Look How Happy I'm Making You

by Polly Rosenwaike

  “He meant Christmas in the secular, materialistic sense,” Jack says. “Right, Dad?”

  “Everyone’s so sensitive these days.” Nicholas looks at Luke, as if his grandson will back him up on this assessment. “No one’s opposed to presents, right? Everyone’s getting presents?”

  “They’d better be,” Luke says. “And not cheap educational crap either.”

  “Good health,” Ruth mumbles, from her corner of the couch. “That’s all we should wish for.” It’s been nearly two years since her husband died from the cancer that invaded his brain. If he were here, he would lie next to her in bed later that night, eloquently bemoaning the shallowness of these people. Oh, Ruthie, he would sigh. When the Israelites came out from Egypt, they had nothing at all.

  * * *

  —

  By ten o’clock on Christmas morning, the living room is a wreck—wrapping paper, ribbons, cards, gift tags—all tossed aside in the rush to get to the goods, which pile up in colorful, half-forgotten heaps. Midway through the rampage, Alice starts crying, which gives Tracy an excuse to leave the room and go nurse her: a questionable privilege. Though she’s finally toughened up a bit to the job required (now she understands the origin of the expression tough titties), it still feels more unpleasant than plucking her eyebrows. What is this breastfeeding bliss she’s heard tell about?

  Five minutes in, her sister knocks on the bedroom door. Jessica is skinny as ever in her eighties-style denim jacket and jeans, a look that used to be cool but that now screams suburban Jewish mom who’s trying too hard. They haven’t talked, just the two of them, since Jessica arrived. And it’s been years since they’ve been close. They used to sit on each other’s beds while Jessica, three years older, would warn about all of the boys Tracy should steer clear of in a way that made Tracy ache to feel their depraved hands on her skin. Jessica was bold and forthcoming then—not so nice to Tracy as a general rule, but her freely dispensed worldly wisdom made up for it. Tracy was the one who loved to read, but it was Jessica who could tell stories. And then she left home, went to college and business school, got married, and became tight-lipped and conventional.

  “She seems to be nursing well,” Jessica says, leaning over Tracy and Alice in the glider. “So sweet. I miss it.”

  “Really? I can’t wait to go back to keeping my boobs to myself.”

  “It’ll get better,” Jessica says vaguely. What everyone says to a new mother.

  So Tracy asks, “Do you think you’ll have another one?” What everyone says to the mother of one child.

  “I doubt it,” Jessica says.

  “You don’t want to? Or David doesn’t?”

  “I don’t know what he wants anymore.”

  Tracy looks at the trembling corner of Jessica’s mouth with a sliver of hope. Maybe she can finally get something raw and real out of her sister again.

  “It’s a little weird, having Christmas,” Jessica says finally. “You don’t mind?”

  “It’s nothing: a bunch of presents, some chocolate Santa Clauses.”

  “You’re not going to teach Alice to believe in Santa Claus, are you?”

  “Jesus, Jess! You used to be a slut, not a stick-in-the-mud.”

  “Don’t be mean to me, please.” Jessica’s face crumples, her heavily lined eyes welling up.

  “I’m sorry, I was joking.”

  “Everything’s falling apart.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “I don’t want to discuss the details right now.”

  But the details are everything, as Tracy’s constantly reminding the high school students in her English classes. The details are what count. Without details, you can’t expect people to care about anything you have to say.

  Tracy switches Alice to the other side, grimacing at the baby’s iron jaw. “Well, how’s Ari doing? How do you handle relationship conflicts with a kid? I’m asking for my own future reference.”

  “You keep things as normal as possible,” Jessica says defensively, case closed.

  During their father’s illness, Jessica handled things with a managerial competence that Tracy was thankful for, but sometimes she’d wished her sister would ease up on the pious professionalism, that she’d talk about existential angst instead of estate planning, would just admit that the whole dying business was horrendous.

