Everything Here is Under Control

by Everything Here Is Under Control (epub)

  What is innocence if not living your life without this preview?

  Without subjecting a child to as much pain and possibly more—all of which will be your fault, because you decided it was a good idea to build her in your body?

  It took me thirteen years, but I get it now.

  * * *

  Gabe offers to run out and buy formula so I can sleep tonight. And it’s tempting, the prospect of closing my eyes and not opening them until morning, but chances are that after four, maybe five hours, I’ll wake up with my breasts rock hard and aching. Plus, I don’t want to give the baby formula. My body keeping him alive is the fuck you I failed to issue to the nurse who accused me of giving up. Once we were home with Jack, my milk arrived overnight. My breasts were pale and heavy with it. He latched on lazily, but when his first few experimental pulls paid off, Jack went slack with relief. He nursed and has since nursed like he’s never known another way.

  So I feed Jack every two or three hours, but it’s Gabe who paces and bounces him back to sleep. In the morning I feel, if not well rested, then functional. Like I could pass a basic multiplication test or recall, on demand, the maiden names of both my grandmothers.

  In the afternoon, we drive to Green Acres to see my mom. We’ve been engaged for a full day, but Gabe and I are the only two who know. It would have felt cruel announcing it to Carrie over breakfast, the morning after her uncoupling with Tyler Cox. Besides, I can’t decide if our engagement is even a big deal. If I want the hugs, the tearful congratulations.

  Last night, Gabe said, “Will you marry me?”

  me: (after a stunned silence) I thought we decided we didn’t care about that.

  gabe: We did.

  me: Is this because I walked out on you? You want to make it illegal for me to leave?

  gabe: It’s 2016. Even married women are allowed to take vacations, I’m pretty sure.

  Here my excitement began to simmer. I imagined myself in a flattering nonbridal dress from a boutique in Brooklyn. Everyone we know drinking whiskey cocktails from mason jars in a bar strung with fairy lights. Jack, a few months older than he is now, wearing a button-down onesie but changing into pajamas right after the ceremony.

  me: Would you want, like, a wedding?

  gabe: If you do. But that wouldn’t be the point.

  me: What would be the point?

  gabe: The point would be to celebrate a choice we made a long time ago.

  I turned to face him, my cheek resting against the braided rug. We didn’t have much time before Jack’s next wake-up. Between us hovered all the reasons we hadn’t gotten married, like everyone else, when we were twenty-eight or twenty-nine.

  me: I should be the one proposing.

  gabe: That’s probably true

  me: Who should we invite?

  gabe: Jack.

  me: Good call. Anyone else?

  gabe: Nina.

  me: I’ll add her to the list. Carrie, too.

  gabe: What about your mom?

  me: If she’ll fly to New York.

  gabe: You don’t want to get married in Ohio?

  No, I decided. We will do this one last thing in New York before we give the city up for good.

  As we approach Green Acres, the sun baking us through the windshield, I’m self-conscious of our timing. People will suspect we had a baby to fix what was broken between us, and, when that didn’t work, got married to fix what was broken by the baby. At best, they will think our decade out of wedlock was a failed experiment. Who needs a piece of paper from City Hall? our younger selves scoffed.

  We do, we admit, chastened at thirty-one.

  My throat is dry as we approach my mother’s trailer. The stone statue of Van Morrison props open the screen door.

  We’re not going to tell her, so why am I so nervous?

  Because, I think, she’ll look at me and know.

  Jaclyn appears before we can knock or ring the bell. Some sixth sense has alerted her to the baby’s presence. Her hair is wet from the shower. She’s wearing a man’s flannel with the sleeves rolled to her elbows. It’s possible the shirt belonged to my father twenty years ago. Mom doesn’t update her wardrobe until it’s absolutely necessary, and even then, only one item at a time: A single pair of thick hiking socks. A black sweater from Walmart, which will pill and collect cat hair before its first wash.

  She makes grabby hands at her grandson. Jaclyn has never been comfortable around Gabe, has never known how to greet or exchange pleasantries with him, but now the baby is a buffer between them. “Here’s your grandma,” Gabe sings, hoisting Jack into her arms.

