Look How Happy I'm Making You

by Polly Rosenwaike

  “It’s time!” Michelle calls from the living room. “Francine! Jack!” And they’re drawn to the TV, to the countdown, like everyone else. “Ten-nine-eight-seven-six-five-four-three-two-one.” As if the New Year is a space shuttle about to blast them into a different zone of being. Only for Alice, Jack thinks. Only she will change that much in one year.

  “Let’s toast,” Barrett says, pouring champagne for the adults, Martinelli’s cider for the kids. “To the newest member of this great extended family. To Alice Keeling!”

  Jack notices Ruth flinch, as if her granddaughter’s full name hurts her. Tracy had suggested once, near the end of her pregnancy, that they might give their daughter her own last name, her dead father’s name. But Jack didn’t want to do that. Tracy carried their child in her body, was going to give birth to her. Let his daughter have his name at least. It’s another thing to feel guilty for now, to wonder about whether it might be held against him.

  Everyone clinks glasses, sips quietly, as the TV people rock out their glee.

  “Right now,” Luke says. “Now the psycho killer’s gonna break down the door and shoot us.”

  “What are you talking about?” Christina shrieks.

  “That’s when it always happens,” Luke says. “When everybody’s happy and celebrating and not thinking they’re going to die.”

  * * *

  —

  Around 12:30, when the party breaks up, Jack and Tracy dress for bed the way they do now, since the baby. They used to sleep naked, had declared to each other, a kind of private marriage vow, that they always would. But if you have to get up multiple times on a cold winter night, it turns out it’s best to be fully clad in flannel pajamas and wool socks. They kiss chastely and say goodnight, then roll their separate ways in bed. A few hours later Alice awakens, bleats for milk. Tracy brings her into bed, glancing at the clock radio with its glowing announcement of the hour: 3:27. A friend had told her that when the baby woke you in the middle of the night, it was best not to look at the time, that it just made you feel more exhausted to know. But Tracy can’t not look. One day at school last year, when she returned to her classroom after lunch, she found that some prankster had covered up the clock face with a homemade sign: Time Does Not Exist. She kept it up for the rest of the day as a philosophy lesson, but it drove her crazy; she gave herself an F.

  Jack stirs and strokes Tracy’s arm, and she sighs, flinching at the tug of Alice’s unforgiving mouth. “Why did we do this?”

  “You mean have a baby? Or let everyone come here?”

  “Both, I guess. But at least she’s cute,” Tracy says.

  “Yeah, imagine if we’d had an ugly baby.”

  “Do you think we’d even recognize it? Maybe she’s not really that cute.”

  “No, she’s very, objectively, cute.” Jack’s still stroking Tracy’s arm and then gripping her wrist tight, and she’s hit with a charge she hasn’t felt since before Alice was born: the effect his body can have on her body.

  “I just keep stupidly hoping they’ll turn into people I can actually talk to,” she says.

  “Nope. They’ll keep on being a bunch of sourpuss Jews.”

  Tracy pulls her arm away. “Well your family’s a bunch of oblivious WASPs.”

  “Hey, joke. It was a joke.”

  “You’re as funny as your dad.”

  Alice’s sucking has stopped, her eyes shut up tight. Tracy lays her back down in the bassinet. In the baby’s long white sleep sack, she looks like the angel that’s missing from the top of their Christmas tree. Is it wrong to feel the most affection for her at this moment, when she’s absent from the sentient world, in need of nothing and no one? Back in bed, Jack’s body gives off heat.

  Tracy could press against him, draw that heat into herself. Enough time has passed; the bleeding ended weeks ago. Instead she lies still, thinking of her father, who kept in touch with all of his relatives, even the ones he didn’t seem to like much. The concept of family was important to him in a way that had always seemed suspect to Tracy. So they were people who shared your name, your genes, whatever. Wasn’t that whole blood-is-thicker-than-water thing a relic, really, from a time when bloodlines were used to keep peasants confined to their class, to justify slavery and segregation, to murder Jews in ovens? Still, there was something charming about her father’s belief that Tracy might care when he reported that so-and-so distant cousin, whom she couldn’t remember ever meeting, had had a baby. Now he will never know that it happened to Tracy too, that she has a little daughter, like he’d had once.

