Everything Here is Under Control

by Emily Adrian

  Her fear is real. Something about her inability to express it—or her inability to even keep trying—freaks me out.

  Leaving New York without Gabe was the closest I could come to quitting. And I wanted, in that moment, to quit. As abruptly and unceremoniously as I quit my job at Arby’s, informing my manager, “I’d rather not,” and leaving through the emergency exit. Most things, when it comes down to it, can be quit. Work, school, friendship, marriage. Even fatherhood allows for resignation; a judge will determine the fee. But there is no way to quit motherhood—not without going to prison or getting kidnapped—and so I went through the motions. I screamed at Gabe; I packed a bag; I gassed up the car.

  I left, even as he begged me not to.

  I’m mad at Gabe for all the usual reasons. All the myopic assumptions men make every day: that he works harder than me, that he is fundamentally smarter than me, that helping to take care of his own child—far more than his father ever did for his mother—is enough. That the pitch of his voice signals sanity, his dry eyes the proof he’s not hysterical. It all sounds so trite—until the person who swore never to desert you is standing in his boxer briefs telling you to calm down.

  But I’m also mad at Gabe for a reason I can barely admit, even to myself. When he took me from Ohio, he took me from Carrie. She wasn’t with me when I gave birth, and she wasn’t with me at 3:00 a.m. The blame is so misplaced as to be unforgivable. I know that. I’ll never lay it on him. Instead, I’ll hope he can forgive the rest: the impromptu road trip, the “Take the fucking baby,” the “I didn’t have a baby because I thought it would make me happy.”

  The way my face tightens with dread every time Jack starts to cry.

  “Mom,” I say, “please don’t worry.”

  Nina and Maxine have loaded themselves into the Subaru. I can see Carrie’s daughter through the windshield, her seatbelt already buckled. She’s checking her reflection in the rearview mirror.

  “How can I not worry? You need stability. Now more than ever.”

  When I was eighteen and I told her I was choosing a boy over college, Jaclyn said, “If your plan is to rely on him, you better be damn sure it’s going to work.” What she wants to tell me now is that if I get dumped, I’m on my own. Jaclyn is not my safety net, a term my friends will sometimes use in oblique reference to their own parents. There is no guest room, no savings account, no disposable cash for disposable diapers.

  Gabe’s name is on Jack’s birth certificate. Legally, the diapers are his problem too.

  Inside the car, the girls appear to be wrestling. It takes me a second to realize Maxine is endeavoring to honk the horn while Nina flails to prevent her.

  “Gabe and I are fine. We’re the picture of stability. I got pregnant on purpose, you know.”

  Mom frowns. She thinks I’m comparing my pregnancy to both of hers.

  “If you’re so stable,” my mother says, “then prove it to him.”

  Jack starts to cry, and I feel myself wince.

  * * *

  When I was twenty-five, I both wanted a baby and wanted never to have a baby.

  When quizzed by friends or Gabe’s nosy sisters-in-law, my official answer was yes. I wanted to belong to a family comprising the man I loved and two or three children who would grow up and ensure that neither Gabe nor I died alone. Motherhood was expected of me, and motherhood was what I had always, vaguely, imagined for myself.

  Then there was the night of the bachelor party on Staten Island, where Gabe imbibed buck-a-shuck oysters that slid innocuously down his throat but left him weak, wan, and fearful. A fellow partygoer buckled him into a cab for the bank-breaking ride to Queens and wished him luck. Gabe made it home, where he took to the bathroom floor and proceeded to vomit seventeen times before daybreak. Neither an athlete nor a risk-taker, Gabe’s life had and has since been nearly painless, but that night, I worried. He perspired into a bath towel folded beneath his head, pulled his bony knees to his bare chest, and shut his eyes against the world.

  My thoughts turned toward what Gabe calls “negative fantasy,” which is when you imagine, in painstaking detail, the last thing you would ever want to happen.

  If he died, would I forget him? Would I remember him feature by feature, as I do my father, or require a photograph to assemble his face in my mind? Would his personality be reduced to a collection of stale anecdotes repeated by me and his loud brothers, his voice a cliché I described in my diary at the age of nineteen?

