With an effort, Jaqe moved herself a little to the side. “Come in bed,” she ordered, patting the sheets.
Laurie said, “Come on, honey, I can’t—”
“Oh, be quiet,” Jaqe said. “No one’s going to mind. If you don’t come hug me, I’ll shout and open my stitches.”
Laurie sat on the bed with one leg up and the other on the floor, like someone in an old movie before they relaxed the code. She put her arms around Jaqe, who rolled her upper body against Laurie’s breasts—almost, Laurie thought, like a baby hungry for milk.
Four
The Child in the Street
They named the baby Kathryn. Kathryn Alice Lang. Kate, Jaqe insisted, not Kathy, not Katy, just Kate. They’d chosen the name before the birth, of course, just as Jaqe had insisted they get Mark’s lawyer to write them a paper appointing Laurie the child’s guardian “if anything, you know,” as Jaqe put it. Otherwise, Jaqe had said, her parents would try to grab the baby for themselves. At the time, they both knew that Laurie would give the baby to Mr. and Mrs. Lang the first chance she got. Just as they knew that Laurie hardly cared what they were going to call the child. Now, however, as she and Louise stood looking through the nursery window, Laurie found herself saying, “She really looks like a Kate, doesn’t she?” She blushed at Louise’s loud laugh. “No, I mean it,” she said.
“I’m sure you do,” Louise told her.
“I mean, look at her hands. Like she can’t wait to grab hold of something. That’s kind of a Kate thing, isn’t it? And look at that red hair.”
“I just love her hair,” Louise said. “It’s so gorgeous.”
“Do you see any other kids with red hair? Red hair and Kate. Perfect combination.”
Jaqe didn’t think so. The first time she saw her daughter after the C-section, when she was fully conscious, before she even touched her, she said to Laurie, “How did she get red hair?” as if someone had played a trick on her.
“Well,” Laurie said, “your hair’s blond, so she clearly didn’t get it from you. And I’m a brunette. So that leaves only one candidate.”
“Why didn’t you tell Mark I didn’t want anyone with red hair?” Jaqe was crying now. Laurie remembered the stuff in the pregnancy books about postpartum depression, and she began to wonder, frantically, if they could give Jaqe hormones or something. Goddess, she thought, spare us this one. Please?
The nurse smiled. “Why don’t you hold her?” she said. Before Jaqe could say anything, the nurse placed the baby in her arms.
Later, Laurie reported to Louise, “It was like a magic trick. Like the baby had some kind of magic wand or something.”
“I keep telling you…” Louise said.
Laurie laughed. “I know, I know. The wands are for boys. Girls have cauldrons and boxes.”
The first time Jaqe held Kate—nervously, and then more firmly when she discovered her daughter’s strength and solidness—that first time Jaqe probably would have been happy just to hold and touch her, or maybe delicately kiss her forehead. Kate, however, had other ideas, reaching for her mother’s breast with a sureness that said, “Finally. No more imitations.”
Jaqe looked up at the nurse. “What do I do?”
“Don’t worry,” the woman said. “Your daughter will take care of it.” At first, Jaqe cried out, more in surprise than pain, at how hard Kate was sucking on her. But then, as Kate settled in to taking care of it, Jaqe found her free hand stroking the baby’s head, even following the tight red swirls with her fingertips. She sighed, and let her body sink deeper into the bed.
Jaqe’s parents noticed the baby’s red hair as well, though the curls seemed to strike them more than the color. “What a head of hair,” Mr. Lang said. “Sure isn’t like Jaqe’s.”
“Dear…” his wife cautioned him, as if they’d rehearsed platitudes in the car. She then added, “It really is curly, isn’t it?”
Later, standing in the hall with Laurie, Mr. Lang said, “Tell me something, Laurie, just between you and me—” (Man to man, Laurie thought.) “What kind—what sort of a person are we talking about here?”
“Who?” Laurie said.
“You know who I mean. You know, the father. What kind of genes are we talking about here?”
“Oh, him,” Laurie said. Don’t play, she warned herself. It struck her suddenly how much she needed these people. “Actually,” she said, “I don’t know.”
“What do you—you don’t know?”
“That was the deal. Jaqe and I don’t know his name; he doesn’t know ours.”
