“Just a rough stage, honey. Kids throw tantrums.”
But she knew it was more than that. Because sometimes—oftentimes—Wendy got mad out of the blue, not because of any perceived injustice but just because. They would be sitting together, she and Wendy and Violet, playing kitchen or making Shrinky Dinks or reading A Light in the Attic, and suddenly Wendy would shriek Stop! and kick a tiny leg out toward her sister, who would be sitting in complete innocence—Violet was a fervent pacifist from the time she was conceived—and then Wendy would spiral downward. Marilyn would watch this, placed squarely between the girls and certain of Violet’s lack of antagonism, watch Wendy’s face harden and Violet’s face sink. She watched Violet learn, after two or three instances, that Wendy’s outbursts would ruin things, at least for a while, that there would be screaming and door slamming and her mother’s barely contained irritation or anguish or fury. Marilyn watched her daughter become aware of this, observed her four-year-old’s first doses of life’s disappointing trajectory, and it would start to break her heart but then she would get distracted by her five-year-old, similarly jaded but much angrier about it all.
The migraines started around that time, too, so sometimes when Wendy made her vociferous exit it was all Marilyn could do to crawl onto the couch and close her eyes.
“Mama has a headache, Violet Rose,” she’d say to her younger daughter, and Violet would climb obediently into her lap, resting unimposingly against her and whispering tiny toddler narratives to the Barbies she held in each hand.
Wendy would emerge later, sometimes in minutes and sometimes hours, looking mildly shamed but mostly seeming as though nothing had happened. And she would come over to her mother, lay a soft hand on her knee or curl up against her belly, and Marilyn would have trouble recognizing this tiny model of penance and fall absolutely in love with her daughter again. But the cycle would inevitably repeat itself, and her appeals to David became more zealous.
“I’m afraid of her,” she confessed one night, near tears, beside him on the couch.
“Sweetheart, she’s five years old,” he said, not unkind but a little amused. Doctorhood had rendered her husband slightly more irritating; she’d thought he would be immune to the characteristic arrogance but every so often it surfaced in the form of a knowing vocal lilt.
“You don’t understand what she’s like,” she continued. “She— It’s like she can’t help it. It’s— I feel awful, watching her, because I know it can’t be fun for her to be so—anguished. She’s hurting and she doesn’t seem to know how to express it and it…” She trailed off, her voice wobbling. “It breaks my heart, David. I don’t know how to help her.”
“Some kids are just more temperamental than others,” he said. His indifference infuriated her and she moved away from him.
“You don’t see her when she does it.”
In fact he had seen her: because Wendy’s outbursts were becoming more frequent, usually three or four times a day, it was now inevitable that David would bear witness. Marilyn was relieved at first but then saw that he still didn’t understand. The first time, Wendy had screamed and purposefully shattered a juice glass because Violet was using the crayon that she wanted, and David had appeared in the doorway, lifted Wendy up under his arm, and started for her bedroom.
“Oh, no you don’t, young lady,” he said, using the Bad Cop voice that he was required to use only on rare occasions. She was, on the other hand, obliged to be the enforcer simply because she was around more, and she despised it, observing her daughters flying delightedly into their father’s arms when he got home in the evenings, shunning her because she’d nixed the prospect of cookie baking or a viewing of Zoom. David was gentle but stern, and he had a solid grip on Wendy though she was flailing violently as he took her down the hall. “If I ever see you do something like that again, Wendy, I’ll take away those crayons forever.” She continued wailing and after David closed her in her room she pounded on the door with her fists in anguish.
It infuriated her, squatting before the mess of glass and cutting herself in the process, the suggestion that all Wendy needed was a little tough love. That all this time, all these times, Marilyn had simply failed to effectively discipline their daughter. She was further infuriated when Wendy appeared twenty minutes later, tiptoed from her room and then flung herself at David’s legs in a dramatic act of atonement.
