I made mental notes: Find out whether Mildred is married, and how she got hired, and whom she prefers to hire. Read more magazines. Watch women in department stores. Eavesdrop. What did people want? What did I want? This: to be in the middle of it all, a lively and opinionated crowd, a step ahead of things, excited by the future, rather than scandalized by it. To be wanted and needed for what I could offer. To rub away the tarnish of the last year and be interested—and interesting—again.
John entered the fray. “But the point isn’t to accept the customers’ opinions and their tendencies. The point isn’t to tell them a nice bedtime story. It’s to shape their wishes and desires. Let’s take baby powder. What is it for?”
I’d been too quiet. I wasn’t keeping up. “To keep babies dry,” I volunteered.
“No, no, no,” he said loudly, so that two other conversations at the table—one about the latest census news proving the US population balance had tipped from rural to urban, another about the new law in a Pennsylvania town, requiring skirts to be at least four inches below the knee—came to a halt.
“And you’re talking about behavior, there,” John said loudly, pointing to the census talkers, “and you’re talking about behavior, there,” he said, pointing to the two men and Mildred, who were disagreeing about whether skirt laws would only make new skirts even shorter, just as Prohibition had made everyone thirstier. “And that’s our business and that’s all well and good. But if I can direct your attention to this particular behavioral question: What’s talcum powder for?”
I was still swallowing back my surprise at how quickly he’d cut me off. No, no, no. Aggressive, even for this crowd of assertive banterers. And he hadn’t meant anything by it—he loved to argue and to jeer—but this was my informal job interview, even if he didn’t know it. I had to say something correct. I had to say something informed and clever.
Well, what on earth was baby powder for?
“Perhaps,” I tried to say, leaning in closer to John and speaking as loudly as I could manage, “it’s more healthful for the child, in some other way. It treats rashes or prevents them. It’s antiseptic.”
“Ah,” John said. “Health. Good feelings.” And he turned to me and winked. I was a student again, a very new student. I might even pass this particular test.
“We’ve tried for years to sell things by stating their positive qualities,” he lectured all of us. “This product is good for digestion. That product suppresses your cough.”
A waiter had come by and taken orders for cocktail refills, which couldn’t come quickly enough for this group. John frowned and raised his voice above the murmur.
“But my lovely wife is wrong. We’ve all been wrong. We won’t sell best by pointing out what works. We’ll sell best by telling the customer what dire circumstances she faces—and yes, I’m aware that four times out of five it is a she who holds the purse strings—if she fails to buy our product. We sell by stirring the most basic emotion there is.”
“Fear,” I said, but too quietly.
John said it louder, rising an inch off his seat, speaking over the waiter, even over the voice of Stanley Resor, who had just started a new conversation at the end of the table about baseball. “Fear!” John shouted.
“It’s not enough to say that powder actively prevents something mildly negative. What if,” he continued, “there are serious diseases Baby might get if Mother does not use baby powder—our preferred brand of baby powder, the only kind Mother can be certain is completely pure. What risks if she chooses the wrong brand, or none? What regrets does she face? We focus on the cost, the guilt: if she does not buy this, the door is open. Not to one specific thing, but to an abstract quantity of things. Not to a single factual problem, but to fear itself, which is more powerful when it is generalized across many possible causes.”
One of the junior copywriters at the end of the table asked, “But how do we convince a consumer that diseases, in the abstract, pose a threat?”
“That’s easy,” John said. “You get the expert to say it.”
“A mother, you mean,” the copywriter said.
“The mother? Heavens no,” John said. At this, everyone laughed, and I sat back, out of my league. “I meant an expert, of course. I meant a doctor.”
A waiter placed a fresh drink in front of me. From the other side, over my shoulder, a second waiter set down a small dish: at the center a crenulated, pearlescent shell, and at its center, a shining mucilaginous orb, gray around the edges. A cataracted eye. Seeing and unseeing. Like me. Oblivious to my dwindling chances, the nature of my own constricted future. Half aware at best. Dumb as an oyster. And queasy.
It was hard, extracting my chair from the tangled seating arrangement. Standing, I leaned hard on one of John’s shoulders to catch my balance, and then, feeling my knees go soft, spun and hurried forward, in what I hoped was the right direction.
I was just leaning over the bowl in the ladies room when I heard the door open again, and Helen’s voice asking the woman attendant, “Is she all right?”
When I came out into the powder-room area, Helen had a damp handkerchief ready.
“I’m sorry,” I said, nose sniffly, arms still trembling. “Let’s join the others. It’s John’s big night.”
“No, let’s just sit here.” Helen directed me to a padded chair. “That rowdy bunch can occupy itself just fine without us.”
She held the damp cloth to my brow, and after it had lost its coolness, I handed it back, and she wetted it again, the freshness welcome if short-lived. I’d neglected to bring my purse, but Helen brought out her own powder compact, which she urged me to use, since my entire face was shining with perspiration. I thought of making some joke about powder and diseases, and selling to anxious women, but the words wouldn’t come. The required cleverness wouldn’t come.
