She, Myself & I

by Whitney Gaskell

  I took it, clasping my fingers against his, this time managing not to flinch.

  “Nice to meet you,” I said faintly.

  “And unless that rash gets worse, which I don’t expect it shall, come and see us again at six months. Any questions before I go?”

  Mutely, I shook my head. He smiled again and inclined his head.

  “Good-bye,” he said.

  “Bye,” I squeaked as the door shut behind him.

  “I think we’ve found you a new doctor, kiddo,” I whispered to Ben.

  Chapter Nineteen

  “So help me God, if your sisters start in on me about my weight, I’m going to tell them to—” I couldn’t complete the sentence with the words I wanted, because Ben was strapped into his car seat in the backseat of my Tahoe, “—go to hell.”

  “Don’t curse in front of the baby,” Aidan said severely.

  “What? I didn’t.”

  “You said h-e-l-l.”

  “Is that a bad word?”

  “When you use it pejoratively, yes.”

  Great. One more bad-mother strike against me. The way I was going, Ben was going to end up as one of those foulmouthed, ecstasy-dropping, skateboarding youths who go around with their pants hanging off their asses.

  We were en route to Carmello’s, an Italian restaurant on West Sixth Street, to meet Aidan’s parents, two sisters, and brother-in-law for dinner. These excruciating family get-togethers always seemed interminably long, and I couldn’t even amuse myself by downing too much red wine, because I was breastfeeding.

  There was no end to the sacrifices mothers have to make.

  “I mean it. Every time I see Allison, she asks me if I’ve lost weight. The next time she does it, I’m going to stick a fork in her hand. What? I didn’t use any naughty words,” I said, exasperated at the martyred expression on Aidan’s face.

  “Just try to get along,” he said.

  “I always do! They’re the ones who pick at me, I’m always nice to them. God, you always take their side,” I said, crossing my arms tightly over my chest. And there were the tears again, pricking hotly behind my lids, threatening to spill out and ruin my makeup.

  “No I don’t. I’m on your side. Come on, Soph, I don’t want to fight,” Aidan said, and we spent the rest of the drive in an uncomfortable silence, broken only by the ring of Aidan’s cell phone when his father called, wanting to know where we were. The rest of his family was already at the restaurant. They’re always ten minutes early, we’re always five minutes late, and they always call to make sure we’re coming. This is just one of the many things about his family that drive me crazy.

  “I’m pulling into the parking lot now,” Aidan assured him.

  We unloaded Ben out of the car. He’d fallen asleep on the way over, but I jostled him as I unbuckled him from his car seat, and woke him up. Ben’s face crumpled, and he started to cry. I lifted him into my arms, savoring the warm heft of his solid little body as he cuddled into me. Ben relaxed for a minute and then began mooching around near my boobs.

  “I think he’s hungry,” I said.

  “Now? But we’re already late,” Aidan said, looking at his watch.

  “I can’t control these things. Do you want to tell your four-month-old son that it isn’t a convenient time for him to be hungry?”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “Just go ahead. I’ll sit in the car and nurse him, and we’ll be in when he’s done,” I suggested.

  I was losing my timidity about nursing in public, especially since Cora had popped out a boob in the middle of Starbucks without blinking an eye. I didn’t even have to be that brazen, I could simply camouflage the latch-on with a strategically placed receiving blanket. And it might be fun to shock my prudish mother-in-law, whose babies were all formula fed and who viewed breastfeeding as unnatural and borderline obscene. But by pleading modesty, I could eke out a final few moments of solitude, away from the sharp, critical eyes of my in-laws.

  I lifted up my shirt and unsnapped my milk-stained cotton Bravado nursing bra, and Ben eagerly lifted his head, his mouth greedily seeking out the nipple. After months of this routine, my nipples had finally started to go numb, which was a relief. Although he was still toothless, Ben’s gums were extremely sharp.

  “My little boob shark,” I said. I caressed the back of his head, noticing that the last of the dark hair he’d been born with had fallen out. He was now nearly bald, although fine downy hair was just starting to sprout. It looked light, almost white. Excellent. This would help me perpetuate the lie that I myself was a natural blonde.