“But how did you—we thought—”
“My boss arranged it.”
“Some company you work for. That’s a hell of a fringe benefit.”
Laurie made herself laugh. “I guess so. I never thought of it like that. But Mark’s more than a boss. He’s like a best friend.” Or a brother, she thought. Or a father?
“And you trust him?”
“Absolutely.”
“He wouldn’t pick any—anyone unsuitable?” Laurie shook her head. So did Mr. Lang. “I guess I just don’t understand this.” Laurie thought, No one asked you to. “And what if the baby wants to know who her father is? You and Jaqe can’t even tell her. Do you think that’s right?”
Laurie’s hand clumped into a fist, but she kept her voice calm. “We talked about that,” she said. “With AI in the clinics—artificial insemination—they keep the names on file, the donors. Except they don’t release it until the child is eighteen and can ask for herself. So that’s what we’re doing. Mark put the name and everything in a safe deposit box, in a kind of trust for Kathryn. Until she’s eighteen. If she wants it. That seemed fair.”
“Fair,” Mr. Lang repeated. “Jesus. Look,” he said, “I’m sorry. If I’ve said the wrong thing. It’s just—I’m just not used to it. All this stuff. We didn’t do things like this—” He stopped.
“In your day?” Laurie said. Mr. Lang’s face tightened. And then he saw Laurie’s grin, and he started to snicker. And then the two of them were laughing, while inside Jaqe’s room someone made a burbling noise and the baby cried, for just a moment.
Jaqe and Kate stayed in the hospital five days. They might have left sooner, but Jaqe’s blood pressure leaped upward after the surgery, and even though it went down again, her doctor wanted to monitor her for a while. Laurie visited them on her lunch hours and every evening, telling herself she couldn’t wait to get them home again so she wouldn’t have to run around. And yet, she knew it gave her a kind of peace to know exactly what she needed to do. In the hospital, it made her nervous every time she had to learn something new with Kate—to burp her or give her a bottle if Jaqe needed to sleep, to change her diaper, even just to hold her for the first time. She kept feeling like she should know what to do, and that everyone—the nurses, Jaqe’s mother, even Jaqe—would laugh at her clumsiness or talk about her when she went home.
At the same time it amazed her how wonderful it was just to hold the baby, to spread her hands across that tiny compact body, to feel the weight against her chest and shoulder. One evening, she was holding Kate and sitting in the chair alongside Jaqe’s bed when the baby began to cry, and a moment later began groping for Laurie’s breast. Laurie rushed Kate over to Jaqe, who was laughing and wincing from the surgery at the same time. “It’s okay,” Jaqe told Laurie, and then motioned her closer to whisper, “I know how she feels. I miss sucking them myself. In fact,” she said, “why don’t you—” She began to unbutton Laurie’s shirt.
Laurie jumped back. “You can’t do that,” she said.
“Why not? The curtains are up. No one will see.”
“Not so loud,” Laurie whispered. “Suppose the nurse comes in?”
“Then we’ll stop,” Jaqe said, and laughed again.
“But you’re feeding the baby.”
Jaqe laughed louder, then groaned and reached with her free hand to hold her belly. She said, “I love it when you act puritan.”
On the day Ja
qe and the baby came home from the hospital, Louise volunteered to clean the apartment. When they came inside they found that Louise and some of the other women had set out baskets of fruit and strung the walls with ribbons and banners of welcome and congratulations. A vase of flowers and a giant bowl of fruit sat on either end of the table, with a giant stuffed lion between them. The lion, golden with a black mane, sat back on its haunches, with its front paws held forward. A note around its neck said, “Hi! I’m Nora (short for Leonora). Louise sent me to welcome you home and stand guard over Kate and her two sweet mommies.” While Laurie held Kate, Jaqe hugged the lion and kissed its nose. “Thanks, Nora,” she said. “Happy to have you in the family.”
“Why don’t you get in bed?” Laurie said. “I don’t want you getting sick.”
“That’s okay,” Jaqe told her. “Nora will protect me.”