“I didn’t mean to, Daddy,” she said, wailing, and David swept her into his arms and murmured to her meaningfully about how he understood that sometimes when we’re angry we do things we don’t mean, but that doesn’t give us permission to break things and hurt our sisters.
Or our mothers, she thought, finally taking the time to wash and bandage the cut on her palm because it became clear that David wasn’t going to notice it. Just because we’re angry about absolutely nothing—because we’re five years old and don’t want for anything and our every single whim is indulged and what on earth is there to be angry about?—is no reason to break things and make our mothers clean them up.
There had been several similar instances, instances during which she felt a shameful, agonizing hatred toward both her husband and her daughter.
“If I have to wrestle Wendy into bed again tonight I’m going to impale myself on something, David, I swear to God,” she’d lamented yesterday, and her husband, obdurate, rolling his eyes, had replied, “Oh, this again. The Antichrist. Good. Great. Let’s talk about that.”
She knew that she had chosen this life, and yet she would marvel over the fact that less than a decade ago she was making out on Oak Street Beach with Dean McGillis, who once took her skinny-dipping. She would have this same thought each time she was in labor with her daughters and her dopey husband sat by, handsome and ineffectual: I could be fucking swimming with fucking Dean McGillis. She could have been there, but instead she was here, sticking a Care Bears Band-Aid to her palm and actively ruing the fact that her husband and elder daughter were having a sweet, lesson-learning moment on the other side of the room. She went into the yard to smoke—trusting that Violet would remain occupied where she sat outside the hall closet, engaged in a heated conversation with her dolls. When she returned, David was sitting at the kitchen table, bluish circles under his eyes, sleeves rolled up to his elbows.
“I think we’ve contained the virus,” he said. “I’m guessing that by bedtime she’ll be completely cured.”
She smiled at him tightly.
“Oh, come on, kid. I’m just joking.”
She sat down across from him and started picking through a pile of papers, intermingled remnants of the girls’ artwork. “I’m not in the mood to joke.”
He stared at her for a moment, and when she refused to look at him, he rose and started out of the room. “Well, maybe I am,” he muttered, and then he was gone.
For a moment she allowed herself to feel angry—what a child he was sometimes—but then she considered what he’d said. Maybe he was in the mood to joke. He was obliging, sometimes to the point of irritation. He was kind and adaptable. He worked twenty-hour days. They had two kids under six. And he had contained the virus, this time at least. She missed being able to find something arousing in these kinds of exchanges, though arousal was the reason that their beloved virus existed in the first place. She rose from the table.
He wasn’t in their bedroom, as she’d expected, nor was he in the living room. She found him instead on the floor outside of the hall closet, sitting with his legs stretched out in front of him and a Barbie doll in his hand. The other held a tiny pink hairbrush, and he was pulling it through the plastic waves of doll hair with baffling gentleness. Violet was leaning heavily against his side, outfitting another Barbie in a lewd waitress uniform.
“Hi, Mama,” Violet said, noticing her first. “Daddy’s doing a braid.”
David looked up at her equably. “Daddy’s attempting to do a braid,” he sai
d, his fingers large and inexpert against the tiny doll head. Violet lunged forward and started rifling through one of her many plastic baskets, stuffed to the gills with tiny shoes, tiny hamburgers, tiny aprons and credit cards and spatulas, microscopic half pairs of earrings that had long ago lost their mates. Marilyn met her husband’s eyes and smiled.
“I was being awful,” she said.
“Only a little.” He shrugged. “You had a long day.”
She studied his face across the sun-streaked wooden hallway, pinkish twilight rays through the windows rendering his hair a kind of stainless steel.
“I’m going to get dinner started,” she said.
“As you were,” he said, and when she turned back to look at him, he winked at her.
Bless him, really, for being in the mood to joke. Someone should be.
* * *
—
One night David came home and his wife wasn’t around; he was so used to the welcome sound of her bustle, her radio, her running water, that its absence chilled him a bit. Things had been different between them lately, paler, cooler. It seemed so trite that they could fall prey to such banal domestic gripes. Their five-year-old was incorrigible: so what? Couldn’t they laugh it off like they had everything else?
