The Baddest Girl on the Planet

by Heather Frese

  You stand over his bassinet, debating whether moving him to his car seat will wake him up. You wonder if you should wrap him in a blanket or put a coat on him, or maybe his onesie is warm enough? You call your mom, but the girl at the desk of your parents’ inn says your mom is outside tending to an issue with the pool heater, and can you call back later? You hang up, take a deep breath, and scoop up your son. His wobbly head still scares you. You tuck him in your arm and pick up the diaper bag. You make it to the living room before he starts screaming.

  He screams all the way to the store. You park at the Red and White, go to the back door of the car, unlatch him from his seat, pick him up, and balance his wobbly head while you walk back around to the front seat. You sit down and begin the process of extricating your breast. The diaper bag with the blanket is in the back, and you don’t want to get up and balance the baby again to go after it, so you lift your shirt with nothing to cover you. Your elbow bumps the steering wheel and honks the horn as you try to latch him. He cries and writhes. His tiny toes and fingers flex. He won’t nurse.

  Dear Abby,

  My baby won’t stop crying. This car is like an echo chamber, and I think I’m going to lose my mind. Is it rude to take a crying baby into a grocery store if insanity is the only other option?

  Had It in Hatteras

  You heft yourself, your breasts, and your baby out of the car and pace back and forth in the sandy parking lot. You remember that you haven’t put your breast away. A woman walks by and stares. Patricia Ballance, the mother of your high school boyfriend. You look down and try to latch him while standing, but he won’t nurse.

  You pull down your shirt, grab the diaper bag, and walk up the brick steps and into the store. The baby howls. A red-faced banshee. People stare. You try to put him in the cart but realize you need his car seat to do that. The diaper bag slides off your shoulder and smacks the baby on the head. He cries louder. It’s then that you notice the smell of fresh shit. You panic. You can’t even remember why you came here in the first place. You know the Red and White doesn’t have a public restroom. You don’t know what to do.

  “Please stop crying,” you whisper to the baby. For a second you contemplate placing the baby in the meat cooler to change his diaper. You could tuck him in next to the bacon and pot roast. At least he wouldn’t roll away. You try to take a deep breath, but everything smells like shit. This is not calming. Your options are: The floor. The check-out counter conveyor belt. A bench on the front porch. The car.

  You decide on the car and are turning around to run back outside when you spot your Aunt Fay. You’ve never been so happy to see her grizzled gray head in your life. “I need help,” you say. The baby’s shrieking climbs another decibel.

  “You certainly do.” Aunt Fay looks at you, then at the baby. “Is it supposed to smell like that?” Aunt Fay has never had children.

  She puts her arm around your shoulder, plugs her ear with her other hand, and walks you outside. Together, you put the baby on a bench, take off his onesie and diaper, wipe and powder him, ointment his baby weenie, and put his clothes back on. You’re covered in shit. You clean your hands with wet wipes, but there’s poop on your shirt. The wipes just smear the shirt shit around.

  You suddenly feel like you can’t keep your eyes open.

  Then the baby turns his head and pukes.

  That evening you wait by the door for Stephen to come home from work. You hand him the baby before he can put down his keys and you run upstairs. You call Charlotte.

  “I can’t do this,” you tell her.

  Charlotte says she knows motherhood must be a difficult adjustment and to give it time. She tells you about the cute professor who teaches her world history class, how he puts his hand in his pocket when writing on the chalkboard and how all the girls ogle his butt.

  You try to tell Charlotte about the Red and White poop debacle, but instead you hear yourself say, “I don’t think I love my baby.”

  Silence on the other end of the line. “Of course you do, Evie. How could you not?”

  You fiddle with the tassel from Stephen’s graduation mortarboard that hangs from the edge of the desk. Your breasts hurt. You’re so tired. “I guess so.”

  Of course you love your son. How could you not?

  You hang up and mess around on the internet. You fall asleep halfway through a game of solitaire.

  Stephen wakes you up by banging into the office. The neatness of his polo shirt and khaki pants infuriates you. He doesn’t have a speck of shit or vomit or snot on him. “I’ve been working all day,” Stephen says. He holds the baby out to you. “Why don’t we have any milk?”

