“It’s not a big deal,” he said. “She just wants to see Maxie.”
It was a big deal. And Dean knew it was. Which is why he hadn’t told me. Things were bad enough for him, having to be contrite all day and accept his position as the Bad Man, deserving of every hostile comment I could toss his way. I’m sure he didn’t want to make it worse by saying he’d allowed, or, God forbid, even invited his mother to come down here.
I decided not to clean the house for her this time. But then, with two hours left till impact, I panicked and changed my mind. I spent the next 118 minutes in a fit of adrenaline. I wore Maxie in the carrier and swept, vacuumed, wiped down surfaces, carried out recycling, sprayed the bathroom with nontoxic cleaner, folded the laundry (which included several pairs of Dean’s boxers), and made the bed. Maxie was fussy and wanted me to take her out, but I just kept cleaning, and eventually, she fell in step with the project. I was sweeping the front porch when Dean and his mother drove up.
As Dean’s mother strode up the front walk in a tan Chanel pantsuit, I felt like a cornered animal. I had planned to change, and to get Maxie changed, but there wasn’t enough time to do everything, and it seemed that a messy house was worse than a messy me. In retrospect, that might have been the wrong call. Or there might not have been a right call.
“Jenny,” Dean’s mother said as she took in my sweaty face and my tangly hair. “Motherhood seems to be tuckering you out.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said.
“Don’t call me that, dear,” she said. “I’m not your grandmother.”
I looked at Dean while his mother moved on to Maxie.
“Hello, baby,” she said. And then to me, “What happened to her face?”
It took me a minute to understand. Then I got it. The birthmark. It was so faint, I hadn’t thought about it since the hospital. And not one person had ever mentioned it. “It’s a birthmark,” I said.
“It looks like she was kicked by a mule.”
“The doctor says it will be gone by kindergarten.”
“Kindergarten!” she shouted, startling Maxie and not even noticing. And then to Dean, as if he were her personal assistant, “Remind me to talk to Sloane Wilcox’s cosmetic surgeon when I get back to the City.”
I looked at Dean again. She had to be joking.
But Dean just had a look on his face like he was actually making a mental note about Sloane Wilcox’s cosmetic surgeon.
“It’s going to disappear on its own,” I said again.
“She can’t spend the first five years of her life with a face like that,” she said. And then she leaned in to Maxie, “Can you, Elizabeth?”
I looked over at Dean again for some kind of reality check. Nothing. He might as well have been her personal assistant.
“It’s Maxie,” I said. “We call her Maxie.”
“Dean’s father and I don’t care for the name Maxie,” she said. “We are calling her Elizabeth.”
I thought about saying to Dean’s mother, “That’s not for you to decide,” but then I thought better of it. I had already lost this battle. I had already lost every battle I would ever have with Dean’s mother.
Dean’s mother cooed at Maxie a little longer, and then she was ready to hold her. I unsnapped her from the carrier and we made the transfer. Maxie instantly started to cry.
“How old is she now?” Dean’s mother asked, over the crying.
“Seven months,” I said. Maxie was wailing, and her face was so red and scrunched up, she looked like a completely different baby.
“She’s an emotional little thing, isn’t she?” Dean’s mother said.
She was holding her sideways, and Maxie’s arm was kind of twisted behind her. “She likes to be a bit more vertical,” I said, but Mrs. Murphy didn’t seem to hear me. She didn’t seem to hear Maxie, either, and she started talking to Dean about her plans for the weekend, all the while shaking Maxie as if she’d never once held a baby. Maxie continued to protest, and her cries got more insistent, and I actually had to hook my arms behind my back to keep from snatching her away.
And then Dean’s mother was ready to go. She handed Maxie back, straightened her pantsuit, blew us both a kiss, and headed down the walk to wait for Dean to take her to the hotel. I gave him a look that said That’s it? He shrugged and trailed after her. She hadn’t even stepped inside the house.