He paused at the landing to listen. No hum of her voice soothing the children, reading a book, singing a song. No hiss of water in the shower. He climbed the stairs. His daughters’ room was empty. He felt a nervousness settle over him and he held his breath as he jogged down the hall to his own bedroom.
There—he exhaled—was Marilyn, in their bed with a daughter on either side. The Tiny Seed was open facedown on her thighs. They were all sleeping soundly, Violet’s head resting on Marilyn’s rib cage, Marilyn’s hand frozen in midworrying of Wendy’s hair. His breath caught at the quiet perfection of his family, honey-blond Wendy and dark, serious Violet, tiny bodies in tiny pajamas, their thumbs in their mouths, their legs—little frog legs—twined together. And Marilyn: the girlish smattering of freckles across her nose, the slight leftward tilt of her head.
He noticed, suddenly—a sharpening of vision like Waldo materializing from a sea of striped Vikings—the curve of his wife’s belly. He stiffened. It strained against the pale blue knit of her sweater, a swell of maybe eight weeks or ten. Perhaps even more: he tried to think of last time, with Violet, how she’d looked. He could only recall her exhaustion.
Now, sound asleep at 7:30. He went in and sat on the edge of the bed beside her, laid a palm flat between her hip bones, gently. She didn’t wake. She didn’t know. And it made him so sad; his wife was so lost to herself that—watching her, sleeping—he was sure she hadn’t noticed. He thought of her that morning, making breakfast for the girls. Had she looked tired? Swollen? Queasy? He could barely remember what they’d talked about—the weather, the impending need for new tires on the car. He’d gone to kiss her and she’d offered him her cheek.
“Have a good day,” he’d said, gathering his things, watching her scramble the eggs. “I love you,” he’d told her shyly, and she’d turned to him and given him a drowsy, tolerant smile.
“I love you back,” she’d said.
On the bed he considered the substance of her beneath his hand. Maybe she’d just put on some weight. But the bulge under his palm felt muscular, distended: the expanding of her uterus. In her sleep, Marilyn whimpered, the reaction to a dream, and he felt the striking impact of shame, suddenly, for doing this to her, for putting her in this position. It made him feel brutish and oppressive. He had impregnated her; he was tying her down, tethering her to a life of laundry and homework and glassy-eyed kid wrangling; he had set her up in a cramped house and filled her womb, again and again and, now, again, with babies, even though she was tired, even though she wasn’t herself anymore. But he couldn’t take all the blame. She enjoyed sex as much as he did. It was the only way they connected lately, really; sometimes when he came home she was already in bed and they wouldn’t talk at all; she would just wrap her legs around him, slip a hand inside his briefs, wordlessly open herself to him, gazing up, even and silent. They made love instead of talking; how could this come as a surprise to either of them?
It would come as a surprise to her. He was positive about that.
He kept his hand on her belly, though, feeling for what he was now sure was another baby, someone to brighten things up, humble Wendy a bit, delight them all. He felt unexpected tears spring to his eyes. Maybe even a boy this time. Another baby.
Marilyn stirred. “Oh,” she said. “It’s you.” She looked at his hand on her abdomen and he rubbed it back and forth over her pelvic bones, like he’d simply been trying to rouse her.
“It’s me,” he said. “Hey, kid.”
* * *
—
Liza was an easy baby, and David honestly didn’t know what they would have done if she hadn’t been because they didn’t have room for a difficult one. They barely had room for any baby at all; they were physically at capacity in their little house and they had wedged Liza’s crib beside their bed; he tripped over its splayed antique legs in the dark when he was getting ready for work. Of course he and Marilyn both were enamored with her in the dazed, delirious, lovesick way of exhausted new parents, but they had more pressing things—more demanding, high-maintenance children—to which they had to devote most of their attention. It was constant stress, constant chaos, a series of indistinguishable days. He did his rounds at the hospital, he kissed his daughters goodnight, he slept, he fought with his wife. It became harder and harder to justify—he was working, of course, smack in the middle of his residency, to get them to a point of solvency, but that would mean nothing if his family fell apart before the logistical stuff started to come together. Their house was too small, Marilyn was spread too thin, and Wendy had more energy than anyone knew what to do with.
