“A’ight. It will be a’ight. What’s your name, dahlin’?” She looks at the file. “Gigi?” She puts the accent on the second “gi.”
“Yeah, and this is Rocky. My other boy is Johnny.”
“Oh, just like an American TV show.”
“About a bunch of mobsters?”
“Exactly. Didn’t want to insult you just in case.” She winks. “And you don’t have to call me “ma’am.” We save ’dat one for Her Majesty. Call me Roxane. Now, would you like a cup of tea?”
Inevitable tea. “Thank you, Roxane. Just black, please.”
“Black? Is that how the Sopranos drink it?” She winks at me again.
“Yep, just before they pop somebody.” I smile. It’s nice to say something and not have it lost in translation.
“Now look at your boy. Another twenty mls already. See? He just needed his mummy.”
“Can I stay here next to you?”
“Of course, dahlin’. But there’s nothing to be scared of.” She puts a hand on my arm. Looks me in the eye.
“I’m scared of everything.”
“Well, we just had a lady come in down ’dere, she got triplets. Let me tell you, then you would be propa’ scared.” She does it too, that British thing: make you laugh when you really want to cry.
She goes to get the tea and Rocky drinks his milk. I rub his downy hair, really gentle, like I used to with Johnny. Like I used to when Frankie was a baby. He opens his little eyes. “Hi. How you doin’?” I say. I brush my hand across his soft baby skin, but it doesn’t feel like it did with the others. It doesn’t feel like anything.
London, February 2016; Baby, 2 months old
What time is it? 2 a.m.? 3? It doesn’t matter because I’ve been awake for fucking forty-three hours. I’ve transcended time.
I do the nights because Harry has to work so he’s got to sleep, even if he’s better at the baby stuff than me. He’s eight weeks old now. I know Rocky prefers Harry. With me he screams, but when it’s Harry he stops crying right away. Harry says that’s ridiculous, it’s just that after being with me all day he needs the change of hands. But I don’t think it’s just anyone’s hands that’ll do; he needs the big, strong, capable, loving hands of his father. He takes comfort in the scent of Harry’s skin; it’s soap and confidence. He knows it’s me because of the smell of my milk but given that he throws up everything I pump I guess he’s not that eager when I come around.
The pumping makes me feel less guilty. If I can’t breastfeed then at least I can say to the GP and the community midwife and the health visitor and the whole parade of people who ask me exceedingly personal questions every day that I’m pumping. When he was in the hospital I used their industrial pump, which wasn’t so bad, and they kept saying that I had to keep going, it’s the antibodies, he needs the antibodies. So ever since we got home, I just keep thinking, Well, I did nothing else right; at least I can do this. Only thing is I hate giving it to him. This should be the time of warm honey but all I have to give is bile. And he knows it. He prefers the chemical sweetness of formula.
I’m up because Johnny’s been sick for two days and Rocky has reflux so if one’s not screaming and shitting and puking then the other one is. And every morning I open the shutters downstairs and there’s a new pile of fox shit on the windowsill saying, “Oh, good morning, Mrs. Harrison, have a shitty day!” Bastards. Nobody told me about the foxes until we moved here, and when I was like, “Um, why are there rabid dogs running the streets and should we call the police maybe?” everybody just said, “Oh, those are the urban foxes.” As if that explained it. As if they’re just a local breakdancing crew practicing on the corner with a boom box.
There’s pigeons the size of turkeys flying around here too. Wood pigeons, Harry said. One of them shit right on Johnny’s face the other day on the way to school. I’m not kidding. I couldn’t help myself, I was so tired from not sleeping, so tired of shit everywhere, that I just yelled, “You motherfucker!” I felt bad, I thought I embarrassed Johnny. I’ve learned to suppress most of my New York reactions to things but then Johnny said, “Dammit, Jeej, can I get some help here?” with the bird shit stuck to his face. I almost cried because that was the New York still left in him. It has a British accent now, but it’s still there.