“He definitely holds his own, your husband,” Helen said.
“Yes, he does.”
I waited, still catching my breath, and Helen sat on a chair next to me, quiet and kind, as if she had no desire to be anywhere else.
“How do you do it?” I finally asked her.
“Work with Stanley?”
I’d meant more than that. I meant, how had she done it all: come so far, accomplishing so much without being pushed to the side, even as the company had grown, even after she’d moved from one city to another, even after they’d married.
“I let him take the credit,” she said. She clicked her purse shut—an exclamation mark to a statement that sadly, I’d never forget.
The dizziness had ebbed, but the nausea remained. Every smell was more acute. The scented powder masked the restaurant’s strong odors just enough to keep me from retching again, but I couldn’t eat. I didn’t even want to be near food.
“You’re looking better now,” she said. “Feeling better?”
“A little.”
“But not entirely?”
“No.”
“Well, it can take a while. I was the same way. First three months at least.” She added, smiling, “John made it through the training period—gold stars all around. He’ll be making a good salary now, and that will help.”
That will help.
“With your new addition, I mean,” she said, and waited for the possibility of a correction that wouldn’t come, that couldn’t come.
How could a modern woman have missed the obvious? But I had. There are some things you know but don’t want to know—that you’re not going to get that job, or that your monthly visitor is late for good reason—until you suddenly, in a brief flash, know them undeniably and want only to disappear, shamed by your own willful ignorance.
“That is it, isn’t it?” Helen asked. “But darling, it’s wonderful news. We’ll all get to celebrate again together before the year is out.”
Chapter 21
Seven and a half months later, the
y handed him to me: Albert William Rayner Watson. Billy. But not Billy yet. Only, for now, a red-faced, puffy-eyed worm, with little threads of dark hair plastered against a wrinkly scalp. I was still fighting my way out of the ether clouds when they put him in my arms, wrapped up tight in a striped hospital blanket. I remember looking around and thinking, “Is this grip strength or vision we’re testing today? Where’s the nurse who’s supposed to be setting things up?”
I was lost. I would be lost for weeks and for years. Because I had not intended to be a mother, certainly not so soon. Possibly not ever.
When I’d informed John about the pregnancy, he’d been magnanimous. These things happened. Make the best of it. While I suffered through a hot New York summer, waddling to our apartment and the corner store and the laundry and back—John gone, most of the time, working his way up the ad-man ladder—he grew increasingly comfortable with the idea. Excited, even. There was nothing better than a blank slate. Polly had never gone back to school after last year’s upset; in fact, she’d never go to school again, and before long she’d be married young, with troubles of her own. Little John was struggling, though intent on college. But it made sense that they’d turned out badly, given the strain of the marriage and Mary’s histrionics and her inconsistent parenting style. Without even trying, I’d surely do better, John reassured me.
I needed that reassurance, since my own family had taken the pregnancy news badly. My parents, I now believe, had thought the marriage would discreetly dissolve if we had no children in the first two or three years, and now that such an easy exit wasn’t possible, my father went into a prolonged funk, attended by my mother, who had said, the only time she came to New York, “You’ll have to give him time. He doesn’t know what to make of all this now.”
At the moment, in the hospital bed, I didn’t know what to make of it all either. Not the distance of my family, and not the high expectations upheld by John, who seemed certain I’d be a better mother than Mary had been, though he disregarded mothering in general. It was like saying my temporary maternal condition was a disease that could be contained. I’d be the better kind of disease: the manageable, treatable kind. Not a chronic condition.
The baby was out of me, and that was a start. My distended abdomen was a pillowy mess of floating organs, rearranged by the trauma of expulsion. My backside ached, and I was glad I hadn’t the strength to pull down the covers and peel away the absorbent cloths wadded up between my legs, to see what damage had been wrought. I was still bleeding, though the nurses said it was normal. But here was something new: my breasts had ballooned and were hot to the touch, so full they seemed ready to split the thin, mottled skin barely encasing them. The left in particular was rock hard and pulsing uncomfortably, a delta of thin, blue veins visible on the stretched skin.
A nurse entered the room with the two-day-old infant in her arms and lowered him, for the moment, into a bassinet in the corner. Good. Keep him there. Silent, sleeping, attended by a nurse who knew what she was doing.
Where was John? He’d been in the room the last time I’d opened my eyes.
“I’m afraid there might be infection,” I said to the nurse, who was standing at the far side of the room, studying a clipboard.
She didn’t look up. “Vaginal?”
“No. My breasts. One more than the other. But maybe both.”
“Why do you think they’re infected?”
“They feel . . . different.”
“Well, they should.”
She came closer, and I could read her name badge: rebecca. Familiar. My mother’s name. Was that the only reason?
“It’s only your milk coming in,” she said.
