Behave

by Andromeda Romano-Lax

  “You know—a good deal more than you think.”

  “I don’t,” I said, near tears.

  “You only need some time and a little dose of common sense. He’s a beautiful, healthy baby boy, Mrs. Watson. You’ll be careful. You’ll do fine. And he’s strong.”

  She paused a moment, her voice shifting, in a way I didn’t care for at all, from a tone of comfort to one of command. “Listen to me and get ahold of yourself. You won’t hurt him.”

  Chapter 22

  We came home from the hospital to our new cottage, snow on the walk and boxes still unpacked, on a Friday. On Monday morning, John came in to give me a kiss on the forehead before he left for work.

  “You’ll get around all right?”

  John was sensitive to my physical ailments: residual bleeding, normal postpartum complaints with a simple timeline for healing. Anything else was filed away under simple fatigue. It was my job to beat my way out of that fog, and to do much more than that—to seek, once the air cleared, a new world.

  Conqueror’s glory be damned. I hadn’t even managed to wash my hair in a week.

  “I left the breakfast dishes on the table,” he said. “Hope that’s all right. Coffee’s still on.”

  “Coffee,” I tried to smile. “Sounds marvelous.”

  “You eat a big breakfast now, hear me? Get your strength back up.”

  The goatlike bleating of Billy, waking up, issued from the bassinet in the small, undecorated nursery.

  “I’ll miss you both today. You’re in charge.”

  “Instead of who—you?”

  “Instead of him.” John laughed. “Don’t forget to take some notes. These first weeks are priceless. You won’t get them back if you sleepwalk through them.”

  John was at the door, making a swift exit before the soft bleating became a breathless, choking cry.

  “Notes,” I repeated. “Schedule.”

  In that moment before the door closed, I listened for the sound of a car idling out on the drive, a colleague of John’s who was sharing the commute to the train station, over the grand cantilevered span of Queensboro Bridge, and then into the city. Then: only quiet. A whisper of traffic on the narrow road outside our rented Long Island home, which John had finally chosen.

  John had said no American should be allowed to bring a new child into the world unless he could afford to give that child its own bedroom, preferably one protected from the nerve-straining clamor of the modern world—though not overprotected from the more salutary challenges of nature, with some yard space for a child to get daily, scheduled fresh air. I would have preferred the tighter confines of a Manhattan apartment, a less isolating place in the middle of the hubbub, closer to friends, frivolity, distraction, the occasional extra helping hand. But he was right. Billy would need his room. And we would need our privacy.

  I strained to hear the traffic passing, to imagine the cars and where they were going today, to imagine the world out there, which hadn’t stopped buying, selling, and speeding along while I had swelled and gone into seclusion and finally burst and been emptied and returned to the world, a little softer inside, a little broken.

  I said, to myself and to Billy: “Sheets.” They smelled fusty, but washing them would require a trip to the village laundry, two miles down the road. “We’re not very clean, are we?” A drive along snowy streets, or a walk followed by a trolley ride. Not anytime this week. “Bath—for me, this time.”

  When would he nap again: two hours, or three? How long would he cry if I ignored him? Would he stop? Quiet enough in the hospital, and moderately quiet for those first two days when John was paying closest attention, he seemed to be gaining strength and volume now that he was home alone with me.

  The properly raised baby doesn’t cry except when it’s been stuck with a diaper pin. I’d found that typed on an otherwise empty page at the top of a box I’d opened on the weekend, searching for my old address book in the vain hope of sending out birth announcements in the next few weeks. Well, all right then. We’d put an end to crying, soon enough. Underneath the single sheet of paper was a folder, still empty, labeled “Psychological Parenting Guide.” It was just like John to start organizing notes on how to raise babies the very week we came home with our first. Nothing like one project to spawn another, and nothing like the voice of expertise to quell any first-time jitters. We were alike in at least one way, John and I: made uneasy by uncertainty or by lack of structure. Better a fantasy blueprint than no blueprint at all.

