Everything Here is Under Control

by Everything Here Is Under Control (epub)

  Tyler sits in a floral armchair with his legs splayed, one hand on each knee. As Gabe and I squeeze onto the sectional between Nina and Carrie, Tyler swallows three times in rapid succession.

  Only now, at the last moment, do I acknowledge the possibility that Carrie will say yes. That she’s actually in love with this guy. But there’s no time to fret over what might happen next; Tyler rises from the floral chair and it’s already happening. Lacking a utensil, he taps his car key against his beer bottle, interrupting Carrie midsentence. The noise intrigues Jack. In my lap, his bobble head lolls backward for a better view of the noise-producer.

  “Carrie, I—”

  She looks at him the way you look at a person about to ask you for a stick of gum.

  “I know crazy romantic gestures aren’t your thing, so I thought I’d do this at home. Where you’re comfortable.”

  Carrie squints at him, and I know I’ve guessed correctly. Tyler Cox will never be her husband.

  Tyler’s hand goes to his pocket, and Gabe unthinkingly narrates, “Oh! He has a ring!” like an alarmed play-by-play announcer.

  With a chuckle, Tyler says, “Carrie, will you marry me?

  Carrie frowns. For a long time, she frowns and says nothing and frowns. Then she clears her throat. “Um, Ty?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Why would you propose to me on my daughter’s birthday?”

  At the word propose, I extend a flattened palm in Carrie’s direction. Without looking at me, she pushes my hand away.

  Tyler clears his throat. “Well, I-I didn’t want to leave Nina out . . .”

  “Please leave me out of this,” Nina says.

  Tyler returns his hopeful gaze to Carrie. When she continues wordlessly gawking at him, he says, “Do you need time to, like, think it over?”

  That she’s tempted to take the out is obvious in the sudden parting of her lips, her eager intake of breath. The fingers of her right hand release their grip on the armrest. And who could blame her? If I were Carrie, I would excuse this boy from my house as soon as possible and reject him later, over email.

  But Carrie’s not me.

  “No, I don’t,” she says gently.

  Tyler is still standing in the middle of the room, looming over the rest of us. “You don’t need time?”

  “I don’t need time.”

  Nina releases a long sigh. The look she and her father exchange is the equivalent of a high-five.

  When Nina first told me her mother was on a picnic with Tyler Cox, I assumed the wholesome, midday date had been staged to show me how little Carrie thought of our shared past. Even the people who had populated our lives were no longer defined by what they had done and said to us back then but by more recent pleasantries exchanged in the supermarket or over drinks or in bed. Then Carrie revealed she’d been dating Tyler for a year, since before I’d turned up on her doorstep, before Gabe and I had made a baby. I understood her feelings for Tyler were genuine. At the very least, her feelings had nothing to do with me.

  Still, could we have dreamed up a better revenge on the boy who mimed penetrating me in front of all his friends? A memory, as vivid as it is fake: Carrie and I ambling down Center Street, sucking chemical-blue ice through straw-spoon hybrids, Carrie spelling out the plan. “I’ll grow up, make him fall in love with me, and turn down his proposal.”

  “Wow,” Tyler says. “Okay.” He snaps the ring box shut. It’s not clear to him—to any of us—how he will get from this unbearable moment to the solitude of his Jeep. It’s the most painful distinction between movies and real life: real-life scenes don’t fade to black; people don’t exit rooms a beat after delivering their punchiest lines.

  Not that Tyler has any punchy lines in store for us.

  What happens, finally, is that Carrie rises from the couch and takes Tyler’s hand—gingerly, as if it’s sticky—and leads him into the backyard to talk. The rest of us disperse. Gabe takes Nina to Dairy Queen, and I settle into the guest room for the nursing session that will put Jack to sleep until nine or nine thirty. Ten, if I’m lucky.

  He’s still pressed against my chest—intermittently dozing and mouthing my nipple—when I hear Tyler’s Jeep rev and reverse out of the driveway. A minute later, Carrie creaks open the door to the guest room. She climbs onto the bed beside me.