  Even if Gabe survived a lifetime of bachelor parties, even if he outlived me, did I not want to see his smile alight on our child’s face? Was I going to deprive myself of that pleasure? These questions began to keep me up at night. And competing with our imaginary offspring was my desire to preserve our life exactly as it was. To sustain our happiness, our comfort in each other—neither of which had come easily or guiltlessly.

  We wanted it both ways. Maybe everyone wants it both ways, and the only way to have it both ways is to retire one version of your life and prepare for the other. We were twenty-eight. We made up our minds. Suddenly, I had never wanted anything more than a baby. It seems improbable, almost magical, how badly I wanted to become pregnant even before I knew it was Jack I would be pregnant with.

  Having him is the most deliberate thing I’ve ever done.

  In our old life, Gabe and I never even left the bathroom door open when we peed. Now I was giving him daily updates on the consistency of my cervical mucus. It was supposed to be clear and as thick as egg whites. It was supposed to stretch between two fingers, like a long string of melted cheese. Making breakfast before work, he cracked an egg into a bowl and lifted his eyebrows lasciviously. It was a joke, the idea that tracking my cycle and scheduling intercourse could be sexy. But it also wasn’t a joke.

  It was also sexy.

  We would lie in bed at odd hours—5:00 a.m., before we had to get ready for work, or midafternoon on a Sunday—and talk about the human life we may or may not have initiated. We would calculate his or her due date, first birthday, high school graduation. Gabe claimed he wouldn’t want to find out the gender in advance of the birth. “There are so few surprises left in life,” he argued, but I refused to entertain the idea, which struck me as archaic, reminiscent of a time when the surprise was only a good one if the baby had a penis.

  My preference was to know the gender at the earliest possible moment and to pick out names even sooner. Given the option, I would have skipped pregnancy altogether and become a mother overnight. Having a baby was, I felt certain, the last step to becoming a full-fledged adult and to leaving my own childhood behind.

  The first time Gabe’s sperm fertilized my egg, it didn’t take. A week after I watched two pink lines appear in the plastic window of a Dollar Tree pregnancy test—a week after I wordlessly dropped the test in Gabe’s lap and braced myself for his joy—I started to bleed. The drops became gushes, which became sinister clots, falling out of me in the shower and staining the water swirling around my feet.

  The pain was not categorically worse than the most painful cramps I’d ever had, but it was different. Sharper. More breathtaking. When it peaked, I was fresh out of the shower, still wearing a towel. Gabe was on his way out the door. It was Saturday and we had no food in the apartment. He heard me gasp, and the sound made him hesitate.

  “Is it okay for me to go?” he asked.

  I almost said no. I almost made him stay home, for no other reason than to bear witness to the end of my brief pregnancy. But I felt brave. Both the pain and the blood seemed appropriate; anything milder wouldn’t have done the situation justice. Looking back, I regret my so-called bravery. I should have made him stay—Gabe ought to have worried about me as I had worried about him, decimated by bargain seafood—if only to delay our inevitable separation. Motherhood would bring a kind of agony through which Gabe would not be able to reach me, pain with which I would be entirely alone�
��but it didn’t have to start yet! If I could go back, I would tell Gabe to forget the groceries, order takeout. I would demand that we be together, before the word together lost its meaning.

  Curled crescent on the bed, I bled and cried. Gabe came home. We filed our taxes. I drank a beer and ate half a package of sour gummy worms purchased from the same Dollar Tree that had supplied the off-brand pregnancy test that had convinced us we would soon be someone’s parents.

  And then it happened again.

  It happened three times in six months.

  The sequence of events was always the same. Around day twenty-four of my cycle, I would pee on a stick and the longed-for second line would appear, barely. Faintly. A near mirage. The next day, a repeat test might show a line of equal or even slightly more compelling visibility, but after another day and another test, the line would have vanished. Soon, blood.

  The technical term for this process was chemical pregnancy, not miscarriage. Sperm met egg, but uterus rejected the almost-embryo.