  Tomorrow, everyone will leave. She and Jack have made it through their first holiday season as parents. Alice has met her three surviving grandparents, her aunts and uncles, her cousins. Everyone has held her, even six-year-old Ari. If there is anything to be agreed upon, it’s that Alice is adorable, precious. And she has no context for understanding how much affection her family has lavished on her. No awareness that she may grow up to feel estranged from them all.

  * * *

  —

  January third, a date steeped in doom. It ends here: the winter vacation that had seemed so long and luxurious at the start. Jack hurries out the door at dawn to scrape ice and snow off the car, to prepare for students as unenthused as he is to be back at school. Tracy is taking this whole year off, a privilege they had planned for, saved for, but hearing Jack’s car start up while she sits on the couch with Alice, she wishes that she were going with him. She misses talking about books, misses those kindred-spirit students who find reading to be a lifeline. If only she had a nanny, or better yet, a mother nearby—not hers, certainly, but one like her friend Raka’s mother, wonderfully sane and thoroughly capable, who would come over during the day and take care of the baby for free.

  It’ll go by so fast, both Ruth and Francine had said to Tracy, as if they were confiding some profound insight, some realization about parenting that had never been voiced before. Enjoy it. As much a rebuke, perhaps, as a blessing. Okay, so they’re getting to be old women, they have the right to be wistful about the passage of time, to romanticize the early years of their practically middle-aged adult children, children who worshipped them once, when small enough to be blinded by love. But time doesn’t feel fast to Tracy. It feels slow as snow falling.

  “I’m your mother,” she says aloud to Alice. “Isn’t that strange? What do you think of me? I mean, be honest.”

  It’s quiet but for the rush of the furnace shuttling into gear. They live off the main road, away from traffic. The neighbors who keep pets have stealthy cats, nary a barking dog on the street. The mail carrier doesn’t come by till late afternoon. Tracy sets the baby down on the couch, where, being too young to do anything but flutter her hands and feet, she will stay put.

  * * *

  —

  Alice looks up—not a blank look, not a dumb look. In just these two weeks, her vision has sharpened. Colors have come in. The crimson of her mother’s loungewear, the navy of the couch cushions. And distance, too, a recognition of how matter aligns itself in air. The branches of the Christmas tree standing in the corner of the living room have assumed a branchlike structure, definition instead of blur. Alice can focus her eyes and track the movement of objects. She can see the strings of lights, descending from the tree now and disappearing into a box. The front door opens to whiteness, a blast of cold. The tree moves farther and farther away until it’s out of sight. For a moment she’s alone. Where to look? Where to look?

  And then, ah—there it is. That face, returning. The most familiar thing, and still for now, for that reason, the most interesting thing, the most pleasing thing. She looks and looks as if she can’t get enough, as if her mother’s face tells her everything she wants to know.

  A Lady Who Takes Jokes

  When Kamal’s eight-year-old daughter Laila wants to know what my job is, I tell her I spend my days tryin
g to make babies laugh.

  “That’s the easiest job I ever heard of,” Laila says. “You just give them a zerbert on the belly.”

  “That would do it,” I admit. “We can’t touch them, though.”

  “Are they sick?” Laila looks worried.

  “No, not at all. Our study examines how babies respond to things they see and hear. So physical touch—things like zerberts and tickling—that’s cheating.”

  From her perch next to me on the couch, Laila sets her chin in her hand and regards me with Kamal’s hard-driving green eyes. Most kids I’ve known haven’t bothered to ask what I’m doing with my life. But Laila takes an interest. As the first woman her dad’s dated since his divorce, I expected her to resent me. Instead, she seems ready to count me as a friend—that is, if I prove to be worthy.

