Little Earthquakes

by Jennifer Weiner

They made it around the block to the Promised Land, the neighborhood coffee shop. Kelly tied Lemon’s leash to a parking meter, pushed the stroller with one hand and opened the door with the other.

  “Triple espresso,” the barista sang out as Kelly approached the counter.

  “You know it,” she said. She didn’t think she was supposed to be drinking so much coffee while she was still nursing—poor Oliver would be a caffeine junkie before he hit nursery school—but she couldn’t get through the day without it. She dumped skim milk and fake sugar into her cup, took her first gulp, then headed outside to collect the dog. Oliver’s stroller had a cup holder, which bore the printed warning NO HOT BEVERAGES! DANGER TO BABY! In the past months, Kelly had gotten proficient at one-handed pushing, with Lemon’s leash wrapped around one hand and her cup balanced in the other. The system worked perfectly most of the time. That morning, Lemon lunged playfully toward a skateboarder, and Kelly jerked her hand back, hissing as scalding coffee splashed her wrist and hand.

  Finally, back in the apartment, Kelly left Oliver dozing in the stroller, dumped food and fresh water into Lemon’s bowls, and powered up the laptop, drinking coffee and checking her e-mail as fast as she could. She’d gotten through half of her unread messages when the baby started to stir.

  She looked toward the bedroom. The door was still shut. “Steve?”

  The door popped open and Steve popped out, still in a T-shirt and underwear, with his flaccid pink penis wagging through the slit of his boxers. “Why didn’t you wake me up? I could have taken the dog out.”

  “Just take the baby for a minute,” she said.

  “No problem,” he said, scooping Oliver out of the stroller.

  “He might need to burp!” Kelly called over her shoulder, knowing it was a lost cause. Steve would give the baby a few halfhearted whacks on the back, then determine that the baby didn’t need to burp. Well, it wasn’t that Oliver didn’t need to burp, it was that Steve gave up too early. That was turning into quite the pattern, she thought, putting the computer on standby, parking herself in the rocker, and unfastening her bra.

  Please, she whispered to herself, as she placed the plastic cups over her nipples and flicked the machine on. Please let this end soon. “Please,” she muttered, looking at the plastic bottles attached to the cups and at her nipples, once a pretty carnation pink, now turned beige, cracked and ugly as an elephant’s knees. There was maybe an eighth of an inch of milk in the right-hand bottle, only a few drops in the left. Pumping was tedious and uncomfortable, and it was impossible to do anything else while the machine was running. It took both hands and all of her coordination to keep the cups in place, and if she didn’t relax, no milk. “Please,” she said again and closed her eyes, rocking until the timer went off and fifteen minutes had elapsed. She unhooked herself gratefully and held the bottles to the light. Three ounces. Not enough for a full bottle. It’d be formula again.

  The doorbell rang as she was pulling her shirt into place. Kelly gathered the bottles and ran to the foyer like she was hoping to see Santa Claus or Ed McMahon with an oversized check. She knew it would be Lia on the other side. And as far as she was concerned, Lia, who’d agreed to babysit three days a week, was better than Santa and Ed combined.

  “Hi!” Lia said, sweeping into the apartment, her hair (newly dyed a shiny chestnut) gathered into a glossy ponytail, her white shirt (clean, unspotted) tucked into her khakis (ironed, this season’s). Kelly could feel herself relaxing as Lia bent and plucked Oliver out of the exersaucer where Steve had deposited him. It was so nice to have a living human being in the house who’d actually help.

  Kelly caught a flash of Steve’s underpants and heard the bedroom door slam as Lia touched her nose to Oliver’s. “Hi, Ollie-by-golly!” Kelly watched Lia hold her baby. The two of them—Oliver so smiley, Lia so beautiful—looked like one of the ads she’d seen in her parenting magazines, when she still had time to read them. Whereas she looked like the “before” photographs in any of the makeover stories. I should have married Lia, she thought. Lia never had to be asked twice to burp a baby. Lia knew instinctively, or from her own experience, that a wet diaper could still feel dry and would never pull one of Steve’s favorite tricks, which was to hook his thumb underneath the leg band, take a quick feel, and say, “Nope, he’s dry,” when the diaper in question was visibly soaked and you could practically see ammonia-scented stink lines coming off of it. Lia would never plop in front of the TV set with the baby in her arms and watch SportsCenter or surf the Net with the baby tucked haphazardly into the crook of her arm. She and Kelly could cook low-fat meals and take Oliver to the park, the zoo, the Please Touch museum. There would be no sex, of course. Kelly didn’t think she’d miss it much.