  * * *

  —

  The hall closet at Jack and Tracy’s overflows with coats and scarves, boots and hats, unmatched gloves and makeshift sleds. The refrigerator amasses an unsavory collection of leftovers. Only Francine, mother of two grown men, Jack and Barrett, seems to feel the responsibility to keep things orderly, including herself. Every morning in the hotel room she applies her full complement of makeup while Nicholas watches something unpleasant—a political talk show, a WWII documentary—with the volume turned up too loud. Francine believes people, especially women, should maintain themselves, preserve their dignity. Christina and Luke don’t call her Grandma or any of the other silly old-lady names, but by her own given name. When Alice can talk, she will do the same. Francine finds it embarrassing the way Ruth babies her grandson, Ari, and frankly disappointing the way she mopes. It must be terribly difficult to lose one’s husband, but Francine knows plenty of women who have, and after a time they’ve increased their volunteer work, planned trips with friends, signed up for extension classes at the nearby university.

  At Jack and Tracy’s, where the floor is always cluttered with toys and the coffee is never hot enough, Francine does what she can. She putters around, straightening books on the bookshelves, returning the perpetually left-out milk carton to the fridge. Being the mother of two boys, she should have become inured to messes long ago, but she could never quite get used to the chaos, the constant interruption and upheaval. Her life for years now has been calm, tastefully unhappy. She and Nicholas don’t fight the way they used to, when the boys were still at home—about parenting, and their own parents, and even money, though they had plenty of it. They mixed drinks at the bar in the basement late at night and then laid into each other, his extroverted, combative personality up against her sneakier anger. It was a kind of sport; it made her strong. When she bathed afterward, by candlelight, in their beautiful marbled bathroom, she imagined leaving everyone behind and going to live in a nearly empty old farmhouse in the country: just a sturdy kitchen table, a well-made bed, and a stone fireplace, like her grandparents had. She scrubbed herself clean; she blazed with the desire to uproot everything. But now she and Nicholas are older than her grandparents were when they died; and he’s had several heart surgeries; and their calendar is full: with charity events, and season tickets to the symphony and theater, and travel to the nice places one should see before one dies. After all these years, instead of arguing, Nicholas turns on the TV and Francine goes to bed early. She spreads the lavender satin eye pillow over her eyes, listens to the way the silence in the room isn’t really silence. The most soundproof place in the world is actually right there in Minneapolis, in the city where she lives, a chamber built into a laboratory, where you can hear the loud thump of your own heartbeat. You have to stay seated in that room, she read in the newspaper. Otherwise you’ll get dizzy and lose your balance in the absence of exterior sound cues, in the utterly disorienting chamber of your own body.

  For a year now, Francine has had a secret. A childhood friend of hers named Raymond, whom she hasn’t seen since high school, got in touch with her last Christmas, and they began emailing, then talking on the phone: long, warm, flirty conversations about everything and nothing. Raymond has lived alone in the South of France since his wife died five years ago, and he wants Francine to come visit. “Or you could just move in,” he said last week, before she left for Ohio. “There’s plenty of room. And a view of the sea. Water blue as your eyes. I remember how blue they are.” He knows, of course, that she’s married, that his proposal
is absurd. Still, as if there’s some understanding between them, he says Je t’aime at the end of their conversations, and she laughs that such foolish romance, such clandestine lightness, can exist in the world. It gives her something to think about at times when she feels utterly outside of life, standing here for instance, in her younger son’s ramshackle house, wiping up the dining room table that everyone has scattered with brownie crumbs.

  * * *

  —

  They’re running out of food, and Tracy had planned on going to the grocery store herself. What was once a chore has become, since Alice’s birth, an hour of escape. But Ruth insisted on coming along, and now, as they fill the cart to capacity (the benefit of this accompanied shopping trip is that her mother will pay), Ruth grills Tracy. How is she feeling, physically and mentally? Is she drinking enough fluids? Is she experiencing postpartum depression?

  It’s always been Ruth’s way to introduce sensitive topics in public, as if she’s specifically stored them up for a time when a retreat to one’s private bedroom is impossible. In department store fitting rooms, customer service lines, and waiting rooms at doctors’ offices, Tracy has endured questions about her friends, her love life, her diet, her personal relationship with Judaism.

