Husband and Wife Read online

  “What does ‘roll with the punches’ mean?” she asked.

  “It means we’ll be flexible,” I said. “It means Binx will nap when he naps. We won’t worry about it. We’ll stop when we get tired. We’ll eat french fries. We’ll have an adventure.”

  “Like Jack Care-whack?” she asked.

  “You’re too little for a motorcycle,” I said. “Otherwise exactly the same.”

  The line at the McDonald’s counter was long, which was bad news for Binx, who truly, truly wanted his milk. If Nathan had been there, he would have waited in the line with Mattie while I searched out the most secluded table and made an effort at modestly sliding Binx under my shirt. He usually foiled these efforts, grabbing the shirt and thrusting it upward just as I popped the clasp on the nursing bra, as if to say, “Hey, everybody! Get a load of this!” I found this frustrating, but I saw now that it wasn’t nearly as frustrating as trying to stave Binx off in a long, indecisive line of people torn between honey mustard sauce or barbecue. I could retreat to a table and make Mattie wait for food, but not only could she cry just as loudly as Binx, with the addition of words, she could get up and march her determined little sparkplug self back to the line, and with Binx attached to my nipple it would be difficult to stop her.

  Binx threw himself sideways, aiming his mouth at my breast. When I straightened him back up, he screamed, and when I say he screamed I mean he made a sound like an eagle swooping in for the kill, or perhaps like an eagle who’d just been struck by a spear to the chest. I mean my ears rang. It was loud. As one, America’s travelers turned to look upon me and judge. Perhaps they thought I was pinching him. Perhaps they thought I’d put burrs in his diaper. Perhaps they just wanted me to shut my baby up. I stared down a woman who looked like she was from Florida in the most egregiously stereotypical way—too tan, too skinny, too blond, and far too colorful in her splashy floral print. I imagined that she either had no children or had had them so long ago she’d succumbed to the pleasing fantasy that she’d always kept them one hundred percent under control, and I thought that if she kept on glancing at me and then muttering something to her husband, who studied the menu as though he’d never been in a McDonald’s before, I was going to march right over and offer to pay her a hundred bucks if she could keep Binx from making that sound for five minutes without smothering him. I put the words, “Fuck you, bitch,” into my gaze. Mattie tried to ask me something, but at the same moment Binx screamed again, drowning her out.

  “What, Mattie?” I snapped, which was unfair, because she wasn’t the one screaming, but I did it anyway.

  “I’m hung-gry,” she said. She grabbed the chain regulating the line and swung on it. “I want some fries.”

  “What do you think I’m doing here, Mattie? We’re waiting in line.”

  “But I’m hung-gry.”

  “What would you like me to do?” I asked. “Would you like me to summon the fries out of midair?”

  She considered this. “Yes,” she said.

  “Well, too bad, I can’t. You have to be patient.”

  “Why can’t you?”

  “I can’t do magic,” I said.

  “Why can’t you?”

  “Why can’t you?”

  “Because I’m a human,” she said.

  “And I’m not?”

  “You’re a mommy,” she said.

  “Mommies are human,” I said.

  She turned to contemplate me. “I want french fries,” she said.

  When we finally had the food, I surveyed the place, Mattie clinging to my leg, Binx struggling to grab the tray, which I held, one-handed, at an awkward distance, one part of my mind picturing it crashing to the floor and this whole thing starting over. I was looking for a good spot to breast-feed and not finding one. There was an open table right by the line, where I’d be like a tourist attraction on the way to hamburgers and fries. There were open booths right by the enormous windows, where I’d be framed for every beer-bellied dude passing through the parking lot. I picked one of the booths and pointed Mattie toward it. She walked in front of me, stopping every couple feet for no particular reason. “Keep moving,” I said, Binx slipping a little in my grip. “Keep moving. Keep moving. That’s our mantra now. Keep moving.”

  “Keep moving,” she repeated, and then she said it again and again, so that the words lost their grip on the sound and it became a chugga-chugga, chugga-chugga, like a train.

