Little Earthquakes

by Jennifer Weiner

  “Wag, Daddy!” Galina instructed. Her Russian accent gave her the sound of a lesser Bond villain. “Wag!”

  Steve laughed and shook his butt. Oliver giggled and tried to clap his hands. “Go, Steve!” Becky called.

  “Nice work, Daddy. Okay, everyone. Let’s put our balls away!”

  I think he’s done that already, Kelly thought, as the Good-bye song started. Good-bye, good-bye, good-bye, mommies . . . good-bye, good-bye, good-bye, babies . . . She worked a sleepy Oliver back into his snowsuit, pulled his hat snug over his ears, and she and Steve wheeled him through the crowd of AA attendees and the fog of cigarette smoke that surrounded them. Out in the lobby, Kelly glanced toward the chapel, the stained-glass Mary looking serene in her halo and white robes. Probably because Joseph had a job.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Back at home, Kelly changed Oliver’s diaper, kissed his belly and his cheeks, and looked longingly at her bed. Maybe just for a minute, she thought, slipping off her shoes.

  The next thing she felt was being shaken awake. She kept her eyes shut. She’d been having the most wonderful dream about Colin Reynolds, her eighth-grade crush, whom she’d French-kissed in the junior-high gymnasium. In her dream, Colin Reynolds was all grown up, and they were doing a lot more than kissing, and there wasn’t a baby, or a husband, in sight.

  Steve shook her again. “Kelly. Telephone.”

  “I’m sleeping.”

  “Oh,” he said. “I didn’t know.” Kelly buried her face in the pillow, hearing a Becky-style wisecrack in her head—Yeah, that lying in the dark with my eyes closed thing must have really had you fooled.

  “Take a message,” she said, as the baby started to cry. Shit. She pushed herself upright and looked at the clock: 5:03? That had to be wrong.

  “Have I been asleep all afternoon?” she asked, lifting Oliver out of his crib and onto the changing table, as Steve trailed behind her with the telephone.

  “I guess you were tired,” he said. Five o’clock, Kelly thought. She hadn’t done any work, and the dog probably needed his walk, and she hadn’t even looked at her in-box. Elizabeth was probably fuming.

  She tucked the telephone under her chin. “Hello?”

  “Kelly Day?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hi, my name is Amy Mayhew. I’m a reporter for Power magazine, and I’m hoping you’d help me with a story I’m working on.”

  “A story about what?”

  “Having it all,” she said. “Women who’ve managed to succeed in the workplace while raising families.”

  Succeed. The word alone was almost enough to send Kelly into gales of laughter. Either that, or a crying jag. But if she could pull it off—if she could appear to the public like a woman who was managing to succeed in the workplace while raising a child—it might help her work her way back into Elizabeth’s good graces.

  “I’ve been doing a little research about you.” Kelly could hear a keyboard clacking in the background. “You’re with Eventives, right?”

  “That’s right,” she said. “I was doing IT venture-capital consulting, and I sort of wandered into the event-planning business. Now I work with Eventives, which is considered the top operation in Philadelphia, and we’re looking to branch out into New Jersey and New York. But I’m only working part-time right now.”

  Kelly could hear more typing. “You just had a baby, right?”

  “July thirteenth,” she said, unsnapping Oliver’s jeans and whipping his diaper off one-handed. “So I’m just working twenty hours a week. Well, technically, that’s all. But you know how it goes.”

  “Not really,” Amy Mayhew said. “No kids for me yet.” From her oh-so-serious tone and brittle little laugh, Kelly could picture Amy Mayhew—her sharp navy suit and a pair of just-right heels. On her desk there’d be a slim little mock croc clutch that managed to contain her keys, a wallet, a lipstick, and a few condoms and still be approximately one-sixteenth the size of the diaper bag that Kelly routinely lugged around town. Amy Mayhew would not have three inches of bangs hanging in her eyes because she hadn’t been able to get to her hairdresser in four months, and her fingernails would be manicured, and she’d smell like some subtle perfume, instead of Kelly’s signature scent of B.O., breast milk, and desperation.

  “Hello?”

  “I’m here,” Kelly managed to say as she resnapped the baby’s pants.