  “How’s Jack adjusting to the baby?” Ruth asks, while they’re waiting for sliced cheese at the deli counter. “Is he giving you the support you need?”

  Tracy hesitates. It’s her policy never to criticize Jack in front of her mother or to suggest any argument between the two of them. With his non-Jewishness already a strike against him, she doesn’t want to provide anything further for Ruth to file away under some banal category: shortcomings of my second son-in-law. And yet Tracy is feeling frustrated. She has some sympathy for Jack, certainly, having to drag himself to school every weekday morning and impersonate a lively, quick-on-his-feet teacher, instead of a dazed new dad. On occasional nights he’s up at whatever hour, feeding Alice from the precious stash of pumped milk, tending to her diaper. Most nights he moans like a man from whom the world is asking too much, pulls the covers over his head, and leaves Tracy to it. At least he hasn’t retreated to sleep in a different room, like other new fathers they know, though whether that’s out of loyalty to Tracy and Alice or devotion to the memory-foam mattress in their bedroom is up for debate. But she can feel their roles calcifying: the domestic tasks falling in her court, perhaps glomming on to her forever, like pregnancy pounds that can never be shed.

  Tracy grabs a plastic container and begins packing it with olives. “He’s really sweet with Alice,” she says. “But I don’t think he gets how much work it all is. I mean, this is what happens, right? The second shift and all that? Of course I’m not teaching now, but I’m afraid when I go back to it—”

  For a moment Tracy thinks maybe they could have a conversation, woman to woman, about gender and societal norms, the bigger picture of family life and its injustices. Her mother had raised two kids while working a full-time job, with an overworked husband who never cooked a meal in his life. But Ruth’s critique is grounded on the local level, directed at Jack’s family.

  “Well, he certainly doesn’t have the greatest role model. Did you hear Nicholas this morning, kvetching about having to wait on hold to get a better room at some resort they’re going to? What else does he have to do with his time? And then he asks Francine where his pills are and makes her drive back to the hotel to get them. His pills. Not that she says a word about it. Just gets her fur coat and goes with that blank look.”

  The deli clerk hands them their cheese, and they wheel the cart over to the bakery aisle. Tracy wants it all. She wants all of the rich baked goods a breastfeeding woman deserves. She grabs an apple pie and a loaf of chocolate chip pumpkin bread. Her mother, who has a history of commenting on her weight, will not say anything today, when they’re shopping for a houseful of people.

  But Ruth’s criticism of her in-laws feels like criticism of Tracy herself, by association. Ruth may be right, but Tracy suddenly feels defensive, especially of Francine, whom she believes, or wants to believe, feels things more deeply than she lets on. Jessica is fair game, though. Any sisterly allegiance they once had has been stripped away by Jessica’s refusal to confide in Tracy for real. “Do you think Jess and David are okay?” Tracy ventures. “She sounded kind of down the other day about how things are going.”

  Ruth waves the concern away with a dismissive hand that comes back up with a box of molasses cookies. “It is what it is. It’s just life, being married. Listen, this is what I told Jessica, and I’ll say it to you too. If you’re not getting along with your husband, if you’re not feeling satisfied, just remember that one day he’ll be dead and none of it will matter.”

  * * *

  —

  They pass the time in various familial configurations of walks around the neighborhood, sledding in the park, board games, kitchen duty, and sitting around. There’s checkers, Monopoly, Pictionary, Boggle. There’s looking at phones, and YouTube videos, and broken things in the house that Barrett attempts to fix, and Alice’s darling face. There’s talk of snow, snow tires, summer vacation plans, cell phone plans, things you can do with kale, political scandals, magic tricks, the tricks behind magic tricks, the complaint that there’s nothing to do here, and the observation that children who say there’s nothing to do must be dull people to think that. Each day is divided into periods of eating and not eating. Each person is divided into the public self they cultivate or let slip, and the private self they’re afraid to reveal.