  Once Ben had his fill and was starting to sag against me, heavy with sleep, I sighed and buttoned back up. I flipped down the mirror on the back of the car visor to assess what my makeup looked like. Staring back was a too round face, pale from a winter spent indoors, and eyes darkly ringed from lack of sleep. My eyebrows were growing out of control—I hadn’t gotten to the salon to have them waxed since before Ben’s birth—and even the addition of eyeliner, cream blush, and rose-hued lip gloss didn’t do much to spruce things up. I was ugly.

  Sometimes it seemed like the rosier Ben’s skin glowed and more brightly his eyes shone, the more my skin and hair dulled and diminished. It was like I passed on a little more of my life force to him every time he suckled.

  I climbed out of the car, Ben in one arm, my diaper bag in the other, and lugged them both into the restaurant. He was dozing again, but as soon as my mother-in-law, Eileen, clapped her rolling blue eyes on us, she shrieked and he startled awake.

  “Where’s my grandson? I haven’t seen him in ages—oh, look, he’s awake. Hello, precious boy, come see your Momo,” she crooned, wrenching Ben from my arms. He scowled up at her. “Sophie, you look tired.”

  I tensed. And so it began. You look tired was Eileen-speak for You look like shit.

  “Hi, honey,” Ron O’Neill, my father-in-law, said, kissing me on the cheek.

  “Hi,” I said. “Hi, Allison, Melanie. Where’s Alex?”

  Allison and Melanie were my sisters-in-law, and they were locked in a fierce battle to see which one could waste away to nothing first. Put them together, and they still didn’t make one normal-sized woman.

  “He went out with his friends tonight,” Melanie said, and I could tell that Aidan was purposefully avoiding my glare. Alex was Melanie’s husband, and so the only other outsider at these O’Neill affairs, and if he was allowed to skip it, then why the hell did I have to show up?

  “May we have a highchair please?” Eileen asked the waitress.

  “That’s okay,” I said, shaking my head at the waitress. “Ben is too little for restaurant highchairs. He can’t sit up well enough yet. I’ll just hold him on my lap.”

  “We’ll just try it and see,” Eileen overruled me.

  “No. Really. He’s too small,” I said. I shook my head at the waitress, who despite my protestation had started to pull over exactly the kind of small wooden highchair that Ben would certainly topple out of if she put him in it.

  Eileen smiled at the waitress. “First-time mother,” she said apologetically.

  The waitress, who looked like she was about thirteen years old, seemed confused.

  “So you don’t want the highchair?” she asked.

  “No,” Aidan said. He rested a hand on my thigh—whether this was meant to comfort me or silence me, I didn’t know. “So, Mom, Ben went to the doctor yesterday, and he’s in the ninetieth percentile for height and weight.”

  “He’s such a big boy,” Eileen said, holding him up so that my father-in-law could tickle his stomach. “Don’t you want to hold him, Ron?”

  “Come to Grandpa,” Ron said, reaching out. He cradled Ben in his arms, holding him horizontally in the traditional “Rock-a-bye Baby” pose. Ben loathes to be held that way, unless he’s nursing. I could tell from the cross look on his face that if Ron didn’t whip out a lactating breast, Ben was about to pitch a fit.

  Aidan also noticed the
storm clouds gathering on the small round face of our son.

  “Dad, you’d better hold him upright,” Aidan warned.

  “I know how to hold him. You’re not the first parents in the world to have a baby, you know,” Ron snapped.

  Ben immediately burst into tears, sticking his lower lip out as far as it would go in between wails. Ron panicked and held Ben out, pushing him back into Eileen’s arms. He did not, of course, apologize for upsetting the baby in the first place. But then, O’Neill men weren’t known for admitting when they were wrong.

  “Maybe he’s just hungry,” Eileen suggested. She tore a piece from her roll and offered it to Ben. He just screwed up his face and screamed louder.

  “Don’t give him that. He’ll choke,” I said sharply. “Ben hasn’t had any solids yet.”

  “No solids? Why not?”

  I plucked Ben out of Eileen’s arms. He immediately stopped crying and snuggled up against my shoulder. I was so warmed by this act of loyalty, I didn’t even mind the quarter-sized dollop of regurgitated milk that he deposited on my black cashmere sweater.

