Everything Here is Under Control

by Everything Here Is Under Control (epub)

  After those first couple of weeks, as Nina slept less and fussed more, Carrie tried to push me away. Her temporary shamelessness, necessitated by the birth and its aftermath, faded. Her modesty returned, and she no longer wanted me helping her on and off the couch, on and off the toilet, in and out of the shower. She grew tired of my gaze on her breasts, so swollen with milk they were Playboyishly huge, but with chapped nipples that sometimes bled.

  A pattern formed. Carrie would snap at me—for a pathetic swaddle job or for occupying more than one and a half of the spit-up encrusted couch cushions—and send me home. Within twenty-four hours, she would call me back. Because her parents worked during the day, there was no one to hold Nina while Carrie peed or showered or scarfed down some toast. In the evenings, Mr. and Mrs. Hart did what they could. Carrie’s mom bathed Nina in the kitchen sink while her dad made dinner and stole furtive, rueful glances at the baby. By midnight, both of Carrie’s parents were in bed, and she alone was responsible for bouncing and shushing the baby to sleep.

  I did not consider that I had a choice. The notion that Carrie had wronged me by dating a boy in whom I was immediately and irreversibly interested had expired. The scorecards we maintained as children were wiped clean in the delivery room. My lingering feelings for Nina’s dad—whenever Gabe was on his way over, I frantically reknotted my hair and brushed my gums raw—amounted to more of a betrayal than Carrie’s decision to claim him for herself. A year had passed since then. Also, a lifetime.

  I came when she called.

  Carrie would mumble an apology, thrust the baby into my arms, and disappear into her bedroom for an hour or more. Now I wonder, Did she ever consider that I had a choice? Did she recall, with a shudder, how close she had come to pushing me away for good?

  When Carrie was still pregnant, she had enlisted my help in cleaning out her closet. Some clothes, she reasoned, would never fit again. Other items were not mom-friendly or would remind her of the type of life that was no longer hers. One T-shirt had bunched offensively in some school photo, and so went directly into the Goodwill pile. But the material was a heathery pink, which I remembered looking good against Carrie’s skin, and I convinced her to try it on, just in case. As luck would have it, the shirt flattered her round belly and newly ample breasts, and she wore it almost daily for the duration of her pregnancy.

  We had things in common, me and that shirt.

  We had both turned out to be useful.

  And then it was August, and the heat was blistering. Mrs. Hart installed a window AC unit in the office turned nursery. I remember standing in front of the unit’s gust, clutching a screaming newborn Nina beneath her armpits until the cold air calmed her down. I sang “Round Here” by Counting Crows because it was the only song I knew by heart, and it happened to include a line about staying up very late. My silent tears were divorced from any feeling but fatigue. When I had the presence of mind, I panicked. Alone in the Harts’ bathroom, I would lean over the sink, make eye contact with my reflection, and review the facts that Jaclyn kept trying to impress upon me.

  Fact: no matter how much I loved her, or him, I was not a prisoner of the moment when Carrie and Gabe failed to locate a condom.

  Fact: I was eighteen years old.

  Fact: I was no one’s mother.

  And yet, Carrie and I signed the lease on a two-bedroom house near the local third-rate Christian college whose dean had informed me of my acceptance over the phone. I took out student loans to cover both the deposit on the house and my tuition. Carrie would get a part-time job; we would coordinate our schedules so that someone was always home with Nina. The child payments from Mr. and Mrs. Feldman were generous—at least by Deerling’s standards, where a gallon of milk still cost less than a dollar.

  Although I cannot point to any obvious flaw in this plan, I struggle now to understand how we ever believed it would work.

  On August fifteenth, I left the airless, milky squalor of Carrie’s house to put gas in the truck. It was a beautiful night. I cranked the windows and from the glove compartment unearthed The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. Ignoring my compulsion to return to Carrie and the baby as fast as possible, I burned the truck’s last gallon driving the carriage-scuffed roads of Amish country. A small, bonneted child flashed me a suspicious look as she darted through the dusk to a dilapidated outhouse.

