Look How Happy I'm Making You

by Polly Rosenwaike

“There’s nothing you can do. You just have to wait.”

  “You should be preparing for bed,” Kamal calls from his office.

  Laila makes a face. “Want to see my room?”

  I’ve never been invited in before. The Tintin poster on her closed door—the boy in his rippling trench coat, the dog in a happy dash—gives the impression that Laila is busy inside with secret and vital missions.

  From floorboards to crown molding, the walls are covered with crazy makeshift wallpaper: pages from coloring books and calendars; postcards; valentines; shiny squares of wrapping paper; ads for clothes, and pet food, and Caribbean cruises.

  “This is amazing,” I tell her. “Did you do it all yourself?”

  “My dad hung up the high ones.”

  “What does he think of it?”

  “He says it’s hideous, but it’s my room.”

  I point to a picture of a chimp laughing, tacked right next to a toothpaste ad with a picture of a young woman baring her gleaming gums.

  “I like this one.”

  “It’s from National Geographic.”

  “Did you know that primates laugh when they’re tickled, just like we do?”

  “Yeah, well that chimp is laughing because he played a trick on his friend.”

  “Really? What was the trick?”

  “He stole his friend’s banana and replaced it with a phone that looked like a banana. So the friend tried to eat it and the chimp thought it was really funny.”

  “Wow. Did the friend play a trick to get back at him?”

  “No. They were just friends again.”

  Kamal knocks on the door and comes in before we can respond. “Are you holding Caitlin prisoner in your den? Go brush your teeth. And brush your hair or it’ll be a mess tomorrow.”

  * * *

  —

  A lamp with a red shade glows amorously in Kamal’s bedroom. The white-and-green patchwork quilt is embroidered with stars. If these are his recently divorced things, I wonder what his married things were like. A wooden cross hangs above the bed; he’s a Maronite Christian. He kicks me out on Sunday mornings so he can attend services at the church he and his ex-wife have been going to since they came here from Lebanon. Nonetheless, I prefer to see the cross as a testament to his taste for lovely hand-carved objects, rather than as a religious symbol that means something to him. Hebrew school taught me that I’m an atheist.

  Kamal emerges from the bathroom with a towel wrapped around his waist. I shower in the morning before I go out in public. He showers in the evening before our bodies touch. If I get into bed with clothes on, he scolds me: “You took the bus today. How many people do you think stick their asses in that seat every day?” So I’m naked under the covers now, waiting for him. At first the rule was no sex if Laila was in the house. Then it was reduced to no staying over on nights when she slept at Kamal’s. But we broke that too.

  Kamal climbs on top of the bed with his towel still in place. Water drips off the hair on his chest; his neck smells like oranges. He pulls back the quilt. “Nice,” he says gruffly.

  While he starts touching me, I ask, “Did you and Mariam ever think about having another kid?”

  “Sure, we’re both from big families. An only child is trouble, right?”

  This is friendly teasing aimed at my own only-child status, which I ignore, because I’m testing how far I can dip into the treacherous waters of the past and the future.

  “So why didn’t you, then?”

  “Well, we wanted to wait until Laila was older, and then by that time, we were fighting a lot.”

  “What were you fighting about?”

  He tightens his grip on my thigh. “Why do you like to make me rehash it all? She thought I worked too much. I’m sure I did. She’s unhappy with a lot of things in this country that I don’t love either, but we’ve decided to be here, so what can we do? She accused me of turning into an entitled American. In the end, we just couldn’t communicate.”

  Not for the first time, I think that I would like to meet Mariam, that she and I would have a lot to talk about.

  “Would you still want another kid someday?” I stare up at the ceiling as if this is a disinterested question, me his accidental naked shrink.

  “I don’t know,” he says. “Maybe I’m resigned to Laila being an only child. You didn’t turn out so bad.”

  Kamal’s art of deflection is a polished one. He slides his hands over my stomach, my hip bones. He kisses my pubic hair. “We have to be quiet,” he whispers.