  A month passes. Four weeks. Thirty sleepless nights. You feed that baby every two hours, every single two hours of every single day, no matter what. Your nipples crack and bleed. The baby sucks the life out of you. You become intimately acquainted with late-night TV. Lifetime, Television for Women, from midnight to two; a dead hour where you have a choice between Miami Vice and Matlock— you usually choose Miami Vice; The Golden Girls from three to five; infomercials after that. You know you’ve lost it when you order a Snuggie, swayed by the inclusion of a free dog Snuggie and $5.95 shipping. You don’t even have a dog but think you could give it to Aunt Fay’s Yorkie, Walter.

  Your mom comes; your mom leaves. The baby eats; the baby cries. The baby poops. A lot. Stephen goes to work; Stephen comes home. You stop making dinner for him. You stop making dinner for yourself. One night, Stephen looks at you like he doesn’t even know who you are. “What the fuck, Evie” is all he says. “What the fuck?” You can’t afford a babysitter. You can’t afford shit. You call Charlotte whenever you can pawn the baby off on someone else. She doesn’t always answer, but when she does, she talks for long stretches, telling you about her classes and her dates and her sorority. Kappa Delta Delta. Their mascot is a panda. If you get her a gift for her birthday, she’d like it to be azure blue and Bordeaux, the sorority’s signature colors, or sapphires, the signature jewel. You stop calling. She rarely calls you. Dear Abby still hasn’t answered your letters.

  Dear Abby,

  Fuck you.

  Irritated on Elizabeth Lane

  The Outer Banks Sentinel piles up on your kitchen table, unread. You’ve even given up on your horoscope. Your mom comes in with three Sentinels in her hand and dumps them on the counter. She picks up the baby, holds him in one arm, and scrubs the stove with the other.

  “He’s eaten,” you tell her. Your voice echoes dully in your head.

  Your mom stops scrubbing. She puts down the sponge and stands beside your chair. “Have you eaten?” she asks. She jiggles the baby up and down.

  You poke up some crumbs with your finger. You honestly don’t remember. You muster the energy to shrug.

  Your mom puts the baby in his cradle and sits at the table beside you. She pats your hand. “It gets easier,” she says.

  Your mom is not the sort to pat your hand and comfort you. You look into your mom’s dark eyes, which are usually snappish but are soft now. “I’m not ready for this,” you say.

  Your mom pats you once more, then sits up straight and takes her hand away. Her eyes turn sharp again. “Do you think I was ready for your brother? For you? For your brother and you and your father working such long hours I don’t think he even crapped at home anymore? But did losing it help? Did an affair help?”

  “Your affair certainly didn’t help me,” you say.

  Your mom tightens her mouth. She crosses her arms and stares at you, her gaze pinpricking your face. “What helped was remembering that no one forced me to marry your father, to get pregnant with one kid and then another. What helped was hard work—teaching you to ride a bike and talking Nate through his first breakup and buying that old inn and scraping paint and spackling walls and polishing floors until my knuckles bled. What helped was going to bed so tired I couldn’t sleep but thankful as hell that this was my choice.”

  You push your hair behind your ears and
cross your arms, a mirror of your mother. “The way it was your choice to leave for four months before you decided you didn’t like living in Buffalo?” you ask.

  “Evelyn, nobody likes living in Buffalo.” Your mom grasps your face in her hands. She shakes your cheeks, like she’s trying to wake you up. “This was your choice.”

  You turn your head away. You don’t want to admit that she’s right, that it was your choice. Ten months ago, you and Stephen had stood on a cold, windswept beach and had The Conversation about What to Do. You’d only been dating for three months, but you’d known each other your whole lives.

  “Let’s not do this,” you’d said. “I can’t do this.”

  Stephen took your hand. “It’s your choice,” he said.

  You plodded through the sand, the wind in your hair like a wild thing. Waves crashed, spitting up gray-white spume that caught on the shore and blew like the tumbleweed you’d seen on TV. You and Stephen walked without speaking, all the way back to the boardwalk with no words, just the promise between you that together, you wouldn’t do this.