  My mom croons in the baby’s face. It annoys me, the way she avoids looking Gabe in the eye.

  I don’t know what it’s like to have a child old enough to have a child of her own. When I consider that my willingness to live five hundred miles from my mother—that I don’t even miss her, most days—is not the result of some unique coldness in my heart but an American norm that will inspire Jack to one day make the same clean break, my throat tightens with panic. It’s not fair how much we are required to love our children and how little they have to love us in return. It’s fucked up that I can’t observe the imperfections of my mother’s aging body—her weathered toenails, the slack skin pooling at her elbows—without feeling ashamed. Her body evokes the beginning of me: all the swollen diapers, all the years I spent making poop jokes and asking what sorts of organs strangers were hiding beneath their clothes. It’s embarrassing having a mother.

  It’s embarrassing being one.

  “Mama, we’re getting married.”

  I hold my breath as she looks up at me. I experience a jolt of that childhood fear: Can I get in trouble for this?

  The last time I saw my father I was sixteen and had recently obtained my driver’s license. As always, Dad called me on my birthday, but instead of hanging up at the earliest moment, he asked me to have dinner with him. He and his new girlfriend, Heidi, were passing through Deerling on their way to Akron to visit Heidi’s parents. That he wanted to “introduce me to Heidi” rather than to see me, his only daughter, should have been my cue to decline. (The same invitation was extended to and wisely refused by my brother.) But one week later, I climbed willingly into my dad’s Dodge Caravan, which he proudly told me he’d won in an auction of items repossessed from Indiana state prisoners. At Buffalo Wild Wings—called B-Dubs by my father and Heidi—with a tray of heavily sauced chicken wings between us, Heidi apologized to me for being “only twenty-nine.”

  “That’s okay,” I said, confused. Twenty-nine didn’t strike me as young; it was older than I had ever planned on being. “You can’t help it.”

  It was 2001, but Heidi’s bangs were curled like it was 1990. She had big teeth, big boobs, big dreams. She worked for a cruise line’s inexplicably South Bend–based marketing division, a company that offered its employees one week of ordinary vacation time or two weeks if they opted to vacation aboard a ship.

  “I choose the ship every year,” Heidi told me. “Who wouldn’t?”

  “Some people might prefer a week on land to two at sea,” I said.

  “Not me!” Heidi said, unfazed. “Me and my last boyfriend cruised to Jamaica and to the Bahamas. Next I’m hoping to take your dad to Cancun.”

  She winked at me.

  Did my father ask me a single question? Did he touch me or breathe his ex-wife’s name or use the word love in a sentence? My memory says no. As a parent, every part of me resists the memory, longing to dismiss it as impossible.

  They dropped me off at home, and by the time they drove away, leaving tire tracks in the fresh snow, I was crying. My rattled sobs bewildered me. I didn’t think I had expected, or needed, anything from my father. I had agreed to dinner at B-Dubs out of sheer curiosity and because I was interested in becoming a person who had seen her father recently, rather
than a person who had last seen him when her age was a single digit. On the porch, in the cold, I waited for the emotion to pass. To clear up like bad weather. But my mother had flicked back the living room curtain in time to see an Indiana license plate departing. She emerged from the house, yanked a knit hat over my ponytail, and ushered me into the cab of her truck. Without asking, she knew I’d seen my father, and she also seemed to know everything that had transpired: his girlfriend calling me “Doll,” the way Dad sat back in his chair, half watching a Cavs game and half watching me, waiting for me to be impressed. With him, I suppose, but for what? For having rustled up a woman who did not yet resent him?

  Jaclyn and I drove with no destination. I stopped crying long enough to ask her for a cigarette; she mumbled, “Fat chance,” our old routine. Out in the country, among the numbered roads on which she had so recently taught me to drive, we approached an intersection that had become a source of contention between us. There was a stop sign, but as you descended into the valley—cornfields, a frozen riverbed, a barn begging to be torn down or else vandalized—you had complete visibility. No blind corners, no place for a cop to hide. When I had been the one behind the wheel, my learner’s permit ratting in a cup holder, I’d threatened not to stop. “It’s pointless,” I argued. “People who stop here are too scared to think for themselves.”