Over the next two days, she spent about an hour a day with Maxie. The rest of the time, according to Dean, she was shopping and making conference calls about a charity auction she was cochairing. She took some pictures, and she brought Maxie all kinds of gifts. A hooded towel in the shape of an elephant, a sparkly toy cell phone, a rug for her room with butterflies on it, pink-check overalls, tiny barrettes with bows, a doll with blinking eyes, a stuffed bunny rabbit, a Curious George book, a veritable closet of smocked lace dresses that Maxie would never wear, and a tiny pair of infant-size roller skates.
“They’re decorative,” she said about the skates, as if I might try to put Maxie in them and set her sailing down the driveway.
On her last day, she sat, knees together, on the couch while I held Maxie and Dean unwrapped yet another stack of gifts. “Pick up all this wrapping,” she said to Dean. “And then take the baby for a walk. Jenny and I want to have girl talk.”
Dean looked terrified at the prospect of being alone with Maxie. He had never taken her anywhere. I didn’t even let him be alone with her inside the house. But there was no way out. He would endure fifteen minutes with Maxie, and I would stay and endure girl talk.
As we strapped Maxie in, I imagined her telepathically pleading for me not to let him take her. I said to Dean, “Stick to the sidewalk. Don’t go beyond this block. Look both ways before crossing the street. Sing anything by Ella Fitzgerald if she starts to fuss. And if you lose control, come back.”
He stared at me with wide eyes, as if he were trying to memorize my list. He said, “Sidewalk. Both ways. Ella Fitzgerald.”
And then I was alone with his mother. “You’ve done a wonderful job with her,” she said, touching my hand. “She seems very healthy and happy.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“Just don’t let her get fat,” she said.
“I’ll try not to,” I said.
“Because nobody likes a fat child,” she said.
“Right,” I said.
“Now, let me share something with you.” She leaned toward me. “Dean is going to propose.”
“Again?” I said. The first time he’d proposed, we’d been in love. Now we were more like housemates. Who didn’t like each other. But who had sex. And a child. At this point, it was more like a collage than a picture. Lots of little pieces and some glue.
“Again.” She watched for my reaction. “And I hope you’ll accept his offer.”
“Marriage?” I said.
She gave a quick sigh, as if to urge me to catch up. Yes. Marriage. Hadn’t she just said that? “I believe he has a new ring. For a new start.”
“Oh,” I said.
“I can imagine you may still be feeling hurt from”—she hesitated—“how things have been in recent months. But let me help you with your decision. Dean’s father and I are not comfortable with the current arrangement. We want our granddaughter to grow up in a normal household. If you marry Dean, his father and I will continue to support your little family financially. You won’t have to work. Elizabeth will go to private school. You’ll have family vacations every year and her college tuition will be paid for.” She looked around the room, letting her eyes rest, at last, on a paint-by-numbers scene of a little Japanese bridge in a forest of dogwoods. “If you choose not to marry him,” she continued, “we will not.”
And that was our girl talk. She’d offered to pay me to marry her son, and we were done. It must have been unpalatable for their son to run around fathering children out of wedlock. I could see why she might like to make things more legal. Dean came back minutes later with a screaming Maxie. I nursed her while his mother a
verted her gaze as if I were picking my nose. And then we were standing next to Dean’s car saying our good-byes.
“It was lovely to see you,” Dean’s mother said as she air-kissed me. And then to Maxie, “Be a good girl, Elizabeth.” She sat herself in the passenger seat of Dean’s car, and he drove her off toward the airport.
I stood by the road for a while, waving Maxie’s hand. Then Maxie and I decided to go to the grocery store. We needed something to do. She fussed on the drive over, and the store itself was a zoo—people knocking over displays, kids running everywhere, a cashier repeating, “Frank, can I get the master key?” on the loudspeaker, over and over—and after a half hour or so there, I felt like we were a ticking bomb.
And then we ran into Gardner. He was holding the Sunday paper. I, in contrast, was laden with Maxie in the baby carrier and a cart piled high with eggs, bacon, Cheerios, yogurt, bags of nuts, organic milk, several different kinds of chocolate, and everything else that had struck my fancy as we’d snaked through the store. He came up while I was waiting in a checkout line that was so long it curved into the floral section, and he touched my arm and then backed away a little, looking shy.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey!” I said with great enthusiasm. “How are you?”