  “The doctor said that I could start giving him a little cereal in a few weeks, but I’m supposed to hold off on most solids until he’s six months old,” I said. As irritating as it was that my parenting decisions weren’t simply respected and followed, and had to be reinforced by trotting out the pediatrician’s recommendations, I knew that it was the fastest way to get Eileen to shut up.

  “That’s not how we did things in my day. But then, new mothers always think they know best,” she said, shrugging and laughing.

  I let this obnoxious comment go and instead focused on the laminated menu, searching for something to eat that wasn’t fattening, and getting increasingly panicked when I saw that every entrée was described as being topped with cheese or swimming in a cream sauce. Or both.

  The waitress reappeared, and the Dueling Anorexics each ordered a small dinner salad for their entrée. Allison ordered hers with the vinaigrette on the side, so Melanie one-upped her by ordering hers with no dressing and no tomatoes.

  I ordered the veal piccata with a side of pasta and Caesar salad.

  “Have you lost weight?” Allison asked as she handed her menu to the waitress.

  “No,” I said shortly, feeling even fatter in my stretchy-waist maternity khakis—I still couldn’t fit into my regular clothes, and I refused to buy anything new in my current size—and the black sweater that was straining against the volume of my newly enlarged breasts.

  “Don’t worry. I’m sure it will come off eventually. Although my friend Jordan—the one who has two-year-old twin boys—said that she could never get the last ten pounds off. Some women just can’t. In fact, she just had liposuction and a tummy tuck a few weeks ago. I’ll give you her phone number, if you want to talk to her about it,” Allison said.

  I stared at her. “Are you suggesting I get plastic surgery?” I asked.

  “Allison, back off,” Aidan said.

  “I wasn’t saying that, I just meant—” Allison started to protest.

  “Just drop it,” Aidan said again, and then he rested his hand on my thigh again, this time giving it a little squeeze.

  A few hours later, when we were safely home, my duty to my in-laws discharged for at least a fortnight, I was lying in bed feeling like a beached Orca whale.

  “I shouldn’t have eaten so much,” I groaned, holding on to the gelatinous mound of skin and flab that used to be my stomach with both hands. I had meant to eat sparingly, but Allison’s comments pissed me off so much I spitefully ordered a tiramisu for dessert and consumed the whole damned thing.

  Aidan entered the bedroom, wearing only his light blue boxer shorts. He paused to admire himself in the mirror—I could tell from the way he contracted his abdominal muscles—and then hopped into bed next to me. Unlike most nights, when he immediately switched on the television set and zoned out to the white noise of SportsCenter, Aidan rolled over on his side, propped himself up on one elbow, and rested his hand on mine. I jumped and pushed it aside.

  “Please don’t touch my stomach,” I said.

  Undaunted, Aidan lowered his hand to my upper thigh.

  “How are you feeling?” he asked.

  Oh no. He was in the mood. The last time I was interested in sex was right around my sixth month of pregnancy, when the hormone influx made me hornier than a sixteen-year-old boy, and I’d had to beg Aidan to sleep with me. As I got bigger and bigger, he’d looked increasingly panicked at the idea.

  “Um, not very good, actually. I think I’m getting a sinus infection,” I said.

  “Are you sure? Maybe if I gave you a back rub, you’d feel better.”

  Actually, a back rub sounded nice. But since he’d probably expect at least a blow job in return, I decided not to risk it.

  “Thanks, honey, but I think I’m just going to read for a few minutes and then go to sleep,” I said, and I rolled over and pretended to read my book.

  Aidan flopped onto his back, gave an exasperated sigh, and then just lay there sulking. I waited patiently, and a few minutes later, as expected, he started to snore softly. I folded the corner of my page down and turned off the light. And then I thought about what it would be like to kiss Dr. Prasad—the soft pressure of his lips against the curve of my throat, his elegant fingers brushing the hair back from my cheeks, the ripples of muscles on his taut stomach—until I drifted off to sleep.

  Chapter Twenty

  I pulled into my mother’s driveway, right behind my father’s black Volkswagen Passat.

  Oh shit, I thought.