  “Who’s made New Year’s resolutions?” Nicholas wants to know. “Who’s ready to become a better person next year?”

  “We’re all joining the gym,” Barrett says. “Family membership. Right, Chris?”

  Christina scowls. Her dad knows she hates exercise, sports, anything that calls attention to her body. Her weight-loss plan involves making herself throw up like her friend Mia does. She hasn’t worked up the nerve yet, but in the New Year she’s resolved to do it.

  “I’m gonna start taking judo classes,” Luke says. “Kick some butt.” In the fantasies he spends a lot of time playing out in his head, the terrorists storm James Madison Middle School, and he crushes them—part physical trouncing, part mental outsmarting.

  “Who else?” Nicholas bellows. “Jessica? David?”

  Jessica is working on a puzzle with Ari at the dining room table: the solar system in two hundred pieces. “Decluttering,” she says. “We should only have what we need and give everything else away.”

  “People don’t need our junk,” David says from behind the newspaper. “If we really want to help people, we should volunteer our time. That’s what I’m going to do.”

  Jessica pounds Mars into place.

  “Noble pursuits,” Nicholas says. “Now how will you all stick to them? Every year my wife resolves to bring me breakfast in bed, but does she do it?”

  “Don’t listen to him,” Francine says.

  I’m not, Ruth thinks. She’s had enough of his bluster. Why does he get to be alive when her husband is buried in Mount Zion Cemetery? She looks up at Nicholas, into the face that must have been handsome once and that still shines with arrogance. “What about you? How do you plan to improve yourself?”

  “Do I need improving? I see you think I do.” He laughs. “What would you suggest?”

  “If you don’t know, I can’t tell you.”

  Nicholas laughs again, the sort of ready laugh deployed as a shield to deflect any arrow of criticism. He turns to Barrett and strikes up a conversation about golf.

  Francine hasn’t been asked what her New Year’s resolutions are, and in that moment she makes one. Somehow, she will see Raymond this year. Fly to France, sit down across a table from him, look into his eyes, and listen to the voice inside herself that will say she is either crazy for going there, or crazy to go back home.

 
; * * *

  —

  Colorful foil horns and takeout Chinese food, pale ale and Pepto-Bismol. The indignity of not having a TV in the house on New Year’s Eve has been remedied by David, who’s unplugged the neighbors’ nineteen-inch Panasonic and carried it over to Jack and Tracy’s, set it up in a place of honor in the living room. Jack wants to object—Leave Alan and Betty’s TV alone!—but he feels powerless to affect the sway of stupid tradition. Now everyone can watch the ball descend into Times Square, people screaming for no reason, for the one-digit change in the Gregorian calendar. Let everyone do what everyone does on New Year’s Eve: same old, same old.

  Barrett and Michelle sit shoulder to shoulder on the couch, chatting about the celebrities at the onscreen bash. In separate corners on the floor, Christina and Luke text furiously. Ari rests against Jessica, determined to stay up until midnight. And Alice is awake again, for her late-night bout of crankiness. Jack carries her into the kitchen, where Francine is loading the dishwasher. “Mom, you don’t have to do that,” he says.

  “Who will do it then?” she protests. She touches Alice’s cheek, the shocking softness. “Do you ever talk to Claire?”

  His mother’s question surprises Jack. They haven’t mentioned his ex-wife since he started seeing Tracy, back before the divorce was finalized.

  “No. It was a pretty clean break. What made you think of her?”

  “I was just thinking that it took courage to start over again like you did,” Francine says. “New job. New wife.”

  Jack laughs. “When you put it that way, it sounds callous. I don’t know that I’m brave. Maybe I just didn’t try hard enough.” Alice squawks, and he flies into motion. “She wants me to keep moving.” He begins swinging her: toward Francine, then toward the refrigerator; Francine-bound, then fridgeward again.

  When Alice was born, he did think of Claire. During their last big fight, before they settled into the cold, final certainty of separation, she’d screamed about wanting to have a baby with him, how she might never have one now. He hopes that won’t turn out to be true.