  She gave Lia the rundown—what time Oliver had gotten up, where they’d walked, what he’d eaten—as she packed up her laptop, cell phone, keys, Palm Pilot, and wallet. Steve ambled back to the table, dressed—more or less—in an ancient, threadbare T-shirt, bare feet, and jeans. “I’m going to be working at home today,” he said, half defiantly, half apologetically. The little speech was for Lia’s benefit, not Kelly’s, because where else would he be quote-unquote working?

  “Fine,” Kelly said, trying to sound cheerful for the baby’s benefit. She gathered her gear and returned to the coffee shop.

  “Back so soon?” the barista called.

  “Me again,” said Kelly. She ordered another triple espresso, plugged in her laptop, and wondered what the staff at the coffee shop made of her, sitting there for five hours a day, five days a week, sucking down espresso and typing away. She wondered if they hated her for taking up the space, a prime table by the window. Maybe they thought she was a graduate student or a struggling poet, something grand and romantic or at least interesting.

  She hit the Power button and slugged down scalding espresso in short little sips, tapping her toes until the sluggish, temperamental old laptop fired up. Her cell phone trilled. “Kelly Day!” she chirped and then closed her eyes, resting her head on her palm as she took notes on the Margolies wedding and the Drexel holiday party and the Pfizer Diversity Day celebration, for which she’d been tasked with procuring a jelly-bean rendering of Dr. Martin Luther King. She typed and took notes and asked the right questions, trying to time her calls to when nobody was ordering a frappuccino, so that her clients wouldn’t hear the blender whirring in the background.

  It was a joke. A sham. She felt like the Wizard of Oz, a fraud behind the coffee shop’s green awning, working her ass off while her husband stayed home watching soap operas—he’d denied it hotly when she’d confronted him, but the TiVo to-do list still included recording the daily episodes of As the World Turns. She’d work, making calls, making notes, checking her watch, thinking about Oliver, wondering if he was napping; thinking about Steve, wondering if he was napping, too.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  At five o’clock she speed-walked home. Lia was playing with Oliver on the living room floor, rattling stuffed animals in front of his face. Steve was nowhere to be found. Probably visiting the career counselor again she thought, hurrying to the bedroom and holding her breath as she inched the shaper brief and control-top panty hose over her hips, and zipped up her long black velvet skirt as best she could.

  “Oh, look how pretty!” Lia said to Oliver, as Kelly sat, legs splayed, on the ghetto couch and struggled into her high-heeled party shoes. “You really do look nice.”

  “Yeah, well . . .” She paused for five seconds in front of the mirror in the hallway, swiping lipstick over her lips, trying to smooth her flyaway hair. “I just hope this goes well. And thank you. Thank you so much.”

  She sat on the couch with the baby on her hip, jiggling him up and down. No Steve. She stabbed his number on her cell phone. “Where are you? You were supposed to be here at six, remember? Lia had to go to Mas, and I’ve got a party . . .”

  She could hear the sounds of traffic in the background—engines and horns blaring. “There’s, like, a fiv
e-car pileup just past Aramingo,” Steve said. “I’ve been stuck here for forty-five minutes. Nothing’s moving.”

  “Can’t you get off and take back roads?”

  “As soon as I get to the exit, I will, but I can’t exactly drive through other people.”

  “What am I going to do?” she moaned. Lia was gone, she’d never be able to get a sitter on such short notice, she didn’t know the neighbors well enough to leave Oliver with them, and if she didn’t leave soon she’d be late for the party she was managing that night.

  “Can you take him with you? It shouldn’t be for very long. As soon as I get off the highway I’ll meet you at the party and take him home.”

  “Fine, fine,” she said, grabbing the diaper bag and her purse, giving Steve the address, hanging up the phone and running out the door.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  The hostess’s name was—Kelly flipped open her dayrunner as she got out of the cab—Dolores Wartz, and the event was a holiday party in an apartment building’s function room for her sorority alums. Dolores Wartz was fortyish, a squat bulldoggy woman with heavy makeup caked in the grooves that ran from the corners of her mouth to her chin, and lipstick the color and consistency of strawberry jam caked on her lips.

