . . . really?”
“You’re breast-feeding?”
Kelly nodded.
“Then you’re not sleeping much. And you’re adjusting to what’s probably the biggest change in your life. Sex probably isn’t very high on your list right now.”
“My husband,” Kelly said and then stopped. The truth was that the six weeks after Oliver was born felt like a vacation. “Nothing in the vagina,” Dr. Mendlow had said. “No intercourse, no tampons, no douching,” he told them. “You can have oral sex,” he said. Kelly thought Steve was going to vault over her hospital bed and hug him, until he continued, “That means you can sit around and talk about all the sex you aren’t having.” Steve’s face fell. “Come see me in six weeks, and we’ll see where you are.” Then the doctor had whacked Steve lightly on the forearm with Oliver’s medical chart and headed out the door.
But now her reprieve was over, and Steve’s hand was inching up her thigh. “Can we?” he asked. Kelly ran through her options. There weren’t many. She could tell him no and just postpone the inevitable, or she could tell him yes, bite the bullet, and hope for a fast conclusion.
“Is the baby sleeping?” she whispered. Steve peered down to the foot of the bed, where Oliver reposed, snug in his Pack-n-Play (after his first night at home, Kelly had quickly figured out that the gorgeous, perfect little nursery was going to remain unused as long as the baby was waking up three or four times a night). Steve nodded, smacked his lips, and dove.
He started by kissing her neck, gentle nibbles up and down. Umm. She closed her eyes and tried not to yawn as he pressed against her. He was kissing her collarbones . . . pushing up her nightgown . . . shaking her shoulders.
“Wha? Huh?” She blinked.
“Did you fall asleep?”
“No!” she said. Had she? Probably. Kelly pinched herself hard on the thigh and vowed that the least she could do would be to stay awake for the entirety of this encounter. She owed her husband that much.
“Where were we?” she asked. She kissed his earlobe and nibbled at his chest. He moaned, and circled her breasts with his hand, rubbing at the nipples with his thumbs.
“Whoa!”
“What?” She couldn’t have fallen asleep again, she thought. It wasn’t possible.
He raised his hands in front of her face, shaking them, with a look of such disgust that she expected to see blood dripping from his fingertips. Instead she saw a few innocuous white drops. Milk.
“Honey, it’s no big deal.”
He shook his head, still looking pale and disconcerted, and resumed his efforts. Off went the nightgown. Off went the granny panties, stained the color of faded ketchup at the crotch (she hoped he wouldn’t notice in the flickering blue light of the baby monitor). In went the KY jelly he’d subtly placed on the nightstand after they’d finished dinner. On went the condom. Ribbed for her pleasure, said the box. Hah.
“Ow!”
“Sorry,” he panted. Ouch. What on earth was going on down there? Had the twelve-year-old resident who’d sewn up her episiotomy accidentally revirginized her? Kelly shut her eyes and tried to relax.
“Oh, God,” he breathed in her ear. “Oh, God, Kelly, you feel so good.”
“Mmm,” she moaned back, thinking that she didn’t feel good at all. Her belly was still loose and flabby; she felt as if there was a half-deflated inner tube around her midsection, and its skin looked as if someone had dipped a rake in red paint and stroked it up and down. She knew the stretch marks would fade, but for the time being, she couldn’t stand to look at them. Steve, however, didn’t seem to mind.
“What do you want?” he gasped and grabbed her ankle, pulling her right leg up toward his shoulder. Kelly bit back a yelp and tossed her head in pain that she hoped he would mistake for passion. “What do you want me to do?”
And instead of some ribald response, some variant of Do it to me harder, which would be her typical prepregnancy answer, his question set off an echo in her head, courtesy of one of the books she’d been reading to Oliver before he’d fallen asleep. Mister Brown can moo, can you?
“Kelly?”
Oh, the wonderful sounds Mr. Brown can do. Mr. Brown can moo like a cow . . .
“Moo!” she said.
Steve stopped moving long enough to stare at her. “What?”
“I mean, mmmm,” she moaned. Louder this time. Goddamn Dr. Seuss is ruining my sex life.
“Kelly?”
Boom, boom, boom, Mr. Brown is a wonder . . .
“Kell?”
Boom, boom, boom, Mr. Brown makes thunder! “Oh, God!” she said. Generic, but acceptable. At least it didn’t rhyme.
She clutched Steve’s shoulders as his breathing sped up. Thank you, God, she thought as he gasped, and Oliver started to cry.
“Argh!” sighed her husband.
“Wah!” cried her baby.
Cow goes moo, sheep goes baa, went her head, which had evidently abandoned Dr. Seuss and moved on to the board books of Sandra Boynton. I am never going to sleep again, ever, Kelly thought, rolling out from beneath her husband and lifting her baby into her arms.
AYINDE
Paul Davis—fiftyish, white, handsome in a tweedy, goateed way—clicked the set into silence and looked down at the résumé on his desk.
“Yale, huh? And a master’s from Columbia.”
“Don’t hold it against me,” said Ayinde, and they both laughed.
“West Virginia for ten months . . .”
“Which was about eight months too long,” said Ayinde. More laughter. She let herself relax a bit as she pulled her jacket tightly across her chest.
“Six years in Fort Worth.”
“I started out doing general assignment work and features, and, as you’ll see, I was promoted to weekend editor, then to anchor of the five o’clock news, which had a twelve percent rise in ratings the first year I was there.”
“Very nice, very nice,” he said, scribbling something on the résumé. “Look, Ayinde. I’m going to be honest with you.”
She smiled at him. He’d said her name right on the first try, which had to count for something.