  What Gabe and I never said aloud but both understood: A chemical pregnancy was the fault of my body, not his.

  * * *

  I can’t do it.

  I can’t whisper-sing Fleetwood Mac into his ear. I can’t press him against my chest and trot in brisk circles around Carrie’s coffee table. I can’t bounce him, or stroke him, or pretend to eat his toes. I can’t stay awake another minute.

  Would it be acceptable to storm into Carrie’s bedroom, thrust this screaming infant into her arms, and go collapse on the cool concrete floor of the basement, beside the washing machine?

  Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, being kidnapped. Not at first. I’m interested in the part where you get to ride around in the trunk of some lunatic’s Chevy Malibu. That part would last at least thirty, maybe even forty-five, minutes.

  With my last shred of patience, I lower the baby to the couch. His screams intensify. I step into the hallway so I don’t have to watch his eyes roam the room. I ball my fists and press my forehead against the wall. The baby has undone me, and this is a problem. I am the problem and Gabe is the solution. It was his body who helped make this child’s body—the tireless vocal cords and scrunched, red face. Gabe was complicit in this. He’s liable.

  Gabe has been taking care of me since we were eighteen. Our first year in New York, I lived in his dorm room. We slept on the university’s narrow plastic mattress, tangled in each other’s limbs. I wasn’t a student, but no one ever said anything. I looked the part. Gabe never let me pay for food, or concert tickets, or the bottles of wine we bought from a convenience store called Family Mart, where you could still rent movies from a wire rack near the Twinkies and where they never asked to see anyone’s ID. When we both had colds, it was Gabe who braved the walk to Duane Reade, sparing my sinuses the wind’s assault. His parents called on Sundays; he would pull on his jacket and go pace circles in Washington Square Park so I wouldn’t have to hear Mrs. Feldman’s strident disbelief at what we’d done.

  He was nurturing. Selfless, for a teenager. It’s no wonder I wanted to have his baby.

  I miss him.

  What have I done?

  The crying stops, and I turn a hopeful ear toward the living room. Maybe the baby has cried himself to sleep. Maybe he’ll sleep through the night forevermore. Maybe I’ve unwittingly Ferberized him.

  Jack unleashes a ceaseless wail. Like the milk steamer on an espresso machine or a cat about to attack. I dart into the room. The couch is unoccupied, and Jack is on the floor.

  What have I done?

  I gather him in my arms, sobbing, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” and demanding to know if he’s okay. My voice is raw, ravaged, resentful. This baby has never rolled over in his life. Harnessing the force of his own rage, he must have flung himself from the couch just to stick it to me.

  His cries yield to sad little gasps. If I’ve succeeded at anything it’s at lowering his standards; Jack is relieved to be back in my arms, at a safe distance from the rug. My own sobs fill the silence. I hate myself. I have always hated myself, and now, because I let my son fall from a height of nineteen inches, I always will.

  Some flicker of movement or intake of breath causes me to look over my shoulder. Carrie is hovering in the doorway, watching.

  “What the fuck?” I ask her. “How long have you been up?”

  “The whole time? I’m a light sleeper, and he’s . . . loud.”

  “Why didn’t you help me?” My anger is too much. It’s intimate.

  “What could I have done?”

  “Taken the baby? He always stops crying when you hold him.”

  Carrie rubs at her eyes. “Maybe I didn’t feel like taking your baby, Amanda. Maybe I just had to pee.”

  “That’s fine. So you sneak into the bathroom and back into bed. You don’t stand there silently gawking at us!”

  “I’m sorry. I was . . . I was trying to remember how that feels.”

  “To almost kill your baby?”

  “No. Just . . . to be alone, in that moment.”

  “How did you do this?” I snap. “How did you take care of a baby by yourself? You were a teenager, for fuck’s sake.”

  I am bouncing up and down. Jack is clinging to my shoulder, enjoying the ride, his tumble and his anguish long forgotten. With my question I have given Carrie all the power, all the authority. And she knows it.

  “I told myself I was no better than my worst moments,” she says.