But none of this was Liza’s fault, however unexpected she’d been—“It’s not fair,” Marilyn had said, heartbreakingly, when her third pregnancy had been confirmed. He’d heard once that children’s personalities adapted to their surroundings, and Liza—apparently sensing, at three months old, that her household could not sustain more turmoil—radiated calm. So he began a new routine with her, one that gave her individualized attention and gave him—selfishly—a dose of tranquillity.
When he got home at night he would bypass his obligations—the mail, the garbage that needed taking out, the dinner that he needed to eat because Marilyn was constantly lamenting that he was disappearing while she was rapidly expanding—and instead tiptoe into his bedroom, circumvent his sleeping wife, and silently lift Liza from her crib. She usually didn’t wake—always a good sleeper, dutiful and disciplined; “a stickler for naps,” Marilyn said fondly—and he took her to the living room or sometimes to the porch, if it was warm, and just sat with her, cradled her against his chest and hummed to her, intoxicated by the immaculate sweetness of this tiny new daughter. He sang to her, held her against him and hummed.
His lips pressed against her head, the vibrations of his throat reverberating back to him through her still-forming skull, and she fit against his shoulder perfectly, relied on him to keep her upright. The grass wet with dew and the moon receding and his daughter in his arms, a person in his life whom he’d managed not to let down yet. Wendy remained moody and difficult in school and guilty and belligerent at home, and Violet was the tolerant peacemaker. Liza was, in effect, the middle child even when she was technically the youngest. And he would never quite forgive himself or Marilyn for that, for letting her exist as anything other than a welcome member of their family, and so he’d hum to her, rock around the yard with his sleeping baby daughter, “Born on the Bayou” and “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” and “Back in the USSR,” and he had to mollify himself with the possibility that though she’d never remember the humming itself, she might absorb the notion of being loved, that it would somehow take hold in the
plates of her tiny skull, that it would accompany her as she grew, as she progressed beyond the confines of her disordered family.
CHAPTER TEN
Liza wondered how much of seemingly normal adult life was simply approximation, effort, good acting. It was the pink stage of morning, the birds going crazy outside, and she was on her side in bed, staring at Ryan, imagining the baby and trying to conjure some tenderness for the two in concert. Perhaps it was less approximation than recognition. Maybe she was feeling tenderness and she simply couldn’t tell. “Hey,” she whispered.
Ryan barely stirred.
She took his hand, hot from being pressed beneath his pillow, and brought it to her belly. Perhaps all of these moments had to be orchestrated. Perhaps all that adulthood was was repeatedly going through the motions, trying out different arrangements and occasionally landing in cinematic tableaus such as this one, a woman in the not-yet-ungainly stage of pregnancy, aglow, maybe, rousing her partner for no other reason than to remind him of the kinetic existence of their child-in-progress.
“Ryan,” she said. Then, louder: “Ryan.”
He startled, regarded her from beneath heavy eyelids. “You okay?”
She tried to smile at him. A precise orchestration of purposefully casual emotion. Maybe that was all relationships were. “I’m fine.”
“What time is it?” He moved his hand from her stomach to rub his eyes, not even seeming to notice her.
“It’s early,” she said. She had it in her head that maybe she could cajole him out with her. She’d read somewhere that one way to help a depressed partner was by urging them to accompany you on manageable trips, brief outings that could yield a sense of accomplishment. They could tackle an item or two on her ever-growing baby list. Maybe wander through the Garfield Park Conservatory. “How about if we venture into the world today?” she said softly.
The Most Fun We Ever Had Page 16