  “Can they watch funny cartoons?” she asks.

  “We do show them videos, actually, but the babies are so little they don’t quite know what’s funny yet. They learn to laugh from their interactions with people. We’re trying to understand how we—humans, I mean—learn about funniness.”

  “I wonder what my dad’s doing in there.” Laila jumps up and runs into the kitchen.

  It’s not the first time I’ve gotten that sort of reaction when attempting to explain what I study. As E. B. White famously said, analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. The poor frog, the poor joke.

  Kamal’s living room couch is silky and cream-colored, woven with tapestry flowers. Opposite the couch, there’s a curio cabinet filled with clay beads, gold rings, pieces of pottery, and sea glass. On our first date, when Kamal brought me back to his house, he told me they were centuries-old artifacts discovered across Lebanon. I wasn’t sure at first if he was telling the truth. Irony seemed to be lying in wait behind his velvety voice.

  “How did you get them?” I asked warily.

  “My parents,” he said, as if it were obvious, as if everyone’s parents give their children ancient treasures.

  “And how did they get them?”

  “They’re archaeologists. After the strikes in Beirut in ’06, they gave this collection to me for safety. They think nothing will happen in Seattle.”

  The big earthquake is coming, the seismologists warn, the worst natural disaster in North American history. There’s a one-in-three chance it will happen in the next fifty years. But an earthquake is a grand abstraction. Generally, the tepid rain falls and we Seattleites sip our lattes in peace.

  Kamal emerges from the kitchen with a platter of flatbread brushed with olive oil and spices, which he calls a thyme pizza. He sets it down on the dining room table and hands me another cappuccino with perfect foam. Laila climbs into the chair across from mine.

  “Did you never have a thyme pizza before?” she asks.

  “Nope. This is my first.” I take a bite while she watches. “Delicious.” Compared to this complex blend of flavors, American pizza is a cheesy embarrassment.

  “My mom says the minute you taste my dad’s food you forgive him for everything.”

  “Laila,” Kamal warns. A native speaker of both Arabic and French, he pronounces his daughter’s name beautifully—Lah-ay-lah, the Ls lilting off the tongue. “Go get some labneh for Caitlin.”

  What did he need to be forgiven for? He’s kind, conscientious, tidy. Over the past few months, I’ve learned it’s not irony in his voice after all, but sincerity balanced with well-considered restraint. His laugh is almost noiseless. He angles his head back, bares his slightly crooked, non-American teeth.

  When Laila disappears into the kitchen, I tease him about her gibe, but I can’t get anything out of him.

  “She was just joking,” he says.

  “It’s the sad truth,” I say, “that most jokes aren’t that funny.”

  * * *

  —

  My friend Lucy is the one with the funniest jokes, the one who gets it—me, everything—the most. She lives on the East Coast, where I grew up, three time zones away. We talk late at night, after her husband’s gone to sleep, and though there’s no one else in my apartment to hear what I’m saying, I close the door to my bedroom and turn off the light. We’ve known each other since we were fifteen, when our parents sent us off to summer camp. Eight weeks of sports in the blistering sun, ugly arts-and-crafts projects, rubbery hot dogs, peanut butter on flaccid bread, poison ivy, mosquito bites, catty girls saying foolish things about boys. That is to say, it was like most summer camps, but we weren’t the summer-camp kind. Having identified each other as outcasts from across bunk lines, we spent as much time together as possible. Just between the two of us, we made concentration camp jokes. “Don’t go in the shower,” we warned each other after instructional swim. And when the tyrannical senior girls’ counselor barked orders: “Watch out for Eva Braun.” We felt it was our right to say things like this, having suffered through years of Hebrew school. During our free period we read aloud from The Handmaid’s Tale, scratched “Don’t let the bastards grind you down” into a tree. At dances we stuck by the refreshments table, eating too many Doritos and half-heartedly mocking the music. People assumed we were lesbians. “Do you guys, like, listen to Melissa Etheridge a lot?” they sneered.

