Look How Happy I'm Making You

by Polly Rosenwaike

  Remember when we had that baby?

  Yeah, that was crazy, Serena would say.

  I miss her.

  I know, but I bet she’s doing great. I bet she’s gone to a good home.

  * * *

  —

  They took up the whole width of the sidewalk: Henry, Serena, and one stately stroller, on their way to the coffee shop. The stroller could rumble fleetly over snowdrifts and ice sheets; the handsome adjustable hood extended all the way down over the baby napping in the removable bassinet. It had been paid for by Henry’s parents, who’d sent their granddaughter a bounty of expensive gifts and made no plans to book a flight and come meet her.

  At twelve weeks old, Eve had been outside only a handful of times: the winter’s fault, for packing the span of her life so far with bitter wind and piles of snow, and Eve’s own fault for throwing a fit whenever she was placed in her posh stroller. Better to keep her inside where it was warm and the walls could contain her crying. But finally she seemed to be contemplating the idea that existence need not mean constant protest. She rode tranquilly this afternoon, staring up into the indigo fabric of the stroller hood as if, for all she knew, it was the sky.

  This was the last day of Serena’s maternity leave. Next week she’d resume her post at the library, in the hushed vault of books. She’d be called upon not for vital sustenance but to satisfy an intellectual curiosity. No one would scream or fall ill because she hadn’t satisfied them. Since Eve’s birth, Serena had been doing the bulk of the care while Henry raced to finish his projects. Now he would serve as the primary parent for the next three months until Eve started daycare. He would no doubt do a better job of it than Serena had—prove more patient and playful and loving.

  At the coffee shop, they found a table where they could park the stroller, and ordered sickly sweet lattes in holiday flavors and a chocolate caramel brownie to share. They sat down facing each other, and Henry slid his hand across the table. “It’s been a long time since we’ve done this.”

  “Yeah, before Eve. B.E.,” Serena said, grasping his hand, and then they fell silent.

  She remembered a time, shortly after they’d started dating, when they sat at another coffee shop, holding hands without talking, the closeness of their bodies filling in for conversation (they’d made love just a few hours before, lingering in bed while their stomachs rumbled from hunger), until she started to worry that she wouldn’t have enough to say to him every time they sat at a table together for the rest of their lives. She already wanted to marry him. But the upside of that probably not happening was that she wouldn’t have to face all the times she couldn’t think of anything to say, or ended up saying the wrong thing. If she estimated at least one meal a day together, nearly every week of the year, for fifty or so years—it was staggering.

  A middle-aged woman with a to-go cup in her hand stopped in front of the stroller. Eve had woken up and was slithering her tongue in and out of her mouth. “What a calm, charming baby,” the woman said.

  “She’s not calm,” Serena said. “Don’t let her fool you.”

  “But so adorable. How can you stand it?”

  Eve smiled at the new face making gaga eyes at her.

  “My two are all grown. The younger boy’s a freshman in college this year, out in California, and the older one is off teaching English in Taiwan.”

  “Wonderful,” Henry said. “Sounds like you did a great job.”

  Serena looked at the woman’s meticulously arranged bright scarf, her scarlet lipstick and beaded earrings. How free she seemed, the accomplishment of her children’s childhoods and adolescences behind her. She could be two decades older than Serena, but if she’d offered to trade places, at this moment Serena might have accepted.

  “I’ll tear myself away now,” the woman said. “Congratulations.” She walked out the door with a little wave.

  “You’re always trash-talking this kid,” Henry said. “Wait till she’s older. She’ll get you back for that.” They were no longer holding hands.

  “I was being honest.”

  “Sweetheart, you could just take a compliment sometimes. Or take it on behalf of our daughter, anyway.”

  That’s how the endearments came at her these days: tagged on to some implied insult. When he put his hand on her shoulder as they left the coffee shop, his touch was the steering, slightly patronizing grip of a father’s.

  * * *

  —

  “How’s her language?” the pediatrician asked at Eve’s six-month visit.

  “Her what?” Serena said, startled.