Anyway, I’m flipping through the channels and feeding Rocky and there’s these crazy Italian women with big hair walking in slow motion along the water right by the ferry terminal. The orange boats in the background, the skyline, the Verrazzano Bridge—it’s all there. They’re wearing fur coats and tight dresses with killer heels and I think I’ve really lost it now. I mean, that’s definitely Staten Island on my TV in London in the middle of the night.
I text Stacy:
I can’t believe they’re here?
Stacy:
Who? What are you talking about?
Me:
Mob Wives!!!
Stacy:
They’re showing that shit over there?
Me:
Me and Rocky are watching it right now
Stacy:
What season is it?
Me:
I don’t know, 2 or 3? Early ones. It’s amazing
Stacy:
Jesus you guys are so far behind. It’s the last season over here now. I thought Europe was advanced and shit. What time is it there? Go to sleep
Me:
I don’t know. Time has no meaning. I got to go, you’re interrupting my show
I watch the women behind the men of the mob talk about their incarcerated husbands and fathers, meet for coffee, get their nails done and walk around the streets of New York City’s underdog, the most underestimated borough, Staten Island. I pause the TV in the credits to see if I can spot my parents’ house or my high school. I watch the orange ferry pull away from the dock.
Pieces of home. The blast of the ferry leaving the dock every half-hour, Little League games, hot dogs and pushing through the crowd on Bay Street to watch the Fourth of July fireworks over the City. The Thanksgiving Day Parade on TV. Pizza by the slice. Christenings and bar mitzvahs and sweet sixteens and getting caught buying liquor from the bodega with fake IDs. Hanging out in a used car that somebody’s dad bought off one of their friends and listening to the radio turned up making too much noise in a parking lot in South Beach. Late-night coffee and cheese fries in the diner on Victory Boulevard. New York City heat in the summertime when you can see the air bounce off the sidewalk in waves. Handsome boys from shitty homes who carry their cigarette packs rolled up in their T-shirt sleeves. Sharon, Danielle and Stacy and people I love with hearts of gold who live in houses of sand fighting every day to keep it all from falling down around them. The goodness that comes with toughness. The grit it takes to make a pearl.
My boys won’t know about the grind of fighting for a dollar that’s only half your worth. They’re going to have a different life. The lucky, privileged children of an average middle-class family, the product of a stable two-parent home. Someday they’ll realize that they’re not like me at all, the person they should be closest to. Or maybe they won’t notice our lack of shared references and histories and people and they’ll run off and be happy while I mourn the loss of our connection alone. Sad that we’re so different, but also relieved. Lonely but grateful that their lives never resembled my own. And who I was before them, the place that made me, it won’t matter.
But what do I know? Johnny’s pissing the bed every night because I’m stressing him out. Rocky and I have a relationship of mutual tolerance. I feed him. I hold him when he cries and eventually he stops. There’s not much more between us than that. It’s not his fault. There’s no one else to do this. I feel like he knows that so neither of us has a choice but to put up with the other one. I don’t want to hurt him. I’m tryin
g to love him.
Rocky finally falls asleep and I put him down on the sofa bed in slow motion, trying not to wake him. I put a cushion on one side of him so he doesn’t roll off, not that he can, but that’s what you’re supposed to do. I lie down carefully and—ah—a sudden shot of pain across my middle. The ends of my wound pulling against each other, like one of those straw finger traps you get as a kid in Chinatown. I close my eyes though it will be only for half-sleep, my body on constant alert for Rocky’s breathing, Johnny’s cries, even though I don’t answer them with love, only automatic instinct. Love will come back some other day.
I close my eyes. I feel the hospital bed under me with my arms wrapped in wires, the needle lodged in the top of my hand. I feel the rocking back and forth. But tonight the bed’s floating in New York Harbor and seagulls fly past while I look at the Manhattan skyline, the way it used to be.