  After dinner, while the other girls did one another’s makeup; made fun of the older, unattractive counselors; and ranked the hotness of TV stars, we escaped to the canteen, and Lucy entertained me with jabs at our bunkmates.

  “Why is a white girl like a tampon?”

  “Why?”

  “They’re both stuck up cunts.”

  “We’re white,” I said, shocked and delighted.

  “Jewish. We get a pass.”

  Now Lucy has a baby named Arthur. I flew out to meet him right before I started dating Kamal. Arthur was five weeks old then. He had a crazy lot of dark hair and a quizzical expression. He made bleeps and bloops with his little baby lips. He shook his hands in the air when he was sleeping, as if he were conducting an imaginary orchestra.

  “Are all babies this funny?” Lucy asked. Because I work with babies, she considers me an expert.

  “Nope,” I said. “This one is a rare comic genius.”

  It was strange to see my best friend graduated to this stage of responsibility and care. Holding and feeding Arthur, Lucy said she felt like she was just playing being a mother, but then that was our attitude toward life: that you spend most of your time fumbling around in your roles, and only occasionally do you really feel like yourself. Her husband Josh had become dadlike, with a burp cloth tossed over his henley shirt; he seemed gentler and more mature than I’d seen him before. Together, they looked like Arthur’s parents, each of them declaring they saw the other one in their son.

  When Lucy and I talk on the phone now, Arthur’s usually in the background: making grunting and sucking sounds, sometimes fussing to the point where we have to hang up. Lucy says she’s so exhausted she falls asleep sitting at her desk at work. She says yes, this time is precious, but she can’t wait for Arthur to be old enough to do something other than eat, poop, and cry. She says she’s sorry she’s turned into one of those women who can only talk about her kid.

  I play the part of the spicy single friend, feeding her details about Kamal. I tell her that he’s introduced me to my all-time favorite drink: Pernod and soda, served in a rose-colored crystal glass. I tell her that he smokes clove cigarettes that come in stylish yellow packages, and that kissing his musky mouth is actually better than kissing a nonsmoker whose breath tastes of mouthwash. I tell her about the way he speaks French with Laila, the two of them pooching their lips out and flicking their hands in the air.

  Tonight, Lucy grumbles about a woman on the street who scolded her for having Arthur out without a hat. Then she asks, “How’s Mr. Sexy, Exotic, and Rich?”

  “He’s not rich.”

  “Hmm. Clove cigarettes. French pri
vate school for his daughter.”

  “He has his priorities. And his job at Microsoft.”

  “Do you know what he does all day?”

  “He’s a computer programmer. So no, I have no idea.”

  “Well, enjoy him,” she sighs. “Go out, drink, fuck. Don’t smoke.”

  All through our twenties, Lucy and I traded stories of ridiculous dates, confusing sex, relationships going nowhere, breakups circling back into relationships going nowhere. Then she met Josh, and her jokes about becoming an old maid cat lady who hates cats turned into jokes about becoming a Jewish mother who neglects her children. For me, the subject of having my own family has become too serious to laugh at. I’ll be thirty-six this year: almost beyond eligibility, or so society and my mom would have me believe.

  “Kamal and I don’t have enough in common, do we?”

  “Enough for what? To end up with a baby on your boob while he snores in the basement?”

  When she found Josh, got married, and then got pregnant, I felt a kind of loss. I’ve had to struggle to shake myself out of it, to steel myself against crude envy.

  * * *

  —

  “Ten more minutes,” Kamal keeps saying from the desk in his home office, where he’s staring at columns of computer code. I came over after I got home from the lab, but he’s still working, as he often is, in this language I can’t possibly understand, more obscure even than the French or Arabic he speaks.

  “That’s what he always says to me.” Laila intercepts my path back to the living room. She’s wearing a giant Mariners T-shirt and a pair of slippers with satin roses.

  “How do you get him to stop?”