  But first, Billy was hungry. I had to feed him, of course. But first, before that other competing first, I had to get off the wet diaper that would soil the bed, which was already far from fresh. I had to change him, feed him, and then I would have to change him again. One weekend, and we were already out of tiny clean shirts and fussy little rompers with tight cuffs and too many buttons. They were all squashed into a basket, damp or mustard stained.

  I went to Billy and lifted him out of his bassinet. He’d been crying so hard for the last few minutes, he’d slipped into short silent spells of rage, unable to catch his breath, red body a single taut muscle of unsatisfied needs.

  “Come now, Billy. Stop that.”

  My nipples were cracked. I’d never discovered whether cabbage leaves worked or whether that was just an old wives’ tale. I dared not ask John to buy or bring home anything that suggested I was toying with old-fashioned remedies. They would just have to heal. My body could manage that much on its own, I hoped.

  When I sat up in bed and put Billy to my left breast, a cramp seized my calf. Without realizing, I’d been pointing my toes, clenching all my muscles in pain as the suck broke the scabby skin and allowed a thin gray cloudy stream to flow through. Then the answering wave, getting softer each day, of my uterus contracting. Breast and uterus talking to each other, while I hovered absentmindedly above, trying to remove myself via my breathing, wondering why women let themselves be turned inside out this way, wondering if other women wondered, wondering why I felt so glum at this moment. Smell of burnt toast still in the air. The dishes. The sheets.

  On top of that, the cupboards we’d meant to clean out before the baby came: sticky paper-lined shelves, littered with mouse droppings. Country living of the type John idealized, remembering with rosy nostalgia the Stoney Lake summer cottage he’d enjoyed with Mary, Polly, John, and visitors, plus a half-dozen assorted child cousins. But a cottage in summer with lots of people helping was one thing. A suburban cottage in winter—with neighbors on each side, but no one we’d actually met and no one whom John seemed interested in meeting yet—was another.

  Billy kept working away at one breast and then the other while I wondered: which dress would fit me, when I finally found time to get dressed today? Half of them were too small, the others, far too large, enormous ugly circus tents I couldn’t wait to give away. Even my feet had gone up a half size, which meant my only pair of winter boots wouldn’t fit, and outside, the walk to the car was along a narrow unshoveled path, under two old evergreen trees whose boughs hung heavy and threatening with their loads of damp snow. John’s trees. (“A boy needs a tree to climb.” “Yes dear, aren’t you sweet—but not for the first three years of his life.” “Well maybe our son will be advanced.”) I would have taken a closer laundry and corner grocery over those sunlight-blocking, snow-gathering trees.

  The doctor had said I should stay off my feet for another week at least. A great sense of humor, those doctors have. I could try kneeling down and washing the baby clothes in the bathtub. And I could walk out into the snowy yard like a farmer’s wife, with clothespins in my mouth. I could hang the clothes and the sheets out to dry—to attempt drying—in the damp winter coastal air. Would it warm up just enough to rain? Was there a line out there, between the trees? Were there clothespins in the mousy drawers?

  A thin line of pain from my left nipple. Breathe through it. Breathe through. I
’d thought one left pain behind following childbirth. Clearly not.

  “How long?” John had asked, the night before.

  “How long, what?”

  He’d smiled at me. Then I understood. “Oh, I don’t know. Six weeks, maybe.”

  “Long time,” he’d said, leaning toward me until his cheek rested, briefly, against my own. Yes, from the neck up: that part he could touch. Even I was reluctant to touch anything much farther down, except when absolutely necessary.

  Billy was making good progress, nodding off, satiated, gums still clamped to the nipple, until his head began to drop back and he startled himself awake, suck-suck-sucking again. The fingers of my free hand went idly to his back, smoothing down the fabric of the sleeper, and then up to the folds of his neck, the soft and nearly hairless back of his head, which fit so neatly into the curve of my palm. I had started humming, absentmindedly. For a moment, I felt peaceful, made drowsy from the nursing, enchanted with the weight of his head against my outstretched fingers and the curve of Billy’s cheek and the velvet of his perfect skin.