  “Okay,” I whisper back, undoing his towel. The idea of making love covertly so that Laila can’t hear us is erotic to me. But then Kamal is always quiet, his brow slightly crinkled, his lips slightly open, as if to admit a slim cigarette. I am the one who has to gasp into the pillow, suck the screams back inside my mouth.

  Because I’m on the pill, my eggs stay put inside my ovaries. My fallopian tubes never see any action. It’s a hoax, on a chemical level. The hormones in the pills convince the ovaries that ovulation has already taken place, that the monthly to-do list is done. Ha ha.

  * * *

  —

  The next morning, while Kamal gets dressed, Laila and I drink our milk and eat the crepes he’s prepared for us with Nutella and banana. She’s finishing up a drawing of her family tree for school. The names are written inside birds’ nests perched on the branches. At the bottom she’s drawn a scrawny robin to represent herself.

  “So most of your relatives are still in Lebanon, right?”

  “We see them in the summer.”

  “They must be so glad when you come to visit.”

  “Yeah, they are.”

  I love her frankness, her lack of need for any false humility.

  “Where does your family live?” Laila asks me.

  “My parents are in New Jersey where I grew up. I visit them a few times a year.”

  “They’re not divorced, are they?”

  I want to lie and tell her that they are so this can be a bond between us.

  “They’re still together. But honestly, I don’t think that’s a good thing. Some parents stay married but it doesn’t mean they’re happy. When I was younger, I used to wish they’d get divorced.”

  “When I was younger, I wished mine would get back together.”

  Kamal and Mariam have been divorced for less than a year. Younger, to Laila, must mean seven instead of eight.

  “What about now?”

  “I know they won’t.” Laila shrugs. She picks up her colored pencil and draws a branch extending out from the nest that says Kamal, Mon Père. On the branch she writes my name—Caitlin, Mon Amie.

  * * *

  —

  Most days at work I see babies. Babies flashing brilliant grins or dissolving into tears for no apparent reason. Babies looking clueless or in the know. Their mothers bring them in—it’s almost all mothers—wearing fancy slings, fully stocked diaper bags at the ready. What I told Laila isn’t quite true: that my job is to make babies laugh. I’m more like the curator of their laughter, collecting it as specimens for study and analysis. Parents keep logs of when their babies laugh and what precedes the laughter. They record notes about situations in which the babies seem to be joking around with others. Every month they bring the logs in to me and respond to a questionnaire. For their part, the babies play for a bit, getting comfortable in the lab, and then they watch videos of people laughing in response to various stimuli. While a baby is looking at the screen, the eye tracker records his eye movements, indicating the duration and point of the gaze. This is the gold standard for infant research: where and for how long does the subject look? We can’t have them fill out a survey. We can’t give them tasks to perform. All we can do is look at them looking. When do they stare intently at the incongruous thing, the mischievous thing, the thing that
doesn’t fit with how people and objects are supposed to behave? When do they look away, tired of the same old joke?

  When Lucy calls at the wrong time—in the middle of the day—I’m sitting in my office between appointments, so I pick up the phone. Her sobs are terrible adult sobs, her choked-out words impossible. The day before yesterday, she’d put Arthur to bed. Everything seemed fine. But in the morning, she woke to silence instead of his siren cry. She rushed to his room and he wasn’t breathing. The paramedics came; they couldn’t revive him. He died. Her baby died.

  There have been times, over the twenty years of our friendship, when, I’m ashamed to admit, I’ve enjoyed listening to her cry, have welcomed being chosen as the one to receive her pain. Have felt less alone because she’s unhappy too. But this is something entirely different, this wipes out anything we might have imagined to be sorrow. Having given me the news, gotten out the words that must be the hardest words to say, Lucy whispers that she has to go and hangs up.