  “You stop because you don’t want to wind up dead,” Jaclyn had always told me, but this time I watched, in hushed disbelief, as she accelerated through the intersection. I felt elated and betrayed.

  “Why’d you do that?” I asked, thinking she was trying to make a point. Something about rules, how some of them were fine to break.

  For example, the rule of loving your father solely because he made you with his sperm.

  Jaclyn gave me a blank look. Then, with a smile containing traces of guilt, she said, “Oh, I never stop there.”

  In 2001 she was still plump. She still barked her laughter as if punctuating a sitcom. For most people my mother was sweet and accommodating, but for me a fierceness smoldered in her eyes. In my favorite photo, Jaclyn is cross-legged on the center of her unmade bed. My brother, a toddler, rests a meaty hand on her knee. I am in a Winnie the Pooh nightgown and scaling her shoulder, my mouth wide open as if I’m about to nip her ear. The unflinching stare she gives the camera both distances herself from my brother and me and challenges the photographer, the whole world: Just try and touch them.

  My beautiful mother. Who could leave her? I swore I would never get married, and I meant it. There’s a version of my life—so plausible I can taste it, can hear the luxurious silence of it—in which I never fall in love, never reproduce, never answer to anyone but myself.

  One year after Jaclyn ran the stop sign, Gabe Feldman moved to town.

  My mother’s instructions were clear: Love him less. But I’ve been trying to love him less since the day I met him, and I’ve never had any luck.

  “Married?” Still standing in the doorframe of her trailer, she squeezes the baby close to her chest, as if Jack’s the one who has delivered good news. “Oh, Amanda. Oh, Gabe.”

  We beam at her, proud of ourselves.

  “You’re going to be so much happier than I ever was.”

  She says this firmly, conclusively—as if it’s been her goal all along.

  * * *

  After Jack was born, we weren’t discharged until I’d answered a series of questions pertaining to my mental health. I nearly blew it when the doctor opened with “Are you doing okay?” and I replied evenly, “No, of course not,” believing only a truly unstable individual would describe herself as “okay” forty-eight hours after giving birth.

  At my bedside, Gabe widened his eyes until I realized what I’d said. I corrected myself: I was doing fine.

  To the hospital, to give birth, I had worn ankle boots with two-inch wooden heels. By the end of my pregnancy, they were the only shoes into which I could still slide my swollen feet without having to bend over. They weren’t comfortable, but they worked. As we were leaving—our baby strapped tight into his car seat, engulfed in pale-blue pajamas—I heard my boots clomping against the floor of the maternity ward, and the sound made me cry. It was the sound I’d heard everywhere in the final weeks before the birth, that era in which, it now seemed, I had been blissfully innocent. Naive enough to hope for a quick labor and an epidural that worked and, in the minutes after delivery, skin-to-skin cuddles—anything approximating relief.

  Carefully, Gabe set down the car seat and gripped my shoulders. “Amanda, when we get home, you can cry for a year. But right now, I need you to put a big smile on your face and walk confidently past the nurses’ station. Got it?”

  Gabe was losing his patience with the hospital staff, who had already detained us an extra six hours. “It’s a Sunday.” Our nurse had shrugged. “There’s a lot of paperwork.”

  In the hallway, gravity straining the floor of my pelvis, I laughed through my tears. “I still love you more than the baby,” I told Gabe.

  Granted, this was before I’d ever spent an entire afternoon with Jack’s cheek resting on my shoulder, before I noticed his chin dimple, identical to mine. Weeks before his first coo, first cold. Before the needles in his thighs. But it was true then.

  Is it wrong to hope it’s true forever?

  * * *

  As we’re leaving Green Acres, my mom says, “Whatever kind of wedding you have, even if it’s just at city hall, I’d like to be there.”

  “Of course,” I say.

  Ostensibly to Jack, she says, “Your mama has a tendency to leave me out of important events.”