  “Kelly Day?” she said, beaming. Her smile evaporated as she caught sight of the baby. “What is that?”

  “This is my son, Oliver,” Kelly said. And he’s not a what, he’s a who. “I’m so sorry about this. My husband was supposed to be home but I guess there was a big accident on 95 . . .” Oliver squirmed in her grasp, and there was the unmistakable sound—not to mention smell—of a baby filling his diaper. Shit, Kelly thought. “I’m just going to run to the bathroom. My husband should be here any minute.”

  “I hope so,” Dolores Wartz said, fingering the heavy gold sorority pin on her lapel. Great, Kelly thought. She hurried to the bathroom, where there was, of course, no changing table. She locked a stall, set the baby on the floor, trying not to think about the germs crawling on the tile, knelt, and changed him as fast as she could. She washed her hands and hurried back to the foyer, where Dolores Wartz was glaring at her and Marnie Kravitz, Elizabeth’s assistant, was shifting her weight from foot to foot like a little kid who needs to use the bathroom and is afraid to ask permission.

  “Kelly,” Marnie said.

  “Yes?” Kelly said, noticing that Marnie had taken their boss’s “festive seasonal attire” directive very seriously. She was wearing a green skirt, red-and-white snowflake-patterned tights, and a red sweater with fluffy white reindeer cavorting across the bosom.

  “We are having a crisis,” she said, laying her hand across Rudolph’s blinking nose for emphasis. “We have no napkins!”

  Kelly pulled her gaze away from Marnie’s hypnotic reindeer. “Excuse me?”

  “The tablecloths came, and the liquor, and the caterer’s setting up, but they thought the florist was bringing the linens, and the florist said you only told her to bring tablecloths . . .”

  Oh, no. Kelly grabbed for her Palm Pilot and saw its red light flashing. Dead battery. Just her luck. And Marnie was practically wringing her hands. Kelly saw she’d painted her fingernails in alternating red and green stripes.

  “What are we going to do?” Marnie moaned.

  She reached into her purse and handed Marnie her emergency fifty bucks. “Run down to the Seven-Eleven on JFK and buy some.”

  Marnie’s eyes bulged. “But they’ll only have paper! Kelly, we can’t use paper napkins!”

  “It’s not the end of the world,” Kelly said. She tried to keep her tone light, but Dolores Wartz was looking at her as if maggots were crawling out of her mouth. Oliver took the opportunity to swing his hand and bash her on the ear. Steve, she thought, goddamnit, as her ears rang, where was Steve?

  “Couldn’t you hire a sitter?” Dolores Wartz asked coldly.

  Kelly took a deep breath. “As I said, my husband will be here as soon as he can.”

  “I have two children. Twelve and fourteen,” Dolores Wartz said. She said nothing else. But then, Kelly thought, she didn’t have to. The subtext was perfectly clear. I had two children and I never had to bring either one of them to work with me. I had two children and I managed much better than you are.

  “I’m going to see how the caterer’s doing,” Kelly said. She settled Oliver against her hip and hurried through the first guests, past the bar set up in the corner, into the kitchen, where she slumped against the side of the ovens and closed her eyes.

  “Wow, what a cutie!” one of the waitresses said.

  “You want him?” Kelly asked. “I’m not kidding. Take him. He’s yours.” She looked around. Shrimp cocktail, crab cakes, cheese straws. Real creative, she thought, as the waitresses loaded silver platters and filed out the door.

  She grabbed a cheese straw off a tray and ate it fast, realizing that she hadn’t had anything all day except espresso. She was finishing a crab cake when a smiling woman in a lavender suit stuck her head into the kitchen. “Sorry to bother you, but do you know where I could find a napkin?” She pointed ruefully at a blob of cocktail sauce on her lapel, and beamed at Oliver. “Ooh, what a cutie!”

  Kelly gave her a grateful smile and dug in her diaper bag for the packet of baby wipes. “This should work.”

  “Perfect!” said the woman. She blotted the sauce, squeezed Oliver’s foot, and headed out the door just as the waitresses returned.