  My office is strewn with toys I need to tidy before the next subject arrives: musical balls, rainbow-colored rattles, stuffed animals with stitched-on smiles. I picture Lucy opening the door to Arthur’s room and hurrying over to the crib. I remember the way he looked—weirdly wise beyond his years, his months—when I’d told Lucy that he was a comic genius.

  I could round up a lab assistant to take over for the rest of the day, but I don’t want to have to tell my coworkers what happened, and I don’t want to leave our psych-lab haven. Here, we live in the land of laughing babies. We chart their month-by-month progress: the increasing deftness of their limbs, the evidence of their developing brains. We believe that playfulness is all. I wipe my eyes and blow my nose and open my office door for the next mother and baby.

  * * *

  —

  At first it’s a relief that Laila is at her mother’s house for a few days. Kamal settles me on the couch with a blanket over my legs, brings me a bowl of lentil soup. “What exactly happened to the baby?” he asks.

  “One of those inexplicable things, I guess. SIDS. For lack of a better diagnosis.”

  “What a nightmare.” He shakes his head. “There will be a funeral?”

  “Yeah, on Sunday.”

  “You’ll fly out?”

  I hesitate before answering. I know he won’t approve; he shouldn’t approve. “I don’t think so,” I tell him.

  “But she’s your best friend.”

  “She’ll have her family with her. I don’t think it would really help for me to be there.”

  This, I know, is not the point. The point is, a horrible thing has happened to Lucy, and I’m too terrified to face it.

  “Okay,” Kamal says, in his I’m-not-going-to-push-it voice. “You need a distraction. Let’s watch a movie.”

  The movie is in French, beautifully boring, with subtitles that sound more formal than the way people really talk. I keep closing my eyes, and when I open them again, it doesn’t seem that I’ve missed anything. When Kamal falls asleep next to me, I wish we’d spent the evening with Laila around instead, that we’d had her to focus on. I would have had to tell her, to explain why I was sad. And she would take it like kids her age do: the evidence of their thoughtfulness alive on their faces. It would trouble her, not in the way such a thing troubles an adult, shuddering at the loss of a mother’s child, but in an almost philosophical way, trying to grasp that the world is capable of such a thing. And I could have pretended that by talking about it with Laila, I was being an honorable grown-up.

  On Sunday, while Kamal is at church and Lucy is burying her four-month-old baby, I take the bus into downtown Seattle and walk along the waterfront. The gray-green water ruffles up, white-capped and choppy. The giant ferryboat trolls its perpetual route across Puget Sound. Tourists buy cheap replicas of the Space Needle that fit neatly in the hand. The rain holds off.

  When I settled on a psychology major in college, I decided early on that I didn’t want to do clinical. I didn’t want to become a therapist. No fifty-minute hour for me. No borderline personality disorder, no chemical dependency, no couples struggling with their marriages, no razor blades to the wrist. I’m a good-enough listener, if listening means knowing the right questions to ask to get people to open up, the nonjudgmental murmurings to encourage them to continue speaking. I’ve been told that I have an approachable, sympathetic face. But I don’t, in my heart, feel I have the power to help people. And it turns out that I’m a coward. I’m afraid to see what Arthur’s death has done to Lucy’s face.

  A few times I speak to the voice on her voicemail, her former voice: pleasant, professional, untouched by grief. “I’m just calling to say hi,” I tell her. “You don’t have to call me back. I love you.” I’ve never been one to throw the word love around. Now I’m hoping it possesses magical properties.

  * * *

  —

  One night Laila asks me to tell her a bedtime story. For a moment I panic. I’m not sure I know any stories. I kneel beside her fairy-tale bed, all lavender and lace. Under the covers, with her long hair shimmering from static electricity, she looks like a princess, safeguarded from the world. Kamal, sitting at the foot of the bed in his violet and gold bathrobe, looks like an emperor awaiting the evening entertainment. I stare at Lucy’s wall, at the picture of the beaming chimp.