It was awkward. We’d had such a great date just a week and a half ago. Normal people would be at least scheduling another one by now. Normal people would be riding a pleasant escalator of anticipation. The two of us had a spark, even in line at the grocery store.
But we also had Dean. In my house. On my sofa.
“I saw your boyfriend came back,” he said.
“Dean,” I offered.
He nodded. “Dean.”
“He’s sleeping on the sofa,” I said, which was not untrue.
“Oh,” he said.
“He says he wants to get to know Maxie.”
“Sure,” he said.
“I was going to kick him out,” I said, “but then I wasn’t sure it was the right thing.”
He nodded. There was a pause.
The grocery line had been inching forward. Gardner had been lingering near me, but Maxie and I were now getting funneled between the magazine racks, and Gardner, who would have been cutting in line, had to hang back.
When Maxie and I made it to the register, I turned to greet the checker, and when I turned back, Gardner was gone.
And just then, Maxie hit her breaking point. She started to wail, loudly enough that people in other aisles turned to look at us. I pulled her out of the carrier and held her in my arms. I waited while the checker rang up item after item: black bean soup, apples, bread, chocolate bars. One slow scan after another. And the bagging guy had disappeared just as we got there, so all the food was just piling up in an eddy at the end of the counter. I started trying to bag the stuff one-handed with Maxie crying on my shoulder. The man in line behind us gave me the hairy eyeball, as if to say Why can’t you shut that baby up?
I started to think about leaving all the groceries and just walking out of the store, but then, as I dropped a can of tomatoes, Gardner came back, stepped in, and took care of everything for me with ease. He’d gone through the express lane and come back around. I paid and let him put the bags in our cart. Then I followed him out of the store, all the while trying to come up with something to say, sing about, or do to calm my crying Maxie.
The minute we stepped out the sliding door, she quieted right down. It was breezy and cloudy out, and the air even felt soothing to me. I pointed Gardner toward the car. He loaded everything in for me, and I held Maxie and watched.
He shut the back door and turned to me. He was done. It was time for him to go.
This was the moment when I could have said something to encourage him to wait for me. But a current was drifting me back to my old life, and it felt so strong that all I could do at that moment was float, watching my possibilities recede on the shore. I didn’t say anything. Not even “Thank you.”
And then he was leaning in, pressing his face up against my cheek. I guess he hadn’t shaved, because he felt sandpapery, and then I felt his mouth against my neck right below my ear. He pulled back and touched Maxie’s cheek with the backs of his fingers. Then he left. And I knew that I wouldn’t have to work so hard to avoid seeing him after that.
29
On the drive home, I panicked at the idea that I’d just let him walk away. I took a few deep breaths and tried to talk myself down.
Because life with Dean was my life. It was the life I’d had for five years. It was easy and familiar. And though Gardner was tempting, he was undoubtedly—as everyone is—better in theory than in practice. It was true that Gardner was thoughtful and helpful and very, very—frighteningly—good with babies. It was true that Gardner was taller and better-looking and better-adjusted than Dean. It was true that Gardner always made me feel, whether it was the case or not, that I was his favorite person—while Dean often had the opposite effect. Gardner had great taste in houses and architecture. Gardner was actually good at his chosen profession. Gardner could banter. He was nurturing. He seemed stable.
But. I had no guarantee that Gardner truly was all these things. He was courting me, that much was clear, and men can be very different when they’re courting than when they’re in the thick of things. Dean and I were certainly not still courting. It wasn’t fair to compare.
Dean and I had had a lot of good times. I tried now to see his abandoning me as no big deal. He’d panicked. It had been too much, and now he was sorry. There was no need to punish him forever. Or myself, for that matter. Or Maxie.