  “So listen,” she said, “I’d love to set up an interview. What does your month look like?”

  “Well, I’m pretty flexible.” Kelly hurried back to the bedroom, set Oliver in the middle of the empty, unmade bed, grabbed a pen from the bedside table, flipped to a fresh page in Oliver’s baby book, which hadn’t been updated in months, and started scribbling. Hair. Manicure. New suit (?). She still couldn’t fit into her old ones. New shoes, too. She’d have to find her briefcase. She’d had a gorgeous briefcase once. Calfskin leather, gold handles. She thought she’d glimpsed it in the closet, wedged underneath the car seat Oliver had already outgrown.

  “Is next Friday good? Maybe we can have lunch.”

  Lunch Fri, Kelly wrote. She used to have lunch. She used to take clients out for two-hour expense-account meals at the Capital Grille and Striped Bass. She’d have a glass of wine and a salad and grilled fish or roasted chicken. Lunch, back then, did not consist of peanut butter eaten while Oliver napped, scooped straight out of the jar and licked off her fingers because there weren’t any clean knives because neither she nor Steve had run the dishwasher.

  “We were thinking we’d want some photographs of you in the workplace, and then some of you at home, with your baby . . .”

  Shit. Shit. Shit, shit, shit. She’d have to clean—the kitchen floors were way past nasty; Steve had spilled a bottle of formula in front of the refrigerator and hadn’t done a very good job of cleaning it up. She’d need fresh flowers, she’d need to vacuum, she’d need to get Steve to clean up the office, and find someplace to stash the bags of zero-to-three-month baby clothes she’d been meaning to take to Goodwill . . . Furniture. She’d need that, too. Or maybe she could tell them that she had furniture that was being cleaned or something, or that they’d moved it because they were having the carpet replaced . . .

  “ . . . and your husband.”

  “Husband?” Kelly repeated.

  “Right,” Amy Mayhew said, laughing a little. “You know, the family unit.”

  “Um, my husband travels a lot for business.”

  “Remind me what he does again?”

  “Consulting for Internet start-ups.” The words flew out of her mouth like a flock of malevolent birds. Oh, God, she thought, what if Amy Mayhew Googled Steve to check? “He’s just starting out . . . nothing official yet, no website or offices or anything, but he’s on the road a lot. He’s working with some of his business-school friends. Shut up, she told herself. This was always how she’d known when her sisters were lying. Instead of a simple answer, you’d get Hamlet’s soliloquy. “So he might not be able to be in the pictures.”

  “Oh, well, how’s this Friday?”

  “Perfect!” Kelly said. They set a time. Amy Mayhew said she was looking forward to meeting her. Kelly said she was looking forward to it, too. Then she hung up the phone and carried the baby into the kitchen. Steve was lying on the couch.

  “What was that about?” Steve asked.

  “Some survey,” Kelly said. “I’m going to take Lemon for a walk. Can you give Oliver his rice cereal?”

  “Sure,” said Steve.

  “And can you maybe get dressed?”

  Steve looked down at himself as if he was surprised to see that he was wearing only boxer shorts and a T-shirt. “Why?” he asked. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  She bit back the insults that wanted desperately to make their way out of her mouth. “I know you’re not going anywhere, but it’s five-thirty at night and it’s a workday . . .” She let her voice trail off.

  “Fine,” he said, pulling a pair of jeans off the floor. �
��Pants,” she heard him mutter. “Your mother’s a stickler!” he called to Oliver. Kelly rubbed at her temples. She could feel her customary late-night headache making an early appearance. She swallowed two Tylenol, started a load of laundry, scraped her hair back into a ponytail, and jogged into the living room.

  Lemon was sitting by the front door, with his tail wagging, and Oliver was sitting in his high chair with cereal dotting his face. Steve was in the kitchen, feeding the baby. “Once upon a time,” Steve said, “there was a brave prince who lived in a castle.” Oliver waved his hands in the air and made a pleased-sounding coo. “The prince was so brave that he could swim across moats full of sharks and alligators and Dallas Cowboy fans,” Steve continued. “He could slay dragons with a single stroke of his terrible sword, and parallel park in even the tiniest parking space, and he could rescue the beautiful princess from spells and enchantments.” Steve sighed. “And then he got laid off, and the beautiful princess didn’t want to talk to him anymore.”