  “Okay, so once upon a time, there was a chimp,” I manage to begin. “He was known throughout the forest for his crazy laugh.” I describe the forest: sturdy vines for swinging, bananas hanging from every other tree, high perches that serve as lookouts for lions and hunters.

  “What was the chimp’s name?” Lucy interrupts.

  “Arthur. His name was Arthur. He laughed all the time. He couldn’t stop laughing, which was weird, because the things that were happening in his life were sad.”

  I describe his misfortunes: his favorite tree gets chopped down; a sister goes missing; the bananas he plucks turn into phones, with zookeepers calling and making threats. Arthur keeps laughing his wild laugh. The other chimps get annoyed. What’s wrong with you? they complain. This really isn’t funny. But Arthur can’t help it. He gets these attacks of the giggles, the way you do when you’re at school or church, someplace where you’re not supposed to laugh, and that makes you laugh even more.

  Finally, he laughs so hard he starts crying, and then he’s crying for real. He cries all night, while the rest of the forest sleeps: the sloths hanging upside down from branches, the birds with one eye open, the other chimps cuddled together in their nests. In the morning, his tears have made a river, and the river brings his sister back, on a boat made out of the trunk of his favorite tree.

  “The end,” I say.

  There is silence, the kind of silence that makes me aware of each individual brain as an organ that no one but its owner has access to, an organ that will shut down forever after five minutes without oxygen.

  “Sad,” Kamal says, eyeing me with his beautiful, serious face.

  “The ending’s happy,” Laila says. “I like Arthur. Are there other stories about him?”

  “Another night,” Kamal says.

  “Another night,” I say.

  * * *

  —

  Today’s baby, nine months old, is named Lionel. His mother’s name is Felicia. They’re both cute and sprightly, sun-haired and moon-faced. This is their fourth visit. Each month Felicia turns in her typed-up notes about Lionel’s laughter history. They’re a data collector’s dream, clear and detailed in the right ways, free of the kind of sentimental excess that tells us more about the writer than the subject.

  Felicia sets Lionel down on the rug and he wriggles toward the felt blocks, stuffs them in his mouth, topples over, and bops back up.

  “What will you do with the data once you’re done?” Felicia asks.

  “Oh, we’ll look for patterns. We’ll think about o
ur findings in relation to other studies on infant socialization. Then, if the results seem significant, we’ll try to publish an article.”

  “Great,” Felicia says.

  If she questions the importance of such research, she is right in doing so. In our grant proposals we attempt to make the case that by studying what causes laughter in infants, we can better understand human socio-cognitive development. But I know we’re not saving any lives here.

  Lionel keeps trying to bite my shoe. I’m not sure if it’s my responsibility to try to stop him, if shoes are too unsanitary for mouthing, or if it’s one of those things where you decide as a parent, oh what the hell. Felicia makes no move to stop it. “I know you’re probably not supposed to say, but have you noticed anything about Lionel in particular, in relation to other babies?”

  What is it she wants to hear? That he’s on par, that he’s normal, or that he’s a superstar? I praise Lionel’s attention span, his responsive and adaptable nature, and Felicia appears satisfied. Now she can confirm what she already knows: that her baby is perfect.

  Though I study babies, I’ve never actually been much of a “baby person.” When I think that I want a kid, I mean a kid. Someone old enough to tend to her own basic hygiene, to understand that her mother isn’t an extension of herself, to know why some things are interesting and others are dumb. But still young enough to be sweet, to think bedtime requires stories, to fail to get the joke because she hasn’t yet learned enough about meanness. Lately, though, I’ve seen babies that have made me think, okay, I’d take that one. Babies charged with the life force: waggling their butts as they rev up to crawl and hissing good-naturedly, as if to propose that everything is just a game, everything is for fun.

  * * *

  —

  When Lucy finally calls me back, I’m about to pull into Kamal’s driveway. “Hold on a minute,” I tell her, and park facing a stand of spruce trees. One of the branches is turned up in such a way that it looks like it’s giving me the finger.