And Maxie figured heavily in my thoughts. Because it seemed wrong to deprive her of her father if he was ready to make a commitment and be with us. Would it be fair of me to throw away a man with a biological connection to Maxie? He wasn’t here when he should have been, but he was here now. And he said he wanted to be. So he didn’t have a way with kids. He’d get it eventually.
“You’re disappointed in love,” Claudia said in the reptile house one afternoon. “It’s easier to be with Dean and have low expectations than to have high expectations of your neighbor and be let down.”
“You’re calling me a chicken?”
“It’s understandable. At least you know what Dean’s flaws are.”
I nodded. That was right. I could recite Dean’s flaws backward and forward, list them in Spanish, set them to music. Gardner’s were a little harder to spot. Did I want to gamble the future on a set of flaws I’d never even seen?
“So Dean won’t disappoint you,” she said. “But he probably won’t make you very happy, either.”
“Actually,” I said, “he’ll find a way to disappoint me.”
But with Dean in my bed every night for over a week, I wasn’t entirely sure that Claudia was right. Dean and Maxie and I fell into a nice little rhythm. We were, after all, a family. And I started to wonder if this could be the way things were supposed to be.
Until Maxie decided she had something to say about that. She started waking up more at night. She’d been waking up some before, of course, but those earlier wake-ups were just appetizers for the full meal of sleep deprivation she was about to serve up. Within two weeks of Dean moving back into my house, Maxie was waking up every single hour, all night long.
I was hell-bent against letting her cry. She was too sweet to be left alone in a dark crib crying. It just wasn’t going to happen. So I had no choice. Each time she woke up, I went in and nursed her back to sleep. I put her to bed at 7:00. She woke at 7:30. I went in, nursed her, and had her back in the crib asleep by 8:00. Then she woke at 8:30. I went in, nursed her, and had her back down by 9:00. Each time, I thought she’d be down for at least a couple of hours. But she wasn’t. She woke, roughly, at 9:30, 10:30, 11:30, 12:30, 1:30, 2:30, 3:30, 4:30, and 5:30, and was up for the day at 6:30. And each time, when I heard her cry, I trudged in and nursed her. Somewhere in the middle of the night, I decided she was teething. I gave her some infants’
Tylenol, but it had no effect.
Needless to say, I did not find time for sex with Dean in between. Wisely, he stayed on the couch and did not even try to find me.
The next morning, I was so tired, my eyes felt like they had been sandblasted.
“I’m going to need you to take her,” I said to Dean.
“How about,” he countered, “I make you a big pot of coffee?”
“No coffee,” I said. “I’m nursing.”
He glanced around, stalling for time.
“Just take her on a walk or something. You know how to walk, don’t you?”
“I’m not sure.”
I thawed out a four-ounce bottle of pumped milk from the freezer. I gave him a bag of Cheerios and some rattle toys. He clutched them while I carried Maxie and pulled the stroller out the front door. Outside, I showed him how to strap her into the stroller. I brought the diaper bag, though I told him not to worry about changing her unless it was a real avalanche.
“What do I do then?” he said.
“Just wipe her up,” I said, using cheerfulness to convey how self-explanatory it all was. Then I remembered. “But only front to back. Okay? Only one direction: front to back. And use a clean wipe for each wipe. You don’t want to give her a urinary tract infection.”
“Right,” he said. “That would be bad.”
I gave them a push down the sidewalk and then turned and headed to bed. Nothing short of fatigue this extreme could have prompted me to entrust Maxie to him. But I told myself this was good. He’d never become a competent caretaker if I didn’t give him a chance.
In bed, I closed my eyes. Ten minutes later, he was back, and Maxie was crying. I hauled myself out of bed. At least he had tried. We’d try again tomorrow, unless Maxie slept well.
But she didn’t sleep well. She woke every hour, all night long, for days and days, with no end in sight. I called the nurse at our pediatrician’s, who suggested early teething, maybe, and then infants’ Tylenol.
“I tried Tylenol,” I said, my voice a little too loud. “I tried it, and it didn’t help.”
The Bright Side of Disaster Page 20