  There’s no judgement or curiosity in her stare. She watches Jack as impassively as she would watch her own baby at her own breast.

  Why, after everything, is it our comfort with each other’s bodies that sticks?

  Carrie unfurls her fist to reveal a crumpled twenty, which she places on my thigh.

  The baby’s eyes are closed. I keep my laughter lodged in my throat. Carrie whispers, “You win,” and I am happier than I’ve been in weeks.

  “Let’s move to Cleveland,” I say.

  “And all live in the same house? Like cult members?”

  “Different houses. Same city.”

  “You think Nina was serious about leaving?”

  “I think she’s your daughter. I think she says what she means.”

  With her chin resting on my shoulder, Carrie watches Jack, the most beautiful baby ever born. I believe in his beauty the way I believe that winter lasts longer than summer, that spaghetti tastes better the second day.

  “I’m in,” she says.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Gabe and Nina are gone for a couple of hours, driving aimlessly or maybe waiting for stars to appear over one of the county’s unlit parks. Gabe joins me in the guest room just as Jack is waking up. He starts to pull his T-shirt over his head. His arm is behind his neck when I say, “We should move to Ohio.”

  Gabe freezes. “To Deerling?”

  “No. To Cleveland. Carrie and I discussed it, and we both agree.”

  Slowly, his arm falls to his side. His shirt stays hitched up in the back. “You would do that?”

  “Gabe, I’m the one who’s from here. I love Ohio.”

  He’s stunned. I think he would be less stunned if I revealed I could dunk a basketball or that one of my eyes is made of glass. “I had no idea,” he says.

  “You want to be near Nina. I want to never again lug a stroller up the steps to the M train. Let’s just move.”

  Slowly, Gabe crosses the room. Leaning over the bed and the baby, he places his hands on the sides of my face and kisses me. I whisper the details of the plan. We’ll take a year. Carrie will sell her house, and Gabe will find a new job. Nina will finish junior high in Deerling and be ready to start anew, a freshman in the city.

  Gabe kisses me deeper. Something in me tenses, some biological insistence that now is no time for touching. Too much touching is what got us here. But I love him, and he is letting me off the hook, and I need a second. I give the baby to Gabe for a burp and a change. I go to brush my teeth. Spitting into the sink, I remember being pregnant. My body was taut and warm and coursing with extra blood. I felt like a mammal but in the best way. We had sex all the time.

  In our room, I find Gabe swaddling a heavy-lidded Jack in a receiving blanket. It feels like it’s been forever since I saw Jack wrapped up like a burrito, his arms pinned to his sides. I had practically forgotten he used to sleep like that, snug and immobilized every night.

  “That doesn’t work anymore,” I tell Gabe.

  He takes his hands off the baby, who promptly punches through the folds of the blanket. “Since when?”

  “Since the first night we spent here. I kept wrapping and rewrapping him, and he kept busting free. He doesn’t like it anymore.”

  Gabe blinks. “The swaddle always calmed him down instantly.”

  “Well, now it fills him with rage.”

  Gabe marvels at his infant son. “How could he change so fast?”

  I marvel too. And I don’t know. I have almost forgotten the way he used to kick agai
nst the walls of my uterus—not exactly like a prisoner but like someone trying to get comfortable on a plane. I can barely remember the shocking thrill of his first detectable movements, the ever-heavier weight of him. How I used to walk around Ridgewood with my hands on my belly, never alone. Never alone again. What will I forget next? How he napped straight through the afternoons, curled like a comma on my chest? How he shook his head from side to side before locating the bullseye of my nipple?

  The pitch of his cry in my ear?

  Gabe sighs. “I guess this is why people have more than one kid.”

  Jack is drowsy. He’s struggling to keep his eyes open. Why fight it? I want to ask him. What do you think you’re going to miss?

  We’re not done yet; I already know that. My injuries will heal, and our baby will learn to sleep at night, and we’ll have another. With a swirl of dread in my stomach, I acknowledge the future versions of ourselves who won’t be able to resist doing this all over again.