  The doctor laughed. “I don’t expect talking yet. I mean her vocalizations, babbling, that sort of thing. At this age it usually starts picking up and you’ll want to encourage it. Talk to her as much as possible. Narrate your lives together.”

  As a kid Serena used to talk to herself a lot. At first she spoke aloud, and then later she silently mouthed her secret observations and her magic spells, her plays and her lists. One day when she was ten, on a back-to-school shopping trip to the mall, her mother caught her moving her lips among the racks of pants and sweaters. “What are you doing?” she demanded. “Are you talking to someone?”

  “No,” Serena said. Obviously she wasn’t talking to anyone; no one else was there.

  “It looks strange,” her mother said. “I’m telling you this for your own good, now that you’re getting older. Keep your mouth closed, okay?”

  And so Serena corrected it: shut her lips tight, redirected her words back up inside her head. It helped to picture them mounting a spiral staircase inside her skull, climbing up into her brain and disappearing there. It made her feel light-headed and empty, but she got used to it. And now, as an adult, the atmosphere of the library suited her well—everyone keeping their own counsel, people quietly approaching the reference desk only to have her send them back into the stacks. Returning to work after her maternity leave was the hushed relief she thought it would be.

  But the rest of the time, when she was home, she was supposed to be communicating with an infant, chattering on when she had nothing to say and neither did the person she was speaking to. She read an article that said “motherese”—the high-pitched, exaggerated style people often used with babies—was good for their language development, helping them to distinguish where one word ended and the next one began. It was a matter of promoting her child’s verbal abilities. So Serena attempted it sometimes, speaking stupid, obvious sentences to Eve: I’m changing your diaper now. Let’s turn up the heat. I’d better do laundry.

  All boring stuff that hardly seemed worth mentioning. Perhaps the key was to say it with greater enthusiasm. Can you believe we’re out of milk? Telemarketers again?! Let’s do our taxes, Eve. Let’s do our taxes! Serena was getting dumber, but Eve was learning. Sometimes, from her position on the floor, plastic keys clutched in one hand, squeaky bunny in the other, she would volley a string of earnest gibberish, as if unleashing some long-held conviction she had not, until this moment, found the opportunity to voice.

  * * *

  —

  On a Friday evening after work, Serena ground up brown rice in the blender and cooked it with water for ten minutes to fix a rice cereal more wholesome and probably better tasting than the commercial stuff you found at the grocery store, and then she mixed it with tahini and mashed banana to make a full nutritious meal. Eve was in daycare now, and Serena thought the women who worked there were great, certainly better than she was at taking care of a baby, and probably better than Henry too, who, for all his patience, and playfulness, and lovingness, wasn’t very good about sticking to reliable routines. Still, she felt guilty that Eve had to leave home every day to be one of a group of babies competing for their caretakers’ attention. Her guilt had led her to a book called Super Baby Food that encouraged parents (mothers, really) to make all their own homemade baby food,
and Serena, who had never much enjoyed making meals for anyone, found herself grudgingly concocting piles of mush. She put Eve in the high chair in the dining room, fastened a bib on, and started feeding her with a baby spoon: an exercise in frustration. Eve puckered her lips, allowing only the tiniest bit to seep into her mouth. And then Serena turned away because the kettle was boiling and she was dying for tea, and while her back was turned, Eve managed to grab gobs of cereal from the bowl, which apparently wasn’t sufficiently out of reach, and she was smearing those gobs on herself and then throwing them down.

  “Fuck!” Serena snatched the bowl away. “No, Eve, no!”

  She was infuriated, all that preparation down the drain—not even down the drain, on the floor—and then Henry was saying, “How can you get mad at a baby?” He was just sitting there on the couch in the living room, watching her get on her hands and knees to sponge up the cereal.

  “Why don’t you help?” she screamed. “You wanted this. Not me. I never wanted to be a mother.”