  But then I pulled my hand back, remembering what John had said, about the biggest danger, the biggest temptation. Too much touching. Too much needy mother love—the mother’s own attempt to satisfy her own sensual and emotional needs. I felt suddenly ashamed. This was how it happened. This was where it went wrong from the start. I let the pillow do the work of holding up his head. I let my hand fall, and felt a morose weight drop onto my entire body in turn, pressing down upon me, anchoring me to the bed.

  I was struck with a greater thirst than I’d ever felt, but the kitchen tap seemed too far. Before he’d left, I should have thought to ask John to bring in a cup of coffee or a glass of water. Getting up was necessary but getting up too often started the blood between my legs flowing again, the pads dampening, and I only had so many. The last thing I needed was more things to wash and wring and hang out to dry. Out in the small kitchen beyond my view, there’d be a plate with toast crusts waiting, tempting the cockroaches. There’d be a sink full of dishes from last night, sitting in the tepid, crumb-filled water.

  I looked down at Billy’s face and he looked back up at me with large, gray eyes. Then he squinted and clamped down hard, screwing up his face as he pushed.

  “No, Billy.”

  But even the “no” was unnecessary. Less touching, less directing, less empty chatter, just instruction, delivered in the most neutral voice possible: that was the goal.

  “That’s for the toilet, Billy. Let’s get you there.”

  Get you there, or I’ll be out of nappies. Get you there, or your father will know we’re not keeping to the schedule we agreed upon yesterday. And I’ll go mad if I can’t do at least one thing right. No place for me at Hopkins and no room for me on Lexington or Madison Avenue and now this. Third strike if I can’t do this right.

  Shuffling into the bathroom, I held him over the toilet, little legs bunched up and peddling until he registered the pressure of the large cool seat against his little thighs. No outcome, no product, but at least we were started. First trial, at age eleven days (Infant Billy), and age twenty-three years (Mother—that would be me). Something to record. A thought and a goal that gave me enough strength to dig a fresh robe out of the closet, fasten it over my nightgown, and return to the bathroom, baby in the crook of one arm, one hand free to splash water on my face. There was a new baby scale on the long sink counter, taking up the space where my cosmetics and hair things had been. Where had John put all of my private things? No matter. Focus on the daily measurements.

  Seven pounds, one ounce. (And now he was fussing again, unhappy with having been set on the cold metal scale.)

  Somewhere in a box, there was a big pile of notebooks, a carton of typing paper. But I’d only located that one page of notes started by John. I went looking in that same box and under the page found instead of blank paper, rubber-banded piles of mail. The topmost had fancy, looping handwriting, an exotic return address from Madrid, Spain—perhaps one of the members of royalty that JWT was trying to talk into offering a hand-cream testimonial. I didn’t actually open that envelope or any of the fancy, perfumed letters beneath it to read the personal messages that John had felt valuable enough to move into our small new home with its shortage of drawers and cabinets. My own survival instinct told me to use my limited reserves to create some sense of order for my days. Maybe when I knew who I was again, and had a job of sorts I knew how to perform, I could be more suspicious of my husband’s letters from various women in Madrid and Paris and New York and Washington, DC. But of course, his job did involve so many women—as consumers, as colleagues, as celebrity endorsement providers. I noted the postmarks, yes, but that was the limit of my curiosity and energy.

  Finally, I located an ivory card—on the front, an invitation to a Vassar classmate’s wedding we hadn’t attended, a much more sumptuous affair than our own quick dash to city hall. I flipped it over to write on the back in light pencil script, “7, 1,” with Billy still over one shoulder, and through the diaper and through my robe, a feeling of warmth spreading onto my shoulder, the front of my chest.

  A diaper change. A walk around the kitchen, dropping the breakfast dish into the sink, grabbing an old spotted apple from the ice box and because it was next to the apple and easy, a leftover pork chop, cold, tearing at the bone with my teeth. A quick hair-brushing, but no time for styling or anything else. There was spit up on my nightgown, beneath the urine-spotted robe. Who would wash the nightgown? Who would wash the robe? Who would wash the sheets? Then somehow, it was two hours later, and he was hungry again. How could he be so hungry when he wasn’t doing much more than bicycle-kicking on his back? Billy. His name is Billy.