  That’s when you saw them, tiny footprints in the sand. You stopped, frozen. Stephen stopped, too, and looked down. You closed your eyes and listened to the ocean. You imagined all the swells crashing on all the beaches of all the world; imagined slipping beneath the undertow, down to where the sunlight doesn’t reach. You imagined the thick atmosphere rolling over your body and sucking you down. You imagined the baby inside you, your blood shushing around it like waves, the waters of your body shaking up and settling like snow in a glass globe.

  “Let’s get married,” you said.

  “Okay,” said Stephen.

  And you did.

  It was your choice.

  In the kitchen of your little white house on Elizabeth Lane, your mother takes her hands off your face. She goes back to scrubbing the stove. Your cheeks feel warm, like her hands are still there. Ghost imprints of your mother’s flesh.

  After your mother leaves, you pick up a Sentinel from the pile. Your horoscope from last Monday says: You will feel more alive over the coming twelve months, as if you have woken up after a long sleep, refreshed and renewed and ready to take on the world. Don’t waste that feeling. Use it to make real your dream.

  You toss the paper aside. Horoscopes are crap. You haven’t slept in a month. Make real your dream. The Sentinel falls open to Dear Abby’s comforting black-and-white smile.

  Dear Abby, the letter reads. It’s not one of yours, but you read anyway.

  My coworker microwaves fish and fish byproducts, which, as you can imagine, makes the office smell dreadful. She also uses all of the coffee creamers. How do I deal with this person without making the work environment even more uncomfortable?

  Fishy Situation in Newark, NJ

  You think if you were Dear Abby, you’d tell Fishy Situation to leave some raw shrimp in her coworker’s bottom left drawer to see how she liked dealing with that shit, but Dear Abby is apparently more mature than you. She writes:

  Dear Fishy,

  You can choose your friends, you can choose your enemies, but you can’t choose your coworkers. Sometimes the workplace calls for being graceful in ungraceful situations. In this case, buy some air freshener (consider a plug-in so the whole office can enjoy) and creamer and call it a day. If that doesn’t work, speak to the HR department about the situation. But unless there are rules against fish in the microwave, there may be little they can do. Try to make the best out of your fishy situation.

  You put down the column and smudge the newspaper ink off your fingers. The October sunlight filters through your kitchen window, streaking the walls golden. Your stove is clean and your kitchen smells like coffee, the only sound the low thrum of the refrigerator.

  You try to imagine what Dear Abby would’ve said if she’d answered your letters.

  Dear Evie,

  Buck up and stop bitching. You’re not the only person in the world to have a kid at nineteen.

  Or maybe,

  Dear Evie,

  Things could be worse; at least your kitchen doesn’t smell like fish byproducts.

  Or possibly,

  Listen kid, if you really want out, do it now. It’s shit or get off the pot time.

  You check on the baby. For once, he’s asleep. You study his face. You check your hand for newspaper ink, then touch his cheek with your pinky finger. The baby twitches his head like he’s trying to get rid of a fly. He opens his mouth then closes it. You look out the window; the sky is a pale, pearly blue. When the baby wakes up, you feed and burp and change him and decide to take him to the beach.

  It takes an hour to get ready, you forget to pack baby wipes, and the baby screams all the way down the bumpy access ramp, but you finally park and get out and set up an umbrella and towel. You wrestle the baby and the car seat out and lay them in the shade. Then you sit down. The baby’s still crying, shallow rasps of annoyance, thrashing his head side to side. “Hush,” you say to him. “Listen to the waves.” He clenches and unclenches his fists, grabbing baby handfuls of air. You jiggle his car seat back and forth until he quiets down. The breeze is soft and salty on your face, warm with a slight, autumn-cool edge. “Look,” you whisper to him. “Those are sea gulls. Don’t feed them or they’ll never leave you alone.” The baby turns his head toward you and yawns. “I’m tired, too, you little turd.”