  “And that worked?” I ask.

  “Eventually.”

  One of these nights, Carrie is going to stop pretending to forgive me. “I’m sorry I woke you up.”

  “You don’t need to worry about waking me up.”

  My laughter is unhinged. “Okay, great. I’ll stop worrying about it. He’ll scream and scream, and I’ll do nothing.”

  “That would be fine.”

  “Yeah, sure. Of course. Everything will be fine.” The edges of my voice are ragged with hysteria.

  Carrie backs away from me. The bathroom door clicks shut. Lately Gabe has been disengaging from our fights with the same abruptness. What’s it going to take for someone to notice I am not okay?

  Jack tightens his grip on my shirt sleeve.

  “You could sleep,” I tell him. “You could close your eyes and go to sleep.”

  But his eyes, fixed on mine, have never been wider.

  * * *

  I am worried the baby is developing a flat spot on the back of his head.

  I am worried the baby will scratch his corneas with his tiny fingernails, which I am too scared to trim.

  I am worried the baby will stop breathing in his sleep.

  I am worried I will spill hot coffee on the baby.

  I am worried the baby will remember me saying to him at four in the morning, “You belong in a mental institution.”

  I am worried the baby will soon realize I cannot sing at all.

  I am worried the baby will go tumbling out of his stroller and onto the cracked, uneven sidewalk in front of Carrie’s house.

  I am worried Gabe will leave.

  I am worried I will never want to have sex again.

  I am worried the baby has already damaged his own hearing, screaming his throat raw.

  I am worried the nauseating knot of scar tissue at the base of my vagina will never go away.

  I am worried I will pull the blankets over the baby’s head.

  I am worried I will crash the car and kill us both.

  I am worried the baby does not love me.

  I am worried the baby will never love anyone but me.

  CHAPTER SIX

  On Saturday morning, Carrie and Nina get into a fight. From the guest room, where I’m trapped in a diapering-nursing-diapering loop, I hear Nina begging for permission to spend the day at Maxine’s house. C
arrie denies the request on the grounds that this would be the sixth consecutive Saturday Nina has spent at Maxine’s house and pretty soon they’re going to start charging her rent. Nina insists this Saturday, for unaccountable reasons, is crucial, that Carrie is being a control freak, that if she’s allowed to go this one time, she’ll stay home for the next fourteen Saturdays or until she dies of boredom—whichever comes first.

  With a maniacal shriek, Carrie aborts the argument. “No!” she says. “No, no, and please don’t ask me again.”

  A second later, Carrie throws open the door to the guest room.

  “Hey,” I protest, hunched over a bare-bottomed Jack, “I could be naked in here.”

  “I took my chances. Are you getting baby poop on my linens?”

  “I mean, probably.”

  She nods. “Want to go grocery shopping?”

  The last thing I’m going to tell Carrie in this moment is no.

  At Walmart we take turns pushing the cart and carrying Jack. Dayshift employees, more chipper than their nocturnal counterparts, stop and ask us how old he is, how he’s sleeping at night, how much he weighed at birth. Other moms—their children performing cartwheels in the cereal aisle or begging to visit the toy section—regard us with suspicion.

  Every time I reach for a modestly sized bottle of laundry detergent or a single roll of paper towels, Carrie redirects me to the jumbo version. (Jumbo is a term I’d forgotten about; I don’t think the concept exists in New York.) We get more food than it has ever occurred to me to buy at once. The total is $168, and Carrie doesn’t stop me from retrieving my debit card to pay for half.

  Loading up the trunk of the car, I’m thrilled by how easily we’ve obtained enough groceries to last a fortnight. No one has to schlep an overstuffed backpack through the snow or stand with a half dozen tote bags clenched between her feet on a crowded subway train. We don’t have to choose between buying milk and orange juice; we can have both, plus a six-pack of sparkling water infused with natural pomegranate flavor. At Carrie’s encouragement I have purchased ninety-four disposable diapers. If I don’t use them all before the end of my trip, she’ll give them to her neighbors, who have twin girls.