  My head shook back and forth, denying something both crucial and obscure to me.

  When I pulled into the Motomart, he was hanging up the pump at station seven. Registering Carrie’s truck, Gabe lifted an apprehensive hand. He’d been at the house earlier that day. After initiating a diaper change, he called out for assistance.

  “It’s a one-person job,” Carrie snapped. “Either you’re competent or you’re not.”

  “I don’t mind changing her. There’s just . . . a lot of poop? And it’s quite yellow?”

  “It’s supposed to be quite yellow.”

  “Is it supposed to be . . . everywhere?”

  With a colossal sigh, Carrie had risen from the couch and shooed Gabe from the changing table. “Go home, Gabe. I need help, not a fucking audience.”

  I hopped down from the driver’s seat of the Toyota, and Gabe grinned. “It’s you.”

  “Were you hoping to see the mother of your child?”

  “Not even a little bit. Christ, is she always so grumpy?”

  I tried to remember the last time Carrie had expressed joy or pleasure or even irony. Had it been days? Weeks? Sometimes her private smog of exhaustion almost lifted. Touring the rental near the college, I had gestured to some old cables hanging out of the wall and said, “We’ll have to do something about those once Nina starts crawling.” Carrie’s lips twitched, as if she’d forgotten that Nina would eventually learn to crawl, would not always need to be held firmly against someone’s body. But she suppressed the smile and regloomed her features.

  I had been meaning to ask Carrie why she so often seemed to be punishing herself—why she denied herself even fleeting moments of happiness—but I hadn’t found the right words or the time.

  “It’s harder than she thought it would be,” I said.

  “No shit,” Gabe said. “For me, too.”

  “Helping with the baby?”

  We always called what Gabe did helping. Despite his best intentions, no one expected Gabe to be a parent.

  “No,” he said. “Leaving.”

  “When do you go?”

  “Friday.”

  It was Monday. Ignoring my heart, which had gone and skipped a beat, I waited out the silence.

  “Do you want to get some food?” Gabe asked.

  I was surprised. “With you?”

  “Yes, with me.”

  I considered the alternative: driving back to Carrie’s house. She would be waiting just inside the door, ready to pass me Nina so she could attend to some basic bodily need of her own. Beneath the gas station lights, Gabe’s skin looked tan and silky, like the moist underside of a cake. If only I had thought to shout yo at a floppy-haired boy reading poetry on a footbridge. If only I had pulled Carrie aside that day or that week and made my case: Let me have him, and I’ll let you go.

  But how was she supposed to know that Gabe was the one person I would love more than I loved her? How was I?

  “Under one condition,” I said to Gabe. “We don’t talk about her.”

  It wasn’t entirely clear whether I meant Carrie or the baby or to refer to them as the same female unit, but he quickly agreed. I parked the truck behind the station’s minimart and climbed into his Beetle. We went to Denny’s—the same Denny’s where Carrie and I had told Gabe he was going to be a dad, because there was nowhere else to eat in that town—and we talked until 3:00 a.m. It was the summer of 2003, and I had no cell phone, no pocket vibrations alerting me to Carrie’s impatience turned concern, turned rage, turned fear.

 
I remember explaining the concept of Denny’s secret menu to Gabe and Gabe not believing me. I triumphed by ordering a French toast grilled cheese sandwich from a waiter who didn’t bat an eye.

  I remember Gabe asking me what I wanted to study at college. On a whim I lied and said philosophy, which impressed him.

  We finished our food and slid lower and lower on opposite sides of the booth, until our knees were pressed together beneath the table.

  We confessed our middle names: mine Candice, after my grandmother; his Theodore, for no reason.

  I said, “Tell me the truth. How bad is Deerling compared to the rest of America?”

  Gabe replied, “It’s not the best, but I like all the grass.”

  We crammed a year’s worth of awkward adolescent courtship into a single night.

  Our discussion of Deerling versus the rest of America landed us back where we’d started: Gabe’s departure date. “Don’t go,” I said, with comic urgency. “Don’t leave me with those people.”