  You rock the car seat back and forth, creating a shallow ditch in the sand, until he falls asleep. You lie down, and, keeping your hand on the car seat, fall asleep, too. You wake up to the baby’s angry howl and jump to your feet without thinking, terrified the tide has come in. But the beach still stretches out in tan undulation, glassy waves lapping in the distance. The baby shrieks again and flails, and you look down to see the green iridescence of a biting fly on his arm. You swat it away. “Shit,” you say to the baby. You unstrap him from the car seat and pick him up. His head wobbles less than it did a month ago. “I’m sorry. Those flies really hurt.” You rub the spot on his arm. He cries and cries.

  You pat his back and pace back and forth, whispering, “Shush, shush, shush.” You match your whispers to the rhythm of the waves, shushing as the water splashes on the shore. You walk and shush until the baby’s cries begin to calm. You walk some more. The baby whimpers, sighs, then jerks his body away from yours, his arms pressed against your chest. He crinkles his mouth, but he doesn’t cry. He stares. He looks at you with his big eyes, which are not blue anymore, but brown, like your mother’s, like yours. He stares. A rush of breeze courses over you both, and you hold his head and look back at him.

  You stand there on the beach in the breeze, you and your baby, looking at each other for a long time. The sun shines and the waves shush and you and your baby gaze. He opens his mouth in a round “o” and raises his downy eyebrows; he turns his head and blinks and gurgles something that sounds like gerblah. You carry him to the towel, sit down, and rest him on your lap. The two of you settle into the sand, facing each other. Still looking.

  Eight

  Women My Brother Has Loved

  — 2017 —

  The first one’s easy—Nancy Drew. When he was thirteen and I was eight, Nate would pay me a quarter to check Nancy Drew books out of the library and bring them to him. It was my first business enterprise. I’d skulk around the aisles, pretending to be a spy in dark glasses and a trench coat. Sometimes I’d wear my yellow rain jacket and my sunglasses with the lenses shaped like daisies. In the beginning, I’d properly sign Nancy out, but then that got boring. I got bold. I’d grab Nancy, The Hidden Staircase, say, off the shelf, my fingers slick against her hard yellow cover. I’d tuck her in my waistband, dash out of the library, and ride my bike home as if I were being chased. Then, breathless and sweating, I’d knock three times on Nate’s door—two quick taps and one long—to make the drop.

  Nate would poke out his head.

  “The eagle has landed,” I’d say, sticking Nancy through the crack in the door.

&
nbsp; Nate never had to rummage for quarters; they always smacked directly into my palm at the transfer of a book. Then his head would disappear, the door closing with a click.

  It never occurred to me to save my quarters, so I’d use them to buy jawbreakers and gossip with the checkout girl at the Rod &Gun. “I don’t know what he sees in her,” I’d say, shaking my head the way I’d seen my mom shake hers when talking with her friends.

  I’d only read one Nancy book, The Runaway Bride. In it, Nancy went to Japan to solve a mystery. She was always changing her clothes, and at one point she dressed up like a geisha. I didn’t know what “titian-haired” meant—I assumed it had something to do with breasts—and I only had a dim knowledge of geishas. All in all, Nancy annoyed the shit out of me. She was just so charming, so intelligent, so wealthy, and, above all, so very, very good.

  After a while, I started having nightmares about the Hatteras Village librarians, especially Edna Owens with her stiff, gray curls and red-lined lips. I dreamed she chased me through the streets of Tokyo, running in quick, jerky steps on geisha shoes. But the nightmares were worth it for the thrill I got when absconding with a Nancy book. Never mind Nate. I was in love.

  One day, I put on my raincoat and daisy sunglasses and knocked on Nate’s door. Two short taps and a long one. Nate opened the door, his eyes narrowed. He hadn’t yet finished The Password to Larkspur Lane, so he wasn’t due for a new exchange.

  “I deserve a raise,” I said.

  Nate stuck his head out, looked down both sides of the hallway, and then motioned me into his room. He sat at his desk chair, gangly arms slung across the faux oak of his desk. “State your case,” Nate said.