“Great,” Laurie said. She thought, A crummy job, a tiny apartment, and a baby. But at least I’ve got a stuffed lion. She looked at the toy. She thought, I sure as hell wish you could protect us. Maybe you’ll come alive at night while we sleep, and clean the house, and feed Kate, and go out and hunt food for us. But Kate started to cry as soon as Laurie put her down in the crib Jaqe’s parents had bought for them, and Laurie knew she better fix the problem, whatever it was, before Jaqe insisted on taking care of it instead of resting. Laurie realized how hungry she was, and how she had no time to eat, no time for anything.
Over the next three months, the people around Jaqe and Laurie gave different reasons for Kate’s almost constant crying. Colicky, some said. Diaper rash, others claimed. A test of wills, the pediatrician suggested, which only caused Jaqe to insist they find another doctor. “I’m not having my daughter described as a tyrant,” she said. Louise thought that maybe Kate had brought some great truth into the world, some mystery of the womb or even earlier, and now could not understand why nobody would listen to her. Others considered the crying existential or maybe political—outrage against the powerlessness of babies. Mark described the problem as “temperament.”
“That’s a big help,” Laurie told him. “So now you’re telling me she’s going to be like this no matter what we do, and in fact—” Her voice rose, and she feared she would become hysterical, a possibility that filled her with shame as well as fear. “We better not do anything, because any attempt to shut her up will just be stifling her natural personality.”
The fact is, Laurie did not really care why Kate cried so much, often refusing to sleep for more than twenty minutes at a time. She just wanted it to stop. She needed to sleep, she told herself. She would sell her soul, if she had one, just for one uninterrupted night. “Hell,” she told Mark, “is made up entirely of young mothers. They’ve got to pretend it’s a bad deal when God or the tourists come around, but otherwise they just sleep the whole time, or else they sit around and discuss current events, and sip mint juleps.”
And yet it wasn’t just the exhaustion, or the destruction of her time with Jaqe, that drove the panic through Laurie’s body. Instead, it was terror that she just couldn’t do it. That this endless series of tests would expose her inadequacy. She thought of single mothers, of fathers, especially fathers, who managed to keep it all rolling forward, and she thought if they could do it—if men, whose bodies weren’t even tuned for babies, could do it—what the hell was wrong with her?
She remembered stories she’d read as a kid where the evil king or stepmother (was she a stepmother? she wondered. An assistant mother? A vice mother?) challenges the princess with impossible tasks. Find a sliver of gold in a huge pile of straw. Bring all the water from the bottom of the mountain up to the top. The tasks all had to be done at night, in a single night. With a fury that amazed her, Laurie thought how the goddamn princesses had it easy, for, win or lose, the test finished by morning. And the animals they’d befriended earlier in the story would do the work. Groundhogs or something found the gold. Flocks of pelicans carried up the water. So that’s the problem, Laurie thought. She forgot to do good deeds for animals. Now there was nobody to help her.
Maybe if Jaqe hadn’t come home still weak from the surgery, she would have done more those first few weeks and Laurie could have relaxed. Or maybe Jaqe did do her share, more than her share, for as well as nursing, Jaqe got up more when the baby cried, and changed her more. Or maybe she didn’t. Laurie discovered she couldn’t tell, she just could not measure it all. Nor did it really matter, for even when it was Jaqe who got up, Laurie still lay awake, listening first to Kate’s crying and then to the silence, waiting for the crying to start up again as soon as Jaqe would turn away, like someone listening to a drip from the ceiling and finding the silence more unbearable than the sound of water striking the pail.
One night, during a break with Kate asleep, Laurie put on the all-news TV station. To her disgust, they had finished the current headlines and gone on to feature a special on “children having children.” Laurie surprised herself by watching it. Along with the statistics and the poignant stories, and the middle-aged men speaking darkly of welfare’s burden on the middle class, there were stories of mothers beating their babies and fathers running away from home. Laurie wondered which category she might fall under.
Later that night she went to a bar, the first time since Kate and Jaqe had come home that Laurie had gone anywhere except to work and the supermarket. She knew she shouldn’t do it; Jaqe hadn’t fully recovered, even after three months, and in fact had been feeling flushed lately, so that Laurie was afraid Jaqe might be coming down with something. But Kate was sleeping—over an hour so far—and it was Laurie’s day off, which meant that Jaqe had gotten some real rest and probably could handle it if the baby woke up. Laurie wrote Jaqe a note, saying she was going out for a short while, the baby was fine, and she loved Jaqe, whom she called “sweet cushion” (after her habit of sleeping with her head against the side of Jaqe’s breast).