  In the booth, Binx screamed while I wrestled with my shirt and my nursing bra, trying not to flash everyone in the place. I got the nipple out and brought his head to it, but he resisted, pushing back against my hand and screaming, drawing all eyes to my exposed left breast. I stuck the nipple in his open mouth and he screamed some more, eyes squinched up, face reddening, until I squeezed my breast with my other hand and milk shot against his tongue. Then he stopped crying, opened his eyes, and began to suck, unclenching his fist so that he could knead the top of my breast. “Oh,” I said, in my bad British accent, “jolly good, then. Sorry about that.”

  “Why did you say that?” Mattie asked.

  “I was pretending to be Binx,” I said.

  “But why did you say jolly good then?”

  “I was pretending that Binx was British.”

  “Binx is not British,” she said hotly. “He’s a baby.”

  I thought about explaining that babies could be British, but decided instead to cede the point. “Touché,” I said, and when she wouldn’t stop asking me what touché meant and then, after I used the word rejoinder for the hell of it, what a rejoinder was, I reminded her there was a toy inside her Happy Meal, and she wanted to know why. I asked her why did she think, and she said, “Because you summoned it out of midair.”

  I said, “So you do think Mommy can do magic?” but she had a mouthful of fries and didn’t answer. I had a couple bites of salad, dropped a piece of lettuce on Binx’s head, wiped the salad dressing off his temple and then noticed that some of it had gotten on his leg as well. Or, no, that wasn’t salad dressing on his leg—it was mustard, a watery yellow-brown. Except it wasn’t mustard. “Oh, shit,” I said.

  “Shit?” Mattie asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “Lots of it.” Because it wasn’t just on Binx’s leg, it was halfway up his back and seeping through the fabric of his onesie. And I saw, when I lifted him away, protesting, struggling back toward my breast, that it was on my leg as well, that it was on the booth, that it was dripping onto the floor. He’d exploded.

  I sent Mattie to get napkins, both of us nervous as she navigated farther from the table, looking impossibly small. She brought back two—not enough, but I couldn’t send her out again. I wiped off my hand, bits of napkin sticking to my skin, and then I just stuck the napkins on his leg and left them there. I tried to lift up and over the mess in the booth without adding to the mess on myself, and then I picked up my bag and put it over my shoulder, Binx pressed to my side, sticking us together with that yellowish paste. I carried him to the bathroom, Mattie walking just ahead while I barked orders at her like an animal trainer and tried not to notice the wet cling of my jeans against my thigh. Inside the bathroom I put Binx in the sink and pulled the pants off and the onesie over his head, dragging the mess, despite my efforts, up to the back of his head, and then I dropped those clothes in the other sink. Two teenage girls walked up and then backed away, as if from a rotting corpse. “Remember this,” I wanted to say. “Remember this, and use birth control.”

  The diaper came off next, and I pegged it into the nearest trash can—swoosh! I thought—and then I washed Binx in the sink with pink liquid soap as he squirmed and slipped and reached for the faucet, pushing it toward the hot side just as I grabbed his hand. I held him there as tightly as I could with one hand while I wriggled out of my own shirt and rinsed it in the sink on the other side, trying only to rinse out the mess but ending up soaking the whole damn thing, because I had to move quickly to tighten my grip on him. I squeezed the shirt out as best I coul
d and contorted my way back into it. Because he was screaming now, not his horrible death-knell scream, but the piteous one that spoke to me of lifetime trauma, I picked him up and held him naked against my wet shirt, hoping he wouldn’t pee on me, while I put each tennis shoe up on the counter, one at a time, to untie and remove it. Then I unsnapped and unzipped and pushed down my jeans with one hand, standing dripping and half-naked in bare feet on the McDonald’s bathroom floor. I rinsed the jeans, too, and then reversed the process, the jeans a struggle to get on with the fabric heavy with water, the shoes impossible to tie with one hand, so I just left the laces dangling. Mattie didn’t know how to tie shoes yet. How many years away from learning was she? I should have taught her ahead of the curve. “Mattie,” I said, “do you think you can tuck my laces inside my shoe?”

  “Okay,” she said, and she squatted at my feet and tried.