  Henry pulled Eve out of the high chair and carried her into the kitchen. Serena kept her head down, scrubbing the floor hard. She’d said what couldn’t be said, what she had promised herself she would never say. When she looked up again, Henry was washing the baby in the little tub that fit in the sink. He worked shampoo into the tufts of her hair, poured cupfuls of water over her head. Eve looked up, blinking, uncomplaining, into the stream. Usually when Henry bathed her he sang—nursery rhymes, Beatles songs, meandering tunes with goofy lyrics of his own invention. You were born to sing to a baby was a sentence that often came into Serena’s head when she watched him do this. She knew Henry would be pleased if she told him that, but she never had. She hadn’t told him what a fantastic dad she thought he was.

  He wasn’t singing tonight. He turned on the radio to a news show, people calling in to air their political grievances.

  Fuck, suck. She hadn’t always been able to say those words. There was a time, in high school, when she’d tried to make herself say them, because everyone else did like it was no big deal, and it seemed to represent something to freely emit those so-called profanities: some coolness, some all-rightness with the world, in declaring with proper crudeness what was no good about it. Now it was laughable how easy such things were to say, how little they meant. Everything was about tone and context, shrugs and sighs: language as a kind of code with the key plain as day, a code cloaked not in mystery but in wry predictability. Even this mean thing she’d just said wasn’t all that surprising.

  She stayed up late reading an article that suggested having a child was the worst thing you could do to a relationship, that cited an alarming statistic for marriages that began flailing postpartum and never recovered. She read another article about how picky eating in early childhood might be a sign of incipient mental illness. She read a series of blog posts by a harried mother of three who called herself The Murderous Mommy, describing in detail all the things her kids did that made her want to kill them. She read the comments posted by other women telling The Murderous Mommy what an awful person she was.

  All day Saturday Serena and Henry skirted around each other, tending to their separate household tasks. It wasn’t that different from the way they’d operated for years before Eve was born, when they chafed at each other’s communication styles (or lack thereof) and couldn’t find their way to talking things out. They would each become more self-righteously industrious—cleaning the kitchen, pulling weeds in the yard, rooting accumulated junk out of drawers. Now the baby just became part of that, both of them silently attentive to her, responding immediately to her needs as if making a show of competence, then withdrawing if the other person got there first. While Henry fed Eve an avocado, Serena grabbed a bin overflowing with papers and brought it upstairs to sort. Amid expired coupons, flyers announcing events already past, car repair receipts, clipped newspaper articles she hadn’t read yet and probably never would—there was an envelope containing a piece of embossed paper with the state seal in one corner, the county court seal in another. CERTIFICATE OF LIVE BIRTH it said at the top, a reminder that it could have gone the other way. Then there was Eve’s name, date and time of birth, the name of the hospital. There was a box for “Mother’s Current Legal Name” and “Mother’s Full Name Before First Married,” and these were the same: Serena Marie Tanner. When she was a little girl, thinking about getting married one day, she imagined it as a kind of wedding gift her princely husband would give her: his last name in place of her father’s, the ideal man becoming part of her official identity instead of the deeply flawed one. By the time she was a woman, even before her father died, she knew she wouldn’t do that. She’d keep her original name for life, for better or worse, for what it represented: the family she came from, her refusal to follow a tradition that viewed a wife as her husband’s property. And also because it need not represent anything at all; it was simply what she was accustomed to being called. She found an empty file folder and wrote Eve Tanner Skolnik on the tab, then folded up the birth certificate and placed it inside.

  Sunday morning, when Eve woke Serena up late, past eight o’clock, Henry was already gone. He was probably out for a run, or treating himself to some kind of pleasure boost—a cinnamon raisin bagel from the deli, an affogato from the coffee shop, “a little sweetness in my life,” he might say later, since Serena was bringing him down. She gave Eve a bottle, turned on some music—Lucinda Williams, loud—and then set the baby on the floor to scramble about. Soon Eve started screeching, what the pediatrician had called her pterodactyl screams. Had the pterodactyls been happy when they screamed like that? Eve seemed happy. She pulled herself up to stand against the couch and dipped her knees as if dancing to the music. If Henry were here, Serena would call him over to see, to watch it with her—their daughter’s joy of life—hoping that might serve as a kind of truce.