  I show Gabe our new routine—how I sit on the bed with my legs bent, Jack propped against my thighs, and rock him from side to side. The rocking must continue for a full five minutes after Jack shuts his eyes. Rock for fewer than five minutes and you can’t be certain he’s asleep. He may simply be resting.

  Once I’ve placed him in the center of the mattress and arranged the pillows, I take Gabe’s hand and pull him to the floor, to the braided wool rug that’s always been in Carrie’s house. When we were eleven, the year we met, it was in the kitchen, strictly Mr. Hart’s domain. We used to annoy him by walking around the outermost seafoam-green braid as if it were a tightrope, careful to avoid letting our feet spill onto the rug’s multicolored inner loops. I don’t remember why. Probably it was just something to do as we sucked on popsicles or waited for dinner to be done.

  “This might not work,” I whisper to Gabe, kissing his throat.

  It didn’t work the first time we tried. Jack was seven weeks old. A few days earlier, at my one and only postpartum checkup, the OB who had delivered him almost declined to examine me. She finally agreed to take a look after I mentioned that things did not feel “entirely normal.” What I meant was that occasionally I would bend my leg a certain way or choose to sit on an unforgiving stool and a flash of pain—the sharp kind associated with lacerations, or having foreign objects yanked from your flesh—would take my breath away. The OB declared that everything looked “perfect” aside from one tiny spot near the base of my vagina where a stitch “must have fallen out.” With her fingertip she applied some kind of solution, which stung.

  “I’m clearing you for intercourse,” the OB announced.

  Jack was squirming in a nurse’s arms. Both women seemed annoyed I’d come to the appointment alone, but Gabe had used up all his sick days after the baby was born.

  “Wait a few hours for that stuff to do its magic, then, you know . . . have a glass of wine, try to relax. And don’t put it off too long—we don’t want you developing a complex.”

  The apartment had sunk into squalor. Every surface was covered in dishes smeared with condiments or heaped with dirty laundry: fetid burp cloths and milk-soaked rags. Jack hadn’t slept for more than three consecutive hours since birth. I was still dressing myself exclusively in sweatpants. The lanolin cream I used on my nipples had left greasy, asymmetrical stains on each of Gabe’s T-shirts, but he didn’t dare ask me to stop wearing them. Most of the time, when he got home from work, I wouldn’t look at him. If he was even a few minutes late I imagined him lingering over stale coffee in the teachers’ lounge or strolling home alongside his female colleague with the shampoo-commercial hair, and I doubled the time I spent cold-shouldering him.

  Sex, I thought, would restore me to myself, us to each other. My hopes were not high or orgasmic. I aimed only for the mechanics to succeed—for nothing to rip open or cave in. If I could get through a few minutes of intercourse, wouldn’t the rest of my life fall into place?

  We waited until Jack was napping in his bassinet. Gabe wanted to shower together, soaping each other up and down like we used to, but I was unwilling to take off my bra. I’d had enough of my boobs; they were not invited to this party.

  There was no wine, no laughter. Only urgency and the accidental fistful of lube that the bottle had belched forth.

  It was as if Gabe had tried to penetrate an open wound, and I cried out.

  Jack woke instantly, desperately needing to nurse. Threatening to fling himself from our fifth-story window if I didn’t commence nursing him immediately. There was no time for what I needed, which was to lie flat on my back letting tears pool in my ears while Gabe assured me sex didn’t matter. We could try again in another month, or a year, or when Jack graduated from high school.

  “We don’t have to try,” he says now.

  And so, like God-fearing teenagers, we do everything but.

  Grimaces freeze on our faces each time a door hinge creaks or a neighborhood dog woofs and Jack stirs in response. After his first feeding of the night, there’s no telling when he’ll wake up; all bets are off. But miraculously, the baby sleeps on. Gabe and I take turns finishing each other with our hands. For me, at least, the end is mild—not a volcanic eruption but a warm bloom. Still, coming at all is an indication—the first I’ve had—that my body will recover. All of this, from my overgrown hair to my unclipped toenails, will be mine again.