  “Like William James,” John had cracked, a few months ago.

  “Only psychologists and philosophers will get that joke.”

  “The first one we’ll call William. The second one we’ll call James. Every child needs a sibling.”

  But John had always liked making sly references with names—the same way he’d made a joke at Hopkins of naming little Albert after my own middle name. To think that I’d felt honored, at the time.

  There he was again: that heavy-headed, drooling, and stoic subject of our shared past. Floating up to remind me of that earlier road I’d been on, not so very long ago, and also to make me wonder: how had Albert been so stolid, those first weeks we’d known him?

  Once I had my own first child, I realized: babies cried. They had needs. They didn’t like to wait. They whipped themselves into frenzies. Evolution had favored them with this: determination to get the food, the attention, the nurturing they required. Babies shrieked, and at least in those first weeks, a mother’s heart pounded in response. (And shouldn’t John have known the same things? He’d had two of his own children by then. Had he really spent no time with them as infants, or had he pushed those observations to the back of his mind?)

  This was natural. This was the stimulus and response that nature intended—that a mother should listen and answer. Not silence. Not stolidity on the baby’s part. Why had Albert been so imperturbable, until we’d finally made him more reactive and fearful? As a twenty-year-old I couldn’t have known, but now I did, at least in part: Albert had not been a typical child. And then I pushed that thought away, not to resurface again for several years. What point, in those difficult early-motherhood days, entertaining it?

  As a graduate student at Johns Hopkins, I couldn’t have imagined myself like this, a disheveled mess, with my own crying baby set on a blanket on the nubby couch, rolling toward the back cushion in his little tantrum, red face against the cushion. (Where did one set a baby safely when there wasn’t a nurse standing by with waiting arms or those handy rolling carts we’d had in such abundance?) I couldn’t wait until he was old enough to sit up at least, to play with blocks. At this age, he could only nurse and cry and sleep. And babies weren’t su
pposed to cry—so said John, regardless of Mother Nature’s intentions.

  I made Billy wait. He fussed and cried and went red and nodded off and immediately woke, fussing and crying again. More waves washed over me: not physical pain anymore, only bone-deep fatigue. I carried Billy into his dark bedroom and lowered him into his crib, his small red arms flying up reflexively as I lowered him, breath catching between airless sobs. Shut the door.

  Eleven. Eleven twenty. Eleven thirty-five. In the living room, near the front hall closet, stood the rocking chair that my mother had sent as a gift, which the department-store deliverymen would be picking up tomorrow, to take back for a refund.

  John had laughed when we’d first seen it, Friday afternoon. “What century do they think we’re living in?” Even the most outdated, prewar baby books said rocking chairs weren’t good for babies because they discouraged independence. “Quickest way to raise a baby who can’t put himself to sleep,” John had said. “I’ll telephone the store from the office on Monday.”

  “What we might need,” I said carefully, tentatively, knowing that cost was always an issue, “is our own telephone, in the house. For emergencies.”

  “But it’s darn expensive,” John had said. “Did you read the paper? Price of sirloin and milk both doubled in just a few years. Stanley owes me another raise, and I won’t let him forget it.” And then, for some reason I couldn’t follow, he’d starting talking about a boat show two weekends from now, on Long Island. Two weekends: I couldn’t imagine that far into the future. Babies weren’t the only ones obsessed with toys. Something about having a baby brought out the baby in the man.

  In the dim light of the hallway, the rocker’s varnished wood shone. It may have been old-fashioned, but it was more beautiful and new-looking than the furniture that had come with the cottage: the sagging checked couch, covered with a scratchy red flannel blanket, and the single overstuffed armchair, and the wooden kitchen chairs with their uneven legs, many times badly repainted, patches of pale green showing beneath the dark brown overcoats of paint.