  I meant Carrie and Nina, of whom we were not supposed to be speaking.

  For a long, inflated moment, Gabe and I studied each other. His eyes were shadowed and bloodshot, like someone who had lost more than a few nights of sleep that summer. Without warning, he gripped the edge of the table, leaned over our grease-slicked plates and empty Coke glasses and kissed me on the mouth.

  “I think you should come with me,” he said, sinking back into place.

  “I think I shouldn’t,” I said.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Jack falls asleep around one in the morning, but I don’t. I lie awake thinking of things I’ve misplaced or thrown out or permanently lost.

  Letters from Carrie, folded into paper footballs.

  A picture of Gabe and me taken with a timer before our first “date” in Manhattan, he in his blazer with ironic elbow patches, me with one sharp hipbone protruding between my skirt and ribbed tank top.

  Every school yearbook.

  A poodle-shaped mug from which I drank lukewarm coffee each morning for years, until I dropped it on the bathroom floor, and it broke into four clean pieces. Gabe wanted to glue the mug back together. Holding back tears, I called him a crazy person.

  All my baby teeth.

  Brochures from the colleges I did not attend.

  A vintage locket, whose chain snapped and disappeared somewhere between West Fifty-Eighth Street, where I worked, and Ridgewood, Queens, where we live.

  That AOL Instant Messenger conversation between Gabe and me—two weeks before Carrie’s due date, three weeks before Nina was actually born—which I printed out, intending to save.

  A pair of cowboy boots from a flea market in Pennsylvania.

  Countless pairs of formerly trendy, now ridiculous glasses.

  A flyer for a studio apartment in Brooklyn—Perfect for the young, single professional—which I tore from a bulletin board the winter I was twenty-three and kept in my coat pocket until April.

  Concert ticket stubs.

  My high school diploma.

  It irritates me to lie awake while the baby sleeps, and the irritation makes my chances of sleep increasingly remote. I ask myself, Why would you need those things when you know you’re going to die someday?

  I don’t need them, but Jack might.

  Jack, who is going to live forever.

  * * *

  Around eight, the baby and I wake up for the last time. I roll onto my side, expecting to see Carrie and Nina sprawled across the second bed before remembering I switched rooms. Maxing out my Visa, I paid for what the girl at the front desk promised was the hotel’s last available suite—two king size beds on the nineteenth floor. The excuse I gave to Nina was that I didn’t want to keep everyone up all night. Carrie required no excuse. As a rule, she and I don’t explain or apologize. There’s no precedent for it; we would feel like we were playacting.

  When I tell Jack he’s going to be reunited with his dad today, he kicks his legs and hoots at the ceiling. His pajamas, patterned with paw prints, are getting to be too small. The idea of folding them up for the Goodwill pile makes me want to cry.

  I can’t help how much I’m looking forward to seeing Gabe. I don’t know that I’ve ever, in our entire history, been disappointed to see him. It’s the defining cause-and-effect relationship of my life—Gabe walks into a room; I smile.

  Lifting Jack to my breast, I lean back against the throne of hotel pillows. From this angle, I can see the sky above Cleveland, an expanse of blue broken by a single helicopter. Will I tell Gabe what Carrie told me? About his proposal, his concession—however he thought of it at the time. Should I confess that I know we were nearly nothing, all our years together contingent on Carrie’s stubborn (generous) refusal of his help?

  I may not have asked her permission to leave town with Gabe, but I was the one who broke the news to Carrie. Before I told Jaclyn and before I even confirmed my decision with the boy himself. My plan was to inform Carrie I was in love with Gabe. In the books and television shows of our youth, the word love wielded so much power—love was a plot point; love was a deal-breaker; love was brand-new information. I expected the revelation to be, in Carrie’s eyes, all this and more. Love was the only excuse for what I knew would be otherwise unforgivable.