  Kelly’s heart twisted. I’m sorry, she started to say—but sorry for what? Sorry that he’d gotten laid off? She’d told him that, and it hadn’t made a difference. Sorry that he felt so terrible? Well, he wouldn’t feel so terrible if he’d just find a job, and Kelly had told him that a few times too many already and if he’d do it, they’d be fine, and she could quit walking around fantasizing about killing him and making it look like a shaving accident so that his life insurance policy would pay off.

  She cleared her throat. Steve looked up. “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey,” she said back, fastening Lemon’s leash. “How’d he do?”

  “Half of the rice stuff, two bites of prune glop,” Steve reported, sliding the high chair’s tray off and carrying it to the sink.

  “Good,” she said, “I’m going to . . .” Her heart stopped as Oliver leaned forward. “Steve!” she screamed, and started forward. Not fast enough. The baby tumbled, face-first, onto the floor. There was an audible thud and a second of silence. Then Kelly scooped the baby into her arms, and Oliver opened his mouth and started howling.

  “Oh my God, oh my God!” Kelly said.

  “Is he okay?” Steve asked, looking stricken.

  “I don’t know!” Kelly shouted over the baby’s wails. “Why wasn’t he strapped in?”

  “I forgot!” Steve said. “Is he okay?”

  Kelly gave him a scathing look and carried the baby past him to get the telephone, noticing on her way that Lemon had, indeed, peed on the floor again. She dialed the doctor’s phone number that was written on the refrigerator, hitting 1 and 1 and 1 again until she was connected with the nurse on call. “Hi, this is Kelly Day. My baby is Oliver. He’s five months old, and he just fell out of his high chair . . .”

  Steve tapped her shoulder. “What can I do?” he whispered. “Does he need ice or something? Should we call an ambulance?”

  Kelly pushed him aside. She knew that if she looked at his face for even a second longer someone in their house would need an ambulance, and it wouldn’t be Oliver.

  “Calm down,” said the nurse. “Any baby who can scream like that doesn’t sound too badly hurt. Did he fall on a hardwood floor?”

  “No,” Kelly said.

  “And he didn’t lose consciousness or stop breathing? Is he bleeding?”

  “No,” she said. Her knees had started to shake. She leaned against the wall. Oliver sobbed and buried his face in her neck. “He just fell. My husband didn’t fasten the straps.”

  “These things happen,” the nurse said. “And most of the time, the babies are just fine. If he’s crying like that, and he didn’t pass out or vomit, chances are he’s fine. Try not to beat yourself up. Or your husband. Just keep an eye on him for the next few hours, and call us if anything changes.”

  “Okay,” said Kelly. “Thank you.” She hung up the phone and cradled the baby in her arms, saying, “Shhh, shhh,” as she rocked him. “Poor guy, poor guy,” she said, carrying him to the rocker, where she pulled up her shirt and guided his face to her breast. Oliver stared up at her, his lashes still heavy with tears, looking miserable and betrayed, then gave a resigned sigh and started nursing.

  Steve reappeared. “He looks okay,” he said.

  Kelly ignored him.

  “But we should take him to the doctor, right?”

  Kelly said nothing.

  “I’m really, really sorry . . .”

  “You’re sorry,” she repeated. “Why wasn’t he strapped in?”

  “I told you, I forgot!”

  “Yeah,” she sneered. The dam broke, and the poison came pouring out. “Just like you forgot your deadline. Just like you forgot to run the dishwasher. Just like you forget to put on your goddamn pants unless I remind you.”

  Kelly adjusted her shirt and got to her feet, shoving past her husband, who stood as if paralyzed in the doorway. “I’ve got to take the dog out.”

  “I’ll walk him.”

  “Don’t do me any favors!” she said, plopping a once-more wailing Oliver into his stroller, buckling his straps with broad gestures, hitching Lemon to his leash, and hurrying the three of them into the elevator and onto the street.

  She was halfway down the block when Steve caught up, looking sheepish and scared.