  When Eve needed a change, Serena carried her upstairs for a new diaper and, for what it was worth, to change her out of pajamas and into clothes for the day. Henry’s parents had sent an outfit that Eve would have no special occasion to wear before outgrowing it: a purple velvet dress with pearl buttons and ivory-colored tights. Why not put them on? Sunday best.

  Serena held her up to the mirror, tilting their faces together. With Serena in the sweeping satin peignoir Henry had bought her for their anniversary, and Eve in her fancy attire, they might make some kind of portrait: Mother and Child in the Nursery. She’d never cared for Mary Cassatt, with those pastel domestic scenes—and yet if you and your child had been immortalized together in a painting, how could you help but be proud? Serena tested out a smile. A few months ago, Eve would have smiled automatically because Serena was smiling, but now she remained serious, the impulse to mimic replaced by watch and wait. Serena studied Eve’s face in the mirror: dark eyes, wiggly eyebrows, bumpy chin. There were bits of her you could half match with each of her parents’ features, but really Eve looked like herself, like her own indignant person. Serena kissed her cheek. “Oh love bug,” she said. Lately, when the two of them were alone in the house, these pet names had begun to ooze out of her, goofy word combinations she’d never uttered before in her life. Sweetie dear. Pumpkin pie. Sugar bean.

  Where did they come from? Biology meeting language: instinctive affection arousing linguistic silliness. Months of sleep deprivation, diminishing brain cells, and baby-board-book speak. The kid was driving her crazy: plunging her into madness and frustration and a primordial syrupy love. She’d never experienced such wild fluctuations—in the baby, which was natural for a baby, she supposed, but in herself too.

  “Evie, devie?” Serena kissed her again and again. “You’re my bunny cupcake. My little buffalo bird. My chummy chum.”

  Suddenly Henry was there, just behind them, framed in the mirror. With the music still blasting, Serena hadn’t heard him open the front door and walk up the stairs. He wore that look of amusement, both ironic an
d tender, that she thought of as distinctly his: a look that could shift the molecules in the air, change everything for the moment.

  “Let’s hear that again,” he said.

  Parental Fade

  You can do it the long and painful way or the quick and painful way, the pediatrician says. The quick and painful way—otherwise known as crying it out—means putting the baby in her crib at bedtime, shutting the door, leaving her there till morning. Whatever it takes to ignore the cries—blast the TV, have noisy sex, take turns leaving the house—this is what we must do.

  The long and painful way is called a parental fade. Put the baby in her crib and get comfortable in the rocking chair. Don’t pick the baby up. Try not to even touch her. Wait for her to settle her own self down, cry herself to sleep. Each night, move the rocker farther away from the crib. Remain in the room for a shorter amount of time. Crying it out takes a few nights at most. Parental fade may take several weeks.

  Either way works. It’s up to you, the pediatrician says. He is the gentlest, smilingest man we have ever met. He sings our baby’s name when we bring her in to his office. He keeps a musical frog on the ceiling, sets it swinging as he draws the needle for her shots. Look at the frog, he croons happily.

  We cringe. We fear the baby will develop a phobia of frogs. We’re exhausted, despairing, mad at each other and at all parenting manuals, at all parents whose babies don’t regard their cribs as horrible cages of doom. Our insurance covers a thirty-minute sleep consultation; it’s coded as a necessary medical intervention. Now our thirty minutes are up. The pediatrician offers a final compassionate smile. Believe me, it works. You’ll be surprised. You’ll be relieved. You’ll be okay.

  In the car on the way home, we consider our options. Can we get a hotel room for the weekend, pay the babysitter to do this cry-it-out-all-night thing? Can we commit to two weeks of being stationed in a rocking chair, pretending to ignore our screaming child? Can we accept that a baby crying is nothing more than a baby crying—that this is only the first of many battles, and we must be strong, we must not yield, we must stay fixed on the goal for the good of all?