When Laurie went inside to lay the note on the pillow, Jaqe looked so sweet, with her lips puckered out slightly as if offering a kiss, that Laurie almost took off her clothes and got in bed beside her. But the idea of staying home panicked her. It seemed like a challenge, or a last chance. Whether she wanted to go or not, if she stayed home now she was lost. And besides, she told herself, Jaqe needed to sleep.
In the bar, Laurie drank so much vodka and cranberry juice that she had to throw up in the ladies’ room. It was like some self-fulfilling prophecy, she thought, not even sure what she meant. She hated being sick, and she hated even more the extra burden of fear that now came with it. What if she got really sick, and couldn’t take care of them, couldn’t work? She didn’t even have medical insurance. Jaqe’s parents paid for insurance for Jaqe and the baby, putting them on their family plan as if Laurie didn’t exist, and there was nothing Laurie could do about it. But she herself had no coverage at all.
When she thought she probably didn’t have to throw up anymore, Laurie flushed the toilet and wiped the bowl with a wad of toilet paper. On the way out she passed a woman about eighteen years old, dressed in a tight leather miniskirt and leaning toward the mirror over the sink to put on dark red lipstick. Laurie wasn’t sure, but she thought the woman stopped to smirk as Laurie passed her.
Outside, a little girl about seven or eight years old, with red hair, was playing hopscotch on a pattern drawn in pink chalk on the sidewalk. The girl wore yellow jeans with rolled-up cuffs and a blue T-shirt covered with gold stars and crescent moons. A bright green barrette in the shape of a frog held back her hair, whose redness made Laurie wonder if this was what Kate would look like in a few years. She frowned. Kate was prettier, she thought. This girl was okay, but Kate…She looked down at the ground, as if someone passing might catch her thoughts and laugh at her.
She lifted her head again to watch the girl play. Instead of numbers, the girl had drawn crude pictures in each of the boxes. Some were recognizable, like a crude tree or a stick figure of a bird. Others appeared like abstract circles or squares crossed
by squiggly lines. Maybe, Laurie thought, they represented characters the girl considered perfectly obvious.
The child played the game a little differently than Laurie remembered. She would toss something—a piece of bone it looked like—then hop after it, mouthing some jingle or formula, to the square where it fell and bend down to pick it up while still standing on one foot. Without turning around, she would make her way back again, hopping backwards through the squares to the bare sidewalk.
Laurie looked at her watch. Ridiculous, she thought. A kid her age shouldn’t be out so late. Where was her mother? God, she thought, a parent three months, and she was judging other people’s failures. Besides, the child looked perfectly safe and happy. Except, Laurie thought, she appeared frustrated with her performance. She seemed to do something wrong each time she picked up the bone, some offense against her private rules which brought out a sigh or a roll of the eyes, before she would retreat out of the pattern. Laurie wondered if the goal of the game might be to go all the way through the pattern and out the other side, and some mistake or other always forced the girl to back out instead of continuing.
Maybe, Laurie thought, she should wait until the girl finished, and then see if she needed help getting home. Somehow, the thought of seeing the child leap triumphantly out the far end of the pattern caused a twitch in Laurie’s fragile stomach. Anyway, she told herself, she couldn’t hang around. Her own family needed her. Her family. For once, the thought pleased her, and she walked a little more lightly, despite the queasiness.
The closer she got to home, the more worried she became. Suppose something had happened when she was out drunk? Suppose the baby had started screaming and Jaqe had leaped up too fast and hurt herself?
When she got home Jaqe was sitting on the couch, asleep, with Kate resting against her breast. Kate must have woken up, rousing Jaqe from bed, and then when Kate quieted down again, Jaqe had fallen asleep where she was sitting. They looked so…so honest, Laurie thought. Not at all like the images of mother and child you saw on TV, where the woman always appeared perfectly made up and looking like she slept fourteen hours a day, with soft music playing. Jaqe’s face looked slightly mottled, and her lips pushed out like Kate’s did when she was getting ready to attach herself to Jaqe’s breast.
Godmother Night Page 20