It’s strange to say, but there was some confusion about this. There’d been so much to sort out during the last few weeks, and John and I had danced around the issue of breast-feeding, both of us preferring to avoid the topic. It was much easier to use our limited time together to debate baby names. It was easier to study classifieds for the various houses John was considering renting for us; I wanted to be as close to an urban center as possible, while he wanted trees and a good yard. It was easier to flip-flop on whether we should hire some kind of home nurse or helper, and how, and when. We wouldn’t accept just anyone, of course. John’s firm ideas made for some high and particular standards not easy to spell out in twenty words or less.
“I hadn’t decided whether I would breast-feed,” I told the nurse, who finally looked up from her chart.
“Well, your body isn’t interested in waiting for a decision. It’s gone ahead and started making the milk.”
She came closer and stood alongside my bed. “One part cow, nine parts devil—is that how you’re feeling now?”
Rebecca.
John had been the one to make that disparaging comment about wet nurses, during one of our Albert sessions more than a year earlier. Rebecca had been a new nurse standing in the corner: face grim, especially once Albert started sobbing. Yes, I did feel like one part cow, now. Never mind about the devil.
I said, “You worked at Hopkins?”
“That’s right. And now you have your very own baby to experiment with. How interesting.”
She didn’t sound interested. She sounded darkly amused, glad to see me uncomfortable, unable to escape my own biology, and paying for something I’d done.
“Isn’t there something I can take, to make the milk go away?”
“Here’s a curious thing,” she said. “The baby himself can make some of the milk go away, if it’s being over full with milk that’s giving you pain now.”
“But then what?”
“Then your body will make more milk. But things will even out.”
I shrank away from her, my arms tight against my sides, chest throbbing.
She crossed her arms loosely over her own chest. “We’ll try some compresses later. Crushed cabbage leaves are helpful.”
Cabbage? I wanted my mother, and at the same time didn’t want her to see me like this, unknowing and uncertain, and using old folk remedies suitable to the nineteenth century.
Rebecca crossed the room and picked up the baby. “Here’s the big boy. William, you’ve decided to call him?”
“Billy,” I said, surrendering only after she pressed the blanketed bundle within an inch of me. My arms reacting in delayed fashion, closing around his blanket-bound body only at the last moment.
“Look, he recognized his own name. He turned toward you as soon as you said it.”
“That isn’t recognition,” I insisted.
“Well, he heard a familiar voice. And he smelled you. He’s hungry.”
“Here . . . I can’t . . .” I stammered, but she was already at work, pushing back my pillow, rearranging the sheet, unbuttoning the top of my nightgown. I turned him—“That’s right,” said Rebecca—and pulled him toward my aching breast, feeling his surprising strength as he rooted around, pushing his face into me, deciding for us both.
But he didn’t know anything a baby was supposed to know. His mouth failed to grasp the nipple immediately. His tongue worked at it, and seemed to reject it, as if he’d tasted something bitter. He pulled away and redoubled his strength and charged against my breast again. I was sure he couldn’t breathe, the way his mouth and tiny nostrils were buried in my skin. He seemed both powerfully determined and horribly fragile, likely to suffocate or shatter, likely to die in my incompetent care. In a flash I had a vision of him rolling out of my arms, off the side of the bed, an image so terrible I squeezed him closer to my chest, despite the ache.
“Billy,” I said again, more surely this time. And to the nurse, Rebecca: “He’s not getting it. There’s something wrong with him.”
“There’s nothing wrong with him,” she said. “He’ll get it.”
I felt the heat of frustration as the baby raised one clenched red fist, which had broken free of the blank
et, and beat it against the taut white drum of my breast. Then, for a moment, he managed to latch on and suck. A moment of relief spread in radiant waves, only to be pierced, in that briefly rosy bull’s-eye, by a sharp thin arrow of pain that ran from nipple to spine. All my muscles tensed, and down in my uterus there was a deep postpartum contraction, a ripple that rolled up and over me like an enormous wake created by some distant passing ship, or something bigger, a tidal wave. I reared back into the pillow, squirming away from him, and the baby lost his suction. His head waggled back and forth in a fit of frustration.
“Stop fighting,” Rebecca said, and I couldn’t tell if she was talking to me or the baby or both of us. “Calm down, Mrs. Watson. Take a deep breath.”
I tried, puffing in and out, flooded by sensations and memories of sensations: of holding slippery baby bodies; of watching the strain of a newborn as it clung to an iron rod, about to fall; of feeling the hot tears of little Albert, desperately pressing into my chest; and of other babies, too, rooting and twisting and flailing and seeking, but none with as much determination as this one. This one, who was intent on mastering this situation, mastering me, and yet feeble and easily snuffed out.
“He’s going to starve,” I said, unable to contain the shrill melodrama in my own voice. “Bring something for him. Get some . . . get some help.”
“He isn’t starving,” she said. “You don’t need help.”
“Tell me what to do. Get a doctor.”
“You certainly don’t need a doctor.”
“Find someone who knows.”
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