  “Hey,” said one of them, peering at Kelly’s head. “You’ve got . . .” She reached out with two long fingernails and plucked something out of Kelly’s hair. Kelly blinked at it. A Cheerio. She’d given some to Oliver the day before. Had she been going around for twenty-four hours with cereal stuck in her hair?

  “New fashion,” Kelly said crisply.

  “Excuse me.” Dolores Wartz had shoved through the door. “Kelly. Your husband is here.”

  Thank you, God, she thought. She managed to smile at Dolores before she race-walked to the door and shoved Oliver into his father’s arms. “Go now!” she hissed.

  “Why?” Steve asked. “Is something on fire?”

  “Just go!” she said, trying to tuck the diaper bag under Steve’s arms. “I’ve got work to do!”

  Steve looked up. “Hey,” he said. She followed his gaze. Mistletoe. Left over from someone else’s party, she thought.

  “Steve, I’ve got a million things to do . . .”

  He leaned forward and pecked her cheek. “Go,” he said. “I’ll see you later.”

  She wiped her hands on her skirt and faced the crowd—sixty women, most of them with glasses of wine in their hands, nibbling cheese straws and swaying to the Christmas carols.

  The bar was busy; Marnie had given some napkins to the waitresses and set out more on the cocktail tables. Under control, Kelly thought, and let herself relax.

  At eleven o’clock the caterers were gone, the guests had departed, the last of the linens had been folded away, the last of the dishes replaced. Kelly said good night to Dolores Wartz, who grunted something in return. She slipped off her shoes in the elevator and limped onto the sidewalk. She’d finally managed to find a cab and had settled herself into the strawberry incense-reeking backseat when her cell phone rang.

  “Kelly?” Elizabeth’s voice was colder than Kelly had ever heard it. “I just got a very disturbing phone call from Dolores Wartz. Do you want to tell me what happened?”

  “Well, that was fast,” Kelly said. It looked like good old Dolores hadn’t wasted a moment saying hello or good night to her kids. Just had to get right on the phone and tattle on me. “Look,” she began, “there was an accident on 95. Steve was late, so I had to bring Oliver, but he was only there for, like, half an hour, and he wasn’t bothering anyone.”

  “Dolores said that he was crying and that he was never taken out.”

  “He wasn’t crying,” Kelly said. “He was maybe making noise, but he wasn’t crying. And Elizabeth, he’s a baby. He’s not a bag of trash!”
>
  “She was very disappointed,” Elizabeth continued. “She said you were paying more attention to the baby than you were to her party.”

  Well, the party didn’t need its diaper changed, Kelly thought, but she bit her lip and said nothing.

  “She’s asking for her money back.”

  Kelly balled her hands into fists. It took her a moment to recognize the unfamiliar sensation that caused her eyelids to prickle with tears. It was something she hadn’t felt since the fifth grade, when the principal had called her into the office and said that, while he admired Kelly’s entrepreneurial spirit, it wasn’t fair for her to charge admission to the jungle gym. She was in trouble. No. Worse. She’d screwed something up. “Fine,” she said. “Whatever my commission was, you can send it to her. Tell her I’m very sorry she was so disappointed.”

  “Fine.” Elizabeth paused. “Kelly, we had this conversation when you started working again. You need to learn to keep your personal and professional life separate.”

  “I’m sorry, Elizabeth,” Kelly said, feeling somewhere between deeply ashamed and furious. “But I can’t control the traffic!”

  “You should have had a backup plan in place . . .”

  “Well, clearly . . .” Kelly forced herself to be quiet. She took a deep breath. “I’m sorry,” she said again. And she was—but not for the reasons Elizabeth probably thought. She was sorry for Oliver, sorry that she’d subjected him to spending even a minute in a room full of toxic bitches who couldn’t bring themselves to be the least bit understanding or the least bit kind. “Send her my money,” she said.

  “Fine,” Elizabeth said. Her voice was fractionally warmer. “Let’s try and put this behind us, Kelly. You know you’re one of my most valued employees.”

  Kelly knuckled her eyelids and willed herself not to cry.

  “I’m sorry,” she said again. “I’ll call you in the morning.” She flipped her phone shut, pressed her cheek against the cracked black vinyl of the backseat, and sobbed for the sixteen blocks home.