  The baby was curled against me, snuffling into my chest. I looked at the gold glinting in Mattie’s hair, her industrious little hands. I loved them both so much. Why couldn’t that emotion remain at the forefront? Why was it so often shadowed by my troubles, by the irritations of the day? The sublime is always dragged down by the ordinary, like a giant toppled by little men. Or maybe I had it all wrong. Maybe the ordinary makes possible the sublime. How long before Dorothy looked at the Emerald City and saw nothing remarkable at all? “What do you think of this experience, Mattie? Could I write a poem about this?”

  “Actually, yes,” she said.

  “What rhymes with leaky poop?” I asked.

  “Sneaky loop,” she said. “I got the laces in. I did it! I helped you!” She stood up, beaming, awaiting my approval.

  I moved my feet experimentally and my laces tumbled back out. “Peeky dupe,” I said.

  She laughed. “Beaky soup.”

  I had no diaper in my bag. I could have sworn I’d put a diaper in my bag. “This is all about the can-do spirit,” I said to Mattie as I pasted paper towels around Binx’s crotch, like I was sculpting him an outfit out of papier-mâché.

  “Pan-do beer-it,” she said.

  “You’re a poet,” I said, and she finished the couplet, “And don’t know it.” Nathan and I had taught her that. Nathan and I. Mattie clinging to my shirt, I walked back through the McDonald’s, soaking wet, my laces dragging on the floor, my half-naked baby shivering in my arms, his balled-up clothes clutched at his back and dripping water down his skin. At the car I dropped the diaper bag on the ground and opened the back door so Mattie could climb into her car seat. “Buckle me in, Mom,” she said.

  “Just a minute,” I said. I said it nicely. I was shivering now, too. I opened the passenger-side door, and there, sitting on the seat, was the diaper I’d thought was in my bag. I put Binx down on the seat, and only then did I see the healthy, unprocessed snacks awaiting consumption in a bag on the floor of the car. Nathan must have packed them for me. At the sight I unraveled. What did it matter if he was a cheating, lying bastard, when he’d remembered to pack the snacks? If he’d been there to tell me about those snacks, I wouldn’t have had to go in the McDonald’s at all. I peeled the paper towels off Binx, dropping them on the ground, which wasn’t like me, I don’t litter, and just as I lifted up his butt to slide the diaper underneath it he peed. He peed right in my mouth. I jumped back, and the pee went on arcing out, now landing on Binx’s face as he turned his head from side to side, grimacing, trying to avoid this sudden storm. I spit onto the asphalt. I spit again. The baby cried and cried, naked in the front seat of the car. Mattie said something indistinct from the backseat, her voice spiking when I didn’t answer, and even though I couldn’t quite hear her, I knew the insistent word, “Mom!” I knew it by the insistence.

  There was a moment when they seemed to recede from me. I could see that it would be possible to shut the door, to press the key fob and hear the car tweet-tweet, to go inside and hand the keys to someone and tell them to call the police and then to walk out the door and keep on walking. Who would I be, if I were capable of doing that? Who would I become? We pass again and again through these doorways, those of us who decide to stay.

  I picked up my baby, my poor baby, and wiped the pee off his face with my shirt. I carried him over to Mattie, and with one hand I buckled her in while with the other I held him close, my shivering baby, and I said, “Shh, shhh, Mommy’s here,” and both of them were calmed, and neither of them knew how badly I wanted to cry. We can’t possibly understand, when we are children, how hard it sometimes is to say the necessary words.