8
tears, tea, rubber
A Wednesday in August 2016, 4:45 p.m. London, Grand Euro Star Lodge Hotel, Room 506
I hit reply to write back to Harry but I’ve spent fifteen minutes staring at the cursor waiting for my heart to slow down. This is one of the things that happens to me. My heart races at random moments when I don’t think I’m panicking but my body decides that I am. Also the trouble swallowing. Not when I’m eating, but when I’m doing something ordinary, like waiting for the light to change so I can cross the street and suddenly I can’t remember how to swallow. I try again and again and I can’t and then suddenly I remember how and I’m flooded with relief. I wonder sometimes if my body does that just to get me the relief part. Also the claustrophobia. I don’t want to talk about that, though, because just the thought of it makes me breathless.
He’s waiting for me to answer. I expected him to understand me, to intuit this, to just know me and realize what was happening. But that was expecting too much, that he would do for me what I would have done for him. Um, excuse me, Gigi, but you haven’t asked him about work since the baby was born. You haven’t asked him how he’s doing for months. You haven’t…
OK, don’t do that. Don’t start with the list of all the reasons that I’m a shitty wife. No, I haven’t done any of those things. No. Because it’s my turn, my turn to be the center and if he’s not going to get it and he’s not going to try then I’m going to…
Leave? How’s that working out?
OK, OK. Fuck.
Cursor’s still blinking. I want to write to Harry that it’s hard for me to think, that the steady stream of alcohol, hormones and sleep deprivation make it hard for me to find the words to respond when people talk to me. I trip over phrases, forget the names of things. Thoughts come that I can feel but not articulate. My mind is always blank. No, not blank. That’s not right. The opposite of blank.
My mind is flooded, overflowing with lists and needs and wants and musts. Dental appointments, school assemblies, vaccinations, birthday parties for children in the class that I don’t know but that I must buy presents for and Johnny must attend. Shopping lists, dinners, electric meter readings, homework to finish, holes in school uniforms and outgrown shoes to replace. Parking permits, TV license renewal. Decisions, tiny microdecisions every minute of the day that must be made about food, sleep, clothes, morality, what laundry detergent to buy since the last one made Rocky break out in hives. The temperature of bath water, the moment to cross the street, the grams of sugar in snacks, the minutes of screen time, whether a knock on the head is bad enough to go to the emergency room again, whether he should take a vitamin, whether I call the doctor because I don’t know what croup sounds like and he could die if I do the wrong thing—every decision requiring my thought and approval. Thousands of bucks stopping with me.
And worries. And questions. Has he moved up a reading level and if he hasn’t then why not? How do I know if Rocky’s allergic to eggs? Is Johnny’s bike helmet the wrong size? How do I make them like books and vegetables? Does he need glasses? What’s a cricket box and where do I get one? Will the baby die in his sleep if I turn the monitor off just this once so I don’t have to listen to the crackle and hum of it all night? Did I explain homelessness right when we walked by the man under the railway bridge? Did I explain that girls and boys are equal but it’s not OK to tackle girls on the playground no matter what the mothers of girls say about how they’re “not girlie”? How do I explain to the mothers of girls that it’s actually more important that he grows up knowing it’s never OK to hit women? Ever. That raising a man is terrifying? Almost as scary as raising a woman.
People see me with my kids and I know that every choice I’ve made is posted on a living billboard. When Rocky cries or Johnny shouts in public or crawls on the floor under the table at the pizza place or gets into a fight at the playground, everyone looks and decides what percentage of blame to assign to me. And when they see me—overweight, tired, unshowered, in baggy clothes, quick-tempered, disorganized, bottle-feeding—that’s not a difficult calculation.
At school, the teachers, young women who aren’t mothers yet, who know everything about kids except for how to raise them, make helpful suggestions that carefully withhold judgment and barely conceal it. They tell me Johnny needs a math tutor, and to control his impulses better, and to use an inside voice, and a reading assessment because he’s behind the other kids. And then they say to me—when I stand in front of them, out of breath, rocking the baby, trying to keep him quiet while they’re talking, sweat beading up on my upper lip—“Will you be signing up to the rota to read to the class? It seems that you’re the only one who hasn’t yet.”