  “Go away,” she said, picking up her pace.

  “I just thought you might need this,” Steve said. He showed her the diaper bag that she’d forgotten. “I put a bottle in, just in case.”

  “Thanks,” she said. She pushed the stroller to the corner and stopped at the red light.

  “Let me walk with you. Please? I feel awful.”

  Kelly didn’t tell him that he shouldn’t, but she did move over enough to give him room to stand beside her. Steve stowed the diaper bag underneath the stroller and stepped behind the handlebars. When the light turned green, he started to push, and they walked for three blocks in silence. “So what was that survey about?”

  The lie she’d told the reporter came slamming back into her brain. “Oh, nothing much,” Kelly said, hoping that he wouldn’t see her blushing in the darkness. “You know, what kinds of articles do I find interesting, and have I bought a new car in the last twelve months.”

  “Sorry I woke you up for that,” Steve said. “Listen, if you need to get some work done, you can head home. I can walk him. I can watch him when we get home.”

  And let him fall again? Or get run over by a truck? Kelly thought. No way. She’d have to make something up to explain why she’d missed the conference call she’d scheduled with Elizabeth and a new client. A cold, a sprained ankle, female trouble. Something that pertained to her, and not the baby, because Elizabeth had made her feelings about the baby very clear.

  “No, I’ve got it.”

  “Kelly, you’re exhausted. Let me help,” Steve said.

  She shook her head wearily, wordlessly, and followed Steve as he pushed the baby back home.

  LIA

  My mother got to Mas before I did, and when I arrived she was already sitting at the table, facing the door. She carried a boxy black pocketbook, big enough for her to take home a class’s worth of tests. It was sitting in front of her, between her fork and knife where the plate should have been, and her hands were curled around its handles, as if any minute she might pick it up and swing it at me. Or at someone. Swing it, and then run.

  “Lisa.” She sounded almost shy. Worried, too. She cleared her throat. “You look . . .” I could hear our history teetering in the balance of that pause. You’re not going out of the house like that. Take off that lipstick. Put on a coat. I licked my lips, remembering the two weeks’ worth of silence after I’d streaked my hair blond when I was thirteen—I’d buried the bottle of peroxide deep in the trash can in the garage and told her that lemon juice and sun had done the trick. I’d buried the receipts for every cosmetic purchase there, too, after my mother had tsk-tsked over a bottle of Chanel foundation and told me it must be nice to have money to throw around on nonsense. “You look well,�
�� she finally said, fiddling with her purse handles. “How are you?”

  “Fine.”

  She looked around the dining room. “Is this where you work?”

  “Yes,” I said and sat down. I’d already figured out what we were going to eat. On Sunday afternoons, Mas served high tea, with chili-pepper scones, cinnamon-dusted chocolates, finger sandwiches with curried shrimp, egg salad, cucumber, and butter. I’d made up the tray myself, and I’d brewed a pot of plum-ginger tea. “Mostly in the kitchen. It turns out I’m not a very good waitress.”

  Her hands gripped the purse handles more tightly. I poured her a cup of tea, which she ignored. “I’ve been talking to your husband,” she told me.

  I almost dropped the teapot. “Sam?”

  She nodded. “We’ve been talking for a few weeks.”

  “What . . .” I swallowed and licked my dry lips. “What did he say?”

  Her face was expressionless. “Well, initially he was very surprised to learn that I was alive.”

  Oh, dear.

  “He wants to know if you’re coming home,” she said. She took a single sip of tea and went back to holding her handbag. “He sounds like a nice young man.”

  Was it my imagination, or did she actually sound wistful? I set the teapot down carefully and wiped my hands on my napkin. “What did you tell him?”

  “What could I tell him? What do I know?” she asked. Her back was ruler-straight; her words were clear and precise. She could have been talking to a class of fifth-graders instead of me. “I don’t think you’re all right. I don’t know if you’re coming home.”

  “But . . .” I shook my head. I’d arranged this meeting, I’d planned everything I was going to say to her, and now she’d turned the tables. “You knew I was married?”

  “Lisa. I’m your mother. And I’m not stupid. You haven’t exactly been invisible, you know.”