  Someday.

  “I’m glad you’re okay.” Gabe rests his hand on my stomach.

  “I didn’t know how long the pain would last. No one warned me.”

  “The birth wasn’t exactly routine,” he says.

  What I want to tell him, but don’t, is that I’m afraid it was.

  Gabe goes on, “When I think about those nights in the hospital, it’s scary to remember how little I knew what I was doing. I look back on it and think, I never should have let that guy touch my baby.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say. Guilt overwhelms me whenever I remember the hospital.

  Halfway through his second night outside my body, Jack became hungry. He alternated between sucking my nipples raw and screaming himself hoarse. Those screams were mad, beseeching. I was not yet producing milk, only colostrum, which resembled Vaseline in color and texture and would, according to the La Leche League breastfeeding manual, satisfy the baby. But the baby was far from satisfied, and I couldn’t tolerate his suffering.

  “We need formula,” I told Gabe at 3:00 a.m.

  Though he too had read the book’s warning that a single drop of formula could render our son birdbrained and unemployable, Gabe agreed. Our night nurse, with whom we were a little bit in love, cheerfully showed Gabe how to feed Jack through a tube taped to his index finger. The baby latched onto Gabe’s decoy nipple. His frown yielded to drowsy contentment as the formula began to flow.

  In the morning, after the 7:00 a.m. shift change, our daytime nurse—whose tight ponytail lifted her eyebrows into a look of permanent skepticism—watched Jack guzzling his breakfast of premade poison and remarked, “I guess you’ve already given up.”

  Had I been able to get out of bed, I would have throttled her.

  Everyone says labor is difficult but, at the end, you get a baby.

  Another possibility: the difference between labor and a near-fatal accident is that at the end of labor, everyone expects you to take care of a baby.

  “You’re not allowed to apologize anymore,” Gabe says.

  I watch the ceiling fan spin above us. I wonder if we could surprise Jack by having a ceiling fan installed in our bedroom in Queens. I don’t know when infants are capable of being surprised. I don’t know when they get teeth or sit up or say Mama. I keep meaning to download an app that will tell me when to look out for this stuff.

  Sometimes I doubt the birth was any easier on Gabe. Could I have watched the love of my life endure thirty-six hours of ceaseless pain without breaking down myself
? Could I have paced the corridors of the hospital, haunted by the late-night howls of women laboring behind closed doors, soothing a rumpled newborn I’d barely met? Who could have been anyone’s baby?

  Across the hall, a toilet flushes. Nina informs Carrie they’re out of toothpaste.

  “Okay,” I say to Gabe. “I won’t be sorry.”

  “Will you marry me?” he asks.

  * * *

  You know how everyone thinks that when you have sex you, like, lose your innocence?

  In the woods that day, I resented Carrie for invoking her own innocence.

  Of course, I loved Nina. And I was too enchanted with the baby’s pursed lips and violet eyelids to wish her existence away, but I hated thinking of her as the result of Carrie and Gabe having sex. That Carrie had brought it up during the one afternoon I might, conceivably, have thought about anything else; that she had done so casually, as if commenting on the humidity; that she was still pretending not to know I was in love with Gabe—all of it prevented me from hearing what she was trying to say.

  I think I might have lost mine when I gave birth.

  In the delivery room, Carrie felt pain for the first time. Not the dishrag twist of menstrual cramps or the jabs of food poisoning. Not the throb of nose fractures, sore shins, or however many twisted ankles she sustained during three years of high school track. Real pain, for which she had no metaphor or simile. From which she could not distract herself. At first, she didn’t know if she would live, and then she did not know if she wanted to.

  Because with the realization that she might die came the certainty that she would die, someday. And so would I, the childhood friend holding onto her knee, and so would Mrs. Hart, stroking the sweaty hair at Carrie’s temples. Worst of all, the baby who hadn’t yet taken her first breath would also take a final breath, maybe in an identical hospital room, with monitors tracking her heartbeat and anesthesiologists wandering uselessly in, out, and onward to the cafeteria.