I see everyone’s pity, disdain, relief that they aren’t me and their absolute certainty that if they were me they would be doing everything differently. Better. I know no one looks at me and my kids and thinks, Now there’s a good mother.
I look down at the phone again. Cursor still blinking. I type:
Johnny needs BigDog. Check the dryer because I washed it yesterday. If it’s not there then he probably pushed it down to the bottom of the pillowcase again and forgot. Check his back for that patch of eczema. He gets itchy when he’s upset. The Diprobase is in the medicine cabinet by the thermometer. Put that on him if he’s scratching.
I press send.
No one sees this, though. How I’m barely breathing. How my skin is wrapped too tightly around me, my old self so far gone that I swear even my fingerprints have worn off my hands. And still, still I remember the Diprobase. The stuffed dog in the pillowcase. Still they are at the top of every thought, still they are first, even when the rest of me has gone to dust.
Harry, do you see it? If no one else sees it do you, at least, even a little? What will you say if we sit down and have the conversation where I tell you that I’m crazy and that today is not just a day off? Will you remember that in the middle of it I thought about his eczema? Will you take into account—before you decide to leave and take them with you, before you decide to put me away somewhere—that when his skin burns and peels I feel it too, and that on the lowest day of my life I still didn’t forget my children? That the whole reason I’m here is that I can’t forget, they’re so embedded in my heart, their lives entwined to make a noose around who I was—I’m lost in the pain of loving them.
Tears again. God, I’m so tired of crying.
So stop crying.
Stop crying.
I feel a sudden rush of energy, a dam unleashed. I get up, put on my flip-flops, wash my face, gather my things, walk to the door. Johnny needs me. He’s upset. I will open this door and leave this place and go to him. I walk unsteadily through the room, put my hand on the doorknob—
And that’s where I stand still.
London, March 2016; Baby, 3 months old
7 a.m.
When I threw Johnny’s truck against the window it cracked the glass. The front bumper split and the doors fell off. One headlight kept blinking. On, off,
on, off. A tire popped off in the crash and sailed into the kitchen, under our status fridge: stainless steel, double door, “American.”
Johnny loved that truck even though he’s getting a little old for trucks now, but it was heavy die-cast metal, realistic, with a flatbed for carrying a helicopter. And I know that he loves it. But I picked it up and threw it anyway. Over the breakfast table, over Johnny’s Cheerios, over Johnny’s head, right at the window. Straight at the gray, gray, gray London morning.
I threw the truck because it was just the last thing in the long line of all the things. The shit-covered onesie in the corner on the kitchen floor. Harry’s shoes left by the door. The garbage overflowing out of the can that Harry can’t take out because he’s a very important finance executive. The laundry basket reeking of urine and moldy towels. The dried food on my shirt. The letter on the table from Johnny’s teacher. My hairy legs. The voicemail from my boss about my start date. The hole in the crotch of the only pair of jeans that fits.
Rocky was screaming for breakfast. There were no clean bottles and I couldn’t wash the dirty bottle in my hand because the pile of dishes was too high in the sink. And I couldn’t move the dirty dishes to the dishwasher because that was full of clean dishes that I hadn’t unloaded from yesterday. I couldn’t unload the clean dishes because there was no more counter space because of the dirty pots and pans from dinner two days ago and the sterilizer and some rocket made out of tin foil and a cardboard box that Johnny brought home from school that I’m not allowed to throw away. So on my way to the bathroom to wash out the dirty bottle I tripped. On the truck. Johnny left it in the doorway. Baby still screaming. Through the kitchen window just gray and more gray.
The truck was the last thing of all the things so I picked it up and threw it. Now the window has a nick in it, the bull’s-eye of a dartboard, cracks in the glass radiating like lightning bolts. And Johnny watched me do it.
When I Ran Away Page 16