  Carrie was on the couch, using her own teeth to trim Nina’s hazardous fingernails. The summer’s final exhale of heat radiated from the cushions, the carpets, the curtains, the windowpanes. In one breath, I told Carrie my plan: forget college, follow Gabe to New York, disappear from Deerling. Then I threw in my secret weapon: “I’m in love with him.”

  Carrie looked at me like I was a fool. Since giving birth, she had returned to the hospital three times—once after a clogged milk duct became infected, driving her temperature to 102 degrees, and twice to have her stitches restitched. At her most recent appointment she had cried, and the same doctor who’d delivered Nina looked up from his perpetual post between Carrie’s splayed legs and asked, “What’s the matter?” Carrie hadn’t slept in over a month, and I was talking about love? Was I out of my mind?

  “You don’t love Gabe,” she said. “You just want out of Ohio. You just want out of this.” She gestured to her environs: the package of Pampers on the mantel, the baskets of unfolded laundry. In the kitchen the breeze from an oscillating fan disrupted the refrigerator’s display of sketches, photos, and expired coupons.

  Mutely, I nodded. If she needed to control the narrative, that was fine with me. In this moment I was prepared to lose her, but as the seconds ticked by and Carrie said nothing, I entertained other possibilities. Would she give me her blessing? Would my absence bring her some semblance of relief?

  “Whatever,” she said, nearly choking on the word. “It’s nothing I didn’t already know.”

  Looking back, I understand Carrie did know more than me. She knew Gabe’s lame jokes put an unrestrained smile on my face, like that of a person clutching a winning lottery ticket. She knew I would be willing to abandon my best friend with a newborn—even after I’d signed my name next to hers on a lease. And she knew that, while I may have been Gabe’s first choice, it was Carrie to whom he’d made the first offer. A literal marriage proposal.

  Why did Carrie wait so long to deliver that particular blow?

  Because she wasn’t interested in delivering blows. Only in our worst moments did we mistake our friendship for a rivalry. Before I left her house that night, she threw her arms around my neck. I smelled conditioner, spit-up, diaper cream, rosewater. She said, “You better fucking call.”

  * * *

  When Carrie and I were thirteen, I bet her she would be the first to get married.

  “No way,” Carrie said. “I’m not getting married until I’m at least thirty.”

  “Okay,” I allowed, “but I bet someone will ask you. I bet you’ll get proposed to way, way before anyone propo
ses to me.”

  Was I trying to imply she was more conventional than I was—more inherently wife material? Or was the wager supposed to be self-deprecating: Carrie was lovable; I was not?

  I remember Carrie sinking into a thoughtful silence before asking, “How much?”

  “Twenty bucks,” I said.

  Twenty bucks was a sum we cited often. As in, If we only had twenty bucks, we could see a movie, or, For twenty bucks we could order a shitload of Chinese food.

  Carrie agreed, and we shook on it. Five years passed. She didn’t bother telling me I’d won the bet.

  So, maybe it wasn’t a proposal. Maybe it was only a bad idea.

  Jack murmurs as he nurses, a sound I should record and keep.

  * * *

  Eager to spot her dad, Nina scans each group of rumpled passengers descending the escalators toward baggage claim. I am just as eager but also racked with anxiety. My tongue has forgotten how to interact with my teeth. I scrape it against my bottom incisors over and over until I taste blood. Before we had a baby, I maintained a constant awareness of Gabe’s mood and how to calibrate it if necessary, whether we were together or temporarily apart. Today his mood is an escaped pet, a dog for whom I have no leash. Gabe might feel anything toward me now.

  “Here.” I shove Jack in Carrie’s direction. A smock of drool darkens his onesie. “I have to go to the bathroom.”

  “Um, can you wait?” She has only a noncommittal grip on the baby. “These guys look like New Yorkers.” She nods at a trio of middle-aged businessmen in baggy suits, each staring at a phone in his palm. I don’t know how she knows. Carrie has never been to New York.

  “Can’t wait,” I say. “My pelvic floor muscles aren’t what they used to be.”

  Carrie wrinkles her nose at the overshare. Nina bounces on the balls of her feet. “He’s here. He’s here.”