  I don’t know what she means until I do. It honestly never occurred to me to ask my mother to be present at my son’s birth. Even if she had suggested it herself—which she didn’t—I’d have been overwhelmed by logistics. Was I supposed to call her the moment I felt my first contraction? What was the going rate for last-minute airfare between Cleveland and New York? Who would drive my mom to the airport? Would she succeed in navigating the mess of taxis outside the terminal at JFK, or would she fall prey to one of those guys who pulls you into his BMW, calls you sweetheart, and charges you $200 for a ride downtown?

  It would have struck me as impossible, calling up my mother and asking her to meet me at Mount Sinai at her earliest convenience.

  Of course, if I’d asked, that’s exactly what she would have done.

  Waiting for Gabe to unlock the car, there’s a flash of movement in my peripheral. I turn to see a man exiting the trailer two doors down, stepping onto his plywood porch to light a cigarette. It’s Brian, I think. The one who has it out for Van Morrison. His yard is festooned with a new make america great again sign—this one with a weather-resistant sheen—along with a family of those plastic flamingos people stick in the ground for no reason.

  Brian is younger than me, but I can’t tell by how much. There’s a spark in his eye as he shuffles his feet and surveys his surroundings, like he’s looking for a kid to tease or something he can set on fire.

  A girl steps outside and huddles beside him. The girl is Trinity, Maxine’s sixteen-year-old sister. She stands on her tiptoes to kiss Brian’s scruffy cheek.

  When Nina referred to Trinity’s boyfriend, I imagined a teenager, a boy who proudly slid his driver’s license inside the transparent sleeve of his wallet mere months ago. I did not imagine a man closer to my own age than to Trinity’s. A man with mud caking his work boots and a week’s worth of stubble crawling down his neck.

  Brian’s truck is parked in the grass. Its bumper bears a single, faded sticker: if jesus had a gun, he’d be alive today.

  “Gabe,” I hiss over the roof of our Subaru.

  “What?” he whispers back dramatically.

  I jerk my head in the direction of Trinity and Brian—though Gabe has never seen either of them before in his life. He doesn’t know Trinity is Maxine�
�s sister, cannot suddenly imagine, with perfect clarity, how she sweet-talked her boyfriend into letting her borrow the truck once or twice. She would have been coy, secretive about the project until he coaxed it out of her. The whole thing—young women canvassing for a detested female candidate—rubbed him the wrong way. Unwilling to retaliate against Trinity’s own family, he set out to punish the girl who didn’t matter to him.

  Or maybe, simply, to correct her.

  “That’s Trinity,” I say.

  Gabe frowns. “Nina’s friend?”

  “Nina’s friend’s sister.”

  “That man is forty.”

  “Twenty-five, tops.”

  “Still gross.”

  “He vandalized Carrie’s lawn.”

  “No. Come on.”

  “Trust me.”

  I consider slashing Brian’s tires. My mother would have a suitable knife. The task would probably thrill her.

  I note the truck’s license plate and imagine trying to explain to the police: it’s not only that he trespassed; it’s not only that he messed with the grass; it’s that he crushed the pure-hearted activism of two little girls. In my mind, Maxine and Nina are as innocent as children offering daisy chains to fairies, cookies to Santa. They asked the universe, Are we alone out here?

  Brian replied, Hell yes, you are.

  “We should do something, right? On behalf of Nina?”

  “Do something?”

  “Now’s our chance. Let’s exact our revenge.”

  Gabe grins at me, pleased by my loyalty to his kid. Assuming I’m kidding, he says, “Amanda, you’re holding an infant. Let’s maybe avoid exacting revenge on a guy so passionate about gun ownership he wishes he could go back in time and give one to Jesus.”

  I place a hand on Jack’s head to calm myself down. Gabe’s right. My only option is to get in the car. But Brian chooses this moment to squeeze Trinity’s ass through the pocket of her embroidered jeans.

  “Hold the baby.”

  Marching up Brian’s porch steps, I feel weightless. Uncivilized and unrestrained. He’s already sputtering some confused obscenity even before I smack him across the face.