  I considered putting the car in reverse and getting the hell out of there, but before I could, the front door opened and my mother appeared, dressed in a red cardigan sweater and denim skirt. She’d cut her hair since I’d last seen her, trading in the smooth bob for a short, choppy style that showed off her long neck. Standing behind her was my father, looking exactly the same as he had for the past twenty years—balding, paunch-bellied, and dressed in his traditional dad-wear of a golf shirt and khakis. And, if I wasn’t mistaken, he had his hand firmly planted on my mother’s ass.

  I parked my Tahoe and climbed out.

  “Hi, Mom. Hi, Dad,” I said, and waved weakly at them before unloading Ben out of his rear-facing Britax car seat. He broke out a gummy grin, which made his round face look like a jack-o’-lantern, and kicked his feet happily.

  “Ben, I apologize in advance. Your grandparents—all of them—are insane,” I whispered into his tiny shell-like ear.

  “Where’s my Ben baby?” Mom said, walking down the short driveway and reaching out for Ben. I handed him over to her, and she bundled him close against her, resting her cheek on the top of his head. “Mmm, he smells so good. What kind of lotion do you use on him?”

  “I don’t know, just the normal stuff,” I said, following her into the house.

  “Hi, baby,” my dad said, grabbing one of Ben’s chubby little bare feet. Ben squealed with laughter.

  “He’s such a happy baby,” Mom said.

  “That’s because of his mom. Happy mother, happy baby,” my dad said proudly.

  “Erm, I don’t think it works like that,” I said, flopping down on the cream wing chair. “Aidan’s dad said that he thinks all babies are just born with the personality they have, and nothing the parents do makes any difference.”

  “Your father-in-law is a jackass,” Mom sniffed. She looked at me, her eyes narrowing. “You look tired. Are you sleeping?”

  Sigh.

  “Here, I brought you copies of some pictures I took of Ben,” I said, trying to ignore that my parents had arranged themselves side by side on the green plaid sofa. They were holding Ben between them, smiling down into his round pumpkin face and tickling his feet. He grinned back at them and grabbed for his toes. I handed them the photos, and my mother balanced Ben in her left arm in order to examine the pictures.

  “Sophie, these are wonderful! Here, Stephen, will you hold the
m up for me? I don’t want the baby to bend them,” Mom said.

  “This one is terrific,” my dad said, holding up a black-and-white shot of Ben lounging in his baby bathtub, a mound of bubbles piled up on his head.

  “Look at this one of Aidan holding Ben. The composition is just gorgeous. I love how they’re both wearing white T-shirts against the dark background,” Mom said.

  “I like that one, too. I also like the one where he’s asleep in his crib. I love how plump his cheeks look when he’s sleeping,” I said. Warm satisfaction curled within me. They were good photos, far better than the ones I’d had taken of him at the mall last month, where Ben was posed against an ugly yellow backdrop and ended up looking jaundiced in the final prints.

  “Why did you ever stop pursuing your photography?” Mom asked.

  “I haven’t. Obviously,” I said.

  “No, you know what I mean. Those arty photos that you used to take in college. Do you remember, Stephen, that exhibit they had of Sophie’s prints?” Mom said.

  “Oh, right. The black-and-white close-ups of the leaves and flowers,” Dad said.

  “It wasn’t really an exhibit. They just hung some of my pictures at the Fine Arts Building,” I said.

  “Don’t run yourself down, honey, it was a wonderful show. I wish you hadn’t given it up,” Mom said.

  I felt a flash of irritation. “I told you, I haven’t. I took the photographs that you’re holding in your hands.”

  “I know, honey, and they’re beautiful pictures. Look, isn’t Ben’s smile in this one sweet? All that child does is smile. What I mean is, I wish you’d been able to pursue it professionally,” Mom said.

  “Why didn’t you? I can’t remember now,” Dad said.

  That’s because you and Mom never asked, since you were going through your divorce and didn’t pay attention to anything other than who was going to get their hands on the ugly avocado-green dishes, I thought. In fact, the photography exibit they were now fondly reminiscing over had been a logistical nightmare for me. There had been a short cheese-and-wine reception on the opening night, and I’d had to hustle Dad and the date he’d insisted on bringing—I could still remember her, she was an associate professor in the English Department, and had a long, horsy face and an annoying yawning laugh—in and out early so that he wouldn’t be there by the time Mom arrived.