  Lack of sleep had flattened out my good emotions and amplified the bad ones. In the motel that night, lying in the dark while the children slept, I thought of articles I’d read in Newsweek about the brains of drug addicts, how they lose the ability to manufacture the chemicals that light us up with pleasure at good food, at a joke, at sex. Life without drugs is tedious and dull. A cubicle life, a seventh-period-history-taught-by-the-football-coach life, droning and endless. There must be joy, there must be grace, to leaven the despair, or there is only despair. I needed a transporting feeling, a Wizard of Oz drug to saturate the black-and-white with emerald green. I’ll tell you what I wanted. I wanted a feeling so easy and liquid and vast I could swim in it, I would have no choice but to swim in it. I wanted to lay eyes on Rajiv, on Austin, and think, Yes, yes! This is where I’m supposed to be.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Helen had cut her hair. The last time I’d seen her, toward the end of her second pregnancy, her hair had been long, down past her shoulders, and that was how I’d been picturing her: the image of big-bellied maternity, her thick black hair even thicker, even shinier with pregnancy hormones, even blacker against her flowy white shirt. But she was skinny again, all collarbones and shoulders in her red tank top, and her hair fell exactly to her chin. She looked neat and contained, which was the very opposite of how I felt. There is something about a person’s physical presence for which our ability to keep in constant touch can never compensate, and you know that by how startling it is to see them, solid and real, a body instead of a voice, instead of words on a computer screen.

  “You cut your hair,” I said. We were standing on her front porch, having said hello, having hugged, having discussed how I’d made good time, considering the number of stops the children had required.

  “Yeah,” she said, and nothing else. Helen, unlike most people, felt no compulsion to elaborate. If you asked her whether she wanted to come over for dinner and she didn’t, she’d say, “No.” Just “No,” when anyone else would rush in with a thousand excuses. I found this disconcerting when I met her, and then I began to find it admirable. Sometimes your answer wasn’t about the cold you couldn’t get over, your prior commitments, your long, hard day at work. Sometimes you just didn’t want to, and that was what they’d asked, after all, if you wanted to.

  Helen looked past me at the backseat of the car, where Binx and Mattie slept slumped over, their heads nearly touching. “So cute,” she said. “He’s so big. I’ve been picturing him like he was in the photos you sent when he was born.”

  “How was he in those photos?” I asked. “I can’t remember.”

  “He was wrinkled,” she said. “He was swaddled in that striped blanket every hospital in America must use.”

  “Oh, right,” I said.

  “I remember thinking he had really long fingers,” she said.

  “He did, didn’t he,” I said. The blanket, the long fingers—I could feel the beanbag weight of him in my arms, the new weight, the slightly scratchy white blanket with its blue-pink-blue stripe, his fingers waving like a sea creature’s extremities, moved by their own power or by the elements surrounding them, you can’t tell. Did Nathan miss the children right now? Did he miss the way Binx said, “Da-DA,” with that emphatic second syllable, as though it had an exclamation point? Did he miss the way Mattie’s eyes widened, her expression fixed and distant, when she launched into one of her made-up stories, surreal concoctions featuring babies who could
fly, owls who wanted to steal children’s eyelashes? Did he remember how our newborn’s fingers had moved?

  “I can’t believe Binx didn’t wake up when I stopped the car,” I said. “It’s a miracle.”

  “Mine are napping, too,” she said.

  “Really? This late?” It was nearly five-thirty.

  She shrugged. “We were out earlier,” she said. “They nap when they nap.” She frowned. “Did you hear something?” She backed up into the house, listened, and as she moved I heard flip, flop, flip, flop, because she lived in Austin and she didn’t have a job and these days flip-flops were all she ever wore. When we met, she’d just moved from Boston, and she owned seventeen pairs of nearly identical black shoes. I know this because her small apartment didn’t have a closet, and she kept the shoes lined up on the three remaining steps of a staircase that disappeared into a wall. “I know,” she said, when she saw me examining them, “they all look the same, don’t they?” She shrugged and hunted around for her pack of cigarettes. “I have a problem. When I’m in the store, they always seem like no shoes I’ve ever seen. It’s not until I get them home…” She lit a cigarette.

  “You never take them back?”

  She laughed. “Course not.”

  “You know,” I said, “there are subtle but important differences.”

  “That’s right!” She pointed at me with her cigarette. “Thank you.”

  Now she didn’t smoke. Now she stepped up beside me, and I looked down at her feet. Red flip-flops, yes, but something else I hadn’t expected: a vicious scab across the top of her foot, a mangled nail on her big toe. “Ouch,” I said, pointing. “What happened?”

  “I got mugged last week,” she said. “The guy dragged me a little ways.”